Collapse (After the Storm Book 2)

by Ryan Casey

  “It—it hurts.”

  “I know, my love. I know.”

  “I want… I want to go home.”

  When she said those words, it melted my heart. Because it was the first time she’d shown a longing for the old ways—the first real time—since we’d been out here. That hurt. That was painful to hear.

  It was easy to forget that Olivia was my daughter. She was so tough, so mature.

  But this was a reminder. This was the biggest reminder of all.

  I cuddled her tighter, being sure to apply more pressure to the wound.

  “We will go home,” I said. “We’ll go home and we’ll make things back to normal, you and me.”

  “Will Kesha be there?”

  “Yes,” I said. I could taste salty tears that’d poured down my face. “Kesha will be there and Bouncer will be there.”

  “And Mum?”

  I wanted to say yes. I wanted to tell Olivia what she wanted to hear.

  But I couldn’t. I couldn’t sugar coat the truth to anyone. Not anymore.

  “I’m sorry, Olivia. But Mum’s not going to be there.”

  I held on to my daughter for a while against the backdrop of drama and chaos. And it only struck me after a short while that we were still here. That we were still surrounded by Danny’s people.

  And that we were still here.

  I looked up and saw Bouncer right beside me.

  His lead had been dropped. He was okay. Hadn’t been shot or anything, which of course was amazing.

  There were four people standing over Danny, who was on his knees.

  They all had guns to his head.

  I stood up, not wanting to leave Olivia’s side but knowing I had to fight this one final demon—that I had to put it to rest.

  I lifted my gun and I pressed it right up to Danny’s bruised, burned face.

  Danny smiled at me, blood between his teeth. “You won’t do it. You won’t do it because you’re too scared. Too scared of what you have to be to survive in this world. Too caught up in the morals of the old ways. And it might not kill you now, but it will catch up with you one day. And when it does, you’ll know about it.”

  My hand started shaking as I held on to the gun. I had to get this done, fast. I had to take him down. But a part of me couldn’t bring myself to. A part of me still didn’t want to accept the monster inside me.

  “Go on,” Danny said, laughing now. A nervous laugh no doubt, but a laugh all the same. “Do it. Take me out. Do it!”

  “Shut up.”

  “You’re not strong enough. You’re too weak. And that’s how you’ll always be. That’s just who you are.”

  I went to pull the trigger.

  Then I lowered the gun.

  Danny’s eyes widened. He laughed some more, although this was a laugh of relief.

  “See?” he said. “I told you. You aren’t strong enough. You aren’t strong enough at all.”

  I looked at Bouncer as he sat there, licking his lips.

  I thought about Kerry. About what Danny had boasted of doing to her. Of all the people he’d killed and eaten.

  “You’re a weak man who won’t make the right decisions for the good of his family.”

  I turned back around. “Hey, Danny?”

  He narrowed his eyes. He looked uncertain again. “What?” he said, venom in his voice.

  I walked right over to him.

  Then I lifted the gun into the air.

  “I haven’t even started yet.”

  I cracked the butt of the gun against his head.

  It knocked him clean out.

  When he fell down, I turned to Danny’s people. I looked each and every one of them in the eye, weighing them up individually.

  “You’re going to stop what you’ve been doing,” I said.

  “Trust me,” the bearded man on the left said. “We want nothing more. And we’ve wanted nothing more for a long time. It’s just…”

  “When things are working for you, you stick to it,” I said. “I get it.”

  I looked over at Olivia. She was still bleeding.

  “You got a medic here?”

  “We can take a look at your daughter. But we can’t… guarantee. If you understand.”

  “I do,” I said. “Just make sure you save her or I won’t be as lenient.”

  They nodded and headed to Olivia’s side.

  Then the man with the beard stopped and looked back.

  “What about him?” he said.

  I looked at Danny and felt the anger I felt towards him coursing through my system. I felt the urge to do what I had to do—what I wanted to do—reaching the point of no return.

  He said I wasn’t strong enough for this new world. Not nasty enough for this new world.

  I was going to prove him wrong.

  “I’ll deal with him,” I said.

  I whistled Bouncer to my side and lifted Danny under his arms.

  I watched his people—his former people—head in the opposite direction with Olivia. Over by the shop, I saw the old captives being released, as this place was liberated from the iron grip that’d been wrapped around it for so long.

  I felt like right now, the world was changing. Like things were shifting in a positive direction. An ugliness had been lifted from this place, and people could be free again.

  But there was something ugly I had to do.

  I looked down at Danny and a part of me—the old part of me—wanted to throw up with what I had planned.

  I ignored that part of me.

  I was going to teach him a lesson.

  I was going to show him exactly how strong I was.

  And he was going to feel every second of it…

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Danny knew something was wrong the moment he opened his eyes.

