*
TOM, LILIANNA AND her brother were only a few blocks from home when a dirty-bearded man stepped out from a knot of people standing on the sidewalk around an outdoor barbecue and yelled at Lilianna, “Hey, show us your pussy!” as the three of them passed.
Tom’s flush of anger was cold blooded, but Lila just gave a muted chuckle as Lucas frowned beside her and looked back at the stranger with even more obvious confusion. It took Tom a second to notice Lilianna’s bemused grin.
“That’s the second time someone’s said that,” she said and laughed lightly. “Why do they think I’ve got a cat?”
“Yeah,” Lucas said. “Weirdo. He probably wants to eat it.”
The gears in Tom’s brain whirred a moment. The grubby old man behind them chuckled to himself and Tom couldn’t help a pause of hesitation before resuming the walk with his kids knowing pragmatism needed to triumph over outrage. But sensing Tom’s conflict, Lucas stopped, his ever-present frown deepening.
“Dad?”
“It’s nothing,” he said.
Before he could explain that he’d explain himself once they made a bit of distance from the old creep, Lilianna emitted a sarcastic guffaw, but left her brother to voice their mutual skepticism.
“There you go again,” Lucas said. “Treating us like little kids.”
Tom stopped, motioning for Lucas to catch up to them.
“You really don’t know what that means?” he asked them. “Pussy?”
Lilianna’s mirth fell at once.
“Oh,” she said. “Is it a sex thing?”
“Sorry, but yeah.”
There wasn’t much point pulling punches. Luke was six and his sister eleven when the lights went off for good, and though there’d been adults around them in the intervening years, Tom wasn’t one for dirty talk and the others were all the same. Without growing up broiled in the digital-media slow cooker, and hidden from what adults would’ve laughably once called “bad influences” – the nightmare of the apocalypse throwing that into stark context – Lilianna and Lucas were painfully uncorrupted. And again Tom was thrown by his ever-evolving awareness of how the past few years had sheltered them, now there were people everywhere.
“Are you saying that bearded old turd just yelled something gross at my sister?”
The boy’s look was as sharp and as hard as an ax.
Without waiting for further confirmation, Lucas spun on his heel and started back down the street, forcing Tom and then Lilianna to follow like they were tethered to the same yoke. And seeing which was this was headed, Tom jogged to catch up, halting Luke with a hand on one shoulder just thirty feet from the dirty old man and his group all watching them.
“Hey,” Tom said. “Hold up here. I need a smart play from you.”
“It’s just some old man, dad.”
“He’s not alone.”
Tom chanced a look, Luke’s antics inevitably absorbing the group’s attention. The bearded heckler watched Tom’s plight with undisguised bemusement, not as old as his dirty face, graying beard and tattered mechanics’ garb made him appear. There were three more men, and two scrawny, chicken-faced women standing around the upturned barrel, most of them with improvised skewers cooking God knew what.
Luke consented only by force of will. They started away, collecting Lilianna where she hovered uncertainly in the middle of the open street, building fronts framing one way, evening shanty stalls the other. Dull-eyed traders and itinerants judged them as they passed.
“That motherfucker deserves a kicking,” Lucas said.
“Son,” Tom said hard but quiet. “This isn’t worth the fight.”
The look in Luke’s eyes said otherwise. His knuckles whitened as they clenched and unclenched into fists. Tom scanned his profile in an instant.
“Hey,” he said, trying to bring him back down to Earth.
“I’ll let it go this time,” Lucas said.
“Geez, thanks for defending my honor, bro.”
Lilianna said it with a look of flushed concern, saluting her brother’s spirit, but not the chance to get stabbed in the street – and in her case, maybe worse. Tom wondered if confiscating his son’s knife was much of a solution in a City where almost everyone carried concealed blades for reasons of survival.
Maybe keeping a lid on the City’s guns wasn’t such a bad idea after all, Tom thought.
