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

by Hately, Warren

  The room was completely dark without windows.

  Navigating by desperation, Tom emptied the Mp5 in a mid-level burst he tracked across the room. Gunshots illuminated empty bunk beds like the ultra-violent light of a forensic crime scene. With no path forward, and near-death if staying still, Tom charged into the darkness, leaving the growing flames behind. Blind, he kicked in the plaster wall as hard as he could, and within ten seconds, bricks on the other side gave way to chinks of another ghostly light source.

  Lucas mimicked his father, efforts as effete as his little boy grunts. Tom took the chance anyway, reloading his ammo while throwing hard nervous looks at the flickering doorway behind them, the conflagration chasing up the hallway after the pair in slow-motion casting a mad clown-house light. Tom rejoined his son’s attack on the bricks until a section big enough to squeeze through collapsed outwards in one hit.

  He stepped out across a carpet of fallen bricks on dingy warped floor boards and caught just a flash of movement as a crossbow bolt thudded past him, and then a small figure flitted out through an external door at the end of the cross-corridor to their left.

  He and Lucas surged towards that exit out of instinct – which again nearly got them killed.

  Two more Urchins lay in wait out on the day-lit fire escape, and it was only Tom spotting the ropes each clutched that he stopped him in time and thus blocked Lucas as well.

  Tom pointed the Mp5 at the two dirty-faced tweens, shaken to the core by their hyena grins as the exit door juddered shut again.

  He shook his head and lowered the gun.

  “Up,” he grunted to his son instead.

  The apartment’s internal staircase was the other way. Lucas had the lead across the spilled bricks, taking point with the raised M4 as professional as anyone. Tom fell into a mistrustful rear guard, though he admired his son’s resolve – and was relieved by it.

  Lucas cautiously checked the intersection, on the other side of the hall blocked by the Urchins’ wheeled barricade. The carpeted stairs beckoned across to them.

  The metal exit door slammed and then loudly bolted shut back behind them, locking them in with the crescendo roar of the growing inferno only amplified, with harsh light flickering across Lucas and Tom as they ascended the filthy stairs.

  Their guns angled as they went up. Tom didn’t need to say anything for Lucas to know they were as exposed now as they’d ever been. Yet they reached the landing without attack, the upper-story flames a riot off to their right amid a sense the building had cleared out except for them as if the Urchins hoped to roast them alive in their innocent game of tag.

  “We have to get outside,” Tom said.

  Whatever the building’s former life, individual doors led to big, self-contained individual bedrooms rather than actual apartments. The father-son pair picked their way through each of these chambers in the howling silence like two hands working together. Memories of sunlit days in the woods, back in the mountains when Lucas was just a child flooded into Tom’s consciousness and he welcomed them, despite the dangers of distraction. He breathed into the chaotic flow of their moment instead, focus deepening as he and his son stalked their way further along the corridor, the identical look of Stoic calm on Luke’s face as astonishing as it was a boon.

  When the shit hit the fan, back five years ago, Lucas was too young to hunt – but now, here they were, as practiced and efficient as Tom’d ever wanted, and so far from how he’d imagined it that their dire predicament made almost no sense at all.

  He realized he wore a smile like a grim Jesus, believing they had just one man left to kill, and then they’d fetch Lilianna, and into the wild they’d go – back into that fantasy of when things seemed better when they were on their own.

  Tom didn’t even feel the first bullet when it hit.

  *

  THE PISTOL CRACK at such short range hit Tom between the shoulders and pitched him forward before he’d even registered what happened.

  The weapon fired again like a cap gun and Tom was already twisting around, smile widening into a too-late cry of alarm as the second bullet cut past his arm – and then two more rounds hit him in the chest.

  Kevin turned the Glock on Lucas caught moving far too slowly still to avoid execution at point-blank range. The murderous tween’s slitted eyes took in Tom’s Mp5 as it came up as Tom fell, and at the last moment, Kevin dived back into his doorway rather than shoot again and Tom raked Kevin’s position with a burst.

