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

by Hately, Warren

  The men’s boots came hard on their heels, but the women pushed through a frieze of drooping tree canopies to sight a fallen picket fence and then open, overgrown fields descending beyond it.

  “Here,” Aurora said.

  She pushed a combat knife into Lila’s hand.

  “You stabbed Hardy?”

  “No,” Aurora answered as they kept running. “Scratched his eyes.”

  She ran some more, catching her breath to add, “Knife was in his boot.”

  A tractor stood abandoned in the field. By the time they drew close to it – with flashlight beams tracking their wake – the landscape unfolded to reveal a sand quarry carved into the facing slope. A big earthmoving truck silhouetted the far side of the crater, and seeing it, Lilianna let go of Aurora’s hand to point across the distant incline.

  “We’ll lose them up there!” she gasped. “They won’t shoot at us.”

  “They did.”

  “They want us scared,” Lila panted. “And we’re not scared. We can do this.”

  She checked to make sure Aurora understood the gravity of her review. The gunmen shooting over their heads wasn’t good news, just because their attackers weren’t about to gun them down. It was just Lilianna’s best working theory anyway, and God alone knew how far these vile men would go if the two escapees continued to evade them.

  She was first to jump down the carved-out sandy embankment and feel just how hard and course the raw earth was, toughened by exposure to the elements the past five years. She bit her lip to conceal a grunt of pain as her knee flared and she stumbled into a controlled downhill run with Aurora coming fast behind.

  They slid and jogged that way down into the middle of the extraction ravine, surrounded by barren crags of hardened limestone. An old chain with a sign on it lay surrendered to the dusty, hard-packed sand, dark white under the moon. Crackling noises pierced the night, incomprehensible at first until Greerson’s voice filtered through to them.

  “YOU WANT TO RUN, BUT THERE’S NOWHERE TO HIDE,” he called. “RELEASE THE HOUNDS.”

  “The hounds?” Aurora cried.

  “They said someone ate all the dogs.”

  Lilianna scouted their way through the crisscrossing quarry pits, disoriented and fighting her own terror.

  “The hostage they killed. . . .”

  Lilianna didn’t have to say the rest. Aurora kenned her sinister tone and stumbled and had to be helped up. The older girl went slack in Lila’s arms and Lila almost couldn’t hold on.

  They sank together, Lila crunching down hard on her butt. The dusty earth bit into her. She held the knife and the jagged stone still.

  “We have to get to higher ground,” she managed to say.

  And she stood again. She handed the rock to Aurora. The girl’s eyes rolled like a newborn foal, but she stood once more with a shaky breath and took the offered weapon.

  “Come on,” Lila said.

  The Fury jogged into the quarry behind them with its mouth agape. But it wasn’t the murdered twentysomething hissing at them, but instead the dead trooper Apache – almost twice the other man’s size, and far more deadly, freshly risen, and not yet satisfied for blood.

  Apache’s comrades hung back at a safe range. Lilianna nudged Aurora, almost as if she didn’t need to cry, “Run!”

  And run they did.

  *

  IT WAS HARD to climb the crusty slope. The chalky, exposed earth cut into their knees and hands, yet crumbled as they tried forcing a way up. Brutally-resurrected Apache powered into the quarry behind them, and his huge, combat-booted feet carried him halfway up the crag. Lila lagged perilously, pushing into her friend’s ass to propel Aurora, even as it worsened her own footing.

  “Go!” Lila yelled and slapped Aurora on the tail.

  Lilianna wasn’t getting away, and she knew it.

  She swiveled back with the knife just in time to meet her jaws-agape attacker.

  Lilianna’s ankle twisted painfully as she sought to evade, but it worked – the monster’s terrifying momentum carried him into the jagged side of the ravine as Lila fell past, stabbing with the knife and not doing much more than cutting a gash into the dead man’s brawny arm.

  But the Fury had her scent, the taste of her in the air like the promise of a feast. He coiled around, utterly distracted from chasing Aurora, pouncing across the sinewy slope as Lilianna slid back towards the ground.

