The Wrath of the Just (Apocalypse Z)

by Manel Loureiro

  A lingering black cloud had replaced the girl’s good mood. She’d been on an emotional roller coaster in the ghetto. From the top of the Wall, she scanned the horizon for her man all day every day, oblivious to the rain and the Undead roaring a few feet below. Alejandra and Pritchenko thought she was losing her mind. Finally Mendoza ordered her to get down. Her presence up there sent up a red flag for Greene’s militia. Someone might ask some difficult questions no one wanted to answer just days before the ghetto rose up against its oppressors.

  As the days passed, her hopes faded. She wouldn’t admit it to herself, but she knew that with every passing hour, his chances of making it back diminished. She feared something far worse than all the dangers lurking on the outside or the infection running through his veins. What if they’d killed him when he got off the train? Night after night she woke from that nightmare screaming. All she could do then was curl up in bed, trembling and waiting for the weak morning light. Another day with no sign of him. Her face was puffy and she had dark circles under her eyes. She couldn’t eat. All the life had gone out of her. She was going through hell, oblivious to everything and everyone.

  One morning during their shift, Alejandra sat her down. “Keep your mind busy. If you don’t, the pain’ll drive you crazy. You’re not the first to go through this and you won’t be the last. There’s two ways to handle that pain: turn it into something small and manageable, or let it grow till it crushes you and you can’t breathe. Trust me, that second path leads to a gray, sad life with no future. You’ve gotta move on.”

  “I don’t want to move on,” Lucia said in a raspy whisper. “Not without him.”

  “You’ll move on, of course you will.” Alejandra gave Lucia’s arm an affectionate squeeze, lifted her chin, and looked into her eyes. “You have to go on, for you and for everything you two stood for. For him, for his memory. Above all, you can’t give up now. The future is so close. Sooner or later this nightmare’ll end and then the world’ll be a very big place for the few survivors. You have to tough it out somehow. So sit down and make those fucking Molotov cocktails as if your life depended on it. Clear your mind. Think about anything you like, but find a way to live! If you don’t, everything you’ve done, for yourself and for him, will be meaningless.”

  Lucia lowered her head and worked in silence, choking back tears, and burying her pain deep in her heart. The mindless work did help to keep her afloat. She didn’t let herself forget, but at least she kept busy. And that was what she needed.

  “How do they plan to break through the ghetto wall?” she asked Alejandra as she carefully filled half-liter bottles with gasoline and potassium soap shavings.

  “No idea,” said Alejandra. “Only a handful of people know that. Rumor has it that, in one of the basements, they’ve stockpiled huge amounts of fertilizer and God-knows-what-else to make a very powerful explosive.” She looked all around. “The walls have ears.”

  “I hope it works, whatever it is—” Lucia stopped short when gunshots rang out.

  Everyone in the workshop looked up, their eyes wide. Then there was a long burst of gunfire, and several assault rifles rattled in the distance.

  “What the hell’s that?” Lucia asked in alarm.

  “Don’t know, but it can’t be good.” Alejandra jumped up and eased over to the windows.

  The windows had been covered so no one could get a look at what they were doing on the second story of the house. The petite woman struggled with the latches and finally managed to slide the window up. She stuck her head out to get a look from their second-story perch, then pulled it right back inside.

  “The street’s full of Green Guards and the militia! They’ve got dozens of trucks!”

  “How many?” asked a tall, rail-thin Mexican man with a tangle of black curls. He tucked a couple of Molotov cocktails into his belt.

  “More than normal. They must’ve enlisted more guards. They’re all over the place!”

  “Whadda we do?” murmured a very frightened woman. “Gato and most of the leaders are outside the Wall. Hardly anyone’s left to coordinate the groups.”

  “We’ll all have to step up.” Lucia was surprised to hear those words come out of her mouth. She felt more centered than she had in days. She wanted to take the law into her own hands. Fuck everyone who’d destroyed her life. Let them share her pain.

  “Is there any way to signal them?” she asked.

  “Yeah, someone’s got flares someplace,” Alejandra replied. “I’m sure they’ll shoot them off anytime now.”

