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

by Hately, Warren

  Suburban bric-a-bràc continued flying past them, and Lucas struggled to recover his breath, eyes wide in fresh fright, Tom’s hand still pressing down against his chest. It took him a second to detect his father cursing like a sailor in a low-pitched monotone.

  “This is fucking crazy,” Tom said at last.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We have to get inside the Enclave.” Tom’s eyes narrowed and went far away. Then he snapped back, gray eyes intense in their focus on his son. “Carlotta Deschain had a way inside. If she could lead us in –”

  “You think we can find Lilianna without anyone seeing?”

  “No,” Tom said bluntly. “You said Kevin said she was outside the sanctuary zone. We have to get to Wilhelm, then we can. . . .”

  Luke waited a few seconds, but Tom stopped speaking. A few more metallic screeching noises came from nearby. Someone’s shelter collapsed and half the pieces flew through the air like shrapnel. Lucas and his dad crouched at the bottom of an old brick storefront, relying on the cover of several fragile-looking wooden shelters.

  But they couldn’t remain where they were.

  “Dad?”

  “Wilhelm had a secret entrance too.” Tom motioned his son to stand. A bicycle and then several planks of wood hurtled past with a whoosh. “We’re making a detour,” Tom said. “This way.”

  He held his hand behind his back and Lucas took it, the pair of them facing into the full-bore wind just long enough to reach the next intersection and veer right. In their wake, any number of smaller structures and badly-made campsites disintegrated into a fast-rushing storm of debris, an airborne river of it amid the continuous hurricane roar from the rest of the sanctuary zone likewise under attack.

  Intervening buildings now took the brunt of the wind as they continued. A few Citizens ran between buildings seeking safety and Lucas tried not to meet the eyes peering out at them from a stack of half-crushed ancient automobiles now with people living in them.

  “Where are we going?” Lucas called.

  They hurried abreast now, though he kept checking on his dad since he’d no idea what was going on and the fear lingered that Tom wasn’t in his right mind still. Adrenalin fatigue also crept into Lucas, but not enough to dull the ongoing alarm for his missing sister. If he could only move time and space with his thoughts like in the old comic books, he knew there’d be nothing and no one safe from his wrath. The City’s tearing apart almost felt like an extension of his nihilistic wish, and Lucas’ scowl curved into a cruel mask.

  He and Tom would rescue Lilianna, or die trying – and the latter felt all too likely.

  They navigated a dozen blocks into emptier streets. The winds eased a little, scavenger birds hunting on high with daredevil grins while the citizenry locked down as the weather edged towards disaster.

  The visibility still sucked. By the time his father led them to The Dirty Vixen, Luke jogged in his shadow with a hand on Tom’s back.

  “What’s this place?”

  “It’s where Carlotta is now,” Tom had to practically yell back to answer him.

  His dad tried the venue’s battleship door, not anticipating success, but he banged his fist on it a few times before retreating around the side of the narrow storefront where a curved metal awning covered the steel-barred, boarded-up old windows.

  The wind dropped to a momentary whisper as if confirming all was quiet within.

  “Magnus?” Tom yelled.

  He repeated himself a couple of times. More trash moonwalked down the sidewalk past them and off in the direction of the next block, and then a vehicle tore through the cross street before the engine noise also faded into the background roar. Tom glanced back to his son.

  “I’m going to give you a boost up, OK?”

  Lucas nodded. The curved awning didn’t look easy. From his angle, he had to rely on Tom’s description as his father told him to climb for the ledge beneath an open window.

  The crackle of gunshots sounded so distantly they might’ve been something else. Apart from the moving scenery, ruffled by the waxing and waning winds, the clogged shelters and occupied territories this side of The Mile were quiet. Gray skies thickened in the direction they’d come with the growing plume of the out-of-control fire worrying the horizon.

  Tom formed a cradle with his hand for Lucas, who slung the M4 over one shoulder and tried to use momentum to get up and over the curved lip in one move. It only went half as well as he wished, and for a long second there, his ass and legs hung down as he scrambled for a handhold. Then Tom pushed his feet up for support and Lucas banged and clawed his way up to the wood-framed window drawn down tight on the Vixen’s upper-floor sentry position. Dingy curtains obscured the next room. There was no sign of anyone.

