After The Apocalypse (Book 6): Resolution

by Hately, Warren

  “Weak as shit,” he said. “Apache, you fuckin’ broke him.”

  “Yusuf and Babycakes brought him in.”

  Greerson tutted. “Fuckin’ Yusuf.” But Yusuf and his companion had already withdrawn to the second vehicle and clambered in. The running engine surged into gear and the battered white utility reversed and took the bulk of the illumination with it. None of the hunters said anything for a moment as their comrades’ vehicle got underway, the wind clutching at everyone’s clothes, and slowly the taillights flickered out of view beyond the crest of the undulating terrain.

  Finally, Denny Greerson gave a final grunt.

  “It’s gonna be a long night.”

  It was more a promise than a complaint.

  *

  AURORA AND LILIANNA were ignored while Greerson stepped across the young man’s supine form and drew a knife, hauling the exhausted and defeated captive upright by his hair just long enough for the Chief to slit his throat. The young man’s surrender was no fakery. He barely mewled, eyes flicking open as a hideous gush of blood sprayed from his neck. Slinky and the helmeted trooper had to skip aside to avoid the wash as the wind tore through.

  Greerson dumped the dying man onto the ground.

  Still grinning, the handsome trooper dubbed Slinky drew a Colt automatic.

  “Gonna shut him up?”

  “No,” Greerson said like it pained him. “Tape him up. Throw him in the back.”

  Then he glowered at the two bound women.

  “We might need him to help us track.”

  “We should be using dogs,” Slinky muttered. He gestured at the faded sign rendered invisible by the night. “It’s a fuckin’ kennels, after all.”

  “Wilhelm said someone ate all the dogs.”

  For some reason, Greerson’s answer made Apache chuckle. Chesterton only watched. Behind them all, McGill came into view only long enough to see which way things were headed, then she retreated into the concrete office out of sight.

  As horrified as she remained, Lilianna had more immediate concerns. Dryness building in her mouth throughout long hours of captivity now hit its peak, and beside her, Aurora wilted, pale, battered and unwell.

  Like a dead weight.

  Lila edged up beside her friend.

  “We have to survive this,” Lilianna rasped.

  Aurora only returned a collapsed look. Lilianna’s heart dropped further.

  “I have to escape,” she said even more quietly now, eyes shifting to track the men as they moved around them with a growing sense of purpose. “I think something’s planned. My father and my brother – they’re in danger. Tonight. We have to get back to the City.”

  “Lila. . . .”

  They’d left Aurora’s hands bound in front of her. Lila tried to comfort the girl as best she could – despite fighting yet more spiraling terror, Lilianna’s reptilian sense of self-preservation at war with the obligation she felt to this person who’d been a rival until so recently.

  “‘Rora,” Lila said again. “I’m not leaving you, OK?”

  The other woman licked cracked lips, split where someone’d hit her.

  “If you can go, you should,” the young woman said.

  “No.”

  “Yes.” Aurora started to cry, albeit silently. “I can’t do this.”

  “Hey ladies,” Slinky barked across at them. “How about a little shut-the-fuck-up, yeah?”

  Lilianna eyed the handsome bastard with venom.

  “We need water.”

  “Is that so?”

  The trooper swaggered closer and played like about to open his flies. Greerson, busy moving his kit around, caught the joke and made a savage hand signal.

  “You pull that thing out, don’t be surprised if she bites it off,” he said.

  Lila lowered her eyes, no plan for such an attack and yet so true.

  Greerson removed a water bottle and tossed it to them, onto the ground. Lilianna took it at once and forced some towards her friend while the Safety Chief held her gaze.

  “You try anything like that with me,” Greerson said, “and you’ll live just long enough to regret it – and beg for death.”

  Aurora drank and Lilianna managed to hold the brutal man’s stare.

  “There’s one thing I can promise,” she answered. “I’m not begging you for anything. Ever.”

  “That so?”

  Spent, Lilianna nodded with no energy for her own conviction. A truck door slammed. Chesterton made a teeth-sucking noise and gestured farewell to the other perverts.

  “I’ll give you a holler when I hear from the boss,” he told Greerson.

