Fiction: Afterlife Volume 3 (Chapter 24)

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Afterlife is a sci fi/western action serial published every other week. Join us in a post-apocalyptic journey through a future where life has become little more than a struggle for survival. However, where there’s life, there’s always hope.

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Read the previous chapter here:

Afterlife, Volume 3, Chapter 23

Where:

Ace is found guilty of several counts of murder and armed robbery and is sent to prison.
Razor and Star face off against lions and the Warriors of Freedom interrupt.
The Warriors of Freedom take over Iron Town.

Find the Volume 3 Table of Contents page here.

View the Map here.

Check out Afterlife on Goodreads and don’t forget to rate it.

 

Afterlife, Volume 3, Chapter 24

As Razor approached Brevington’s Antebellum style mansion, four black guards in black uniforms who’d been standing at the door pointed laser pistols at her.  “Where do you think you’re goin’?” one of them asked.

“I need to see Evileye Alphacore,” she said.

“Not armed like that,” he said.

“I’m on your side.  I’m here to kill Phillip Brevington.”

The four men smiled and looked at one another.  “Leave your swords.”

“I can’t,” she said, glaring at them.  “I need them.”

The door opened and a tall man peeked through the crack.  He was thin and had cornrows.  Razor could make out the glint of gold chains hanging from his neck through the crack in the door.  “What’s up?” he asked the guard.

“Says she wants to see Alpha.”

“Let her in,” the tall, thin man said.

“With her swords?” the guard asked.

“Sure,” the tall man said.  “We got lasers.  What the hell her swords gonna do?”  The other guards laughed.  “Alpha wants to see her.”

The guard who Razor had been talking with nodded.  “All right, then, Sal.”

The guards opened the doors and Razor walked into the same foyer she’d seen before.  The red carpets with gold lining were all still there.  The confederate flag was gone, though.  Black men in black uniforms were standing throughout the foyer.  Some had laser rifles trained on her.  Others had pistols.  There were a few on the second floor, guarding the doors to Brevington’s office.  Directly in front of Razor stood a short black man in a gray shirt.  Razor skimmed over him at first, barely noticing him, until she realized everyone else’s attention was on him.  He was light-skinned and bald, smiling at her cordially.  “I’m Evileye Alphacore,” he said.  “Call me Alpha.”  He looked her up and down.  “So you’re Razor.   I’ve heard you’re the best female gladiator in Iron Town, which probably makes you the best in the world.  I hear you beat Simone Blaze.  No small feat.”

Razor nodded.  “I’m here to kill Brevington.  So stay out of my way and let me do it and there won’t be any trouble.”

His eyes widened and he chuckled.  “Trouble?  So you’ve come here to appropriate my kill?”

“I made a promise,” she said.  “I have to keep it.”

“A promise?  What was the promise?”

“I told him I was going to come back here and show him his guts.”

There was laughter throughout the room, including from Alpha.  “That’s far more creative than what I had planned.  And more psychotic.”

“Call me what you want,” she said.  “Just let me by.”

“I can’t do that,” Alpha said.

“I’ll get by one way or the other,” she said.

Alpha smiled at her as his guards continued pointing their lasers at her.  “I don’t know if you realize this, but I was the most famous gladiator in the world before I became the leader of the Warriors of Freedom.”

She squinted at him.  “You?”

He nodded.  “I may not look like much, but I was undefeated.  I won over one hundred fights.  So as one gladiator to another, out of respect, let me tell you, this is a battle you can’t win.  Leave us be and go about your business.  You’re free now.”

“A gladiator,” she said, deep in thought.  “I’ll cut you a deal, then.  You and I can fight.  No weapons.  Just hand to hand.  To submission or KO.  The winner gets to kill Brevington.”

He laughed.  “You may be a great fighter, but you’re a woman.”

“Like I didn’t know that.”

He smiled and looked her up and down again.  “Men have more muscle mass than women.  That’s just a fact.  Sexism aside, I’d have a distinct advantage.”

