After The Apocalypse (Book 6): Resolution

by Hately, Warren

  “Fuck.”

  The fool with the shotgun grabbed Vegas by the arm. He was easy to fight off. The wisecrack complaint was still spilling from the man’s broken teeth when Vegas wrenched his arm, twisted the old man about, and forced the shotgun to fire at the trooper coming up behind.

  Vegas took the ensuing chaos as his chance to change vector, leaping over the fighting girls to push aside a filth-encrusted lattice, breaking most of it as he stepped through.

  A narrow space ran along the brick wall of the original Columbus streetscape. Permanent campers blocked the broad entrance to an old office complex. Vegas kept hurrying along the concealed channel, past nailed-shut doors, until finally he came to where one stood open, revealing a corridor and interior staircase exposed to The Mile’s street life.

  A burst of automatic gunfire seared the air. Beyond the shelters, people started to scream, the dude with the shotgun yelling in terror or anger or pain, and then Vegas rushed into the building and up the carpeted stairs.

  A woman stared at Vegas blankly, holding back a teenage boy, and reassured when Vegas ignored them and he swept to the right, his mouth hanging open as he sucked in mighty breaths and scanned around as he spotted and dismissed each unfolding option while continuing on and up and into the second level.

  Another corridor yielded onto a second, tea-stained by daylight at its end. Vegas hurried forward, and hollow noises shook the stairs below. A man yelled out. Vegas checked the nearest window latch and got the damned thing open fairly easily, with another fire escape outside – and then he was on it, the iron frame shaking as Vegas took a hard tack and clattered up to the next floor. Seeing an option and with no time to lose, he then leaped from the fire escape to the sill of an open bedroom window. Three stories above ground, he clutched the ancient frame by fingertips until he could get a toehold. Then he crawled over and dropped inside.

  Musky carpet greeted him as he broke furniture tumbling into a private room, mercifully empty for just a second, until the door flew open and a Puerto Rican woman began screaming at him in cursive.

  Vegas pulled the gun and she shut the fuck up at once, backing out of the room with her hands up, and allowing him to pad into the squalid living room like a panther, two kids and an old man hiding behind the couch. Vegas ignored them to check towards the front door just in time to hear more pounding footfalls in the corridor outside.

  He headed through into the survivors’ gutted kitchen. Tattered awnings like cellophane curtained off a gap where exterior bricks had collapsed in the outside wall.

  Another fire escape passed overhead, just at the edge of his vision through that view. Vegas made a show of stashing the pistol into his blood-soaked pants, glowering at the old woman with a laser beam stare. Then he pushed through the plastic sheets, squinting not to wince as his wounds made themselves known. He angrily wiped half-dried blood from his chin instead and focused on the best means of egress as he blinked the sweat from his eyes, took another breath, and leapt across to grab the underside of the rusting metal steps passing overhead.

  Vegas hung from his hands with the effort sending fire through his forearms and shoulders, but he managed to bull his way across to the far side and haul up just enough to catch a lower railing and start spider-climbing around. The Puerto Rican woman, abandoned with her family back inside the apartment, took her chance to throw her front door open and Vegas heard her hollering for help.

  He was halfway up the next landing and headed for the roof when the fire escape shook with fresh pursuit. Sorely tempted to hold his ground, instead Vegas continued up, performing a lazy dip to vault from the top of the stairs and onto the cluttered roof.

  Incredibly, a half-dozen tents dotted the top roof surface of the building. Several men and women stood up from their communal cooking fire featuring the half-butchered remains of a starved-looking dog. But Vegas ignored them too. He hurried back from the building’s edge, gun at the ready again, scanning around for better options as the rooftop Citizens backed away from him.

  The next tenement on the block sat a few feet lower, but campers crowded it too. Vegas checked the fire escape again, saw no one coming, and picked up his pace, ready to make the easy jump across to the next rooftop just as the blonde-bearded trooper Rothwell clattered up behind him armed with an Ak47.

  “Get down!” he bawled.

  People complied – as did Vegas.

