The slaughtered Fury outside Dr Swarovsky’s door emitted some sort of gaseous sigh as if the feral undead lifeforce within it was only now giving way. At the same time, a group of men pushed open the main apartment doors from the outside, a big, red-bearded man in the lead of several more men, all of them wearing red armbands.
Tom glanced at Iwa. The doctor pulled her gown over her bared legs, face unreadable as she looked down the steps from her work, to the dead Fury, then up to Tom, a cryptic expectation in her gaze and little other emotion on show.
“OK, so you’re OK,” Tom said to her. “You opened your door, so. . . .”
“I heard Lemmy calling your name.”
“Yeah,” Tom replied. “Which one’s Lemmy?”
Iwa gestured at the rheumatic man up at the hand rail. White-bearded Lemmy gave Tom a thumbs up over the railing they all stood behind, leaving Tom to question how his name was even known and also why they’d use it. The old women, the teenage boy, Iwa, even Lilianna and Lucas now peeking out from the threshold, all seemed focused on him as their guarding presence, and for the first time Tom grew annoyed at the presumption of it all. He swiveled his gaze back to Dr Swarovsky, and as if she sensed him, she looked up again from her patient. And Tom’s annoyance only grew, drinking in her sleep-addled features fixed in their customary imperviousness, regardless of the ungodly hour or the grisly task before her.
He gave a grunt and tramped downstairs, the newcomers not just opening the door, but letting in the dawn. The sound of hooffalls echoed from the street outside, a team of trash collectors with their horse-drawn cart eyeing the spilled house bricks around the tenement’s door. Tom glanced out at them, surprised by the appearance of the day given they were all asleep seemingly just moments before.
Beyond the trash collectors and their work outside, he spied a skinny boy aged no more than about ten already disappearing back in among the tents cluttering the nightly campsite some Citizens made of the opposite, no-longer-truly-vacant lot.
“Someone did a number on you,” the red-bearded man said to Tom. “Trapped you all in here, good and proper.”
Tom hesitated near the front doors, losing track of the boy and glancing briefly at the bricks the Red Armbands had kicked free.
“Why would they do that?” Tom asked.
No one had an answer. Nor did anyone offer who “they” might be.
Six men and women from the ground-floor units were soon joined by their children, the little ones terrified as was their right. Tom’s eyes were instead drawn to their bare feet, eyes narrowing as he lifted a hand and called out to get the room’s attention.
“You might want to step back,” he said.
*
IVAN AND HIS Red Armbands stood in a semicircle as the shabbily-dressed neighbors withdrew to opposite sides of the foyer, their absence drawing attention to what now looked obvious. Bloody drag marks stained the linoleum from the front door to the middle of the lobby. The “charity” table in the stairwell was undisturbed with its vase of dead flowers and a metal bowl containing three moldy lemons.
“The biter dragged itself in here off the street,” Ivan said.
Tom flicked his eyes to the other man. They’d made their introductions all of ten seconds before and there was something lucid and at the same time not quite right about the look in the bigger man’s eyes.
“And it . . . barricaded the door behind itself?” Tom asked.
Ivan studied the question long enough for it to be embarrassing. The other five men of differing pedigrees pressganged into the de facto neighborhood militia swapped nervous looks, but it was one of the nearby, ghostly-looking men from the lower apartments who spoke up.
“That biter was dumped in here, man.”
“Freshly killed, too,” Tom added.
He swept the room with his gaze. The mother of the children in the apartment opposite his came down to join them, toddler on her hip, rewarding Tom with a beatific smile he avoided.
“Someone’s done this deliberately,” he said slowly to the room for added emphasis. “Any of you know any reason someone’d do that?”
Rather than answer, the other Citizens exchanged anxious frowns.
