Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4]

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  Given the misery brought about by the Awakening, paper currency is essentially worthless, but we still use it to exchange for goods and services. Somebody tried introducing some kind of fake money made of metal ingots and then some kind of newfangled crypto-coin crap, but that went nowhere real fast. People just felt more comfortable with paper money, so that’s what we continue to use.

  As for the concept of remuneration, every time I go out and come back in one piece I get eighty bucks which amounts to a salary. The cash is then exchanged for food, gears, etc. Same as the days of old. If I bring something back on top of that I get an extra fifty.

  Big Sam slaps my regular eighty bucks down on the counter and then the other fifty for the generator as I hand him the small gold bracelet copped from the Asian Dub.

  This seems to make Big Sam’s day as he holds the bracelet up and wipes off some of the green residue and grins.

  Seeing that Teddy and Big Sam are the ones who safeguard and repair the equipment upon which the lives of each Jumper depend, it’s just good business to grease their palms every now and again.

  Flush with cash, I exit the depot and amble down a corridor, passing sleeping quarters and kitchens and indoor greenhouses that perfume the air with the fragrance of vegetables and fertilizer. There’s a gray metal door at the end of the hallway and my first order of business after returning from a jump and doffing my gear is to debrief the man who works behind it. Odin’s right-hand man, Ben Shooter.

  My hand shakes as I reach up and pound on the metal door. A voice on the other side tells me to come in as a buzzer sounds and the door clicks open and I enter.

  5

  Shouldering the door open, I enter another hallway and pad up one more staircase that opens to a space centered by an intricately-detailed diorama of the city.

  Shooter’s there, panthering around the diorama, searching for something only he can see.

  He turns which allows me, for an instant, to study his face in profile. The first thing that comes to mind is racing dog. Seriously, that’s what Shooter looks like: a greyhound, long and lean with closely mown hair.

  He appears thirty years older than me even though he’s only around thirty-one. Of course, running from an army of the undead on a nearly daily basis has a way of prematurely aging you.

  Shooter’s a legendary figure amongst the Jumpers, one of the first and the only one of the original group to still be alive.

  He helped string many of the first sections of The Dream Catcher and would often volunteer to go out on long-range patrols, usually by himself.

  There are stories about how he was nearly killed dozens of times, yet able to miraculously find some point of exfiltration while single-handedly smoking hundreds of the undead. After breaking his back, pulverizing several vertebrae, and nearly losing an arm, he “retired” and became Odin’s watchman, overseeing the day-to-day operations of the Jumpers and the Hogs and several of the other trades related to The Dream Catcher.

  With some effort, Shooter turns and acknowledges me with a bob of his head. I’ve always tried to be as succinct as possible in my jump debriefs since Shooter’s a mercurial sonofabitch; nasty as a bag of broken glass on one day and cool, yet enigmatic on another. The kind of dude who prefers to say, “someone put a period on their sentence early,” rather than use a word like “suicide.”

  Shooter hunts in a pocket and tosses me a laser-pointer. “Show me where you trekked, troop,” he says.

  The pointer clicks on and I maneuver its red beam over the diorama until the building Del Frisco and me escaped from is located.

  “What floors did you recon?” he asks.

  “Eighteen through twenty-two.”

  “Anything?”

  “A generator,” I reply.

  “Gas or solar?”

  “Solar.”

  Shooter nods approvingly at this, taking back the pointer before crouching on his heels and drawing a mark on the diorama building with a black grease pencil.

  “How many of the bad guys did you encounter?” he asks.

  “Unknown, sir.”

  “More than fifty?”

  I nod.

  “More than three-hundred?”

  I shake my head and he looks up at me.

  “Both of you make it back?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Del Frisco’s a wild-card isn’t he?”

  I stare at Shooter who smirks.

  “I’m not asking you to rat on the guy, Wyatt. You can tell true.”

  My head sinks. “His methods are… unorthodox, sir.”

  Shooter laughs at this and I’m glad he’s in a good mood as he sidles up next to me.

  “Did you see anything else? Anything out of the ordinary?”

  I feel like screaming at Shooter that everything nowadays is out of the ordinary, but thinking better of it, I simply ask, “Like what, sir?”

  “You tell me.”

  I know exactly what Shooter’s asking about.

  He’s fishing for info on the numbers we saw scrawled on the inside of the building.

  One of the other Jumper teams spotted some of them in another building and reported back to Shooter.

  But not me.

  For some reason, my natural bent is to keep certain things to myself.

  “No, sir,” I lie, “didn’t see nothing out of the ordinary.”

  Shooter pats me on the shoulder like a child and then his eyes drop to the ground.

  There’s a single droplet of blood that’s just pinged my boots.

  My guts seem to spring up high into my chest all at once.

  I can barely breathe as Shooter reaches a finger out and nudges aside my right elbow brace. There’s a nearly imperceptible cut there, courtesy of the Asian Dub whose bracelet I snagged. I was praying that nobody would spot it before I cleaned up, but of course Shooter does.

  “You know this whole area is supposed to remain sterile, don’t you?” he says.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He studies the cut closely. “That wound doesn’t look particularly serious does it?”

