After The Apocalypse (Book 5): Retribution

by Hately, Warren

  Towards Lilianna and Szczyz.

  “Shit,” Lila said, and froze.

  “Tough decision,” Szczyz agreed.

  Lila checked the repurposed tenements on the other side of the street, but a laneway beckoned towards the hulking shape of a last-century brick monstrosity, the industrial building now full of apartments still boasting its historic loading platform façade which faced off across from a tall brick warehouse roofed with broken glass and patched in recent times with epic quantities of black plastic sheeting. Several fleeing Citizens headed that way, and Lila barely grunted her suggestion before charging after them to escape the coming exodus of troopers escaping with hell in human forms at their back.

  Trooper Szczyz ran alongside Lila once her longer legs let her catch up, and she and Lila took turns shooting worried looks to their six as a dead man in a moldering leisure suit let the brickwork arrest his slapping momentum before relaunching himself after them on a new vector.

  “There’s one!” the trooper yelled breathlessly.

  Lilianna whipped about and raised the M16’s stock to defend them, but a pair of quick gunshots took the Fury in the back and then the back of the head, blowing his face apart in a grisly display the two escapees watched, dumbfounded, as then a black figure stepped from the vague shelter of a nearby alcove. Lila recognized the man with the cornrows and her elation and surprised transfigured into a toothy grimace not lost on their would-be rescuer.

  “Chill,” he said quietly.

  The man named held a pair of mismatched automatics by his sides, insouciant despite the clamor all around them. Szczyz grabbed Lila by one shoulder, tugging her into the lee of artificial safety the shadowed gaps along the side wall created and bringing them within whispering distance of the stranger.

  Another two Furies, perhaps drawn by the gunfire, jogged into the paved alley with bizarrely human expressions of curiosity to their blood-speckled faces: a man wearing so much blue-gray drill he resembled a postman, and an older woman, just another member of the upright Citizens’ brigade until the calamities of the past half-hour.

  Lilianna cursed and brought her rifle into play at the same time as Szczyz shot the postal worker outright, and its hesitating offsider – perhaps new to the business of carnage – paused as if having second thoughts until Lila put a single round squarely between the dead woman’s orange-bleeding eyes.

  “There’s gonna be more of them,” Lila said.

  A quick glance to Szczyz gave her confirmation, and the dark-skinned man beside them merely grunted, rolling his shoulder, all of them ignoring a hapless civilian who tore down the alley past them at that moment with eyes focused one hundred per cent on liberation and nothing else. His slapping footfalls receded to leave the sounds issuing from the nearby street fronting the dinner theater – and nothing in that direction augured good.

  “We can’t run,” Lilianna said quietly. “We have to do something.”

  *

  THE OTHERS SIMPLY stared at her for a long moment, and flustered under their gaze – particularly the heavy-lidded, condescending look from the man who muttered that his name was Vegas – she checked her M16 and crept back to the alley’s lip, chancing a cautious look back out into the night. To her credit, Szczyz followed, and even Vegas figured there was some kind of safety in numbers as he made a derogatory noise under his breath and joined them too.

  The Fury attack in the street outside the Council meeting had dissolved into a raucous scene of a dozen-or-so of the undead sating themselves on the corpses littering the street. About a dozen City troopers and a half-dozen civilians had fallen to the wave of attackers, and already several of the deceased showed signs of life again, stirring and turning over, one crawling with the wounds stripping the muscles from her legs to drop wetly atop one of the closest bodies and start clawing at the dead soldier’s Kevlar trying to get at the sweet nectar within.

  To Lilianna’s right, away down the street her father’d taken, several Citizens were still looking for somewhere to hide, and one unfortunate woman howled in despair banging at the lobby entrance of the nearby apartments which were now firmly bolted against the ravagers outside. There was no warning Lila or the others dared make, and so they watched helplessly as two of the half-blood-drunk Furies switched fierce gazes on the fresh target and quit their depredations to give chase. Seeing them coming, the woman clutched a shawl about herself and lit off towards The Mile with the two monsters firmly on the hunt.

