One of the nearby rubbish crew leaders shouted for the teams to hurry up their work. MacLaren, Kent and the Irishwoman Bess formed a phalanx against the solitary Fury on the roadway, two of them in sharpshooter crouches, but MacLaren looked back Tom’s way to motion him forward. Torn by the scene of impending disaster for the innocent scavengers below, it took him a second to steel himself to obey – if that’s what you’d call it – and nock his bow and jog a hundred yards further up the line to heed Dan’s call.
“We have a noise protocol,” MacLaren said at conversation level as he arrived. “Don’t tell me why these fucking bin-men don’t listen.”
He met Tom’s stern and worried gaze.
“Let’s use that bow of yours, Tom.”
“There’s Furies down in the dump-site,” Tom said somewhat breathlessly. “And people, too. Scroungers.”
MacLaren ignored him. If the ex-commando looked flustered, little of it showed. He radiated command and Tom was relieved by it, though not a beneficiary himself.
“Can you take the shot?” he asked.
MacLaren pointed at the feral zombie scurrying left and right across the road surface another fifty yards beyond them. At the closer distance, the swaying of the man’s impressive yet rotting genitals was distractingly hypnotic.
“What about the people below?”
“Priority is keeping our own people safe,” MacLaren said. “Don’t freak out on me, Tom. I heard you’ve got a talent for this.”
The implied rebuke was enough to silence him, though not without Tom reflecting on how pride still often triumphed in the face of adversity, even for him.
“Of course I can take the fucking shot,” he snapped.
Arrow already fitted to the bowstring, Tom checked Kent and Bess still had their guns offering cover, and then he walked out another five yards and drew the arrow to his cheek. The Fury was a moving target, its growls now audible as it tried to find an angle to rush in and give vent to its furious desires while also hopelessly compromised.
The scream from down below sounded behind him just as he fired.
The hunting arrow hit the Fury in the chest, making little difference except seeing the undead cop stagger back a couple of paces, not even acknowledging the shaft now protruding from below where its badge had once been.
“You’re gonna have to use your guns,” Tom growled.
If they thought he was saying he couldn’t make the kill, he left them to the misperception. He couldn’t ignore the screams continuing from the girl down in the dumping ground behind him, and he wouldn’t waste another second. Only a few wagon-lengths behind, the trash had built up in such a slope that it was a safety risk anyway, and with the briefest of scans to ensure he wasn’t throwing himself into immediate peril, Tom vaulted over the concrete lip and braced himself for the fall as he crashed into the rubbish pile fifteen feet below and managed an uneasy lumbering run down another thirty feet to ground level.
He knew he was lucky not to break an ankle, but at least he had the right footwear. The three scroungers had pitifully few defenses, disappearing from Tom’s sight as he navigated his way down to what constituted the stinking, trash-strewn ground. There was plenty more to the dump than the City’s sloppy offcasts. Almost every piece of broken equipment, junk, old plastics, useless technology, and pretty much anything else deemed unredeemable by the Citizens duly made its way here, keeping the Sanitation workers in hot demand. And now it created a filthy maze through which Tom hurried at a pace just below a full run, careful of his footing and the disquiet of his surrounds.
He followed the screams every step of the way hoping to a God he knew didn’t exist that they wouldn’t end any time soon.
*
TOM SKIRTED BETWEEN two forty foot-high mounds of trailings as the girl’s screams finally cut out, and for the briefest moment Tom thought the silence was for the obvious and inevitable reason he feared most. Instead, the running girl almost slammed into him as he came into view and took in the sight of the undead skier laid on top of the old man with the cart, hungrily drinking from the man’s gushing throat.
The teenage boy – the first of the scroungers he’d seen – appeared from the midden just behind Tom’s right shoulder, taking one look at him before turning tail to run.
“Stop!”
But the teenager ignored Tom’s cry. He looked sixteen or older, but malnourishment had hunched his spindly form, desperation fueling his rapid exit from the scene of danger.