  “Let’s show them what we’ve got,” said Lucia, dragging out a box of Molotov cocktails. “We’ll blow the head off any asshole who comes snooping around here.”

  They loaded the cocktails into backpacks and headed for the street. Shots, screams, and the sound of breaking glass and wood came from everywhere. The Greens were clearing out the ghetto strongholds, showing no mercy to anyone who resisted. There was nowhere left to hide.

  A couple of explosions rocked the street. The demonic rattle of machine guns grew with a crescendo and a huge fireball rose from the far side of the ghetto with a sickening roar.

  “We’re fighting back!” roared the tall guy, raising a fist. “Those are our AK-47s, not the Greens’ M4s.”

  “We gotta hurry,” Alejandra said. “They don’t have enough ammunition to keep that up. They’ll need all the help we can give them. Divvy up the bombs and split up.”

  The small groups scattered in all directions. Alejandra and Lucia went with the tall man, who seemed to have a plan. The shooting was widespread and the sky glowed with a dozen fires. People ran everywhere, screaming and looking scared out of their wits. A few clutched motley collections of weapons with a determined look in their eyes.

  “Back a mouse into a corner and he’ll attack a lion,” Lucia muttered under her breath.

  “What’d you say?” Alejandra asked.

  Lucia felt an ice-cold fury rush through her veins. “It’s something he used to say—”

  “Explain it to me later.” Alejandra tugged Lucia’s arm. “Right now we have to hurry! Run!”

  There was a screech of tires as a big army truck barreled around the corner with a group of militiamen perched in the truck bed. They’d painted Reverend Green’s cross over the white US Army star. The driver smiled sadistically as he mowed down anyone who wasn’t fast enough to get away.

  “Run for it, girls!” cried the tall man. He grabbed a Molotov cocktail and planted himself in middle of the road. He lit the Molotov behind his back so the truck driver couldn’t see what he was doing and stood in the middle of the street with suicidal bravery. When the truck driver saw him, he looked daggers at the man and speeded up. The man didn’t flinch. He waited, lips pursed, eyes trained on the truck until it was ten feet from him. He darted aside as he tossed the Molotov cocktail through the open window of the truck that by then was less than five feet from him.

  The bottle burst into a ball of fire that engulfed the driver and his passenger. The truck swerved, flames shooting out its windows. The guards in the truck bed held on tight to keep from being thrown out. Then the truck slammed into a house with the sounds of metal twisting and wood splintering. The soldiers in the back flew off in every direction like cannonballs. Most slammed into the house. Some soldiers broke their necks in the crash or were impaled on the house’s broken wood frame. Others fell into the flames devouring the house. You could hear screams of agony over the roar of the fire.

  “We’re done here. Let’s go,” the tall man said matter-of-factly.

  They shouldered their backpacks and continued to the next intersection. In a house on the corner, some helots were in a standoff with a group of militiamen who were trying to cross the intersection. The bodies of a dozen soldiers were sprawled on the ground. The surviving militiamen had taken cover behind their vehicles and were firing on the helots with assault r
ifles. Although the militia and the Green Guards’ firepower was far superior, the helots were well protected in the house. Suddenly a Humvee equipped with a 50mm M2 machine gun raced into the intersection. From about a hundred feet away, it trained the M2 on the house.

  The helots fired on the Humvee, but it was too late. The M2 roared with a lazy cadence and the front of the house collapsed in a cloud of pulverized wood, cement, and blood. After a few seconds, the firing stopped. There was nothing left of the top floor.

  “Wait here,” whispered the tall man as he lit two Molotov cocktails. “This’ll be a piece of cake.” With a bomb in each hand, he flattened himself against the building on the opposite sidewalk and edged toward the Humvee, out of its line of sight.

  Just then a militiaman on the street spotted him and shouted an alarm. The tall guy let out a whoop and ran toward the Humvee, raising the Molotov cocktails over his head, but he was too late. The machine gun blasted away, nearly slicing the man’s body in half. He collapsed like a rag doll. As he fell, the Molotov cocktails broke and the flaming liquid spilled all over his body, quickly reducing him to a pile of burning flesh in the middle of the road.

