After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set

by Warren Hately

  The woman in body armor cautiously followed as Tom scurried, her rifle poised to fire at the merest sign of him. Tom ducked as low as he could, silence returning after the latest burst of gunfire, conscious of movements beyond the rear garden, and also Ben-Gurion’s hollering cries, and then of course Ortega – alive against all odds – perhaps making good his escape.

  Rather than return fire, Tom steadied in his pained crouch, breath whistling through his teeth as he clamped down his will, forcing himself to check the Python still had five rounds. He snapped the gun shut and regretted spinning the cylinder like some cowboy, trusting to the night’s bad luck the hammer might fall on the lone empty.

  Black plastic sheeting between every third row of boxes offered concealment. Tom flitted from one side of the cannabis rows to the other as quickly as he dared.

  Instead, he nearly collided with the woman tracking him through the maze just as she chose that moment to tear off her helmet, claustrophobia and sweat in her eyes befuddling clear vision now leaving her completely exposed.

  Tom faltered.

  “Pamela!”

  *

  PAMELA DE JONG swiveled her rifle back into play in a slow motion almost as awful as her knowing Tom had her dead to rights – if he’d only take the shot.

  Her terrified eyes widened in recognition despite knowing who they were hunting. Tom had nothing like a nanosecond as Pamela’s M4 came up.

  Despite his peril and the urgency of the night, there was nothing in Tom that wanted this woman dead, and it showed as he fired the Python almost reluctantly into her vest at a distance of no more than five feet, knocking Pamela back despite her own determination to level him.

  Pamela’s rifle lifted again, even as she staggered against the brick wall of the house, forcing Tom’s face into a sour look of misgiving as he fired again.

  The shot took Pamela through her throat.

  The woman who’d offered her life to spare Tom now slammed into the wall, her life’s blood splashed black against the bare bricks. Pamela slumped slowly to the seat of her pants as the strength went out of everything except her wild, blue-eyed gaze still focused so intently on him.

  Tom checked the nearby doorway, then the load of his gun, and knew both were just distractions from his bastardry. Despite another panicked shout from within the bowels of Ortega’s nest, he forced his gaze back at Pamela.

  The utterly human pathos of this confrontation with the vast inevitable played like a film strip across Pamela’s eyes as she stared up at him and Tom’s mouth spasmed with inaction, not having the words and not knowing if he should utter them even if he did. Those bullets had been traveling towards her her entire life, though she couldn’t have known it. Tom didn’t believe in Fate, but he also knew each person’s choices in any moment were the only ones they’d likely make, and thus in a sense, moved them through life predetermined by their own character so that in the end, destiny and Fate were one and the same thing. No one could’ve known it was Tom’s hand that would spell Pamela’s end, nor when that end would come, and yet now that doom had finally arrived as the ultimate awful mystery.

  “I’m . . . sorry, Pamela.”

  The woman tried to speak, to say anything – as if producing words might somehow save her from the death even then seeping into her glazed expression, a hateful twist to her sharp face that cut Tom to the core – her mixed sense of betrayal and outrage not at all lessened knowing she had driven this funeral herself.

  A man’s voice distracted Tom coming from somewhere to the rear outside the compound. There was no time for anything – and when Ben-Gurion’s cry sounded even more close by, Tom growled and threw himself into action leaving Pamela slumped and nearly dead beside the doorway he now charged through.

  And nearly collided with another female form.

  The radio operator held a twelve-gauge across her chest as she ran, eyes wide in terror, perhaps never expecting to find herself thrust into such a dangerous role.

  Tom and Ortega’s girlfriend Ruby smashed into each other just a step inside the house. Tom lifted the Python at once, firing this time without pause.

  The dark-skinned woman’s pretty face exploded in one horrible moist confrontation as the Colt boomed, the nearly headless woman spinning into the nearest wall and thereby splattering blood and pulped brains across the tired brickwork before the momentum went out of her and she seemingly tripped, dead already, and fell splayed across the hall.

