Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4]

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  BOOM!

  A red flare bursts overhead at the instant that my eyes flap open. The ocean vanishes and I’m back on the roof.

  The one that Naia left me on.

  It’s obvious from the bank of shadows shrouding the roof that I’ve been unconscious for many hours.

  Raising my head, a mallet-sized hand presses down on my chest.

  “Ease back,” a voice says. “Ease back.”

  Leaning back, I look up into the almond eyes of Ed Brixton, one of VC1’s biggest and baddest Sweepers, the English dude we nearly had a run-in with before.

  A little wisp of smoke curls up from the flare gun he’s holding.

  I’m still loopy from everything that’s happened and who’s to say I’m not hallucinating, so I sigh and whisper, “You – you’re Ed Brixton.”

  “And you, you nutty bastard, you got some kind of death wish. The hell you doing out here?”

  “My job.”

  Brixton pockets the flare gun. “Bringing a whole fucking building down’s your job?”

  “We did it, didn’t we?” I say. “Me and Del Frisco. We rolled that mother up.”

  A ghost of a smile grips my face and I continue, “We crossed them all over. I swear we snuffed out over a thousand Dubs, maybe more.”

  I wait for him to return my look or possibly slap palms with me, but he does neither. “You hecked up the works alright. You brung the noise and ‘roused up the attention of every brain-muncher from here to the water.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Get up and I’ll show you.”

  Brixton grabs my forearm and pulls me up.

  My gait’s unsteady for several steps, but eventually I find my feet. I make sure to conceal the numbers Naia scrawled on my arm as I follow the big man who whispers into a wireless mic looped around one ear.

  Ahead of Brixton is one of Gus’s dogs, a large salt-and-pepper shepherd mix of some kind. The dog paces near the edge of the building and an oversized rucksack.

  I follow Brixton forward and a sound builds from somewhere down on the streets below. A steady drone, like the sound railroad tracks make before a train arrives.

  Brixton places a finger to his lips, motioning me over. Dropping to my knees, I look over the lip of the roof.

  It’s difficult to see the pavement the ground is so heavy with Dubs. Some of them are still staggering out of the wreckage of the building we brought down. Most of those are missing parts, their faces smeared ghostly white from the dust and debris. Others apparently heard the noise and came to investigate and still more are directly under us, trying to batter their way into our building.

  “They followed me in and I barricaded the door maybe twenty minutes ago,” Brixton says. “I reckon it’ll hold for another five.”

  I grab his wrist. “Thank you for coming back for me.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess white lives matter too, eh?” he says with a taut smile.

  Brixton grabs his rucksack, the dog nipping at his heels.

  He crouch-runs to the other side of the roof, drops his rucksack, opens it. There’s an odd assortment of weapons and gear inside (an axe, a machine-pistol, ammo mags, nylon rope, etc.)

  The dog’s ears pin back. The sound of cheering rises up from the streets.

  “Jesus, I think they’re in,” I say.

  “Start counting down from ten.”

  “What?”

  His icy gaze meets mine. “Are you deaf, man?”

  Immediately I count:

  “Ten, nine…”

  Brixton hoists something from his rucksack. It’s black, stocky and metal, looking like the spawn of a harpoon and assault rifle.

  On the business end of the thing are a barrel and a steel bolt with a tip that resembles an industrial arrowhead. On the device’s aft is a metal wheel looped by a wire leader that sits beneath a giant, rusted tank of propellant gas.

  I’ve seen things like this before. Defcon and some of the other Roof Hogs use them to fire anchors into the facades of buildings.

  “… seven, six…”

  There are sounds on the other side of the roof door. Garbled voices followed by the pounding of flesh against metal.

  “Five, four…”

  Brixton flips a dial on the tank and pulls a pin back on the device, sighting it down. He whispers into the mic I saw earlier and a hushed voice whispers back. He looks at me and motions to the dog.

  “I grab Zeus and go first. You bring up the rear.”

  “But we’ve only got-”

  “NOW!”

  He rises up, aims, and triggers his harpoon device.

