After The Apocalypse (Book 6): Resolution

by Hately, Warren

  Attila paused at Tom’s signal. Karla crossed the alleyway and sought cover, then glanced into the scene with a wry face. Tom checked back at his son and couldn’t stop himself. “Lucas, don’t look,” he said, earning himself a justified scowl.

  The second trooper glanced back at Tom’s voice. He offered a pugnacious snarl. Attila grabbed Tom by the arm and the next moment they were gone.

  The Edgelords’ gate was ajar to restrict traffic in and out. Karla had the lead by reason of impatience, and as they’d agreed, the four intruders stormed through as a group with Lucas at their tail. The move caught the compound’s lone watchman by surprise. For all his security role, the plump Edgelord embroidered with gadgets only managed to open his mouth and yelp before Karla clubbed him in the side of the neck with her gun, allowing Tom and Attila to continue on through.

  Despite the gale beyond the walls, a handful of youngsters stood around outdoor tables and benches. It was still early in the day and the place wasn’t full. Lucas had outlined the compound’s basic layout. Attila peeled right, towards the prefabricated buildings, while Tom ran in a crouch straight for the camper trailer’s door, relying on peripheral vision for any sign of Kevin.

  One of the teenagers started shouting as the intruders streamed in. The boy’s shout was the only other sound in the world for a moment – other than the meaty sound of Karla’s ongoing subdual of the first guard with multiple attempts. The shouted warning conjured a curious, pale-looking creature from the trailer with goggles pierced or stapled to its face. Tom drew the longbow on him as a flash of movement also caught his eye.

  A bigger, even fatter version of the gate guard burst from the prefab computer lab pointing a crossbow at Tom – unaware Attila stood just the other side of the same door.

  The Edgelords sure ate well. It was a shame they didn’t shoot the same.

  The crossbow bolt flit unevenly across the yard – by poor design or the interfering breeze, it couldn’t be said – and the shaft rather than its business end struck Tom’s arm.

  Maybe Tom didn’t realize he wasn’t shot, or perhaps he just didn’t have much impetus to care. He turned his drawn bow and released the shot as a right of reply with much better aim.

  There was power in the traditional bow all the other Road Warrior contraptions lacked. Wind or not, the arrow seemed to time travel the short distance and emerge as if already buried beneath the other man’s scraggly beard.

  The Edgelord gave a choked sob, and then Attila was on him.

  Tom whirled back around to throw himself across the remaining distance to the camper door before anything else stupid could happen, shoving aside the reinforced door the occupant weirdo tried to close, then kicking the damned thing in when the Edgelord fought him on it.

  The Colt Python slid easily from the back of Tom’s belt and the Marilyn Manson cosplayer fell over himself trying to get out of the way. In the same move as he forced entry, Tom ducked his head, ascending into the cramped trailer. The most gargantuan of all the Edgelords lurked in wait with a handmade spear he thrust straight at Tom.

  Dropping to the ground was the only thing that saved his life.

  But life offered the spearman no such relief.

  The Colt in Tom’s hand roared and kicked fire. The gunshot hit the grotesquely fat man somewhere in the middle of his black-clad belly, but without immediate effect. Tom fired a second and then a third time as he stood.

  Gunfire within the camper was appallingly loud. The first, far skinnier Edgelord scurried over the top of the kitchenette table in an effort to find cover as his protector slumped like a slaughtered bear leaking blood from his chest and belly before finally exploding like a wet red firecracker as Tom’s fourth bullet took half the bastard’s face off.

  The survivor scrabbled at some kind of flap or secured latch on the far side of the camper’s table, but Tom dragged him back bodily by one skinny ankle.

  No other gunshots came from outside. Tom hauled the skeletal black-clad disaster out of the claustrophobic camper to dump him onto the hard-packed ground where broken plastics and the inner workings of old phones were scattered like an additional layer of grit.

  “Troopers!” Karla called out.

  She retreated into an excellent ambush position as Tom quickly took in Attila recruiting Lucas to hold his M4 on two more captives, the Edgelords’ patrons all fled. The Hungarian was still moving into a back-up position when the troopers from the alleyway thrust their guns in either side of the half-open gate.

