After The Apocalypse (Book 6): Resolution

by Hately, Warren

  “See you around,” he called.

  Now it was Vegas taking a few steps after Martin so his voice could be heard.

  “If you’re after Tom Vanicek, you should know he’s the one that killed Jay,” Vegas said. He could hear the desperation now in his voice and hated it. “He’s no friend to me!”

  Martin nodded, finished his frozen salute, and went back to his kind.

  Vegas sagged as if the life force left him. But he redoubled the grip on his scavenged bundle and hauled it and him along with it up to the gate.

  Latisha now stood with two of his homies, Ray Chuck and D-Man, the first of them wearing an idiot’s grin above the chubby thick neck he maintained. D-Man eyed Vegas more cautiously and stepped back, speculative and bright, deferring as Vegas shared a sour look with them.

  “Where’s Homo and Spinner?”

  “Spinner’s asleep,” Ray Chuck said as he strangled his own mirth. “Holmes and Twenty Six went out for a salvage run.”

  Vegas snapped his fingers as he cast a look back down the street, watching the Ascended trio stride off back into their compound with the newfound urgency of a lynch posse. Vegas might’ve cursed them, but only with his voice within. He said nothing else about the matter as he turned back to the other members of his crew instead.

  “Wake up Holmes and get everyone else together,” he said to Ray Chuck. Then to D-Man, he added, “Tool up, lock these gates, keep a watch at all times, yeah?”

  “We have a roster,” the other man replied.

  “Then fuckin’ use it,” Vegas said.

  He checked in with Latisha because he could feel her waiting on it, plus it was the right thing to do. He refastened a grip around the suitcase handle.

  “We have to fast-track our plans, yo,” he said to D-Man. “Lockdown. Shit outside’s getting weird. Dangerous.”

  “You think it’s this weather. . . ?”

  “Naw, man,” Vegas told him. “There might be a storm comin’, but it’s not comin’ from the sky. We got problems right here now that’s gonna take everythin’ we got if we’re gonna see this through.”

  D-Man stroked his goatee, thoughtful rather than frightened, remaining somehow dignified in his black track suit and trainers. He drew around the Uzi on its strap, concealed behind his narrow back, and nodded once to the darker Vegas before turning to secure the gate.

  Vegas found Latisha extending her hand his way with a big smile.

  Chapter 7

  TOM’S GRIP ON the longbow was hard enough to make the wood complain, if only he could hear it. Instead, the winds tore through the disassembled streets with ever-greater vigor. Tom could barely hear his son’s questions as he trailed behind, Tom marching resolute yet without any idea of where to go; and the questions Tom did hear, he ignored, too much bitterness and anger and confusion and outright panic for his daughter a heady stew like narcotics in his head leaving him feral and restless with murderous intent despite the aches and pains and bruises and possible fractures making it a miracle he stood upright at all. He didn’t give Moira Blaze another thought as he led them away from The Dirty Vixen, no matter how much the handsome woman had hummed and hawed and rolled her eyes to be left behind.

  One problem alone consumed Tom Vanicek.

  “Dad!” Lucas yelled for something like the fifth time. “What are we going to do?”

  “We have to find your sister,” Tom shot back at him as if angry at the kid, too.

  But Lucas only returned a defiant, pugilistic look and motioned irately.

  “And. . . ?”

  Tom scanned the intersection. The two-story brick firmaments of the overarching streetscape cordoned the trash-littered colony between the streets. Several bodies lay out in the open, gathering into mounds of wind-blown garbage, a coil of chicken wire, a bright strip of pink cloth, someone’s abandoned stroller tumbling through and past them and bouncing somehow back onto its wheels as if by invisible strings until a random gust clutched it and the whole thing flew off somewhere beyond where it hurt to look, grit and too much other crap obliterating the view to the south. A man ran low to a doorway with a bundle clutched against himself as if fearing the rising winds might snatch it. A woman with a missing eye watched from the doorway of another hovel. A sharpened tool glinted in her hand.

