After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set

by Warren Hately

  “I am very thirsty, though,” Tom said. “Water?”

  “Coming right up.”

  “You know what I want,” Carlotta said to him.

  “Oh baby, I know what you want,” Wilhelm said.

  It was painfully awkward to hear the black man fail so badly at being black. Carlotta winced, softening somehow as if maybe that was somehow endearing if you were his woman. But maybe it was also just to secure Wilhelm’s exit. The moment he’d gone, Deschain threw a low and unamused stare Tom’s way.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You know why I’m here,” Tom said back to her in an equally hushed voice. “Your husband’s the one who invited me.”

  “And you know that’s not what I’m asking,” Carlotta replied. “I don’t know you. We barely know each other. What are you trying to drag me into?”

  “You spoke with Councilor Ben-Gurion?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “Yes,” she said again, though it took her a moment.

  “Then we’ll talk later.”

  “You’re asking me to keep a secret from my husband,” Carlotta hissed. “That’s a hell of a leap of faith to ask from a total stranger.”

  “Well,” Tom said and was lost for words for a moment as he motioned slowly at the fine table settings. “Maybe soon, at least, we won’t be strangers anymore.”

  *

  TOM DRAINED HIS glass, as thirsty as he’d claimed, and Wilhelm gestured at the jug as he went to a drinks table and started sorting his wife a short sherry.

  “I made a decision about your Confederates and I’ve already asked Chief Ortega to provide us an escort for tomorrow,” the Councilor said.

  “Against my better judgement,” his wife added.

  “You’re coming with me?”

  “Yes,” Wilhelm said and turned back to face them. “I need to meet these people directly and get my own feel for them and . . . what they’re proposing. Then we can negotiate then and there.”

  “Ortega’s picking the squad?”

  “Not a squad,” Wilhelm replied. “The Chief suggested Mr Greerson and a driver. Do you have any problem with that? He’s our Chief of Safety, after all.”

  Tom kept his misgivings about Ortega to himself, somehow unsure amid the gigantic clusterfuck of recent days whether the maverick Safety chief made the wrong call acting on the Raiders after all. His men, though, might be another question.

  “Greerson seemed like an OK dude,” Tom said and shrugged. “I heard you’ve still got Burroughs locked up?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the Chief’s call too?”

  Wilhelm sighed and looked down at his empty plate in clear frustration.

  “Yes.”

  “We heard about the violence today,” Carlotta said. “Terrible.”

  “I was there when it happened.”

  “You do have a talent for being Johnny-on-the-spot, don’t you, Tom?”

  Whatever Wilhelm hoped Tom would make of the comment was undermined by two women dressed almost like nurses entering the dining room carrying two impressive trays. A teenage girl obviously related to one of the two older women followed them with a dish set with tongs, and she immediately served the coarse fresh bread rolls onto the smaller of their two plates. Tom instinctively placed his hand on the roll, somehow thrown off to find it warm, the smell of freshly-baked bread late to register. His stomach awoke and did a slow, gelid, sickening flip as it kick-started back into life, and Tom winced as he quickly lifted his left hand to cover the temptation to belch. He turned the sudden activity into reaching for the jug again and carefully helped himself to a refill.

  “How are you recovering, Tom?” Wilhelm asked.

  “Fine,” he said. “What about Burroughs?”

  “We should’ve released him already,” Carlotta said.

  Wilhelm nodded, thrust back into his annoyance.

  “Maybe so,” he said. “Now our hand’s been forced, we can’t afford to.”

  “What?”

  “Chief Ortega agrees,” Wilhelm said. “If we give into the Brotherhood’s demands, we’ll never be able to bring these supremacists to heel.”

  “You think you’re going to . . . bring them to heel?”