  “There’s a ladder,” Tom called up to him. “A rope ladder. See if you can throw it down.”

  Perched carefully, Lucas moved alongside the window ledge and eased up the pane. The old timber juddered each step of the way. Gritty light defeated the shadows to reveal a mess of shoes and metal tools scattered across the room’s tired linoleum, a metal toolbox open on its side fallen from a step-rack beneath some jackets on pegs. A tripod lay tipped over, adding to the confusion, but Lucas only registered a sniper rifle’s camouflaged stock while searching for the rope ladder pooled on one side of the floor.

  Lucas adjusted the M4 across his back and stepped into the room just as the first Fury attacked.

  *

  LUCAS HADN’T PAID much attention to Carlotta Deschain in life, but she had his attention now, tearing into the room and straight for him with her hands stretched out like a hunting bird and her mouth equally agape.

  Halfway into the room, Lucas dropped the rest of the way and tried to roll past the screeching undead woman – except he jerked back, caught by the strap across his chest as the short-barreled rifle still managed to get caught in the window frame.

  He got a single hand up as Carlotta slammed onto him. Her outdoors jacket was rank with blood and her own disembowelment. Those gory insides crushed up against him. Try as he might, Luke’s repeated knee strikes connected with the dead woman’s crotch without noticeable effect. Tom’s worried cries came from outside, but Luke was as powerless to reply as he was fending off the ravening woman.

  And all their ruckus drew a second, gray-skinned figure who loped into the room and came at Lucas atop her.

  The white-haired man’s face was lined with blood and pain long before he died and rose again. But his remaining teeth gnashed hungrily, ravenous as he tried scaling past the woman Fury in their shared bloodlust.

  Luke pissed his pants as he got his short knife free. Tom kept screaming. It came so faint. Lucas couldn’t get up. His legs scrabbled just as uselessly against the piss-slick linoleum. He stabbed into Carlotta’s neck and temple a half-dozen times and then the rifle strap broke and he dropped fully to the floor, catching his tailbone on the window ledge and then sliding on the jellied gore between Carlotta Deschain’s feet.

  Lucas squirmed in the slippery, half-dried blood to get around and then behind the pair of starved Furies, but they moved too fast for belief. Fresh ones, Lucas’ stammering mind yelled shrill behind fear-sequestered eyes. The old man rushed first, swinging a hand around to deter the dead woman with the same intent. Whatever they were in life, the couple had no loyalties left, but for the kill.

  He dodged one of the dead barman’s claws, then Lucas stabbed. The knife clipped Magnus as the woman Fury slammed into them and all three went skidding down into the remainder of the shoe racks, more shoes and boots and the contents of the toolbox spewing across the floor, Lucas twisting about at the searing pain in his thigh as Carlotta’s thumb crushed deep into the meat of his leg between the layers of duct tape he’d added earlier.

  At least the pain brought inspiration and strength. Lucas wrenched his leg to kick up and out, catching the former Councilor in the jaw and repelling her back for just long enough that Lucas could stand again, wre
stling with Magnus to keep his snapping jaws an inch short of Luke’s neck. Their momentum conspired with balance, and they fell again, with Lucas coming down the heavier of the two. Fresh pain burst across his lower back and the will to live nearly went with it.

  The male Fury bent over across its own broken leg to get at him, shards of bone squelching through day-old meat. One of the philosopher’s hands were mangled into not much more than a bloody cudgel. With his other hand, Magnus clutched Luke’s zippered jacket, trying to rend it open, and Lucas snarled, stretched one hand to grab the dead man’s ponytail, then pulled his head down towards the knife. The creature struggled against him, but Lucas had the leverage to drive the blade into the Fury’s throat, and he kept on pushing, teeth aching as he grit them, his boyish fist forcing slowly deeper into the wound as Lucas grunted and sighed and whimpered and fought for dear life until the short blade finally plunged into brainstem and the dead weight of the dead barman sagged heavily across him.

