After The Apocalypse (Book 5): Retribution

by Hately, Warren

  “I should be gettin’ back,” he said. “Get that meat sorted out.”

  Jay nodded, letting Dkembe fill the pause by walking towards the kitchen. His friend followed, gesturing at the red-and-green bundle in the sink.

  “You’re takin’ the cut when you could have the whole damn thing.”

  Dkembe narrowed his eyes at Jay, who kept speaking as if only ribbing him.

  “You’ve got no real reason to side with those people, ‘kembi.”

  “I’m not siding with anyone,” Dkembe said. “You an’ me are good.”

  “OK.”

  They bumped shoulders and Dkembe took the meat and left.

  *

  THE LAUGHTER IN the hall outside wasn’t echoed in the bedroom. As the women took their showers and the old pipes in the Ortega compound rattled as they slowly warmed, Erak stood at the top bedroom’s single window staring down on the unlit street through the patterned drape rendering him functionally blind to whatever might be out there, which clearly wasn’t the point.

  Dkembe eased into the room with a slow, grimacing sigh, and he peeled off his heavy jacket and hung it on the peg and waited to confirm Gonzales had no immediate plans to greet him.

  “You dark at me about earlier?” Dkembe asked.

  The thin grizzled statue at the window didn’t move. Dkembe eyed the mattress on the floor and the single candle burning low inside an old jar.

  “Thought you might be happy with some hot food inside you.”

  “I would’ve gone with you,” Erak said.

  He broke from the window like he was never there. He crossed to the bed almost quickly, sorting the covers between the ones he and Dkembe used each.

  “It’s not a good place, Erak,” Dkembe said. “Tryin’ to spare you that, man. Scares the piss out of me.”

  He saw Erak was in no mood to interrupt. Dkembe’s brow furrowed, and a long pause turned into a contemplative silence.

  He lowered himself to the far corner of the double mattress and started unlacing his boots.

  “They got people hostage there,” he said softly. “There’s a girl.”

  Gonzales tensed, and stopped what he was doing.

  “So?”

  “She’s a slave,” Dkembe said. “They . . . I think they rape her.”

  “Of course they do.”

  “It’s not right, man.”

  Gonzales offered a muted, boggling shrug. “What’re you gonna do?” He said it as a rhetorical question, though Dkembe turned away, shielding his expression from his friend as he worked his second boot loose. Then he glanced back to Erak.

  “You showerin’?”

  His roommate stiffened as if the concept sickened him. Dkembe nodded and stood.

  *

  THEIR BARE CHESTS rose and fell in unwitting harmony as Dkembe cracked one eye open at the deadness creeping into his arm with Erak curled onto it.

  In the dark, it was only luck that he sensed the figure moving as he groggily looked to the shut door to see light coming through it from the landing outside.

  The door was ajar. The dark figure moved. Dkembe rose onto one hand, displacing Erak’s repose as Dkembe hissed a warning just as a small figure hurtled straight at them.

  Erak screamed.

  It would take seconds for Dkembe to process how other yells rang out within the house, because in that instant the roar of blood filled his ears as he and Erak desperately scrambled backwards, scuttling over each other and slipping on the bedcovers and their desperation as a boy no older than eight or nine or ten slashed at them with a knife like a straight razor. Dkembe’s bedmate took several hacking cuts on raised arms, then Dkembe got one of the covers in his fist to shield Gonzales as the Urchin slashed a few more times, then melted away. Erak gave another blistering shriek as the child hurtled free from the room.

  Tom’s booming yells came from downstairs. Feet pounded on the landing. Then a massively loud gunshot. Erak’s cries made Dkembe deaf to everything else, and wild-eyed, it was all he could do in that moment but to slam the bedroom door shut and throw his weight against it while wildly scanning the room to confirm he wasn’t trapping any other attackers in with them.

  “Light!” Dkembe bellowed hoarsely. “Light, Erak!”

  “I’m cut,” Gonzales cried. “He cut me.”

  “We need light!”

  “Bolt the door shut!”

  Ashamed in his panic, Dkembe did as told, accustomed in the past week to leaving the door unlocked at night for the sake of not loudly waking others during his nighttime trips to the bathroom after he and Erak had lain together, and before sleep set in.

