“Jesus,” Ortega said like he was almost impressed. “You’re fucking cold blooded, Vanicek, I’ll give you that. You sure you didn’t come here to kill me?”
“All I care about is keeping my children safe,” Tom said with utmost sincerity. “I didn’t protect them through five years of living hell to get us all killed fighting for fucking politicians. Do you get that?”
Tom sounded angry now, and he was glad for it, sincere in his rage.
It burnt out pretty quickly though, as many things did these days.
“But there’s a . . . slight problem,” he added.
“And there we have it,” Ortega sniggered. “The ‘but’.”
“My children are still in the Enclave,” Tom said and tried not to think about Dkembe or the other little boy. “I need safe passage for them, tonight, before the shit hits the fan.”
He motioned to the work bench, though all he could do was shrug at it.
“That’s what the walkie’s for,” Tom said.
Ortega was thankfully contemplative, eyeing the gun and the handset and the water bottle like each was a token of astrological significance, harbingers of different fates yet to be discerned by gods no one remembered.
“Can I have the water at least?”
Ortega snickered, nodded.
At a silent instruction, the bored-looking guards uncuffed Tom, who tried not to groan as he moved some life back into his arms. Ortega motioned the masked sentry close and whispered something. The man nodded, taking the closest exit and leaving just the other two.
Tom moved to the table and almost fumbled the drink with his numb hands.
“This world has different rules now.”
He met Ortega’s eyes as he screwed the lid back shut.
“Some choices we make, they’re a matter of survival.”
“I might agree with your sentiments,” Ortega said. “Not the same as agreeing with you.”
He picked up the two-way handset and switched it on, hesitated, then spoke into the unit.
“Who we got on the other end here?”
Empty static was the only reply.
Ortega looked at Tom. The thoughtfulness slid off his face and his eyes turned dead. Tom spoke hurriedly again, reaching for almost anything to stay Ortega’s hand.
“MacLaren was a good man.”
It was a naked effort to maintain some sort of rapport, but Tom tasted the grief of MacLaren’s death again all the same.
“Yeah,” Carlos said and sighed like it didn’t matter much, though he took the opportunity to study Tom more closely and maybe might’ve said something more if the radio didn’t squawk into life.
“Dad?” Lilianna’s tinny voice rang out. “Is that you?”
Ortega grimaced at Tom again, somehow turning it into a smirk. He switched the handset off and set it back down on the table leaving Tom with his heart pounding, perspiration wetting his brow and perhaps the last of his adrenalin rising up as well at the sound of his daughter’s voice.
The wry grin and averted eyes told Tom Ortega was literally chewing over a decision, and he fought the nausea of fear to swallow hard, left hand like a claw around the water bottle.
“Even MacLaren thought you thought the Colonel was a stupid old prick,” Tom said.
“Rhymes is a stupid old prick,” Carlos said. “But Madeline . . . She makes you and me look like cheerleaders, Vanicek. She’s got enough hardware stashed in her attic to take the Enclave on her own, but she’s way too smart for that.”
“She knows how to fly under the radar too.”
“Yeah,” Ortega said. “She takes that Sun Tzu shit to a whole ‘nother level. You could probably learn a lot from her.”
Ortega eyed him coldly.
“Or maybe you’re even more cold-blooded than you’re making out, huh?”
The ex-soldier studied him in the dim brightness. Tom fell very still.
“Hell,” Ortega said. “I really can’t tell whether you’re tryin’ to pull one over on me or not.”
The dangerous man gave a grim chuckle.
“I don’t think Miss Plume’s gonna be thrilled with me bringing you into the fold. You see, Tom, we’re a little disappointed in you.”
“In me?” Tom replied. “Why?”
“You should’ve come to me when you found that laptop.”
*
TOM MASKED HIS dry throat by slowly unlatching the water bottle again, though he didn’t take a drink, roiling, barely-realized terror undercut by disappointment at being uncovered yet again.
“I did tell someone,” he said.
“Yes,” Ortega replied.
“MacLaren told you?”
“You told MacLaren?” Ortega hissed. “Jeez. But maybe that faggot wasn’t the only one you told, Vanicek, right?”
