After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6]

by Hately, Warren

  “Ernie, no,” Carlotta said. “What are you doing? No. No.”

  Greerson took the steps and Wilhelm was right behind him, pausing at the door he held ajar with one hand. He glanced at it and the door’s observation slit. His smile only brightened.

  “How convenient,” he said. “There is a little window. I will be watching, Carlotta. Remember that you chose this, whether you think you did or not.”

  He slammed the door shut before his lover could answer. Straight away, Carlotta’s muffled yells sounded and Greerson shut the door’s latch. True as he’d said, there was room for Wilhelm to stand at the Perspex slit and stare bloodlessly into the room.

  The Councilor’s smile slowly grew more fixed as Carlotta’ enraged and desperate cries fell away, and she turned instead to stare at the body of her lover, for only a short while longer lying dead on the floor.

  It took Magnus almost seven minutes to turn.

  Chapter 2

  THE SWORD WEIGHED too heavily in an arm already throbbing with such dull pain that Tom could barely register it amid all the hyperventilation and bloodlust. Shocking, retributive violence hung like a profound silence in the air contested only by the rattling noise from leaves and debris blowing against the building in the gale outside. Tom’s halting breaths sounded like a bellows in that aftermath, blood and flecks of meat still dripping from dead Kent’s longsword proven a suitably arcane instrument for his medieval punishment of a crime maybe the dead man Jay didn’t even commit. But as Tom stood there, sweat running off his whiskered chin, blood almost deafening in his ears, eyes strained and mercurial as he gave his own slow muted inspection of the terror meted out by his hand, he only felt the eyes of the others locked on him, he and hardly anyone else noticing as Dkembe backed out of the violated apartment and into the night.

  Tom gasped and fetched his eyes to the right like suffering a nervous tic, ignoring the onlooker Vegas cautiously inching away from him on the nearby sofa, Tom’s gaze instead falling upon his son’s openly terrified stare.

  He couldn’t meet Luke’s eyes, forcing himself just to breathe as he took in Attila, grim-set as usual, and Karla with a staunch but worried expression aimed his way. Vegas kept scuttling backwards until it demanded Attila’s attention, which by then saw Tom lower the deadly blade in his hand until the tip rested on the blood-splattered carpet.

  The movement drew his attention back to the bloody carnage he’d wrought. The sword’s tip dug into the rug only inches from Jay’s outstretched hand, his arm about the only part of his upper body not cleft into great awful ruddy chunks like a Sunday roast carved by a madman. A deep gash in the dead man’s neck and above his ear failed to split his skull, and though the cadaver just lay there for now with Jay’s eyes hooded in death, accusatory and with something of that final terror still clinging like spider-web to his face, Tom had to swallow deeply and thrust the tip of the heavy weapon directly into Jay’s face to still his quiescent brain once and for all.

  The gesture forced a choking sob from Vegas, now all the way off the couch yet somehow crouched down sitting still on the far side of the room, one hand raised, valiantly trying not to give in to violent shakes as Attila loomed and Lucas kept his rifle’s sight on him.

  Tom raised his hand woodenly to quell the panic.

  “No,” he said. It felt like a lifetime since he’d used his voice even though his throat and larynx burned for all his roaring. “Leave him. Stop.”

  Attila and Lucas backed off without moving their feet. Vegas’ eyes flitted rapidly between them, not even bothering to think he could make an escape and then slowly sedated by Tom’s confirmation he didn’t need to.

  Tom opened his mouth to speak, but didn’t get beyond the first pronoun. He lacked words for such a moment. He steeled himself to meet the other man’s horrified eyes, waves of that violence still within Tom like something tidal, Cyclopean, vast. He choked a noise, grieving in his own way too as his gaze skittered, coming back to Vegas again and again until he mastered it, the other man’s expression not slackening a bit, offering reflected back to Tom all the disgust and fear and black awe he already felt.

  “Tom?”

