We’ve done this a time or two before so we we’re well aware that the margin is narrow. The bedlam we’ve just caused gives us only seconds to make our move.
By the time the flames begin to lick the walls we’re already on the run, blitzing directly at the Dubs, dropping onto our sleds. Before the Dubs know what’s happened, we’re slipstreaming past them, ground-surfing at an incredible rate of speed.
We cover our heads and feel the warmth of the fire, my eyes watering from the sulfurous smoke as we slash through the sea of chaos right past them!
Our sleds eventually slow on the pocked cement floor and we roll off a hundred feet from the gaping hole in a Dub-free zone.
Coming up on the balls of our feet, we look ahead and spot the two lengths of thick wire that were embedded on the exterior of the building, just on the other side of the open exit hole. That’s how we first climbed in.
Opening pockets on our compression suits, we pull out leaders attached to four-point harnesses wrapped around our torsos. On the end of the leaders are carabiner clips that we secure around the thick wire. The leaders are fifty-three feet long which gives us plenty of room to move.
Suddenly, the sounds of the Dubs have merged into a great booming chord.
We swivel to see that they’ve regained what little senses they still possess and are coming for us, squirming clumsily through the fire and smoke. There’s something pitiable in their cluelessness (something I find entirely human), as they howl their displeasure at our efforts to circumvent them.
The ghouls’ moaning grows in intensity, their numbers augmented as others drop down through holes in the ceiling and wall. In seconds, the corridor fills with the spastic movements and hungry eyes of a hundred flesh-eaters tracking our every move.
We could exit the building if we wanted to, but to leave that many Dubs behind would hamper the ability of the Hogs to get the generator out. For that reason alone, Del Frisco motions for me to follow and we veer down toward the Dubs and then, when they’re a dozen feet from us and supremely pissed, we reverse course and run toward the hole in the wall as the Dubs charge after us.
Before the brain-suckers realize what’s happened, we’re leading them toward the hole.
My heart thumps as my arms pump.
We gain ground, sprinting, leaning into a dead run.
I look back over a shoulder and see their mouths unhinged, tongues lolling over blackened teeth as they grin. The fools actually believe they’ve got us pinned in.
Del Frisco looses a rebel yell and I do likewise, pivoting as the Dubs reach for me. I hesitate for an instant and in that interval a Dub snares and rips off a handful of my hair which means I don’t feel sorry for what comes next.
And what does come next?
Panting hard, I look down as my feet kiss the last bit of building and then there’s a feeling of pure weightlessness as I fly through the air, hundreds of feet off the ground.
4
I hang, suspended over terra firma for what seems like an eternity, looking down onto the city streets below.
Then gravity cinches my arms and legs and I’m falling, rocketing straight down as the Dubs fumble through the hole in the wall after us like lemmings.
Del Frisco and me drop like fallen angels, screaming fifty feet down, silhouetted against the dying sun when WHAM! our momentum stops.
We snap back and up, the leaders around our harnesses finally pulling taut.
I spin in my harness, dazed and blinking.
I watch the Dubs that followed us out of the building soar several hundred feet down toward the city streets which are swarming with thousands of other Dubs.
The airborne Dubs slam onto their brethren in a thrashing heap, scattering them across the ruined blacktop like gory pins in a bowling alley.
“Erase my name off the grave cause you’ve just been Del Friscoed!” Del Frisco says while pointing toward the ground.
I look over at him as he dangles on the wire like a marionette.
“How many you think we took out?!” he shouts, breathless, supremely pumped.
My gaze fixes on him and then swings out to the periphery.
I see something I might’ve ordinarily missed.
A face, the visage of a young girl framed in the hollowed-out window on a ten-story building several blocks over.
Watching us.
Watching me.
Pebbles of sweat assault my eyes and I blink them away and when I look back, the girl’s gone.