Tom felt something liquid in his bowels that didn’t bode well.
Ortega motioned to the dormant sentries.
“Bring him with us.”
Tom gave a last desperate glance at the handset. Although he wasn’t cuffed any more, the two armed guards closed in enough that between them and Tom’s stunted arms, he felt as helpless as ever as they pushed him forward, following Ortega’s panther’s silhouette proceeding back into the house headed towards one of the smaller rooms at the rear.
The small brick-walled room had the plaster stripped from its old walls. Metal bars covered a single pane of windows set up high.
Abraham Ben-Gurion sat slumped in a chair on the chipped concrete with yards of silver electrician’s tape the only thing keeping him upright.
The one-time software genius moaned awake as Ortega entered, the guards pushing Tom in, but keeping back in the corridor themselves for lack of room – and also the chance to keep their firearms raised, which they did now, looking for all the world like they could spray the cell in one effortless burst and kill them all. The sweat-soaked hackles on the back of Tom’s neck wouldn’t abide.
Ben-Gurion looked at Tom with twin black eyes seeping redness down into his gingery stubble. His mouth wasn’t in a much better state.
“Tom?”
“Jesus.”
“We were just torturing him for fun, but he gave you up pretty quick,” Ortega said. “For a smart guy, he doesn’t know shit about how the Enclave runs.”
“I don’t live in the Enclave,” the Councilor said in a mushy voice.
He moved his wounded eyes back to Tom, thoroughly broken.
“I’m sorry, Tom,” he said. “Please don’t let them kill me.”
“You should’ve come to me when you found that computer, Vanicek,” Ortega said again. “That changes the whole goddamn ball game.”
A murderous glee lit within the darker man’s features. Tom’s guts lurched again.
Ortega cast a disdainful look at Ben-Gurion and then flicked his eyes to his men. They backed aside and Ortega returned to the hall, clicking his fingers for Tom to follow.
Ben-Gurion struggled to keep his head upright and threw one last mournful, plaintive look at Tom before Tom also left, fighting to keep his face blank, struggling with his own emotional math as the gunmen fell in behind him.
*
THE FINE, ANTIQUE wooden door opened onto another small room where its elegant desks and side tables were turned over to a complicated series of radio arrays, vintage telex sets, and an old-fashioned telephone switchboard, the whole operation powered by the solar array on the roof. Maps pinned to cork boards were nailed to the walls in an ultimate act of pragmatism. Apart from the maps of Columbus and the wasteland now around it, the others showed detailed terrain across a series of maps running from Ohio to the North Carolina coast. A cherub-faced Latino woman wearing head cans sat in front of a station built into the far wall housing military radio gear. She held her hand to one of the earphones and paused in her work, dark gaze flicking quickly between Tom and Ortega in the doorway.
Tom froze as the implications of it all overcame him.
That sinking feeling only got w
orse as the radio woman’s words cut through.
“Understood, Washington,” she said. “Advise on next telecom ETA please? Over.”
Tom’s shaky look met Ortega’s devilishly broad grin.
“That’s right, Vanicek.”
“You made contact with the Washington?”
“First contact,” he said. “You might’ve guessed, but I know a trick or two for reaching out to our Navy friends, now I know they’re out there.”
The shifting scope of the City’s peril threw Tom adrift, rattled as he was already at the torture of Abe Ben-Gurion. In the pause, pleased with himself, Ortega fiddled with the dog whistle hanging on a chain around his neck and the radio officer finished up her communique, carefully transcribing details for the room’s logbook. Then she stood, smoothed down her skirt, and joined Ortega by sliding her arm around the older man’s waist.
Ortega ruffled her curly dark hair.
“Ruby, this is Tom Vanicek,” Ortega said. “He wants to be friends.”
“The laptop guy?”
“Yep,” Ortega grinned and added: “The hero of the Raptor crash? How’s that all feeling now, Vanicek? Heroic enough for ya?”
“Fuck,” Tom said.
“Feeling disappointed?”
“Truth is, I don’t know what I’m feeling,” he replied. “You know, from the tone of their communications – the information I found with the laptop – I’m not sure contact with the USS Washington’s such a good idea.”
