“Welcome to the new world order. You hear that?”
Keo listened for a moment. “What am I supposed to be hearing?”
“Nature. That’s the whole point of this, you know. We’re going back to our roots. That’s what they want.”
Keo didn’t have to ask who “they” were. Different people might have different names for them-ghouls, nightcrawlers, bloodsuckers, creatures, even monsters-but they were always the same. They. That was all you really needed to say.
“You ever wondered why they want it like this?” Keo asked. “Taking us back to the Stone Age?”
“I know exactly why, and I’m good with it.”
“It must be nice to care so little about your fellow human beings.”
Steve chuckled. “Don’t make me slap you again, Keo.”
“We wouldn’t want that now, would we? Especially me.”
“That’s a good boy.”
They walked through a wide-open (and very empty) parking lot that took up a huge chunk of the marina and toward a pair of buildings to the right side of the grounds. Men milled around inside one of them, visible through open doors and windows. A large warehouse that looked like it could hold a handful of boats at one time squatted to one side of the buildings. Keo wondered what was inside. It probably wasn’t boats…
“Expecting trouble?” Keo asked, looking around him at the armed men.
“You never know when you’ll run into someone with a fancy German submachine gun,” Steve said.
Keo grunted. “It’s not that fancy.”
“What’s the matter, an American gun like the M4 isn’t good enough for you?”
“I didn’t know you were so patriotic, Steve.”
“Rah rah, and all that jazz.”
They were heading toward one of the two buildings next to the warehouse. Someone had spray painted “Marina 1” and “Marina 2” on the walls.
“Your boys look a little on edge,” Keo said.
“Nothing we can’t handle,” Steve said. They stopped in front of the buildings and Steve nodded at Taylor and Jack. “Take the kid to Processing.” And to Donovan and Horace, “The two of you with me.”
Steve pulled open the door and stepped inside Marina 1.
Behind Keo, Taylor was leading Gene away while Jack waved one of the soldiers on horseback over. Gene looked over at Keo, and if he expected to see fear in the teenager’s eyes, he would have been disappointed. Gene looked almost happy, as if he had come home.
“See you around, Gene,” Keo said.
“Yeah, see you around, Keo,” Gene said.
Jack had traded places with the horseman and had tossed his crutches to Taylor. “Save them for me, just in case.” He looked over at Keo. “Don’t worry about the kid. Look at him. Once he sees what T18 has to offer, he’s never going to want to leave. They never do.”
Jack turned the horse around and galloped off, while Taylor led Gene after him.
“Come on,” Donovan said, and poked Keo in the back with the M4 again.
Keo followed Steve into Marina 1.
It was an office suite, with a big desk where a secretary would have sat and a row of empty cheap plastic chairs along the walls for the guests. A dead plant draped over the side of a faded brown pot and magazines were strewn along a chipped table. Keo walked across dirty, heavily mud-caked tiled flooring and into a back hallway that Steve had disappeared into earlier.
They walked all the way to the end before Donovan said, “Inside,” and gave him another shove in the back with the same barrel.
He stepped inside, expecting Donovan to follow, but the man instead turned around and headed back to the waiting area.
Steve had already made himself comfortable inside a nice big office. The place looked heavily lived in, with a blanket and pillows on a pullout sofa along one wall and empty plastic bottles of water littering the corners.
The older man was pulling up the lone window, letting the cool breeze from the river rush inside. He looked comfortable, like a king in his (shabby) throne room. “Have a seat, Keo.”
Keo sat down on a surprisingly comfortable chair in front of a desk, its laminated surface covered with a large and heavily annotated map of the area that finally allowed him to see T18/Wilmont in relation to the rest of the Gulf Coast. They were on the outskirts of League City, on the other side of the I-45 highway. A long river, like the slithering body of a snake, stretched from T18 all the way to Galveston Bay.
Steve walked back over. “I saw that.”
“What’s that?”
“You looking at the map.” He smirked. “You think you’ve committed enough important details to memory?”
Keo smiled. “You give me too much credit. My memory is shit. I was just trying to figure out where I was.”
“Ah,” Steve said, though he clearly didn’t believe a single word Keo had said.
The man sat down on an executive chair and opened one of the drawers and produced a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels, then grabbed two shot glasses from another drawer. Keo watched him expertly pour the Tennessee whiskey into both glasses before sliding one across the desk.
“To your health,” Steve said, and downed his.
Keo hissed as his went down. Even as he was tilting the glass to his lips with his still zip-tied hands, he briefly considered using it to bash Steve’s head in and grab his weapons, including the M4 Steve had leaned against the wall behind him.
“It’s been a while, huh?” Steve said with a grin, watching him closely. Too closely. It was going to be tough to catch Steve off-balance.
“I’m more of a brandy man.”
“I can see that. A world traveler like you.”
“How you figure?”
“Oh, come on. You’re not from around here, we both know that. You couldn’t find Pearland on a map if I put a gun to your head.”
“What is that, a city made of pears?”
“Cute.” He poured himself another glass and offered Keo another one too, but Keo waved him off. “You should learn to appreciate American whiskey. There’s nothing like it, especially now. Soon, there won’t be Americans anymore. No Europeans or Asians or blacks and whites and Mexicans, either. They’ll just be humans and nonhumans.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. I think they’ll always be Asians and blacks and whites to some people.”
“Neanderthals,” Steve said, and emptied his second glass with a flick of his wrist.
“I didn’t know you were such a progressive fella, Steve.”
A chuckle. Keo couldn’t tell if that was the whiskey talking or if Steve really was an easygoing guy. Of course, that easygoing guy had given him a nice slap last night for absolutely no reason. Okay, so there was a reason, but it was far from justified.
“I’m pragmatic,” Steve said. “It’s just us and them now. The faster the human race accepts our new position on the totem pole, the easier it’ll be for us as a species to move forward. We’re obviously the second-class citizens at the moment. All of us. That’s fine, someone has to be. But there are classes within classes. People who embrace that get to keep on keeping on.”
Keo looked out the window as two armed men in black uniforms walked the riverbanks behind Steve. “You need that many guns to keep on keeping on, Steve?”
“Can’t be helped. We have a bit of a problem, you see.” Steve leaned slightly across the table. “You wanna hear about it?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Steve shrugged.
“Gee, Steve, what kind of problem do you have?” Keo asked, with all the enthusiasm of a man being forced to recite a line at gunpoint.
Steve smiled. “I like you.”
“I don’t blame you. I’m a likable guy.”
“Was that before or after this?” he asked, tracing the left side of his face with his finger.
“Scars give a man personality. You should try it.”
“I’ll stick to looking handsome.” He leaned back in his chair. “So, this problem of mine. You see, everyone here’s gotten with the program, but not everyone out there has. I still have people running around causing trouble.”