Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4]

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  With Zeus barking alongside us, we slam the front door and negotiate our way out into a corridor on twelve.

  The Dubs are close behind, making a horrible racket as they slap the walls and their own flesh and shriek like animals at a slaughterhouse.

  “Which way?!” says Naia.

  I lead Naia through a side door and over a walkway built between different wings of the twelfth floor.

  The door splinters somewhere behind us, the Dubs bawling, sirens going off.

  I can hear voices above us, footfalls, and then we greet a half-dozen workers who are startled to see me.

  I recognize several of them as having taken part in the tormenting and torturing of Gus.

  They look at me like I’m a ghost, which, I suppose, I am.

  Even though there’s a part of me that thinks they’re about to get what they deserve, I urge them to run. I plead with them, but they react by staring or snickering or glaring and mumbling harsh words. Naia tugs on my arm and we work our way slowly past them with Zeus in tow. Twelve steps later I turn back a final time. The look on those we leave behind is something I’ll take with me for as long as I live.

  The blood has somehow gone out of their faces.

  They sport a look of absolute astonishment.

  It’s a look you often saw in the days during the Unraveling.

  The “I can’t believe I’m about to die,” look.

  They hear the noises made by the Dubs and turn and the ghouls quickly blanket them, grabbing people and ripping and biting and tearing. The floors and walls are quickly splashed crimson as the Dubs divide, some heading down a stairwell, others following us.

  Zeus gallops ahead of us and over the walkway and ascends a set of steps.

  I elbow a door open and we enter a portion of the physical plant, running as fast as we can by blast-furnaces and through tangles of machines and giant wheels and pneumatic hammers

  We thread through suffocating spaces where daylight never shows itself and past alarmed workers, men and women who are bending over whirling machines and humming devices that help route power through the building.

  “RUN!” I shout at them. “GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!”

  They look up and those who coverings over their ears remove them and listen because they can hear it. Even over the roar of the machines they can hear the sound they hoped and prayed they would never hear.

  It’s like a vast stirring, a rolling and rumbling all at once and from every direction.

  The Dubs are here in full.

  The dead have invaded the corridors and caverns of the Vertical City.

  17

  I hold Gus’s pistol in my right hand, watching the tide of Dubs roll in.

  The workers that did not flee are quickly overwhelmed, some cut down while standing, others gang-tackled, disappearing under a blur of bluish-white flesh and talon-like hands.

  Zeus is alongside me, barking, Naia pumping my hand.

  “There’s nothing else we can do,” she says.

  We cross to the other side of the room and I kick open another door and we head up into one of the building’s countless stairwells.

  A man appears, a boy really, probably a few years younger than me.

  He’s holding an axe in his trembling hands.

  My pistol comes up and I draw an imaginary circle over his chest.

  “Wha- what’s happening?” he says.

  “Hell’s coming,” I say. “And unless you want to enter the void, I suggest you beat your heels and tell the others to get out of here.”

  He drops the axe and gallops up the stairs as we follow, so much adrenaline surging in our bodies that neither of us feel any pain.

  “Where are we going?!” Naia asks, taking the steps two at a time.

  “We’re going to help an old friend,” I say.

  With each step I take, the blood pounds in my brain like an engine’s throbbing.

  The wail of the sirens combined with screams and shouts is deafening, but we hustle up the stairs and reach another gunmetal gray door.

  On the other side is the sixteenth floor.

  There’s going to be more people on sixteen, more guards, better armed, better trained.

  We’ve got one gun and maybe eight or nine rounds and a million Dubs in hot pursuit.

  I fire into the door.

  “What the hell did you do that for?!” Naia asks.

  “I wanted to see if it worked.”

  She scowls and I shoulder open the door and there’s pure panic on the other side.

  People are running for cover, carrying their belongings, calling out for guidance.

  We shield our faces as best we can with our arms, drifting through the bedlam.

  One or two people who were involved in Gus’s shunning appear to spot us, but they’re too preoccupied with saving their own asses to do anything.

  At the far end of the hallway is a single, bearded guard who looks as petrified as the kid with the axe in the stairs.

  He’s fronting the door I want access to.

  We surge forward with a crowd of perhaps twenty people, everyone so tightly packed in the space it’s almost impossible to move.

  This works to our advantage because bearded guard is unable to stop the forward progress of the crowd.

  By the time bearded guard has looked up, most of the others have retreated through other doors.

  I bring the gun around and plant the barrel against his nose. “Who’s inside?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I thumb the gun’s hammer back.

  “The pri-pris-prisoner. Del Frisco. He’s in there,” bearded guard stammers.

  “Anyone else?”

  He shakes his head.

  “If you’re lying I’ll take your head off.”

  “I ain’t lying,” he mutters.

  Bearded guard unlocks the door and Naia holds Zeus whose mouth is open, the dog growling.

  I enter the room and—

  WHUMP!

  A metal bar grazes my head.

  The bearded guard, the sonofabitch, was lying.

  Without thinking my gun comes up and I fire into the middle of the second guard (the one hiding behind the door), the unlucky who’s holding the bar.

