Collapse (After the Storm Book 2)

by Ryan Casey

  I did know what it meant. And suddenly, the inevitable showdown I knew had been building for a long time seemed more real and more imminent than ever. “If Kerry’s still alive, she’s with Danny’s group right now.”

  “Right. So you have a choice. You take your daughter and your dog and you go wandering off into the middle of nowhere. You get your leg caught in a trap, only this time, there’ll be no one to help you. Or, you come with us. You put your daughter and your dog somewhere safe. Then we take this place. Together.”

  I looked at the gun in my hand, and the rifle over my shoulder. “You sure we’ve got enough?”

  “They might have numbers, but we have bullets and soon, we’ll have darkness. So we get to this village. We get there and we watch and we wait. And then, when the time’s right, we attack. You ready?”

  I didn’t want to shake hands with Alec. I didn’t want to put differences aside. I was pissed that I’d been screwed over again. But I didn’t have a better option right now.

  “I guess I don’t have a choice,” I said.

  I took Alec’s hand. Shook it, firmly.

  Then I realised everything had gone quiet behind Alec.

  I looked over his shoulder and in the space of a second, I understood.

  There were two people behind Steve and the other guy, Carlos.

  One second, Steve and Carlos were standing.

  The next they had knives to their necks and their throats were slit.

  “Quick!” I shouted.

  I tried to alert Alec to what was happening.

  But before he could turn round, something slammed into his neck.

  His eyes widened. He gasped. Blood spurted out of his lips.

  A throwing knife was in his neck.

  The three attackers were emerging from behind the trees.

  And they were coming for me, Olivia, and Bouncer.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Part of me wanted to run as the three men with knives ran at me, Olivia, and Bouncer.

  But another part of me wanted to hold my ground.

  To fight.

  I turned around and ran into the trees. Not running away, necessarily. Just finding the right moment. The right opportunity to fire at them. I needed to compose myself. I’d seen how quickly these people had taken down Alec, Steve, and Carlos. They weren’t messing around.

  I felt something sharp whoosh past my ear. When I saw the blade land in the bark of the tree just ahead of me, I knew I’d been inches away from taking a knife to the head.

  I fell to the right, dragging Olivia and Bouncer down to the ground with me.

  “Run,” I said.

  Olivia shook her head. “Dad I don’t want—”

  “Just take Bouncer and—”

  I felt a thumping pain in my stomach. For a second, as I looked down, I expected to see a trail of blood running down it, a knife sticking out of it.

  But it wasn’t a knife.

  It was a grenade.

  Instinctively, I grabbed the grenade and threw it as far as I could ahead of me.

  It exploded in mid-air.

  The explosion was deafening. It made my eyes sting with the bright light and muffled everything else around me. I felt the broken branches of the tree falling down on me, the pieces of wood thumping against me. I didn’t know where Olivia and Bouncer had gone. I couldn’t be sure how far they’d got. I didn’t know what’d happened to the people pursuing me, either.

  I just had to scramble back.

  I just had to—

  I saw the man flying towards me, knife raised, and it almost took me by surprise.

  Almost.

  I lifted the handgun and fired three shots in his general direction.

  It took a second or two to realise whether I’d succeeded in hitting him or not, but then he fell onto me with all his weight, knocking all the wind from my body.

  I lay there, winded, a dying man on top of me. My head spun. I couldn’t breathe properly. The smell of burning filled the air. I had no idea where my daughter or my dog were. I was alone. Completely alone.

  I waited. Waited just a few seconds, then went to push the man’s bodyweight from on top of me.

  I stopped when I saw movement in the corner of my eye.

  I closed my eyes. Let the blood from the dead man trickle onto me, making me look dead, too. I held my breath and kept still. Totally still.

  Except for my grip on the handgun.

  If I got any sense that this man was going to attack me, I’d put a bullet through his head.

  I waited. Waited as he stood over me, stared down. The smoke was strong. I had to be careful not to cough. I couldn’t even breathe, because that’d be enough to alert these people that I was very much alive.

  After a minute that felt like forever, I heard the man start to walk away.

  I kept still. I didn’t move for a while. Part of me wanted to go after that man, another part of me figured it’d be better to just stay here and not risk a thing because I’d be putting Olivia and Bouncer in more danger.

  This was a long game. I had to play it.

  When I was absolutely sure nobody was around, I pushed the man from on top of me. It was hard. Much heavier than I’d imagined. I mean, I’d always heard the talk about how heavy dead bodies were. I’d just never actually comprehended it could be this bad.

  With a stitch crippling through my system and an agonising pain tearing through my right lower back, I forced the man’s bodyweight from on top of me, digging my teeth into my bottom lip.

  Then I rolled out from underneath him and stood.

  I looked around. My head was still aching, and my eyes hadn’t properly refocused. I tried to reorient myself with my surroundings, with which direction I’d been heading in before that awful shit went down with Alec and his people.

  I wandered around, feeling totally lost, totally alone, and then I found Alec’s body.

  My stomach sank when I saw it. His eyes were open. There was a gaping wound in his neck where the knife had been. He was lying flat, chest down.

  Around his neck, and in his hand, a necklace.

