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

by Hately, Warren

  “We have to keep moving,” Lila hissed and her breath plumed. She motioned to herself. “Check me over. Look for anything that might be a bug.”

  “A bug?”

  “Yeah?”

  “From the river?”

  “No,” Lila scowled. “Like a tracking device.”

  Aurora blinked, but did as asked. Lila felt numb fingers tracking over her, and never felt more remote and alone and despondent, wet-haired and freezing cold and on the edge of failure. She bit her lip and fought off a cough, clear blue eyes furrowed to pierce the scenery and the darkness beyond the slope that defied her control.

  Brick steps ascended to the parking lot for the riverside reserve. A band shell slumped amid more grass laying claim to the road and other unsurfaced areas. A pair of information booths, a line of rusting Winnebagos, a brick-and-concrete bathroom block, and more asphalt studded with rusty seedlings mounted towards a major roadway, the inert neon sign of a motel across the way, and beyond that, the dark tunnel of a smaller road cutting off into an arcade of heavy trees.

  It seemed best to avoid the major roads – and the moment Lila had that thought, the sound of a motor carried distantly back from the direction of the bridge beyond their line of sight. No electric lights appeared, but panic arose in their stead, and Lila motioned her intent, clutching Aurora’s hand as they ran towards the shadowy, tree-choked avenue.

  Forest smells filled the air at once as they plunged into the arboreal gloom. Moving was better than sitting still, but the cold had a firm grip on both of them. Aurora lagged by her side, and Lilianna wasn’t sure they could keep moving even if their lives depended on it.

  She just couldn’t stop shivering. They were a good distance from the motel before the reality sank in on her.

  “We’ve got to get warm,” she said.

  A quarter-mile from the back of the motel, it was open fields to the east and more forest to the west, left and right of the tree-lined arcade they traveled. Just ahead, the turn of a driveway appeared with a letterbox and jaunty yellow sign, HENDERSON, indicating sanctuary.

  “House up here,” Lila said.

  “This is farmland,” Aurora said. “Could be a ways.”

  “We need blankets,” Lila said. “Warmer clothes.”

  “Yes.”

  Aurora nodded, shivering and defeated and yet moving ahead with her arms wrapped around herself in misery. Lila could only acknowledge the other girl’s efforts as she faced off against her own near-fatal inertia, thoughts numb, and she reoriented her exhausted focus on the task at hand. She had the gun again – for threat value, if nothing else. Now they were north of the river, Greerson’s men weren’t the only threats.

  The chance for Furies, for instance.

  Lila shivered bodily, and threw that off too. Advancing at a tactical pace, Aurora followed her down the curving drive, more trees either side, dark firs with their limbs broken and laid before them like some kind of old-fashioned welcome.

  Moonlight caught on glass from the slatted mechanical windows along the back of a metal shed. Several big pieces of farm machinery manifested out of the gray details. The women veered towards the building, leaving the driveway to approach the shed, then across from it another concrete-walled structure, and beyond it all a big open blackened patch from the burned remains of the old house. Only a knee-high maze of brick walls remained, the interior little more than the occasional burnt strut reaching out of the ashes.

  The yard was thick with grass, yellowed by day, turned by night into a gently undulating carpet more like something from the ocean floor as they navigated through the swaying mass, the wind driving it conspiring against Lilianna’s hopes for the night.

  A steel door darkened the back wall of the concrete shed. The latch rattled, but the bolt was soldered shut against the join, effectively sealing it. Lilianna traced her hand along the door as they circled the building. Two vehicle hulks swam into view. The gravel around the sheds suspended the sea life. Their wet shoes crunched on the tiny stones.

  “There’s no house,” Lila said. “Fuck.”

  The metal work shed occupied her view. Lila kept her hand against the solidity of the bigger, concrete-walled building as if it might desert her and leave her to fall. It was Aurora whose urgent curiosity drove them along the front of the building.

