Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4]

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  My body follows the angle of the plastic chute, curling down and round and then there’s a sliver of light that rushes up to greet me as-

  WHUNK!

  I’m spat out the end of the flexible plastic tubing and go airborne, arms covering my face, bracing for impact.

  I fly over a metal dumpster, catching the faintest outline of Gus who’s lying inside it.

  My body glances off the dumpster’s rim and I pinwheel down into a trash-strewn knoll.

  I land hard and pitch sideways, eventually coming to a stop halfway down a slope that terminates at the backside of a building shell.

  My arms and legs are on fire, my head throbs, and my bladder aches. The mask on my face has been ripped away, the stench of the ground under me, equal parts fermented earth and rotting flesh, is overwhelming.

  I fight the urge to gag.

  I lie there for a few seconds and then push myself up. Through a veil of sweat the outline of the bodies under me emerges.

  The ground under me is a patchwork of arms and limbs and skulls encrusted in dirt and trash and the debris left over by the old world. Rising up I realize I’m standing on either a mass grave or a dumping ground or a combination of the two.

  Some of the bodies, those still wrapped in thin sheets of flesh, show the telltale bite marks of the Dubs. Others don’t, their wind-polished skulls bisected by chopping marks or perforated by what were probably shots fired by high-powered rifles.

  And the thing that chills me the most is that one of bodies, a partially decomposed young man, appears to have been scalped.

  I search for and find my Onesie and sled and then take a step as a barrage of black body-birds, the kind that feed on dead things, take to the air. I didn’t notice them before and the commotion results in cries of muffled rage that cause my head to jerk to the right. Two or three-dozen forms materialize out of the darkness.

  Summoning my last ounces of energy, I prepare to call out for Gus when an object flies out of the dumpster. I can tell by the shape that it’s one of Gus’s clocks.

  The clock lands on the other side of the knoll and its piercing screech disorients the Dubs, allowing me to backpedal down the slope. I want to go back for Gus, but there’s no way to reach him. The only chance he’s got is to remain silent and hidden inside the dumpster and pray that the Dubs don’t catch his scent.

  “DON’T MOVE AND DON’T SAY ANYTHING!” I scream in Gus’s direction and then I’m off.

  I’ve never been in this part of the city before and without Gus’s GPS device, I’m blind. I do a quick catalogue of the path ahead and plunge down over a cinderblock wall and worm through a gap in an alley and then I’m out on a main thoroughfare.

  Backtracking, I keep to the shadows under a building’s awning and assess the street. It’s deathly silent, my peripheral vision fuzzy, things seeming to hover at the outer edge of my line of sight.

  I fling Del Frisco’s orange bouncy-ball.

  The ball caroms off the pavement and ping-pongs around and that’s when a handful of Dubs that were waiting in the shadows pounce. I streak off in the other direction.

  Cut loose from the security of Gus, I’m hyperaware of every sound, every angle.

  I can feel the eyes of the Dubs on me as I race across the asphalt at breakneck speed, the pavement turning to a rutted road and then a footpath of sorts that curls between bombed-out five and ten-story buildings.

  Looking back, I can see a gruesome assembly of the dead pursuing, swinging their arms, wild and fast.

  Hugging the shadows, I conceal myself in the skeleton of a jackknifed big-rig that’s filled with empty biohazard bins.

  The Dubs bomb past me and I wait and then I’m on the run again, coming up behind them. Before they can react, I’ve taken a knee and smithereened their ruined flesh with a flurry of metal darts.

  More Dubs rush out of the gloom and I double back and dance between the urban bramble, stacks of brick and cement loosed from a bombed-out building.

  Marooned in the chaos, I no longer feel the dampness from the river in my clothing.

  I’m running on adrenaline and pure instinct.

  Ahead: a tangle of corroded machinery and looted scrap and the remains of a fire-blackened tank. All of this lies below a clutch of buildings that have forests of antennae and circular dishes sprouting from their roofs.

  Realizing I’ll have to go under the wall of corroded machinery I pull my luge sled out and drop it to the ground. Flopping on top of it, I easily sail under the machinery. Then I roll off and come up in a sprint, squeezing through the junk warren into a natural passageway lying between the wreckage and a building.

  Something comes into focus and I slow and stop. Through a hole in the building above me I can see the outline of my old apartment building.

  Stumbling, I begin to measure distances and look into the sky. My heart sinks because if my calculations are correct, I’m probably standing at or around the spot where Mom landed after she fell out of the helicopter.

  My internal compass suddenly fails and even thought I try to fight off the miserable memories, thoughts of Mom accompany a rush of emotions.

  I can’t deny the urge to wonder where she is and whether she’s been joined by Dad and possibly by Gus who probably met a grisly end back in the dumpster.

  All of them are gone or likely gone which makes me wonder what the use is in continuing on. Why bother fight a battle that can’t be won?

  Wisps of fog and shadows curl around me and then out of the silence emerges the sounds of bare feet slapping against hard surfaces.