  A locket, which no doubt had some kind of significance to him.

  I pulled the locket out of his hand and from his neck.

  “If I find your wife, I’ll give this to her and tell her how hard you fought. I promise.”

  I closed Alec’s eyes.

  Then I went to stand.

  Something clicked then, though.

  The wound in Alec’s neck.

  There’d been a knife there.

  There was no sign of that knife anymore.

  Which meant…

  I felt the sharp pain slice past my shoulder almost immediately after I’d had the thought. It wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be. Wasn’t as painful. It just felt like I’d been punched, really hard. A strange sensation, really.

  But when I looked at my shoulder and saw the knife poking out of it, thankfully not too deeply, the pain hit.

  The man who was throwing the knives stood opposite.

  I went to lift my handgun, to fire the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  I scrambled for my rifle with shaking hands.

  But the pain from the knife wound stopped me.

  The knifeman pulled back another knife.

  He went to throw it.

  And then…

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I waited for the knife to hit me.

  But it didn’t get the chance to.

  Olivia stepped to the side of the man with the throwing knives and stabbed him right in his left side.

  The man froze. I saw the shock in his eyes as he staggered from side to side. I saw his pain, his confusion.

  Then I saw him look at Olivia.

  Still alive.

  Still functioning.

  “Again, Olivia!”

  I saw the confused expression on her face as she looked over to me. “What—”

  “Again!”

&nbs
p; I didn’t like ordering her to do what I was ordering her to do.

  But it was just the way things had to go.

  The man who’d thrown the knives went to grab her hand.

  She pulled it away, as well as the knife she’d had all this time.

  Then she slammed it into his belly.

  I ran as quickly as I could over to her now, pain still crippling my right shoulder. She kept on stabbing the man, more blood progressively pooling from his stomach. I didn’t want her to be the one to kill him. I didn’t want her to have another dark memory to haunt her at night.

  But the man dropped to his knees before I got there.

  Then he fell face flat into the dirt.

  I stood in silence over the man. Olivia was silent, too.

  After that, I grabbed Olivia and hugged her.

  I felt the man’s blood that had splattered onto Olivia’s face drooling down onto me. “Thank God you’re okay,” I said.

  “Dad, I—”

  “Thank God you’re all okay.”

  “I love you, Dad. But Bouncer…”

  When she said Bouncer’s name, I pulled away. I didn’t want to hear what she was going to say. I wasn’t prepared for it. “What’s wrong? Where is…”

  It dawned on me then that Bouncer wasn’t with Olivia.

  “Where is he, Olivia? Where’s Bouncer?”

  Tears streamed down her cheeks as I waited for her to say the words. Those awful words.

  Then she turned and pointed through the trees. “He’s—he’s over there, Dad. He’s over there.”

  I could tell from the pain in her voice that Bouncer wasn’t just over there. That something had happened to him, for sure. And it hurt. It cut me deep. Really deep.

  But right now I had to be strong for Olivia. I was her dad. I was the one who was supposed to look out for her. I was the one who would comfort her when she was hurt. And that’s exactly what I was going to do.

  I held out a hand, and she put it in mine, spreading the blood from her palms on to me.

  “Come on,” I said. “Show me.”

  She sniffed up, then she nodded.

  She led me through the trees in the direction I’d told her to run with Bouncer not long ago. I kept checking beneath me to make sure Bouncer wasn’t lying on the ground. I listened out for him panting. My boy. My strong, brave boy. He’d been with me since day one. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do without him; how I was going to survive.

  But I had to find a way. I had to adapt with this absolute mess of a world.

  It was then that I saw him.

  He was lying across the grass, totally flat, totally still.

  Except, no. He wasn’t totally still.

  He was panting.

  He was bleeding.

  “Bouncer.”

  He wagged his tail as I approached, as he heard my voice, but I could tell it was hard for him to do so. I crouched by his side. Turned him over.

  He looked up at me and whined.

  Bouncer was bleeding from his belly.

  I needed to stitch him up.

  I needed to get him somewhere where I could—

  “I recognise you now.”

  The voice came from nowhere.

  I looked up and I saw Danny standing in front of me, four men behind him.

  All of them were holding long blades.

  Danny was holding a gun.

  “See, I didn’t think much of you at first. Thought you were just some random guy trying to survive this world, like the rest of us. But I see who you are now. You’re the guy from the locket. Kerry’s locket.”

  I felt my body tense up all over as he said her name. “Don’t you—”

  I tried to fly at him, but two people grabbed me out of nowhere, stopped me moving further forward.

  Danny grinned. “Huh. I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Not now we’ve got you surrounded.”

  Two more men grabbed Olivia.

  “Get your hands off my daughter, you piece of shit.”

  “Oh we will. We’ll have our hands off all of you, soon enough. For now though, I’ve always wondered what dog broth tastes like.”

  “No!” I shouted. “No!”

  I kicked out. I cried out. I screamed as Danny approached Bouncer. As he lifted his knife above his neck.

  “No!”

  He lowered the blade towards Bouncer’s throat.

  Then he stopped.

  He looked up at me. Smiled. “Hell. You really think I’d kill a dog? You don’t have a very high opinion of me, do you?”

