Road To Babylon | Book 11 | Nice Shot Read online

  Nice Shot

  Copyright © 2021 by Sam Sisavath

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Road to Babylon Media LLC

  www.roadtobabylon.com

  Edited by Jennifer Jensen & Wendy Chan

  Cover Art by Deranged Doctor Design

  Contents

  Books in the Road to Babylon Series

  Also by Sam Sisavath

  About Nice Shot

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Coming Soon

  Books in the Road to Babylon Series

  Glory Box

  Bombtrack

  Rooster

  Devil’s Haircut

  Black

  The Distance

  Hollow

  Daybreak

  The Ranch

  100 Deep

  Nice Shot

  Ain’t Goin’ Down

  Also by Sam Sisavath

  The Purge of Babylon Post-Apocalyptic Series

  The Purge of Babylon: A Novel of Survival

  The Gates of Byzantium

  The Stones of Angkor

  The Walls of Lemuria Collection (Keo Prequel)

  The Fires of Atlantis

  The Ashes of Pompeii

  The Isles of Elysium

  The Spears of Laconia

  The Horns of Avalon

  The Bones of Valhalla

  Mason’s War (A Purge of Babylon Story)

  The After the Purge: Vendetta Trilogy

  Requiem

  Tokens

  Remains

  The After The Purge: AKA John Smith Post-Apocalyptic Series

  Mist City

  Run or Fight

  Shoot Last

  The Allie Krycek Vigilante Series

  Hunter/Prey

  Saint/Sinner

  Finders/Keepers

  Savior/Corruptor

  The Red Sky Conspiracy Series

  Most Wanted

  The Devil You Know

  The Fall of Man Post-Apocalyptic Series

  The Break

  Homefront

  Firebase

  The Tide

  About Nice Shot

  IT’S ALL FUBARATS FROM HERE.

  Your past has a way of coming back to haunt you. It’s worse when you’re a man like Keo, who has done a lot of very bad things, sometimes to very bad people. Those were the good ol’ days.

  These days, everything is a little more complicated.

  Sent to Shaker Town on a spying mission, Keo has instead left the place on the run. The mission itself is an unmitigated failure. Now Keo has to evade an army of killers and a man with a very big grudge to settle with him.

  Hunted? Check.

  Fighting for his life? Double check.

  Unexpected allies and enemies? Triple check.

  Close to defeat? Hell no.

  One

  Keo once overheard someone saying that Shaker Town people smelled different. He hadn’t really understood it then; and in truth, he didn’t buy it. People were people, and people smelled like all other people. Unless, of course, they’d been sleeping in a room covered in smoke. Then, maybe, they would give off a different odor.

  But Shaker Town folks smelling different from just being Shaker Town folks? That was a bit much.

  That was then.

  Now, he wasn’t so sure, because goddamn he could easily, without even trying, detect the strong stench radiating from the pores of the three walking underneath him. They didn’t just give off an obvious stink, they reeked of it. The stench of Shaker Town evaporated from their skin and through their clothes like a diffuser run amok.

  It was bad. Bad enough that Keo knew they were coming even before he saw them.

  Three. All wearing Atlanta Falcons caps. The preferred “uniform” of Shakers everywhere. One of them even had his with the bill turned backwards. The “outlaw” of the bunch, perhaps. Or just an asshole.

  No, check that. Three assholes. Two white and one black. Why three? Obviously, because assholes only ran in threes. Well-armed, wearing boots that were thick and heavy enough to make as much noise as possible as they stomped their way through the woods, not giving a flying you-know-whatsoever they were making enough noise to wake the dead. Then again, they likely fancied themselves the hunters, with Keo and his two compatriots the prey.

  They weren’t entirely wrong in that regard.

  Keo had never once believed Buck when the old man had told him he’d wait until Keo, Claire, and Steven reached Arrowhead before he retaliated. Keo hadn’t believed the man, because Buck was a liar. And liars, well, tended to lie.

  So Keo wasn’t the least bit surprised when his instincts turned out to be correct and these three yahoos appeared out of the foliage, moving with the grace of a herd of stampeding elephants. Not that they were that reckless, but from where he was sitting—or squatting, to be overly pedantic about it—they might as well be.

  Keo was thinking about Lara and how he was going to survive all this in order to see her again and welcome that new life he’d created with her into this sucky ass world when he took aim at the first of three Shakers. They’d already passed underneath him and gotten ten yards ahead when he zeroed in on the back of the first one’s skull and pulled the trigger.

  Pfft! as the round flew, struck the head, and the man pitched forward.

  For an instant—two seconds, possibly three—the other two didn’t realize their friend had died, and kept going.

