After The Apocalypse (Book 6): Resolution

by Hately, Warren

  “What did Kevin say about your sister?”

  “Not much,” Lucas answered. “But I believed him. Dad, he said it was Councilor Wilhelm.”

  “Councilor Wilhelm who what?”

  “They have Lila,” Luke said. “Some place outside the City.”

  There were other questions. His father couldn’t frame them, squinting with eyes like broken glass.

  “Wilhelm?” he said. “Why? Why the hell would they – Jesus Lucas, your sister – she –”

  “I don’t know.”

  Tom mustered himself and Lucas made a quick check around them. At the site of the first trap of Persian rugs soaked in fuel, the outside wooden fence had caught alight too. The berserk fire now in two buildings made the whole Rats Nest a deathtrap. The heat was choking. It seared the eyes. Smoke swirled around Lucas and his father, and betrayed several more Urchins making their escape. Lucas raised his gun at the other youngsters crying from the heat and smoke and the general disaster, but just watched them leave instead.

  “Locke’s dead,” Tom said in a mixed, uncertain voice. “Before I could. . . .”

  His father’s eyes refocused several times as if he kept startling awake – awaking again each time into concentric layers of nightmare, each reality more terrible than the last.

  “We have to get clear,” he said. “Did you see Attila?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe he got away,” Tom said. “I hope so.”

  Tom started towards the burning exit and halted, uncertain.

  “Lucas, if they have Lilianna. . . .”

  A stretch of paneling from one of the apartments clattered down in a cloud of embers. Noises of destruction echoed from inside the first building. Its neighbor’s whole internal face was now alight with nascent flames as glass shattered and more muted detonations came from inside. A whole section of the north building’s external scaffolding collapsed noisily then, kicking up more smoke and embers, and aborting any further hesitation as Luke watched his father’s eyes snap back into hardened points.

  “This way,” he said.

  *

  THE WESTERNMOST OF the buildings with its collapsed façade offered the safest escape route, traveling opposite to the flames which looked guaranteed to create disaster for anyone else in nearby homes. That could be hundreds of people. Lucas kept his rifle trained and sweeping around them to compensate for his father’s single-minded focus on their escape.

  Tom hit a back door at ground level and shouldered in with the Welsh longbow drawn tight.

  He released the arrow at once, grunting as he reached back for a second.

  Lucas couldn’t see the target, following with trusting blindness until he had to step over a teenager’s corpse, sprawled with a fire ax in his hands still.

  “Boy’s name is Dega,” Luke’s dad said. “I don’t understand why they wouldn’t run.”

  Tom’s tone continued to worry Lucas, but there were plenty of more imminent threats to fear. As if required of him, Lucas angled around and past his father, scouting the open entries into multiple rooms containing sofas and any number of discarded blankets, bean bags, pillows and throws. A big-screen TV stood mounted on a wooden trolley, cords from it disappearing into the murk. Lucas blinked hard, smoke in the air, at once confronted with the rewards of life in Finnegan Locke’s household – which only heightened his desolation and loss at Kevin’s betrayal.

  “He sold us out for this?”

  His father moved past and roughly caressed the side of Luke’s neck where the hair had long since grown out. Now it was the younger Vanicek’s turn to edge towards collapse. Lucas barked a noise in lieu of tears, which only brought Tom back into him. Lucas pressed against his father’s grimy chest with his cheek brushing the bullet holes in Tom’s jacket.

  “I’m sorry, dad,” he said.

  “We have more important things now than that,” Tom answered. He forced a compassionate look onto his face for his son’s benefit, Lucas knew, yet he was grateful for it. Luke’s eyes dropped just as Tom’s expression broke and his father started gently crying too, struggling to work his jaw muscles as he continued to talk. “We could really give up now, son. But we’re not going to. I’m fucking terrified. We have to get your sister at once. And she . . . she might already be dead.”

  Lucas made a noise as if to interrupt, but a single hand stilled him.

  “Just facing it, alright boy?” his father said. “But we’re not giving in.”

