Blood Runners

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  He finished his time in the room of weights, achieving some measure of bulk in the last few weeks, bench-pressing much more than he weighed. Two hundred and twenty-five pounds. "Two wheels," his trainer had called it. He did this for reps and then "super-setted" with an exercise that involved pulling a sixty-five-pound dumbbell high over his chest, and then he worked his legs, doing sets of barbell squats and hack squats and stiff-legged deadlifts and all sorts of extensions, weighted and unweighted. When he was finished, he wiped the sweat from his brow and flicked it away, and asked for permission to run outside.

  The summer air was not yet heavy as he exited the room and smacked his legs to warm the blood and sustain the pump, and then he was off, moving slowly at first, then jogging. Elias enjoyed the late days the most, the hours just before twilight when the light went golden and he was given license to roam outside the Pits. By directive, he was permitted only to run on preordained paths, curved trails of asphalt and hardened dirt that paralleled the river or the man-made ridgeline that fell below sections of the wall. He was so good, so fast, that the trainers often permitted him to run on his own, and it was in this time that he deviated from his orders and took shortcuts and switchbacks that led to the edge of downtown New Chicago. He was forever curious, though he’d never actually visited the belly of the city before.

  Elias wended out away from the Pits and along the river, and then he cut back past rowhouses and backyards and small businesses and former houses of worship. He stopped and stared at the ragged wall that lined the horizon, keeping New Chicago in the middle between it on one side and the Great Lakes on another. He crested a hill and stopped at a series of giant wooden poles that stood at the edge of a roundabout like sentries. Posted to the wood were hundreds of pieces of plastic-sheathed paper. Survivor logs, yellowing lists of names of those who’d made it through the Unraveling. He scanned these often, looking for a sign. Searching for a sibling’s name, even though he suspected none of them had made it.

  He was barely at the age of memory, living in the outer burbs in a nice house with a mother, father, and two brothers when the sky exploded. He and his family had been caught up in the city when the grids went down and he was amazed at how quickly everything had changed. How the lights had flickered off, and the stores, once filled with plenty, shuttered. How fast friends quickly became faster enemies. His father didn’t panic. He had a plan. They would wait out the initial chaos and then make a run for a small hovel (his father’s "bug-out" shelter, as he called it) that he kept hidden in a section of woods in the country at the edge of a trout stream that ran clear and cold and deep.

  They didn’t have to wait long. The food ran out after a few weeks, the water a few days after that. When a group of neighbors tried to force their way inside, his father picked up a gun and did what he had to do. It was time to go.

  They packed their world into the back of an SUV the size of a small school bus and thundered off in the dark of the night, taking back roads and staying off main thoroughfares and other arteries overseen by what was left of the National Guard. They listened to the radio and heard politicians and scientists offer words of calm assurance while pontificating about how things were going to be rebuilt and order restored, even though his father was convinced the fabric of society was torn beyond repair. His old man was a bootstrapper and believed the world had gone soft, too reliant on handouts and bailouts. "The safety net’s become a hammock," he was known to say. He was eternally pessimistic, a purveyor of black tidings in the later days, but Elias and his family nevertheless prayed that the tide would turn.

  It didn’t and they never made it to their shelter. They were run off the road by a cordon of men and boys in pickup trucks who descended on them like wolves as a carful of dirty cops watched and laughed and egged them on. The attack was sudden and swift, but Elias’s mother and father were ready. Elias’s father told the boys to stay low in the backseat as he pulled a sawed-off shotgun out and gutshot the first man through the driver-side window. The man’s stomach opened like a sandwich bag as Elias’s father kicked his door open and dropped to a knee and began giving and receiving.

