Sam Sisavath - The Isles of Elysium

“So we’re walking?” Keo asked.

“The only thing more precious than lives these days is gas.” Jordan waved to the three men who were still standing guard on the rooftops of the strip mall and shouted, “Let’s go!”

Keo followed her across the street and back to the tree lines. He felt naked without his weapons, and that feeling got worse when they stepped into the darkened woods. Despite wearing a long-sleeve shirt and pants, he shivered anyway.

What he wouldn’t give for a gun, or two. And silver bullets, of course. Always silver bullets.

Tobias’s men followed them inside, then immediately began spreading out without having to be told. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing, including Wyatt, who gave Keo a hard stare before vanishing behind one of the many identical trees around them.

There were, he counted, five other people inside the woods with him and Jordan at the moment. Five people meant five potential sources of weapons. He’d prefer his MP5SD and the silver ammo, but he was good at making do. He had been looking for the man who had taken his things, but the guy had either left with Tobias or was somewhere else in the woods at the moment.

“Don’t even think about it,” Jordan said beside him.

“Think about what?”

“You know damn well what.” She flashed him a warning stare with her brown eyes.

He smiled innocently back at her. “I’m just following you, Jordan. That’s all I’m thinking about at the moment.”

“Uh huh.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“No.”

“I’m hurt.”

“And I’m a virgin.”

“You mean you’re not?”

She rolled her eyes. “This isn’t a date, Keo.”

“Too bad.”

The last time he saw Jordan she was a shooter in training, but she had clearly progressed past that stage. As he watched her walking with a gun belt and her beat-up M4 held at the ready in front of her, he had no doubts she had been putting all those lessons at the cabin to good use since they separated almost six months ago.

“Where’d you get all the M4s?” he asked.

“T18 supplies them. But don’t tell them that.”

“Mum’s the word. How long has this been going on? You guys and T18.”

“Before there was even a T18. You know about the camps?”

“I’ve heard of them.”

“T18 was just a camp when we first showed up. It wasn’t that bad in the beginning, despite how they brought us here. I mean, I wanted to kill every last one of them for what happened back at Santa Marie Island, but it wasn’t like we had a lot of choices, or chances.”

“You and Gillian.”

“Yeah.”

“She stayed and you left. Why?”

“You’ll have to ask her.”

“I’m asking you.”

“And I’m telling you, you’ll have to ask her.”

“Was it the whole pregnancy thing? Is that why you left?”

“That was a big part of it. The ‘donating’-” she used air quotes “-blood part, I might have been able to live with. It made me physically sick each time they forced us to go into those tents and give blood, but the idea of conceiving and then raising a child for that cycle to continue? That made me want to throw up.”

“I saw a lot of people back there. They seemed okay with it.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not a lot of people, Keo.”

He looked over at her again. She was still the tall athletic girl he had almost killed back in Louisiana, and the same college student who had kept Mark and Jill alive for months after The Purge. Her hair was shorter, but somehow the new cut complemented the shape of her face more.

“What?” she said, narrowing her eyes back at him.

“Nothing.”

“So stop staring like a perv.”

“Sorry.”

“So, have you come up with a better story yet? Because, make no mistake about it, Tobias would have killed you back there if I hadn’t stopped him.”

“And I appreciate that.”

“That’s not the point. You need to make him believe you weren’t a part of the ambush. Can you do that?”

“I didn’t know about the ambush because I came here to kill Tobias,” he thought about saying, but of course, didn’t. He said instead, “It’s the truth.”

“I don’t think Tobias is going to like your truth very much. And out here, what he says goes.”

“Even with you?”

“Even with me.”

“You guys involved?”

“What?”

“Are you guys-”

“I heard you the first time.” She paused, then, “Why would you ask me that?”

“I don’t know. Back in the office, the way you guys were talking…” He shrugged. “The two of you seemed to have a very copacetic relationship.”

“Just because we see eye-to-eye doesn’t mean we’re screwing, too.”

“Why not?”

“Why not?” she repeated, as if she didn’t understand the question.

“The guy’s Captain America. Who doesn’t want to jump Captain America’s bones?”

She actually smiled. “I was always more of a Punisher fan myself.”

“Punisher? I didn’t know you rolled that way.”

“What way?”

“Sex and punishment?”

“Oh, God,” she groaned. “I meant the Punisher. The comic book character?”

“I don’t read comic books.”

“He had a couple of movies. Three, I think.”

“I don’t watch a lot of movies, either.”

“What exactly did you use to do with all your free time, Keo?”

“Troll bars for women.”

She sighed. “Why did I even ask?”

He smiled. “So, that’s a no on the sex and punishment?”

*

They had been walking for half an hour, and it didn’t seem as if they were any closer to reaching their destination. Keo spent most of that time keeping tabs on Tobias’s people, but they moved like ghosts, coming and going around him. He had no trouble at all understanding why Steve had such a hard time pinning them down. These people had made themselves comfortable out here, with guys like Wyatt and the two scouts he had encountered earlier probably giving the soldiers fits around T18.

The only person who was close enough for him to even consider taking her weapons was Jordan. Maybe it was the soft gooey part of him that had developed in the last year despite his best efforts, but the idea of hurting her for her guns didn’t sit well with him.

You’ve gone soft, pal. Real soft.

“I’m sorry about Mark,” he said after they had been walking in silence for a while.

“Yeah, me too,” Jordan said.

She was slightly in front, the handle of her holstered Glock staring invitingly back at him. It was tempting. So, so tempting.

He thought about Gillian. He could do it for her if he had to. Finding Gillian again after all these months was a minor miracle, and all he had to do to be permanently reunited with her was kill Tobias and return to T18. But to do that, he needed guns, such as the one staring back at him right now…

“What happened to you?” Jordan asked, looking over her shoulder at him. “After the cabin, we were pretty resigned to you and Norris being dead. Even Gillian. She kept waiting for you to find us, you know. After Santa Marie Island, and even when we were at T18. I would catch her staring off at nothing for long stretches until it occurred to me she was looking for you. Waiting for you to show up to rescue her.”

“Norris and I ran into trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“The kind that kept me away for almost six months.”

He told her about Pollard. About Joe. About running for his life in the woods of Louisiana and not knowing where the hell he was going, until he finally ran out of room. He skipped the part about Allie but told her Norris had found some survivors to stay with and that he was probably still safe right now, living out his remaining years.