Sam Sisavath - The Isles of Elysium

“Desperate times call for desperate luck,” Keo said. He picked up a box of 5.56mm rounds. “Catch,” he said, and tossed it.

Dave caught it with one hand. “That’s a lot of bullets.”

“It’s really not, but it’ll have to do for now. You good with the M4?”

“One’s enough for me.” He patted the Walther P22 in his back waistband. “I still got this.”

“What happened to your fancy German gun?” Jordan asked Keo.

“Jack took it,” he said.

“Miller’s little brother? The one Dave-”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

Dave groaned. “I didn’t even want to shoot the guy. Or the other soldier in the living room.”

“So why did you?” Keo asked.

“I didn’t know Jack would be inside Bannerman’s garage. But there he was, and the stupid asshole went for his gun. Then the soldier comes barging in, right at me.” Dave shook his head. “It got bad really fast.”

“It usually does when guns are involved.”

Keo picked up a Mossberg pump-action shotgun with a pistol grip and slung it, then opened a box of shells and began shoving them into the leg pockets of his cargo pants.

“You didn’t happen to get me one of those, did you?” Jordan asked.

“As a manner of fact, I did.” He picked up a Remington 870 from the bundle and handed it to her. “Designed for the fairer sex.”

“I’m touched.” Jordan clutched and unclutched the weapon. “I gotta admit, it feels pretty good.”

“That’s the point.” He handed her another box of shells. “Use it in close quarters. The AR-15 for everything else.”

He handed her a spare gun belt and she put it on, then slid the Glock he had given her earlier into the empty holster.

“How’s the body?” he asked.

“Why, you wanna cop a feel?”

He smiled, and she returned it.

“Maybe later,” he said. “Can you walk without pain?”

“I can’t even breathe without pain.” She looked down at her chest, as if she could see past the raincoat to where Steve had cut her with his knife. “They’re going to scar, aren’t they?”

“Yeah.”

“There goes my meet cute moment with Prince Charming. Hard to make a good first impression with bodily scars.”

“You’ll get by.”

She frowned.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked.

She nodded and gave him her best forced smile. “You got shot twice last night, and you’re still running around. So I’ll be a big girl and suck it up.”

“Good. You’re going to need to move around, or you’re going to be a sitting duck. I’ll do what I can to keep the both of you alive, but you’re going to have to do your part, too.”

“Relax. I know you’re the badass with the past, but it’s been half a year since you last trained me, and I’ve picked up a thing or two while I was with Tobias.”

“Yeah, what she said,” Dave added.

*

Despite all three of them having unwittingly drunk enough water last night during the rainstorm to last a lifetime, they were all parched by midday and desperate for liquid. Keo knew exactly where to find them and went looking for houses with exterior access to the rooftops. He thought it would hurt the more he moved around, but thanks to a combination of Jay’s painkillers and constant motion, the pain started to ebb into the background.

It took him a half dozen homes to find the same one he had spotted Gene on top of the other day. There was a long extension ladder in the back of the house that he used to climb up to the rooftop, where he found a pair of two-liter plastic soft drink bottles duct-taped to the pole of a satellite dish. They were both almost topped off thanks to last night’s rain. Keo looked around but couldn’t find the caps, so he reused the duct tape to cover up the bottles and carried them down one at a time.

Dave was now on the other side of the island, keeping an eye on the eastern marina, when Keo handed him one of the bottles, then walked across the island to Jordan’s position, stopping just once to take more of the painkillers, silently thanking Jay for being so damn well-stocked.

Jordan glanced over as he walked back to her. “You went shopping without me? I hope you at least got me something nice.”

She was at Dave’s old position overlooking the marina, the AR-15 leaning against a boulder nearby, and she had the Remington slung over one shoulder. From up here, she could see all of the marina and the Texas coastline. They were in a perfect position to spot any approaching boats, because there weren’t a lot of places to hide out there.

Their twenty-footer was still tied to the dock below them, and easy enough to spot from a distance. That was the point. All he needed was to draw Steve in and they could unleash on him and his men. Of course, that was assuming Steve would be approaching from the west. If he decided to come from the east, they’d have to run over to back up Dave.

He had a fifty-fifty chance of being right, which was pretty good odds these days.

“Water?” Jordan said when she saw what he was carrying.

He handed her the bottle. “Drink up.”

She pulled off the duct tape and didn’t stop drinking until she was splashing water down her chin.

“Oh my God, that hit the spot,” she said, handing the bottle back to him. “Rain water?”

He nodded and drank some himself. It wasn’t Evian, but it wasn’t salt water, so he couldn’t really complain.

“Found any food?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“But you think they’re around?”

“Gene, the kid I told you about, hid a lot of things around the island. He called them go-bags. Of course, finding them is another matter.”

“Big island.”

“Eight kilometers.”

“Yup. Big island.”

Keo sat down next to her, trickled some water onto a rag, and dabbed at his forehead. The cut, courtesy of Tobias’s “love tap,” had scabbed over, and it itched more than it hurt. He felt Jordan’s eyes on him the whole time.

“You need to stop going around and pissing off people, Keo,” she said. “That pretty face of yours can only take so much.”

He chuckled. “Thanks.”

“No offense.”

“None taken.”

“I mean, you’re still not bad looking, but adding in that love tap from Tobias and those two bullet holes, and you’ve definitely seen better days.”

“Stop trying to butter me up,” he said, and handed the bottle back to her.

She drank again, and this time didn’t stop until there was just half remaining in the container. “I’m starving,” she said when she was done.

“You already said that.”

“Well, just in case you forgot.”

“I haven’t.”

She sighed and leaned back against the boulder.

“There’s a bright side in all of this,” he said.

“Oh yeah? Pray tell.”

“Steve’s coming soon, and he’ll probably bring some food.”

“That’s the bright side?”

“I mentioned he’d probably be bringing some food with him, right?”

“I’ve missed your screwed up sense of humor, Keo. By which I mean, I haven’t really missed it.”

They sat quietly for a few minutes, listening to birds chirping as they swarmed the wide-open skies above them. Even the sloshing of the ocean was calming, as if last night’s rainstorm had drained the sea of its power and it was only now starting to regain its strength. It was so peaceful he wanted to close his eyes and go to sleep.

He did close his eyes, but he didn’t go to sleep. That wasn’t going to happen for a while, no matter how tired or sore or numbed he was. Instead of lingering on what he couldn’t control, Keo spent the next few minutes swapping out the bandages with fresh ones.

“Need a hand?” Jordan asked.