“Fuck anyone who gets in our way.”
Attila grunted, expression unclear. Karla looked at him.
“Right?”
Attila grunted again, glanced away a moment, then tersely nodded.
“Good,” Karla said.
Lucas stepped forward as if the moment required it of him. He clasped his father’s blood-flecked forearm.
“I’m sorry too, dad,” he said. “It was Kevin. It must’ve been Kevin.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“No,” Lucas said, disagreeing with him. “I know, somehow. A part of me knows. Knew before. I should’ve said.”
Lucas couldn’t quite face Jay’s death. Tom took him into a squeezing, one-armed embrace and grit his teeth as the pain in his shoulder flared. A few raindrops pattering against the outside windows filled the moment’s silence, and drew Attila’s eyes to it.
“Kicking up outside,” he said.
“A storm’s coming in,” Tom muttered.
“There’s already one here.”
Karla’s voice was a whisper of restrained violence. Tom met her eye, then scanned around to confirm Vegas was gone. He sniffled, wiped off his face, and turned himself to the business-like job of cleaning off the longsword using a decorative drape, then he adjusted the scabbard across his back so he could sheathe the weapon without making his aches any worse. It gave the others time to put their affairs in order. Attila, Karla, and his son scooped up the weapons confiscated earlier. Luke handed Tom the rifle, which Tom duly stowed.
He missed his longbow. It’d be a fine match for the sword, though the medieval image it conjured was far from the grim reality of the picture Tom cut, standing with the sword handle jutting from out behind one crag-like shoulder, the dull light of early morning coming silver through the slatted blinds and catching every mote and highlight in his beard, black against the spots where blood already crusted dry across his arms, shoulders and face.
Tom took a deep, fatalistic breath.
“Let’s move.”
*
IT WAS ONLY one last killing. At least, that’s what Tom told himself as they lit out from the half-asleep building and stepped through the human waste crowding the foyer and the sidewalk outside. Menacing with their extra weapons, Karla and Attila took point, guns raised, ready to deliver death on anyone taking umbrage with their deadly foray in the night. Instead, the few Citizens in the street – and those peering out at them from the improvised shanties of Brown Town – retreated from the war party’s advance. Tom’s posse made it back to where they were ambushed earlier, and though eyeballs watched from cover, none of the self-proclaimed Dominators appeared.
Tom and his crew dumped the promised gear and moved on.
The wind picked up another notch, and now they had to contend with grit flying into their eyes as they headed back towards The Mile.
Tom signaled to Karla and Attila.
“We’ll meet you at home base,” he said. Including Lucas, he added, raising his voice above the gale, “We’re going to go get Lilianna.”
“You sure you don’t want us to come?” Karla asked.
Tom shook his head.
“If you’re coming with me, I need you two ready.”
Gratefully, no one asked him for what. It grated almost as much as Jay’s senseless murder, the fact Locke’s location still eluded them. He glanced aside, back now to his son, as the other two members of their household offered final salutes and moved off.
The question of Kevin hung heavily between father and son. But now wasn’t the time – and it sure as hell wasn’t the place. Leaves and small items of crap flew past them. Tom’s aching eyes suffered in their slits. Lucas sheltered his face with one hand, the M4 gripped with the strap across his narrow shoulder.
“We’re getting sis?”
“Yep.”
“What about Dkembe?”
Tom shrugged and regretted it. “I don’t know,” he said.
He somehow couldn’t think ill of his reluctant young lieutenant. Jay’s dying words incriminating Dkembe didn’t ring true.
Like his son’s friend Kevin, Dkembe was a question for another time.
“Come on.”
Luke followed him, turning at the next street. The day coming up illuminated early workers and those scurrying from their abodes out of sheer necessity. A cloak of gloom and danger still reigned over everything, getting deep into the second week after the Council attack. An old woman appeared near a tent awning, blocking the entrance to the apartment behind her, and then thought better of begging from the pair, Tom and Lucas equally hard-faced as they marched towards the Enclave.