  Tom grabbed the wall for balance and looked down to confirm the two small holes gently smoking in the jacket he wore across his ballistic vest.

  “Dad!”

  Tom stumbled and sat heavily on his ass. Pain shot through him like an eruption as Lucas angled his M4 on Kevin’s position.

  Instead, another door now directly next to Tom opened to reveal Kevin there instead.

  Tom didn’t have the time to swear.

  Lucas charged past him to crash head-on into his former friend, using the M4 like a club as Tom struggled to his knees in time for both boys to vanish impossibly from sight.

  Tom leapt after his son in a daredevil move that ignored any hope to avoid the same fate, but then he halted short at the edge of jagged floor boards partly-concealed by a mammoth, freshly-collapsed tarpaulin.

  Crashing noises in the gloom sounded from the cavernous space below, but the huge collapsed plastic sheet and its ropes hid the detail, aided and abetted by the precocious sunlight. The only real light was the last thing Tom wanted to see – the reddish glow of fire consuming the lower floors and spreading throughout the complex.

  He stood at the edge and called his son’s name with his bowels at risk of turning to water as panic threatened strangulation. It was only a flash of movement from behind that saved him.

  The Urchin betrayed himself with a shrill war cry as he rushed in at Tom from another doorway.

  The black child plunged another of their homemade spears at Tom’s midriff and Tom blocked it with the sub-machinegun.

  Then he slammed the weapon’s haft as hard as he could into Jamon’s face.

  The boy’s momentum and the severity of Tom’s attack conspired to stave in the boy’s face clear to the brainstem, and the horrified, awful wet hooting panic noise was so terrible Tom immediately stepped back and lifted the gun around and opened fire on the Urchin boy he’d met back before everything had collapsed into this madness.

  The 9mm rounds took the boy in the ruins of his face and his skull blew apart to leave a sucking red Claymation neck cavity gushing a half-hearted geyser of blood, and then Jamon’s stunted frame collapsed to the ground, twisting grotesquely with a repulsive sigh as it continued emptying its gore across the bare boards.

  Behind Tom, the last of the tarpaulin slipped free, and he moved aside with a gaunt, shell-shocked expression, still too horrified to comprehend it all. The enormous plastic ground cover fell into the rooms below to reveal sawed-through boards amid the ghosts of an old renovation project, interrupted by the end of the world, the carpenter’s notation still legible on the half-finished planks.

  “Lucas!” Tom bawled. Then he yelled it twice again.

  His son appeared a steep drop beneath him, already gesturing to the south.

  “There’s an exit,” Luke called. “Dad, you’ve got to get out.”

  Tom considered the jump, but shook his head as if deep in conversation with himself.

  “You too,” he said instead. “Get outside, now!”

  There was no sign of Kevin. Tom had no idea what that meant.

  Another fire door beckoned at the end of the immediate corridor. Tom stalked towards it, away from the crevasse, throwing caution to the wind as he kicked the flimsy sheet metal open. It failed to knock any waiting assassins off the outside landing, and Tom edged out, blinking at the daylight and the assailing winds.

  Dozens of filthy bed sheets and old Persian rugs hung midair between the rooftops, obscuring the compound’s layout, but builders’ scaffoldin
g offered a path along the face of the three-floor building now deeply ablaze. The scaffolding met up with a metal walkway to the next roof blocked by more weather-stained and madly-dancing bedsheets.

  Tom moved towards the building with the caved-in, north-facing street front, but only as a means to finding a way down.

  Instead, Finnegan Locke stepped out from its opposite door, and the crossbow he fired at Tom was a quality weapon.

  But it was no Welsh longbow.

  The bolt flew at Tom the same instant another gust tore between the buildings strong enough for one of the heavier drapes to blow into the gap to smother Locke’s deadly aim. A look of consternation and self-hatred burned through the other man’s face just as quickly as the silver-bearded Fagin ducked back into hiding. The whole scaffolding shook with Tom’s violent reaction. He grabbed a handhold before he could wring the sub-machinegun around to strafe the vacancy forged in his prey’s wake.

  “Locke!”

