The young man shook his head. Tom was too out of breath to do much, and he didn’t fancy volunteering as he eyed the black exit and the unknown outside.
Teddy plunged out into the darkness.
“Fuck it,” the other trooper snapped and followed.
Tom grabbed Lilianna’s hand as she went to do the same.
“Honey,” he said. “People were running back in just a minute ago.”
Lilianna motioned back fiercely to the madness they’d just quit.
“Do you want to be here in another few minutes when the dead start waking up?”
Carlotta Deschain started blubbering, and the young woman beside her too.
“For fuck’s sake, Aurora,” Lila hissed at her. “Grow a pair.”
Vast as the decision might be, Tom’s daughter had a point. He’d broken the stool to pull a metal leg free, not that it felt like much of a weapon. He handed it to Aurora and took back his knife since she looked completely on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
“OK,” he said. “After you.”
And fresh screams and cries curdled the air behind them.
*
TOM LOOKED BACK at the brutal tableau, everyone else now also fighting to quit the brightly-lit stage which turned their strife into a garish spectacle as men and women tried fending off their fellow Citizens, increasingly overwhelmed, falling victim to the waves of Fury assault. Weapons fired, but not as often as before, and it was just the sight of several groups of Citizens getting clear of the carnage to hurry for the mezzanine exit that gave Tom any relief. He nodded again, for Lilianna’s benefit, and then his eyes lit on one of the attackers, its ravenous face spackled with gore, and with an horrific likeness to his own son.
“No!”
“Dad! What?”
Tom growled and pushed Carlotta and her assistant into Lilianna’s care.
“Go!” he yelled.
“Like hell.”
The moment Tom’s movements confirmed him headed back into the maelstrom, Lilianna brought her rifle up and followed.
Carlotta took one look at Aurora, then the exit, and went straight after Tom too.
The child Fury sat up from its triumph at the throat of a fallen man Tom at first took to be Magnus, but the murder victim was as anonymous as the monster that killed him. It only took a few running paces for Tom to see the undead boy wore an unfamiliar t-shirt and his forehead was too narrow to be his son, but the knife in Tom’s hand begged for some kind of vengeance. With Lilianna covering him, Tom advanced on the blood-thirsty child and caught it by the shirt as it leapt up. He shook it, saddened at the boyish frame, the young life stolen, the lightness in his hands even as he defended himself. Bites and scrapes might not infect, but they were filthy wounds nonetheless. He forced the boy Fury’s arm aside with his own, then slid the dagger into the back of its neck and up into the skull, and the boy gave a warbling hiss, legs stiffening as it died, like the child it had once been trying to make one last utterance before the lights went out to no avail.
Tom dropped the limp creature onto its victim, and then fell to one knee to silence the white-bearded man just to be sure. Lilianna’s metaphoric shadow fell over him, and she fired once, then twice – individual shots that took down another nearby lurker.
Injured and terrified Citizens increasingly poured from the direction of the stage, and not really knowing what he was doing, Tom waved them onwards. The first was a middle-aged woman limping as fast as she could despite a rolled ankle, and Tom directed the woman into Carlotta’s care.
“Get her to the exit,” he said. “And find out if it’s safe out there.”
Carlotta snapped herself out of her daydreaming nightmare and nodded affirmative.
Tom eyed his daughter as Carlotta went, then followed her gaze back to the violence, the roaring of the Furies as they hissed and spat and darted among the leftovers, more and more people quitting the stage. A brief burst of gunfire revealed Denny Greerson like a presidential guard steering Councilor Wilhelm to safety, but Tom saw no sign of the President herself – only more and more people flooding towards him, some falling over, some only able to drag themselves towards the faint hope of safety.
And some who simply didn’t make it, pounced on by the Furies.