They made the next silent intersection, only foot traffic either way as the street led them further away from The Mile. Tom spoke gruffly, tinged with regret.
“If classes are putting you this much on edge, Lucas, we need to have a longer conversation than this,” he said. “OK?”
Lucas didn’t say anything. He just kept staring straight ahead.
*
THEY HAD COMMISSIONED what looked like an old dinner theater for their Council meetings. The squat brick building had plenty of open space inside, solar panels on the roof to give enough juice to the lounge lighting switched on at the onset of night. The theater had galleries and a kitchen too, which should’ve been Tom’s first inkling the following dinner wouldn’t be at Ernest Eric Wilhelm III’s rumored mansion.
But between now and then, he had a City Council meeting to get through.
The philosopher-cum-bar owner Magnus hadn’t lied when he said meetings were the social event of the week. As a survivor of such meetings back in his time as a cub reporter, Tom was taken aback to see more than a hundred people queuing to enter the Town Hall. At least for Columbus, the apocalypse brought a fierce revival of interest in the workings of local government. It almost made Tom chuckle as he guided his children ahead of him into the throng of people headed for the proceedings.
More of the Enclave’s clean-cut Administration staff lined the foyer, most with clipboards and pads, pens out as they handled or deflected incoming Citizens. Tom recognized the towering Sorrel Williams striding like a human megaphone among the people coming through into the main assembly, a clipboard over his head as he called for any more questions.
A low ceiling designed to give an intimacy to performances came unstuck in the face of the City Council meeting. The noise of the crowded onlookers created an unpleasant buzz, Tom wincing as he led his children into the thick of it, holding Lilianna’s hand and Lucas all but doing the same with hers.
In such a fashion, they descended from a tiered upper level to the floor of the old theater itself, the majority of the lighting focusing its limited brightness upon the wide stage, back-lit by vast red velvet theater drapes, with black-painted backstage flats framing several long tables set end-on-end with seven people seated at them. The whole thing was a surreal juxtaposition, flaring a match in Tom’s memories of the young thespian he’d dated in college a lifetime ago and her fascination for Beckett and the Theater of the Absurd.
Perhaps that moniker never seemed so well set.
Tom jostled them into a position with a better vantage – the crowd noise not enough to censor Luke’s complaints – and spotted the black-pated Wilhelm in the middle of the assembled Councilors. The head count left him nonplussed, given all Delroy Earle’s talk of “The Five”. There were several ancillary tables off to one side as well, more modest affairs, but the answer didn’t lie there either. Tom’s eyes stayed briefly with a sallow-faced, military-looking type with a black ponytail, seated in the middle of four other men and women so clearly top-level Admin bureaucrats that they didn’t merit any further quiz. Then Tom’s eyes returned to the main table, quite literally center stage, drinking in the dynamics of the seated Councilors and their subtle relations to each other as they waited for a cue for the meeting to start while they shuffled office folders of paperwork, each on his or her own. Each Councilor was helpfully identified with a desk plaque – a visual non sequitur, zombie apocalypse and all that still not dislodging priorities, apparently.
A woman of color sat close beside Wilhelm, maybe just a little more than ten years his junior. Carlotta Deschain. She’d dressed for the occasion
in a sensible black suit jacket, black hair mostly pinned up high and spilling from the top of her head like a riotous crown. She passed Ernest a sheet of paper and their fingers touched, lingered, a gentle joke between them.
A stern-faced woman sat to Carlotta’s right – “stage left,” as Tom’s old girlfriend would say – a severe fringe hewn into Dr Dana Lowenstein’s thick, shoulder-length chestnut hair. There didn’t look like there’d be much that amused her about anything. Her eyes flicked with annoyance at the hand games between Wilhelm and Carlotta Deschain on her left, but to her credit, Council President Lowenstein was more focused on imposing order on the barricade of paperwork spread out before her.
