“Okay, so then it’s your mother that you miss. That’s your wound, that’s why you do it, right?”
I’m silent, but my throat tightens at the reference to Mom.
My God, it’s been almost twenty years and the grip she has on me is as strong as the day she died.
It’s there and will always be there, probably until the moment I slip off into the great void.
I’m pissed at Gus for dredging it all up and I’m pissed because he’s absolutely goddamn right.
Gus eases his head back and peers at the ceiling.
“What makes a person kill another living thing? I guess it’s because sometimes it threatens the person or has something he wants.”
He looks over. “Those things out there no longer really threaten us so maybe we’re killing them because they have something we want.”
“Like what?”
“Freedom.”
My head sinks. I’m beginning to think maybe the others are right. Maybe Gus is nutzo.
“Del Frisco, and Strummer and some of the others, they worry about you, man,” I finally say.
“Doubtful.”
“They think you spend too much time alone.”
“Maybe I should leave.”
“Don’t be stupid, Gus.”
“Have you ever considered leaving?”
“Leave where?”
“Here. This place.”
Laughing, I half expect that Gus is pulling my leg, but his face is screwed up, deadly serious.
“Why the hell do we have to talk about this?”
“Because we’re all getting older.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Nobody wants to talk about it.”
“Because we all know how it ends.”
I stare at him, but he doesn’t break gaze. “Change the subject.”
“How can you change the subject when it’s the only one we’re talking about?”
“Move on, Gus.”
“Fine, okay, you want me to change the subject, buddy boy? I will. Satellites,” he blurts out after a moment. He holds up a small circular device made of plastic and glass. He presses a button on the back of the object and it glows and hums to life.
“You ever heard about them? Satellites I mean.”
I shake my head.
“Christ, I never told you about GPS?” he asks.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s not a ‘who’?” he says with a smirk. “It’s a thing. Global positioning satellites. GPS. Back in the day the sky beyond what we can see was filled with satellites constantly roaming around the planet. Up there in space,” he says, pointing to the ceiling.
He hands the object to me. I can see digital numbers on the face of the thing.
“If you had certain numbers, digits, you could type them into that little machine and it would tell you where to go.”
Internal machinery whirrs inside the device as a map of the city appears. I hand him back the device and the digital camera and he inputs the coordinates I photographed into his little machine. Then he holds it up to I can see a digital map of the city being created.
“Those numbers you’ve been seeing. They’re kind of like a code. They lead to a spot in the city, probably a building if you want my guess,” he continues.
“Where?”
He gestures to the map on the tiny machine. “Close. Maybe six blocks from here.”
I examine the map, trying to discern something I might recognize, but the map isn’t incredibly detailed so I can’t make out much of it.
“It’s not pinpointing anything,” I say.
“That’s because you’re missing a few digits. Find those and you’ll find the location.”
I squint at the map as Gus powers it off. “There’s one more thing,” he continues. “I’m pretty sure those numbers were meant to be found. Somebody probably left those for us… for you.”
“You don’t – the Dubs?” I ask.
“Dunno,” he says with a shrug. “But my guess is there’s someone else out in the city besides us. Somebody who’s leaving numbers around, somebody who wants one of us to find something.”
“What?”
Gus pockets the tiny GPS device and smiles.
“That’s yet to be determined, kemosabe.”
Over the course of the next hour we debate the finer points of why someone would leave those numbers behind and how this and how that.
I share with him my thoughts and he shares his and then, when we can babble no more, Gus procures us a few bottles of suds from a wall stash.
We sit back and down the down the room temperature beers and watch a film.
Gus has his screen and recorders and stuff hooked to a camouflaged wind turbine, so at least once a week we sneak down to watch a pic. Tonight’s feature is a movie called “The Sound of Music” that Gus said he always loved as a child. I’m not necessarily into the story, but I hang because I feel sorry for Gus, who doesn’t really have anyone aside from the dogs, and besides, I kinda dig the songs in the movie. Gus sings them off key, slugging beer after beer.
Two hours later, Gus is three sheets to the wind as I slip away. I’ve gotta get moving. The others will be wondering where I am if I’m not back soon, but not Gus. He could sit down in his lounge for a few days and nobody would miss him, which I guess is the blessing and the curse of being a dog handler.
7
Stealing away from Gus’s room, I’m careful to push the work-benches back to conceal the hidden doorway.
Then I’m out and moving briskly into a stairwell. Beneath me is the tenth floor and I can hear sounds coming from behind the metal door near the landing below.
I haven’t been down there since I was a child, a particularly terrifying time when the Keep was breached and several dozen Dubs managed to get inside. Dad was still around then.
I remember him frantically grabbing me as sirens screamed and we ran into a panic-room somewhere nearby.
Faint cheers rise up on the other side of the door and curiosity getting the better of me, I descend and move through it.
Ribbons of smoke and steam greet me as I’m dead-eyed by an axe-wielding guard who looks carved from granite. I hold out a plastic identification badge and he mumbles “Jumper” to himself and waves me past.