  Boy, won’t they be surprised!

  When they finally figured out they were one man short, the Shakers stopped and turned around. They stared like slack-jawed hillbillies at their dead friend. Dead, because Keo’s round had gone clean through his head and exited the bottom of his jaw, before pekking into the soft forest ground.

  The two remaining men—one white, one black, all fuckheads—exchanged a confused look. Keo would have given anything to hear what they were thinking. Before the two dummies could figure out where the shot that had ended the life of their partner had come from, Keo tattooed the black guy in the chest with two rounds. As the man fell, the third and last one spun in a wild circle, AR rifle rising and sweeping the woods.

  He was looking in the wrong direction. Which was to say, he was looking at the ground level and not up.

  Keo put the man out of his misery with two more shots—pfft-pfft!—from the MP5SD. Both shots weren’t exactly silent—you could never completely suppress a gunshot even with a built-in suppressor such as the one the H&K weapon he was wielding had—but it was a clean enough kill. Just to be safe, Keo waited ten minutes for more Shakers to show up in response to the shooting.

  None did.

  Satisfied
he’d achieved a clean ambush, Keo hopped off the branch and landed in a slight crouch. Twenty feet, give or take. It was a good thing he’d always been good at climbing, even now as an adult.

  Keo spent the next few minutes going through the bodies. He didn’t recognize any of the three men, not that he thought he would. There had to be a few thousand people in Shaker Town, and half of those were men. In the three months since he began his mission, Keo hadn’t met everyone and probably never would.

  Cap Turned Backwards guy had the best spoils of war—a radio, two spare mags for the SIG Sauer Keo was already carrying, and some useful supplies—while the other two had come not bearing gifts. The louts. He stripped one of them of his tactical backpack. He also found a pack of unopened chewing gum in one pocket. He tossed the weapons—he didn’t need the extra weight—and grabbed only the essentials. There wasn’t much of the latter, but enough he felt better about wasting the hour or so it’d taken to lie in wait for Buck’s men.

  Keo walked off, scanning the woods around him for additional presence, but there was just him and the creatures going about daily life. If they noticed what Keo had done, not a single living thing had bothered to stop to watch. As for the bodies, if Buck’s people didn’t retrieve them, Keo was sure something else would when night fell.

  And speaking of nightfall…

  Later. He’d cross that bridge when he came to it.

  Or came under it.

  Either/or.

  Keo raised the radio to his lips and pressed the transmit lever. He spoke into it. “Three down.”

  There was no response.

  Five seconds.

  Ten…

  “I had to give it a shot,” a voice finally said through the tinny speakers.

  Keo smirked, but didn’t stop moving. For all he knew, the rest of Buck’s merry band of Shakers was right behind him. He was very aware that he was inside a heavily wooded area, and in order for the radio’s broadcast to reach another radio tuned to the same frequency, they had to be nearby.

  “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” Keo said into the radio.

  Small laughter came through the two-way portable. The source, Buck, had done that for Keo’s benefit, since the man hadn’t had to transmit when he did it. “Would you believe me if I said those three was all there was?”

  “No.”

  “I swear on my momma’s grave.”

  “You don’t have a momma.”

  More laughter. “Pretty sure I did, Keo.”

  “Maybe you can introduce me to her, then. I’ll tell her what a piece of shit her boy’s become.”

  “Now, now, that’s not nice. I was hoping we could be friends.”

  “Did you, now?”

  “Sorta.”

  “Well, as they say, hope springs eternal.”

  “So you’re saying there’s a chance?”

  “Nah. You burned that bridge when you came back from the dead.”

  “I never said I was dead.”

  That part was true. Keo, like most people who even knew Buck existed at all, had only assumed the man was dead.

  And we all know what happens when you assume, don’t we?

  “No, you didn’t,” Keo said. “I guess I’ll have to make sure of it this time. And it’s gonna hurt, Buck. It’s gonna hurt real bad, my friend.”

  “Ouch,” the man said.

  “Exactly.”

  There was a brief moment of silence on the other end as Keo maneuvered his way through the woods. Trees of various sizes sprouted out of the ground all around him. From memory, he knew he was still many miles from the sanctuary of Arrowhead, even if a part of him wondered if he should even be going there. It wasn’t that he didn’t think the place was safe, but did he really want to bring the world of hurt that was Buck into their lives? Did he have that right?

  Norris was not going to like this, that was for sure. Not one bit. But Keo didn’t have any choice. He had to reach Black Tide; had to tell Danny what he’d found out. Which was…

  …what?

  He didn’t know, even now. Three months of undercover work, coupled with a last-second dive into a stream, and he wasn’t any closer to learning what was going on in Shaker Town, or if the weapon they were said to be developing was, in fact, being developed.

