Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4]

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  With much effort, the three of us push the cabinet aside to reveal a rope bridge leading from the window to another roof that’s maybe fifty-feet away.

  Del Frisco heads out first, followed by Strummer and then me. The rope bridge, frayed and gray, has deteriorated since the time it was first strung.

  I white-knuckle the rope, one foot in front of the other, the three of us unable to proceed beyond a crawl.

  The sounds of mayhem boom from behind me. Glass smashes followed by grunts and snorts and the slap of bare flesh on wood and stone.

  Del Frisco picks up the pace and the rope underfoot sags because something, maybe multiple things, have joined us on the ladder.

  “Jesus, they’re coming!” I shout.

  Del Frisco and Strummer lurch ahead. I look over my shoulder to see the bone-colored fiends grinning at me, visible in almost every window of the building we’ve just left.

  Two of them are on the rope bridge and then three more join them. Before I can react, there’s a dozen more flinging themselves at the bridge, dangling from it like primates.

  Crazed with endorphins, I turn and rocket over the bridge toward Strummer who drops and rolls onto the roof of the next building.

  The Dubs match me step for step even as I dive onto the roof. Del Frisco stands and hacks the bridge away with his Onesie.

  One of the Dubs, a female teenager, launches herself at us as the bridge falls away.

  Her ragged nails glance off the roof near my foot. She and the other Dubs fall to their deaths, squealing and snatching at the air.

  There’s barely a moment to catch my breath as Strummer waves at us from the edge of the roof.

  “Look at this.”

  I tumble to the ground beside him and peer over the roof. The streets below are buzzing with hundreds of Dubs who are rushing into, at ground level, the building we’re about to enter.

  “Not cool,” Del Frisco says.

  “How long?”

  “Minutes,” Strummer says, “maybe less.”

  We run toward a roof door and bomb down a staircase to an upper floor consisting of a corridor and maybe a half-dozen offices.

  Bolting down the corridor, I peer into an open elevator where forms are toiling in the murk. My eyes acclimate, the darkness alive with movement.

  I can see them now.

  There’s a small army of Dubs shimmying up the elevator ropes.

  “Spiders!” I shout, referencing the Dubs that like to climb.

  Backtracking from the shaft, I stand next to Del Frisco who’s adopted a defensive stance. Quicker than either of us can swallow, a widening mass of Dubs emerge from the open elevator shaft.

  “Kneel,” Del Frisco says to me.

  “What the hell for?!”

  Del Frisco points to a bulkhead overhead, a spot where the wall meets the ceiling. There’s a section of drywall that appears discolored, as if it was added or modified at some point after the original installation.

  “That’s where the stash is, Wy!” he shouts. “NOW KNEEL!”

  I drop to my knees, hands fanning out in front of me, shoulder-width apart. Del Frisco mounts my back and I grimace as he stands on my spine.

  Hunks of drywall flurry down as he hacks at the bulkhead, exposing a gray, metal cabinet hidden inside.

  “Big fat score!” he screams, grabbing the cabinet and dismounting me.

  Del Frisco drops the cabinet and Strummer smashes off its lock to reveal a most glorious sight waiting for us inside.

  Weapons.

  A shitload of weapons.

  Rifles, pistols, several magazines of ammunition, and what looks like a handful of metal baseballs.

  “Grenades!” Strummer says, snatching up one of the metal orbs as Del Frisco hoists a rifle.

  Rising to my feet, I’m handed a pistol as the three of us turn, clutching our implements of death, ready to give and receive.

  “It’s on, baby,” Del Frisco says as the first Dub appears, “it is most definitely on.”

  He aims at the Dub’s head.

  “Boom,” he says while pulling the trigger.

  Unfortunately, there is no boom.

  Just a trickle of rusty water that leaks from the rifle’s barrel. He eases back on the trigger again and it comes off on his finger.

  Strummer pulls a pin on the grenade and chucks it at the Dubs. The grenade hits the ground, sparks, fizzes, and then lies dormant.

  One of the Dubs plucks the grenade off the ground and stares at it.

