After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6]

by Hately, Warren

  “We have had calls for elections in the past,” Wilhelm said. “I don’t believe it’s the best way forward.”

  Spectators fell ever-more quiet as the Councilor stood at his table, waiting as they willed him to explain himself further. A tiny smile played on Wilhelm’s face, irking Tom, wedged among the onlookers five deep from stage’s edge.

  “What was that embarrassing headline, Mr Earle?” the Councilor said to the crowd and the errant newspaper man who stood across the chamber near the lectern. “‘Winter is coming’? Really, you couldn’t do better than that?”

  Wilhelm chuckled, turning back as if to his audience.

  “Cliché, but at least accurate,” he said. “We have lost key Councilors due to the Uprising, and the people who caused us all such harm still want more of us dead – not that they can do much about that while they remain locked up. You are right to say the Council is not what it was. We need new blood, new expertise . . . a few firm hands to help ride out the storm. For now, I recommend forming an executive.”

  Wilhelm motioned off stage. A beat later, the drapes parted and a half-dozen figures walked out, nervous as game show contestants. Denny Greerson had the lead, and with him a few more men and women including grizzled Sam Hoskeens from the Traders’ Alliance and an owl-faced woman accompanying him. The newcomers took up vacant seats at the back tables.

  “With their expertise, the City can focus on the job of preparing for the coming winter,” Wilhelm said. “Of course, that’s only if Citizens support the idea. Otherwise, we can’t guarantee continuation of existing services.”

  Wilhelm blank-looked the entire audience with the subliminal threat.

  “If the Citizens want elections, I will support them,” he said. “I will resign my position immediately, and we can reconvene here in Spring – those of us who are left – and see what way forward from there.”

  If the onlookers whispered before, now they broke into open discussion, which included several threats of defiance aimed towards the speaker. Clearly, the Councilor expected them.

  “What?” his voice rang out over the assembly. “You want an election to have your say, but you also want the Safety patrols and the food rations and the beef shipment and everything else to continue?”

  A few people heckled back. Magnus was one of them. Delroy Earle fought his way to the edge of the stage as the only way to pitch a question himself, then got stuck there, anonymous in the mob and frustrated at it.

  The Councilor laughed, his point made. And somehow Wilhelm pulled it off, looking equally defiant and principled rather than like an arrogant and mercenary sonofabitch.

  The noise levels were so fever pitch that no one even heard the screaming.

  But then came the gunshots – and after that, the screaming was almost all anyone could hear.

  *

  ALL AROUND HIM, Tom’s fellow Citizens scanned hurriedly for some clue to the madness unfolding more like precognition than anything real. Gunfire rang out from back stage, and then maybe off to Tom’s right, in the direction of the front doors, and before anything fell into even a semblance of coherence, the screaming stage right tore through the crowd like a spectral force. Citizens started twisting, pushing, falling, fighting for their lives, and surging towards Tom and crushing him and those around him in their panic.

  A six-deep crowd was suddenly twice that as people fled the unseen threat. Tom tried to get away from the worst of it around the stage and couldn’t move. A woman fell beneath him and Tom grabbed her arms, hauling her back to her feet and barely able to interpret her thanks before yet more turbulence pulled the woman from his arms as she went veering away like in a riptide, disappearing into the sea of humanity around them.

  And then Tom had to fight not to get crushed beneath it all.

  It was utterly hopeless to quest around for Lilianna, but Tom did it anyway, grunting to stay upright and bracing himself between fellow Citizens trapped like cattle in a pen, fighting against the sucking tide of other Council attendees to wrench his Colt Python free and raise it with enormous difficulty above the level of the crowd. That effort alone sent his right shoulder into shock, unready to be pressganged back into service despite the resurgent threat to survival.

  Those around him saw the gun and no one understood yet the nature of their peril, so the Colt’s appearance caused a brief gap as people drew away. Tom checked the stage and saw the remaining Councilors and their middle men on their feet in a cluster, two Safety troopers with their guns trained on the pulsing drapes, more and more Citizens escaping the press around the flattened Question Time lectern by clambering up onto the lit stage too.

