After The Apocalypse (Book 5): Retribution

by Hately, Warren

  Something vital in the man’s skull broke. Tom heard it and didn’t care. He needed answers, and the mechanic in fuel-stinking coveralls wasn’t going to give it. Not now, anyway. He cracked the man’s head several more times, face twisted as if his mouth curled up in distaste at itself.

  “Fuck it,” Tom whispered hoarsely under his breath.

  He grabbed the dead man’s revolver and tucked it into his belt along with the empty Colt Python in pride of place at his lower back. He was used to the metal barrel digging between his butt cheeks and knew the discomfort was also a reassurance – at least when he had ammo. Now he tightened his resumed grip on the Russian rifle, checked the way was clear again, and jogged across to the bottom of the fire escape.

  A faded, red-painted door beneath the metal staircase let into the side of the repurposed old house or gentrified office space. Whatever it had been. It didn’t matter now.

  A powerful smell of vegetable decay clung like gasoline fumes to the squat, partly-sunken concrete-walled room inside. Plastic industrial drums filled most of the dirty space, though there was a clear path to a couple of raised steps and a wooden door. The door was ajar already. Tom moved through it quietly, the strains of someone singing carrying down from above.

  It was dark on the ground floor. The brick building was just a shell of its former self and the floors and walls bore the scars of sledgehammers and crowbars used to remove any furnishings. Huge wheeled skip bins crowded the underdark, and gray light from somewhere ahead cast across the rounded lids making the containers resemble sleeping robots in the gloom. Tom advanced through them, mouth open, holding his breath as the floorplan opened out into several more big, hand-widened chambers given over to the fuel-production process.

  Stairs appeared to Tom’s right, and with them the source of the pale light glimmering frostily from higher up. Half the stairs remained in shadows. Tom checked the creaking wood, then all around himself for threats. Nothing moved. The firecracker pop of a distant gunshot was all he heard. He started up, going as lightly as he could, the Ak47 raised and ready for action if needed, but the winding view as the stairs doubled around showed an ugly carpeted hallway hung with waxy yellow lights, and a darker, almost reddish light coming from an open doorway at the far end as well as the softly resonant voice.

  Without relaxing his hold on the rifle, Tom reassured himself, slowly reaching around to check the hunting knife’s handle, fingers still on it as he eased down the hall and the muck-stained carpet crackled from the floorboards beneath.

  The man’s gentle, distracted singing halted, and trying to ease his weight off the groaning board only made it worse for Tom as it relaxed back into position. He took another step, cautious again of the sense of light shifting through the doorway ahead, and then a tall white guy with collar-length blonde hair and mutton chop sideburns stepped out into the corridor with a loaded Desert Eagle in one gnarled fist.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  Tom froze at point-blank range for the gunman.

  “I’m looking for my son,” he said.

  He raised his hands, not confident it looked innocuous that he clutched a loaded assault rifle. The man leveled the gun and crossed the hall, still keeping his distance back, and then he called out, “Hector! You back yet, man?”

  “Hector’s not coming,” Tom said.

  The big man had an English accent as well as about three inches on Tom. Now he scowled.

  “Why you sayin’ that?”

  “In the workshop, I tried talking to him –”

  The blonde man jerked the gun again and Tom froze. He let the Ak47 go, still suspended across his body by the old leather strap. The man – clearly Gunderson, the man he sought and who his daughter warned him about – gestured with the gun for Tom to kneel. He did.

  “You killed the mechanic?” Gunderson asked.

  “My son –”

  “Fuck your son.”

  “I know you did it, killed a bunch of people,” Tom said almost quietly, like a prayer. “Don’t even know how you did it. You hoarded them? Saved them up, the Furies?”

  The Englishman’s scowl turned into a sneer, defiant in the face of his own shame.

  “You’ve come from the meeting?” he asked.

  Gunderson nearly snickered, then he bellowed again loudly, “Hector?”

  Tom heard a door open downstairs.

  Without warning, he bulled forward into the bigger man. Gunderson swung the pistol back into focus and clubbed Tom across the ear, but too late to stop him driving into Gunderson’s midriff and slamming him into the brick doorframe.

