Their four pursuers fell upon his injured friend just as Dkembe’d hoped they would, satisfying their thirst for vengeance by bludgeoning their quarry to death while Dkembe did what he’d known he’d do since the first day he and Erak met.
He ran.
Chapter 6
VEGAS SAT WITH shaking legs, marveling at the luxury of a working toilet compared to the sheer barbarity of the night, his friend’s drying blood flecked across his bare shins, clinging to the hairs, the smell something that wouldn’t wash off any time soon. When he flushed, Vegas stood watching the turds go down as if remembering the sight for the last time. People had come so far back from the edge of ruin to reclaim some of their lost world’s civility, and now that lay in ruins just like Jay’s corpse in the room next door.
Vegas walked back into that room which still reeked with slaughter and men’s sweat. Figures creeping around in the living room caught fright at his re-entry. The mother and father and their kid from next door and then another woman quit back out of the apartment through the broken exit. Vegas watched the scavengers go with nothing more than an inflamed breath, staring blunt daggers as he eyed the kicked-in door and knew crossing to shut it meant taking in the whole awful thing all over again.
But there was no doing it otherwise.
He went and got dressed in cargo pants and his thermal underwear top before returning to the living room to scan the broken doorway as a distraction one last time, taking a prolonged reprieve before he inhaled deeply to steel himself to take in the sorry sight of OK Jay laying twisted and nearly cut into pieces by the departed Tom Vanicek’s sword.
“A fuckin’ sword,” Vegas muttered to himself like it were a prayer to Tom’s victim. Then Vegas knelt with mixed tenderness and caution, one hand hovering like a faith healer over his dead, slightly younger compadre. Jay’s face was split from one of Vanicek’s terrible sword strikes. Askew in their face, Jay’s brown eyes still managed to convey the raw and convoluted emotions of his final moment of death now as tangled as his guts slid out the broad rents in the dead young man’s chest.
“A fuckin’ sword,” Vegas said again. “Aw brother, you deserved better’n that. Fuck.”
Jay was a littler shorter than him, and not as brawny, but his corpse still dominated the room. An unconscionable amount of blood had come from the man. The rug was ruined, the exposed boards stained – lucky if the mess didn’t leak into the apartment below.
The sickening thought turned Vegas’ gaze in avoidance to the front door once again, but this time he found Latisha there.
“Hey,” she said somberly.
Latisha remained in the doorway, an unwitting shadowy medusa with her complicated coiled locks unleashed for the nighttime so savagely interrupted. Her round face stayed fixed on his to avoid the grisly details spread out on the carpet, and she wore that look with the appropriate sorrow even though she’d never liked Jay much.
“Is that OK Jay?”
Vegas stood.
“Yeah.”
He cast a final look at his murdered friend, then unceremoniously hauled the blanket from the settee and threw it over the mound he’d become. The corpse relaxed wetly under the weight. Vegas clenched his vomit response and looked further down, disturbed, to see his toes inching into the bloody muck.
“Fuck,” he said again.
“Hey baby,” Latisha said and eased closer. “I’m sorry for your loss, OK?”
“No need to pretend for me,” Vegas told her.
“Nigga was weak,” Latisha said with a shrug and put her hand against his chest. “Not like you, baby.”
She kissed him, though he took it on his cheek, unable to dismiss a sense of repulsion any better than he could find its source. There was a lot more to the mood in him than just the slaughter of his friend – and no disrespect to Jay intended by that. Vegas pictured the flushing turds again, and gently moved Latisha aside with strong hands on her hips.
“You gonna clean up?” she asked.
“Clean up? No,” he answered. “I’m moving out.”
“Movin’ out?”
“Yep.”
Latisha’s outrage softened only a little out of consideration for the setting. His booty call’s self-interest was as clear as the stark evidence that none of them were safe.
Vegas didn’t want to look at all the things in his apartment he now either had to relocate or abandon – the cumulative effort of two years, fighting so hard to believe the City’s fairytale.
