“We get Locke,” Tom said. “We take him out. Then we get Lila. And leave. Cool?”
Lucas nodded.
“I’m right behind you, dad.”
“Fuck you guys,” Karla said with a black chuckle. “You think I’m gonna pussy out?”
Attila grunted, and as usual, no one really knew what that meant. But he checked the safety on his rifle and inspected the loaded round.
“Then we go now,” Tom said.
He cast one last look at the defeated Edgelords, mentally mapping the way to Finnegan Locke’s reputed base.
*
BUFFETING WINDS SENT the flags and awnings around the apartment complex into an agitated frenzy. Tom and his war band crouched in the shelter of several abandoned, storm-damaged booths on the opposite corner, hidden by the frayed and tattered fabric of weather-soaked old blankets torn yet nailed in place against the gusts that stirred them.
A long-standing unspoken agreement kept the Rats Nest’s south-east street-corner block clear. Now Tom could see why the Edgelords named it so.
Some enterprising soul had built an enclosed, ramshackle runway around the three buildings clumped closest together. The back building was double-storied, the others with three levels, but the third old tenement had failed in the face of some calamity in times past when its north-facing outer wall collapsed to expose its upper rooms. A pirate’s lookout made from wooden boards offered a neat observation point overlooking the streets. A metal fire escape provided similar views on the eastern angle, and more of the same hasty-looking wooden construction secured that face of the block from easy access at ground level. A gate adorned the north side, almost at the corner, still under watch from the ruined upper decks. And the second-floor window above it betrayed signs of movement through its open shutters, with a wooden ladder bolted to the outside wall reaching up to it. A spider-web of ropes and tarpaulin rigging obscured the higher levels, and between the buildings, with much of the compound rooftops showing metal walkways, old satellite dishes and telemetry and defunct air-conditioning all likewise shrouded by weather-stained sheets and blankets whipping merrily in the wild daytime breeze.
A flash of blonde hair at the north-face of Locke’s headquarters caught Tom’s eye as an under-age sentry revealed himself at the lookout, bored-looking, a hand on the rough-hewn edge of the wood-fronted observation point. The child’s eyes flicked jaded their way and saw nothing as Tom and his crew scuttled even deeper into the frayed shadows.
“There’s only one gate,” Tom whispered gruffly.
“We could scale that wall,” Karla said, then added, “The wooden one.”
“Not while that kid up there’s watching on,” Attila said.
“What about the other side?” Lucas asked, just as quietly as the others.
Their eyes pored over the east face of the street once again. The wooden runway, walled to the street with an overlaid assortment of old garden gates, forklift pallets, crates, and lumber planking, was effective fortification in its own right, and although it was only about seven-feet high, the iron-barred windows on both east-facing buildings were sufficiently dark as to conceal almost anything.
“There’s a gap,” Attila said.
Tom grunted agreement. Behind the fence, there was space between the two closest buildings. But a wall of Persian rugs, suspended by more rope-work, hung across the tight squeeze between the old apartment blocks. The Edgelord called the place a “murder hole” for good reason. Above the seven-foot fence, the external walls looked weathered and torn as if from acid rain. The other second-floor windows were barred or shuttered, with just the one, oddly quaint sentry point overlooking the gate with the wooden ladder nailed beside it.
“Lucas,” Tom asked as quietly as he had so many times out in the wild. “Can you see anyone in that open second-floor window?”
“It’s dark,” his son replied. “No internal light.”
“They wouldn’t silhouette themselves,” Karla muttered.
Lucas voiced his own quasi-masculine grunt of agreement, then looked to his father with a nervous licking of his lips.
“This doesn’t feel good,” the boy said.
Tom coughed a quiet laugh heavy with grief for the moment.
“You expected this to feel good?”
Uncomfortable silence fell into place.
Tom returned to his study of the Rats Nest, eyes narrowing at the inconsistent view of the blonde child on watch from the broken upper floor. Attila followed Tom’s eyes as he often did, grunting to announce his question.
“Take out the kid?” the Hungarian asked.
