After The Apocalypse (Book 6): Resolution

by Hately, Warren

  Chapter 8

  THICKENING CLOUDS SWALLOWED the moon, turning their escape into a blind run into the dark as Lilianna and Aurora reached the road and almost instantly fell through weeds into the concealed culvert. Throwing looks behind them, Lila clawed at the soft, rock-filled earth for purchase and instead found Aurora just ahead of her. Laying down flat on the road’s edge, her friend reached down to help Lilianna scramble free, joining Aurora on her belly as one of the men’s bad wolf impersonations rang out somewhere yonder.

  Gasping for breath, Lilianna fought the temptation to make lying down on the road surface a permanent deal. Her exhausted limbs forced her shakily to her feet, where Lila remained half-crouched, fatigue still with its hold on her as she willed Aurora also to stand.

  Aurora flicked night-darkened eyes up at her. Lila nodded back tiredly, encouraging and compassionate for her friend and the wish to surrender which Lilianna had to resist as well.

  “They’re still coming,” Lila said.

  Aurora took the proffered hand and they limped to the far side of the road crouched together. Trees and telephone wires crossed overhead as they headed down a tarmac laneway stout wooden fencing, plunging on into a thick, vision-defeating landscape of armpit-high growth and trees rising to erase all sense of direction around them.

  Lilianna scanned about, confused, unable to discern the shape of anything in the blackness. She turned back to her friend.

  “What if we head south?” she said. “Get back across the river?”

  Aurora paused to answer, but then a single gunshot cracked out somewhere close by.

  Then the Fury hurtled like a mad thing down the lane behind them.

  Tortured ankle be damned, Lilianna clutched Aurora’s arm and they renewed their flight, but they had to fight just to stay upright, no grace in their movements as they forged through dense foliage, tiptoeing inadequate to the task. The Fury slowed too, snarling as the resurrected young man paid no attention to the gauging brambles and ripping vines.

  Lilianna tripped and her fractured ankle screamed – and her along with it.

  She collapsed among the overgrowth, regret for the noise drained by a palpable sense of doom that washed over her.

  “Run, Aurora!”

  “What? No!”

  “My ankle’s gone,” Lila told her. “Go now. Please, one of us has to live!”

  The Fury tore in at them, savoring the sense of easy prey at last.

  Aurora stumbled away a few paces, hesitant and lost, and then she gave a defiant bark, forging back through the trampled undergrowth to Lilianna as the black-haired revenant threw itself at Lila struggling to get to her knees.

  Lila grabbed the thing by one shoulder and a wrist and would’ve gone under, except Aurora got hands to the Fury’s face and the other arm as well, and together, the women held it back.

  The young man’s terrified eyes were now just black orbits, focused on nothing other than slaking its eternal thirst. Aurora screamed in rage, squealing as the thing crunched teeth down on one of her fingertips clawed into its mouth. The bone broke, crushed, and the girl howled, and Lilianna wrested the desperate pressing weight of the creature off to one side.

  Lila’s hands slid around the monster’s throat. The Fury was too freshly dead for Lilianna’s numbed fingers to do much as she crushed its larynx and pharynx. She might’ve done more, but Aurora’s shrieked warning turned her eyes to Hardy wading in through the edge of the bracken with his rifle trained on them.

  Aurora clutched her ruined hand as she shrieked and wept.

  “Enough already!” the battered girl cried. “Enough! Enough! Please!”

  Crying, Aurora moved to help Lilianna again, wrestling with the black-haired Fury snapping jaws at her face. The creature snarled, as trapped as the two women grappling it, and quested back around until it saw Hardy, standing with the gun still trained on them, licking nervous lips.

  The Fury screamed with rage and dived away into the closest patch of cover, thrashing away unquietly into the darkness. Its escape faded in volume to leave just Aurora and Lilianna breathing heavily under the scope of Hardy’s gun.

  “Have you got ‘em?”

  Slinky’s pained voice echoed out of the dark. He appeared a second later at a hobbling pace using his upturned M14 as a crutch.

  “Yeah,” Hardy said.

  He continued licking his lips whether he knew it or not. Lilianna put up her hands, but beside her, seeing the gesture, Aurora just groaned and sank to her knees, and was lucky to stop there.

