After The Apocalypse (Book 5): Retribution

by Hately, Warren

  The pipes came on with a judder. Tom luxuriated in taking his time to peel off his jacket, grimacing with pain and discomfort as he followed with his button-up shirt. The water chugged out, splashing into the stained tub with reluctance as Tom eased onto the seat of the toilet they’d all agreed was not fit use, groaning as he loosened the ties on his boots and took them and his socks off.

  Steam started curling out of the faucet, but the heat sapped the urgency out of him, almost like he’d taken a warm bath already. It was just fatigue. Tom had to muster his energies to straighten from his slump and then stand long enough to unfasten grimy jeans he let fall heavily to the floor, then snatched them up from the soggy carpet to save making them worse.

  He hung the jeans on the cracked sink, which meant resting his weight either side of the basin to stare blearily into the blotchy mirror. He didn’t like much of what he saw. Like with Lucas, Tom’s hard-won muscle had lessened in just the past month. A litany of scars, bruises, and untreated scratches marked his torso, shoulders, and upper arms, his hands still healing and raw from recent travails, and the steam couldn’t envelop him fast enough to escape noticing it all.

  Tom looked down with fatalism at his dirty underwear. Battle-stained boxers he let fall to the floor, watching almost disinterestedly as they soaked in the petri dish of moisture clinging to the erratic tiles and the variegated layers of squamous old towels, jackets, and discarded fabrics sandwiched geologically, almost like an archeologist’s wet dream of the apocalypse and the tales it might tell. Tom grunted and scooped up his sodden pants and forced them out the gap in the window like posting a rain-soaked letter, address unknown.

  And then he stepped into the shower.

  Scalding hot water coursed over him, and Tom grit his teeth against it knowing the temperature was more about the chill Fall air than any heroics on behalf of the hot water system. The steam clouded around him as he did a man’s job of washing himself and his privates, finding it hard not to grunt gently and make the odd pained noise as he felt his tenuous ribs protest any time he bent. His back stung like under attack from a bee swarm, and a bullet graze still healing on the side of his arm tracked a gruesome scab that should’ve curved around more muscle than it did. Tom weakly flexed a fist, curling his arm up against the deep lethargic ache in his tired muscles when forced into action. Then he gasped, almost slipping in the tub with the force of it, and hung his head under the baptismal spray.

  Images came. He did nothing to fight them, here under the hot water exorcism. Tom braced his hands against the tiles, settling in for the long haul as the shakes came, and Tom had to work to keep himself upright at all.

  *

  LATER, THE GENERATOR cut out leaving nothing but darkness in the bedroom as quiet as the rest of the compound with everyone in bed or at least returned to their private quarters with or without companions, and just Kent out doing the lonely job of maintaining security as full bellies and warmth threw its stupor over most of the household. Tom was first to repair to bed, and later cracked an eye open when Lucas crept in, the lights gone without the generator, and just a single oil lamp burning out where Kent’s family camped. A child’s gentle snoring carried like an entreaty to sleep, and Tom wasn’t even sure if he remained awake long enough to sense his son crawl in under the comforter and curl up against his side.

  He awoke later, instead.

  It was still dead quiet, but there was a character to the silence that drove Tom up onto one elbow as it seemed like a breeze blew through the building and he watched, almost still dreaming, as the door to the bedroom eased gently ajar.

  The befuddlement of sleep still had him, because Tom stared at the narrow black figure slipping into the room with him and Lucas and frowned.

  “Lilianna?”

  But he knew that wasn’t right.

  Alarm plunged through him and Tom heaved himself upright nothing like the man who earlier hobbled to his bed.

  The figure in the dark doorway split into two, and those shadows whispered to each other.

  “He’s awake –”

  “Seen us –”

  They flitted each way around the room as Tom kicked free of the bedding and stood with such force that Lucas sat bolt upright to see Tom draw the Colt Python from its rest.

  He had less than one second and he took it.

  One of the two Urchins rushed in at him with the slightest glint of a drawn weapon and Tom leveled the gun and fired into the child’s face.

