“What were you doing out here?” Tom asked the man.
Yusuf kept his hands raised, ready to run for it at the merest chance.
“Told you, we’re just drivers,” he said.
“Takes two of you to drive?”
“We’re still Department of Safety,” Yusuf said.
“Jesus,” Tom said quietly. “You still dare fucking call yourself that?”
Yusuf looked suitably abashed as only a man sensing summary execution could. He swallowed with difficulty, hands raised even though it was tiring him, and Tom motioned him through.
Florid, ancient graffiti extended along the battered street beyond the shopfront. The winds assailed them once again, and Tom turned slitted eyes on the Desert Storm-era Humvee and then back to Yusuf as garbage cartwheeled past them, and Tom forced thoughts of Lilianna into abeyance.
“Who were you waiting for?” he half-shouted at the hostage.
Yusuf lowered his hands a fraction and clearly didn’t want to answer until Tom growled and hefted the pistol, but even then, the trooper inched down into himself while shaking his head.
Tom barked, “Answer the goddamned question!” and uselessly cocked the hammer.
“Was it Wilhelm?” he yelled. “Were you waiting for him?”
Yusuf looked away and nodded and looked ready to pee himself. A terrified boy had taken control of his bearded face and Yusuf used one hand to wipe away tears before they formed.
“We don’t know when he’s comin’, man,” Yusuf said. “Wait all day, sometimes.”
Tom didn’t believe that for a second. He glanced to Lucas.
“Keep your gun on him.”
Then he moved around the Humvee, peering in through the scarred windows as if someone might still be within. An AR15 propped one door open, with a discarded radio handset, still switched on, in the driver’s seat.
Tom took the walkie-talkie and returned to the guard.
“Here,” he said and held it out to Yusuf. “Call for him, now.”
“Nah, man.”
Yusuf shooed him away as if such a thing were possible. Tom’s eyes flared at the refusal and he thrust the handset out with deliberate force, pushing into Yusuf’s chest. Before the trooper could even think about going for Tom’s gun, Tom drove his knee into the man’s gut.
The guard went down and lay coughing up drool onto the dusty, cracked pavement. It was a long second before Tom decided against further violence. He gestured impatiently with the radio again.
“Call him,” he said.
“I’m not doin’ that, man,” Yusuf said. He kept his face down, eyes anywhere but on Tom. “You gonna shoot me, you gonna shoot me. You wanna find your daughter, you got no one else boy but me.”
“He’s right, dad.”
Tom grunted, nothing more than stupid pride making Luke’s words seem like a betrayal. He briefly met Luke’s eyes and nodded.
“I know.”
He gave a final look towards the shuttered delicatessen and then the Humvee. He motioned for Lucas to get in the vehicle, he kept his eyes away from the boy to avoid any indirect confession.
Wilhelm would have to wait for another time.
Despite his promise to his son, a return to the City now looked inevitable.
*
THEY DROVE NORTH along the freeway until some prearranged turn-off, then Yusuf told Tom to take the first of the open roads through the city’s ancient subdivisions. The trooper sat in the shotgun seat with Luke’s gun pressed to the back of his head.
Tom knew the road to Stratford well by now. Desiccated husks of in-fill housing whittled past them under attack from the gale, the day lengthening, but growing cold and overcast with the view to the north further clouded by dust clouds and what might be rain, far off in the distance.
The homes of yesteryear were in ruins now. The calm, idyllic streets with wide and easy roadways and their houses set far back were choked with weeds in most directions, except where recent transit kept them clear. Yusuf directed them on a parallel course to another highway headed north. After twenty minutes, they turned west onto buckled hardtop, one side of the road fringed by a city nature reserve now turned halfway Jurassic. Saplings sprouted all along the motorway, cracking the tarmac asunder. Even more trees lined the southern perimeter, and the Humvee rattled past the driveways of numerous abandoned semi-rural homes now recycling back into nature.
“Right up here,” Yusuf said.
“Where is this place?”
