After The Apocalypse (Book 5): Retribution

by Hately, Warren

  And yet the loss weighed so heavy. It opened the floodgates for a long and painful trek through her own back catalogue of griefs, so that in the end she could barely rise from the single steel-framed bed anyway, and the life of her father’s household went on around if not despite her.

  Her sense of duty to the City’s mission hadn’t faltered. If anything, the death of her friends like Montana and Teddy reaffirmed how treachery, like that dealt by the Lefthanders, couldn’t be allowed to win. As much as she loved her father and brother, she was a young woman, and life in the wilderness forever wasn’t a life she wanted to live. With or without Beau, she wanted something bigger. Her father quoted her someone once upon a time and it stayed with her: too afraid to live, too afraid to do. She’d be neither.

  Yet she had to grieve her dead fairytale romance and the new life it had promised. Lila tried forcing her way onto her father’s search team, trying to compensate for the inescapable sadness – conscious also of a sense of recklessness within her perhaps a danger to everyone else, so that she surrendered far more prematurely than she might have when Tom put his foot down.

  By the time his search squad returned, and the rain grew heavier with the night, Lila’s resolve finally settled.

  Downstairs, she had to pick her way through the open lobby where Kent and his wife and kids had settled into their temporary nest, spare mattresses but no frames for them crowding the corridor to the back rooms at ground level. Attila was on watch, but the pounding of the rain made it seem unlikely many ne’er-do-wells were out and about.

  Yet there was no promise that was true either.

  Tom stood in his back office, studying a ledger by the light of a hurricane lamp turned down low. He looked up and smiled and snapped the tome shut as Lilianna made her way in.

  “What are you working on?” she asked.

  “I’m just killing time, like the rest of us, babe.”

  Lilianna nodded, holding herself as if for comfort, consciousness of her dead tone.

  “What was it like out there, earlier?”

  “No action on The Mile,” her father said. “We found a trading post, down in an old supermarket – thanks to your boss, actually. Carlotta Deschain.”

  “She was out of the Bastion?”

  “Ah yeah,” Tom said. “Come to think of it, you might not have a boss anymore.”

  He chuckled like a man with a secret.

  “Technically, Miss Stacey is my boss,” Lila said. “But why do you say that?”

  Tom motioned as if magical would save him from an explanation. Eventually, he resorted to words.

  “It’s complicated,” he said. “Adult stuff.”

  “What, like I’m not an adult now?”

  Her father smirked, unaware Lilianna knew when she was getting fobbed off.

  “I’m just saying there’s other adults’ stuff,” he said. “Infidelity. Carlotta was going back to the ‘Bastion’ when I left her to clear out her stuff.”

  “You went to the Bastion?”

  “No, but we took her close,” Tom said. “There were patrols nearby. She’ll be fine.”

  “You’re seriously not going to tell me the details?”

  “Is it needed?”

  “Bastion scuttlebutt?” Lilianna chortled without her usual amusement. “You tell me who she’s been cheating with, and I’m sure I can trade that for a dozen eggs. You’re talking about Councilor Wilhelm’s wife, after all.”

  “How many chickens do they have in the Enclave?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Lila replied. “Hundreds. There’s a guy full-time in charge.”

  “Jesus.”

  “We eat a lot of eggs,” Lila said emptily. “You never know, dad. You might like it there.”

  “I don’t think so,” Tom replied. “And I prefer having you here.”

  The rain intensified outside, then came the sound of crashing thunder. Tom looked back to her thoughtfully, and Lila told him, “You know I’m going in the morning?”

  Tom nodded and couldn’t help another one of those smirks.

  “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he said and smiled. “You never know when this rain’s going to let up.”

  *

  TOM OPENED THE gate for them almost as if the daylight was too much for his eyes. Despite feeling utterly depleted by the past four days, Lilianna smiled as sunnily as she could. The sadness almost made her grieve for her father, too, in a way. She knew what her departure meant. But Tom’s constant maudlin expression at even the slightest mention of the Bastion was more than she could bear.