  Lucas resurrected his hold on the M4 and Tom did that blinking thing again, now crouching to his level with his hand on his son’s shoulder again as if they weren’t in the midst of a blazing inferno.

  “You did good, Lucas,” Tom said. “If you didn’t get that information from Kevin, about your sister . . . Locke just . . . died. I didn’t . . . he just fell. To his death.”

  Lucas understood well enough – but it wasn’t enough to stop a sick guilt that he hadn’t wrung more information from Kevin before he died. Perhaps the poor pathetic sorrowful little boy who’d been his friend hadn’t known any more than he said. But fury rather than sadness laid its claim on Lucas to help banish his tears.

  “He fired a fucking gun at you, dad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was my friend and he betrayed us and he . . . he wanted me to. . . .”

  “Betray us too,” Tom said.

  “Maybe,” Lucas nodded and couldn’t hold the eye contact any longer and felt a failure for it. He sniffled and wiped his filthy face. “But he fired a gun at you, and if he knew about Lila. . . .”

  “I’m still sorry you had to kill your friend,” Tom said.

  “I killed that lady too,” Luke said more slowly. “That was my . . . the first person I ever had to kill.”

  “Lucas, I know this might seem like a terrible thing to say, but I honestly wouldn’t lose any sleep over that woman,” Tom said. “She was fucking bat-shit crazy and trying to kill us, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s harsh, I know. Hell, it’s insane” his father said and started tears anew. “But this is the . . . this is the world you’ve inherited. I’m so fucking sorry, Lucas. And I . . . I’ve done a crap job trying to spare you the worst of it.”

  “Dad.”

  Lucas took a few rapid breaths, the madness of the moment still pressing in on him that they weren’t safe, that Lilianna might be dead or raped or tortured or dumped already in some shallow grave or – even worse – alive again as one of them and waiting until he and Tom found her that way.

  “Dad, you’re my everything,” Lucas said quietly, hushed. “Without you, I can’t even . . . I couldn’t even survive.”

  Tom wiped his eyes roughly. He smiled sadly.

  “No,” his father said. “I’m so sorry for that too, Lucas. Today’s the day you stop needing me at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t protect you anymore,” he said. “I have to ask you what I never wanted, and . . . and I have to ask you right now. Your sister’s missing and God knows what else. I need you to back me up on this – whatever it is we have to do. Do you understand? Whatever we have to do.”

  Luke nodded with an otherworldly sense of completing some kind of ancient ritual forgotten in the world of computers and supermarkets – a violent coming of age for him.

  “That’s exactly what I said to myself,” Lucas said and tried not to splutter the words. “When I knew I had to kill Kevin, because of what he’d done, I told myself . . . first I had to kill the boy in me . . . before I could kill him. And I did. I did.”

  They hugged and his father kissed the top of his head reaching now to almost beneath his chin.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you too.”

  Luke’s father nudged him to move and Luke fell exhausted into Tom’s wake.

  *

  THE STREET WAS full of people crouched against the gale-force winds, yet watching in terror as the fast-moving blaze leapt from the
burning top floor of the second building and across into trees and an old powerline while its embers hosed like dragon-fire into the upper windows of a taller, unrelated three-story apartment block with an abandoned café and country-style tearooms at street level. The site housed a public trading house now, but dozens of Citizens spilled out of it into the street instead.

  It was all beyond Luke and Tom’s control as well as their concern. Lucas kept pace with his father as they headed into the worst of it, the air tinged like burning metal and compost, their eyes forced narrow against all the grit as if under attack from Agent Orange.

  “We have to find –”

  Tom abandoned speech to barrel into his son, dragging the pair of them into cover as a riderless rickshaw hurtled out of the fog and past them, bouncing along the street straight into the thirty-odd people further along. A woman cried out and someone else started shrieking, the sound diminished by all the rushing air, and at least two of the onlookers didn’t get up again as the errant rickshaw, a wheel broken now, skittered onwards along the cobbled street and at some point flipped again and became airborne, snatched by the hurtling winds.