  They’re coming for me.

  Turning back, the air explodes with the war cries of the Dubs. I shift my weight and bring up my Onesie, waiting for one of the monsters to deal me a deathblow when an arm ratchets out and wraps around my neck.

  Screaming, I break free of arm and bring my Onesie up into a face.

  A familiar face.

  A woman’s face.

  It’s Naia.

  She’s clutching two mini-sledgehammers whose ends have been sharpened into points, her foot keeping a metal door propped open.

  “What took you so long?” she asks, pulling me through a door on the side of a building which she quickly slams shut and bolts closed.

  I have trouble following Naia she moves so quickly. She deposits the sledgehammers in sheathes that droop from a combat belt and then leads me down a short flight of stairs. She takes the stairs three at a time, guiding me into the gloom of an underground parking garage.

  “What happened to the guy you were with?” she asks.

  “How did you know I wasn’t alone?”

  She stops and freezes me with a look.

  “I know a lot of things, Wyatt. What happened to him?”

  “We got separated.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “I – I don’t know.”

  “What’s his name?” she asks.

  “Gus.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “He pretty much raised me-”

  “Not responsive.”

  “I’ve known him for my whole-”

  “Did you not hear my question?” she asks, her eyes piercing, uncompromising.

  “Yes, yes, I heard you. I trust the guy.”

  She snaps on a thin flashlight and we breeze through the garage and into a door and up another flight of stairs.

  Five minutes later, we’ve moved through an inner security door. Naia streaks ahead of me, clad in a tactical vest and dirty canvas pants. Her hair’s pulled back in a pony-tail that’s banded by a loop of wire.

  She pushes through the security door and shuts it, throwing heavy bolts across the top and a series of security bars against the bottom.

  She takes a few steps and flips a switch on a solar generator. The generator hums to life and Naia floats a dimmer switch as a few bulbs crackle to life overhead.

  The bulbs’ radiance reveals the room to be oddly shaped and choked with all kinds of technology, the w
indows smeared black.

  Banks of monitors against one wall and long table-tops in the middle filled with keyboards and other gear and a sleeping bag and plastic jugs of water and lots of canned food.

  “You’ve been living here?” I ask.

  “Beats sleeping outside.”

  “How long?”

  “What month is it?”

  “October.”

  “Three months then.”

  Naia flips switches on the monitors and keyboards like she’s done it a hundred times before. The machines blink and boot up.

  “You know what ‘CCTV’ means?” Naia asks.

  “I think I’ve heard of it.”

  “Closed-circuit television. Surveillance cameras.”

  Black-and-white images of the city, shot at a dozen locations appear on the monitors. I’ve got a million questions for her, but I don’t ask them because it looks like whatever she’s doing is building to something.

  “Before everything changed the city had lots and lots of surveillance cameras. One for every eleven people.”

  “Why?”

  “Terrorism, crime, illegal immigrants. Basically, to keep an eye on people and prevent bad things from happening.”

  “How’d that work out?”

  I smile, but she doesn’t, preferring instead to turn back to the monitors.

  “All of the footage that was shot was sent back to one location where it was monitored, all day and all night.”

  Naia pivots and throws her hands out. “This is that place.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My old man was an Air Force jockey and a mechanic for the cops before it all ended. He taught me some things and I know what to look for.”

  She dims the lights until the only illumination in the room is from the monitors. She picks up a small plastic controller and toggles between the monitor footage.

  “I’ve been watching the city and your building for as long as I’ve been here.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “I don’t have time for a back and forth, Wyatt, so-”

  “Another state?”

  “I came from upstate, okay?”

  “How far?”

  “Far enough that we thought things might be better down here, okay? There are settlements up in the mountains. Good people, but not enough to fully rebuild. We were sent here to bring others back.”

  I want to know details and she seems to read my look, taking a moment to gather her thoughts before continuing:

  “There were four of us on the boat. Me and Angela and Pope and a guy named Evers, who used to be in the Marines.”

  My eyes dart back and forth between Naia and the footage on the monitors.

  “We were offshore when someone picked a distress signal up. Everything was smooth until we hiked inland and reached that double-decker highway-”

  “Freeway,” I say, correcting her.

  “There were mines and traps and those things-”

  “Dubs-”

  “-we call them something else. I guess everyone has a name for them. There are more of them here than anywhere else I’ve ever been. We got ambushed and Pope was ripped apart and then Angela ate the barrel of her own gun before they could get her. Then it was just me and Evers and we hid for a while and then he lost it.”

  “Lost it?”

  “His mind – just completely lost his marbles. Said he was going to have communion with the dead and then he bolted on me and I was alone and I ran and ran.”

  She stares at a shot of a deserted street on a monitor and I can see a single teardrop ease its way down her cheek. I feel like asking about Evers, but my gut tells me he might’ve been the naked guy we found in the room back in the RIP Hotel.

  “Why did you leave those numbers in the building?” I finally ask.

  “Because I wanted you to find them.”