  If those breaths felt trapped in his chest before, now Tom’s entire torso seized up as he dropped into a frightened crouch, aliveness yet again juxtaposed against the inherent deadliness of the night. And although he did the sensible thing – taking Ruby’s shotgun and stowing his half-empty pistol in the tool belt – once sheltered, Tom stayed there longer than he knew he could afford, succumbing to terror despite Councilor Ben-Gurion’s protests and frightened begging now ominously near. Tom’s panicked thoughts flew to his son and daughter, seemingly a thousand miles away, desperately wishing he was with them and repenting for the ongoing foolishness of his own choices.

  Ben-Gurion’s shrieks redoubled with a new urgency as moral as anything else, quashing Tom’s urge to cut and run despite what his twisted sense of honor demanded.

  Tom swore, growling, deep in his chest, a caricature of himself as he pumped the shotgun as he rose and started moving in the direction of Ben-Gurion’s cries.

  *

  WHATEVER THEIR PLAN, the two guards dragging Shakes Ben-Gurion to his doom knew their headquarters was under attack, so it was no enormous surprise when Tom stepped around the turn and pointed the shotgun down the corridor into what would be a killing ground if not for the Councilor sweating and stumbling between them.

  The cowboy was in the lead, though he’d lost his hat, and now he let go of Ben-Gurion’s wrist to heft his assault rifle at Tom, despite knowing Tom had them dead to rights.

  “Down!” Tom screamed.

  At that point, there weren’t many options on the table – and if the terrified Councilor didn’t have the sense to help himself, Tom wouldn’t take the blamed if he got killed in the crossfire. And yet Ben-Gurion moved with the sort of paralysis frightened beasts suffered going to their slaughter so that at the last instant, Tom lifted the shotgun as he fired so that it went over the trio’s heads and caused all three of them to scatter.

  The second guard threw a wiry forearm around Ben-Gurion’s neck, trapping them both in the corridor. But the cowboy shouldered open the closest side door and threw himself inside, and in that pause, Tom shucked the twelve-gauge and retreated a step back around the corner, cursing himself just as the black guy yelled out his predictable threat.

  “Get the fuck out of here or the Jew-boy’s dead!”

  Tom had a hard time swallowing – only made worse as he backed alongside a wire-grilled window and spotted Carlos Ortega running in a staggered lope along the compound’s back fence holding a hand to his throat, eyes wide like a wounded deer thinking the hunter still on its tail. The temptation for Tom to abandon Ben-Gurion as a lost cause and cut back outside to give chase was nearly overpowering, but the Councilor’s muffled shrieks twisted Tom’s guts like a mother listening to her baby cry, feeling every cell in his body calling on him to respond despite the cold-blooded voice between his ears urging him to track down Ortega before he made it to Plume’s base at St Mary’s.

  And again the image of the walkie talkie discarded amid the cannabis plants came clearly into Tom’s mind and he growled again, beyond frustrated at the impasse he’d helped create – frustration he now took as fuel as he gave a tactless roar and plunged back around the corner to fire just as the hatless cowboy stepped out again.

  The blast took the handsome gunman in the middle of his vest, catapulting him backwards into the other sentry holding Ben-Gurion in a clinch.

  The three of them scattered in the hall, the Councilor smart enough to slip free of his captor, rushing halfway across the fifteen foot distance between them a
nd Tom, and then wisely throwing himself to the floor as Tom pumped another shell into the Remington and fired into the tangled sentries. The shot hit the cowboy as he rose, spinning him by one shoulder which disintegrated in the same hit, the blood and the man’s flailing limbs thwarting the second guard’s efforts to escape. The second guard scuttled like a spider-man towards the nearest doorway, abandoning his M4 and drawing a Sig Sauer from its holster.

  Tom chambered another cartridge and advanced, impersonating a tactical stalk as he focused his aim and stepped deliberately over Ben-Gurion whimpering and hugging the dusty floorboards. The fleeing guard turned back to fire, covering his escape, but Tom shot him fair in the face and the guard’s wide-eyed expression vanished in the one red-blurring carnage.

