“Lucas!”
He scouted around, no sign of Attila either, half-blinded by the rooftop’s shifting architecture just as Locke wanted.
He called for Lucas again and again.
But the boy didn’t answer.
*
TOM GROWLED AND forced himself to close the gap chasing after Locke, and he closed the final few yards firing two more tight bursts that ended with him kicking in the bullet-riddled third-floor door and sweeping hard right, heedless to the dangers as he tasted the air thick with cordite and dust, the gale blowing crap through the air outside as the single oil lamp on a bookshelf revealed Locke’s private study, and another door only just swinging shut to the north. Already oriented that way, Tom fired the gun again and grunted with a weird sort of satisfaction at the explosion of wood chips as he blasted the door back open.
Locke came at Tom as if he knew the Mp5 would click empty.
The ex-convict wrested the gun from Tom’s hand in a burst of motion, twisting cannily to tighten the strap across Tom’s chest and lever the slightly bigger man off balance – and it was only Tom’s desperate Frankenstein dance that stopped Locke kicking his feet out from beneath him.
Tom pulled the hunting knife from behind his back. Locke sensed the move if not the blade, and leaped back, giving Tom the chance to cut through the gun strap instead. The move left Locke with the useless gun he cast aside at once in the crowded room, feinting some kind of roundhouse kick that now made Tom the cautious one. Locke seized his hesitation and bolted between antique furniture and back through the shot-through door on the far side of the room.
Tom switched to Kent’s longsword and went after him.
The door led into the exposed side of the apartment block now under fierce attack from the buffeting winds.
Locke knew his way around. He hurried along the half-exposed corridor while Tom almost fell into the maw of the next floor below. It cost him a precious second as he steadied his footing to follow like a tightrope walker, lagging at Locke’s rear. At the far end of the hall, the exterior north face of the building resumed in a cage of serrated brickwork.
Fagin jumped a tripwire, hit the back fire door, and slipped through and outside.
Tom copied Locke’s deliberate sidestep, then paused a second before repeating the door kick, this time expecting attack rather than another metal walkway, this one without a guard rail as it turned the corner of the top floor. Halfway along already, Locke shot Tom a snarling grin of defiance.
Tom roared in reply to demand the fugitive face him. But Locke had other ideas. Taking off again forced Tom into pursuit. Despite the sheer fall to the ground twenty yards below, Tom threw himself after his enemy, hacking desperately with the longsword and hoping to hamstring the man before he could escape.
Instead, Tom’s sword struck an overhead metal wire and sent it thrumming.
Locke turned to protect himself as the nearest rain-soaked bedsheets snapped towards him in reaction to Tom’s blow. Locke batted them away only to realize, too late, he needed a better handhold, grabbing for the same sheets as he slipped from the narrow third-floor platform, hit the back of his skull on another metal cable stretched across the next floor down, which then propelled him somersaulting forwards as if out of a siege catapult.
Locke lifted feeble arms too late to avoid his face-first collision with the glass-paned window frame set in the far wall.
The shattering sound echoed above the wind now assailing the Rats Nest, and Tom steadied himself where he stood, aghast to see Locke’s face and jaw sheared off, and the rest of his body a dead weight dangling throat-first from the glass-covered ledge before it tumbled like so much manure the rest of the way to the ground.
Clouds of swirling black smoke thickened the air around Tom as he found his way down another metal staircase all the way to the courtyard where his dying enemy sprawled beside a metal skip. An horrific clusterfuck of blood poured from the carnage as Locke’s body shook with autonomic function, twitching so that his Italian leather-clad feet painted twisted bloody sigils across the paving.
And Finnegan Locke took all his secrets with him to the grave.
Chapter 3
THE BLUE PLASTIC wanted to suffocate him, but Lucas crawled towards the light and finally burst out from under the canopy, not pleased to see his savior was the fire eating through the wall and windowed door between them and the blazing southern wing of the old lodging house.
Them.
Lucas struggled to pull his rifle free of the coils of rope and random garbage dragged down with him and Kevin in their struggle, and Lucas chided himself the whole time for not just emptying his M4 into his so-called “friend”.