  The big-bore round punched the boy’s head apart as well as the black hood of the tracksuit top he wore, the trajectory of his disintegrated skull hurling him by an awful kind of gravity, the demonic force of the blast filling the room as Lucas screamed and the gunshot robbed the air of its vibrations and Tom batted his son into cover with his one free hand.

  And just in time. The second attacker thrust a needle blade much lower than Tom expected, and he dragged Lucas out of harm’s way, hurling his son whirling into the bedroom’s far corner and then backing around as a boy only about a year older than his own son rushed at him. The Urchin trusted to speed and ferocity, but underestimated the strength of Tom’s alarm. Barefooted, he kicked the boy’s weapon hand away and took a wound for it, cursing, bringing the heavy Colt up again as the child assassin dived back in.

  Too fast.

  The Urchin got past Tom faster than he could believe. He batted Tom’s gun hand aside to strike, and it was only Tom’s unexpected crouch that stopped the kid plunging his sharpened spike into Tom’s ribs or worse. Tom clutched a handful of bedding and hauled the it upwards with all the power he could. The child attacker danced free, but his frenzied stabs then struck only wool and rayon – and then Tom bundled the whole wrap around the kid’s weapon arm.

  A boy’s astonished, gap-toothed face looked up at him.

  “Jamon?”

  Despite his shock, Tom didn’t waste time waiting for an answer. He tightened his hold on the blanket snaring the boy’s arm, thereby hauling Jamon off his feet to where Tom could headbutt him. The deadly young tween slumped. Tom let him drop to the floor boards, astonished at the betrayal of feral kids he’d tried befriending even as Lucas yelled a warning. Jamon scuttled backwards, unconsciousness a fakery as he twisted free of the blankets. And again Tom was too shocked to move except to defend himself and his son – and watched Jamon flee instead as the first screams from the other householders carried from beyond the wide-open bedroom door.

  *

  THE DIMMED LAMPLIGHT threw itself twisted across the open doorway, and Tom waited just a nanosecond long enough to make sure Lucas wasn’t wounded before he retrieved the hunting knife kept under his mattress. He trained the Python on the open door with a shaky hand, and Lucas grabbed up an armload of bedding as a shield like he’d seen his father do.

  The shrieking woman sounded a lot like Karla.

  Tom ran for the door so intent on bounding through and up the stairs that he completely forgot about the fact of Kent’s family camped out in the lobby just outside, and he stumbled through under the burden of increasing disorientation to see Ming and the younger children tumbled out of their beds glassy-eyed and stricken with fatal knife wounds bleeding incessantly black like treacle in the terrible jaundiced light. Tom staggered to halfway through their encampment before halting, stricken in horror as he cast eyes at the farthest doorway and back to Luke behind him conscious more threats might appear at any second.

  “Kent!” he yelled as loudly as he could. At once, he almost wished he could shield his friend from the horror surrounding them. His vigilance collapsed as he moved to beneath the staircase where the dead little children earlier played, and loud, muffled noises upstairs stopped Tom in his tracks, frozen as if he could block Kent’s view when he came.

  Except he didn’t come. And the landing above them broke into life as a door burst open somewhere, Karla’s cries unfiltered now as a dark, bare-legged form hurried across the landing and just as quickly the woman screamed and tumbled m
adly down the stairs until her harried squeal was cut short with a horrible loud snap.

  Ionia slithered lifelessly down the rest of the stairs to land at Tom’s feet as he reached the end of the hall. He knelt at once, his extended hand useless with the knife in it, but useless anyway because the dark-haired young woman’s head was twisted at a fatal angle, legs splayed naked from beneath her blood-spattered bathrobe punctured with more than a dozen wounds.

  “N-no,” Tom gasped. He met Luke’s stunned gaze. Karla’s scream sounded again upstairs, followed by a chaos of breaking glass. Lucas reached his father in time for his own eyes to fly wide, and he clutched Tom’s shoulder in warning and Tom barely moved in time as another dagger came at him.

