The Fields of Lemuria (26 page)

Finally, he smiled.

“Shouldn’t you be dead, San Diego?”
the message read.

“How is he?”
Keo asked, looking down at Norris’s sleeping form. He had never seen the old-timer looking so peaceful in his life.

“They really worked on him,” Allie said. “I didn’t think he’d survive past the night, but he proved me wrong. He’s stubborn. Which I guess is why you two get along so well.”

“That’s one theory.”

They were in the back room of her houseboat, with Norris snoring on one of the lower bunk beds. Two open windows allowed plenty of light inside, along with a nice and surprisingly cool breeze this afternoon.

“He’ll be mostly fine with a lot of rest,” Allie said. “And I mean a lot of rest. Zachary told me you guys were headed down south to New Orleans.”

“That was the plan.”

“That’s not going to happen if you want him to live past the week.”

He nodded, because that was his best-case scenario anyway. Norris’s appearance had been barely okay two nights ago, but the morning after he looked worse than half-dead.

“And what about you?” Allie said. “You were actually good looking when you were last here. What happened?”

He grinned and didn’t want to imagine what he actually looked like at the moment. Zachary and Shorty had done a double take when they came to pick him and the kids up in one of the pontoon boats. The blood still clung to the fabric of his shirt, and his face was probably black and purple. His nose was certainly a different shade than his skin color, and the long bandage stretching from the middle of his cheek to his temple probably didn’t improve his looks any.

“You should see the other guy,” he said.

“I bet,” Allie said. “That was a hell of a fight back there. I was listening to it all day. Then when I thought it was over, you went at it again all night. What was that about?”

He told her about the men in hazmat suits and saw the look on her face. He guessed that was probably the same expression he had given Georgette when she told him about the same men last night.

“Are you serious?” Allie said, when he was finished.

“As a heart attack.”

“You have any idea who they were, or what they wanted?”

“They didn’t stick around to tell us in the morning, and we didn’t feel like going out there to find out when it was still dark.”

“What about the bloodsuckers? Did they just…ignore them?”

“I don’t know. I just know that they were out there and I didn’t see a single creature around them.”

“That’s…” She shook her head, speechless. “Jesus Christ. As if we don’t have enough to worry about.”

Hazmat suits. Gas masks.

What the hell’s going on out there in the rest of the world?

“What about the kids?” he asked.

“You took a big risk bringing them here.”

“It wasn’t much of a risk. They’re three teenagers and a scared twenty-something without adult supervision.”

“With automatic weapons.”

“Just the one.”

“One’s all it takes.” Then, softening a bit, “Maybe you’re right. They seemed harmless enough. More hungry than anything.”

“They’re not the only ones,” he said, just as his stomach growled.

Allie smiled. “She must be gorgeous, huh?”

“‘She’?”

“This girl you’re all hot and bothered to finally get to after all these months.”

He smiled, but didn’t answer.

“I thought so,” she said.

*

Afterward, he ate
in the dining room of the houseboat by himself. He was starving and wolfed down the plate of fried fish and sucked out everything from the fish heads, eyeballs and all.

Georgette, Brian, and the other two girls were busy walking around the island’s limited space, meeting the residents who called this place home. In the couple of times he saw them, they looked both impressed and frightened, and he couldn’t tell if they were making plans to spend the rest of their lives here or leave the first chance they got. Not that whatever they decided mattered to him anymore. He had his own path, and it wasn’t up north.

Allie came out of the back room while he was still eating. “Jesus, it’s a good thing the lake’s full of fish.”

He grinned, feeling slightly sheepish at the pile of bones on his plate.

Allie pushed aside some of the dishes and unfolded a map between them. “So,” she said, pointing at Downey Creek Lake and Robertson Park. “You’re here. And this is where you want to go. New Orleans.”

Keo took a moment between bites to trace his progress ever since leaving Earl’s house. He saw the surrounding area for the first time and now suddenly understood why he felt as if he had been blindly running around in the woods for the last few months.

Because he had been.

He and Norris had tracked about thirty kilometers since the gunfight from Earl’s house. It had seemed like an eternity, and he was certain they had gone farther south than that. But no, according to the map, they were no closer to New Orleans. The city was still a distant blip from his current position, more than 400 kilometers away.

“I’m off course,” Keo said.

“No kidding,” Allie said. “How long were you in those woods?”

“A long time. We must have been going in circles for God knows how long. Jesus.”

“No map?”

“No.”

“Well, you were being hunted like mangy dogs day and night, and neither one of you are from the area, so…” She put her finger on New Orleans. “Anyway, your bright idea was to launch from Orleans?”

“That was the plan.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean?”

She traced the map as she talked. “NOLA is southeast. But Lake Charles is southwest, and you’ll be saving probably a hundred miles of travel if you went there instead. There are other benefits to Lake Charles. Plenty of marinas to find a boat that’ll fit your needs, and you’d be much closer to Texas when you finally did launch.”

Keo stared at the map for a moment. “You’re right. Lake Charles was always the better choice.”

“There’s also Lake Dulcet before that. Smaller casino town, but like Charles, it joins up with Lake Beaufont through a series of river veins. From there, it’s an easy trip into the Gulf of Mexico. See?”