  She kept trying to right herself as she tumbled fifteen feet, groaned at the impact, and then stood – mainly on her twisted ankle. The bright pain was an afterthought. The huge threat of the Fury vaulted down at her with massive hands and his grimace outstretched.

  There were Furies she’d wrestled – desperate times requiring desperate methods to survive – but Apache’s strength was beyond anything she’d encountered. Her sneakers flailed on the dusty ground and the dead commando landed atop her with the weight of a rockslide.

  Her head hit the back of the ground so hard she heard her scalp split, too desperate fighting to scramble free to notice the blood weeping from her hair as she stabbed underhanded with what limited chance she could. The blade dug into Apache’s leather vest and chest half-a-dozen times. The spattering blood challenged Lila’s grip on the knife. And when she tried to use a knee to lever the brute off, which proved impossible, the dead man shifted a bracing hand and knocked the dagger from her slick fingers as a fluke.

  The monster roared, craning its head back in triumph as it dug fingers into Lila’s shoulder and grasped her hair with the other hand. Its weight kept Lilianna trapped as the Fury wrenched her in opposite directions and she felt herself tearing apart, pain shrieking through her neck. The Fury’s spittle wet her exposed throat and she fought with every muscle, starting to whimper and freak as it plunged its face towards her neck.

  Slinky’s boot took his dead comrade in the side of the head, deflecting Apache’s fatal intent, and giving Lilianna just a second’s reprieve. Snickering as usual, the trooper pushed the Fury off-balance, then shot the dead man in the face with his purpose served.

  Apache’s weight crumpled beside her like a demolition job.

  Lila couldn’t move. Agony transfixed her. Slinky chuckled as he studied her reaction, his breathing a little short as he scanned back for his colleagues.

  “The idea’s to let them catch ya, not have all the fun,” he told her and winked. “Chief wouldn’t like that.”

  Lilianna gave up trying to breathe or manage the crushing pain in her neck and back. She slapped a red hand down on the fallen dagger, lunged, and stabbed it into Slinky’s calf.

  The handsome bastard screamed. Lila was on him, scratching and clawing, trying to get at his rifle, her wet, nerveless fingers seizing the karabiner and failing to get the strap free in time. Aghast, the soldier pulled the knife from its wound. Lila drove her knee into his crotch and Slinky buckled over.

  Lila groaned to see the man’s pistol holster empty, and she cast around for Slinky’s knife and failed to see that too. She took Hardy’s combat knife from the ground near where Slinky writhed. Other figures advanced into the ravine and Lila took off in a hobbling sash.

  No more gunfire sought to halt her. They were too far gone for that.

  Greerson pursued like a mad devil on her tail as Lila veered away from the previous slope, hoping to find an easier exit than Aurora and also not to lead Greerson to her friend. But the branching limestone quarry didn’t reveal much – just more sandy, rocky runnels grizzled into the scarred landscape.

  And then an access road.

  The massive haulage truck threw its moonlit shadow on them from the crest of the rise overhead as Lilianna ran, ankle injury forgotten, hitting the dusty surface of the crumbling dirt road as it arced on the shortest curve possible to clear the quarry. Greerson’s breathing came loud behind her and Lila chanced a single look to confirm the skull-faced man running twenty yards back with clear expertise. Hardy hung back with Slinky, caught between trying to help the injured
man as well as manage the other dead hostage squirming at the end of an actual dog leash. The shock-haired young man’s death-distorted face kenned the air, keening with a high-pitched squeal through its gag.

  The road angled up, past and under the massive truck.

  But Greerson was a veteran runner. There was no way Lilianna could outpace him. Reaching the quarry’s lip, the pain in her ankle demanded attention and she moaned at the blood in her sock and soaking her shoe.

  “Run, ‘Rora!” she shouted raggedly. “Go!”

  There was no sign of the other woman, not that Lila had time to look. She reached the mammoth truck’s sand-blasted door and nearly fell against it. Greerson crested the ridge behind her with a huge hunting knife in one fist.

  Lila abandoned the cabin door and hobbled down the side of the truck’s gigantic tip tray.

  The rear lip of the big dirty metal scoop angled slightly, caught in position forever and rusted in place like some sentinel awaiting the dawn still a frighteningly long way off. She grabbed the tray’s edge and hauled herself up as Greerson clutched her wounded ankle and squeezed.