He motioned to the corpse on the floor.
“Have a look around you, Tisha,” he said. “You think OK jus’ had a bad fall?”
“What happened?” she asked in a careful voice. Then, as was her habit, she filled the space for any answer with more words of her own. “I mean, we all heard it. God damn, that fella was yellin’ like it was the end of the goddamn world, you know?”
“Tom Vanicek.”
“That fella from the newspaper?”
Vegas snorted. Sensed his own jealousy there.
“That’s the one,” he said.
“Where on earth you gonna go?” Latisha asked. “The warehouse?”’
He nodded.
“The plan was always to fortify the building and then get the housin’ arrangements better’n just campin’ out on the floor,” he said. “Have to ramp the timetable up a bit.”
“You think it’s that bad?”
Vegas found it hard to restrain his harsh look.
“You serious?” he asked her. “Motherfucker just walked in here and cut Jay to shreds.”
“Sorry,” Tisha said. “I just ain’t ever seen you scared before.”
She couldn’t help herself the tiniest sniffle. Vegas’ eyes hardened. It was the wrong time for his fuckbuddy to shit-test him – and it confirmed everything about the woman he already knew.
“What about me?” Latisha asked, coy, almost playful, ignoring his look. “I like that sweet time with you, my man –”
“We’re neighbors, Tisha,” he said and cut all eye contact. “I told you that.”
“Yeah, you tol’ me that,” she answered, indignant. “That mean you gonna leave me here when you’s afraid there’s a fuckin’ ax murderer on the loose?”
“You wanna move too?”
Latisha softened, looking like she expected a marriage proposal. Batting her lashes, she smiled slowly, lowering her eyes down the full length of him standing with arms folded across his broad chest.
“Only if you want me there, Vegas baby.”
The apartment door creaked inwards, aborting the need for any real answer. Vegas grabbed the interruption with both hands, rounding on the doorway with an irate look. A skinny-figured old white man clutched his frizzy beard and bobbed his head in apology.
“Sorry t’interrupt you, boss,” the retiree said and winced a smile and bobbed his head some more.
“Pedro,” Vegas said in a dull tone. “What you want?”
“Everythin’ OK?”
“What’s up with you motherfuckers an’ your stupid questions?”
Vegas growled and eased up on the imposing glare. His eyes instead found the carpet again, Jay’s blood slowly spotting through the blanket covering him.
“No,” Vegas said at last. “Things are certainly not OK.”
Latisha cleared her throat, thinking better of words. The old man’s fevered eyes flicked between them and the atrocity on the floor.
“That your friend?”
“Yep.”
“Dead?”
“Yep.”
“You put him down?”
“Didn’t have to,” Vegas said.
“You want help with clean up?”
Vegas stared at Old Pedro a moment, eyes on the speculative tongue betraying its owner beneath a white-whiskered lip.
“I’m not stayin’,” Vegas said slowly.
“Got somewhere to go?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Takin’ your friend?”
Pedro didn’t
mean Latisha and she knew it. Latisha made a sickened face, flicked her eyes to Vegas and then made an “I’ll call you” gesture which these days somehow still meant something. Then she squeezed past Pedro and into the hall leaving the implicit stink of the old man’s question hanging in the air like a fart.
Vegas returned sorrowful eyes to the blanketed shape and couldn’t strain them for irony.
“Takin’ him to the Ascended?” he asked, dulled.
“Ahm sorry, man,” Old Pedro said. “Don’t wanna eat people myself, but folks’ll have him.”
“If they even know,” Vegas said.
“Or care.”
Vegas met the old man’s eyes then, but only to nod tersely as he escaped to his bedroom unable to outpace the awful clamor of his heart.
*
BY THE TIME he had his clothes packed, there wasn’t much room left in the single backpack. He re-entered the living room and ignored Pedro and an associate who quietly left the apartment for decency’s sake, wasting no time plotting the logistics of whatever foul bargain they were cooking up – metaphorically, if not literally – all the same.
