“Hey,” Tom said.
Dkembe looked equally caught in his own reverie, though his dark face broke into a wide smile once he’d overcome the momentary uncertainty, seeing Tom, every thought and memory of the past fortnight’s shocking violence and the death of his friends Laurance and Shirts coming into relief in the microcosmic reactions of his face.
“Uh, Tom,” Dkembe said, then added unnecessarily, “Mr Vanicek.”
“Jesus, man,” Tom barked. “Lay off the title. How’re you doing?”
As if to warm their exchange, he added, “My kids have been asking after you,” and then he remembered Lucas’s claim and it felt like a lie, even as he unconsciously checked down at the ripple-soled work boots on Dkembe’s feet.
“Um, what I mean is –”
“I didn’t think . . . after Laurance . . . like, I should leave you folks in peace.”
“Yeah, I appreciate that,” Tom said. “But, uh . . . what about you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You left your gear at my place.”
“I’m sorry about that –”
“Fucking hell, man, I didn’t mean it like that,” Tom said. “Are you OK?”
Dkembe’s shoulders sagged, the slightest bit of empathy enough to reveal the burden he carried every moment of the day.
“I’m just tryin’ to stay focused on makin’ a living, you know?”
“You’re working?”
“Work to eat, right?” Dkembe said. “Construction.”
Tom chanced a quick skim of the dejected-looking younger man, confirming Dkembe still wore the same sort of tool belt Tom’d inherited from his dead friend. An idea which blossomed as an impulse and then an instinct coalesced then in full.
“You’re a carpenter, right?”
“Yes sir.”
“And, uh, where have you ended up, you know, finding somewhere to live?”
Dkembe gave another mighty sigh and rubbed his face with one big palm. The two of them were the same height, though Dkembe’s dark African features made him seem bigger somehow, at least to Tom, who had the thought and hoped it wasn’t in a racist way.
“I went back to the Department of Housing like we’re supposed to,” Dkembe said. “They put me in with this family, like a bunch of Dominicans or Croatians or something. Couldn’t understand a word they said. You can imagine how much they welcomed my black ass into the family.”
“You didn’t stay?”
“I traded for a tent and a little portable cooker with this guy,” Dkembe said and shrugged. “Powered off an old car battery, you dig? I’m getting by.”
“Camping?”
“It’s rough, but it’s only for now,” the younger man said. “Least, that’s what I’m tellin’ myself.”
“Dude, look,” Tom said in that voice he used sometimes where it seemed like he was regretting the words, though really only trying to underscore that sincerity drove him to make the point. “You’re a good guy. If you can stomach it, I’ve still got a room. There’s no way my kids are letting me sleep alone any time soon.”
“The . . . front room?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure?”
“Hey,” Tom said more firmly than he liked, though suspecting the dejected-looking carpenter could do with a little parental authority. “I’m no charity. I could do with another pair of hands, another pair of eyes, you know? Help watch our backs.”
“Fuck, Tom, that’d be incredible,” Dkembe said. “Excuse my language.”
Tom just chuckled, tempted to say “Lol.” Instead, he shook his head.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m putting you to work right away. You’ll see I’ve got plenty self-interest, just like every other prick in this place. Someone kicked in my front door more’n a week ago and I’m no carpenter. I could do with your help.”
And this time he couldn’t help himself, eyes dropping once more to Dkembe’s potentially incriminating boots, shaking his head that he’d even consider Lucas might be right.
*
TOM LEFT DKEMBE pledging to retrieve his gear from its daytime hidey-hole, turning once more towards his home, tantalizingly close – once he escaped the lure of the fresh aromas spilling out like a luscious fog from the Night Market, always a temptation of sorts on his way to home base.
Walking up to the building, he tasted a moment’s disappointment knowing Iwa Swarovsky wasn’t home and might not be for days. The memories of the brief deliciousness of their clinch assailed him as powerfully as other memories far more traumatic, causing him to marvel at holding that sweetness in avowal against the terrors of the day. Again, those memories, half-sensate, half in his head, were plunged and discolored as Tom’s persistent rationality tried forcing such romantic ideas to conform with the hard reality of life in the Fury-plagued City. Not for the first time, he pondered the absurdity of how his children would react if the good doctor spent a little more time in their company – and in a roundabout way, wondered how he might feel as well.
It was two years now Maya’d been in the ground – not that they’d been afforded the luxury of anything like a burial or knowing the date on which it happened. The memory of poor little Jasmine was fresher yet, that pungent sense of dislocation not marred by anything like the myriad levels of competing needs and wants and desperate lost wishes as Tom’s failed marriage and the grief he felt, somehow, amid all the hurt, the sharpness made worse for how it all affected his children.
As was so often the case, Tom shrugged aside the whole ungainly, suffocating distraction with a few grumbled curse words, shouldered his pack, and entered the apartment building past its chipped and pitted front door.
Almost like she’d been waiting for him, Mrs Uganda appeared on the upstairs landing as Tom trudged up to his door, rueful and unhappy to see his apartment hanging open and neither of his children in sight.
“Afternoon, Mr Vanicek,” the older woman said.