Their previous discussion drifted in like a fog. Tom’s eyes betrayed nothing except the awful gravitas of their few options. Lucas spoke instead.
“I think I could get him from here, dad.”
Tom’s shock at Luke’s volunteerism forced his dumb gaze onto Luke’s hands indicating the M4 held at rest. Tom looked to Attila, also armed with a rifle.
“Me? Not from here,” the older man said. “Not with my eyes.”
“Dad.”
Lucas tugged Tom’s trouser leg just like the young child he appeared.
“No,” was all Tom said in answer.
They covered their ears as a shrill, ear-piercing shriek of metal-on-metal sounded off beyond where they crouched hidden. Tom’s face strained, refusing to relax the grip on the nocked longbow across his thighs while watching a ragged sheet of rusty metal fencing tumbled in from somewhere, clatter, and then lift up into the invisible hands of the furious wind. The awkward projectile flapped and warbled as it flew across the intersection and slapped into one of the Rats Nest walls.
The commotion drew the ten- or twelve-year-old watchman peering out from his cubbyhole – and Tom burst from cover.
The boy had his eyes on the metal sheet as it succumbed to gravity, grinding tinnily down and into the concealed walkway hidden behind the compound walls, and Tom didn’t take his eyes off the Urchin as he charged out into the street and drew back on his longbow the moment the space allowed.
The youngster noticed him with an alarmed widening of eyes.
And Tom shot him through the throat.
The arrow hurtled true from the powerful Welsh bow, merely caressed by the whipping breeze as it cleared the wooden observation shelter and plunged deep to its fletching in the Urchin’s narrow bared neck.
Tom wasn’t wise enough to look away. He had to take in the boy’s shocked expression turn into utmost terror as he registered the fatal wound, then his asphyxiation, the blood hosing around the stump of the arrow wound. The boy clutched his injury and then mercifully collapsed from view.
Tom shook himself back into the moment to resume his charge at the single wooden gate, which he hit as hard as he could with one shoulder. It was a testament to his slow recovery that he didn’t faint at the queasy sick shock juddering through him as the hollow door exploded into loosened planks and splinters and Tom crashed on through with them into the wall behind.
Karla had Tom’s back even if the others faltered. She stormed in and past Tom through the breach point with her sub-machinegun leveled, scanning the internal walkway circling the block. She looked hard left, along the east face, eyeing the indistinct clutter where the first building ended and its neighbor began in a shroud of tapestried carpet, and on instinct Karla turned the other way, trusting Tom to right himself as she jogged a half-dozen paces to the bottom of the corner building’s fire escape.
Tom stood with a pained grimace, flicking away a length of split wood and glad he’d not somehow broken an ankle, though his gratitude was lost somewhere beneath the images of the boy he’d just killed rapidly replaced by yet more sickening first-person shooter scenes of his knife stabbing the child attacker in Ortega’s stairwell again and again and again, or his sword hewing into OK Jay, his dagger raining death upon Walter while the nonplussed Ascended watched.
Tom pushed the back of his fist against his mouth as he slung the longbow, and Luca
s and then Attila loped across to join him – all while the wind howled with greater and greater force. Another crashing noise sounded off somewhere in the distance, and with the gale assaulting his ears, Tom didn’t even hear Karla start up the rain-rusted fire escape. Attila peeled off to follow her, leaving Tom exchanging a breathless look with his son.
“Keep low,” he whispered. “Stay behind me.”
Crouched, Lucas barely came up to his father’s hip. But the boy tracked his assault rifle in their wake with grim efficiency and Tom started ahead only to stop nearly at once.
He took one more step before his nose registered the smell of oil and old gasoline.
“Careful,” he said.
Tom led them along the face of the building to where the heavy rugs hung to obscure the narrow lane between the next longer apartment block, but the smell of fuel only grew worse. Loose items of debris blustered past them, the wind masking the worst of the reek until Tom’s eyes took in the puddles of congealed diesel before them.
Movement in the window overhead revealed a slim hand as it dropped a lit Molotov.