  He couldn’t see. Not properly. It felt like there was a light somewhere in front of him. A dim glow, like that of a fire. In fact, yes. It must’ve been a fire because he could smell something burning and hear something crackling. That calmed him, in a way. Because burning meant that it was his people burning something. That he was just sat around a campfire waiting to treat himself to another meal.

  Then he felt the pain.

  He couldn’t explain the pain. Not really. It felt like it was coming from his left leg. But it was a dull pain, like it wasn’t really present. There was a nasty tingling right along the middle of his left leg, though. A sharp, biting pain.

  But below that. Yeah, that was the weird pain.

  He blinked a few times, trying to get a sense of where he was, of what was happening. He could taste sick and blood. His tongue was bleeding, that was for sure. He could remember taking a hit. Some kind of nasty hit to the top of the head.

  And then it came flooding back to him.

  He’d stood against Will. Stood against him and his daughter as he prepared to walk out of this place, to leave it, for good.

  Then shit had gone down and in the end, even his own people had stood against him.

  He felt nauseous, then. Because if the pussies who were left in his group had stood against him, then that meant this burning wasn’t coming from his people at all. Not anymore. His people had been compromised. A virus had slipped into the ranks and it was going to make them all weak. It was going to tear them apart.

  He felt a sharp pain at the bottom of his leg again. No, not the bottom. That spot in the middle of it. He couldn’t explain it. It felt like there was a hole in his leg. Like someone was shoving something right into the middle of it, past the skin and into the muscle.

  He blinked a few times, his head feeling dizzy, his consciousness weak.

  Then he saw what was happening.

  Danny didn’t totally get it. Not at first. It was surreal, like something out of a dream. An awful dream, that was for sure.

  But there was no denying what he was looking at.

  The bottom half of his left leg was gone, just above the knee. That explained why he was experiencing
that weird kind of pain.

  When he saw it though, he didn’t really react. His reactions were dull. It was all just too surreal.

  Plus, there was something else weird.

  The dog at the bottom of his leg stump.

  Chewing away at the flesh.

  Bouncer.

  Danny started to moan then. He leaned back as the pain grew more prominent, more acute.

  “How does it feel?”

  He heard the voice echoing around his skull, like it’d come from nowhere in particular— from a voice in the sky.

  “Please. Please.”

  Someone grabbed his hair and yanked him back as the dog continued to sink its sharp teeth into his flesh and pull it away.

  “How does it feel?”

  Danny opened his eyes and he saw Will looking at him. There was a different look in Will’s eyes now. An anger, a primal nature that he hadn’t seen in Will before.

  Will pulled harder on his hair. “I asked you a question. You’ll answer. How does it feel?”

  “P-please. Please.”

  Will let go and walked around to the bottom of Danny’s leg. “It’s not nice, is it? I mean, lucky for you, you stayed unconscious for the worst part. We took your leg off. You woke up a few times, but you soon drifted away again with the pain. Probably don’t remember much of it. Especially not the part where we cooked your leg.”

  Danny felt consciousness slipping away again. But he remembered what Will was referring to. He had woken up already. He had experienced moments—just moments—of total agony.

  And he had no doubt he’d wake up again.

  Will walked over to the fire and he pulled something from a spit sitting above it.

  It didn’t take a genius to realise what it was.

  Will held the flesh in his hand. He walked over to Danny. Pressed it up to his face, under his nose. Danny had never felt so sick about charred flesh before. So sick.

  “This is a part of your thigh. It’s only fair with all the people you’ve tried that you try yourself sometime. Right?”

  “Please,” Danny begged. It was the only word he could get out.

  Will pushed the flesh to his lips. He could taste its smokiness, smell the blood. “Eat it.”

  “She’s not… she’s not…”

  “Eat it!”

  When Danny didn’t open his mouth, Will punched him, then opened it for him.

  As much as Danny tried to push back, Will opened his mouth and stuffed some of that flesh—his own flesh—inside.

  “Now you know how it feels,” Will said, as the flesh dribbled down Danny’s chin. Bouncer kept on ripping away at that leg flesh. He couldn’t have long left to live now. “Now you know how it feels to have everything taken away from you. And to you, all that matters is yourself.”

  Will wiped his hands on Danny’s chest then whistled at Bouncer.

  “Leave it, boy. You can finish him off when he’s dead.”

  As Will took Bouncer away, Danny felt unconsciousness returning. His eyes blurred. His head spun. Even the sounds around him faded.

  And in that final moment—because he knew death was imminent—he said the words he had never wanted to say. Because he was desperate? Maybe.

  But mostly because he knew it was all he had left.

  Because he could torture Will with the knowledge.

  With the truth.

