Blood Runners

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  Marisol barely needed to catch her breath. She dappled the dusty ground near Harrigan with spit, and briefly considered finishing Harrigan off once and for all with a blade to the prominent vein that pulsed on one side of his neck. If she did, would it be considered murder? Self defense? Did any of those distinctions even carry any currency anymore? The lights flickered back on and Marisol noted a camera hanging from a nearby ceiling like a gargoyle. She stepped over Harrigan and exited the Kill House.

  Farrow and the others were waiting for her. They’d seen much of what she’d done via a monitor on the outside that showed images of what was taking place inside, and most clapped and hooted for her, save for Sikes (who was friendliest with Harrigan) who grumbled and iced her with a nasty look. For some reason, she intentionally feigned a lunge at Sikes, who flinched and tripped back on his heels as Farrow watched and nodded and grinned.

  He took her aside and mussed her hair and whispered, "We’re going out again tomorrow." She looked at him and replied, "A new hunt?" He nodded, glanced at the other Apes to make sure they couldn’t hear, and then he whispered again, "A big one this time. And from what I can tell it’s someone linked to the Codex." She took this in as a sound rose and Marisol swiveled to see Harrigan emerging from the Kill House, wobbly, weak-kneed, getting razzed by the other Apes for having his hind end kicked by a girl barely eighteen years of age. Marisol stood her ground, holding Harrigan’s gaze, ceding nothing to him or any of the other men.

  CHAPTER 17

  In the days long past, the area around New Chicago had been first settled by native peoples. Some had called them "Indians," though that term had fallen out of favor, replaced a half-dozen times by other words depending upon the direction of the winds of political correctness. Longman remembered they called themselves Algonquian and they chose the area principally because of the portage, a finger of swampy land, verdant and flat, that connected the Chicago River with the Great Lakes. Here, the Algonquian kept great pens filled with all sorts of animals that they bred for sport and for food. In the days since his Guild had taken control of the city, Longman had done the same, establishing a zoo and breeding pens out near an old amusement park on the lip of the Lakes.

  Longman was many things to many people: a leader, a killer, a prophetic destroyer of dreams and worlds, and, surprisingly, a lover of animals. He hadn’t always harbored such feelings, but in his adult years he’d held a place in his heart for lower creatures. There was no guile in them. They either were for you or against you. There was no duplicity or manufactured affection. There was no in-between.

  He strode between the locked slips full of deer and pigs and barnyard animals, along with more exotic creatures that he rescued from the zoos after his reign began. A smattering of African animals, strangely-colored birds, and a half-dozen truculent wild hogs that someone had given to him in return for not killing their son. All of these were housed in a high tent made of woven metal mesh with gaps at the high sides where food (and other things) could be tossed in. The sound of an engine drew his attention to a battered Town Car that stopped and disgorged Hendrix, who slithered out and moved past the animals, many of which bayed and hissed in his direction.

  Hendrix handed Longman his Absolution file, which Longman quickly fanned, stopping at the photo of Marisol.

  "This is her?" Longman asked. Hendrix nodded and said, "She’s a straight-up heartbreaker and life-taker ain’t she?"

  "I don’t remember seeing her," Longman responded.

  "You haven’t watched in ages, boss, and when you did, she was offscreen. She was a tracker before, but now she hunts with the rest. And the best thing is her scores."

  Hendrix’s mouth peeled into a satanic smile. "They’re…perfect."

  Longman nodded and handed the file back to Hendrix. "How much?"

  Hendrix’s face went wooden for a beat, then he looked out over the animals and whispered, "Ten thousand, sir. We’ve explained to the family and to their Guild that Caleb — that was his name — was cut down by some mugger out past the river, an unsolvable, but the family, they hold you responsible because security’s gone to hell of late, as we both know."

  "Your cover story, did they buy it?"

  Hendrix nodded, sniffed the warm air, and continued. "It’s worth it to pay the money and end the whole thing anyway though, ‘cause if the hunt should prove unsuccessful, they’ll undoubtedly want more answers and then they’ll start digging."

