Apokalypsis | Book 5 | Apokalypsis 5

by Morris, Kate

  “What about the other man?” she asked.

  “The soldier? He’s there, too,” the woman answered.

  “You telling me the truth?”

  The woman nodded vigorously. Wren stood up and shot her in the chest. Roman had to look away. This girl was like some sort of assassin mercenary or something. She was cold, stone cold.

  “Let’s go,” she ordered, to which he nodded, and the dog followed.

  Going down the next hallway was more complicated because it was full of leftover supplies from the offices and some from the manufacturing. They had to climb over some of it. He even had to lift her dog over a few pieces.

  Gunshots went off straight ahead, and they both ducked. It sounded close. Two people came around the corner as they fired off rounds and took cover. Wren raised her gun, but Roman stayed her.

  “Psst!” he whispered.

  “Roman?” Alex asked.

  “Yeah, it’s us,” he replied and jogged forward to join Spencer and Alex. “Need help?”

  Spencer stood and threw something down the hallway they’d just ducked, and it exploded. Then he stalked forward, Wren on his heels. Roman and Alex also stood and followed. The hallway was wide and also littered like the one they’d come through. The flashbang had the added effect of smoke, and a ton of green fog was hanging in the air. A few men ran at them through it, and Spencer shot one while Wren took out the other with a headshot. Roman hadn’t even used his smoke grenade yet. There’d been no need so far.

  “Told you she’d be fine,” Alex commented and turned to go back the other way again.

  He followed, and so did Wren and Spencer. She barged past them.

  “They’re this way,” she informed the others. “We found out from someone.”

  Alex looked at him, and Roman sliced a finger across his neck, to which Alex nodded knowingly.

  They followed Wren and ended up where the woman told them to go, towards the cafeteria. She paused at the door. Or rather, Spencer grabbed her arm to halt her. Roman wanted to warn the poor guy that this girl was not big into being told what to do, but there wasn’t time. Someone on the other side of the doors fired off a shot. They weren’t shooting at them, so unless these people were shooting at each other, then it must’ve been Tristan getting into it with some of them.

  Spencer opened the door slowly and went through first. Roman held the door and shut it quietly behind him. It clicked into place loudly, though, which made him cringe.

  Once inside the long and wide room that still held tables and chairs and everything a company would need to feed its employees at lunchbreaks, Roman was surprised. Nobody was in it. A lot of kitchen equipment was sitting in the middle of the enormous room, including at least six vending machines left behind. Some of the tables were stacked or standing on their ends. Chairs were stacked taller than him, and some of the tables were more like resin picnic tables. It was a maze but not as bad as that storage room he and Wren had come through.

  Her dog growled softly, which creeped him out. Spencer was shining his flashlight into the more open spaces as he led the way. Going slowly, Roman kept checking behind them. Alex split off and went around some picnic tables that were lined up on their ends closer to the wall.

  More gunshots cut through the silence. They still weren’t coming from this room as he’d thought, but somewhere beyond.

  As they rounded a particularly tall pile of chairs, almost like someone was trying to create some sort of monolithic artwork display, the dog barked once and sharp, startling him.

  “Oh, shit!” Spencer yelled and blasted away with his rifle as his flashlight fell to the floor.

  Roman immediately saw what he meant and what the dog had seen or sensed before them. A cluster of night crawlers had been hiding behind the vending machines. At least ten of them ran toward them. Their shuffling, uncoordinated feet and legs were being illuminated by the dropped flashlight.

  “Jesus!” Alex said nearby and shot one.

  Roman raised his own gun and fired two quick rounds, disabling one. Then they were in an all-out fight for their lives. Wren ducked behind a picnic table and squatted. Her dog stayed by her side. She used the tabletop as leverage to steady the rifle she’d switched back to. Then it was only a matter of picking them off with carefully designed and executed shots.

