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

by Hately, Warren

  A heavyset man with a shaved head and neck tattoos stumbled into Tom’s view and collapsed to his knees, clutching at the blood gushing from his chest and throat as he fell over and died. The office door behind him hung half-open, darkness beyond.

  The hostages in the kennels started thrashing madly. A woman’s frantic, incoherent cries renewed Tom’s insane hope the female trooper lied, and Tom whirled back the way he’d come and stormed into the back of the dingy complex lit only by dangling orange globes. He thrust the Mp5 out front, scanning between the individual caged hovels as best he could alert for the other of Wilhelm’s fled henchman.

  Two women and a man writhed bound and gagged in kennels at the rear. Daylight shone on them from the tin back door left ajar.

  The screaming woman worked her gag free, but locking eyes on Tom’s furious mask left her stricken, and it was only the male captive shaking the wire cage door and grunting, gagged, at him, that broke off Tom’s stare.

  He glanced at the gate’s flimsy padlock. Outside winds blasted into the kennels, the outside concrete walls not quite reaching the timber-framed roof. Tom stamped down on the mechanism as hard as he could. The lock broke, and the young man stumbled out, but Tom glowered at him with blood rage still clouding his vision.

  “Stay low,” he grunted. “A lot of bullets. Tornado coming in.”

  Then he whipped around the dividing wall and headed back to the front.

  *

  TOM LEFT THE kennels just as the office door blew open again and a solid, chestnut-featured man in tactical armor charged out hefting a grenade launcher.

  To his shame, Tom threw himself to the ground, but the trooper hadn’t even registered him – focused instead on swinging the snub-nosed weapon around on Luke’s position and promptly opening fire.

  The M40 grenade lobbed true right into Lucas’ sniper spot, detonating as it hit the tall-grassed ridge and exploding with a sharp bang. Dirt rained down, but was instantly flung away from them by the gale – and Tom grabbed onto the horrified reprieve to vault bodily from the ground and charge into the gunman.

  Tom drove Chesterton directly into the flaky-painted frame of the officer door. The ginger-hued trooper’s thick-haired head smacked back into the concrete and he slumped without passing out, growling his own inspiration even as he clawed at Tom’s chest for purchase.

  The trooper seized a handful of Tom’s tunic and drove a knee into the inside of Tom’s thigh. Tom’s stance buckled immediately, and the trooper parlayed the momentum into a wrestling move to somehow get astraddle while also driving Tom onto and then into the half-ajar door.

  Tom hit the wood face first and blacked out for the shortest second. Blood flowed back into his brain along with terrified thoughts about his son. But the adrenalin burst of it all saw him backhand Chesterton aside, before the other man could consolidate his hold, and then with his hip and ribcage shrieking their protests, Tom threw his arm and shoulder into Chesterton’s midriff despite barely getting up again from the floor. The trooper drove powerful elbows down on Tom’s head and shoulders and Tom took the punishment in trade for the time to get boots beneath him once more. He clutched his foeman around the waist with both arms and then thrust Chesterton bodily upwards.

  The chief trooper’s head smashed into the concrete lintel of the doorframe and he was barely conscious to resist when Tom drove him up again a second and then a third time. Tom finally dropped the bloody bundle hard into the open doorway and snatched the Glock from Chesterton’s hip.

  Outside, Luke’s vantage point was just a ruined chunk of exposed dirt. The wind continued stripping it, black clouds like gnats peeling away from the crest to vanish into the day turning rapidly dark. Whole tree branches and boards and pieces of sheeting crashed across dead Dixie’s private enterprise as ambassadors of the tornado’s advance.

  Tom grabbed Chesterton by the beard and almost couldn’t shout the question for all the tears choking him.

  “Where’s Lilianna?”

  He shook the guard and repeated the question two more times.

  “. . . dead by now,” Chesterton groaned. “Or one of them.”

