I roll with the momentum and then there’s a brief respite before a battery of new sounds gather. The whistle of the debris as it presses down and then the floor under us gives way and we’re falling again. My helmet shields me repeatedly from blows struck by chunks of debris that fly in every direction.
We hit another floor and then another, the dust from the collapse so thick it’s like being in the middle of a sandstorm.
Our momentum stops again, halfway between floors, and I feel intense pain in my back and arms. I’ve got blood about my nose and lip. I raise my arm to blot the blood and see the goosebumps ridging my flesh.
I have the unsettling sensation that I am not alone.
A shape pushes itself up out of the sea of chaos. For a moment I think it’s Del Frisco and then a palsied, bluish hand wipes away a line of grime from a neck that sports a vicious bite wound.
The figure, a chaotic-looking older Dub, peers at me, face slack, head cocked at an unnatural angle courtesy of the fall. The thing still wears an old set of eyeglasses, one lens fogged up, but intact; the other shattered. The monster seems to share my amazement at what’s just transpired.
A feeling of sorrow for the Dub sweeps over me, because I can see something in the Dub’s ivory eyes. There’s a shred of understanding and then the shock wears off and it moans. The look on its face tightens into something rabid, the madness back in its eyes. The thing lunges for me and whunk!
A piece of rebar bisects its skull.
The Dub slumps as I look back to see Del Frisco who’s pulled himself up onto the edge of a section of drywall. He mounts it, balancing on his toes, covered in dust, looking like a surfer ready to confront a massive wave.
There comes to me a sudden burst of joy and I cheer Del Frisco.
That’s when it happens.
The floor trembles and buckles a final time, bolts and screws shearing off.
Del Frisco smiles and then the two of us are sucked violently down into the black hole that lies at the heart of the building.
11
Covering my head, the floors rush by in a spongy blur and then everything comes to a crashing stop.
Landing hard, dust sheets me and building shrapnel pelts my face. My ears ring and my vision whites out momentarily, the force of the implosion having heaved me sideways like a quarter in a washing machine.
The impact from the landslide, which punches the air from my lungs, undoubtedly saves my ass. It spits me out and away from another deluge of debris that would have likely flattened me.
My body comes to a rest on my back in an opening six stories below where I was only moments before.
My hand goes to my head. My helmet’s been pried loose during the fall and lies to my right, smashed and useless.
I rouse, sweaty, terrified, disoriented, alive, yes, but still partially buried under an avalanche of rubble and bodies.
Dub bodies.
At least two-dozen of them.
My heart leaps before I study the corpses, broken, torn to bloody hunks.
There are little tendrils of blood and indiscernible fluid sprays on the floor. Most if not all of the things evidently perished on the way down.
I’m relieved about this and the fact that the building hasn’t entirely collapsed. Rather, it sags at an unnatural angle, the middle bored out, as if a giant fist has punched a hole through its center.
I work to muscle my legs free, but they’re not cooperating.
They’re pinned in place by the rubble.
Straining, I’m unable to move anything below my waist. Elbowing myself up, I throw my arms, trying to shrug the debris to the left or right, but none of it gives.
Flicking a look over my shoulder, I can see that entire rear sections of the building are gone. The force of the semi-implosion apparently ripped the walls away.
The structure continues to undulate and I’m scared that if I continue to struggle, I’ll bring the whole thing completely down.
I consider trying to wriggle my toes free and then I hear the old familiar sound.
The patter and thump of bare feet on what remains of the floors above.
Don’t they ever give up?
Some of the infected undoubtedly survived the crash and are coming for me.
They’re pissed and hungry and probably want a little payback. I can’t blame them I guess. If I was in their shoes I’d probably want the same. That said, I won’t do it. I will not dignify the devils by looking up and so I glance about for any sign of Del Frisco.
Catching sight of a few speckles of blood down the hallway, I wonder if it’s from him. I hope like hell he managed to get away, a lone survivor, possibly partnering up with Strummer. Maybe they tried to come back for me, but couldn’t. At the very least one of us will have made it back to tell the others how it all went down.
Horrific howls follow and soon it sounds as if a million Dubs are just above me. They’re coming fast and when they reach my floor I have little doubt that they’ll feast on me or, as a result of their numbers and weight, bring the building down in its entirety.
My head sinks back and amidst the grainy illumination of the collapse, a silhouette rises up thirty-feet away from me.
Stars are still in my eyes so I can’t tell the quality of the figure’s gait. Can’t discern if the thing is human or Dub.
I do know, however, that I’m bone-tired, defeated. I don’t have the strength to fight back and so I pray that whatever occurs next will be, if not painless, quick.
Blinking, the figure materializes. It’s a female striding toward me.
A girl.
Where she came from I do not know, but she’s approximately my age and drifting through the carnage, appearing to take stock of the whole situation.
She’s the very picture of calm, this girl, seemingly untroubled by the wreckage and limbs and body-parts strewn about.
She sidesteps tiny streams of black blood from the eviscerated Dubs and looks about.
