“Not your night,” his muffled voice answered. He clicked his fingers. “Hand it here. Ammo too. Never get enough ammo.”
Tom didn’t move. The bowman looked at Dkembe and held his hand out for the Glock in the young man’s belt. He barely moved before Tom lifted a hand to halt him.
“We’re just passing through,” Tom said to the man. “Nothin’ to do with you.”
“We’re the Dominators, you dumb fuck,” the hooded man said. “Take that name pretty seriously, too.”
He scanned them with just serpentine eyes visible through his black woolen mask. The back-up with the second crossbow levered adjusted angles a little, two long strides away.
It was the sniper at three o-clock who distracted them. The two crossbowmen snapped across to see Attila had a fucking huge knife held to the man’s throat, and Karla’s harsh “Don’t fuckin’ move” came from Tom’s left, across the other side of their parlay. Lucas then scurried in, midget-sized as he ran in a scrambled crouch with the M4 in steady position to fire at either of the remaining men.
“Shit.”
“Shit’s about right,” Tom said. “Nice night for a walk. I meant what I said about passin’ through, OK?”
“Yeah man,” the hooded guy said. “Got it.”
Tom demanded their weapons, but said he’d dump the gear on their way back through. The biker types clearly didn’t like it, but they were smart enough to see the win-win – or at least the lack of lose-lose.
Dkembe started to move, one of the crossbows in his arms, but Tom wasn’t done.
“Dominators?” he asked in a voice meant to be friendly despite the leveled growl. “What’s your name?”
“Mike-O,” the masked man said.
Tom slung back his weapon.
“My father always told me it was rude to speak to people with a hat on,” he said.
“A hat?” the Dominator replied.
Dkembe blanched, overwhelmed by the urgent need to take a terrified piss as he realized Tom’s belligerence or whatever it was he intended here risked plunging them all back into mortal terror – or at least it did for him.
But Dkembe remained inert as the Dominator called Mike-O finally gleaned Tom’s intent. He hesitated, then pulled off the balaclava to reveal a hoary, sandy-haired bearded man with a dent of scar tissue across one brow.
“I’m Tom,” Vanicek said and offered the man his hand.
They shook. Dkembe blinked, turned around again in his head and in his thumping heart to see the ambushed Dominator look relieved as well.
“See you on the way back, maybe,” Tom said and pointed. “I’ll leave your weapons here.”
With no further pause, Tom turned them in the direction they were headed and gave Dkembe a quick check.
“Are we close?”
“Yeah.”
“Then lead on.”
*
A DAZED SENSE of confusion still hung over him right up until the point they reached OK Jay’s door inside the dormant apartment building and Tom barely motioned for the others to keep up as he kicked that door in.
Just before 2am was about the worst time to invade anyone’s sleep, especially so violently, and that’s what made it the best for Tom Vanicek and his willing helpers as they surged into the apartment ahead of Dkembe and spread out without a single word.
It was just dumb luck that Tom – with Lucas, cautious, but right behind him – stormed in on Jay, twisting around in bed, disoriented, and grabbed him by his thick pullover to drag as much as lead him out into the cramped living room where Dkembe remained, a horrified observer more than participant. Attila backed into the room to join them, Karla assigning herself to watch the corridor outside as the svelte black shape of Vegas followed into their assemblage clad only in boxer shorts and shivering with his hands above his head.
“Sit down,” Attila ordered him.
He motioned roughly to the couch as if he might force the issue, and Vegas saw the looks as much as all the weapons and almost meekly did as told, wearing a hurt yet calculating expression as his dark eyes went to Dkembe – who just offered more of the same slack open-mouthed look that characterized the past half-hour of his life.
Tom looked to Vegas as he released Jay and backed off, drawing the Python.
“I’m not here for you,” he told the other man. “You’ve got no skin in this game.”
“Don’t I?”
For all his captivity, Vegas stared back at Tom with his handsome broad nose flaring in an expression of near-fatal hatred.