It was like the monsters had glutted themselves and now saw it as a game. Tom was reminded of the cruelly entranced fascination of cats hunting native birds he’d seen in the mountains, only now it was the Furies throwing themselves at the fleeing people as if just for the feral joy of pulling them down. A woman bellowed like a man as she was disemboweled. A neatly-dressed Enclave staffer who’d shat himself went down under a pile of three of the beasts, getting his small pistol to his own forehead just in time before the Furies did the job for him. A teenage girl with no business even at the meeting managed to drag herself away from beneath several other tumbled Citizens, but only made it a few steps before a huge slobbering member of the undead tackled her from the side, overpowering her by sheer force.
“Come on,” Lilianna said.
She marched past Tom, into the flotsam and jetsam headed straight for them, and her father was almost glad for the choice taken from him to wade back into the madness. He was ready to cut and run, no matter the shame it’d cost him. But there was no way he would abandon his daughter, and curse her as he might, Lilianna knew it.
Once committed, Lila and Tom broke into a run to reach the teenage girl, and Tom jumped in to manhandle the brute off her, bleak about his chances as the huge big black dead man rose up again from one knee with his hands and lips spread wide. But Lilianna cut the creature down to size. Two bullets hit its shoulder and then its eye, and the monster’s brains blew out its temple and it toppled like a hillside into the carnage all around it.
“Here!” Tom yelled and offered the young woman his hand.
Freaked, the girl only looked up at him, curled up to make herself small.
Lilianna leaned in.
“Get up,” she barked. “Now.”
Now the teenager took Tom’s hand. He hauled her upright, and then at once let go as two more Citizens charged through and past them. Lilianna steadied the girl as she quickly angled around with her gun. It fired again, across-wise the stage left open area to the carpeted far wall. A Fury with a face like a Hallowe’en mask dropped heavily as Lila blew out its eye.
“Jesus,” Tom remarked. “Good shooting.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ve had a little practice.”
It wasn’t the occasion for her to lecture him about the added advantages of her residency at the Bastion, Tom was at least glad to know. He helped up another man who’d tripped, always checking back to the progress of the other Citizens fleeing the scene.
“We need to fall back,” Lila said.
Tom agreed. He grabbed the teenage girl by the shoulders and propelled her behind her, unwittingly right into Carlotta Deschain. Despite her earlier terror, the woman had mastered herself well enough to follow them back thirty yards into danger.
“The doorway’s clear,” she said.
“The idea was for you to use it,” Tom replied.
It was possible Carlotta growled at him. Tom couldn’t read the woman as she took over care of Tom’s teenage ward, and joined him and Lilianna and a half-a-dozen others now in full retreat to the mezzanine. Just behind them came Wilhelm and Denny Greerson, and another trooper in their group fended off the dead. Using his useless rifle, the trooper clubbed away a fat-faced, putrid-looking woman whose skin had turned purple with decay, and then broke into a run with his comrades, hot on Tom’s heels.
Lilianna’s gun barked until it was empty. The last remaining trooper from the doorway joined her in that last stand, and Tom picked up another discarded rifle and sought to do the same, chagrined when he realized the ammo was out. Then Carlotta was in his ear again.
“Outside,” she said. “Now.”
*
THE MOMENT THEY left the theater, Tom’s daughter lit into
him.
“What the hell were you doing going back in there again?”
Tom blinked, still adjusting to the moonlight and the simple orange light of a nearby street rig. A dented, bullet-riddled four-wheel drive was parked crooked in the street and the young man Teddy lay with blood discoloring his entire polo shirt, neck at a strange angle in the paved city gutter.
“Fuck,” Tom gasped, and refocused on Lilianna. “You’re the one asking me?”
“You went after that Fury,” she hissed. “The kid.”
“I thought it was. . . .”
“Dad,” Lila said.
Tom felt sick at once. His daughter’s welling eyes and gravid voice foretold a heartbreaking tragedy he didn’t, couldn’t, never wanted to face. By sheer effort of will alone, he held her eyes as she broke and started crying.
“I saw my friend Montana in there.”
The relief was enough to make Tom vomit.