*
THE DISCUSSION PETERED out almost as soon as it started. The other tenants seemed more keen on trading gossip than giving any useful insight into their predicament. Iwa bandaged up the injured woman, but there was no way to treat the victim’s shredded nerves, eyes still wildly ablaze at her survival from the Fury attack. Her neighbors offered to help her back to her rooms. And Tom retreated for his apartment without any answers and none too happy about it, even if the conundrum didn’t directly involve him. Any threat against the building was a threat to him and his kids – a point underscored as Lila and Like met him halfway, cutting his ascension once more outside Iwa Swarovsky’s flat.
“I’m not sure the Red Armbands will be much help to you if you’re looking for clues, Tom,” Iwa said as she joined them as well.
“I’m wondering why everyone thinks this is my problem,” he said.
“‘Everyone’?” she replied.
Tom clucked at himself for the rookie generalization and shrugged, maybe prepared to say more – or at least defend his reputation – except then the matriarch of the upstairs apartment came down and quietly stepped into their circle.
“Did the others tell you anything?” she asked.
Uganda, no last name disclosed, had kept herself slim since the end of the world interrupted her life of Swiss chocolate, Creole cooking, and big-screen TVs. And the past five years had done more than diminish her frame. There was something leathery and unwell in her pallid appearance not helped by the head wrap she wore concealing her hair. She was over-friendly on the hand contact, too, Tom noted, her fingers cared for like rare jewels formed into small birds that pecked at his arm several times as she spoke.
“I don’t think anyone wants to think about it,” she said. “We heard someone broke in, burgled you too, hmmm Tom?”
“I’m curious how you ‘heard’ we got burgled?”
He asked the question bluntly, in no mood to entertain gossip even with his neighbor hinting she knew something worth telling. But the effect on Uganda’s dreamy smile was like he’d said nothing at all.
“Do you think that they could be linked?” she asked.
“You’re saying there’s been other break-ins?” Tom asked.
“No one mentioned that,” Lila said.
Tom’s eyes flicked to his daughter, remembering himself as he pulled the pair of them close, though the tragic former housewife Uganda paid little attention to that, too.
“You sounded like you knew what you were doing down there,” she said to him with a fixed look. “You know, like one of them TV shows?”
“Are you actually going to answer one of my questions today?”
Uganda gave a tired smile, trying to make it effortlessly charming even though she’d lost that charm somewhere on the road. She’d reassembled as much of her wardrobe as she could manage and there was no one around alive now to say whether all her jewelry was real or fake. Tom couldn’t help notice she’d somehow changed out of her nightclothes before approaching them, though how she’d managed such a feat in the time allowed made little sense – pretty much like everything else.
“The other residents don’t want to say,” Uganda said enigmatically once more and beamed as if proud of herself. Tom only fumed, so sick of the eccentricities of a City filled with traumatized survivors even as he chided himself for his lack of compassion.
“They don’t want to say what, exactly?”
He studied her a moment longer, losing the war with sympathy.
“Actually, you assume I’m even interested,” he said after the pause. “Tell me what you know or I’ll be getting on with my day, thanks. And ‘You’re welcome,’ by the way.”
He heard a birdlike noise behind him and was surprised to see Iwa suppressing a giggle. When he checked on his ki
ds, Lila and Luke also eyed him with mild embarrassment.
“This is bullshit,” he muttered to himself and dismissed everyone else to do as they pleased, moving politely past the unmoving Uganda, who again clipped at his wing.
Like a grand tease, she finally whispered, “It’s the children outside.”
*
IT WASN’T LIKE there was any prospect of going back to bed, but Tom remained quietly infuriated as he finished his begrudging interview with Uganda and headed back down the blood-spattered stairs to where Ivan and his club-wielding troops stood in twos and threes gossiping with the other residents. The ground floor dwellers had the most to lose, but the weird, motley-looking lot – dressed alike in weather-stained black clothes of all descriptions – seemed far too relaxed for Tom’s liking.
“Ivan,” he said quietly.
