The Forsaken - The Apocalypse Trilogy: Book Two

by G. Wells Taylor

  They scanned the courtyard for signs of trouble as they piled in the passenger door. Felon hissed and snarled, still climbing the walls about a trap. Tiny didn’t bother reminding him he was about to cross the City in a car full of gunmen with enough outstanding warrants to choke a whale.

  There was a sudden rumble of power and then a harsh rev that brought a girlish sigh from the Marquis. The Nova’s throbbing muffler echoed giving its monstrous voice. The wide muscular vehicle rumbled, its tailpipe making hot, wet noises.

  Driver rolled his tinted window down. “Let’s go.”

  The Angel was manhandled into a rough spot in the back seat between the angry handguns of Felon and Bloody. Tiny slid the sleepwalking nun onto the front seat beside Driver and climbed in. She was waking up but was blinking and still a little dull like she’d been smoking cheap Mexican weed.

  Driver pointed the car down the drive and the Nova rumbled smoothly into life, quickly gliding onto the street and flying down the avenue toward the guard post for the gated neighborhood. The Marquis played along real nicely and just flirted with the guard and talked about going “clubbing.”

  The Nova passed the gate and hit Currency Boulevard. That took them south to the main Skyway ramp. There were a lot of cars out, but that was to be expected. Day and night meant little in the covered city. Some cars bore the designs of other nostalgic waves, but about half had the squat shapes of Skyway riders. These were small vehicles with wide set tires and powerful engines designed for the challenging angles and precipitous drops presented by the Skyway designers.

  Driver pulled the car up to an intersection. The Skyway ramps looped down from the east and west. Felon hissed in the back seat. Across from them, Tiny spotted the Authority Cruiser too. There were two uniformed Enforcers in it looking right at the Nova.

  “The car!” Felon grumbled.

  “I reckon she caught their eye,” Driver said patting the dashboard.

  “Drawing attention,” Felon growled.

  They watched the Enforcers lift a radio-telephone.

  A spotlight burned out of the cruiser, slid over the car.

  “Reading the plates.” Felon’s ire was growing.

  “I ain’t got none,” Driver chuckled.

  “AUTHORITY!” boomed a mechanical voice. “Turn your engine off and exit the car.”

  “Do you think I’d draw attention to myself?” Driver glared into the rearview mirror. “If I couldn’t do somethin’ about it.” The Texan hit the gas and the Nova’s tires screamed.

  The acceleration pressed Tiny into his seat as the car burned through the intersection sliding under the rusted rear corner of a flatbed. They flew toward the Level Five Skyway ramp. Sirens came to life behind them.

  “Down to Zero!” Felon shouted.

  “I figured a scenic route!” Driver chuckled as he worked the gearshift. The car’s engine roared and the tires squawked as they caught on the slippery asphalt. The Skyway incline rose rapidly to forty-five degrees.

  “The Nova ain’t one of them elevator cars,” the Texan drawled. “She’s stylish, and she’ll run straight up a tree.”

  Sirens wailed behind them as Driver shoved the Nova up the ramp with both hands, weaving in and out of slower traffic—really pouring it on as they crested the top. The engine howled at the wide lanes ahead and Driver opened the Nova up to merge.

  Because there was no night and day in the City the Skyways were always crowded. The Nova tore into the thick traffic with ease—still squawking through gears as Tiny watched the speedometer hover at eighty.

  Skyway 4 North ran twelve lanes across, depending on cables and struts some forty feet below Level 5. It was a distracting place with tons of traffic and lights and signs warning of turnoffs and rest stations, turnpikes and merging lanes and advertising coffee and hotels and Formalin. Tiny read somewhere that designing the Skyway system to move the City’s 150 million people around was considered a feat greater than building the wall of old China. And he could believe it too. The roads swung and looped and crossed. There were multilane and multilevel sections too—and the traffic was relentless.

  Driver wove and dodged keeping to the two center lanes. The noise of traffic was overbearing—echoed and magnified by the proximity of Level 5’s heavy bulk overhead.