“I told you, it’s complicated,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any street names anymore, even if I knew ‘em, you know?”
They drove like that for another few minutes, threading in and out of side roads, Yusuf twice admitting a mistake so that they had to backtrack. Tom checked the fuel gauge for the umpteenth time and his soul growled, deep in his chest, and he caught a look at Lucas just long enough to catch the boy’s weary expression. The gun trained on the back of Yusuf’s head dipped with Luke’s tiredness.
“I think it’s a left here,” Yusuf said for all the world like he didn’t have a pistol aimed at him.
Tom slowed the Humvee, turning just enough to confirm the next road was actually blocked, studded with thickets of young trees growing strong.
“Oops,” Yusuf said. “My bad.”
Tom sighed and let the vehicle come to a halt.
He looked across at Yusuf. “Get out.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“You’re not gonna leave me out here?”
Tom only stared at him. Dumping Yusuf in the middle of nowhere seemed like a fairytale compared to the look on Tom’s face. Yusuf buckled under the scrutiny, put his hands up, and reluctantly opened his door. Tom joined him clambering from the vehicle and Lucas scuttled out after them with the Glock by his side, reassured by the pistol in his father’s hand.
“Where are these kennels, Yusuf?”
“I only been there once,” the trooper said.
“You’re lying.”
“You lyin’ to me,” Yusuf said.
“And you’re deliberately wasting our time.”
The trooper looked anxious again, and he glanced around as if hoping help might arrive. The bucolic solemnity of the overgrown woodlands undermined that daydream too.
“Yeah, well. . . .” Yusuf sighed. “The moment I take you there, you gonna kill me, so I’m not in any rush, you know?” Then he added, “Not rushin’ like you, anyway.”
Yusuf chuckled and met Tom’s look bare-faced.
That turned out to be a mistake. Tom growled and surged forward and Yusuf was too busy watching Tom’s hands that he took the kick in the balls completely unguarded. The life went out of him. Yusuf buckled, curled up on the muddy roadway, the smell of pine trees and conifers thick as treacle in his nose.
Tom nudged his son’s shoulder, then pointed once he had Luke’s attention.
The mounted road sign was battered and worse for wear, but still legible. Among the nearby attractions was Dixie’s Doggie Daycare, at a distance of two miles.
Luke gave Tom a startled look.
“You saw that already?”
“What I’ve been looking for, the whole time,” Tom said.
Lucas looked down upon Yusuf at their feet.
“Then we don’t need him anymore.”
He lifted the Glock and put a bullet through Yusuf’s back.
The trooper arched in pain and Tom stood like a statue as his son then shot the bearded man in the head.
*
THEY TOOK THE weapons and ammo from the Humvee and left it, doors open, at the crossroads like some kind of marker for Yusuf’s corpse. No word passed between father and son as Tom gave one final glance of confirmation at the faded sign and started through the avenue peopled by fiercely-growing saplings thriving without humankind getting in their way. The overcast day threw a gray pall over pretty much everything, matching Tom’s mood, belied by the stonily neutral look on his face.
<
br /> And Lucas marched behind him like the Angel of Death.
The riot of overgrown nature reserve petered out to their north as they tracked west, the way the sign pointed, and the trees in the roadway thinned out too. The view now included a series of gently serrated crests overcome with wild grass submerging the occasional homestead, rural lot, commercial building or private industry into the one organic blur. Two cars had wrecked at the intersection where a major road cut through, and their blackened, age-tarred husks carried a tang of burnt metal on the wind along with a hint of the nearby Scioto River.
Further to the west, a side road headed towards a gaunt bridge. When Lucas and his dad reached it, another sign confirmed they were headed the right way. Stalled cars creating a chokepoint on the bridge itself suggested human hands at work. Tom and Lucas shunted down into cover – plenty of wild growth surging up from the direction of the river banks – each armed with an assault rifle as they eyed any chance of movement through the dead cars ahead.
“Lucas,” Tom said gently.
“There’s no time, dad.”