  There’s a THUMP! followed by a gaseous plume that issues from the barrel.

  The arrow rockets out of the device and soars away from the roof.

  The leader unspools, trailing the arrow that slams into the side of another building, maybe eighty-feet away. A few feet away from where the arrow landed is a metal catwalk that one of our people fastened at some point in the past. It winds along the side of the building.

  Brixton tugs on the leader. It holds and he wraps the device and the other end securely around a nearby vent pipe.

  A sound catches my attention and I glance up to see what looks like a bird zipping past, maybe twenty feet over my head. Closer inspection reveals it’s not a bird at all, but a small handheld drone called a “Raven” that’s used for surveillance.

  “Let’s go,” Brixton says, tossing me a metal handle that I’m to use on the leader. Before we can act, the roof door bursts from its hinges and a marauding pack of Dubs spill out.

  “THEY’RE HERE!”

  The dog, Zeus, doesn’t hesitate, spinning in a flourish and going on the attack.

  Zeus rips the throats of the first three Dubs he encounters clean out.

  Then he goes up on his hind legs.

  Knocks the other two Dubs back and pounces on them in a roiling mass of fur and flashing teeth and claws and mutilated flesh and geysers of black blood.

  As I watch Zeus go psycho on the Dubs, I’m reminded of an adventure book Gus read to me when I was little. It was written by a man with the last name of London and was about a dog named Buck and his owner, Thornton. Thornton was murdered in the book, but the dog avenged his death by killing the killers. I think Zeus is an awful lot like that dog.

  Zeus knocks down another line of Dubs and then one of the ghouls, a fleet-footed woman in a moldering business suit, throws a punch. Her fist catches Zeus in the ribs, knocking the canine sideways. Anger swells up in me and I thunder forward without thinking.

  The suited Dub rears over Zeus and I lower my shoulder. I plow into the Dub’s side and a funk that can only be described as equal parts decaying flesh and shit bombards me. My hands push out, feeling shrink-wrapped skin that barely conceals the monster’s musculature and gooey innards.

  A rope of ochre gushes from the woman’s mouth and she flops sideways. The Dub’s deteriorated trunk splits open like a baked gourd and she flaps around before I bring my foot down and curb-stomp her brains out.

  Two sharp whistles echo from Brixton and the dog churns back and past me. Brixton has a machine-pistol out.

  “BELLY IT!”

  I drop to my chest and he sprays his gun, mowing down a covey of Dubs that have shambled out of the roof door.

  The bodies crash in a glistening heap which buys us time.

  Pushing up, I watch Zeus hurtle into Brixton’s arms, snuggling into a webbed vest.

  Brixton grabs his handle and tosses me the other.

  Brixton swings out, ziplining across the leader with his dog as I glance back. The roof is lousy with Dubs spider-creeping over the bodies of their brethren, closing in on me in all their frenzied, pus-filled glory.

  The Dubs are a diverse lot, various races and both sexes visible, all united in their desire to eat me. Several of them paw at the ground like bulls while others tug at their privates and shout.

  My hands clamp down on the handle and I angle it around and swing ou
t onto the leader.

  The leader bends under my weight and I kick my legs which gets me going. In seconds I’m roaring over the metal line, maybe 75-feet feet away from the other building.

  My pulse quickens when I look down to see thousands of hungry Dubs on the streets below and I hope Naia escaped before the dead arrived. The wind whips my hair, momentum carrying me toward Brixton who’s positioned near the other building’s façade, struggling to disengage from the leader.

  I shout and Brixton finally extricates himself and climbs up onto the catwalk. The speed of the descent is too much, my weight propels me faster. Brixton waves his hands and I grab the leader to slow myself and it burns my fingers.

  Yelping, I close my eyes and draw my feet in tight against my chest. Blood thrums in my ears and here comes the building, big as life and twice as big.

  BOOM!

  I hit the front of the building.

  The impact rattles my teeth, but I quickly recover.

  My line of sight drifts up and that’s when it happens.

  The leader twists and frays.