  “See,” Driver said searching the rearview for Felon’s eyes. “I could paint her red with silver stars and leave them fuckers in the dirt!”

  Crunch! The Nova suddenly bucked to the right. Driver glared out his window. A heavy sedan had made its way through the traffic. Inside fedoras were backlit by headlights.

  “Plainclothes!” Tiny shouted, reaching for his gun. The nun shrieked.

  “Well, all right,’ Driver drawled.

  The sedan slammed into the Nova again. Metal shrieked.

  “My paintjob!” the Texan growled, touching the wheel and tromping on the gas. The Nova lurched powerfully to the left and locked fenders, shoved the other vehicle across a lane until the plainclothes had to brake and do some fancy steering or hit a truck from behind.

  Driver swung the Nova back to the center lanes.

  “There!” Felon snapped and pointed over the seat at a sign: Level 4 down ramp - six miles.

  The Nova rocketed forward. Traffic flew past the windows.

  Tiny was watching the plainclothes car keeping pace two lanes over and burning to catch them. Then he spotted the marked car’s lights dodging through traffic behind them. He swung his head to the other side. Felon was watching a long black car with a dash light coming up that side.

  “Fuck, Driver they’re all over our ass!”

  Driver’s eyes squinted into the rearview mirror, and he tilted his head and quickly turned to make the count.

  Glaring red taillights suddenly filled the windshield. Driver braked. There was a loud bang and scraping sound as the Nova slid right under the solid steel bumper of an Authority Transport. Its big armored backside was blue with a thick yellow stripe.

  “Nice!” Tiny braced himself against the dash. “They dropped back to seal us in.”

  “You’d think so!” Driver bellowed. “Whoa now!” He slammed on the brakes and revved the Nova’s engine tight, started jumping traffic to the left. “We got to make that down ramp pronto.” He watched the transport’s massive body slide across Tiny’s window. Its driver suddenly poured on the fuel; its engine howled keeping pace with the Nova.

  “Fucker’s fast,” Driver said wistfully. “Be fun to drive.”

  Suddenly the rear window made a snapping sound—and crackled.

  “Gunfire!” Felon shouted.

  “Bullet proof!” Driver winced, putting the gas to the Nova. Tiny felt the car’s acceleration as they topped a hundred miles an hour. The Nova shot across six lanes of traffic toward the down ramp. Other cars were passing and moving that way too.

  The transport sped up as they passed its nose and just brushed the trunk with its high front bumper. Then it opened up with a nose-mounted machine gun. The Nova’s fenders rattled and sparked with the onslaught.

  “Kevlar fenders!” Driver reassured his passengers. “They gotta try harder than that.”

  There was a deafening boom and the Nova rocked forward. The vehicle lurched like its back wheels were airborne. Driver momentarily lost control and rear-ended a van but he wrestled the car into trim. It was rocking like a spring was broken. Driver glared into the rearview.

  “Cannon!” Felon barked.

  “You win!” Driver accelerated across the final two lanes. He wove and swerved, ready for more cannon fire.

  And Tiny felt his stomach jump as the down ramp collector lane suddenly dropped away to many street lit miles of Skyway ramp. To either side of the ribbon of blacktop the City’s lights burned. Interesting, yes, but the biggest thrill was the traffic. Four lanes of cars and trucks hurtled down the forty-degree downgrade.

  “It’s like we’re falling!” Tiny said to himself and smiled.

  “Them too,” Driver hissed at t
he rearview.

  The transport was recklessly matching their speed hurtling downward—on either side of it, Authority cruisers. Tiny knew the sedans would be back there somewhere too.

  “Plan?” he yelled. There were more cars to either side.

  The Nova continued to weave. “I was rememberin’ a dirty stock car driver!” Driver shouted. “See—I thought it was dirty at the time—cars had bunched up to win a race and one fella got creative.”

  The Nova squawked and lurched between a pair of slower moving cars ahead. Driver floored it and shot down the ramp toward a knot of cars past them. He gunned the Nova up to a sedan and hooked his chrome bumper in the car’s rear left wheel well. He hit the brakes and then tramped on the gas.

