Guilty, Tom thought to himself without the remorse the law courts of yesteryear would’ve expected from its offenders. He knelt unobserved instead, then checked behind him as the man on the other end of the radio handset turned the front corner, and Tom was too stiff and sore to move fast enough to evade detection.
Several gunshots boomed behind him as Tom stepped around the corner, effectively into view beneath the rusting fire escape, but out of reach from the gunfire. Before any of the other Lefthanders could react, Tom continued across and then into the half-submerged basement storage room where he’d first entered the building.
One last man struggled to move a heavy ethanol tub from its position.
He looked up as Tom shot him in the face at a distance of three feet. The man’s skull exploded wetly against the rough-painted far wall, above the remainding fuel barrels, and Tom at once tipped the first of them over as he ranged about for threats back from the doorway as well as the internal door at the top of three steps. Instead, he saw several figures flitting for the vehicles. Someone yelled, “Grab McGovern!” Doors slammed.
Setting the building alight wasn’t much of a solution if no one was inside.
Keeping to cover, Tom returned to thrust the Ak47 out the doorway, and once committed to it, depressed the trigger as well. Bullets hurtled through the back of the nearest van and sparked wildly among the storage pumps. The black van juddered forward, veering hard to turn the tight circle with its fellow – an ancient-looking carpenter’s truck – which failed to start as the remaining mutineers jumped into it.
The stalled vehicle blocked their escape route.
Emboldened, Tom refreshed his ammo, then drew one of the pistols in his belt and started emptying the Glock at the trapped insurgents. But automatic weapons chattered back from the windows of the truck, and then the side door on the stranded van opened and someone started yelling about the fuel and all the fucking gunfire and Tom stepped back into the frame and shot at him.
The pistol had a lot more bullets in it than Tom realized, but they weren’t enough for his inaccurate fire at anything beyond point-blank range. He ducked back into cover to avoid more return gunfire, and somewhere out there, the stalled truck’s engine fired, and Tom switched to the assault rifle as the carpenter’s truck lurched forward, towards the open compound gates, and the second vehicle glided after it at an ominous pace.
The van’s side door was open as it moved, with three gunmen braced for co-ordinated return fire.
And Tom remembered he was in a room full of ethanol drums.
Heading deeper back into the building didn’t seem any more wise, so Tom hurled himself from the doorway and into the lee of the small, two-foot-deep forecourt beneath the stairs. Bullets battered around him. Something metallic pinged and started to fizz. Stuck in a World War Two movie, Tom thrust the Ak47 over the lip and pulled the trigger at random, and then again he scrunched up hopelessly into himself and waited for a grenade or some such similar doom triggering the tubs behind him to explode.
Nothing did.
The gunfire ceased, replaced with the noise from two dirty ethanol engines heading away down the block.
Tom looked at his hands gloved with dirt and human tissue. He slowly sat up, ignored the random Citizen gawping in through the gateway ready to run at a moment’s notice, and then eased back heavily onto his ass. Spent. All the breath curled out of him, and then he slumped, no more of his attackers in sight, laid down across the lip of the courtyard’s edge.
The respite lasted three seconds.
No Lucas.
Tom stood shakily, reclaimed his weapons, and started for the open gates.
*
Chapter 3
KEVIN’S SHRIEKING FROM their abductor’s bedchamber went ominously quiet, and Lucas rolled onto his side, helpless and trussed, rope around his wrists behind his back, his ankles tied up the same. Neglected in the corner of the dank-carpeted room, he flinched each time his second captor, the skinny older man in the filthy anorak, came in and out from the apartment kitchen.
Once Luke’s friend stopped screaming, eventually there was nothing but an horrific rhythmic squeaking of bed springs through the shut wooden doorway, and the older man stepped out from the kitchen yet again with a knife in his hand and simply stood there, staring down at him, until Lucas finally curled up as tight as his bonds allowed and silently wet himself, shaking, terrified, his dry mouth gagged, his vision blurry with tears.
The skinny man chuckled. Luke had his back turned by then, conscious only of the man drifting through the room towards the far side of the second-floor apartment. The ornate old windows were decorated with slatted wood blinds. Bundles of garlic and salami hung from pegs between the slats, joining the potted plants spilling herbs and vines studded with peppers over the wooden ledge the two housemates had built within their fortified nest of depravity.
Lucas shook with a fearful palsy.
The apartment door bore a hydraulic mechanism. Steel bars were slid into place. The night outside was cold and lonely and remote and relatively silent so close to The Mile.
But the first distant gunshots made Lucas flinch.
He couldn’t restrain the moan. Quite simply, he’d abandoned any hope or idea he could breathe his way out of this imprisonment, his looming abuse, torture, and maybe death. His father was far away, almost like he’d never existed. Lucas was utterly lost. Bereft. He’d moved beyond desperate and into the emotional moonscape on the other side, almost too weak and frozen even to understand when the old man spoke to him.
“What’s that, boy?” he asked as if genuinely curious for Luke’s input. “Do you hear?”