But his stupid heroics saved his dad. Lucas knew that.
When he finally stumbled fully free from the gigantic tarp, he whipped the snub-nosed rifle around, anticipating Kevin and his Glock at any moment. But he saw nothing. Apart from the furnace roar, relegated beyond the stout bricks, everything else went quiet. Tom called out his name from higher up, but Lucas kept his eyes peeled even as they started to water.
Kevin turned his gun on Luke’s father and it was only a miracle Tom wasn’t dead. Luke’s hands and then his thighs started to shake. He growled low, boyish, furious.
Holding his breath, Lucas scoured the ground-level chamber. Someone had stripped the room back to its fundamentals and then abandoned a heap of timber, crates, power tools, workbenches and big pieces of old electrical machinery probably too heavy to relocate anywhere else. The knocked-through chamber had an airy warehouse feel reinforced by the hole in the ceiling, despite the old paint and mildew disturbed in the recent chaos.
He tracked the gun around, having trouble with his breath, palpitations slamming through his narrow frame as Lucas swallowed abortively, open-mouthed and blinking and only just starting to feel the pain in his hip, elbow, shoulder and palm from his rough descent.
Tom’s roar and then another burst of gunfire sent Lucas shaking again.
He whipped around, eyes peeled for Kevin, the heat from the fire next door already oppressive. He broke into a sweat and glanced upwards at sign of movement.
“Lucas!” Tom bawled down to him.
Luke scanned the room once again and then motioned to the south.
“There’s an exit,” he called. “Dad, you’ve got to get out!”
Tom eyed the chamber below and shook his head looking flustered,
“You too,” he called back. “Get outside, now!”
Tom gave him a final curt nod, then disappeared from view.
Lucas adjusted the Mp5 and turned for the door he’d spied at the far side of the room, but flinched with surprise yet again as Kevin sprinted out from the cover of a dusty, paint-spattered stack of timber.
Lucas whipped his gun around before the other boy was clear, and yet only watched as Kevin reached the far door, which was half-blocked by the fallen plastic sheeting. Kevin yanked the handle, but the door budged only a few inches as it caught in the spilled tarpaulin.
Panic in his eyes, the smaller boy lit his gaze around to check Lucas’ gun and then the hesitant cast of his face – and Kevin’s mouth split into a nasty grin.
“Still a scaredy-cat, Loo.”
He started pulling the tarpaulin furiously away from the blocked door. Lucas felt the dryness in his throat like he’d swallowed all of the dust. Heat from the blaze choked their surrounds like a boiler room. Kevin grunted, sweating and frustrated, then abandoned his labors at once to look meaningfully past Lucas.
“Burn to death in here,” the boy said. “Both of us.”
The wall and door behind Lucas was now fully ablaze. Radiant light seeped through the very bricks. Lucas shut his mouth tight, and with his own breath stilled, heard again the roaring chatter of the inferno taking hold of the whole building.
“Work together.”
Kevin grunted, thrusting a meager handful of the huge tarpaulin at him.
Lucas held the assault rifle
still.
“You attacked my family, Kevin.”
“Nuh,” the other boy said. “Didn’t.”
“You killed Kent!” Lucas screamed. “We know it was you!”
Kevin eyed the M4. It was his turn to be choked for words.
“Killed someone,” he said and almost shrugged, looking down. “Didn’t know his name.”
“It was Kent you . . . you. . . .”
The insult wouldn’t come. Lucas was too aghast at his resurgent anger, his vast sundered sense of loss, betrayal – feelings of rejection piling atop such recent horror that his hands shook hard enough to make his aim dance. The burning door cracked open behind him and blasting flames sloughed into the rear of the room ready to make short work of the other stacks of lumber covered in paint-stained sheets.
And still Lucas was afraid.
“C’mon!”
It was just a squeal in Kevin’s muted way of talking. The boy stared at Lucas with frantic eyes, then returned, desperately trying again to haul armfuls of the heavy plastic sheeting away from their only exit. The tarpaulin’s pinned edge was deliberately weighted beneath one of the abandoned refrigeration tanks, and Kevin gave up his futile efforts for more frustration of a different kind as he began grabbing the power tools at random and testing to see if any of them worked.
