“You could opt out,” Greerson said. “But you won’t. You sure it’s not you who’s excited by all this chaos?”
“I was talking about Ortega.”
“Yeah,” Greerson again. “Takes one to know one.”
“Jeez, look at you,” Tom snapped back. “Full of quotable wisdom tonight, Greerson.”
Greerson only hung his head.
“If the City has to roll the dice tonight and put its faith in just one person, Vanicek, I’m glad it’s you.”
The troop commander awkwardly made himself force the eye contact and Tom’s jaw scrunched, discomfited by Greerson’s earlier admission, all muddled up as it was with their time together in dire straits back in the day already vanished into darkness. Tom’s guilt returned as fierce as ever, now he was walking alone into the inferno, but he smothered it and offered a handshake and no words and Greerson looked glad for it.
Random gunfire echoed off in the distance somewhere.
And Tom felt truly awful that he was about to betray all of them.
*
GREERSON LED THE way through the foyer doors, sporadic activity out on the open ground still despite the late hour. They started along the face of the big building back towards the main Enclave checkpoint.
“If you’re going into this solo, the least I can do is make sure you get there.”
“I appreciate it,” Tom lied.
“The real question is what is it that Rhymes’ troops actually want,” Greerson said as they walked. “They knew Wilhelm had control of the Enclave and it sounds like their attack was easily rebuffed. They couldn’t risk laying siege.”
“Let’s hope,” Tom said with a shudder. “Ortega kept himself off the radar for long enough that we don’t know what kind of mischief he might’ve been up to. He could still have people on the inside, loyal to him and Plume and Rhymes.”
The eight men and women on duty at the gate turned as Tom and Greerson approached. Tom glanced aside at Greerson as they fell into earshot. A fit young man in a tracksuit and Kevlar vest jogged up behind them and offered Tom a small vial of painkillers and a bottle of water.
“Mr Amsterdam sends his regards,” the youngster said.
“Thanks.”
Tom didn’t wait on ceremony, unscrewing the drink and downing four of the dozen-odd pills. Then he gingerly checked the handgun still stuffed into the back of his pants beside the walkie handset clipped to his belt. He attached the water bottle as well and stuffed the pills into the pocket of his pants leg.
“Listen up,” Greerson said to the collective. “We need to set internal patrols, here, within the Enclave, starting immediately. We also need perimeter sweeps . . . for Furies.”
Greerson turned to a chip-toothed woman in a Kevlar helm. Amsterdam’s runner stood close by, clearly keen to listen in on the news.
“Mary,” Greerson said. “Make sure those procedures are put in place at once, OK?”
“Why?” the woman answered. “Where are you going?”
Greerson hitched his breath a second and glanced at Tom, then excused himself, extracting the M14 from a young trooper’s hands and motioning for him to cough up the ammo as well. He passed the weapon to Tom, who accepted the poisoned chalice with a rueful, dejected grin. Greerson then calmly returned his attention to Mary as he slid on his own helmet.
“Best not to ask.”
He gave her a non-ironic salute and nodded to Tom and they headed through the checkpoint and then through and beyond the immediate halogen-lit night.
*
MORE DISTANT GUNSHOTS rang out over the stooped and dilapidated houses around them, some of them stately once, despite crowding from the typical Ohio brickwork stores now cluttered by the foundations of the shanty town filling the streets between the Enclave and The Mile. It wasn’t a great distance to travel, but Tom was somewhat glad for the extra security of Greerson with his automatic weapon trained on every dark corner they passed. From somewhere ahead of them came a long peal of woman’s laughter, then a faint crashing noise like from metal trash cans, and then a couple of rats skittered across their path, driven by the probing torchlight of even more figures, possibly a trooper patrol, further down the closest alleyway.
There was no way to tell if the soldiers were Ortega’s men or troops still loyal to the City – whatever that meant anyway – and discretion once again proved the better part of valor as Greerson led them hurrying to the next street corner and seeking cover as a City trooper carrier thundered past and turned for the Enclave.