  Tom whirled, stepping and thus tumbling backward over Ionia’s corpse as another dark-shrouded child came from nowhere to launch into him.

  The would-be murderer struck with a fierce silence that made it all the more terrifying, and somehow in the frenzied seconds during which Tom fended off the sandy-haired child, he saw the rat-faced Urchin was just a girl aged about ten.

  Lucas yelled, “Dad, what should I do?” while Tom took several cuts to his palms and one to his wrist deep enough to worry him, and then he finally got a knee into the girl’s ribs, driving her into the heavy timber balustrade.

  The girl’s head rebounded from the timber with an awful crack, but this time Tom only grimaced fierce faced and barked at Lucas to look away like this was just a bad moment watching a Friday night horror movie and not his father hauling the broken girl bodily from where she slumped to twist her skull in two hands hard enough to snap her neck.

  He dumped the girl’s corpse onto the ground like a renunciation of the murder and immediately started bawling and yelling despite the terror knowing he couldn’t fail his people now making him gape and gasp around trying not to completely lose it and seeing Luke’s stricken terror made it incredibly hard.

  The door from the kitchen crashing open snapped Tom out of it as Dkembe burst through with blood smeared across his gray hooded top.

  “Kent’s dead!”

  Screams redoubled upstairs.

  “They’re still inside!” Lucas yelled.

  Tom scoured the room as if tallying the dead was any use, ignoring Dkembe’s widened eyes as he drank in the further violence of Kent’s murdered family spilled out across the corridor to the downstairs office and bedroom.

  “What the . . . what the hell . . . what the –”

  “Dkembe,” Tom grunted. “Go unlock some guns.”

  Tom then eyed the top-floor landing, a hand on the blood-smeared railing as he hesitated twice before taking a big step over where Ionia lay dead to start upstairs.

  Chapter 7

  HE WAITED A long time for Erak to acknowledge him, but patience won out in the end. Gonzales exhaled with an eye roll like he thought he looked pretty doing it, which certainly wasn’t the case. It took him a good second longer to clue in on Dkembe’s narrowed brows, at which point the skinny Latino man huffed.

  “I don’t think you should be doin’ it,” he said.

  “We have to keep the Ascended sweet,” Dkembe replied. “And Tom asked.”

  “‘Tom asked’.”

  “So?”

  The bitchy comment transformed Dkembe’s look into an outright glare.

  “Said yourself, religious freaks are dangerous,” he said.

  “Not as dangerous as him.”

  “You afraid of Tom now?”

  It was more than Dkembe meant to say and he buttoned his lip now, unable to maintain his annoyance as a wave of petulance swept through him. He and Erak made a fine couple, he snorted angrily to himself.

  “I’m going.”

  “You’ll be back?”

  “Erak, man . . . sheesh, of course I’ll be back,” Dkembe said. He tried to add more lightly, “Might bring some meat back for supper, too.”

  “Tom ask that too?”

  Dkembe sighed and dropped his eyes, because of course he had.

  “It means something,” he said weakly. “Maybe not to you. Tom trusts me.”

  Wisely, Gonzales said nothing.

  Dkembe grabbed his thick jacket off the hook on the back of the door and Erak moved in to grab his too.

  “You comin’?”

  “Someone’s gotta watch your back.”

  The other man said it in a flush voice, not that much of it showed in his pallor. Dkembe felt his smile stiffen, then finally fall away as he dropped his eyes to the floor.

  And remembered the captive girl.

  “You should stay here, man,” he said and put his arm through one jacket sleeve even as he hit the door, swinging it closed behind him to leave Erak staring at nothing.

  *

  IT WAS BRIGHT outside and Dkembe headed towards the slaughter house with his hands and chin buried in his bright jacket, doing his best not to reflect on the mood swirling through him like the first stages of a disease. The wind cut its way between the derelict buildings reoccupied under City life, making an eerie sound forcing through the cracks and deficits in the hovels lining both sides of the street. A girl no older than six sat out on a section of unbroken sidewalk, coloring in her drawings with chalk. Dkembe crossed to the other side of the avenue to avoid her, feeling the eyes on him from doorways and gaps in the awnings all around.

