“Never?” Keo said.
“Not when they know people are nearby. People that aren’t us. In uniforms. And they goddamn know you’re in here.”
“You don’t know that,” Gene said. “They’ve always passed the house over. Tonight’s no different.”
Keo thought the teenager was trying to convince himself more than he was Miller.
“They know,” Miller said with absolute certainty. “Trust me, they know. I’ve been around enough of them that I can tell when they know. And they fucking know.”
Keo and Gene exchanged a quick look.
“Then why-” Gene started to ask, but he didn’t get to finish before the crack! of a gunshot broke the island’s quiet and the window next to him shattered.
Gene ducked down, dropping Deuce and throwing his arms over his head.
Keo dived to the floor as a bullet slammed into the ceiling above him. He landed hard on the dirty and shoeprint-caked slate tiles, but even through the rain of glass shards falling into the tub around Gene, he heard the echoing ploompt! from outside.
Grenade launcher. That was a grenade launcher!
He expected an explosion, waited to be screaming in agony as fire and shrapnel ripped through him, but instead he looked up and saw a cylindrical canister appearing out of the night like a bulbous bullet, but slower and shinier. It slipped through the broken window and rainbowed from one end of the room to the other before bouncing off the counter behind him. The loud hissing filled the air even before the object had settled, telling him that he was wrong-it wasn’t a grenade, but a gas canister.
Keo grabbed his shirt and pulled it up and over his mouth and nostrils. His eyes stung immediately even before the smoke managed to engulf his side of the bathroom. When he had first seen the room he thought it was big, but now as he teared up and his lungs burned, he wished it was much bigger.
The sounds of Gene and Miller coughing up a storm in the room around him invaded his senses. Gene might actually have been crying, or that might have been Miller. Maybe both. Or all three of them, for all he knew.
He was trying to maintain his grip on the MP5SD when he heard the loud pounding of footsteps. Not ghouls this time, because these were heavier and showing all the subtlety of a stampeding herd of elephants. He wasn’t sure how long it had been-ten seconds? Ten minutes? — since he could barely keep his eyes open, and every time he took a breath it felt like someone was stabbing his chest with a spear, or a dozen.
The door. Someone was knocking on the door.
No, not knocking.
Banging.
It would take the ghouls hours, maybe days, to finally break through, he remembered thinking. The creatures weren’t known for their strength, and he had felt relatively safe inside the confines of the bathroom. They would need something like a sledgehammer, or maybe a car to get the job done.
Boom-boom-boom!
It sounded as if they had found one of those two things right now, because the entire room seemed to be trembling each time they smashed into the doors on the other side.
He had made it across the bathroom, alternating between breathing and trying to look past the gathering smoke. It was difficult enough trying to maintain his vision through the waterfall of tears and the sensation of someone dropping barrels of ground peppers into his eyes, but every step made him want to give up and fall down and scream until the pain went away.
Boom-boom-boom!
He spun around until he was facing the doors-or, at least, where he thought the doors were-and waited. He didn’t have to actually see to know where they were-he just had to follow the crushing sounds of blow after blow landing against the mahogany wood somewhere on the other side of the blanket of smoke.
The MP5SD was slippery against his hands, and someone was screaming to his right. Keo ignored everything and focused on what was in front of him, which at this point was smoke and…more smoke.
Soon, the tear gas would be sucked out through the broken window, but soon wasn’t fast enough. Not nearly fast enough.
Boom-boom-boom!
His vision started to blur. Or maybe that was all the tears flooding them. God, he hadn’t cried this much since…well, he’d never cried this much in his life. Of course, no one had ever locked him inside a bathroom with an exploding gas canister before, either, so it wasn’t like he had any experience here.
There was a final boom! before the very distinctive sound of wood splintering came from across the room.
There goes a door. Maybe both.
He sought out the window and saw a figure next to it curled up inside the large bathtub. Gene, trying desperately to make himself small and be spared the tendrils of crushing smoke gathering around him like tentacles. It wasn’t going to work. Poor Gene was alternating between crying and trying not to cough his lungs out.
The window!
What was that Gene had said earlier?
“Push comes to shove, we can always escape through the window.”
He hadn’t greeted that comment with much enthusiasm, and Keo still didn’t have a lot of it as he stumbled in that direction, but he had very little choice at the moment. Unfortunately for him, while his mind had declared that this was the correct path, his legs had somehow turned to Jell-O while he wasn’t looking, and he had to grab at the nearest wall to keep from falling down.
And his lungs. Jesus, his lungs were on fire.
He pushed off the wall-or was it a counter? — and braved the endless curls of smoke, using the window as a beacon of hope. If he could get to it, if he could climb out, and he could somehow crawl up to the rooftop…
Out there, he would be able to breathe again, to see, to not feel like every inch of his body was on fire.
He didn’t know how far he had actually gotten before something blindsided him and Keo went sailing across the room. He must have slammed into another wall and gone down in a pile. Not that he felt it. Any of it. He just knew it was happening. At that moment, the only thing he was intensely aware of was screaming pain from his insides as it threatened to turn all of him into a pool of liquid.
Keo was on his back and looking up as the thing that had assaulted him rose up from the floor. It was a minotaur, blackened and monstrous, and it peered back at him with glassy oblong eyes.
No, it wasn’t a beast from Greek mythology after all. It was just an asshole in a gas mask.
Pain exploded across Keo’s face as something struck him and his head snapped backward and slammed into the slate tiles. It hurt, but the blow wasn’t nearly as intense as the inferno raging inside his body, threatening to burst through his eyeballs.
Then, mercifully, there was just darkness.
CHAPTER 6
Keo’s lungs were still burning, but at least he could breathe again without fearing that his entire chest cavity was going to cave in with every breath. Motor control was (gradually) coming back, along with feeling in his legs and arms, though he was pretty sure his eyes were the color of mandarin oranges. If Keo weren’t already covered in scars, he would have been hesitant to look at a shiny reflective surface at the moment.
Instead, he concentrated on his surroundings.
They were inside the living room of the same two-story house where he, Gene, and Miller had retreated for the night. The windows were broken, the jagged shards still sticking out of the frames covered in coagulated black blood. It looked less like plasma and more like mud: thick and still oozing.
Two men in black uniforms similar to the one Miller wore sat on the floor in opposing corners, M4 rifles lying across their laps and gas masks dangling from their hips. One was already snoring, the other getting there. A third man leaned against a wall looking out the window while spooning gobs of mashed potatoes into his mouth from a bag of MRE. Keo recognized the distinctive bulky six-shot cylinder and short barrel of the M32 grenade launcher-the weapon that had sent the tear gas sailing into the bathroom-slung behind the man’s back.