  He dropped three more attackers before one of their rounds blew out his neck in a foam of red, and down he went for good. Elias’s mother screamed as a sweat-salved man slid over the hood, heaved her door open and pawed at her. As she was spun around by the attacker, she drew a dagger hidden near her ankle and plunged it into the man’s eye, as blood pulsed onto Elias’s pants. She stabbed two more men and sliced open a third before she was ripped, screaming and gnashing, out of the car. The doors were pulled open, and Elias dropped to the ground in the confusion and secreted himself under the SUV.

  They stole his two brothers away as Elias clutched the underside of the SUV and held on for dear life as it was driven off and deposited inside a nearby impoundment lot. He dropped from the car when the attackers left and looked inside the only building of any measure within sight. Seeing no sign of his mother and brothers, he ran off through an industrial yard and collapsed at the edge of a field hemmed on all sides by an orchard. He was taken in by a childless couple beyond the middle term of life that owned and farmed the land.

  His new dad was fair, but stern. His mind was differently circumstanced from Elias’s congenital father and despite the deep intelligence on his part, there was no approach to intimacy between himself and Elias. He was less a real father and more like a guardian, a trainer of sorts. He focused on core principles, basic things related to the elements and the land and survival. He taught Elias how to work hard, how to craft things from refuse, how to live off what could be grown or gathered. The years went by and Elias grew and worked in the fields and orchards, harvesting and canning and readying for the unknown. He also ran. He’d sprint around a circular path his new father had pounded into the ground around the orchard. His new father had been a runner in his younger days, you see. Times were good, at least for a short while.

  His new father and mother knew much, but nobody at that point had heard about the Thresher. It was by that time many years after the Unraveling, and stories had only recently begun to filter out: rumors about other "survivors," great masses of people who’d lost their sight and had their minds somehow murderously reformatted when the sky fell. Word was these roaming packs had taken root out in the suburbs and the lands beyond, but were now constantly in motion, hunting, searching for sustenance, moving in such great numbers that they trampled the grass and vegetation like the reaping machines of old. Hence their nickname: "the Thresher."

  They came for Elias’s family, dozens of them, in the hushed silence of a cool, crisp autumn evening.Elias saw the first one in the candlelight from the kitchen. It was once a man, now bald, with skin as tight as a drum-cover, snugged down over bony appendages and with jagged teeth that had been whittled down naturally over time to points. Smiling at him before he punched his way through a window.

  Elias’s new father fought like a force of nature, dispatching many of them that night, the house clouded with plumes of cordite and explosive backwash as he fired out guns and tossed homemade incendiaries and explosives. Elias watched as the things burst into flames from the firebombs, running to and fro like ambulatory torches. They crashed and burned in droves and set the fields afire, but there were too many. When one fell, another took its place. Over and over they kept coming, like the brooms after that mouse in an animated movie that Elias had once watched.

  Elias’s father sensed the inevitable and shoved Elias out an upstairs window as a gnarled talon hooked around his neck and snapped his neck back. Elias hazarded a final look back to see the things bent over his father and mother, snatching up hunks of flesh and handfuls of dark, shiny gore out of their still-writhing bodies like crazed pickers at a swap meet. He could have gone back to help, but seized by fear, he chose flight over fight.

  Elias dropped to the ground and dove between the legs of a Thresher and rolled over and peered up at a slavering frenzied mass of veins and ga
ngrenous, snapping teeth. Elias combat-rolled to his left and was off and running faster than anyone his age should’ve been able to run. Across the rotting fields and down through the treeline he scrambled, the Thresher giving chase behind him, bellowing like herds of panicked swine. Elias was faster than any of them would ever be as he met the Chicago River and took cover along its matted banks.

  He soon fell in with a disreputable flock of river bandits for a hot minute, but when the going got too rough and the Thresher began closing in, he left them one night. He thought it might be because the desire to fight back had left him after his parents died, but he was always leaving somewhere behind. Always running. And so he came to abandon the bandits and experienced a number of small adventures and close encounters with the Thresher as he followed the river into the city and eventually fell under the watch of Moses O’Shea. Most of those in New Chicago had no earthly idea what lay on the other side of the wall, but Elias did. He knew all too well about the things that shambled around in the dark, but he mostly kept those traumatic memories to himself.

