I immediately think of Del Frisco who’d get a real kick out of watching this scary-ass dog go to town on the flesh-eaters.
The dog’s teeth rip through flesh and a pulse of bile jets from the rent jugular vein of the first Dub.
Zeus bites the throat of the next Dub with such force that the neck cartilage jellies and the head pops off. Then the shepherd whirls and batters the third one until the ghoul tumbles back off the roof.
“Get back! Get the hell back!” Brixton shouts.
I grab Zeus who’s still frenzied, a hurricane of fury.
The dog nearly takes off my hand as we collectively backtrack, retreating across the roof while dozens of enterprising Dubs land behind us. The bastards faceplant on the ground then push themselves up, smiles plastered on pulpy, savaged faces.
Brixton tugs back the firing bolt on his gun and fires at the metal tanks that are on either side of us.
There are plumes of white gas and my nostrils curl up at the stench of gas. I’m readying to shout a question about whether our people planted the tanks when the first one goes up like bottle rocket.
Another explodes and then there’s a chain-reaction as the tanks detonate, birthing a wall of flames that covers our flank.
The heat from the explosion singes my face, the backblasts nearly knocking me off stride.
We slingshot across the roof and then tiptoe through a maze of steel girders that once formed the backbone of an office building partially erected before the collapse.
Fighting our way through the banners of smoke cast from the fire, we drop from the high-beams and slide over a green-tiled roof to the summit of another building.
Brixton prowls forward and then throws up a balled fist. Zeus and I stop, standing behind the big man who points at a collection of items up ahead.
Small piles of what looks like jewelry, watches, coins and even some paper money. Zeus paws at the ground and barks.
“I seen shit like this before,” Brixton says, his voice dipping to a whisper. “A trap. The twats, the Dubs, they got boltholes that they like to bait.”
He starts walking slowly, staying on the balls of his feet. I can feel the texture of the roofing membrane underfoot. It goes from smooth to springy and now Brixton has picked up the pace. We’re a few yards away from the valuables when he shouts:
“ANKLE BITERS!”
He must’ve seen something I didn’t because the roof under the valuables slides away to reveal three Dubs, lurking just out of sight as if in some kind of desert spiderhole.
Because the monsters lost their lower bodies at some point in the past (everything below their abs has been torn away, either because of decay or trauma), they’re only able to bite at your lower extremities, your ankles, hence their nickname.
This is not to say that we take them lightly, because their arms and hands are powerful, propelling the half-ghouls into the light.
They flop and pinwheel forward like frogs, followed by a full-sized Dub who’s gangly and bald as an egg, nearly naked, wildly swinging his arms.
He lunges at us and Brixton, harnessing his soccer skills, drop-kicks the thing in the face.
The Dub crashes back through the roof, the fall taking down the Ankle Biters and opening up enough holes to reveal dozens of unseen Dubs who scatter like termites from a piece of unearthed wood.
Yet another building comes into focus, what was once a parking garage that’s now choked with car corpses and various machines.
I can see the outline of VC1 behind it, maybe six blocks down the street.
Some of Brixton’s men and one woman, including a few I’ve glimpsed before, are visible on the roof of the parking garage. They’re readying weapons or sitting atop an enormous truck that’s painted the color of fresh blood.
Gus showed me pictures of trucks like this that were used for fighting fires in the days gone by. The fire truck is as large as a whale and studded with all sorts of gizmos and gear, including a cab on the top of the truck connected to something Gus called a turntable ladder.
Upon seeing us, Brixton’s people signal and vigorously spin a large wheel as the turntable ladder, a device that was used to fight fires occurring at great heights, telescopes out.
Hearing the clatter of the Dubs from behind us, we advance to the roof’s lip. Two broad-shouldered men and a woman clad in begrimed tactical vests, matte-black weapons dangling from chest slings, greet us without saying a word.
