Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4]

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  Turning, whistles as he takes in my newfangled Onesie (which I brought down along with a new luge sled that’s secured in a rucksack).

  “That is one helluva piece of artillery, kid.”

  “They made it for me special.”

  “To do what? Annihilate the whole city?”

  He runs his hand over it and whistles. “Ugly-looking thing.”

  “Might just save our necks.”

  He shrugs and points to the alarm clocks. “I’ll take my chances with these.”

  I open the backpack and he places eight of the devices inside. The clocks vary in shape and condition, but they share one trait: they’re all of the wind-up variety.

  “You twirl these puppies up,” Gus says, touching one of the clocks, “and then you place them in one direction and run in another. Works like a charm.”

  “Just how many times have you gone outside?”

  “More than I count on both of our hands and feet.”

  “Jesus, Gus.”

  “You know what I’ve learned doing it?”

  I shake my head.

  “Death absolutely, positively, does not hold sway beneath the tenth floor.”

  There’s no time for small-talk so we remove the faux wall behind the bench and advance down the hidden crawlway.

  Gus has a penlight on which he snaps off as we near the open window.

  Night has come and shadowy nothingness greets us as we peer through the window.

  We wait a few seconds for our eyes to acclimate and then we check to see if anybody is watching.

  Seeing and hearing nothing, we hurl our gear over into the next building and then Gus jumps across.

  My nerves jangle as I follow him over, Onesie in hand, landing hard at the edge of the other building. Rolling over and rearing up, I catch sight of something peripherally, several floors up on the building we’ve just left. Barely more substantial than a shadow, whatever was there disappears from view.

  I turn to tell Gus that I saw something, but he’s already moved into the heart of his lair.

  Creeping back and out of sight, I pause for a few moments to make sure nobody was watching. Nothing stirs and so I pivot and parallel Gus who’s shrugging on another backpack filled with water and dehydrated food packets. He holds up a small hand-axe and two gas masks. He tosses me one of the masks.

  “You’ll thank me later,” he says of the mask.

  He powers up his tiny GPS device.

  “Maybe I was wrong about the whole thing, Gus.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Naia. The girl. Maybe I just, I dunno, imagined her.”

  He slides back the bolts securing the room’s metal exit door and takes half of a section of metal I-beam that acts as a crossbar.

  “If that’s true, if everything was conjured up in your mind, then it won’t hurt to take a look around, right?”

  He takes a step and I grab his wrist. “The Flatlands aren’t like here.”

  “Thanks for the news flash,” he says.

  “There’s going to be two of us this time. More noise, more targets.”

  “What’s your point?”

  I point at the axe. “Are you okay with having to use that? Cause there’s a difference between seeing death and dealing it.”

  His eyes narrow, but he doesn’t respond, choosing instead to turn and disappear through the door.

  We thread down a hallway and enter a stairwell landing that lies against the far side of the building. The wind whistles through a huge hole that was blasted in the wall.

  The stairs below us are crisscrossed by wire and rigged with boobytraps.

  Gus motions for us to climb through the hole in the wall and we do, pulling ourselves out onto a two-person seat attached to nylon ropes. Gus says the contraption was used by window-washers back in the day. “It’s safe,” he says, as it swings back and forth four stories off the ground. “It’ll hold.”

  Gus engages a manual device as a counterweight rises up and we head down. The seat descends to within a few feet of the ground and we gather up our gear and jump down onto a sidewalk.

  The kind of spooky silence that comes with a first snow seems to hover over everything. A few wild dogs grumble and fuss somewhere in the distance, but otherwise all is quiet.

  Gus sits on his haunches, eyes closed, sucking in the air.

  “We better go,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “The Japanese used to have a practice called Shin-rin-yoku. Know what it means?”

  “How would I know that?”

  “I’ve told you about it before.”

  I’m silent, my eyes making an inventory of every inch of open space, scoping for trouble.

  “It means sometimes it’s wise to unplug and bathe in the natural world.”

  “Sounds like fun, Gus.”

  “The sarcasm is not appreciated.”

  Gus rises and we gather up pieces of plastic and trash to camouflage the seat and ropes as best we can. Once finished, we grab a pair of bicycles that are stashed near the back of a torched yellow bus.

  “We’ll go as far as we’re able to and then we’ll hoof it,” he whispers.

  I’ve only ridden stationary bikes in the gym so it takes me some time to find my balance. I swerve and sag on the bike, but eventually I’m able to keep pace with Gus as we knife through the city under a skull-colored moon.

  We make sure to take routes that are generally not watched by the Prowlers, coasting through the wreckage of the city’s final battle with the Dubs. We pedal by hollowed-out armored personnel vehicles and the skeletons of fighter-bombers that crashed and gouged out the city streets.

  There are piles of barely recognizable remains here and there, fragments of anatomy really, bleached bones and scraps of yellow tissue that are tougher than leather.

  Stopping my bike in the middle of an intersection, I focus on the far end of the street.

