The HUDs only revealed so much, and Marisol was wont to disable hers except for the comms system that linked her to the other Apes.
She raised her head and took in everything: cool, partly cloudy, a light breeze flapping the weeds near her boots.
Somewhere in the distance, an air-raid siren of the kind used to warn of impending wars in the past shrieked, and everyone took up defensive positions save Marisol, who alighted onto the savaged hull of a rusted SUV.
She lifted her nose and sniffed at the air, which was filled with a flurry of dust and ash from the great foundries built on the edge of the poisoned river that snaked under the wall. She could see a ribbon of dust rising several thousand yards ahead, then a flock of startled birds that signaled the Runner was probably already on the move, well ahead of them.
The other Apes were busy firing up smokes and tossing back shots of booze made from water, old bread and sugar, or readying pressed wads of the plants that the Guilds grew that gave them energy and an exaggerated sense of self.
Marisol disdained these vices while on the clock, preferring instead to harness the excitement of the hunt itself. In a flash, she held aloft a balled fist and signaled for the others to follow, and they did.
Marisol led the others down a narrow artery and across an urban switchback that lay on the wrong side of New Chicago, a few klicks south of the Q-Zone.
She took in what was left of the once great city, her recollection straying drowsily as a flashstorm of images from the past assaulted her.
She remembered very little before First Light, save that it had not been a time of want. She had a generous Papa with his omnipresent smile, a mother, an older brother and a small dog that she’d carried in a backpack that her uncle had handed down to her.
She could see her mother still, stooped over a small fire at the back of their house, roasting peppers and chicken that she combined with a thick black sauce made of mashed tomatoes and golden taters, and sweet onions with a hint of cumin and dark chocolate and slivers of yucca.
Her father was part of the last great wave of migrants who moved over the border during the times of plenty. He’d initially joined the military, but quickly washed out and then became a “stick man,” a framer of houses.
He’d helped build several large developments in Colorado during the crest and collapse of the housing market, in the days before the sun burst and voided its load on all that lay beneath it.
When the power died, he corralled Marisol and her family and explained that things invariably fall apart when the middle cannot hold, and then they loped off in a camper Marisol’s father five-fingered from a neighbor who’d washed out and committed a crime against himself in a moment of weakness.
In the days before it all came crashing down, the country’s resources were focused more on the land near the great oceans. The left and right coasts were the major population centers. That’s where unemployment was highest and most of the country’s military elements were housed.
Not so in the middle and upper-middle west, those central-corridor states unburdened by pesky taxes and regulations and pension obligations, flush with easy money from natural gas and oil concerns. At least that’s what Marisol’s father surmised. He read the papers, he watched the tube. He heard the stories of burger-flippers in the Dakotas netting twenty dollars an hour and companies paying for people from the South and East to flood their newly infrastructured boomtowns and work the phones at their processing centers. If any place could make it in the new times, it would be somewhere like that.
They traveled the backroads for weeks, headed north, with Marisol ensconced inside the camper, playing dolls and word games with her brother, feeding treats to her dog, and trying to avoid the terrified looks shared between her father and mother. They listened to the radio for the first ten days and then were forced to silence it when the news became grim. Finally the broadcasts stopped altogether.
They eventually ran out of fuel close to what she would later know as the far corner of the Q-Zone near the Great Plains. They made that place their camp — their “coop,” as Marisol’s father liked to call it.
It was here, out beyond a bone-dry gas station, where her father took every doll, every plaything she’d taken with her and set fire to. Marisol had wept, but her father said it was the only way.
Fun and games were a luxury that could no longer be abided. He told her that she would have to start learning new things. New exercises, new ways of looking and examining and reacting.
She wanted to know why he was forcing her to become something that she wasn’t. He smiled and hugged her. He said, “Most people have no purpose in this life. They’re just…travelers. Bystanders. Do you understand?” She nodded. “But you, Mari, you’re different. You were sent for some reason. You have purpose.”
“But what is it?”
Her father couldn’t answer, but he whispered in her ear that he believed it was no accident that he had been forced to bring the family to this very spot and that, in his words, “It’s never too late to be who you are really meant to be.”
In the coming weeks he trained her and her brother day and night, teaching them to listen to sounds and discern portents on the ground and in the air.