  “You’ve caught us,” Lilianna wheezed. “Congratu-fucking-lations. Big men. So proud.”

  The rest of the diatribe failed to materialize. She hung her head, hands on her knees too, utterly spent.

  “What do you say, Hardy?” Slinky asked the other rogue trooper with an exhausted kind of delight. “Does this look like the right place?”

  “To end them?”

  “Eventually,” Slinky said. “Eventually, yeah.”

  *

  “GREERSON’S DEAD,” LILIANNA spat at the two men. “I killed him.”

  “Yeah,” Slinky replied. He didn’t sound upset. “We figured.”

  A look passed between the pair. Lilianna managed furrowed brows, despite the exhaustion. Slinky’s handsome whiskered face curled into an evil smile, pensive, and the most worrisome sign of all was when Hardy also relaxed.

  “Now take your clothes off,” Slinky jeered.

  Lilianna didn’t budge an inch. Hardy glanced at his fellow trooper.

  “Here?”

  “That was what I was just askin’ you,” Slinky snapped back.

  “We don’t have to share them with Greerson,” Hardy said.

  Disjointed, his dark eyes took a long, truculent pass over Lilianna and then lingered there. Lila shivered, crossing her arms over the ruined polo shirt tied around her chest.

  Hardy added, “We could take our time.”

  “Aw,” Slinky smirked at him. “I knew you had the love-eyes for this one.”

  He snorted and motioned at Lilianna.

  “I don’t know what’s with you guys,” Slinky said and shook his head. “You’re dumbstruck by that pussy, aren’t you?”

  Hardy blinked and looked across at his comrade and then withered as Slinky adopted a mocking singsong tone.

  “‘Aw, and maybe we don’t have to kill them either’, hey Hardy? Right?” Slinky asked him and laughed. “‘Oh, maybe we could just keep her, huh? Maybe one day’. . . .”

  Slinky didn’t have the appetite for the performance and finished with a final snarky grin.

  “I dunno, man,” he said to Hardy. “Maybe ‘Love can’t be rushed,’ right?”

  Slinky sniggered. His fellow hunter drew his handgun and shot him in the head.

  Poleaxed, the handsome trooper’s corpse fell like the strings’d been cut.

  To Lilianna’s horror, Hardy then calmly turned and shot Aurora too.

  Her friend’s expression froze forever in a terrified scowl as the bullet took her between the eyes and the back of her skull blew out, taking most of her brains with it. A ghastly sigh escaped the executed girl and then Aurora’s pallid corpse slumped into the bracken.

  “You fucking –!”

  Hardy cranked the pistol right at Lilianna and for an awful moment she had no idea what he’d do. So she froze.

  The last of Greerson’s men, Hardy wasn’t much bigger than her. He backed away towards the more solid footing of the roadside and gestured with the gun for her to follow.

  Lilianna looked back at dead Aurora as if to awaken from a bad dream.

  Instead, the dawn broke – and took Lilianna’s heart with it.

  *

  LIGHT STARTED TO assemble their surroundings as Hardy prompted Lila along the battered road. The grass grew thick and rank to shoulder height to east and west, that river smell still in the air which blew ragged pieces of the vista around them like gnats. Lilianna kept checking over her shoulder, but Hardy s
tayed well back with the pistol lowered, still in his hand, ready to execute her as cleanly as he’d done her friend. It was only ten minutes since Aurora’s death and Lilianna’s distraught sobs hadn’t left her.

  “Keep on walking,” the trooper said.

  Lila flicked her eyes back at him again, careful not to show anything other than horror for the cautious, worried-looking little man. Hardy’s teeth nibbling at his upper lip only reinforced his rodent vibe. His work trousers were reinforced with black tape, and the upholstery revealed legs thinner than Lila’s own. Skin the color of pencil shavings and his haunted, determined, fatalistic leer came into focus as the daylight gradually strengthened.

  “We’re going to get out of this,” the trooper said.

  Hardy motioned to the north where the distant horizon was little more than a black smear with the incoming storm.

  “And then what?”