  Tom hauled himself along the metal railing one-handed, breathing hard as he forced bellows-forge lungfuls of air to cool his rage while scanning the lower courtyard for his son.

  “Lucas!”

  He scouted around, no sign of Attila either, half-blinded by the rooftop’s shifting architecture just as Locke wanted.

  He called for Lucas again and again.

  But the boy didn’t answer.

  *

  TOM GROWLED AND forced himself to close the gap chasing after Locke, and he closed the final few yards firing two more tight bursts that ended with him kicking in the bullet-riddled third-floor door and sweeping hard right, heedless to the dangers as he tasted the air thick with cordite and dust, the gale blowing crap through the air outside as the single oil lamp on a bookshelf revealed Locke’s private study, and another door only just swinging shut to the north. Already oriented that way, Tom fired the gun again and grunted with a weird sort of satisfaction at the explosion of wood chips as he blasted the door back open.

  Locke came at Tom as if he knew the Mp5 would click empty.

  The ex-convict wrested the gun from Tom’s hand in a burst of motion, twisting cannily to tighten the strap across Tom’s chest and lever the slightly bigger man off balance – and it was only Tom’s desperate Frankenstein dance that stopped Locke kicking his feet out from beneath him.

  Tom pulled the hunting knife from behind his back. Locke sensed the move if not the blade, and leaped back, giving Tom the chance to cut through the gun strap instead. The move left Locke with the useless gun he cast aside at once in the crowded room, feinting some kind of roundhouse kick that now made Tom the cautious one. Locke seized his hesitation and bolted between antique furniture and back through the shot-through door on the far side of the room.

  Tom switched to Kent’s longsword and went after him.

  The door led into the exposed side of the apartment block now under fierce attack from the buffeting winds.

  Locke knew his way around. He hurried along the half-exposed corridor while Tom almost fell into the maw of the next floor below. It cost him a precious second as he steadied his footing to follow like a tightrope walker, lagging at Locke’s rear. At the far end of the hall, the exterior north face of the building resumed in a cage of serrated brickwork.

  Fagin jumped a tripwire, hit the back fire door, and slipped through and outside.

  Tom copied Locke’s deliberate sidestep, then paused a second before repeating the door kick, this time expecting attack rather than another metal walkway, this one without a guard rail as it turned the corner of the top floor. Halfway along already, Locke shot Tom a snarling grin of defiance.

  Tom roared in reply to demand the fugitive face him. But Locke had other ideas. Taking off again forced Tom into pursuit. Despite the sheer fall to the ground twenty yards below, Tom threw himself after his enemy, hacking desperately with the longsword and hoping to hamstring the man before he could escape.

  Instead, Tom’s sword struck an overhead metal wire and sent it thrumming.

  Locke turned to protect himself as the nearest rain-soaked bedsheets snapped towards him in reaction to Tom’s blow. Locke batted them away only to realize, too late, he needed a better handhold, grabbing for the same sheets as he slipped from the narrow third-floor platform, hit the back of his skull on another metal cable stretched across the next floor down, which then propelled him somersaulting forwards as if out of a siege catapult.

  Locke lifted feeble arms too late to avoid his face-first collision with the glass-paned window frame set in the far wall.

  The shattering sound echoed above the wind now assailing the Rats Nest, and Tom steadied himself where he stood, aghast to see Locke’s face and jaw sheared off, and the rest of his body a dead weight dangling throat-first from the glass-covered ledge before it tumbled like so much manure the rest of the way to the ground.

  Clouds of swirling black smoke thickened the air around Tom as he found his way down another metal staircase all the way to the courtyard where his dying enemy sprawled beside a metal skip. An horrific clusterfuck of blood poured from the carnage as Locke’s body shook with autonomic function, twitching so that his Italian leather-clad feet painted twisted bloody sigils across the paving.

  And Finnegan Locke took all his secrets with him to the grave.

  Chapter 3

  THE BLUE PLASTIC wanted to suffocate him, but Lucas crawled towards the light and finally burst out from under the canopy, not pleased to see his savior was the fire eating through the wall and windowed door between them and the blazing southern wing of the old lodging house.