Smarter than the other scrounger perhaps, the little girl flanked Tom and hid in his shadow, putting the intruder between her and the hell on two legs.
“It’s got my grandpa,” was all she said.
Tom nocked the bow and loosed its arrow in one swift movement. Here, his aim was true, the task far easier with the woman in the ski suit gorging herself hungrily on the unfortunate old scavenger.
The arrow took the Fury in the back of the skull. She lay down across the slaughtered old man with an air of mild anti-climax.
A second Fury burst out from Tom’s left flank without warning, the lowing of its feral growl coming only as the well-rotted middle-aged black woman threw herself at him.
In such proximity, the bow was no use, and the Fury came so fast Tom had little option but to cast the weapon aside, backtracking and failing, trying not to crush the child he sheltered as the ravenous creature flew into him.
They went down on a bed of garbage, summer heat drying it of its worst excess, but leaving the broken canisters, shattered plastics, rough lengths of pipe, a scattering of busted iPads and old shop fittings and sharp crusts of dried fecal matter spongy beneath him as he levered the snarling undead woman away, flipping her over as he scurried upright again as fast as he could, dismayed to see the girl child off and running after the boy as Tom drew the ax from his belt in one swift motion.
The Fury righted itself with terrifying speed. Though rotten to the core, like most of the undead troubling the ruins of civilization these days, she’d been dead no more than a year and still had her fatal instincts intact – and the nerve fibers to use them. The woman’s bedraggled head, the face half coming off, snapped to attention at sight of the nameless girl running, and it was almost like the Fury was more drawn to the motion than the view of Tom testing the balance of the weapon in his hand coming in for the final strike.
Except the Fury was quick. Disturbingly quick and fast. Almost like a bad Martin Lawrence movie – as if there were any other kind – the undead older woman dodged Tom’s ax by a hair’s breadth and took off after the little girl, who herself trailed after the teenage boy, the warbling, plaintive, desperate, heartbreaking cry of “Derek, wait!” as effective as a car alarm in making sure the feral predator stayed on her tail.
*
TOM SNATCHED UP the longbow as he threw himself into pursuit.
For all her failings, the little girl was swift – but not swift enough to evade the Fury on her tail forever.
Pounding after her at a pace he could sustain, Tom chanced frequent looks up at the freeway overhead, intervening slush piles from past Sanitation endeavors intruding on the view of more and more of the trash collectors either furiously ditching their loads over the side or standing gawping at Tom and his potentially misguided heroics.
It didn’t help dodging the occasional heavier chunk of household waste tumbling down the mountains of trash and clattering into his path, and when they were followed seconds later by gunfire, Tom instinctively huddled down into cover, pained, breathless and exasperated that his own people halted his rough chase after the two young survivors seemingly determined not to help themselves. There was no strategy to their flight, only running heedlessly headlong through the catacombs of fecund trash before disappearing from sight – and with the undead woman flailing behind.
“Vanicek!”
Tom glanced up again to see MacLaren with his assault rifle braced in an upright pose. Beside him, Bess aimed her older-model M16 as if tracking the unsee
n Fury on its tangent, firing again and eliciting nothing more than panicked shrieks hidden by the unpleasant scenery in between.
“Get back up here!” MacLaren yelled.
Tom didn’t want to undermine his friend’s authority, but the command wasn’t even under consideration. The little girl’s yells sounded from close by, and that was sufficiently galvanizing for Tom to wordlessly shake his head, mouth agape sucking in vast lungfuls of desperate air as he spurred himself back into motion, drawing an arrow and nearly tripping over another long-since collapsed biter hidden and half-buried amid the junkyard floor, one arm reaching out weakly as it mewled at him, its unholy lifeforce spent. Tom ignored it, moments later rounding the bend in time to see yet another Fury – very much active, and drawn by the clamorous allure of the incident – literally bounding on all fours over the hillocks on his right, grisly jaws ajar in a perverted mockery of Tom’s exhausted grimace.