The boy avoided his father’s eyes.
“You did well,” Tom said, surprising him. “Don’t make a habit of it.”
“Surviving?”
“Putting people down like that,” Tom said.
“I’ll put anyone down who deserves it.”
Tom studied that a moment. The complexities were like cogs whirring inside a clockmaker’s fantasies and Tom’s son was correct that they didn’t have the time for any of it.
“He deserved it,” Tom agreed. “I still wish there was another way.”
“I don’t think I care anymore, dad.”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “That’s kinda why I said what I said.”
He left it at that, still hopeful Lucas might contemplate that seed of consideration and maybe even tend to it. Tom left the matter behind them in the crushed grasses they now emerged from to cautiously track across the bridge. Brass cartridges expended long ago lay profuse across the road surface, and the side-turned cars collapsed on disintegrated tires revealed several skeletons in ragged clothes, their flesh long gone along with any clues about their story. But it explained the roadblock they now had to squeeze through, and despite looming proximity to the promised kennels, where Yusuf said Lilianna was taken, Tom felt the sheer emptiness of the countryside and his hopes dimmed with it.
But he pushed them ever onward, forehead ablaze with imagined logistics for a situation he couldn’t foretell and was little more than a sophisticated distraction to keep his screaming thoughts from the images of his daughter – alive, or dead – in a living hell.
*
THE FAR SIDE of the bridge yielded onto a wilderness of riverine vegetation which had long-since conquered the picnic spots and information boards and tourism signs and parking bays of the land sloping higher in a series of overgrown, manmade terraces abutting another road. Beyond it, the path immediately west was blocked by a long wire fence subsumed by yet more woodland and vine-infested land, but Tom spied the hint of another road to the north and lifted his weapon up as he advanced.
He had no idea how long it’d been since Lilianna was taken.
He had no idea whether they were racing against the clock, or if that clock had long since wound down to nothing.
The sun beat in vain against the thick cloud cover, the skies ever-moving with the harsh breeze scouring in across the grasslands throwing leaves and twigs like confetti. Tom barely checked the clear way north, but then he froze mid-step and remained there until Lucas caught up.
“What?”
“Look,” he said.
Lucas reoriented his gaze on the far horizon and stood sharing his father’s almost biblical awe at the sight of a gray-bodied twister annihilating the distant landscape.
“Tornadoes,” Tom said.
The wind intensified as if to make the significance clear. Tom stammered in the back of his throat, grabbed Luke by one shoulder, and hurried ahead to the turn-off. He then broke into a ragged jog with his son close behind.
The churning twister drifted across to the west as if keeping pace with them.
And it grew slowly in perspective as it also tracked across the landscape headed south.
*
THEY ABANDONED ANY stealth the shrieking winds left to them, hurrying deeper through a stand of trees running parallel to recent tire tracks crossing the overgrown slope. The old dirt road surface showed like a ghost among crushed weeds. A few towering ferns rose out of the swards to left and right like sentinels of sorts, seed-heavy flowers stripped skeletal and bare. Thorns grabbed at their legs. Trees blocked the rise to the north, and it was only the land’s continued swell which gave Tom and his son glimpses to confirm the seasonal Ohio tornado chugging inexpertly across the land beyond, destroying submerged homes, fences, loosening water towers which flew up into the sky like some kind of mechanical Rapture, torn into and then thrashed to pieces by the dirty vortex spiral as it meandered south-west.
Stray debris in the wind clawed at Tom and Luke as Tom led them to the edge of the rise and threw himself down in the long grass. Lucas knelt, nowhere near as out of breath, his face flushed as he gave the recently-claimed AR15 a professional once-over.
Tom had to drag his own mesmerized, mortified gaze from his son to focus on the sunken complex to which the vehicle tracks led them.