  “I’m keeping a room for you . . . and Beau too.”

  Lilianna studied him a second in the wet morning light.

  “If you have to,” she snickered.

  “Yeah,” her father agreed. “You’re getting . . . you’re being careful with him, right?”

  Lilianna sighed even as she died a little inside.

  “It’s not like that, dad.”

  Tom failed to conceal his surprise at the tone she’d failed to strain from her reply, and when he asked, “I thought you two were getting serious?” she had nothing to give.

  “Yeah.”

  Tom closed the gate and Lilianna did her best Beau impersonation, looking almost anywhere else than at him. A man crossed the street down at the next intersection carrying a crate of something on his shoulder, looked their way, and vanished into a run.

  “Are you . . . OK?” her father asked.

  Lilianna blew out her cheeks.

  “You told me, dad, everyone has scars.”

  “And?”

  She looked back at him, front-on, trying to stay clear-eyed.

  “Sometimes I hate it when you’re right.”

  She walked off, and her father followed, bringing up the rear until he came alongside and they settled into a steady march, Tom getting the implicit message not to dig too deep. The night’s rainfall sparkled off nearly everything and gathered in pools in the buckled, paved street, somehow rendering the squalor of the cityscape more benign. Yet the closer they drew to Lila’s destination, the more remorseful she became.

  She glanced across at her father’s profile with palpable guilt.

  “Doesn’t it unnerve you a little, dad?” she asked. “Living in the compound where you nearly got killed?”

  “It’s not the first place I’ve nearly died,” Tom replied. “It makes sense. It’s secure.”

  “It’s not that secure.”

  “It’s a work in progress,” he said. “And another priority.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m the one worried about your safety.”

  Lilianna gave him a curious look.

  “You never really explained how you got in to see Ortega,” she said. “Nor how you survived.”

  “It’s not much of a story.”

  She watched her father’s mask so neatly fall into place it almost made a clanging noise, and Lilianna had to swallow her delight at his transparency.

  “You still believe in what we’re doing here though, right?” She made the question sound as naïve and girlish as she could.

  “The Enclave?”

  “The City.”

  Tom looked back at her, and held his reply as they reached the outer defenses.

  The gates clanked open as he watched, saving him an actual answer to the question, which Lilianna knew. Her brow furrowed in annoyance, but Tom just did his benevolent mystic thing, all sage and mindful and full of shit. Lilianna’s frown turned into a proper scowl, which her father also ignored, like he did whenever she tried probing too deep.

  “Tom!”

  Lilianna was surprised to see the troopers walking out towards them with Councilor Wilhelm in their ranks, the Safety Chief sleazebag Greerson his personal escort.

  “And Lilianna,” the Councilor greeted her too. “I hope all is well?”

  “Just reporting for work.”

  Lila kept it quick, one last embrace with her father, telling him she’d call
from the Bastion soon. Squeezing his arm – and not reconciled at all with her sadness – Lila then hurried towards the gates as they squeaked their way shut once more.

  Greerson made a gentle clucking noise at her as she passed.

  Lila regretted looking back. The Safety Chief winked, with Wilhelm and her father locked in discussion behind him. She didn’t want to cause an international incident, and Greerson wouldn’t dare more than that. Lila blew him off, and squeezed through the gates just before they shut.

  “We’re on lockdown,” a hard woman’s voice called.

  Two female troopers in full battle mode still managed to clutch clipboards and pens. Lila dutifully walked towards them, digging out her credentials.

  *

  THE SIX- AND eight-floor apartment blocks framing the majority of the compound were eerily quiet as Lilianna re-entered the Bastion. Even the vast courtyards, vegetable plots, and tent city in the middle showed only a handful of Administration workers about. Lila waved to several of them, too new herself really to know anyone. Troopers lounged on the steps at the front of her building, smoking cigarettes with a grimness foretelling more tough times ahead.