There was a clattering noise behind them and the pair turned as one. Getting caught unawares by a random civilian didn’t reflect brilliantly on either of their efforts at stealth, though Tom knew it’d be optimistic to say he was running on anything close to a quarter tank of gas right now.
The long-haired man looked drunk or stoned or religious or something like that, swinging towards them with the help of one of the poles attached to the nearest awning fronting an old shopfront. A beatific though mischievous smirk creased his scrawny face as he half-stumbled towards them wearing a stained linen shirt and frayed pants.
“What are you two doing out here, hmm?” the man grinned. “Up to no good?”
Greerson grunted and brought his silenced rifle into play, emptying a neat burst into the man’s chest point-blank. Tom was too shocked to say anything or even react – not shocked at the gravity of taking another life, but maybe the ease with which it unfolded, as seemed a regular thing in the world they’d come to know. It didn’t stop him gawping at the newly-minted Safety Chief, but Greerson gave him a terse, hardly complimentary scowl and flicked his eyes over the skinny man’s butchered corpse laying perfectly still.
“Let’s keep moving.”
“You just wasted that guy,” Tom half-whispered.
“Yeah,” Greerson said. “It’s after Curfew, remember? C’mon.”
He motioned the way with the gently smoking gun barrel and there wasn’t much for Tom to do but follow, all the way down past the Foragers depot, dodging two more foot patrols and hearing a shrill, almost childlike cry break out beyond the rooftops of Brown Town nearby. The noise of an approaching engine scuttled Tom and Greerson’s final approach to Ortega’s compound, a wire fence-enclosed, brick-walled, tin-roofed series of sheds running like a shawl around a two-floor brick building with a skillion roof.
It was a hell of a place for a single man to claim as his own given the cramped conditions everywhere else in the City, and the Kevlar-clad figure who rolled aside the main iron gate confirmed the alleged weed factory could be home to any number of potential threats.
But not Ortega – or at least not quite yet.
Seconds after scurrying into the dark of an alleyway a half-block from the compound, a military jeep roared past revealing Ortega and a female soldier at the wheel.
The jeep swerved at a fair pace right through the compound’s quickly-opened gate, and then the barricade rolled back into place with a precision only possible with radio coordination. Pressed against the wall of the alley, the sweat itching on his tired skin, Tom tried rethinking his intentions as well as everything that’d brought them to this place – and came up empty-handed for any other choice than what he had to do now.
“It’s time,” he said gravely.
“Are you sure, Tom?” Greerson asked. “I can back you up.”
“No . . . I appreciate it, Denny.”
He paused, meditative, like he might say more. Instead, he patted Greerson on the shoulder while swallowing his potential remorse.
Tom slung the rifle around his back, checked for traffic like he was six years old again, then strode out from the shelter headed for Ortega’s gate.
*
HE MADE IT to about five yards short of the compound barricade before a man’s voice called for him to halt.
“Stay where you are!” the voice came again. “Get on your knees and disarm.”
“I’m here to see Ortega,” Tom called back.
Two held their rifles on him and the third quickly pulled Tom’s arms behind his back, causing him to emit a harsh bark of agony and almost rise again.
“Please,” Tom said. “Go easy. I’m injured.”
“Fuck you and your injuries.”
“Carlos might not see it that way,” Tom said. “Let’s let him decide, huh?”
The sentry took the ax from Tom’s belt and briefly studied it.
“Bring him inside,” one of the others said.
They urged Tom to his feet and steered him in through the undercover gateway, dark away from the moonlight of the street and just the random geometry of what little Tom’s senses could tell him as he was hurried through a big, shed-like garage with room for the jeep and two box trucks, a luminous glow through thick black plastic mesh at the rear of the space, the undercover area’s roof caged by wire and camouflage netting and the main brick building corralling the left side as they hauled him painfully up two steps and through a door, then across a barren linoleum workroom of some sort inside.
