And still Lucas was afraid.
“C’mon!”
It was just a squeal in Kevin’s muted way of talking. The boy stared at Lucas with frantic eyes, then returned, desperately trying again to haul armfuls of the heavy plastic sheeting away from their only exit. The tarpaulin’s pinned edge was deliberately weighted beneath one of the abandoned refrigeration tanks, and Kevin gave up his futile efforts for more frustration of a different kind as he began grabbing the power tools at random and testing to see if any of them worked.
But the skinny boy discarded the dead tools almost instantly, scouting around the rest of the room, perversely confident now amid his sense of emergency as Lucas almost lazily followed him with a crestfallen sense of emergency of his own.
“Kevin,” Lucas said to him. “You let them try to kill me.”
The younger boy said nothing. Still searching. Hurrying now either side of the huge obstacles and vanishing from sight – but not without giving a telltale shout of triumph.
“Kevin!” Lucas yelled again.
The fire was impossibly hot now. Luke lifted the M4 to his shoulder again and backed away, sights trained on the dark empty spaces with the air slowly turning into treacle. The rear wall collapsed completely and strips from the ceiling on that side of the building fell as just more clattering fuel for the fire.
“Kevin!”
“Put your gun down, Lucas.”
Out of sight, Kevin racked the slide on the pistol he’d recovered.
Lucas felt a flush that almost ended in his pants, and he gulped ashen air to master himself, righting and re-righting the gun stock against his shoulder and wishing and wishing and hoping and then coldly seeing Kevin step back into view with the Glock on him.
“Put it down,” Kevin said again. “You can’t shoot me.”
“Yes I can.”
“Then do it,” Kevin said. “Shoot each other?”
Remorse was a stranger to the boy’s face. Their stand-off lengthened, grew tenuous. Finally, Kevin lowered the Glock, and Lucas was certain he should shoot his friend right then and there, but he let his rifle lower too. The emotion had him, then. Tears forced their way from Luke’s eyes and Kevin made an insouciant check on the disaster burning into the room all around and behind them.
“Whole place is gonna burn,” Kevin said and wheezed.
Lucas glanced at the other door and the tarpaulin in the way.
“Work together?” he repeated.
Kevin grunted. Luke could already see the weakest point to release the pinned sheets, and he hurried to the second stack of timber planks and pushed it sideways so that they toppled. He then grabbed a double handful of the slippery material and yanked it sideways towards him, tugging it free of the slewed load.
Kevin joined him to pull the last of it free, and Luke stood then, letting Kevin finish the job with a grunt as Lucas drew and then stabbed his knife into the boy’s back.
“You shot at my father,” he whispered into Kevin’s ear.
Kevin gave a choked gasp, and Lucas put his hand around his friend’s mouth and drove the knife in again. The boy whimpered, muffled, and kicked back violently, fighting to escape with such a look of intense betrayal that Lucas almost faltered.
But Kevin pulled the Glock from his waistband and it was mostly luck Luke had one hand free to grab the other boy’s wrist and smash the pistol and his hand with it into Kevin’s own face.
Luke tried the move a second time, but Kevin fought him now. Lucas’ knee struck the other boy’s solar plexus, and then another stab wound – into Kevin’s chest, this time – saw the strength drain from the wild boy, and Kevin started to holler and scream as the furnishings crackled and fire caught in some of the old electrical junk and Lucas coldly wondered if any still held their old flammable gas cylinders.
“Lucas,” Kevin gasped. “No, stop please, no, Lucas, Lucas stop. . . .”
But Lucas had it in him now, and he forced the traitor to the ground with superior strength, steadying the short-bladed knife in his hand and genuinely hesitant only because the urge to inflict pain and punishment was so powerful he didn’t know how to abort it.
“Kill me an’ never find your sister,” Kevin hissed.
Lucas stayed his hand in shock at the words. Pain and fear filling Kevin’s eyes gave him a near-religious conviction.
He spoke truth.
Lucas shook him.
“What are you talking about?”
“They took her.”
Kevin could barely speak. He spluttered bloodily. Lucas eased the knee digging into the boy’s bleeding chest.
