He squeezed the trigger and watched the rounds hit the man’s Kevlar, knocking him to the ground. Return gunfire from the second assassin hit the 4WD’s windscreen and Tom ducked just as he saw the running gunman’s head explode.
The recoil of the sniper’s high-caliber rifle rolled across the Ohio tundra as the headless man flopped lifelessly into the spindly grass at the base of the nearest outcrop. The other ambusher hissed a hurried question, but there was no reply. Then movement back down the road caught Tom’s eye.
A hooded commando appeared just long enough to lob a grenade towards the roadblock and then a second one did the same. Opening fire on them was his last thought as Tom dropped back into a squat breathing heavily and bracing for the detonations.
Instead, the gushing noise only took one look to confirm.
“Holy fuck,” he whispered in case Wilhelm could hear him. “They’re throwing smoke.”
*
TOM RAPPED HIS knuckles on the side of the car as he checked the load in his magazine.
“Wilhelm,” he barked. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“What?” came the muffled reply.
“Get out of the fucking car!”
Still cradling his gun, Tom shuffled back and yanked the rear passenger door open. Wilhelm lay pressed as low as humanly possible in the floor space behind the driver’s seat. He looked at Tom like a terrified hostage. Tom gestured with his free hand, which the Councilor misconstrued as an actual offer. He grabbed Tom’s hand in a monkey grip, mindless to Tom’s grimace of pain as he helped haul the Councilor free and onto the gravel beside him.
Pink smoke unfurled slowly ahead of the ambush, twin torrents gushing in slow-moving waves carried towards them by a favorable breeze. For decency’s sake, Tom pointed the rifle in the vague directions their attackers lay and then unleashed the remainder of the mag, but the tactical gunfire only sent Wilhelm to the ground, hands covering his ears.
“No time for that,” Tom snapped as he grabbed him by one arm. “Let’s go.”
“We’ll be killed!”
“We’re dead here.”
Their guardian angel fired another round and Tom took that as their cue to make a break for it. He dragged Wilhelm with him in a mad race to the corralled wrecks pushed together on the highway despite knowing nowhere was safe.
“Greerson!”
The troop commander popped up from behind a bullet-stained pick-up. His hair was askew, just like the wild look in his eyes, but he waved them across like Hell’s crosswalk attendant and then hefted his rifle into view.
“Go!” Greerson yelled. “I’ll cover you.”
“Go where?” Wilhelm barked.
It was another of those good questions Tom had no immediate answer for that’d been popping up with annoying regularity of late, but necessity was the mother of invention as always, and desperation made their choices stark.
“With me!”
It seemed like the thing to yell. There was only so much rescuing Tom could do. He released his grip on the Councilor’s upper arm and swiveled as he ran, Greerson pouring gunfire into the expanding pink mist. Tom tossed the spare magazine he’d scrounged in Greerson’s general direction and then refreshed his own ammo with a decided lack of grace, nearly dropping the damned thing as he fell into a stumbling run cutting directly through the middle of their impromptu battlefield headed straight for a low, collapsed-roofed building submerged in the riotous growth more than three-hundred yards away.
They were out in the open and desperately vulnerable to attack, but at about fifty yards beyond the other roadside, weeds resumed their inexorable march across the landscape and Tom ran as doggedly as he could, awaiting death at any moment and hoping – and checking backwards to confirm –Wilhelm was right on his heels no matter how madcap their escape.
“Down!”
Tom threw himself into a dive with a boisterousness he’d soon regret, nearly screaming at the pain in his shoulder and ribs as he went down into the long grass. Wilhelm pounded down beside him.
“I don’t have a weapon!” the Councilor cried.
Tom lay on his back with the sort of pain he’d only witnessed in childbirth. He gestured weakly with the assault rifle he barely held as an exchange of gunfire behind them stilled his words. Wilhelm understood him well enough. He took the modified M4A1 with an air of determined reluctance, the Councilor steeling himself almost admirably as the invisible sniper’s latest attack rang out again.