  Something broke behind him, and Tom felt rather than saw the crowd dispersing faster towards the exit as if a drain was unblocked, and he staggered backwards casting his eyes around to the source of their peril and saw dozens of people pushing in his direction.

  Except not all of them were people – or not anymore.

  Half of the figures attacked those running from them, and then Tom heard the Furies’ signature growls and hissing shrieks.

  Another Fury tore through the backstage drapes at that moment, the troopers’ guns causing Tom to flinch as he lowered the heavy pistol in his hand and shot inaccurately at a fresh-looking Fury chasing a slower-moving man. The bullet took the undead young woman in the shoulder, briefly impeding her progress as she chased open-mouthed after anything that moved. When Tom went to fire again, there were too many running Citizens in the way, and several of them running past then jostled him, nearly knocking Tom to the ground too as they fled.

  He picked himself up and started beating a retreat, throwing desperate looks all around for his daughter. When he looked back stage right, a trooper jumped down into the fleeing crowd and started firing his M16 – and then a child no more than about eight leapt at the man and took him to the ground.

  A fleeing Administration officer grabbed the fallen rifle and twisted back to fire it, fussing with the mechanism to switch to bursts which he laid down indiscriminately into the mass.

  Tom yelled at the man – one of the bursts hit trader Sam Hoskeens right in the brisket, knocking him down – but the increasing gunfire and screams made it impossible, and the distance back towards the officer was just enough that he’d emptied the gun by the time Tom reached him, still sweeping the disaster area for trace of Lilianna and startled by the madness unfolding around that side of the stage.

  With Tom just a yard short of the polo shirt-wearing youngster, the tattered, cyclonic figure of an older woman in a torn dress leapt at the Admin staffer, ramming him back into the edge of the stage platform. The same moment, a dead man in oil-stained dungarees lurched towards Tom, who had to wrestle him around, pistol still in hand, then force him back with one hard boot before shooting point-blank into the creature’s head – except he never got the chance to fire.

  The rejected Fury twirled away instead, throwing itself at a fleeing woman that another of its kindred had taken down, and Tom’s efforts to track his aim were thwarted as a woman ran into him and then behind him, using his body as a shield. Tom barely registered Carlotta Deschain, who sure as hell wasn’t the Enclave staffer he most wanted to defend right now. Yet with screams and roars and rending hands all around, Tom put his left hand behind him to grab the ex-Councilor’s hip to push her firmly out of harm’s way. Then he emptied his pistol into the closest of the hunting Furies and managing to silence one of them for good.

  “Where’s my daughter?” Tom yelled over his shoulder.

  He only had a few more rounds in his pocket and he started reloading as Deschain stammered her reply while Tom edged them backwards towards the stage again.

  “She’s . . . I don’t know!”

  “The stage,” Tom said. “Climb up.”

  More than thirty other Citizens had the same idea, but there was still room on the higher ground. Tom glanced to check the way was clear, never truly taking his eye off the chaos behind and all around them as cl
usters of Citizens fought for their lives and mostly lost. A bearded man hacked a Fury down with a short-bladed dagger, and a woman fended off another with an upturned stool. But mostly they died. And as the blood ran, it was almost hard to tell the dead from the dying. The Furies themselves were fellow Citizens, plucked and then plunged into a hellish afterlife. And their arrival was no accident. The nearest Tom could tell, the attacking Furies were freshly dead. He shot another as it lunged at them – just a teenage girl with a shock of dark hair already matted with her death wounds.

  But there were too many of the things and Tom didn’t have enough bullets.