  The concrete shelter’s face had a simple office door. The opposite shed’s front door hung agape, the lock broken by efforts past. There wasn’t much of a moon, but ambient light filled the open gravel yard, daunting Lilianna as she led them in a quick dash to the smaller shed and inside.

  “We need blankets, anything,” she said. “Keep an eye out for weapons.”

  “They have guns, Lila.”

  “Yeah,” Lilianna agreed. “I had one too.”

  Further conversation was stilled by the reality of the shed. It was more than picked clean, containing nothing except a huge wooden bench. Lila retrieved a length of oil-stained bedsheet stuffed into the corner near the door and handed it to her friend.

  “Here.”

  The moonlight showed the extent of Lila’s bruises, reflected in Aurora’s concerned eyes. The whole side of her face had swollen and turned blue, intruding on her sight from that eye. But Lilianna fended off her friend’s hand, and Aurora bound the filthy sheet around herself. Lilianna then also rejected her friend’s offer of shelter within the meager fabric.

  “Looks cleared out,” Lila said instead.

  “Yeah.”

  Lila cast eyes back to the concrete building and saw the now familiar graffiti across and over the buckled wooden door.

  “Hastur,” she said.

  “I saw that before.”

  “Someone’s marked their territory,” Lila said.

  Each stared at it wordlessly. Finally, Lilianna nudged her friend.

  “Looks like a work shed or garage,” she said. “We’ll check that, then we clear out of here too. We’re still . . . in their territory, you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go.”

  *

  THE OFFICE DOOR opened into a small rest area and two framed doorways without doors. Left went into the main work space. It was impenetrably dark. The faintest of discoloration in the congealed black tones marked a huge tarpaulin over the carcass of some unrestored wreck.

  Lilianna checked over the walls and furnishings, everything frighteningly bare, then ventured through the other door, a compact passage with more doors ahead.

  “Lila.”

  Aurora stopped her with a hand. When Lilianna turned, Aurora again offered the oily sheet she only half-wore.

  “Here,” she said.

  It was too late to dry their hair, but Aurora started rubbing Lila down as vigorously as she could. The numbness burnt. Her friend’s efforts seemed pointless until Lilianna felt life throb back into her arms. It was hard to resist the shivering, which she solved by taking the sheet and doing the same for Aurora.

  “We’re in a tough spot,” she said almost silently.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Lila gave the other woman a startled look.

  “What the hell do you have to be sorry for?”

  “I was such a bitch to you.”

  Lila stared at her unmoving for a long second, not quite parsing the reference to a lifetime ago.

  “In the Enclave?”

  “The Bastion,” Aurora said. “Yes. I was threatened, when you turned up. I always . . . always had a thing for Montana. And now she’s dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you saved my life,” Aurora said.

  “If you want to put it that way. . . .”

  “You and your father,” the girl said. “I knew it, that, compared to you, I wasn’t good enough, and now here we are . . . and now we know that’s true.”

  Lilianna jerked her head back in surprise a second time.

  Then she slapped her friend across the face.

  “Don’t you dare talk about yourself
that way.”

  Aurora stared back at her in shock. Lilianna instantly tumbled back into the memory of a near-identical scene, but it was her father, Tom, delivering the slap – and her the recipient. It’d angered her for so long, that now it was equally shocking to her to feel that fury dissipate completely as she at last understood her father’s desperation.

  “There’s no time for you to be anything but what you need to be to survive,” Lilianna hissed and did it louder than she wished. “Do you understand?”

  Aurora sniffled once, then nodded stiffly.

  “We have to survive,” Lila said. “We have to live.”

  A soft scraping noise sounded through the thin passageway wall.

  Lilianna held her tongue, life lesson aborted to stare unfocused and horrified as the noise ceased, as if daring them to believe it never was.

  The women’s met eyes. Aurora mouthed, “What the fuck was that?”

  Something thumped into the wall on the other side beside her and Lila jumped.

  It was her turn for silent whispering.

  “Fury,” she barely breathed.

  They backed out of the corridor as the danger on the other side of the wall sounded again. Aurora and Lilianna retreated to the small foyer room as the creature came again – and the fibers of thin wall sheeting gave a sharp crackle.