More people loitered or moved through the corroded intersection where all the structures gave out so the Bastion’s gatepost guards had a clear range of fire if ever needed. They’d come close, but the trooper team atop the high gates picked out Tom and his son long before they’d made the full approach, leaving the two-story streetscape and its attendant hovels behind as they trudged the rain-eroded decline and ever easier into the troopers’ sights.
“Hold it right there!” one of the men on duty yelled.
Tom clutched Luke’s shoulder as if he needed it. Lucas only offered a glum upwards look. Tom blanched as he recognized the peril he’d dragged his boy into – made even worse by the dire need for it. The whole maddening foolishness of all the steps they’d taken since their last refuge near Willow Island came back at him like a freight train filled with bad memories, and Tom fought almost bodily to focus as he angled himself towards the sentries. The smile he faked hurt his face as he levered each muscle required into action. A woman trooper in the three-person crew took in his expression and raised an eyebrow beneath her green Kevlar helm.
“I’m here to see my daughter,” Tom called out.
“We’re in lockdown,” the same man yelled as before.
“Really?” Tom replied. “I need to see my daughter. She can come with us.”
“It’s not happening,” the man called back. “You folks should get inside. Wind’s getting bad. Maybe tornadoes on the way. Seriously. Get indoors.”
The female trooper called out too.
“Get your son indoors, mister,” she called. “Your daughter’s safer in here.”
She nodded to him, sincere. Tom had to wonder if they knew him. The odds were good. He even considered using Wilhelm’s name to gain entry, but thought better of it, and at the same time remembered the secret route Carlotta Deschain had taken in venturing back home from her secret trysts with Magnus.
Tom’s eyes flicked, at risk of betraying themselves as he glanced towards that side path, the Enclave blocking off a stand of old street trees, some crumbling sidewalk, the edge of a steel-mesh fence guarding a skinny orchard looking like a sick zoo exhibit filling what was left of the old public park. The Enclave had more elevated observation posts than just the front gates, but whether the civilian effort inside its walls was that well-organized was anyone’s guess. Tom only felt the light machinegun turret still fixed on him and his son fifty yards out in the middle of the driveway. He lifted a hand, saluting the troopers – maybe the woman was right – and didn’t push his luck since no one’d yet said boo about him and Lucas going armed.
Things were changing in the City, and not for the good.
*
ATTILA STOOD AT sentry duty behind the gate and already had it open for them as Tom and Lucas tracked across on the diagonal and dodged a bicycle rickshaw hurtling past. Tom nodded to the stoic Hungarian, hoping to reassure him all was in order – a terrible lie.
Raised eyebrows always signaled an intent to talk. Tom waited as Attila refastened the gate. Lucas went on into the slaughterhouse Ortega’s headquarters had become, walking dead on his feet perhaps sparing the boy the worst of the charnel atmosphere. They’d already discussed what to expect. There was no time for burying the dead.
“Your friend’s daughter, Crimson,” the Slavic man said to Tom thick-voiced. “She su
rvived . . . but she’s in a state.”
“She has a right to be,” Tom replied. “Karla?”
“With her . . . woman.”
Attila’s eyes flicked meaningfully to the gate and the rising glare of outside daylight.
“No Lilianna?”
“Not yet,” Tom said. “We’d need to infiltrate the Enclave for that. Maybe she’s safer in there, for now. I don’t know. It’s killing me. But I want to get my ducks in a row.”
Attila grunted agreement.
“I’m ready when you are,” the Hungarian said. “Just did a quick inventory. Ammo’s not endless, Tom.”
“I know,” he answered. “And we’ve hardly had used the guns, yet.”
As if thinking about it, Tom unconsciously tested his longbow arm and managed it with a wince. Attila nodded, gruff. And Tom clasped his shoulder a moment, surprised such a heavyset man seemed so thin. He muttered his thanks for Attila’s loyalty.
Loyalty so far, anyway.
To Tom, it felt like he alone knew the dark business that might still test their allegiances.
Crimson’s tears echoed from the stripped-back house. Tom stopped in the doorway and looked back at Attila nursing one of the rifles.
