“Turn here,” Keo said when they finally reached their destination.
Grant turned the cart up onto the driveway and parked out in the open. Keo took a brief second to look around him-a pair of soldiers down the street, about five houses down; two more on the opposite side further up the road. The two behind him were the problem, but they were moving slowly, the combination of the weather and the need to search every room of every house before moving on taking up most of their time. No doubt the warmth of the houses compared to the bone-soaking rain outside convinced them to make all those searches go slower, too.
He hoped, anyway.
Keo pulled off Grant’s M4 rifle and shoved the Glock into his front waistband, then climbed out of the golf cart. “Get out.”
Grant did and was soon hopping from foot to foot, arms folded across his chest as rain ran down his head and uniform. His teeth started chattering almost right away.
“Don’t be such a girl; it’s not that cold,” Keo said.
He nodded toward the door and Grant moved toward it obediently, asking, “Where are we?”
“Shut up and move.”
“You’re not going to get away with this.”
“You know what a bullet tastes like, Grant?”
Grant shook his head. “No…”
“If you don’t want to find out, keep your mouth shut unless I speak to you. Comprende?”
The soldier swallowed and kept moving. Keo followed him, only allowing himself to shiver and his teeth to chatter when Grant wasn’t looking.
Christ, it was freezing cold. And it was only going to get worse as the night dragged on. He wondered how long it was going to take the neighborhood to be completely flooded. Hopefully Steve had paid attention to the sewers so the water would have someplace to go when that did happen.
Grant was waiting at the front door, trembling underneath a pair of small solar-powered LED lights. Keo leaned across him and knocked on the slab of wood. He could only see pitch blackness through the side security windows, but soon a lamp turned on before moving across the foyer toward them.
“Not a fucking word,” Keo said to Grant.
Grant nodded. Or shivered. Keo liked to think he was afraid and not just freezing.
The door opened and a man in his thirties, wearing thin-rimmed glasses, looked out at them. He was wearing slacks and a white T-shirt and used the lamp in his hand to illuminate Grant’s face before moving over to Keo’s.
He lingered a bit on Keo-or maybe just on the scars.
“Yes?” he finally said.
“Jay?” Keo asked.
“Yes. Do I know you?”
“No.”
Keo nudged Grant in the back and the soldier stepped anxiously inside the house, glad to be out of the cold night. Jay looked conflicted, and for a moment Keo thought he might fight back, but instead he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and stepped aside to let them in.
Grant sighed audibly as they were immediately embraced by the warmth of the house. It might not have air conditioning or heating anymore, but a well-insulated building still offered more than decent protection against the climate, especially one that was currently being rocked by a thunderstorm.
Keo closed the door behind them, grateful for the sudden soothing silence, with only the distant pak-pak-pak against the rooftop to remind him what was going on out there. “Where’s Gillian?” he asked.
“She’s asleep,” Jay said.
“It’s barely six in the evening.”
“She…had a long day.”
Jay was a terrible liar. What’s worse, he probably knew it but couldn’t do anything about it. He was either a very decent guy not used to lying, or an asshole. Keo wanted to believe it was the latter, but chances were pretty good it was probably the former.
Just my luck.
“What’s this about?” Jay asked.
“Gillian!” Keo shouted.
“I told you, she’s asleep,” Jay started to say.
“Shut up, Jay.”
The man looked as if he might argue, but like last time, decided to back down instead.
Grant, standing between them, looked back and forth, clearly picking up on the extra “something” going on between them. Or, at least, coming from Keo. Smartly, though, he kept his mouth shut.
“Gillian!” Keo shouted again.
He heard footsteps coming down the stairs before Gillian finally appeared in a nightgown, which was supposed to confirm Jay’s statement that she had been sleeping. He didn’t buy it. Keo didn’t need to ask her, because he could see it on her face.
“Keo,” she said softly, genuinely surprised to see him there.
“Grant and I were just tooling around in his cool golf cart and decided to see how you were doing,” he said.
She gave him a confused look.
“Joke,” he said.
“Oh.”
Jay hurried over and stood next to her. “What’s this about?” he asked again.
Keo locked the door behind them. “They’re coming,” he said, directing everything at Gillian and ignoring Jay.
“Who?” Gillian said.
“The soldiers. They’re searching every house in town.”
“What?” Jay said, alarmed. “Why are they doing that?”
“Stop fucking around. There’s no time for that. Right, Gillian?”
She didn’t answer.
“Right?” he said again.
She sighed. “Right.”
“Where are they?”
“Upstairs.”
“Gillian,” Jay said.
“It’s okay, Jay,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. “He knows already. Keo’s a smart guy.”
Not that smart, or I would have been here earlier before he knocked you up, Keo thought about saying, but didn’t.
Jay looked over at him, as if to say, “Is he?”
“Just enough to get in trouble,” Keo said.
“How long do we have?” Gillian asked.
“It’s probably going to take them about thirty minutes to get here. Maybe more, maybe less. How secure are they?”
Gillian thought about it. Jay, next to her, looked physically pained.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Not very. We didn’t expect a house-to-house search.”
Keo put a hand on Grant’s shirt collar and dragged him forward. “I need someplace to put him.”
“Jay can help with that,” Gillian said.
Keo gave her a disbelieving look.
“He can keep him from running off,” Gillian said. Then to Jay, “Go get your little black bag, honey.”
“Why?” Jay asked.
“Trust me,” she said, before looking back at Keo and adding, “And you can trust Keo. We’re going to need his help to survive tonight.”
CHAPTER 20
“How did you know she’d be here?” Gillian asked as she led him up the stairs.
They were moving much slower than they really had to, not that Keo was complaining. Despite everything, being this close to her, smelling her, was still preferable to not seeing her again.
“I took a stab in the dark,” he said. “She’s stuck behind enemy lines at night and she can’t leave the safety of the town. Where would she go? There’s only one person here who she calls a friend. You. There was also her accomplice, but I took a chance that they burned their cover when they rescued her.”
“That’s a big chance.”
“It was fifty-fifty. I’d take those odds any day of the week and twice on Wednesdays.”
“Wednesdays?”
“I don’t like Sundays.”
She smiled, but it was gone quickly, replaced by the very determined Gillian he remembered from the days and nights of trying to survive after The Purge. “She’s bad off, Keo. I almost didn’t recognize her when Dave brought her here.”
Ah. Dave. The cafeteria man.
“Jay almost fainted at the sight,” Gillian continued.
“I thought he was a doctor.”
“He is, but he’s never seen someone get beaten that badly. It’s really bad.”
“I know. I saw her earlier.”