  Carlotta clambered over the pair throughout, clutching at the silenced Magnus as if to haul her fallen lover aside – and Lucas knew better than to let her.

  Tom’s voice rang out again, far from any use to Luke. The boy whimpered. Panic made its demands on him, and Lucas bravely fought it off.

  His aching hand held onto the dead Magnus like some kind of shield, the Fury’s intestines caught around itself like torn plastic wrap, and Lucas kicked feebly from underneath to hold Carlotta back. She dropped on top of them instead, fingers sinking into the meat of Lucas’ shoulder strong enough to crush bone, it seemed, as she snarled and leaked foulness from her bloodied mouth and Lucas screamed like never before.

  The boy’s strength started to fail, and he let go of Magnus to clutch weakly at Carlotta slithering atop him like a demented Medusa come bloodily from some old film. Her fanged face strained to push slowly and inevitably down towards his, and at the last moment, Lucas turned his face aside, sniveling, his arms giving out with the knife in his fist stuck, buried somewhere inside Carlotta’s ribs.

  The two adult bodies atop him crushed down with murderous weight.

  Lucas collapsed. Carlotta immediately wrenched her head aside to shove past Luke’s barred forearm and into his throat just as an iron rod burst out from her eye.

  The snarling Council woman froze suspended an inch above Lucas with gore trickling onto his face from her parted lips, and then the dead woman seemed to levitate, swaying up and back and halfway rising into the air away from him to reveal a flame-haired older woman standing over them, straining at the other end of the iron rod piercing through the back of the Fury’s skull.

  She hefted dead Carlotta aside and let go of the weapon which clattered hard off one of the unopened toolboxes and the dead Fury finally lay still.

  *

  “I’M MOIRA BLAZE,” the woman said as Lucas stared around and then slowly back at her, agog, still far too deep in the abyss of terror to think about his piss-stained jeans or the smell of his bowels along with everything else rancid in the air.

  The woman showed a tired fragility as well as strength. She hauled the rope ladder to the window’s edge matter-of-factly, then tossed it out. It was only seconds before Luke’s distraught father scrambled over the metal awning and into the room with his eyes also frantic even as they took in Lucas alive and well despite the appalling scene. Tom fell to his knees beside Lucas and checked the gory boy over once before then grabbing Lucas into his arms.

  Astonishing them all, Lucas took several long, steadying breaths and eased upright, gingerly feeling the small of his back where the metal case hit him – or he, it – during the brutal scuffle. Nerves still sent his eyes checking for reassurance both Furies were truly dead.

  Tom cussed, locating the deep gouge in his son’s thigh.

  “Jesus Christ,” Tom said. “We’ve got to get you clean.”

  He instantly looked to the woman. Moira stood near the spilled tripod where she retrieved the hunting rifle and checked the weapon over, then nodded tersely, leaned it against the wall, and slowly sat on the window ledge as if it were she who’d only narrowly survived.

  Stunned that he still lived, Lucas watched his father scan the room to process the story it told. A freshly crestfallen expression turned him haggard.

  “What the hell happened here?” he asked.

  “Denny Greerson came, with some men,” Moira told them. “And then Ernie Wilhelm.”

  “Wilhelm.”

  The flat voice confirmed everything. Tom’s head spun.

  “I got into the roof space, when they came,” Moira said. “Didn’t understand who they were, why they would even come here. Magnus thought they were looters . . . Honestly, Tom, he told me to hide. He –”

  “You don’t have to apologize for living.”

  “Then why does it feel that way?”

  “Wilhelm came because of . . . Carlotta?”

  Lucas didn’t understand any of it. Although it pained him, he used the wall and the coat racks to get upright and his father only watched, as shocked and seemingly confused as his son.

  “I don’t fucking get it,” Tom said.

  “He was a vengeful man,” Moira said. “Petty. But I didn’t know he had this in him.”

  “This isn’t all of it.”

  “We think he took my sister,” Lucas told her.

