“And then what?”
She had to raise her voice like a theater heckler to be heard. But words were pointless. Hardy wasn’t taking questions. He flicked the automatic’s gun barrel at her again by way of encouragement, not that she’d ever stopped her tired, limping trudge along the road’s edge.
“You could at least tell me where we’re going,” she called back.
“Out of this weather,” Hardy said. “You should be grateful.”
“Fuck,” she said and actually managed some semblance of a laugh. “You think?”
“What do you think Greerson would’ve done to you?”
“I did it to him, first,” Lila shot back.
Now it was Hardy’s turn to chuckle, though Lila nearly missed most of it amid the barrage of wind. Somewhere close by, there came a horrific ripping noise, and then the upper body of a weakened tree lifted up and across like on a wire, flew across the road a quarter-mile ahead of them, clipped the roof of a house, and then it and numerous roof tiles continued sprawling across in the act of disintegration as they were sucked into the overall murk.
Lila cursed to herself, unable to move faster on her ruined ankle. Pain already crept like fire to her knee, joining similar signals from her ribs, her hip, her exhausted arms, the wind-numbed swelling in her face. She curled a fist without any weapons in it, imagining them instead – but Hardy hadn’t finished.
“Don’t kid yourself, girl,” he called out to her. “Greerson had a hate-on for you. By comparison, you killed him quick. He was going to hurt you.”
Lila stopped. Her ankle demanded it. The wooden fence buried in the overgrown roadside had a cluster of dime store mannequins crushed against it like someone’s forgotten prank, and she stared at the chipped and dented blank faces a second before rounding on Hardy, who’d halted, concerned ten yards behind her in the middle of the road. A weather-blasted old Kombi van rested nearby on its side with grass and ferns shooting all through it, and a crow landed briefly, seeking respite, before a fresh gust claimed it in a flapping of wings as it disappeared into the ether.
“So, you saved me?”
Lila wanted to play it nice – to try and manipulate the verminous little prick – but she hadn’t the stomach for it.
“That’s the story you’re telling yourself, huh?”
“Get moving,” Hardy answered. “We can’t stay outside like this.”
Lilianna dropped her eyes, no need to feign tiredness.
“I can’t walk anymore,” she said. “My ankle. . . .”
The trooper checked her foot where the flesh at the bottom of her jeans was swollen to capacity, the sock hiding somewhere inside the trainer out of sight. Hardy tutted, convinced. And he scanned around their location, the roadside trek fallen a long way short perhaps of how he’d imagined it.
“We’re still in their territory,” he said. “Nowhere here’s good.”
“‘Good’?”
Lilianna had no idea what she even meant with the question, but Hardy still answered it.
“Safe.”
Yet more tiredness flushed Lila’s features and she fought off the wish to lay down.
“Not yet,” Hardy said, reading her mood. “Keep walking . . . if you want to live.”
*
THE MORNING BECAME a blur of pain and sorrow and exhaustion, and eventually Lilianna plunged into delirium and wasn’t exactly sure how the next few hours passed, except that she desperately wished for her father and brother – and feared both were dead. The blinding wind added its misery to her pained trudge, which only ended when Hardy physically guided her into a grass-infused parking lot.
He clearly no longer viewed Lilianna as a threat – perhaps the greatest insult of them all. But Hardy’s view was well-founded. The hours which had become days had overpowered her at last, leaving her a weakling the foul trooper could safely guide by one shoulder towards a row of motel room doors across the otherwise empty lot.
Lila stumbled and craned her head to the sun, half-blotted out by swirling gray clouds. Detritus torn from the countryside hovered up there like birds surfing the storm, and she returned her gaze, disoriented, to Hardy, who did no more than offer a weird, shy smile, before encouraging her to continue on.
She started to black out, but then Lila’s eyes flew open at noise like from a freight train.
A shed door hurtled out of the sky and collided with the motel’s old neon sign. Glass exploded in another spray, which joined and then dislodged the wooden door as it all flew together across the motel’s roof tiles like machine-gun fire.