Tom reared back, pushing Lucas gasping backwards with him as the bottle hit the bricks and the tiny lick of flame bloomed when it met the fuel-soaked drape.
The whoosh of hot air was a detonation in its own right. Only the harsh crosswind saved them from the immediate flames as the trap caught alight in a full blaze blocking their path.
“Back!”
There was a sense of more movement like rats scurrying in the walls all around them. Lucas let his father force past, trampling back across the ruins of the outside gate as they now ran as if their lives depended on it, Tom stomping up the metal fire escape with his son training the M4 behind. But there was no pursuit. Instead, Tom barreled to the top of the landing and its freshly-opened doorway and the impenetrable gloom he nevertheless charged into, drawing a fresh arrow as he angled through with the bow.
The upper room was bare except for a table and chairs, one of them tipped on its side. A door stood open directly across from them, another shut to the right. Luke continued guarding the rear as his father hastily checked the closed door, forcing it inwards at the same time a fine-boned figure scurried low and through. Tom yelped in pain as a blade cut across his leg, his taped-up jeans taking most of the impact as he jumped out of the way. The feral Urchin was a filthy mess, tousled hair knotted in a rats nest of its own, eyes and face unrecognizably boy or girl, just a feral animosity as the child twisted about, saw Lucas, gauged Tom clutching the longbow, and then ran through the room’s open door.
Luke tracked the Urchin with the M4, but fear and revulsion froze his trigger, and father and son watched, shocked, as the child slipped away.
A muffled groan carried from somewhere close by.
Tom pushed the first door open once again, eyes wary for more surprises. A quick scan showed a filthy bedroom with three stained cots on the floor and an unruly chaos of personal items and clothes and looted trinkets only a street kid could prize. Tom caught Lucas waiting on his signal and so returned a quiet headshake, and then the pained, muted, feminine moan sounded a second time from the direction the feral Urchin quit.
Lucas retrained his rifle on the open door, unaware of his furious lip licking and the trembling of his skinny legs. Pitying him, Tom swapped the longbow for the Mp5.
He held the sub-machinegun low, never more feeling a fraud in that moment as he eyed the dark oblong of the doorway – and the briefest flash of temptation for him and his son to cut their losses and run swept through him. But vengeance outshone trepidation – and brighter still the shame he’d feel if they escaped now. Instead, Tom all but manhandled himself forward.
It was a musty, narrow corridor with an awkward turn. Little made sense in the clammy light, but Tom was relieved and then just as quickly concerned to see Karla standing in front of another door with her back to them. Her blonde ponytail hung at an odd angle, and so did her Mp5. It dangled its strap bound tight around Karla’s arm which hung by her side dripping with dark ichor proper sunlight would show as blood.
She moaned softly again, but still didn’t move.
Tom swallowed hard, holding his own gun on his comrade as if afraid she might be a Fury already. Another shut door to his left added to his confusion about the layout. Tom took several steps, gesturing for Luke to hold back. Karla came into full view around the dog-leg turn, her back to them still, the moldering carpet dark with fresh blood at her feet.
Tom readjusted the Mp5 and eased closer. The door was mounted on a pair of heavy-duty old motorcycle springs and had launched into Karla on a tight arc, with more than a dozen knife blades and sharpened metal spikes driven through it – and now through her.
A kittenish noise escaped the woman. Tom winced, trepidation and repulsion and the fear of imminent attack almost getting the better of him once again as he gently touched Karla’s shoulder and her sagging head lolled around to him with one cheek gashed open by a spade-like blade. Sympathy and guilt washed through him.
Death was in her eyes already. At least a half-dozen spikes had punched their way through to leave Karla impaled flat against the door’s blood-soaked surface. Karla muttered something as the blood pooled beneath her booted feet. The deeper they advanced into the building, the more the noise of the outside storm fell away. Tom pressed close, but her words made little sense – and a second later, they cut out completely as Karla’s head tipped back and a death rattle escaped.
“Fuck,” he cursed beneath his breath, reaching up to close the dead woman’s eyes.
But the door on his left opened inwards with a flourish.
