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After The Apocalypse
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Book 5
Retribution
by Warren Hately
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Chapter 1
LILIANNA WATCHED HER father’s back recede into the distance as he stalked away down the street until completely obscured by the rapidly-gathering crowds spilling into the street outside the devastated City Council meeting. The M16 in her arms was lighter without a full magazine, and the crashing and ongoing distant screams rending the night sent a shiver up her spine as she stood watching Tom’s departed space, the by-turns horrified and fascinated Citizens milling into it, and Greerson’s fast-arriving back-up patrols surging into the blood-spattered area out the front of the old dinner theatre and its sidewalks crusted with discarded shells.
She looked back to where her friend Teddy lay, dead in the street and seemingly forgotten already. The calamity of the present moment explained the lack of basic decency afforded the young man – decency beyond the mercy shot to the head which ensured his silence forever – but in that brief pause, Lilianna’s watering blue eyes fell upon the handsome man’s twisted corpse and the emotions bottled up during the latest crisis almost threatened to overcome her.
But even she knew the focus on Beau’s dead friend, who she barely knew herself, was a convenient stooge for the numerous conflicting emotions rushing through her. Her father was gone into the night, potentially on the cusp of some kind of murderous rampage, and her little brother was missing – at least, unless he turned up among the dead – and the Dead themselves were only momentarily contained. The rush of armed men and women crowding into the dinner theater’s forecourt, barking conflicting orders, swapping gear, and looking to their Chief for guidance, increasingly squeezed out the hordes of terrified survivors from the Council meeting.
And beneath it all, with a healthy dose of guilt, she wondered too about her alleged boyfriend, whether Beau survived – and if so, where the hell he’d been throughout the disaster.
First things first, Lila pulled aside one of the battle-harnessed troopers pushing his way through the crowd.
“Hey,” she said. “Do you have any spare ammo? I’m dry.”
The blank-faced trooper wore only a t-shirt beneath his Kevlar and stammered in shock as Lilianna intruded on his trajectory. Lila repeated herself, aiming for clarity, the trooper in obvious shock. The young man hawked phlegm and spat before he could mouth a reply.
“What do you need ammo for?”
“Me?” Lilia said like it was her turn for confusion. “What do you think, man?”
She held the M16 out parallel to show it was inert.
“Aren’t the . . . isn’t everyone still inside, with them?” the trooper asked.
Another loud crashing noise sounded away behind them, and Lila was set to explain the obvious when it became obvious of its own accord. A titanic ripping noise followed the previous crash, and the black night sky beyond the silhouette of the low-rise Council building lit up with the orange flash of some kind of explosion which roiled upwards, a weather pattern in its own right, not quite adequately drowning out the resurgent noise of distant screams.
As if to add even greater urgency to the situation, the half-nailed front doors to the theatre started shaking with a concerted effort from someone – or somebodies – on the other side.
“There’s dozens of them,” Lilianna said with a feminine growl. “This isn’t over.”
Another trooper bustled past them with a fresh look of terror on his face that distracted Lilianna completely from the first soldier’s incoherent response as the newcomer headed for where Denny Greerson now held center stage, stepping up onto one of the concrete ledges outside the venue.
The Chief snapped his fingers, yelling orders as more newly-arrived reinforcements fell into working pairs, several of the sentries roused from their private lives only half-dressed for the emergency too. Someone handed Greerson a bullhorn while he finished issuing the call for someone to get in touch with the now-disbanded Brotherhood, and the Chief fought off the panicked and confused responses of his ground troops who had no idea how to do make that contact, nor who to call given it was public knowledge the Brotherhood’s de facto leader Ed Burroughs was just another casualty of the torrid past week.
Lila growled again, determined to follow the other troops, and all but tore the offered magazine from the sleep-addled trooper’s hand, ramming it into the vacant slot on the M16 as the soldier kept after her as she pushed through crying, sniffling, pained Citizens escaped from the horrors inside and yet still reliving them as the chaos rolled on.
“Burroughs had a City phone,” Greerson bawled back at the nearest men. “Phone’s still working. Someone get onto it and see who answers. We need every man we can get.”
And women, Lilianna thought, though she kept the unpopular comment to herself. At least a quarter of the thirty-odd Safety personnel cramming the forecourt were women too, and the looks on their faces showed few were worried about the gender balance right at that moment.
Greerson’s voice now boomed out over their heads, amplified by the handheld klaxon.
“YOU PEOPLE!” he called to the ever-growing crowd. “GET BACK IN YOUR HOMES –”
“Shit,” Lila muttered to herself, the frightened trooper following her, and anyone else close enough to give a damn. “Should he really be doing that?”
A woman with a nasty cleft scar running down the side of her face lifted the plexiglass of her old riot cop helmet to regard Lilianna with flustered yet controlled concern.
“Doing what?”
The Chief’s voice continued over the top of them, urgently trying to repel the Citizen onlookers continuing to grow in number. Few of them yet realized they were seeking thrills far too likely to turn fatal.
