“You think?”
“He must have,” Grant said, trying his best to sound more confident-and failing miserably. “It wasn’t until Pete stumbled across Roger’s body inside the house and called it in that we even knew what had happened.”
Steve didn’t say anything. Instead, he squinted up at the storm clouds continuing to gather en masse above them. There was a strangely serene expression on his face, as if he hadn’t just discovered his little brother was dead.
Keo glanced around him. Every soldier, even the ones across the street, seemed to know something bad had happened inside Bannerman’s house, something that was going to affect all of them. Like Keo, they looked as if they were waiting for the inevitable eruption from Steve.
Any moment now…
“It’s going to rain all night,” Steve finally said, sounding perfectly calm. “They have two options: Make a run for it, or hide. It’s too dark to go into the woods. The crawlers will be out by now, and they’d never survive for more than a few minutes in there. Anyone who has been here for a while knows that. So they’ll hide.” The man glanced at Keo and narrowed his eyes. “You have any ideas?”
“About what?” Keo said.
“Where they would be hiding.”
“You’re asking the wrong man. I didn’t even know they existed until yesterday.”
“They have inside help,” Steve said, looking around the streets. “I’ve always known that. Someone feeding them intelligence, stealing supplies for them. M4s and ammo going missing. That’s who we’re looking for. Someone who knows the town, knows where to hide. That means we have to look everywhere. Turn this place inside out, because they’re still here. I can fucking guarantee you that.”
An inside man? Right. What was that Jordan had told him?
“If this blows up in your face, there’s another way out of the town… His name’s Dave. I’ve never actually met him before, but Tobias seems to trust him. He works in the main cafeteria…”
Dave. Main cafeteria.
Maybe Dave had heard about Jordan being held at Bannerman’s. People would talk. Maybe one of the soldiers who liked eating with the civilians. Bragging, trying to impress some pretty young girl with inside gossip.
Not that it mattered. Dave, or one of Tobias’s other inside agents, had clearly saved Jordan, though Keo still hadn’t decided if that was a good thing or not. He would have eventually come up with a plan to rescue her himself. Heck, he might not even have to, since Steve seemed to have bought his line about Jordan wanting to re-assimilate back into town. The only certainty now was that someone had acted and Jordan was out there, somewhere.
And Steve was right. They would still be in T18 right now because there would be no other places to go. Certainly not out there. Not under the suffocating darkness.
“Someone who knows the town, knows where to hide.”
Keo was watching Steve’s face, the way he was scrunching his eyes and sweeping the streets, as if he could see through the walls of the homes, when something fell out of the sky and landed on Keo’s forehead. He held out his hand to catch a few more drops, as did some of the men around him.
The rain came slowly but quickly picked up momentum.
In less than ten seconds, Keo was soaked from head to toe.
Steve, standing next to him, didn’t seem to notice.
“Search every house!” he shouted, raising his voice to be heard. “They’re hiding in one of these houses! No matter how long it takes, search every single building and shack and room until you find them!”
*
Steve left Keo in the driveway with Grant and rode off on the same horse that had been dining on the lawn when they arrived-it turned out to be Jack’s-along with a dozen other mounted soldiers. Keo guessed it was faster to travel by horseback than in the slow-moving, solar-powered golf cart.
“Come on,” Grant said. “I got orders to take you to Processing.”
Keo climbed into the cart with Grant and they motored off, raindrops bouncing against the solar panels on top of the vehicle. The streets were already showing signs of flooding, the multiple cracks of thunder in the distance followed by lightning flashes sounding as if the gods had finally decided to punish T18 for its trespasses.
“Does it usually rain this hard?” Keo asked, shouting over the pak-pak-pak of raindrops cascading around them.
“Not usually!” Grant shouted back as lightning crackled again. “Hear that? This is gonna be a huge one!”
They were driving through two to three inches of water by the time they left T18A2, and Grant turned south down the road-toward Processing, wherever the hell that was. Soldiers in raincoats had begun appearing on horses and on foot around them, many wielding flashlights. They looked coordinated, some moving in groups while others spread out among the subdivisions. Like a Western posse times ten, except these cowboys were carrying assault rifles.
“Looks like it’s gonna be a long night,” Grant said. “We’re going to find them, though. Not a lot of places to hide around here. No one’s going to harbor them, either. Sooner or later they’ll run out of corners, and then we’ll get them.”
Keo didn’t respond. Instead, he tried to imagine where Jordan and Dave (if it was Dave, and not another one of Tobias’s inside men) would go. Like Steve, they would know better than to brave the woods. Even before the rainstorm it had gotten too dark, and that brought out things worse than soldiers. Would they hide out in the inside man’s place? That would depend if he was single or if he shared a house with someone (or someones). Not that it mattered, because he didn’t know who had taken Jordan anyway, which left him with…
Jordan. Where would Jordan go?
Keo was thinking about that as two horsemen galloped past them along the shoulder of the road, flashlights shining in his face. Compared to the Maglites they were carrying, the golf cart’s own headlights were barely strong enough to illuminate the paved lanes in front of them. If not for the LEDs hanging off the poles, Grant would be driving almost in total darkness.
Thunder boomed in the distance, seemingly getting closer (and louder) with each new one. For a second Keo thought they were gunshots and was thankful he was wrong. Gunshots would mean Steve had found Jordan and her friend, but soldiers still running around searching every house and building meant the exact opposite.
They were about to pass the open gate into T18A1 when Keo tapped Grant on the shoulder. “Hey, turn left.”
“What?” Grant said.
“Turn in here.”
“I got orders to take you to Processing.”
“You can do that later. I have to swing over and talk to a friend about something.”
“Forget it.”
Keo reached over and drew Grant’s gun-a Glock-and pressed it roughly into the man’s side. “I said, turn in here.”
Grant almost missed the entrance but stopped in time and turned into the subdivision. The gate was already open, which wasn’t a surprise since soldiers had probably been going in and out of the place before they even arrived.
Keo spotted two people inside the guard booth, shivering against the cold. They were soaking wet and neither one felt like coming out when they saw the golf cart moving past their window. One of them did make the effort to wave Grant through. Grant started to slow down when Keo jammed the gun harder against his gut. Grant took the hint and they continued through.
Steve’s people were flooding all five subdivisions at once, but that also meant they had to stretch their numbers thin. They drove past soldiers along the sidewalks knocking on doors. They seemed to be moving in groups of two, flashlights cutting through the sheets of falling rain. Every single one looked miserable and wet, and a few gave them envious stares as they cruised by under the (barely there) protection of the cart’s roof. Keo just hoped he had the gun held low enough that the others couldn’t see where it was pointed.