“He got one!”
Greerson’s shout sounded far quieter than the hundred yards between them.
Buried in the grass, Tom rolled over again, reorienting himself back towards where Greerson remained pinned down. Several figures advanced through the roiling pink smoke like a vague suggestion.
“Wilhelm,” Tom said.
“Should I fire?”
“Fuck yes.”
Tom wrenched the Python from his belt. The Councilor eyed the sinister black weapon.
“Did you have that . . . with you . . . in my house, Tom?”
“What do you think?”
The curt reply told Wilhelm everything he needed about the more important focus right now, with Tom bringing the pistol about, but holding fire because of the range. Wilhelm fumbled over his rifle one last time, though he clearly knew how to use one – or had, at some point. The Councilor went into a brace position lying in the loamy soil and cut loose with a single burst, and then another, as controlled and deliberate as the man himself. The sniper’s distant retort echoed out over it all, then Greerson added his reply to the fracas.
“Cover me,” Tom whispered as he managed himself upright. “And conserve your ammo. That’s the last of it.”
Pistol in hand, Tom cautiously returned, stalking into the smoke.
*
VISIBILITY WAS AS bad as he expected, and the temptation to shield his eyes was only hindered by the incapacity of his right arm. Tom leveled the Python before him, angling back towards the roadblock, knowing he was slightly ahead of it, uncertain of his footing in the haze, his eyes peeled for their unknown assailants.
The guerrillas were in the mist somewhere close, but when Tom closed in on the faint sound of static, he found a corpse curled on the ground, the dead man’s headset, strapped under his Kevlar helm, squawking and spluttering white noise.
Everything else was silent.
The rose-colored mist slowly curled across the scene, the breeze down to almost nothing.
It was so quiet, the nearby scrape of a boot on the cracked macadam carried like damnation. And then came again. Tom focused hard on the noise as the flimsy outline of the last remaining gunmen came into focus.
Tom wrenched up his gun to fire as his target launched forward, colliding with Tom as the Colt went off and Tom went down hard on the broken road and tensed to save his head doing anything worse than bouncing off the unyielding surface. His hand with the gun was trapped under the weight of the man and Tom’s right arm simply didn’t respond. The hooded gunman’s weapon was likewise crushed between them, and the best Tom could do was grasp the hot barrel with his feeble right hand and twist, angling it around beneath them with an uncertain strategy immediately cut short by another figure flinging itself onto the pile.
Alvarez’s savage pale face was shocking in such close quarters, drool and blood leaking from his mouth as he put his teeth against the side of the gunman’s head and bit down on the balaclava with abandon, tearing off the man’s ear and causing him to shriek like a hog in an abattoir as the dead driver bit again and again and the man’s hood came off to reveal a startled and terrified thirty-something with one side of his head a bleeding ruin.
The attack loosened their crush just enough for Tom to haul the Python free and point it at both, but the reincarnated driver slapped a hand down, carelessly deflecting Tom’s aim so that he fired into the Fury’s leg without any noticeable effect.
Panic and self-preservation were one in the same for the gunman. The command
o rolled off Tom and drew a serrated combat knife from his hip and lifted the weapon overhand.
And Tom shot him.
Robbed of his atonement, the unmasked man’s eyes boggled in Tom’s direction with such a look of betrayal that even Tom felt a deep existential dread thrum through him – siding with the dead against the living – despite the gunman’s likewise betrayal just minutes before.
Killed and driven into an unnatural unlife, Alvarez had no thought for such petty human sympathies. In fact, freed of such things – and with nothing left but a deep, instinctual, perhaps ancestral blood lust – he seized on the gunman’s faltering pause to throw himself bodily at the man as seemed the Furies’ wont. Alvarez impaled himself on the man’s knife, again barely noticing, snarling instead as if the dagger in his chest was a mere inconvenience. The Fury’s preternaturally fierce grip pinned the commando’s arms so it could then help himself to its victim’s throat. The soldier gave a strangled scream.