  I shake my head.

  “Was it caused by one of them?” he asks.

  “I believe so, sir.”

  “You knew that before you came in here?”

  I nod, petrified he might put me down at any moment.

  “I’m glad you didn’t lie,” a voice booms and I look up to see a man well over six feet tall emerge from behind a wall of frosted glass at the back of the room.

  It’s Odin, the head honcho, and with his long, dark hair and piercing eyes, he resembles some kind of Old Testament prophet.

  Odin nears me, giving off a funk that reminds me of blood mixed with herbs. I glance at his hands as a wide grin stitches his face.

  I make a second perusal of his hands and notice the nails.

  Manicured, flesh firm and unblemished.

  Beautiful hands. Delicate even.

  The kind of hands that are not used to physical work.

  “We’re pleased that you’ve told us the truth, aren’t we, Mister Shooter?”

  Instantly I detect a slight softening in Shooter’s face. He nods and my eyes stray to that wall of frosted glass. Odin was back there the whole goddamn time, snooping on our convo.

  For a few seconds, Odin contents himself with studying my face, then, with a rueful smile, he leans in and whispers.

  “Wyatt… do you mind if I call you, Wyatt?”

  We’ve never conversed before, but I nod.

  “Do you know what would have happened to you if you hadn’t told us the truth?” Odin asks, pointing to the blood.

  I don’t, although I have a sneaking suspicion it might involve my untimely demise. I stare into his shark eyes and ask, “What are you gonna do, sir?”

  A few seconds of silence and then he laughs and slaps me on the shoulder.

  “Not a thing. Not one damn thing. Go get yourself cleaned up and get ready for the next op.”

  I’m a little shocke
d at this so I hesitate, backtracking, waiting for the other shoe to fall and when it doesn’t, I make for the door. Odin waits till the last possible minute and then calls after me.

  “Wyatt?”

  I stop, rooted in place. Slowly I look back over a shoulder and Odin has the pointer on. The red dot circles a spot on my chest.

  “Do you know what?” Odin asks.

  “I… no, sir.”

  “You owe me now,” he says, punctuating the words with a zippered grin.

  My face somehow manufactures a ghost of a smile that’s returned by Shooter. Taking two steps back, I spin on my heels and get the hell out of there.

  6

  Jason Sullivan’s hands are greasy and hotter than metal hinges in hell as he grips my arm and examines my cut.

  I’m propped up on an old door that lies over a clutch of cinderblocks, what passes for an examination table down on the twenty-eighth floor.

  Sully’s good peoples, blue-eyed and fair, with thick brown hair that curls in waves about his ears. He does a little black market medicine work on his off hours, but during the day he’s a “Burner,” one of the guys who sweats his nuts off around the incinerator shaft on the tenth floor.

  After the Dubs rose up, there was a period of mass violence and general unrest. Basically, what you’d expect on the eve of civilization’s end. Somebody, and nobody knows whether it was deliberate or accidental, ruptured the city’s primary gas line which produced an unquenchable tsunami of fire that cooked a good portion of thirty city blocks.

  At first the fire consumed everything within its reach below ground, but eventually it just fed off the seemingly inexhaustible supply of gas from the pipe. It’s burned for as long as anyone can remember.

  Darcy said there was a town in Pennsylvania called Centralia where the same kind of thing happened, but I don’t know anything about that. What I do know is that there’s a business elevator shaft on the rear of VC1 that leads down directly into a section of the fire. That’s where we toss our trash, general refuse, the bodies of our deceased, and any Dubs we take down. Don’t go down there if you can avoid it. The entire place has an odor for which there are no polite words.

  Anyway, Sully labors down there during the day, but in the evening, for a few bucks, he’ll clean off any wound that doesn’t require stitches, disinfect the thing, and then run a little homemade test to determine whether you might be infected.

  He’s got one of the whirly medical things called a centrifuge that he freed from the backpack of a dead physician.

  He claims he found out years ago that Dub blood differs from the red stuff that pumps through our veins. Something about it having a different texture or viscosity, whatever that means.

  What he does is take a sample of your crimson and mix it with some from a Dub and run it in the centrifuge.

  If the samples separate, you’re platinum, but if they become one, you’re presumably a few hours away from snacking on your best buds.

  Sully closes his door and locks it and I pass him a few bucks because even though my injury wasn’t caused by a bite and Shooter didn’t seem to think much of it, I need to know. I ask him to run the test.

  He turns to a collection of buckets he has at the back of his coop. There’s a shitload of plastic and metal pails, probably thirty in all, of various shapes and sizes. Sully reads my look, shrugs, and says, “You can never have too many buckets, Wyatt.”

  He hoists a three-gallon jobber and flips it over and sits. He’s smoking when he takes a sample of my blood with a lancet and powers up the centrifuge. The blood separates – meaning I’m apparently not infected – and Sully high-fives me as he disinfects my wound and wraps it up in gauze and sends me on my way. I honestly don’t know if any of what Sully says is true, but it’s reassuring, and that’s worth something.

  Having gone out on an op, I should probably catch some rack-time, but I’m still amped from the jump and don’t really sleep much anymore. Besides, I’ve got a few errands to attend to.

