Blood Runners

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  In the back of the room sat a tiny 3 kW diesel generator (with red signage on its side that said, "Now Whisper-Quiet!"), vented to the outside for carbon monoxide purposes. Elias flicked a switch on the generator, which turned over and, while hardly whisper-quiet, buzzed softly to life, providing power and full illumination for the room.

  Elias stared at the printed pages, many of which were shots of Longman and his goons engaged in myriad acts of violence and malfeasance. He ran his fingers over a diorama of the city. Of the wall. Of a tunnel that seemed to lead under the wall to the lands that stretched beyond. The diorama was made of wood and melted plastic and fabrics that had been affixed to various areas. It was crudely crafted, but well detailed, and somebody had written small notes and words in strategic spots. Asides about the number of guards being located here, the lethality of a trap or traps hidden there. Everything that Caleb (presumably) had experienced as he explored the city.

  Next to the diorama were moldy pages from some city manual marked " MWRD – TARP – Tunnel & Reservoir Plan – City Of Chicago." The pages were dated 1972, which seemed like a million years in the past. He hoisted the manual and fanned the pages, which fuzzed and crumbled and flurried into the air like dandruff. Under the manual sat a plastic badge with a photo of Caleb and his full name, "Caleb J. Lavey." Elias recognized the last name as belonging to a Guild of means, then pocketed the badge and surmised that Caleb must have blown a fuse and been exiled here with all the other Crazies. Surely everything in this room, while interesting, was the work of a troubled mind. Then again, what better place to hide your secrets than in the one area of the city that was largely beyond the purview of Longman’s all-seeing eyes? Elias snatched up a hand-drawn set of instructions that mirrored the diorama, with details of how to get to the tunnel (and what lay beyond), when a loud crash outside caused him to flinch.

  CHAPTER 36

  Longman moved with alacrity down a hallway in the Codex Building, Hendrix at his heels. His senses were overloaded, his brain chiming like a tuning fork. The footage was proof that a plot was in the works. Whether it involved O’Shea and others effectuating some kind of coup was unknown, but he knew one thing. The time had come to summon Farrow and the other Apes and get to the bottom of this before heads rolled.

  He sent Hendrix and some of his men to question the Apes and then moved into his office, which had been fitted with a still-functioning retina scanner. He peered into it. A red light flashed green, a metal door hissed open, and Longman stepped through a pressure-lock without sound into the Holy of Holies. His "Sterncastle": the place where he made decisions and weighed evidence and rolled the dice. Scientia est potentia, " knowledge is power," his superiors used to say, and by God they’d been right.

  He moved through his office toward a hidden panel that opened to an elevator hooked up to the roof turbines. He pressed a button and descended through the Codex Building and exited onto the 12th floor. The Circles of Dante’s Inferno consisted of nine levels. The Codex Building contained twenty-five.

  Guards nodded and tensed when they saw Longman exit the elevator and move across a catwalk. He looked side to side to see the rooms where agitators and political prisoners were kept for re-education and interrogation. He heard the moans and spastic supplications of these forgotten and strolled past them, along with heavily armed guards who clutched metal cudgels and oiled pistols. He took a flight of short stairs past men in lab garb who were prepping and binding packages of the White for distribution and barter, and past weapons vaults filled with rifles and explosives devices and ammo crates and ghillie suits and all manner of devices he’d freed from National Guard armories.

  He passed by glass-pebbled offices where workers watched surveillance footage from the city Zones, and through an ironclad door, and beyond the smoke-filled rooms where the upper members of the Guilds, men and women alike, partook in sins of the flesh. He breezed past a bare-chested fat man, who genuflected before him, and noted that life here was not much different than it was in the days of old. Those in power, the one-percent, still lived high on the hog, while the unfortunates below flopped and flitted in their own filth.

  Longman signaled to four guards, who stepped aside as he keyed open a titanium door that he had transported here on the back of a pack of draft horses from a Federal Reserve building downtown. The blast-proof door swung open and Longman entered dead space, a concealed gangplank that stretched across open air to another cube of metal and glass wedged onto the side of an adjacent building. He stopped halfway across the gangplank, which was buffeted by howling wind, and looked down on the city streets, hundreds of feet below.