  The Desert Eagle went off.

  Tom headbutted the man fair in the teeth, and Gunderson did all he could to clutch his mouth as Tom went berserk throwing left and right fists into the bigger man’s torso and guts. The air exploded from the Englishman’s lungs and he doubled up into one of Tom’s more stellar blows. Then Gunderson’s cheek bone exploded painfully inwards and took its owner down to the floor.

  Tom dropped a knee onto Gunderson’s gun wrist and prized the weapon free. Boots pounded up the staircase behind him and then a skinny Latino in trooper’s gear appeared at the head of the stairs.

  Finger on the trigger, Tom fired as Gunderson swung a fist into the side of his head. The heavy bullet tore away into the nearest wall and the Englishman used his bulk to upend Tom, body-slamming him into the threadbare carpet. The wooden boards complained and Tom coughed up blood as his bigger opponent reared back in a planned series of downward hammering blows that never came.

  All Tom could do with his left hand was drive the hunting knife into Gunderson’s side. The bigger man twisted in surprise, his knee coming off Tom’s sleeve, and Tom then dragged the blade up and across the man’s bare stomach beneath his fatigue shirt. Hot coils of guts and bloody matter poured onto Tom’s chest and slid gelid to the floor amid an awful stink as Tom fought clear, glimpsing only movement before he dived through the doorway to shelter as the hallway behind him erupted in automatic weapon fire.

  Breathing hard and wet to the wrists, Tom got himself out of direct view behind the doorframe. The room had workbenches covered in guns and even more of them in a rack. Gunderson lay down, expiring in the patch of exposed corridor across from Tom, and the dying man’s hand flopped towards him along with an accusatory look.

  And Tom nearly screamed with rage and burst into tears, desperate to find his son, and in truth find evidence to show him there was still a chance his precious boy somehow lived. Against all reason, that felt increasingly unlikely. Tom staggered to his feet, a chip of the nearby brickwork embedded in his upper left arm that he brushed away as he changed hands with the Desert Eagle, backed up against the side door, and then fired randomly twice outside.

  “Stop where you are!” Tom yelled. “I don’t give a fuck what you’ve done. I’m looking for my son!”

  “There’s no kids here, you crazy asshole!”

  “My son!” Tom yelled. He checked about himself at all the weapons. “He’s eleven. His name’s Lucas –”

  “I don’t care about no kids!” the false trooper Hector shouted back. “Look what you did to Terry, you dirty fuck! You’re not gettin’ out of here!”

  Tom draped an Mp5 Navy across his torso, adjusted the Ak47 hanging alongside as well, then emptied the Desert Eagle back around the corridor. He heard Hector Graves curse, but that was about all. Tom threw the depleted pistol into the hall.

  “You know what room I’m in, asshole,” he shouted back. “You think you can get me out of here without –”

  Tom halted abruptly as lights and squeaking vehicle brakes sounded just beyond the walls outside the compound, followed at once by several shouts and clanking noises. An unprotected window in the Lefthanders’ back-up armory allowed Tom a quick look out at a parked van and men in military gear working the compound gates.

  He was in it deep now.

  *

  “JUST TELL ME about my son and I’ll walk out of here,
” Tom called back to Graves in the hall.

  “You think I’m afraid of you?” the trooper yelled in return. “You hear that? Cavalry’s arrived, motherfucker. You’re dead. You, and your kid.”

  “What do you know about my son?”

  “You’re one persistent white boy, I’ll give you that.”

  “That’s all I care about,” Tom answered. “Lucas. His name’s Lucas.”

  “Man, if you’re lookin’ for your kid,” Hector yelled back, “you better hope he didn’t come through here.”

  Tom swallowed hard, but the resolve to leap out in suicide into the hall and trust to the gods of luck and derring-do that he’d survive just wasn’t in him. He briefly rested his head against the bricks, eyes closed, trying to breathe and not just start to lose it. Anger at himself, the world, and everything else swirled around him and finally forced his eyes wide open again. Tom gave a low growl of his own.

