Tom reared back, pushing Lucas gasping backwards with him as the bottle hit the bricks and the tiny lick of flame bloomed when it met the fuel-soaked drape.
The whoosh of hot air was a detonation in its own right. Only the harsh crosswind saved them from the immediate flames as the trap caught alight in a full blaze blocking their path.
“Back!”
There was a sense of more movement like rats scurrying in the walls all around them. Lucas let his father force past, trampling back across the ruins of the outside gate as they now ran as if their lives depended on it, Tom stomping up the metal fire escape with his son training the M4 behind. But there was no pursuit. Instead, Tom barreled to the top of the landing and its freshly-opened doorway and the impenetrable gloom he nevertheless charged into, drawing a fresh arrow as he angled through with the bow.
The upper room was bare except for a table and chairs, one of them tipped on its side. A door stood open directly across from them, another shut to the right. Luke continued guarding the rear as his father hastily checked the closed door, forcing it inwards at the same time a fine-boned figure scurried low and through. Tom yelped in pain as a blade cut across his leg, his taped-up jeans taking most of the impact as he jumped out of the way. The feral Urchin was a filthy mess, tousled hair knotted in a rats nest of its own, eyes and face unrecognizably boy or girl, just a feral animosity as the child twisted about, saw Lucas, gauged Tom clutching the longbow, and then ran through the room’s open door.
Luke tracked the Urchin with the M4, but fear and revulsion froze his trigger, and father and son watched, shocked, as the child slipped away.
A muffled groan carried from somewhere close by.
Tom pushed the first door open once again, eyes wary for more surprises. A quick scan showed a filthy bedroom with three stained cots on the floor and an unruly chaos of personal items and clothes and looted trinkets only a street kid could prize. Tom caught Lucas waiting on his signal and so returned a quiet headshake, and then the pained, muted, feminine moan sounded a second time from the direction the feral Urchin quit.
Lucas retrained his rifle on the open door, unaware of his furious lip licking and the trembling of his skinny legs. Pitying him, Tom swapped the longbow for the Mp5.
He held the sub-machinegun low, never more feeling a fraud in that moment as he eyed the dark oblong of the doorway – and the briefest flash of temptation for him and his son to cut their losses and run swept through him. But vengeance outshone trepidation – and brighter still the shame he’d feel if they escaped now. Instead, Tom all but manhandled himself forward.
It was a musty, narrow corridor with an awkward turn. Little made sense in the clammy light, but Tom was relieved and then just as quickly concerned to see Karla standing in front of another door with her back to them. Her blonde ponytail hung at an odd angle, and so did her Mp5. It dangled its strap bound tight around Karla’s arm which hung by her side dripping with dark ichor proper sunlight would show as blood.
She moaned softly again, but still didn’t move.
Tom swallowed hard, holding his own gun on his comrade as if afraid she might be a Fury already. Another shut door to his left added to his confusion about the layout. Tom took several steps, gesturing for Luke to hold back. Karla came into full view around the dog-leg turn, her back to them still, the moldering carpet dark with fresh blood at her feet.
Tom readjusted the Mp5 and eased closer. The door was mounted on a pair of heavy-duty old motorcycle springs and had launched into Karla on a tight arc, with more than a dozen knife blades and sharpened metal spikes driven through it – and now through her.
A kittenish noise escaped the woman. Tom winced, trepidation and repulsion and the fear of imminent attack almost getting the better of him once again as he gently touched Karla’s shoulder and her sagging head lolled around to him with one cheek gashed open by a spade-like blade. Sympathy and guilt washed through him.
Death was in her eyes already. At least a half-dozen spikes had punched their way through to leave Karla impaled flat against the door’s blood-soaked surface. Karla muttered something as the blood pooled beneath her booted feet. The deeper they advanced into the building, the more the noise of the outside storm fell away. Tom pressed close, but her words made little sense – and a second later, they cut out completely as Karla’s head tipped back and a death rattle escaped.
“Fuck,” he cursed beneath his breath, reaching up to close the dead woman’s eyes.
But the door on his left opened inwards with a flourish.