  One tiny segment at a time and then …

  The leader snaps off.

  2

  My hands scramble for purchase as gravity bear-hugs me, fingers fanning out as I claw at the air-

  WHAM!

  Brixton shoots out and grabs my chest and pulls me forward into the catwalk, saving my ass for the second time in less than five minutes. I hit the metal hard and it sways and I’m terrified the rusted structure will break off at any moment.

  Brixton tosses me a little packet of climbing chalk that I smack between my hands.

  “Get the hell up!” he shouts.

  Grabbing the edges of the catwalk, I muscle to my feet and lumber forward, following man and dog.

  The spine of the catwalk groans, the three of us continuing forward as the walkway bends around the side of the building.

  My eyes can’t help but stray to the horrorshow below, the blacktop aswarm with packs of ambulatory meat.

  The Dubs hold up their hands and jeer us and the smarter of them seem to motion for the others to follow and some of them do.

  We wind toward the rear of the building until the walkway abruptly terminates two feet below the roofline. I claw at the edge and flip over and roll to the ground to catch my breath, my body reeking of ammonia and Dub blood.

  “What happened to the others?” I ask.

  Brixton plucks his earpiece and pins me with a look. “Ain’t no others right now. You’re lucky one of the spotters saw you down here. Only reason I risked my arse is because I got this annoying habit of not leaving anybody behind. Course your boys in the ivory towers don’t know nothin’ about that.”

  “They’re not my boys.”

  His jaw locks. “You know what a Sweeper calls the shit on the streets? The Flatlands? ‘The Suck,’ that’s what we call it. Now you and your ilk don’t know nothing about it ‘cause you’re in heavy with Odin and the others and get to swing around above the crazies.”

  “That’s what I was trained to do.”

  Brixton sneers at this and I want to say more, but I don’t. He rummages in his rucksack and pulls out two small plastic bags with blue, yellow, and red lettering. They say “Walkers” and “Cheese & Onion.”

  Brixton opens one bag and gives most of the contents to Zeus.

  He tosses the other bag to me and I fumble it open. The scent that comes from the open bag, cooked onions and potatoes and salt, is perhaps the greatest thing I’ve ever smelled. The crisps quickly find their way into my mouth.

  “I liberated that from a Brit bodega,” Brixton says of the crisps. “Got my own, personal stash in the VC. Worth more than gold so cherish every morsel.”

  My head bobs and I munch slowly, savoring every bit of the crunchy goodness while wiping crumbs and snack residue from my filthy face.

  “Thank you.”

  He’s silent.

  “I meant what I said before,” I continue. “About your man back up on the roof. The one that got bit and was shot down.”

  “Colson was his name,” Brixton replies, massaging his mahogany skin. “Had himself a woman and a little girl who just started to talk. Good sort of fella. He was my friend.”

  “It’s hard to lose people.”

  He nods.

  “There were two other Jumpers with me when the building went down by the way.”

  “If there were, they went ghost.”

  “There was Del Frisco and Strummer and… there was a girl too.”

  He arches an eyebrow. “You zonked? You hear what I said? There wasn’t nobody else on that bloody roof when I found you.”

  I hold his fiery gaze, listening to the muffled voice on the other end of the earpiece. Somebody’s whispering to him as he tosses his empty bag of crisps and points to the roof door.

  “We hit that on my call and go cock-diesel down the stairs and don’t stop for shit. We juke down one floor, not two or three, but one. You understand, ace? You register and copy that?”

  I nod.

  “Then what?”

  “Then we pray my people come through for us.”

  “I thought you said-” I reply, but he’s already up and running, Zeus nipping at his heels.

  Zeus scents the door and paws at it.

  The dog’s ears remain at attention and it scratches at the door which I know from Gus are good signs. Brixton white-knuckles his machine-pistol and kicks the door down.

  The building’s interior is gloomy and smells of water and rot, the floor discolored and spongy.

  Brixton holds up a balled fist and I stop directly behind Zeus. We listen, but don’t hear anything save the shrieks of the Dubs outside and below which sound like the roar of a crowd at a sporting arena.