  A trooper Humvee half-blocked the route ahead, halfway along, but the three armed men looked more concerned about the vehicle with its hood up, several onlookers and a grizzled man in a thick, filthy fisherman’s sweater clustered around the end. One of the troopers flicked his eyes Dkembe’s way, jutting his chin out at him.

  “You know anything about mechanics, man?”

  “Sorry,” Dkembe said and dropped his eyes at once. “No.”

  He skirted the group and past a middle-aged woman seated with her legs out in the road, the street beyond them deserted, and Dkembe guarded himself as she refused to get out of his way and he had to carefully pick past her, eyes swiveling as if expecting an ambush, and then he could burrow down into his jacket once again and continue south.

  The smell of the abattoir reached him before he turned the corner and strode to jaywalk across the last intersection, nervous eyes flicking around as if out of the vestigial need to check for traffic. Only a handful of street kids watched, consulting among themselves out the front of an old brick storefront where unrelated people were living. One of the boys held a bundle that yowled like a cat in his arms, but the merest glimpse of a toddler’s bare arm saw Dkembe thrust his eyes furiously back in front of him as he blinkered his own vision, and the smell of the approaching slaughter house seemed to thicken, the taste of metallic ash on his tongue, eyes already stinging, and beneath it all Dkembe’s heart rate skipping frantically along.

  One of the teens called out, “Hey mister!” but Dkembe ignored him, and when it came again, nodding instead to the gaunt-looking, white-hooded figure guarding the compound’s main gate.

  The Ascended held a thick-handled machete which merely dangled from his wrist by a strap as he watched Dkembe approach, rendered impassive and unknowable by the slit strip of blank fabric masking his face. The strap of an M14 crossed the devotee’s stained cloth tabard that he wore over leather jeans and so many layers of shirts that it made his arms thick like the Stay Puft marshmallow man in a paramilitary color scheme. Dkembe slowed, but continued in through the entrance, spooked, skin crawling with the sentry’s eyes on him.

  The noise of the slaughter house at work took over. Dkembe kept his pace cautious, worried any sudden intrusion might get him shot or killed or worse, and the filthy, grime-encrusted railings of the first cattle pens superimposed themselves on the image of the man Tom Vanicek had killed in the main shed, dragged away like just another carcass to process after Tom’s murderous fit of rage. Dkembe would’ve shivered if he wasn’t already battling with a tremble he struggled to calm as a solid figure in dark clothes, no Ascended regalia in sight, stepped out of one of th
e nearest cabins, ducked down under the cattle yard’s steel awning, and drew the visitor’s attention with nothing more than a stern look.

  “Martin,” Dkembe said. “Hello.”

  The Ascended’s major domo slipped on a pair of leather gloves before crossing to the newcomer, at which point they shook hands, Dkembe now unsettled by the calfskin feel within his own clammy grip as he swallowed hard to choke back his nerves under the scrutiny of Martin’s dark unflinching eyes.

  “Dkembe,” the man said in the same monotone as his bearded look. “How’s business?”

  “That’s what I should be askin’ you, man.”

  Dkembe forced an easy grin onto his face as he resurrected the inner teen hoodlum once believed dead at some point along the long winding road between Baltimore and Columbus.

  “It’s been a disruptive week,” Martin said impassively. “What’s your news?”

  “Tom asked me to come and settle the details on your intake, how fast you can process the cattle once they arrive,” Dkembe told him. “We need to plan the feed lot, out where they’ll be maintained, and the Rations situation –”

  “Why would you feed them?” Martin bluntly replied. “They’ll soon all be dead.”

  Dkembe bit back the thought, So will we, his apprehension channeled instead into more of the grimacing smile he spread like a counterfeit across his dark face.

  “That’s why we need to discuss rates,” Dkembe said.