  He crossed the gangplank and opened another door and entered what amounted to his office and closed the door. It was quiet here. Becalmed. He sat in a swivel chair and took in the room, whose walls were covered in thick wood fastened over iron plates that were three inches thick. In the old days, it would have made a perfect bug-proof SCIF at the airbase. Always, when faced with hardship or a threat to his rule, the same ritual. Longman looked to the floor.

  He opened a safe in a concealed cavity in the floor and removed a small, ruggedized object that appeared to be what was known as an iPad back in the day. A tablet. This device, however, came with a black crypto-ignition key that, when turned, would power up a multisensory display screen embedded with software called FalconView (and other various other applications) that could set in motion things that the others in the city couldn’t even dream about.

  This was the knowledge only Longman possessed. This was his true power. The notion (known at only the highest levels of the Guild) that Longman alone still had the ability and will to bring the hammer down on anybody who threatened his reign. He set the iPad-like device back in its hiding spot and thought of all the ways he would hunt down the boy and girl and crush this putative uprising before it could coalesce into something of true substance.

  CHAPTER 37

  Cozzard, Lout, and a dozen of Longman’s brawlers had already been sent streaking through the city in their begrimed SUVs. Half were paying a visit to Moses O’Shea, while Cozzard and Lout were flashing official badges and moving into the Apes’ barracks. They had paperwork and the force of law behind them and immediately sought out Farrow. They found him in a cafeteria, fork speared through a cube of braised meat, barely able to turn his head before Cozzard used his pistol to pin Farrow’s head to the table. Ordinarily, Farrow would have gutted Cozzard and the others before they knew what hit them, but Farrow ceased all movement when Lout dropped what amounted to a warrant from Longman himself on the table.

  Farrow wasn’t worried. At the moment the slugs burst through the doors, he’d already crawled into an inner space that he often retreated to when times were bad. A space where time had stopped some ten years before, back when everything made sense and Farrow was a suburban cop with a nurse for a wife and a little girl who loved her daddy more than anything and a last name that hadn’t been uttered in nearly a decade. Blackstock.

  Farrow had done multiple tours on the mean streets of East Baltimore, breaking down perps back in the days before. He was reminded of the ancient saying that a jeweler working on a hunk of stone is not dissimilar from the seeker of information. They both have to tap at the right point, to chip away the rough areas to see the value that lies hidden inside. Longman’s men were anything but surgical, and no matter what rough justice they sought to dispense, he would never break. They could do what they wanted, but they would never reach his core. They’d never take his honor. It was the last thing to go, the last thing that was his. He’d never help them, he’d never rat Marisol out.

  Cozzard’s pistol pulled back as Farrow looked up to see the thugs leering down at him like fairy-tale giants.

  "Where is she?" they said.

  "Where’s who?"

  Cozzard snapped the slide back on his pistol as Lout mouthed "Five, four, three-"

  "She’s gone if, that’s what you mean," Farrow mumbled.

  "Gone where?
"

  "Outside."

  Cozzard planted the tip of his pistol in Farrow’s cheek.

  "Get up and get your gear. You’re coming with. You’re leading the way. We’re going after her."

  A similar scene unfolded at the Pits, where Longman’s men tossed the joint, shaking everyone down, snuffing out the celebratory fires and aiming their guns at anyone who cracked back. Moses was led off at gunpoint, protesting all the while, telling anyone who’d listen that he had no idea where Elias was.

  CHAPTER 38

  At that very moment, Elias peeked outside of the door and saw and heard nothing. Whatever had been there before was long gone. He was just about to turn the knob when a hand grabbed his wrist. His eyes enlarged at the sight of… Marisol!