Adrenalin helped Tom twist aside as someone thrust a tattered-looking spear out across the narrow corridor and its tip dug a wedge of plaster free from the opposite wall.
Lucas swiveled the end of his snub-nosed rifle into the doorway and let rip.
Muzzle flashes lit up a rangy-looking woman as the bullets tore through her and her studded leather jacket. Beside her, and lower down, a boy aged no more than eight or nine flinched down and away as Tom grabbed at the spear haft, pulling it from the dying woman’s grasp as Tom reversed it, and stabbed the wrought-iron head overhand and down, into the assassin’s throat. His second blow strike hit the madwoman in the upper chest, and Tom growled, mustering his strength to force the bullet-shredded woman back into the hollowed-out closet space, and she then fell backwards through an awning of old Army blankets into yet another room beyond.
Luke’s gunsmoke thickened the air around them. The back of the linen cupboard revealed another alcove which Tom immediately ducked into and through as the shaggy-haired boy beside the dead woman yanked open the door to another escape route, and Tom just as quickly kicked the Urchin in the middle of the back. The child slammed back into the door, shutting it, and trapping himself in the room with barely a moment’s hesitation before switching around with a long sharpened hook in one hand he swung at Tom’s midriff.
Tom didn’t think he had another child murder in him and just as fiercely feared he had no choice. He blocked the sharpened hook with the bloodied spear shaft, then backhanded the child. He grabbed the youngster’s wrist and squeezed until the sharp hook dropped.
“We’ve only come for Locke,” Tom hissed, voice low despite the gunshots. “Where’s Fagin?”
The child snarled, then shrieked. “Get off!”
He scratched his free hand at Tom’s face. Tom let him go and just as quickly hammered a fist into the boy’s temple, poleaxing him unconscious to the rank carpet.
“Come on,” he said shakily to Lucas.
“They’ve heard us now,” his son said.
Lucas looked pale and wide-eyed and still fixed on the corpse of the scrawny woman he’d killed, in danger of getting lost in his first-ever kill. Tom clutched his son’s shoulder almost as hard as he’d grabbed the other child.
“We have to move fast.”
The alcove door burst open to reveal a man in a wrestling mask wielding a spiked baseball bat.
Tom hefted the Mp5 one-handed by its pistol grip and opened fire.
Bullets hit the intruder and the doorframe around him. Tom stepped over the dying man without pause, shouldering through into a skinny corridor. He swept the Mp5 each way, heard a door slam somewhere, and then came a shout followed by more children’s voices shrieking and then dying away.
“Oh Christ,” he muttered.
*
TOM WENT LEFT, watching the doorways ahead while also checking low for tripwires, regretting every further step he made walking into this nightmare. He thought to glance upwards too, and was astonished to see an open hatch above them and a small pair of hands working the cap off a fuel can even as it started gurgling out.
“Back!”
Lucas crashed into his father from behind, and Tom whirled, grabbing the boy and hauling him bodily ahead, continuing on the path he’d committed to and fighting inertia and the slack fingers of time itself to get past and through and out of the way. Putrid-smelling gasoline splashed across the back of Tom’s jacket as they escaped
. Lucas angled the M4 at the roof space, but with a look on his face as if he’d never fire the weapon again. Tom grimaced, marching backwards as he copied his son’s aim and the cramped rank corridor shook with gunfire.
A girl’s cry was drowned out by the whoosh of the entire roof cavity catching alight.
Tom hurried them on, cursing and trying not to weep as the burning fuel delivered flames across the hallway carpet, liquid fire trickling down the wall forecasting an imminent conflagration in which Tom and his son – and somewhere, Attila – looked trapped.
Tom cursed some more. Locke had to know the place was a death trap now.
Ahead, some kind of mounted screen on wheels launched from a side chamber and blocked their path. Nail-studded planks armored it. No genius was needed to see the obstacle was only the start of a one-two maneuver they didn’t want to be around to experience. Tom kicked in the next door they passed while Lucas squirmed free of his grasp, intent on his contribution covering their rear with the M4.
