Sam Sisavath - The Isles of Elysium

“Someone who knows the town, knows where to hide.”

Keo was watching Steve’s face, the way he was scrunching his eyes and sweeping the streets, as if he could see through the walls of the homes, when something fell out of the sky and landed on Keo’s forehead. He held out his hand to catch a few more drops, as did some of the men around him.

The rain came slowly but quickly picked up momentum.

In less than ten seconds, Keo was soaked from head to toe.

Steve, standing next to him, didn’t seem to notice.

“Search every house!” he shouted, raising his voice to be heard. “They’re hiding in one of these houses! No matter how long it takes, search every single building and shack and room until you find them!”

*

Steve left Keo in the driveway with Grant and rode off on the same horse that had been dining on the lawn when they arrived-it turned out to be Jack’s-along with a dozen other mounted soldiers. Keo guessed it was faster to travel by horseback than in the slow-moving, solar-powered golf cart.

“Come on,” Grant said. “I got orders to take you to Processing.”

Keo climbed into the cart with Grant and they motored off, raindrops bouncing against the solar panels on top of the vehicle. The streets were already showing signs of flooding, the multiple cracks of thunder in the distance followed by lightning flashes sounding as if the gods had finally decided to punish T18 for its trespasses.

“Does it usually rain this hard?” Keo asked, shouting over the pak-pak-pak of raindrops cascading around them.

“Not usually!” Grant shouted back as lightning crackled again. “Hear that? This is gonna be a huge one!”

They were driving through two to three inches of water by the time they left T18A2, and Grant turned south down the road-toward Processing, wherever the hell that was. Soldiers in raincoats had begun appearing on horses and on foot around them, many wielding flashlights. They looked coordinated, some moving in groups while others spread out among the subdivisions. Like a Western posse times ten, except these cowboys were carrying assault rifles.

“Looks like it’s gonna be a long night,” Grant said. “We’re going to find them, though. Not a lot of places to hide around here. No one’s going to harbor them, either. Sooner or later they’ll run out of corners, and then we’ll get them.”

Keo didn’t respond. Instead, he tried to imagine where Jordan and Dave (if it was Dave, and not another one of Tobias’s inside men) would go. Like Steve, they would know better than to brave the woods. Even before the rainstorm it had gotten too dark, and that brought out things worse than soldiers. Would they hide out in the inside man’s place? That would depend if he was single or if he shared a house with someone (or someones). Not that it mattered, because he didn’t know who had taken Jordan anyway, which left him with…

Jordan. Where would Jordan go?

Keo was thinking about that as two horsemen galloped past them along the shoulder of the road, flashlights shining in his face. Compared to the Maglites they were carrying, the golf cart’s own headlights were barely strong enough to illuminate the paved lanes in front of them. If not for the LEDs hanging off the poles, Grant would be driving almost in total darkness.

Thunder boomed in the distance, seemingly getting closer (and louder) with each new one. For a second Keo thought they were gunshots and was thankful he was wrong. Gunshots would mean Steve had found Jordan and her friend, but soldiers still running around searching every house and building meant the exact opposite.

They were about to pass the open gate into T18A1 when Keo tapped Grant on the shoulder. “Hey, turn left.”

“What?” Grant said.

“Turn in here.”

“I got orders to take you to Processing.”

“You can do that later. I have to swing over and talk to a friend about something.”

“Forget it.”

Keo reached over and drew Grant’s gun-a Glock-and pressed it roughly into the man’s side. “I said, turn in here. ”

Grant almost missed the entrance but stopped in time and turned into the subdivision. The gate was already open, which wasn’t a surprise since soldiers had probably been going in and out of the place before they even arrived.

Keo spotted two people inside the guard booth, shivering against the cold. They were soaking wet and neither one felt like coming out when they saw the golf cart moving past their window. One of them did make the effort to wave Grant through. Grant started to slow down when Keo jammed the gun harder against his gut. Grant took the hint and they continued through.

Steve’s people were flooding all five subdivisions at once, but that also meant they had to stretch their numbers thin. They drove past soldiers along the sidewalks knocking on doors. They seemed to be moving in groups of two, flashlights cutting through the sheets of falling rain. Every single one looked miserable and wet, and a few gave them envious stares as they cruised by under the (barely there) protection of the cart’s roof. Keo just hoped he had the gun held low enough that the others couldn’t see where it was pointed.

“Turn here,” Keo said when they finally reached their destination.

Grant turned the cart up onto the driveway and parked out in the open. Keo took a brief second to look around him-a pair of soldiers down the street, about five houses down; two more on the opposite side further up the road. The two behind him were the problem, but they were moving slowly, the combination of the weather and the need to search every room of every house before moving on taking up most of their time. No doubt the warmth of the houses compared to the bone-soaking rain outside convinced them to make all those searches go slower, too.

He hoped, anyway.

Keo pulled off Grant’s M4 rifle and shoved the Glock into his front waistband, then climbed out of the golf cart. “Get out.”

Grant did and was soon hopping from foot to foot, arms folded across his chest as rain ran down his head and uniform. His teeth started chattering almost right away.

“Don’t be such a girl; it’s not that cold,” Keo said.

He nodded toward the door and Grant moved toward it obediently, asking, “Where are we?”

“Shut up and move.”

“You’re not going to get away with this.”

“You know what a bullet tastes like, Grant?”

Grant shook his head. “No…”

“If you don’t want to find out, keep your mouth shut unless I speak to you. Comprende? ”

The soldier swallowed and kept moving. Keo followed him, only allowing himself to shiver and his teeth to chatter when Grant wasn’t looking.

Christ, it was freezing cold. And it was only going to get worse as the night dragged on. He wondered how long it was going to take the neighborhood to be completely flooded. Hopefully Steve had paid attention to the sewers so the water would have someplace to go when that did happen.

Grant was waiting at the front door, trembling underneath a pair of small solar-powered LED lights. Keo leaned across him and knocked on the slab of wood. He could only see pitch blackness through the side security windows, but soon a lamp turned on before moving across the foyer toward them.

“Not a fucking word,” Keo said to Grant.

Grant nodded. Or shivered. Keo liked to think he was afraid and not just freezing.

The door opened and a man in his thirties, wearing thin-rimmed glasses, looked out at them. He was wearing slacks and a white T-shirt and used the lamp in his hand to illuminate Grant’s face before moving over to Keo’s.

He lingered a bit on Keo-or maybe just on the scars.

“Yes?” he finally said.