Tom juddered to a stop and aimed the bow, not at the latest Fury itself, but the space into which it was headed as he let loose. The lime-colored sports shaft hurtled across the distance to catch the snarling, designer-clad twenty-something in the throat. The arrow was the proverbial nail in its coffin, momentum disturbed and limbs tangled in the unexpected impact as it twisted sideways in shock and tried to right itself and gloriously failed, committed to its groundwards descent and thus tumbling into freefall until it crashed down, snapping, twisting and writhing on the path directly ahead.
Ax in hand once more, Tom brained the squirming thing and ran past leaving the treasured arrow for the moment, more focused on the ongoing danger seemingly always around the next turn.
The undead black woman reached the girl just as she caught up with her teenage companion, the boy startled, panicked, horrified and ashamed to find himself in a dead end under the shadow of the freeway overhead. Catcalls and cries of encouragement sounded above them, but they were as useless as anything else, and the scroungers’ twisted transit took them directly beneath the suspended roadway and thus at exactly the worst angle for any supporting gunfire – not that Tom trusted it anyway. He nocked another arrow as the teenager threw himself in front of the young girl – driven by valor or desperation, Tom didn’t know – and Tom watched knowing he was a split second later than needed to be as the snarling Fury launched itself at the young man and immediately flattened him.
Like some B-movie vampire sprung to life from one of the dozens of discarded, unspooling VHS tapes nearby, the Fury reared back and bared its fang-like teeth and Tom took one last moment of aim, easing back on the full draw strength of the bow lest the arrow go straight through.
And just as he released, the zombie’s head exploded.
The unexpected gunshot showered the terrified teenager in gore, leaving him with no worse a problem than a serious laundry bill, potentially including his own pants.
The Fury dropped wetly atop him, the boy wriggling free – and like Tom – staring without comprehension at the arrow jutting from behind the dead woman’s left shoulder blade.
Tom lifted his eyes back to the freeway, too sharp an angle to see anything, and then turned around coming face-to-face with MacLaren.
With trash on his boots still, the unit commander lowered his gently-smoking rifle, nodding with a centurion’s hardened tension and at once turned to secure any other vectors of attack.
*
THEY FERRIED THE children up onto the roadway, and since he’d been the one to inspire MacLaren’s own headlong jump into the abyss, Tom made it a point to be the last one helped up to safety. The gathered garbage workers eyed him with mixed looks of awe and annoyance while their colleagues finished sweeping the wagons empty with brooms.
“You’re quite the action hero, Tom,” MacLaren said with a tired, slightly pained grin.
“You pissed at me?”
“None of us want to leave people to die.”
MacLaren puffed himself up to a semblance of his sometimes military carriage, but without the enthusiasm to sustain it, exhaling heavily and aging ten years in the move.
“None of us want to leave people to die,” he repeated. “But sometimes we have to.”
Tom looked over to where the children Diego and Kitten were coddled by a couple of the female workers who still had their souls, the Irishwoman Bess guarding over them with a maternal instinct she expressed by checking in on their hydration again and again. The little girl – Kitten, because she’d lost her parents so young she didn’t know her own name – glanced Tom’s way, elated by her survival and maudlin with grief in the same shy look. A blue tag dangled almost loose enough from her tiny wrist to fall off. MacLaren had silenced her “grandfather” off-camera, before he could turn, torn to bits by the first Fury attack, which was the only concession to kindness they could really offer apart from saving her life.
MacLaren’s eyes returned to Tom, who took a moment to understand the ex-commando was checking out the anachronistic bow.
“Where’d you come across that?” he asked. “Hell of a weapon.”
“It was mine, before,” Tom answered. “We always had bows, growing up.”
“Handy skill.”
“My dad was big on medieval history,” Tom said.
“Plenty of hunting bows and crossbows around these days,” MacLaren said. “Most have got all those pulleys and shit.”
MacLaren’s gaze moved from the bow to settle more uncomfortably on Tom as he allowed himself the slightest of shy smiles.
“You sure you’re not into dudes?”
