After The Apocalypse (Book 6): Resolution

by Hately, Warren

  Dkembe halted and squeezed a look past the man and into the back cargo area revealed by the open gate. Flailing winds minimized the stink. It was as much the memory as any fresh stench of chemicals and rotting blood that swept across him as Dkembe hesitated under the hooded man’s impassive eye and Gonzales paused behind, hanging back. The noise from the workers starting their early morning shift echoed, distorted from beyond the compound wall.

  “I need to see Martin,” Dkembe said.

  After a long moment, the guard’s wrist moved. Nothing more. The machete on its sling dangling gently in wake of the movement. Dkembe glanced once at Erak, spooked, and spooked Gonzales in turn by clearing his throat, awkward, and chancing another look beyond the loading bay.

  The Ascended guard did nothing as Dkembe slowly went through. Gonzales looked as if he was thinking really hard about it, but he skipped after Dkembe once he saw his commitment, moving through into the slush-ridden back area, the geography of inner buildings made clear within line of sight across to where the ramp led into the back of those cattle pens so crucial to Tom’s cattle plans now surely in utter ruins . . . or they soon would be.

  There was no OK Jay at work that morning. The fatality of it all hung heavy on Dkembe. He bit down on the guilt again as if it might escape him in some kind of anxious, free-for-all collapse if he allowed it. The only option was to master his nerves. Dkembe distracted himself from his own distress by focusing on the nearest of the workers coming in and out of the inner gate off to his left.

  “Excuse me!” he called.

  A terminally florid, hardbitten woman in a once-reflective pink puffer jacket begrudged him a look as she wrestled out a heavy toolbox. The fortysomething blond nodded with the grunting jut of her bristled jaw.

  “Whut?”

  “I need to speak with Martin,” Dkembe said.

  A distance of about fifteen yards lay between them. The woman returned a dour grimace and for a moment looked like she’d just turn back through the gate and leave him there.

  “Not here,” she said instead. “Come back later.”

  Dkembe advanced into the back bay where a truck stood. Along his right, between the fence and the first warehouse wall, two more workers wrestled out what looked like a dead antelope they abruptly dropped to the hard-packed ground with looks of disgust as a graying human body rolled out of the parked truck as well. The corpse hit the ground with force and the unpleasant noise carried across the whole courtyard. The woman in pink sniffed, professionally curious. Dkembe and Erak stood midway point between them all, just a few yards short of the ramp up into the roofed cattle yard.

  “Dead Fury,” one of the men called across. “Rotted out weeks ago. No use to us.”

  “Still gotta unload it,” the woman bawled back.

  She stepped across to Dkembe and eyed him up and down. The heavy toolbox in one hand didn’t trouble her as much as it could. The gruff woman’s calculating look unnerved him, but she spoke before Dkembe’s anxious throat-clearing resolved into speech.

  “You gotta shuck them guns here,” she said.

  Dkembe felt the weight of the Remington as if someone else just put it there.

  “Yeah, of course,” he said.

  The woman lowered the metal box and held out a hand. She calmly took the shotgun and then looked to Gonzales who sheepishly handed over the Glock.

  “Whatchoo want Martin for?”

  “It’s important.”

  “Repeatin’ myself?”

  She didn’t look happy about it. Dkembe buckled.

  “It’s about Tom Vanicek,” he said.

  Whatever the woman already knew, she kept it a mystery with the air of any old regular worker not getting paid enough for this sort of shit. The best she could manage was a feminine grunt which escaped her as a clear gesture for the pair of them to stay put. Dkembe held his tongue as she trod away up the ramp taking their guns with her.

  “Dkembe. . . .”

  “Chill, Erak.”

  “Chill?” A justified yet petulant sigh escaped the other man. “Dkembe. . . .”

  The woman and another Ascended guard reappeared. The woman motioned. By the time they reached her, she’d already gone, bustling back past them to retrieve her toolkit and get on with whatever they’d interrupted. The hooded, blue-eyed guard clutched a fire ax almost casually, and he swiveled on a boot heel the moment he had their attention.