  The Chief seemed to bristle at the term – applied to Councilor Wilhelm – and gruffly turned his frustrations on the hostage pair. Lilianna barely snatched a drink for herself before he tore the flask from her bound hands and hauled her by them to her feet.

  Aurora slumped, then lay down, only to be dragged upright by the other men.

  *

  THEY THREW THEM into the back of the open truck. With silver tape binding his hands, ankles, and mouth, the wretched dead twentysomething twisted and squirmed and sucked air through the gag staring at them red-eyed and starving, a Fury reborn. Aurora started weeping, and Lila let her wriggle out of the way as Slinky clambered into the back with them as well.

  “Sit down,” he said – a redundant comment, since they were laid out like sardines in the can, the smell of congealed blood in the air or something else driving the newborn Fury wild. Slinky took a long look at the resurrection, a gentle smirk on his face like a young dad staring in through the windows of a pet store. He looked nothing like a hard-faced murderer and rapist – until his cold eyes fell on Lila.

  She had trouble swallowing, and wished desperately for more water. Greerson instead walked past the tray and thumped the metal panel as he climbed into the cab.

  “Let’s go meet the others.”

  Lilianna’s heart fell further still.

  *

  THE TRUCK DROVE across a swampy hinterland, in and out of old driveways, overgrown laneways and country roads on the outskirts of Columbus’ far north. The darkness conspired with nature, reclaiming huge chunks of the territory. Lilianna knew there were old homes and businesses and industrial sites out there, but five years of unchecked growth cloaked nearly everything.

  She and Aurora were hopelessly lost.

  The vehicle climbed a slight hillock where trees failed to make the ascent. Another four-wheel drive sat there with two more men looking cold and bored smoking cigarettes. Lila recognized Greerson’s regular sidekick Stonefish from everyday life in the Bastion. The other was a smaller, slightly stooped figure clad in all the requisite gear favored by the others, but not quite able to pull off the look.

  “Finally!” Stonefish cried out. He thumped the side of Greerson’s truck as it pulled in and immediately peered into the back. Sandy-haired and weak-chinned, he shared a gleeful look with Slinky that took a frightening number of years off him.

  With the vehicle stopped, Lilianna got to her knees using her momentum, but Slinky shoved her off-balance so that she fell across Aurora and onto the tape-bound wraith groaning and with actual slaver leaking out the sides of his silver gag. Lila regretted a squeal as she urgently struggled away from the Fury despite the lack of immediate danger.

  There was danger enough. And she was face-first with the fate perhaps awaiting her come sunrise. Lilianna shivered and pledged an end to her weakness.

  They dragged Aurora slithering from the bed and Lila crawled out into the men’s callused hands which discarded her like trash onto a rank, muddy patch of grass.

  “On your feet, ladies,” Slinky said.

  Greerson appeared. He lit a smile of genuine affection on Stonefish.

  “I thought you wasn’t gonna come,” his lieutenant said.

  Greerson nudged him with one elbow as he rearranged his gun. He had ten or fifteen years on the other man and some kind of dysfunctional father-son dyn
amic going on. Wide-eyed, Lilianna almost expected the Chief to ruffle Stonefish’s hair. Brooding Apache watched closely, unimpressed. Slinky kept his eyes on the two women while the smaller, dark-featured man remained near his vehicle.

  Lilianna checked him up and down once. Though small, Hardy radiated a sense of nervous, feral danger Lila knew she couldn’t dismiss. The pencil moustache gave him a rodent’s look. With Aurora moaning and whimpering at her side, Lila continued her quick scout around as she staggered to her feet.

  “‘Rora,” she said. “Get up. This is it.”

  “Never a truer word spoke,” Slinky agreed.

  He tittered, but Greerson shot him a look that killed the mood. His men seemed to ignore the Chief’s belligerence most of the time, but now they all stepped back, making room for Greerson’s undeserved swagger as he moved center-stage in the stormy moonlight. The truck lights were doused, leaving their vehicles like wrecks. The wind cutting through the tall grass and the susurrus of nearby trees filled their ears. And some birds engaged in startled histrionics, off in the far-off, which slowly faded from hearing. The other hunters checked over their communications gear while Greerson stepped closer and Lilianna braced herself as Aurora grabbed a handhold of Lila’s dirty jeans to stand as well.

