Sam Sisavath - The Isles of Elysium

If there was once thriving life to the left of the channel, there wasn’t much on the right side. He glimpsed warehouses, businesses, and overgrown fields of grass spread across undeveloped land. The juxtaposition of the two areas was stunning, and Keo found himself drawn back to the structures along the boardwalk to his left. Abandoned or not, at least there was a lot to look at over there.

They cruised through the channel, passing silent buildings and sun-bleached parking lots still filled with vehicles. It wasn’t until they went underneath a highway that stretched across the channel that they finally saw a shipyard. It covered a huge chunk of the water and was spread out to both sides. The multitude of open slips told him hundreds of boats had once called this place home. Where were all those boats now? At the bottom of the bay, probably. Maybe the vessel he was riding in now was one of the lucky few survivors.

After the shipyard, it became a series of turns and empty houses and buildings and more (though much smaller) docks with empty slips. Keo lost track of how many times they eased around a bend, and each time he thought they might have reached their destination, they kept going. The path was wide enough that Donovan felt at ease keeping their boat moving at a reasonable speed. At this point, the soldiers had probably traversed this same area so many times it would have been second nature to them by now. To Keo, one stretch of water and empty parking lots and the wooded areas that surrounded them looked like the dozen others they had passed in the last hour. He stopped trying to make sense of his scenery after a while.

One thing was certain: They were getting further inland.

Donovan didn’t slow down until they had slipped under a large highway that ran west to east. Signs told him it was Interstate 45, with Galveston back east and Houston, along with the rest of Texas, to the west. Once they went under the I-45, the river began narrowing and thick patches of woods sprouted up to both sides of them.

Keo knew they were getting close to their destination when he started seeing men in black uniforms moving among the trees to their right. Sentries. They were all very well-armed, and a few of them waved to the boats. Donovan and Steve waved back.

Soon, the soldiers gave way to civilians along the riverbanks. Like the soldiers, they were concentrated only on the right side. A dozen or so women were washing clothes against the rocks while half-naked kids jumped into the water, which had to be cold given the falling temperature. Keo was reminded of documentaries about frontier times, before washing machines and dryers were invented.

The people waved excitedly at them as they passed by. He had to look long and hard before he could conclude that they either wanted to be here, or they were really good actors.

“What are they doing?” Gene asked, straining to see the women-and they were almost all women, except for the children-off the boat’s starboard.

“Washing clothes,” Keo said.

“I’ve never seen that before.”

“That’s how people used to wash clothes before washing machines.”

“No, not that,” Gene said. “Her.”

He was pointing at a young woman standing further up on the bank holding a laundry basket and talking to a couple of older women as they scrubbed clothes against some boulders. She had a noticeable belly, but it wasn’t because she was fat.

She was pregnant.

Now that he had seen one, it was easier to spot others. Two more women who also looked pregnant, though not nearly as far along as the first one.

He thought about Carrie and Lorelei; the girls had fled one of the collaborator towns and had ended up at Song Island with him.

“It’s not the sex,” Carrie had told him. “It’s what happens afterward. With the babies. You understand, right? Why we couldn’t stay? Why we ran?”

Because the babies didn’t belong to the women who would give birth to them; they would belong to the ghouls, to continuing the cycle of humans supplying blood to the creatures for years, decades, and generations to come. That was the foundation of an “agreement,” the why and how towns like T18 existed in the first place, because the people here-the women washing clothes by hand, the children swimming in the river-had come voluntarily. They had agreed. Sanctuary and safety, in exchange for human slavery.

Keo wasn’t entirely sure what he was feeling. He had heard the stories and believed them, but to actually see it in person was an entirely different universe. Part of him didn’t blame them for choosing this path, but the other part, the one that had kept him alive this last year, felt a bit sick to his stomach.

He glanced back at Steve, standing next to Donovan behind the center console. “Why am I here?” he asked, shouting over the roar of the double motors to be heard.

Steve didn’t answer, and for a moment Keo thought the man hadn’t heard him. He seemed preoccupied with waving back to a couple of kids that were chasing after the boat along the banks, as if Steve were some kind of returning hero.

“Why am I here?” Keo asked again, shouting louder this time.

“You’ll find out,” Steve shouted back.

“I’d like to know now.”

“I bet you would, but you’ll find out when I decide you can find out. And not a moment sooner.”

“They look so happy,” Gene said next to him. He looked mesmerized by the sight of the women and children. “Are they really that happy? Is this real?”

“I don’t know,” Keo said.

“They look so happy,” Gene said again.

Don’t be fooled, Keo was going to tell the kid, when he caught a glimpse of a figure among the civilians on the riverbanks.

A woman, and something about her seized his attention. It helped that she was standing up just as their boat passed, and she was clearly taller than the other women around her, which made her stick out even further.

Keo shot up from the bench, wobbly on his feet because of his zip-tied ankles, and looked back at her until they locked eyes over the river.

She was moving up the riverbanks, trying to keep up with them, but there were just too many people in her way, and a few seconds later she disappeared behind some tall trees.

After all this time, all these months and uncertainty, there she was, still as breathtakingly beautiful as the day he sent her away on Mark’s boat, hoping to save her life.

Gillian.

They had taken over a small city called Wilmont and turned it into T18. The place was separated into two parts, with a residential district and a commercial area connected by a wide steel bridge further up the river. As far as Keo could tell, the left side of Wilmont was abandoned, with the civilians (and Steve’s men) congregating entirely on the right side.

And among those civilians was Gillian.

She had seen him too, he was certain of it. They might have locked eyes for just a brief second or two, but the way she had looked back at him, following the path of the boat, he could tell she recognized him.

Gillian.

The fact that she was still alive, after all the ifs and maybes of the last six months, was the best news he could have hoped for, especially after the disaster that was Santa Marie Island. The problem was, he was still in zip ties and being boated away from her.

That left Keo to focus instead on his new surroundings.

The marina where they docked was tiny compared to the shipyard they had passed earlier, but it had a full complement of boats, anywhere from thirty to forty of them (So that’s where all the boats went) , occupying almost all of the available slips. Heavily armed soldiers stood watch, with two stick figures moving along a walkway that ringed the top of a rocket-shaped water tower in the near distance.