  Apparently, the Ascended sentries didn’t speak.

  The Apex was a different case. He glided out into the dingy concrete pass that cut to the shed’s inside back wall which was decorated with dead hanging naked light globes and rusting old cattle hooks.

  “There is a matter of urgency?” the masked figure said in his light, unaffected singsong.

  Nondescript brown eyes regarded Dkembe and Erak through the delicately-stitched eye-holes of the crisp conical mask that covered him like a pope’s regalia, layered on his chest atop a fuller white gown which looked much older and more travel-stained than the headpiece.

  “M-master Apex,” Dkembe said like he remembered it. “I’m . . . I’m sorry to intrude on your Cathedral –”

  The Apex took a sharp intake of breath Dkembe feared was the trigger for some awful alarm, but instead the tall masked figure raised his arms like a benediction and Dkembe had to force back his panic like the heavy contents of a wardrobe threatening to tumble out opened doors.

  “You are welcome,” the Apex said calmly.

  His reedy voice took a long pause. The sentry shuffled his feet and it was as if Dkembe could hear the wooden handle of the fire ax creaking in the man’s strong grasp.

  “You mentioned Tom Vanicek,” the leader said. “We remember you. What would you tell?”

  Now was the moment for his gambit – and Dkembe stalled. The patriarch’s brown eyes fell on him with the weight of centuries as Dkembe stammered and Erak shifted anxiously beside him and it was too late to flee.

  “I was . . . was told, Martin said you. . . .”

  “Yes?”

  Dkembe dropped his eyes and on impulse knelt on the dusty concrete.

  “That I could serve,” he said.

  The Apex’s apron rustled. Dkembe looked up to see the faceless expression shift from him to Erak and then back again. Erak knelt too, as if for no other reason than to stop his legs shaking, and then it was just both of them, like lambs for the slaughter – and the appropriateness of their setting for such an execution sent adrenalin like fireworks into Dkembe’s skull. His pulse hammered so loud he feared it might knock him out, his nervous system taking over to save the greater organism from disaster. Yet the Apex only touched the tops of each of their heads and blessed them.

  “The Hand spoke to you at our behest,” the Apex said. “Stand.”

  Dkembe arose, blinking like a coal miner coming back from weeks underground. Senseless, half-formed syllables choked him and Erak set a hand on his arm as if to save him blacking out.

  “Martin said that I . . . already served. . . ?”

  “Yes,” the Apex answered carefully. “All serve, even those who do not know it.”

  Those haunted brown eyes fell on Dkembe once more.

  “The last of Man will be the Ascended,” the Apex said as if tired of his own voice. “Do you think this was the Apocalypse, child? No. It has barely begun. Satan unleashed these terrors on the Earth as his last challenge to the Almighty – and the will of Man. Those who wish for Ascension, among we righteous, must now triumph above all – mastering every dark art, every debasement, all sinfulness, if we are to emerge the victors, unrivalled by the Devil’s kindred.”

  That was a lot to take in. Dkembe blinked rapidly as he processed.

  “Then how can I. . . ?”

  “You already serve,” the Apex said. “You are already my Hand.”

  “And my friend too?”

  “If he will submit.”

  Erak nodded to say he would, no comprehension in him at all.

  The Ap
ex returned his linen visage to Dkembe. The mask angled slightly, awaiting the words quiescent within the younger man.

  “Martin said . . . the Hands . . . in return, you would. . . .”

  “Yes?”

  Dkembe’s voice cut out like a sputtering motor.

  He was a victim of his own plan now: first surprised that he had one; then breathlessly drawn along in wonder at its execution – and finally seeing now it’d never made sense.

  “The girl. . . .” he said.

  The hooded Apex watched like a hawk biding its time until the Spring. He stood, cloaked and masked like a museum exhibit, silent and unmoving for so long that the slow, awful souring of the moment congealed into the dread confirmation of everything Dkembe now feared.

  He’d fucked up.

  “Your lust brought you here,” the Apex said.

  The Ascended guard stood a dozen paces back. Now he started towards them, and Dkembe offered a vague look of warning to Gonzales and dug one of the grenade rounds out of his pocket.