“I don’t care,” she said.  “The deal still stands.”

“What do I have to gain from making this deal?” he asked.

She shrugged.  “I won’t kill you and all of your men.”

He laughed.  “You’re brave.  You’ve got guts.”

“Imagine how you’d look to your men if you turned me down,” she said, looking around at the snickering faces of the men in black uniforms.  “Are you afraid of a girl?”

“And beating up a woman would make me look better?”

“You aren’t going to beat me,” she said.

He smiled and looked her in the eye.  He took his laser pistol out of its holster and threw it to one of his men.  “All right.  I’m curious now.  Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Razor took off her belt and tossed it onto the floor near the wall, swords, scabbards, and all.  Alpha’s men cleared space in the foyer and Razor ran at him.  She leapt in the air, kicking as Alpha swiftly dodged out of the way.  She felt him kick her in the back and she collapsed onto the floor, turning to see Alpha lunging at her.  She quickly leapt to her feet and blocked his kick with her forearm.  She kicked him in the stomach and punched him in the face.  Alpha stumbled back a few steps.  Razor punched hard at his stomach again but Alpha blocked it this time.  He punched her in the chest and she fell backwards.  Alpha jumped on top of her, holding her arms down.  “Do you submit?” he asked with a grin.

Razor head butted him with all of her might, her forehead slamming into his chin.  She brought her legs up and grabbed his head with them, flinging him to the floor.  With both legs, she kicked him away from her with all of her might.  Alpha rolled across the floor as Razor leapt to her feet and tried to stomp on him, barely missing.  Alpha spun to his feet and took a defensive stance as Razor attacked with a barrage of kicks and punches.  Alpha was able to block all of them.  He was soon backed up against the wall, though.  Razor landed a hard punch in his face and Alpha’s head slammed into the wall and he fell to the floor face-first.  Razor jumped on his back and twisted his right arm behind his back.  He shouted in pain.

“Do you submit?” she asked as she locked his legs in place with her own legs and continued twisting his arm behind his back.  He reached back with his other arm, which she grabbed with her free right hand and pinned to the floor.

Alpha laughed through his pain.  “All right.  He’s yours.”  Razor let him go and Alpha stood and smiled at her as they caught their breath.  “You’re ferocious.  I didn’t want to really hurt you, but it seems that’s the only way I could have beaten you.  That’s the real reason I ended it.  You could probably tell I was taking it easy on you.  I never hit your face, for instance.”

“Whatever,” Razor said.  “I kicked your ass.  Brevington’s mine now.”  She picked up her belt with her swords and strapped it around her waist once again.

Alpha gestured to his guards at Brevington’s door.  One of them opened the door and signaled to someone inside the office.  Four more of Alpha’s men came out and stood near the door as Razor walked up the stairs.  “What’s your real name?” Alpha asked as Razor walked to the door to Brevington’s office.  “I know Razor’s a gladiator name.  At least do me the courtesy of telling me your real name.”

Razor stopped and smiled at him.  “Tell me your real name and I’ll tell you mine.”

Alpha laughed.  “I can’t do that.”  Razor shrugged.

She stepped through the iron double doors into the office she’d only been in once before.   The huge office was as she’d remembered it, with its stairs and loft, glass dome and grand piano.  Phillip Brevington was sitting in his hover chair in front of his desk, as he’d been when she’d first seen him.  “So I suppose you’re here to kill me,” he blurted, glaring at her with angry brown eyes.  “Do your worst, then.  You’re an animal.  Just like them.”

Razor drew her swords and walked towards him.  “Say what you want.  It won’t change anything.”

“You’ll kill an unarmed man.  I have nowhere to hide.  No way to defend myself.”

“You’re a hypocrite,” Razor said.  “You’ve spent your life preying on the weak and downtrodden.”

“So you admit that they’re weak then,” Brevington said with a smile.  “That they’re subhuman.  Like monkeys.  They’re a step between white people like us and monkeys.  Animals.  Look how they live.”

