He led them out across the intersection just as a shower of debris rattled past. A shard of wooden planking rebounded off Tom’s shoulder and he gave a startled moan, though he barely felt the impact through his thick, bloodstained jacket. Feverish, his eyes scoured the street for troopers, assassins, Furies – or any threats at all. A truck drove through an intersection to the north, but most other Citizens looked to be bunkered down against tornado weather.
“What are we gonna do, dad?”
“I had a way into the Enclave,” Tom said. “If Wilhelm knows we’re still alive, though, that seems like madness now. . . .”
“But what about Lila?”
“I know.”
“Do you, dad?” Lucas berated him. “Every minute that passes means –”
“I know.”
“Then isn’t there another way in?” his son asked. “Someone in the Bastion knows what they’ve done with her.”
Lucas blubbered from anger as much as fear for his sister. Tom felt the same, though his face was that of a dead man, revealing nothing even though that was everything anyone needed to know, the fatalism writ across his battered, gray-whiskered Stoic mask.
“Another way in?” Tom repeated aloud. “To the Enclave? No.”
A rat almost the size of a house cat tore across the street in front of them where they’d stopped moving due to the uncertainty of it all, sheltered by the awning of a row of iron-plated shopfronts echoing with the noise of civilians inside. A woman’s voice rang out, muffled, amid the clanging of a pot, a child’s brief complaint, the soft underlying tone of someone else singing in denial of their collective dire straits.
Tom looked at Lucas trying to instill some counterfeit of hope in him.
“I do know another way out,” he said.
“Out of the City?”
“Out of the sanctuary zone, yes,” Tom said as he revisualized the exit. “It’s how Wilhelm comes and goes himself. I don’t know if anyone else even knows about it.”
“Then let’s go,” Lucas said.
The boy was already moving, destination unknown, fiercely desperate for even the semblance of a plan. Again, relatable. Tom’s brow furrowed, lost in his reverie, methodically retracing the steps in his mind even as he wondered why the Councilor even showed him the secret exit through the old stores and doorways soldered shut for perhaps his use alone. Maybe, for a little while there, they had been friends – or allies, was the better word – which dragged Tom back into more contemplation at what that alliance had truly revealed.
Tom clutched Lucas by one pitifully narrow shoulder.
“This way.”
*
THE HARDIEST OF the City’s survivors were gathering on The Mile with talk of marching on the Rations Depot, astonishingly undeterred by gale-force winds. Tom ignored them all to take his son by the hand in through a plain metal door and down into the old city water tunnels. They left the mortal realm’s concerns behind as they tracked through the errant Councilor’s secret labyrinth all the way to the sturdy glass door at the rear of the old dispensary. Steel bars and a complex pulley lock for iron deadbolts adorned the exit.
Tom motioned caution to Lucas, threading through the back of the storage room and into the small loading bay the door protected. It only took a moment to work the mechanism and then the door relaxed open a crack. Lucas audibly licked his dry lips and handed back the treasured longbow. They’d looted the Mp5 for its last few 9mm rounds to consolidate the Glock that Lucas inherited from his showdown with Kevin. Now that was the only gun they had.
Tom didn’t know what they were headed into, but they’d need more guns than that. The urgency of the fact was immediately apparent when he eased open the heavy reinforced glass door onto the blocked alleyway, and saw a dozen or more figures crouched in a pack behind the closest barricade.
Furies.
The breath caught in Tom’s throat as Lucas walked into him standing stricken at the half-open door which Tom then gently closed with a desperate prayer, the wind outside covering the worst of the noise as their view narrowed onto at least a dozen of the recent dead conspiring in a group crouched in a claustrophobic pack beneath and around the underside of the rusting delivery truck. None of the Furies showed more than a week’s decay, and the blood stains adorning their tattered clothes looked semi-recent.
Tom hushed Lucas gawping an inevitable question, and kept the door open the barest crack, kneeling despite the bow in one hand, better to let his son share the view.
“Fresh ones,” he said.
