The Walls of Lemuria by Sam Sisavath Page A

on him. After about ten seconds of futility, he turned off the engine and kicked the bent door open just enough to angle his way out.
    Jake was there to lend a hand, pulling him free from the destroyed vehicle. “Jesus. I can’t believe you just did that.”
    “Worked, didn’t it?”
    “Yeah, but… Jesus, you’re crazy.”
    Keo grinned at him.
    “He’s not wrong,” a familiar female voice said.
    Figures were climbing out of the rubble in front of the truck through the makeshift hole in the wall. One of them was a tall woman with black hair wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, coughing as she pushed a girl in a wheelchair outside. The girl had her shirt pulled over her mouth and nostrils to keep out the smoke.
    “You’re insane, Keo,” Gillian said with a big smile on her face. “I think I’m in lust.”

CHAPTER 9
    Gillian had been hiding in the hospital morgue with ten others—three nurses and six people who had either been waiting to see a doctor or were visiting patients, and a young girl named Lotte, who was in a wheelchair. Lotte, whose broken right leg was covered in a cast from a car accident, was fourteen, and Jake was wheeling her up the ramp into the back of the ambulance.
    “How many are coming with us?” Keo asked Gillian.
    They watched the cars driving away, all of them in a hurry to get somewhere. There had been a lot of questions about what had happened last night, and Keo had told them everything he knew, which wasn’t much. He didn’t blame them for not coming to the police station with him and Jake, or going to Fort Damper. They had families, friends, and loved ones they needed to find, despite the odds being against them.
    By the time the last vehicle pulled out of the parking lot and disappeared up the street, it was just Keo and Gillian standing next to the ambulance, with Jake in the back getting Lotte’s wheelchair strapped in for the drive. Jake had found the keys to the ambulance still dangling from the ignition.
    “It’s just Lotte, me, and Taylor,” Gillian said. “Lotte’s family was killed in the accident that put her in the wheelchair about a month ago. Some cousins were supposed to come get her next week.”
    Taylor was one of the nurses, a pretty girl still wearing her blue nursing scrubs. She stood next to the ambulance, absently scraping at the dried blood on the front of her shirt and along her pant legs with her nails.
    “She told me she’s only been in town for about a year,” Gillian said, looking over at Taylor. “She had a boyfriend, but he left a few months ago for a job in Monroe, so she doesn’t have any friends or family, either.”
    “What about you?” Keo asked. “You’re taking the end of the world pretty well.”
    “Am I?”
    “Better than her,” Keo said, looking at Taylor.
    “I have an ex-husband running around out there somewhere. He can stay out there for all I care. Other than that, the only thing the end of the world means is I don’t have to pay the rent anymore.”
    “What were you doing at the hospital last night?”
    “I wasn’t feeling well all week, and the over-the-counter stuff I was taking was just making it worse.”
    She caressed her throat. Gillian was tall at five-eight and had a long neck to match. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, and as promised, she had lovely green eyes that he wouldn’t mind getting lost in at the first opportunity.
    “It was a last-minute thing,” she continued, “and the hospital was on the way home from work. It wasn’t like I had a social life, anyway.”
    “So, what did you have?”
    “I don’t know. All of this happened before I got the chance to see someone. Wouldn’t it be ironic if coming here saved my life, all because I thought I was coming down with something? That morgue might have been the best thing to happen to me last night.”
    “Where were you coming home from?”
    “What’s with all the questions?”
    He shrugged. “We’re not going anywhere until Jake’s done