  “What the hell?!” Strummer says.

  I look down at my pistol, grains of dust coming from where the ammo magazine is still lodged. I realize the weapons stash was placed here so long ago that the elements have gotten to it. I can see the water stains on the inside of the cabinet now, the places where the vermin have bedded down.

  The weapons are useless.

  Each and every one of them.

  “Let’s go!” Strummer says.

  “Hell, no,” Del Frisco replies, “we need to make a stand.”

  “That’s a death warrant.”

  Del Frisco drops his useless rifle and pulls out his Onesie. If only we had our luge sleds we might be able to make a break for it. But where would we go?

  “You are going to die if you stand, man,” Strummer says.

  “I like it well,” Del Frisco answers, “I shall die before my heart is soft and before I have spoken a word unworthy of myself.”

  And with that, Onesie held over his head, he runs raggedly at the horde. Strummer and me hesitate and then we follow him into battle.

  “Sink your claws into ‘em, boys!” Del Frisco screams while splitting the pus-colored skull of the first Dub he encounters.

  Globs of brain jelly smack my cheek as I drop low and hack off the leg of an older Dub wearing soiled hospital scrubs. Down goes the ghoul as I mount its chest and do a little skull-cratering.

  Turning, a female Dub with desolation in her yellow eyes rushes me. She’s got some size to her and the punch she throws catches me in the cheek, freeing a rotten tooth. Del Frisco sees this and two-hands his Onesie, harpooning her in the side. He uses his momentum to force her back into three other empty-headers that we quickly decapitate.

  We trade blows for a few minutes, the space filling with the harsh sounds of close-quarters combat.

  Fists, elbows, palms, and legs fly as we wade into the monsters, metal against bone, even as reinforcements emerge from the elevators.

  We continue to nuke and shank the Dubs, my muscles fatiguing. I spit out a mouthful of blood from where the Dub suckerpunched me, sweat cropping my forehead and stinging my eyes.

  Strummer whistles for us to drop as he depresses the button on his Onesie and swings the barbed ball hidden inside. We duck as the ball slices through the mural of angry faces and frenzied mouths.

  Arterial lines of black blood that leap and spray. The Dub warpack seems to melt in front of Strummer, the dead falling in rows.

  And then one of the Dubs grabs the ball in his meaty hand and snatches Strummer’s weapon away from him.

  “Jesus,” Strummer says. “Jesus.”

  The other Dubs gawk at their confederate who’s holding Strummer’s Onesie. In that instant, in that moment of surprise, we falter. We’re watching Strummer, expecting him to do something and then he does.

  He turns and runs.

  Just like that.

  Del Frisco curses and grabs me, but I skid on ghoul gore and have to push myself up. I spin in every direction, backtracking, disoriented before I see Del Frisco waving at me from an open stairwell door.

  High-stepping to the exit, I help him slam the door shut.

  It’s for a fire exit and made of heavy metal which means it should buy us a few precious minutes of time.

  The three of us high-step it down the darkened stairs as fast as we can, praying nothing is coming up to greet us.

  The stairs are slippery and steep. I fall on my ass twice, skinning my back. Del Frisco helps me up and
we cut down two floors to a landing.

  Strummer grabs the door here, wooden, waterlogged, and tugs on the knob.

  No dice.

  The frame’s warped, but its lock holds.

  I hear the soulless howl of the Dubs. I look back and up and even in the viewless gloom I can see the inside of one of the thing’s mouths.

  It’s grinning at me from two floors up.

  “Hurry!” I scream.

  Strummer grabs my Onesie and he and Del Frisco chop the door as the stairs fill with dozens of Dubs.

  Above us there’s the hideous rush of naked flesh, the bodies grinding against each other as they hungrily descend.

  The door’s exterior comes off in splintered sections. Strummer and Del Frisco continue to chop at the door as if working their way through a cord of wood.

  The Dubs are so close now.

  A floor above us.

  I can smell their funk: a potpourri of fetid water and mold and meat that’s gone bad.

