She vaulted onto the hood of a car, part of a chokepoint on a section of highway. Marisol ran forward across the tops of the cars, gaining ground on the fair-haired boy and the Asian girl who appeared to be running in concert. They were in the lead, maybe eighty feet ahead of her.
To her left and right she saw shapes toiling in the semi-darkness. She heard the screams of the Thresher, watched as three of them shambled toward her. Jumping over their outstretched hands, Marisol slipped off the hood of a compact sedan and landed on the asphalt just as a female Thresher stagger-stepped toward her.
Marisol crouched low and kicked the demon in the midsection and then sliced at the Thresher’s throat. The monster tottered back, grabbing at the ruined flesh as black bile spurted from the wound.
Marisol clipped forward, running down a gravel verge, juking around the detritus from the when the world had become undone: fallen street signs, torched buses, overturned cement barricades, and cars filled with the flesh-starved corpses of the unlucky. She knew this had once been a major thoroughfare into and out of Chicago, but no longer. It had been more than nine years since the machines had stopped and her world turned upside down.
She wouldn’t end up like the things out here.
She wouldn’t end up like her family.
She would win the race and become like the others.
She would gain a place for herself, a position of high station in New Chicago.
She ran for what seemed like fifteen minutes, passing several of the other runners. Eventually, Marisol looked up to see movements off to her right and accordingly, glided to the left. She alighted onto the hood of another car and jumped forward.
Her boots thumped over the roofs of the cars, she was making excellent time, the wall growing larger in the distance.
That’s when the Asian girl fell, just toppled down before her, maybe ten feet away.
“Help!” the Asian girl cried. “Please help me!”
Marisol dropped down and instinctively reached for the girl who was lying on her side, as if she’d turned her ankle.
“I think it’s broken,” the Asian girl cried.
“I’ll help you,” Marisol said, leaning out her hand.
In a flash, the Asian’s girl’s mouth curled up in a demonic rictus. “You are such a silly little bitch,” the Asian girl said. She picked up her knife and Marisol knew it was a trap. She’d been feigning injury to buy the fair-haired boy some time so he could win the race. The Asian girl swung her knife at Marisol who parried it with her own blade. The Asian girl spat at Marisol who pulled back before the girl’s fist struck her nose.
Marisol crumpled onto her ass and the Asian girl rose up, knife daggered over her head.
That’s when the white hands ratcheted out the darkness and grabbed the Asian girl’s shoulders and pulled her back into the shadows.
Marisol levered herself up as two Thresher set upon the Asian girl, pulling parts of her off.
Biting back a scream, Marisol turned and ran with everything she had.
She called out to the fair-haired boy whose chest was heaving. The wall was only twenty yards away now, Marisol could see the guards on the catwalk, could see the graffiti on the exterior and the bodies of the criminals and those who’d betrayed the city’s dictator dangling from its parapets.
Sensing she was about to overcome him, the fair-haired boy spun and bellowed at Marsiol. He swung his knife and made a move for her, but she simply planted her feet and somersaulted over him.
Time and sound seemed to slow for her.
The boy looked up in wonder as Marisol drifted past him, her boots clipping the top of his head.
She landed hard and never stopped running as section of the gate opened. Emerging from the opening were several of the Apes, including Farrow. They lifted heavy machine-guns and opened fire. Marisol hit the deck and then looked back to see that they were firing at the Thresher. Hundreds of Thresher that were nearly upon her. The creature had overwhelmed the other runners, including the fair-haired boy whose chest was being canoed open, the monsters fighting over his glistening, steaming insides.
Marisol muscled herself up and then Farrow was moving towards her. She fell a final time and he grabbed her wrist and pulled her through the gate. Dawn was breaking overheard and Marisol could see the other Apes gathered. Waiting. Cheering for her.
Farrow reached down and pulled her up. “Congratulations, kiddo. You made it. You are officially one of us. You’re officially an Ape. Today is day one. Today is your First Light.”
Blood Runners Absolution
Marisol, or “Sling,” as some of the Olders called her, held her rifle at shoulder level to peer through the scope, searching, hunting. The dark blue skies of pre-dawn cast a blue hue across New Chicago, and then she saw him, saw the man in the window, always staring out from that skyrise, one of the few that remained, gazing in her direction.
Well, not her specifically, but to the barracks inhabited by the hunters, the area where she and the other so-called “Apes” lived.
Their predecessors, cops and national guardsmen and the like, had worked to restore law and order after First Light (the local euphemism for the Unraveling, the purported solar storm that ended the old ways) and the populace, upon seeing them arrive for the first time in their militarized, then-shimmering black gear and body armor, had nicknamed them Apes.
The name stuck and the youngest of the Apes, Marisol, took some small measure of satisfaction from seeing images in the basin of the long-dead creatures with their muscle-quilted bodies and silver backs and faces seemingly screwed up in perpetual disgust. They were strong and powerful, and so was she.
Even though she had no idea who the man watching her was, she wanted to pull the trigger and watch him fall. Anyone who peered in the direction of the Apes often had to have sins enough worth dying for. An infatuation with their trade meant a love of death.