  “Put your fucking guns down!” one of the Safety officers yelled.

  “We’re all-clear in here!” Tom yelled back at them. “No cause for alarm. We’re not gonna shoot.”

  The lack of any immediate gunfire lured the braver of the two men into peering in through the metal gate. He glimpsed Attila crouched near the corner demountable, and then Tom out in the open with the Edgelord squirming at his feet. The trooper was still assessing the odds when he realized Karla had him dead to rights if she wanted. The man paled visibly. He looked back Tom’s way with an utter lack of confidence.

  “You’re Tom Vanicek, right?”

  Tom exhaled like a snorting bull and drew the longsword from its scabbard over his back.

  It was a movie moment, but the trooper didn’t want to wait to see how it finished.

  He backtracked to his companion, head shaking and muttering.

  “Nothing to do with us, man,” he said. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  *

  THE CAPTIVE ON the ground wept tears of blood where his eyewear had torn free of its scabby mounts. Tom could barely look at the man. He held the Python like a club, scouring the compound repeatedly and coming up with nothing. Two more survivors knelt under Lucas’ guard beside the corpse of the Edgelord with the faulty crossbow.

  “Where’s Kevin?” he asked. “He’s a kid.”

  “There’s a lot of kids, come and go here.”

  The Edgelord blinked rapidly through the goggles. Tom morbidly wondered why the young man had done such a thing to himself – the small wounds trickling blood into his eyes as he squirmed on his back as if he might anticipate and thus avoid the executioner’s gunshot when it came. Tom kicked him in the ribs instead, sword by his side.

  “What about Locke?”

  “Lock?”

  “Finnegan Locke?”

  The man nearly fouled himself, panicking as if Tom now spoke a foreign language.

  “He means Fagin!” one of the watching captives yelled.

  “Fagin?” The skinny Edgelord twisted around yet again, now trying to get up. Tom pushed him back over with a boot and he squirmed some more. “You’re after Fagin? Fagin?”

  “That’s right.”

  “OK,” he stammered. “OK, we can help. Got no beef with us.”

  “I need a location.”

  Tom kept his voice low – ironic for all the ruckus he’d raised. He didn’t even think about the two fresh corpses, only Locke, and the same fate he planned to deliver him.

  The Edgelord started blurting a pained description of Fagin’s base. Like Tom, his old nemesis had a two-story building to himself, except of course he wasn’t alone.

  “They call it the Rats Nest, man,” Tom’s captive wheezed. “It’s a no-go zone for almost everyone.”

  “The kids,” Tom said.

  He let his interrogatee stand at last.

  “The Urchins, they’re with him?”

  “I don’t know, man,” the skinny man said and ducked his head, whimpering, not good with all the violence despite years immersed in it. “They come and go, OK? Like, all the time. That place is a . . . that’s a fucking murder hole, man. You can’t get in there like you did here.”

  “Yeah,” Tom said. “Your security sucks.”

  The captive crouched in a stoop, hands raised ready to ward off blows. Tom gestured him away with the pistol and looked back to his war party with all malevolence exhausted.

  “I can’t see these cree
ps coming after us,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “Let them live,” Karla agreed.

  Tom understood the look of relief on his son’s face, and did him the honor of pretending not to see it. What worried him more was the day he’d see his own revenge-at-all-costs expression in Lucas too.

  The compound’s sheet-metal fence groaned as the wind picked up into a steady howl, punctuated with the occasional clattering of loose debris now made highly mobile. A crash echoed from somewhere beyond the yard. Luke and Karla flinched. Karla fixed her worried gaze back on Tom.

  “It’s getting wild,” she said.

  “If it’s too much, you go,” he answered, and strode to where they all now gathered near the guard sprawled beaten and still unconscious inside the gate. “Now’s the time to strike. We don’t have darkness, but this storm will cover our approach.”

  He gestured to the rising gale and looked to Lucas and tried not to think of the tall boy as his son, which proved impossible. Luke saw his father’s expression falter, pained as he spoke to him.