  A rope of saliva drops from somewhere overhead and pings my head.

  We’ve only got seconds.

  With one final burst, we smash in the door.

  Strummer tosses me my Onesie and drops into a three-point stance. He charges into the remnants of the door, blasting through the frame. He’s on the other side as we follow, the Dubs right behind us.

  Looking back, it’s difficult to discern any features in what appears to be a wall of ambulatory meat.

  The Dubs rush toward us in numbers so I great I can no longer count them.

  Del Frisco grabs a handful of my shirt and urges me to run faster.

  We fling ourselves down a corridor that, unlike the floors above, is in terrible shape. Everything here seems out of level and slimy, the surfaces drenched with liquids from holes in the ceiling and burst PVC pipes that sprout from drywall that looks like the wax on a melted candle. Pretty much what’s to be expected on a compromised floor in a structure that hasn’t been maintained for almost two decades.

  And to make matters worse, there are gaping holes underfoot and it’s only on account of me following Del Frisco’s deft footwork that I don’t fall through.

  Looking up, I nearly crash onto Del Frisco who’s slowing.

  “KEEP GOING!” I scream.

  “To where?!” he responds, wheeling on me.

  I look over his shoulder and it’s obvious there’s nowhere left to go. The hallway ends at a blasted-out wall that looks down over the city streets a hundred and seventy-five feet below.

  There are no more stairwells.

  No fire escapes, no ladders, no means of climbing down.

  We are in seriously deep shit.

  We’ve only got one option left.

  The nuclear option.

  10

  “ROLL UP!” Del Frisco thunders.

  Del Frisco’s words stop me cold.

  Roll. Up.

  They are words I hoped never to hear. Words that have never been uttered out in the field, i.e., in real life, before.

  The practice, the very mention of the contingency phrase “Roll Up” strikes fear in the heart of every Jumper for one specific reason.

  Rolling up is the last thing we want to do. It’s the equivalent of a soldier calling in an airstrike on his or her position, a theory of mutually assured destruction conjured up by Odin and a former VC1 architect and structural engineer who brought down buildings for a living back in the day. Basically, it’s the notion of causing a building to crash onto its footprint.

  If the Dubs are gonna get us, the thinking is we’ll destroy their hive and take as many of them with us as we can.

  “ROLL UP!” Del Frisco shouts again, “ROLL THE FUCK UP, WYATT!”

  “How the hell are we gonna do that?!” I yell in response, my insides all knotted up.

  “There’s a detonator under us,” Del Frisco replies. “I saw it on the map.”

  My mouth goes dry because the likelihood we’ll survive the next few minutes is exceedingly slight.

  Searching for Strummer, I realize he’s vanished. I wonder whether he’s had enough and jumped to his death or somehow found a way out that he didn’t want to share with us. Del Frisco always said Strummer had a bit of yellow in him, but I never believed it until now.

  The two of us pivot to face the rampaging pack of Dubs. They’re at the other end of the hall, but closing fast.

  The thing leading the charge, a teenager with a mane of black hair whose arms end just above his elbows, has fixed his barren gaze on me. His mouth is open and his tongue darts out, the kid hissing like a snake. Del Frisco points to the floor.

  “How do we know it’s even there?!”

  “It’s there!” Del Frisco shouts.

  We crouch a few feet away from each other.

  I put my hand to the ground and suss out a spot between my knees.

  At some point in the past, other teams, at the direction of the VC1 architect, placed non-electric detonators in certain buildings. I’ve seen pictures of them in debriefings.

  The detonators are little contraptions made of shock tube and reactive compounds. They were fixed at key locations underneath the floors and then concealed so that no one would be able to disable them.

  Here’s the thing though. Everything about the practice of rolling up is theoretical. Nobody in the Vertical City has ever tried to do it in real life. Hell, we don’t even know if the detonators are where they’re supposed to be or whether they’re still functioning (unlike the weapons back in the stash).

  Del Frisco places one of his orange balls on the ground and I slide my helmet on and then we begin hacking away at the floor and subfloor, the blows from our blades deafening.

