Tom inspected the jars as a ragged chorus of cheers came faintly from the house. He backed out of the shed rattling an old biscuit tin and found Miranda grinning.
“Sounds like they found something good,” she said. “Last month, we lucked in on a warehouse wall-to-wall with toilet paper. We were popular that day, I tell you.”
The normally terse woman smirked.
“Let’s go check it out.”
“Sure,” Tom said. “I’ll catch up.”
He smiled, immobile, the tin in his hands, watching her go, other crewmembers peeling off from their duties to get in on the celebration.
The tin held only spare buttons and old tarnished coins. He put it back in the shed and went behind the back wall and relieved himself, surrendering to the tranquility of the afternoon and the tantalizing, weirdly ineluctable anticipation of two days’ leave. It wouldn’t be much of a vacation – there were jobs to be done, doors to be fixed, and time spent with children to further unpack the week’s horrors – but it seemed enough for now to enjoy a good piss knowing his labors were nearly done while summer bees hummed past him.
And it was a good piss. He had time to scan the countryside back to the rear, curious about some of the trees down in the woods at a cantered angle. The white flesh of broken tree-meat drew his eye, but just as quickly his examination was distracted by the sight of Chicago Jones cutting from the farmhouse and racing in a panic straight down the slope for those selfsame damaged trees.
Tom buttoned his pants and emerged from behind the shed, glancing around, no one in sight, a puzzled frown in place as he uneasily took off after Jones, the Chicago native who’d come to be a sort of friend despite the other man being one of the most unlikely candidates for surviving the end of the world. Jones was deeply fearful, and with a bunch of nervous mannerisms leaving him unsuitable for anything more than the cataloguing work which kept the Foragers busy. He certainly wasn’t one for trouble – which was all the more reason Tom started doubting himself as he made halfway down the slope and Chicago reached the trees ahead of him, dashing on and momentarily vanishing from sight.
Halfway down, Tom came to a stop and looked back at the silent farmhouse, wondering at his own instinctual reluctance to call out to the other crew.
*
TOM STOOD WITH the tomahawk in his hand, eyes on the farmhouse and erring on the side of leaving Chicago to fend for himself, but then a shrill cry sounded from beyond the trees, the intensity of it clutching Tom with a fear he could at least verify. And Chicago’s screams didn’t stop, either, so Tom threw on speed he wasn’t sure he possessed, careful of his footing even as he charged down and in through the thin forest.
The trees were only a hundred foot deep: not enough to shield an up-close view of the downed F22 Raptor fighter plane resting in the middle of a rocky stream.
It was the Foragers’ week for finding crashed aircraft. The jet plane had come in at an angle on the gully, shearing through dozens of trees and leaving a deep furrow of exposed black earth intersecting the rocky creek. The airplane was missing a wing, donated to the scenery behind it, but the main fuselage sat in ankle-deep water and Chicago Jones was caught screaming and frantic at the open cockpit in which he’d sought to hide.
The struggling man broke free of a Fury’s grip just as Tom’s eyes took in the scene, the visual non sequitur of the fighter plane made worse by the apparent freshness of the damage. Regrowth of summer shoots colored its trail of destruction, but otherwise the Raptor practically gleamed in the fell afternoon light.
Chicago’s plight called for immediate action, so Tom forced all other thoughts aside and ran towards the crash site at the same time Chicago emitted one more shriek and dropped heavily, more than a dozen feet to the ground. He crashed head-and-shoulder first with an audible snap, but that only set off more of his screams, hugely arousing to the dead fighter pilot now snapping and rasping in the cockpit. Still strapped into the crash that’d killed him, now the helmed pilot squirmed and growled, twisting his way partly out of the restraints, lured by the prospect of an easy kill.
Tom bounded across the rocky water and past Chicago to put a boot on the broken ledge of the wing and hauled himself up to the cockpit of the plane. Ax in hand, it took him a second to register the pilot’s helmet as the reborn Fury snapped and clawed at him. Spider-webbed mirror shades covered its eyes.
