“I’ve done hundreds of them, sir,” I say proudly. “Shooter and Odin say we kill below so that we don’t have to fight above.”
“Odin’s always been good with slogans and sayings. Man was a born salesman.”
“Bureaucrat,” I blurt out, having no idea what the word means, although I’ve heard Gus use it often when referencing Odin.
Parker’s eyes stray toward the ceiling and he slowly nods. “You know what the problem with a bureaucracy is, Wyatt?”
“No, sir.”
“Procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.”
I’m silent, because I don’t really understand what he means. More importantly, I don’t know what Parker wants me to say in response so I just smile.
“How’d you end up as a Jumper anyway?”
“I was pitched by a friend to Shooter who agreed to learn me and some of the others up.”
“You a natural?” he asks.
“Hell, no, sir. Didn’t come easy and I had a bit of an attitude when I first started.”
“Swole up?”
“Like a tick at a dog show.”
He smiles.
“After five months of getting my ass kicked I finally lost my lip and got the hang of it,” I say.
“Spidering.”
“We call it ‘High Intensity Buildering.’ We do a bunch of slack-lining too. Like walking a tight-rope. It’s easier since we work in teams.”
“You always been mated with that long hair I believe I’ve seen you with?” Parker asks.
“Del Frisco? Nope. I got paired up first with a dude named Blake Chambers. We got some big scoops during our first runs. Virgin stuff. Lithium batteries right out of the boxes in an old R&D lab. We scored so much, so soon, we got cocky and got caught trying to snatch some meds in a pharmacy in a courtyard five stories below this blown out roof. We grabbed the stash and were climbing up on our carbon-fiber ropes when they came for us. I barely made it out.”
“I assume your partner became somebody’s lunch?”
I choose not to dignify that with a response, swinging my gaze away from and then back to Parker.
“Why did you bring me here, sir?” I ask.
“I like to answer questions with questions, Wyatt. That trouble you?”
“Depends on the question.”
“If I ask you one, do you promise to give me a straight answer?”
“I promise not to tell a black lie, sir. That’s about as good as I can do,” I reply.
“How many ops have they been sending you out on?”
“More than I can remember.”
“You see anything unusual of late?” he asks.
“I’ve seen some things, sir,” I say, not entirely sure why I’m giving him this nugget of information. Maybe it’s the fact that Parker doesn’t look or act like every other fat cat that came before him. The politicians in the years during the Awakening with their good hair and delicate hands who swore to take the world back from the dead and all the men and women who came thereafter. The ones with honeyed tongues who made lots of promises, but rarely ever kept any.
“You want to elaborate on what you mean by ‘some things?’”
“No, sir. Not unless you force me to.”
He smiles for a final time. “We don’t do that here, kid. That’s what makes us different.”
Parker gestures for me to follow him down a flight of stairs until we’ve come to a metal door in the side of the building. He grips the handle and pulls the door open and a gust of wind greets us. I can see a concealed catwalk outside, barely visible, leading to a retractable metal ladder cocooned in mesh that connects to the middle floors of VC1. I’ve been up on VC1’s roof hundreds of times and I don’t remember ever seeing it, the thing is so well camouflaged.
“You’re free to go,” Parker says.
I take a step and Parker grabs my wrist and steadies my arm.
“Tell them what it’s like over here, Wyatt. The ones you work with.”
“What good would it do?”
He considers this. “Sometimes big things have small beginnings.”
And with that, he reaches behind his back and pulls out the two wooden dowels I had before. They’ve been cleaned off as he gives them to me and smiles and retreats through the door which closes shut. I pivot and take in the path ahead.
With much effort and the moves of a contortionist, I tense myself and scale across the ladder that bends and sways with the wind, nearly buckling under my weight.
Looking back, I spot a young Hispanic guy watching me from the half open door. He smiles and holds up a balled fist as I climb through the window onto the eleventh floor of VC1.
3
I make my way through VC1, cutting up stairwell after stairwell.
The upper floors breeze past and my mind reels with what I witnessed over in Parker’s building.
I’d love to go and tell someone what I’ve seen, but I don’t know how it will be received. I’m already on thin ice with Shooter and Odin and if they discover I’ve been outside VC1 it might not end well for me. And besides, who’s to say the whole thing wasn’t a set-up? A loyalty test of sorts. Maybe Odin or Shooter had Parker take me over to the other building to see whether I’d turn on them. Given all that I know about the Vertical City, such a thing is not out of the question, especially of late.
Putting aside thoughts of Parker and his commune, I make several stops on the way up a staircase, including on the sixteenth floor, which serves two functions.
On one end of sixteen is a nursery and school that houses our youngest members. Gus says this is perhaps the most important area in VC1 because, as some famous writer said in the past, a place without children comes undone.
On the other end of the floor is an infirmary.
This is where the physically ill and people deemed “fragile” are kept: those broken at birth, the severely mentally ill, the perpetually hopeless, and folks who’ve seen shit which cannot easily be unseen.
I move down a corridor filled with a river of slump-shouldered fragiles, mostly men and women in grubby clothes with lifeless eyes.