  Some sort of noise behind him let him know they were not alone in that direction, either. He turned just in time to see a man, not a night crawler sneaking into the cafeteria. Roman hoped to hell it wasn’t Tristan and pulled the trigger. The man went down with a wound to his leg as Roman jogged over to see. It was definitely not Tristan. Another man burst through the door next, and Roman shot him, too. The man on the floor moaned.

  “Help me!” he cried out as Roman’s team kept firing into the crowd of night crawlers behind him.

  He wasn’t Wren. He wasn’t too sure if he could shoot a man in cold blood like she had. This man was down. He was no longer a threat. Instead of pulling the trigger again, he turned and retreated back to the group.

  “Duck!” Alex yelled at him, and Roman did so right before Alex fired off a round in his direction.

  Roman spun quickly to see what he’d missed.

  Alex jogged over to him and said, “Asshole was gonna shoot you in the back.”

  It was the man he’d left on the floor, the man he’d mistaken for being incapacitated. In his hand was a semi-automatic pistol he hadn’t seen. Alex had shot him in the head, and now he really was dead.

  “Roman, you better pop that smoke!” Spencer called out as Roman slowly turned to follow his group.

  He could see a group of them clustered in the corner, ready to attack them. He took out the smoke grenade and pulled the pin. Without pause, he threw it at them. Green smoke immediately billowed into the air and out some of the broken windows.

  Then they were on the run again, this time exiting the cafeteria into another space that was hopefully not full of other night crawlers or assholes who would shoot a person who’d shown them mercy.

  He was badly shaken. He’d let that man go, and he’d turned pure evil. The evil bastard was going to shoot him in the back with no regrets or hesitation. Roman had let him go. The man had no intention of doing the same. He would never make this mistake again.

  Chapter Five

  Avery

  “Did you hear that?” Kaia asked her in a hushed tone.

  “Yes,” Avery whispered back and stood.

  They’d both been trying to snooze on the sofas in the living room. Tristan was gone, having left a few hours ago for the city to try and help Wren and Alex retrieve their family members. About an hour after they left, Avery thought she’d heard something outside, but it stopped. After an extensive search through the slat in the boards covering the windows, she’d not seen anything. Now, she heard it again. This time it was louder and closer.

  “That sounded like our patio chairs being scraped across the concrete,” Kaia echoed her own thoughts.

  “I know,” she answered and stepped cautiously toward the French doors, one of which was not boarded closed. It was one of the few “soft spots” as Tristan called it, but they needed a way back into the house from the backyard in case of an emergency. The house was just too big to consider running all the way around to the front door if they were in trouble. There was still some plywood on it, but the door was not nearly as covered as the rest of the many doors and windows, nor was it boarded shut to the frame so that it wouldn’t open.

  Kaia was right on her heels as she braced against the wall next to the door. Another noise outside caused them both to jump at the same time. After a moment, Avery slid closer to the open space between the bottom and top sheets of plywood, a space about five inches wide of just glass. She looked over her shoulder at Kaia, who nodded with wide eyes, indicating that she should peek. Avery nodded in return and craned her neck slowly toward the glass. She had to roll up onto her tiptoes a bit to be able to see. It was dark, snowing lightly, and the
moon was hiding behind clouds. Tristan had disabled all of the outdoor solar lighting that had been put in place by her meticulous father’s design and aesthetic. Tristan wanted the place dark at night, no spotlighting, no security lamps including the one on the garage’s peak, just darkness. He also set the sensor lighting in her apartment and house with Spencer and Abraham’s help to no longer automatically illuminated or dimmed upon entry and exit. The switches were manual now, which was hard to get used to. However, she understood his reasoning. When they needed to shroud the home in darkness at night to avoid detection from the night crawlers, having indoor sensor lighting come on at inopportune times wasn’t the best idea. She was glad for sure this night that he’d done so as she and her sister stood in the pitch dark of their living room.

  She strained to see anything in the backyard or on the patio, but nothing was visible.

  “Anything?” Kaia whispered and touched her forearm.