“Dkembe?”
“He and Erak, gone.” Before Tom could ask, Attila added, “Cleared their gear out.”
“Good.”
“And took weapons,” the gruff man added.
“What weapons?”
“The Remington,” Attila answered. “Some ammo.”
Tom grunted, expression unreadable even to himself. He bid the other man a brief farewell and stepped into the gloom of the cold house, tasting a newborn enmity towards Dkembe and his strange companion rise from beneath the weight of a guilt which might never leave.
“Just one more killing,” Tom whispered to himself. “Then we go. For good.”
A former editor once told him “life’s a shit sandwich – but you get a choice of toppings”. That’d never felt more apt.
Tom took a breath and set his shoulders and headed to the sound of Kent’s wailing stepdaughter.
*
THE NIGHT’S TRAGEDIES were underscored by the four of them leaving Ortega’s old compound, now void of life except for the teenage girl still crouched sobbing in the wardrobe. No amount of gentle talk could tease her out, and Tom’s own rawness left him little will for the effort despite his deep sense of obligation, driven by an even deeper wish for atonement.
None of which rivaled the death wish for vengeance.
Even Lilianna’s ongoing entrapment within the Bastion couldn’t abate the furnace of Tom’s single-minded focus on ending Finnegan Locke’s second life. If it meant killing more children . . . it wouldn’t be the first time, now, he knew, the awful acts of the dark hours of the past morning still with their hooks in him, as great as any cloak of worries Tom dragged like a dead body’s weight as he led Attila, Karla, and Lucas in the direction of The Mile.
“Do you remember the layout?” Karla asked Luke for the second time.
“I said ‘yes’.”
“Just remember,” Tom intervened. “My son’s only back-up.”
He eyed Karla and dour Attila a moment to underline savage earnestness.
“There’s no expectation on either of you,” he added more softly. “I helped make this problem – and I aim to fix it for good.”
“I want a piece of this Fagin prick too,” Karla told him.
Attila only gave his characteristic grunt. Tom evaded Luke’s eyes, playacting yet another scan of their surrounds as they pressed through trash-lined streets, discarded junk and increasing amounts of actual garbage now poor Dan MacLaren and so many others were dead, and basic City functions like trash collection had gone the way of so much else. More and more people turned out into the streets as they progressed, several seeing the guns and dour looks and mistaking Tom and his team for people with answers.
“Are you going to the Depot?” a haggard man asked.
“Do you have any Rations?” said another.
A woman with a face like an open grave tried clutching Tom’s shirt, but he shoved her off. The midmorning hour destroyed any tactical surprise, but he had little patience for that now anyway – and his companions sensed it. The Citizens outdoors turned and tracked them as they passed, drawing closer and closer to the subdued main thoroughfare.
No one failed to notice the armed war band on the march.
Tom had one of the Mp5s slung over his shoulder, but he carried his father’s longbow in his free hand, his back clustered with Kent’s sword in pride of place competing with the low-slung quiver. Karla had her Mp5 alert, and likewise, Attila with the leftover AR-15. Lucas begrudged never getting his own archery gear back, but seemed content with the weight of the snub-nose assault rifle he’d made his own. Taking Tom’s cue in the matter, each had bound electrician’s tape around their legs and boots, even at the crotch, better to ward against anticipated knives. They all wore jackets, and Karla had knee and elbow guards salvaged from old motocross gear.
The Citizens they passed showed more than curiosity. Hunger, fear, desperation – all were etched into the hard lines created by deprivation and mounting starvation. For all the free running water in Columbus, dirt and soot stained clothes and bodies alike. Children lurked like shadows in doorways and almost anywhere they could hide, and the hard, predatory looks Tom only glimpsed in passing was enough to tell him Locke’s Urchins were just the start of the sanctuary zone’s problems. It seemed too many older survivors had abandoned ambitions of civilization, normalizing the lurking barbarism of their offspring. Tom’s crew passed a boy squatting between two piles of refuse and old bicycle parts, pants around his ankles, but when he looked up imploringly and moaned, “It hurts, mister,” Tom held Lucas back, the hint of the child’s knife and some kind of madman’s ruse catching his eye.