These kinds of mirages happen on a daily basis, so I don’t give it a whole lot of weight, but still. It’s been a while since I’ve mistakenly seen anything alive this close to the ground.
“What up, Wyatt?!”
“What?”
“Two-hundred? You think we crossed over two-hundred of ‘em?!”
Fighting the urge to respond and mention the girl, I turn instead and look up at the gap between two immense buildings which is crisscrossed with a dozen separate lengths of thick wire (a portion of which we’re suspended on), that everyone calls “The Dream Catcher.”
The Dream Catcher, which resembles an industrial spider’s web, is composed of elevator cable (or “Ropes” as Jumpers call them), that have been pried out of elevator shafts and carefully separated by worker’s in the physical plant into “tendrils.”
Tendrils are made of several individual strands of rope that have been heated until pliable then covered in various epoxies until they’re ready to be threaded around sharpened, eight-inch long stainless steel masonry darts.
The darts are fitted into pneumatic guns that resemble harpoons and which are bolted onto the roofs of several buildings (and occasionally shoulder-fired) and then launched into the faces of adjacent buildings.
Once the tendrils are secured to the other buildings, they’re pulled taut and then permanently tied to posts on the tops of the other buildings.
I’m over twenty now and the cables were first stretched between the buildings when I was five or six. That was around the time the survivors realized we’d never be able to inhabit the lands below us, what we now call the Flatlands, again.
Our only hope was to live above the infected.
The cables were strung as a means of colonizing new buildings when the foodstuffs in the original building ran low in the third year of our ordeal. Now they’re our only real means of transportation, meticulously maintained every night by members of the physical plant.
Reaching up, I grab the tendril above me and clip my carabiner to it which allows me to pull across to another building where a metal staircase has been affixed to a stone lip that protrudes from the structure’s façade.
There’s a network of metal staircases all over the various buildings in eyesight along with metal cleats that have been driven into stone and brick to provide us with footfalls and perches as we move up and down. Darcy’s father used to be a serious scaler of stone back in the day, and she always says we’re like him now, urban rock-climbers.
Lactic acids sears my arms and legs, my body and mind totally spent as I haul myself up onto the staircase and ascend ten feet.
I watch a bearded, horse-sized man nicknamed “Defcon,” one of the Roof Hogs, wave and whistle to me.
I do the slightest of bows as he and his men begin winching up the leader that’s attached to the solar generator we’d clipped moments before. Sitting on a rung of the staircase, a satisfied smile twitches up my mouth as the generator is hauled out and up in one piece.
“Score one for the good guys!” Del Frisco says from the middle of the Dream Catcher.
Ignoring this, I nimble up and hook onto the master tendril that leads over to the roof of a building that rises up into the sky like the horn on some great beast. This is the place I’ve called home for most of my life, the Vertical City’s mother building, “VC1.”
The wind buffets me as I edge laterally across the master tendril. As a youngster I was terrified of heights, but years of forced training cured me of it and n
ow I wouldn’t think twice about crawling across a single strand of wire twelve-hundred feet off the ground. A few moments later I drop down onto the roof of VC1, the forty-fifth floor, and roll over onto my side as Defcon waddles over peers down at me.
“You boys did real good down there, Wyatt.”
“Nearly ate it.”
“How many you encounter?” Defcon asks.
“Least a hundred, maybe one-fifty.”
“And we took down all of ‘em, gents,” Del Frisco bellows while somersaulting dramatically onto the top of VC1.
A kind of etiquette is observed atop the buildings.
The Hogs have witnessed so much death and despair over the years that they loathe anyone who gloats or excessively celebrates after an op. This is the reason why Defcon raises an eyebrow at Del Frisco while leaning down and hoisting me up to my feet.
“Your partner over there still doesn’t get it, does he? The death-stalkers down under? They got the time and the watches.”
I nod, recognizing how much the older folks in the building loath the notion of body-counts and an all out battle royal with the Dubs.