“The only subhuman here is you.”  She stopped walking a few feet in front of him.  “Your ideas make you subhuman.  Your actions make you subhuman.  Not the color of your skin.  Not where you were born.  We are all in control of who we are and who we become.  You’ve chosen to become a vile, hateful creature.”

“Get on with it,” he blurted.  “Enough words.”

“I’m just getting started,” Razor said, glaring at him with fiery menace in her one remaining eye. “You’re just like all the other white supremacists and white nationalists who’ve ever existed. You all feel inferior.” He looked at her defiantly and shook his head. “You all blame others for your own shortcomings,” Razor continued. “You project your own subhuman existence on others because in reality, you hate yourselves. You’re the most vile, hateful, self-loathing creatures who ever existed. You never take responsibility for your own actions, but you blame all of your problems on others, whether they’re black or Mexican, or gay, or female, or whatever else. You’re the one who’s lazy. That’s why you need slaves to do all of your work for you. You’re the one who’s stupid. That’s why you have to always resort to simple stereotypes, eschewing the complexity that exists in a deeper understanding of humanity. You wanna know why white supremacists call people cucks? Because they’re afraid black men are gonna come along and bang their wives. It’s just more external projection. You’re the scum of the earth, and you made yourself that way. And it’s too late for you to change now, because as you said, I’m here to kill you.”

He opened his mouth to speak, looking at her angrily.  “Just get on with it.”

Razor walked up to him until she was standing just a few feet away and she glared into his arrogant eyes.  She sliced his stomach open diagonally with one sword, and then finished the “X” across his belly with the other.  Blood seeped out, quickly covering his white shirt.  His intestines spilled out onto the floor as he tried his best to hold them in place.  “There,” she said, nodding towards the snaky guts hanging out of his stomach as he shouted in pain.  “I told you.  They’re pink.  Just like everyone else’s.”

“Just kill me,” he shouted painfully, his eyes closed in extreme agony.

Razor smiled.  “Oh, don’t worry.  You’ll die eventually.”  She turned and walked away from him, heading towards the open iron doors and leaving his death shouts behind her.  Her nausea reminded her of the unborn baby she was carrying and a smile stretched across her face as she left the room.  Now it was time to turn her full attention back to Warrick Baines.

“So you killed him?” Alpha asked as she walked past him and his men.

She didn’t respond.  She walked down the stairs and left the mansion, scanning the streets for a sand bike she could use for the journey to Drummond.  She found a shiny new black one with a dead Warriors of Freedom soldier lying next to it.  The sand bike had the red, black, and blue stars and stripes flag painted on both sides.  Razor took the dead soldier’s laser rifle and strapped it over her back.  Then, she took his keys, straddled his sand bike, and started the engine.  She drove southwest and was soon outside of the burning town, heading for the last dot on her map.  Heading for Drummond and Warrick Baines.

<>

Eileen Traymont knew she and her group of enforcers were about to run out of food as she stood atop the dune, looking out towards the northern horizon.  Rose City was in that direction.  Stars speckled the sky and the moon glow seemed brighter than usual.  Stanley Everett stood beside her.  She glanced at him, noting the missing left lens of his glasses.  “We’re almost out of food,” she said.  “And water.”

“I know,” he said.

“Talk quietly,” she said, looking back at the beat-up hover car where Mick Calloway, Dusty Snow, Phil Funk, and Gerald Remus were sitting, probably getting ready to go to sleep for the night.  They’d all been sleeping in the car at night, and during the days, they’d been taking turns walking out across the dunes, looking for any sign of a possible rescue.  Stanley’s sand bike had run out of fuel while he was scouting, so he’d left it and walked back to the car.  He didn’t find anything on his scouting mission except one distant resistance outpost.  Eileen was happy to at least know where her closest enemy was located, even if General Schmidt and his army were nowhere to be found.

Stanley frowned.  “We’re in trouble.”  He nodded towards the car.  “They’re about ready to turn on us.  We need to figure something out.  And soon.”