There were several more big rooms off the immediate corridor, but the three guards dragged him deeper into the old brick building, veered through a stripped and gutted former kitchen, and then out again through another external doorway.
Deeper, and now behind the parking lot, mesh wire fencing stripped from an old garden center ran from the back of the main building to the far sheet-metal fence enclosing the factory’s rear block. An undercover nursery occupied the wide, eighty-yard space.
However it was powered, a dull but comprehensive array of hot lights played down on rows upon rows of wheel-mounted industrial wooden crates now housing thick stands of staked-out cannabis plants, the rows separated at points by head-height walls of black plastic beneath more metal sheet-and-wire roof sagging under the weight of bundled reticulation pipes and hoses. Just outside the second back door, there was enough space for a bunch of Home Depot timber work benches, most, but not all messy with the debris of Ortega’s commercial hemp operation. A row of open metal lockers revealed secured racks of rifles and other weapons in obvious good repair. A grenade launcher and what looked like a flamethrower sat in pride of place at the end of the rack. Marijuana resin hung heady and pungent in the lamp-heated air.
The guards were a skinny black guy with nervous eyes and a white guy rendered faceless by a black kerchief and Kevlar. The third wore a cowboy hat instead of a helmet and had the whole Marlboro Man thing going on with a porno moustache and a toothpick between his teeth.
The cowboy watched as the other two forced Tom to his knees once again, but then his eyes lit up in alarm seeing the Colt Python still in Tom’s pants. The man took it, the handset, and the water bottle, leaving the empty carpenter’s rig uselessly in place with nothing else in it. The black guy and the cowboy then trained their guns on Tom again, while the masked one manhandling him then forced Tom’s head down from behind, eliciting more strangled grunts as Tom allowed himself to be pushed as far to the ground as he could manage without simply falling on his face.
A shadow then fell across him.
Tom sensed a gesture that dismissed the harsh hold on the scruff of his neck. Almost hesitantly – given how hard he’d pushed to arrive at this point – Tom lifted his gaze to find Carlos Ortega with his bare, muscular arms crossed over his combat vest.
“Tom Vanicek,” the ousted security boss said.
“I came here to speak with you.”
“Clearly.”
“I know you sent men to kill me when I was with Wilhelm,” Tom said and then met his eye. “And I don’t care.”
Ortega snorted and took a step one way and then back. He asked his men if Tom was totally disarmed and the grunts of assent led to them backing off a little.
“So can I stand?”
Ortega said nothing, so Tom made a fair effort of it, the muscles in his thighs aching and bruised. He shakily met Ortega’s bemused yet serpentine gaze and let out a very genuine nervous dark laugh.
“I’m not a threat to you,” Tom said. “I don’t care who runs the fucking City as long as my children are safe and people stop trying to kill me.”
“I’m meant to believe that?”
“Some of your people tried to kill me,” Tom said in what he hoped was a dry, matter-of-fact voice. “They’re not the first. They failed too. And I’m still here. I aim to keep it that way.”
Ortega simply watched him a moment, then checked in with his men before sharing another self-confident smirk.
“That’s not the only reason,” Tom said more slowly. “Did Pamela tell you what she did for me?”
Ortega was admittedly curious, raising an eyebrow at his sidekicks and then back to Tom.
“No?”
Tom nodded slowly, looking at Ortega with something akin to reluctance.
“She saved my life.”
The words sounded empty, incapable of rendering the enormity of it. For Tom, that among everything else in the charade of his life made it feel all the more real and sincere.
“We were the only two who survived MacLaren’s mission,” Tom said. “The Confederates were going to execute one of us. She . . . volunteered . . . because I have children.
“And it got me thinking,” Tom continued. “We thought Freestone’s people were raiders, and maybe they are, but . . . they have honor, or something like it. I don’t care about the City, I care about my family. I don’t want a badge and a whistle or whatever they hell you guys are thinking. I’m only here for my kids. That’s why I brought them to the City. I thought we’d be safer . . . but that’s not been my experience so far.”