Adrenalin helped Tom twist aside as someone thrust a tattered-looking spear out across the narrow corridor and its tip dug a wedge of plaster free from the opposite wall.
Lucas swiveled the end of his snub-nosed rifle into the doorway and let rip.
Muzzle flashes lit up a rangy-looking woman as the bullets tore through her and her studded leather jacket. Beside her, and lower down, a boy aged no more than eight or nine flinched down and away as Tom grabbed at the spear haft, pulling it from the dying woman’s grasp as Tom reversed it, and stabbed the wrought-iron head overhand and down, into the assassin’s throat. His second blow strike hit the madwoman in the upper chest, and Tom growled, mustering his strength to force the bullet-shredded woman back into the hollowed-out closet space, and she then fell backwards through an awning of old Army blankets into yet another room beyond.
Luke’s gunsmoke thickened the air around them. The back of the linen cupboard revealed another alcove which Tom immediately ducked into and through as the shaggy-haired boy beside the dead woman yanked open the door to another escape route, and Tom just as quickly kicked the Urchin in the middle of the back. The child slammed back into the door, shutting it, and trapping himself in the room with barely a moment’s hesitation before switching around with a long sharpened hook in one hand he swung at Tom’s midriff.
Tom didn’t think he had another child murder in him and just as fiercely feared he had no choice. He blocked the sharpened hook with the bloodied spear shaft, then backhanded the child. He grabbed the youngster’s wrist and squeezed until the sharp hook dropped.
“We’ve only come for Locke,” Tom hissed, voice low despite the gunshots. “Where’s Fagin?”
The child snarled, then shrieked. “Get off!”
He scratched his free hand at Tom’s face. Tom let him go and just as quickly hammered a fist into the boy’s temple, poleaxing him unconscious to the rank carpet.
“Come on,” he said shakily to Lucas.
“They’ve heard us now,” his son said.
Lucas looked pale and wide-eyed and still fixed on the corpse of the scrawny woman he’d killed, in danger of getting lost in his first-ever kill. Tom clutched his son’s shoulder almost as hard as he’d grabbed the other child.
“We have to move fast.”
The alcove door burst open to reveal a man in a wrestling ma
sk wielding a spiked baseball bat.
Tom hefted the Mp5 one-handed by its pistol grip and opened fire.
Bullets hit the intruder and the doorframe around him. Tom stepped over the dying man without pause, shouldering through into a skinny corridor. He swept the Mp5 each way, heard a door slam somewhere, and then came a shout followed by more children’s voices shrieking and then dying away.
“Oh Christ,” he muttered.
*
TOM WENT LEFT, watching the doorways ahead while also checking low for tripwires, regretting every further step he made walking into this nightmare. He thought to glance upwards too, and was astonished to see an open hatch above them and a small pair of hands working the cap off a fuel can even as it started gurgling out.
“Back!”
Lucas crashed into his father from behind, and Tom whirled, grabbing the boy and hauling him bodily ahead, continuing on the path he’d committed to and fighting inertia and the slack fingers of time itself to get past and through and out of the way. Putrid-smelling gasoline splashed across the back of Tom’s jacket as they escaped. Lucas angled the M4 at the roof space, but with a look on his face as if he’d never fire the weapon again. Tom grimaced, marching backwards as he copied his son’s aim and the cramped rank corridor shook with gunfire.
A girl’s cry was drowned out by the whoosh of the entire roof cavity catching alight.
Tom hurried them on, cursing and trying not to weep as the burning fuel delivered flames across the hallway carpet, liquid fire trickling down the wall forecasting an imminent conflagration in which Tom and his son – and somewhere, Attila – looked trapped.
Tom cursed some more. Locke had to know the place was a death trap now.
Ahead, some kind of mounted screen on wheels launched from a side chamber and blocked their path. Nail-studded planks armored it. No genius was needed to see the obstacle was only the start of a one-two maneuver they didn’t want to be around to experience. Tom kicked in the next door they passed while Lucas squirmed free of his grasp, intent on his contribution covering their rear with the M4.
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 51