After The Apocalypse (Book 5): Retribution

by Hately, Warren

  It was Mercy who asked the question. There was no dignified answer, and Vegas didn’t leave much room for one.

  “There’s no time for this,” he said to Lilianna.

  “Agreed,” the teenager said. She eyed up Mercy, the waitress the only one with much resolve, though she included all of them in her gaze. “We need to lock this place down tight before any more of the Dead escape into the City outside. We’ll never get order in –”

  “What’s that you’re carryin’?” Vic asked.

  Lila’d already forgotten the military pack in her nerveless grasp. She looked down at the portable radio unit and the cook took her absence of reply as an invitation to help himself, taking the heavy satchel from her and carting it into the next room.

  Vegas whispered, “Gonna check the other exits.”

  “Good,” Lila replied. “Make sure you don’t take any of them yourself.”

  Her erstwhile companion had time for a derisive glower before he sauntered away, panther-like, to check their security, and Lilianna found her eyes trailing him whether she wanted to or not. And she wasn’t the only one. She tuned back to find the dark-eyed Mercy watching her shrewdly, and Lila covered any embarrassment by shooting a cold appraising look at the blade in the other girl’s hand.

  “Do you think you could use that?”

  “Have before,” Mercy answered. “Not this one, but one just like it.”

  “Good.”

  Szczyz glanced to Lilianna almost as if seeking permission before turning to capture the remaining survivors’ attention. It felt like the quarterback’s huddle in the middle of a tough game, but that was a serious understatement.

  “Listen,” the trooper said. “We’ve got to lock down the theater loading bay.”

  “There was a truck,” Janine said.

  “Yeah,” the girl Darlene spoke up. “And it tore out o’ here back when everythin’ turned to shit.”

  Lila and Szczyz exchanged looks.

  “They made sure to block both theater exits,” the trooper said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” Janice asked.

  Vic’s hurried chatter reached them from the conference room, which turned out to be the big dining chamber the Councilors and their guests used for dinner. Lilianna was almost surprised not to find more of the Council’s hangers-on huddled in there. Checking in through the doorway, all she saw was the cook working the radio like he knew what he was doing.

  “Anyone on this channel?” the big man asked and met Lila’s eyes while keeping on talking. “Anyone? We’re at the theater. We need Safety back-up ASAP.”

  Vic fiddled with the settings and glanced across again.

  “I did two tours of Iraq,” he said. “Marines.”

  Unkind chortling sounded behind them as Vegas returned.

  “Thought you’d have a little more grit then,” he snickered. “Semper fi.”

  “I was a fuckin’ cook,” the other black man growled back, not quite able to manage the eye contact. “And that was Iraq. Ruined me. Fuckin’ apocalypse only made it worse.”

  Vegas lifted his own chin square and regarded Vic who’d seemingly forgotten whatever he was trying to achieve on the short-wave.

  “You’re a sad example of African manhood,” he said.

  Vic wilted under the critique, less an admission Vegas was right, and more the exhaustion he looked to have carried for plenty of years before the world fell. Lilianna didn’t have much patience for the exchange, careful too of the racial undertones, and the residual sounds of clamor still carrying from the night outside were a plentiful excuse to break away from the group and advance, as Vegas himself had done, down the main corridor past the kitchens to the ostensible front of the place where a corpse lay, shunted aside during a past melee, egregious wounds to the shoeless veteran’s head rendering him faceless.

  Her hand reached for the handle before she knew what she was really thinking, and only the door shaking with more grunting impacts stilled her, ironically, as more and more fears piled in.

  But it was Szczyz who gave them voice.

  “Not too late to back out now,” the woman said from behind.

  Lila jumped at the sudden words, catching herself in time and submerging her incumbent panic behind a mask like her father’d taught her. She rounded on Szczyz with a serious frown instead.

  “Agreed,” she said. “But we have to do this.”

  “Honey,” Szczyz said with a motherliness she couldn’t really pull off. “That cocky black fuck’s right. This is a suicide mission.”

  “Not if we’re careful.”

  “Listening to that?”

