Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4]

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  He’s bald, his skull crowned with blood from where his hair was taken.

  The bastards actually did it.

  They either wounded or killed him and then, just for the hell of it, they scalped him.

  Memories of all the years we had together wash over me and my muscles go slack. I know Gus has turned and I should be moving to put him down, but I can’t do it. I won’t even as I note the gore-smeared knife the size of a lawnmower blade in his right hand. The one he probably used, after being wounded by Odin’s men and seeking shelter here, to kill the Dubs at our feet.

  He drops the knife.

  I drop the hangar.

  I notice words scrawled on the metal behind him in blood: “We die as we dream: alone.”

  I’m sure it’s the very last thing he ever wrote.

  Time and sound slow and emotion wells up inside me.

  “Jesus, Gus.” I say. “Jesus.”

  Gus’s lifeless gray eyes open and there’s something there, some flicker of light. It’s like he’s wearing the costume of another man. The old Gus is still in there somewhere in the background, peeking out from behind a curtain, and then he opens his mouth and part of his tongue is missing and his jaw moves back and forth as if he’s trying to speak.

  At that moment he looks more curious than dangerous.

  That’s when Naia rises up peripherally.

  She’s got a long metal bar raised over her head.

  “NO!” I scream, extending an arm to block her.

  She drops the bar and I throw a punch that hits Gus’s jaw and snaps his head back.

  Gus flaps to the ground, unconscious, and I pivot to Naia who’s just standing there, clutching herself.

  “I don’t want to alarm you, but…”

  She points and I glance back to see the bodega filled with Dubs who’ve herded together and are marching toward us. My eyes roam over their faces, bloated and leprous with disease, some shouting or screaming, others barking like dogs or raving and tearing themselves in delirium.

  I take another look at poor Gus and then I hop over his body and follow Naia out through a back door that leads to a circle of cement surrounded by a warped wooden fence.

  We hit the fence hard and scale it as the back door of the bodega explodes off its hinges.

  There are hundreds of Dubs tracking us as we roll over the top of the fence and run down an alley.

  I expect to hear the sound of engines and the triumphant shouts of Odin’s killers, but none appear and I’m hopeful they licked their wounds after engaging the Dubs and retreated back to VC1.

  We race through the alley and across the open shell of another building. There’s a yellow interior door up ahead that we kick open to reveal a set of metal rails and stairs that drop to a landing dock.

  I plant my hand on a section of railing and drop down over the side to the bottom of the dock, coming to a rest on the balls of my feet.

  Naia follows my lead, soaring through the air before screaming in frustration as she awkwardly lands.

  Her foot turns at an odd angle and she hop-falls forward into me.

  “Turned my damn ankle,” she says.

  I swing an arm around her and we thread between a pair of red-bricked buildings and into the rear of a metal shed connected to the back of a warehouse studded with solar panels.

  We close a rusted door behind us and walk through the shed, an overhead light connected to the solar panels snaps on and Naia’s hand goes to her mouth.

  There are bodies stacked like wood on either side of the shed.

  Some of the corpses are relatively intact, others are swollen or deflated and festering, their skin resembling the jackets on sweet potatoes I once saw left outside to rot. I imagine the fallen were a group of people who took refuge here and simply chose never to leave.

  There’s a loud POP! which startles both of us and I look over to see the belly on one of the bodies split open. Out come a knot of worms and a line of black beetles.

  “It’s death-bloat,” Naia says. “The gas in the body has nowhere else to go and so it builds up in the gut and bursts. Usually takes a few months, but if the space is sealed off, it can take years.”

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s how long it took to happen to my father.”

  I open to mouth to ask the specifics, but Naia silences me with a look.

  Then she kneels before a woman who lies against a wall. The woman’s chin is pressed to her sunken chest, a yellow liquid pouring out of her ears and mouth.

  “That’s the brain liquefying,” Naia says, pointing at the yellow liquid.

  She studies the woman’s face and pushes down the folds of skin over the woman’s eyes which look like egg yokes.

  “I don’t mind if it’s one of those things back there or just a part of someone’s body, ‘cause then it’s just meat, y’know? But when I see dead people pretty much whole like this—”

  “It’s way worse.”

  She nods.

  “It’s like I can … see into their past life, see a part of who they once were.”

  She leans near the woman and then hands pound on the door behind us and we slip ahead, exiting through a pocket-door into an interior of the metal-clad warehouse.

  We run through the warehouse and stop near a drain cover in the middle of the room.

  Suddenly, a section of brick skirt on a faraway wall crumbles in and a jumble of Dubs appear. We both take a step onto the drain cover which breaks apart under us.

  We drop straight down, landing in a moat of water, one of the city’s many sewer channels.

  We hit the bottom of the channel and fall to our sides, sloshing in the putrid ditch that smells like a rotten swamp.

  It’s almost impossible to see in the subterranean space, but peering up I spot the shadows of one or two Dubs hunting for us. I urge Naia to duck back and out of sight and pray that they didn’t see us.

  “Which way?” Naia asks softly.

  “The opposite of where they’re going,” I reply, pointing to the ceiling.