  Goosebumps ridge the arms on my flesh as two men tussle over the corpse of a dead dog. One of them dips its hands in the feral canine’s chest cavity and holds up a handful of gooey intestines. The other’s head flicks toward me, but I’m already moving, violently pedaling after Gus who’s surging between a bottleneck of abandoned vehicles and machinery, the city appearing endless and dark and incredibly menacing.

  We slash by a promontory made up entirely of discarded cellphones and tablets, a stand of street signs covered in ragged, stuffed dolls, and apartment buildings with oversized decks where mass suicides occurred right before the city’s lights winked out for good.

  We proceed past a church whose doors have been pried off. There’s a single solar lamp near the front, spotlighting an oversized, painted image of Christ. Jesus is muscular and imposing, his eyes glazed white, hands outstretched as if he’s trying to keep something only he can see at bay.

  “We used to call him ‘Rambo Jesus,’” Gus whispers, pointing at Jesus’s laddered midsection.

  “Maybe it’s like the preachers say, Gus. Maybe Jesus will be coming back.”

  Gus considers this and shrugs. “Who’s to say the Unraveling isn’t his handiwork? You remember the Bible, don’t you? That guy Jesus raised up from the dead, Lazarus, was kinda the first Dub if you think about it.”

  We ride on and ten minutes later we’ve traveled over a wide junction in the city streets ringed by hulking apartment buildings and glittering glass structures shingled with faded signage that still read “New Condos from the One Millions!”

  Gus lifts his nose and signals for me to pull hard right.

  We dismount our bikes and take shelter in the carcass of an overturned ice-cream truck. It’s clear that Gus heard or saw something and wants to lay low.

  I stare at the ravaged buildings and the trees and foliage that rise up out of the holes in the cratered streets.

  “Nature’s reclaiming everything,” Gus whispers. “In fifty years this might all be a forest again.”

  “Long time.”

  “Blink of an eye,�
� he replies with the wave of a hand, popping a handful of sunflower seeds in his mouth. “Nature bides its time on certain occasions, other times not so much. Take the end for instance. You probably don’t remember, but it didn’t happen all at once.”

  “I remember the hordes invading the city.”

  “Of course. But the run-up to that happened at kind of a leisurely pace. You’d see a story on the news about refugee problems overseas. It was always in some other country at first and then there’d be a piece or two in the paper about more murders than usual. Then maybe you’d see one too many homeless guys or hear more ambulance sirens than usual, but it was all still in the background.”

  “Wars and rumors of wars…”

  He flips me an alarm clock and takes one up, winding it slowly, a smile splashing his face. “Where’d you pick up that line?”

  I point at him and he chuckles.

  “Jesus, at least you remembered something I taught you.”

  I stare at the alarm clock and finish winding it up.

  “They did it on purpose, didn’t they, Gus? Before the end came they didn’t want anyone know the truth because they didn’t want anyone to worry.”

  “I think they were preoccupied with the idea of people panicking, which was a mistake because if we’d have panicked a little bit earlier maybe we could have righted the ship.”

  “I remember dad complaining near the end about the streets being filled with rats and dogs.”

  “Yep. Getting the hell out of Dodge,” he responds, nodding.

  “Dad said animals always know what’s going to happen before we do.”

  “Your old man was right. Christ, if he could see us now.”

  “He’d probably be running the other way.”

  Gus blanches. “Don’t – do not say that.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “It’s a black lie. Your father was one of the good ones, Wyatt. He stood up for what was right and fought his tail off. And he loved you. My God how that man loved you.”

  That’s at odds with my memories, but I don’t challenge him on it.

  “So then why isn’t he around?” I ask.

  “Because he had the weight of the world on his shoulders, that’s why. Because he kept everything bottled up inside and when you do that sometimes a fuse blows.”

  I hand the clock back to Gus as something rustles outside and we watch a small dog-like animal dart across the street. Gus mouths the word “coyote” and I watch as the first creature is followed by another and then four more. Seconds later, the vaguely human outlines of a handful of Dubs can be seen, plodding after the coyotes.

  Gus signals for me to toss our alarm clocks. He flings his to the left and I chuck mine to the right and then we move away from the clocks, cycling over a rise in the city streets as the clocks wail behind us.

  The rise allows us to see a hint of the river and beyond that the massive two-tiered freeway that forms the city’s spine.

  The scent of brackish water and decay pricks my nose and then the river comes fully into view, winking at us from behind rings of moldering sandbags and rusted razor-wire.

  Gliding up near the banks of the river we take stock of the bridge. Most of it is pockmarked and cratered and the middle portion is blocked by debris and vehicles or littered with tiny metal objects haphazardly dotting its surface.

  “Mines,” Gus says. “Explosive stuff. They put them on that bridge and apparently up on the freeway. If you don’t know the way across it and step the wrong way, boom you’re dirt-napped.”

  We turn back to the river and Del Frisco was right, it’s choked with cargo containers sucked down from the city’s port when the seawall (which is only a mile or two away) was breached. The containers are tightly packed together, so many bobbing in the water that several have been lifted up on top of each other.

  Gus drops to the ground and starts drawing in the dirt.

  “This is us,” he says, scrawling a large X to mark our current position. “And this is where we need to get,” he continues after dashing a Y.