The big man shot a hale smile and clapped a hand on the shoulder of the man he’d been speaking to, moving across to join Tom at a casual clip before the almost-bare charity table.
“Yes, Vanicek?”
Whatever syntax Tom was working on abandoned him as he registered his own surname somehow abrasive on the other man’s lips.
“You know my surname?”
“Heard you got your door kicked in,” Ivan said and smiled somewhat handsomely, if equally dimwitted. “Rookie move.”
“The woman in 3B, Mrs Uganda?” Tom continued. “She says there’s a problem with some kids around here. Outside?”
“The Urchins, yeah,” Ivan said and shrugged like it was no big deal.
Tom studied the man once again and took his time framing a reply.
“Dude,” he said with gentle force and pointed to the dead Fury leaking blood still on the landing. “Someone just murdered this poor guy this morning and dumped him in here for a reason.”
“You think?”
“I’m pretty damned sure.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Well, I already said, he didn’t brick up the door after himself, right?”
“I thought maybe someone outside did that to keep him in,” Ivan said.
“Exactly.”
They traded looks of mutual incomprehension and Tom’s brows instantly furrowed.
“Someone did block the door outside on purpose, Ivan.”
“Yes, to protect themselves,” he said and shrugged, not understanding why Tom didn’t see what he’d seen as commonsense.
“Jesus, no way,” Tom said. “I seriously doubt that.”
Tom motioned with one finger and led the bigger man back up the first flight of steps to where the emaciated teenage boy from 3B, Silas McCarthy, fussed with a filthy old paint-stained floor cover, trying to wrap the slain Fury in it. At the same time, one of the bearded lodgers in the lobby behind them called out that the troopers were finally coming.
Ignoring them all, Tom pulled the corner of the tarp aside to reveal the dead Fury in all its befouled glory. Then he dragged the cadaver away from the wall so it rolled onto its back and Tom flicked open its Confederate jacket to reveal the corpse’s torso riddled with more than a dozen narrow stab wounds.
“Someone needled this guy,” Tom said. “The corpse is fresh. This man was walking around like you or me yesterday. These are the sort of stabbings you see in prison.”
“He was in prison?”
“No,” Tom snapped and had to take a moment, not wanting to be cruel to the red-bearded man if it was birth defect, substance abuse, or trauma from the apocalypse rendering him seemingly retarded.
“I’m saying he’s been shivved,” Tom said. “Mrs Uganda said there was some trouble with some kids.”
“Yeah,” Ivan said.
“Have you been dealing with that?” Tom asked. “You and your, um. . . ?”
“Citizen’s Militia,” Ivan said. “They call us the Red Armbands.”
“I got that.”
“They’re just kids,” Ivan said. “I don’t know. There’s a lot of orphans in the City.”
Tom nodded, unconvinced about the merits of any further discussion. Ivan took that as his cue to retreat amiably back down the stairs, half-heartedly saluting the male-and-female pair of troopers cautiously advancing up to the second floor landing as if they might still be called on to shoot.
“All good?” the male trooper asked.
Tom only let out a sigh he didn’t know he’d been holding and motioned to the Fury at his feet before walking away.
*
AS THE DOCTOR on the scene, Iwa handed the dead Fury into the troopers’ care for disposal, something in her demeanor showing she wasn’t in the mood for idle chitchat, and for his part, Tom wasn’t interested in trying to read the grimly handsome doctor’s hot-and-cold-running moods with the adrenalin still coursing through his system. He retreated to his apartment, the children trailing him, one scarred fingertip probing the still insecure doorframe broken a week ago and substantially unrepaired.
Tom blasphemed quietly to himself again, loud enough for his children to hear and ken the black sails of the mood blowing through him. Lilianna tailed him, while Lucas disappeared back into the back bedroom.
“Are you OK, dad?” his daughter asked. “Everyone fusses over the victims. No one thinks about the one who makes the save.”