“I know,” Eileen said.  “At least you’re still loyal.”

“Maybe we should turn ourselves in to the resistance,” he said.  It was the first time he’d suggested such a thing.

The thought had crossed Eileen’s mind, though it didn’t take long for her to expel it.  “You know we can’t do that,” she said.  “If we do that, we’ll either be prisoners or they’ll kill us.  Besides, I’d rather die out here in the desert than turn myself in to those socialists.”

“It may be better than starving to death for nothing,” Stanley said.

Eileen spit into the sand.  “It’s not for nothing, Stanley.  If you want to head to that outpost, go ahead.  Take those other guys with you.  I’m staying here.  And if I see any resistance, I’ll fight them to the death.”

A laser blasted the sand near Eileen’s feet and she instinctively dove to the ground.  She drew her laser pistol and noticed that the four other enforcers at the hover car were firing at her and Stanley, using the car doors as cover.  Stanley was on the ground next to her, aiming his laser pistol also.  “Damnit,” he said.  “We waited too long.”

Eileen aimed her laser pistol at Mick’s head and fired through the window of the car door he was hiding behind, blasting a hole through his eye.  Several lasers hit Stanley and another hit Eileen in her side.  She also felt one graze her face and another hit her shoulder.  She collapsed into the sand and couldn’t move.  She felt the warm blood dripping down her side into the sand.  She knew the wound in her side was pretty bad.  The pain was intense.  She tried to aim her laser pistol again and another laser blasted her hand, damaging the weapon beyond repair.  It sparked and caught fire and she threw it away from her.  She brought her burnt and wounded left hand close to her body and she painfully looked beside her to see that Stanley wasn’t breathing.  He was staring lifelessly in her direction, smoke rising off his back into the night.

Eileen heard the sound of sand bike engines.  She strained to look up once again, and though her vision was blurry, she could see the silhouettes of uniformed men against the night sky.  They were pointing guns at Dusty, Phil, and Gerald.  Mick was dead in the sand, his head bleeding out from the wound she’d given him.  “Don’t shoot,” she heard Dusty say.

“Keep your hands in the air,” someone shouted.  “Drop your weapons.”

“They’re enforcers all right,” someone else said.  “There are two over here.  One’s dead.  I think the girl might still be alive.”  A wave of intense pain came over Eileen and her head dropped into the sand.  She could see dark, blurry dunes and stars as her sight went to black and she drifted into unconsciousness.

<>

Freemont Daley was afraid to leave his home.  He’d heard shouts and screaming outside, followed by several explosions.  Drummond must have been under attack.  It was the only explanation.  His projector had been all but useless since the IAO had taken over, and he’d lost his connection to the Satellite Net.  He was basically living in a vacuum.  He walked over to his front door, not sure whether to open it or not.  He didn’t have a laser pistol, so he looked around his living room for any possible weapon.  He picked up a candlestick and slowly opened the front door to his house, cautiously peering outside.

The buildings of Drummond were in flames.  The dark night sky was clogged with smoke and the smell was overwhelming, causing Freemont to cough.  There were bodies strewn across the street, some missing limbs, some missing heads.  Freemont felt sick to his stomach as he took in the awful scene.  There were bodies hanging from signposts.  Everything was fire and smoke and death.  Drummond had become Hell.  And it didn’t take him long to find its Satan.  A silver cyborg was walking towards him.  It was wearing shredded black pants, and its upper torso was scattered with bits of skin here and there, but it was mostly metal.  It had one red eye.  Where the other eye would have been, there was an empty socket seeping smoke.  The cyborg’s face was bone and metal, with just a little skin left.  Electric sparks were flashing all over its face and body.  Freemont had never seen Warrick Baines before, but this thing fit the descriptions he’d heard.  It appeared to be unarmed, but it was oozing hatred.  “I won’t do you no harm,” Freemont said.  “I’ll leave.”  Two blades slid out from the cyborg’s wrists.  “Can you talk?  We can talk.  We can work this out, I think.”  Freemont was shaking.  “You don’t have to kill everyone, do you?  There’s really no reason to do this.”  The cyborg didn’t seem capable of human communication.  Freemont slammed his door shut and locked it.  He quickly pushed the couch behind the door and backed up towards the wall.  The door rattled a little.