  The blast lifts the man off his feet, whipsawing him back over a chair.

  The second guard slumps in a pool of red, tries to push himself up, then collapses on his back.

  I stand there in shock, horrified that I’ve killed one of the living.

  The gun feels as if it weighs a hundred pounds and I want to toss it away when footsteps echo.

  I look back for bearded guard, but he’s run off as Naia enters with Zeus.

  Looking sideways I spot Del Frisco, hanging from the wall as if he’s been partially crucified, his untamable hair shagging his face.

  I close the distance between us in seconds and whistle.

  With great effort he lifts his head, his face wrecked, purpled with bruises and weeping wounds, eyes sunken with exhaustion.

  “Jesus, Del Frisco, what did they do to you?”

  He smiles, blood dribbling between his teeth. “They got their licks in, man. I asked the lifers to kill me, but they didn’t have the stones.”

  I hug him as tightly as I can. “We’re getting you down.”

  “There’s no time.”

  “The Dubs are here.”

  His eyes widen. “How?”

  “They followed us in.”

  His gaze hops to Naia as I undo his bindings. “Jesus, you weren’t lying were you?”

  I shake my head.

  “Mystery lady was real after all.”

  “Mystery lady has a name,” Naia says.

  The final straps come free from Del Frisco’s wrists and he falls forward into Naia and me.

  “I’m Naia.”

  “Del Frisco.”

  “I’ve seen you before,” she says.

  “How?”

  “It’s a long story,” I say, helping Del
Frisco take a few steps until he’s able to stand without assistance.

  “Well, Naia, in the few minutes of life we’ve all got left at least I had the chance to get to know you.”

  “We’re going to make it,” she says.

  “I wish I could share your—”

  “Optimism?”

  “I was gonna say delusion.”

  “Can you walk?” I ask.

  He nods and knots his hair in a pony-tail.

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here.”

  We streak toward and out the door and back into the hallway.

  The Dubs are at the other end, tearing into a group of terrified guards that probably came to investigate and finish off Del Frisco.

  “This way!” Del Frisco shouts.

  We bound up a ramp and into a hall that dead-ends at a metal door.

  I grab and turn the knob and it’s locked so I shoot the thing off.

  There’s the hiss of some unseen pneumatic device, whatever awaits us on the other side evidently sealed for some reason.

  I kick the door in and shafts of light from the hallway reveal the enormous dimensions of the room.

  We close the door behind us and I take a step and a motion-sensitive light sizzles on.

  We’re in the middle of a vast hydroponics shop, an indoor greenhouse of sorts that takes up most of an entire building floor.

  The space is glassed in on three sides and filled with long, heated tables where cubes of rock wool are being used to grow vegetables. The veggies have sprouted so tall and wide it almost looks like a jungle scene from one of Gus’s old National Geographic magazines.

  There are aisles, maybe three-feet wide between the tables and lights dangling from the ceiling below a maze of sprinklers and fans.

  Del Frisco processes his way forward, grabbing a few vegetables, tossing them back to us as we eat.

  “We need to head up and cross over.”

  “To where?” Del Frisco asks.

  “The outer buildings.”

  “There’s no easy way over.”

  “I know a way,” I say.

  “You’ve been there?”

  I nod.

  “Roger Parker took me over.”

  “Parker’s in on the whole thing,” he says.

  “No, he hasn’t thrown in with Odin.”

  “Bullshit,” Del Frisco says, tossing his half-eaten tomato to the ground. “If he’s not trying to stop Odin, he’s in cahoots with him. He’s a – what do you call it?”

  “Enabler?” Naia says.

  Del Frisco snaps his fingers.

  “That’s the one.”

  “He’s our only chance,” I say.

  Zeus drops to his haunches, facing the door, ears drawn back.

  Bullets shred the wall and the door.

  We’re forced back, retreating down an aisle as the barrel of a machine-gun noses through the ruined door.

  Strummer follows the gun in along with Shaw and a few other killers.

  They assess the room and take aim at us.

  We dive between the rows of vegetables as bullets lap up the ground all around us.

  Soon the air’s filled with vegetable-shrapnel and bits of wood and metal from the chewed-up tables as guns are fired and at least one explosive tossed in our direction.

  Crawling under a bench fixed to one of the tables I spot Naia and Del Frisco who motions for me to follow as we collectively crouch-crawl between the rows of vegetation.

  “COME OUT, COME OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE!” Strummer shouts.

  Del Frisco whistles to me.

  “Gimme your piece, man,” he says.

  I hand him my gun and even with his mangled hand he’s able to aim and fire a few expertly placed shots at the sprinklers above. Before I can ask why he’s doing it, the sprinklers open up, all of them, dousing the entire floor with water.

  In seconds a layer of steam rises over the heated tables, visibility falling.

  We use the cover to move briskly, crawling over and under tables and benches.

  At a junction near the middle of the room we’re up on our feet.

  I look back and nothing is clear in the steam.

  The faint outlines of Strummer and the others are visible.

  Along with something else.

  There are other forms in the room now.