  It was his turn to yell "YOU?!" as she emitted an unearthly shriek and shoved Elias back on his ass. Her immediate reactions were born more out of fear than anger, and when he spit at her, she raised a fist and threw a haymaker that Elias deftly stepped under. Marisol dropped her rucksack and swung repeatedly at Elias, who groped for anything and found a length of rubberized conduit that he gripped in his right hand. He swung it at Marisol, wildly at first, then with measured scythes, connecting against her shoulder as she dipped and punted him in the ribs. Elias fell backward, crashing through the diorama, as Marisol jumped at him. He planted a boot in her midsection and flicked her back into a wall.

  Marisol rolled over. A low-throated snarl escaped from her throat, and in a blitz of tangled limbs she was on the attack again. Right punch, then left, all manner of jabs following. Marisol’s wrists and hands were chopping the air like the blades on some mechanized machine. Elias fought her off even as she landed blows, bloodying his lip and his nose as he flat-palmed her forehead, sending her back. He grabbed the leg of a fallen table, wrenched it free, and brought it around like a baseball bat, cracking Marisol across the knees as she dropped like a bag of bricks to the ground. He moved over to her, unsure of what to do, as she whipped out a collapsible baton and cracked him across the ankles. Down he fell until he was resting near her, the two side-by-side, gasping for air, faces twisted in pain.

  "What the hell are you doing here?" Elias groused.

  "Following you," she said.

  "You tried to kill me before, you crazy bitch!"

  "That’s my job."

  "The hunt’s over. I won."

  "Because I failed."

  Elias smirked and whispered, "I beat you. I beat all of you." She remained silent as he righted himself and looked at the trashed room.

  "I saw you before," Marisol eventually responded. "That’s how I knew. I saw you kill that boy back in the alley."

  Elias flipped her Caleb’s badge. "He was dead when I found him."

  "Didn’t look that way to me."

  Elias pivoted and looked at her as she stood and dusted herself off. "How come you didn’t step in if you were so damn concerned?"

  "Wasn’t my fight."

  "This is?"

  "No," she replied. "I guess this is something else. This is… personal."

  "Cause what? You’re pissed that I kicked your ass during Absolution?"

  "You wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t willed it."

  Elias laughed at this, shaking his head.

  "You gonna finish the job right now, girl?"

  She considered this, shook her head. "Maybe later."

  She brushed warily past Elias and looked around the room, making sure to keep her baton in one hand, her eyes glued on Elias. "What is this?"

  "The dude who died, Caleb. This was his."

  "How’d you find it?"

  "I just did, okay?"

  They traded a long look, Elias unwilling to offer up any information on the cellphone and key as she asked, "Was he a Crazy?"

  "Looks that way, huh?"

  She scanned the photos of Longman, the images of him engaged in brutality. Her attention turned to the diorama of the city and the tunnel, which she picked up as it broke into pieces.

  "What is it?"

  "It’s the city," he said.

  "I can see that."

  "Then why’d you ask?"

  She pointed to the tunnel. "It goes under?"

  He swiped the piece of the tunnel away. "It’s nothing, okay? That kid, this whole thing, it’s bullshit."

  "What’s that?" she asked, pointing to the instructions to the tunnel that peeked out of a pocket on Elias’s pants.

  "None of your business."

  She grabbed for them and he shoved her back, and now the two were facing off again like prizefighters. That’s when they heard it. The sound of the front door to the building being ripped off and then a blitzkrieg of voices shouting in disparate tongues.

  "They’re coming! The Crazies!" Marisol cried as Elias searched for a way out. Marisol closed and locked the door to the room, but it would only hold for a few moments as she turned over tables, looking for something, anything to use as a barricade.

  Elias grabbed a poster-sized image of Longman and ripped it down to reveal a trapdoor hacked into a section of fiber board on a rear wall. He pulled on a cord that centered the faux wood, and the door opened to reveal HVAC ductwork that he climbed into, Marisol following closely behind. She cast one last look over her shoulder and saw the door being pried open and then the first face poked in. The face of a Loon, one of the Crazies, whose eyes were saucering. Long strings of saliva dripped from a mouth that hung perpetually adroop. The Loon pointed at Marisol, and the others rampaged past him as she turned toward Elias, who’d vanished into the ductwork. She crawled and grabbed her rucksack and headed in after him.