Vegas adjusted the Glock tucked into his waistband so he could crouch and examine the small bookcase, sighing quietly to himself as he farewelled a few other old friends. He limited himself to five of his favorites, which made the first few choices easy: Osho’s book on Tao, Ecce Homo and Homo Deus. He selected The Marrow of Tradition even though he almost knew the book from heart, and he added Mules and Men for the link to his people’s lost past, if nothing else. The weather-beaten copy of Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected beckoned as a sentimental favorite, not for the stories – as inventive as they were and however much they’d appealed to his love of thinking outside the box – but because it was Dorothea who’d given it to him.
But she was dead now, in the past, too, just like Jay and so many others. Vegas let his fingertips trail the bent and frayed book cover for just a moment, then groaned like an old man and stood.
He stuffed the books into his half-open backpack and swung it onto his shoulder, a cold-hearted sweep of the living room one final time before heading out with no apparent hesitation and swinging left into the hall. He sensed as much as saw Pedro and his pal swoop back into the apartment behind him, and though he knew he had to pass Latisha’s door to make it to the stairwell, she still somehow caught him unguarded when she stepped out and blocked his path.
“Goin’ so soon, baby?”
“You’re seeing it,” he said.
Latisha reached out a hand, slow and deliberate and as snake-like as the hair coming down like a crown to frame her generous features, the equally slow and quiet-like way she curved her mouth into a smile.
“You think about me?” she asked in a rich, expectant voice.
“You need shelter, you can come,” Vegas told her. “But it’s a man-cave, baby. Women and children have their place.”
“And where’s that?”
Vegas chuckled and shrugged as he moved past her with the pack on his shoulder.
“That’s on you to find that.”
“You’re just leavin’ me here?”
Latisha followed him to the top of the unlit stairs and someone camped in the lobby beneath them called out for her to shut up. Vegas agreed.
“What about you an’ me, baby?” she called after him anyway.
He paused halfway down for the sake of no more yelling.
“Yeah, Tisha, you know I care about you, and we have some fun times when we together,” he said and smiled even though it pained to add the shrug because he did really like the woman, for all the fact she also bugged the shit out of him. “Don’t blame me, baby,” he said. “This is on that maniac who murdered my brother.”
“So you are scared.”
“Bitch, please,” Vegas replied. “Of course I’m fuckin’ scared. Fooled myself to think I could stay out here, but everyone’s got their bastions now, it seems. Time to finish mine.”
More indignant voices rang out for them to quit it.
“You come to me if you get in trouble, girl,” he said – and finished up with a curt, but serious nod.
Then he angled out of there.
*
BROWN TOWN LAY in amid an outright lie of peace and tranquility, the dawn just an hour or two away. Once Vegas got clear of the apartment block and its complainants, he readjusted his bag, checked the Glock in place, and sniffled to reorient himself while drinking in the cool early morning air as scurrilous winds caressed his face, and trash and other litter blew by like a metaphor for freedom itself.
There was only so much holding together of one’s shit Vegas could handle for one night, and he’d handled a truckload of it. Each intake of steadying breath helped, but there was nothing to quell his shaking hands, it seemed – nor his heart. A capacity for grief Vegas truly no longer thought within him threatened to overflow and drown him with such thoughts it was almost enough to stagger off a short distance and reconsider everything he’d imagined for the day ahead. Fear itself had marked him, but he knew that could be overcome.
At least for now.
Vanicek spoke of quitting the City. Whether Tom initiated that disaster or knew something Vegas didn’t, Vegas couldn’t tell. The lack of answers unsettled him, and the fracas in his living room which cost Jay’s life also left Vegas bewildered about what the hell even sparked the attack in the first place.
Vanicek had looked totally unhinged, but that wasn’t his reputation. Vegas knew enough to know he didn’t know the full picture – and that, if nothing else, was added reason to grieve Jay’s death.