  “She’s not dead,” he said.

  He saw Will’s silhouette stop. And turn around. He thought he heard him ask what he’d said.

  “Kerry,” Danny said, his lips shaking, his entire body going cold. “She… she’s not dead. And you’ll never—never find her now I’m good as dead. Never.”

  He felt Will grab his chest. He heard him shouting. Felt him shaking him, punching him.

  But in his final moments, as all feeling drifted from Danny’s body, he couldn’t help but laugh.

  He knew the truth about Kerry.

  He knew where she really was.

  And that secret was dying with him.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  I stared down at Danny’s dead body.

  His face was burned. His leg was a thing of horror, bitten and chewed at. The air was ripe with the stench of charred flesh.

  But I didn’t feel anything.

  At that moment, I felt nothing but cold, as the last of the blood from Danny’s face that I’d just spent the last five minutes punching dripped down my bruised, pained knuckles.

  “Where is she?” I gasped.

  I didn’t get a response. I’d never get a response.

  And that was the hardest thing of all.

  “Where is my wife?”

  I shouted it at Danny, but he just lay there, totally still, totally dead.

  But with the fragment of a final smile on his face as he’d used the last of his energy to laugh hysterically at me.

  His final, most devastating form of torture.

  He’d told me Kerry was alive.

  He’d told me she hadn’t been killed after all.

  He hadn’t eaten her.

  And he’d died with that secret.

  That secret had died with him.

  And I was never going to find her.

  “Will?”

  The voice broke me from my trance. When I looked up, I saw it was Arthur, one of the men who’d helped me overthrow Danny. He was holding a walkie talkie.

  “Hate to interrupt,” he said, looking slightly pale.

  “Is it Olivia?”

  “No, Olivia’s fine. It’s… You really need to listen to this.”

  I took the walkie talkie from Arthur’s hands, the blood transferring onto it. I pressed the button, and I heard the static crackling to life. Damn. Another working long range walkie. Someone must’ve had a load of them in Faraday cages before the world collapsed.

  “Will?” the voice said. A woman’s voice.

  I didn’t speak. Not for a moment.

  “Will Stuartson. Is that you?”

  “Who is this?”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. You should know something, Will. You should know that I’m very keen to hear from Danny. And I’m very concerned that I haven’t already.”

  “Your concern isn’t my concern.”

  “It will be, if I tell you who I’m standing over right now.”

  I heard a shuffling. Then I heard a few mumbles. Pained mumbles.

  “Speak,” the woman said, in the background now. “Speak to him.”

  “Will?”

  I heard the voice and my body weakened.

  “Kesha? What the hell—”

  “I’ve got a gun to your girlfriend’s forehead right now,” the woman said. “And not only that. I’ve got a ton of guns to all your friends at Heathlock’s heads. See, Danny might’ve liked keeping people alive for a little while. But I’m different. However, I respect my old friend. So this is how it’s going to play out from here. You’re going to put Danny on the line within twenty-four hours, or I’ll put a bullet in the skull of everyone back at Heathlock.”

  “Please.”

  “And don’t worry. I won’t kill Kesha. Not right away, anyway.”

  I heard struggling, then a scream. An agonised scream that could be no one but Kesha.

  “Twenty-four hours, Will. Twenty-four hours. Good luck.”

  “Kesha!”

  The line went dead.

  The walkie talkie turned to static.

  I looked into Arthur’s eyes and he looked back at me.

  Then the pair of us looked down at Danny’s dismembered, brutalised corpse, a glimmer of a smile staring hellishly up at us underneath splatterings of blood.

  “What now?” Arthur asked.

  I tightened my fists. The old me wanted to mope. The old me wanted to give in.

  But the old me was dead.

  “I know exactly what we do now,” I said.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  She closed her eyes and pictured them in her mind’s eye.

 
She did it every single morning, just so she didn’t forget what they looked like.

  She remembered him. His smile.

  Her cheeky little face.

  And her dog, wagging his tail.

  She smiled when she thought of them. Felt a warmth, right in the middle of her chest.

  Wherever they were, she hoped they were okay.

  Wherever they were, she hoped they were in a far better place than she was right now.

  “Kerry?” a voice said.

  She let herself think of her family for a few more seconds in the cool morning sun, before opening her eyes and returning to the reality of everyday life, as it was now.

  Olivia.

  Bouncer.

  Will.

  She held them in her mind for as long as she could.

  She waved them goodbye, mentally.

  “I’ll find you,” she whispered.

  Then, she opened her eyes.

  “I’ll find you.”

  Want More from Ryan Casey?

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  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. Any reference to real locations is only for atmospheric effect, and in no way truly represents those locations.

  Copyright © 2016 by Ryan Casey

  Cover design by Damonza

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.