But she was dead now, in the past, too, just like Jay and so many others. Vegas let his fingertips trail the bent and frayed book cover for just a moment, then groaned like an old man and stood.
He stuffed the books into his half-open backpack and swung it onto his shoulder, a cold-hearted sweep of the living room one final time before heading out with no apparent hesitation and swinging left into the hall. He sensed as much as saw Pedro and his pal swoop back into the apartment behind him, and though he knew he had to pass Latisha’s door to make it to the stairwell, she still somehow caught him unguarded when she stepped out and blocked his path.
“Goin’ so soon, baby?”
“You’re seeing it,” he said.
Latisha reached out a hand, slow and deliberate and as snake-like as the hair coming down like a crown to frame her generous features, the equally slow and quiet-like way she curved her mouth into a smile.
“You think about me?” she asked in a rich, expectant voice.
“You need shelter, you can come,” Vegas told her. “But it’s a man-cave, baby. Women and children have their place.”
“And where’s that?”
Vegas chuckled and shrugged as he moved past her with the pack on his shoulder.
“That’s on you to find that.”
“You’re just leavin’ me here?”
Latisha followed him to the top of the unlit stairs and someone camped in the lobby beneath them called out for her to shut up. Vegas agreed.
“What about you an’ me, baby?” she called after him anyway.
He paused halfway down for the sake of no more yelling.
“Yeah, Tisha, you know I care about you, and we have some fun times when we together,” he said and smiled even though it pained to add the shrug because he did really like the woman, for all the fact she also bugged the shit out of him. “Don’t blame me, baby,” he said. “This is on that maniac who murdered my brother.”
“So you are scared.”
“Bitch, please,” Vegas replied. “Of course I’m fuckin’ scared. Fooled myself to think I could stay out here, but everyone’s got their bastions now, it seems. Time to finish mine.”
More indignant voices rang out for them to quit it.
“You come to me if you get in trouble, girl,” he said – and finished up with a curt, but serious nod.
Then he angled out of there.
*
BROWN TOWN LAY in amid an outright lie of peace and tranquility, the dawn just an hour or two away. Once Vegas got clear of the apartment block and its complainants, he readjusted his bag, checked the Glock in place, and sniffled to reorient himself while drinking in the cool early morning air as scurrilous winds caressed his face, and trash and other litter blew by like a metaphor for freedom itself.
There was only so much holding together of one’s shit Vegas could handle for one night, and he’d handled a truckload of it. Each intake of steadying breath helped, but there was nothing to quell his shaking hands, it seemed – nor his heart. A capacity for grief Vegas truly no longer thought within him threatened to overflow and drown him with such thoughts it was almost enough to stagger off a short distance and reconsider everything he’d imagined for the day ahead. Fear itself had marked him, but he knew that could be overcome.
At least for now.
Vanicek spoke of quitting the City. Whether Tom initiated that disaster or knew something Vegas didn’t, Vegas couldn’t tell. The lack of answers unsettled him, and the fracas in his living room which cost Jay’s life also left Vegas bewildered about what the hell even sparked the attack in the first place.
Vanicek had looked totally unhinged, but that wasn’t his reputation. Vegas knew enough to know he didn’t know the full picture – and that, if nothing else, was added reason to grieve Jay’s death.
He was fucking tired of all the killing – and yet maybe there was no end to it in sight. Vegas still ached bodily from the aftermath of the Fury attack on the City Council – and thoughts of that past disaster also helped bring Tom Vanicek’s defiant daughter to mind.
Vegas stood with his head bowed under a dead street light.
Lilianna was nowhere to be seen during Jay’s death.
The girl was too young, and definitely too skinny to take a man like him and what Vegas believed he offered. But damn, she had those eyes. And fearless, too – or not fearless, Vegas thought, but well and truly proven capable of keeping her shit well together in the face of the worst terror any survivor faced in these End Times. Lilianna took after her father in that way – and that mad motherfucker and the girl were a package deal.
And unlike Latisha, the Vanicek girl had no ass. Breeding with her’d be like mating a pit bull on a poodle and still expecting a fighting dog – or so Vegas thought.
A black man had to keep his lineage pure if he wanted to leave a legacy beyond the end of the world.
Vegas refocused himself on the exit to Brown Town and hefted the pack yet again.
But it turned out Latisha hadn’t finished.
“Vegas, you don’t take off on me like that,” she called from halfway back at the building’s front as she marched across despite the incoming rain, her arms folded inside her biggest winter coat.
Vegas welcomed her with a glowering look.
“Are you serious right now?”
“Dead serious,” Latisha said. “Come back, help me get my things. I’m comin’ with you.”
“You don’t want to go where I’m going.”
“You got sanctuary, bae?”
“I’m not your fuckin’ ‘bae’!”
Vegas shook off her hand before it landed. His fist tightened around the rucksack strap. He knew, somewhere beneath his outrage, he was probably in the wrong right now, but tiredness from this endless night evoked a mood for cutting ties and making fresh starts.