  He traces a path across the cargo containers which lie directly between X and Y.

  “It’s dark out there,” I say.

  “Luckily for us, it won’t get any darker.”

  He moves toward the river and I grab his arm. “You know the way?”

  “Relax,” he says with a nod, holding up the GPS device. “The hard part is over.”

  Gus is a friggin’ liar because the going gets a shit-ton tougher as soon as we plant our feet on the containers. For one thing, the container surfaces are as slippery as eels on account of water and mist from the river sluicing across them. Moreover, the stacked metal boxes (rising almost twenty-feet in the air in certain places), have a way of blocking or deflecting the moonlight so as to create little pockets of shadows. Navigation is downright impossible through those dark places and I’m terrified about what might be lurking there.

  Because of this our progress is slow as we climb and inch and crawl and zigzag across the containers. I do my best to imagine I’m up on The Dream Catcher but the sensations and smells are totally different. I’m unable to completely focus, getting distracted by the sound of water lapping against metal and the splash of something larger as it churns through the black water.

  Humming a nursery rhyme to myself, I grab hold of a metal bar riveted to the side of the container and watch some creature with an immense fin, roll right over a collection of Dub bodies. The bluish-white Dub flesh, silhouetted under the moonlight, breaks apart like crumbled cheese and the beast dives down into the water and surfaces no more.

  Gus whispers for me to hurry and I climb a series of metal rungs to the top of a container and slide down the reverse.

  Gus consults his GPS device and thrusts out a hand. Our destination is five or six blocks down the other side of the river, which is fifteen or twenty yards away.

  We crouch-run as best we can over the containers, leapfrogging some, slithering over others. Surprisingly, Gus has the energy and movements of a much younger guy as he leads the way forward.

  He grabs a metal handhold and hauls himself up onto the top of a container and looks back at me. I guess the night air has invigorated him because he’s never looked more alive. He’s wanted to go out on operations for the last few months and this is as close as he’ll ever get and I think he knows that.

  “We’re doing it aren’t we?” he says, smiling, gulping in air, taking everything in.

  I stare out over the water and he tugs at my arm. “This is something real, Wyatt. This could be… something important.”

  I open my mouth to respond and Gus takes a step up and across the top of the container and then he vanishes from sight.

  16

  “GUS!”

  Screaming, scrambling forward, I spot Gus just beyond me. He’s fallen through a section of the container, his legs dangling, fingers wrapped around a metal bar that’s rusted and about to give out.

  Grabbing a bolted-on handhold, I snag his wrist as my weight collapses a portion of the container that falls away under him.

  Gus hangs from my hand, the interior of the container, seven or eight below him, sloshing with water.

  “Hold on,” I say. “I’ve got you.”

  I pull Gus up and the air seems to shift in such a way that I can tell we’re not alone. There are grunts and the blubbering sounds things make when they’re spitting up water. Outlines are visible down in the water at the bottom of the container.

  “Wha – what is it?” he asks.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “Don’t look back. Give me your other hand and don’t look-”

  A skeletal Dub breaches the water like porpoise and swings a hooked hand at Gus. The ghoul’s tethered to a chain, so it misses Gus by an inch or two, the water from its talons misting his hand.

  “Christ, kid!”

  “GIVE ME YOUR OTHER HAND!”

  I set my Onesie
aside and Gus swings his other hand and I grab and pull him up and past me and that’s when it happens.

  The weight and movement of Gus’s body as it repositions is enough to dislodge the remaining rusted metal under my feet.

  Before I can blink I’ve lost my grip and fall into the darkness.

  I hit the inky-black water and keep falling.

  Straight down.

  Caroming off bulky objects hidden in the shadows.

  The water’s cold.

  Icy enough to freeze gasoline.

  My heart flutters and my feet slam into something and my mouth clamps shut, even as some of the foul-tasting water channels down my throat.

  Swinging my arms, I see movement up above me.

  Bands of moonlight reveal the seven Dubs above me, yoked in chains and what looks like nylon netting.

  Some wriggle like worms and others simply drift, missing pieces, slowly disintegrating in the water.

  Seconds, that’s all I have left to act.

  Confront the Dubs or drown.

  Swinging my feet out, I brace against what’s left of the bottom of the container and push up.

  The Dubs flap their arms and legs, foaming the water as I swim right at them.

  One of the things cranes its head, searching for me. A clawed hand stabs the water and I thrust back, right into another Dub that grips me in a kind of choke-hold.

  I throw a punch that connects with a jellied face, the flesh so waterlogged that it comes off in my hands like wet newspaper. I crack the surface of the water, gasping for air, surrounded by the dead. Gus bellows above me, but I don’t have time to answer.

  Another Dub bites at me and I take a breath and dive back down and another of the death-walkers, a snake-like demon with stubby arms and a scooped-out chest, literally breaks its hands off to come after me.

  The Dub descends and then something hits the water behind it and sinks.

  It’s my Onesie!

  Gus was good enough to give me a fighting chance as two things happen almost at once.

  The Dub kicks at me and I grab my weapon and trigger it. A metal dart whizzes through the water with enough force to puncture the monster’s forehead.