  Exiting Sully’s quarters, I shuffle through the tight hallways of VC1, waving to acquaintances. Though the building’s fortified, we’ve still got to be on guard at all times because of the Dubs. As such, half of us work during the day, while the others take over at night. It’s early evening now so everything’s at its high tide of activity as shifts change. At least 523 people call VC1 home and another 70 or 80 come here from other buildings to work so things do get cramped.

  In addition to the Prowlers and Jumpers, there are those like Sully who work at the incinerator and pods of people that grow the food that we eat, clean out our refuse, keep The Dream Catcher in tip-top shape, monitor the condition of the building, do our laundry, monitor our sources of power and communication, each of us functioning like cogs in a contained machine.

  A good number of us work in VC1’s middle floors, as the top floors are set aside for Odin, Shooter, and the rest of upper management. The bottom floors, mainly at or around the ten, are where, as I’ve mentioned before, the bulwark against the Dubs lies.

  The tenth floor is often called the “Keep” because it’s a secure area and policed by hulking guards and the “Sweepers.”

  The Sweepers are the unlucky men and women whose job it is to actually venture out onto the Flatlands and sweep the streets within ten city blocks.

  Search and destroy stuff.

  Nobody will admit it, but there’s serious class resentment in VC1 between those above and those below. Odin and the top dogs are all descended from folks who were in charge before the world fell: tech gurus and money manipulators and the like.

  Guys like me were scions of middle management, while those in the lower floors were birthed by men and women who worked with their hand and backs. Gus says wherever people live together inevitably there’s gonna be a caste and I guess he’s right, but then again he also says stuff like we’re living in a seething cauldron of jealousies and hatreds which seems awfully dramatic to me. Either way, there have been some grumblings about inequality of late, but nobody has the brass to challenge Odin on it.

  I pass a steady stream of workers and various sleeping quarters.

  We’ve started to run out of room so some of the populace have taken to running what you might call flop houses, which are really just large, gutted rooms filled with mattresses. It’s by no means unusual for two men to have the same mattress in common, one working by day and using it by night, and the other working at night and using it in the daytime.

  Staring through a door into one of the flop houses, twenty mattresses are visible on the ground, stacked next to each other like headstones at a cemetery.

  Aside the mattresses are a handful of laborers, smoking, reading books, shooting the shit. Beyond them, on the far side of the space, there’s a sad-eyed girl in her late-20s holding the room’s communal satellite phone to her ear. For the first few years after it all ended, some of the grids and servers and computer networks were still up so it was possible to call and check on voice-mails.

  I’ve watched a bunch of make-believe stuff with Gus, movies about what people thought the end of the world might be like.

  In most of them there’s some important scene showing a place where people put up pictures and missing signs and notes for loved ones. This never made any sense to me for two reasons. For one, how the hell would you do that when the world was being overrun by flesh-eating nasties? Two, by the time of the Unraveling, nobody wrote anything anymore. All communication was by computer or cellphone, emails, texts, and ridiculous sounding things called tweets.

  While I was too young to partake, anyone over twenty-five remembers the daily routine of calling to listen to the voices of loved ones and leaving messages in the hopes that somebody called back. Nobody ever did.

  I feel for the girl, watching her mumble into the sat-phone, calling out for her mother (like so many of us do at night). There are others like Del Frisco who think it’s pathetic, holding onto the past like that (“wasting time jawing with gho
sts,” he says), but not me. I get it. Sometimes it’s impossible to move forward without going back.

  Slipping past this, my access card provides access through another door and into a “tankage” room which is awash in industrial-sized metal drums filled with waste products of all sorts. There has been an effort to repurposes everything given our limited space, so what we do is dry out a portion of the crap that we produce and then grind it into a fine powder and mix with some other stuff to fertilize the vegetable and fruit banks and indoor aqua fish farms.

  Exiting the tankage room, I hop down staircase after staircase, popping my head through the door that leads to the physical plant. The air here seems to almost be on fire it’s so heavy and warm, suffused with the gamey smell of perspiring bodies and burning metal.

  Three giant cauldrons, big enough for all the devils of hell to brew their broth in, roar in one corner as if volcanoes were blowing through them. Liquid fire leaps from the cauldrons, flinging out jets of hissing, roaring flame.

  I watch as workers pull apart the elevator ropes. Most folks think a dude named Otis built the first elevators back in the day, but Gus told me a guy named Archimedes did it first, followed by some bigshot in France who wanted to use one to see a chick he was banging.

  The workers use giant metal tongs to separate the individual strands of elevator rope before others drag the rope over to furnaces where the strands are made malleable and then reformed into tendrils.

  One of the men, a mountain of flesh with a welder’s mask on, spots and flips me off as I duck outside and continue down the stairs until I’m just above the Keep.

  Moving over a ramp, I stop before a wall that’s tagged with graffiti. In black chalk, somebody has scrawled outlines of the heads of three people.

  There’s enough detail that I recognize one of the three as Roger Parker, the head of the outer buildings.

  He’s sandwiched on the wall between two other guys who were famous in the days before.

  Gus said one was called Che and the other Fidel.