But the skinny boy discarded the dead tools almost instantly, scouting around the rest of the room, perversely confident now amid his sense of emergency as Lucas almost lazily followed him with a crestfallen sense of emergency of his own.
“Kevin,” Lucas said to him. “You let them try to kill me.”
The younger boy said nothing. Still searching. Hurrying now either side of the huge obstacles and vanishing from sight – but not without giving a telltale shout of triumph.
“Kevin!” Lucas yelled again.
The fire was impossibly hot now. Luke lifted the M4 to his shoulder again and backed away, sights trained on the dark empty spaces with the air slowly turning into treacle. The rear wall collapsed completely and strips from the ceiling on that side of the building fell as just more clattering fuel for the fire.
“Kevin!”
“Put your gun down, Lucas.”
Out of sight, Kevin racked the slide on the pistol he’d recovered.
Lucas felt a flush that almost ended in his pants, and he gulped ashen air to master himself, righting and re-righting the gun stock against his shoulder and wishing and wishing and hoping and then coldly seeing Kevin step back into view with the Glock on him.
“Put it down,” Kevin said again. “You can’t shoot me.”
“Yes I can.”
“Then do it,” Kevin said. “Shoot each other?”
Remorse was a stranger to the boy’s face. Their stand-off lengthened, grew tenuous. Finally, Kevin lowered the Glock, and Lucas was certain he should shoot his friend right then and there, but he let his rifle lower too. The emotion had him, then. Tears forced their way from Luke’s eyes and Kevin made an insouciant check on the disaster burning into the room all around and behind them.
“Whole place is gonna burn,” Kevin said and wheezed.
Lucas glanced at the other door and the tarpaulin in the way.
“Work together?” he repeated.
Kevin grunted. Luke could already see the weakest point to release the pinned sheets, and he hurried to the second stack of timber planks and pushed it sideways so that they toppled. He then grabbed a double handful of the slippery material and yanked it sideways towards him, tugging it free of the slewed load.
Kevin joined him to pull the last of it free, and Luke stood then, letting Kevin finish the job with a grunt as Lucas drew and then stabbed his knife into the boy’s back.
“You shot at my father,” he whispered into Kevin’s ear.
Kevin gave a choked gasp, and Lucas put his hand around his friend’s mouth and drove the knife in again. The boy whimpered, muffled, and kicked back violently, fighting to escape with such a look of intense betrayal that Lucas almost faltered.
But Kevin pulled the Glock from his waistband and it was mostly luck Luke had one hand free to grab the other boy’s wrist and smash the pistol and his hand with it into Kevin’s own face.
Luke tried the move a second time, but Kevin fought him now. Lucas’ knee struck the other boy’s solar plexus, and then another stab wound – into Kevin’s chest, this time – saw the strength drain from the wild boy, and Kevin started to holler and scream as the furnishings crackled and fire caught in some of the old electrical junk and Lucas coldly wondered if any still held their old flammable gas cylinders.
“Lucas,” Kevin gasped. “No, stop please, no, Lucas, Lucas stop. . . .”
But Lucas had it in him now, and he forced the traitor to the ground with superior strength, steadying the short-bladed knife in his hand and genuinely hesitant only because the urge to inflict pain and punishment was so powerful he didn’t know how to abort it.
“Kill me an’ never find your sister,” Kevin hissed.
Lucas stayed his hand in shock at the words. Pain and fear filling Kevin’s eyes gave him a near-religious conviction.
He spoke truth.
Lucas shook him.
“What are you talking about?”
“They took her.”
Kevin could barely speak. He spluttered bloodily. Lucas eased the knee digging into the boy’s bleeding chest.
“What?”
“Don’t kill me.”
For all Lucas knew, Kevin was already dead and didn’t know it.
“What did you say about my fucking sister!”