But she couldn’t give him that gift today. It wasn’t her place, and honestly, the rifle wouldn’t shoot that far. She and the other Apes were segregated, kept far enough away from the populace, from what was left of the great unwashed masses.
Life in the barracks could be cold and cruel, but it was still better than being outside of the city. Out there, beyond the New Chicago’s great wall was darkness and the horrible things that toiled there… the Threshers. She’d never seen one personally, but she had heard stories. Rumors mostly … creatures that survivors only whispered about. Nightmarish, rapacious, brain-cleansed beasts. Humanoid animals, long-limbed abominations with skin as white as mushrooms and burned-out eyes that hid a demonic madness.
Yeah, she’d take this ostracized lifestyle any day over being cast out to deal with them.
She turned to her duty of the night, picking up the blood stained knife and shirt, and moving to the bathtub to scrub them. As often as possible, she kept her distance in a hunt. However, more often than she liked to admit, she had to move in for the kill, feeling the life drain out around her hand as she sunk her blade into flesh.
It disgusted her, but it also filled her with wonder. Wonder at the delicate nature of existence.
The blood washed from the knife easily enough, but not so the shirt. Disgusted and drained, she stripped bare and stepped into the tub, scrubbing at herself now, fighting to get clean. No matter how long she lived as a Hunter, the sensation of feeling somehow unclean would never truly go away, she imagined.
That’s what Farrow told her, anyway. When they had gone on their first hunt together, he saw the look in her eyes and said, “Embrace the darkness. Let that feeling become one with you. Better to embrace it than spend a lifetime fighting in futility.”
And embrace it she had, she thought as she toweled off and stepped from the tub. There wasn’t another Hunter alive now that could keep up with her. She had smoked them all, and meant to keep it coming too. Being the best kept her alive, and it kept her in the need.
Born several summers before First Light, she was nearly s
ix feet tall, with a wave of copper-colored hair knotted on top, the tiniest piercing on the right side of her nose, and arms and legs that were sinewy and limber after years of successful hunts.
And because of her success during the hunts, she received the assurance that none of the other Hunters would ever touch her. That they would allegedly defend her to their last breath if needed. Yeah, she’d say that was worth training her ass off all day every day.
Standing there with the toasty, dry air of her room warming her still slightly damp skin, she considered her bed and the panties and t-shirt she had put out for the night. But it was early still, and in spite of her rule that she train harder than everyone else, she believed wholeheartedly that rewards had to be part of one’s routine.
Another successful hunt deserved another successful trip into the city for a drink. Shit, she might even have two or three. They might help wash away those last dying groans and whimpers that she never could quite block out without the help of some good, old-school basement hooch. Honestly, the underground spirits were horrible stuff, but after the senior Apes had basically forced it down her throat one night to jeers and hollers, she learned to almost enjoy the stuff. She liked it enough to return for it on nights like this, anyway.
She dressed, putting on one of seven black outfits she wore, all made of some repurposed compression material that was the required wear for her and the other Apes. It clung tight to her body like a second skin, with red lines like blood running up each side. If they were caught out in the city not wearing the sign of the Hunters, the punishment could be severe. And if they engaged in a brawl or spilled civilian blood without the outfit to let the opponent know they were Hunters, well, they might as well throw themselves to the Threshers.
Ducking out a rear entrance and sneaking around the barracks, not that she wasn’t allowed, but because she really preferred to be alone right now and so didn’t want to be spotted, she crouched and ran for the gateway. She was relieved to reach it without anyone challenging her, and then angled sideways, away from it toward a wall that she gingerly hopped over.
Marisol paused on the other side of the wall, crouching, waiting to see if footsteps or shouting followed her. Nothing. All clear.
The grass was moist from a late afternoon drizzle, but not so slippery that it impeded her descent.
She made her way across a depression in the earth, then turned to follow the canal that zigzagged along toward the heart of the city and that damned tower with the silhouette of the man who’d earlier been staring at her, still visible in the window.
Alone in her thoughts, Marisol massaged her neck and wondered what life was like for the elite in their fancy towers and skyscrapers that crowned the ground near the horizon. After the sky had fallen and that first seemingly endless night smothered the land, an America that had been slowly sipping at perdition finally took a knee.
The people that survived what came after the end of the machines, the riots, looting, fire-bombings, convulsions, and generally trying times, hunkered down in fortified keeps in the interior of cities like Chicago, which became a sort of permanent Gaza Strip/flea-market meld inhabited by the terrified and downtrodden, of which Marisol was one before she’d found her place among the Hunters.
Not all had been so lucky though, as the ghettos of the city showed.
To protect the populace, the decision had been made after the world ended to build a wall around everything, an incongruity of metal and wood that stood on the other side of what was once the South Branch of the Chicago River.
Over the last several years, the wall was strengthened with lengths of stout wood, cinderblock, metal beams, and whatever could be pried loose from the city’s industrial past. Checkpoints were added and haphazardly built turrets constructed over low points, the wall soon dividing “New Chicago” from the Q-Zone, the quarantine zone, and all the mysteries that lay beyond.