In comparison to the upper floors, it’s a damned hard life down here as I’ve alluded to before. During the summer it’s brutally hot and then with the winter comes pneumonia and what some call the “grippe” that seems to seek out those with weak constitutions; there’s also tuberculosis and the cruel, cold, and biting winds and blizzards of snow, all testing relentlessly for failing muscles and impoverished blood.
A significant portion of the male and female Burners labor near the incinerator by artificial light, lugging sacks of trash and Dub bodies. It’s a fearful kind of work. They keep warm by the residual glow of the incinerator and vis-à-vis the cheap hootch called “Shine” that’s made by straining various epoxy residues through cheese-cloth and then mixing it with distilled water and vinegar. The number of men and women I’ve seen drinking themselves sodden on Shine has increased of late, and it’s only a matter of time before there’s some sort of official intervention.
In addition to the Burners, there are those who safeguard the Keep, the giant slabs of steel that were welded down over the elevator shafts and stairwells to secure the floor permanently.
There are also men who guard these men and others who make sure that the walls and ceilings and floors are in good condition and still others who roam around the incinerator positioning and repositioning fans – as the supply of trash and bodies is renewed every few hours - to blow cinders and the remnants of the burnings out holes that have been hewn into the walls.
For their efforts, these folks are given the lion’s share of the protein that’s grown in VC1. Protein in the form of beans and the like, by the way, because the little amount of meat we’re able to produce, goes directly upstairs. Stil
l, there’s enough good stuff to go around as evidenced by the muscle-quilted frames of most of those in sight.
I slip between the titans as they carry hundred-pound sacks of trash and the palsied bodies of dead city-dwellers and Dubs.
The hands of these laborers are so criss-crossed with cuts and raised lacerations, that it’s impossible to count or trace them. Most of them also don’t have any fingernails, having worn them off in fights and various ops; their knuckles swollen so that their fingers spread out like fans.
A pair of wooden dowels fall from out of a sack of trash and clatter on the floor.
The trash haulers don’t bother to turn back and I pocket the dowels, staring at the far end of the floor.
There’s a brace of ironhard men with weapons and beyond them, a gunmetal hunk of steel, positioned floor-to-ceiling.
On the other side of that wall are presumably a thousand famished Dubs, just waiting to surge up through the building and finish us all off. I imagine if I placed my ear to the metal I could hear them on the other side, clucking their tongues, conspiring, searching for a way in.
I follow the sound of cheers echoing behind me and peer in through an open door where I see two-dozen men and women, swilling Shine and bellowing at a pair of Dubs that are fighting each other.
One of the Dubs is tall with long brown hair and the other one is short and broad-shouldered, wearing a camouflage jacket with sprung elbows.
Each is missing pieces: the tall one’s mouth cratered, its jaw ivory and exposed, while the shorter one’s spinal column has begun to protrude from a deep divot in his back.
The Dubs stand in a pit encircled by a three-foot brick wall.
They’re chained at the ankles and clutch sharpened lengths of metal with which to do battle.
I watch the tall one batter the other about the face until a section of skull flies off in a spurt of black liquid. Gus is right, it’s a grisly thing to defile the dead.
The skull lands in the pit and the people cheer and I wonder what kind of impact this close quarter’s brutality has on those who live here?
What happens when you know that the place you live in is being besieged by the Dubs; who come, literally, by the thousands every single morning, fighting with each other for a chance to devour you? Blizzards and colds make no difference to these demons, they’re always on hand. Gus says the specter of death desensitizes you to suffering and I think he’s right. Slowly but surely, the humanity is being stripped away from the folks down on ten.
One of the men watching the battling Dubs, a bearded Burner named Sid Saab who I’ve seen on the upper floors, gapes back at me. Sid’s face is nearly hidden behind a layer of soot and grease as he cocks an eyebrow and rises. His frame nearly blots out the ambient light.
“The hell you from?” he asks.
“Twenty-eight.”
“High-minders,” Sid sneers, referencing a slur that’s used by those down here to refer to anyone living or working above ten (I’ve also heard “High-Horsers” used before as well, which never really made any sense to me).
“You think it’s smart to do that?” I reply, wagging a finger in the direction of the chained Dubs. I watched as the shorter Dub dips low and then shoves his sharpened metal shaft into the chin of the tall one. He works it into the tall one’s neck meat until there’s a rush of putrid liquid as the Dub topples over in stages. To his knees first, then to the ground.
“Smartest thing I done all day,” Sid says, watching the Dub’s body lie in a puddle of black ooze.
“Smart doesn’t necessarily mean right,” I reply.
Sid’s face turns a few shades of red as he registers this.
He takes a step toward me and it dawns on me just how big he is. Gus read me a story once about some magical creature called a Golem, and Sid looks to be about the same size. A stone statue come to life.
“Right and wrong don’t cut no ice down here and they don’t carry no currency anymore,” the big bastard breathlessly mutters. “Where the hell you been, boy?”
I point up and then hands shoot out from behind me and latch on my wrists. Before I know what’s happened my arms are pinned behind my back. Sid’s leering at me, spittle flecking the corners of his mouth.
“I think you need to be baptized.”
“But I’m not religious.”
“Religion ain’t got nothin’ to do with it,” Sid says with another sneer.
