Steve turned down the volume until Keo could barely hear Lara’s voice. “She believes it, too. Just like Tobias. She thinks you can keep fighting them. The sad part is, we’ve caught a couple of people listening to this propaganda bullshit. Luckily, we’ve managed to nip those in the bud before they got out of control. This type of thing is like a virus; if you don’t stamp it out immediately, it spreads. We can’t have that.”
“How are you going to stop it?” Keo asked.
“Easy. I outlawed radios.” Then he smiled. “Anyway, let’s go wash up. The chicken smells ready.”
On cue, Lois called from outside in that much-too-June-Cleaver voice, “Come and get ’em, boys!”
*
Lois was pretty and lively, and while she was bringing the plates of fried chicken, beans, and corncobs over, Steve leaned over to Keo and whispered, “She wants to get pregnant-you know, do her part for the town-but I won’t let her. I don’t know about you, but I prefer them slim and hot.”
Keo smiled and nodded, but all he could think about was Gillian. She was pregnant right now with another man’s baby. Four months pregnant. What was he doing four months ago? He couldn’t even remember. Somewhere in the Louisiana woods, trying to survive Pollard’s small army of paramilitary assholes, probably.
Steve had grabbed the biggest piece of chicken thigh on the plate and was about to wrap his mouth around it when his radio squawked, and a male voice said, “Sir? It’s Grant. Come in.”
Lois sighed. “Honey, why do you still have that thing turned on? It’s dinnertime.”
Steve ignored her, put down the chicken, and unclipped the radio from his belt. He keyed it, said, “What is it?”
“Uh, sorry to disturb you, sir, but I have some bad news,” Grant said.
“Steve,” Lois started to say, but she froze when Steve shot her a hard glance. She looked down at her plate of beans instead.
“Go on,” Steve said into the radio.
“It’s, uh, your brother, sir,” Grant said. He sounded nervous.
“What about Jack?”
“He’s dead, sir.”
“What the fuck do you mean he’s dead?”
Steve shot up from the table, nearly knocking it over. Lois gasped and grabbed onto a corncob as it rolled off a plate.
“The woman,” Grant said, and Keo thought his voice was trembling slightly. “She’s gone. Someone busted in on Doctor Bannerman’s place and took her. They, uh, shot Jack while they were escaping.”
Keo thought he was ready for it, but even he was surprised when Steve punched the table so hard that everything-the dishes, the chicken, and the corncobs-flew everywhere. Lois screamed and stumbled to her feet while Keo managed to grab onto a chicken leg as it bounced into the air.
“Fuck!” Steve screamed.
Keo didn’t say anything. He took a bite out of the chicken leg. It tasted good, but then he hadn’t had fried chicken in years, so Lois could have actually been an awful cook and he might not have noticed.
Besides, he needed something for his mouth to do, otherwise he might have burst out laughing uncontrollably at the sight of Steve raging in front of him.
CHAPTER 19
Keo still had the taste of chicken in his mouth, and maybe a small piece of meat hidden somewhere between his molars at the back, when he was driven over to T18A2, next door to Gillian’s subdivision, and climbed out of the golf cart in front of a squat one-story house. There were already five soldiers standing in the driveway, with a horse grazing on the lawn nearby, oblivious to the activity.
One of the men hurried over. He was sweating even in the chilly air and with storm clouds continuing to gather above them. With thirty minutes before nightfall, it already looked pitch-dark outside, and most of the streetlights (and the few sprinkled among the lawns) had come on all around them.
“What the fuck happened?” was the first thing out of Steve’s mouth.
“Someone helped her escape,” the man said. Keo recognized his voice from the radio. Grant.
“How many?”
“Bannerman said there was just one.”
“And Jack?”
“He’s inside.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know exactly, sir. He was inside the garage with Bannerman and the woman when it happened. They shot Roger on their way out.”
Steve brushed past Grant and made a beeline for the door. The other soldiers hurried out of his path. They were all wearing gun belts and cradling M4 rifles, and Keo kept count of all the others around the area. Counting these five, there were the two standing guard at the gate and a half dozen more he had seen on his way over here.
Too many. Always too damn many.
Unlike Steve’s house, the interior of Bannerman’s was sparsely lit by a pair of LED lamps, one resting on the kitchen counter and another in the living room over the fireplace. It almost looked as if no one lived here, but of course the blood on the floor and a dead soldier lying facedown on the carpet said differently. Keo stepped around the blood and followed Steve to the back of the house.
Steve marched straight to a door that opened into the garage, crunching heavy tarp covering every inch of the concrete floor as he did so. The room had been converted into some kind of operating room, though it looked and smelled more like a butcher shop. A pair of metal tables sat in the center, flanked by steel trays with surgical instruments; one had been upended, its contents tossed liberally across the room. One of the tables was covered in blood and there were fresh, bloody footprints all over the place.
A man in his sixties, wearing white hospital scrubs, sat in a comfortable-looking armchair in the corner, cradling his arm in his lap. Someone had bundled the arm up with gauze and the man looked tired, wiping sweat from his face. The garage door was closed-and didn’t look capable of opening-and there was very little ventilation, which probably accounted for the old man’s perspiration.
The lack of circulating air also kept in the smell of the blood that pooled underneath Jack. The younger Miller sat awkwardly against the far wall, his head lolled to one side, eyes open, as if he had simply decided to sit down to rest and could stand up at any moment.
Steve ignored the old man and walked straight to Jack. He kicked a surgical scissor in his path and it skidded across the room. He crouched in front of his brother and held Jack’s sweat-slicked face in his hands, staring at him in silence.
Keo looked over at the old man, Bannerman. “What happened?”
Bannerman picked up a bottle of water on a table next to him with his good hand and took a slow, drawn-out sip. “Some guy in a ski mask. Came in and shot Jack, then took the woman. I guess he shot someone else in the living room, too?”
“You didn’t go out to check?”
“He shot me, too,” Bannerman said, holding up his wounded arm as proof. “I thought it’d be more prudent to wait for help instead of running out there. I’m just a doctor.”
More like a butcher.
Steve stood up and ran his fingers through his hair for a moment. Keo waited for the outburst, the profanity, but instead Steve just whirled around and walked past Keo and back into the hallway. The man hadn’t spared a single glance at Bannerman, which, Keo guessed, the old man was grateful for.
Keo followed Steve through the living room, then to the front door. “What now?” he asked.
“Find her and kill her,” Steve said.
Oh, that’s all?
Grant hadn’t gone anywhere and was waiting for them in the driveway. For a man who was barely a few years younger than Steve, Grant looked overly small and frail and fidgeted back and forth nervously.
“There was gunfire,” Steve said. “Why didn’t anyone stop them?”
“No one heard gunshots,” Grant said. “I think he was using a silencer or something.”