He staggered away, his daughter’s grief forgotten, irrelevant as his body heaved and he threw up a stinking gray stew of bile and stomach acid onto the pavement off to one side of the exit. Several more people ran out into the street, one of them a woman who simply didn’t stop shrieking – or running – perhaps the wisest of them all as she continued down the block and never looked back.
Tom wiped his lips. Wilhelm’s team passed him, and he and Tom swapped chiseled looks. There would be time for that. Tom returned to Lilianna and grabbed her arm.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” he whispered.
Then he turned to the closest men.
“We have to seal these doors!”
“There’s people coming,” Wilhelm said and strode back towards them. The Councilor was shaking, unaware snot was smeared across one of his cheeks in a glistening, fast-drying snail trail. He took one look at Tom, his words quivering too as he sought some kind of redemption beneath Tom’s accusatory gaze. “There’s people,” he said again. “Please, Tom. Not yet.”
“Fuck ‘em.”
It was the City’s Safety Chief speaking. Greerson angled back on the doorway too, his gun at hip height. Whatever else he was about to add, Lilianna drowned it out. Tom’s daughter hurried away from the building and started yelling and waving her arms beyond the abandoned vehicle, angled on people now approaching from the street.
“Don’t come this way! Stop!”
Lilianna cast a look back at the other men.
“People are coming because of the gunshots,” she said. “We have to warn them.”
Tom blasphemed again, assailed in every direction by competing priorities. And Lucas was never anywhere but front and center of his thoughts. Tom snapped his fingers at the nearest troopers, but none could offer any weapons. Finally, Greerson stepped in close and offered his .45 handle-first.
“Doorway!” one of the nearest troopers bawled.
And a Fury burst out the entrance behind them in a maddening suicide run.
*
THE KAMIKAZE HURTLED into oncoming fire as Greerson and two of the remaining troopers opened up. One of the gunmen ran out of ammo almost at once, but Denny and his subordinate beheaded the reanimated cadaver with their crossfire. Beyond them, a man then yelled that he was coming out, and another of the City’s middle managers emerged with his arms up like he’d just escaped a bank siege, and behind him followed the agri-hub manager, another of Carlotta’s young women, and two more injured men. Several more troopers bundled out in their wake, one of them bleeding horribly. And then came a woman ushering out an older male with a stomach wound he couldn’t possibly survive.
In the orange-lit courtyard outside the meeting rooms, Greerson and the others waited with guns trained, and Wilhelm nodded tiredly as the first outside trooper patrol arrived on the scene. Those reinforcements hurried forward and pushed shut the first of the external glass doors which the City had reinforced with wooden boards a long time ago.
Tom watched them with heaving breaths, Greerson’s pistol cradled like a dead hamster in his hands. He kept tumbling back through the past moments, replaying and assembling his daughter’s comments, the dead girl, that Lucas was missing, that everything had gone to hell. The betrayal was vast. And the deep sense of dread he’d ridden like a white-water current all day now surged, became a vortex, threatening to surge over his head as he grabbed for his radio handset and realized it was lost somewhere in the theater behind them.
He marched across to Lilianna, her hands still raised, one of Greerson’s troopers taking up her cries to stop the first dozen people emerging into the street. There were more Citizens coming behind them. Dazed, Tom looked down at the dead young man in the stained polo shirt as he stepped over him to reach his daughter. A skinny, bearded figure in camouflage gear lay sprawled on the far side of the abandoned SUV. He clutched an Ak47 against his lifeless chest.
“Jesus,” Tom muttered. “Who did this? Lefthanders?”
Lilianna turned back towards him and Tom saw her face wet with tears. She motioned to the brave dead young man in the gory stained shirt.
“That’s Teddy,” she said. “He’s Beau’s best friend in the world.”
“And your friend,” Tom asked her. “The one inside. Where did you see her?”
“Montana was . . . she was in the first wave,” Lila said. “They hit us . . . I was over on the right of the stage. Near the lectern. And I. . . .”
His daughter shook her head, far too practical to cry anymore right now. She clutched her face momentarily as if to still herself, head still shaking like an old lady with dementia.