  Little more than dark cutouts.

  They’ve entered from gaps at the sides of the room.

  I can’t discern whether they’re human or something else and then I hear Naia’s scream and I instantly know a bad situation has gotten immeasurably worse.

  18

  I’m motionless, crouching next to Naia, Del Frisco and Zeus, waiting for something to happen and then my skin starts to tingle like it does before a rainstorm.

  And then everything comes into focus.

  There’s dozens of forms out in the steam.

  They possess the stooped posture of Dubs and appear to be hunting for warm flesh, padding up and down and across the rows of vegetables.

  A female Dubs flaps past me, close enough to touch.

  She doesn’t see us and then she turns, looking like a rabid animal, lips curled up.

  She hisses at me and then her head disappears in a red spray.

  More gunfire rings out, bullets slicing through the air just over our heads.

  Dubs scream in anger and pain.

  One man cries out, telling the others he’s been bitten.

  More gunfire.

  Someone tosses another explosive that rocks the room and shatters the glass walls.

  A Dub squeals in delight, then another, followed by the patter of naked feet across the ground.

  Strummer and another man shout orders to stand firm and shoot at anything that moves.

  Del Frisco signals to me and points to the closest door and we’re up and combat-running.

  Forms wolf past us as we advance through the steam which thankfully conceals us from view.

  Peripherally I can see Dubs slashing through holes in the glass on either side of us.

  Glancing back, the gloom is shattered by gunfire and the silhouettes of the Dubs as they fall to the ground and counter-attack.

  Rising up, I throw up a hand to point the way forward and then the butt of a rifle strikes my jaw and destroys my equilibrium. I wobble for a few steps and then pitch to the ground.

  Rolling sideways, I catch sight of Strummer who’s smiling demonically.

  He looks ready for war with his slicked back hair and tactical vest overflowing with ammunition magazines and what look like a cluster of baseball-sized grenades.

  I search for Naia, Del Frisco, and Zeus, but they’re nowhere to be seen.

  I elbow myself up, exposed in the open between a row of tables.

  Strummer pulls back the firing bolt on his gun and I manage to plant my feet and dive over a vegetable table, bringing down a row of staked peas.

  Bullets obliterate the clay and plastic pots on the tables around me, Strummer nearly invisible in the steam as he zeroes in on me.

  I turn over on my hands and knees and a heavy object crunches the small of my back.

  Strummer grabs my hair and pulls me back and then he flings me to the ground where I slowly rotate around.

  As he closes on me, I remember how it was when we first met. Maybe we were never friends, real friends I mean, but I’d respected him once. Admired what I thought was his level-headedness, his ability to maintain his cool.

  That’s all changed.

  He looks deranged.

  Feral.

  His eyes seem as black as little pieces of licorice.

  “You – you did this, didn’t you?!” he says, almost too angry to spit out the words. “You brought the fucking devil into this place!”

  “I didn’t have a choice. They followed me back in,” I say, my hand in front of my face.

  Gus always quoted some fancy writer who said there are only two types of people: the pursued and the pursuing. We’re both
in the former category, Strummer and I. He might not realize it, but he’s got the look of a man who knows he’s little more than a meal for the things that are waiting out in the shadows.

  “We can work together,” I croak. “We can do like we did before back with Darcy and the others.”

  “That’s all ancient history, asshole,” he says.

  “We can still get out of here.”

  He glares at me as if this is the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard.

  “Why the fuck would I ever want to leave?”

  I watch his finger curl around the trigger of the gun.

  But for whatever reason, Strummer hesitates.

  And in that moment of hesitation, Zeus soars out of the shadows and rams into Strummer’s ribs.

  Strummer’s gun goes flying and he falls on his side.

  Zeus lunges and rips the flesh from Strummer’s left Achilles tendon.

  Little geysers of red stain the floor as Naia and Del Frisco appear.

  Del Frisco grabs for the gun and Strummer surges up on his good leg and grabs Del Frisco and now the two are in each others’ arms like a pair of deranged dancers, fighting for the weapon.

  Their momentum forces them back and through the rear door which is a shed filled with sacks and plastic bags of fertilizer and hills of soil and minerals and oil and fuel for the growing machines.

  Strummer bites Del Frisco’s hands and Del Frisco, still bloody from his beatings, head-butts him back, splitting Strummer’s lip open.

  Strummer sinks to the ground and Del Frisco brings the gun up, aimed at Strummer’s head.

  “Go on and do it,” Strummer says.

  BAM!

  Del Frisco fires a shot—

  –Directly over Strummer’s head.

  Strummer wails and clutches himself and Del Frisco cackles.

  “See,” Del Frisco says, “that’s one of the ten or twenty things I never liked about you, Strum. You’re a pussy and you never even knew it.”

  He lowers the gun.

  “What do we do with him?” I ask.

  “We do to him like he did to us. We leave him.”

  The war cry of the Dubs rings out, ten or fifteen of the monsters stamping through the mist.

  There’s nothing we can do for Strummer and so we proceed toward a pocket-door at the back of the shed as Strummer’s voice rises.