“So we’re gonna let you go,” Greerson said.
Neither of the women were open to hope at that point. Lilianna just watched the Chief steadily, waiting for more details to drop. Greerson drew a compact handgun from the holster on his thigh.
“Open country, hereabouts,” he said and motioned with the weapon, playacting the friendly rancher. “Lots of places to run and hide. No surprises for guessing we’re coming after you.”
Aurora choked. “Why?”
It wasn’t a question Lilianna wanted answered.
Greerson’s lurid smile foretold the games to come.
“You gonna undo our hands?” Lila asked.
She offered her bound wrists. Still not answering, Greerson snickered. He tucked the pistol into the waistband beneath his open jacket.
“Na,” Slinky said from the sidelines. “That’s your problem to solve.”
Lilianna shot a hateful look at the man and might’ve channeled a diatribe about her plans to kill him if it weren’t for Denny Greerson practically throwing him the same look.
“Shut the fuck up, Slinky,” the Chief said.
Then he stabbed his fingers pointing at each of the various men.
“You guys are pairing up,” he said in a big voice. “Stoney with Slinky. Hardy with Apache. And remember what I said,” Greerson added, glowering for their attention as he gestured to Lilianna. “That one’s for me.”
“What, there’s only one for all four of us?” Hardy said.
It wasn’t a surprise the smaller man’s voice came out a reedy whine.
“That’s not how this works,” Greerson answered gruffly because he knew it was a shit deal. “To the victors, the spoils,” he said. “And be grateful for what you get.”
Pleased with his own theatrics and clearly under the spell of the only time in his miserable life he’d had any authority, Greerson turned his showman’s grin on Lilianna and her friend and motioned with one thin arm as he put on a radio headset.
“Time to start running,” he said.
Aurora surged past Lilianna at once, but then stopped.
Lilianna remained unmoved. She held Greerson’s eyes and forced herself a smile.
“Next time, you should really put a flashlight up beneath your chin,” she told him. “You’re really spooky . . . creep.”
Greerson’s greasy leer froze, the rage bubbling almost visibly into his eyes as he launched himself at her – and Lilianna in turn snagged the automatic pistol lazily stashed in the Chief’s belt rather than his holster – and Greerson immediately caught his mistake and started hauling backwards with his eyes wide as Lila lifted the gun, double-handed thanks to the ties around her wrists, flicked the catch on the safety, and opened fire the second she could.
The first bullet went into the ground and the second missed Greerson leaping back, the gunshot punching through the door of the closest truck.
Lilianna kept moving with the gun raised, shouldering Aurora into the flight she’d just abandoned, while Lilianna continued shooting blind at the men as she ran too.
Apache gave a pained bark, but Lilianna didn’t see the bullet, nor that it cut through a major artery in the trooper’s thigh. She also didn’t see her fourth shot, which clipped Apache’s Kevlar, or the fifth bullet that hit Stonefish through the jaw to leave him gasping wetly, clutching at the destruction of his face wedged into an old military-grade Desert Storm helmet.
Instead, Lila and Aurora ran, and Greerson and Slinky hit the deck. Hardy took cover behind the nearest vehicle and crouched there as Lilianna chanced a look over one shoulder at Greerson getting back to his feet, lurching in blood-stained running shoes towards Stonefish with a look of wild horror on his face.
The two women ran madly away down the slope towards heavy foliage as Greerson’s lieutenant spluttered and gasped and died in slow motion in the Chief’s arms.
*
THEY PLOUGHED DOWN the hillock trusting to luck not to trip on all the buried monuments of the past. Thick, dark green, waist-high grass cloaked everything, all of the way down to the buckled pavement of a narrow old road, more lush greenery on the other side bisected by a sagging wire-link fence almost utterly reclaimed by wilderness.
Lila clutched the gun still and still tried grabbing at Aurora’s arm to urge her to keep pace as the other girl faltered. Lilianna had to fight off shrieking thoughts that her friend remained a liability she couldn’t afford if she wanted to live and have even a chance at saving her brother and dad. Her own bravery so far deserved a week in shutdown mode to recover – and there was no time for any of that.
Aurora continued choking and spluttering her way through some kind of terrified commentary on their plight, and as she ran beside her, Lila cast yet another look back for sign of pursuit before clutching her friend hard, the gun digging into her, and hissing for her to be quiet.
“We have to use every fucking advantage we’ve got,” Lila added. “Or we’re dead. Got that?”
“Lila, I don’t think I can do this –”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“But I –”
“Do you want to get me killed?”
The question finally silenced the other woman.
“Just keep up with me,” Lila added, and checked back behind them once more.
A crackling, amplified voice rang out across the moonlit serenity.
“WE COULD SHOOT YOU NOW, BUT THERE’S NO FUN IN THAT,” Greerson’s voice came through the bullhorn. “RUN, LITTLE BUNNIES. WE’RE COMING AFTER YOU.”