Ortega only chuckled and motioned at the two sentries in the hall.
“You should probably think it’s a great idea, Tom,” he said. “That’s if you want to live to see the morning . . . or are you ready to kiss those kids of yours goodbye? I can make it quick?”
“Like that, is it?”
“Hey man, I want to let bygones be bygones too,” Ortega said without much conviction. “But we’re not in the business of armed insurrection just to pick up more traitors. You got that, right?”
There was a fierceness in Ortega’s scowl now.
“That aircraft carrier’s made landfall, and there’s survivors on the east coast,” Ortega said. “That ship has the best of everyone left who used to run things. Wilhelm wants to make America great again? That’s how we do it.”
Tom waited until he had eye contact once more.
“Carlos,” he said. “You really want to go back to being a paid assassin for a bunch of neo-con gun nuts?”
Ortega snickered.
“Actually, Tom. I kinda miss it,” he said. “If things go as planned, we’ll meet their ambassadors within the month.”
A special kind of numbness now seeped through Tom that he’d only experienced a few times in his life – and all of them in the most recent years.
It was almost funny, in hindsight, how easy the first year in the mountains had been, considering everything that’d happened on the road between the Smokies and here, and things – the violence, the betrayals, the unearthed stockpile of calamities coming thick and fast every other day – only seemed to get worse. Accelerating. Here was a whole new scale for potential disaster. And Ortega’s reverent tone only added to it.
Tom wanted out.
“Carlos,” Tom said. “I . . . I told you this already: I just want to speak to my children. You heard my daughter. She’ll be worried sick I never answered.”
Ortega looked back at him for long moments, perhaps unaware his thick black eyelashes gave him a strangely made-up look in the radio room’s dim light. Finally, he gave an open-palmed gesture the guards could see, then gave the radio operator a slow kiss finishing with another of his signature wicked grins.
“Go get some sack-time, sugar tits.”
The woman smirked and left.
“The hero of the Raptor crash wants to speak to his children!” Ortega boomed.
He glanced back at Tom as if cutting him in on the joke.
“I liked your boy . . . Lucas?” he said. “That kid has grit.”
Tom nodded, uncertain about how much leeway the ex-soldier was going to give him.
“But Vanicek,” Ortega added. “I thought you told me to stay away from your kids?”
Ortega’s tone deadened. Tom felt dry-throated, tongue like a balled-up pair of old socks in the back of his mouth as he looked out the doorway, conscious of Ben-Gurion beaten and trussed-up only a few yards away, the walkie talkie left in the nursery outside, and wondering if the guards were set to take him as another inmate – or outside for the half-promised execution.
But Tom’s thoughts were with Lilianna.
*
ORTEGA TOOK THE exit, leaving Tom to follow with the armed escort as they moved back through the mostly gutted building, internal niceties reduced to pure functionality by the not-so-clandestine operation. Movement in one of the other bare-walled rooms revealed the masked soldier from before, as well as a woman with her back to them, the pair tooling through a pile of rifles as if looking for something else.
Ortega led the way back out to the worktables and motioned to the radio set, the only thing unclaimed from Tom’s supplies. The skinny guy and the cowboy guard eyed Tom with sullen looks, Ortega’s aura of command enough to quell any temptations they might have.
“Is the phrase I’m thinking of ‘fair-weather friend’?” Ortega asked. “Can’t quite remember.”
He met Tom’s eyes, but Tom lifted up the walkie talkie instead, relieved he could do it at all considering it was in his right hand. Ortega returned him another of his long lizard-eyed looks, then gave a nod of assent and switched focus to his lackeys.
“Go get rid of that kike in the back room,” Ortega said. “He’s not much use to anyone anymore.”
Tom’s heart rate returned to its earlier gallop as the two men returned mercenary smiles and filed back into the house leaving him and Carlos alone. Ortega raised a curious eyebrow at Tom, waiting to see how he’d play out what was clearly just another test of his loyalties.
Tom sniffled, switched the handset on, and pressed the switch.
“Lila?” he said. “Lilianna? Are you there?”
There wasn’t much of a pause.
“Dad? Are you OK? Where are you?”
“I’m OK,” Tom said.