  Szczyz indicated the noises outside, the scraping of feral monsters on the prowl.

  “Yes,” Lila answered her. “And every second we hesitate, the job gets that much harder.”

  Vegas strode towards them with a dissatisfied look reserved for the company he’d just quit. The girl Mercy followed, kitchen knife in hand. The so-called proud black man motioned off-handedly at the door.

  “You’re really doing this?”

  “It’s ‘we’, right?” Lila replied.

  “Man,” Vegas sighed. “Ain’t even got no window to check out of.”

  “Be glad we don’t,” Mercy said.

  Eyes fell on the other teenage girl. She shrugged.

  “They’d all be in here with us, too.”

  As if underscoring her point, a ferocious hammering started on the door they’d entered through, back at the other end of the central corridor.

  “OK,” Szczyz snarled, her mind made up as she grabbed the lever handle. “Let’s roll.”

  “Hold on,” Lila said.

  “You said every second –”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But we can’t just go out there guns blazing.”

  Somehow, Vegas chuckled darkly despite the tension and gave Lilianna a terse, almost approving nod.

  “Balls of steel, princess,” he said. “Let’s see how you roll.”

  And he hit the door.

  *

  THE SAFETY DOOR was barely ajar before a bloody-faced man in his sixties surged through the gap. His shocking forced entry stole all their momentum, and Vegas wrestled trying to keep the door narrowed before cursing with annoyance and alarm and letting the deranged Fury inside. The attacker was so thrown off by his sudden entrance that he stumbled, and Szczyz kicked his legs out from beneath him as Lilianna scanned through the exit for sign of others, and then Vegas wielded the fire ax once more.

  The blow chimed off the man’s skull, severing an ear, then burying itself in his shoulder. Vegas strained with his considerable might to keep the ax handle like an unexpected leash on the Fury, which twisted around, movements compromised with the weapon stuck in him, and Mercy repeated Lilianna’s trick from earlier to backwards lobotomize the monster with her kitchen knife.

  The corpse slumped, pumping fresh blood across the linoleum hallway. It’s death left the survivors with their hard and fast breaths almost pluming in the cold air.

  Vegas cursed again, then looked to Lila almost shaken.

  “Clear?”

  “Not sure I can say that.”

  “Let’s do this, before I come to my senses,” he said.

  The sound of Vic’s renewed, frantic wake-up calls on the radio came to them from the dining room – along with Janice’s gasps that “no one’s answering”. Lilianna bowed her head, resolute, and shouldered the door wide to let the others out.

  The front doors faced the back fences of the improvised compound, gaps between neighboring buildings hammered shut with twenty-foot-high banks of metal and wood sheeting. The theater itself beckoned to their right, but the orange lamps revealed figures spread out between the dining rooms and the loading bay, and very little of the depot blocked from sight by the building they now crept from, Vegas with his ax ready, Mercy with her knife, and Szczyz still clutching her AR15. Lilianna drew her hunting knife again, reassured by the M16 across h
er back despite it being nothing more than an alarm to summon more Furies if she dared use it.

  The remaining Furies they’d evaded coming into the dining hall now circled the block – two shabbily-dressed men and a woman who looked more than a month into her Fury-hood, judging by the decay on her face, jaw hanging open like a serrated hole in her face – and Vegas angled around to give himself swinging room, sinking his weapon into the first one’s chest, which left the other two hurtling past him towards the three women.

  Despite the rifle, Szczyz pushed the ghastly female attacker off her, lashing out again with a boot to snap its thigh bone, briefly throwing the monster off its game. Lilianna and Mercy traded the briefest of strategic glances before they went left and right of the third Fury. Lila’s blade took it point-first in the throat, its arm slapping her hard enough in the face to make her head snap back, and Mercy again played the assassin’s role silencing the pinioned creature for good.

  The remaining Fury launched back into Szczyz, who didn’t anticipate a low blow and nearly howled as the ghastly dead woman sank teeth into the trooper’s thigh. Lila threw herself atop the creature without pause, crashing it into the hard ground and reversing her grip on the hunting knife and stabbing down half-blindly until her frenzied efforts resulted in the dead woman’s silence. Meaty whacking noises followed, and then Vegas grunted that he too was done. He put a running shoe onto the first attacker’s chest and pulled the ax free of the ruin of its skull.