  The man’s corpse barely dropped to the ground before Tom caught movement from the cowboy, his left arm practically severed by the shotgun blast. Ortega’s man knew the jig was up forever if he didn’t move, but his boots failed on the blood-slippery floor and Tom only hesitated a moment before executing him as well.

  The shotgun clicked emptily as Tom sought to shuck another round. He dropped the weapon, flicking an exhausted glance at Ben-Gurion grappling with the realization they’d somehow both survived.

  “Grab a weapon,” Tom said.

  Taking his own advice, he retrieved the dead cowboy’s gun, another M4.

  It was difficult not to absorb the destruction he’d wrought on those two men, and Tom had to remind himself neither were innocent – that in fact no one was innocent, that innocence itself was just a fantastic idealism amid the ruins of civilization – and he stripped the dead man of his ammo pack, annoyed when he turned back to find Shakes Ben-Gurion unmoved from his knees on the gore-speckled wooden boards staring up at Tom in horror.

  “Councilor,” Tom said. “Abraham, we have to move.”

  A background in software engineering hadn’t prepped Ben-Gurion for the apocalypse. Protected status among the folks from Rickenbacker had also spared him direct confrontation with many moments of such grim reality. But Tom had neither time nor the desire to convince him otherwise, as if his motivation to help the tortured man had also evaporated now he’d done his ethical duty and saved the Councilor from whatever the Lefthanders had planned for him – the end of a rope, or more likely a quick firing squad, Tom reckoned. It felt like a fluke that he’d escaped the same fate himself. Tom made a disgusted face and shouldered past, headed back into the undercover nursery, the scent of marijuana plants now leaden with the coppery tang of blood.

  *

  TOM STEPPED INTO the rear area just as Pamela’s corpse started to stir. With his heart still surprisingly heavy for all the carnage, Tom reached one aching hand for the ax on his belt and felt the Python’s grip instead. The ax was gone. Long gone. He crossed to the pool of blood in which Ortega’s combat knife lay, Pamela-the-Fury only just re-orienting itself to life, a skein of deadness across her vibrant blue eyes. Then Tom moved back, knelt, and deftly rammed the point of the serrated blade into the side of her skull, then snorted with some kind of begrudgingly relieved recognition as Abraham stepped out gingerly after him.

  “Weapon,” Tom said and pointed to Pamela’s rifle. “Grab a weapon.”

  “I’m no soldier.”

  “You don’t have much choice.”

  “I mean it,” Ben-Gurion replied, unable to scrape the hint of pathos from his voice. “I’m no soldier. I can’t do this.”

  “You can, and you will.”

  Tom hoped the emphasis was enough. Still struggling to give a shit, he focused instead on searching the far side of the chamber until he found where the two-way handset lay amid the woodchips and dirt. Although he knew every second he tarried, Ortega made good his escape, Tom took a deep, shuddering breath of gratitude when the device switched back on unbroken.

  “Lila?” he said into it. “Lila? It’s dad. Over. Please pick up.”

  The device sat in his palm for long seconds producing nothing but dead air. Tom cursed, stuffing the thing into his belt as he quickly scanned the chamber and distracted himself from Pamela by turning his frosty gaze on Abraham once again.

  “Grab. The. Fucking. Gun.”

  Clearly there was something in Tom’s look even the shell-shocked Councilor couldn’t ignore. He withered under Tom’s gaze, crouching to collect Pamela’s gear with shattered nerves only made worse by his illness.

  “You don’t want me as your back-up, Tom,” he said.

  “If you think I’m relying on you as back-up, guess again,” Tom replied with a mildness he didn’t feel, tempted to excoriate Ben-Gurion instead. Every precious second thwarted what needed to be done for Tom to make things safe for him and his children once again.

  “The gun is so you can protect yourself,” Tom said with finality. “I’m done holding your hand, OK?”

  “I know you saved me,” Shakes replied. “They were going to kill me.”

  “No shit.”

  “Are you angry because I told Ortega about the laptop?”