“What?”
“Don’t kill me.”
For all Lucas knew, Kevin was already dead and didn’t know it.
“What did you say about my fucking sister!”
He grabbed Kevin by the shirtfront as he roared, pulling him one-handed from the ground. It was a miracle he didn’t fly into a rage worthy of his father, turning the captured boy to mincemeat with the dagger clutched overhead. Kevin raised feeble hands. The noise of more gunfire outside was almost lost to the firestorm crashing around them. Flames licked across the walls and tracked along the front wall towards their exit.
“Your Councilor a–”
“Who?” Luke barked. “What? What’s happened to Lilianna?”
“–ying to tell you –”
Lucas almost didn’t let Kevin speak. The knife in his hand had an urgent weight, almost its own dark desire to be used. He remembered Tom slaying OK Jay as he knelt, in a similar wordless rage that destroyed far more than it revealed. That cold memory, and the reality of the blaze threatening to entomb him, brought Lucas’ eyes back to his dying friend. He imagined strangling the boy like a sacrifice, or slicing open Kevin’s throat for his father’s approval. Instead, their chamber darkened with fire and brimstone all too real.
“Tell me,” Lucas said.
“Safety . . . first,” Kevin wheezed. “Fire.”
“Who is the Councilor?” Lucas demanded. “Do you mean Ernest Wilhelm, my dad’s friend?”
“. . . not your friend.”
“What about Lilianna?”
“No,” Kevin said.
He coughed weakly. Lucas started coughing too, barely able to see now with all the smoke and fumes. He eyed the unblocked door, and still hunched over his hostage, scanned the fire behind him advanced to no more than a half-dozen yards away. A living carpet of fire burnt like magma over the stack of beams, crackling around and within the metal appliances and slowly turning their supports into slag. Lucas fought off light-headedness to stand, tucking the knife away and grabbing Kevin two-handed.
“What is it about my sister?”
“No.”
“Tell me.”
“No,” Kevin coughed and spat. “Safe first. Fire –”
“No!” Lucas shook him hard. “Tell me!”
“Lucas!” Kevin’s voice was a whine. “Please, I wanna live.”
“No.”
Lucas snorted and trembled, then he clutched Kevin to drag him towards the fire.
“Tell me,” he grunted.
He swung Kevin forward with enough force to show he could do it. The smaller boy started shrieking, but the blood loss left him mewling like a premature kitten.
“Lucas!”
“Tell me!”
“They took her!” Kevin’s legs kicked back against licking flames. “Outside city. They got a place! Please!”
Lucas dropped Kevin to the ground and scurried back as the rampant fire ate its way across the hard floor as if deconstructing reality itself. The flames burnt close enough to Kevin’s twitching sneakers that it was only a moment before the boy’s shoes started to smolder and melt and then Kevin’s feet caught alight, and Lucas watched for only a second longer before retreating to retrieve the Glock.
He returned to his friend like a sleepwalker, the handgun pointed down.
Kevin managed to holler, “Lucas, no!”
Then Luca
s shot him once through the head.
Kevin relaxed even as the flames caught hold of his jeans and the noxious fumes worsened with the smell of human flesh and burnt plastic.
Luke covered his face with his arm and hurried for the door.
The same moment, Tom kicked it in.
*
HIS FATHER DIDN’T give Lucas a chance to scramble free, clutching him bodily and hauling him from the furnace over one shoulder like a firefighter. Tom didn’t understand why Lucas kept kicking and shrieking until they escaped the compound and the fire and black smoke replacing the overhead sky.
Fierce winds sucked the flames from the first of the two eastern buildings into the second one, the awnings and snapping flags of their rooftop defenses only fueling the spread. An Urchin tore past them in the smog as Lucas finally got free, rolling clear of his father as if from another attacker.
“They have Lila,” he said as loud and focused as he could. “Dad, do you hear me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Kevin told me!”
“Kevin?”
“He’s dead in there,” Lucas said and pointed needlessly. “I killed him.”