  Alejandra and Lucia stared, terrified. Before they could react, another Humvee roared up behind them. The women were trapped. Lucia gritted her teeth. Just as she was about to light a Molotov cocktail, the second Humvee turned and headed straight for the soldiers, who cheered when they saw it. The first Humvee screeched to a halt and its crew peered out the hatch. The soldiers’ faces froze in horror when the machine gun on the second vehicle took aim at them and opened fire.

  The second Humvee mowed down the soldiers like a giant sickle cutting wheat, and kept firing until nothing moved on the street. Bullets penetrated the first Humvee’s fuel tank and it exploded in a raging fireball. The burning house and Humvee cast a spectral glow on the dozens of bodies lying in the street.

  The Humvee door opened and a soldier cautiously stuck out his head.

  Alejandra cried out, “Strangärd!”

  The Swede sprang out of the Humvee, aiming his rifle. When he saw Alejandra and Lucia crouched behind a hedge, he breathed a sigh of relief and lowered his rifle.

  “What the hell are you two doing here? I almost shot you, for the love of God!”

  “What’re you doing here?” Lucia asked, incredulous.

  “We came as soon as we could.” Lucia noticed he was wearing a white armband on his right bicep. “We learned that the ‘cleanup’ had started. We knew we had to try to prevent a slaughter, but this is way worse than I imagined. There aren’t many of us, but we’re well armed. Where’s Mendoza? I need to talk to him.”

  “Gato took the trash convoy and went to get the Cladoxpan,” said Alejandra.

  “Damn it!” the Swede snarled. “This is no time for him to disappear! What about the short, blond guy, the Russian soldier? Where’s he?”

  “He’s with Gato,” said Lucia. “And he’s not Russian, he’s—”

  “Ukrainian. I know, I know. So who’s in charge?”

  “I have no idea,” said Alejandra. “We’re trying to get to the center of the ghetto to find out. And to get these to the fighters there.” She pointed to the Molotov cocktails.

  “You won’t get very far on foot,” Strangärd replied. “Most of the fighting is in the center. Grapes brought reinforcements. Nearly a thousand men. Get in the Humvee. We’ll get as close as we can, and then, God help us.”

  Once the women were in the Humvee, the driver sped off past the burning remains of the tall helot, who looked like a charred mummy. Then the street fell silent. The fallen on both sides gazed at each other with the empty eyes of death.

  45

  Malachi Grapes was finally happy. His life had never been easy. When he was a little boy, everyone had called him white trash. The son of a single mother addicted to crack, little Malachi learned to defend himself early—first with his fists, then knives, and then guns. Transitioning from a street gang to the Aryan Nations had been a no-brainer.

  Grapes’s whole life had been violent, including his long prison term. He’d come to enjoy violence. Fuck it! He really liked it. The prison psychiatrist described Grapes’s personality in detail, his severe schizophrenic fits and his above-average intelligence. But none of that mattered to him. He was motivated by other people’s pain. That and power.

  But nothing he’d experienced before compared to what he felt standing in the middle of a blazing street as his men hunted down all those losers in the Bluefont ghetto.

  His boots splashed through a pool of helot blood as houses collapsed around him in an inferno of sparks and charred timbers. Grapes felt more alive than ever. He felt like a god. A violent, destructive god of war. He grew light-headed as the feeling of power swept over him.

  He was going to kill every last one of those sons of bitches, including the two thousand helots Reverend Greene had told him to spare. He’d make up some excuse. They fought back, Reverend. They wouldn’t agree to your terms. They didn’t let us take them alive. He’d come up with something. He was so drunk on blood that only one refrain ran through his head: Destroy. Kill. Maim. Inflict pain.

  “Hey, Malachi,” said a voice behind him. It was Seth Fretzen, his right-hand man. “They radioed that the streets on the other side are under control, but they’re having some problems in the center of the ghetto. Them assholes are fighting back.”

  Grapes looked down at the phrase tattooed across his knuckles: HATE JEWS. He flashed a big, satisfied smile. Those morons had just given him the excuse he needed.

  “OK, Seth,” he said amiably. “Let’s go kick their brown asses. We’ll teach ’em who’s fucking boss.”