  “So we’re gonna let you go,” Greerson said.

  Neither of the women were open to hope at that point. Lilianna just watched the Chief steadily, waiting for more details to drop. Greerson drew a compact handgun from the holster on his thigh.

  “Open country, hereabouts,” he said and motioned with the weapon, playacting the friendly rancher. “Lots of places to run and hide. No surprises for guessing we’re coming after you.”

  Aurora choked. “Why?”

  It wasn’t a question Lilianna wanted answered.

  Greerson’s lurid smile foretold the games to come.

  “You gonna undo our hands?” Lila asked.

  She offered her bound wrists. Still not answering, Greerson snickered. He tucked the pistol into the waistband beneath his open jacket.

  “Na,” Slinky said from the sidelines. “That’s your problem to solve.”

  Lilianna shot a hateful look at the man and might’ve channeled a diatribe about her plans to kill him if it weren’t for Denny Greerson practically throwing him the same look.

  “Shut the fuck up, Slinky,” the Chief said.

  Then he stabbed his fingers pointing at each of the various men.

  “You guys are pairing up,” he said in a big voice. “Stoney with Slinky. Hardy with Apache. And remember what I said,” Greerson added, glowering for their attention as he gestured to Lilianna. “That one’s for me.”

  “What, there’s only one for all four of us?” Hardy said.

  It wasn’t a surprise the smaller man’s voice came out a reedy whine.

  “That’s not how this works,” Greerson answered gruffly because he knew it was a shit deal. “To the victors, the spoils,” he said. “And be grateful for what you get.”

  Pleased with his own theatrics and clearly under the spell of the only time in his miserable life he’d had any authority, Greerson turned his showman’s grin on Lilianna and her friend and motioned with one thin arm as he put on a radio headset.

  “Time to start running,” he said.

  Aurora surged past Lilianna at once, but then stopped.

  Lilianna remained unmoved. She held Greerson’s eyes and forced herself a smile.

  “Next time, you should really put a flashlight up beneath your chin,” she told him. “You’re really spooky . . . creep.”

  Greerson’s greasy leer froze, the rage bubbling almost visibly into his eyes as he launched himself at her – and Lilianna in turn snagged the automatic pistol lazily stashed in the Chief’s belt rather than his holster – and Greerson immediately caught his mistake and started hauling backwards with his eyes wide as Lila lifted the gun, double-handed thanks to the ties around her wrists, flicked the catch on the safety, and opened fire the second she could.

  The first bullet went into the ground and the second missed Greerson leaping back, the gunshot punching through the door of the closest truck.

  Lilianna kept moving with the gun raised, shouldering Aurora into the flight she’d just abandoned, while Lilianna continued shooting blind at the men as she ran too.

  Apache gave a pained bark, but Lilianna didn’t see the bullet, nor that it cut through a major artery in the trooper’s thigh. She also didn’t see her fourth shot, which clipped Apache’s Kevlar, or the fifth bullet that hit Stonefish through the jaw to leave him gasping wetly, clutching at the destruction of his face wedged into an old military-grade Desert Storm helmet.

  Instead, Lila and Aurora ran, and Greerson and Slinky hit the deck. Hardy took cover behind the nearest vehicle and crouched there as Lilianna chanced a look over one shoulder at Greerson getting back to his feet, lurching in blood-stained running shoes towards Stonefish with a look of wild horror on his face.

  The two women ran madly away down the slope towards heavy foliage as Greerson’s lieutenant spluttered and gasped and died in slow motion in the Chief’s arms.

  *

  THEY PLOUGHED DOWN the hillock trusting to luck not to trip on all the buried monuments of the past. Thick, dark green, waist-high grass cloaked everything, all of the way down to the buckled pavement of a narrow old road, more lush greenery on the other side bisected by a sagging wire-link fence almost utterly reclaimed by wilderness.

  Lila clutched the gun still and still tried grabbing at Aurora’s arm to urge her to keep pace as the other girl faltered. Lilianna had to fight off shrieking thoughts that her friend remained a liability she couldn’t afford if she wanted to live and have even a chance at saving her brother and dad. Her own bravery so far deserved a week in shutdown mode to recover – and there was no time for any of that.