  At least the quartet of men nodded to her politely as she skipped to go past.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” the oldest of the squad called.

  “Yes?”

  “Can I see your ticket for that rifle please?”

  “Ticket?”

  Lila looked around more confused than she should be – and increasingly self-conscious of the rifle over her shoulder.

  “I don’t have one,” she said with minimum umming and ahing. “I’ve had this with me since . . . the night, you know?”

  “You’ll need to hand it in,” the trooper said.

  “I’m not even sure it’s from the Enclave.”

  “We’ll track it down, work out where it sits on the inventory,” the man said. “If it’s not from the arsenal, they may well return it you. For now though, only Safety personnel carry weapons inside the sanctuary zone.”

  “Do you mean within the Enclave?”

  “No,” the man said. He tried an elderly statesman smile and wasn’t bad at it. “That’s policy for now, to try and rein in some of the madness.”

  “I thought all the Furies were . . . contained.”

  Her own use of such officious language didn’t sit well with her, but Lila struggled more at the sense of naked danger implied by giving up her gun. She couldn’t cite the Constitution any more, after all.

  “OK,” she said. “I’ll, um, hand it in once I drop off my other things.”

  “OK,” the senior trooper said. “Please see that you do.”

  Lila nodded, not even sure whether she was honest in her contrition. Instead, she hurried through the doors into the tenement’s lobby, quickly hitting the stairwell and up to her room.

  Montana’s empty bed was what she dreaded most, but Aurora sat dangling her legs from her bunk to distract Lilianna from that awful confrontation. She snapped upright at the newcomer’s entrance, a bleary look on her gaunt-looking face.

  “Lilianna,” Aurora said. “You came back. Thank God.”

  She dropped to the floor and moved straight to embrace her. It was such a turnaround for Lila that she stood mutely as the other woman forced herself into her arms, and Lila then draped one hand around her while unshucking her pack and setting the M16 down as well.

  “You’re still armed?” Aurora said. “They won’t like that.”

  “So they said,” Lila answered. “Are you OK?”

  Aurora snuffled. Her defiant roommate had vanished, replaced by the pale, thin, shaken-looking twenty-year-old across from her. Aurora shivered, running a hand up her own tattooed throat before retreating to Montana’s empty, well-made bed, and sitting cautiously on it. The girl placed her palm on the comforter, crying on the inside.

  “It’s been quiet here,” she said. “So many people went to that meeting and never came back. Some are still missing.”

  Aurora sniffled loudly.

  “I’m only here because you and your father . . . helped so many . . . during the Incident. . . .”

  Lila said nothing. She sat on her own bed opposite.

  “I did some things to survive out there,” Aurora said and flicked a snake-quick look Lilianna’s way. “I’m no action hero, though. I showed that, didn’t I?”

  “You’re still alive,” Lila answered. “That’s nothing to scoff at, considering.”

  “I’m only alive because of you.”

  The heart-broken confession forced Aurora’s head to slump as she said it, her out-growing cinnamon bangs and unkempt hair providing the mask she wanted.

  “That’s why we’re all here, isn’t it?” Lila said slowly. “Working together?”

  She stood at that thought.

  “I have to report in to Miss Stacey.”

  Lilianna looked back almost fondly at the door, driven by her urge to escape the other girl and her cloying misery. Aurora’s gratitude was welcome, and likewise the end of their hostilities, but the price seemed too great. The hard-faced older girl had lost her spitfire edge, now with the making of just another future corpse whether she sat there breathing and crying right now or not. Lilianna could almost sense it, like something limbic in the air. Meat. Rather than pity, or God forbid compassion, instead came the overpowering urge for self-preservation.

  She quit the room without another word.