“Whatever needed to be done,” Tom said on autopilot.
His gaze lost focus and a fear plunged through Lucas that his old man was about to start bawling again, right when Lucas – and Lilianna – needed him most. But Tom lurched back into action, grabbing Luke’s shoulder.
“What did Kevin say about your sister?”
“Not much,” Lucas answered. “But I believed him. Dad, he said it was Councilor Wilhelm.”
“Councilor Wilhelm who what?”
“They have Lila,” Luke said. “Some place outside the City.”
There were other questions. His father couldn’t frame them, squinting with eyes like broken glass.
“Wilhelm?” he said. “Why? Why the hell would they – Jesus Lucas, your sister – she –”
“I don’t know.”
Tom mustered himself and Lucas made a quick check around them. At the site of the first trap of Persian rugs soaked in fuel, the outside wooden fence had caught alight too. The berserk fire now in two buildings made the whole Rats Nest a deathtrap. The heat was choking. It seared the eyes. Smoke swirled around Lucas and his father, and betrayed several more Urchins making their escape. Lucas raised his gun at the other youngsters crying from the heat and smoke and the general disaster, but just watched them leave instead.
“Locke’s dead,” Tom said in a mixed, uncertain voice. “Before I could. . . .”
His father’s eyes refocused several times as if he kept startling awake – awaking again each time into concentric layers of nightmare, each reality more terrible than the last.
“We have to get clear,” he said. “Did you see Attila?”
“No.”
“Maybe he got away,” Tom said. “I hope so.”
Tom started towards the burning exit and halted, uncertain.
“Lucas, if they have Lilianna. . . .”
A stretch of paneling from one of the apartments clattered down in a cloud of embers. Noises of destruction echoed from inside the first building. Its neighbor’s whole internal face was now alight with nascent flames as glass shattered and more muted detonations came from inside. A whole section of the north building’s external scaffolding collapsed noisily then, kicking up more smoke and embers, and aborting any further hesitation as Luke watched his father’s eyes snap back into hardened points.
“This way,” he said.
*
THE WESTERNMOST OF the buildings with its collapsed façade offered the safest escape route, traveling opposite to the flames which looked guaranteed to create disaster for anyone else in nearby homes. That could be hundreds of people. Lucas kept his rifle trained and sweeping around them to compensate for his father’s single-minded focus on their escape.
Tom hit a back door at ground level and shouldered in with the Welsh longbow drawn tight.
He released the arrow at once, grunting as he reached back for a second.
Lucas couldn’t see the target, following with trusting blindness until he had to step over a teenager’s corpse, sprawled with a fire ax in his hands still.
“Boy’s name is Dega,” Luke’s dad said. “I don’t understand why they wouldn’t run.”
Tom’s tone continued to worry Lucas, but there were plenty of more imminent threats to fear. As if required of him, Lucas angled around and past his father, scouting the open entries into multiple rooms containing sofas and any number of discarded blankets, bean bags, pillows and throws. A big-screen TV stood mounted on a wooden trolley, cords from it disappearing into the murk. Lucas blinked hard, smoke in the air, at once confronted with the rewards of life in Finnegan Locke’s household – which only heightened his desolation and loss at Kevin’s betrayal.
“He sold us out for this?”
His father moved past and roughly caressed the side of Luke’s neck where the hair had long since grown out. Now it was the younger Vanicek’s turn to edge towards collapse. Lucas barked a noise in lieu of tears, which only brought Tom back into him. Lucas pressed against his father’s grimy chest with his cheek brushing the bullet holes in Tom’s jacket.
“I’m sorry, dad,” he said.
“We have more important things now than that,” Tom answered. He forced a compassionate look onto his face for his son’s benefit, Lucas knew, yet he was grateful for it. Luke’s eyes dropped just as Tom’s expression broke and his father started gently crying too, struggling to work his jaw muscles as he continued to talk. “We could really give up now, son. But we’re not going to. I’m fucking terrified. We have to get your sister at once. And she . . . she might already be dead.”
Lucas made a noise as if to interrupt, but a single hand stilled him.