Seconds later, the door and the couch burst into pieces and the cyborg was flying towards him, its blades spinning like propellers.  Freemont screamed as his life ended in a blood-splattered instant.

<>

Abby was camping on top of a high dune, using the portable charger she’d gotten from Bernard Parks to charge Einstein.  She wanted to get to Drummond as quickly as possible, but she knew she needed some food and rest, so she’d camp for the next several hours and leave early in the morning.  She opened a can of pork and beans and started cooking them over her portable stove.  “I detect something approaching,” Einstein said.  “It’s hard to tell from this distance, but I believe it’s a human driving a sand bike.”

Abby frowned.  She turned off the stove, tuned on her camouflage projector, walked over to her sand bike, and turned on the radar jammer she’d attached to it with a magnetic strip.  She opened the bag Bernard had given her and took out the electromagnetic force field projector, which, to Abby, looked almost like a megaphone.  The difference was the red lights and the concentric yellow rings in the mouth.  She pulled out some night vision binoculars that had also been in the bag and scanned the dunes around her.  “There’s only one of them?” she asked.

“Yes,” Einstein said.  “One that I detect, anyway.”

Abby continued scanning the dunes.  She heard an engine to her left, so she looked in that direction and saw the sand bike.  It appeared to be heading towards Drummond.  Maybe an IAO scout returning to Warrick to give him information?  She kept watching.  The driver was wearing a jumpsuit.  A prisoner or ex con, perhaps.  As the driver came closer, Abby realized it was a woman.  She had awful hair.  The middle was about six or so inches long and dark and the sides were lighter and very short.  Abby couldn’t differentiate exact colors with the night vision, but she could tell shades.  There were scars on the woman’s face and an eye patch covered her right eye.  She definitely had the look of a bandit.  There were two swords at her sides and a laser rifle was strapped to her back.  Whoever, she was, she wasn’t anyone Abby wanted to come face to face with.  “Einstein, I’m going to abandon the camp temporarily.”  She took Einstein off the charger and strapped him around her wrist.  She turned off the stove, grabbed her bag and the bag Bernard Parks had given her, and started walking away from her camp.  “I have everything that’s important.  I’ll have to leave the sand bike here since the camo projector I have is only meant to project a personal image.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” Einstein said.

“She already has a sand bike, so hopefully, she’ll view the camp, see nothing of interest, and leave.”  Abby looked through the binoculars once again.  As the sand bike came closer, Abby looked more closely at the scars on the woman’s face.  There were scars on her cheeks, her chin, and her forehead.  There was something very familiar about the woman to Abby.  She zoomed in on the woman’s face.  The heart-shaped facial structure, small nose, and full lips, along with the very familiar, slightly slanted eye, cemented it.  Abby smiled as memories streamed through her mind.  “Shelly.”  She turned off her camo projector and ran down the dune, waving her arms.  Shelly noticed and drove the sand bike towards her.

“What’s going on?” Einstein asked.

“It’s Shelly,” Abby said as she ran through the sand.  Shelly stopped several feet away from Abby, jumped off the bike and ran to her.  They embraced one another in a warm hug beneath the moon and the stars.

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAjx0d-fda4]

 

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Continue on to the next chapter:

Afterlife, Volume 3, Chapter 25

Where:
Abby and Shelly are reunited, but it’s a bittersweet reunion.
Averil Jones sells her wares at the New Atlantis Black Market.
Members of the resistance enjoy a calm before the storm in Rose City.

Find the Volume 3 Table of Contents page here.

View the Map here.

Check out Afterlife on Goodreads and don’t forget to rate it.

Check out Michael Monroe’s page on Amazon to find other stuff he’s written.
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