“Keep moving,” Tom ordered.
The Mile remained a shadow of its former self. The days elapsed since the last City-wide tragedy and the fires that came after meant supply and demand were underscored by a new desperation. The City’s sprawling bazaar was the lifeblood of its trade and the key to its survival. And on that count, its survival didn’t bode well.
The slow-motion train wreck of City life was far too apparent. The usual shelters, hovels, commandeered workspaces, repurposed old vehicles, vans, shipping containers, porta-toilets, evacuation netting and defunct CDC shelters choked the streets everywhere they looked. But only a handful of stalls were open for trade, and despite very little to offer.
A gray-skinned man called out that there were no Rations on The Mile, as if hoping to discourage them, and yet within a few more yards, a seriously tall, seriously gaunt-looking man in a catcher’s vest and steel welder’s mask guarded one of the few remaining public eateries. The smell of tasteless broiling stew whispered out of the place, tantalizing regardless, and the sentry clutched a weapon like a sharpened hockey stick to discourage vagrants. Mere yards away, a ragged woman and her dying child lay on a bed of crinkled plastic sheeting, too starved and listless to move. An older man crouched a short distance from them with his pants down too, squatting to shit. Tom had the thoughts, At least someone’s still eating – and then took in the rats crouched beneath the man’s open sewer as the shitting man grabbed one of the foul shiny creatures drawn like a moth to the candle of his trap – and the bile welled in Tom’s throat making his eyes water.
He stopped and dug one of the .38 rounds from his vest pocket and tossed it for the mask-clad doorman to catch.
“Get these people something to eat, please,” Tom said.
The sentinel didn’t move and the bullet bounced hard off the cracked sidewalk. Tom’s companions filed past, but Tom stood his ground.
“We’ll be coming back this way in fifteen minutes,” he told the sentry. “All four of us.”
The welder’s mask concealed the man’s eyes behind tinted glass. Like a robot, the head slowly angled on Tom
and then down to where the bullet lay. A muscle worked in the man’s splotchy neck. He knelt carefully and picked the bullet up like it might escape. He examined it briefly, then tossed it back at Tom.
Tom made the catch with his left as the muscles tightened in his throat too, but Karla clutched his arm hard enough her nails stung.
“For fuck’s sake, Tom,” she growled. “You don’t think we’ve got enough on our hands for today?”
Tom glowered at the gatekeeper a moment more and sniffed agreement and they moved on.
“Are you sure about this?” It seemed Karla had a sudden appetite for questions. “We still don’t even know where this Locke lives.”
“We will,” Tom replied.
“By hitting these . . . Edgelords?”
“We’ll find Kevin,” Tom said.
“Someone will know him, or know where he is – and that’s with Finnegan Locke.”
*
CROSSING THROUGH AND then beyond The Mile took them back into streets where the wind came renewed at them like the City’s own self-defense system, a banshee-wailing as if the sanctuary zone fought off an infection – perhaps Tom and his team. Certainly, a black intent radiated off them as they marched as if with banners aloft. But each time they spotted a trooper patrol, Tom’s quartet melted into cover by silent agreement, using the chaotic scenery to traverse to within a bowshot of their latest destination.
The corrugated iron gate looked serious beneath the old-tech decorations welded across the front of the Edgelords’ compound. Tom and his followers hugged an adjacent wall, moving under the awnings of the last of the boarded-up old shopfronts to reveal a murky alleyway, tall brick walls, and the top of the Edgelord’s perimeter fence like medieval battlements blocking out the weak overhead sun.
In that alley, a pair of troopers stood with their backs to Tom’s team, weapons over their shoulders. Tom froze, a hand raised in caution, then also registered a woman with her dress pinned beneath her breasts as she let the first of the troopers have his way with her while the second man awaited his turn.
After The Apocalypse (Book 6): Resolution Page 4