  More erratic shouts sounded out on the landing, but he ratcheted the bolt into place. Then he hurried in near-pitch blackness to the wooden stool housing their candle. It was a long moment getting it right and finding the chipped old disposable cigarette lighter running on empty, but good for one more go as the candle dimmed into life.

  Erak’s wild expression assailed him. His friend clutched a deep gash across one forearm with a hand showing wounds of its own. The cuts glared back sickeningly, the flesh open to the bone.

  Someone hammered briefly on the door. Dkembe’s horrified gaze broke to it, then back to Erak as he licked his lips, moving around the scattered, blood-dotted sheets to where his wooden baseball bat lay, knocked clear of the shunted mattress. Erak moved as if to stop him, the moment he saw Dkembe’s intent.

  “No,” he said and thrust his injuries forward. “Help me, please. I can’t do this myself.”

  A disturbingly heavy tumbling sound drummed through the floorboards, followed by Karla’s fierce shrieks, Tom shouting again. Someone else too. Dkembe hesitated back to the bolted door as he scanned Erak’s wound and desperate pleading face.

  “I’ll be back in a moment,” he said.

  “No! I can’t –”

  “Quiet!” Dkembe hissed and motioned for Gonzales like he wanted him to hide, as well he might. “Bind it with a sheet tight and I’ll be right back. We can’t leave them.”

  And despite all his fervent wishes to the contrary, Dkembe unlatched the door.

  Karla stood with her back to him just across the doorway, focused on the stairs out of sight while clutching her face, completely failing to notice another small figure flitting out from the empty spare bedroom to spot Dkembe, then take off towards the washroom.

  Dkembe clutched the bat double-handed, but somehow gave Karla’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze as he muttered, “Right behind you, here,” and headed after the intruder.

  The second Urchin came from the next doorway before Dkembe could react.

  The hooded kid tore from Attila’s bedroom door with a tiny-headed hatchet he swung at Dkembe as if on reflex. Startled, Dkembe barely saved himself from a blow as he lurched back, only to have the boy come at him harder rather than flee.

  Dkembe countered with the bat, shielding himself from a series of frenzied chops that only halted as a rifle shot rang out right behind them.

  The tall skinny dark-haired boy spun around with a shocked expression on his face. Attila advanced from the bedroom with his M4 raised and fired again. The second round took the boy through the throat. A third shot blew out his eye. Another shot wasn’t needed. The kid splattered back against the railing and collapsed dead and gone for good.

  Crashing sounds and Tom’s yelling drew Dkembe’s eyes back towards the bathroom where he’d headed. Now he looked to Attila and the other man kenned his meaning and shrugged off a nasty wound to his neck, veering instead down the corridor with Dkembe immediately after him. Karla dropped to her knees behind them, collapsing into deep and mournful sobs.

  Cold night air eased in from the shattered bathroom window.

  The toilet bowl sat broken. The toilet water guzzled out onto the sticky carpeting of old towels and clothes already soaking on the washroom floor as an ungentle silence descended on the compound.

  *

  DKEMBE FELT TOO overwhelmed to meet the others’ h
orrified expressions, busying himself with checking the Glock pistol Attila handed him and then moving across the landing and into the turn where the other boy’s bedroom lay. Kevin’s door was ajar, the bare room inside empty. Renewed tears and moans and the sense that nothing was safe impelled him back to his housemates wrestling with their shock and fear.

  Attila nodded to him, the only one stoic. Erak broke their awkward camaraderie, issuing from the bedroom a bloody mess. Attila stowed his rifle, clutching the scrawny other man in a supportive hold as Gonzales all but collapsed. Dkembe peered down the staircase as if to escape and saw Ionia sprawled below, quite clearly dead. He moved to Karla on instinct, but the woman started down to her lover like the sleepwalker she deserved to be. Dkembe stood frozen and useless, eyes drifting back to Erak as Attila afforded expert first aid.

  “Go check the others,” the terse Hungarian said. “I’ve got him. Help Tom.”

  Tom sounded as if he needed the help, though maybe not the kind Dkembe could offer. His slow descent in Karla’s wake revealed the leader of their household sobbing and bereft as he threw himself down across the bodies of what looked like Kent’s children stabbed to death. Dkembe’s thoughts at once flew to the staunch Islander, and he hurried to vault past Karla crouched over Ionia’s body. At the same time, Tom Vanicek started to bawl.