  Lucas held his pistol and the depleted Mp5 Navy hung like a weight from its strap across his narrow frame. Tom dug the spare 9mm clip from his pants and handed it to his son, then felt the empty space where his Colt Python used to live, lost amid their various affrays.

  He sighed and looked around. It wasn’t the distraction Tom wanted or really needed, sorely ruing every second that passed. But it was the option he took now as he grunted to his son, no words needed as he veered back the way to their home compound.

  It wasn’t until Ortega’s old digs came into view that Lucas questioned him again.

  “Dad?” the boy asked. “I know we –”

  “Guns and ammo,” his father told him. That was enough.

  But the entry gate hung open wide and partly busted as they returned. Midmorning daylight denied any efforts at stealth, exposing them as harsh as the grime-encrusted bricks of the double-floored abode, sunlight catching on the wickerwork of overlapping tarpaulins securing the side rear of the compound.

  “Looters?” Lucas whispered as much as he could, still in combat with the wind.

  “Maybe,” his father answered. “Stay ready.”

  The boy nodded and Tom threaded one of his half-dozen arrows to the bowstring.

  The covered entry threw shade across everything. Kent still lay dead, and now with flies buzzing around him. A lo-fi reek of carnage emanated from the house, too. Tom scanned the kitchen doorway and its single step and saw the ghosts of too many dead gathered there, so he threw his attention into their ambitious garden workspace now abandoned for good, and both Tom’s gardeners dead. A tired flush of sorrow coursed through him at memories of Karla and Ionia and the precious few moments in which the two women seemed most at ease, almost happy – all of it amid dreams of a self-sufficient garden, a safe life, civilization reclaimed, useful and doing good work and with the trust of hardy comrades underscoring their shared vision, none of which came true.

  “Fuck.”

  Tom grunted and kicked aside a wooden stool to orient on the weapons locker at the same moment he saw it completely picked clean – clean, as if from confiscation.

  Then his eyes caught the pair of feet amid all the dirt and woodchips further along between the wheeled garden beds.

  The girl wore a pair of battered old Cons as red as her namesake.

  Kent’s daughter Crimson lay strangled by the black cord used to do it, discarded and left there with her, along with a signature chisel-wound to the side of her head which stilled her life for once and all. Further along, one of the huge wooden tubs had burst open. Half-covered in dirt, Attila lay on his back with a look of furious rage resulting in nothing, thanks to the bullet wounds to his shoulder and chest, and a final coup de grace to the head to release him before the dormant Fury within took hold.

  “What happened here?” Lucas asked.

  “We’re. . . .”

  Tom didn’t actually know what to say. He checked back at the side door, the cool slaughterhouse within likely to yield more clues he didn’t want to know about.

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered again under his breath.

  The screeching of metal sheeting under attack from the storm made his blasphemy a private affair. Tom remembered his parental duties and mastered his scowl well enough to speak to his distraught son.

  “They must’ve sent men looking for us here already,” he said. “We need to go, unless they’re still here, inside, or . . . watching for us.”

  “The Councilor did this?”

  “It seems so.”

  “I thought he was your friend?”

  Lucas shrugged when Tom made a face, though Tom didn’t really begrudge him the shorthand for Tom’s deal with
the anodyne Councilor.

  “We can’t talk here,” Tom answered in a harsh rasp. “This storm’s our best cover.”

  But Luke’s eyes stayed locked on the girl’s skinny pale corpse.

  “Why did they have to strangle her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Tom led them back to the open exit.

  “And Attila was here?” Lucas asked.

  “Maybe he ran?” Tom shrugged, squinting on the return to daylight. “Thought it might be safe, maybe he could . . . maybe thought he could make the City work still.”

  Tom shrugged eloquently again to show he didn’t have any real answers.

  “Do you think they tortured her?”

  Tom gave his son a pained look. He didn’t want to sugar coat it – or talk about it at all, for that matter.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “They were looking for us?”

  “Wilhelm knows we survived the Urchins,” Tom said. “And by now, he’ll know Locke’s dead too. That fire alone. . . .”