“Just facing it, alright boy?” his father said. “But we’re not giving in.”
Lucas resurrected his hold on the M4 and Tom did that blinking thing again, now crouching to his level with his hand on his son’s shoulder again as if they weren’t in the midst of a blazing inferno.
“You did good, Lucas,” Tom said. “If you didn’t get that information from Kevin, about your sister . . . Locke just . . . died. I didn’t . . . he just fell. To his death.”
Lucas understood well enough – but it wasn’t enough to stop a sick guilt that he hadn’t wrung more information from Kevin before he died. Perhaps the poor pathetic sorrowful little boy who’d been his friend hadn’t known any more than he said. But fury rather than sadness laid its claim on Lucas to help banish his tears.
“He fired a fucking gun at you, dad.”
“Yeah.”
“He was my friend and he betrayed us and he . . . he wanted me to. . . .”
“Betray us too,” Tom said.
“Maybe,” Lucas nodded and couldn’t hold the eye contact any longer and felt a failure for it. He sniffled and wiped his filthy face. “But he fired a gun at you, and if he knew about Lila. . . .”
“I’m still sorry you had to kill your friend,” Tom said.
“I killed that lady too,” Luke said more slowly. “That was my . . . the first person I ever had to kill.”
“Lucas, I know this might seem like a terrible thing to say, but I honestly wouldn’t lose any sleep over that woman,” Tom said. “She was fucking bat-shit crazy and trying to kill us, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s harsh, I know. Hell, it’s insane” his father said and started tears anew. “But this is the . . . this is the world you’ve inherited. I’m so fucking sorry, Lucas. And I . . . I’ve done a crap job trying to spare you the worst of it.”
“Dad.”
Lucas took a few rapid breaths, the madness of the moment still pressing in on him that they weren’t safe, that Lilianna might be dead or raped or tortured or dumped already in some shallow grave or – even worse – alive again as one of them and waiting until he and Tom found her that way.
“Dad, you’re my everything,” Lucas said quietly, hushed. “Without you, I can’t even . . . I couldn’t even survive.”
Tom wiped his eyes roughly. He smiled sadly.
“No,” his father said. “I’m so sorry for that too, Lucas. Today’s the day you stop needing me at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t protect you anymore,” he said. “I have to ask you what I never wanted, and . . . and I have to ask you right now. Your sister’s missing and God knows what else. I need you to back me up on this – whatever it is we have to do. Do you understand? Whatever we have to do.”
Luke nodded with an otherworldly sense of completing some kind of ancient ritual forgotten in the world of computers and supermarkets – a violent coming of age for him.
“That’s exactly what I said to myself,” Lucas said and tried not to splutter the words. “When I knew I had to kill Kevin, because of what he’d done, I told myself . . . first I had to kill the boy in me . . . before I could kill him. And I did. I did.”
They hugged and his father kissed the top of his head reaching now to almost beneath his chin.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you too.”
Luke’s father nudged him to move and Luke fell exhausted into Tom’s wake.
*
THE STREET WAS full of people crouched against the gale-force winds, yet watching in terror as the fast-moving blaze leapt from the burning top floor of the second building and across into trees and an old powerline while its embers hosed like dragon-fire into the upper windows of a taller, unrelated three-story apartment block with an abandoned café and country-style tearooms at street level. The site housed a public trading house now, but dozens of Citizens spilled out of it into the street instead.
It was all beyond Luke and Tom’s control as well as their concern. Lucas kept pace with his father as they headed into the worst of it, the air tinged like burning metal and compost, their eyes forced narrow against all the grit as if under attack from Agent Orange.
“We have to find –”
Tom abandoned speech to barrel into his son, dragging the pair of them into cover as a riderless rickshaw hurtled out of the fog and past them, bouncing along the street straight into the thirty-odd people further along. A woman cried out and someone else started shrieking, the sound diminished by all the rushing air, and at least two of the onlookers didn’t get up again as the errant rickshaw, a wheel broken now, skittered onwards along the cobbled street and at some point flipped again and became airborne, snatched by the hurtling winds.
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 53