  Tires squealed as the sedan fishtailed to the left into a van. That van rammed the car ahead of it—which hit another. The van continued to slide, rubber and engine screaming. But the incline was too much and the vehicle shuddered and rolled. It started over sideways—but its front bumper hooked another car that careened to the left, and the first sedan suddenly went end over end, sparks flying.

  Driver gunned the Nova, breaking and alternately gassing the engine. Tiny grit his teeth as the Nova roared through an opening. A van flipped into another car that lurched across two lanes and almost hit the Nova’s tail before it lodged under the transport’s front wheels. A flame of sparks started. The transport was three tons of armor on tall wheels. It tipped nose down and couldn’t steer. The front tires turned wildly and one broke off.

  Tiny watched through the rear window as the transport started to tumble. Cars behind it flipped, and rolled, were crushed by the mammoth vehicle or knocked off the ramp.

  The salesman clapped Driver on the back as the behemoth rolled over cars ahead and then slid and bucked over the cruisers. Lights were flashing; sparks flew. Heavy metal slammed. The Skyway shuddered under the Nova’s wheels.

  Driver gunned the engine and the car whipped to the bottom of the hill away from the carnage rolling, smashing and burning behind them. The Nova’s tires squawked and the undercarriage thumped at the bottom of the incline.

  Driver eyed the wreckage behind him before turning the Nova toward Skyway 3 down ramp.

  “See that worked well,” he drawled, throwing a smile at his companions.

  50 - Moneylenders

  No one would ever convince Able Stoneworthy that this wasn’t an army. The fact that the force consisted for the most part of walking dead somehow increased its potential for violence. It was terrifying to behold.

  Captain Jack Updike stood beside him beaming joyfully at the ranks of dead soldiers. They had come from the villages and towns where they’d awaited this call to arms. For decades, rumors had circulated about settlements for the dead, and the coming conflict and thousands came from all over Westprime to see if it were true. They carried weapons of every make and antiquity, with the addition of relics like sword and spear that gave the dead army a look of gothic terror and epic undertaking.

  Stoneworthy was still getting his bearings. He and Updike had just returned from their visit with the mayor of The City of Light. A little more than twenty hours had passed since they first met.

  Their trip from the airport had been uneventful. While the limousine threaded its way over the busy Skyways, Updike radioed ahead. They exited the City and some ninety miles into the countryside they reached the glass towers of the Rebirth Foundation. Updike left him in the care of doctors with the assurance that he would return for him. The living and dead physicians began Stoneworthy’s treatment immediately.

  He soaked in chemical baths while being probed with questions by technicians before being transferred to an operating theatre. A repair team set to work. Broken ribs were inspected, trimmed and screwed into place on a plastic sternum; his skin was cleaned; the wound site was filled with a flesh-colored caulking and heated; and the ragged edges were heat-sealed with a flesh-toned plastic. After four hours under the knife his chest looked “healed” despite some discoloration.

  Stoneworthy was awake during the procedure but felt no anxiety. His pain-free state allowed him clarity of thought and calm that he had yearned for his entire life. He was not displeased with the “afterlife” he still had in him.

  After the treatment, Stoneworthy experienced tremors of sensation ranging from a mild tickling at the small of his back to prickly heat over his left arm. He felt strangely energized. A doctor assured him that the sensations would vary randomly until his body got used to its new state.

  “Afterlife requires no sleep, for reasons we do not yet understand. We do recommend an enforced period of relaxation. Your mind will not wear out, but your body will.” He also reassured Stoneworthy that the psychiatric tests performed indicated that he had lost none of his higher brain function.

  Updike had arrived in his room after midnight. The man’s big frame and powerful features were electric with purpose. He wore a tight-fitting uniform of military cut with clerical collar: it was dark green, with brown boots and a peaked hat over his stiff gray brush cut.

  “My brother,” he said. “You look better.”