  “Why me?”

  She turns to me. “Because you’re not like the others.”

  I snort and she shakes her head.

  “You want to know the truth?” she adds.

  “I’ve come this far.”

  “Some of the people in your building are worse than those things out in the streets, Wyatt.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Is it?”

  Naia rises and inserts a tiny device I’ve heard was called a thumb-drive into one of the computers and taps buttons on her controller, aiming it at an upper monitor. She’s able to make the footage of a single city street speed by in reverse. The point of view is from an intersection down the street from VC1 (undoubtedly a camera positioned above a street-light). The front of VC1 is visible in the footage.

  Time lapses, the images showing night turning to day and day turning to night. How many hours flash past I don’t know, but there’s shot of Dubs and animals and rain and sun and night and then the footage slows and something else comes into focus.

  It’s dusk and the roll-up door at the base of VC1 opens and a solitary figure appears.

  A woman.

  The one named Melissa.

  The very same one who questioned Shooter, died accidentally, and was then cast into the incinerator on ten.

  She’s very much alive in the footage, staggering outside, turning back as if expecting something from inside the building to follow her.

  “This is the most recent one,” Naia says.

  Melissa runs toward the camera and then there’s a flash from somewhere up on VC1 and she jerks sideways and falls to the ground. Her mouth is open and she’s crying, though there’s no sound. A dark stain spreads across her chest and it’s clear she’s been shot.

  She wills herself up and bolts past and Naia taps her controller to bring up more images.

  Another camera.

  Another angle.

  The same horrors.

  The new footage shows Melissa from the back as she barrels down a sidestreet and then she stops and turns back.

  She’s close enough that we can see the terror on her face.

  She mouths something and then dark figures move toward her.

  There’s something about the way the figures move that immediately reveals they are not Dubs.

  There’s another flash and Melissa’s chest turns black and she folds up like a card table and drops to the ground.

  The figures, whose faces are covered by masks, circle her.

  One of the figures, the tallest, points and appears to say something to Melissa and when she tries to elbow herself up the figure shoots her in the chest with a pistol fitted with a silencer.

  Point blank.

  Just like that.

  It gets worse when the killer removes the mask to reveal that it’s Matthais.

  Naia taps her controller and the footage freezes on Matthais.

  Staring at the camera.

  Grinning.

  “There have been others,” Naia says, her eyes lifted to mine. “At least nine or ten since I’ve been watching.”

  She taps her controller and more images appear: people running from VC1, hunted down by small teams. Sometimes Matthais fires the killshot, other times it’s someone else.

  Some of the murdered are familiar to me, others I haven’t seen before. But most of them share one thing in common: they were the people who were shunned and allegedly given a chance at a better life.

  I suddenly feel so stupid. I should’ve known it, I should’ve realized before but I was blinded by the idea of making a difference. Of belonging.

  The place beyond the river.

  It was all lies.

  All bullshit.

  The truth is they never made it three blocks beyond the mother building.

  And the most difficult thing is I can’t help but think about Dad.

  God in heaven is this what happened to him? Was he gunned or hacked down like some rabid dog?

  My eyes are fixed on a loop of people being snuffed out and then they grow blurry and I can’t take it anymore.

  “Turn it off,�
�� I say softly, peering at my hands which shake. “Please turn it off.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “They were supposed to make it out. They were shunned by the administration and given a chance to make it to a safe place.”

  “There is no safe place in this city, Wyatt.”

  I hold her look. “Is that why you wanted me to come here? So you could show me this?”

  “I knew I’d need evidence to convince you.”

  “Convince me of what?”

  “To help me get out of here. I’ve watched you, I know you’ve got the skills to help me get across that freeway. You can’t walk across, but if you were able to climb above it or knew a safe way through it-”

  “No, no…”

  “We can do it, Wyatt! We can leave and look for others and head back upstate!”

  Turing from her, I shake my head and massage the back of my neck.

  “We can go back to VC1. Matthais, that’s his name, he’s the killer. We can go back and I can talk to Odin and Shooter for you. They run the place and would be willing to listen and probably-”

  “Jesus, if they’re running your settlement then they know what’s going on! They’re part of it!”

  “You don’t know that!”

  She points to the monitors. “How much more do you need to see?”

  She continues to talk, but I’m not listening. My eyes are glued to another monitor that’s showing real-time footage of the streets.

  There’s something in one of the shots, a solitary man fleeing from a battalion of Dubs.

  I gasp because I know the man by the slump-shouldered way he moves.

  It’s him.

  It’s Gus.

  He’s alive and running for his life.

  19

  “GUS!” I scream, jabbing a finger at the monitor.

  I grab my Onesie and Naia’s penlight and run to the front door. The bolts slide back and the security bars are kicked aside.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” Naia screams.

  “I’M HELPING HIM!”

  Naia grabs my arm. “There’s too many of them!”

  I shrug off her hand and she throws her body in front of the door.

  “I’m not letting him die,” I say.