“Fuck.”
Lila grabbed Aurora’s wrist and burst with her back outside.
Electric lights hit their eyes like a laser target.
“Bring ‘em in, boys!”
Slinky’s shout echoed in the nearby crackling of a two-way unit.
Lila shielded her eyes, and the spotlight played across her to repeat the blinding trick with Aurora, who managed to get half a hand up. Lila was utterly blind. She reached for the dud gun at her back and almost fell over as her hand found nothing and she lurched free of the doors ready to run blindly if needs be. Instead, someone caught her with a forearm bar that smacked her in the face and left her nearly flipped upside down on the hard yard dirt, as disoriented as before.
Aurora called Lilianna’s name several times, shrieking like a crazy woman, and all Lila could do was try to struggle back to her feet with fingers pressed into her eyes.
The flash-addled blurriness showed Hardy dancing out of striking range, though the reason for it wasn’t clear. The seconds filled with the noise of an approaching vehicle. Finished his business with the spotlight, Slinky whooped and charged in, and Lila only just got her bearings in time to see the mercenary clutch Aurora around the waist and throw her up against the concrete wall.
Hardy held back – and Lilianna snarled and rushed him with nothing more than spread nails.
The skinny man panicked, leaving Lilianna to veer away for the nearest shadows as fresh electric headlights bobbed across the scene.
“Run!” she yelled.
But Aurora lay slumped beneath the HASTUR scrawl with Slinky tearing away her singlet.
Greerson’s truck juddered through the rampant foliage and into the yard. Hardy ran to it for cover as he unshucked his Mp5 Navy. At once, the Chief jumped from the moving cab and barked for him to put the gun away.
“We didn’t come out here to shoot ‘em, you dumbfuck!”
Lila didn’t wait around for whatever came next. Greerson’s words fell behind as she ran.
She circled behind the metal shed, checking the view of a possible escape route through the jungle, then back to see whether Aurora had managed away too. But her friend squirmed, half-standing before the concrete workshop, trying to wrestle free from Slinky’s grasp.
The trooper’s fist crashed down on the side of Aurora’s cheek and the girl disappeared from view as Lilianna ducked into the trees and ran for her life.
*
THE PROFUSION OF greenery overwhelmed her, almost choking Lilianna fighting to escape – and to do it quietly, at the expense of her speed, plunging away from the burnt-out farmhouse and deeper into the night. She forged a path through a dense thicket of stalks and tangled fallen telephone lines, checking behind herself again and again, each time her face ever more drawn in anger-fused-with-panic at the villainy she’d left behind – along with Aurora.
A hundred yards into the foliage, Lila dropped into a crouch to recover her breath.
The idling engine hummed behind her unseen. Lilianna knelt carefully, and snapped a thick stalk almost as loud as a rifle crack in the malevolent stillness. She peed through her jeans out of necessity, relieved in more ways than one at the miracle, given her dehydration.
Her tongue clutched in the roof of her mouth, but Lilianna’s narrative unfolded silently to herself as she picked back towards the metal shed. Almost instantly, a beam of light tricked her way and she dropped as a confused voice rang out.
“Which way?”
The seconds oozed past. Someone gave a gruff bark, then came Greerson’s voice.
“Get off her and help me.”
Slinky’s reply didn’t carry. The wind played across the scene touching at everything. Lilianna used it for cover to circumnavigate the yard at its farthest periphery. She finally came around the big concrete shed blocking most of her view of the yard and Greerson’s unknown number of men.
The back door was welded solidly. Lila flitted from the overgrowth and up to the back wall, ignoring the metal door. Flat against the wall, reining in her wild breaths, she crept around with her hands curled into fists.
A chunk of mismatched stone caught beneath one sneaker. Lila retrieved it, fitting the paperweight into her palm to take advantage of its edge, ready to hammer someone’s face in if needed. But she reached the corner without detection. The sound of the Fury’s renewed assault inside the workshop carried loudly, but the hunters weren’t concerned.
The door to their growling truck hung open across from Lilianna as its floodlights bathed the whole courtyard.