  He led them out across the intersection just as a shower of debris rattled past. A shard of wooden planking rebounded off Tom’s shoulder and he gave a startled moan, though he barely felt the impact through his thick, bloodstained jacket. Feverish, his eyes scoured the street for troopers, assassins, Furies – or any threats at all. A truck drove through an intersection to the north, but most other Citizens looked to be bunkered down against tornado weather.

  “What are we gonna do, dad?”

  “I had a way into the Enclave,” Tom said. “If Wilhelm knows we’re still alive, though, that seems like madness now. . . .”

  “But what about Lila?”

  “I know.”

  “Do you, dad?” Lucas berated him. “Every minute that passes means –”

  “I know.”

  “Then isn’t there another way in?” his son asked. “Someone in the Bastion knows what they’ve done with her.”

  Lucas blubbered from anger as much as fear for his sister. Tom felt the same, though his face was that of a dead man, revealing nothing even though that was everything anyone needed to know, the fatalism writ across his battered, gray-whiskered Stoic mask.

  “Another way in?” Tom repeated aloud. “To the Enclave? No.”

  A rat almost the size of a house cat tore across the street in front of them where they’d stopped moving due to the uncertainty of it all, sheltered by the awning of a row of iron-plated shopfronts echoing with the noise of civilians inside. A woman’s voice rang out, muffled, amid the clanging of a pot, a child’s brief complaint, the soft underlying tone of someone else singing in denial of their collective dire straits.

  Tom looked at Lucas trying to instill some counterfeit of hope in him.

  “I do know another way out,” he said.

  “Out of the City?”

  “Out of the sanctuary zone, yes,” Tom said as he revisualized the exit. “It’s how Wilhelm comes and goes himself. I don’t know if anyone else even knows about it.”

  “Then let’s go,” Lucas said.

  The boy was already moving, destination unknown, fiercely desperate for even the semblance of a plan. Again, relatable. Tom’s brow furrowed, lost in his reverie, methodically retracing the steps in his mind even as he wondered why the Councilor even showed him the secret exit through the old stores and doorways soldered shut for perhaps his use alone. Maybe, for a little while there, they had been friends – or allies, was the better word – which dragged Tom back into more contemplation at what that alliance had truly revealed.

  Tom clutched Lucas by one pitifully narrow shoulder.

  “This way.”

  *

  THE HARDIEST OF the City’s survivors were gathering on The Mile with talk of marching on the Rations Depot, astonishingly undeterred by gale-force winds. Tom ignored them all to take his son by the hand in through a plain metal door and down into the old city water tunnels. They left the mortal realm’s concerns behind as they tracked through the errant Councilor’s secret labyrinth all the way to the sturdy glass door at the rear of the old dispensary. Steel bars and a complex pulley lock for iron deadbolts adorned the exit.

  Tom motioned caution to Lucas, threading through the back of the storage room and into the small loading bay the door protected. It only took a moment to work the mechanism and then the door relaxed open a crack. Lucas audibly licked his dry lips and handed back the treasured longbow. They’d looted the Mp5 for its last few 9mm rounds to consolidate the Glock that Lucas inherited from his showdown with Kevin. Now that was the only gun they had.

  Tom didn’t know what they were headed into, but they’d need more guns than that. The urgency of the fact was immediately apparent when he eased open the heavy reinforced glass door onto the blocked alleyway, and saw a dozen or more figures crouched in a pack behind the closest barricade.

  Furies.

  The breath caught in Tom’s throat as Lucas walked into him standing stricken at the half-open door which Tom then gently closed with a desperate prayer, the wind outside covering the worst of the noise as their view narrowed onto at least a dozen of the recent dead conspiring in a group crouched in a claustrophobic pack beneath and around the underside of the rusting delivery truck. None of the Furies showed more than a week’s decay, and the blood stains adorning their tattered clothes looked semi-recent.

  Tom hushed Lucas gawping an inevitable question, and kept the door open the barest crack, kneeling despite the bow in one hand, better to let his son share the view.

  “Fresh ones,” he said.