  “Jesus,” Szczyz whispered. “This is bad.”

  “Going to get a whole lot worse too,” Lila answered in a similar tone.

  She glanced back at her newfound colleagues, still startled at times by the smug and superior look Vegas gave her. The handsome man sniffed and thrust his chin out at her.

  “And what’re you gonna do about it, princess?”

  “Don’t call me that,” Lila muttered. “Lilianna. My name’s Lilianna.”

  “I’m Szczyz,” the other woman added.

  Vegas included the tall woman in his scowl, undeterred that she topped him by an inch.

  “So much for Public Safety, trooper,” he said.

  If Szczyz was even capable of blushing, she did it now – or at least wherever the scar didn’t cruelly mark her face.

  “Even Greerson ran,” Lila said quickly. “But I heard them say the compound’s not secure.”

  “Compound?” Vegas asked.

  Lilianna only motioned at the dinner theater, the blood-spattered lobby fifty yards from them and crawling with the risen dead, the remaining ten Furies picking over the carcasses of the slain and sometimes moving on, as if with apologies, when the bodies began to stir.

  “That’s suicide,” Vegas said.

  “We have to do something.”

  “Safety patrols cut and run,” he answered.

  “They had to,” Lila replied. She didn’t know why she defended them, despite Trooper Szczyz at her elbow, but she’d defend the Devil himself just not to give the cocksure Vegas his due. “Suicide to stand and fight.”

  “Their job.”

  “It’s our City too,” she told him.

  Vegas would’ve chuckled if their predicament wasn’t so dire, and Szczyz offered Lilianna a long and cautious look not entirely in tune with what the teenager seemed to propose. In turn, Lila sharpened her impassioned look, even as every other fact in her arsenal demanded she concur.

  “We have to secure the compound,” she said tightly instead. “There’s dozens of people in there, still. Dead. But not for long.”

  “Furies too,” Szczyz added quietly. She almost looked like a daydreamer, the way the terse woman said it. “Too many in there for that to be all of ‘em in the street.”

  She motioned as if it were necessary to point out the feasting creatures still peopling the way outside. And underscoring her remark, the dinner theater’s half-blockaded doors started a hellish banging once again, screams and throaty roars beyond it, or perhaps from even further afield.

  “Fuckin’ madness,” Vegas said.

  “Lilianna’s right,” Szczyz said. “Wish it weren’t so, but it is.”

  “We’ll circle around,” Lila said. “The street access –”

  “No time for that,” Vegas snapped. “If this is serious as you say, we got minutes if we got any time at all before the whole place empties Furies by the fuckin’ dozen out here.”

  He thrust one of his salvaged pistols into his belt and started forward without another look back, scampering to the left hugging the adjacent fence across from the carnage as if trusting to dumb luck to get past without the Furies seeing. For all their agreement, Lila and Szczyz watched him go a moment out of sheer disbelief, and when the athletic man scooped up an abandoned fire ax from the glistening pavement, leaves and trash blowing around him on the strident wind, it was clear Vegas planned to hit their target hard and fast.

  “Let’s go,” Lila said.

  Rhetoric turned to reality in the one terrifying instant. Sh
e and Szczyz followed, with Lilianna almost instantly suffering a deluge of very sensible second thoughts. It was as if she could feel the lightness of the half-empty magazine slotted into her weapon, and the facts about her father, Lucas, and Beau threatened to pile on top of her yet again and leave her frozen with misgivings as Szczyz took the lead and Vegas gracefully caved in one feasting Fury’s skull before turning about, as nimble as a ballet dancer, to decapitate a second.

  The black man looked back their way and hissed with his eyes, reminding Lilianna this was her idea after all. In turn, Lila blanched, then lifted her gun as several of the nearby monsters grew aware of them amid a cacophony of low growls.

  “Wish I had my bow,” she muttered.

  Vegas streaked past the last Furies, swinging a blow that took a stick thin, painfully gorgeous dead woman in the face, his momentum carrying on into a staggered run for the access road another fifty yards past the theater’s front. Szczyz fired a neat burst into the two closest Furies, dissecting them, and Lila swiveled as she ran to check on the other threats closest – pausing out of necessity as a blood-soaked trooper in filthy camo rushed at her with open hands.