Like most of us, there’s a bit of hardness in her face. It’s as if she’s seen these kinds of things (and worse) a thousand times before.
Finally, she glances at me and I can’t say that she’s beautiful from where I’m lying. I’m not sure that makes any difference anyway, but her appearance and affect are intriguing. She takes a few steps and stops, silhouetted in a gauzy sweep of daylight from some unseen hole overhead, a look of grim determination on her face that makes it seem like she’s capable of just about anything.
She could save me or…
She could put me down.
She takes another step and I realize I’ve seen her before.
God help me, this girl is the very same one that stared at me from a window as I dangled on The Dream Catcher after making my escape from the Dubs with Del Frisco.
“You,” I say and she reaches down and grabs my arms and apprises me. I’m sure I look like hell, begrimed, my eyes bugging out like the survivor of some natural catastrophe.
“Are they broken?” she asks, pointing at my legs.
I shake my head.
“Just pinned.”
She kneels and I see she’s got a backpack on. She has a small pickaxe in hand and begins digging out the refuse that holds my legs in place.
Her teeth saw together as she brings the pick down, careful not to dig too deeply.
I can tell she’s done this kind of work before. In a flourish she’s pulled back a small mountain of stone and metal and drywall.
My eyes trace the contours of her head.
Her medium-length black hair, pulled back tight, the mosaic of scratches on her cheeks, the green eyes that sparkle like the tips on a pair of knives. Looking down, it’s clear that she’s not wearing a backpack after all.
The markings and lettering on the thing strapped to her back I’ve seen before in a book.
She’s wearing a parachute.
A device that was most often associated with airplanes back in the day.
I have no idea why the girl w
ears one, but the debris comes free. My head flops back and I’m forced to look up through the cratered floors above. The Dubs are there in all their satanic glory. Staring down at us with hungry, imbecilic eyes.
Ash-colored tongues loll and flick against jagged teeth and a few of them thump their chests.
“They’re here,” I say.
“Move them,” the girl replies, smacking my legs, ignoring my comment about the Dubs.
I grit my teeth and jingle my legs and now they’re completely free and she’s pulled me to my feet. Panicked and swaying, I place a hand on her shoulder before finding my footing.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
Her expression darkens. She puts a finger to her lips and mouths the words:
Shut the hell up.
“Nice to meet you too,” I say.
She grabs and pulls me forward and now we’re shuffle-running, loping down the hallway against the sound of Dubs falling through the roof behind us.
The building trembles like a leaf in a breeze, but we don’t slow. We’re too busy heading toward the other end of the hallway. To a section of wall that was blasted out during the partial collapse.
“Hope you’ve got a plan,” I say.
She doesn’t respond, leading me over a corridor that narrows to a sinuous path snaking between the aftermath of the partial implosion.
There’s a rawness in her movements as she expertly jukes over slabs of fallen drywall. I follow and catch my wind atop a rampart of pretzled joists.
Looking back, I observe the Dubs.
They’re still coming, insane with rage, their nearly translucent skin shimmering in the half-light. Several dozen of the monsters are plainly visible, some rotund, others scarecrow thin. Their faces are lit by an unholy light, simultaneously filled with anger and ecstasy.
Here’s the kicker by the way and the opposite of everything that I read in Gus’s zombie books and some of the movies he has. The Dubs that are primed to attack us are mostly naked. Horrible to think about, but entirely logical considering the clothes they died in disintegrated years ago.
A burly male Dub grabs his sex and howls as the girl grabs my hand once again. She tugs and I turn and now I’m being pulled down to the other side of the wreckage as the entire structure pitches. It’s as if the building is measuring the proper place to bring itself down.
We charge forward until we’re standing atop a hummock of debris that was once the far side of the wall.
The city streets spool out below us.
It’s a helluva long way down.
It dawns on me with all the suddenness of an axe blow to the face.
This is it.
There is truly nowhere left to run.
“I’m Wyatt,” I say, thinking I might as well get that out before we die.
She remains silent, her face emptied of emotion. She’s too busy scanning the delegation of the dead that’s watching us from a roost on the rubble pile. Various ages and ethnicities are well-represented in the pack, the ghouls’ hands rubbing together as they let rip with guttural war whoops.
The girl seems nonplussed by the whole thing even as a powerful force builds in my extremities. The surge of power that’s issuing up from the bottom of the building. The edifice seems to be singing its death song, preparing for the final swoon.
I pray that the end comes soon, and by that I mean death by implosion which is preferable to being eaten alive, at least to me.
“I’m Naia,” the girl finally says.
“Nice of you to wait until the bitter end.”
“This isn’t the end,” she says.
I search her face, but the fatalistic look of the adrenaline junkies and suicide jumpers I’ve seen in the past isn’t there. She’s exceedingly calm, serene even.
“If it ain’t the end, what the hell is it?”
“The beginning,” she says with a whisper.
My gaze smokes into hers and then she bear-hugs me and pulls the cord on her parachute.
These things happen at the precise moment that the building splits apart with an earsplitting howl.