  Longman’s gaze hopped from the animals to Hendrix. He thought back on the notion that violence can only be concealed by a lie and the lie only maintained by violence. How very circular. He nodded to Hendrix. "We can’t have them digging into what happened to that little spy."

  "No, sir," Hendrix responded. "Bad for business and all."

  Longman duly noted this, then placed a hand on Hendrix’s wrist. "If this doesn’t work out, Hendrix, I’ll be honest. It won’t end well for you." Longman said this with absolutely no affect, no emotion in his voice or face such that he looked less like a living man than a statue wrought by some dark-imagined sculptor. Hendrix was terrified, but slowly nodded as Longman set out, strolling along a boardwalk he’d had built that snaked between the pens of animals. The stench of the farmyard burned his nostrils and he stopped and reached in a pocket and pulled out a half-eaten vegetable and tossed it to the hogs. The giant beasts rolled and fought over the morsel and Longman nodded and grinned. He loved these sludge-slicked low-dwellers. They were like him. Willing to do almost anything to survive.

  CHAPTER 18

  The dim light of day had withdrawn, relinquishing all of New Chicago to the evening gloom. Elias was down in the Pits, training as hard in the last hours before his first run as he’d done in the many months leading up to it. No changes in eating or routine. He did an hour of sprints (many of them with weights strapped to his back), then ran several miles and downed various protein and carb drinks made of goat’s milk and shredded grain and the concentrated pulp from the multicolored fruits that Moses grew in an old greenhouse near the edge of the river.

  He listened to speeches from a trainer named Max who’d survived an unheard-of nine hunts, read reports of those who didn’t make it back, and studied crude topo maps of the land where the hunt would be. When he lay himself down to rest that night, he made sure to check the hiding spot inside the mattress for the phone and the key. His plan was this: he would vanquish all of the Longman’s men tomorrow and then, after returning in triumph, would explore the secrets of the phone and key in greater deal.

  Even when he was a child he exhibited a knack for visualization, for plotting out the way things were to unfold. So he continued to think on his plan and had no doubt that he was more than prepared for tomorrow and would be returning victorious with his head held high. On two feet.

  CHAPTER 19

  As Elias continued to train and prepare, Marisol sat in an ordnance vault in the barracks with an oversized blade and cut notches in the tips of 5.56-millimeter bullets. Acting upon the advice of a younger Ape, she proceeded to pour molten wax on top of the notches. The wax was supposed to give the bullets extra stopping power. She’d never used her rifle on a Runner before, but her intuition told her that tomorrow might be different. She needed to be ready.

  When the wax cooled, she collected the bullets and fitted them into two ammo magazines that she taped together and slapped into the receiver on her assault rifle. She hefted her gun and it felt good in her hands as she placed it next to her body armor that she doused in alcohol and scrubbed clean. Her hands quivered as she worked the alcohol into the grooves on the outside of the armor that would encase her on the hunt like an individual fortress. She hoped that tomorrow would go smoothly, but her intuition said it would be different, that this next hunt might be the start of something, rather than the end of it.

  CHAPTER 20

  Longman lounged on a chair at the top of the Guild building, listening to a dented iPod muted low and the sounds of the night as it cloaked the city.
He fiddled with a small machine that resembled a metal bird, a mini-drone made of carbon fiber and high-tech plastics that was built for eavesdropping and surveillance. He checked the lithium batteries bolted inside the drone, then the aperture camera that captured ground-level images. He smiled at the shimmering exterior of a device he used on rare occasions to track the progress of the Absolution hunts.

  Satisfied that all was well, he hoisted the drone and ran a short distance and flung the device like a javelin as it soared off and away from the roof. Micro-electrical motors hummed to life inside and soon the drone was flying out and away and over New Chicago.