  Suburban bric-a-bràc continued flying past them, and Lucas struggled to recover his breath, eyes wide in fresh fright, Tom’s hand still pressing down against his chest. It took him a second to detect his father cursing like a sailor in a low-pitched monotone.

  “This is fucking crazy,” Tom said at last.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We have to get inside the Enclave.” Tom’s eyes narrowed and went far away. Then he snapped back, gray eyes intense in their focus on his son. “Carlotta Deschain had a way inside. If she could lead us in –”

  “You think we can find Lilianna without anyone seeing?”

  “No,” Tom said bluntly. “You said Kevin said she was outside the sanctuary zone. We have to get to Wilhelm, then we can. . . .”

  Luke waited a few seconds, but Tom stopped speaking. A few more metallic screeching noises came from nearby. Someone’s shelter collapsed and half the pieces flew through the air like shrapnel. Lucas and his dad crouched at the bottom of an old brick storefront, relying on the cover of several fragile-looking wooden shelters.

  But they couldn’t remain where they were.

  “Dad?”

  “Wilhelm had a secret entrance too.” Tom motioned his son to stand. A bicycle and then several planks of wood hurtled past with a whoosh. “We’re making a detour,” Tom said. “This way.”

  He held his hand behind his back and Lucas took it, the pair of them facing into the full-bore wind just long enough to reach the next intersection and veer right. In their wake, any number of smaller structures and badly-made campsites disintegrated into a fast-rushing storm of debris, an airborne river of it amid the continuous hurricane roar from the rest of the sanctuary zone likewise under attack.

  Intervening buildings now took the brunt of the wind as they continued. A few Citizens ran between buildings seeking safety and Lucas tried not to meet the eyes peering out at them from a stack of half-crushed ancient automobiles now with people living in them.

  “Where are we going?” Lucas called.

  They hurried abreast now, though he kept checking on his dad since he’d no idea what was going on and the fear lingered that Tom wasn’t in his right mind still. Adrenalin fatigue also crept into Lucas, but not enough to dull the ongoing alarm for his missing sister. If he could only move time and space with his thoughts like in the old comic books, he knew there’d be nothing and no one safe from his wrath. The City’s tearing apart almost felt like an extension of his nihilistic wish, and Lucas’ scowl curved into a cruel mask.

  He and Tom would rescue Lilianna, or die trying – and the latter felt all too likely.

  They navigated a dozen blocks into emptier streets. The winds eased a little, scavenger birds hunting on high with daredevil grins while the citizenry locked down as the weather edged towards disaster.

  The visibility still sucked. By the time his father led them to The Dirty Vixen, Luke jogged in his shadow with a hand on Tom’s back.

  “What’s this place?”

  “It’s where Carlotta is now,” Tom had to practically yell back to answer him.

  His dad tried the venue’s battleship door, not anticipating success, but he banged his fist on it a few times before retreating around the side of the narrow storefront where a curved metal awning covered the steel-barred, boarded-up old windows.

  The wind dropped to a momentary whisper as if confirming all was quiet within.

  “Magnus?” Tom yelled.

  He repeated himself a couple of times. More trash moonwalked down the sidewalk past them and off in the direction of the next block, and then a vehicle tore through the cross street before the engine noise also faded into the background roar. Tom glanced back to his son.

  “I’m going to give you a boost up, OK?”

  Lucas nodded. The curved awning didn’t look easy. From his angle, he had to rely on Tom’s description as his father told him to climb for the ledge beneath an open window.

  The crackle of gunshots sounded so distantly they might’ve been something else. Apart from the moving scenery, ruffled by the waxing and waning winds, the clogged shelters and occupied territories this side of The Mile were quiet. Gray skies thickened in the direction they’d come with the growing plume of the out-of-control fire worrying the horizon.

  Tom formed a cradle with his hand for Lucas, who slung the M4 over one shoulder and tried to use momentum to get up and over the curved lip in one move. It only went half as well as he wished, and for a long second there, his ass and legs hung down as he scrambled for a handhold. Then Tom pushed his feet up for support and Lucas banged and clawed his way up to the wood-framed window drawn down tight on the Vixen’s upper-floor sentry position. Dingy curtains obscured the next room. There was no sign of anyone.