  Tom cursed him and shot another look back to Luke’s blasted position hoping to see his son reappear. The noise of a motorcycle roaring to life was almost inaudible beneath the weather’s attack. Tom could also barely hear the half-conscious Chesterton, who continued speaking, groggy, perhaps delirious. Tom grabbed him one-handed by the vest and dragged him into the lee of the kennels, throwing suspicious looks back to the office door too, no idea of how many armed men or women there might be.

  “Where’s my fucking daughter, you piece of shit?”

  Tom half-throttled the man. In more ways than one, it was a miracle Chesterton could speak at all.

  “Greerson took her, with the other one,” the trooper replied. “With the others.”

  “What ‘others’?”

  “Greerson’s pals . . . Wilhelm’s . . . frequent flyers.”

  “You piece of shit. . . .”

  “. . . never touched any of them.”

  The redhead hawked up a piece of tooth and spat, eyeing Tom with difficulty as one of them swelled shut.

  The motorbike noise rose to a peak – and echoed by another.

  Back up the slope, the old four-wheel drive coughed to life and fired up as well.

  Tom checked Chesterton again – no immediate threat – and then towards one of the female captives coming forward, still pulling tape from her wrist.

  “They were talking about your daughter earlier!” the carob-haired woman said and blinked rapidly, flustered, all kinds of fucked up. “You’re Tom Vanicek, right?”

  The other two captives flanked her.

  “I worked with your daughter,” the woman said. “I know her. I met you too, on the train the day you came in. I’m Gwen Stacey.”

  Tom took it all in without blinking. Chesterton slumped except where Tom clutched him.

  The two engines outside squealed amid a sickening crash and it felt like the whole kennels shelter almost gave way as the impact of a collision rolled through.

  “Twister’s coming in,” Tom said as if he’d heard nothing. “Tie him up.”

  He motioned to Chesterton as he released the broken man and then headed back into the storm to find his son.

  *

  THE HELMETED MAN’S screams were dulled by the mask he wore, but the moment Tom registered them, the crushed man stayed forgotten, pinned by the faded white four-wheel drive now with its grille caved in around him against one of the trees to the side of the yard. The roofless vehicle had driven up and over the fugitive’s motorbike, and Lucas stepped out of the driver’s seat and waved a hand at his father.

  The nearly twelve-year-old held the AR15 by his side as casual as a career marine. And the look he gave his father floundered in confusion as Tom charged forward and grabbed him in a fierce hug.

  It took a few seconds for Tom’s breathless profanities to stop. Their crouched embrace left him at much the same height as his son, and Lucas scanned back over his dad’s shoulder to the front of the office, surveying it for threats.

  “Dad. . . .”

  “He fired a fucking grenade right where you were. . . .”

  “What?” Luke replied and dared make a puzzled face. “No he didn’t.”

  “You were set up there.”

  “First position, yeah,” Lucas said and snorted, amused despite his father’s clearly near-incoherent relief that he lived. “You don’t stay in the same spot once you reveal your position, dad,” Lucas said more gently. “Anyone could tell you that.”

  Tom straightened as he released his son and not yet ready to acknowledge the world of pain radiating through his battered back and limbs. He glanced to the crashed four-wheel drive instead.

  “Yeah,” Lucas said without needing the question. “The guy from the shed tried to get away on that bike he’d stashed.” Lucas shrugged. “I stopped him.”

  Tom snorted.
“You stopped him.” He shook his head. “You sure fucking did.”

  “I was already using the truck for cover, so. . . .”

  Lucas suffered his father’s bloody hand ruffling his hair. The man Tom had freed earlier now appeared with the young black girl, guarding the front of the kennel office. The younger man bore a fresh assault rifle he trained on the half-open door. Behind them, near the kennels’ entrance, the older woman Gwen crouched beside where Chesterton lay hogtied.

  Tom went to bellow and order, but an awful ripping noise came in slow motion, causing them all to flinch as a fresh blast-wave of haze tore through the yard. The back of the kennels started disintegrating one rusty tin roof panel at a time.

  The big serrated sheets cartwheeled into the air like a card dealer’s trick, lethal and sharp, and now it was Lucas clutching his father by the arm as they rushed down to the others and into the concrete bunker.