He taught them how to box, how to use their hands as weapons for defensive purposes, how to craft utensils from hunks of wood and the bones of dead animals.
He showed them how to clean guns, and how to range a rifle by measuring wind and humidity and ballistic prediction. How to calculate the delta of aiming points in crosshairs while sitting squinched in a self-built blind. Her brother was a decent shot, but Marisol was a natural, born with off-the-charts dexterity and hand-eye coordination that her father helped her hone.
At night, the family sat on the top of the camper and watched the horizon go from blackness (“As dark as the bottom of the devil’s well,” her father said) to ablaze with brilliant fires, punctuated every now and again by the thud of ordnance dropped from planes, or fired by helicopter gunships. Six months in, the machines stopped flying. She hoped it was the end of the conflict but her father told her that it was likely that only the dead would see an end to the fighting.
Two months later, her father was caught trying to jimmy a truck belonging to a farmer who nearly blew his head off. The farmer refrained from killing her Papa only because he sensed that he might be a man who could be more than he was. A fighter, maybe. A tracker. In truth, the farmer spared her father’s life because his hands were calloused and his neck thick and he looked like he knew his way around a gun.
The farmer forced Marisol’s father to give up the group and all of them were taken at gunpoint to see Longman, who was by this time encamped on the outskirts of old Chicago.
One of Longman’s lieutenants tested Marisol’s father, and when he passed, when he showed them that he could run and fire and had his wits about him, they gave him and Marisol’s brother drab surplus-style jackets and patches emblazoned with red bolts and well-worn assault rifles with four mags of ammo each. They were soldiers in Longman’s army now. Marisol remembered watching them stand in rows of twos in the last shards of light before they headed out to battle the forces of a nearby settlement that had allegedly taken to cannibalism.
Marisol hugged and waved to her father and brother and gave them both loops of metal she’d found that they wrapped around their wrists to ward off harm. They marched off into the late-day sun, her mother staying behind, brought low by a respiratory sickness that spread like fire through the camps. It was the last time she’d see her father and brother alive.
In the days that followed, only a portion of the soldiers returned, and those that did told tales of battle and how Longman had performed brilliantly and bravely in leading his men to victory. She pressed for information about her kin, but was only given vague information: They’d died defending a hillock that overlooked the final field of fire. They were heroes in the camps. It was all too much for her mother, who soon passed into the great
void, either from illness or heartache, and Marisol was left to fend for herself.
She let her little dog go free in the wilds and then sacked up with the other survivors and began the march toward the wall surrounding old Chicago, which was still a work in progress. Those inside gave up without a fight. There really was nothing worth fighting for, and besides, many of them had been waiting for someone to lead, a strongman. Longman seemed to be the fulfillment of their wishes.
Once inside the wall, she was just another survivor until Farrow spotted and rescued her from a mob of young men who were intent on doing her all kinds of wrong. Farrow brought her inside the barracks and introduced her to his superiors and soon tested her to find that she had abilities the others didn’t.
She could, for instance, sense changes in her surroundings and discern patterns in the lower sub-zones that formed the areas where the hunts occurred.
She could spot people hiding behind foliage and blinds, footprints on the ground, an errant branch broken by an unlucky Runner.
She knew these things the same way she’d known the times of misery were coming before it all happened. The same way she’d known she was never going to see her father and brother again when they tromped off under Longman’s banner. She’d always had the gift to sense things before they happened and now her natural abilities were of great use to what passed for the State. The thought of it brought a bemused smile to her lips, for it was as if she’d been in training for Absolution her whole life.
Marisol’s head suddenly snapped up and she made a quick assessment of her surroundings.
An unfamiliar vibration hung in the air, a faint hum, like a million tiny insects fluttering their wings all at once.
Next, she sensed movement.
None of the others felt it, but Marisol did.
She waited.
Listened.
Smelled the Runner before she saw him, caught wind of the sulfurous scent of fear and then, a half-click later, she saw him: a rangy boy about her age with a scarf covering his face.
He stealthed behind a truck and nimbled over a low-slung wall that circled the shell of what was once a factory.
He hedged left, then scampered up a fire-escape when Marisol, without uttering a word to the others, snapped off her HUD and blasted forward, using the hood of a car as a springboard to launch herself onto the base of the building that looked down on an endless warren of exposed rooms and duckholes.