He was fucking tired of all the killing – and yet maybe there was no end to it in sight. Vegas still ached bodily from the aftermath of the Fury attack on the City Council – and thoughts of that past disaster also helped bring Tom Vanicek’s defiant daughter to mind.
Vegas stood with his head bowed under a dead street light.
Lilianna was nowhere to be seen during Jay’s death.
The girl was too young, and definitely too skinny to take a man like him and what Vegas believed he offered. But damn, she had those eyes. And fearless, too – or not fearless, Vegas thought, but well and truly proven capable of keeping her shit well together in the face of the worst terror any survivor faced in these End Times. Lilianna took after her father in that way – and that mad motherfucker and the girl were a package deal.
And unlike Latisha, the Vanicek girl had no ass. Breeding with her’d be like mating a pit bull on a poodle and still expecting a fighting dog – or so Vegas thought.
A black man had to keep his lineage pure if he wanted to leave a legacy beyond the end of the world.
Vegas refocused himself on the exit to Brown Town and hefted the pack yet again.
But it turned out Latisha hadn’t finished.
“Vegas, you don’t take off on me like that,” she called from halfway back at the building’s front as she marched across despite the incoming rain, her arms folded inside her biggest winter coat.
Vegas welcomed her with a glowering look.
“Are you serious right now?”
“Dead serious,” Latisha said. “Come back, help me get my things. I’m comin’ with you.”
“You don’t want to go where I’m going.”
“You got sanctuary, bae?”
“I’m not your fuckin’ ‘bae’!”
Vegas shook off her hand before it landed. His fist tightened around the rucksack strap. He knew, somewhere beneath his outrage, he was probably in the wrong right now, but tiredness from this endless night evoked a mood for cutting ties and making fresh starts.
“I’m gonna go see Wilhelm and sort out this mess,” he told Latisha. “You stay put. I’m not comin’ back for you, Tisha, but I’ll come back and help you move, if you still want to, OK?”
“But you’re not comin’ back for me?”
“Naw babe, I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s safer that way anyway. Once I’m gone, Vanicek and an
yone he’s got in his crew got no reason to take anything out on you.”
“You fuckin’ shitbag, Vegas,” Latisha snapped back. “You’re usin’ that excuse on me, for fuckin’ realsies? Fuck you.”
“Hey, you’re not interested in me,” he growled and caught the hand she considered for slapping him. “So don’t make out like you do.”
“Baby, what the fuck you talkin’ about?”
Tisha tried to soften, but Vegas wouldn’t budge.
“I like you, girl, and we had some fun,” he said far more quietly than before. “And that’s not nothing, OK? I told you that before. But you’re like my . . . my fuckin’ karma or something’, yo.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Vegas released Tisha’s wrist at last and she punched him in the meat of his shoulder where she knew he could take it.
“Talk to me, Vegas.”
“Naw,” he said. “Best I leave off, aiight? You think about whether you want my help or not.”
“You got someone else?”
“No.”
Vegas pushed away the image of Lilianna again with clear and genuine annoyance.
“Don’t lie to me,” Latisha said. “I can take it, baby. Honest.”
“There’s no one else,” he said, then half-moaned. “I gotta go, Tisha.”
“Not before you explain yourself.”
Vegas held his ground longer than he wanted and thought to say half-a-dozen things and said none of them. Instead, he cut to the quick.
“You’re only after a man to keep you safe, keep you fucked, and keep you fed,” he snarled. “There ain’t nothin’ in that deal for me I can’t get when I need it, and none of that shit’s a priority right now, you got it?”
“I knew you had other women.”
Vegas couldn’t say anything else. Half his thoughts were hypocritical anyway, and he knew it. Latisha started crying and he hung his head as she spoke.
“Yeah, I thought you’d protect me.” Her voice warbled with emotion and none of it good. “Maybe I’m just stupid, huh? A man these days ain’t what it used to be.”
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 62