  The first round punched through the dead man’s shoulder, arresting the thing’s trajectory just long enough for Lilianna’s second shot to clip his ear and blast a chunk of skull from the side of the man’s head that killed him or left him paralyzed.

  She wasn’t sticking around to find out which.

  Szczyz used her weapon to push off another of the risen attackers, stomping the creature’s leg with one heavy boot that broke its limb and left it screeching like a hyena stuck to the pavement behind her as Lilianna raced past, fired point-blank into another rising trooper, and then the bulk of the threats were behind them.

  Several of the Furies stuck to their diets, bloodshot eyes still tracking them, while a newly-dead teenage girl hissed and whirled away, maybe hoping for better hunting grounds somewhere else. Szczyz fired twice more as she followed Lila, tracking after Vegas, and while two more of the Furies bold enough to rush at them got cut down, the trooper’s ammunition clicked loudly spent. Lilianna thought she was helping, scooping up a heavy green-clad satchel left abandoned on the street like so much of the troopers’ other gear, but as they followed Vegas heading around the blind corner, she was crestfallen to find the pack instead a portable field radio and not a satchel full of spare mags.

  “Goddamn it.”

  Szczyz swapped out her magazines, tapping the fresh one on her helmet like all the old war movies taught her to do regardless of whether it worked or not. Vegas hugged the fence-line just ahead of them in the dark, the gaping twin metal gates ten yards further along blocking the bulk of the electric lights of the compound’s hidden forecourt. Two Furies arose from where they’d torn a hapless fugitive in half, intestines and organs disgustingly exposed to the cold night air and a look of sheer Lovecraftian horror on the corpse’s face made worse for its eyes now open, blue and unblinking as it tried to make sense of its own transformation and infirmity.

  “Heads up,” Vegas said. “We need to keep this quiet.”

  He’d already shelved the second gun. With the reddened ax in two strong hands, their male companion anticipated the two new attackers like a prize fighter waiting to prove his worth. Lilianna threw her gun on its strap across her back and drew the hunting knife her father acquired for her weeks back, far more hesitant than Vegas, and uncertain how she’d use it.

  Szczyz stepped into the gap instead. One of the two deceased launched itself into Vegas timed with the perfect symmetry in the arc of the heavy firefighter’s ax that caught it in the side of the neck and stuck there like chopping wood. Szczyz battered the second one with the butt of her gun, taking the creature in the face and ignoring scratching hands by keeping her chin drawn back into her helm as she also kicked the Fury between the legs and hard enough to make it leap whether the crotch shot hurt or not.

  It took an age for Vegas to get his ax free, and he almost lost his footing doing it. Lila saw her chance and slipped behind the Fury gushing redness from its throat wound looking black in the shitty light, grabbing the undead man by his rank, muddy mullet and thrusting her knife tip-first into the back of his skull. Szczyz battered her foe to the brick-paved road, and Vegas made a tactical noise to get her attention so she got clear as he swung the ax powerfully overhead and down and chopped so hard through the top of the beast’s head the metal ax beard deflected loudly off the road surface beneath it.

  “Quickly,” Szczyz said.

  Taking ownership of their quest, the hard-faced woman nodded to Lilianna and hurried forward towards the open gates.

  *

  THE ENCLOSURE BEYOND the metal gates showed four Humvees and an armored Jeep slumbering beneath the surveillance of several pole-mounted orange lights designed to highlight moving shadows, which weren’t truly needed to reveal a half-dozen more of the furious Dead coming only now from the direction of the theater’s back loading area concealed by the fencing as it continued to their right. The Furies tasted the wind as much as seeing the trio of intruders, or the lure of recent gunfire, but they lit on Lilianna, Szczyz and Vegas unerringly within seconds of them sneaking inside.

  “Shit,” Vegas snarled.

  “This way,” Szczyz said.