In spite of the wall (or perhaps because of it), the buildings littered around the center of New Chicago had soon started to sag, the pipes throughout the city burst apart, with thick grass and foliage sprouting up in great abundance through nearly every inch of buckled asphalt and cement.
The living kept to themselves and shared “leftover logs”—lists with the names of survivors who’d lived through the Unraveling—along with vegetables and other goods they managed to scavenge and grow in greenhouses and small plots of green up on the tops of towering, soot-stained buildings that rose out of the smudged sky like the horns on the head of some great beast.
The survivors kept vigil behind boarded-up windows and bolted doors and lived for the light. In the early years after the Unraveling, they’d ceded the night and the streets and all the lands beyond them to the misshapen things that moved under cover of darkness.
Marisol preferred not to think of this though, instead turning to look out beyond the city limits and over the sinuous banks of a wide river that curled through the center of town. Out there and beyond the wall, nature had long ago reclaimed much of what it had given up in the prior decades. Vast prairie-fields that had been denuded in the rush for farmland and acreage for corn and soy biofuels sprang up once again. Illimitable vegetation took hold in the prairie-fields, along with other things, creatures that survivors only whispered about at first.
The Thresher.
The thought of the dead-eyed monsters was enough to send a chill up her spine, so she wrapped her arms around herself and hunkered down, eyes on the gravel path before her. That’s when she saw the purple glow of light reflecting on damp cement ahead. Marisol looked up and smiled.
“The Fallen Hero,” she said, reading the name of a local bar with a smile. “My only friend.”
As if in welcome, the bar’s sign blinked off for a moment before flashing back on with a spark, and she laughed. “It’s good to see you too. Now give me a goddamn damn drink, you asshole.”
Each step felt a little lighter now, excitement boiling up inside her.
A hissing sound came from nearby and she passed the corner of the building to see a man standing there, pissing. He turned to face her, not bothering to cover himself or even to stop urinating.
“Come on, man,” she said, shielding her eyes as he shook. She kept walking, but heard a zip and then footsteps. She stopped. She could hear the man advancing on her and so she warned him, “Walk away, dickhead.”
“You’re one of them,” the guy said.
She turned and he pointed at her.
“Hey, you got a problem with me? You’re not better than me, you’re a piece of shit!”
She paused, watching trickles of piss running down the front of his worker pants. The guy was sloshed.
“I’m just here for a drink” she said.
“My son was a Runner. Keyword, was. He was gunned down by one of your people.”
“Then he did his duty for the survival of society,” she said, and nodded. She tried to turn, but the man closed the distance between them quickly and she found his thick hand on her shoulder. On instinct, she turned with a fist forming and then clocked him across the jaw.
He fell to the ground with a yelp, and sat there staring up at her with fury.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she said. “I really am. But that doesn’t give you the right to touch me. Now get the hell out of here.”
She walked off, relieved to hear he wasn’t following. The last thing she needed right now was to have to beat the hell out of him and get in some serious trouble. Double doors soon opened to the smell of fermented bread and potatoes, sweat-slicked men and women, and—she sniffed and cringed—yes, that was definitely vomit. Sometimes having an enhanced sense of smell wasn’t a good thing.
Sitting in the corner, by himself in the shadows, was Farrow. Clad in a tactical vest and black pants, Farrow was just turning the corner on forty, a broad-shouldered, hulking bruiser with a surprisingly soft side. A broad grin splashed across her face.
“The hell are you doing here?” he said when he looked u
p to see her standing over his table. “Stalking me, I see.”
“Something like that. Or, maybe the world just doesn’t revolve around that gigantic head of yours. Besides, a lady can get herself a drink every now and again, right?”
He laughed. “Sit down then. What’ll it be?”
She gave him a look and a wink and he laughed, then motioned for the bartender to bring another glass of the only drink they served--a mixture of fermented bread and potatoes, which explained the stench.
“Have mine while we wait,” he said, sliding it over. “It’s my second anyway.”
“Aw, you sweetheart.” She took a swig and had to suppress her gag reflex, then swallowed. She soon took another slug of the liquid that tasted like a combination of mouth-wash and battery acid.
Farrow laughed. “You should see your face every time you take a drink.”
“It’s that bad?”
“Imagine a donkey. Now imagine that donkey getting rammed by an elephant, while someone screams in one ear and someone else sticks dead rat guts up its nose,” Farrow said, laughing. “That’s you, girl!”
She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to laugh or vomit at the thought of that. Instead she just took another swig, trying her best to control her expression this time.
He laughed, and nodded his thanks to the bartender for bringing the second drink. She waited for him to drink, and made a tsking sound as he swallowed, straight faced.
“I don’t know how you do it,” she said in awe.
He smiled, but looked down at his black suit, then over to hers. His finger reached out and traced the red line of her sleeve, then pulled back for another gulp. “Drink enough of these, it’s like second nature.”
Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 40