  As Carlotta made the climb onto the stage and Tom followed her, he guessed at more than twenty Furies he could see running loose inside the murderous fish bowl the dinner theater had become. And that didn’t account for the ones elsewhere in the complex. The gunfire petered out back beyond the rear curtains. Citizens came racing back towards the stage and the middle area, inexplicably shunning the theater’s front exit. Within seconds, the stage was overwhelmed as more and more clambered for their safety, and a support rod cracked, the whole thing lurching down a notch and spilling a half-dozen climbers back onto the carpet. A lone Fury in trooper’s gear threw itself at them and Tom had no idea whether the monster was a fresh corpse or one of the newly-arrived dead.

  Tom scanned back towards the theater’s front, squinting against the stage lights, one hand raised to shield his view. It was impossible to tell anything except that people were coming back in, retreating from their escape, with more Citizens clutching themselves and each other, men and women of the City lulled into thinking the sanctuary zone safe, yet now thrust back into the old nightmare.

  Then Tom saw Lilianna.

  It was unconscious instinct that forced his eyes on her, fighting against the glare to see her silvery form resolve at the corner of the alcove sheltering the far entrance. Lila held a scavenged clipboard in hand, waving it and shouting, trying to achieve something Tom could only guess at from across the crowded hall and the mezzanine. He whipped about himself – Carlotta clutching his arm as much for balance as anything – confirming they were well and truly land-locked with more than a hundred yards between him and safety, surrounded by the choking mass of Citizenry piling onto the collapsing platform. Nothing explained why other survivors were headed back in, and the only thought that made sense in Tom’s head was that more Furies were pouring in from the street outside.

  And that meant his daughter was right in the crossfire.

  “We have to get out of here,” Tom bawled.

  The ex-Council woman grabbed Tom’s free hand and nodded, eyes tearful and panicked as she tried to hold her shit together and managed only a passable job. She wasn’t yammering and screaming like she wished to, at least. More and more people fled back onto the stage, its creaking drowned out by the ongoing yells, the chatter of another assault rifle unseen back behind them, screams all around, more frightened shrieks, the feral Furies’ war cries, the sheer howling of the afterlife as a terrible wind cut through them and the risen dead sated themselves on their hapless victims and the victims fell over each other or fought openly to get away.

  Gunshots echoed all around by this point. Tom lost sight of his daughter, only slightly appeased to see armed men now over near the exit. Their guns were muffled by the yells of the people on the platform around him. Tom squeezed Carlotta’s hand unconsciously, like back when his kids were little and they were at a crosswalk, and he angled them both towards the edge of the stage.

  “Are you sure about this?” Carlotta yelled.

  “No,” Tom said. “But we have to get out of here.”

  “The front way looks blocked, Tom!”

  Tom checked back at her, the ex-Councilor almost deranged with fear.

  “They got in here somehow,” Tom all but shouted back. “Backstage. The cargo bay. We can’t escape that way.”

  “Then what are we gonna do?”

  “Stick close!”

  Refastening his grip on the woman’s hand, Tom fought through the crush of people, even those on the stage pushing to get away from the old dining area to which Tom now headed. It felt like madness, but staying with the Citizens crammed onto the platform was no good either.

  What followed was one of the most grueling two minutes in his life.

  Terror had a firm hand on the other survivors, and pushing through them was nearly impossible. At the edge of the stage, trying to find a way down, Tom saw more people collapsed against it, a pile of the crushed and desperate like a human rubbish dump, and with Furies at the edge of it feasting on the dead. The Furies tore bodies open, living and dead, sucking at the meat and vital organs and spools of intestine to drain the precious life’s blood they craved. A woman with her face alight in shock and pain looked up at him, a hand raised pleadingly for help even as the strength abandoned her, two Furies pulling her torso apart with their bare hands. He shot one of them – the Colt’s retort shockingly loud in his own ears – and then shot the woman as well, unable to do much more with living bodies crushing all around him, destroying his aim.

  He helped the nearest few people up and past them, though a woman with broken legs couldn’t be saved, and a handful of the fallen Citizens had gone unconscious – one woman catatonic in fright unable to save herself, let alone be saved as Tom barked at her three times, nervous glances on the nearest Furies doing their awful business only yards away. Then he gave up as one of the creatures stormed towards him and Carlotta Deschain.