Tom had more immediate concerns than dirty looks. He shucked the Mp5 behind his hip again as if it annoyed him, checking Karla’s position, Lucas hanging back, Attila with the enormous knife again. Satisfied, he then removed the sub-machinegun and confiscated rifle, then finally stowed the pistol. Dkembe eased out a sigh of blessed relief.
Then Tom drew the longsword.
The silver blade whispered with all due theatrics. Dkembe’s stomach dropped, and Jay on his knees did the same, throwing himself at Tom’s feet and not even trying to look to Dkembe to understand what the hell was going on.
Jay didn’t look like a man who’d engineered their attempted mass murder, and just as his heartrate redoubled, Dkembe grasped the full horrible scale of the misunderstanding he’d maybe wrought. Tom’s face burnt dark with anger.
“Tom, wait,” Dkembe said.
“Stay back, Dkembe,” the older man said, barely giving him a quarter-look. “I’d hate to hit you with this thing.”
He lowered the drawn sword into a two-handed grasp with the tip significant for its proximity to Jay pissing himself on the rug.
“You know Finnegan Locke and the Urchins?” Tom barked.
Jay stammered, muffled with his face burrowed into the carpet.
“Wh-what’s this about?” he asked. “Dkembe, man, help me.”
“Answer the question,” Tom said.
He lashed out with his boot heel, taking Dkembe’s friend in the side of the head. Jay’s face rebounded off the rug with a grunt, and he wasn’t quick enough to scramble backwards to avoid a follow-up as Tom sank his toe into his ribs that made everyone else squirm.
Vegas rose up from his seat. Lucas swiveled the M4 at him so fast Vegas froze to take in the cold reality of the not-quite twelve-year-old boy staring at him blank-faced down the weapon’s sight. Vegas relented all ambition, sinking back into the sofa, hands raised, as Tom circled Jay and hauled him up to face the tip of the leveled sword.
“Did you tell Locke to do it?”
“Tell him what?”
Jay turned his frightened bewilderment towards Dkembe, but Tom gave his captive a violent shake. He let go and then punched Jay with the same fist, sending the man crashing back to the ground as Tom roared and veered around the room. He chopped several of the furnishings into junk wood and by the time he whirled back around, Jay was on his knees with forearms raised anticipating immediate death. Tom instead stood there, sword double-handed almost over his head. The older man lowered it, expression unchanging as he slowly rolled his right shoulder and eased out a breath.
He turned back and dead-eyed Dkembe.
“What were you talking about when he said he knew Locke?” Tom asked. “And why didn’t you tell me?”
Dkembe felt Vegas’ eyes on him too, and then Jay chancing to look up, testing the air for a reprieve. The room started going dim as Dkembe took several flustered breaths as he realized he was in danger of passing out.
“Dkembe, man,” Jay said. “What’d you tell him?”
Dkembe sucked in more air, eyes rolling between his betrayed friend and Tom glaring at them. He had a hand clawed into his own stomach as if to quieten his shrieking bladder, sweat pouring off him as pungent as any confession.
“Tom, honest,” he said. “You got nothin’ here. Look at him. They were just sleepin’, man. C’mon. This ain’t right, please. Please.”
He would’ve kept pleading, but Tom swiveled back to Jay.
&
nbsp; “Locke,” he said. “I want his location.”
“Man, I can’t tell you that.”
Tom instantly went to punch him again, but Jay was wise to it now. He scuttled on his back, trying to crawl backwards on his elbows to get out of reach. Tom froze rather than press on, hovering with the sword in one hand overhead.
“Tell me.”
“I don’t know Locke from shit, man,” Jay said and whimpered. He frantically gestured at Dkembe, like he was pointing out a kid passing notes in class. “It wasn’t my idea, man. ‘kembi said we could roll your white ass. I don’t wanna blow my job with the freaks, man, for real. They’re a super-size scarier than you, and you scarin’ me to shit right now, brother. Please.”