He grabbed Kevin by the shirtfront as he roared, pulling him one-handed from the ground. It was a miracle he didn’t fly into a rage worthy of his father, turning the captured boy to mincemeat with the dagger clutched overhead. Kevin raised feeble hands. The noise of more gunfire outside was almost lost to the firestorm crashing around them. Flames licked across the walls and tracked along the front wall towards their exit.
“Your Councilor a–”
“Who?” Luke barked. “What? What’s happened to Lilianna?”
“–ying to tell you –”
Lucas almost didn’t let Kevin speak. The knife in his hand had an urgent weight, almost its own dark desire to be used. He remembered Tom slaying OK Jay as he knelt, in a similar wordless rage that destroyed far more than it revealed. That cold memory, and the reality of the blaze threatening to entomb him, brought Lucas’ eyes back to his dying friend. He imagined strangling the boy like a sacrifice, or slicing open Kevin’s throat for his father’s approval. Instead, their chamber darkened with fire and brimstone all too real.
“Tell me,” Lucas said.
“Safety . . . first,” Kevin wheezed. “Fire.”
“Who is the Councilor?” Lucas demanded. “Do you mean Ernest Wilhelm, my dad’s friend?”
“. . . not your friend.”
“What about Lilianna?”
“No,” Kevin said.
He coughed weakly. Lucas started coughing too, barely able to see now with all the smoke and fumes. He eyed the unblocked door, and still hunched over his hostage, scanned the fire behind him advanced to no more than a half-dozen yards away. A living carpet of fire burnt like magma over the stack of beams, crackling around and within the metal appliances and slowly turning their supports into slag. Lucas fought off light-headedness to stand, tucking the knife away and grabbing Kevin two-handed.
“What is it about my sister?”
“No.”
“Tell me.”
“No,” Kevin coughed and spat. “Safe first. Fire –”
“No!” Lucas shook him hard. “Tell me!”
“Lucas!” Kevin’s voice was a whine. “Please, I wanna live.”
“No.”
Lucas snorted and trembled, then he clutched Kevin to drag him towards the fire.
“Tell me,” he grunted.
He swung Kevin forward with enough force to show he could do it. The smaller
boy started shrieking, but the blood loss left him mewling like a premature kitten.
“Lucas!”
“Tell me!”
“They took her!” Kevin’s legs kicked back against licking flames. “Outside city. They got a place! Please!”
Lucas dropped Kevin to the ground and scurried back as the rampant fire ate its way across the hard floor as if deconstructing reality itself. The flames burnt close enough to Kevin’s twitching sneakers that it was only a moment before the boy’s shoes started to smolder and melt and then Kevin’s feet caught alight, and Lucas watched for only a second longer before retreating to retrieve the Glock.
He returned to his friend like a sleepwalker, the handgun pointed down.
Kevin managed to holler, “Lucas, no!”
Then Lucas shot him once through the head.
Kevin relaxed even as the flames caught hold of his jeans and the noxious fumes worsened with the smell of human flesh and burnt plastic.
Luke covered his face with his arm and hurried for the door.
The same moment, Tom kicked it in.
*
HIS FATHER DIDN’T give Lucas a chance to scramble free, clutching him bodily and hauling him from the furnace over one shoulder like a firefighter. Tom didn’t understand why Lucas kept kicking and shrieking until they escaped the compound and the fire and black smoke replacing the overhead sky.
Fierce winds sucked the flames from the first of the two eastern buildings into the second one, the awnings and snapping flags of their rooftop defenses only fueling the spread. An Urchin tore past them in the smog as Lucas finally got free, rolling clear of his father as if from another attacker.
“They have Lila,” he said as loud and focused as he could. “Dad, do you hear me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Kevin told me!”
“Kevin?”
“He’s dead in there,” Lucas said and pointed needlessly. “I killed him.”
“Whatever needed to be done,” Tom said on autopilot.
His gaze lost focus and a fear plunged through Lucas that his old man was about to start bawling again, right when Lucas – and Lilianna – needed him most. But Tom lurched back into action, grabbing Luke’s shoulder.
After The Apocalypse (Book 6): Resolution Page 7