  “Three down,” he gasped. “Dozens to go.”

  “Maybe not.”

  Lilianna pointed towards what they could see of the loading bay. Although several more feral shapes peopled the night in that direction, one of the two big back theater doors remained shut. The concrete shelf of the loading bay showed a scattering of other debris, including the missing door bent outwards and twisted on its side hanging over the lip, completely torn off from within.

  “You want to get that door up?” Vegas asked as quietly as his heaving breaths allowed. “That won’t work. It’s clean busted.”

  “We just have to plug that gap.”

  “There’s fuckin’ Furies –”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Lilianna spat. “Keep that ax ready.”

  Then she took the lead.

  Rather than a full-frontal assault on the stage doors, Lila crept to the edge of their own building for the chance to scan right, and out into the vehicle corral. The Jeep and Humvees seen a few minutes earlier remained in place – as were another half-dozen Furies, shuffling around rather than running, heads craned as they tasted the air and listened to the City’s soundscape like an opera of death. A fresh round of cries erupted from one of the nearby streets. As if by silent agreement, all but one of the Furies turned to the compound’s rear gates and sprinted off that way, defeating hopes those threats might be contained too – but also clearing a path to the sleeping vehicles.

  “We use the cars,” Lila said.

  “What?”

  “Explain,” Szczyz whispered.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, and the first images that popped into Lilianna’s head failed to come with much more detail. She motioned once again, now towards the armored Jeep and its companions.

  “They said a truck was here,” Lila also said as quietly as she could. “Someone trucked these Furies in, overran the Council meeting. We can plug that gap the same way.”

  “It’s elevated,” Vegas said. “A loading bay. Higher ground.”

  “The door,” Lila said.

  Their eyes met. Desperation had defused the other man’s swagger and he merely studied her as he constructed the idea Lilianna suggested in his own mind.

  “A ramp?”

  Lila only nodded.

  “Fuckin’ hell,” Vegas whispered. “That’s some risky-ass shit right there.”

  But rather than complain, he nudged Szczyz squeezed in beside him.

  “You a tall drink o’ water, girl,” he said to the trooper. “Let’s hope you got some strength. Ready?”

  Now it was Szczyz’s turn to look freaked.

  “Ready for what?”

  “Wait for my signal,” Lila warned.

  Again their eyes fell on her.

  “Oh yeah,” Vegas replied and smiled cynically. “What’s that, princess? Gonna hoot like a barn owl or somethin’?”

  But Mercy answered instead.

  “You’ll hear us coming,” she said, then patted Lilianna’s arm, unaware of the old scar concealed beneath her jacket sleeve. “Ready? Let’s hope they have the keys in them.”

  “Agreed.”

  *

  LILIANNA AND MERCY hurried across the barren lot in an awkward running crouch, but managed to reach the first vehicle without getting seen. A woman with her throat torn out and huge patches of flesh missing from her arms and legs sniffled across from them, and they paused, crouched in hiding, able to listen as fresh blood still spattered from those awful wounds.

  The two teenagers checked in with each other, and by silent agreement, Mercy gently tapped the tip of her improvised murder weapon against the courtyard’s brick pavers, and the thing at the threshold quit its skulking routine around the drums and pumps for ethanol, shuffling around to their vector with the unhurried pace of a person missing a good chunk of the muscle needed to make such movements.

  Mercy squirreled herself beneath the Humvee and Lila’s mouth dropped open – that wasn’t part of the plan, however telepathic it’d been – and the hungry-looking dead woman’s beady black eyes fell on Lila crouched there. Its face lit with the closest thing to a wicked smile she’d ever seen on such things.

  “Shit.”