Greerson stood in front of the beams, transfigured into something quasi-religious, demonic – an apparition dissolved in the harsh sodium lights.
His subordinate Slinky dragged Aurora like a piece of girl-shaped baggage through the dust towards him. The hunters’ attention switched away from the concrete shed, and Lila eyed the truck door again, frantic thoughts about the undiscovered Fury inside the bigger building – just as Hardy stepped from the obscurity of the parked truck’s rear with a nasty smile.
His Navy trained on Lila once again.
She broke and ran for the shed’s office door.
Gunshots rang out – just a burst into the air – and Greerson shrieked like he’d fouled himself, immediately barking questions and insults while only just then spotting Lila tear through the office door.
“Inside there!” he screeched from outside. “She’s mine!”
The trapped Fury banging and scratching at the half-split wall came much louder now. Lila couldn’t see the shreds of insulation foam in the darkness, but the air was full of carcinogens she intuitively gasped against, a hand across her face as she quested around by just the light from a single clear plastic roof panel overhead admitting the scant moonlight beyond.
Lilianna set her jaw and headed for the door to the Fury’s jail cell, but the creature snarled at her proximity and forced itself bodily through the split panel, the prefabricated sheeting like some obscene, post-industrial childbirth.
The light was just sufficient to confirm the savage haircut and solid, womanly build of Dana Lowenstein fighting to scramble free of confinement. Now, a Fury’s lust bled from the dead President’s eyes despite a thick gag of black electrical tape around her suffocated-to-death head.
The woman’s hands were little more than blackened stumps.
Detoothed and declawed.
Lowenstein-the-Fury forced itself out and into the corridor as Lilianna backed away, rethinking everything, the chunk of rock in one hand as she swiveled right, into the pitch-black garage workshop.
To her horror, the giant rusting roller door across the front of the shed started winching open to admit the harsh light from Greerson’s truck which flooded into the garage, disintegrating shadows and hiding places in equal turns. Lowenstein’s muzzled Fury stumbled into the rest room behind Lila to the sound of a loud gunshot and then a chuckle as the ex-President’s dead weight took out the card table.
Lilianna caught just a glimpse of Greerson before she elected suicide, and dropped to the dirty floor and rolled through beneath the rising roller door right beside Slinky’s booted feet.
The trooper wore his scarf again, which concealed nothing of his delight as he reached for Lilianna and she swatted him away, getting to a knee, lungs burning with desperation as she saw Aurora unconscious in the yard with Hardy standing over her.
“Leave the blonde!” Greerson yelled from inside.
Slinky held a drawn pistol he raised at Lilianna as she backed away, stumbling along the front of the concrete shed as the gunman tugged down his bandanna and smirked at her stricken plight as he followed.
Then Greerson scuttled out from under the roller door with a grunt.
And Aurora moved like a flash.
Hardy’s scream drew all their eyes, but Aurora was already in motion. A look of glee crossed Lilianna’s face, Aurora’s fakery taking the three remaining hunters by surprise.
Lila pushed off the concrete to run towards Au
rora on an angle to again clutch her friend’s offered hand as they hurtled past the smaller tool shed towards escape.
And Slinky’s pistol rang out as they fled.
*
THE GUN BARKED once, twice, and then again as the two women shrank down into the smallest possible targets while running for dear life. The bullets hitting metal chimed like lightning strikes against the shed, deliberately wide. But the running pair crossed back into the shadows, Aurora’s expression wild, ecstatic and terrified all in one as she hauled on Lilianna’s arm to turn them towards the nearest cover.
The men’s calls followed, disembodied behind them, and Lilianna gave her friend one quick check for injuries before seizing on their momentum to plough on through the trees with the sense of pursuit in their wake.
The men’s boots came hard on their heels, but the women pushed through a frieze of drooping tree canopies to sight a fallen picket fence and then open, overgrown fields descending beyond it.
“Here,” Aurora said.
She pushed a combat knife into Lila’s hand.
“You stabbed Hardy?”