Instantaneously, the light darkened and thick torrents of rain pelted the motel lot, smacking into Lilianna and Hardy like baby fists. Freezing water soaked Lila’s face and eyes, and she wakened at once as Hardy left off his hold on her arm to simply shout an encouragement and run for shelter like a Tinder date gone wrong.
Lilianna stood stock still.
The water slapped her back into consciousness – the freezing downpour like a root canal as she flicked terrified eyes after her captor, then around to take in the disaster unfolding, thick serpentine shapes rising out across the barren vista behind the motel like angered gods come to wreak their unhappiness on the mortal realm. Shrapnel came with the rain, but Lila didn’t even notice the piece of twisted wire which flicked past and opened a narrow gash across her bare arm, above where the flesh of her tricep was already a glossy, dented white scar.
Lilianna hobbled away from the motel.
The road was lined with residential homes shredded down to their foundations by the intervening years, the house-proud Ohioans snarling in their graves at rank nature’s intrusion on their domain. Trees now held dominion across the wide verges and generous driveways and the loose-gravel roadside to create thickets of head-high saplings, grown like teenagers too thin for such tall bodies, their branches already destroyed by the weather. Heavy cold rain sloughed across the scene, and Lilianna ran into that madness blind, spurred on by Hardy’s frantic yells.
Greerson’s lone surviving hunter hunkered under the motel awning, but then committed to the chase. And after one more careful backwards glance, Lilianna threaded away through the maze of the young forest using it for handholds as she struggled to remain upright.
Lila hurtled into the cover and soon lost trace of pursuit. She veered left and right almost randomly, sacrificing stealth for speed and hoping misdirection might play its part.
There was nothing for her to grab for a weapon better than a tree branch, and so she armed herself and ended up using it more like a crutch, continuing to hobble on through ongoing thickets as the sky overhead, beyond her vision, crashed and clattered, turning black, and when she cast a single glance back, Lila was struck by the most bizarre sight imaginable as a horse writhed, twisting and kicking and neighing as it ascended into swirling clouds so much that Lilianna dismissed the vision, imagining for a terrible moment that her whole life now was just a fever dream.
But the freezing rain and the urgent need to escape her future rapist were enough to keep Lilianna lucid. She ran blindly into a wooden fence and crashed over it, landing awkwardly, her left hip in brief agony before she got herself upright with the fence’s help, glanced back to see Hardy unhooking his rifle, and then turned tail to run on through an ancient back yard.
It didn’t seem like a yard because the fences and the bulk of the house had disintegrated long ago. The brick chimney and a trellis of steel beams hinted at caution, and seconds later, Lilianna was feeling her way between the carcasses of several vintage sports cars concealed in the wild savannah. Hardy continued somewhere to her rear. The yard ended in a hump of earth. Lilianna clambered over a collapsed fence and into the yard of the neighboring home, its walls still standing, roof gone, a metal storage shed flipped on its side and wedged into the broken-windowed hulk of an old school truck.
Beyond it all, another road cut through the sward. Recent traffic had flattened its natural crop of wild canola.
T
he road was slippery with the decomposing stalks and the rain. Several big structures loomed out of the frieze – an installation of some sort ringed by a huge metal wire fence. Lila only had eyes for the gate as she plucked up her remaining spirits, crying uncontrollably with rage and grief and terror while using the tree branch to hobble forward.
Hardy came out on the road behind her.
“Stop!”
Too tired for words, Lilianna ignored the man.
Hardy jogged up behind her, surprised again when Lila whirled and struck him with the tree branch. Although the crutch snapped in half, the blow sent Hardy sprawling and the pistol from his hand. The dull glint of metal vanished into the profuse road edge. Hardy squared her with a vengeful look as he went crawling after the gun.
And Lilianna limped towards the gate.
*
THE SOLID MESH took her weight and the top of the padlocked gates didn’t even have razor wire to protect the shutdown old zoo and aquarium. Hardy came after her with a limp of his own, and Lilianna only let her tiredness overcome her again when she’d swung both legs and herself over the top of the gate.