“I thought you were a divorce lawyer before all of this?”

She rolled her eyes. “I can read a map, Keo.”

“That helps, too.”

She folded the map back up and handed it to him. “Have you been monitoring FEMA?”

“In the first few months after everything happened. Why?”

She walked over to a cabinet and came back with a radio. “Then you were probably like us. We kept waiting for the state or government to tell us everything was all right, that we could finally head back home. Of course, it never happened.”

The radio was old and beaten, but it powered on just fine. He wasn’t surprised by the lack of anything other than static coming through the speakers.

“A while back—maybe four months ago?—we finally picked up something by accident,” Allie said. “Zachary was playing with the radio and he happened to land on the FEMA band.”

“FEMA is the U.S. government.”

“I know. But it wasn’t the government. Someone else was tapping into the frequency. A group of people from Beaufont Lake, on a place called Song Island. They were telling other survivors to go to them, that they had electricity, food, and shelter. They also told us something we already knew—that the creatures won’t cross bodies of water. It was a recorded message playing in a loop. Twenty-four seven. Come to Song Island. Shelter. Food. Electricity.”

“If it was on a twenty-four seven loop, that means they really do have a power source.”

“Or they did,” Allie said. “The message stopped. Just like that—one day it wasn’t there anymore.”

“What happened?”

“We don’t know.”

“You never went there to find out if what they were offering was real?”

“It was tempting. We definitely considered packing up and going there. We even took a vote, but in the end, most people decided to stay here. We don’t have a lot here, but we have enough, and we can always find more in the surrounding shoreline. Out there…” She shook her head. “You know how dangerous it is.”

He nodded. “Understandable. Why take the chance?”

“Not everyone voted to stay. Some wanted to go, and they did, about a week after we first heard the message. There were seven of them.”

“Did they make it?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t heard from them since. That in itself is a bad sign, because they promised to contact us once they got there using whatever was broadcasting the message.” She walked back to the shelf and put the radio away. “Zachary was friends with some of the people who went. I think he wanted to go too, but stayed because he thought the others here needed him more. That was then, though. We’ve gotten into a routine, and I think we can afford to let him go now.”

“What are you saying, Allie?”

“Unless you want to wait for Norris to heal up, you’ll have to go out there by yourself. I’m saying you don’t have to. If you ask Zachary, I think he’d jump at the chance to go with you. I know he wants to find out what happened to his friends, and he believes the answers are on Song Island.” She sat back down. “I’d hate to lose him, but I know it’s killing him that he doesn’t know.”

Keo looked over at the door into the back room. “I have to talk to Norris first.”

*

“Back in my
day, you whippersnappers didn’t leave the old folks to die on a boat,” Norris said. “You had the decency to dump them into a home. Kids these days.”

“Stop your bitching,” Keo said. “Besides, I would drag you along, but Allie says you’d be dead within a day.”

“She a doctor?”

“Ex-lawyer.”

Norris grunted. “I have a couple of rules in life: Never trust a guy with a gun pointed at you, and never trust a lawyer.”

“She’s a divorce lawyer.”

“Even worse.”

Keo smiled. “Admit it. You want to stay. This place will extend your life by a few more years. I read somewhere that a steady diet of fish is supposed to be good for your longevity.”

Norris peered at him with surprising seriousness. “You really good with this, kid? Me staying here?”

“You’re only going to slow me down, old-timer. I promised Gillian, and I’m already way overdue. I have to make up time before she finds another guy.”

“That your way of trying to make me feel better?”

“There’s nothing for you to feel bad about.”

“Yeah, well…” He let it trail off and didn’t say anything for a moment. Finally, he said, “I’m assuming this isn’t a two-way trip.”

“Not if I can help it.”

He sighed. “I gotta admit, it’s not a bad way to waste however many years I have left. Of course, I’m not sure I’m ever going to get used to sleeping on the ocean.”

“It’s not really an ocean.”

“Ocean, lake, whatever,” Norris said, looking down at his bare feet on the sun-drenched foredeck of Allie’s houseboat. “I always figured I’d end up in a lot of places when I left Orlando, but a floating boat in the middle of a lake was definitely not one of them.”

“That’s what makes life interesting. Surprises.”

“Says the guy with a pretty girl waiting for him on a beach somewhere.”

If she’s still alive,
Keo thought, but said instead, “You wouldn’t want to keep traipsing around the country with me, anyway. It’s way too hot out there for an old coot.”

“You got that right.”

“I’m frankly shocked you’re still alive.”

Norris chuckled. “You and me both, kid. You and me both.”

The ex-cop looked better in the sunlight, though Keo still didn’t trust him not to fall down at any moment. He had struggled out of bed and walked the length of the boat before anyone had even spotted him. Keo still couldn’t see Norris’s bruised and battered body beneath his pants and a white T-shirt, and he didn’t have to. It was written all over the older man’s face and in the careful way he moved every muscle, as if just breathing hurt.

Keo knew a little bit about that himself. His broken nose had been giving him trouble the last two days while he waited for Norris to wake up. His side still throbbed when he walked, but it was really the itching along the left portion of his face that was getting on his nerves.