“No,” Ortega said slowly. “You got into bed with Wilhelm.”
“No I fucking didn’t,” Tom said in a low growl and averted his eyes to avoid angering the other man, which clearly didn’t work.
Ortega gave a bitter snort of amusement betraying his uncertainty as well as annoyance. He crinkled his gaze at Tom grimacing still at the hands cuffed behind his back, then crossed the short distance between them.
“What’s your fuckin’ story, Vanicek?”
He punched Tom hard in his broken ribs and Tom dutifully dropped to his knees again, as much from self-preservation as the fresh agony, unable to clutch himself and barely managing to speak through gritted teeth.
“I’m not a threat to you,” he snarled and heard the edge of tears in his exhausted voice.
“Stop saying that, Vanicek.”
Ortega nudged his boot into him, causing Tom to stagger and nearly fall again.
“You forgive me, Tom, is that it?” the soldier jeered. “That’s so fuckin’ good of you.”
Tom drew in a few thirsty breaths and dared meet Ortega’s eye in the weak hydroponic light.
“Were you trying to kill me, Carlos?” he spat back. “Or was I just in the way of whatever the hell you’re trying to achieve here with this charade you’ve been living?”
“Charade?”
Ortega laughed like a man thinking himself innocent.
“You kept your stripes pretty well hidden,” Tom said. “You played everyone good.”
“It sounds like even you’ve noticed the Five are clueless fools,” Ortega said.
“I don’t know about ‘fools’, but . . . politicians, yeah,” Tom said bleakly and dropped his gaze. “If there’s one thing good about everything we’ve lost, it’s losing that . . . that sham we called democracy.”
“You don’t sound like much of a patriot, Vanicek.”
“I love my country,” Tom replied. “That’s why it hurt so much watching everyone abuse it. Our freedom. And we were trapped the whole time by jobs, taxes . . . Netflix . . . Walmart.”
“Then maybe we’re not on such a differ
ent page as you think,” Ortega said as he sized Tom up yet again. “A firm, but loving hand, so people can get on with their lives. Doesn’t that sound good?”
“Sounds like a dictatorship.”
Ortega shrugged.
“You and the Colonel were the Five’s military strategists,” Tom said to him. “Without you, they’re screwed. They don’t know what to do.”
The comment had the ring of truth to it because it was – something Tom’d long found one of the most efficient means to persuasion. Ortega grunted in recognition and couldn’t help look a little pleased.
“They’re secure in that compound, though,” Tom said. “They have supplies. And you know they’re training a small army in there, right?”
“That’s why we’re not going to attack them.”
“No?”
Carlos couldn’t help himself. He beamed, proud of what he obviously thought was a genius move, grimly handsome and belligerent at the same time. It was hard for Tom to scrape the appreciation from his own repugnance.
“We’re taking control of the City,” the rogue said. “We don’t need the Enclave for that. We can starve them out. Hiding away in their bunker, they don’t control shit.”
“But the Safety officers. . . ?”
Ortega produced a joint he rolled between his fingers, but didn’t light.
“Most of them will come across pretty quick once the food runs out.”
“Can you help me get my children to safety?”
Ortega swiveled a shrewd look back to Tom, disinterested maybe, idling closer to the work bench and picking up the Python. He turned it over, feeling the balance of the black gun, then tucked it into his own pants beneath where the stab-proof vest faltered.
“You’re assuming I’m not fixing to take you out back and put one in your head?”
“You could do that, sure,” Tom said a little too quickly. “But despite your best efforts, I sealed a deal with the Confederates yesterday for a steady supply of fresh meat – and they’ll only deal with me. Freestone feels the same way about Wilhelm as you. You can rule the City, whatever your vision is, I don’t give a shit. But people are still going to need food, and winter’ll be here sooner than anyone seems to think. You don’t want me dead, Ortega. And frankly, you can’t afford to.”
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set Page 60