  CHAPTER 39

  Moses O’Shea sat cuffed with a loop of metal wire in the back of one of Longman’s SUVs. In times like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, the imagination morphs into an amplifier that imparts vividness to ideas. Moses’s mind was full of bad thoughts. He was breathing heavily, fighting to make those evil notions slumber, struggling for reassurance that things could be much worse. The morons that Longman sent hadn’t found his stash under the floor of the desk, and therefore didn’t know about all he’d wagered on the hunts (and Ephraim Jax would never rat on him, for to do so would mean death). He mentally scrolled through various scenarios, none of which ended particularly well for him. Still, there was no evidence linking Moses directly to anything (not that there had to be in Constitution-less New Chicago), and he could always fall back on the argument that should Elias be found unharmed, he would make sure that he was immediately pressed into service for Longman, whatever that might mean. Moses watched the lights from the Codex Building stabbing the black sky through the windshield and he muttered a prayer to himself, for whatever it was worth.

  CHAPTER 40

  Farrow led Longman’s men down through the paths that snaked to Zone 3. His eyes skipped around in the semi-gloom, trying to discern whether there was a way out of this. He saw no good end, not with eleven of Longman’s thugs, all heavily armed, keeping an eye on him. He heard the shouts before they got within a thousand yards of the Zone 3 fencing. Howls and guffaws and soul-shattering screams. Longman’s men magged their guns and readied firing bolts as they crested a hill of crud that loomed over Zone 3. All of them could see the bedlam taking place within the fencing, the Crazies flooding the building where Elias and Marisol were struggling to exit.

  "There!" Cozzard shouted. "She’s in there!"

  Lout jammed a gun in Farrow’s back and handed Farrow a pistol. "Don’t go gettin’ any ideas, big man," Lout hissed. "Only two rounds in it. Just enough to do the job."

  "What job?"

  "You’re gonna do it, you stupid bastard. You’re gonna light that friggin’ girl up."

  At the same time, Elias flew through the ductwork on his hands and knees, Marisol closely behind him. The metal passage sagged under their weight, zigzagging across the structure until it hit a section of grating. They paused, still listening to the sounds of the Loons echoing behind them.

 
; "What now?" Marisol asked.

  "We choose what’s behind the first door," Elias responded, gesturing to the grating. They worked as a team, each grabbing one side of the grating and prying back until zip screws popped free. They peered into the abyss on the other side of the grating. All was dark and without form. After a beat, their eyes adjusted and they could see that a metal chute led directly down. They exchanged a look; Elias nodded and entered first, whooshing down into the blackness as Marisol followed.

  They whipped past and down in the chute, moving at incredible speed. Elias bit back a scream when — WHOOMPH! — he hit the end of the chute and was propelled through the air and through a section of styrofoam and thin, wooden sheathing before crashing to a stop in a grassy knoll behind the building. Marisol landed on top of him. He grunted and shoved her aside, only to be kicked when she rolled over and pressed to her feet.

  They barely had a chance to see where they were when the beams from the flashlights held in the hands of Cozzard and the others streaked overhead. Elias grabbed Marisol and pulled her to the ground, a finger pressed to his lips.

  "Stay down, idiot. God you’re dumb."

  She smacked him in the side of the head and fixed a look on Longman’s men, then grabbed a handful of Elias’s shirt when the first Loon burst out of the building behind them. Then another, and another… a whole retinue of marauders barreling out through sections of storage walls that collapsed like wet cardboard.

  A few hundred yards away, Farrow clutched his pistol, disoriented by the lights and the keening whine of the Loons and the forms that swung in from the shadows. Cozzard and Lout overreacted like the unprofessional boobs that they were. Rather than taking the time to properly target, they hitched up their rifles in joyous derangement and urged their brethren to lay down suppressive fire as their weapons spit tongues of orange and red.