  Chapter 8

  THICKENING CLOUDS SWALLOWED the moon, turning their escape into a blind run into the dark as Lilianna and Aurora reached the road and almost instantly fell through weeds into the concealed culvert. Throwing looks behind them, Lila clawed at the soft, rock-filled earth for purchase and instead found Aurora just ahead of her. Laying down flat on the road’s edge, her friend reached down to help Lilianna scramble free, joining Aurora on her belly as one of the men’s bad wolf impersonations rang out somewhere yonder.

  Gasping for breath, Lilianna fought the temptation to make lying down on the road surface a permanent deal. Her exhausted limbs forced her shakily to her feet, where Lila remained half-crouched, fatigue still with its hold on her as she willed Aurora also to stand.

  Aurora flicked night-darkened eyes up at her. Lila nodded back tiredly, encouraging and compassionate for her friend and the wish to surrender which Lilianna had to resist as well.

  “They’re still coming,” Lila said.

  Aurora took the proffered hand and they limped to the far side of the road crouched together. Trees and telephone wires crossed overhead as they headed down a tarmac laneway stout wooden fencing, plunging on into a thick, vision-defeating landscape of armpit-high growth and trees rising to erase all sense of direction around them.

  Lilianna scanned about, confused, unable to discern the shape of anything in the blackness. She turned back to her friend.

  “What if we head south?” she said. “Get back across the river?”

  Aurora paused to answer, but then a single gunshot cracked out somewhere close by.

  Then the Fury hurtled like a mad thing down the lane behind them.

  Tortured ankle be damned, Lilianna clutched Aurora’s arm and they renewed their flight, but they had to fight just to stay upright, no grace in their movements as they forged through dense foliage, tiptoeing inadequate to the task. The Fury slowed too, snarling as the resurrected young man paid no attention to the gauging brambles and ripping vines.

  Lilianna tripped and her fractured ankle screamed – and her along with it.

  She collapsed among the overgrowth, regret for the noise drained by a palpable sense of doom that washed over her.

  “Run, Aurora!”

  “What? No!”

  “My ankle’s gone,” Lila told her. “Go now. Please, one of us has to live!”

  The Fury tore in at them, savoring the sense of easy prey at last.

  Aurora stumbled away a few paces, hesitant and lost, and then she gave a defiant bark, forging back through the trampled undergrowth to Lilianna as the black-haired revenant threw itself at Lila struggling to get to her knees.

  Lila grabbed the thing by one shoulder and a wrist and would’ve gone under, except Aurora got hands to the Fury’s face and the other arm as well, and together, the women held it back.

  The young man’s terrified eyes were now just black orbits, focused on nothing other than slaking its eternal thirst. Aurora screamed in rage, squealing as the thing crunched teeth down on one of her fingertips clawed into its mouth. The bone broke, crushed, and the girl howled, and Lilianna wrested the desperate pressing weight of the creature off to one side.

  Lila’s hands slid around the monster’s throat. The Fury was too freshly dead for Lilianna’s numbed fingers to do much as she crushed its larynx and pharynx. She might’ve done more, but Aurora’s shrieked warning turned her eyes to Hardy wading in through the edge of the bracken with his rifle trained on them.

  Aurora clutched her ruined hand as she shrieked and wept.

  “Enough already!” the battered girl cried. “Enough! Enough! Please!”

  Crying, Aurora moved to help Lilianna again, wrestling with the black-haired Fury snapping jaws at her face. The creature snarled, as trapped as the two women grappling it, and quested back around until it saw Hardy, standing with the gun still trained on them, licking nervous lips.

  The Fury screamed with rage and dived away into the closest patch of cover, thrashing away unquietly into the darkness. Its escape faded in volume to leave just Aurora and Lilianna breathing heavily under the scope of Hardy’s gun.

  “Have you got ‘em?”

  Slinky’s pained voice echoed out of the dark. He appeared a second later at a hobbling pace using his upturned M14 as a crutch.

  “Yeah,” Hardy said.

  He continued licking his lips whether he knew it or not. Lilianna put up her hands, but beside her, seeing the gesture, Aurora just groaned and sank to her knees, and was lucky to stop there.