“Shit,” Tom said. “Chicago, are you alright?”
Tom switched hands with the hatchet and made a stupid attempt to unbuckle the dead pilot’s chinstrap in one neat move nearly impossible to achieve. The dead pilot’s head was suppurated and foul, the smell like shit almost overwhelming after baking in the Perspex cockpit for months. Bared teeth caught Tom’s knuckles and then Tom lost his composure, growling as he drew on nascent panic to grab the chisel from his belt and ram it up and into the creature’s face. Three stabs into the Fury’s nose and jaw struck brain and the horrible thing gave a wretched sigh and slumped sideways in its seat.
And revealed a military satchel bearing the seal of the United States government.
*
TOM GRABBED THE laptop bag and jumped down beside Jones, throwing looks towards the farmhouse visible only as a suggestion through the frieze of intervening trees.
“Chicago,” Tom said. “What happened?”
“I think my arm broke.”
“We’ll look at your arm in a minute –”
Anything else he could’ve said was cut short by a burst of gunfire – automatic fire coming from within the farmhouse.
“Shit.”
“They were under the floor,” Jones stammered and sat up.
Tom nudged the black satchel into cover, easily camouflaged amid the mud as he knelt and washed the bloody chisel in the stream ready to leap into action, but with no idea what to do.
“Who?”
“I don’t know,” Jones said. “They must’ve been hiding all this time. All through the last week, Vanicek –”
“How many?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “At least two. They had guns.”
“You ran from two men?”
“They had guns,” Chicago repeated.
“There were a dozen of you in there.”
The gunshots didn’t leave a lot of time for debate.
Tom looked at Chicago and felt disdain flood through him followed by a regret that such an appraisal was even needed. The man was useless to him. Of all the things Tom hoped to leave behind in the wilderness, such cold-blooded thinking was key among them. He felt its resurgence comforting and repulsive at the same time.
He told Chicago to stay put, drew the hatchet, and loped back towards the trees.
*
IT WAS OPEN ground and uphill heading back to the cottage, so Tom skirted west in a wide angle headed for the back of the building and its sheltering copse of cherry and apple trees, conscious he might be seen from any south-facing windows. As he reached the trees unhindered, he noted what the first security sweep failed to observe: the trees were picked clean of summer fruit.
The trees crowded the homestead’s back door, a red-painted thing warped from age that would’ve once served its occupants well, but not any longer. There was no way the old door would open without noisy protest. Tom eyed the grimy window beside it, then dropped into a squat, jaw agape to quieten his breaths, his fitness perhaps the only thing saving him from immediate detection as he flinched back out of sight at sign of movement just the other side of the dirty glass.
A man with a camouflage bandana around his face carrying an AK-47.
Tom had to work to keep his breathing calm, thoughts trying not to fly to his children as every ass-backward heroics he imagined led over and over again to making them orphans.
But Tucker’s crew were in dire straits.
The details were unclear. It was dark inside the farmhouse. Working carefully, he inched up to the window frame once again.
The gunman he’d seen stood with his back to t
he door, Russian rifle leveled to corral the Foragers in the main open living room-cum-kitchen. Tucker, Hugh, Fitz and the Councilor stood with their hands raised on the far side of the space in which everyone else – and it was literally everyone else who’d spilled into the old house, lured by the whiff of a big score – knelt in one big huddle.
Two more rough-looking gunmen countered the far side of the group. A balding, long-bearded man looking every inch the grizzled veteran threatened Tucker and Wilhelm with an old M1 Garand. An even skinnier and younger man wearing spectacles wore a hard-bitten gleam in his eyes as he covered the hostages with a handgun. The troopers’ weapons hung in a bunch over his shoulder. Fitz’s short-handled shotgun lay out of reach to one side on the warped bare boards of the farmhouse floor.