  Tom made a face like the words themselves were distasteful, but the councilors chastened their replies for the sake of the housekeeping staff, and Tom was happily forced to ease back into his chair as the two older women served fried fish, a salad of roast vegetables seasoned with salt and lemon, steamed asparagus, and field mushrooms. There was butter for the bread and a bottle of wine unopened on the table. Tom methodically ploughed into the meal at a pace just below what might be rude, destroying the bread and calmly noting his own lack of compunction in accepting a second and then a third dinner roll. The Councilor’s job offer, Tom’s rejection of it, and Amsterdam’s earnest if ill-informed gratitude all swirled through Tom’s thoughts like cream in the coffee he anticipated at the end of the meal, wondering if he should deliberately drop a few hints to make sure it happened.

  If he was going to throw away the chance for a perfectly respectable line of work with excellent perks for the sake of doing exactly the same duties for free, Tom figured he might as well avail himself of whatever crumbs such self-sabotage still allowed.

  *

  PHILOSOPHER BARKEEP MAGNUS glanced up from his musings behind the long counter as Tom entered, checking the pour on a customer’s drink, and then throwing Tom a welcoming grin.

  “Howdy, stranger,” he said. “Been keeping out of the news?”

  As if Tom needed any more reasons to wince. He did so and clambered up onto one of the bar stools. The man and woman further along from him took their drinks to a booth. Apart from a pair of sex workers in the far corner, the Dirty Vixen was quiet, but for the tinny sound of some kind of repetitive jazz playing subtly in the background. Candle and lamp light caught in the wall of glass bottles and the inevitable mirror, radiating out to gently Photoshop the dingy cantina and its faded and frayed booths and over-stuffed couches, only the ministrations of the philosopher-cum-bartender who kept the wood bar gleaming in the weak light. Magnus rested his elbows on the counter and would’ve said more except for a moment of brief open-mouthed surprise as Councilor Abraham Ben-Gurion ducked his head under the lintel coming in from outside.

  “Is it cool if we use your place for neutral territory?” Tom asked Magnus.

  “Er, are you buying drinks?”

  Ben-Gurion reached the bar and joined the conversation.

  “What can you do for us with this?”

  The former software genius fished out a hand grenade and set it down on the counter. Magnus did a double-take, and Tom joined him in surprise.

  “Wow, seriously?”

  “Sure,” Ben-Gurion said.

  The younger man shot Tom such a look of sunny good cheer that Tom had a moment wondering if the Councilor was completely unhinged. But Magnus sealed the deal with a laugh, sweeping the grenade off the counter and into a tray down below.

  “I’ll get you a bottle of what I call the ‘good stuff,’ though it’s not much better than the regular rotgut coming through here this week,” Magnus said. “Anyone got a lowdown on some quality hooch I can peddle to these people?”

  “You’re sounding more like a real bartender every day,” Tom said to him. “Very Wild West. Keep it up.”

  “Thanks.”

  Ben-Gurion accepted the bottle and retreated to one of the booths, but Tom lingered with Magnus for a second.

  “Can you keep this under your hat?”

  “Metaphorical hat,” the barman said. “Sure.”

  “Thanks,” Tom said. “Keep the change.”

  “Ha, very funny.”

  “Thanks.”

  Tom joined Ben-Gurion, settling across from him and noting a mild fragility in the other man’s eyes – eyes that looked much older than his curly Jewish geek haircut and neat, short-sleeve sh
irt otherwise suggested. Tom scanned him as if for the signs of multiple sclerosis, the two of them not known to each other any better than Tom and Carlotta Deschain.

  The booze would help. Tom retrieved three glasses and sat back down again.

  “My first question is if you always walk around with a grenade in your pocket?”

  “Yes, Tom, I have a few questions too,” the Councilor said. “But yes, usually I do.”

  “I figured you more for an iPhone sort of guy.”

  Ben-Gurion chuckled, avoidant of eye contact.

  “I think of it like Delroy and his, a-ha, ‘Mastercard’, you know . . . as in, ‘don’t leave home without it’?”

  “But a hand grenade?”

  “I have a terminal condition, Mr Vanicek,” Ben-Gurion replied.

  Now the eye contact was made, gaze serpentine, ultimately butt-hurt at the inescapability of his own forthcoming demise and angriest of all there was no one really to be blamed.