The room was completely dark without windows.
Navigating by desperation, Tom emptied the Mp5 in a mid-level burst he tracked across the room. Gunshots illuminated empty bunk beds like the ultra-violent light of a forensic crime scene. With no path forward, and near-death if staying still, Tom charged into the darkness, leaving the growing flames behind. Blind, he kicked in the plaster wall as hard as he could, and within ten seconds, bricks on the other side gave way to chinks of another ghostly light source.
Lucas mimicked his father, efforts as effete as his little boy grunts. Tom took the chance anyway, reloading his ammo while throwing hard nervous looks at the flickering doorway behind them, the conflagration chasing up the hallway after the pair in slow-motion casting a mad clown-house light. Tom rejoined his son’s attack on the bricks until a section big enough to squeeze through collapsed outwards in one hit.
He stepped out across a carpet of fallen bricks on dingy warped floor boards and caught just a flash of movement as a crossbow bolt thudded past him, and then a small figure flitted out through an external door at the end of the cross-corridor to their left.
He and Lucas surged towards that exit out of instinct – which again nearly got them killed.
Two more Urchins lay in wait out on the day-lit fire escape, and it was only Tom spotting the ropes each clutched that he stopped him in time and thus blocked Lucas as well.
Tom pointed the Mp5 at the two dirty-faced tweens, shaken to the core by their hyena grins as the exit door juddered shut again.
He shook his head and lowered the gun.
“Up,” he grunted to his son instead.
The apartment’s internal staircase was the other way. Lucas had the lead across the spilled bricks, taking point with the raised M4 as professional as anyone. Tom fell into a mistrustful rear guard, though he admired his son’s resolve – and was relieved by it.
Lucas cautiously checked the intersection, on the other side of the hall blocked by the Urchins’ wheeled barricade. The carpeted stairs beckoned across to them.
The metal exit door slammed and then loudly bolted shut back behind them, locking them in with the crescendo roar of the growing inferno only amplified, with harsh light flickering across Lucas and Tom as they ascended the filthy stairs.
Their guns angled as they went up. Tom didn’t need to say anything for Lucas to know they were as exposed now as they’d ever been. Yet they reached the landing without attack, the upper-story flames a riot off to their right amid a sense the building had cleared out except for them as if the Urchins hoped to roast them alive in their innocent game of tag.
“We have to get outside,” Tom said.
Whatever the building’s former life, individual doors led to big, self-contained individual bedrooms rather than actual apartments. The father-son pair picked their way through each of these chambers in the howling silence like two hands working together. Memories of sunlit days in the woods, back in the mountains when Lucas was just a child flooded into Tom’s consciousness and he welcomed them, despite the dangers of distraction. He breathed into the chaotic flow of their moment instead, focus deepening as he and his son stalked their way further along the corridor, the identical look of Stoic calm on Luke’s face as astonishing as it was a boon.
When the shit hit the fan, back five years ago, Lucas was too young to hunt – but now, here they were, as practiced and efficient as Tom’d ever wanted, and so far from how he’d imagined it that their dire predicament made almost no sense at all.
He realized he wore a smile like a grim Jesus, believing they had just one man left to kill, and then they’d fetch Lilianna, and into the wild they’d go – back into that fantasy of when things seemed better when they were on their own.
Tom didn’t even feel the first bullet when it hit.
*
THE PISTOL CRACK at such short range hit Tom between the shoulders and pitched him forward before he’d even registered what happened.
The weapon fired again like a cap gun and Tom was already twisting around, smile widening into a too-late cry of alarm as the second bullet cut past his arm – and then two more rounds hit him in the chest.
Kevin turned the Glock on Lucas caught moving far too slowly still to avoid execution at point-blank range. The murderous tween’s slitted eyes took in Tom’s Mp5 as it came up as Tom fell, and at the last moment, Kevin dived back into his doorway rather than shoot again and Tom raked Kevin’s position with a burst.
Tom grabbed the wall for balance and looked down to confirm the two small holes gently smoking in the jacket he wore across his ballistic vest.
“Dad!”