  “There’s a ladder,” Tom called up to him. “A rope ladder. See if you can throw it down.”

  Perched carefully, Lucas moved alongside the window ledge and eased up the pane. The old timber juddered each step of the way. Gritty light defeated the shadows to reveal a mess of shoes and metal tools scattered across the room’s tired linoleum, a metal toolbox open on its side fallen from a step-rack beneath some jackets on pegs. A tripod lay tipped over, adding to the confusion, but Lucas only registered a sniper rifle’s camouflaged stock while searching for the rope ladder pooled on one side of the floor.

  Lucas adjusted the M4 across his back and stepped into the room just as the first Fury attacked.

  *

  LUCAS HADN’T PAID much attention to Carlotta Deschain in life, but she had his attention now, tearing into the room and straight for him with her hands stretched out like a hunting bird and her mouth equally agape.

  Halfway into the room, Lucas dropped the rest of the way and tried to roll past the screeching undead woman – except he jerked back, caught by the strap across his chest as the short-barreled rifle still managed to get caught in the window frame.

  He got a single hand up as Carlotta slammed onto him. Her outdoors jacket was rank with blood and her own disembowelment. Those gory insides crushed up against him. Try as he might, Luke’s repeated knee strikes connected with the dead woman’s crotch without noticeable effect. Tom’s worried cries came from outside, but Luke was as powerless to reply as he was fending off the ravening woman.

  And all their ruckus drew a second, gray-skinned figure who loped into the room and came at Lucas atop her.

  The white-haired man’s face was lined with blood and pain long before he died and rose again. But his remaining teeth gnashed hungrily, ravenous as he tried scaling past the woman Fury in their shared bloodlust.

  Luke pissed his pants as he got his short knife free. Tom kept screaming. It came so faint. Lucas couldn’t get up. His legs scrabbled just as uselessly against the piss-slick linoleum. He stabbed into Carlotta’s neck and temple a half-dozen times and then the rifl
e strap broke and he dropped fully to the floor, catching his tailbone on the window ledge and then sliding on the jellied gore between Carlotta Deschain’s feet.

  Lucas squirmed in the slippery, half-dried blood to get around and then behind the pair of starved Furies, but they moved too fast for belief. Fresh ones, Lucas’ stammering mind yelled shrill behind fear-sequestered eyes. The old man rushed first, swinging a hand around to deter the dead woman with the same intent. Whatever they were in life, the couple had no loyalties left, but for the kill.

  He dodged one of the dead barman’s claws, then Lucas stabbed. The knife clipped Magnus as the woman Fury slammed into them and all three went skidding down into the remainder of the shoe racks, more shoes and boots and the contents of the toolbox spewing across the floor, Lucas twisting about at the searing pain in his thigh as Carlotta’s thumb crushed deep into the meat of his leg between the layers of duct tape he’d added earlier.

  At least the pain brought inspiration and strength. Lucas wrenched his leg to kick up and out, catching the former Councilor in the jaw and repelling her back for just long enough that Lucas could stand again, wrestling with Magnus to keep his snapping jaws an inch short of Luke’s neck. Their momentum conspired with balance, and they fell again, with Lucas coming down the heavier of the two. Fresh pain burst across his lower back and the will to live nearly went with it.

  The male Fury bent over across its own broken leg to get at him, shards of bone squelching through day-old meat. One of the philosopher’s hands were mangled into not much more than a bloody cudgel. With his other hand, Magnus clutched Luke’s zippered jacket, trying to rend it open, and Lucas snarled, stretched one hand to grab the dead man’s ponytail, then pulled his head down towards the knife. The creature struggled against him, but Lucas had the leverage to drive the blade into the Fury’s throat, and he kept on pushing, teeth aching as he grit them, his boyish fist forcing slowly deeper into the wound as Lucas grunted and sighed and whimpered and fought for dear life until the short blade finally plunged into brainstem and the dead weight of the dead barman sagged heavily across him.