*
THE SLOPE DESCENDED to an overgrown intersection and Lila didn’t hesitate to lead them across to the far side and into the darkness of a riot of juvenile trees grown wild like the advanced army for the even thicker woods which seemed to beckon in scant detail in the future darkness. Her hands were still tied. At first, she stuffed the pistol into her jeans, but the terrain was too fierce to risk losing it. She led them headlong into the thicket of overgrown trees, shrubberies bursting to armpit height, all manner of things unseen scratching at their bare arms and faces. The night was cold, but the women ran hot – for now at least – and Lilianna kept the gun aimed double-handed ahead with her ears pricked for their pursuers.
“This is ridiculous,” she muttered just loud enough for Aurora to hear.
Her companion’s labored breaths destroyed most their stealth anyway. Right now, it seemed best to make as much distance as possible, subterfuge be damned. It was madness to think Denny Greerson’s pervert troopers would leave any chance for escape next time they met.
Clearly, that was part of their thrill – but the game was rigged.
It had to be, she thought. It was too much risk – that victims might get free, and that others would find out. The whole little set-up had to be Wilhelm’s dirty secret.
Lilianna only wished the Councilor was also on the hunt so she could shoot him too.
Carlotta Deschain. Beau. Now her father and Lucas were in danger.
Lilianna thought briefly of her supervisor and friend Gwen Stacey, still back in the Bastion. A deep shiver of fear ran through Lila.
But she lost her vengeful scowl when the ground beneath her feet buckled inwards. Jolted away from fevered imaginings, she nearly lost the gun as she grabbed for the illusion of ground beneath all the greenery and hit an earthen embankment instead. Lila pulled her sneaker-clad foot from some kind of foul wetness she didn’t need to examine any further, her near-collapse a stark lesson for Aurora, who followed now more carefully, eyes wildly affright still, managing her way across the sewage ditch and on Lila’s tail while Tom’s daughter crouched, and continued to forge on through the skeleton of another wire fence and into the back of a gravel parking lot.
An old fast food restaurant sat weather-beaten and stripped of its markers, a corporate anonymity with even the towering sign on a metal pole battered and long-since broken into plastic shards littering the carpark. Several young trees grew out one end of the restaurant, seeded
by a much bigger tree which had fallen into it sometime in recent years. A half-dozen rusty cars and trucks angled nose-first along the front wall. Someone had again spray-painted HASTUR in a rageful white scrawl across the banks of window glass, but Lilianna now knew who that someone was.
“Can we hide here?” Aurora asked.
“No.”
“Why?” her friend replied. “I’m tired, Li–”
“It’s too soon,” Lila said. “We have to make more ground.”
Lilianna jogged across the yard searching for anything to cut their twisted, silver-tape handcuffs. Nothing sprang into view except for solutions which took too much time or risked too much noise. She fought off a sense of rising panic. Aurora’s hopeless reluctance sucked the life from Lilianna like a turgid gravity, and she twisted back to shoot several annoyed looks at the girl hoping that she’d get it. But Aurora’s wan surrender was almost enough to make Lila forget all the other horrors her friend had suffered – horrors which lay in wait for Lilianna, too.
It was only Greerson’s sickening protection that’d spared her, thus far.
The urge to vomit was nearly overwhelming, but Lilianna had nothing left. Instead, she dropped to a knee, taking cover at the far corner of the tree-shadowed restaurant.
Further north, the access road curved away into Tolkienesque forest like some eldritch, primeval force. Ambient moonlight fell into the yard behind them, but beyond was only thickening gloom.
And somewhere off in the middle distance, a man howled like a wolf.
*
THEY LIT OUT from the old restaurant, jogging hands-together down the road and turning north-east. For all her complaints, Aurora’s fitness was good, and half-a-mile down the road they both had reason for shortness of breath.
Out in the open, they made easy targets, but the undergrowth transforming the semi-rural outskirts was so dense it cut into their pace, and left obvious trace of their passage for Greerson and his hunters to follow.
Fallen street signs at the intersection were no help.
Every view offered a confounding vista of head-high bracken, woods, growth, and nothing else in the near-to-black conditions. A single SUV sat rusting on blown tires parked across the dogleg, and Lilianna led them to it while casting eyes into the forest of ruin, and then, like Aurora, back up the street behind them.
The dog howl sounded faintly again.
“It could be a distraction,” Lilianna whispered.
She opened one of the car doors, moving quietly, but brisk as she scanned the picked-clean interior and then back to the open door, smashing the glass in the window on the second try and resting the Star model B handgun on the roof.
“Get these ties off,” Lila whispered. “Hurry.”
She made haste by example, cutting herself on the jagged window before the job was done sawing through the electrician’s tape. She then retrieved the pistol and checked the magazine while Aurora did a much more dainty job of freeing herself.
Lila’s gun only held three more bullets.
She cursed softly. Free, Aurora threw a worried look, but Lila shook her head.
“Come on.”
She led them along the street out of view of the immediate intersection and then into the dense scenery, threading carefully and motioning, hands blessedly free, to Aurora on her tail to go gently so they minimized the disruption. She also remembered Greerson’s night vision goggles, and a deeper level of chill went through her. Sour at herself then, Lilianna huffed like a psychopath, half-muttering to herself as she refastened the grip on her pistol and resumed her double-handed grip as she advanced, stalking sideways into the darkness nearly totally blind.