  Them.

  Lucas struggled to pull his rifle free of the coils of rope and random garbage dragged down with him and Kevin in their struggle, and Lucas chided himself the whole time for not just emptying his M4 into his so-called “friend”.

  But his stupid heroics saved his dad. Lucas knew that.

  When he finally stumbled fully free from the gigantic tarp, he whipped the snub-nosed rifle around, anticipating Kevin and his Glock at any moment. But he saw nothing. Apart from the furnace roar, relegated beyond the stout bricks, everything else went quiet. Tom called out his name from higher up, but Lucas kept his eyes peeled even as they started to water.

  Kevin turned his gun on Luke’s father and it was only a miracle Tom wasn’t dead. Luke’s hands and then his thighs started to shake. He growled low, boyish, furious.

  Holding his breath, Lucas scoured the ground-level chamber. Someone had stripped the room back to its fundamentals and then abandoned a heap of timber, crates, power tools, workbenches and big pieces of old electrical machinery probably too heavy to relocate anywhere else. The knocked-through chamber had an airy warehouse feel reinforced by the hole in the ceiling, despite the old paint and mildew disturbed in the recent chaos.

  He tracked the gun around, having trouble with his breath, palpitations slamming through his narrow frame as Lucas swallowed abortively, open-mouthed and blinking and only just starting to feel the pain in his hip, elbow, shoulder and palm from his rough descent.

  Tom’s roar and then another burst of gunfire sent Lucas shaking again.

  He whipped around, eyes peeled for Kevin, the heat from the fire next door already oppressive. He broke into a sweat and glanced upwards at sign of movement.

  “Lucas!” Tom bawled down to him.

  Luke scanned the room once again and then motioned to the south.

  “There’s an exit,” he called. “Dad, you’ve got to get out!”

  Tom eyed the chamber below and shook his head looking flustered,

  “You too,” he called back. “Get outside, now!”

  Tom gave him a final curt nod, then disappeared from view.

  Lucas adjusted the Mp5 and turned for the door he’d spied at the far side of the room, but flinched with surprise yet again as Kevin sprinted out from the cover of a dusty, paint-spattered stack of timber.

  Lucas whipped his gun around before the other boy was clear, and yet only watched as Kevi
n reached the far door, which was half-blocked by the fallen plastic sheeting. Kevin yanked the handle, but the door budged only a few inches as it caught in the spilled tarpaulin.

  Panic in his eyes, the smaller boy lit his gaze around to check Lucas’ gun and then the hesitant cast of his face – and Kevin’s mouth split into a nasty grin.

  “Still a scaredy-cat, Loo.”

  He started pulling the tarpaulin furiously away from the blocked door. Lucas felt the dryness in his throat like he’d swallowed all of the dust. Heat from the blaze choked their surrounds like a boiler room. Kevin grunted, sweating and frustrated, then abandoned his labors at once to look meaningfully past Lucas.

  “Burn to death in here,” the boy said. “Both of us.”

  The wall and door behind Lucas was now fully ablaze. Radiant light seeped through the very bricks. Lucas shut his mouth tight, and with his own breath stilled, heard again the roaring chatter of the inferno taking hold of the whole building.

  “Work together.”

  Kevin grunted, thrusting a meager handful of the huge tarpaulin at him.

  Lucas held the assault rifle still.

  “You attacked my family, Kevin.”

  “Nuh,” the other boy said. “Didn’t.”

  “You killed Kent!” Lucas screamed. “We know it was you!”

  Kevin eyed the M4. It was his turn to be choked for words.

  “Killed someone,” he said and almost shrugged, looking down. “Didn’t know his name.”

  “It was Kent you . . . you. . . .”

  The insult wouldn’t come. Lucas was too aghast at his resurgent anger, his vast sundered sense of loss, betrayal – feelings of rejection piling atop such recent horror that his hands shook hard enough to make his aim dance. The burning door cracked open behind him and blasting flames sloughed into the rear of the room ready to make short work of the other stacks of lumber covered in paint-stained sheets.