Tom rose sketchily to one knee, stood, and then stood over the pair. He executed Alvarez with a single shot to the back of the head and the bullet went through him and into the gunman’s Kevlar.
Tom clicked back the hammer and pointed the weapon at the man’s face. The dead weight of the Fury had the gunman pinned to the ground with no chance to do anything except plead at Tom with eyes wet with brains and his own blood.
“Who sent you?” Tom asked.
“Don’t kill me,” the man whimpered. “Anything.”
“Who sent you?”
“Ortega.”
And Tom fired again.
*
THE GATHERING SOUND of the motorbike engine nearly distracted Tom from Wilhelm’s warning cries. Sure enough, as the negligent breeze started doing its business, it revealed two of the bullet-riddled ambushers sitting up in the puzzled first moments of their rebirth.
Wilhelm jogged back as the smoke cleared from the roadblock and Greerson scuttled out of cover to grab one of the nearest dead commando’s guns.
“These are City armory,” he said.
Tom homed in on the growing sound and saw a figure on a motorbike cutting through the hinterland off to their far right, beyond the devastated old house he’d thought might offer them shelter.
Meanwhile, the first of the newborn Furies got to its feet and turned, seemingly sniffing the air as the feral light of hunger dropped into its cold dead eyes – the only feature visible under the mask. The dead man had lost his helmet, and his close-quarters rifle dangled uselessly on its strap around his midriff. Nearby, the second Fury simply rolled over, got to its knees, and burst into a gathering run headed straight for Tom and Greerson. The Fury still wore its helmet and mirror shades – and was all the more sinister for it.
Wilhelm joined them with his rifle already shouldered. He emptied another burst into the middle of the charging attacker, knocking it backwards off its feet even if the rounds mostly took it in the armor.
Greerson grunted an acknowledgement and then strode forward as the resident Safety officer, firing at close range into the squirming thing’s face as it rose once more. His intention was more direct, and the Fury’s head burst into a messy pulp inside the protection of its helmet – and then it lay completely still.
The other Fury made whatever reptilian calculation it could and gambled on a straight rush as well, lumbering in over the steaming corpse of its comrade to tackle Greerson. The pair of them went down. With Wilhelm circling to provide cover, and wary of the mysterious rider now closing in on them, Tom lurched forward and kicked the dead gunman in the side of the head to lever its whole body off Greerson long enough for the troop commander to execute an unarmed combat move with surprising grace, considering the circumstances. He trapped the Fury by one arm and scissored his legs around the thing’s neck and then heaved with all his might. Like any other dumb animal not comprehending its own plight, the undead commando snapped and growled, craning its neck around, unable to understand the ski mask covering its face thwarted any efforts to bite.
“I don’t think I can choke it out,” Greerson wheezed.
Tom holstered his gun and used the same hand to draw the ax from his belt. Begging Greerson to hold still, he staved in the top of the creature’s head, then repeated the move one more time for good measure.
Greerson gave Tom an exhausted nod of thanks, but anything they might’ve said was drowned out by the high-pitched roar of the dirt bike as it slowed and turned into them in a tight circle.
The rider wore a green outdoors jacket, a hunting rifle slung over his back, and somehow when he removed his helmet, Tom wasn’t at all surprised to finally recognize who’d come to their rescue.
Jackal.
*
THE HUNTER TOM met in the week before while on Foragers work kicked the stand out on the bike and set the helmet on its handlebars as the engine died. Collar-length black hair plastered the sides of the man’s narrow, sallow, sweat-soaked face, but Jekyll nodded to Tom with a sense of calm shot-through with an equal amount of obvious relief.
Tom helped Greerson to his feet, though it was more moral support than any physical assistance. Tom’s right arm cradled against his torso as if still in a sling, throbbing in borderline agony. His left arm merely ached to the bone. He offered a slow nod of welcome to the hunter he’d last seen trapping Furies and living out the shell of a downed passenger jet.
“I take it that was you playing guardian angel out there?” Tom said.