  He jumped the short distance to the next roof anyway, going into a deliberate roll across concrete he didn’t quite manage right, though he did reach shelter behind an old defunct air-conditioning cluster as planned. The shoulder he’d injured before now redoubled its pain, transfixing his grim visage, but the silver handgun remained in a death grip in his right hand.

  Vegas scoped back towards the trooper just as he came into view.

  He shot the man at a distance of about fifteen feet.

  The bullet hit the side of the trooper’s turned jaw and blew the whole thing off. Staggering, Rothwell grabbed for his face only to freeze in horror at the wound itself, the entire jaw bone gone, his tongue hanging down loose, grotesque and seared like from a barbecue. The choking man rolled dying eyes towards Vegas and went down on a knee and didn’t stop there, tipping over the far building’s edge and plunging down into the narrow space between them.

  The campers on the second rooftop registered the fatality with a shared sense of Vegas rising to his feet and staring back hard. Uniformly, the closest five people backed away. An older man picked up a little girl by one arm and ducked out of sight behind the nearest shelter.

  Vegas eyed the next rooftop and tried to ignore the pain.

  *

  IT WAS MIDDAY before he felt safe enough to unfold himself from the old laundry chute, and an hour after that before Vegas hobbled through the tent city south of his old apartment block on lawns long-since trampled into dust churned into muck by the light rainfall flung repeatedly by the passing squalls.

  Everything ached as he traveled, paying the price for his earlier heroics. He pressed a folded old t-shirt to his wounded side and prayed no one paid much attention to the deep layer of bloody grime plastering the side of his dark cargo pants as he made his way unerringly towards and then into his abandoned apartment block.

  Squatters in the lobby eyed him with suspicion as he entered.

  “What the fuck you all lookin’ at?”

  The destitute Citizens hunkered down. Vegas’ irritation did a slow boil.

  “Motherfuckers oughta be out there lookin’ to yourselves,” he spat as he closed in on the stairs where he paused. “Ain’t no one comin’ to rescue you. It’s fuckin’ crazy out there.”

  He didn’t plan to start a lecture, but one of the nearest women halted him as he turned. She stood with a shaky voice.

  “Is the Rations depot still closed?” she asked. “We’re all owed clicks.”

  “Rations?”

  He left a laugh behind as an answer and trudged up the stairs with the slow, deliberate pace of a Frankenstein monster, managing to maintain his dog-tired propulsion until he finally reached Latisha’s door where he weakly thumped his palm a few times before resting his forehead against the jamb and nearly passing out.

  “Tisha,” he said quietly, though he had to bellow to say anything at all. “Open up. It’s me.”

  The locks rattled and Latisha appeared with a strained, worried look.

  “Vegas, you OK?”

  But he could only blow his cheeks out now rather than chide the stupid question.

  “We got to move, yo,” he said. “Like, now. Right now.”

  “What is it?”

  “They took all my stuff.”

  “Your stuff?” Tisha answered. “What stuff?”

  “Fuckin’ books an’ everything,” he told her. “Pack light. We got to move.”

  The blunt news delivered, Vegas stumbled along to his own abandoned rooms. The door was shut, and for a moment he feared someone’d taken roost. But it eased in on its
broken mechanism to reveal the somnambulant living room and the stink coming from the bloodstain pride of place in the middle of the floor.

  “Fuck.”

  “Baby, you have to tell me what’s happening.”

  Spooked, it was only his tiredness giving Latisha stealth as she followed.

  “What’d I tell you?” he said angrily. “Pack your fuckin’ things, yeah?”

  Tisha started another protest. Vegas cut her off. He stepped into the apartment and she followed as if he’d said nothing.

  “They’ll come for me here,” he explained. “Wilhelm knows where I live. Should’ve cleared out o’ here long before.”

  “Wilhelm?” Latisha gasped. “I thought it was Tom Vanicek you –”

  “Yeah, him too.”

  Struggling to keep up with all the ill portents, Latisha finally looked ready just to go get her stuff when instead OK Jay’s bedroom door swung open and Dkembe appeared.

  “Dkembe?”