  She had to raise her voice like a theater heckler to be heard. But words were pointless. Hardy wasn’t taking questions. He flicked the automatic’s gun barrel at her again by way of encouragement, not that she’d ever stopped her tired, limping trudge along the road’s edge.

  “You could at least tell me where we’re going,” she called back.

  “Out of this weather,” Hardy said. “You should be grateful.”

  “Fuck,” she said and actually managed some semblance of a laugh. “You think?”

  “What do you think Greerson would’ve done to you?”

  “I did it to him, first,” Lila shot back.

  Now it was Hardy’s turn to chuckle, though Lila nearly missed most of it amid the barrage of wind. Somewhere close by, there came a horrific ripping noise, and then the upper body of a weakened tree lifted up and across like on a wire, flew across the road a quarter-mile ahead of them, clipped the roof of a house, and then it and numerous roof tiles continued sprawling across in the act of disintegration as they were sucked into the overall murk.

  Lila cursed to herself, unable to move faster on her ruined ankle. Pain already crept like fire to her knee, joining similar signals from her ribs, her hip, her exhausted arms, the wind-numbed swelling in her face. She curled a fist without any weapons in it, imagining them instead – but Hardy hadn’t finished.

  “Don’t kid yourself, girl,” he called out to her. “Greerson had a hate-on for you. By comparison, you killed him quick. He was going to hurt you.”

  Lila stopped. Her ankle demanded it. The wooden fence buried in the overgrown roadside had a cluster of dime store mannequins crushed against it like someone’s forgotten prank, and she stared at the chipped and dented blank faces a second before rounding on Hardy, who’d halted, concerned ten yards behind her in the middle of the road. A weather-blasted old Kombi van rested nearby on its side with grass and ferns shooting all through it, and a crow landed briefly, seeking respite, before a fresh gust claimed it in a flapping of wings as it disappeared into the ether.

  “So, you saved me?”

  Lila wanted to play it nice – to try and manipulate the verminous little prick – but she hadn’t the stomach for it.

  “That’s the story you’re telling yourself, huh?”

  “Get moving,” Hardy answered. “We can’t stay outside like this.”

  Lilianna dropped her eyes, no need to feign tiredness.

  “I can’t walk anymore,” she said. “My ankle. . . .”

  The trooper checked her foot where the flesh at the bottom of her jeans was swollen to capacity, the sock hiding somewhere inside the trainer out of sight. Hardy tutted, convinced. And he scanned around their location, the roadside trek fallen a long way short perhaps of how he’d imagined it.

  “We’re still in their territory,” he said. “Nowhere here’s good.”

  “‘Good’?”

  Lilianna had no idea what she even meant with the question, but Hardy still answered it.

  “Safe.”

  Yet more tiredness flushed Lila’s features and she fought off the wish to lay down.

  “Not yet,” Hardy said, reading her mood. “Keep walking . . . if you want to live.”

  *

  THE MORNING BECAME a blur of pain and sorrow and exhaustion, and eventually Lilianna plunged into delirium and wasn’t exactly sure how the next few hours passed, except that she desperately wished for her father and brother – and feared both were dead. The blinding wind added its misery to her pained trudge, which only ended when Hardy physically guided her into a grass-infused parking lot.

  He clearly no longer viewed Lilianna as a threat – perhaps the greatest insult of them all. But Hardy’s view was well-founded. The hours which had become days had overpowered her at last, leaving her a weakling the foul trooper could safely guide by one shoulder towards a row of motel room doors across the otherwise empty lot.

  Lila stumbled and craned her head to the sun, half-blotted out by swirling gray clouds. Detritus torn from the countryside hovered up there like birds surfing the storm, and she returned her gaze, disoriented, to Hardy, who did no more than offer a weird, shy smile, before encouraging her to continue on.

  She started to black out, but then Lila’s eyes flew open at noise like from a freight train.

  A shed door hurtled out of the sky and collided with the motel’s old neon sign. Glass exploded in another spray, which joined and then dislodged the wooden door as it all flew together across the motel’s roof tiles like machine-gun fire.

  Instantaneously, the light darkened and thick torrents of rain pelted the motel lot, smacking into Lilianna and Hardy like baby fists. Freezing water soaked Lila’s face and eyes, and she wakened at once as Hardy left off his hold on her arm to simply shout an encouragement and run for shelter like a Tinder date gone wrong.