  Aurora continued choking and spluttering her way through some kind of terrified commentary on their plight, and as she ran beside her, Lila cast yet another look back for sign of pursuit before clutching her friend hard, the gun digging into her, and hissing for her to be quiet.

  “We have to use every fucking advantage we’ve got,” Lila added. “Or we’re dead. Got that?”

  “Lila, I don’t think I can do this –”

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  “But I –”

  “Do you want to get me killed?”

  The question finally silenced the other woman.

  “Just keep up with me,” Lila added, and checked back behind them once more.

  A crackling, amplified voice rang out across the moonlit serenity.

  “WE COULD SHOOT YOU NOW, BUT THERE’S NO FUN IN THAT,” Greerson’s voice came through the bullhorn. “RUN, LITTLE BUNNIES. WE’RE COMING AFTER YOU.”

  *

  THE SLOPE DESCENDED to an overgrown intersection and Lila didn’t hesitate to lead them across to the far side and into the darkness of a riot of juvenile trees grown wild like the advanced army for the even thicker woods which seemed to beckon in scant detail in the future darkness. Her hands were still tied. At first, she stuffed the pistol into her jeans, but the terrain was too fierce to risk losing it. She led them headlong into the thicket of overgrown trees, shrubberies bursting to armpit height, all manner of things unseen scratching at their bare arms and faces. The night was cold, but the women ran hot – for now at least – and Lilianna kept the gun aimed double-handed ahead with her ears pricked for their pursuers.

  “This is ridiculous,” she muttered just loud enough for Aurora to hear.

  Her companion’s labored breaths destroyed most their stealth anyway. Right now, it seemed best to make as much distance as possible, subterfuge be damned. It was madness to think Denny Greerson’s pervert troopers would leave any chance for escape next time they met.

  Clearly, that was part of their thrill – but the game was rigged.

  It had to be, she thought. It was too much risk – that victims might get free,
and that others would find out. The whole little set-up had to be Wilhelm’s dirty secret.

  Lilianna only wished the Councilor was also on the hunt so she could shoot him too.

  Carlotta Deschain. Beau. Now her father and Lucas were in danger.

  Lilianna thought briefly of her supervisor and friend Gwen Stacey, still back in the Bastion. A deep shiver of fear ran through Lila.

  But she lost her vengeful scowl when the ground beneath her feet buckled inwards. Jolted away from fevered imaginings, she nearly lost the gun as she grabbed for the illusion of ground beneath all the greenery and hit an earthen embankment instead. Lila pulled her sneaker-clad foot from some kind of foul wetness she didn’t need to examine any further, her near-collapse a stark lesson for Aurora, who followed now more carefully, eyes wildly affright still, managing her way across the sewage ditch and on Lila’s tail while Tom’s daughter crouched, and continued to forge on through the skeleton of another wire fence and into the back of a gravel parking lot.

  An old fast food restaurant sat weather-beaten and stripped of its markers, a corporate anonymity with even the towering sign on a metal pole battered and long-since broken into plastic shards littering the carpark. Several young trees grew out one end of the restaurant, seeded by a much bigger tree which had fallen into it sometime in recent years. A half-dozen rusty cars and trucks angled nose-first along the front wall. Someone had again spray-painted HASTUR in a rageful white scrawl across the banks of window glass, but Lilianna now knew who that someone was.

  “Can we hide here?” Aurora asked.

  “No.”

  “Why?” her friend replied. “I’m tired, Li–”

  “It’s too soon,” Lila said. “We have to make more ground.”

  Lilianna jogged across the yard searching for anything to cut their twisted, silver-tape handcuffs. Nothing sprang into view except for solutions which took too much time or risked too much noise. She fought off a sense of rising panic. Aurora’s hopeless reluctance sucked the life from Lilianna like a turgid gravity, and she twisted back to shoot several annoyed looks at the girl hoping that she’d get it. But Aurora’s wan surrender was almost enough to make Lila forget all the other horrors her friend had suffered – horrors which lay in wait for Lilianna, too.