  Lilianna stood as the walking cadaver rushed in, but then Mercy’s intent became clear. The girl kicked out from hiding as the thing pounced, tripping it, tricking the monster to fall unhelpfully onto Lilianna’s blade. The hunting knife went into the Fury’s heart, which kept on beating sluggishly around it as her stinking, blood-choked breath hit Lila like a furnace blast, and it was all the teenager could do to turn her attacker’s momentum down and past her, the knife slipping free as the monster fell splat on the hard surface, and would’ve twisted around right at once if it wasn’t for Lilianna then pinning it down with a knee between its shoulder blades, giving her the precious pause needed to stab once, then twice down into the back of the thing’s head.

  Still mostly under the Humvee, Mercy shot Lila a “you cool?” look that almost saw Lilianna shudder, a weird sort of violent agreement as she worked the caught knife free and confirmed the Fury was down for good. Then she nodded to the other girl, who rolled across the distance to the far side of the vehicle and stood now at the driver’s door, gently cracking it ajar and doing the business inside.

  There was a moment’s silence. Lilianna scouted for any more immediate threats, then Mercy drummed her fingers quietly across the vehicle’s hood and met Lila’s eyes with a veiled head shake.

  Lila crossed to the armored Jeep, the rear of it mounted with a pair of welded metal kegs as part of its ethanol reserves. Lila was still checking every which way as someone quietly whistled. She looked back to the relative sanctuary of the corner of the side building to see Vegas motioning in desperation – and then the cause of his alarm became clear.

  The theater was leaking reanimated Citizens.

  Several more Furies stumbled out into the space between the buildings, coming from the direction of the theater’s back entrance with a kind of drunkenness so typical of the well-fed. But the Furies were insatiable in their bloodlust, and opportunists always, and they no sooner came into view than spotted Vegas and Szczyz at their corner, and Lilianna and Mercy among the vehicles, and the biggest of the three started a braying alarm. Eager for the kill, the other two split ways to charge at their different foes, and suddenly the whole suicide mission took on a new hi-octane urgency as Lilianna threw herself across the armored Jeep’s hood the same moment Mercy hauled its door open and crammed inside to search.

  “Ke
ys!”

  Lilianna had the armored vehicle between her and the gutted figure of Traders Alliance leader Samuel Hoskeens. Wild-eyed and with his shoulder-length white hair torn loose from its usual ponytail, the newly-risen Fury scurried to come around them as a single gunshot rocked the night, silencing the screaming Fury sentinel and its rallying call for more of its demonic brethren. The same moment, the Jeep coughed into life, Mercy inside yelling frantically for Lilianna to get in as well.

  And that was about when Lilianna realized her plan wouldn’t work.

  *

  LILA THUMPED THE roof of the Jeep, yelled “Drive!” and backed away to let the parked vehicle reverse out from its shelter. The gearbox made a shrill noise instead, and dead Sam Hoskeens rounded the back fast enough to avoid getting run over as the Jeep then jerked backwards, tired squealing, and Lilianna’s cover went with it.

  Hoskeens was missing the greater part of his torso, just ribs and shattered bones exposed through the wet red rags of his flannel shirt. He leapt at her like a quarterback making a desperate play, and Lila twisted away, slashing with the knife for all the good it’d do her, lucky to stay upright as the feral trader hit the bricks and the reversing Jeep crushed one of its arms.

  Lilianna would’ve struck at precisely that moment – were she able to – but instead a clawed hand caught her hair from behind and she jerked about in horror to see a dead City trooper still wearing its helmet and imposing face mask reeling her backwards.

  Left hand desperate, Lila grabbed the barrel of the M16 to wrench it around, reversing the hunting knife and stabbing it into the sentry’s unfeeling shoulder meat as Hoskeens drew himself from the pavement unperturbed by the sick ripping noise as he left his hand and forearm squished to pulp on the cold unyielding bricks.

  The trooper thrust its face at her, but the plastic mask made the follow-up impossible, which was the only thing giving Lila a chance to twist about again, wrestling with the creature even with her hair still fiercely clutched. She left the knife embedded in the trooper’s arm, seized her swiveled rifle in a proper hold, and thrust the barrel under the helmed trooper’s chin at the same time as she fired a burst that exploded its head in a shower of gore.