  Lila shrieked like an alarm, bucking and kicking out. Her rubber heel caught Greerson in the face, freeing just an instant for her to scoot into the cavernous, sand-filled back of the tray.

  The Chief’s insults flew thick with spittle as he hauled himself into the tray after her, and Lilianna stood woozily, pain keeping her sharp as she backed away until she crushed up against the banked sands set like stone by the years.

  Greerson slammed into her heavily. The parked truck gave a groan.

  Lila clutched one of Greerson’s wrists and didn’t understand at first as the angle of their confinement started to tip. She stabbed into Greerson’s Kevlar, the point flicking away and almost into his chin, and the Chief threw himself aside.

  The ridgeline beneath the quarry-side of the tip truck collapsed along the edge. Hard-packed dirt and sand cracked apart, gathering pace as gravity took its time to take hold of the enormous weight.

  Lila dropped her knife to throw herself double-handed at the inside lip of the tray.

  Her hands caught the rough edge as the big truck’s slide became inevitable. Luck and desperation drove her scrambling up and onto the far edge, battering her knees as she jumped up and over with all her strength.

  The next moment, the truck slid away behind her as it tipped and crunched down into the collapsing ravine with Denny Greerson still in the back.

  The massive truck hit the hard quarry floor and boomed like a thunderstorm kicking up a huge cloud of gritty dust. Lila’s hand across her face did little to protect her, and she staggered further back before any more of the grassy ridgeline caved in too. Her eyes squeezed shut against the gritty assault, and somewhere below, after several more loud thrumming bangs, the haulage rig settled at the bottom of the fifty-foot slope.

  Dirt hung thick in the air. Lilianna crawled on her knees to the edge of the fresh-made precipice. The dark hulk of the truck on its back appeared in glimpses through the fog of fine debris, and she waited there, determined to see if her pursuer somehow survived.

  The seconds trickled by just like those sands in the hourglass.

  Nothing moved at all – until it did.

  Hardy emerged through the dusty fog to Lila’s right leading the snarling, furiously dead young captive on a leash, the Fury snapping at the madness in the night air. Slinky hobbled along behind with his leg hastily bound and a look of sheer bloody murder on his face.

  *

  AURORA’S VOICE RANG out across the field and Lilianna somehow located her friend standing in the field of waist-high grass almost a quarter mile away beyond the sand mine, across where more trees and the squat shapes of several ordinary houses loomed.

  Lilianna saw her friend, and so did her pursuers.

  Slinky favored his wounded leg, but jostled his skinny companion. Hardy released the choker on their frenzied former hostage who at once whirled around at his handlers. Hardy hit the thing between the eyes with the folding stock of his Mp5 and Slinky pushed the Fury away.

  Ravenous, the scrawny, black-haired figure turned hateful eyes on the seemingly easier prey of Lilianna, who didn’t wait to see what came next.

  “We’re gonna get you now, girl!” Slinky yelled. “You and your girlfriend!”

  Lila couldn’t run. The pain in her ankle and foot were indescribable, and there was no time even to check her injury. She started hopping in Aurora’s direction and spent the next minute hustling determinedly through the clawing grass, stumbling several times in old runnels, ditches, tripping on overgrown irrigation pipes and then almost into the corpse of an ancient well. The back rests of old garden chairs rose out of the grass like gravestones. Aurora ran to join her from the sheltering trees, shivering once again and pale and pallid, nothing on but her sneakers, jeans, and a bra. Lila’s tattered polo shirt hung on with just a shred of decency. She pulled it off as she met Aurora, checking back at the ambling Fury as she tied the body of the shirt across her chest like some barbarian princess.

  “‘Rora. . . .”

  “We’re not giving up yet,” her friend hissed. “There’s a house. Come on.”

  Lila followed with her face aching like she’d been branded. The Fury howled a hundred yards in their wake. The flashlights of the hunters tracked after them.

  “I got Greerson,” Lila panted.

  “Good,” Aurora said. “How many left?”

  “Two, I think . . . plus that other thing.”

  “Poor guy.”