  Maybe Tom only imagined he recognized the woman with the strawberry birthmarked face. The back of her skull blew out and ruined her hairstyle for good, and then her corpse pitched onto the top of the writhing crush of escapees, and Tom grabbed Carlotta again, dragging her down into it with him and nearly having to fight her resistance as well.

  “I will leave you here if you don’t come,” Tom growled.

  Carlotta fell into compliance, his almost literal shadow as Tom circled around the front of the stage picking past and between the bodies. What people in the wild sometimes called an “early riser” – one of the undead with a much faster reaction to the turn – sat up among several fallen corpses beside a young woman still trying to flee, concussed from a head wound. Tom shot the creature dead, then swung Carlotta around behind him as he stowed the hot pistol a moment, helping the other injured woman to her feet. He recognized the severe fringe framing the girl’s bleeding temple, and glanced around uselessly once more for his daughter. Beside them, two Furies intercepted a trooper running through the hall and they tore him apart as he fought with refusal to go down.

  “Get to safety!” Tom yelled at his daughter’s friend Aurora. “We can’t stay here.”

  Carlotta hammered her fists into Tom’s back and he turned just in time to shoot another Fury, at ground level, clutching for Carlotta’s legs. The Colt was useless now, but he still tucked it into the back of his belt. He spied a few stools discarded amid the ruckus and hurried towards them with both women now at his back.

  Not all Citizens had gone to ground. More and more of the City’s depleted troopers gathered into a pack halfway between Tom and the stage, the men and women desperately co-ordinating a counter-attack even as their enemies saw them and rushed forward. A fresh thunder of weapons’ fire drowned out any further talk, and then the fighting was fierce.

  Tom wouldn’t stand still to witness it. He signed for Carlotta and her junior staffer to follow, and then he came from behind on a fit-looking man with hair in corn rows – the same guy he’d seen with Ernest Wilhelm before. The black man kicked and punched a Fury to the ground and then stomped on the thing’s jaw and head, but when Tom reached him, clutching the stranger’s shoulder and yelling for him to come with them too, the younger man sneered and simply pushed him away, angry, and then uprooted one of the round cocktail tables and charged it into another Fury as it loped into their path.

  The collision was like an explosion, and the sprawling bodies smash
ed into Tom and the women with him as well. Tom managed to stagger into the support of an upright pillar, still holding Carlotta by one hand. Aurora scampered across the carpet, ducked a Fury that leapt, snarling at them, and then Tom pulled the combat knife from its sheath and stabbed the thing silent with the blade in a back-handed grip.

  “Here!” he yelled.

  He passed the gory weapon into the young woman’s hands.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Aurora.”

  “You know my daughter Lilianna,” he said. “We’re going to find her.”

  “You’re Tom Vanicek?”

  Tom grunted that he was, then bent to retrieve one of the stools. The black guy had his situation under control, kneeling over the Fury as he squashed the life out of its skull with his bare hands. Tom thrust out the stool to deflect another of the monsters incoming, saving the black man from another ambush, and then the next few seconds were an awkward tussle. He lost his footing tumbling over the broken cocktail table, and things were about to go from bad to serious when nearby gunshots nailed Tom’s attacker through the back, and then took out its face as it whirled on the gunman.

  Lilianna held the smoking M16 and motioned towards them.

  *

  “I THINK THE front’s clear,” Lila said. “Come on.”

  Tom’s daughter barely gave him a backwards glance, instead moving with assurance towards the nearby carpeted steps leading up to the exit. Several nearby survivors saw them headed that way and followed too, and ahead of them, a pair of troopers and an armed Administration officer knelt guarding the theater’s front doors.

  “Clear?” Lila yelled at them.

  “Only one way to be sure,” the officer said.

  He stood, checked his weapon, then nodded to Lilianna.

  “Tell Beau that Teddy wished him well, if I don’t see you again.”

  “Teddy,” one of the troopers said. “You don’t have a vest, man.”