  No threats or demands could save them here. Panic be damned, Dkembe still had time to chastise himself as he knelt and slammed the firing mechanism into the concrete. The grenade issued a gassy noise and Dkembe was still rising to his feet as he lobbed it underhanded down the corridor just behind the Apex.

  Erak crouched and withdrew a needle-thin dagger from his sock, but Dkembe didn’t register it before he dived into his lover to get him to safety. The Apex whirled about and clutched his skirts and the hooded sentry paused, frozen, triangulating the various threats and players as the grenade clattered into their backdrop.

  The guard gave a grunt and charged the five yards past the Apex to throw himself atop the grenade just a fraction late to thwart the whole explosion which then send fragments of blasted meat roaring down the corridor and back at them.

  Dkembe felt pain in his hand where Erak’s dagger pierced it, and was half upright even as the blast sent the upper chunks of the Ascended man’s body across them like a meaty rain. A thick cut of the dead man’s scalp splatted across Dkembe’s shoulder and stuck there. The Apex tumbled, spluttering and off-balance in the periphery as Dkembe’s eyes bulged, fixed like they were nailed in place, staring down at the oozing gray-haired clump adorning his shoulder.

  Just as suddenly, he remembered his Uncle Rodney – the only black man he’d ever known with a toupee, and how that musty, unnatural rug of his had spurred numerous childhood nightmares he’d forgotten where the hairpiece crept up on Dkembe like a tarantula while he slept.

  Dkembe pissed himself at the same time he flicked the ugly chunk of scalp off him with a seal’s yelp, and only then finally registered the Apex up again and staggering towards them emitting his own shrieking yell.

  The Apex’s headwear remained in place, but so much blood and human tissue clung to his filthy robes, Dkembe couldn’t tell if the madman was hurt or not. And it didn’t matter. The fear response hardened Dkembe’s fist and he knocked the screaming man flat.

  The Apex dropped heavily to the concrete floor and twisted still. Dkembe looked to Erak with the knife in hand, ears still ringing, regretting their confiscated weapons. He grabbed the dead guard’s ax and motioned for Gonzales to follow as he stepped past the Apex and rushed into the gore-blasted hall.

  The remains of the human sacrifice lay in the middle of the blast zone in front of a metal door now hanging off a single hinge. The dead guard wasn’t getting up again – in this life, or the next. The grenade eviscerated the bulk of the corpse from the chest up. The dead man’s arms splayed impossibly wide across the bloody carpet thick with concrete shards and itself.

  Dkembe hurried them through the door without looking back.

  *

  THE BLASTED DOOR opened onto a strip of trampled ground between the outbuildings, and at a guess, Dkembe saw the wood-paneled exterior of an enclosed walkway between the warehouse and the next building across and ran towards it remembering his previous visit. The ax he clutched was well suited to the task as he collided with the wall and chopped at the pine boards until he’d cleared the bare minimum needed, stomping through more timber panels with his boot while shouts and cries rang out behind him and Erak.

  “Quickly,” Gonzales hissed.

  Dkembe pushed into the corridor, ignoring the jagged timber cutting his neck and face as he ducked through to make way for his slimmer companion to follow. An amber half-daylight spilled into the prefabricated hall through windows like those in truck stop restrooms. Dkembe forced on around the turn and veered into the first room with its withered crucifixion dominating the far left wall.

  Erak took in the grisly sight of the mummified corpse appalled and still in shock. Dkembe’s eyes flickered too quickly over everything for anything to make much sense.

  The single door on the far side of the bare room flew open. A hooded Ascended guard burst out with a Colt six-shooter raised.

  Dkembe threw the ax the moment he saw motion, and the bright red spinning beard of the weapon somersaulted almost lazily to thunk into the Ascended’s chest.

  The sentry’s gun went off, the bullet wide, and Dkembe rushed forward to grab the handle of the ax and lever the wounded man aside, at the same time also stamping down madly on the guard’s hand until the gun clattered free. Only then could he yank the ax free with an adrenal roar to bring the weapon down, and it rebounded off the guard’s forearm and into his masked face.