He double-checked the rust-colored fire door on the far side of the narrow brick alley, just a half-dozen steps closer to the Furies snickering and shuffling around together.
“What are they doing?”
“You know what they’re like when they’re in packs,” Tom said.
An unfortunately rich history between them made no more details necessary. The more there were, it often seemed, the smarter the creatures got.
“Wilhelm sealed this alley well, kept it hidden from the people,” Tom whispered tersely. “Perfect hiding place for the Furies.”
“There’s still Furies. . . ?”
“You thought the troopers got them all?”
Lucas didn’t answer. Like his dad, he was more focused on what the fuck they were going to do now. Tom used the pause to eye the distance across to the fire door once again, and cast a speculative look back to the weather-beaten Furies. The creatures’ heads turned, craned, snapping about, listening to the wind whistling through the City, sniffling yet rapt as a gunshot sounded distantly, followed by a woman’s shrieking cries.
“They look hungry,” Lucas said.
“They always look hungry,” Tom answered. “They’re not getting either of us. Do you see that door?”
He pointed, just to be obvious, and tried to smile encouragingly in counter-point to the wide-eyed look which overtook his son.
“We’re going to run for it?”
“They’re distracted,” Tom said. He motioned as well as he could to show the alley was a dead end behind the Fury pack and to their right. The creatures were focused beyond the rusting hulk of the box truck, reading the rich stories their heightened senses gathered from the air.
“I’ll open the door and you run for it, try and get that door open,” Tom said. “But I’ll be right behind you if you don’t. Got it?”
“This is the only way?”
One of the Furies snarled and snapped its jaws at one of its fellows. A woman with dust-speckled curls of blonde hair reduced now to a mop reared back, away from the other one, scuttling like a demented chimpanzee to shuffle among the others, only briefly glancing back towards the drugstore’s back exit. Tom nodded to his son.
The glass door squeaked as it opened and Lucas ran through.
The boy was true to his intent and made it all the way across the ten-yard distance without a sound, and Tom was halfway after him before the rusty fire door rattled as Luke grabbed two-handed to haul it open – and the whole thing merely thudded dully, locked.
The first Furies snapped about as Tom joined his son and added all his strength to the futile effort of hauling the metal door open.
Tom remembered the combination lock on the other side.
The Furies surged out of their slumber and Tom stepped back, drawing an arrow and then pointing with it to the edge of the door.
“There’s a lock, here,” he cried. “Shoot it out.”
The risen pack burst towards them in the one action, bare feet and those still clad in shoes scrabbling alike across the bricks from thirty yards away. The monsters abandoned any need for tactics, grasping with instant, feral comprehension that Tom and Lucas were trapped.
The first one took an arrow through its baleful eye, collapsing to be trampled at once as the other dozen members of the pack hurtled in at their prey.
A man’s muffled voice sounded beyond the locked door.
Tom nocked a second arrow as he furiously moved to
the rear of the door, Lucas frozen with the drawn gun like he didn’t know whether to use it on the lock still, the charging Furies, or perhaps himself.
*
THE FADED RED metal door clicked and banged open to reveal the oblivious grin of a narrow-faced black guy wearing a frizzy beard framed by a checkered blue-and-white keffiyeh – though his eyes hardened the moment he saw Lucas with his drawn gun, and then tightened further as he registered Tom.
“Go!”
The sentry started to complain, but the fastest of their attackers appeared and Lucas dived through the safety of the doorway and Tom abandoned readiness with the longbow to follow.
Human solidarity was short-lived. The guard slammed the door back into place, but couldn’t take his double-handed grip off the handle to lock it. He looked back at Tom and Lucas in fear as Tom dumped his father’s bow in the small brick room behind them and hissed with pain to draw the longsword overhead.
The black man’s eyes widened, caught between the not-quite-shut disaster of the rear door and his utter exposure to whatever the hell Tom planned. But Tom only gestured to Lucas, drawing his son’s attention to the cage-like safety door hanging open, and then he hacked into the various fingertips wedged along fire door’s edge.