  Lilianna stood stock still.

  The water slapped her back into consciousness – the freezing downpour like a root canal as she flicked terrified eyes after her captor, then around to take in the disaster unfolding, thick serpentine shapes rising out across the barren vista behind the motel like angered gods come to wreak their unhappiness on the mortal realm. Shrapnel came with the rain, but Lila didn’t even notice the piece of twisted wire which flicked past and opened a narrow gash across her bare arm, above where the flesh of her tricep was already a glossy, dented white scar.

  Lilianna hobbled away from the motel.

  The road was lined with residential homes shredded down to their foundations by the intervening years, the house-proud Ohioans snarling in their graves at rank nature’s intrusion on their domain. Trees now held dominion across the wide verges and generous driveways and the loose-gravel roadside to create thickets of head-high saplings, grown like teenagers too thin for such tall bodies, their branches already destroyed by the weather. Heavy cold rain sloughed across the scene, and Lilianna ran into that madness blind, spurred on by Hardy’s frantic yells.

  Greerson’s lone surviving hunter hunkered under the motel awning, but then committed to the chase. And after one more careful backwards glance, Lilianna threaded away through the maze of the young forest using it for handholds as she struggled to remain upright.

  Lila hurtled into the cover and soon lost trace of pursuit. She veered left and right almost randomly, sacrificing stealth for speed and hoping misdirection might play its part.

  There was nothing for her to grab for a weapon better than a tree branch, and so she armed herself and ended up using it more like a crutch, continuing to hobble on through ongoing thickets as the sky overhead, beyond her vision, crashed and clattered, turning black, and when she cast a single glance back, Lila was struck by the most bizarre sight imaginable as a horse writhed, twisting and kicking and neighing as it ascended into swirling clouds so much that Lilianna dismissed the vision, imagining for a terrible moment that her whole life now was just a fever dream.

  But the freezing rain and the urgent need to escape her future rapist were enough to keep Lilianna lucid. She ran blindly into a wooden fence and crashed over it, landing awkwardly, her l
eft hip in brief agony before she got herself upright with the fence’s help, glanced back to see Hardy unhooking his rifle, and then turned tail to run on through an ancient back yard.

  It didn’t seem like a yard because the fences and the bulk of the house had disintegrated long ago. The brick chimney and a trellis of steel beams hinted at caution, and seconds later, Lilianna was feeling her way between the carcasses of several vintage sports cars concealed in the wild savannah. Hardy continued somewhere to her rear. The yard ended in a hump of earth. Lilianna clambered over a collapsed fence and into the yard of the neighboring home, its walls still standing, roof gone, a metal storage shed flipped on its side and wedged into the broken-windowed hulk of an old school truck.

  Beyond it all, another road cut through the sward. Recent traffic had flattened its natural crop of wild canola.

  The road was slippery with the decomposing stalks and the rain. Several big structures loomed out of the frieze – an installation of some sort ringed by a huge metal wire fence. Lila only had eyes for the gate as she plucked up her remaining spirits, crying uncontrollably with rage and grief and terror while using the tree branch to hobble forward.

  Hardy came out on the road behind her.

  “Stop!”

  Too tired for words, Lilianna ignored the man.

  Hardy jogged up behind her, surprised again when Lila whirled and struck him with the tree branch. Although the crutch snapped in half, the blow sent Hardy sprawling and the pistol from his hand. The dull glint of metal vanished into the profuse road edge. Hardy squared her with a vengeful look as he went crawling after the gun.

  And Lilianna limped towards the gate.

  *

  THE SOLID MESH took her weight and the top of the padlocked gates didn’t even have razor wire to protect the shutdown old zoo and aquarium. Hardy came after her with a limp of his own, and Lilianna only let her tiredness overcome her again when she’d swung both legs and herself over the top of the gate.

  She fell heavily fifteen feet to the ground and lay sprawled and panting – and realized the rain had moved on. The saturated brick paving was alive with water whipped into a misty frenzy by the wind. Lilianna shielded her eyes from it as she rolled over, got to her knees with difficulty, and backed away as Hardy came up the access road with his pistol on her and still without the desperation to use it.