  Vegas let his eyes boggle, too astonished to know how he even felt.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  The memories of Dkembe and Jay squabbling trying to throw blame at each other in the last seconds before Jay’s murder swept in on him like a thunderstorm and Vegas growled, low and dangerous in his throat, and reached back for the keen-edged tomahawk the Bastion men had taken from him hours ago.

  Dkembe understood the subtext without needing an ax blow to the head. He backed away, but the bedroom doorway was blocked with another, more slender figure.

  The skinny drab white girl wore Jay’s second favorite hoodie and stared hard at Vegas with unfocused, pink, sleep-deprived eyes. Vegas looked between the girl and Dkembe, and his burning scowl deepened to a whole new level.

  “What the fuck is goin’ on here?”

  “I thought your place would be empty, man,” Dkembe said. “I’m sorry. Astrid’s tired. We’re both . . . tired.”

  Vegas tasted his own loathing and flicked eyes to Latisha.

  “Pack now,” he told her.

  “OK.”

  Latisha left, and Vegas swiveled back on the two runaways as he broke into action, crossing angrily to the bookshelf and snatching Roald Dahl and then several other slim, dog-eared paperbacks while tugging the cotton throw from the room’s only other chair.

  “You have to get out of here, it’s not safe,” he told them.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Packing,” Vegas said. “What’s it look like?”

  “We just need somewhere to stay,” Dkembe said. “Just for one night.”

  Vegas stood.

  “Well here ain’t it,” he said. “I’ve half a mind to let Wilhelm’s men find you instead of me. You deserve it, after what you did.”

  “It was Tom who killed Jay –”

  “And you led him right here.”

  “I didn’t think . . . I didn’t think he was just gonna murder. . . .”

  “You serious with me right now, brother?”

  Vegas waited until he had Dkembe’s eye contact, then delivered his toughest stare yet. The other man broke in a heartbeat and started blubbering while the pale girl watched on. Vegas watched Dkembe cry for all of two seconds.

  “Who’s this?” he snapped at him. “Your girlfriend?”

  Dkembe sniffled, wiped his face.

  “Why is . . . why is Wilhelm’s people comin’?”

  Vegas only glared at him.

  “Motherfucker. . . .”

  He couldn’t manage the rest. He angrily bundled the books into the cotton throw and bustled away into the kitchen where he armed himself with OK Jay’s carving knife.

  “Vegas,” Dkembe said. “What’s going on?”

  “I went to Wilhelm,” Vegas said. “Thought I could do something about your buddy Vanicek.” He scanned the empty shelves. “Slimy sack of shit lowlife motherfucker set his dogs on me instead.”

  “Dogs?”

  A few tinned cans and a chunk of fabric-wrapped meat went in with the books with little regard to hygiene.

  “You remember I was tied up with the Brotherhood. . . ?”

  Dkembe nodded. “They’re a bunch of racists,” he said.

  Vegas chuckled without rancor. “Not all men are created equal,” he said.

  “I see that now,” Dkembe said – clearly desperate. He closed the distance to clutch Vegas’ arm. “Wherever you’re goin’, I’ll go with you.”

  Vegas shook him off.

  “What, you and her?”

  Astrid watched mutely from a few yards away, unaware or just too tired to notice she stood in the middle of the drying blood.

  Dkembe shot the girl a guilty look.

  “I had to help her,” he told Vegas. “They captured her.”

  “Who?”

  “The Ascended.”

  “The butchers?”

  Dkembe dropped his eyes. Vegas gave a dry, mysterious laugh, and pushed past Dkembe and then around the girl as he headed into Jay’s bedroom and stood glaring angrily at the freshly-tousled bedclothes. Then he tore off his own filthy shirt and started salvaging more clothes from his dead friend’s belongings, gasping and wincing and feeling maudlin and half-dead. His blood-soaked shirt lay where he’d dumped it on the floor.

  Vegas ignored the whispered conversation behind him. He stuffed his bundle tight and twisted the cotton sheet and re-entered the living room to find Dkembe cradling the girl against himself in a move that made Vegas sick.