The foul old skinny cadaverous man strained to hear the gunfire almost like sniffing the air. But Lucas couldn’t answer even if he wanted. The man’s attention made his clammy, piss-wet skin crawl, and Lucas stifled another long moan as the man snickered, cut down one of the gray hanging sausages, and said, “Wonder how you’ll taste, once we grind you up, huh?”
Lucas shuddered violently, almost out of control.
Unperturbed, his captor strolled back into the kitchen as the infernal sounds continued through from the oil-driller’s room, speaking all Lucas could ever bear to know about his best friend’s torment. But the man in the anorak hadn’t done with Luke, and despite the continued retorts of automatic weapons now sounding from out across the sanctuary zone, the old man continued to speak.
“Rust will want the rosemary and sage,” he called out from the kitchen, almost conversational. “He always does. We had some honey. Can you believe that?”
The spectral man appeared in the doorway once, just a silhouette with a hurricane lamp behind him.
“You want to be sweet, boy?”
He still held the knife, though absent-mindedly, no immediate plan to use it – at least until one came to him.
“Salt’s getting low,” he continued after a moment pondering his own remarks. “Hard to believe we’d take salt for granted, but there you are. You know the Romans used to pay their soldiers with it. Fuck gold. Got all the gold you could want. North of Vermont, there was a cash exchange . . . but you don’t want to hear about that.”
The predator chuckled. He looked down fondly on Luke, but not like he was a person. Lucas desperately avoided that gaze, as if the man’s sickness might invade him through his pores, his eyes, his very Being.
“Salt, rosemary, sage,” he said at last. “Gotta keep Rust happy. You gonna keep Rust happy, boy? Yes. But something else too. Let me think on it. Garlic, obviously. Maybe try some slow roasting. What do you think, boy?”
The diatribe looked set to continue. Still shaking from head to toe, Lucas rolled onto his back to stare up at the man with his face wet and crusted by tears. His wild hair plastered wetly across his face, but not his eyes, which glared back at his tormentor.
He didn’t need speech to give the sick bastard his answer.
Lucas started to snarl.
And as if by m
agic, the wooden blinds exploded inwards.
*
LUCAS REALLY DID somehow expect to see his father, and remained caught in the confusion of his own childish wishes as a man in a thick jacket and tactical gear landed in a tight roll on the carpet and stood with a pair of black nunchucks, head obscured by a gray mask.
The armed figure glanced once at Lucas, then straight onto the old man with the knife still caught in the act of staggering back from the unexpected violent intrusion. The gray-hooded invader lashed lightning fast. The nunchaku broke the man’s knife-wielding forearm, snapped back to beneath the vigilante’s armpit, and then struck out again to smash in the old man’s face.
Utterly brutalized, Luke’s captor staggered back into the wall beside Rust’s bedroom and the figure in the gray hood kicked a motorcycle boot into his victim’s guts. The man went down vomiting blood and teeth as the locks behind him on the bedroom door snapped open.
The door opened inwards as the sweating figure of the oil driller smashed out of the next room wielding a baseball bat bound in coils of green copper wire. If Lucas hadn’t already emptied his bladder, now he would’ve as he twitched and curled up involuntarily watching his apparent savior duck into a squat by the narrowest margins, avoiding decapitation, at which the intruder gracefully bridged backwards one-handed, swung the karate cudgels to take out Rust’s leg, and then stood up by cartwheeling over his own masked head.
Whether stunned by the intrusion, the broken knee, or the gymnastics, Rust reached behind himself for the pistol he didn’t have in his pants because he’d removed it when he started raping Kevin. Now his mouth opened soundlessly amid that revelation – and as the intruder’s nunchaku came down across his head. The noise cracked like a rifle shot.
Rust sagged to the ground and lay as good as dead.
Lucas started trying to inch sitting upright as the Gray Hood now turned to him.
“Lucas?”
Luke gasped a muffled “What?”
There wasn’t anything else could be said.
Kevin appeared at the bedroom doorway like a ghost of himself. Dressed again. A blank look on his face. He looked on their masked savior with a monotone gaze, like a kid watching TV. He didn’t even look at Lucas, whose face burned almost grateful for it. The unknown intruder knelt over Lucas with a short knife and sawed through the ropes inside of a couple of seconds, then Lucas shook the remaining cords off and started to his knees blubbering his profound gratitude and not quite comprehending how the man knew his name. Disorientation reigned supreme. The gray mask hid the man’s features completely, though he had a tall lithe build and moved like a young man despite the Kevlar vest and combat webbing over his leather jacket and matching pants, the legs red-striped from some past popular vanished motorsport brand.
“Please,” Lucas stammered at the end of it. “Who are you?”
“That’s not important,” the vigilante said, deliberately muted.
He moved to the broken window to look out, then hurried along to the apparatus across the back of the apartment door only to stop dead in his tracks instead, eyes on the monstrous kitchen. Lucas stumbled forward to look on in horror as well, barely conscious as Kevin stepped up to his side and took his hand.
All that remained of a six- or seven-year-old boy was the torso, gently rotting beside a meat grinder and a spice rack.