  “What the fuck?” the older man yelled.

  “Who the hell did this? What the fuck is this, these are fucking . . . fucking children, for God’s sake. What the hell . . . hell kind of . . . fucking disaster fucking. . . .”

  His aimless words fell apart into more sobs, kneeling over the children’s bodies now, his very alive son Lucas standing back terrified.

  The boy’s eyes flicked Dkembe’s way.

  “Where’s Kevin?” he asked. “Is he OK?”

  Dkembe felt the deathwish to escape again and turned for the kitchen. He grasped the baseball bat and barely answered.

  “He’s not upstairs.”

  Then he left them, bat clutched two-handed.

  The kitchen was a maze of shadow he negotiated from memory, just a chink of external moonlight coming in from the pane above the exit door. Dkembe quietly opened it, more ambient light casting just as much confusion as clarity onto the outdoor scene, moonlight strained through the lattices, the dark forms of worktables and then screening mercifully silent and still. The illusion of a groan drew him further, orienting to the right, and the night sentry position inside their hopelessly exposed front gate.

  Kent lay curled on the ground amid a glistening darkness, blood rather than shadows congealed in a thick puddle across the pitted tarmac of the garage.

  “No. . . .”

  Dkembe trembled, tracks halted as his eyes frantically searched around in the dark to check for any chance of other attackers, riven not so much with grief for the man he didn’t know well, but at yet again how the casual ripping-away-of-life now seemed a daily fact.

  Again.

  He almost closed his eyes with the futility and dread coursing through him. The City’s reprieve from terror as a constant background noise was gone, banished as easily as a shroud to reveal the awful truths perhaps always there, in the existential dust storm of the young man’s thoughts.

  *

  A SLACKENING WIND conjured more groaning noises in the outdoor area. None came from Kent. Armed now with an Mp5, Dkembe cautiously returned to the corpse, caught off-guard as Tom stomped out from inside with a gun in his hand.

  He sighed heavily and stood looking at the shadowed body, the personification of defeat. But it only lasted a moment. He spurred forward, something about the wincing indication of his right hand, pointing at the corpse, drawing Dkembe’s eyes to the dark creases in Kent’s light-colored trousers.

  “Aw man,” Tom said.

  He choked, then knelt beside Kent’s long twisted body as solid as a fallen tree in the empty parking bay. Dkembe came closer out of obligation as Tom rolled his dead friend over.

  The knife wounds ran from Kent’s knees to his groin – and no higher.

  Tom’s grievous eyes switched to Dkembe.

  “Kids?” he said as if it still surprised him. “The fucking Urchin kids did this?”

  “Yeah.”

  Tom looked down on his friend a moment before standing.

  “Kevin’s missing,” he said.

  Dkembe blinked, impotent.

  “The Urchins?” he stammered like it was his turn for disbelief. “No, man. No.”

  Tom turned over Kent’s body one last time. He removed the leather belt across the dead man’s shoulder to retrieve the longsword the Islander bore across his back. Tom drew the blade six inches from its scabbard, the shadows ageing his craggy features like a knight of old.

  “What is it?” Tom asked Dkembe softly.

  “What?”

  “Your voice,” he said, destroying the illusion of calm with fierce eye contact. “What is it, Dkembe? You know something?”

  Dkembe’s face was a slack plastic bag, holes torn for eyes. He couldn’t disentangle himself from the guilt exposed by Tom’s look. His mouth worked dumbly.

  “Jay,” he said.

  “What about him?”

  Dkembe couldn’t frame the reply. Attila emerged from the side door and stopped short, letting out a pent-up breath same as Tom a minute before.

  “Dkembe,” Tom said. “Kevin’s missing. Kent’s whole family’s dead, and we lost Ionia too. Erak doesn’t look good. We could’ve all died here.”

  “Jay said he knows Locke,” Dkembe said. “Finnegan Locke.”

  “He said this when?”

  Dkembe’s eyes rolled away.

  “Earlier. Today.”

  That was enough for Tom. He gave a low groan belying his rage as he slung the sword across himself and nodded to Attila, who nodded right back.