Jekyll surveyed the scene coolly, something like an Inuit cast to his dark narrow eyes that settled on the destitute 4WD abandoned with its tires blown further along the roadside.
“And I take it you’re the one who took off with my stash car?”
“The wagon?” Tom replied. “Yours?”
“One of them,” the hunter said.
“Then yeah,” Tom said. “I owe you big time. It saved my life.”
Jekyll didn’t say anything, checking out Wilhelm and Denny Greerson instead.
“That makes it twice,” Tom added to the pause.
Jekyll flicked his eyes back to Tom and nodded as if putting the matter to rest. For his part, the middleman once again, Tom weakly motioned to his companions.
“This is Denny Greerson and Councilor Ernest Wilhelm.”
Tom nodded to Greerson, almost overcome by the new camaraderie born of their most recent crisis, flustered as well to feel almost the same for Wilhelm beside him with few pretensions. Tom gently nudged the Council man trying his best to look stoic.
“Right now,” Tom said, “it feels like you three are about the only people I know aren’t trying to kill me.”
*
“IF IT WAS Ortega, the Councilor was the target,” Greerson said. “You and me, Vanicek, we’re just casualties of war. Pawns. Ortega and I never really got along . . . and you, Vanicek – you’re obviously a nuisance.”
Greerson wore a look Tom recognized from his own face in the mirror: a rank disgust with himself that he’d walked into another disaster without any hint of forewarning. The expression rang true for Tom too, though he did more to mask it.
“He trussed us up in a neat little bundle, all packed together in your vehicle and with Alvarez on instructions to head straight into this ambush,” Greerson said.
“I guess he knew our route . . . because I discussed everything with him,” Wilhelm said in a slow and slightly self-ashamed voice. “Chief Ortega, though. Are you sure? I’ve trusted him with . . . nearly everything.”
The Councilor looked even more fiercely at Tom, sucked into the maelstrom of his own disbelief.
“Everything, Tom,” Wilhelm said. “How can he be behind this? And why?”
Tom drew in a massive lungful of air as he contemplated it, feeling like he’d forgotten to breathe a lifetime ago. Deep within the introspection, his eyes tracked back to the hunter sometimes known as Jackal standing quietly to one side watching them.
“The gunman said it was Ortega.”
Tom motio
ned at the corpse, dead beneath Alvarez with his head blown into pieces sprayed across the edge of the tarmac like puke from a wild night out.
Wilhelm stashed the rifle and stood with hands on hips, civilian once again, though he looked like he’d never be the same man who’d set out that morning.
“This all means,” he said, “while I’m absent, I’ve left the City’s defense entirely in the hands of the one man I never should have trusted.”
“Does that mean he’s in bed with Plume?” Tom asked.
“Plume?” Greerson said. “Who’s Plume?”
“You should attend a few more City Council meetings, trooper,” Wilhelm said with the weakest of all possible smiles. “Madeline Plume’s a mouthpiece for the Colonel. And Ortega’s ridiculed August Rhymes more times than I can count. This can’t be right, Tom. Are you sure?”
“One thing’s for sure,” Tom said. “If Plume’s involved, that means there’s a woman in the middle of this – that doesn’t sound like Burroughs’ style.”
“That line Ortega’s been trotting out blaming the Brotherhood is horseshit anyway,” Greerson said with real venom. “I figured he just wanted someone to blame so it didn’t look like he didn’t have his shit together. But it was probably deliberate.”
Denny pulled a wad of tobacco from his belt and gummed it.
“Misdirection,” Tom said.
“Fantastic,” Wilhelm added and sighed.
He walked off a short distance, rubbing his face furiously with his hands.
Tom’s eyes drifted back towards Jekyll.
“Life in the City sounds great,” the hunter said.
Tom couldn’t help a weak laugh. He nodded with dry agreement.
“I could do with some ethanol for my bike,” Jekyll said. “You know, if you think the City owes me something.”
After the Apocalypse Book 3 Resurgence: a zombie apocalypse political action thriller Page 15