  “You never know when you might want to go, right?” he said and faked a laugh. “I don’t think I could eat a bullet, you know? Besides, a hand grenade has its uses in more ways than you might expect. Like just now, for instance.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want it back?”

  “No,” Ben-Gurion said and gave a gentle laugh and looked away. “I’ve got a crate of them at home.”

  Tom took advantage of the lull in insecurities to quietly boggle at all the red flags, despite Ben-Gurion’s seemingly soft-spoken demeanor.

  Carlotta Deschain saved them from any more social awkwardness. She appeared at the edge of the table and shot a nervous look around before staring at the pair of them and choosing to bunk in with Shakes. Ben-Gurion experienced a brief moment of his customary trembles, smiling awkwardly, almost shy at his fellow Councilor despite their long history.

  “This had better be good,” she said.

  “I was thinking that about that bottle of wine I just bought,” Shakes said.

  He gently bit his tongue as he fiddled with the bottle and got the catch off.

  “Is it meant to fizz?” he said. “I think I can hear it fizz.”

  Tom said he’d only have one drink, then met Councilor Deschain’s nearly hostile stare. She folded her arms across her breasts as Tom met her gaze and exhaled slowly, just settling in for the long haul, which of course could unsettle almost anyone. Deschain glanced away, seemingly exasperated already, but like Ben-Gurion, with no one else really to blame for her dilemma. She returned her eyes to Tom.

  “Shakes told me what Earle told him, but I’m not into Chinese whispers,” she said.

  “Are we still allowed to call it that?” Ben-Gurion asked. “Sounds kinda racist.”

  “Give it to me from the start,” Carlotta continued, clearly used to ignoring Abe’s remarks.

  “In a nutshell?” Tom replied. “Let’s see. I’ve got an encrypted US Government laptop from a still-functioning US warship which I think’s made contact with survivors on the east coast, just south of Newport. That’s where the USS George Washington was based.”

  “It’s the George Washington?”

  Despite inviting Deschain for her military expertise, Tom’d forgotten the other implications of her background in service.

  “I had friends on the George,” she said. “Are you serious?”

  “It’s a nuclear-powered ship,” Tom said. “They’d have a constant power supply. Storage, supplies . . . it sounds like they picked up a pretty diverse array of people from the military, the Government, NSA, CIA, you name it.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Carlotta said. “Where’s the laptop?”

  Tom gestured with minor difficulty at the slim backpack he still wore. Deschain studied him closely. Ben-Gurion must’ve felt the silence was all about him and chuckled.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Carlotta said. “This is exactly the sort of thing you should be bringing to the Council, Tom. You had dinner at my house today and didn’t tell my husband a thing about this.”

  “There was a dinner?”

  “Abraham,” Carlotta said tiredly. “Not now.”

  “I was there to discuss one thing with your husband and just one thing,” Tom said. “I’m the one that found the laptop. I’m the one who nearly got killed finding it. Maybe it was meant to be me who found it.”

  “I don’t think you really believe anything like that,” Carlotta replied.

  “No,” he said softly. “But it was a good line.”

  “Let’s go to Ernest with this,” Carlotta said. “It’s not too late, we could just go there now. You can come too of course, Abe.”

  “Am I the only one who thinks Tom’s absolutely correct that maybe it was him who found it for a reason?” Ben-Gurion asked. “And keeping it from our fellow Councilors right now is also absolutely the correct thing to do.”

  “Oh OK, genius,” Carlotta said tiredly. “Educate us dumber folks.”

  “Well, you heard there was another shooting in the City today,” he said. “Right? The Council’s got a core set of problems that need its undivided attention. I think we should think of our little encounter tonight as a new . . . unofficial . . . sub-advisory panel, you know, a-ha, looking into the whole . . . possibility-of-other-settlements-thing we’ve actually talked about before, remember?”

  “You’re on the Council too, dipshit,” Carlotta said.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “But I’m not speaking as Abraham-on-the-Council here. I’m one of my parallel selves.”

  Ben-Gurion looked at his colleague with a little less sarcasm and then winked at her.