Tom turned towards Dkembe, who almost fainted at the look. Dkembe held his hands up, wordless for a second or two as he drank in Jay’s ashamed-yet-spiteful look and the echoes of his words and the retribution on Tom’s face a prophecy that someone was going to die here.
“Tom, no, I –”
“Where’s Locke?”
“I don’t know, man!” Dkembe shrieked.
Jay yelled the same, and the outburst almost seemed to startle Tom who screamed with rage and turned, fully possessed, chopping down at Jay so hard the younger man’s whole forearm came off as the heavy blade cut through and Jay scrambled to protect himself and lost the bid.
Pained eyes flew open in astonishment as he looked between his sudden amputation and Tom with the sword already raised again for another strike, bellowing “Where’s Locke?” again. A squirt of bright arterial blood burst from the wound. Jay screamed now in terror, collapsing into madness, and Tom growled, yelling blind and wordlessly now as he struck Jay again in the side of the neck.
The blow fatally opened the younger man’s throat, but somehow without stilling his abject screams as a new wave of blood loss surged from the fresh wound – and then Tom struck him again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
* **
After The Apocalypse
*
Book 6
Resolution
by Warren Hately
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Chapter 1
THE WOMAN’S TEARS carried so starkly through the darkness that he almost felt ridiculous for the night vision goggles masking his face as he crouched low in the bushes, mouth open to quieten the noise from his rapid breaths. He hardly needed to bother. A rapacious breeze cut its way through the low-lying bushes and overgrown grass near the edge of the old fence-line, collapsed some time since the property owners went the way of nearly everyone else on the city’s outer limits.
Ernest Eric Wilhelm III felt over-equipped for such pathetic prey, but engorgement overcame any fashion sense, knowing, as he’d planned, it was just him and his quarry along out beyond the neglected farmstead – and if decency alone was going to stop him, it would’ve happened a long way before now.
As Wilhelm crouched there, keenly erect and listening, Dana Lowenstein’s spectral form emerged from hiding as she lumbered unevenly across the overgrown yard, Wilhelm watching her pick her way barefoot towards the half-collapsed machinery shed and the concrete-walled workshop behind it. The homestead itself had burnt down in recent times, daytime revealing it as nothing more than black skeletal ruins jutting out from the overgrown tundra. In the dark now, the ruins and the husks of two vehicles hunkered down like monoliths of the ancient past, mostly submerged between the riotous bracken and grass slowly consuming the derelict property Wilhelm had tracked through a dozen times before.
He knew the layout of the two buildings – and he’d soldered the back door of the workshop himself. Seeing the Council President veer towards it, his wolf-like grin forced the heavy goggles to ride up despite the rubber chin strap, and thus acclimatized to the night, Wilhelm gently removed and holstered them beside the small pack bound tight to his lower back.
The moonlight was enough to show the sobbing, distraught, confused Council leader tread carefully towards the shed’s open door and venture inside, clutching her torn clothes, and it was almost too much for Wilhelm to bear as he squeezed the erection straining through his black tactical pants, checked over his gear one last time, then carefully withdrew the climbing ax from the toys he’d chosen for tonight.
And just like a wolf, he then loped low through the grass moving silently towards the workshop marked already with his scent, his truth, his lifelong becoming.
The spray-painted word “HASTUR” was almost invisible beneath the quarter moon.
*
WILHELM SWEPT INTO the laboratory, momentarily thrown off as he always was at the jarring sense of stepping back in time, as if the apocalypse hadn’t gone and ended everything.
Abraham’s workshop blinked and hummed with an impressive array of computers, towers, external hard drives, and various other gadgets the software genius had established for himself. Old-world tech was one of the rarest luxuries of them all, but as a Councilor, Ben-Gurion had extra resources – as well as the expertise to put it all together.