  So what exactly do you have, pal?

  Not much. Not much at all.

  He only knew one thing for certain: Buck was alive, and he was in Shaker Town. Maybe he was even the one pulling all the strings. So where did that leave John Deacon, a.k.a. The Deacon?

  Keo didn’t know. That was the problem. One of many.

  “I got a question that’s been bugging me,” Buck was saying through the radio.

  Fuck your questions, Keo thought and wanted to say, but didn’t. He needed intel, and that meant learning what Buck knew—or, in this case, didn’t know.

  “What’s that?” Keo said into the radio.

  As he weaved his way around the trees and was careful not to disturb bushes, leaving as little evidence of his passing as possible, Keo kept one eye in front of him and the other around him. His ears, similarly, were at once tuned into the radio and on the sounds of the forest. He had already run into three of Buck’s men, and Keo didn’t have any illusions they were the only ones.

  “Steven,” Buck said through the radio. Keo had turned the volume down slightly, just enough for him to hear, but not loud enough to alert anyone nearby. At least, not unless they were within eyesight of him already anyway.

  “What about him?” Keo said.

  “You kidnap the kid or something?”

  Keo had to smile at that. If Buck only knew why Steven was with them, he’d know that force had nothing to do with it. He wasn’t sure if the man would laugh or grunt with disappointment if he learned the truth.

  He said into the radio, “What do you think?”

  “I’m wondering why you’d bother to take him with you,” Buck said. “He’s a liability. And you did kill his dad.”

  No, I didn’t, Keo thought. As far as he knew, Steven’s dad was still very much alive back at Arrowhead. Unless, of course, Norris—or one of his people—had put the Shaker out of all their miseries. But Keo didn’t think so. For one, Norris wasn’t that kind of guy. And two… There was no two. Keo just didn’t believe Norris would allow Harvey to be murdered while in his custody. And as an ex-policeman, Norris would view his former enemy as a prisoner of war, with all the “privileges” that title entailed.

  Of course, Norris also let Keo go to town on the man with a hammer, so…

  50/50, Keo thought on the chances of Harvey still breathing back at Arrowhead.

  “Harvey got what was coming to him,” Keo said into the radio. He’d quickly concluded it was more beneficial for Buck to think Harvey was dead. Why? He didn’t quite know at the moment, but perhaps Harvey knew something Buck didn’t want him spilling.

  If he’s even still alive...

  “We’ll all get what’s coming to us when the time comes, son,” Buck was saying.

  “I’m not your son,” Keo said.

  “It’s a figure of speech.”

  “I got another figure of speech for you, Buckaroo. Wanna hear it?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Sure. You can say no.”

  “Now what would be the fun in that?”

  “Wanna hear it, or not?”

  “Fire away.”

  “When I see you, I’m gonna put a bullet between your eyes. Then I’m gonna cut off your head and walk around with it on a stick. That way, no one can question again what happened to you.”

  The radio was silent for a few seconds.

  About four seconds later, “That’s not much of a figure of speech,” Buck said. “In fact, I don’t think you quite know what a figure of speech is, son.”

  “Fuck your son. The next time I see you, you’re a dead man.”

  “Funny…”

  “What’s that?”

  “I was about to say the sam
e thing to you.”

  Keo smirked. “We’ll see who makes good on their threat first.”

  “I got a bigger army than you.”

  “Big whoops. I’m better at climbing trees.”

  “What?”

  Keo grinned. “I’ll see you when I see you, pal. Until then, better keep a close eye on the guy wearing the Falcons cap next to you. One of these days, it might just be me.”

  He dropped the radio to the ground and stepped on it with his boot, hard enough that he cracked the cheap plastic shell and exposed some wires. Buck may or may not have had a comeback for Keo’s threats, but Keo didn’t wait to find out. It was useless anyway. As soon as Keo signed off, Buck would quickly order their frequency changed so he couldn’t eavesdrop. Buck was a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.

  Keo moved around one of the biggest trees in the dense Georgian forest just before picking up his pace. Soon, he was jogging, heading back to where he’d told the kids he’d meet up with them.

  They weren’t anywhere close to Arrowhead yet, and it wasn’t going to be smooth sailings the rest of the way. Buck had lied about leaving them alone until they reached their destination, but Keo had expected that. The man was a certified asshole, and if he’d learned anything in his many years of experience, it was that assholes tended to lie.

  Keo was of two minds when it came to Buck’s deception. On the one hand, he liked being able to pick off the man’s soldiers one by one, and at his own pace. Slowly but surely thinning the man’s numbers. The woods provided the perfect environment to do that.