“Dad, listen,” she said. “I know my friend was hooking up with this guy called Gunderson. He’s from the ethanol plant. No one saw her since she went out for a drink with him last night. They might have gotten Lucas too. Look at them,” she said. “This was . . . this was premeditated.”
The nausea returned, but Tom shook his head at it.
“I saw your brother this morning,” he said. “I. . . .”
But he didn’t know what else to say. All the facts came tumbling back in. Tom’s eyes fell on the dead gunman in the street, and Tom was growling and already moving before the dead man’s eyes fluttered open with a Fury’s newborn stare. It’s arm moved – as if it lifted the limb upright, surprised at its new life as much as anyone – and Tom kicked the thing in the side of the head, snapping its neck, and then dropping onto the paralyzed creature’s chest and stabbing his combat knife into its eye socket and wrenching until the bone snapped.
“Fucking things,” Tom muttered.
He took the dead gunman’s weapon and checked the ammunition, then retrieved the bag looped awkwardly around the corpse. Three spent magazines and a tickertape parade of used shells littered the street.
“One gunman out here,” Greerson said as he walked over. “Pinned everyone down.”
“Trapped them inside,” Lilianna added.
“Trapped us inside,” Tom said. He took a massive jolting breath. “Gunderson?”
“Terry Gunderson?” Greerson asked.
Further discussion was ruined as a Fury broke out past the men still securing the front door, took a fast sweeping look at the numbers against it, and then hurled itself back inside. The men locking down the first door quickly pulled the other side shut. Almost instantly, there was hammering against it and a man’s cries. The troopers relented, letting out a terrified, bloody-nosed man who dragged himself out, torn pants showing legs covered in bites, and then the theater doors slammed shut at last as the workers moved to secure it.
“Get a Construction team mobile,” one of the troopers at the doors yelled.
Greerson snapped his fingers at another pair of men.
“Make it happen,” he said. “Go now.”
And Tom was still standing there, still fuming, as someone ran out of the half-gathering crowd to reveal himself as another trooper in a torn, bloodied shirt. The guard carried a black rucksack to the Safety Chief.
“The cargo bay’s full of them,” he sai
d in a shellshocked voice. “Someone drove in with a truck.”
Greerson took the pack and the distraught trooper helped him extract portable radio gear. They knelt on the bloody sidewalk as the Chief put out the call for all available hands.
Tom growled, and took the distraction as a chance to grab his daughter by the arm and steer her away and through the scene. Lilianna resisted out of pride alone, but it was the look on Tom’s face – and her curiosity – that led her to the spot where he stopped, halfway down the street and ignoring the shaken City residents coming from nearby hovels and homes to marvel at the survivors. Tom’s shirt was soaked with someone else’s blood, and Lila had lost a sleeve, and wore the M16’s strap in its place.
“Who’s Gunderson?”
“Why?”
“Look at the time,” Tom snarled. “If you’re brother’s not at home, he’s probably in there. That’s the most likely thing, whether you want to face it or not. They said someone drove off in a truck?”
“So?”
“So, like an ethanol truck?” Tom said to her. “Someone drove a truckload of Furies in to sabotage the Council meeting. Who do you think would do that?”
“Plume’s people,” Lila said.
“Yes,” Tom said. “God damn, they need to check the jail.”
He looked back down the street at Greerson and Wilhelm, surrounded by eight or nine troopers and a few gun-toting officials, and maybe thirty survivors of the meeting.
“If they had a truck, they’ve been planning this for days,” Tom said. “One of them will know if they took Lucas and Kevin too. I’m going to get some answers.”
It finally dawned on Lilianna that her father’s savage expression wasn’t mere bottled rage. The fuse had blown. His son was missing, maybe horribly killed. And Tom had retribution on his mind.
Tom checked the slide on the assault rifle and nodded to her.
“Stay safe,” he said. “And get back to our place until you hear from me.”
He then whirled away, stalking down the street and through the gathering crowd.
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 23