  Longman returned to his seat and admired a small monitor fastened to a harness that he strapped around his shoulders. The monitor showed top-down footage shot by the drone and enabled Longman to control the drone via a tiny joystick and dial. He was not unfamiliar with the technology, having used it during a period of "all hands on deck" at his air base directly after the Unraveling. It was a time of great uncertainty when all able-bodied men and women had been asked or ordered to stay on, to move on base with their families and significant others to monitor events happening on the ground. Recognizing an opportunity, Longman volunteered to man the twenty-four-hour flocks of drones that High Command sent out over the cities and the lands in between. The satellites were still in orbit (and fair number continued to be in orbit far overhead, though only Longman knew this), and the wind and algae-charged batteries that powered the drones in full vigor, and the whole of Middle America became a kind of free-fire zone in the months after the Unraveling.

  There were some at the base who couldn’t take it, who broke after seeing all they held dear crumble and burn into nothingness. Not Longman. He volunteered for drone training when others dropped out or stopped showing up for work, and soon he was consorting with "Reachback Operators" in Nellis and Creech Air Force bases via encrypted sat links and flying Predators and Reapers and raining Hellfire (quite literally) down on unsuspecting "Crows" (which meant, in military parlance, the bad guys), their luminous forms running in the darkness before his IR sensors locked on and he banished them into the void.

  Adopting the handle "Icarus," Longman was soon in charge of the "Disposition List," the initially electronic (and then paper) log that contained the names of people the High Command wanted liquidated. He was ruthlessly efficient, though he spent most of his days watching the collapse of civilization in real-time and striking marks on a wooden desk to denote his "kills."

  He observed the futile attempts to power the grids back up. He watched them glow and then fall permanently dark. He studied the lines that formed in the cities and the burbs, and then tracked those lines as they collapsed into frenzied mobs that ransacked and pillaged and fought against law and order until there was none left to fight.

  He perused the news flashes that ran for a spell on backup generators, detailing the fatal disease birthed by the solar storm that hit the economy and stopped the oil from flowing. Solar storm. Solar flares. Magnetic tsunami. Terrorism. Preemptive strike. Act of God. EMP. The party of the donkeys believed one thing; the elephants, another. And none of the geniuses or talking heads or people with no real discernable skills who got paid for jabbering on shows could quite agree on what had happened, but it mattered not. No power meant no jobs, no transport, no buying of plastic goods from faraway lands, no living beyond means. The engine of America locked and burned in a few quick months. It had not been too big to fail, after all.

  As the final seconds ticked down, Longman sat alone and watched at the air base as stories unfolded after the news went dark. He watched the death of the golden calf as the stock market dropped thousands of points in a matter of days, the technorati throwing up their hands, unable to massage their money and manipulate sectors and industries in a world without power. He poured through top-secret databases called SIPRNet and JWICS and Anchory and Broadsword and all of the various internal portals and networks connecting groups and elements nobody had ever heard of, like the National Correlation Working Group, and the Proactive Preemptive Operations Group, the Strategic Support Branch, and all of the other entities with their cute little acronyms that were birthed by tax dollars to compress the kill chain.

  He studied the mass suicides that took place on the great bridges in San Francisco and New York. He observed penitents with bent knees in broad fields seeking a sign from some higher power that never came. He analyzed the standoff at the Mall of America two months into the collapse. Armed bands had taken it over and forced the hand of the remnants of some second-tier military element, which burned it all down in a conflagration that made the events at Waco look like a Fourth of July barbecue.

  He clocked the grotesque ferocity of the battles over the bridges that connected Detroit and Canada and Maryland from the Commonwealth of Virginia, the sieges that ensued around the oil fields in Texas (which moved unsuccessfully to secede from the Union) and the viaducts and fracking pools in Pennsylvania, the wild firefights across the high-tech campuses in the greenery below San Francisco, and the murders of various reality stars in the hills of Beverly by vengeful and long-suffering viewers. He watched all of this like God, occasionally picking winners and losers with the squeeze of a trigger that deposited fire and brimstone down on the unlucky. And by the end of it all, when the power finally winked out and his ammo ran dry, Longman peered around and realized he was it. Last man standing.

