Sam Sisavath - The Isles of Elysium

Pita was there, moving through the wounded men that had traveled here earlier by vehicle. Three of them were unconscious while a fourth drank from a bottle of water as Pita undressed his bloody bandages and grabbed a fresh roll from a teenage girl who was acting as her helper.

He counted about two dozen men in all, including Wyatt and the others that had arrived with them. The three or four men who hadn’t had to brave Steve’s ambush were easy to tell apart from the rest-they were the ones without blood on their clothes. Besides Pita and the girl, there were only two other women in the place. Like the men, they wore gun belts, but unlike Jordan, they didn’t look very dangerous at all.

Keo looked around but couldn’t find Tobias anywhere. Maybe he was in a back room, trying to come up with a plan to regroup after the shellacking they had taken. No one went toe-to-toe with an M60 and came out unscathed.

“Is this it?” Keo asked.

“There was a lot more this morning,” Jordan said quietly. She grabbed a man with a thick red beard as he was walking past them. “Where’s Tobias?”

“Back office with Reese,” the man said.

“Thanks,” Jordan said. Then to Keo, “Come on.”

He kept pace with her through the cafeteria, which looked abandoned despite the company of men and women moving around it at the moment. The cavernous feel, he guessed, was because the room was designed for a large army of hungry teens and not the two dozen or so people eating MREs or talking quietly among themselves. They all looked beaten and whipped, and he wondered how long Tobias was going to be able to keep this fight up after today.

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

“Same place we get most of our weapons. T18.”

“You have an inside man.”

“We have inside men. One of them supplies us with as much nonperishables as he can get his hands on.”

“Where does he get them?”

“T18 has a storage warehouse filled when the Millers raided the surrounding areas. One of them sold mail-order civilian versions of Army MREs. Prepper food. That’s what we’ve been living on for the last month or so. Before that, we were surviving off the land.”

“Hunting?”

“Hunting, fishing, whatever it took. It’s a big river. They can’t guard every inch of it twenty-four hours a day.”

“They seem to go back and forth along it just fine in those boats.”

“That’s because we don’t attack the riverbanks if we can help it.”

“Why not?”

“Didn’t see you them?”

He was going to ask who, but he remembered the women and children along the banks washing laundry and swimming.

“Civilians,” he said.

“Yeah. We’re trying to save them, not get them killed. So we do our best to keep the fighting contained to just us and the soldiers. It’s not always ideal, but no one said this would be easy.”

Keo wanted to tell her that he had seen a little bit of what Steve had at T18, and that “this” wasn’t just not going to be easy, it was going to be downright impossible. But that would have antagonized her, and right now he needed at least one ally at his side.

Even so, Keo kept close enough to Jordan that he was within easy lunging distance of the Glock in her hip holster. If she noticed or was uncomfortable with his closeness, she didn’t say anything. He was thinking about how he was going to kill Tobias and somehow keep both him and Jordan alive when she opened a door marked “Director.”

He hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps inside when he saw a flash of movement out of the corner of his right eye. Keo turned, started lifting his hands to ward off an attack, but the man was faster and pain exploded across Keo’s face as the butt of a rifle smashed into his forehead.

The blow would have done more damage if he hadn’t seen it coming just in the nick of time and turned slightly. The result was more of a glancing blow, but it was enough to stun and stagger him.

He glimpsed a buzz cut as the man followed, pressing his attack, even as Jordan shouted, “What the fuck, Reese?”

The man ignored her and swung his weapon at Keo’s face again, but Keo managed to dodge the oncoming strike this time. The wooden stock flashed across his face for a split second before Keo grabbed the barrel with one hand, pulled his attacker off balance, then slammed his cocked elbow into the back of the man’s neck.

He heard a satisfying, pained grunt.

Keo followed his attacker-turned-victim, hoping to finish this as soon as possible (and that rifle, he could definitely use that rifle), when something rammed into the small of his back. He might have screamed; he couldn’t be entirely certain. But he definitely felt the boot stepping on the back of his left knee and dropping to the floor.

He glanced back over his shoulder just in time to see Tobias, all six-three of him hovering with an M4 clutched in both raised hands. Tobias didn’t look happy or sad, he just looked like a man doing a job.

It was the last thing Keo saw before the collapsible stock of the carbine hit him in the face and he dropped like a sack of meat.

*

“Jesus, your face looks like shit,” Jordan said. She was whispering and looked concerned as she dabbed his face with a wet…something. “That throbbing pain? That’s your forehead. It was bleeding so much even Pita thought you were going to bleed out. Lucky for you, it stopped.”

Yeah. Lucky. That’s me.

He grimaced and fought the urge to reach up to touch his forehead, where the strong odor of antibiotic ointment was coming from. Someone had been very generous with it. He guessed too much was better than not enough when you were dealing with possible infection.

His entire face hurt. At least both Tobias and Reese had aimed straight for the noggin and spared his nose. Having it broken once was enough, especially now that it had all but healed. Well, mostly, anyway.

He was lying on a cold, hard floor and staring up at a patch of moonlight spilling in through a high ceiling window. Something soft, probably cotton, was rolled up underneath his head, allowing him to turn it with minimal effort and take in his new surroundings.

He and Jordan were inside some kind of classroom, and they weren’t alone. One of the women he had seen in the cafeteria was sitting against the opposite wall next to one of the wounded men; her eyes were closed and she was stroking his forehead while he snored. Pita and her teen assistant leaned against each other in another corner; they were both asleep. Unused school desks were scattered around them, some lying on their sides.

Nightfall.

There was barely any noise inside the room except for their breathing and the light snoring around them, as if everyone just knew not to be too noisy. Maybe a survival instinct kicking in unconsciously after a year of living in a post-Purge world.

What was that Lara liked to say? “Adapt or perish.”

These people had clearly adapted. You didn’t survive this long without understanding the rules. Making a sound in the middle of the night (What time is it?) was one of those things to be avoided at all costs.

It was impossibly quiet outside. Even the birds were afraid to make any noise. He was relieved to discover that the window in the back of the room was closed tight. He and Jordan, along with everyone in the room, were sitting along the sides, with Pita and the girl underneath the window. Even if one of the ghouls had crawled up there, they wouldn’t be able to see them.

Hopefully.

Next to him, Jordan put down the balled T-shirt she had been using on his face and leaned tiredly back against the wall. It wasn’t just the day’s events pressing down on her-the ambush, the losing friends-but his arrival probably hadn’t contributed to her peace of mind. What should have been a happy reunion for both of them had instead kicked off a bloody and challenging day for her.