  He shrugged off thoughts of the past and continued his run past a former municipal sewer system that still reeked of death and decay. He stopped to catch his breath and stared into the water. Still dirty, but a few fish swam there now. Overhead, there were flocks of birds, including larger ones that dropped down and plucked up smaller surface fish every now and again. Without man, the air was cleaner. Some of the water was beginning to grow clearer, and animals that most had not seen in many years were reappearing in greater numbers. There were some days Elias wasn’t entirely convinced that the Unraveling hadn’t been a blessing in disguise, at least on some cosmic level. There seemed to be so much more life after all the death.

  He trotted down over a ridgeline to see the city’s skyline, maybe two miles distant. Faster he ran, past concrete drainpipes and defunct water purification plants, Elias supremely in the zone, running at a level where thought and action were nearly seamless when the teen boy staggered into him and down he went.

  CHAPTER 8

  Elias pitched sideways, crashing to the ground in an alley as the boy fell on top of him. Elias reflexively pushed the boy aside and felt swatches of his hot blood as the boy crumpled into a fetal ball. It was the teen boy from before, the very one that Cozzard and Lout fired at.

  Elias remained in a defensive crouch as the boy moaned and shivered. Elias had seen enough over the years to know the boy was severely injured; his outer jacket was stained a deep, gory red, and his balled right fist lay extended. Elias froze as he looked at the boy whose features were separately striking almost to grotesqueness, the whole of his facing leaving a deep impression in the memory. A small puff of blood and spittle bubbled from the boy’s lips as his countenance drained of color. His eyes fluttered open for an instant and fixed on Elias as he fought against the slow approach of death. His fist opened, and a tiny cellphone (what his pursuers wrongly assumed was simply an old-school digital camera) and key fell from it. The boy forced himself to head-bob in the direction of the phone and key as Elias took them up, wiping a smear of blood from the face of the phone. The boy gestured for Elias to draw near, and as he did, the boy’s breath rattled in his throat and then he whispered, "T-they’re coming."

  The not-too-distant sound of pounding footfalls forced Elias to look up and then crab back into the shadows of the alley. He caught the faint outlines of Cozzard and Lout drawing near. He slithered back a few more feet and cast a final look at the boy. Some impulse, some voice audible only to himself, commanded him to go back and help, but he realized the boy’s death hour was surely at hand. He shuffled back and turned a corner, listening to the sounds of silenced gunshots as Longman’s brutes finished off their prey.

  Elias stopped and pressed himself against a garage, making his form as small as possible. He waited, and then cursed when he saw his jacket was stained with the boy’s blood. He looked down at the phone and key, listened, heard nothing, and then ran with all his might back from whence he’d come.

  CHAPTER 9

  Marisol waited in line for lunch along with the other Apes. They were receiving their rations from the sustenance couriers that worked for the Codex Guild. The Guilds got their shares first, then the soldiers that guarded the wall and downtown, then those owed favors by Longman, and finally the Apes.

  She grabbed a plate of mashed root vegetables and some steaming gray meat and sat down next to Farrow at a long table. She looked down the table where Jimmy Sikes sat and cleaned his rifle, sucking on the half of his tongue that was left after Marisol had bitten the other half off during an ill-fated attempt to go at her. Sikes had learned his lesson, as had the others. They all went at her back when she was green and unsure of herself, lunging at her in the shower and in the barracks, making feels for her in the shadows of the tac vehicle and even when they were out on their hunts. But no longer.

  Marisol was strong now. Stronger than she knew and far more skilled than any of the Grizz or the other Apes. Farrow was kind to her if for no other reason than he wanted to find favor in her eyes. Indeed, the scuttlebutt said that the men of means in the Guilds were reportedly keeping a fast eye on her, and Farrow had every reason to believe that one day she would be plucked up and seated at the right hand of Longman as head of what amounted to his Praetorian Guard. He hoped she remembered him when she came into her kingdom.