  Attila spoke. The heavyset man wore a fierce yet muted look, heavy brows and that accent underscoring the implicit demand for Tom to get his shit together. But the man he’d hacked to death just a minute before still had him stuck in his own impotence, Jay’s words echoing on and on in Tom’s mind, and now the terrible fatality of his murder meaning no more answers could be had.

  “Dkembe’s gone,” Karla said.

  Tom said, “Yes,” though he had no idea. He still gauged the room like an eighty-year-old man, dropping the sword to the ground for fear of collapsing as adrenal shakes coursed through him and he staggered away to the kitchen doorframe and braced himself while Vegas cautiously stood.

  “You just killed him, cold like that?” he asked quietly, the rebuke implicit without daring to raise his voice.

  “The Urchins came into our home,” Lucas answered. “They killed our friends. Children.”

  Vegas looked at the boy, the whole scene beyond Tom’s control momentarily as he tipped his head back trying to swallow in his parched throat, tears running down his face the only comfort as the reflex wouldn’t come, just leaving him standing there, retching in the back of his hoarse throat while Lucas wilted, unable to face the look Vegas gave him.

  Now, words weren’t needed – or again, they wouldn’t come.

  “Tom,” Karla said. “We have to go.”

  “What about Dkembe?” Lucas asked.

  Tom wheeled himself back into consciousness.

  “We have to find Locke,” he said.

  “Kevin.”

  Tom met Luke’s eyes. The boy nodded in confirmation. The terse look broke him, and Tom started losing control of his own juddery tears.

  All this emotional violence was enough for Vegas. He held up his hands, standing straighter as he backed away and made like he just wanted to escape the building despite living there.

  “You’re seriously out of control, man,” he said to Tom.

  Lucas hissed at his father. “Dad, keep it together.”

  It was the last thing Tom needed to hear, and coming from his son only sharpened the pain of it. Wretched sobs tore through and out of him. He collapsed to his knees just beyond the crime scene.

  Attila surrendered his sentry duties and shook his head as Vegas took that as his chance to leave. Then it was just the four of them in the blood-soaked room.

  Gore had shot against the wall leading to the kitchen and also spattered the nearest chair and cabinet. Tom took it all in, crucified by madness and sorrow and repulsion. The latest corpse was just a semaphore for all the rest – and those still to come.

  He stood.

  “We have to find Locke,” he said with a jaw that hardly let him. “We have to find Locke. Get your sister. And get out of here.”

  He threw his furious look to Attila and Karla watching.

  “The City. . . .” He shook his head, random words pouring out now. “It’s just . . . the destroyer . . . What we . . . what . . . what I have. . . .”

  It was too much for him to say it aloud. His own victimhood hit him like a lightning strike and he channeled all of it into his fiercest of looks. An iron will forced an expression of utmost deadly gravitas upon his face as Tom calmed.

  “I mean it,” he said to the pair. “I’m leaving the City, after this. With my children. You’re free to do what you want, but I think they’d take us. All of us.”

  Attila was too boggle-eyed to reply, which Karla did for them.

  “Who?”

  “Freestone’s Confederates,” Tom said. “It’s gotta be better than this.”

  Lucas started to say something, but Tom quietened him with a raised hand. Lucas flinched. Tom gasped and moved across and hugged his son, fighting back the temptation to give up right there completely and collapse once again.

  “I shouldn’t have
done that,” he said instead.

  Luke squirmed free as carefully as he could. Tom felt all their eyes on him and couldn’t lift his head. He motioned to where Jay’s carcass lay. No one needed to look again to understand him.

  “I just . . . lost it,” Tom said. “I know. I know.” He swore under his breath, realized Lucas was no longer beside him, and then he walked back and angrily retrieved Kent’s sword. “Fuck,” he growled again. “I’m . . . sorry doesn’t cut it, I know. It’s just –”

  “Fuck him.”

  “What?”

  Tom looked, shocked, back to Karla, the only one prepared to gesture to where OK Jay lay seeping his lifeblood into the living room rug.

  “Tom, they attacked us,” the woman growled in her own threatful way. “My lover is dead, Tom. Dead. They fucking murdered her. The Urchins. This Locke guy? I want my piece.”

