Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4]

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  Finally, after all of the others have disappeared, Shooter extends a hand and thanks me for my words.

  “You did an excellent job, Wyatt.”

  “Just telling them the way things went down.”

  “But it was the way you said it. It was authentic and most of all… grounded.”

  “Not everyone liked what I said.”

  Shooter waves his hand dismissively. “Melissa, that’s the name of the lady who piped up, is a malcontent. Always has been, always will be. Of course she’s entitled to her opinion. That’s her right and we respect her point of view, just like we do everyone’s.”

  “So … what’s the plan, sir? Are we going to form a new Jumper team?”

  “You mean with you?”

  I nod.

  “No, no, you’re much too valuable now. We need you in operations. We need you on the sidelines instead of the field.”

  He looks at his watch. “What say we meet back here at thirteen-hundred hours to discuss specifics and the road ahead?”

  “Yes, sir,” I say before adding, “what about Del Frisco?”

  “What about him?”

  “Will he work with me?”

  “What does he have to offer?”

  “He did the same thing I did. He collapsed the building. And he’s got more months in the field.”

  Shooter considers this, a frown etching his face. “I’m afraid he doesn’t quite have the temperament for operations works.”

  “So you’ll send him back out.”

  “Of course, assuming he can handle the load. You see, Wyatt, it’s not good for a man like Del Frisco to stay idle.”

  “Why is that?”

  “It causes people to more closely assess him. And knowing him as well as I do, I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing.”

  I remain behind in the debriefing room, gazing out one of the banks of windows. The city’s gripped in another storm, rain pelting the windows, wind tossing a few errant leaves from the trees kept in the gardens on the other buildings. The trees are just beginning to rust into their fall colors and winter will be here soon.

  Leaving the upper floors behind, I drop down a stairwell and stumble into another Sweeper team that’s just returned.

  They’re barreling down the hallway, soaked to the bone and carrying one of their own, a woman who lies on a longboard, moaning.

  Her leg’s bent and I see a flash of white from where something inside her has splintered off and poked through the flesh below her kneecap.

  “Get the hell out of the way!” one of the men carrying the woman hisses, elbowing me aside as the team hustles off down a corridor to the infirmary. Someone else, a bearded Sweeper with a foghorn voice clad in shorts and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, appears out of a door in the middle of the corridor, glaring.

  “No Jumpers allowed on this floor.”

  “He’s cool,” a voice barks from behind. I look back to see Asian Phil who’s clad in jeans and a tactical vest, gobbling a sandwich.

  The other Sweeper grumbles and disappears back into his room. Asian Phil offers me a bite of his sandwich, but I defer.

  “You got a concussion from yesterday, wild man? You lost or something?” he asks me.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, you came at a bad time. A team just came in and we’ve got beaucoup people on the PUP list.”

  “The what?”

  “PUP list. Physically unable to perform.”

  Asian Phil points back down the hallway in the general direction of the infirmary. “We’re down two people in the last three days. Pretty soon they’re gonna have to start a draft.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Where people are conscripted, forced to join teams and go outside.”

  “How can they do that?”

  “Who’s gonna stop them?”

  I consider this and he shrugs. “We’re fighting a war that’ll never end and there are more of them than us. And the end of the day it’s just math, bro.”

  I glance over his shoulder. “Where’s Brixton?”

  Asian Phil cocks a thumb at a door at the end of the hall. “Knock three times, enter, and pray the man’s feeling hospitable.”

  I do exactly as I’m told and shoulder in the door that reveals a long, narrow space.

  Classical music plays as I stroll past bunk-beds and gear and clothes strewn about.

  There are several soccer posters on one wall, hanging above photos of Brixton and Asian Phil in the past, and newspaper clippings trumpeting Brixton’s greatness on the soccer field.

  At the very back of the space stands Brixton, stooped over a glass case that lies across a pair of plastic saw-horses. Someone has written the words “God can restore what is broken” on the wall behind him.

  Brixton maneuvers a pair of tweezers, holding up the Dub Popper that he retrieved from the corpse yesterday.

  He dunks the bug into an amber liquid and then inserts it into the case and secures its body with a pin.

  Then he closes the case and locks it and hangs it on the wall. The recessed lighting reveals the case is filled with all manner of insects.

  “I always liked dragonflies the best,” Brixton says without turning back. “This girl I had a thing for back in my city, in London, she fancied a place called the Golders Hill Park that was swarming with them. Guess I took to the things because it sort of reminds me of her.”

  He points to several dragonflies in the case, their glimmering heads and veined exteriors making them resemble pieces of stained glass with wings.

  His finger traces the outline of one with black bands on clear wings, another with green tracings on its abdomen.

  “That’s a whitetail,” he says. “And that’s a green darner and a meadowhawk. Rather brilliant looking things aren’t they?”

  “I’ve never seen most of those,” I say softly.

  “Most people don’t notice them, but they should. They’re a window to our past. They’ve been here for a million years and will probably be around for a million more.”

  At this he turns to look at me. “Suffice it to say, we ain’t gonna be around that long.”