  Farrow knew much more than he let on. He knew, for instance, about how bad things had been after First Light. About how society had taken a knee two weeks after the grids collapsed and then crumpled to its belly two weeks later when the food stopped flowing and the power failed to come back on. He knew how men like Longman had risen up. Men with connections, with access to the only remaining things that mattered: weapons and fuel and the lack of hesitation to use both with force and impunity.

  There were many legends about just exactly how Longman came to assume his position at the head of the Guilds. Stories about how the "Lord of Misrule" had led a great force of irregular soldiers out to confront warring masses from a violent city to the south. A great pitched battle was supposedly fought out on the Plains, a mini-war of attrition that ended with the Longman bravely leading a final charge that resulted in close-quarters combat and the ancient sounds of fighting, the echo of stone and wood against bone and flesh.

  Marisol’s family had been part of one of the battles, her father allegedly a soldier fighting at the foot of Longman. He’d died somewhere out beyond the wall, along with the rest of Marisol’s family. This was what Marisol had confided in him, but Farrow suspected different. Farrow was not yet a part of the system back then. He’d only recently been forced to seek shelter inside the wall, taken in by a veteran of the battles, a former Army Ranger who confided to Farrow that history was written with the blood of the vanquished and that all was not as he’d heard.

  The Ranger told Farrow that Longman hadn’t been any defender, but an aggressor. A man who was a purveyor of "FUD," the Ranger said. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. A feckless tyrant who’d ginned up an army of the downtrodden and raided several weapons caches (that only he knew about) and then moved out to confront any encampment that lay before him. Longman and his army, the Ranger said, had laid siege to nearby settlements, waited them out, then breached their defenses, murdered their inhabitants, and set the torch to anything that couldn’t be consumed or carried off. They’d done the same to any settlers or stragglers they’d encountered, stealing from them and then putting them to the sword.

  Though he’d never seen it himself, the Ranger confided that there was allegedly a great open pit in the middle of the Q-Zone where all of Longman’s victims had been dumped. There was even talk that the Thresher did not exist, but merely had been conjured up as a way of preventing people from venturing out into the Q-Zone.

  "But surely there were those who could’ve taken a stand against Longman," Farrow wondered. The Ranger acknowledged the logic of this, but whispered that Longman had been made aware of milita
ry secrets in the days before the Unraveling. He was able to utilize this information to gain access to some great weapon (which was unknown to the Ranger, though he harbored dark suspicions) whose very existence, whose threat of use, was sufficient to force the other survivors and members of the Guilds to fall in behind Longman, lock-step. Farrow knew all of this and much more, but kept it to himself.

  "I’m going outside," Marisol said.

  Farrow, slurping up a pool of food, cocked his head sideways.

  "What’s out there?"

  "Something new," she responded. "Don’t you get tired of sitting in here?"

  He considered this, shook his head. "No, I know what’s out there."

  "And?"

  "And that’s why I stay in here," he grinned as she played with her food, not amused by his response.

  He could see her pout and so Farrow leaned over the table. "Listen, kiddo, if you really wanna see what the bright lights and big city are all about, have at it."

  She perked up. "You mean it?"

  "Sure. Ole Farrow’ll see the head honchos myself, put in a good word, hook you up with a pass so you can follow the course and detour it down past the greenery."

  She smiled and nodded. It was in moments like these that Marisol most reminded him of his daughter.

  Later that afternoon, Farrow approached her as she was doing one-armed pushups in the barracks and handed her a scroll with a red stamp. "Good to go, young lady," he said. She hugged him, grabbed a flak jacket and a pistol, checked her Sigil, the unique I.D. tattoo branded on the palm of her hand that identified her as a Runner, and then she looped a rucksack over one arm and was off through a side door.