  He re-oriented towards the doorway and squeezed his hands around the Ak47 and jumped into the hall just as Hector Graves tried the same move. The two men crashed together with dueling barrels, and Tom instinctively pushed the smaller man off rather than fire. Graves tried swinging his rifle as he staggered, and Tom kicked the barrel off course. The gunman held his fire, dropped to a knee, and tried rising again as Tom bull-rushed into him so that they collided against the brick wall. Flakes of plaster rained down as Tom pinned the Latino by the rifle across his chest and they wrestled briefly. Tom’s shoulder was killing him, but he swept his right hand behind his back to draw the filthy hunting knife once again and Hector ducked back to avoid the strike. Tom lashed out with a boot into the middle of Hector’s chest, and the Lefthanders’ gunman was still scrabbling to remain upright when he hit a similarly unguarded window at the end of the corridor. It shattered as he went through, paused for one dreadful moment with glass sawing the small of his back. But when he writhed in pain to avoid worse injuries, Graves tipped over backwards and disappeared without a hitch.

  The thump echoed from outside as the sound of squeaking gates and engines running came through the broken glass. Tom edged to the window, retaining the assault rifle. Now a second van drove in through the inwards-opened mesh gates, and a blonde man in dark gear and a man wearing not much more than a blanket hurried to follow the two-vehicle convoy.

  Tom stuck the rifle out the window and opened fire on them.

  The 7.62mm rounds tore through the half-naked man, lanced the ground between him and his partner, then took the second man through the leg. The victim threw his aghast blonde-featured gaze up at Tom in the window frame, then staggered away clutching himself after the second van which moved out of sight from Tom’s eagle’s vantage.

  Noises in the house now echoed downstairs.

  Tom checked the magazine in the rifle and swapped it over anyway, flustered and blinking and with an ever-familiar out-of-body sensation prevalent whenever caught up in such a mess. He brushed away competing thoughts and made himself drink in the air, controlled hyperventilation as he reloaded the gun and turned back down the hall. He wanted past the squeaking boards quick, and wished suddenly he’d made a better reconnoiter of the arsenal in the room behind. But the booming noises and men calling to each other down below demanded urgency, as well as a degree of luck Tom just wasn’t convinced he possessed.

  Terry Gunderson moaned weakly from the floor at Tom’s feet. Vanicek knelt.

  “My son Lucas,” he said to the disemboweled man.

  The dying man lay on his back, missing innards uselessly clutched in bloody hands. Blood flecked his shaved chin. Blue eyes watered up at Tom.

  “F-fuck you,” the Englishman grunted.

  Tom did little more than nudge the man with his boot.

  “Do something to redeem yourself, you piece of shit,” he said. “You sent a truckload of Furies into a peaceful meeting, and you must’ve been taking people in the lead up. Maybe for weeks. Was my son one of them? He was only eleven, for fuck’s sake.”

  Gunderson’s eyes closed as Tom finished his speech. The nearly-dead man’s eyes flared open when Tom pressed his boot down onto Gunderson’s chest.

  “An eleven-year-old boy,” he said again.

  “Maybe,” Gunderson said and sighed so that blood burbled from his mouth. “Dunno, man. There were kids. . . .”

  The Englishman stopped breathing. Tom’s boot now crushed his chest.

  “Kids,” the dying man said again. “All the Saint’s plan. . . .”

  Gunderson died and Tom immediately hurried to the top of the stairwell, racing the advancing voices just as the first shadow appeared. He opened up with the Ak again, firing from the hip.

  It was doubtful he hit anyone. The double burst yielded nothing but panicked shouts, a stream of ribald language, and then the quickest glimpse of a head ducking back around the turn of the stairs and then retracting once more.

  Tom had a second to move and he took it.

  A Filipino man in a red headband and another barefoot, shabbily-dressed man, both wielding the H&K Navies, appeared crouched as they opened crisscrossing fire that tore apart the upper landing just as Tom hit the deck. Flying chips of scenery rained down on him, and for a second more it was just enough not to go screaming mad at the chaos. When it ceased, Tom came up on one knee to return fire, saw no one there, and dropped again just as the Asian gunman leapt back and opened fire once more.