Tom dropped back onto his haunches and duck-walked along to the next window, tattered chintz curtain obscuring any useful view. He had to move carefully, the roots and a few fallen branches right up against the house’s whitewashed foundations. He continued to the corner, more open country beckoning on the north side of the house and its view back up to the roadway where they’d loitered just fifteen minutes before.
The voices in the house grew louder, reaching a crescendo before dying away. Tom waited for more gunfire, a reprisal killing, the scene set for what might be a mass execution – he had no idea. And the side windows didn’t reveal any details of what Chicago claimed. Internal walls concealed any trapdoors giving access to the farm cellar.
That said, the most hopeful of ideas flickered into thought, and driven by it, Tom accelerated his crouched progress around the north side of the house, feeling naked as the day he was born to leave the shelter of the cherry and apple grove. But sure enough, he spied an outside hatch, half-buried by five years of fallen leaves.
There was an urgency inside the farmhouse brewing like a weather system congealing out of tension. Driven by that sense, Tom risked dropping to his belly to crawl the ten yards beneath the milky side windows to where white-painted doors in the ground gave access to the cellar.
The build-up of leaf cover was hardly accidental. Tom’s fingers caught in the web of a camouflage net.
The surprise stilled his hand. He wanted to listen for more details before plunging ahead, but the pulse in his ear and his self-strangled breath made that futile anyway. He wrapped a careful fist around one handle and set to ease one of the doors open.
Only to find it locked.
*
HE KEPT TELLING himself the gunfire might’ve only been warning shots. Something far greater than mere frustration turned his fingers into useless claws as he gently exerted pressure on the hidden cellar just to confirm the doors were bolted from within. The prospect of lying in the mulch trying to find a way to work the bar free while his crewmembers knelt waiting for the whole shitfight to turn fatally sideways saw to quit his efforts almost as soon as they were begun. Continuing his circuit of the farmhouse seemed equally doomed. Out of caution, Tom backtracked to the sheltering trees and nearly reached the back door again.
And then it opened.
The door was noisy as expected. The gunman with the AK stepped into the brilliant day as casual as if for a cigarette, but he hadn’t accounted for the blinding light and Tom saw a reckless chance.
The ambusher put a hand to his eyes, squinting, and Tom slammed him bodily into the doorframe, the sound of breaking ribs almost shocking as he grasped the gunman’s belt to leverage him around, and thereby taking in one groggy, disorientingly dark view of the Foragers marching towards him at gunpoint.
The man grunted, trying to wrestle free despite his injuries. He stank like apple cider and athlete’s foot. One of his big hands pushed under Tom’s jaw to no effect.
A rust-handled Colt Python jutted from his waistband, but in that one fear-lengthened second, Tom fumbled the draw and the heavy gun dropped in the doorway as Tom kept twisting the gasping man around, trying to achieve so many things with the maneuver all at once that he couldn’t keep track, almost hypnotized by the looks of frozen shock on his comrades’ faces as he head-butted his target to keep him docile.
The gunman’s head rebounded from the doorframe as the other ambushers shouted warnings and looked about themselves in shock for other attackers. Tom got slippery fingers on the assault rifle, still in his opponent’s grasp, forcing it around as Miranda and Graves and Hanna and Hugh and Lee and those behind them immediately threw themselves flat and Tom squeezed his finger over his captive’s trigger hand and the weapon barked a burst cutting across the room at chest height.
The skinnier of the two ambushers fell back with his head and upper chest just flayed meat as the man in Tom’s grip surrendered to unconsciousness. Gravity and the unseen rifle strap looped around one arm pulled the gun from Tom’s hands.
He stood weaponless in the doorway as the last ambusher swiveled.
The situation was absolutely hopeless. Tom was totally exposed, spot-lit against the sunshine – the other Foragers diving for safety as the gunfire echoed in the abandoned house – and then Tucker launched himself at the bearded gunman.
The man lifted his lightweight rifle one-handed and savagely beat Tucker to the ground, his shot at Tom foiled – and Tom barreled into the house.