A little empathy cracked his surly demeanor and Tom hung his head as he squatted on the edge of the sofa and put his face into his hands, fighting off and then disoriented by the thought of how much he’d love a coffee – and then remembered he actually could.
“Holy fucking shit,” he softly gasped.
Lilianna was too much a veteran of her father’s errant tongue to react much herself. If anything, she looked relieved and slightly puzzled at the change of mood which drove him back onto his feet again to scurry over and dig around beneath the kitchen sink. The coffee tin was concealed in Dkembe’s abandoned sleeping kit, still hidden in the cupboard.
“Can you get a fire going?” he asked.
Tom produced a pot and turned on the kitchen’s phlegmatic tap, meeting his daughter’s crossed arms and bemused expression.
“I have work,” she said. “Don’t you?”
Tom paused, striking a diplomatic tone as he skirted the issue, kneeling beside the gas canister stove inherited from Laurance upon which he now settled the pot in place.
“It’s my weekend,” he said. “Eight days straight for you, Lila. You don’t get a day off?”
“I thought you needed us to earn?” she answered. “Work to eat, right?”
“Not today, thanks to this.”
Tom motioned at the coffee tin as he uncrouched from lighting the gas stove, trying and failing to keep creaking knees and aching lower back troubling the smile he lit on his daughter as his eyes flicked to the back bedroom.
“Lucas too,” Tom said. “The kid – both of you – you deserve a break, right? The only thing I have to do this morning is meet Tucker and try and collect our stuff.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Lilianna said. “No more blue tag, huh?”
She looked put out.
“Your turn will come as soon as I can work out whose arm I have to bend,” Tom told her. “I thought we could spend the day together. The three of us, at last.”
As if on cue, Lucas re-entered the living-cum-kitchen area with a bag over one shoulder.
“I have classes,” he said.
“You can have the day off,” Tom said. “We’ve had another windfall, and I’ll need your help.”
Lucas eyed the tin of coffee in Tom’s big hands.
“No, it’s OK,” the boy said. “I’ll go.”
“Really?”
“That’s a first,” Lila snorted.
“Luke,” Tom said. “I said as soon as we could manage it, you could stop going there.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“So?”
“It’s OK,” Lucas said and shrugged and his gaze slipped away, eel-like. “It’s not as bad as when it started . . . I’ve made . . . friends.”<
br />
“Really?” Tom said again and blinked. “Well, OK, um . . . If that’s what you want, OK. I just thought we could work smarter, you know?”
“Like . . . how?” Lila asked instead.
Tom slowly opened his mouth, caught unprepared at another crossroads for disclosure.
“Listen, I wasn’t going to say anything yet, but there’s something you should know.”
Lila came alongside Lucas and lit Tom with another curious smirk.
“Wow, actually telling us what’s going on, dad,” she said. “I’m impressed.”
“Thanks, honey. I said before that this was my weekend, which is true,” Tom said. “But you should also know . . . I’m not going back to the Foragers.”
The children swapped looks, slightly less invested than Tom hoped.
“Why?” Lila asked.
“It’s like I said before,” he said. “Shirts was right about one thing. There’s opportunities here, and I meant what I said. We can work smarter than just . . . rejoining the goddamned rat race, right?”
“The what?” Lilianna asked.
“And what is that?” Lucas said and pointed at the tin again.
“Well, I’m so glad you asked,” Tom said and briefly flashed his salesman’s grin.
“I’d like you to meet your friend and mine: coffee.”
He checked the boiling water like the impatient man he was, shooting one quick look back at his son, surprised still at the kaleidoscopic changes in him.
“How does coffee help?” Luke asked.
“It’s like your bullets,” Tom said to his son. “Here, I’m going to make each of us a cup. This is a bonafide precious commodity.”
“I don’t want coffee, dad,” Lucas said.
“More for you, dad,” Lila added.
“Look, this may be the only time in your life you get to taste coffee,” Tom said to them. “I’m making you a cup.”
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 20