The river gradually ebbs up ahead until there are only a few people milling around in a common room, including a hunched form sitting in a corner, pounding out a righteous beat on an old set of drums. That’s the dude I’ve come to see, Stanley Storch, who’s pocket-sized, maybe five and a half feet tall, a hundred and ten pounds dripping wet.
Stan’s a guy my dad took under his wing many moons ago after his parents died during the helicopter crash. I don’t remember any of it; but apparently nobody would care for orphaned Stan so Dad did, albeit reluctantly at first. Later it seemed he bonded more with Stan than me, but that was never much of a shocker. Dad was always more comfortable around other peoples’ kids.
Anyway, Stan’s always been a little different, high as a kite one minute, low as a cowardly worm the next, bi-polar probably the correct diagnosis (like so many others in VC1), at least if Gus and Sully are to be believed.
Some people, when cast into the middle of a horrific ordeal, rise to the occasion.
They become thinkers, leaders, stuff like that.
Others crawl up inside themselves and never really make it back out. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened to Stan.
“Big Stan,” I say as he looks up and grins crookedly.
He’s clad in shirtsleeves with a red and green vest that makes him look like a piper in some child’s fairy tale book.
“What it is,” he says.
“What it should be,” I say in response as he raps out a wicked beat on his drums.
“How’s life back in the world, Z?” he asks, using a nickname for me. When I was smaller, Stan got tired of calling me “Wy” all the time, so he just started call me “Z,” and it stuck.
“No better than yesterday.”
“You get me my pass yet?”
I shake my head, shocked that he remembered asking me about a pass to one of the other buil
dings.
“I wanna grab my skins and go work over there in one of the outer buildings.”
“I know you do, Stan.”
“If they don’t make it legal I’ll go on my own. You know I know a secret way down and over.”
“I’m sure you do.”
He gestures for me to lean in close to him. “It’s down a bunch of floors and through this heating duct that reaches all the way to the ground floor. They think I don’t know the way, but I do.”
This is news to me so I simply smile and nod as Stan’s eyes roll heavenward.
“I hear they got a nice spread in them outer buildings. Lots of lovelies and wild nights.”
“I’ll bet.”
“So … you gonna hook that up or what?” he asks.
“Working on it,” I say quietly, realizing it will never happen.
“How’s Dad?” he asks and I freeze because I always forgot how bad his memory is. Before Stan was tossed onto sixteen, he acted out quite a bit and was roughed up by an off-duty Prowler.
In point of fact, Stan was beaten so badly that he suffered significant memory loss, what Sully said was a TBI, a traumatic brain injury.
On certain days, and this is clearly one of them, he thinks he’s back in the past, trotting along behind Dad as he made his rounds as a security volunteer from nineteen down to eleven.
He asks again about Dad and I stare at him blankly. What do you do when faced with questions about ghosts? I’ll tell you what you do. You shut the topic down. You change the subject. You distract.
“I got something for you,” I say.
Stan’s mouth tugs back in a wide grin as I hand him the wooden dowels.
“I know they’re not exactly regulation size-”
“Nah, they’ll do,” he says, cutting me off. “They. Will. Do.”
He takes the dowels in his mouse-like hands and twirls them and begins playing his drums like a man possessed by demons. He’s a speed freak, cracking the dowels in a pattern that he says was called “Blast Beat” back in the days of old. Boom-crack-crack-boom-crack-boom-crack. On and on it goes.
I watch Stan whip and slam the dowels and remember why he told me he plays. During a period of unusual clarity, he related that he drummed to get “behind the beat.” He mentioned other drummers that I’d never heard of, people named Bonham and Moon and Porcaro, who apparently excelled at this.
Stan says there’s some unmentioned universal truth that lies in a backwater behind that groove.
As he plays, I bop my head, worrying about what will happen if and when he ever finds it.
Leaving Stan behind, I continue up through VC1, passing a secure prison floor on seventeen and the de-facto redlight district on eighteen. It’s filled with shops and bars with names like “Slippery Slope” and “One Fell Swoop” and “Bumper Crop.” I’ve never visited any of the establishments. Either I’ve been too young or figured I had enough problems without adding booze or women to the mix.
I jog up a ramp and then another stairwell and stop for a bite to eat at the mess hall.
Then I hit the weight-room for thirty minutes or so. I’m not a big iron worshipper, but I can hold my own, particularly when it comes to my back and hands.
All the months of static holds and drooping from wires have defined and strengthened my lats and while I’m no Del Frisco, I’m able to pump out several good sets of pull-ups. I do this and then chalk up my palms and dangle from the edge of a wooden “hangboard” by the tips of my fingers. The hands are probably the most important things for a Jumper to exercise because we live by our fingers.
A few of the Prowlers are nearby, tossing around six wheels on the bench-press. They snicker at my hand-training, but I shrug it off. Functional strength has always been more important to me than gym strength. Besides, it’s well-known that Odin keeps the Prowlers juiced to the gills with whatever gear and big pharma goodies the teams find during their forages. Del Frisco says the drugs are necessary since the Prowlers are Odin’s de-facto bodyguards (“Brown Shirts” he calls them). Whatever the reason, they eye me warily, grunting, inhaling smelling salts, and slapping each other as they move on to assault a rickety incline press.