The woman on the fire truck continues to furiously spin the wheel and the ladder emerges in full from its metal housing like a turtle peeping out of its shell. The ladder inches toward us, covering the forty-foot gap between the two buildings.
“You may have to jump again,” Brixton says to me.
I look sideways at him.
“I figure that ain’t no big thing, seein’ that you’re a rockstar jumper and all,” he continues.
“I’m a little gassed.”
“Join the club.”
The ladder reaches its end maybe six feet away from us.
Brixton grabs Zeus and jumps onto the ladder. I look over my shoulder and forms start rising up out of the plumes of smoke cast from the fires that Brixton caused.
A delegation of the dead shuffle forward, including some stragglers from the other building Brixton torched.
Their blackened flesh sloughs off with every step.
A woman, long and rangy like a praying mantis, shakes the scalp from her head to reveal a raw bulb underneath. She points at me in an accusatory fashion and I pivot and spring onto the ladder.
The female member of Brixton’s team clamps onto my arm and steadies me. I look up into her eyes, perusing her muscled bulk and tattoos and closely-mown black hair. Her face is a puzzle of welted flesh and poorly stitched wounds, making it look like she’s been sewn together from a collection of graveyard parts.
“Don’t move,” she says.
I reflexively do and nearly fall, held in place only by the woman’s pincer-like hands.
“You’re making me regret our policy of not leaving anyone behind,” she sneers.
“Nice to meet you too.”
She grabs and hoists me up and flings me back like a sack of trash.
I hit the ground at the instant that Brixton and his men crouch and open fire.
Bullet casings scatter and sizzle on the ground, my ears ringing from the gunfire as several dozen Dubs scurry across the other roof.
Brixton’s team fires volleys of lead that push the Dub hordes back, but for every one that falls, two more rise up.
Another of Brixton’s people, an Asian man as big as a bear who sports a skin-tight T-shirt with a yellow smiley face above the words “Maybe the hokey pokey is what it’s all about,” opens a rucksack. He pulls out a tiny gadget made of polished metal and ballistic plastic.
“What your name?” he says, turning and kneeling next to me.
“Wyatt.”
“I’m Asian Phil,” he says, a sly humor in his face, a certain indescribable waywardness as he cocks a thumb at the woman.
“That’s Mad Meg.”
He points at another man with a thick beard and fierce eyes. I watch as the man, who’s holding a controller device, reaches out a hand to catch the small Raven drone I saw earlier. He stashes the drone and controller in a duffel bag.
“And that gent’s our eyes and occasionally our ears. We call him Donkey.”
“Why?”
“Because he kicks and punches like one.”
Asian Phil pushes a button and a green light blinks and he waves the object over my body. “You get punctured?”
“No, sir.”
“Because if the truth ain’t in you and we find out you got bit,” he says while pointing to a pistol, “I’ll have to give you a final meal of lead pudding. Capeche? Understand?”
I nod and Asian Phil finishes his scan, the light remaining green.
“He’s clear!” he shouts to Brixton who’s busy laying down suppressive fire, a veritabl
e blizzard of bullets.
The Dubs tick and click and fall, but some manage to catapult onto the ladder.
In seconds the telescoping device is swamped.
Brixton signals for a general retreat, his people shouldering their gear.
More and more Dubs tumble onto the ladder, the sheer weight of the monsters tipping the fire truck up. We watch the machine overturn and disappear from sight, grinding to a stop, somehow jammed between the two buildings.
More of the Dubs hurtle down onto the stricken truck, using it as a bridge onto our building.
We zoom back across the roof and descend through an opening onto a ramp that leads into the heart of the garage.
The structure’s interior is deserted which allows us to make good time while circumventing knots of forgotten machines, completely bypassing some, sliding across the hoods of others. Our descent is so quick my sides begin cramping from exertion.
At the bottom of the ramp Brixton signals for everyone to dodge right. He crouches near the edge of a cement wall aside the remains of a recently fallen Dub, and communicates with his team (who huddle around him) in so low a tone that it’s clear whatever message he has is intended only for their ears.