  Then she gestured back to the dead man on the carpet.

  “Fuck anyone who gets in our way.”

  Attila grunted, expression unclear. Karla looked at him.

  “Right?”

  Attila grunted again, glanced away a moment, then tersely nodded.

  “Good,” Karla said.

  Lucas stepped forward as if the moment required it of him. He clasped his father’s blood-flecked forearm.

  “I’m sorry too, dad,” he said. “It was Kevin. It must’ve been Kevin.”

  “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “No,” Lucas said, disagreeing with him. “I know, somehow. A part of me knows. Knew before. I should’ve said.”

  Lucas couldn’t quite face Jay’s death. Tom took him into a squeezing, one-armed embrace and grit his teeth as the pain in his shoulder flared. A few raindrops pattering against the outside windows filled the moment’s silence, and drew Attila’s eyes to it.

  “Kicking up outside,” he said.

  “A storm’s coming in,” Tom muttered.

  “There’s already one here.”

  Karla’s voice was a whisper of restrained violence. Tom met her eye, then scanned around to confirm Vegas was gone. He sniffled, wiped off his face, and turned himself to the business-like job of cleaning off the longsword using a decorative drape, then he adjusted the scabbard across his back so he could sheathe the weapon without making his aches any worse. It gave the others time to put their affairs in order. Attila, Karla, and his son scooped up the weapons confiscated earlier. Luke handed Tom the rifle, which Tom duly stowed.

  He missed his longbow. It’d be a fine match for the sword, though the medieval image it conjured was far from the grim reality of the picture Tom cut, standing with the sword handle jutting from out behind one crag-like shoulder, the dull light of early morning coming silver through the slatted blinds and catching every mote and highlight in his beard, black against the spots where blood already crusted dry across his arms, shoulders and face.

  Tom took a deep, fatalistic breath.

  “Let’s move.”

  *

  IT WAS ONLY one last killing. At least, that’s what Tom told himself as they lit out from the half-asleep building and stepped through the human waste crowding the foyer and the sidewalk outside. Menacing with their extra weapons, Karla and Attila took point, guns raised, ready to deliver death on anyone taking umbrage with their deadly foray in the night. Instead, the few Citizens in the street – and those peering out at them from the improvised shanties of Brown Town – retreated from the war party’s advance. Tom’s posse made it back to where they were ambushed earlier, and though eyeballs watched from cover, none of the self-proclaimed Dominators appeared.

  Tom and his crew dumped the promised gear and moved on.

  The wind picked up another notch, and now they had to contend with grit flying into their eyes as they headed back towards The Mile.

  Tom signaled to Karla and Attila.

  “We’ll meet you at home base,” he said. Including Lucas, he added, raising his voice above the gale, “We’re going to go get Lilianna.”

  “You sure you don’t want us to come?” Karla asked.

  Tom shook his head.

  “If you’re coming with me, I need you two ready.”

  Gratefully, no one asked him for what. It grated almost as much as Jay’s senseless murder, the fact Locke’s location still eluded them. He glanced aside, back now to his son, as the other two members of their household offered final salutes and moved off.

  The question of Kevin hung heavily between father and son. But now wasn’t the time – and it sure as hell wasn’t the place. Leaves and small items of crap flew past them. Tom’s aching eyes suffered in their slits. Lucas sheltered his face with one hand, the M4 gripped with the strap across his narrow shoulder.

  “We’re getting sis?”

  “Yep.”

  “What about Dkembe?”

  Tom shrugged and regretted it. “I don’t know,” he said.

  He somehow couldn’t think ill of his reluctant young lieutenant. Jay’s dying words incriminating Dkembe didn’t ring true.

  Like his son’s friend Kevin, Dkembe was a question for another time.

  “Come on.”

  Luke followed him, turning at the next street. The day coming up illuminated early workers and those scurrying from their abodes out of sheer necessity. A cloak of gloom and danger still reigned over everything, getting deep into the second week after the Council attack. An old woman appeared near a tent awning, blocking the entrance to the apartment behind her, and then thought better of begging from the pair, Tom and Lucas equally hard-faced as they marched towards the Enclave.

