After The Apocalypse (Book 5): Retribution

by Hately, Warren

  But Vegas only shook his head.

  “We don’t get out of here soon, girl, imma bust a move anyway, you dig?”

  Angrily, Vegas then pushed off from the stairs to stomp along the walkway with the irritation of a man not suspended thirty feet above the ground.

  *

  THEIR POSITION IN the rafters gave Lilianna and Vegas a unique view across the theater, and had they seen earlier what now they confirmed, there was no way either could’ve mustered the courage to enter – and few would blame them for it.

  The theater was overrun by dozens of Furies, maybe as many as a hundred. Hell, maybe even twice that. It was impossible to tell. The stage lights, the intervening scenery, the puddles of unlit gloom, and the collapse of several internal wall sections obscured any clear view of their surroundings. A sense of the darkness teeming with horrors was more tangible than confirmed, and from their eagle’s vantage, Lila and Vegas saw the moving figures in other parts of the complex snarling and fending each other off as they continued the frenzied feasting started when the whole place was overrun twenty minutes or more earlier. It just wasn’t possible to get a clear sense of the numbers, with some of the undead mindlessly tracking them through the black-painted corridors, or circling around in the backstage area, or trapped by ignorance in other parts of the dinner theater still fighting over scraps, or hammering at boarded-up windows, disfigured by wounds and injuries incurred during the course of the night.

  It was only a few seconds until Lila and Vegas poised above the three men and two women waving their arms from within their burial chamber. Two sofas and a corpse were wedged behind the green room door, down in their lamp-lit shelter, and it was luck as much as any rigorous defense that explained the Citizens’ survival. Vegas moved away up another turn of the metal boardwalk, a short flight of steps echoing with his bootfalls as he crested the scaffolding directly overhanging the stage, and whatever he was doing there, he quit it almost at once and left Lilianna behind him, frozen with uncertainty, the people trapped in the green room also going still as they wrestled with crying out for help again, or keeping their mouths shut to avoid any further detection. Their eyes bore up at Lila tearfully, but her gaze was fixed on her companion’s broad back, and she hissed at Vegas, “What is it?” and got no immediate response.

  The metal platform shook instead.

  Lila scanned around in the half-light, utterly helpless to determine the cause of the latest disturbance, though the liquid churning in her bowels confirmed what she knew, even if she couldn’t see it for herself. A fetid moan wafted in their direction, re-igniting Lilianna’s determined scowl as she carefully picked her way after Vegas, more daunted than her companion by their elevation off the ground. One of the men in the green room shouted “Hey!” before his fellow survivors shooshed him, and then Lila was just a few steps away from Vegas when he turned with horror etched across his ebon features.

  “We gotta get out o’ here,” he said.

  “Fuck,” Lila replied. “Not this again.”

  “Seriously,” Vegas said and pointed to where Lilianna couldn’t see. He kept his voice low as he turned back to her and started down the steps until they were close. “We been lucky so far, girl. There’s too many of ‘em. If we’re shutting this place down, we gotta shut the whole place down, OK?”

  Lila couldn’t understand her own confusion at what Vegas was saying, though it felt like shattered nerves left even her veins aching and her thoughts like mud. All she could retain was the urgent wish to save the people pleading up at them, even though Vegas looked ready to make another run for it.

  “We’ve come this far,” she said lowly. “And Mercy –”

  The other man shook his head, eyes dropping. “Na.”

  But Lilianna refused to bow. Without much further thought to strategy, she looked across the far end of the walkway within reach of several of the gigantic hanging black theater drapes, and Vegas only watched as she struggled to lean out across the gap to snag one.

  She hauled in an armload of the heavy fabric, exposing a narrow space technicians in the past used for secretly accessing stage left during performances. The rustling fabric revealed two hunched Furies who snapped their necks up at her thirty feet above them.

  “Sorry, boys,” she muttered gamely under her breath.