She grabbed hold of the rusted bars of the fire escape.
The Runner saw her and, not unsurprisingly, started running, slowly at first, then faster, finding his feet, angling through the maze of debris that littered the interior of the building.
The rules of the hunt were simple. Marisol and her brethren had one hour to pursue the Runner. If the Runner lasted longer than an hour or slipped four miles downfield, into what was the lower section of Zone 5, he was permitted to live another day to run, and the sin placed upon him would go unpunished.
The Runner had to be aware of more than just the Apes, however. Crude traps were placed at strategic locations throughout the Zones. A toe-popper mine or IED here; a pit filled with sharpened stakes there. The traps varied, depending on the mood and attitude of the craftsmen and bomb-builders.
The Runners were without weapons, sans the few inches between their ears (or whatever they could scavenge), and Marisol was not surprised when the boy picked up a length of pipe and turned and swung it hard enough to make the air bleed.
Marisol anticipated this and slide-stepped under the pipe as it breezed past her head. She dodged to the right and shouldered through a moldering hunk of drywall.
Planting her boots on a bathtub, she pushed and was able to somersault toward the boy who screamed at her. “YOU BITCH!”
She crashed into him, her raised elbow meeting his nose, loosening the amber liquid housed inside.
Blood spraying, the boy freaked as he staggered toward the back of the building. Marisol pushed herself up and bumrushed the boy, lowering her head, hitting him hard as his feet left the ground.
They pitched over and fell together through the air like broken dancers as their bodies plummeted from the rear of the building, smashing through the wood and metal railings that lay below.
Momentum catapulted the two sideways so that Marisol hit the ground hard, rolled over, and was back on her feet in a flash, sprinting.
The Runner was somehow up and ahead of her, arms and legs chopping the air, vaulting over cars and parkouring past and off the side of a building.
The blood roared in Marisol’s ears as she pursued, lasering forward, hyperaware of her surroundings.
She sensed the Runner once again and instinctively rolled forward upon turning a corner on a blighted two-story building.
She felt the length of wood swung by the hidden Runner as it creased the air over her head.
Barrel-rolling forward she kicked back her right leg, felt it connect with something solid, heard the Runner yelp.
Pushing herself up into a fighting position, she swiveled and he was upon her.
The Runner punched above his weight, throwing a series of wild haymakers, one of which connected with Marisol’s jaw.
She bit down on her tongue.
Tasted her own blood which was like gargling a handful of copper pennies.
Pissed, she blinked and fumbled back and the Runner wrapped both arms around her head and pumped his leg. He made a rookie mistake of not instantly powering his knee into her chest which she made him pay for.
Marisol blocked his leg and drove her forehead into the Runner’s nose.
Cartilage separated and blood spritzed.
The Runner reeled and Marisol booted him in the groin.
The young man staggered back five feet, then repositioned himself,
He reached down and grabbed a fistful of busted concrete.
Marisol did the same, snugging a jagged shard in a groove in the palm of her hand.
He threw his rock.
She reciprocated.
The Runner’s rock grazed Marisol’s cheek.
Her piece struck the Runner just below his right ear, freeing a ropy spurt of red.
Disoriented, the Runner stumbled back and vanished around the side of the building. Marisol hitched herself up and gave chase—
But before she could fully react, the Runner was heading for her again, screaming, a large boulder raised over his head.
The Runner brought the stone back at the instant that the first bullet struck him below his chin and an artery ruptured like a punctured beer can.
The Runner fell to the ground and Marisol saw the outlines of Farrow and the others behind him.
More bullets followed and the Runner’s body bucked and heaved, the young man crumpling in a fusillade of slugs fired by the Apes.
Marisol turned from this — she always turned during the “lettings.”
She didn’t shed a tear for the dead Runner, however. She couldn’t. But she whispered a prayer for him, hands over her ears as her comrades stitch the boy from groin to temple with bullets, absolving someone unknown of their sins.
And then, when it was over, when the last bit of brass had pinged the ground and the smoke had cleared, Marisol stood and began marching back toward the tac vehicle. She shrugged off her armor, rubbing the bruises that purpled her flesh as the lactic acid churned and burned within her. It always burned after the killings, but she’d gotten used to it. Used to the ancient sights and sounds of a new kind of hunting that had become all too common in New Chicago.
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Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 42