  More people loitered or moved through the corroded intersection where all the structures gave out so the Bastion’s gatepost guards had a clear range of fire if ever needed. They’d come close, but the trooper team atop the high gates picked out Tom and his son long before they’d made the full approach, leaving the two-story streetscape and its attendant hovels behind as they trudged the rain-eroded decline and ever easier into the troopers’ sights.

  “Hold it right there!” one of the men on duty yelled.

  Tom clutched Luke’s shoulder as if he needed it. Lucas only offered a glum upwards look. Tom blanched as he recognized the peril he’d dragged his boy into – made even worse by the dire need for it. The whole maddening foolishness of all the steps they’d taken since their last refuge near Willow Island came back at him like a freight train filled with bad memories, and Tom fought almost bodily to focus as he angled himself towards the sentries. The smile he faked hurt his face as he levered each muscle required into action. A woman trooper in the three-person crew took in his expression and raised an eyebrow beneath her green Kevlar helm.

  “I’m here to see my daughter,” Tom called out.

  “We’re in lockdown,” the same man yelled as before.

  “Really?” Tom replied. “I need to see my daughter. She can come with us.”

  “It’s not happening,” the man called back. “You folks should get inside. Wind’s getting bad. Maybe tornadoes on the way. Seriously. Get indoors.”

  The female trooper called out too.

  “Get your son indoors, mister,” she called. “Your daughter’s safer in here.”

  She nodded to him, sincere. Tom had to wonder if they knew him. The odds were good. He even considered using Wilhelm’s name to gain entry, but thought better of it, and at the same time remembered the secret route Carlotta Deschain had taken in venturing back home from her secret trysts with Magnus.

  Tom’s eyes flicked, at risk of betraying themselves as he glanced towards that side path, the Enclave blocking off a stand of old street trees, some crumbling sidewalk, the edge of a steel-mesh fence guarding a skinny orchard looking like a sick zoo exhibit filling what was left of the old public park. The Enclave had more elevated observation posts than just the front gates, but whether the civilian effort inside its walls was that well-organized was anyone’s guess. Tom only felt the light machinegun turret still fixed on him and his son fifty yards
out in the middle of the driveway. He lifted a hand, saluting the troopers – maybe the woman was right – and didn’t push his luck since no one’d yet said boo about him and Lucas going armed.

  Things were changing in the City, and not for the good.

  *

  ATTILA STOOD AT sentry duty behind the gate and already had it open for them as Tom and Lucas tracked across on the diagonal and dodged a bicycle rickshaw hurtling past. Tom nodded to the stoic Hungarian, hoping to reassure him all was in order – a terrible lie.

  Raised eyebrows always signaled an intent to talk. Tom waited as Attila refastened the gate. Lucas went on into the slaughterhouse Ortega’s headquarters had become, walking dead on his feet perhaps sparing the boy the worst of the charnel atmosphere. They’d already discussed what to expect. There was no time for burying the dead.

  “Your friend’s daughter, Crimson,” the Slavic man said to Tom thick-voiced. “She survived . . . but she’s in a state.”

  “She has a right to be,” Tom replied. “Karla?”

  “With her . . . woman.”

  Attila’s eyes flicked meaningfully to the gate and the rising glare of outside daylight.

  “No Lilianna?”

  “Not yet,” Tom said. “We’d need to infiltrate the Enclave for that. Maybe she’s safer in there, for now. I don’t know. It’s killing me. But I want to get my ducks in a row.”

  Attila grunted agreement.

  “I’m ready when you are,” the Hungarian said. “Just did a quick inventory. Ammo’s not endless, Tom.”

  “I know,” he answered. “And we’ve hardly had used the guns, yet.”

  As if thinking about it, Tom unconsciously tested his longbow arm and managed it with a wince. Attila nodded, gruff. And Tom clasped his shoulder a moment, surprised such a heavyset man seemed so thin. He muttered his thanks for Attila’s loyalty.