“I’m gonna go see Wilhelm and sort out this mess,” he told Latisha. “You stay put. I’m not comin’ back for you, Tisha, but I’ll come back and help you move, if you still want to, OK?”
“But you’re not comin’ back for me?”
“Naw babe, I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s safer that way anyway. Once I’m gone, Vanicek and anyone he’s got in his crew got no reason to take anything out on you.”
“You fuckin’ shitbag, Vegas,” Latisha snapped back. “You’re usin’ that excuse on me, for fuckin’ realsies? Fuck you.”
“Hey, you’re not interested in me,” he growled and caught the hand she considered for slapping him. “So don’t make out like you do.”
“Baby, what the fuck you talkin’ about?”
Tisha tried to soften, but Vegas wouldn’t budge.
“I like you, girl, and we had some fun,” he said far more quietly than before. “And that’s not nothing, OK? I told you that before. But you’re like my . . . my fuckin’ karma or something’, yo.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Vegas released Tisha’s wrist at last and she punched him in the meat of his shoulder where she knew he could take it.
“Talk to me, Vegas.”
“Naw,” he said. “Best I leave off, aiight? You think about whether you want my help or not.”
“You got someone else?”
“No.”
Vegas pushed away the image of Lilianna again with clear and genuine annoyance.
“Don’t lie to me,” Latisha said. “I can take it, baby. Honest.”
“There’s no one else,” he said, then half-moaned. “I gotta go, Tisha.”
“Not before you explain yourself.”
Vegas held his ground longer than he wanted and thought to say half-a-dozen things and said none of them. Instead, he cut to the quick.
“You’re only after a man to keep you safe, keep you fucked, and keep you fed,” he snarled. “There ain’t nothin’ in that deal for me I can’t get when I need it, and none of that shit’s a priority right now, you got it?”
“I knew you had other women.”
Vegas couldn’t say anything else. Half his thoughts were hypocritical anyway, and he knew it. Latisha started crying and he hung his head as she spoke.
“Yeah, I thought you’d protect me.” Her voice warbled with emotion and none of it good. “Maybe I’m just stupid, huh? A man these days ain’t what it used to be.”
It, Vegas thought and sighed, unable to hold his head up with everything hanging over him. He softly swore to himself yet again, unsure if Tisha even heard it.
“Listen to me,” he said as quietly as he could in the hard breeze. “When I come back, you be ready to go, got it? One bag, baby, and I mean it, cool?”
“You’ll come back to me?”
“I’ll come back for you, babe.”
“You’re good to me, Vegas,” she said. “It’s good when it’s you an’ me.”
Latisha grabbed him in a hug and for some reason Vegas fought back tears too.
*
IT WAS A twenty-minute trek to the Bastion gates and it still wasn’t sun-up. Vegas was careful picking his way through the empty, restless streets, the dwellings and the very walls around him pregnant with whoever survived among the City’s thousands of souls. He kept his eyes and his ears sharp, cautious of safety yet glad to be living in the now, rather than beneath his traitorous nerves which threatened to overpower him. If he blinked more, licked his lips, adjusted the straightness of his cornrows a little too much, he begrudged it. Reassurance came in the Glock digging into his hip and the weight of the small tomahawk he’d recently filched.
Still, when he cleared the barricades and the last shanty homes, and stepped from the shelter of the old Columbus buildings overlooking the cleared concourse now a muddy slope to the Bastion’s gates, he started imagining a dozen different terrifying scenarios as he set eyes on the bored-looking sentry and the machine-gun turret surveying the whole approach.
Vegas bulled his shoulders instead and set out towards the broad gate, one hand raised, head and eyes down. The helmeted gate guard swept at him with a policeman’s gaze and a soldier’s threat, throwing Vegas to life before the Fall.
He halted a fair distance from the gate. Night’s gloom still clung to the scene, lightening just a fraction in the minutes to come.
“Hold up!” he called out, no need to do it loudly with the guard watching him from ten yards up in the air. “I need to speak to Councilor Wilhelm.”
“It’s not even six,” the sentry said. “Come back later.”
“I need to speak to him as soon as I can.”
The white trooper studied him and said nothing and it drew out for a few seconds. Vegas checked back the way he’d come, giving himself something to do as the pause elongated, wishing he’d brought a water bottle, his housemate’s blood spurting across his legs every time he dared close his eyes, even when he blinked.
“We’re closed,” the trooper called back finally. “Go home.”
Vegas cleared his throat with difficulty. Whether it was the name he uttered which choked him, or the last-second panic he felt in playing the card, he couldn’t tell.
“It’s about Tom Vanicek,” Vegas said. “He’ll want to know.”
The trooper eyed him shrewdly, then nodded slowly.
“Let me call back-up, then we’ll bring you through.”
Consent somehow took Vegas by surprise, but he nodded his understanding and compliance, and felt every inch the lackey dog he’d lectured his comrades from becoming.