  The woman dove left, bringing up her weapon as if to guard them as Lila and Vegas followed in the direction suggested, which led them away from the dinner theater and towards the other long building encircled by the fortified walls. Lilianna vaguely remembered the place from the dinner she was dragged into by her father, back before she won right of entry to the Enclave in part earned by the meeting with Councilor Wilhelm on that night. But being first to the nearest safety door didn’t help much. The horizontal bar locked out when she tried to force their way in.

  “Fuck!”

  Szczyz looked as shocked at the cuss word as the predicament it unveiled, and Vegas hit the door with one brawny shoulder as if that alone would do the trick.

  But no dice.

  With even less hesitation, the closest three Furies charged at them.

  Now it was Szczyz’s turn to swear. Whether it was rage or near-panic that fueled her, the tall woman gave a foolhardy battle cry and swept her barking rifle in a tight arc which took out two of their three incoming assailants and left the third – a graphically disemboweled trooper still protected by her armor – coming in on them with hands outstretched and a bloody snarl Vegas intercepted with an accomplished ax swing that struck the creature to one side of its head, driving it on and into the wall beside them. The creature peeled away, leaving a gory impression of itself on the paneled timber, then tipped backwards onto the pavement where Vegas then stomped the thing silent.

  “Is that someone?”

  The woman’s voice came muffled through the safety door. Lilianna’s trio swapped startled looks before Lila stammered a reply.

  “Yes!” she said and hammered on the door with her palm. “Open up!”

  The door broke inwards at once revealing a harried-looking serving woman and two teenage girls behind her guarded by a hefty-looking black guy with a blood-stained apron across his heaving bodice. The man held a heavy flashlight like a baseball bat, though relief mostly painted his face at the newcomers’ surprise appearance.

  Vegas pushed inside without ceremony, muttering for the women to follow.

  The matronly woman pulled the door closed shut, and for the shortest moment, it was just the seven of them breathing hard in the startlingly mundane back foyer of the Council’s side meeting rooms, a linoleum feel to the place like the back exit of a hospital even though all they could smell was the Council’s burnt dinner and the fresh stink of piss.

  “They’re everywhere,” the wide-eyed man in the apron said, thus explaining the wet patch on the crotch of his leather-patched jeans. “We bunkered in, waiting for a rescue. Are there more of you?”

  “Afraid not,” Trooper Szczyz said.

  Lilian
na watched their faces fall. Vegas abandoned his moment’s rest to forge ahead down the hall, pulling a 9mm from his belt, ax in the other hand as he checked the laminate wood doorways to left and right ahead.

  “Anyone else in here?” he stage-whispered.

  “It’s just us,” one of the teenagers said.

  The girls also wore what passed for maidservant livery in the Council headquarters these days. It’d struck Lilianna at the time, but even more fiercely now, the question of where on earth and more importantly why it was such important Council business that the women in charge of meal prep wore nicely-starched outfits with matching aprons like maids of yesteryear. The big guy, who introduced himself as Vic, wasn’t the only one to stink of fear, though of the two younger women, a dark-skinned, defiant-looking girl Lilianna’s age set her jaw amid the hastily-swapped intros.

  “I’m Janice,” the older woman said. “This be Darlene and Mercy.”

  “Mercy?” Lila said.

  The darker girl nodded. She held a kitchen knife by her side and looked undecided about using it on them instead. Lilianna tried to make a peace gesture, not quite matching it right with her facial expression, but Vegas’ dark leer tore them apart instead.

  “Not like we need your names,” he said. “Just waitin’ here to get yourselves killed, fools.”

  “We were hiding!” Janice said as if it needed explaining.

  “Where are the others?” Vic asked.

  The cook looked like he needed desperate reassurance, and just as clearly knew it in his big bones that none was coming. He started whimpering and even Janice shot him a reluctant look, clearly tired of his routine.

  “There are no others,” Lilianna said in a somber voice. “We’re it.”

  “How can that be?” the older woman asked. “They’re just leaving us here?”

  “Lady,” Szczyz said using her official trooper’s voice and only barely reining in her own apprehension. “You’re lucky we’re here at all.”

  “Everyone just ran?”