She looked at him expectantly. On this occasion, Tom was happy for the formal title to go uncorrected.
“I thought you might like to know you’ve been broke into,” Uganda said. “Again.”
He glanced back her way and met her eyes, noting she looked somehow pleased about it, but in his bowels he knew why – casting him into the same lawless predicament as all the other apartment dwellers and turning him into a resource the old woman thought she could exploit.
“Uh-huh,” was all he said. “Red Armbands been by?”
“It’s daytime,” she said. “Not much use when everyone’s away, huh?”
“Not you, though.”
“This building needs its eyes and ears, don’t you think?”
“What about ‘work to eat,’ huh?”
Mrs Uganda only gave a sly smile.
“We all give in our own ways.”
“Right,” Tom said. “Any chance you can tell me who kicked in my door this time?”
“Walked in, more like it,” she said and let a little of the Creole in. “Boy, you don’t even got a lock on that door?”
“Hard to do when its busted.”
“And likely only gonna get busted again.”
Tom went from relaxed and dejected about the whole thing to alarmed in an instant. Of course, he’d scoured the pantry and made what trades he could, expressly with the aim of reducing their vulnerability to further thefts.
But he’d forgotten about the laptop.
“You maybe wanna come in,” Tom said more than begrudgingly. “I have to check the damage.”
“You might be going the wrong way, if you wanna get to the bottom of this?”
Tom paused halfway moving past her, drawn in by her deliberateness and flair for the dramatic, and followed her gaze down to Iwa’s doorway and then the door opposite it.
“Jesus, woman,” Tom growled. “Just speak your piece for once, will you?”
“I thought we was still in the negotiation.”
Uganda chuckled, folding her arms across wha
t used to be a heaving bosom like she still hadn’t quite made the adjustment.
“Spit it out.”
“We all got an interest here, Tom,” Uganda said with her rich voice no longer so subtle with the undercurrent of her intentions. “Ivan and that, they mean well, but you know they ain’t exactly what you call an effective police force, yeah?”
“Understatement,” Tom said. “Go on.”
“We each gotta watch our backs, if we got good intentions, yeah?”
“I get it,” Tom said. “You want me to help be your eyes and ears, huh?”
Mrs Uganda laughed and shook her head.
“You’re a fine-ass piece of muscle, Tom,” she said and dared lay a hand on his arm, her sleek black fingers curling around his wrist. “But we need more than that.”
If her fingers didn’t grasp him so tightly, Tom’d think this was headed back down a predictable path – another one of the City’s desperate female denizens driven by hypergamy to max out Tom’s best intentions. Instead, the look in the woman’s eye gave him pause.
“What is it you want, then?”
Uganda released her grip, trying to distance herself from the intensity of the negotiations in which she’d played her hand too open.
“You ain’t troubled by yesterday’s attack?” Uganda asked him. “Someone killed that man and dumped him in here hopin’ to cause a fuss.”
“A ‘fuss’,” Tom said.
“We need more than eyes and ears,” the woman said. “You’ve got me for that. What we need is a man of action. Fits you to a tee, yeah?”
“You’re trying to talk me into being your home security or something?”
“We need a fixer. And we’d be duly grateful,” Mrs Uganda said. “And I don’t just mean with please and thank yous. Folks are willing to pay, knowing we can sleep safe and sound at night. It’s not like the City’s got police.”
“The troopers?”
The older woman only scoffed. Tom repositioned himself, mentally if not physically, eyes flicking to the ajar front door and the boot print still in pride of place.
“Tell me what you know about who keeps hitting my apartment and I’ll think about it.”
And Mrs Uganda nodded with a wry smile, Tom the fly in this particular web.
She pointed to the second-floor door she’d glanced at before, gave a condescending smile, and bowed as she withdrew back into her own home.
*
TOM’S APARTMENT WAS empty, Lucas and Lilianna not yet back, and it only took a moment to confirm what he’d feared. The laptop was missing.
There didn’t seem much choice. Setting down his near-empty pack and archery gear out of sight from the doorway, Tom shucked off his jacket too, rolling his shoulder to relieve the tension he couldn’t shift from his jaw as he went back outside and eyed the apartment down below. Like with so many things, the moment he caught himself in hesitation, he ploughed on ahead like pushing someone else into the fray.
He thumped the stained door a couple of times with the side of his fist.
It popped ajar almost instantly. A skinny man aged no more than about thirty peered out through the gap with a hopeful, slightly comical look on a narrow face bearded with what looked to Tom like armpit hair. Watery blue eyes immediately shrank back on seeing him.
“Er –”
Tom pushed the door inwards and the younger man fell back a step, no good reason to explain why he was home for the day, Tom making a brief scan of the numerous improvised shelves packed with gear and supplies clearly taking up the majority of the tenant’s time.
“I think you know who I am,” Tom said.
He glanced down to confirm his neighbor’s work boots were a rough match for the impression on the door above, but instead found the man barefoot. Tom’s falling grim look worsened further still catching sight of the stolen laptop sitting on a table in the middle of the apartment’s crowded kitchen-cum-living space.
“Hey, I don’t want any trouble,” the man stammered.
“Stupid way to go about it then.”