“No,” Aurora answered as they kept running. “Scratched his eyes.”
She ran some more, catching her breath to add, “Knife was in his boot.”
A tractor stood abandoned in the field. By the time they drew close to it – with flashlight beams tracking their wake – the landscape unfolded to reveal a sand quarry carved into the facing slope. A big earthmoving truck silhouetted the far side of the crater, and seeing it, Lilianna let go of Aurora’s hand to point across the distant incline.
“We’ll lose them up there!” she gasped. “They won’t shoot at us.”
“They did.”
“They want us scared,” Lila panted. “And we’re not scared. We can do this.”
She checked to make sure Aurora understood the gravity of her review. The gunmen shooting over their heads wasn’t good news, just because their attackers weren’t about to gun them down. It was just Lilianna’s best working theory anyway, and God alone knew how far these vile men would go if the two escapees continued to evade them.
She was first to jump down the carved-out sandy embankment and feel just how hard and course the raw earth was, toughened by exposure to the elements the past five years. She bit her lip to conceal a grunt of pain as her knee flared and she stumbled into a controlled downhill run with Aurora coming fast behind.
They slid and jogged that way down into the middle of the extraction ravine, surrounded by barren crags of hardened limestone. An old chain with a sign on it lay surrendered to the dusty, hard-packed sand, dark white under the moon. Crackling noises pierced the night, incomprehensible at first until Greerson’s voice filtered through to them.
“YOU WANT TO RUN, BUT THERE’S NOWHERE TO HIDE,” he called. “RELEASE THE HOUNDS.”
“The hounds?” Aurora cried.
“They said someone ate all the dogs.”
Lilianna scouted their way through the crisscrossing quarry pits, disoriented and fighting her own terror.
“The hostage they killed. . . .”
Lilianna didn’t have to say the rest. Aurora kenned her sinister tone and stumbled and had to be helped up. The older girl went slack in Lila’s arms and Lila almost couldn’t hold on.
They sank together, Lila crunching down hard on her butt. The dusty earth bit into her. She held the knife and the jagged stone still.
“We have to get to higher ground,” she managed to say.
And she stood again. She handed the rock to Aurora. The girl’s eyes rolled like a newborn foal, but she stood once more with a shaky breath and took the offered weapon.
“Come on,” Lila said.
The Fury jogged into the quarry behind them with its mouth agape. But it wasn’t the murdered twentysomething hissing at them, but instead the dead trooper Apache – almost twice the other man’s size, and far more deadly, freshly risen, and not yet satisfied for blood.
Apache’s comrades hung back at a safe range. Lilianna nudged Aurora, almost as if she didn’t need to cry, “Run!”
And run they did.
*
IT WAS HARD to climb the crusty slope. The chalky, exposed earth cut into their knees and hands, yet crumbled as they tried forcing a way up. Brutally-resurrected Apache powered into the quarry behind them, and his huge, combat-booted feet carried him halfway up the crag. Lila lagged perilously, pushing into her friend’s ass to propel Aurora, even as it worsened her own footing.
“Go!” Lila yelled and slapped Aurora on the tail.
Lilianna wasn’t getting away, and she knew it.
She swiveled back with the knife just in time to meet her jaws-agape attacker.
Lilianna’s ankle twisted painfully as she sought to evade, but it worked – the monster’s terrifying momentum carried him into the jagged side of the ravine as Lila fell past, stabbing with the knife and not doing much more than cutting a gash into the dead man’s brawny arm.
But the Fury had her scent, the taste of her in the air like the promise of a feast. He coiled around, utterly distracted from chasing Aurora, pouncing across the sinewy slope as Lilianna slid back towards the ground.
She kept trying to right herself as she tumbled fifteen feet, groaned at the impact, and then stood – mainly on her twisted ankle. The bright pain was an afterthought. The huge threat of the Fury vaulted down at her with massive hands and his grimace outstretched.