Ben-Gurion forced himself out of the wheelchair he normally used, nearly fumbling the clutch on his walking stick as he straightened, shooting the inbound Wilhelm a smile that oozed self-pity. Wilhelm’s face only tightened into its usual smile. His hands extended wide to gesture all around, and he knew Abraham found it tiresome that he made the same comment every visit, but that was precisely why he did it. People were just automatic teller machines, and once he found the most efficient hack, he’d always keep stabbing the same numbers every time.
“It is very impressive, what you have built for yourself here,” he beamed.
Ben-Gurion winced and nodded, happy to let it die for once. He didn’t look well, his face never quite recovered from the beating he took, and it wasn’t just the out-of-control multiple sclerosis straining his expression. His eyes strayed and defrayed and returned again to Wilhelm in the middle of the room.
“You know I just want to live, Ernest,” the other Councilor or ex-Councilor or whatever he was said. And again with the puppy dog eyes.
Wilhelm smiled like a statesman. The software engineer dropped his gaze, sniffled.
“Dana promised me a search team,” Abraham said. “Not much chance of that now, huh?”
“Yes,” Wilhelm said brightly. “She is still missing.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I told you before,” Wilhelm said again. “Your best chance now of finding medicine or another treatment lie with the USS Washington.”
“I know that.”
Wilhelm gestured. “I thought you would be getting on with decrypting that Air Force notebook?”
Ben-Gurion nodded absent-mindedly.
“I did that already,” he replied. “I figured if there was anything on that hard drive worth torturing me and nearly getting me killed, I’d just find it myself.”
“You decrypted a classified US Government notebook already?”
Ben-Gurion shot him a look cool enough to evoke the Councilor’s foolishness. Wilhelm grit his teeth a moment, nodding with discipline.
“What are you going to do, now?” Abraham asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The City’s in chaos,” the self-described genius said. “The Council President’s gone, or whatever the story is you’re telling. Ernest, you know I don’t . . . it’s not that I don’t care. I just wanna live, OK?”
“I understand, Abraham,” Wilhelm replied. “There are no hard feelings between us. You know I had nothing to do with Ortega and his ‘rebellion’. They nearly killed you –”
“– if not for Tom Vanicek.”
“–and it had nothing to do with me,” Wilhelm said. “You are still a trusted advisor, just like back on the base.”
“Then what are you gonna do?”
“With?”
“The chaos?�
�
“Nothing,” Wilhelm said and allowed himself a short smirk. “You understand our predicament as well as anyone, Abraham. We can only protect our supporters now.”
“But Burroughs is dead, Dana’s . . . ‘missing’ or . . . whatever,” Abraham replied. “No one’s seen Hoskeens since the Night.”
“That is why I am bringing other community leaders into the decision-making process,” Wilhelm said. Cocksure, he added, “The Citizens seemed to want elections. We can hold them. But first we have to face the winter, and after that, see who is left to vote and how much they care about elections then.”
“Cold,” Abraham said.
“No pun intended?”
The other man grimaced.
“Ernest,” he said. “The Air Force material. . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, there’s enough intel in there to keep the New York Times in front pages for a month, if any of that was relevant anymore, which it’s not,” Abe said. He shivered as he spoke and begrudged his weakness as he sneered and soldiered on. “But there’s a lot of Government facilities in there. Top-secret ones.”
“And?”
“And one not that far away,” Ben-Gurion said. “Really.”
“Interesting.”
“Ernest,” Abraham said. “There could be anything in those locations. If they didn’t survive the Fall, they might be sitting with God-knows-what in storage.”
“If you’re thinking about your medicine again. . . .”
“That would require uninterrupted refrigeration these past five years,” Abe said. “I’m not an idiot, Ernest. But still –”
“Yes,” Wilhelm agreed. “Worthy of further investigation – when we can.”
“But I’m not on the same timeline as you.”
“Agreed,” the Councilor said. “You say you want to live? Maybe you should make the most of the time you have left.”
Ben-Gurion looked suitably chastened. Like the feverish look beneath his beaten demeanor, there was something else there, too.
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 46