  “We just have to see if we can get that laptop up and running and if you can decode it,” he said to her. “First order of business before we really know anything, right? I don’t even know if we can do it.”

  “You said there were documents?”

  “That’s what Tom showed Earle,” Shakes said. “Right, Tom?”

  “I want to see everything,” Carlotta said.

  “Delroy said he was limited in what he could print –”

  “I’ll run off duplicates,” Ben-Gurion said casually. “No biggie.”

  “But you have to keep it on the down-low,” Tom said.

  He realized the monumental nature of what he asked, assuming Carlotta valued a trust-based relationship with her husband, which frankly wasn’t a given. But Tom just as equally knew the folly in his own thinking, as if he could include more than one person in his conspiracy and not thereby “invite the world,” as the old adage went. In that way, he had next to zero hesitation asking Deschain to make such a pledge because he didn’t realistically expect her to honor it. The real question was how long she could keep Tom’s information to herself – long enough, he hoped, to get a clearer picture of what the files really told them.

  *

  THE LATE SUMMER sun threw on a burst of early morning brilliance as Tom drove his windfall 4WD into the alley beside the Human Resources building, pleased to see Councilor Wilhelm and the other two men already there. Driving the vehicle with his arm in a sling was more difficult than he liked, and the truth was, his left arm was still too sore to keep at it for long. Apart from Wilhelm and the gaunt-bearded Safety commander Greerson, the designated driver was a young Hispanic guy with an athletic build who wore a little Confucian beard that didn’t suit him at all.

  “Tom, this is Trooper Alvarez,” Wilhelm said as the two men shook left-handed. “You remember Denny Greerson?”

  “Just call me Greerson,” Denny said. “That’s what I’m used to.”

  Tom nodded. His eyes fell on Greerson’s mismatched running shoes rather than the combat boots he and Wilhelm wore. But it was Dan MacLaren in his thoughts, his handsome features flattered by the morning sunlight in the same alleyway less than a week before.

  “Fucking hell.”

  “Something the matter, Tom?”

  Wilhelm wasn’t good at hiding his concerns. Greerson looked harder to f
luster. He gave Tom a curt appraisal.

  “People said you used a bow,” he said. “Where’s it at?”

  “If you look real close, you might get a clue.”

  Tom slowly flapped his captured wing. Greerson continued looking unamused. He had a weird gum-chewing expression explained when he spat onto the dirt-caked street and the wad of tobacco left his teeth stained and green. Tom turned to Alvarez and kept wondering what to call the guy since the Department of Safety eschewed anything but the most nominal of ranks.

  “Alvarez, you’re good to drive?”

  “That’s what they said I’m here for,” the young man replied. “Where’d you get the wheels? We’d be better off with a Humvee.”

  “Driving this, we could be anyone,” Tom said.

  “Discretion is the better part of valor, right?” Wilhelm said cheerfully.

  Alvarez gave the Council man a sullen look, clearly with no clue what the hell Wilhelm was on about.

  Abolish military structure, Tom thought, and don’t complain when no one salutes.

  “Let’s get going,” Tom said. “We’re expected.”

  *

  GREERSON SETTLED IN the front passenger seat, leaving Tom and Wilhelm in the back. Tom was frankly relieved for a little extra space after his brief, much-fraught, six-mile-per-hour circumnavigation of The Mile. And he softly chuckled as Wilhelm did the right thing and seat-belted himself in. Greerson glanced back from the front seat and angled himself in case anyone wanted to explain things further.

  “The Chief chose you special for this mission?” Tom asked him.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “Lucky me.”

  “What about you, Alvarez?” Tom asked. “First name?”

  “Leroy,” the driver said.

  He gave a casually handsome grin.

  “Alvarez is fine, too, though.”

  “OK, Alvarez,” Tom said. “Are you a Forager too?”

  “What?” the man said. “Naw, man. I work directly for the Chief.”

  “Mr Alvarez is one of Ortega’s internal operations team,” Wilhelm said, ever the politician.