There were Furies she’d wrestled – desperate times requiring desperate methods to survive – but Apache’s strength was beyond anything she’d encountered. Her sneakers flailed on the dusty ground and the dead commando landed atop her with the weight of a rockslide.
Her head hit the back of the ground so hard she heard her scalp split, too desperate fighting to scramble free to notice the blood weeping from her hair as she stabbed underhanded with what limited chance she could. The blade dug into Apache’s leather vest and chest half-a-dozen times. The spattering blood challenged Lila’s grip on the knife. And when she tried to use a knee to lever the brute off, which proved impossible, the dead man shifted a bracing hand and knocked the dagger from her slick fingers as a fluke.
The monster roared, craning its head back in triumph as it dug fingers into Lila’s shoulder and grasped her hair with the other hand. Its weight kept Lilianna trapped as the Fury wrenched her in opposite directions and she felt herself tearing apart, pain shrieking through her neck. The Fury’s spittle wet her exposed throat and she fought with every muscle, starting to whimper and freak as it plunged its face towards her neck.
Slinky’s boot took his dead comrade in the side of the head, deflecting Apache’s fatal intent, and giving Lilianna just a second’s reprieve. Snickering as usual, the trooper pushed the Fury off-balance, then shot the dead man in the face with his purpose served.
Apache’s weight crumpled beside her like a demolition job.
Lila couldn’t move. Agony transfixed her. Slinky chuckled as he studied her reaction, his breathing a little short as he scanned back for his colleagues.
“The idea’s to let them catch ya, not have all the fun,” he told her and winked. “Chief wouldn’t like that.”
Lilianna gave up trying to breathe or manage the crushing pain in her neck and back. She slapped a red hand down on the fallen dagger, lunged, and stabbed it into Slinky’s calf.
The handsome bastard screamed. Lila was on him, scratching and clawing, trying to get at his rifle, her wet, nerveless fingers seizing the karabiner and failing to get the strap free in time. Aghast, the soldier pulled the knife from its wound. Lila drove her knee into his crotch and Slinky buckled over.
Lila groaned to see the man’s pistol holster empty, and she cast around for Slinky’s knife and failed to see that too. She took Hardy’s combat knife from the ground near where Slinky writhed. Other figures advanced into the ravine and Lila took off in a hobbling sash.
No more gunfire sought to halt her. They were too far gone f
or that.
Greerson pursued like a mad devil on her tail as Lila veered away from the previous slope, hoping to find an easier exit than Aurora and also not to lead Greerson to her friend. But the branching limestone quarry didn’t reveal much – just more sandy, rocky runnels grizzled into the scarred landscape.
And then an access road.
The massive haulage truck threw its moonlit shadow on them from the crest of the rise overhead as Lilianna ran, ankle injury forgotten, hitting the dusty surface of the crumbling dirt road as it arced on the shortest curve possible to clear the quarry. Greerson’s breathing came loud behind her and Lila chanced a single look to confirm the skull-faced man running twenty yards back with clear expertise. Hardy hung back with Slinky, caught between trying to help the injured man as well as manage the other dead hostage squirming at the end of an actual dog leash. The shock-haired young man’s death-distorted face kenned the air, keening with a high-pitched squeal through its gag.
The road angled up, past and under the massive truck.
But Greerson was a veteran runner. There was no way Lilianna could outpace him. Reaching the quarry’s lip, the pain in her ankle demanded attention and she moaned at the blood in her sock and soaking her shoe.
“Run, ‘Rora!” she shouted raggedly. “Go!”
There was no sign of the other woman, not that Lila had time to look. She reached the mammoth truck’s sand-blasted door and nearly fell against it. Greerson crested the ridge behind her with a huge hunting knife in one fist.
Lila abandoned the cabin door and hobbled down the side of the truck’s gigantic tip tray.
The rear lip of the big dirty metal scoop angled slightly, caught in position forever and rusted in place like some sentinel awaiting the dawn still a frighteningly long way off. She grabbed the tray’s edge and hauled herself up as Greerson clutched her wounded ankle and squeezed.
After The Apocalypse (Book 6): Resolution Page 13