There was nothing for it. He threw himself into a madman’s charge, scooping up the Colt Python from the warped boards as Tucker clutched at the gunman who panicked, wresting his weapon free and grabbing Councilor Wilhelm.
A second later and the gunman had his hostage and Tom didn’t even think.
“Get down!”
He raised the pistol and fired and the detonation filled the room as the gunman didn’t quite get the end of his old rifle to Wilhelm’s chin, his own head exploding instead as the big caliber bullet hit him above one eye and the back of his skull flew apart.
Wilhelm hit the floor at Tom’s command with his hands over his ears as if that might protect him, but the suddenness of the execution somehow almost made him look foolish, splayed amid the blood-spotted linoleum and the mud tramped into the building during the past few years. The bearded gunman dropped heavily onto his ass and keeled over, head burst open.
Behind him, the blood-splattered carpet was folded back to reveal the open trapdoor to the cellar.
Wilhelm made like to stand and then thought better of it, crawling across into a recess near the kitchen sink instead and emptying his stomach like a made-for-TV cliché.
“Holy shit,” he repeated half-a-dozen times.
Tucker got to his feet with a hand to his gashed forehead.
“Secure the cellar,” he barked.
At once, Hugh and Fitz retrieved their guns. Claypool and Lee dived onto the unconscious gunman crumpled in the back doorway.
Tucker checked the safety on his Glock, but not without shooting a nervous, exasperated, relieved look Tom’s way.
“Good job, soldier.”
Tom nodded in return, and didn’t say anything more lest the adrenalin torturing his system betray itself in voice or face.
For maybe thirty seconds, the others left him standing like a hard-breathing statue in the middle of the grisly kitchen, then crewmembers slowly started forward, crowding around him, Hanna gently touching his arm and asking if he was OK, the Councilor moving through them to take Tom by the upper arms, not completely abandoning his politician’s beaming smile even as he fought against his own, very understandable shock.
“You saved my life, Mr Vanicek,” Wilhelm said.
“He saved all of us,” Tucker said without any of his previous deference.
Fitz and Hugh emerged from the cellar and gave the all-clear. Tucker joined Tom as Wilhelm and a few of the others fell back. The troopers moved past, drawing black zip ties from their belts and trussing the unconscious gunman now the others were off him. Claypool, relieved of his duties, only grinned at Tom.
“You sure I don’t know you from TV somewhere?”
Tom waved him off, releasing a pent-up breath.
/> “I think they were fixing to line us all up outside,” Tucker said.
Tom nodded slowly, chewing the thought over.
“I figured,” he said, and let his own uncertainty lie.
“Come on outside,” Tucker said. “All of you. Get some sunlight. Let’s get out of this . . . fucking pig sty.”
A couple of minutes after the gunfire, conversations bloomed like disease, the other crewmembers trying to make sense of what happened.
“They were in the floor the whole time?”
“Why didn’t they just wait. . . ?”
“Jesus, man, we were dead meat just standing there.”
Tom stood apart from it all, but he was grateful for the fresh air, letting the weak breeze cool sweat he hadn’t known was pouring down his back. Tucker came alongside.
“Good job, soldier,” he said again.
“I’m no soldier.”
“Good enough to me,” the unit leader said. “Here.”
He drew a knife from his belt and took Tom’s wrist, cutting the blue tag.
“You’re allowed to do that?”
“I’ll square it with ‘em,” Tucker said. “Fuckin’ bureaucrats.”
He gave a guilty look over his shoulder and was correct suspecting Councilor Wilhelm stood close behind. To his credit, the City man played deaf, again patting Tom on the shoulder and moving past and outside and out into the sloped field and its decrepit vegetable gardens until he was by himself. Chicago trudged his way up the pasture towards them, left arm at an awkward angle as he cradled himself in obvious pain.
“We were drawn in like amateurs,” Tucker said without the vehemence he obviously felt.
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set Page 18