She fell heavily fifteen feet to the ground and lay sprawled and panting – and realized the rain had moved on. The saturated brick paving was alive with water whipped into a misty frenzy by the wind. Lilianna shielded her eyes from it as she rolled over, got to her knees with difficulty, and backed away as Hardy came up the access road with his pistol on her and still without the desperation to use it.
He’d already shown he didn’t want Lila dead. That knowledge wasn’t much comfort.
She had no plan, but she couldn’t keep running for much longer. Her only option lay with the nearest buildings.
She ran through an entrance of timber poles, sobbing in pain only to stop herself shrieking, propelling herself along on the wooden supports and catching sight of a well-tended stand of fruit trees, old ticket booths repurposed into earthen beds, and beyond them a series of service buildings fronted with roller doors – one of which stood open.
Lila headed for it, the grainy details resolving as she went. A mud-splattered SUV with a handmade wooden roof rack hunkered down in the shadows beyond the roller door. Wicker baskets were mounted on its rear door.
By the time Lila reached it, she saw the children’s bicycles and low work benches covered in dirt and garden tools sharing space with the dingy-colored four-wheel drive.
“I said to stop!”
Lilianna gave another a cursory look over one shoulder as she entered the shed. There was nothing to stop Hardy following, impotent pistol in hand, and for Lila it became a foot race she couldn’t win as she slid and thumped along the side of the parked truck, saw another door at the back of the shed, then slipped and fell on all the spilled soil.
Hardy bustled in, making the mistake of holstering his gun to reach free hands out to grab her. But Lilianna twisted about, kicking in the front of Hardy’s knee so that the kneecap gave way with a sickening snap.
Hardy screamed in panic and rage, and then he finally went for the gun as Lila expected. The hunter fell on his ass, one leg bent at a wrong angle, and fresh rain pelted the metal roof overhead with a roar. Lilianna threw herself atop Hardy with both hands going for his gun. Hardy drew the weapon, only for her to slap it away.
The dull metal thud of the pistol on dirty concrete was echoed by the rear door cracking open.
A fair-featured woman in an orange headscarf stared at the pair of them as Lila and Hardy floundered like mud wrestlers on the filthy floor.
Hardy sensed Lila going for his knife, and he abandoned defense to instead twist away from her to crawl across the wet potting mix to his discarded gun. And Lilianna clawed after him, grabbing hold of his belt and knocking over one of the wooden benches which tipped more soil and scattered tools around them.
Despite his broken knee, Hardy backhanded Lila across her aching jaw. She saw stars for a moment, and came back from the darkness to find the stranger in the doorway still watching as Hardy leapfrogged the final distance to grab his gun’s handle.
Lilianna clutched the trowel without really thinking about it.
She dived after Hardy in desperation and stabbed him in the middle of the back.
Hardy screamed, and then screamed some more – with Lilianna pinning Hardy’s broken leg beneath her – and then she stabbed the gardening spade into the back of her abductor’s head as hard as she could.
It was good quality steel and didn’t bend.
The first blow drove Hardy’s face into sharp contact with the floor, but he had little time to register it. Second and subsequent strikes cleaved through his skull and directly into his brainstem, and Lilianna was a thorough young woman. Before that tenuous strength finally deserted her, Lila made sure he would never threaten anyone again.
*
LILIANNA LAY DISORIENTED on the muddy floor and barely registered people emerging through the warehouse door. The woman in the head wrap lead the way, followed by a cautious, skinny teenager in a black cap, a younger black boy, and two even younger children. The youngest – a little dark-haired girl – carried a tattered blue Carebear, holding it against her chest and peering down at Lilianna between its frayed ears. Standing back a safe distance, the teenage girl whispered to herself, words lost to the storm assault. Her eyes flicked back and away from where Hardy lay dead.
It felt like forever before Lila could move, and even then, she did so in agony. The tall woman – aged in her late 20s, and clearly not all of the children’s mother if she was mother to any of them at all – bent to help Lilianna stand, and found herself instead brushed off.