Brixton points to graffiti on a wall up ahead that says “God Is Not Dead!”
“If He ain’t,” Brixton growls, eying the graffiti, “then he’s on a long fucking holiday.”
The others chuckle as Brixton removes a metal canister from the inside of his vest and a pair of rusted tweezers.
He crouch-walks over to the Dub’s corpse and studies it.
Then he reaches the tweezers down and extracts an insect from a gaping bite wound in the Dub’s bloated back.
I’ve seen bugs like this before, katydid-looking things with yellow stripes that Strummer once called “Dub Poppers.”
Brixton places the insect in the canister and secretes it back inside his vest before tossing me a look.
“Back in my country there was a movement right before the end to make everything natural again. Return rivers like the Wandle to their original courses, reintroduce animals, that kinda guff. ‘Rewilding’ they called it. Now, I appreciate the idea of wanting to get all up in the bosom of Mother Nature and return to a state of nature as much as the next fella-”
He pauses here and edges a finger toward the wall.
“-but this shit outside is fucking ridiculous.”
Brixton smirks, but I’m still too shocked to reply.
Brixton snaps his fingers at me. “Hey. You still on our frequency? You gonna make it?”
I’m still fighting to catch my breath which comes in quick, wincing gasps, but I dredge up a nod.
“We’re moving on my signal. And when we do, we run and we don’t stop for nothin’. You register that, Jumper?”
I nod again and whisper, “Is the worst part over?”
“Not by a fuckin’ long shot,” Meg growls.
Swallowing hard, my gaze remains fixed on Brixton whose visage is resolute, grave, and somehow thoughtful.
He peers with hard vigilance out a hole in the garage’s side wall, squinting like Gus does when he’s playing chess and plotting a move, trying to stay two steps ahead of his adversary.
Brixton holds up five fingers and motions toward a faraway door that lies open. An alley that appears clear of Dubs is visible. Asian Phil hands me a pistol and an extra magazine of ammo.
“You’ll need that.”
“Why?”
He grins darkly. “Cause we’re about to run the gauntlet.”
I clutch the pistol in a trembling hand, scared shitless when I see Brixton and his people with their heads bowed, muttering what sound like prayers. I assume they know something terrible that I don’t.
Meg makes the sign of the cross and clutches an assault rifle tight to her chest, intoning, “So long as we love life for itself, we seldom dread the losing of it.”
The others shout “Amen!” and I creep forward, following them, eyes lacquered by fever sweat, but never straying from Brixton.
He silently counts, then signals for us to run.
We burst outside and all is clear and my heart leaps!
I almost manage a smile because Meg was wrong!
The worst is indeed over and we’re in the clear. There are a few glorious seconds of euphoria and then the man called Donkey motions up with his eyes and everyone starts screaming.
It’s the Dubs, you see.
They’ve spotted us from up above.
Spotted us and decided to attack.
I look up and the sky fills with their screwed-up faces as they jump from the top of the garage.
There’s silence and then the only thing I hear is the sound of their bodies crashing down all around us.
3
When I was a kid, Mom and Dad took me into the city’s largest park after a winter storm. There were hundreds of icicles dangling from the trees. We walked through the woods until a stiff wind swatted the icicles down. The shattering sound the icicles made upon hitting the ground is eerily similar to the sound a Dub body makes after it crashes to earth after a five-story fall.
There’s an explosion of bone and putrid flesh as the Dubs blast to the ground.
Some land on their heads, others on their feet, compound fractures abounding as the impacts piston leg bones through chests and rib-cages.
The bodies smear across the ground as we thread between them, Brixton shouting, “Rock out with your carcasses out!”
He leads us out onto one of the city’s major streets, a destination for low fashion and high-rollers in the days before.