  “No?”

  “Ninety-eight percent of the species that have ever existed on this planet have gone extinct. What makes us unique?”

  “Extinct? You really believe that? I mean… we’re winning aren’t we?”

  “Says who? The desk jockeys up on thirty who spend their days tallying up the bloody body-counts for the Administrators?”

  “Odin and Shooter said they’ve got a plan-”

  “Oh, well, if those two wastes of carbon said it then I guess it makes it so.”

  Silence floods the space between us and then Brixton motions me closer, gesturing at the case. He points at a row of Dub Poppers, including the one he just mounted. “Tell me what you notice.”

  Not much if truth be told. Just a bunch of creepy-crawlies pinned to a hunk of laminated wood.

  “They all look kind of the same,” I reply after a quick glance.

  “Look closer. See the one on the far right? The colorful little bugger I nabbed yesterday?”

  I nod.

  “Check its thorax… the space between the head and lower body.”

  I scan the Dub Popper and notice the bulge in the region that Brixton just described. The sucker looks like it’s about to give birth.

  “The one I just caught is larger than the one before which is bigger than the one before it.”

  I squint and notice that it’s exactly as Brixton says. The Dub Popper on the far left is noticeably slimmer form the one on the far right.

  “They’re getting bigger,” he continues.

  “So what?”

  “So they feed off the Dubs, which means there’s apparently more food for them which means the crowds on the ground are not thinning. The Dubs are increasing in number.”

  My brow furrows.

  “If that’s true isn’t that a good t
hing? Odin and Shooter say when they’re bunched up it makes it like shooting fish in a barrel.”

  Brixton clicks his tongue and smirks. “Who are the shooters and what are the bullets?”

  I don’t know how to respond to that.

  “They want to start bringing the buildings down,” I blurt out.

  His face freezes.

  “They – what - how do you know that?”

  “They told me.”

  He curses under his breath, his lip quivering. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It worked for us the other day. I mean we survived and rolled the thing up and-”

  “Good on you for doing it, but I want no part of it.”

  “You’ll refuse to go?” I ask.

  “Did they ask you to ask me that?”

  “No,” I reply.

  “Did they send you out to be a snout for them?”

  “No, no way, man, I’m not a spy, I was just-”

  He grabs my shirt. “You got a wire on you or something?”

  “I don’t even know what that means!”

  He rises up, dwarfing me. His hands are bigger than my head.

  “There was a man named Gareth, a spook who worked for the intelligence services back in my country a few years before the world shat itself. One day he saw something he shouldn’t have seen and ended up, quite literally, in a suitcase. It was a pretty big story, but the whole thing was covered up. Suicide is what the honchos said.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It means it pays to be a little crazy, a little paranoid sometimes. Always question things, always take a look around. If you do you’ll begin to wonder why so many people are having ‘accidents’ these days.”

  “I haven’t noticed that.”

  “Have you noticed that the Administrators are consolidating power? Have you noticed them stripping our freedoms away a little at a time and playing us against each other? Endless conflict and confusion are the coin of the realm. And the people that don’t like it, that chirp up, they don’t last long.”

  “You’re still here.”

  He smiles darkly and releases his grip on my shirt. “And then maybe one day I’m not. And what do they tell you? Oh, that Brixton, that uppity black bastard, he finally slipped up. He let his guard down and got caught outside and chewed up and a few days later poof! it’s as if I never even was!”

  “I haven’t seen anyone go missing.”

  “That’s because you haven’t been looking.”

  He slaps his palms together. “Did you know there are things that go on below the tenth floor? Terrible, very bad, no-good things. People don’t really know it, but there are sections on eight and nine that are like black sites. Prisons. Hush coops. Windowless rooms where troublesome people are taken and never heard from again.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I – I’ve heard stories,” he says frowning, probably pissed because that’s the best evidence he can dredge up.

  “Why would anyone let that happen?”

  “Because people care more about being safe than being free.”

  At this he grabs hold of both of my shoulders, his forehead nearly pressed to mine. “We can’t win. We need to abandon the sweeps. Can’t you see that?” Again, bitterly: “We cannot defeat the Dubs. It’s impossible. We just – we need to move on.”

  “To where?”

  “I don’t – I guess anywhere but here.”

  I stare at him, unwilling or more likely unable to offer an intelligent response and so I simply say:

  “Thank you for saving my life.”

  A look that’s halfway between anger and sadness grips his face. “If that’s the reason you came by, Wyatt, you are most welcome. Now get the hell out of here.”

  11

  I’m barely five steps outside of Brixton’s door when an alarm shrills. Caught in a crush of people, I’m forced down the corridor and a short flight of stairs.

  Voices bounce off the walls up ahead, some of the Sweepers carrying weapons, presumably expecting to confront a Dub or two that have slipped in through the Keep.

  The mob I’m with takes a hard right, the hallway emptying into a series of bullpens.

  The source of the sound is visible now.

  A single man.

  Standing at the summit of a mass of desks, swinging a six-foot long tube that used to be an office lamp.

  My stomach knots when I see that it’s Del Frisco.