  It was such a dumb question, Tom struggled not to laugh – knowing laughter would only confuse the hapless hostage even more. Tom shook his head, the pain of his own tortures surging back in now the adrenalin took a back seat.

  “I had a way out of this,” Tom hissed at him. “Now look at me!”

  Ben-Gurion did as told, staring at Tom and blanching in such a way Tom felt suddenly self-conscious, wondering what the timid genius saw, and knowing the blood caking his clothes was probably the least of it.

  Tom nodded with finality, ready to sweep from the room, but instead cast one last look back over Ortega’s bullet-riddled weapons cache until his eyes settled on the flamethrower and the M32 grenade launcher at the end of the rack.

  Whether by intuition or neuroticism, Tom couldn’t tell, but he grabbed the stumpy grenade launcher and a belt of 40mm rounds he looped over one shoulder, nodding again with a grunt at Abraham before making for the front exit.

  *

  SHAKES BEN-GURION followed him out the front of the fenced compound and moved right up behind him as Tom paused in the shadows making sure the way was clear.

  “What are you doing?” Tom hissed in little more than a whisper.

  “Coming with you.”

  “You don’t want to go where I’m going,” he replied. “Hell, neither do I.”

  “You’re after Ortega?”

  “We have to end this,” Tom agreed.

  “The safest place right now seems to be with you.”

  “You might think twice about that in a few minutes.”

  Further discussion was cut short by Tom’s radio crackling into life.

  “Dad? It’s me. We’re mobile.”

  Lilianna’s voice was backgrounded by vehicle noise, telling Tom at once what his daughter said was true.

  “Where are you?”

  “We’re headed for Madeline Plume’s place like you said,” Lila said and added, “Over.”

  “Shit,” Tom cursed, though he stayed off air for it.

  His eyes uselessly raked Ben-Gurion even though the Councilor was clearly little help. While he frantically considered and discarded options, Tom kept them moving around the perimeter of Ortega’s headquarters until he came to the back fence, previously unsighted, and saw a metal gate listing ajar. He trotted towards it as Lila’s voice came again.

  “Dad?” she said. “Are you there, over?”

  “Yes, honey,” he answered quietly.

  It was too dark in the street to tell much and he regretted not finding a working flashlight before quitting Ortega’s house – not that there’d been any time for such niceties. A few drops of wetness on the pitted asphalt revealed traces of blood. Ortega’s blood. And Tom swiveled his gaze around the deserted street, conscious of movements in the nearby buildings he ascribed at once to residents bunkering down away from the recent gunfire. As far as he could tell – still without a wristwatch – dawn couldn’t be too far away.

  “D
ad?”

  “I’m on my way,” he said. “How many are with you?”

  “There’s twenty of us, and more on the way,” Lila replied. “Over.”

  “Lilianna,” he said with dread seriousness. “Don’t make any moves until I reach you, OK? And for God’s sake . . . stay safe.”

  It felt like the most ridiculous thing he’d said in recent memory. To underscore the pointlessness of it all, he added, “Over.”

  “Understood,” his daughter replied. “But you better get here quick.”

  “Here?”

  There was the slightest pause.

  “We just arrived,” the handset squawked. “Over.”

  *

  TOM BROKE INTO the best he could do for a run, tailed by Ben-Gurion as he lumbered up the street in his closest guess at the direction Carlos Ortega might’ve taken headed straight for St Mary’s Church. It was a test of Tom’s fledgling knowledge of the City’s layout, but when he reached the next street corner and saw two shabbily-dressed men pulling another one bodily from a shuttered stall and knifing him, Tom knew he was on the right track.

  Two barrels guttering with flames cast ragged orange light across the nightmarish intersection. The fresh blood spatter on the cracked and disjointed pavement caught Tom’s eye at once – even as he ignored the cries for help across from him, and likewise ignored one of the two assailants throwing a worried look his way, undeterred all the same as he continued helping to stab an older man to death. Tom reshouldered the M4, cast a dismissive look that effectively absolved the murderers, and then nodded to Abraham to keep up with him.