  He watched the drone flit over downtown New Chicago and past the Pits and the Apes’ barracks and the Zones set aside for Absolution. The world would soon be stitching itself back together, Longman thought while looking at the sky overhead. The hunt would soon begin, and blood would be spilled and then all the wrongs committed before the new day would be washed as white as snow.

  CHAPTER 21

  Blood roared in Marisol’s ears as she ran through the tall grass that blanketed her line of sight in every direction. The sun was faint overhead, little more than ambient light as Marisol streaked past, barefoot, unarmed, following a path on the ground, moving across little cubes of rock with the practiced grace of a professional dancer. She paused and heard the sound, the unearthly grunts of pursuers. They were coming, the same things that haunted her on occasion in the light and always in her dreams. A flap of movement at the periphery of her vision. The tail end of something clutching the shadows, staying low to the ground. Her pulse quickened, and then there they were — dark cutouts at first, freaks of imagination, mottled forms with rotting, talcum-colored flesh. Nearly indefinable, they stumbled up into the light, clawing their way across mounds of fresh earth. Spider holes and duck-backs. Their movements more humanoid than animal, eyes milky and sheathed in a layer of loose skin.

  She screamed and turned and ran through the grass that rippled all around her. They were closing fast as Marisol skirted forward, bursting out the other end of the grass maze, and then she was tumbling, falling down an embankment until she came to a rest in a windfall of tombstone-white tree branches. Her vision was spotted white and swarmed with stars as she rolled over and pushed herself up on a stout branch that was revealed to be a human bone, a femur. She shrieked, recognizing that she was hip-deep in a never-ending boneyard. A pale netherworld of bleached bones and flesh-starved corpses that lay like twisted sculptures. Marisol squinted up as her pursuers paraded down the embankment, following her like animated targets from some horribly violent, first-person, mow-em-down video game. The sound of the things echoed behind her, beside her, all around her. They were everywhere now, an immense force that careened down toward her as she grabbed a bone to use as a club. The horrid clamor rang in her ears as she brought the bone back over her head, wailing, before she roused into consciousness.

  She leapt from this liminal state, nearly fell from her bed in the barracks, and shook off the nightmare and looked through a slit in a faraway wall. The sun was just beginning to peek through. It was nearly time for Absolution to begin. She reached over and plucked up her tactical vest and swung a hand out
for her rifle. As the alarm sounded, she lurched from her bed and grabbed her gun and the rest of her gear and made for a nearby exit.

  CHAPTER 22

  Elias was already awake and in the back of a militarized Range Rover, driven by Max, his trainer, who’d been conscripted to drop the Runners off at the starting point. Unlike many of the trainers, Max wasn’t a screamer or a brow-beater or "hands on." He preferred a lighter touch, and took the time to gently encourage Elias, building him up, getting between his ears, reminding him how he’d succeeded with lesser talent than that possessed by Elias.

  "Listen, El," he said, "You’re gonna do fine, okay? Y’hear me? You’re smarter than them. You’re faster, better, you’re aces, bro. Comprende?" Max would’ve made an excellent salesman in the days of old, Elias thought. Elias nodded and then Max cracked wise, mentioning something about society’s hunger for heroes rising up in the darkest of hours as Elias’s eyes hovered over his hands, which were clenched tightly together. Elias’s mind wandered and he thought back on the past and his parents and all that he’d done, the good and the bad, to make it to this point. He was glad he could muster some modicum of confidence for his accomplishments, but still. His heart was pounding in his ears and something came over him that he hadn’t felt in a very long time. Fear.

  CHAPTER 23

  Marisol sat with her head bowed in the gullet of the tac vehicle as it clipped through the city.

  "What say, girl?"

  She looked up, saw some of the other Apes snoozing, heard the harsh, uncouth tones of others as they whispered. She glanced sideways at Farrow.

  "I had a nightmare," she said.