  We crouch and fight our way down through the sewer, past small forests of fungi and colonies of rats and huge, floating blooms of flesh and chunks of hard tissue and bone that have sloughed or broken off from hundreds of Dubs bodies.

  The frail light from the hole we fell through ebbs and I try and orient myself by creating a crude map in my head of a safe way forward. The underground space is uncharted territory, however, and the shadows swamp my vision.

  Striding forward, the sewer dilates into a high chamber that allows us to stand to our full height on top of a stone damn of sorts. It’s here that multiple storm-water discharge and sewage pipes converge, dumping their contents into a lagoon that lies beneath a cement ramp.

  The sound of rushing water obscures everything else as we take a breather and examine the water pooling in the lagoon.

  “I’m sorry about your friend, Gus,” she says.

  “He was the best of us,” I reply. “He was the only person back in VC1 who never wanted anything from anyone else. He was—”

  “Selfless.”

  I nod.

  “That’s a damn rare thing,” she says. “Aren’t too many people left who think their prime purpose in life is helping others.”

  “You’re like that, Naia. You’re like Gus in a way. You saved me. You’re a good person.”

  She stares at me, her mouth crooked open.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because good people don’t last long.”

  She moves away from me and I reach for her, but the combination of algae, scum, and tiny black snails under our feet is incredibly slippery and we begin to slide.

  Naia’s right foot goes out from under her first and she slips, pulling me down with her into the lagoon.

  The water is icy and much deeper than it first appeared.

  Naia’s hand slips away from me and she’s caught by the current and vanishes into a swirling
vortex of black water.

  I study the darkness and shout for her and something stirs.

  The water swells, waves fanning out, a hand breaching the water’s surface.

  Instinctively I grab the hand, only to see that it’s flesh-ragged bone. The thing, the Dub that’s attached to it is like a person who’s been unmade. The monster emerges from the water like a living skeleton held together by rotting sinew and scraps of slippery connective tissue and flesh that’s been pinholed by maggots.

  I’m so shocked I don’t move even when the waterlogged demon tackles me back into the lagoon.

  Water funnels into my mouth.

  Salty.

  Rank.

  Dotted with discolored curds of God knows what.

  The Dub’s hands latch around my throat as it forces me back and down. Fear blows through me because it looks like the ghoul’s trying to drown me and then it bites at the water—at me—as if I’m a bobbing apple.

  My back hits the rocky bottom of the lagoon and I piston my legs up, breaking the thing’s grip, buying myself a few precious seconds.

  Surfacing, I upchuck the water and suck in a mouthful of air. Naia’s visible off to my right, waving frantically.

  I look down to see what appear to be tiny snakes rising from the water.

  Closer inspection reveals they’re not snakes at all, but fingers.

  Dozens and dozens of fingers.

  Followed by the sunken, chalk-white faces of countless Dubs.

  They’d been down there in the water the entire time.

  I guess I assumed the damned things couldn’t operate underwater, that they’d drown like a normal person, but apparently, like so many other things, I was wrong.

  Thankfully time and the water have eroded their hands and faces, their cored-out eyes deep-set and black, teeth gone from their mouths, the flesh and nails vanished from their hands. The contrast between the eggshell paleness of their paper-thin skin and the black holes in their mouths is jarring.

  They spider-scuttle and moan and grab at me, their rubbery digits moving over every inch of my body, squeezing, touching, groping, mouthing with blackened, bile-greased gums, but unable to break the skin.

  I press through the gauntlet of squashy dead, throwing elbows, and reach Naia who’s standing, hip-deep in a section of the lagoon where debris has collected by a wall grate. We paddle and wade through the rest of the water to a set of crumbling stone steps that lead to another passageway.

  Peering back, we see one or two Dubs splashing through the water and then the pack that was chasing us up on the street appear, a flock of them ghosting out of the semi-darkness, sliding down the ramp, swimming across the lagoon.

  We blitz down the passageway, Naia running as quickly as she can on her bad ankle, heading toward the light.

  There’s another grate, much larger this time, at the end of the passageway, partially open.

  We burst from the grate only to find that we’ve circled back around.

  We are directly across the street from the building that houses Gus’s lair. From where I stand I can even see the two-person window-washer contraption that Gus and I used to venture out before.

  Meanwhile, it sounds like the city is being torn apart a second time the shrilling of the Dubs is so loud. They seem to somehow be all around and even above and below us, the patter of naked feet on pavement growing louder.

  “Leave me, Wyatt,” Naia says, her normally calm voice breaking. “Just let go and leave me back in one of these buildings and I’ll find a place to hide.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the very last time I saw my mother I let go and I made a promise to myself that I would never do that again.”

  She stares at me and then I point at the window-washer contraption.

  “Besides, it takes two people to work that thing.”

  She sighs and nods and I drag her across the street where she sags on the sidewalk. I jump up to snag the seat which is where Gus and I left it, suspended several feet off of the ground.

  “Um, Wyatt,” Naia says, pointing.

  I look back and every inch of solid ground is filled with Dubs.

  It looks like some kind of crazed parade, the Dubs thronging the street, an avalanche of decaying flesh.