A lone, dented white four-wheel drive with its chassis hacksawed open sat parked, pointed with redundant headlights on the descending path to a concrete-slab house with a front office business beside the rusting, decrepit, tin-roofed kennels on the east side of the property. From the height of the crest overlooking it all, they had a good view of the strangled Irish strawberry trees framing the back of the house, more submerged car wrecks, and beyond them a collapsed chain-link fence, after which the land fell away to reveal more distant tree-studded, forest-overcome Ohio plains, and then the infernal, ghostly shadow of the twister grown to massive proportions throughout its advance towards them.
“We have to get into cover,” Tom hissed.
“And Lila?”
“She may be in there.”
“Unless we’re too late,” Lucas said.
Tom forced down bile, nodding curtly. “We need to interrogate anyone we find, not just kill them outright. Understood?”
Lucas nodded as if scolded.
“You don’t have to tell me that,” he said. “But don’t tell me we’re getting through this without more . . . without any more people getting killed. Right, dad?”
Tom replied with a hooded nod. His grip refastened on Yusuf’s Mp5. He unlooped the longbow from across himself and checked the sword and the pistol remained in place.
“I want you to stay here,” he said.
“What? Why?”
Tom motioned so Luke would see the vantage they enjoyed. Broad daylight and the elevation conspired to rob the site’s few secrets. As they watched, the front office door banged open and a pale-featured man in motorcycle leathers burst out, cramming a helmet onto his head as he ducked and headed through into the dog kennels, dislodging the shadows to reveal another figure just beyond the clarity of its rusted wire-mesh screens.
“You’re a good shot,” Tom said. “I need you to cover me.”
“There’s no keeping me out of this, dad.”
The words – and the tone – were disturbing from someone so young, and coming from his own child only made it worse, but Tom nodded fiercely rather than wince, almost grunting his reply.
“You’re in this with me whether you like it or not,” he said. “Or whether I do. That’s the deal. So can you fucking cover me, or what? We’re here to find your sister.”
Lucas gulped at the classic “careful what you wish for” – his own words maybe haunted him, knowing this was the quiet before the very literal storm to come.
“We’re going to need shelter,” Tom said.
He eyed the brooding entity roaring quietly across the
near beyond.
“And we don’t have much time.”
He nodded to Lucas and disallowed himself any other comment as he quit their vantage point and scurried down the embankment in a crouch.
*
MILITARY-STYLE OPERATIONS weren’t ever something he’d imagined in his future, and frankly Tom didn’t have the patience for much in the way of strategy with the howling storm thrashing everything outside. He made the edge of the cleared yard equidistant between the office door and the half-open kennels shelter with the sub-machinegun to his aching shoulder.
He ducked down and to the right without any pause and came in on the helmeted man gesturing to a broad-featured woman, struggling to be heard above the gale. The woman’s lizard-like gaze widened seeing Tom over her comrade’s shoulder, and though the helmeted man didn’t turn to see, whatever he saw writ across the woman sentry’s face was enough to send him dashing to the left, ducking low and out of sight beyond an intervening wall of wire, timber, and old chipboard dividers.
It left the woman dead to rights. Tom stalked forward, casting a desperate look after the vanished man, knowing any change in focus would let the woman run for it too. So he thrust the brutal muzzle of the gun straight at her, fighting back a low growl deep in his chest.
“Where’s Lilianna?”
The blonde woman stared back at him in shock.
“Gone!”
“Where?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
Tom pointed the gun at the woman’s bare throat above the Kevlar. And she stared back, frozen and aghast. Crashing noises and a muffled, feminine squeal came from deeper in the kennels and forced that low growl up and out of Tom’s throat.
“Fuck!”
He emptied a burst into the woman’s chest and face and she flew back into the dusty concrete corner and fell down dead.
He swiveled and took a step to chase the helmed guard, still processing the noise made by more captives barely glimpsed as anything other than movements in the wire cages deeper in the shed. Tom’s heart surged with irrational hope one might be Lilianna. But then a series of sharp rifle cracks kept him turning, and he nearly fell over himself checking back out through the day-lit opening to the slope and just a flicker of movement as Luke fired on the front of the house from cover.
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 67