  Avery shook her head and observed. One of their weighty, steel patio chairs was lying on its side. She wracked her brain, trying to remember if it had been like that or if it was newly toppled. Maybe the wind did it.

  “Wait,” she whispered softly. “I think I see something.”

  Maybe not the wind.

  “What?”

  She peered harder through the snow that was blowing sideways. The flakes were huge, practically the size of her palm, and coming down in sporadic spurts of density. Then she saw it again.

  “It’s just a deer,” she said and blew out a held breath. Kaia immediately joined her and glanced out the window, too. “Just a deer.”

  “Yeah, I see it,” her sister said in the same hushed tone.

  It was strange. They all spoke quietly or whispered as soon as the sun went down. Their home, which had been so full of noise and bustle before all of this happened, was now very quiet in the evenings. They didn’t play board games in a loud and rowdy, competitive style like they used to. They only practiced on their instruments when the sun was fully up. They certainly didn’t go out and build a snowman or an igloo in anticipation of coming in to their mother’s homemade hot cocoa at night. Everything was different now. They’d lost every single aspect of who they used to be as a family. Their parents were gone, their habits and traditions, their values even. Avery wondered if it’d ever go back to normal, but deep down, she knew the answer to that. The longer this dragged on, the slimmer the prospect seemed.

  Just as she was about to turn away and say something to Kaia about it, a flash of movement, a blur almost, zipped past the door right in front of them, only the glass and frame of the door and plywood separated her and her sister from it. A second later, another blur, another one of those things, sped onto the scene, too. Together they hit the deer so fast and so hard, it didn’t even have a chance to react before it was taken to the ground.

  Beside her, Kaia sucked in a loud inhale and stumbled back. Unfortunately, she stumbled into a bookcase with glass doors. The whole unit banged loudly against the wall. One of their mother’s decorative chicken planters, a piece of colorful pottery from a trip she’d taken with their father to Mexico, teetered and fell to the hardwood floor before Avery could catch it or stop it from happening. It shattered. Kaia also fell all the way to the floor but looked up with frightened eyes of her mistake.

  They both sucked in sharp breaths and waiting. Just when Avery thought it had not been heard, something slammed against the glass doors. They didn’t break, of course, since they were reinforced with wood, but she also jumped back. It only happened once, and she squatted on the floor with Kaia and waited.

  “Is everything…?” Ephraim asked as he came down the hall.

  “Shh!” Avery hissed quietly.

  Her little brother joined them in their huddle. Avery whispered directly into his ear what they’d seen and what had happened. She couldn’t coddle the children anymore. This was just their life now. He was fifteen and needed to know. Hiding truths or softening the situation would not help them. They needed to understand when they were in danger and not to take it lightly.

  “I’ll check,” she whispered and crawled on all fours to the door again.

  She stayed below the glass so that she wouldn’t be seen. Instead, there was a slat near the bottom, too, where she lowered down to peer through it. The slat was maybe four inches wide and in between pieces of plywood. It wasn’t as if the plywood they’d scavenged had come in ideally cut portions to fit everything perfectly. Some places on windows even had sheet metal. Others were boarded up with pallets Tristan had broken apart. Some doors, since they had so many glass sliders, were covered in pieces parts of plywood sheeting meant for a roof. It wasn’t perfect, certainly wasn’t beautiful, but it was safe.

  “Ave,” Kaia whispered as if she wanted a report.

  “Shh!” she sent back and crawled closer to the slice of glass that was probably about a foot up from the floor. She tried to control her breathing so that she wouldn’t fog up the glass, but it didn’t work. She had to wipe her sweater sleeve across it. Then she realized she still had a pistol in her hand and was pointing it at herself. That wasn’t too smart, so she quickly lowered it back down. “I think they’re gone. I don’t—”

  On the other side of the glass appeared two bloodshot eyes. Avery gasped in horror and scooted sideways. It was too late. It had seen her.

  Then the real terror began. Outside, the thing screech-screamed and began calling to others using that signal.