  Moira’s eyes widened. It wasn’t a reassuring look.

  Tom reoriented on Lucas with a fierce, exhausted yet defiant expression.

  “I’m telling you, Lucas, I’ll hack my fucking way through the whole Enclave, friend and foe alike, to get your sister back,” he said.

  “People are going to die for this,” Tom added. “And then we will get free.”

  Lucas sank back to the floor.

  Everything was too far gone for him to ask if that were a promise.

  Chapter 4

  THE UTILITY PARKED hard when it finally came to the end of the long drive and Lilianna couldn’t do anything to stop herself slamming against the inside of the tray. The hands behind her back had gone numb during the past hour and her gag was chokingly dry. She twisted violently, disabled by ankle ropes too, and threw her elbows around without care until she could see Aurora.

  The other girl stared back at her in mute terror. She was dirty, but showed no injuries – unlike Lila, with a fresh gash at her temple courtesy of Greerson’s man Yusuf responding to Lilianna’s unabated distress at seeing her boyfriend butchered into chunks.

  The carnage persisted in her thoughts amid all the other turbulence, as well as the inevitable survivor’s guilt made even worse for all the heartbreak of her sundered dalliance with Beau and knowing she’d somehow abandoned him without ever realizing it. Or that’s how it felt. But the very real fear of the present moment, and yet another serving of guilt for dragging Aurora into this madness with her, left Lilianna unable to express any of it – and not just because of the knotted rag stuffed deep into her mouth making it an effort just to breathe, her pulse hammering amid the unexpected tranquil sunrise foreshadowing yet more misery by day’s end.

  A man wearing a face scarf unbolted the back of the tray, an Ak47 over one shoulder. The black guy Yusuf came around the other side and helped lower it and at once reached in to snag Aurora by one ankle and drag her out. The guy with the scarf wore it as if ashamed at his associations, standing back and holding the wood-stocked rifle relaxed as he somehow smoked a cigarette. A bigger, pudgy man with a broken face joined in the work. He caught Lilianna’s twisting feet and grunted as he pulled her from the back. Lila caught a whiff of the man’s rank body odor, the disconcerting apron he wore, and the staved-in-yet-healed horror of his upper jaw – and then she dropped like a dead weight to the hard dirt.

  It was only daybreak. Birds twittered in the branches of nearby trees left lonely and skeletal amid reams of rank, overgrown grass and weeds surrounding a concrete-walled office, an adjacent rusty, low-roofed shed, and the dilapidated sign for the old dog kennels. Rusted four-
wheel drives and disassembled motorcycles rotted in situ in the yard, with the overgrowth claiming a chain-link fence which sagged around the compound, a few more trees and the bare dirt driveway veering off in two directions into the uncertainty beyond the crest.

  The big man picked Lilianna up by her bonds, swinging her to catch her feet with the other hand with ease, thereafter carting her like baggage down through the wide-open gates. She tried to get a look back to Aurora whose shrieks were insufficient for her gag. But the big man with the demented eyes shook Lila hard enough to rattle her teeth as he carried her down the path to the front of the main building. Men’s subdued laughter reached her, throwing off her expectations even as her heart beat ever faster.

  Old concrete pavers descended to the well-trampled yard. The word HASTUR was scrawled across the front of the sunken main office and the leaking paint had dried like blood even though it was black. Four men loitered at the door to the old office, and to Lilianna’s right, a tall picket fence framed the abandoned kennels – little more than an enclosure built atop rank concrete, sheltered by interlocking tin sheets overhead long since demoralized by rust. Straw and mud were trampled along two concrete walkways, but despite an orange globe burning somewhere inside, internal walls and more wire mesh obscured the specifics. An agricultural smell pervaded everything – and beneath it all the smell of her own fear.

  The brutal man lowered Lilianna to the ground and dragged Aurora in beside her. Yusuf and the scar-faced man worked to loosen the women’s ankle ropes while the four strangers watched. They wore an assortment of camouflage and outdoor gear and had guns as well as knives and other weapons on their belts. Lilianna sobbed.