We run headlong through canyons of stone and steel and over the mucked asphalt, dodging ankle-shattering sinkholes filled with pools of putrid water and small trees that have erupted out of the upturned blacktop, the sound of the Dubs building from behind. All the while, my eyes remained fixed on VC1 which is now just four blocks away.
We bolt past trashed boutiques and defiled clothing shops and under signs laden with metal surveillance and traffic cameras. It might be just an optical illusion, but a few tiny lights seem to flicker inside the all-seeing eyes.
There’s a wall of trucks and cars up ahead, a blockade formed after a breach of the city’s seawall near the end of the collapse.
We’ll have to go around the cars.
Or over them.
We hit the blockade midsprint and scrabble up the hood of an old post office truck that’s covered in smears of fecal buckshot left by the city’s birds.
Brixton leads the way, carrying Zeus.
I follow his lead, mounting the roof of a luxury sedan and then sliding down over the rear of a hatchback.
My hands leave a bloody slick on the hatchback, sliced open by a shard of rusted trunk metal. When you’re up on the Dream Catcher it’s like touching a live wire. The height and the relative thinness of air make it seem as if some wonderful drug is pumping through your veins. The abrasions, the nicks, none of the bumps and bruises are felt. But down on the Flatlands the small terrors of life are experienced in real time and high definition. This is one of the reasons I’ve got newfound respect for the work the Sweepers do.
Landing on the ground, we peek through gaps in the wall of machines. Thousands of Dubs are streaming down the streets on the other side of the blockade. Brixton pulls out a small object and distends an antenna.
“Cover your vitals!” he shouts.
I instinctively throw my hands over my head. Brixton presses a button on the object and BOOM!
A concealed improvised explosive device hidden down near the base of the blockade (on the other side of our current position) detonates, sending the other cars on top crashing down.
Dozens of Dubs are flattened like used soda cans and hundreds more are momentarily disoriented.
We dance between the remnants of the blockade and run down the street as fresh Dub mobs appear from alley-ways and sewer-grates.
It’s a damned difficult thing to fire a gun while
on the run, but Brixton’s people do it with ease. I, on the other hand, can barely hold my pistol up as we crash past looted department stores and bus stops, the Dubs working to cut us off.
We slow our pace, firing at the gray-splotched bodies, everyone drawing closer together. Our once clear avenue of escape has closed up.
“What say, Phil?” says Brixton.
“I say fate gets its jollies off of thwarting us, Mister Brixton,” says the Asian.
Meg and Donkey smirk at this, reloading, apparently nonplussed about the possibility of dying a premature and gruesome death.
Suddenly Zeus barks and we’re following his lead down the narrowest of alleys, an urban switchback I hadn’t noticed before. It lies between a warehouse and a library with a set of old-school bronze lions standing watch over limestone steps.
The Dubs give chase, seeming to gain ground as we follow the contours of the alley, the cement path weaving right, then left.
Asian Phil shouts something to Brixton who nods and gestures at what was once a private parking lot wreathed by razor wire.
Zeus yelps his head off because the lot teems with wild dogs.
I’ve heard rumors of places like this, pens where the Sweepers corral feral canines and other wild things they nab while out on patrol.
The dogs inside the metal box, mostly larger animals (shepherds and retrievers and the like), are a famished and psychotic looking pack, maybe three-dozen beasts in all.
Brixton points to the section of the alley that continues past the lot. Asian Phil grabs and pulls me back along with the others.
Brixton shoot a lock from the gate penning in the wild dogs.
The ravenous animals immediately toss themselves at the gate as Brixton joins up with us.
Our eyes remain on the pen, watching with astonishment as the feral canines emerge from their oversized cage at precisely the moment the Dubs arrive.
The dogs set upon the Dubs in such a way that it’s impossible to tell the Dubs and dogs apart, so closely locked are the two groups in combat.
We hook a right back onto the main thoroughfare only to be confronted by a Dub rear-guard, probably the remnants of the original pack that were victimized by the blockade IED.
Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 17