Then, at last, Vegas felt the stirred coals of anger, and he gave a slow, low growl that wouldn’t carry to any guards behind the wide Bastion gate. He refastened the grip on his pack, feeling the spines of books digging into him as he willed himself back into that nourishing, self-righteous sense of vengeance. The more he focused, the more self-evident it became. In the five minutes the troopers worked behind the scenes making their adjustments, Vegas grasped hold of his understandable fury and fashioned it into a blade, invisible in his hand, but as tangible to him as Tom Vanicek’s longsword hacking down repeatedly into his friend.
“Fuck Tom Vanicek,” he hissed.
The gate cracked ajar and the same trooper or some other well-fed white boy stepped into the pass and checked him up and down at a spot where two more hard-faced turds had negligent aim of twin AR15s, their backs sheltered by the compound fence. Righteous as Vegas felt – fighting back against the imprint of his life as a black man in old America the whole time – he lowered his eyes and allowed their scrutiny as just one more means to an end.
Presenting no danger once they’d taken all his gear, he waited with the patience of an impatient man as the trio conferred and several more guards offscreen played their part. The gate guard finally coughed and motioned for him to follow and led Vegas through.
It was more than the late season making the inside of the old Enclave look so skeletal and bare. The old tent city was stripped from the gigantic interlocking courtyards between the brick tenement blocks, and all but a few paths remained of the ugly old concrete pavers. Naked garden beds now awaited further work between the slabbed sidewalks.
The gate guard led Vegas along one of the paths, marching the visitor needlessly down the central aisle with a hand clutching the sleeve of the newcomer’s shirt. Vegas allowed that, too, with an unpleasant sneer, the face of a man dicked around before an important appointment rather than the supplicant he was, tail between his legs, maybe, seeking the succor of the leader of the pack.
*
THE SLAMMING DOOR snapped him awake with a start. Every part of Vegas ached as he unfolded from the hard wooden bench seat and registered the growing daylight cascading in now through the tall windows lining the fourth-floor corridor. A door which last closed in darkness and the promise of swift return now revealed a tall, sandy-bearded security guard in khaki, a holstered pistol strapped to one leg.
“Councilor’s ready for you.”
Vegas stood to his full height and resisted the stretch.
“Cool.” About time.
“You OK?”
The trooper wasn’t asking after his welfare, and Vegas got that. So he grunted in assent and sniffed impatient eyes into the room beyond.
“He in there?”
“This way.”
The trooper left his back exposed as he led Vegas into and through one room and then out another, meeting tables and then a corporate lounge, everything tastefully done. His guide then pushed through a pair of big paneled doors leading deeper into the building and Vegas caught the merest glimpse of a stairwell. They approached another guarded door, which opened into another meeting room where Wilhelm abruptly stood up at the table’s end.
A third trooper with a slung M16 fronted a door on the far side of a room otherwise empty but for the two of them and Vegas’ escort. His guide took up a position against the door behind them, and the move sent a ripple of discomfort racing through Vegas’ gut.
“Vegas.”
Wilhelm came on with that bright smile of his and a hand already extended. They shook with Vegas shrugging off his own resentment in case it showed.
“Hey, Wilhelm, thanks for seeing me.”
“Of course,” the Councilor said. “They told me it was urgent.”
“Yeah,” Vegas said down low. “Hope they didn’t get you outta bed.”
“I was already up,” Wilhelm said and kind of beamed. “I do not sleep much.”
“Listen,” Vegas said to him. “Tom Vanicek’s a fuckin’ maniac, brother. I tell you what I tell you, you got to back me up, OK?”
“What do you mean?” Wilhelm asked. “Are you in trouble with Tom Vanicek?”
He did it with a smile, like someone was naughty.
“He killed my friend in cold blood last night,” Vegas snarled. “Just cut him down. Murdered him.”
Wilhelm nodded, chastened maybe, but still disinterested.
“We know Tom Vanicek is a dangerous man,” the Councilor said. “Is that really something you needed to get me out of bed to say? We already k
now.”
“Thought you was up already?”
Wilhelm made an annoyed face.
“It is a figure of speech,” he replied. “I have a whole City I am trying to hold together here. I am sincerely sorry for your friend –”
“Don’t give me that.”
The Councilor paused and raised an eyebrow at him.
“Tom Vanicek,” Vegas then said. “It’s kinda like the secret password around here, huh?”
“I do not understand what you mean by that, Vegas.”
“I told your people I had somethin’ on Vanicek and they got you right up.”
“You may have forgotten the time you spent asleep outside.”
Wilhelm chuckled, but didn’t like Vegas’ shrug.
“My Safety people said you had something important I needed to know,” Wilhelm said like it didn’t mean a lot. “We have no secret passwords here, Vegas.”
“Uh huh,” Vegas replied. “OK.”
“So is there something more you wanted to tell me?”
“You’re pretty keen to know, right?” Vegas replied instead.
The Councilor dropped his smile with a look to show the effort it was taking him, fixing a disapproving eye on Vegas and perhaps resisting a check on the two guards watching on.
“I made an effort to see you as soon as I could,” Wilhelm said. “I was already in another meeting and I have one after this. We can do this another time.”
He was already upright, but Wilhelm made like getting ready to move.
After The Apocalypse (Book 6): Resolution Page 17