  Seth Fretzen smiled, flashing his broken, rotting teeth—what few were left. He was having a great time too. He signaled to the militiamen and Green Guards surrounding Grapes’s tank, then got behind the wheel as the rest of the men climbed into their vehicles. They roared through the burning streets. Along the way, dozens of people ran for the shadows. Grapes sneered. I’ll take care of them later. First, I’m gonna take out the motherfuckers who’re fighting back. That’ll break their resistance and the rest’ll be gentle as lambs. Stupid shits.

  The Just, they called themselves. What did justice have to do with it? In Grapes’s mind, justice died when the Apocalypse destroyed the old world. Now the only law was survival of the strong and the fit. With Greene behind him, he was the strongest of all.

  As his convoy turned the corner, shots rang out from every direction. Grapes heard a howl of pain next to him as a soldier fell from the turret of a Humvee, half his head blown away. Bullets pinged against the side of Grapes’s truck and cracked the reinforced glass, leaving bumps on the inside of the door. If the truck hadn’t been reinforced, Grapes would’ve been toast.

  The Aryan was stunned when one of the vehicles in his command flew into the air in a ball of fire. His men gunned down the helots who’d thrown the Molotov cocktails as they ran from the scene, but his convoy was suddenly in chaos. The veins in Grapes’s neck swelled in rage.

  “Seth, call in all the reinforcements now! Let’s take out these fucking pussies! And get a heavy tank over here!”

  The man nodded and barked the orders into his radio. Grapes jumped from his truck and organized his men into a firing line out of the snipers’ range. He was too pissed off to duck as bullets pinged around him.

  He finally got his men into a semicircle at one corner of the plaza. The helots were mainly concentrated on the opposite side. His men were firing blindly, wasting ammo as if this were a shooting contest. Of course, they had plenty to spare: the whole fucking Navy warehouse in Gulfport.

  The helots’ firepower had dwindled to a trickle compared to the torrent of fire Grapes’s men unleashed. He grunted, satisfied. He suspected that the assholes were running out of ammo, but he didn’t want to take a chance.

  Sud
denly a Humvee like his, but without the green cross on the side, appeared on a side street. The driver slammed on his brakes, as surprised to see Grapes as he was to see them, then revved his engine as his shooter opened fire on Grapes’s line. Its huge machine gun pierced Grapes’s armored shields as if they were soda cans, and half a dozen of men fell on the ground, writhing in pain. Then that Humvee drove off, disappearing into the shadows like an evil ghost.

  Grapes scanned the night, frowning, trying to follow the roar of the Humvee’s engine as it rushed from corner to corner, hiding in pools of darkness. When his men returned fire, the Humvee disappeared behind a row of houses. The helots howled with joy.

  Grapes swore under his breath. How did those fuckers get ahold of one of his vehicles? Did they have allies on the other side of the Wall? That worried him more. Grapes tried to make out who was inside as the Humvee came back for another pass, but it was too far away and the flash of gunfire blinded him.

  Stopped there in the middle of the street, Grapes’s large convoy was an easy target. As the rogue Humvee made its second pass, nearly all its bullets hit their mark, forcing his men to take cover behind their vehicles. Grapes wished he had the night-vision goggles that were back at the military base. He never dreamed they would put up such a fight.

  Just then he felt the ground shake. Coming around the corner, a heavily armored Bradley tank rolled over its chains, cracking the pavement.

  “The tank’s here, Malachi!” Seth cried, elated.

  “Have them take out those lunatics once and for all,” Grapes growled, pointing to the houses on the other side of the plaza.

  The driver of the Bradley nodded. Unfamiliar with the vehicle, he ground the gears a few times before finally getting it in gear. The mammoth tank headed straight for the helots.

  The Humvee crossed its path, desperately firing its machine gun at close range, but the big tank’s armor was too thick. Then the Humvee’s driver made a fatal mistake as he spun around too sharply in an attempt to avoid a blast from Grapes’s men. The Humvee skidded and the driver had to slow down to regain control. That left it a sitting duck as the Bradley fired at it broadside.