  Karla stepped from the kitchen doorway and went straight to the weapons rack. She wiped her eyes as she retrieved her own favored gun and swiveled back to them.

  “Who do we have to kill?”

  Tom checked the Python in his belt. He looked back at Dkembe with no veiling the implicit demand.

  “Let’s go find out.”

  “Not without me.”

  Lucas looked far less confident than his voice. Tom was already halfway to Brown Town in his head, judging by the look on his face and the hard way he turned it towards his own child, sniffed the air with a grunt like a feral animal, then nodded. He nudged Attila in the arm.

  “Give him the M4,” he said. “He knows it.”

  Then Tom turned to Dkembe.

  “Take us there.”

  *

  THE WOLVES OF Dkembe’s thoughts howled in disarray as he led the expedition robot-like across the unconscious City with Tom barely managing to keep his shit together, fuming and raging under his breath about the madness of it all – and threatening to quit the minute he was done with whatever the hell they were all now about to do, Dkembe complicit in it, harangued by his own broiling furious monologue at betraying his so-called brother and yet locked into it all the same like strapped into the front of a rollercoaster ride plunging downhill into the Abyss.

  The their march took them into foreign territory with alarming speed. Dkembe couldn’t help constant sideways glances, invisibly yoked to Tom’s bullish right shoulder. He also couldn’t conjure any words that made sense to quell the older man’s cold-burning fury.

  “Tom, we need to think about this,” he finally said.

  “I did.”

  “Really? I just –”

  “I’m going to have a conversation,” Tom said.

  It sounded like anything but. Wiseass remarks he might’ve shared with the friends he was betraying died stillborn on Dkembe’s tongue. He knew how many of Tom’s conversations ended. Even better, he knew Tom’s ruthlessness justification for anything that befell those who harmed his family.

  Try as he might, Dkembe couldn’t get his head around the scant facts anyway. He knew well enou
gh to know he had no real clue about what Jay was capable of doing, and the supremacist talk around him was its own one-eyed way of looking at the world. He was just adrift in the middle of it all, barely able to swallow for the sheer choking terror he kept ramming back down into his gullet as he moved along at Tom’s side just like the tame dog – the broken slave – as Jay taunted.

  Tom glanced to Lucas, Karla and Attila behind them. The blonde woman’s tear-sore eyes were narrowed into murderous slits and Attila looked just as staunch. Even Lucas wore a grim and frankly dangerous look that gave Dkembe pause all over again. But Tom’s hissed instructions cut through anything he might’ve said, had it come to him, and if he dared.

  “You three, hang back,” Tom said. “Keep your weapons locked. Someone up ahead will stop us.”

  “How do you know that?” Dkembe asked in fright.

  “The motorcycle gang or whatever the fuck they are,” Tom said. “Good chance they’ll be out, given the madness of the past week.”

  “What about troopers?” Lucas asked.

  “Them too, maybe,” his father said. To Attila and Karla he added, “Hang back at least a block. Once they have us, come in hard.”

  It was a blunt instruction, but neither flinched. Karla turned cold eyes on Dkembe with seemingly no awareness the young man’s loyalties were torn.

  Tom tapped him on the upper arm with a grunt.

  “Let’s go.”

  He started striding even faster. Dkembe shot a final look at their rearguard, then hurried to catch up like a man who thought he still might be able to do something. But he fell into step with fighting off a sense of wordless alarm.

  “Keep breathing, Dkembe,” Tom said to him.

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “Huh,” Tom grunted. “Is it.”

  He cradled one of the sub-machineguns in his hands, holding the weapon low and at ease almost in anticipation as a man’s voice called out for them to stop.

  A liquid shudder ran through Dkembe’s bowels, unable to trace the voice in the dark amid the shanty dwellings either side of the entrance to Brown Town. The dark bulks of the crisscrossed school buses and old delivery trucks ahead, forever locked in moorings of garbage, dirt, and broken wheel stocks, revealed a single moving shadow as a bulky figure in a balaclava emerged with a crossbow trained on them. A second, thinner man followed, armed and dressed much the same. A third sentry melted out of the shadows across to their right and held back, a raised hunting rifle aimed at them.