  “Fuck.”

  Lila grabbed Aurora’s wrist and burst with her back outside.

  Electric lights hit their eyes like a laser target.

  “Bring ‘em in, boys!”

  Slinky’s shout echoed in the nearby crackling of a two-way unit.

  Lila shielded her eyes, and the spotlight played across her to repeat the blinding trick with Aurora, who managed to get half a hand up. Lila was utterly blind. She reached for the dud gun at her back and almost fell over as her hand found nothing and she lurched free of the doors ready to run blindly if needs be. Instead, someone caught her with a forearm bar that smacked her in the face and left her nearly flipped upside down on the hard yard dirt, as disoriented as before.

  Aurora called Lilianna’s name several times, shrieking like a crazy woman, and all Lila could do was try to struggle back to her feet with fingers pressed into her eyes.

  The flash-addled blurriness showed Hardy dancing out of striking range, though the reason for it wasn’t clear. The seconds filled with the noise of an approaching vehicle. Finished his business with the spotlight, Slinky whooped and charged in, and Lila only just got her bearings in time to see the mercenary clutch Aurora around the waist and throw her up against the concrete wall.

  Hardy held back – and Lilianna snarled and rushed him with nothing more than spread nails.

  The skinny man panicked, leaving Lilianna to veer away for the nearest shadows as fresh electric headlights bobbed across the scene.

  “Run!” she yelled.

  But Aurora lay slumped beneath the HASTUR scrawl with Slinky tearing away her singlet.

  Greerson’s truck juddered through the rampant foliage and into the yard. Hardy ran to it for cover as he unshucked his Mp5 Navy. At once, the Chief jumped from the moving cab and barked for him to put the gun away.

  “We didn’t come out here to shoot ‘em, you dumbfuck!”

  Lila didn’t wait around for whatever came next. Greerson’s words fell behind as she ran.

  She circled behind the metal shed, checking the view of a possible escape route through the jungle, then back to see whether Aurora had managed away too. But her friend squirmed, half-standing before the concrete workshop, trying to wrestle free from Slinky’s grasp.

  The trooper’s fist crashed down on the side of Aurora’s cheek and the girl disappeared from view as Lilianna ducked into the trees and ran for her life.

  *

  THE PROFUSION OF greenery overwhelmed her, almost choking Lilianna fighting to escape – and to do it quietly, at the expense of her speed, plunging away from the burnt-out farmhouse and deeper into the night. She forged a path through a dense thicket of stalks and tangled fallen telephone lines, checking behind herself again and again, each time her face ever more drawn in anger-fused-with-panic at the villainy she’d left behind – along with Aurora.

  A hundred yards into the foliage, Lila dropped into a crouch to recover her breath.

  The idling engine hummed behind her unseen. Lilianna knelt carefully, and snapped a thick stalk almost as loud as a rifle crack in the malevolent stillness. She peed through her jeans out of necessity, relieved in more ways than one at the miracle, given her dehydration.

  Her tongue clutched in the roof of her mouth, but Lilianna’s narrative unfolded silently to herself as she picked back towards the metal shed. Almost instantly, a beam of light tricked her way and she dropped as a confused voice rang out.

  “Which way?”

  The seconds oozed past. Someone gave a gruff bark, then came Greerson’s voice.

  “Get off her and help me.”

  Slinky’s reply didn’t carry. The wind played across the scene touching at everything. Lilianna used it for cover to circumnavigate the yard at its farthest periphery. She finally came around the big concrete shed blocking most of her view of the yard and Greerson’s unknown number of men.

  The back door was welded solidly. Lila flitted from the overgrowth and up to the back wall, ignoring the metal door. Flat against the wall, reining in her wild breaths, she crept around with her hands curled into fists.

  A chunk of mismatched stone caught beneath one sneaker. Lila retrieved it, fitting the paperweight into her palm to take advantage of its edge, ready to hammer someone’s face in if needed. But she reached the corner without detection. The sound of the Fury’s renewed assault inside the workshop carried loudly, but the hunters weren’t concerned.