  Tom swore loudly amid the ruckus, then clamped his jaw shut once it quit. Absolutely no genius moves occurred to him at this point, and he rolled sideways across the landing to the right of the stairs, rose onto his haunches again, and moved around to its extreme edge, head bowed under the angle of the outside wall protruding down on him at that point. When the Filipino and his friend appeared next, Tom emptied half a magazine from the Russian rifle, killing the pair outright or else leaving them crippled to die a slow death. He resisted the urge to swap out magazines again in the lull, terrified of what it meant if his ammo ran out.

  More men downstairs were yelling, and at least one voiced concern about using grenades in the middle of an ethanol processing plant. So much for strategy. Tom started moving as fast as he could just as one such heavy object thumped up onto the landing.

  The explosion seemed almost muffled – at least until Tom realized his ears were blown out, choking on the dust and plaster thick in the air and squinting to see, to remain upright, picking himself up off the floor back at the far end of the hall with its jagged, red-rimmed window. Several small spot fires burnt on Gunderson’s corpse, and the roof and the walls in the direction of the stairs licked with flames that only looked likely to build.

  One way or the other, Tom couldn’t wait for a second grenade to finish the job. As much as he didn’t want to do it, he moved to the shattered window and checked down to where Hector Graves decorated the front porch below. Tom jumped fifteen feet to the top of the concrete plinth which framed the front entrance, managing not to break both ankles, nor plunge over the edge. Instead, still grimacing with the impact, he jumped the rest of the distance down to the ground itself, another ten feet, to roll almost gratefully across the dirt.

  It was dark at the front of the building despite the single orange lamp. Tom crawled into the lee of the sandbagged front brickwork, down from the main door itself, and waited holding his breath in the shallow shadows as voices rang out again all around him, inside the house, and in the yard across and behind the monolith to the right. One of the two vehicle engines cut out, and then more clearly came the sound of any number of people running. The brittle chime of the Curfew bells rang out again as if to add their bedlam to the moment.

  The illuminated courtyard continued to betray the Lefthanders’ movements. Tom waited breathlessly in the shadows as two men and a woman ventured around the turn and stopped. Madeline Plume stood in their midst, shrugging on a leather jacket while holding a pistol by her side. The two armed men peered in Tom’s direction – and he lay there frozen, hunched, totally uncertain about
his discovery until one of the men grunted something, Plume gave one last piercing look down the face of the building, and the three of them moved off.

  The front door then opened directly behind Tom.

  A tall man with scarecrow hair stepped out with a raised Mp5, and Tom swiveled around and brought his rifle up as the man said something to someone, and a second soldier followed and then continued down the steps towards where Tom lay.

  The blonde man vanished back inside the doorway.

  Tom slung the Ak47 behind him and drew the knife, running into the coming man in a crouch and only stepping out before him in the last moment, anticipating his desperate block with the left hand, Tom’s right hand hooking around with the blade.

  The knife went into the side of the man’s ribs with a satisfying, yet sickening thunk.

  The soldier’s eyes flew open, but he failed to say anything. Tom grabbed the man by the jacket and dragged and in truth just tossed him into those selfsame shadows before checking the doorway remained clear. Then he fell atop his latest victim, finishing the job with the knife.

  There was blood all over him. Tom looked at it, black in the light, his eyes the same. He cleaned the weapon on the dead soldier’s shirt, unholstered the man’s Glock, and started yet again counter-clockwise around the site.

  *

  SHOUTING CAME FROM the direction of the workshop.

  Tom labored around, his fist stinging from its assault on Gunderson, not to mention the nicks and grazes from the Fury shitfight at Council HQ. His shoulders ached, as did his ribs, and the back of his head throbbed with dull pain as if competing for the sharp ache from a cut above his ear courtesy of Gunderson’s pistol. And as he staggered his way around the brick foundations, Tom found himself blinking to keep his eyes focused, which added just another level of chill to his thawed rage. Tiredness pulsed through him, but he listened intently to the noises from the shed, Plume’s feminine tones higher among them, other voices raised in emergency, the van doors thumping as they were loaded amid more paramilitary shouts.