Fighting a war of attrition was attempted unsuccessfully in the past, including the time one summer when a looted armory provided survivors with ten-thousand rounds of ammunition that they used up over the course of a five-day turkey shoot.
Then there was the middle-ordeal weekend where incendiaries were hurled onto faraway buildings to start structure fires that everyone hoped would smoke the Dubs permanently from their spider holes. None of it significantly dented the pustulant packs, and those still around from the early years liken the whole thing to trench warfare: lots of carnage, but no real forward progress.
Defcon slaps me on the back and hands me a metal thermos filled with chilled water that I take a long pull from before pouring over my head.
Thanking Defcon I march past his colleagues, ten colossi in all, who admire the generator. Stopping near the edge of the roof, I look down over my city.
It’s dusk now, which is an excellent time of the day.
The sun has turned blood red and the tops of the city’s buildings shine like they’re ablaze. Most of the city was carbonized in the fires after the ordeal, save for VC1 and about ten surrounding blocks. Nobody knows why our block was saved although there are plenty of rumors, including that the block housed bigwigs or branches of some intelligence or military units that called the shots up till the bitter end.
Life stirs overhead.
Flocks of carrion birds circle the skies, their numbers so great they nearly blot out what little light is left.
They dive-bomb past me, heading toward the ground to feed on deceased Dubs or those the Dubs have dispatched. I’ve always thought that when we see the last of the birds we’ll know the ordeal is over, but every day seems to bring more of them.
The sun fades and I scan what used to be one of the world’s most beautiful skylines. In the twilight the city resembles one long, jagged scar, and the sections that weren’t burned or otherwise destroyed during The Awakening, lie dormant.
I close my eyes and draw strength from an image of how it all used to look. Back when my mother would take me out onto our terrace to listen to the cacophonous sounds as the city-dwellers moved briskly down the clamorous streets. The wind coos and for a moment I can almost smell the sweet scent of Mom, there for an instant and then gone.
My jaw locks and I look down to see if there’s anything else moving in the lower buildings or on the ground.
Maybe the girl I imagined before, possibly someone else.
Every night I do this and every night it’s the same: nothing truly alive moving on two feet. It’s like Odin, the man in charge of VC1 always says:
Death holds sway below the tenth floor.
My line of sight creeps to the right where a small forest of high-rises are visible. While none of us love the idea of never being able to touch solid ground again on a regular basis, our lives were made immeasurably better by the copter’s fortuitous crash on the top of one of the largest buildings in the city, tucked amidst other high-rises on a few city-blocks, all within a stone’s throw of each other. The roof of VC1, an immense, slightly sloped asphalt plaza, provided an excellent roost in those first years and would soon enable us to increase the territory under our control.
For the first five years of the unraveling we all lived in VC1, but then we took in a few dozen other survivors. Mostly people who’d lived and worked in the lower floor of the building. After that, those within the group started to couple and reproduce, swelling the population, which caused some of the other survivors to expand the settlement.
Dad and most of the other adults were for expansion years ago, but those a decade or so younger, were not. They wanted to keep everything under one roof. There were a lot of heated exchanges and then a bunch of the older survivors simply said that in a communal setting each member could do as he or she chose to do and so they were moving out.
I was probably eight or nine when some of those hearty folks, mostly engineers and those who’d done upkeep on the buildings, began stripping the lower levels of the building for material.
As for VC1, the Dubs had infiltrated the building (as they’d done in every other building), but we’d sealed everything off at the tenth floor with welded metal plate across entry points that the Dubs would never be able to get through. But recognizing that the Flatlands were overrun by the Dub hordes, the settlers knew that they needed a way to bypass the Dubs and move onto the adjacent rooftops. They soon began prying the ropes from the elevators, and after many months of trial and error (and multiple deaths), The Dream Catcher was born.