  Down comes the sharpened edge of my Onesie with such force that I’m terrified it might break off.

  Hunks of flooring fill the air and we’re quickly into the building’s innards.

  Panting, we work at a furious pace, chopping through a thin layer of cement and the metal casings that hold the waterlogged floor together.

  Del Frisco is singing an old rap song about fighting the powers that be and me, well I’m humming a rhyme that seems appropriate given the circumstances:

  Three blind mice, three blind mice,

  See how they run, see how they run…

  Del Frisco reaches for me and I shrug him off, too intent on doing the deed all by myself.

  A raucous noise arrests my attention.

  The first wave of Dubs is a hundred feet away.

  Even Del Frisco looks terrified as our blades smash down, throwing off friction sparks.

  We hack and hack, cleaving the floor as it separates, opening up a gap as wide as my hips. My fingers bleed, my blisters have blisters, but I don’t stop. I can’t.

  I wait for Del Frisco to grab the detonator, but he pauses. Realizing I’m the only one that can fit into the slit, I thrust my head down.

  “Hurry, Wyatt!”

  I search and search. A few precious seconds pass and then I see it.

  Something white and small and plastic.

  What looks like a little plunger connected to a wire that runs to a long length of plastic tubing that’s hooked around a screw.

  I grab the plunger and pull it up, but it’s too late. The Dubs are on us so Del Frisco uncorks a rebel yell and pulls his Onesie up and triggers the flare.

  The flare bursts from its compartment and zooms toward the Dubs.

  The flame from the flare blinds me for a second, the ball of fire smacking one of the lead Dubs in the mouth.

  The Dub, who’s dressed in the ratty costume of an animal character from a children’s book, goes up in flames, melting from the inside.

  The fiery ghoul bumbles into two more of his brethren, setting them afire.

  This buys us some time as I toss the plunger to Del Frisco who depresses it without hesitation.

  There’s the crackle of electricity and the whiff of something burning. My heart sinks because I think the detonator hasn’t worked and then
a series of explosions echo from somewhere under us.

  Out of the corner of my eye I spot Del Frisco’s orange ball. It’s rolling back behind us.

  The floor has definitely dropped, only by the barest of degrees, but it’s moved.

  For God’s sake we’re doing it, we are bringing the building down.

  Another explosion.

  Louder this time.

  Not caused by the detonator, but by the building that’s likely begun the process of tearing itself asunder.

  Shooter always said that many high-tech buildings had “redundant designs,” meaning that if one floor broke the whole thing wouldn’t come crashing down.

  I don’t think this building has that kind of design.

  My POV tilts wildly.

  More explosions underfoot.

  We’ve done the unthinkable.

  We’ve managed to strike a sweet spot.

  With a concussive boom! whatever supporting structure lies beneath us heaves and splits apart as the floor lists and drops.

  A thunderous screech nearly ruptures my eardrums, the sound of our floor locking and finally fragmenting.

  The floor bends and gives way in sections like tumbling dominoes and then a hole opens up in the middle of it.

  There’s panic in the glazed eyes of the Dubs as they scrabble for purchase. Some continue their attack, faces still aglow with anger as they slide right past us. Most of the others are caught in around the hole, falling into it, pinwheeling down into the murk.

  Me and Del Frisco do the only thing that seems to make sense. We run, jump, and grab onto long sections of exposed metal framing and hold on for dear life.

  It’s like being on the peak of a mighty wave the way the metal sways, bent by the kinetic energy of the building as it turns over on itself.

  “Travel light!”

  Del Frisco’s voice is nearly lost under the clamor of advancing Dubs, but that’s the last thing I hear him shout. The shrill whine of metal collapsing upon metal soon obliterates everything. My mouth opens, but I’m unable to scream as my body is lifted up and then…

  We’re falling.

  The two of us.

  Pulled straight down, plunging through the wreckage like we’re riding a roller-coaster from hell.

  Losing sight of Del Frisco I count the seconds. One second passes, then another, our floor smacking onto the one beneath us.