Now Tom allowed himself to manhandle the thief, pushing him into the short hallway wall as if foreshadowing much rougher intentions.
“Please, don’t hurt me.”
Tom glowered, theatrical if nothing else. He took a moment to shut the door on their impromptu confab, dull eyed as he took in the expensive-looking lock and a pair of unlatched reinforcing bars.
“Quite a set-up you’ve got here,” Tom said. “Anyone else home?”
“I live alone.”
Tom wondered how he managed that – but that was a conversation for another time.
“You broke into my apartment twice now,” Tom said. “That’s not going to happen again.”
“Honestly, please, I didn’t.”
The man’s expression was contrite and panicked at once. He clearly wasn’t under any illusions about the potential for rough justice.
Tom stabbed a finger towards the inert laptop.
“That’s mine.”
“I was just –”
“Dude, don’t even fucking bother.”
“Your door was already broken –”
Tom pushed him hard against the wall again. They were almost as close as Tom’d been with Iwa Swarovsky. The memory flashed like an irritant and Tom growled at the juxtaposition, grabbing his neighbor by the lapel of the cloth jacket he wore, and spun him deeper into his Aladdin’s cave of hoarded supplies.
“You really don’t have to hurt me.”
“I think I do.”
“Man, I’m just an opportunist, honestly,” the skinny man said and sounded fit to cry. “I’m scum, I know. A bottom feeder. You weren’t home and I just –”
“What, you just thought you’d have a look around?”
The guy shrugged as if to say “something like that”.
“That laptop wasn’t just sitting out where anyone could find it,” Tom growled.
“Yeah, I wondered about that.”
“You’re focused on the wrong problem right now.”
“Please don’t hurt me.”
Tom wasn’t making any promises, so he said nothing, letting loose with an exaggerated huff of menace as he took a good look around the hoard. Some of the shelving looked pilfered from an old Ikea, but plenty of it was handmade. Everything from spare shoes to k-rations adorned the trove, which dominated all the available space in the apartment that was otherwise pretty much an identikit for Tom’s own.
“You live here alone?”
“Y-yes.”
“Name?”
“Aldous,” he said. “Friends call me Hairball.”
For a moment it seemed like he would offer his hand. Tom was ready to rip it off, and there wasn’t much concealed about the look. Aldous shrank back into his den, ferrety eyes a cliché, though Tom watched him close in case he had weapons stashed.
“Don’t even think about trying something here,” Tom said.
“Honestly, please, I’ve got my own thing going on,” Aldous said. “I don’t need any more trouble than I’ve already got.”
“Explain.”
“It’s just a . . . you know, a. . . .”
“A line?”
“No! I just. . . .”
“Have a lot of trouble finishing sentences?”
“It’s hard enough making a life here, you know?”
“Stealing off other people while they’re at work?”
“Hey, Mr Vanicek, if they want to be sheeple –”
“You know my name?”
“Everyone knows who you are,” the other man replied. “You don’t read the paper?”
“If you read about me in the Herald, you know I’m not to be . . . trifled with.”
Tom’s word choice left even him nonplussed. He sniffed, trying to regain his former glower, but it wasn’t working for him. He felt depleted. Aldous’ utter contrition and smarmy looks of hopelessness threw cold water on the rage he was trying to build.
“You stole
from my fucking home.”
“I won’t do it again,” Aldous like an embodiment of pathos. “Promise.”
“What the fuck did you take the laptop for?”
“Looked important?” Aldous shrugged. “You don’t have any power for it anyway.”
Tom grunted, trying not to remember his own earlier foolishness and failing.
“I could help you with that,” the nervous younger man said.
Tom bit down on his own unconscious tells to conceal his interest.
“I could help you get that laptop up and running,” Aldous said. “Free, you know? Call it compensation.”
“For my door?”
“That wasn’t me who kicked in your door, mister,” Aldous said. “That’s not how I do things. I’m just a business man . . . always trying to keep down my margins, you dig?”
“You didn’t kick down my door?”
Aldous forced himself to meet Tom’s leveled stare for added sincerity.
“Honest, Mr Vanicek,” he said. “For real.”
“You know I can’t just let you off the hook for stealing my shit?”
“I’ve got a small generator here, been meaning to do some work on it,” Aldous said and licked his lips, eyes flicking from his labyrinth of supplies and then to the front door. “Free, OK? It’s just a little misunderstanding.”
“You knew about me and you still went into my family’s home uninvited.”
Aldous swallowed hard.
“Please, Mr Vanicek,” he said. “Don’t kill me.”
Tom rewarded him with a chilling laugh.
“I’m not gonna kill you, Hairball,” he said. “You could be useful to me. And you want to be useful, right?”
“Yes,” he stammered his reply. “Yes please.”
“You’re in the eyes and ears business now, got it?”
“Eyes and ears business?” Hairball replied, clearly showing he didn’t.
“You’re here all day?” Tom replied. “Working for yourself, right? Living the dream?”
“It’s more like a . . . nightmare.”
“You know there’s problems here,” Tom said. “In the neighborhood, right?”
“You’re talking about the Urchins.”
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set Page 29