In just a matter of seconds, the sentry hauled the door firmly shut, and Tom helped Lucas shut the wire door behind it. The Furies tore the fire door away at once, pressing forward with rapacious snarls. Tom and then Lucas put their shoulders against the wire door to hold it in place and the trooper worked the sturdy combination padlock back into position.
The Furies clawed and tongued the wire mesh. Tom stepped back and ignored the slavering undead, sword in hand still, eyes fell and meaningful at the breathless trooper with his Mp5 strapped across his back.
“You’re not the Councilor,” the man gasped. “Thought you was him.”
“Nope,” Tom said.
Sunlight trickled down a single corridor from the ruined delicatessen and its exit onto the next street, one block outside the official sanctuary zone. Tom sensed the guard calculating his chances of escape. Tom instead lowered the sword and held it two-handed, threateningly, though the expression on his face was enough.
“You took my daughter,” he said. “I’m here to take her back.”
“You’re Tom Vanicek, aren’t you?”
The trooper wasn’t really asking a question, but the speculation never really left his bearded face. A single hand rose unconsciously to stroke his beard whiskers, but Tom lifted the longsword’s tip and that was the end of that.
“What’s your name?”
“Why you wanna know that?” the trooper replied, afeared. “I got no issue with you.”
“Then where’s my daughter?”
The trooper stared back at Tom, panicked without ceasing his shrewd look. Anger bubbled and Tom stepped closer, the sword by his side, his left hand curled into a fist.
“You tell me something I want to know now, motherfucker, or I’m killing you where you stand.”
The trooper lifted his hands in surrender and backed away as much as he dared. The dozen Furies snarled and frothed and puked grime in desperation for the feed they imagined for themselves just a few feet away, curtailed by the locked wire security door. Tom’s hostage glanced from him to them and paled even further, fussing with the checkered scarf and then using it to mop the sweat breaking out across his face.
“My name’s Yusuf, man,” he stammered. “We’re cool, honest. I don’t know much about what you’s after, but I’ll tell you anythin’ you wanna fuckin’ know, OK?”
“Who else is here?” Tom asked.
Merely asking the question, he was proud to see Lucas snap about and start guarding the corridor through to the storefront like he should’ve done ten seconds earlier.
“There’s just me an’ one of my homies,” Yusuf said, trying to keep it casual, adding an inauthentic laugh as if it might get him killed. “Honestly, bro, you an’ me are cool, OK? It’s just you and me and your kid here an’ my buddy Fuckface and that’s it, yeah?”
“Fuckface?”
“Just a nickname, man.”
“Where’s my daughter?”
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about there, man.”
“Lilianna.”
“Please, honestly,” Yusuf said. Fear straining his voice made him sound legit. “We’re just the Council man’s drivers, OK?”
“Dad!”
Lucas drew Tom’s hard gaze to an approaching figure, the barest glimpse of a hulking man in the brick corridor Tom didn’t have time to study because Yusuf danced back out of immediate sword range with a gleeful, unbecoming smirk.
“Oh you in for it now,” the trooper snickered.
Tom’s eyes betrayed a glance towards the shelved longbow, and Yusuf edged towards it with a maniacally playful grin. Tom was close enough to strike if he went for the sub-machinegun still across his back. But the look on Yusuf’s face showed he really thought he was free of danger now – which sent Tom checking back at the corridor. Lucas stood to one side with Kevin’s Glock raised in a TV cop grip, but he kept checking with his dad.
Frantic curse words tumbled through Tom’s head as he regripped the sword and a brutal-looking trooper came out the narrow corridor as if having to force his way out.
The man’s mangled face and the “Fuckface” nickname came together in the one instant and Tom recognized the irate drinker he’d bashed at The Dirty Vixen – and his victim did the same. It only fueled the bellowing roar Fuckface gave as he charged the last few steps, and Yusuf, just out of Tom’s reach, gave an acid squeal and yelled, “You’re not gonna see your fuckin’ daughter now, homie. We all had a taste, and she was sweet!”