  “I think I shot Apache, earlier,” Lila said. “No sign of Stonefish too.”

  “They used their friend as a . . . a hunting dog?”

  The two women’s muttered chatter cut out as they skirted a low-rise old picket fence, the back yard as overgrown as everything else. Autumn-withered vines crawled through the nets of an ancient, rusted trampoline. Big conifers framed a concrete path sprouting its offspring, and yet more wild, spiked ferns grew in profusion guarding the homestead’s rear door.

  The Fury closed in loud enough behind them that they could hear its redundant, rasping breaths. The two women kept moving in a businesslike way, resisting panic, cautiously checking all around them – Lila, with an awkward limp.

  “They knew about Lowenstein,” Lila said.

  “What?”

  “That was the President, trapped in that shed.”

  “The Fury?” Aurora asked. “Someone killed her?”

  “Who do you think?” Lila replied. “They killed her – then they shut her in.”

  “Why?”

  They reached the back door. The black-haired killer on their tail followed, hanging back as it sniffed out the unfamiliar terrain, scrambled brain cells grasping for strategy.

  Lila’s eyes returned to the water-stained back door.

  “Greerson’s men know the whole countryside around here,” she said. “And they’ve filled it with traps. We have to be careful, still.”

  “Furies?”

  And maybe other things.

  The abandoned house was no true sanctuary – any promise of a reprieve was ruined knowing their pursuers had stripped their territory of all the tools, weapons, food, clothing, or anything else their prey might seize to defend themselves.

  Lila’s hand hovered over the warped door’s handle, ears attuned to their Fury pursuer, still hanging back – almost as if it knew something they didn’t.

  “Fuck,” Lila cursed hard. “Not here.”

  It took an effort to clutch Aurora’s wrist again.

  She dragged the girl with her down the side of the creepy house and headed for the distant road.

  Chapter 5

  THE AIR IN the living room seemed to smoke from Tom’s slaughter. It was just a moment in time. And Dkembe’s bowels watered, hands shaking on the grip of the gun he still somehow held as his eyes flicked nervously around, taking snapshots of the others and where they stood.

  All while he backed towar
ds the door.

  Karla stood there blinking and licking her lips furiously, a woman struggling under battlefield conditions to conjure a workable rationale to explain Tom’s violence. The others watched OK Jay’s hacked-through cadaver, or like Lucas, had eyes locked on Tom himself – and it was the boy Dkembe somehow feared amongst them all as he took the chance he dared not take and opened the apartment door.

  Karla stared at him. Frozen.

  Dkembe at once stepped through into the corridor and hurried away down the hall.

  He tossed terrified looks behind himself while shuffling at pace, passing other ghostly, half-lit doorways, as quiet as he could be with his whimpering gulps for breath as he reached the stairs and still no one appeared in the doorway left ajar in his wake.

  He caught himself stammering needlessly. Incredulity fought against the shock. He abandoned useless words for the sake of stealth and bustled quickly downstairs with the solid weight of the Glock no kind of reassurance at all digging into his waistline. Shocked and startled and afraid campers watched him pass from the false security of their hovels in the foyer.

  A harsh nocturnal breeze ran shrill across the street outside the fatal tenement. The feeling Dkembe used to get as a young child in the lead-up to Hallowe’en lit within him, and he shivered, fearful of goblins and ghosts of the past and other terrors now far too real.

  It was a long way to skirt any Dominator patrols. By the time He made it a few blocks, Dkembe was a shivering, chattering, snot-nosed mess, mouth constantly agape, like ready to explode in outrage at any moment, yet trapped in silence like he was only an old film playing, one more flickering light or apparition within the clusterfucked City and its numerous shelters and enclosures, forever-parked vehicles, handmade barricades and repurposed trucks no more than shells for the sake of the people living in them. The two- and three-story structures of the City’s firmament were partly obscured by the shanty town, and not helped by impoverished moonlight. Dkembe fought against the wind blowing its shrill flotsam of particles which stung his eyes. The brick buildings blocked the benighted skyline like monuments of the old world, and the profusion of pathetic hovels and blockaded precincts were a ghost town ready to be made real for what, to him, now seemed a doomed populace.