They looked back at him, as if to say, “What, you thought we were going to go in there with you?”
He smiled to himself then tried the door. It clicked open without a fight. He pulled it all the way open and slipped inside, sweeping the immediate area with the MP5SD. He took out an LED flashlight from one of his pouches and ran the beam over the seats in the middle. He was greeted by the very good sign of dust along the headrests and the smooth surface of a table to his right, half-encircled by a booth with plastic seats.
He moved up the aisle, boots squeaking softly against the vinyl flooring. There was a small kitchen complete with sink and range to his left. A dining table was fastened to the floor across from it, and more booth seating. Two doors at the very back. One opened up into a small bathroom and the other into a surprisingly spacious bedroom with a twin-size bed that had a wooden frame in one corner and an oak dresser on the other. There was a single window at the back, but it was blocked by the warehouse wall on the other side.
He rasped his knuckle on the solid fiberglass door and liked the sound he heard. It had a 12x21-inch tinted window at the top and a deadbolt lock on the inside. The odds of it withstanding a prolonged assault were good, especially with the dresser and bed as reinforcements.
Keo headed back to the front door.
Lorelei was leaning through the opening, giving him an anxious look. “Is it safe?”
“Safe enough,” he said.
Carrie followed Lorelei up the steps. “Okay?” she asked.
He nodded. “It’ll do. We only need it for one night, anyway.”
“So,” Lorelei said, “can we eat now? I’m starving.”
Carrie smiled wryly at Keo. “I told you. Like a horse.”
“Hey!” Lorelei said.
As dusk fell, visibility inside the RV began to drop. Carrie sat in the booth across from Keo while they listened to Lorelei snoring inside the bedroom in the back. The teenager had gone to sleep almost instantly. Keo wondered if she was tired from all the walking or the talking. Maybe both.
Carrie had her legs pulled up against her chest, sneakers resting on the seat. “What now?” she asked after they had been sitting there in silence for a while.
Keo reached into his pack and pulled out a Glock, then handed it to her butt-first. “Just in case.”
She took the gun and laid it on the table between them. Keo took out two spare magazines and placed them next to the weapon.
“How many of these things are you carrying around with you?” she asked, sounding amused.
“Plenty. Now, pay attention. It doesn’t matter where you shoot them. As long as you hit them with a silver bullet, they go down. Understand?”
She nodded and picked up the magazines, putting them into her pocket. “So, you’re like Chinese or something? I know you’re Asian. But not the whole way.”
He smiled. “‘Not the whole way’?”
“You know what I mean.”
“My mom was Korean.”
“Ah. What kind of name is Keo, anyway?”
“Chuck was taken.”
She stared at him, unsure how to process that response.
“You can take the bedroom with Lorelei,” Keo said. “I’ll sleep out here and keep an eye out.”
“You sure?” she asked, the tiredness coming through.
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Keo. For everything.”
She picked up the Glock, stood up, and headed to the bedroom in the back.
Alone again, Keo pulled the tab on a can of Dole pineapple and sporked himself a nice big chunk dripping with syrup. He finished the entire can in a few minutes, watching as night fell outside the window like a canvas draping over the streets, the Spartan grounds within the hurricane fencing, and finally, the RV itself.
He picked up his MP5SD and put it on the table next to him, then leaned back against the wall. There was another window behind him, but it was blocked by the garage wall so there was no chance of anything coming through it. That only left three possible points of entry — the window directly across from him, the door to his left, and the front windshield. The windshield was mostly concealed by one of the other three walls, which really left just the window and door.
He closed his eyes briefly and thought about Gillian to help pass the time…
Keo wasn’t asleep, but he had settled into a peaceful state somewhere been dozing off and wide alert. It was an old trick he had learned a long time ago, something that had become very useful when he found himself stuck up a tree recently.
When he heard the noise, he knew immediately what it was before he even opened his eyes, slid off the plastic seat, and glided across the RV to the other side and pushed up against the window.
Headlights speared the street, cutting across the fading light outside. From the sounds of it, a truck. Despite his limited perspective, he could tell it was moving erratically, headlights swaying left and right as it got closer.
One of the trucks with the soldiers? How did they find us?
Keo watched it near, wondering what was going to reach him first — the truck or the falling night. If he were a betting man…
Click.
Carrie squeezed out of the partially open bedroom door and looked across the darkened vehicle at him. He lifted a finger to his lips, hoping she could see, and when she quietly closed the door and walked on her tiptoes toward him, he guessed she had.
She flattened her body against the wall next to him. “I heard a car…”
He nodded.
“Did they find us?” she asked. “The soldiers?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
The pickup finally came into view. It might have been red, but it was hard to tell against the falling night. The vehicle had begun to slow down a bit, but it was still swerving from lane to lane, clearly out of control.
“It’s in trouble,” Carrie whispered.
As if on cue, the truck flipped and a figure — thin, gaunt, and unmistakably ghoul—flew off the bed where it had been holding on and was slingshot across the night sky as if shot out of a cannon. It landed somewhere further up the road, well beyond Keo’s line of sight.
The truck rolled on its side like a ball of steel and metal and aluminum, chunks of its frame firing off in every direction like missiles. Its bright front and rear lights shattered against the asphalt, showering the road with fireworks.
“Oh God,” Carrie gasped.
Finally, the truck came to a stop, settling on its roof with a loud groaning noise as smoke flooded out of its crumpled hood. They heard the metallic clinking of car parts big and small rolling around the road and dropping from the overturned vehicle.
“We should go out and help them,” Carrie said.
Keo didn’t say anything.
“Keo…”
“It could be a trap. I can’t tell if the truck is one of the three we saw earlier…”
A figure crawled out of the truck. It was a man. Or, at least, it had the size and large shoulders of a man, though Keo couldn’t make out details in the darkness. The man (?) crouched and reached into the truck and was pulling something out (another person, maybe?) when he suddenly let go and staggered back, and two loud gunshots exploded across the empty city.
The man fired again and again and again.
Until he finally stopped, turned, and ran—right at the fence in front of them.
He leaped desperately and reached out for the top of the fence, just barely managing to get a handhold, and began to pull himself up. He was wearing slacks and a T-shirt. Definitely not one of those camo uniforms.
“He’s not one of them,” Carrie whispered next to him. “We should go help.”