  “You an’ me still might have a reckonin’,” he told Dkembe. “But for now, you want to come with me? You gotta ditch her.”

  “No, Vegas, I can’t –”

  “You won’t much like it where I have to go, so maybe it’s just as well,” Vegas said.

  Latisha arrived carrying a motherfucking suitcase. Tired annoyance swiveled aim back on Dkembe.

  “You don’t know where my crib’s at, huh?”

  “Jay said you had other guys –”

  “Yeah,” Vegas agreed. “Right across the street from your Ascended.”

  He looked to Tisha.

  “Let’s go.”

  Vegas glazed his eyes as he bulled past Dkembe standing shell-shocked with his hands on the shivering young woman’s arms. Only the blonde girl tracked Vegas as he grabbed Latisha’s suitcase, and he and her and it quit the ransacked apartment.

  *

  THEY HAD TO go deep into the City’s south on foot, and by the time Vegas led Latisha towards the solid three-floor brick factory unit, the afternoon sun had vanished behind thick clouds spreading grayness across the whole of Columbus. Away in the distance from The Mile, fresh black plumes of smoke arose, adding to the sense of doom, the strident winds fanning the newborn blaze so that soon, flames started writhing from the scene as blazing, wind-torn tendrils.

  Vegas’ stomach dropped another notch, dull compared to the hastily-treated ache in his side. The encroachments of The Mile didn’t extend to the wider streets in the City’s reclaimed south. Despite the fierce winds, three of the gruesomely-hooded cultists stood armed in the barren street between the Ascended complex, a line of demountable units, and the faded red brickwork of the three-story building opposite – where Vegas was heading. A pair of civilian meat workers clutched weapons too, though they stood only surveying the wreck of a burnt-out truck near the Ascended’s trade entrance.

  Latisha dragged the heavy suitcase along by its stupid little wheels clogged thick with City grime. Vegas helped force the baggage along from behind with tired kicks and the occasional shove, eyes darting towards the cultists over the sack of clothes he carried. A man in leather with a beard and moustache didn’t hesitate, striding out to Vegas across the wind-battered intersection as he trudged.

  It was still thirty yards to the wire-mesh enclosure of home. The crib gate stood ajar ahead of them, with no one on security duty. Vegas sighed and slowed, making a pained face as he hissed for Latisha to keep moving.

  “It’s that gateway up ahead,” he told he
r. “Don’t look back.”

  Vegas set down his things, offering the newcomer a serious, but calm look.

  “Help you with somethin’?” he asked into the wind.

  The man nodded and closed the distance before offering a paper-dry handshake.

  “Martin,” he said.

  “They call me Vegas.”

  “From there?”

  “Nothin’ like that.”

  “Uh-huh,” Martin said and dropped it. “We got hit this morning. Ascended lost one of their Anointed. Seen anything?”

  “‘Anointed’?” Vegas replied. “What’s that?”

  “A girl,” the other man said. “A girl.”

  Vegas motioned towards Latisha making slow progress towards sanctuary.

  “You can see, we’re just comin’ back.”

  The wind whistled through their conversation, with Martin standing too close.

  “We’re looking for a black man,” he said.

  The foreman stared at him with such deranged intensity that Vegas crumbled.

  “You’re lookin’ for Dkembe,” he said.

  “And Tom Vanicek,” Martin said.

  “Well, I can’t help you with that,” Vegas said. “But Dkembe was a friend of Jay – Jay who worked for you.”

  “He didn’t turn up for work,” Martin said.

  “Because he’s dead,” Vegas said bluntly. “Dkembe’s there, at his place. You know it? You’ll find him there.”

  Martin’s expression eased and he took a step back and Vegas felt the noose loosen around his throat. The hooded figures across the roadway watched like hawks. Martin cut a vague hand signal and then glanced back to him.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ve got no beef with you,” Vegas told him.

  Martin stared back. Deadpan.

  “Was that a joke?”

  “Er, no . . . of course not, man.”

  Martin grunted. “Makes it funnier.”

  Then he angled away on the heel of one cowboy boot and offered a little salute.