Anything else Yusuf might’ve yelled was drowned out as Lucas shot Fuckface dead.
The boy was smart and his target was big. Hard to miss. But hard to put down, too.
The Glock clacked with shocking force as Luke shot the newcomer six times.
The raging Fuckface went from shock to anger to panic and thus into existential woe as each bullet struck him, and then the last bullets confirmed his doom. Fuckface took a single heavy step and then buckled on a bad knee and fell down on top of himself with one hand grasping for the slick-painted bricks. His hand slapped uselessly at the wall several times, and then the huge trooper gargled and collapsed there, staring back at them, blood pooling as he fouled himself, and then his breath came out in a final rattling gasp as he went still.
Lucas turned the gun towards Yusuf and coldly stared and the guard dropped to his knees, haunted expression switching to Tom as if hoping for a greater chance of mercy there.
Tom retrieved his bow and hooked it over his shoulder despite the risk to the string’s tension. Fuckface was dead and Luke had the last survivor dead in his sights – and Yusuf’s words still burnt their slow way down to the core of Tom’s heart. Tom bought himself precious moments – moments in which he gave himself a chance for something other than immediate butchery – by crossing to the dead trooper and taking the automatic from his belt.
He checked the safety and then also aimed the gun.
“You’re going to tell me everything in a minute or less,” Tom told Yusuf. “You do that, and I might let you live.”
Yusuf’s black eyes switched between the pair, father and son resolute.
“You’re just gonna wax me, yeah. . . .”
“Tell me,” Tom said. “Everything.”
“You’ll never find her,” Yusuf said. “Not without someone to take you. Wilhelm’s got a place, out in the sticks, yo.”
He made eye contact without any trouble while lying earlier. Now, Yusuf hung his head, daring not to look in case he caught the moment of his own execution.
Tom stared at him hard. He tucked the gun into his waistband to reclaim the workmanlike grip on his long-hilted sword.
“You raped my daughter?”
“No man, no,” Yusuf said. “I was jus’ . . .
messin’ with your head. I thought –”
“Yeah?”
The trooper glanced from Tom to his dead comrade and then over to Lucas.
“Didn’t figure your kid for a stone-cold killer.”
“Well, you figured wrong,” Tom said.
He wasn’t happy about it, and when he glanced to Luke, the boy struggled not to beam with pride, which plunged Tom’s spirits lower still. He rounded back to Yusuf.
“Did you touch my daughter?”
Yusuf shook his head, worried, a hand raised too, backing away except there was nowhere to go except across towards the low-growling Furies watching now like a pack of vitriolic critics through the wire door.
“Greerson told us not to touch her,” Yusuf said. “Honestly, man.”
“Where is she?”
The trooper’s eyes flicked all around the room, even scoping the passage blocked by his dead friend.
“There’s a Humvee out front,” he said. “Drive you there.”
Tom eyed Fuckface, still dead – for now. Lucas held the Glock on Yusuf. The longsword was a sudden liability, and Tom backed clear away until he could sheath it, his eyes never leaving the captive and also never quite losing their murderous intent. It almost pained Tom not to kill the bastard, as if Kent’s sword was like one of those in the old dime-store novels, cursed with a dark thirst for life which slowly possessed its wielder too.
Blood was demanded here, and he and Yusuf both knew it.
Tom dragged Fuckface free of the corridor and stole the dead man’s spare magazines, then the sheathed knife he stabbed down and left embedded in the side of the man’s skull. Tom took a final look at Yusuf, then motioned to his son as he stepped clear of the steps.
“After you,” Tom said and drew the Smith & Wesson M&P.
The narrow corridor led into the store and its empty, dusty white shelves, much of its unlooted contents now littering the floor. A suspiciously clear path ran direct through the junk to one busted-inwards flap of a fire-scorched black security grille drawn down on the shop in the earliest days of five years ago. Slatted daylight revealed the parked Humvee just as Yusuf said – and no one else in sight.
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 66