  Just as Tom had taken to Jay with the longsword, now his lieutenant rained slaughter on the hooded man until the mask was a red ruin leaking pulp.

  Dkembe caught himself on the seventh blow and whipped his gaze at Erak as if accusing him of something, but his companion just stared back, pragmatic, moving now it was safe to grab the fallen pistol just in time for the door behind them to throw open.

  Erak fired three times into the black worker in abattoir coveralls.

  The man slumped, a hand raised halfway to his chest as he lay down instead and his slow-dying gasps filled the silence left by the heavy gunshot’s retort.

  Dkembe snarled and tore down one of the nearest long religious banners from the wall and wiped his hands and the handle of the ax with it as he thrust his chin importantly towards the dead sentry’s door.

  “Through here,” he said.

  “How many are there?” Erak asked, tactical and terrified in equal measure.

  “I don’t know.”

  Erak’s returned stare was enough. Dkembe whirled back to the door and clutched the handle, hesitating as if, with the blood pounding in his hears, he could possibly discern what lay beyond. More Tom Vanicek’s disciple than he’d ever wanted to believe, Dkembe growled low, took a steadying breath, and threw the door open to plunge through despite the near total darkness inside.

  Something or someone groaned aloud and Dkembe shuffled to one side to avoid his silhouette in the open door, through which now a semblance of light trickled. But Dkembe collided with someone in the gloom, and it took only the bare minimum of light to reveal a gray-bearded man restrained in an upright chair set against the wall.

  Another door faced them on the opposite side of the room across from a spotless long dining table neatly laid out with cutlery and plates.

  The man strapped in the chair was missing legs from the knee down.

  Fevered and barely conscious, the fifty- or sixty-year-old captive turned towards them and shook weakly at his restraints.

  “Please. . . .”

  “Holy shit,” Dkembe whispered under his breath.

  Erak looked at the captive man as if snake-bit, then backed his way around the table, followed by Dkembe, ignoring the crying man and forcing the other door instead.

  It led into a hallway with various doors to their right. Rather than scan their other options, Dkembe noted the heavy locks on the nearest door and his own cosmic wisdom somehow came to life despite all its previous errors.

  The ax chimed as it hit the locks until they broke.

  *

 
THE ECHOES OF more booted feet pounded towards them somewhere in the building as Dkembe stared through the broken doorway to the half-dozen hooded women crouched inside, all of them awaiting disaster and – not that any faces were visible – looking anything but pleased at a chance for freedom.

  “We’re leaving,” Dkembe said with heaving breaths, and added, “You’re gonna be free at last.”

  Nestled among the six, one young woman abruptly pulled off her conical mask to reveal a scrawny, near-starved-looking blonde with tears already coursing down her face.

  “You came back?”

  Her voice was just a whisper. A daydream. A secret wish. Gray daylight was harsh on the women in their hovel, and Dkembe blinked, confused, barely recognizing the gaunt-ribbed blonde girl as the exquisite waif he’d perhaps only ever imagined.

  She met his eyes with weeping gratitude despite the other hands reaching out to clutch and hold her back.

  “Don’t be stupid,” one of the women hissed.

  “We can’t go!” said another.

  “No,” Dkembe told them, less sure of himself with each passing second. “You’re free. Come with us. Now.”

  He had the sense of forces closing in on them, beyond the corridor, and he wished violently for his shotgun rather than the fire ax.

  Dkembe stepped back from the doorway and motioned and yet none of the women moved. The girl he’d come to rescue – her, and her fellow captives, he lied to himself – struggled so weakly it almost seemed like she sought an excuse not to flee.

  Gonzales gave a muttering hiss and stalked into their quarters to start jostling the frightened women as if that was any help. To Erak’s astonishment, the closest women batted away his hands, and then he was completely outnumbered as they grabbed and then clutched at him as well. He only got free by drawing his knife.

  The dagger caught one of the other girls on the forearm and that was enough to free the unmasked girl. She tumbled free like a stunt double and got on her feet again alongside Dkembe as several of the other captives howled at them and for help.