Once the first ropes were stretched, pull-carts and mini-sleds were balanced on the tendrils, added to increase the ability of the settlers to haul goods and other materials between buildings. Soon tents and other structures and huge flower-beds and rain-barrels and whole rooftop vegetable gardens and mini-farms were erected. As with VC1, these buildings were sealed off at the tenth floor as the settlers carved out the structures’ innards and built rickety catwalks and ladder-paths on their facades that were supposed to provide easy access between floors.
Presently, the far end of the Dream Catcher extends to the other six buildings in our community which now resemble sprawling squatter villages, with the nearest street twenty-nine stories below.
Of course, the farther away folks move, the less fealty there is toward Odin and the others that are in charge of VC1. There’s also less desire in the other buildings for violence, with Roger Parker, de-facto leader of the outer buildings, preaching about ending the ops and the ground sweeps and bringing everyone together even as they move farther apart.
There has been talk, mostly whispers and the like, of forcibly resettling those in the outer buildings to VC1 or some other closer structure, but I think that’s just tongue clucking by those who know they don’t have the stones or mandate to do it.
Striding past a field of solar panels and wind-turbines (erected over the hallowed ground where our copter first crashed), I wave to a pair of black-clad Prowlers who oversee the far corners of the roof.
There are at least two and sometimes four Prowlers atop each building, depending on the time of day and circumstances.
They’re led by a long-haired knuckle-dragger named Matthais who’s eagle-eyed and quick on the trigger.
Matthais totes around this massive black rifle with an oversized scope and is rarely seen, preferring instead to hide behind blinds he’s constructed on several of the roofs. I don’t particularly care for the guy, he’s got homicide in his eyes and a meanstreak a mile wide. In another life he’d probably be behind bars, but give the devil his due: he’s saved some of the others before. Darcy, for instance, told me once about how Strummer got hung up on a ladder, cornered between ledges full of Dubs when Matthais came to the rescue. She said she never even saw the guy, just listened to the thump of his gun as he dropped the attacking Dubs one at a time fro
m somewhere up on high.
Matthais is nowhere to be seen so I head through a rooftop doorway and down a set of stairs that spill to the armory manned by Big Sam and Teddy. The pair oversee the depot where Ledge Jumpers and Prowlers store their gear.
I enter the depot which is windowless, the floor covered in black mats retrieved from a kiddie gym.
The walls are adorned with metal lockers and hooks and all kinds of compartments to store stuff. Big Sam and Teddy are standing behind a long counter that’s raised so that they look down on me.
I always get a kick out of seeing the two because they’re such a contrast.
Big Sam’s a giant, nicest guy you’d ever want to meet with these long corded arms, whereas Teddy’s a smack-talking runt, flinty-eyed, bald as an infant, always running his gums and seeming to do something with his hands.
“You made it back in one piece, Wyatt,” Teddy says with a sly grin.
“How many is it?” I ask.
Big Sam consults a blackboard on a wall with white marks and does a tally. “We haven’t lost one in a hundred and three days.”
“Hundred and four,” I say, removing my compression jacket and handing it over to Teddy along with my rucksack, Onesie, and other gear.
Teddy, who’s surprisingly fastidious, makes a face when he sees that the Onesie’s streaked with blood, fluid, and flesh-residue. “What the hell, Wyatt?”
“Ran into a nest.”
“You have to be this messy?”
“Battlefield conditions,” I say with a shrug.
Teddy sucks loudly on his yellow teeth. “One of these days I’m gonna go out with you Jumpers and show you how it’s done.”
“We’d love to have you,” I say with a weary smile as Big Sam chuckles.
Teddy scrunches his nose and slides on a glove and removes a moist towel from a plastic tub. He plucks off an errant piece of Dub bone-confetti and wipes down the Onesie before depositing it in the locker that’s been assigned to me.
Big Sam checks all of the gear off and hands me four twenty-dollar bills, remnants of a stash that was liberated from a Federal Reserve Bank by Del Frisco and a Jumper named Edwin Spoke who was KIA eight months ago.
Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 4