  But Lilianna’s efforts to drag the heavy fabric across was worsened as one of the two dead men below clutched onto the bottom of the drape – and to her horror – started clawing its way up. The effort was hindered by the Fury’s mate trying the same thing, and they fought there a moment trying to get past each other while putting an impossible weight on the curtain. Lilianna grunted, and now more of the trapped survivors started to shout.

  Vegas hissed, “Tell ‘em to stop doing that.”

  Lilianna looked across at him for moral support, but dismay creased her features seeing Vegas already at the other end of the walkway and headed back the way they’d come. She made eyes at him, urging him to stop, and the noisy collapse of another black theater flat somewhere close by diverted her attention. Lila’s heart plunged another notch witnessing three more Furies down below surging in through another hole in their defenses and tracking around unerringly towards the green room door.

  She chanced another look at Vegas, frozen at the top of the stairs.

  “We gotta burn the place down,” he told her.

  *

  THE HEAVY DRAPE slowly came across as Lila fought against the Furies’ pull, looping up more and more of the fabric until she could draw her knife. She started hacking the thick cloth, terrifyingly mindful of the two creatures intent on scaling up the twisted drape towards her, and at the same time scanning madly about as the metal walkway shuddered violently.

  Vegas spotted the running Fury first.

  The woman’s thick braids flew wild beyond her as she surged along the catwalk, her means of access unknown, fingers splayed like talons made all the more real for her long red manicured nails. The Furies had killed her, tearing out her guts and throat and leaving her ribs splayed like a nightmare of the body, and now she sought to kill in turn.

  Ax in hand, Vegas stepped back on the intercept and Lilianna had no more time to watching anything else. Squealed grunting sounded over the platform’s edge, and with a furious final burst of effort, she hauled across the length of drapery she’d cut, trying to fish it down into the green room and the waiting hands of the two women pushed to the front of the line by the men. One of them braced the green room door looking panicked because he could see what his role augured in the next few minutes – or next few seconds, perhaps, if Lila’s plan didn’t work. And by her own admission, she’d proven no star recruit in those efforts so far. Amid all the ruckus, noise, and chaos – ever mindful of the agitated horde of Furies intermingling away beyond the silhouette of the backstage – Lilianna felt haunted by cries she perhaps only imagined coming from Mercy trapped in the upturned Jeep fifty yards away.

  Vegas’ battle cry drowned out the survivors’ fevered excitement. The torn curtain ripped higher as they exerted some pressure, but Lilianna was confident it would hold. The climbing part was one hundred per cent on the trapped Citizens now, and Lila wished she still held the steel rod as she checked back to her right and saw the first of the two Furies scrabble to the top. The dead man’s bleeding hands clutched the metal scaffolding at the bottom of the catwalk, and then the second Fury appeared over his shoulder, climbing over its fellow predator like a complete bastard, trapping the first one, but coming even faster over the top.

  And all Lilianna had was the knife.

  The thing clattered wetly onto the end of the walkway and Lila backed off five paces, poised the only way she knew how, able to count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she’d been required to fight for her life this way. Past survival left her no veteran. She could barely breathe, nor swallow in her throat, and the cries and screams of the survivors below her, and the Furies now attacking the green room doo
r in full force, left her almost dazed in a desperate survival panic of her own. Thankfully, it found expression in the hardened set of her face as Lila clutched the knife handle as hard as she could as if to will her whole body to silence and harden into the one weapon as well.

  The Fury got to its feet and charged her.

  The thing moved in exactly the same untrained way as Aurora had, during their public sparring match back at the Bastion gym.

  Lila almost grinned to use the same tactic, though rather than catch the Fury as she moved to take it out from one side, Lila clutched the catwalk’s lone handrail instead as the whole structure shook and the Fury fell.

  The brutal creature had no sense of its orientation and clutched wildly, twisting as it hurtled to the ground. But to Lila’s shock, the Fury hit the top of the green room’s dividing wall and snaked desperate talons around it, arresting its descent, and then tipping over and into the green room and onto the four of its denizens clustered trying to get up the torn theater drape.