  “We get Locke,” Tom said. “We take him out. Then we get Lila. And leave. Cool?”

  Lucas nodded.

  “I’m right behind you, dad.”

  “Fuck you guys,” Karla said with a black chuckle. “You think I’m gonna pussy out?”

  Attila grunted, and as usual, no one really knew what that meant. But he checked the safety on his rifle and inspected the loaded round.

  “Then we go now,” Tom said.

  He cast one last look at the defeated Edgelords, mentally mapping the way to Finnegan Locke’s reputed base.

  *

  BUFFETING WINDS SENT the flags and awnings around the apartment complex into an agitated frenzy. Tom and his war band crouched in the shelter of several abandoned, storm-damaged booths on the opposite corner, hidden by the frayed and tattered fabric of weather-soaked old blankets torn yet nailed in place against the gusts that stirred them.

  A long-standing unspoken agreement kept the Rats Nest’s south-east street-corner block clear. Now Tom could see why the Edgelords named it so.

  Some enterprising soul had built an enclosed, ramshackle runway around the three buildings clumped closest together. The back building was double-storied, the others with three levels, but the third old tenement had failed in the face of some calamity in times past when its north-facing outer wall collapsed to expose its upper rooms. A pirate’s lookout made from wooden boards offered a neat observation point overlooking the streets. A metal fire escape provided similar views on the eastern angle, and more of the same hasty-looking wooden construction secured that face of the block from easy access at ground level. A gate adorned the north side, almost at the corner, still under watch from the ruined upper decks. And the second-floor window above it betrayed signs of movement through its open shutters, with a wooden ladder bolted to the outside wall reaching up to it. A spider-web of ropes and tarpaulin rigging obscured the higher levels, and between the buildings, with much of the compound rooftops showing metal walkways, old satellite dishes and telemetry and defunct air-conditioning all likewise shrouded by weather-stained sheets and blankets whipping merrily in the wild daytime breeze.

  A flash of blonde hair at the north-face of Locke’s headquarters caught Tom’s eye as an under-age sentry revealed himself at the lookout, bored-looking, a hand on the rough-hewn edge of the wood-fronted observation point. The child’s eyes flicked jaded their way and saw nothing as Tom and his crew scuttled even deeper into the frayed shadows.

  “There’s only one gate,” Tom whispered gruffly.

  “We could scale that wall,” Karla said, then added, “The wooden one.”

  “Not while that kid up there’s watching on,” Attila said.

  “What about the other side?” Lucas asked, just as quietly as the others.

  Their eyes pored over the east face of the street once again. The wooden runway, walled to the street with an overlaid assortment of old garden gates, forklift pallets, crates, and lumber planking, was effective fortification in its own right, and although it was only about seven-feet high, the iron-barred windows on both east-facing buildings were sufficiently dark as to conceal almost anything.

  “There’s a gap,” Attila said.

  Tom grunted agreement. Behind the fence, there was space between the two closest buildings. But a wall of Persian rugs, suspended by more rope-work, hung across the tight squeeze between the old apartment blocks. The Edgelord called the place a “murder hole” for good reason. Above the seven-foot fence, the external walls looked weathered and torn as if from acid rain. The other second-floor windows were barred or shuttered, with just the one, oddly quaint sentry point overlooking the gate with the wooden ladder nailed beside it.

  “Lucas,” Tom asked as quietly as he had so many times out in the wild. “Can you see anyone in that open second-floor window?”

  “It’s dark,” his son replied. “No internal light.”

  “They wouldn’t silhouette themselves,” Karla muttered.

  Lucas voiced his own quasi-masculine grunt of agreement, then looked to his father with a nervous licking of his lips.

  “This doesn’t feel good,” the boy said.

  Tom coughed a quiet laugh heavy with grief for the moment.

  “You expected this to feel good?”

  Uncomfortable silence fell into place.

  Tom returned to his study of the Rats Nest, eyes narrowing at the inconsistent view of the blonde child on watch from the broken upper floor. Attila followed Tom’s eyes as he often did, grunting to announce his question.

  “Take out the kid?” the Hungarian asked.