*
THE GUNFIRE LIGHTING the night outside came with increasing ferocity, sounding closer and closer as it continued. However transformed the boys were witnessing the true horrors they’d just escaped from, a residual urgency hung over everything and seemed matched by the conflict beyond the apartment’s walls.
“Can’t stay here,” the vigilante said in a Batman voice.
Luke tried to pick the accent, some hint of who the masked man might be, and came up with nothing thanks to the Gray Hood’s deliberate theatrics.
“With me,” their rescuer said. He paused to stare eyelessly at Kevin. “You can move?”
Kevin nodded. The Hood pounced on the front door, winding the mechanism’s rotating arm and shunting the bolts. A blast of cold air hit them from outdoors, atop the wooden staircase along the side of the tenement, and the next burst of gunfire lit up the sky in the direction of the old dinner theater where the Councilors met, Lucas realized.
Where his dad would be.
“We gotta find my dad,” he said and tried not to blubber anymore.
Kevin grunted behind him in the negative, but the Gray Hood’s rasped warning drowned out anything else.
“Go home from here,” he said. “Not safe.”
“What’s that shooting?” Lucas asked.
“Don’t know,” he said. “Not safe.”
He held the door open for them, the suggestion clear: flee into the night.
Luke stammered, unable to find the right words, and Kevin jostled past with a flash of the old anger Lucas knew so well from when his blood brother was displeased. Given their survival, and Kevin’s ordeal, Lucas was set to forgive his friend almost anything.
But it was dark out there. And clearly not safe.
Their masked rescuer clearly felt the boy’s reluctance. The stranger growled low in his chest, said nothing, and started hard down the stairs following Kevin who descended to the street outside slowly filling with random people coming out of other apartments or from the tents and flimsy shelters crowding the closest intersection.
Luke looked desperately back into the wretched apartment. There were guns, weapons in there. And yet he was too terrified to step back inside. He clutched his shamed trousers away from his skin and silently wept, swallowing it all just as quickly as panic about the Gray Hood’s departure resurfaced and he scuttled down the wooden steps nearly colliding with a gray-haired matriarch thrusting her head out a nearby window.
The Gray Hood reached the bottom of the stairs, swiveled a look back at him, then nodded to Kevin drifting towards the edge of the crowd.
“Go.”
And then he strode away.
*
THE PEOPLE FILTERING out from the unassuming apartment building barely gave the boys a second glance. Luke noted Kevin was barefoot and felt too tongue-tied to say anything about it. He reached out for the boy’s hand which Kevin immediately snatched away.
“What are we going to do, Kevin?”
“Not cry like a baby.”
Lucas almost choked, nodding, ashamed, exhausted, his feelings of repulsion at himself almost worse than all the rest if it weren’t for the damned shaking he just couldn’t control. He blinked and nodded at his friend like a rheumatic ninety-year-old and continued to stammer, choking on phlegm and swallowed tears as Kevin discarded him with a glance and started away as well.
It was almost more than Lucas’ self-hatred could abhor when he hurried after his friend, hurt beyond belief practically no consideration at all among all the competing vectors for anguish. Kevin walked with clear difficulty, face a mask of concentration as they passed through the last few Citizens and an older woman clutched ghost-like for Luke’s sleeve.
“Where are you boys going?” she asked like a woman in a bad dream.
Lucas had no answer to offer, and Kevin soldiered on, ignoring his own injuries and now, Lucas saw, holding their dead captor’s pistol in one hand.
Luke’s sense of terror somehow worsened.
He hurried after his friend and then slowed once caught up alongside, glancing to Kevin often without much feedback as they continued on.
Luke had no idea where they were going and wasn’t sure his friend did either. The rough map of the City in his head had too many blank patches. Even when he tried to orient himself on the Council meeting chambers, how that connected directly to The Mile, and where their new lodgings were in relation to that, it somewhat escaped him, made worse for the disorientation of misremembering where he called home.
The street had a long row of post-apocalyptic fencing to protect the wire-caged front yards of the passing tenements.
At the corner, tents and packing-crate architecture narrowed the road, and more men and a few women spilled out of what looked something like a speakeasy with a track record of defying Curfew. A hard-bearded, shaven-headed man called out to them, “Where’s all that gunfire at, lads?” and Lucas mutely pointed the direction and said, “Council meeting.”
He then stopped in the middle of the intersection.
“Kevin.”
He had to say it three more times. His friend halted a dozen feet away and turned back to him such that he didn’t have to move his head, neck, or either arm.
“What?” Whut?
“We’re going in the wrong direction,” Lucas said. He pointed yet again. “My father –”
“Home,” Kevin said instead. “Home for now.”
He’d never called it that before, and that he called it “home” now somehow only made Luke more uncomfortable. He gestured more wildly back towards the theater site.
“No, Kevin,” he said. “My father –”
The people in the doorway behind them screamed as one, hauling ass back into the sunken establishment and slamming shut a door made from a wooden pallet and disguised to look like it was only resting against an otherwise featureless brick wall. A sense of motion in the street demanded more immediate review, and Lucas twisted about and started running just in time as a yellow-faced woman with dirt and mud in her hair tore in at them with her bloodied lips agape and hands outstretched.
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 31