  Approaching an inner stairwell, Brixton kneels and holds a hand over his earpiece. He curses and signals for me to look down the stairwell. I squint, trying to get my bearings. We’re six floors up so it’s hard to see, but eventually my eyes follow the stairs through the interior of the building to a foyer.

  Zeus pants and whines and I search the darkness and finally see it. Across the foyer’s cracked tiles is a front door that was crudely barricaded with wooden pallets and debris at some point in the past.

  The door itself is made of metal inlaid with little lozenges of plate glass. Shadows are visible on the other side of the glass.

  The door violently rocks back and forth.

  Brixton growls and curses and the hair on the back of Zeus’s neck stands at attention.

  The door suddenly implodes and a wave of Dubs storm inside.

  We clamber down the stairs as Brixton stops up ahead, running a hand over a section of wall.

  I scream for him to hurry, the Dubs rampaging up the stairwell. They’re hooting and hollering like the hyenas at the city zoo.

  Brixton’s hand stops on a bulge in the drywall and he pulls out a pistol and fires into the wall.

  Once.

  Twice.

  A water pipe hidden in the wall erupts, rusty water spewing out, flooding the stairs.

  “MOVE!” he shouts.

  We run down the stairs, the water from the pipe deluging the lower floors, keeping the Dubs at bay.

  Hitting a landing one floor below, we gallop down a hallway dotted with offices.

  Three Dubs lurch out of an open office door and Brixton riddles them with bullets, the slugs shattering glass and obliterating foam-board and drywall.

  Brixton signals for me to follow while booting down another door to reveal a fire-escape. The sound of the Dubs grows louder and Brixton slips out onto the escape with Zeus.

  There’s another roof maybe ten feet away, a sloped, asphalt-slicked plaza dotted with metal tanks and dormant HVAC handlers.

  Brixton grabs the dog in his bulging arms and flings it over to the building where it lands and skids and rolls over, whimpering a few times, but unharmed.

  He plants his feet on the edge of the escape and vau
lts over.

  Crashing sounds echo from down the hall behind me. My gaze drops through the metal grating of the fire-escape and I can see the Dubs on the street below, pouring into the building, torquing themselves through doors and windows.

  The squeal a wounded pig might make draws my attention.

  I gape back to see a red-haired child of about eight or nine tottering into view.

  He’s missing his jaw and part of his nose and a bone in his right arm is visible, shattered, poking through ash-colored flesh.

  The abomination’s tongue flaps like the tail on a rattlesnake and behind it appears a woman with ball-bearing-like eyes and a blackened organ-tree that flashes from inside a canoed chest. My stomach churns and I heave myself off of the fire-escape.

  I sail through the air and land, managing a fingerhold on the opposite roof. Brixton grabs my wrists and deadlifts me up into the air to safety.

  Unable to adequately brace myself, I land on my chest in such a way that a bunching of muscle near the middle of my back seems to separate. If it wasn’t for the adrenaline sluicing through my body, there’s no way I’d be able to make it another ten feet.

  I snake-crawl forward when a shadow looms and-

  WHAM!

  Something collapses on top of me.

  Something heavy and wet followed by a few ropes of black drool that drench my cheeks.

  Brixton screams and there’s the subsonic crack of a bullet and then I’m smothered in warm, damp goo.

  I can smell the primordial odor of Dub gore and shake my body side-to-side as a corpse, freshly skull-capped thanks to a shot from Brixton, sloshes off of me.

  Cursing, I elbow myself up to see Brixton firing back at the building we’ve just left.

  Clusters of Dubs are jumping at us from the fire-escape, open windows, and roof.

  Brixton shoots the first wave like skeet, but a bulbous male Dub lands on our roof and then another and another and soon Brixton’s fighting to slap another magazine of ammo into his gun.

  Zeus is a force of nature, going for the necks and heads of the Dubs.

  He springs at the first Dub and there’s a flash of silver and I realize Brixton has fitted the dog with a muzzle that contains faux teeth made of steel, sharpening to glimmering points.