He whistles and a knee lodges in the middle of my back as I’m hurled forward.
My legs smack against the edge of the pit, momentum carrying me face-first into it. Crashing to the ground, I slide across the bloody slick left by the dead Dub.
The others surrounding the pit cheer and jeer in my general direction.
There’s a low trailing moan that echoes from above me and I elbow myself up as the shorter Dub stares at me.
At this close distance I’m privy to every raised vein pulsing in the thing’s bluish-white flesh.
But it’s the eyes that get me.
I’d expect to glimpse some semblance of humanity in them, but it’s not there. What is there, however, is a vacant, hungry look that signifies one desire: to feed.
A frown etches the snub-nosed Dub’s face and the thing’s mouth wrenches back. It snaps at me, but isn’t close enough to do any harm. That changes as another Burner cuts the Dub’s shackles with bolt-cutters.
The Dub doesn’t come at me from the front. Rather, it spiders sideways and only on sheer instinct do I lurch back at the moment that the Dub’s jaws snap at the air.
Bile from the Dub’s mouth daubs my face. I combat-roll sideways and spring to my feet.
The Dub bull-rushes me, slashing the air with its hooked hands. I throw an elbow and block its hand, but the thing’s momentum forces me back.
My eyes catch sight of the audience and I can see they want blood. There’s a fat woman closest to me with a shaved head clutching a baby doll. She points and shakes a fist and curses me.
I dodge the Dub and run in a circle as the air explodes with the furious cries of the onlookers. The Dub takes up its metal club and swings at me.
WHOOSH!
The club glides past my head.
I duck and dart and kick the Dub in the chest.
He goes down to his knees, dropping his metal shaft.
I grab the shaft and swing it like a baseball bat as the Dub rears back up in a rage.
The shaft’s sharp metal edge opens a fissure in the Dub’s chest. He wobbles, then there’s a rush of gas and foul-smelling liquid issues forth as the thing throws itself against me.
Dub viscera sheets the ground as the thing rains blows down on my head, opening a cut near my eye.
Somehow I’m quickly on my knees, vision cloudy, murmuring a nonsensical children’s rhyme that Gus taught me.
Another punch smashes my lip.
I roll over and gape up.
I can see the Dub’s baleful eyes, irises constricting into dots.
I can hear the meat-eater hissing at me, lips drawn back, its freakshow face mere inches from mine. For an instant, the gnashing of the thing’s teeth sounds like a primitive language. As if the Dub is trying to talk to me.
It backtracks and then impulse sends it springing at me a final time. I withdraw the wooden dowels I’ve got in my pocket and bring them against the Dub’s head like cymbals.
There’s a tremendous explosion of flesh and bile, the dowels exposing the Dub’s skull. The monster doesn’t slow, however, raging forward as a shadow falls over us, some figure rising up behind me.
Before I can look back, the Dub’s glassy eyes have rolled up. A look of bafflement comes over the Dub as a hammer violently shatters its forehead.
Rust-colored gore splatters me as the Dub’s body falls on mine.
I shrug the corpse aside and spin in every direction, blinded by blood and body fluids.
The roar of the crowd further disorients me as someone, presumably the bearer of that hammer, mutters the wo
rd “pussy.” A fusillade of footfalls echo all around and then a heavy object thumps my neck.
Pain shoots through every quadrant of my body and my legs turn to jelly. Crashing to the ground, the last thing I see is a man leering down at me.
I raise a finger to object to whatever it is that’s about to happen next, but the words die on my lips.
I swoon, falling unconscious as darkness smothers me like a blanket.
Afterword
Thanks for reading VERTICAL CITY, Part 1. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on Amazon (yes, it’s a bit of a pain, but reviews are much appreciated).
Author Notes On Book 1
I get emails all the time from curious readers who ask what was the inspiration behind these books and my answer is always two things: thawing ice and 28 DAYS LATER. First, I read a number of truly terrifying articles about all of the potentially horrific viruses that currently are alive and well (and frozen) in various places around the globe. Like the monster in John Carpenter’s THE THING (the original btw, not the crappy remake), the viruses are slowly coming back to life as the planet warms.
I thought the idea of an ancient evil suddenly being awoken was pretty damn compelling, but I struggled with how to execute on it. My gut told me that a zombie book was the right way to go, but I had issues coming up with an angle that was unique. After watching 28 DAYS LATER for the umpteenth time, I knew there was no way I’d ever be able to top it and besides, almost every zombie book contains the same basic beats/plot-points: people running around, chased by the zombies, seeking shelter in a place that is invariably worse than the one they left. I was tired of that and wanted to go in a totally different direction and then it hit me. If you were a survivor, trapped in a city in the midst of a global pandemic, wouldn’t you think it was safer to go up? To hide in the tallest building you could find and seal it off somehow, and wait for the things on the ground to eventually die off? I thought that was a pretty cool way into the book, the notion of a small group of survivors coming together to try and form a new society under the most extreme circumstances imaginable. Sorta LORD OF THE FLIES by way of WORLD WAR Z. Once I had the concept down, the bones of the story and the characters just came to me, and I was off and running.
Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 7