Tom stumbled and sat heavily on his ass. Pain shot through him like an eruption as Lucas angled his M4 on Kevin’s position.
Instead, another door now directly next to Tom opened to reveal Kevin there instead.
Tom didn’t have the time to swear.
Lucas charged past him to crash head-on into his former friend, using the M4 like a club as Tom struggled to his knees in time for both boys to vanish impossibly from sight.
Tom leapt after his son in a daredevil move that ignored any hope to avoid the same fate, but then he halted short at the edge of jagged floor boards partly-concealed by a mammoth, freshly-collapsed tarpaulin.
Crashing noises in the gloom sounded from the cavernous space below, but the huge collapsed plastic sheet and its ropes hid the detail, aided and abetted by the precocious sunlight. The only real light was the last thing Tom wanted to see – the reddish glow of fire consuming the lower floors and spreading throughout the complex.
He stood at the edge and called his son’s name with his bowels at risk of turning to water as panic threatened strangulation. It was only a flash of movement from behind that saved him.
The Urchin betrayed himself with a shrill war cry as he rushed in at Tom from another doorway.
The black child plunged another of their homemade spears at Tom’s midriff and Tom blocked it with the sub-machinegun.
Then he slammed the weapon’s haft as hard as he could into Jamon’s face.
The boy’s momentum and the severity of Tom’s attack conspired to stave in the boy’s face clear to the brainstem, and the horrified, awful wet hooting panic noise was so terrible Tom immediately stepped back and lifted the gun around and opened fire on the Urchin boy he’d met back before everything had collapsed into this madness.
The 9mm rounds took the boy in the ruins of his face and his skull blew apart to leave a sucking red Claymation neck cavity gushing a half-hearted geyser of blood, and then Jamon’s stunted frame collapsed to the ground, twisting grotesquely with a repulsive sigh as it continued emptying its gore across the bare boards.
Behind Tom, the last of the tarpaulin slipped free, and he moved aside with a gaunt, shell-shocked expression, still too horrified to comprehend it all. The enormous plastic ground cover fell into the rooms below to reveal sawed-through boards amid the ghosts of an old renovation project, interrupted
by the end of the world, the carpenter’s notation still legible on the half-finished planks.
“Lucas!” Tom bawled. Then he yelled it twice again.
His son appeared a steep drop beneath him, already gesturing to the south.
“There’s an exit,” Luke called. “Dad, you’ve got to get out.”
Tom considered the jump, but shook his head as if deep in conversation with himself.
“You too,” he said instead. “Get outside, now!”
There was no sign of Kevin. Tom had no idea what that meant.
Another fire door beckoned at the end of the immediate corridor. Tom stalked towards it, away from the crevasse, throwing caution to the wind as he kicked the flimsy sheet metal open. It failed to knock any waiting assassins off the outside landing, and Tom edged out, blinking at the daylight and the assailing winds.
Dozens of filthy bed sheets and old Persian rugs hung midair between the rooftops, obscuring the compound’s layout, but builders’ scaffolding offered a path along the face of the three-floor building now deeply ablaze. The scaffolding met up with a metal walkway to the next roof blocked by more weather-stained and madly-dancing bedsheets.
Tom moved towards the building with the caved-in, north-facing street front, but only as a means to finding a way down.
Instead, Finnegan Locke stepped out from its opposite door, and the crossbow he fired at Tom was a quality weapon.
But it was no Welsh longbow.
The bolt flew at Tom the same instant another gust tore between the buildings strong enough for one of the heavier drapes to blow into the gap to smother Locke’s deadly aim. A look of consternation and self-hatred burned through the other man’s face just as quickly as the silver-bearded Fagin ducked back into hiding. The whole scaffolding shook with Tom’s violent reaction. He grabbed a handhold before he could wring the sub-machinegun around to strafe the vacancy forged in his prey’s wake.
“Locke!”
Tom hauled himself along the metal railing one-handed, breathing hard as he forced bellows-forge lungfuls of air to cool his rage while scanning the lower courtyard for his son.
After The Apocalypse (Book 6): Resolution Page 6