  “You’ve caught us,” Lilianna wheezed. “Congratu-fucking-lations. Big men. So proud.”

  The rest of the diatribe failed to materialize. She hung her head, hands on her knees too, utterly spent.

  “What do you say, Hardy?” Slinky asked the other rogue trooper with an exhausted kind of delight. “Does this look like the right place?”

  “To end them?”

  “Eventually,” Slinky said. “Eventually, yeah.”

  *

  “GREERSON’S DEAD,” LILIANNA spat at the two men. “I killed him.”

  “Yeah,” Slinky replied. He didn’t sound upset. “We figured.”

  A look passed between the pair. Lilianna managed furrowed brows, despite the exhaustion. Slinky’s handsome whiskered face curled into an evil smile, pensive, and the most worrisome sign of all was when Hardy also relaxed.

  “Now take your clothes off,” Slinky jeered.

  Lilianna didn’t budge an inch. Hardy glanced at his fellow trooper.

  “Here?”

  “That was what I was just askin’ you,” Slinky snapped back.

  “We don’t have to share them with Greerson,” Hardy said.

  Disjointed, his dark eyes took a long, truculent pass over Lilianna and then lingered there. Lila shivered, crossing her arms over the ruined polo shirt tied around her chest.

  Hardy added, “We could take our time.”

  “Aw,” Slinky smirked at him. “I knew you had the love-eyes for this one.”

  He snorted and motioned at Lilianna.

  “I don’t know what’s with you guys,” Slinky said and shook his head. “You’re dumbstruck by that pussy, aren’t you?”

  Hardy blinked and looked across at his comrade and then withered as Slinky adopted a mocking singsong tone.

  “‘Aw, and maybe we don’t have to kill them either’, hey Hardy? Right?” Slinky asked him and laughed. “‘Oh, maybe we could just keep her, huh? Maybe one day’. . . .”

  Slinky didn’t have the appetite for the performance and finished with a final snarky grin.

  “I dunno, man,” he said to Hardy. “Maybe ‘Love can’t be rushed,’ right?”

  Slinky sniggered. His fellow hunter drew his handgun and shot him in the head.

  Poleaxed, the handsome trooper’s corpse fell like the strings’d been cut.

  To Lilianna’s horror, Hardy then calmly turned and shot Aurora too.

  Her friend’s expression froze forever in a terrified scowl as the bullet took her between the eyes and the back of her skull blew out, taking m
ost of her brains with it. A ghastly sigh escaped the executed girl and then Aurora’s pallid corpse slumped into the bracken.

  “You fucking –!”

  Hardy cranked the pistol right at Lilianna and for an awful moment she had no idea what he’d do. So she froze.

  The last of Greerson’s men, Hardy wasn’t much bigger than her. He backed away towards the more solid footing of the roadside and gestured with the gun for her to follow.

  Lilianna looked back at dead Aurora as if to awaken from a bad dream.

  Instead, the dawn broke – and took Lilianna’s heart with it.

  *

  LIGHT STARTED TO assemble their surroundings as Hardy prompted Lila along the battered road. The grass grew thick and rank to shoulder height to east and west, that river smell still in the air which blew ragged pieces of the vista around them like gnats. Lilianna kept checking over her shoulder, but Hardy stayed well back with the pistol lowered, still in his hand, ready to execute her as cleanly as he’d done her friend. It was only ten minutes since Aurora’s death and Lilianna’s distraught sobs hadn’t left her.

  “Keep on walking,” the trooper said.

  Lila flicked her eyes back at him again, careful not to show anything other than horror for the cautious, worried-looking little man. Hardy’s teeth nibbling at his upper lip only reinforced his rodent vibe. His work trousers were reinforced with black tape, and the upholstery revealed legs thinner than Lila’s own. Skin the color of pencil shavings and his haunted, determined, fatalistic leer came into focus as the daylight gradually strengthened.

  “We’re going to get out of this,” the trooper said.

  Hardy motioned to the north where the distant horizon was little more than a black smear with the incoming storm.