BOOK ONE
‡
THE RUNDOWN
CHAPTER 1
KEO
“See the world. Kill some people. Make some money.”
Well, one out of three wasn’t bad.
Okay, so it was downright pitiful, but then Keo was used to making lemonade out of lemons these days. First there was that whole end of the world curveball, then getting stuck with strangers in a cabin in the woods. He compounded those problems by falling in (lust) something with a girl named Gillian.
And now this.
“This” being stuck on a luxury yacht adrift in the middle of the lake with Song Island behind him and God only knew how many guys with guns in front of him. On the plus side, he was well-armed; besides the shotgun, he still had the Heckler & Koch MP5SD submachine gun, and he had added an AK-47 and a silver-chromed revolver with five bullets left to his arsenal. If life before everything went kaput had taught him anything, it was that there was no such thing as having “too many” guns.
Have bullets, will make mess.
In some ways, his life now wasn’t all that different than it was a year ago. These days, though, people weren’t paying him a lot of money to risk his hide. These days, he was voluntarily risking his precious limbs for…what again? A bunch of people he didn’t really know? Sure, he respected them, but was that really worth dying for?
Then again, maybe he had just finally developed something approaching a conscience.
Say it ain’t so.
The big guy with the melon for a head was lying half-on and half-off the floor of the upper deck. Or what was left of the head, anyway. The shotgun in Keo’s hands had removed most of the top portion, leaving behind something that looked suspiciously like a badly carved jack-o’-lantern. Clumps of blood and brains were spilled across the floorboards on the other side of the spiral stairwell that connected the upper and the main deck directly below.
There had been footsteps pounding up those same stairs a few seconds ago, but they quickly stopped after Melon Head took the buckshot to the side of the face. The hard chargers decided to retreat after that, then went very quiet soon after. They were tiptoeing around down there, most likely getting ready for an assault on his position. So they weren’t complete idiots, after all. Too bad. He liked dealing with amateurs.
Keo was crouched in the semidarkness of the Trident, the boat continuing to move even with the anchor lowered. He had turned off the whisper quiet engine at the same time, allowing him to hear everything around and underneath him, including his own slightly racing heartbeat.
Jesus, calm down. What is this, your first time in a firefight?
He leaned back from the turn in the hallway that connected the bulk of the deck’s floor with the bridge behind him. Keo spent a few seconds slowing down his breathing while keeping one ear open for noises.
Come on, boys, let’s not keep daddy waiting. He’s getting antsy.
Song Island was directly behind him, but Keo hadn’t had the opportunity to check how far he still was from the beach before he dropped the anchor to keep the boat from running aground by accident. They were close, he could tell that from the halo of lights visible on the other side of the bridge’s curving windshield, the swath of intense brightness reaching all the way across the room and into the hallway.
There was no doubt Lara and the others would have heard the shooting by now. Even muffled by the walls around him, there was no mistaking a shotgun blast against the quiet night. Just to make sure, though, Keo leaned out from the corner and fired another shot at the wall across the deck, squinting involuntarily at the thunderous boom!
There. They’d have to be deaf not to hear that.
He recalled his last conversation with Lara (a.k.a. kid leader), just before he went for a swim (again) in the cold lake water:
“Don’t shoot unless you have to,” she had said.
“Trust me,” he had replied, “if you hear shooting on the boat, there’s a very damn good reason for it.”
He didn’t know why, but Keo trusted her. She had proven to be a tough customer with some big brass ones. That was hard to find in a woman, but especially the civilian variety. He didn’t even mind that she had manipulated him into helping with the island’s defense the last few days. Now that was smooth. Keo was a shoot-first-and-what-was-the-question type of guy, but he’d always had a lot of grudging respect for people who could think two, three steps ahead and give orders with lives at stake (usually his).
He pressed his back against the wall and tried to pick up any slight vibrations that could signal an incoming attack.
Nothing. A big fat zero. Nada. Zilch.
That should have comforted him, but instead it just made him more paranoid.
Come on, boys, what are you waiting for? An engraved invitation?
To keep his mind off what may or may not be happening out there right now, Keo spent a few seconds taking inventory.
He counted four victims, but only three bodies. There were the two in the bridge — the captain (or the guy wearing a captain’s hat, anyway), his first mate, and a third man who had come up the stairs. And Melon Head made three stiffs. The captain was kneecapped and whimpering softly in one of the bridge’s corners. Alive, but whipped. Just the way Keo liked them.
That was four down and an unknown number still to go. The vanishing footsteps he had heard earlier were proof of that. There was also someone named Rod, a sniper who had been watching the island when the boat was on approach earlier tonight. He was likely on a high perch — possibly on top of Keo right this moment, or maybe somewhere along the side rails. Someplace high to shoot from.
Counting Rod, there were at least two more still running around out there. His one big advantage was that they were going to have to come to him if they wanted to get the Trident moving again. That meant retaking the controls on the bridge.
Keo waited for ten more seconds.
Then ten became twenty…
…and still no attack.
At thirty, he got up and moved, slightly bent over at the waist just in case (you could never be too careful when there were assholes running around with loaded guns), making a beeline back to the bridge. The assault rifle and submachine gun thumping against his back made more noise than he would have liked; the eerie quiet made them sound like firecrackers, and he wished he had tightened their straps before moving.
Live and learn, pal. Live and learn.
He slipped back inside the bridge and closed the door, then locked it. Not that he expected to keep out a half dozen determined assaulters, but it would give him time to prepare a proper defense. Which, in this case, meant waiting with the shotgun for the first target to appear so he could pull the trigger. Keo was a simple guy that way.
The “captain” was still in the corner, where Keo had left him earlier. The man had taken off his shirt (it turned out he had an undershirt beneath, though it, too, was now stained with blood) and wrapped it over his right kneecap, trying desperately to stop the bleeding. Keo couldn’t tell if the man was more freaked out by his injury, the pain, or the inability to stop blood from dripping through his makeshift tourniquet.
Or it could have been the sight of his first mate’s body, sitting on the floor with his back against the long console that covered nearly the entire front half of the room. The man, like Melon Head outside, was missing most of his noggin, with pieces of it clinging to the curving glass windshield behind him. It was a hell of a mess, made more surreal against the wash of the island’s LED and multicolored lights from the boat’s computer screens and buttons. The fragments of a destroyed handheld radio were sprinkled around the body. Too bad, because Keo would have liked to use it to contact the island.