The ground vanishes under our feet.
I scream as the force from the implosion and attendant blastwave sucks the Dubs down and rips us back, jettisoning us out of the building as the parachute unfurls like the wings on an angel.
Oh, what a thing is to see an entire building fall away right before you. We drop straight down like a poled animal, smothered in plumes of blinding dust, tumbling through the sky.
The urban landscape careens past even as the ground rushes up to greet us.
I have little doubt that we’re falling to our deaths. Blood roars in my ears and I can feel the drum-like beat of Naia’s heart as we swing violently between buildings.
Looking to my side, it’s obvious the apparatus holding us up is actually more glider than parachute. There are two rigid arms and something billowing above us that I remember is called a parafoil.
“Hold on,” Naia says.
I do indeed hold on as she grips steering handles on the device, piloting us between the towering stone and steel sentries.
The buildings whip by, Naia expertly guiding us down and to the right. I can see VC1, visible for an instant between two skyscrapers and then a windcurrent buffets us and the parafoil tangles. Crippled, we spiral laterally toward the roof of a two-story building.
“BRACE YOURSELF!” Naia shrieks and I roll up my legs as we hit hard. I glance off the side of a dormant HVAC handler, my head grazing metal, my teeth clamping down on my tongue.
Blood fills my mouth again as I roll over, everything seeming to swim and stir together.
A mushroom-cloud of dust, birthed by the thunderous building collapse, fills the sky and obscures my vision.
I crawl a few feet and then deflate.
My body folds up like an old knife.
My legs curl in tight against my stomach.
The last thing I see is Naia over me as I lie in a fetal ball, stricken and splayed.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“I’m fine.”
The lie comes out so smoothly I would’ve believed it myself were it not for my abdominal muscle spasms, massive headache, and of course the urine, which trickles down my leg from where I’ve pissed my pants.
She drops a plastic canister filled with a clear liquid at my feet. Lord, let it be cool water.
“Wha – what happened?” I ask.
“What happened is we made it. You’re alive. For now.”
The unflappable Naia kneels and tugs back the sleeve on my shirt. She pulls out a marker and scrawls a series of numbers on the flesh where my forearm meets my elbow. Then she rolls the sleeve back down.
My mouth opens, a hundred questions on my tongue, but before I can utter one of them she’s crouch-running across the roof, vanishing from sight.
I lay on my back, staring into the overcast sky. Mercifully, the drizzle has stopped. Dizzy, I place my hands under my head and roll onto my side, slipping into a kind of half-sleep, on the verge of unconsciousness.
Suddenly, I’m transported back in time. Back to my home in the years before the Awakening. It’s my birthday, I can tell from the decorations and the cards standing at attention on a table near a cake with glowing candles mounted atop it.
I’m strapped to a booster seat.
Mom’s there.
Standing off in the distance, staring out a window.
I call for her and she turns, revealing that one side of her face has been exposed. Blood crowns her forehead and the skin has been tugged back from her cheek like the husk on an ear of corn.
A darkness passes over her face and then she summons up a smile.
I can see her teeth, decorated in gore, and the pink outline of her jaw along with the shiny musculature that holds everything in place.
I scream and then Dad lurches out of a closet, his freakshow face screwed up in demonic delight. Streamers of flesh hang from his midsection which has been ca
noed open to reveal a smorgasbord of glistening organs.
He grabs up the cake and walks toward me with the gait of a drunken man.
Mom follows at his side.
My hands go up and I plead with them to stop.
They don’t.
Mom grabs my arm and holds it up to her open mouth. Blood and saliva foams from her lips and runs, hot and sticky, down my flesh.
I pull back a fist to punch her. Her mouth comes down at the instant that Dad blows out the candles on the cake as darkness devours everything.
Afterword
Thanks for reading VERTICAL CITY, Part 2. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on Amazon.
Volume Three
1
The spillage from the world’s dead has corrupted the oceans. I know this because I’m drowning in the middle of a great, rust-colored body of water, snagged in its angry current.
The swirling vortex sucks me down and my lungs fill with liquid, and it’s at that moment, after uttering a long prayer for a quick demise, that something catches my attention. A ragged object glimmering in the vagueness of the water.
A trick of my mind’s eye I think at first, but no, there’s something, barely more than a shadow, up above me.
Scissoring my legs, I fight my way up toward the silhouette, slashing through a plume of debris that resembles the slick left by a fishing boat after a vigorous chumming.
The water and flotsam cause me to squint as a body glides by.
The defiled corpse of a young girl, her back pried open, the braid of her spine visible between pillows of flayed flesh.
Blubbering, more liquid funnels into my mouth along with tidbits of debris that sticks between my teeth.
I bat the body away only to see more corpses.
Hundreds of them trailing slicks of blood, some barely recognizable, other as fresh and shiny as the day they crossed over.
One of them opens its mouth and I kick away and power to the surface which is backlit by a few tatters of light. Still more carcasses descend and I bat them away, extending a single finger to breach the water’s surface when-
Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 15