  He double-checked the rust-colored fire door on the far side of the narrow brick alley, just a half-dozen steps closer to the Furies snickering and shuffling around together.

  “What are they doing?”

  “You know what they’re like when they’re in packs,” Tom said.

  An unfortunately rich history between them made no more details necessary. The more there were, it often seemed, the smarter the creatures got.

  “Wilhelm sealed this alley well, kept it hidden from the people,” Tom whispered tersely. “Perfect hiding place for the Furies.”

  “There’s still Furies. . . ?”

  “You thought the troopers got them all?”

  Lucas didn’t answer. Like his dad, he was more focused on what the fuck they were going to do now. Tom used the pause to eye the distance across to the fire door once again, and cast a speculative look back to the weather-beaten Furies. The creatures’ heads turned, craned, snapping about, listening to the wind whistling through the City, sniffling yet rapt as a gunshot sounded distantly, followed by a woman’s shrieking cries.

  “They look hungry,” Lucas said.

  “They always look hungry,” Tom answered. “They’re not getting either of us. Do you see that door?”

  He pointed, just to be obvious, and tried to smile encouragingly in counter-point to the wide-eyed look which overtook his son.

  “We’re going to run for it?”

  “They’re distracted,” Tom said. He motioned as well as he could to show the alley was a dead end behind the Fury pack and to their right. The creatures were focused beyond the rusting hulk of the box truck, reading the rich stories their heightened senses gathered from the air.

  “I’ll open the door and you run for it, try and get that door open,” Tom said. “But I’ll be right behind you if you don’t. Got it?”

  “This is the only way?”

  One of the Furies snarled and snapped its jaws at one of its fellows. A woman with dust-speckled curls of blonde hair reduced now to a mop reared back, away from the other one, scuttling like a demented chimpanzee to shuffle among the others, only briefly glancing back towards the drugstore’s back exit. Tom nodded to his son.

  The glass door squeaked as it opened and Lucas ran through.

  The boy was true to his intent and made it all the way across the ten-yard distance without a sound, and Tom was halfway after him before the rusty fire door rattled as Luk
e grabbed two-handed to haul it open – and the whole thing merely thudded dully, locked.

  The first Furies snapped about as Tom joined his son and added all his strength to the futile effort of hauling the metal door open.

  Tom remembered the combination lock on the other side.

  The Furies surged out of their slumber and Tom stepped back, drawing an arrow and then pointing with it to the edge of the door.

  “There’s a lock, here,” he cried. “Shoot it out.”

  The risen pack burst towards them in the one action, bare feet and those still clad in shoes scrabbling alike across the bricks from thirty yards away. The monsters abandoned any need for tactics, grasping with instant, feral comprehension that Tom and Lucas were trapped.

  The first one took an arrow through its baleful eye, collapsing to be trampled at once as the other dozen members of the pack hurtled in at their prey.

  A man’s muffled voice sounded beyond the locked door.

  Tom nocked a second arrow as he furiously moved to the rear of the door, Lucas frozen with the drawn gun like he didn’t know whether to use it on the lock still, the charging Furies, or perhaps himself.

  *

  THE FADED RED metal door clicked and banged open to reveal the oblivious grin of a narrow-faced black guy wearing a frizzy beard framed by a checkered blue-and-white keffiyeh – though his eyes hardened the moment he saw Lucas with his drawn gun, and then tightened further as he registered Tom.

  “Go!”

  The sentry started to complain, but the fastest of their attackers appeared and Lucas dived through the safety of the doorway and Tom abandoned readiness with the longbow to follow.

  Human solidarity was short-lived. The guard slammed the door back into place, but couldn’t take his double-handed grip off the handle to lock it. He looked back at Tom and Lucas in fear as Tom dumped his father’s bow in the small brick room behind them and hissed with pain to draw the longsword overhead.

  The black man’s eyes widened, caught between the not-quite-shut disaster of the rear door and his utter exposure to whatever the hell Tom planned. But Tom only gestured to Lucas, drawing his son’s attention to the cage-like safety door hanging open, and then he hacked into the various fingertips wedged along fire door’s edge.