The people around Lila quickly kenned her alarm at the noisy bullhorn, and likewise cast around themselves with worried expressions soon made redundant as yet another bedraggled trio of bloodstained troopers staggered into the middle of their concourse. One of them helped his comrade, bleeding heavily from one leg, while the oldest of the trio went straight for Greerson who spotted the commotion and handed his bullhorn off to one of his immediate lieutenants with vague instructions to continue warning the crowd. Greerson then jumped down to the pavement, no more than a dozen yards from Lilianna, where he met the incoming men just as blood-curdling yells sounded off in the dark, from the opposite end of the block. There were few stragglers that way, towards the road exit from the back of the dinner theater’s fortified compound.
Lilianna’s heart resumed its rapid beat.
“Greerson,” the veteran among the trio said. “Bunch of us got out the rear exit, but it’s overrun.”
“Tell me you secured that exit, trooper.”
The other man dropped his eyes.
Someone nearby cursed richly, and immediately a man with his hair in neat cornrows was in Lilianna’s face, growling irritably as he gestured to her gun and told her to hand it over. The man’s skin glistened like onyx and was almost as chiseled, and Lila caught herself flustered at his unexpected handsomeness just a moment before her irritation won out.
“Get your own damned weapon,” she snapped.
Lila literally held the rifle out of his reach, yielding a few steps because the stranger was so in her face seeking to disarm her. Because he kept coming, Lilianna shunted him with her forearm clasping one end of the M16.
“Get your hands off me,” she said.
“There’s more of those things coming,” the man glowered. He actually clicked his fingers. “Hand it over.”
“Fuck off,” she said.
The rude stranger exhaled heavily, bull-like, and Lilianna twisted away and behind the traumatized soldier behind her and then the woman with the scar. That trooper, her plastic-screened helmet back in place, calmly interc
eded between Lilianna and her pursuer, and the female Safety officer wasn’t a small woman. The black man pulled himself up, sniffed at the pair of them, then wheeled away looking to do basically what Lilianna told him. More troopers moved all around them and it took a moment for Lila not to get herself bowled over. She found herself still in the taller woman’s company and was glad for it.
“I’m gonna shut up that moron with the bullhorn,” the woman said. “Care to join me?”
“Yeah.”
Lilianna shot a final dirty look in the other man’s direction, but people were starting to break into runs, headed in either direction – and following the tall female trooper’s wake demanded her attention. Lila checked the slide on the rifle and grit her teeth and tried not to think of Beau and Lucas and her father out there unsafe in the night.
*
LILIANNA’S NAME RANG out in a woman’s voice just an instant after Szczyz – the immigrant, Polish-born trooper ahead of her, pronouncing her name “Sscheesh” – grabbed the guy with the bullhorn and made him stop. Greerson’s lieutenant was a dude named Stonefish, but he wasn’t as tough as the name suggested. Lilianna turned back in the direction of the theater entrance to find her roommate-turned-nemesis Aurora hurrying towards her clutching a blood-soaked button-up sweater and shivering in the chill night air.
Lila let the other young woman come towards her, and used the pause to scan back around with the horrible fear she might need to bring her weapon into service at any instant. Nothing about the frantic milling and repositioning of Greerson’s troops gave her mind ease. More intermittent yells and shrieks pierced the air, and not all from within the abandoned Council meeting. The plume of orange phosphorescence like treacle in the sky behind their dinner theater backdrop added a surreal quality, the wind up, leaves and other garbage swirling down the street along with chunks of ash and a fine patina of residue falling around them like the tiniest black snow possible. The screams that rang loudest came from back in the direction of the apparently wide-open back theater exit, its loading bay and the side building where the Council held its weekly dinners opening onto a small vehicle depot out of sight beyond the ten-foot metal fencing and barbed wire on that side of the compound.
Aurora reached her and all but clutched at Lilianna’s shirt.
“What are we going to do?”
Aurora twisted her ruined top, unaware there was so much of other people’s blood in it that wetness ran down her hands and wrists. Her green eyes locked on Lila with clear desperation.
Lilianna didn’t have time for a coherent answer, which was just as well.
A male voice yelled “Contact!” and Greerson barked something lost to everyone as a half-dozen automatic weapons roared in the night. Aurora flinched, maybe would’ve huddled into Lilianna if the younger girl didn’t heft her rifle into position and start backing away, just like the first few onlookers in the crowd started doing. The throng of people behind them – those not already dissuaded by the troopers’ amplified warning – pressed even further forward, mindlessly curious, and those making sense of the situation at the front went into panic mode.
The gunfire back beyond it all cut out and they could hear a woman yelling.
“Please, no!” her shriek rang out.
Troopers’ yells drowned out whatever the woman said next. Lilianna remained braced for an imminent Fury attack which hadn’t come yet, but then Denny Greerson’s yell sounded above all.
“Open fire, goddamnit!”
The female voice started bawling and maybe it was just Szczyz’s voice behind her, someone pleading “No,” and then the first weapon opened fire again, followed by others.
Lila let herself blaspheme, conditioned by a lifetime with her irreverent father, and then she had to contend with Aurora bursting into tears, fragility finally overcoming her mean girl persona. Trooper Szczyz grabbed her bodily, thrusting Aurora behind them and into a run for safety.