  “Thank you,” Stoneworthy had replied. “I’m ready to serve the Lord.”

  “And you shall.” Updike grinned. “In fact, I need you this night. Do you feel up to ministering? It is late, but time moves past us. We must make our declaration of purpose to the evil that controls this city. Now, is the time that the meek shall inherit the earth.”

  “I am ready.” Stoneworthy took his hand.

  A black suit was brought to him, with clerical collar and shirt. They took an elevator down to the waiting limousine, this one bearing the Rebirth Foundation logo on its doors. A dead man dressed in blue held the door for them. They were soon speeding toward the City.

  Stoneworthy knew that Mayor Gregory Barnstable had ruled the City uncontested for fifty years. He was an employee of the International Credit Co., as was the rest of City Council after they determined it was insensible to waste valuable resources on the electoral process. A company would be foolhardy to invest millions in a candidate and then throw the entire selection process to the unstable whim of the voters. A state of undeclared martial law had been effect for years.

  International Credit Co. held mortgages on the City of Light and most of the populated property left in Westprime. The man who held the office of Prime, Oscar Del, was the company’s Chief Executive Officer and owner. Politicians, local Authority Enforcement Services and the Westprime Defense Command were his property. The Prime had appointed Mayor Barnstable many decades before.

  “The City donated money toward the construction of Archangel Tower.” Stoneworthy pointed out. “Not all things are corrupt.”

  “The City bought a piece of the Tower.” Updike frowned. “And I fear that Archangel has been poisoned by drinking from such a wellspring. Does not the Prime use many Sunsight floors?”

  “How shall we strike at the heart of this evil?” Stoneworthy’s mood had darkened.

  “By striking where it lives.” A vein bulged on the preacher’s forehead. “What is more evil than loaning the poor money, only to charge interest on it? What is more evil than the rich controlling what is God’s to control?”

  “The moneylenders,” Stoneworthy replied.

  “Indeed.” Updike’s face had become dark with passion. “Gold is a God they will worship no more. They can’t refuse!”

  “Is it too late, brother,” Stoneworthy wondered, realizing the time.

  “We’re expected.” Updike smiled. “I have an amicable relationship with the moneylenders. They know whose interests I represent and fear them. The mayor awaits.”

  They took the Skyway to Level Four and arrived at City Hall at three. Updike pushed past the security guards sent to deflect his purpose. “Away! God’s word needs no invitation. The mayor expects me!”

  Stoneworthy hurried in his wake, noticing the reaction of living people to his state. The technicians and doctors at the Rebirth Foundatio
n were used to the dead through constant exposure—many of them were dead as well. But Stoneworthy was appalled. His repaired body was in good enough condition to be mistaken for the living at first glance. When they realized he was dead, people turned away in disgust.

  It was a recurring theme in all of earth’s Babylons. People dismissed charity and compassion as weaknesses as they strove for individual fulfillment. With passion building in his heart, he followed Updike through a heavy oak door into the mayor’s office.

  Mayor Gregory Barnstable looked up from his massive desk. A quick emotion of petulance flitted behind his features before a cunning smile of greeting appeared. He got to his feet. Barnstable stood about average height, and was very wide in the shoulder and waist. He wore a pinstripe suit of purple and gray. His smile sat on a face creased and lined by expression. There was dark skin around shifting eyes that twinkled when they met Stoneworthy’s.

  “Gentlemen, I am glad I could break my engagement to meet with you.” His voice was practiced, expressions deliberate. “What can I do for you at this late hour?” He held out a welcoming hand that Updike ignored.

  “We come for the Lord.” Updike’s voice boomed in the spacious office. “The day of reckoning approaches.”

  “Reckoning?” The mayor’s mind whirred beneath feigned humor. “But taxes aren’t due for another two months.” He laughed.

  “Hold your tongue.” Updike glared over the desk. “We’re here to deliver a message.”

  The mayor’s façade cracked when his eyes focused on the dead minister. “You’re Able Stoneworthy! Christ!” He looked Stoneworthy up and down. “They’re looking for you!”