  Their numbers swell with every step as more and more of the brain-slurpers haul themselves up out of sewers and subway drops.

  They gesture and howl their displeasure in our direction.

  “There’s so many,” Naia says. “Looks like the entire city.”

  “And we went and rang the dinner bell.”

  I bring the seat down to the ground and we climb inside (shivering in our still soggy clothes), and then I do as Gus did before. I engage the contraption’s manual device and tell Naia to hold the excess nylon rope as the counterweight rises down and we head up.

  As we rise up alongside the building we watch the Dubs arrive and huddle on the ground. As if caucusing, they form a circle and one or two of them grunt and point at us. The others seem to listen and then another moans and points at the side door that leads into the building we’re about to enter.

  They’re coming for us, they know we’re going to hide inside and they’re going to cut us off.

  “Help me, Naia,” I say. “We’ve got to go faster.”

  She grabs the rope attached to the counterweight and helps me by pulling in a downward motion.

  As we rise I look out over the city and see the remnants of Odin’s men, still fighting a running battle with another battalion of the dead two or the three blocks away.

  The sound of gunfire and explosions is like a call to arms for the Dubs, the beasts rampaging from all quadrants of the city, marching toward VC1.

  We reach the hole in the side of the building and I help Naia inside. Then we enter the hallway only to see that the Dubs have already breached the lower-level door and are churning up the stairwell. They’re only a few feet away from the boobytraps Gus rigged.

  “RUN!” I scream, pointing toward the metal exit door at the other end of the hall.

  Naia gimp-runs forward and I look back to see a Dub hit the first boobytrap as a blast of hot air flips me backward and my world turns upside down.

  16

  The floor tilts under me and I land on my ass as a portion of the far wall vanishes in a teeth-shattering explosion.

  My elbow shields my face the explosive fragments as I roll over and check to see that I’m not missing any parts. Naia crawls over next to me and we see that the stairwell has been cratered, but not so significantly that the Dubs still can’t climb up which they do, like spiders, clambering over the shredded bodies of their comrades.

  I shove open the metal door to Gus’s hidden room and secure it with the half-section of metal I-beam that he used as a crossbar.

  “What is this place?” Naia asks.

  “This was Gus’s safe-room.”

  “His fortress of solitude, huh?”

  I nod and drop to my knees, scanning the interior of the space which apparently was trashed by Odin’s boys.

  The flatscreen and phonograph and all the stacks of periodical and books have been smashed or ripped apart.

  On the floor I see pages torn from books by Ted Lewis and Fitzgerald and Amis and all the other writers that Gus loved; posters of the movies by Peckinpah and Kubrick; stills from famous photographers and images painted by masters hundreds of years ago when the world was still right defaced; and Gus’s prized pile of zombie books soiled by spit and blood and urine, the walls and floors covered in filthy graffiti, images of sex organs, and anti-gay obscenities.

  They found and destroyed everything Gus held dear, but my gut tells me they likely missed the most important thing.

  The Dubs pound on the door as I crawl over and pick up the section of floor that conceals the cavity where Gus kept his secret goodies. Everything is still there: the gold coins, the weed, the old Bible…

  The bl
ack pistol.

  The only thing of value is the gun and so I hold it up and like I’ve seen others do before.

  I pull back the slide and a round jumps out.

  Naia grabs the bullet and I insert it back into the gun and click off the safety.

  The metal door thumps and bends, the Dubs on the other side trying to smash their way in.

  “What’s the plan?” Naia asks.

  “There’s only one way out,” I reply pointing to the window at the other side of the room.

  We move to it and Naia looks down and then across to VC1.

  “Don’t even tell me we’re going across,” she says.

  “We have to,” I say, bobbing my head toward VC1. “We have to go back in.”

  “Not with this ankle, Wyatt.”

  I search through the piles of debris and find the long ladder lying hidden under the bed sheet that Gus used to use to camouflage the open window.

  With no time to spare, I slide the ladder out until it reaches into VC1.

  The metal door creaks and little clouds of dust spring from around its hinges as the drywall buckles.

  We scramble across the ladder as the metal door caves in and the marauding Dubs rampage forward.

  Crossing the ladder, we dive into the space hidden between the walls in VC1. I look back and the Dubs are already on the ladder.

  I grab the ladder’s end to either shake the Dubs free or drop it to the ground, but the weight of the Dubs makes it impossible to move.

  There’s no more time to do anything about it and so we turn and crouch-crawl through the tight corridor that leads into the building.

  I spot the hidden doorway into Gus’s workshop and kick the fiberboard as we scrabble inside.

  Ramming a screwdriver in the latch to secure the door on the other side, I spin to see that most of Gus’s dogs are still in their cages, including Zeus.

  Naia limps over to the front door and opens it as a sound builds from the direction we’ve just come.

  The Dubs are following our scent.

  Naia holds open the front door and I pop the latches on the cages and release the dogs.

  Zeus is the only one who doesn’t bolt.

  He kneels next to me and perks up and growls in the direction of the Dubs who burst from behind the faux wall as we turn and run.