  Their previous discussion drifted in like a fog. Tom’s eyes betrayed nothing except the awful gravitas of their few options. Lucas spoke instead.

  “I think I could get him from here, dad.”

  Tom’s shock at Luke’s volunteerism forced his dumb gaze onto Luke’s hands indicating the M4 held at rest. Tom looked to Attila, also armed with a rifle.

  “Me? Not from here,” the older man said. “Not with my eyes.”

  “Dad.”

  Lucas tugged Tom’s trouser leg just like the young child he appeared.

  “No,” was all Tom said in answer.

  They covered their ears as a shrill, ear-piercing shriek of metal-on-metal sounded off beyond where they crouched hidden. Tom’s face strained, refusing to relax the grip on the nocked longbow across his thighs while watching a ragged sheet of rusty metal fencing tumbled in from somewhere, clatter, and then lift up into the invisible hands of the furious wind. The awkward projectile flapped and warbled as it flew across the intersection and slapped into one of the Rats Nest walls.

  The commotion drew the ten- or twelve-year-old watchman peering out from his cubbyhole – and Tom burst from cover.

  The boy had his eyes on the metal sheet as it succumbed to gravity, grinding tinnily down and into the concealed walkway hidden behind the compound walls, and Tom didn’t take his eyes off the Urchin as he charged out into the street and drew back on his longbow the moment the space allowed.

  The youngster noticed him with an alarmed widening of eyes.

  And Tom shot him through the throat.

  The arrow hurtled true from the powerful Welsh bow, merely caressed by the whipping breeze as it cleared the wooden observation shelter and plunged deep to its fletching in the Urchin’s narrow bared neck.

  Tom wasn’t wise enough to look away. He had to take in the boy’s shocked expression turn into utmost terror as he registered the fatal wound, then his asphyxiation, the blood hosing around the stump of the arrow wound. The boy clutched his injury and then mercifully collapsed from view.

  Tom shook himself back into the moment to resume his charge at the single wooden gate, which he hit as hard as he could with one shoulder. It was a testament to his slow recovery that he didn’t faint at the queasy sick shock juddering through him as the hollow door exploded into loosened planks and splinte
rs and Tom crashed on through with them into the wall behind.

  Karla had Tom’s back even if the others faltered. She stormed in and past Tom through the breach point with her sub-machinegun leveled, scanning the internal walkway circling the block. She looked hard left, along the east face, eyeing the indistinct clutter where the first building ended and its neighbor began in a shroud of tapestried carpet, and on instinct Karla turned the other way, trusting Tom to right himself as she jogged a half-dozen paces to the bottom of the corner building’s fire escape.

  Tom stood with a pained grimace, flicking away a length of split wood and glad he’d not somehow broken an ankle, though his gratitude was lost somewhere beneath the images of the boy he’d just killed rapidly replaced by yet more sickening first-person shooter scenes of his knife stabbing the child attacker in Ortega’s stairwell again and again and again, or his sword hewing into OK Jay, his dagger raining death upon Walter while the nonplussed Ascended watched.

  Tom pushed the back of his fist against his mouth as he slung the longbow, and Lucas and then Attila loped across to join him – all while the wind howled with greater and greater force. Another crashing noise sounded off somewhere in the distance, and with the gale assaulting his ears, Tom didn’t even hear Karla start up the rain-rusted fire escape. Attila peeled off to follow her, leaving Tom exchanging a breathless look with his son.

  “Keep low,” he whispered. “Stay behind me.”

  Crouched, Lucas barely came up to his father’s hip. But the boy tracked his assault rifle in their wake with grim efficiency and Tom started ahead only to stop nearly at once.

  He took one more step before his nose registered the smell of oil and old gasoline.

  “Careful,” he said.

  Tom led them along the face of the building to where the heavy rugs hung to obscure the narrow lane between the next longer apartment block, but the smell of fuel only grew worse. Loose items of debris blustered past them, the wind masking the worst of the reek until Tom’s eyes took in the puddles of congealed diesel before them.

  Movement in the window overhead revealed a slim hand as it dropped a lit Molotov.