And that was the last time Lila looked for her roommate as the horrors of the disaster continued to unfold around them all.
*
THE TROOPERS’ GUNS fell silent a second later. Cordite roiled across the street, quickly dispersed by the wind which carried moans as well as groans and grunts of confusion as a lone figure appeared.
Whether spooked, confused, or curious, the troopers immediately blocking Lilianna’s view moved aside to reveal a woman in Administration clothing walking slowly, clumsily picking her way through a tangle of corpses which even Lila, at that distance, could tell were ordinary terrified civilians just seconds before. The troopers kept lowered guns angled towards the woman as she tripped and staggered forward, wounded or otherwise struggling to remain upright as she clutched bleeding wounds in her stomach, blood saturating the thighs of her sensible gray slacks, and then she lifted her eyes, confused, blood also in her hair and her eyes, but not enough to explain her rapid blinking, nor the way her mouth twitched as if contemplating and then retracting something she might actually say about her fatal wounds. The woman’s eyes scoured the nearby armed men and women instead as she sank to one knee, and Szczyz cussed with sympathy.
Herself, Lilianna was too shocked at the apparent massacre to make much sense of the situation, nor take in when those around her started muttering, all eyes on the woman, now with one hand on the dilapidated tarmac, blood pooling beneath her as her mouth continued to work, jaws increasingly ajar, and the onlookers watched live as the dying woman became seamlessly one of the undead.
“Holy shit,” Szczyz said. “I ain’t seen anything like that. Ever.”
Lila watched, mesmerized, equal parts astounded at the gory spectacle as she was shocked no one else yet moved to quell the newly-risen Fury before she became a true threat.
Just as the resurrected woman started to move, a single gunshot sounded as Greerson put a single round into the woman’s head from behind.
The dead official dropped to the ground like a sack, holding almost everyone’s attention.
*
THE FIRST FOUR Furies ran out of the traffic exit behind the scene almost as if surprised themselves not to face an instant wave of gunfire. Natural opportunists, the mostly fresh-looking Furies saw their advantage and broke into desperate runs at the nearest edge of armed Safety personnel fresh from a massacre of their own, and another dead female Administration worker and a black guy wearing a scarf that now included most of the left side of his face threw themselves at gun-wielding troopers before anyone had the chance to aim. The gunfire which followed hit the third and fourth Furies, cutting one of them almost in half, and then two more of the creatures appeared fifty yards away at the alley leading into the Council compound. Blood was in the air, and the monsters threw themselves towards at least twenty armed Safety officers in such a way that Lila’s intuition tingled just a second before she saw why.
The Furies somehow functioned like pack animals, and they had feral instincts smart enough to keep them from full-on suicide runs unless they had a reason to think the pack would win out.
A wave of at least twenty more rabid Furies boiled out the side exit.
Lilianna whirled, grabbing Szczyz by the shoulder and pushing her in the direction of where Aurora and now the remaining elements of the crowd headed, back down the street towards The Mile, and desperate enough that several tripped over each other and fell to the ground and were trampled by all the other fifty or sixty pairs of feet headed in the same direction. Lilianna tried pausing to help up one of the men and flinched, as if out of instinct for survival, when she saw the side of his head split open and leaking blood onto the blacktop. Whatever the hell Fury phenomenon they’d just witnessed with the dead woman turning into one of the Risen in slow motion before them, Lilianna wasn’t sticking around in case the opposite happened, and the latest luckless victim was one of the rare “early risers” instead. Szczyz grunted her approval as Lilianna dropped the man’s hand and broke back into a half-paced jog shooting startled looks behind herself.
It
was almost more than she was prepared for when the dispersing crowd ahead of them now took their turn to break into frightened shrieks, several more Furies falling upon them from the other direction, perhaps also escaped from the dinner theater or drafted into the Devil’s service in the bloody aftermath of everything gone wrong with the night. A vehicle with its headlights blazing – soon revealed as a Safety Jeep – hit one of the sprinting figures, but then veered away at the turn, also running down a man and a little boy as it quit the scene.
“Holy shit!” Lila cried, now her turn to use the phrase.
Szczyz halted in front of her and they stood, each with a rifle raised guarding either direction as the thinning crowd of people ran every which way, screams and then gunshots following suit.
“This is some bullshit,” the tough Polack said.
“Agreed.”
Back at the scene they’d quit, the other troopers’ guns raged in near-continuous fire, but the volume dipped, then dipped again, and far too many of the soldiers were down, Furies poised above them, and then Greerson broke with the remainder who started to run.
Towards Lilianna and Szczyz.
“Shit,” Lila said, and froze.
“Tough decision,” Szczyz agreed.
Lila checked the repurposed tenements on the other side of the street, but a laneway beckoned towards the hulking shape of a last-century brick monstrosity, the industrial building now full of apartments still boasting its historic loading platform façade which faced off across from a tall brick warehouse roofed with broken glass and patched in recent times with epic quantities of black plastic sheeting. Several fleeing Citizens headed that way, and Lila barely grunted her suggestion before charging after them to escape the coming exodus of troopers escaping with hell in human forms at their back.
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 24