“I could’ve done with your help earlier,” Lila said.
The woman said nothing. She and the children swapped apprehensive looks.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said helplessly. “I’m . . . You can call me Sophie.”
“Sophie.”
Lila repeated it, dulled. She still hadn’t made it fully upright, and she took stock for a long moment, listening to the wind shriek. Finally, Lilianna stood on shaky legs, her feet slippery in their muddy shoes. Hail started hitting the shed. Lilianna eyed the SUV and the baskets and the spilled gardening equipment and then around to the young woman again.
Sophie concealed her sun-ripened features with the scarf she wore like a disguise, protecting her against the grit whipping in at them through the open roller door. The woman glanced out at the hurricane winds, then gestured to gather the youngest three children.
“I’m sorry,” the woman shouted. “I have to think about the children first.”
The older boy tugged her sleeve, and for the first time, Lilianna noticed the child was armed with a small tomahawk. He pointed out towards the roller doors, the enemy outside not so easily defeated. Uncontrolled tremors coursing through Lila as she fought off the cold and the shock.
“Mama!” the girl with the teddy bear cried.
Lila turned tired eyes back to the shed entrance to see where the girl pointed.
A skeletal figure stood at the front of the SUV caked in mud and grime.
And it held a gun.
Denny Greerson lifted the AR15 on Lilianna and stared at her with barely-suppressed rage.
*
DISORIENTATION NOW COMPLETE, Lilianna stared back at Greerson as if expecting him to lurch forward with a Fury’s madness to tear and bite. Resurrection was the only thing that made any sense to her, except then Greerson flicked the safety off his rifle and took a single step, blue eyes the only flash of color on his mud-masked face.
The Chief’s hair was plastered to his skull, and he’d abandoned the heavier gear and body armor as well as one sleeve sometime since Lilianna saw him last, vanished into the sand mine and presumed dead. The wind tore at his wet clothes, plastering them to a skeletal frame and nearly plucking him backwards as the scenery behind them slowly tore itself apart under the storm’s assault.
“You!” Greerson bawled at Lilianna.
So
phie and the children froze, headed for the door. The frail teenage girl was closest to him, and Greerson turned the gunsight her way.
“Don’t you fuckin’ move!”
Just as fast, Greerson put his focus back on Lilianna, the young woman drunk with fatigue, off-balance, unable to find Hardy’s forgotten gun until too late – long enough for the Safety Chief to bark a harsh tutting noise. He switched the assault rifle back on her.
“You!”
Greerson’s wrath focused on the teenage girl with a frightening intensity for such a battered man. His scrawny-strong frame caked in mud and grime and blood somehow only made him look more dangerous, and he had the attitude to back it. He flicked the gun barrel between the girl and Lilianna.
“Bring her here,” he ordered.
“Siri! No!” Sophie yelled.
The teenager stood rooted to the spot as if in the middle of a seizure. Greerson’s hot flashing eyes lit upon the older woman.
“You, then!” he called. “Do it now!”
Sophie looked to Lilianna in terror. The girl Siri remained frozen, while the youngest of the two little boys buried his face into Sophie’s thick skirt. Such aberrant trauma rent Lilianna’s heart, driving her to take a step towards the gunman, lifting her hand to halt Sophie.
“No!” Greerson bawled.
The tip of his tongue appeared, shockingly bright against his dark face. The storm had shredded all humanity from his visage. He turned the gun on the other woman again and Lilianna stopped. She looked back and across at the children as Greerson spoke again.
“You, I said,” he ordered Sophie. “Bring her! Slow!”
The single look showed he still feared Tom Vanicek’s unpredictable daughter, and in that moment, Lila knew it was for good reason. Her low growl was too weak to escape her chest, but the spirit that drove it burnt brighter.
She took another step toward Greerson as an enormous rending, crushing, tearing noise outside deafened them all, sending the children running in panic despite where Sophie stood, hands frozen as if still holding the little boy in her arms.
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 69