Free The Fields of Lemuria by Sam Sisavath Page B

look. The others had also courteously stopped gawking, though some of the kids couldn’t resist.
    He changed into new cargo pants and a T-shirt in the back room, which took up one quarter of the cabin and held bunk beds. There were dressers, but apparently not enough for everyone, judging by the clothes hanging along wall hooks. Women’s clothes.
    Allie and the others, including Gabe and Bill, and a bearded forty-something Keo hadn’t seen before, sat around the dining table in the center of the cabin eating fried fish with their hands when he came back out. It took Keo a few seconds to realize the bearded man was actually Zachary, cleaned up and wearing regular clothes.
    “Look at you,” Allie said. “Cleaned up real good.”
    “Was that a compliment?” Keo said.
    “Mostly, sure.”
    The others made room for him to sit at the table. Allie tossed a fried white bass onto a ceramic plate from a big basket at the center of the table and slid it over in front of him. His fingers were almost trembling when he picked it up and started eating.
    Jesus, it tasted good.
    “So, you want to tell us what’s going on out there?” Allie said. “It sounded like you guys were fighting World War III.”
    “You can hear all the way out here?” Keo said.
    “You’d have to be deaf not to. Sound travels these days. Plus, Zach has been tracking all of it since…when?”
    “About nine days ago,” Zachary said. “Faded shots, but it was pretty clear they were coming our way. Shorty and I came to the conclusion they’ve been chasing you and your friend since that first gunshot. We wrong?”
    Keo shook his head. “No.”
    “Who are they?” Allie said. “The truth.”
    Keo spent a moment digesting the fish. It was slightly overcooked and crunched in his mouth, but it still tasted better than anything he’d had in…well, it had been a while. Allie opened a cooler and took out a bottle of water. It tasted like rain.
    “We’re running from a guy named Pollard,” Keo said. “He wants to kill us.”
    “Why?” Allie asked.
    “Because I killed his son.”
    Allie stared at him for a moment. Then she exchanged a look with Zachary, then with Bill and Gabe. He could almost see her mind turning, crunching the numbers to see how much trouble he had brought them, and how putting a bullet in his head, then tossing him into the lake would solve all her troubles. His first instinct was that she wasn’t capable of something like that, but that was before the world went to shit. Who knew, these days, what even the most mild-mannered person was capable of…
    “Why did you kill his son?” she finally asked.
    “Because his son was trying to kill me,” Keo said.
    “So it was self-defense.”
    “Yes.”
    “Or is that your interpretation of events?”
    “What is this, a courtroom?”
    “Why shouldn’t it be?” she said with a slight edge in her voice.
    “He didn’t give me any choices. He was trying to shoot me, so I shot him first.”
    “Sounds pretty straightforward.”
    “It was.”
    “From the beginning,” Zachary said. “The truth, kid.”
    Keo told them about the attack on the house and killing Joe during the gunfight. He skipped the part about Levy, the creature in the garage, and Bobby, Pollard’s nephew. He told them about Gillian and the others escaping on Mark’s boat during the battle, then added in the ambush by Pollard’s men at the gas station along the interstate, figuring it would get him some bonus points. He left out the part where he and Norris killed two more of Pollard’s men at the barbershop.
    Nothing he told them was a lie. He just elected not to tell them everything. Given their situation—hiding out here in the middle of the lake—he guessed (hopefully correctly) that they were more apt to fall on his side if forced to choose between him and a man like Pollard.
    “So they just go around taking what they want?” Gabe said when Keo finished.
    “They have the firepower for it,” Keo said.