  “Get Finn!” she whispered, to which Ephraim ran down the hall toward the basement.

  “Jesus!” Renee called out quietly as she came from the other side of the house wrapped in a warm robe. “What the—”

  “Shh!” Kaia said this time.

  Avery stood and ran to her friend to explain in a quiet tone, which was probably stupid now since they clearly knew the house was occupied. She was just glad her friend wasn’t staying in the apartment by herself. Spencer wanted her to stay in the main house when he wasn’t home. Renee, being a bit of a feminist, had argued against his show of machismo but had seen the upside of it and relented.

  Ephraim came back with Finn, who had unshed tears in his eyes. He was carrying a tattered stuffed bunny and was clinging onto it. She picked him up immediately and tried to soothe him.

  “What do we do, Avery?” Ephraim asked with wide eyes.

  “Nothing. We stay inside. They’ll lose interest,” she said and earnestly hoped it was true.

  She wasn’t sure if that would happen as others joined the melee. Renee spied out the window from time to time.

  “They’re eating the deer,” she whispered to Avery, who nodded.

  Another one pounded on the house wall outside, which caused her to jump. Then she reassured Finn he was okay because she knew he was scared to death. He had buried his face in her neck and not come up for air for a long time.

  “I’m checking everything again,” Kaia said.

  Ephraim volunteered, “I’ll come, too.”

  They left the room, and she was alone with Renee, who seemed equally frightened. Avery could tell her friend was as afraid as her but was trying to hide it for the children’s sakes. However, she knew Renee better than anyone, and she knew her fear ran deep. She knew because hers did, too.

  They both startled when something on the roof thumped.

  “Can they…?”

  She cut her friend off. “No. They can’t get in. Tristan boarded up all of the skylights. They’re just going to slip on the snow and fall.”

  Renee nodded and bit her lower lip. “I’m going to get dressed.”

  “Me, too.”

  They split up, and she kept Finn with her. She ran into Kaia and Ephraim upstairs and told them to dress, as well. If something happened and they had to abandon the house, there was a truck in the garage. Unfortunately, the garage was under the apartment. Up the hill. It was not in the garage that was attached to the house. That one was too full of supplies now to park a vehicle in it.

&
nbsp; “Avery, I’m scared,” Finn whispered.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” she returned. “I’m just getting dressed. Here, sit on the bed.”

  She placed him there, but he immediately began looking around and petting his stuffed animal.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said and rushed over to make sure the door to her father’s office was locked. If they got onto the balcony, they could potentially break through the glass slider doors in there. She took a decorative chair from the corner and wedged it under the knob just to be sure.

  Then she pulled on jeans and warmer socks. She removed her cardigan and grabbed a turtleneck to go under it. When she was dressed, she carried Finn back downstairs. It was a good thing she’d lived in this house her whole life, or navigating it in the dark would’ve proven difficult.

  She took Finn to the basement, where he slept with his brothers and helped him get dressed just in case. Avery almost starting crying. He was so scared he’d wet his pants. Finn was way past the age of wetting the bed, so she knew this was from fear. It broke her heart.

  “Let’s put on some warmer clothing, okay?” she said as if she didn’t even notice. He just nodded and hugged his bunny.

  After she had him changed and dry, Avery carried him back upstairs. He was seven and certainly didn’t need to be carried, but she also wasn’t sure he’d let her put him down anyway. Holding him tightly to her made Avery feel like she was keeping him safe. It was a lie, but it felt right to think it.

  “Are the monsters out there?” he asked in a tiny voice.

  It was gut-check time.

  Avery nodded and kissed his cheek, “Yes, love, but I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

  “Like Daddy?”

  Maybe it was gut-punch time.

  She nodded again and kissed the side of his head as they came into the kitchen. Then an idea struck. “Sit with Renee, okay? I need to get something.”

  She tried to deposit him on the sofa next to her friend, who reached up for him, but he shook his head and clung on like a monkey. “Finn, just for a second. I’m not…never mind.”