Tentative plans had been made yesterday for me to see Del Frisco and the others tonight, but I’m gassed as I leave the gym so I head for my sleeping quarters.
It’s a little shy of midnight when I enter my room which is where me and three admin flunkies crash in what used to be a large corporate office. The room’s boxy and sectioned off by fiberboard dividers we copped from a telemarketing place that used to be down on seventeen.
My little slice of heaven consists of an old memory foam mattress propped near a window (with a blanket acting as a curtain). Aside this are three dividers adorned with a few knickknacks: a photo of me and Mom, some old spotted newspaper clippings of things of interest (stuff about how the world ended and the like), and a leather steamer trunk that Dad left behind. I stare at the trunk every day though I haven’t dredged up the courage to open it.
Stinking of sweat and blood, I shuck my under-clothes, which are speckled with Dub bile and God knows what else, and secure them in a plastic box that’s picked up and disinfected once a week.
When that’s finished, I stand before a mirror in the shower room and examine my hands and every inch of my decidedly ordinary five-foot eight, one-hundred and seventy-pound frame (aside from the laceration that Sully patched up), with my penlight to make sure I haven’t been punctured.
Once I’m satisfied I won’t be turning, I step into the shower basin for the day’s allotted three minutes of hot water which is piped down from solar water-heaters up on the roof.
The filth comes off in chunks.
Moments later, I lie on my mattress in the darkness, curled around one of Dad’s old shirts. When someone dies, is cast out, or vanishes, their worldlies are kept in a universal storage area for eight days.
That’s how long you have to grieve; not seven or nine days.
Eight.
Then you have an hour to sort through their possessions and you’re permitted to retain two objects: a personal affect and an article of clothing.
Everything else is torched.
I wanted to remember Dad’s smell so besides the trunk, I kept the only thing I ever saw him sweat in: an old flannel shirt.
I lie there so far beyond the point of exhaustion that I can’t sleep. My emotions creep up on me as they always do when I try catching some rack time. During the day I generally meet life with a pleasant welcome; but at night, when I lie tossing about, phantoms come to me in the form of all of the sights and sounds of the things I’ve experienced after it all ended.
I wonder how our community began relying on people like me. Narrow-shouldered children.
I mean, I can climb some rock, but that’s basically all I can do.
Sure I’m out of my teens, but who in their right mind would ever classify me as an adult?
There are days when I look over my shoulder, waiting for the grown-ups to appear and set things right. But then I remember they’re the ones that hecked it all up. They dug up the bodies and loosed the contagion that began toppling the dominoes. They screwed the pooch.
More things come to me, Mom falling to her death, me and Dad and the other survivors huddling in the building in those first horrible days after the helicopter crash. I remember Dad whispering to another adult about how they’d kill all the children first if the Dubs broke in. They’d do it with their bare hands or poison. They didn’t think I heard them discuss this, but I did. I heard my own father saying between sobs that he would strangle me if he had to.
And so every night it’s like this, the events that brought us low appearing before me like a sideshow. The world falling away from under my feet for a second, third, infinite number of times; like plunging down into a bottomless abyss, a yawning cavern of despair.
Somewhere out in the distance a siren wails and machine-guns rattle and a woman’s screams ec
ho. I listen to her calling out, asking someone, anyone, to help. Nobody responds and then… a single gunshot rings out and all is silent.
I guess I’m used to it all by now.
It’s what we hear when the sun goes down.
The pulse of the Vertical City.
4
The buzzer pinned to the wall above my mattress barks just after daybreak.
I’ve got thirty-minutes to eat, grab my gear, and make it to the daily roll-call.
Looking out a window, I can see dawn’s brought the rain which falls in torrents.
Every season has its trials.
In the fall and spring there are cold downpours that turn the city streets into canals and bogs. Later comes mid-summer with its stifling temperatures exacerbated by the incinerator, the heat beating down, the air motionless in much of the building, the warmth mixing with the stench of trash and death. It’s enough to buckle even the strongest of men and women.
The Dubs don’t function very well in precipitation, however, particularly rain and snow. It seems to mess with their sense of smell which is why so many ops are undertaken in shitty weather. The precipitation bombards the window and I get the feeling that they’re gonna send us back out again.
I’m running late as I swoosh by Teddy and Big Sam who hand me my gear (I decide not to take my luge sled).
I gather everything up and haul ass over to the mess hall. Cutting in the food line, I get bashed with a few volcanic stares from a pod of laundry jockeys, then grab a breakfast smoothie and a few packets of babyfood for later and sprint up a nearby stairwell.
Exiting the stairwell two floors up, I listen to the sound of music pulsing. There’s only one person I know who likes to rage this early in the morning.
I enter a wide multipurpose floor that functions as sleeping quarters. The room’s been sectioned off by plastic cubicles which Gus says were designed in the past to quash individuality. I wade through them, treading quietly as most are still sleeping in spite of the noise. Del Frisco’s visible, lounging in a cubicle near the back, Strummer and Darcy slumped next to him.
Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 9