  The second Fury hung on to the other part of the slashes drape throughout the turbulence, and as the catwalk righted itself, it scurried up over the edge and turned its momentum into a staggering charge at Lilianna, herself only just recovering her balance and holding to the handrail for dear life. She met the creature with her dagger in the wrong hand, but stuffed the blade into the side of the monster’s neck all the same.

  It was just a shame she was aiming for its head.

  In trying to claw her, the Fury punched Lila in the face, and she felt several more blows land as she flinched, eyes squeezed almost shut, anticipating its raking claws, fixated on wrenching her knife free to stab again. The walkway resumed its swaying, but rather than let go, Lila drove her knee into the Fury, repeating the move a half-dozen times even though the creature remained insensate. The solid blows halted its momentum and gave Lilianna the strength needed to get the knife free. She reversed the grip, moved around the Fury, and trusted her dexterity to swap hands, grabbing the handrail again with her left, and now driving her knee into the Fury from the other way, lifting it slightly as she stabbed again, strong enough that if the damned thing moved she’d risk driving it into her own face. But her aim was true, and the dagger-point pierced the dead man’s moustache and up into its brain, and Lilianna pulled the knife free to let the corpse tumble harmlessly onto the concrete floor of the side corridor where its head split open with a disgusting crack.

  Lila almost stabbed the woman who clambered up from the drape and sent the walkway shuddering again. The pretty girl in her twenties had a nasty black eye, saturated by a panicked sweat, and she only weakly raised her hands, kneeling, as Lilianna’s knife hand came up. Lilianna scouted back around, saw no sign of Vegas, and then the chokepoint of the theater curtain now in the grasp of a solid-figured bald man, pulling himself hand over hand away from the chaos. The remaining female survivor threw up useless hands, already failed in her efforts without the upper body strength to get herself free. The man with his back to the door watched horrified as the fallen Fury pinned the last remaining male survivor down and took enormous bites of the screaming victim’s face, and seeing that, the man at the door broke and pushed past the shrieking woman and started up the curtain as well.

  The green room door at once pushed open, the Furies outside it grunting as the door stuck half-open with the two sofas and some nameless, poor, previous unfortunate adding his dead girth to the blockade.

  The bald man at the lead grasped the edge of the catwalk with one hand. For a moment, his hold looked tenuous, then he gave a snarling look down at the frantic woman below, and dragged himself up with impressive strength.

  “That’s why I spend all that ‘fucking time in the gym’, Eileen!”

  The woman probably didn’t hear him. She was more concerned with the snarling terror bursting through the door behind her. The Fury on top of her friend snapped its jaws as she trembled across from it, but kept drinking the torrent of blood gushing from its victim’s neck while the woman watched and cowered.

  Then the dam wall broke. Three Furies burst through. They took her to the ground with horrific force. Lilianna was struck by the violence as if watching a pack rape as much as any murder. The urge to throw up again swept through her and she was only distracted from it by the second man crawling up onto the landing and immediately grabbing her by the shoulders.

  “How do we get out of here?” he bawled.

  Lilianna wasn’t sure she had the answer to that.

  “I’m heading this way,” she said and started past him, the bald man, and the surviving young woman. Over her shoulder, Lilianna added, “You take your own risks.”

  *

  THE WOMAN BEHIND her called out, “You got Eileen and Murchison killed!”

  If her companions didn’t move to physically cover the woman’s mouth, Lilianna might’ve turned truly feral. Instead, she offered a viper’s glare, poised with inadvertent menace with the hunting knife still in one bloody hand. Then Lila whipped back around to the stairs and started down while scouring the dark-lit scenery for trace of Vegas as well as threats between her and the exit and within that awful dangerous triangulation created by Mercy’s wrecked Jeep. Lila saw Vegas there instead, then heard the clanging of his ax as he struck heedlessly into the twin metal tanks affixed to the armored car’s back. On the second blow, ethanol started gurgling from the rent in the metal tank, then Vegas moved focus to its twin.