He measured his words, giving one sideways glance to Ortega leaning against the brick doorway all casual and shit, studying his every damned word.
“Where are you, dad?” Lila’s voice came again.
“Listen,” Tom told her. “Have you checked in with Lucas?”
“Yes, he’s fine.”
“OK, I want you to remember what we talked about earlier,” he told her. “I’ll be at Madeline Plume’s place. Over?”
Ortega scowled and pushed off the wall to snatch the handset from Tom’s hand.
“Hey, little lady,” Ortega now hissed into the device in turn. “Your daddy’s here in plenty of company and begging for us to take you and your little brother in, so let’s not try anything stupid, OK?”
Glaring at Tom, he added, “Over.”
Then he switched off the handset and threw it onto the floor, clattering past the work bench, and turning his dangerous glare squarely onto Tom standing close beside him.
Close enough for Tom to pull the saw-toothed combat knife from Ortega’s belt.
*
THE LOOK ON Ortega’s face was of such astonished betrayal that he barely flinched as Tom threw one hand across the soldier’s mouth and stabbed the blade into the side of his neck.
But Ortega was ex-special forces – and a hell of an opponent to take on in such impossible conditions. On instinct, the Chief thrust a brawny forearm between Tom’s stabbing wrist and his own neck even as the knife went into him, Ortega grunting and making loud, muffled gasps, too constricted to call for help, and fighting desperately as Tom did the only thing he could without the strength to stab the blade any deeper. The knife blade sawed with agonizing slowness in their struggle as it cut across and through Ortega’s larynx and voice box in
stead.
A horrible fluid whispering noise issued from the Chief’s throat, his bulging eyes fixed on Tom as Tom let go of the knife and grimly pulled the tucked Colt Python from Ortega’s belt with one blood-soaked hand.
Despite horrific wounds, Ortega also drew his pistol in one hurried, frenzied move, the same moment the face-masked sentry strolled back in, registered the life-and-death tussle going on, and brought up his cut-down M4.
Tom twisted towards the work bench thinking about cover. He kicked out at Ortega’s gun hand, deflecting the automatic as it fired, terrifyingly loud in the garden area, and by some miracle the bullet hit the masked trooper in the armpit and the man gasped, vomited blood into his face rig, and crumpled in the doorway just as the trooper’s female partner moved in with her assault rifle.
Tom pulled the Colt’s trigger only to find the safety still on. Then he dived. The female trooper strafed the room with thunder, wooden crates and furnishings and the work benches erupting in a cloud of dust and splinters, metal sizzling with bullets striking Ortega’s arsenal in its racks behind him.
Ortega stood in the haze. one hand clutched to his throat, still getting a bead on Tom and firing twice as Vanicek threw himself behind one obstacle and then the next, rolling across concrete and old carpets and debris to bring up the Colt with his weak right hand, the catch off with his thumb – but by then, Ortega hurried to the doorway instead. The Chief thumped the woman with the butt of his automatic, then fled as Tom dropped down again, crab-walking behind the closest of the massive wheeled growing crates.
A terrified shriek came from somewhere out back – Ben-Gurion confronting his own rapidly-diminishing hopes for survival. Tom’s eyes bulged, like on the verge of cardiac arrest, but there wasn’t much he could do to help the Councilor, panicked at his own inertia and no other immediate exit from the nursery set to become his burial ground if he didn’t act soon.
Tom sprang from his hiding spot to hurry away down the back of the undercover space, the night sky over his head through the wire mesh, trusting to nothing but luck as Ortega’s woman tracked his moves in the orange gloom and sent a thunderbolt of bullets whistling past, one clipping Tom’s upper left arm just as he threw himself behind yet more of the weed-filled containers shielding him against the worst of the damage as the air filled with deadly splinters and Tom caught his already-wounded forehead on the upper edge of the closest box. Bolted metal sheeting enclosed the whole back fence, with nothing like an emergency exit in sight. With blood in his eyes, Tom caught the slightest hint of movement through the dark mesh, senses preternaturally sharp in his heightened panic. Then he steeled himself, teeth gritted, the desperation running through him the only thing moving him at all.
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set Page 61