Her end of the table only had one more occupant. Abraham “Shakes” Ben-Gurion was a cliché of Silicon Valley software nerd, and for good reason. Tom remembered the glimpse of him from the Enclave. Although the computers were mostly gone – the one stashed in Tom’s apartment not withstanding – Ben-Gurion’s native genius kept him in the City’s inner cabal even despite his genetic legacy rebelling against him. His nickname came from spasms he was slowly failing to control, any feasible treatment for his multiple sclerosis now lost in the past.
To Wilhelm’s right, and a fair distance apart, hunkered the form of Air Force Colonel August Jamieson Rhymes. He looked like an actor hired to play the part of a cantankerous, ageing military commander, though he’d allowed himself to grow a glistening white handlebar moustache and lavish, feline sideburns against Air Force regs. He wore the green dress uniform still, or at least the jacket and pants. The years and their accumulated troubles showed in the colonel’s papery skin, thinning white hair exposed by the hot theater lights.
Beside him was a neatly-bearded man aged the same as Tom, and adjacent him, positioned so her wheelchair could fit in, an older Asian woman poised at the table’s far end. Australian refugee and former immunologist David Hamilton wore a white lab coat like a badge of office. Across from him, Aileen Leng rested an iPad in her blanketed lab, no longer troubled by anything as intrusive as legs to get in her way.
The lighting was bad in the gallery, but it dimmed a few notches further and the more experienced attendees hushed their din. The Councilors on the stage looked self-consciously aware they were mere actors preparing their lines as the noise dimmed in cadence with the gathering gloom which left them the center of attention.
And a half-dozen troopers with rifles at rest slowly fanned out across the black background behind them.
*
COUNCIL PRESIDENT LOWENSTEIN used an actual gavel to start the meeting. As she launched into a customary preamble, Tom felt his son press against his side, the imploring look on Luke’s face demanding a reasonable explanation why any of them had to sit through this – or stand, as seemed the case.
Tom craned his neck to look back over the crowd massed around and behind them, noting more troopers moving slowly through the folks up on the mezzanine. Williams and several more of the Admin workers worked the crowd to enforce a cordoned-off path between the main doors and the stage, and as Tom watched, a motley slew of Citizens formed a queue along it. Williams checked his clipboard, motioned to several of the people closest by, and led them further up in the line to where a female official changed the batteries on a microphone, at the foot of the stage, the closest middle managers stage right, and another group of well-dressed women in the orchestra pit sitting at desks taking notes.
Tom couldn’t spare himself a head shake of bemusement verging on actual wonder. Any of the horrific memories of the past few years felt like pages torn from a comic book compared to the sheer mundane urbanity of the proceedings.
He might’ve dwelt on it more – pondering what it said about humanity’s drive towards reconstructing the familiar – if it wasn’t for who he saw next.
*
FINNEGAN LOCKE MOVED through the throng a hundred feet away without seeing him.
While Lucas tugged on Tom’s sleeve as if expecting some sort of answer, Tom felt the speech drain from him, instinctively hunching down to evade the other man’s sight.
At that distance, and in such weak light, Tom was anonymous in the crowd. Hidden for the moment, and with Dr Lowenstein’s welcome speech coming to an end, Tom chanced another look across the far side of the gallery at the unexpected figure from his pre-apocalyptic life.
Like almost everyone else, former white collar fraudster Finnegan Locke was focused on the illuminated stage, settling into a place shoulder-to-shoulder with his fellow Citizens about ten or twelve rows from the front – not that there were any rows, the assembled residents held back at the front by a line of Safety officers going wisely unarmed so no one could wrestle their guns off them to make the Council meeting a whole lot more interesting.
It was years since he’d seen Locke, and seeing him here, now, in Columbus, was like a final disorientation Tom couldn’t bear.
And Locke had Tom’s reporting to thank for sending him to prison.