  He’s wrapped in his Jumper garb, hair matted, shagging his sweat-slicked face.

  There was a Burner named Jeb Larriland who operated a furnace down on ten a few years back. He was a sorry looking thing who lost his daughter and son in a Dub attack. They’d been bitten and resurrected and Jeb had to put them down with a hammer. He was caught up in a wash of self-pity and despair after that and in the days before he crossed himself over, the poor bastard looked an awful lot like Del Frisco. Ragged and unkempt with feverish eyes.

  I rush to the front and Del Frisco sees me and shouts:

  “Get back, Wyatt! Get the fuck back!”

  “Put it down,” I say, motioning at the lamp.

  “You don’t know, man, you don’t know how it is!”

  Inching closer, Del Frisco lowers the lamp and I can see his hand, the one that’s missing the fingers. The stubs are bloody and raw looking.

  “I tried, Wyatt,” he says softly. “I tried to hang and climb, but I couldn’t do it. I’m broken, brother. Your boy’s a goddamn gimp.”

  “You’ve gotta rest and get better.”

  “They’re already making plans…”

  “To do what?”

  “Cast me out!”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  I feel something at my back as another Sweeper bulls by, grabbing at Del Frisco who swings the lamp. The lamp connects with the Sweeper’s head and down he goes as the crowd grows restless.

  I spot Strummer and a contingent of men and women who are ginned up, shouting at Del Frisco, “Put him down! Put him down!”

  A man standing aside Strummer white-knuckles a metal club and a female Sweeper removes a fire-axe from a wall holder. Their fingers stab the air, hatred in their eyes as they gesture in Del Frisco’s direction.

  The better of us, those calling for calm, are quickly shouted down. I’ve never seen such raw anger directed at the living before.

  Realizing there’s only seconds to act, I pivot and push ahead as Del Frisco brings the lamp down. I grab the tube and yank it from him as a few attendants from the infirmary appear and tackle him.

  He reaches for me and I take his hand and mouth that it’s going to be okay even though I have doubts that it will be. His pupils dilate and the hardest thing is when this man, this coiled ball of fast-twitch muscle who I’ve seen escape death on more occasions than I can remember, curls up and cries.

  Del Frisco is quickly carried off as the temperature in the room drops a few degrees. Voices are lowered and everyone resumes their normal activities except for Strummer and his posse who encircle me. I look to some of the others for help, but they turn their backs and leave. Strummer maneuvers in close and violently bumps my shoulder.

  “What’s your problem?”

  “My problem, Wyatt,” Strummer says, “is that if you don’t watch your ass you’re gonna be next in the dead pool.”

  “You forgot I know who you are, man,” I reply, not giving any ground, “someone who bails when the chips are down.”

  “You’re a lying piece of shit!”

  “That’s not what Odin and Shooter think!”

  He throws a punch that breezes past my head and I grab his wrist and head-butt him. He yelps and swings wildly and one of his boys grabs and pries my arms back.

  I’m pinned in place as Strummer moves with menacing purpose toward me. His first punch sucks the air from my chest, his second opens a gash on my lip.

  I struggle and kick which makes Strummer’s gang laugh and tighten their grip on my arms. Strummer rolls up h
is sleeves and pulls a knife from an ankle sheath.

  “Now I’m gonna do to you what I should’ve done back out on that op,” he says.

  “WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON IN HERE?!” someone shouts.

  My eyes find the source of the voice, Gus, who’s standing at the back of the room.

  “If it isn’t the dog lover,” Strummer hisses.

  Gus keeps his eyes on Strummer while inching around the room.

  “You get lost, pops?” Strummer asks.

  “Looks like I’m exactly where I need to be.”

  Strummer chuckles. “Where you need to be is down in that dungeon of yours, playing around with those fucking mutts.”

  “With jealousy comes anger,” Gus says.

  “Jealous? Jealous of what?”

  “That my canine friends possess two traits you’ll never have: bravery and loyalty.”

  Strummer’s hand tightens around the knife. “You are so dead, old man.”

  Gus chirps twice and something trots out of a side door.

  It’s Zeus.

  The dog lopes forward, head down, ears back as if ready to strike.

  The others around Strummer whisper words of caution, releasing their hold on me, as the dog sidles up.

  Zeus scents my hand and licks it and then swivels and stares at Strummer.

  The dog’s lips pull back.

  A low-wattage growl ushers from its mouth which is enough to make Strummer flinch. He scowls and curses me and Gus under his breath and then exits with his crew. Gus watches him go while handing a treat to Zeus.

  “Jesus, you have a falling out with your former bestie or what?”

  “He was never my friend. And now he’s scared because I know who he really is.”

  “Truth is a dangerous thing around here.”

  Gus leashes Zeus while leaning in close to me. He looks around to see if anyone’s watching. “You got a minute, kid?”

  “Why? Something important come up?”

  “I found something with your numbers. Something you’re going to want to see.”

  12

  The halls and stairwells are relatively clear as we push through the red door and enter Gus’s lair.

  He unleashes Zeus who does a quick circuit of the room.