  He moved the blade away from Bouncer’s neck. “Take a look at the dog. Make sure he gets stitched up.”

  Two of the people behind Danny lifted Bouncer and carried him away into the unknown.

  “Besides,” Danny said, looking at Olivia and licking his lips. “I prefer human meat anyway. Like Kerry. She was delicious.”

  The two men holding Olivia started dragging her away.

  Her eyes widened. Fear crossed her face. “Daddy!”

  “Olivi—”

  I felt a heavy crack over my head.

  I wanted to fight. I wanted to save Olivia.

  But all I could do was fall to the ground below.

  And as the darkness filled my vision, all I could think about was Olivia.

  And Kerry.

  Bouncer, too.

  My family.

  My rock.

  All of them, supposed to be there beside me. Mine to look out for.

  All of them, gone.

  I heard Olivia scream, but it soon faded into the background.

  I stretched out my fingers to try and move even the smallest distance.

  But then I felt another crack over the head.

  And then, nothing.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  When I opened my eyes, I knew right away that something was wrong.

  I couldn’t remember exactly what it was that I found so wrong about my current predicament. But there was a deep sickness, right in the pit of my stomach. The kind of sickness that told me something had happened. That I’d witnessed or been a part of something.

  I opened my eyes and the sun burned into them, making me close them right away. I was cold, shaking. It didn’t feel like I was wearing many clothes. I could taste blood in my mouth, and every inch of my body was aching. Especially my head. That was agony.

  My ears were ringing, but in the silence, I swore I could hear a rustling. I opened my eyes again, tried to move the lids more gently this time, but it was still difficult as hell.

  And all the while, the knowledge of what’d happened taunted me from the back of my mind. I didn’t know what’d happened exactly, but I knew something bad had happened. And to me, that was enough.

  Sometimes it was better not to know the truth.

  Sometimes it was better to hide behind ignorance for just a little longer—

  A flash, then. A flash, right in my mind.

  I saw Bouncer lying on the forest floor, blood coming from his body, wagging his little tail.

  I saw Danny taking Olivia away.

  Olivia looking into my eyes, horror in hers as they dragged her off.

  Then I felt the hit I’d taken to the back of my skull once again and almost immediately, I tasted sick fill my mouth.

  My eyes adjusted to my surroundings right at that moment. I was in the woods, still. There were trees around me, autumn leaves fallen on me, sticking damply to my face. I couldn’t be sure how long I’d been out. Usually, unconsciousness was like clicking fingers—it was over and done with in no time. But it felt like I’d been out for a while. I wondered if that was just my subconscious punishing me in my state of nothingness. Taunting me at what I’d lost.

  Kesha was back at Alec’s camp.

  Alec was dead.

  Olivia had been taken.

  Bouncer had been shot then dragged away.

  And Kerry…

  It was the memory of what Danny said about Kerry that hurt me more than anyt
hing. Well, not more than anything. This whole shit show made for a pretty crappy sequence of events.

  But the way he’d looked my daughter—our daughter—in the eye and told her that he’d enjoyed eating her mother…

  I leaned forward as far as I could and puked into the earth.

  It was at that moment, as the acidic taste of sick lurched from my mouth, that I realised I’d been tied up to the tree I was sat against. Tied right around the front, with barbed wire. When I moved forward, I felt that barbed wire stab into me. It hurt. Of course it hurt.

  Not only that, but my shoulder was still hurting. The shoulder where the knife had hit me. I wasn’t sure if they’d cleaned it up. I wasn’t sure what they’d done. Just that it hurt. A lot.

  But my eyes clouded as I threw up some more. Because as much as it hurt, nothing hurt compared to what I’d lost.

  To the fact that I was alone.

  To the fact that I’d failed.

  I thought back to Heathlock. We’d been there not long ago at all, in the grand scheme of things. And sure, it’d been hard living there. I’d been terrified of stepping beyond the walls. But because of circumstance, I’d pushed myself. Pushed myself out of there. Forced myself to go searching for my wife.

  And now I was here.

  Totally alone.

  I knew right then I’d made the wrong decision.

  I should’ve stayed in Heathlock. I should’ve stayed there and looked after Olivia. Sure, I’d rule over her with an iron fist. But at least she was safe. At least she’d still be alive.

  And Bouncer, too. I felt a lump in my throat. Danny took him away. Said he’d look out for him. But he’d taken a bullet and there was no guarantee he was going to make it. Poor dog. He’d been satisfied back in Heathlock. Sure, life was different for him there, but at least he didn’t have to worry about a thing. At least he didn’t have to suffer any pain.

  I pushed further against the barbed wire and yelped as it pressed into my chest.

  I wanted to fight.

  I wanted to keep on pushing.

  But then I just flopped back against the tree and stared up into the sky.

  I couldn’t be tough. I couldn’t be the monster this world needed me to be.

  Because that wasn’t me. No matter how much I tried.

  I wasn’t sure how long I lay back against that tree staring up into the gradually clouding sky. But it was when I felt the rain hit my cheeks that thoughts returned to my mind which had, up to this point, gone pretty empty.