In the briefest of moments that he’d even thought about such things, Tom imagined most the corrupt and criminal figures who’d suffered the consequences of investigative journalism followed the same fate as every other prisoner locked away in confinement once the rule of law fell amid the rise of the Furies. Seeing Locke alive and free in the City sent a choking flush creeping up from Tom’s chest to his throat, threatening to invade his skull. He averted his reddened gaze, animal fight-flight-or-freeze instincts overcoming rational thought like a PTSD response, or at least that’s what Tom reasoned with himself, clamping down on his flustered panic before it could rise and overwhelm him with a savagery he hadn’t experienced in years.
Lilianna threw off Tom’s hand as his grip started hurting, taking in her father’s look and growing instantly alarmed.
“Dad, what is it?” she only half whispered.
Tom turned back to her, fighting the urge to cover her mouth with his hand like they were back in the Library again without any prospect of survival. He swallowed fiercely. Conflicting memories forced their way through him like a virus at high speed. But he clutched his daughter’s shoulders more carefully instead, more lovingly, aware of Luke’s eyes on him too as Tom couldn’t stop himself now looking back his target’s way.
Finnegan checked an expensive-looking wristwatch with an unguarded lack of patience, turning to the stranger beside him and swapping a few queries as he brought his eyes consistently back to the stage. He wore a beard now, and flecks of steel were shot through it, tarnishing the ever-well-dressed specter from Tom’s past. But those eyes were unmistakable. They briefly swept Tom’s way, Locke like Tom’s brother from another mother with his eyes so alike, slate gray and subtly illuminated on his otherwise handsome face.
Lucas stretched up on tiptoes to hiss, “Who are you looking at, dad?”
Tom ignored him. One of the random Citizens pushed in beside them was tall enough to provide cover, and Tom allowed himself a longer study of his one-time nemesis, ready to inch back out of sight. The scar running from one corner of Locke’s mouth down through the beard and out of sight was a new addition, but the stranger wasn’t a hallucination. It was Finnegan Locke, sprung to life as neatly as any old newspaper photograph.
The last time they’d crossed swords, it was outside the courthouse, Tom wrapping up his to-camera piece as Locke was led out under police escort. And Locke gave Tom that look. An air of impotent threat in it that – like with most of them – would never come to anything.
Until now.
It seemed like lifetimes ago. And in different worlds – almost literally.
Tom forced himself to check back in with Lilianna and Luke. On the stage, the Councilors swapped a few remarks, and then, in her dry voice, Dr Lowenstein opened Question Time, reminding everyone about new strict time limits.
“We don’t want to be here all night, people,” the Council President said.
“We have plenty of official business still to get through.”
*
A
BULLISH MAN was first to take the microphone, but Tom wasn’t focused on his words. His children awaited some further explanation, their father stretching the moment as he checked in every direction, inexplicably activated and needing to make sure they were safe. He knew there was no logical direct threat to him and his family just because of the coincidence of the moment, but he still couldn’t dispel the low-level urgent whispers warning to ward for danger.
He spotted the barman Magnus waiting in the queue for the microphone, equidistant between him and Finnegan Locke, but Tom wished in vain for someone closer, astonished at once to find that wish answered noting his Reclaimer comrade Kent standing just a few rows behind them.
“I’m not here to upset anybody,” the man with the microphone said.
The PA system echoed his words loud and clear.
“This is third time I’m here addressing the Council and asking you to take action on this issue.”
The Councilors all wore lapel mikes. Dr Lowenstein’s clipped answer was just as clear.
“Mr Burroughs,” she said to the speaker. “Question Time, please. Let’s make it quick.”
“OK then,” the man answered. “When are you going to introduce a fitness test for my female recruits?”
The broad-shouldered man stood at the front of the queue like he’d let the question hang there for as long as needed. The Councilors swapped looks as if unsure who should answer, and again Burroughs stepped in.
“Come on, you guys gotta have a coherent policy here,” he said. “This isn’t the old world. I see plenty of fit and healthy-lookin’ young men fetching water here tonight. You’re putting Foragers in danger if you keep sending us dud recruits.”
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set Page 31