  The door to their growling truck hung open across from Lilianna as its floodlights bathed the whole courtyard.

  Greerson stood in front of the beams, transfigured into something quasi-religious, demonic – an apparition dissolved in the harsh sodium lights.

  His subordinate Slinky dragged Aurora like a piece of girl-shaped baggage through the dust towards him. The hunters’ attention switched away from the concrete shed, and Lila eyed the truck door again, frantic thoughts about the undiscovered Fury inside the bigger building – just as Hardy stepped from the obscurity of the parked truck’s rear with a nasty smile.

  His Navy trained on Lila once again.

  She broke and ran for the shed’s office door.

  Gunshots rang out – just a burst into the air – and Greerson shrieked like he’d fouled himself, immediately barking questions and insults while only just then spotting Lila tear through the office door.

  “Inside there!” he screeched from outside. “She’s mine!”

  The trapped Fury banging and scratching at the half-split wall came much louder now. Lila couldn’t see the shreds of insulation foam in the darkness, but the air was full of carcinogens she intuitively gasped against, a hand across her face as she quested around by just the light from a single clear plastic roof panel overhead admitting the scant moonlight beyond.

  Lilianna set her jaw and headed for the door to the Fury’s jail cell, but the creature snarled at her proximity and forced itself bodily through the split panel, the prefabricated sheeting like some obscene, post-industrial childbirth.

  The light was just sufficient to confirm the savage haircut and solid, womanly build of Dana Lowenstein fighting to scramble free of confinement. Now, a Fury’s lust bled from the dead President’s eyes despite a thick gag of black electrical tape around her suffocated-to-death head.

  The woman’s hands were little more than blackened stumps.

  Detoothed and declawed.

  Lowenstein-the-Fury forced itself out and into the corridor as Lilianna backed away, rethinking everything, the chunk of rock in one hand as she swiveled right, into the pitch-black garage workshop.

  To her horror, the giant rusting roller door across the front of the shed started winchin
g open to admit the harsh light from Greerson’s truck which flooded into the garage, disintegrating shadows and hiding places in equal turns. Lowenstein’s muzzled Fury stumbled into the rest room behind Lila to the sound of a loud gunshot and then a chuckle as the ex-President’s dead weight took out the card table.

  Lilianna caught just a glimpse of Greerson before she elected suicide, and dropped to the dirty floor and rolled through beneath the rising roller door right beside Slinky’s booted feet.

  The trooper wore his scarf again, which concealed nothing of his delight as he reached for Lilianna and she swatted him away, getting to a knee, lungs burning with desperation as she saw Aurora unconscious in the yard with Hardy standing over her.

  “Leave the blonde!” Greerson yelled from inside.

  Slinky held a drawn pistol he raised at Lilianna as she backed away, stumbling along the front of the concrete shed as the gunman tugged down his bandanna and smirked at her stricken plight as he followed.

  Then Greerson scuttled out from under the roller door with a grunt.

  And Aurora moved like a flash.

  Hardy’s scream drew all their eyes, but Aurora was already in motion. A look of glee crossed Lilianna’s face, Aurora’s fakery taking the three remaining hunters by surprise.

  Lila pushed off the concrete to run towards Aurora on an angle to again clutch her friend’s offered hand as they hurtled past the smaller tool shed towards escape.

  And Slinky’s pistol rang out as they fled.

  *

  THE GUN BARKED once, twice, and then again as the two women shrank down into the smallest possible targets while running for dear life. The bullets hitting metal chimed like lightning strikes against the shed, deliberately wide. But the running pair crossed back into the shadows, Aurora’s expression wild, ecstatic and terrified all in one as she hauled on Lilianna’s arm to turn them towards the nearest cover.

  The men’s calls followed, disembodied behind them, and Lilianna gave her friend one quick check for injuries before seizing on their momentum to plough on through the trees with the sense of pursuit in their wake.