Tom’s battle-hardened gravitas broke.
“I’m gonna have to put you in the friend zone, dude. Sorry.”
“Shit.”
MacLaren laughed, knowing the outcome was preordained anyway.
“‘You’re like a brother to me,’ or something like that?” MacLaren said.
The battlefield context of the remark hung more heavily between them than was intended and Tom found himself nodding slowly.
“Something like that.”
He offered MacLaren a handshake the other man took with a wry, accepting smile.
“What’ll be done with them?”
MacLaren shrugged as Bess joined them.
“Dunno,” Dan said. “The Orphanage? It’s a City problem, now.”
“They weren’t even together,” Bess said, sadness conspicuous in her gentle lilt. “The old man wasn’t her real grandfather either. Probably fucking her, poor kid.”
Tom swallowed hard, no real evidence for the woman’s rough claim, and yet somehow conjuring the pathos of the entire incident like nothing else could. He walked off a few paces, desperate for a moment’s inner commiseration, drawn back to the little girl’s eyes as she tracked him like requiring some physical marker of assurance. He tried offering a smile, knowing it came out weak and lacking the conviction the girl craved.
“What a fucking mess,” he muttered.
The words weren’t intended for an audience, but he found the petite woman who’d yelled the first warnings eyeing him from nearby. She valiantly tried a coquette’s smirk, marred as it was by missing teeth and a milky film across one blue eye.
“What are you doing after shift?” she asked. “We should celebrate.”
Tom could guess what she had in mind. Instead, he regathered himself with a negligible huff, sniffed, brushing her off with the minimum contact necessary as he walked back to rejoin MacLaren now standing with Kent, the tall Islander offering him a fist bump, and Tom grateful, at least for the moment, of no more words.
*
THE DAY’S WORK left a couple of hours’ valuable daylight at the end of shift, as much as the earlier action also left Tom drained and needing sleep. He signed off with a paltry two ticks on his rations book, MacLaren leaving him with a wry jibe about not getting more despite his theatrics saving the two kids.
“Same time tomorrow?” the handsome ex-commando asked.
Tom nodded, his own wry grin more dour than anything else.
&nb
sp; Later afternoon – around five o’clock as someone with a wristwatch would have it – saw the First Gates crowded with workers returning from their far more domestic shifts, and scores of the inner City’s denizens hurrying about their business as the end of The Mile spilled more and more Citizens like effluent from a drain. Maybe Tom had waste disposal on the brain. Understandable enough, he thought. What he couldn’t shake of the stink of the day transferred itself into grim and unwelcome thoughts about humanity itself.
There was nothing within him able to stand by and watch the little girl come to harm, but he mastered his human heart, signing off from the Sanitation escort and deliberately striding away, forcing himself to welcome the uncertainty about hers and Diego’s fate. If there was one thing the City was fast teaching him, it was sometimes better not to know.
Again Tom found himself in the role of forging the wrong way into head-on traffic. Whatever business occupied the minds of the dozens upon dozens of people floundering into his way, it didn’t include much eye contact and even less consideration. He had to stop at one point, mildly bewildered as two men wearing motorcycle vests and conical hats led a line of seven women, each dressed in white shifts, and wearing strange, Ku Klux Klan-style headdresses obscuring their faces for everything except the long, unhindered tresses flowing down their backs. One of their escorts grunted at Tom, as if mistaking his pause for appreciation, and some vital quotient missing in the rough man’s gaze made Tom avert his own eyes before he’d realized – yet another vital reminder of the potential for savagery, even behind the City’s supposedly impregnable walls.
Although he knew it was a tactic for distancing himself from the day’s madness that still registered as an adrenal flicker in his veins, Tom’s thoughts returned to the inert laptop, now with the sought-after electrical cord, back in his apartment. The distraction was surprisingly effective – so much so, he almost didn’t recognize Dkembe until the pair of them near collided, throwing Tom’s ever-evolving problem-solving overthinking on a new and unexpected tangent.
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set Page 28