  Blaspheming under her breath, Lila checked the elevated layout. The stairs descended to the ground, at the rear of stage right, the darkness nearly total directly at the rear of the back of the stage. A wooden platform and more steps ran behind the stage, one of its drapes open a chink to admit light from the collapsed stage beyond it and revealing at least several dozen Furies gorging themselves on the leftover dead even as their meals arose to join them. It was truly awful, but terrifying, too, and the shadows at the end of her immediate options left her chilled to the core.

  She took the knife between her teeth and dropped to the surface of the metal walkway. The two men and the woman behind her hissed in alarm, distressed at sight of a twenty-five-foot drop. Lilianna only gave them a final narrowed glance backwards and scuttled down dangerously over the edge, offering her slender legs and posterior for anything malevolent within reach. The moment she had her grip on the walkway secure, she then pushed herself further off, ignoring the pain of the hard metal edge punching into her wrists as she swung herself across and into the nearest upright flats and tried surfing their collapse to the theater floor.

  It didn’t go as smoothly as that. The collapse was gradual, and less than a second into it, Lilianna’s momentum doubled back on her and the half-broken plywood wall turned into a hard-angled slide for her to tumble down, delivered sprawling right into that turgid blackness she feared. At least she had the knife, only a minor cut to her mouth as she took it and almost stabbed pre-emptively into the night creeping into the dark building.

  The threats weren’t in her imagination, either. The hollow sound of her impact on the wooden flats drew two nearby Furies on a vector towards her, scrambling over and then flattening the collapsed walls as they went, heads already cocked upright tracking she and the others as they’d proceeded ahead. Even the first of the two male survivors jumping down in the Furies’ wake didn’t distract the hunting pair as they tore in at Lila veering left and right at the last moment as if by prior agreement.

  The first Fury grunted with a squeal as Vegas’ ax chopped in bodily from one side. The creature’s feet flew out from beneath it as the broad blow sent a patina of blood raining across the concrete floor. The butchered Fury’s head cracked loudly on the hard surface and it went still.

  Lilianna, on the other hand, backed away from the other which made a passing lunge at her, and moving backwards, she turned to put her back towards Vegas and start the retreat. The other male survivor jumped down too, and he dutifully turned to catch his young companion as she followed suit.
Together, the four of them beat an exit across the broken flats, the woman leading the way left through the last upright section of corridor, and then out the second plywood door into the back loading bays.

  The orange security light spilling in through the wide-opened door showed a chilling scene of carnage. Mounds to left and right of where the Jeep had crashed through, gauging deep clefts in the concrete floor, were carpeted with disabled Furies moaning and snapping and reaching weakly with broken limbs. The bald man with the stocky build ran ahead of Lila’s group and headed straight for the open doors, barreled out into the twilight, and then became spot-lit as circling predators set upon him.

  “Shit!” screeched the complaining young woman with them, though she covered her own mouth this time, swiveling about in alarm, and Lilianna used the moment to snatch up a discarded M16 from the ground, checked the magazine and found it empty, and then hunting around until a chrome-plated pistol caught her eye instead. Vegas saw her prize – a few steps closer to him than she was – and retrieved it for himself with a discreet, fatalistic snicker, clearly not yet convinced anything was getting them free of this disaster before they met a grisly end.

  In his other hand, Vegas held a cigarette lighter.

  “No,” Lila said, and moved for him with her hand out, which only forced Vegas to take more steps towards the exit and out of her reach.

  Trailing them, the frantic-looking male survivor picked up the same empty rifle as Lila, drew identical conclusions, and then found an AR15 he brought up just as one of the closest Furies in the darkness beyond them charged forward. The man emptied the remainder of the ammunition into it. The dead Fury’s head burst open like something volcanic as the corpse eased itself, then fell the rest of the way heavily to the ground. Lilianna only watched, stricken as the ethanol leaking from the wrecked Jeep finally started splashing down and across the floor in the open space between the backstage area and the remainder of the old dinner theater.