She only stumbled twice. The quality of the nightfallen soundscape changed as they went deeper, a hyperventilation of minutes tumbling past. Lila sniffed, almost able to taste the nearby running water, lost somewhere in the dark. Then she stumbled out onto another road.
A huge wooden sign announced a recreation area and the Scioto River for tourists never to return. The landscape had erupted with just as much violence down along the banks of the Scioto. A stand of already well-established trees framed a view further into the gloom against which they could pick out the steel-framed details of a road bridge in the night.
“We should get across the river,” Lila said.
“The bridge?” Aurora whispered.
“No, it’s a chokepoint.”
Lila craned her neck for any audible trace of pursuit. The night was frustratingly, deceptively calm.
She motioned ‘Rora to follow rather than risk speech again. Enough times hiding out in the woods in days of yore, she knew how far even a little misguided talk carried. As a younger kid, Lucas nearly got them killed or robbed several times. But the thought of her little brother now was as sharp as any blade. His big sister winced, and willed the images away, leading them towards the river and scurrying into the shadowy embrace of the big trees swaying in the wind.
Among those boles, the grass grew to conceal an old playground. Lilianna led them straight into collision with a submerged picnic table and chairs, all bolted together and completely hidden, trap-like, beneath the confusing grass. The two women circled the site, feeling the way with their hands. The metal handholds of an old merry-go-round rose out of the rampant grass like ghosts. Beyond them, a crushed gravel path let the pair continue, crouched and concealed, along to the next road headed for the river crossing.
As they advanced, the huge gray metal struts came into stark definition.
The wolf call now came from behind them. And the moment the fugitives hurried forward into deeper cover, a doglike call of a different character sounded off to their right.
Lilianna bit back a cuss word, her furrowed intent alone communicating their danger to Aurora as the hunters narrowed in on their location – cutting them off at the bridge exactly as Lilianna’d feared.
So she stopped. Aurora joined her, crouched. The gun was heavy in Lila’s hand and she sniffled as if that was enough to keep herself focused. Stiff and alert, she traced the wind, a scattering of leaves and light debris flitting along the riverside track. She clutched Aurora’s wrist and led them into the cover of the road’s edge. The howl came again, perhaps back along the road they’d left, and the answering howl echoed back from the direction of the bridge distorted by the rising breeze.
“COME ON OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE!”
The bullhorn sounded shockingly close.
Lila froze, her instinct to burrow into the earth.
Instead, she stood and whirled the gun around towards Greerson’s amplified voice and squeezed off all three remaining bullets.
Men’s shouts rang out, and Lila tucked the spent pistol into the back of her jeans and grabbed Aurora’s hand to lead them running back the other way along the track before plunging down into the foliage at the river’s edge and not letting up until they stumbled over the moss-congealed bank and the water took them at once up to their chins.
“Lila! No!”
Lilianna slapped her hand across Aurora’s mouth.
“We swim,” she said.
Aurora got it. Nodded – terrified in the soaking black, but far less afraid of a river crossing at night than the prospect of staying behind.
Without another word, Lila let herself sink into the water’s embrace, unwilling and unable to remove her sneakers anyway as she tried to quietly swim away from the river’s edge.
Holding her breath, she angled further from the direction of Greerson’s bullhorn, the useless pistol digging into the small of her back. Aurora’s hand clutched her leg as if she might catch a ride, and before she instinctively fought her off, Lila gave another tired, not very friendly look at her companion and saw something in Aurora’s gaze wither another notch under such stern regard.
Aurora sank deeper into the water, and then also started to paddle. Lilianna turned to put some effort into it, for now not even daring gauge the distance ahead.
*
LILIANNA
DRAGGED HERSELF up onto the overgrown brick pedestrian walkway and tiredly offered Aurora a hand to do the same. Then it was enough to roll free, crawling into the hoped-for shelter of a pair of bench tables sitting unaffected in the old paved picnic spot, a weed-riddled ridgeline and a carpark barely glimpsed higher up the embankment.
Water soaked their clothes and their spirits too. For a long time, breathing, recovering their strength, it seemed impossible to believe swimming the river might be their savior. One side of Lilianna’s face ached from an earlier punch to the head. Her ribs were the same. She sat up with a mighty effort, staring down blankly at the wet girl spent beside her.
“We have to keep moving,” she said quietly.
Aurora rolled onto her back.
“But we made it.”
Lilianna scoffed a laugh without any humor.
“No,” she said. “I doubt it. It doesn’t matter. I have to get to the sanctuary zone.”
Aurora groaned and turned about until she could get to her knees and stand. Glad for it, Lila stood too.
“If we can get in among suburban houses, they’ll never find us,” Aurora said.
“I don’t think they’d trust it to that.”
Lila wondered if she was too paranoid to think they might have electronic trackers. Greerson was a coward and unlikely to take risks without precautions. But maybe such technology no longer existed. She found herself scouring eyes over Aurora’s bedraggled clothes. They’d had their jackets and outer layer taken from them, and now, clad in jeans, Lila in her torn polo shirt and Aurora in just a singlet, the cold really bit into their wet flesh.
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 57