  *

  THE POLISHED WOOD hallways hadn’t been swept for days and big sections of the office network around the communications hub went unlit as Lilianna tracked downstairs. Several Administration staffers pressed past her, all of them guided by the daylight coming through tall industrial windows along one gargantuan wall. But everyone seemed in a hurry to be somewhere else. A woman she barely knew called Rose stopped briefly, clutching Lila’s arm with a “You OK, kiddo?” and then hurried away before Lilianna could ruin her day with an honest reply.

  The outer door to the comms hub was open as Lila stepped in. None of the other women were at their posts. Instead, a pair of troopers with a young, serious-looking woman in a polo top swiveled their gazes upon her as one.

  “This unit is closed for today for an inventory,” the woman said.

  She adjusted her clipboard, easily staring Lila down.

  “OK cool, no problem,” Lila replied. “Do you know where I can find Miss Stacey?”

  “No,” the woman said. “Miss Stacey is no longer managing Communications.”

  “Then who is?”

  The woman glanced at the two armed men, rifles across their backs and seemingly just waiting for Lilianna to go already. No answer was forthcoming.

  “Do you know where I can find Miss Stacey?” Lila asked.

  “No, sorry,” the woman said. “Report back in tomorrow. We have to get this done.”

  “Have you seen Councilor Deschain then?”

  “Councilor?”

  The young official studied Lilianna carefully, then gave a head-nodding blink.

  “No, I haven’t seen her.”

  “OK, well . . . thanks.”

  Lilianna left them to it, pausing a few yards further down the outside hall just to look back, any useful view lost to her at that angle. Consternation crossed her face, with no idea what she should actually do.

  So much for the urgency of her return.

  With some trepidation, Lila made the climb to Beau’s floor and carefully navigated through the deserted corridors to the corner mess kitchen, then Beau’s two-bed room adjacent. Despite her gentle knocking, no answer came – and she found herself glad.

  But Beau was in the gymnasium, at the far end of the big hall working out with several off-duty troopers. Their assault rifles stood stacked against the nearest mirrors, though the men themselves wore training gear. A half-dozen fit-looking young female staffers also worked in a neat cohort on the far side of the mats, but the hardcore aerobics and the tinned music behind it weren’t Lilianna
’s style.

  She strode up to Beau with her usual smile faked firmly in place. Beau set down a fifty-pound kettle bell and grabbed his towel to wipe off his sweaty neck and face. His blue eyes watched her with a fixed lack of expression as she approached, and Lilianna popped up before him on the tips of her toes, the kiss dying on the vine as Lilianna smiled awkwardly and rested a too-brief hand upon his chest before easing back.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  Beau looked at her, and then his workout gear, returning to the towel required to keep him busy as he knelt over, wiping down his long legs while Lilianna hovered.

  “I’m not sure I have a job anymore,” she said.

  “Why is that?”

  Beau stood. He toweled down some more, even his ears, avoiding her gaze.

  “Just some strange stuff going on,” Lila replied. “You’ve been back a few days. What do you make of it?”

  “Make of what?”

  “It’s quiet,” Lila said.

  “Yeah,” he snorted, semi-appalled for a moment as he glanced back at her. “People have died, Lilianna.”

  “Geez, Beau,” she said. “I know a lot of people were at the Council meeting, but that doesn’t explain . . . it’s like a museum in here.”

  Museums – those she remembered. A happy place. Part of the memory lit in her smile as she watched Beau finally throw down the towel. He examined the row of dumbbells.

  “People are busy,” he said.

  “Not me,” she replied. “Not you, right now, either, huh?”

  She screwed her nose up at him, no idea what she herself was playing at in trying to keep it light and easy, but of course the paradox fluttering in her chest knew what was what. Lila’s smile didn’t survive long anyway, unnoticed or ignored by Beau. Lilianna’s heart almost seemed to contract as she looked him up and down while he again studiously avoided all eye contact.

  All of this swept away because of a little piece of meat?

  But just as quickly as the thought came, it collapsed, buried beneath the weight of knowing the irrefutable truth of it. Her father’s voice came at once to her uttering some garbage about the repopulation of the Earth.