Vertical City (Book 2)

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  We follow the two up the stairs and spend what seems like an eternity sweeping a series of offices, alcoves, and building nooks, rifling through debris and trash that even the looters deemed unworthy of removing.

  A roostertail of dried blood on the floor draws my attention and I unhitch my Onesie, following the trail down to a metal cabinet that was bolted into the wall aside a heavy wooden desk. The cabinet has a grill in the front and I peer inside, half-expecting eyes to flash back. Nothing returns my gaze and I look down to see tiny flecks on the soiled carpet.

  Fingernails.

  Hundreds of shards of fingernails, some clear, others yellow, a few black or brown. I quickly surmise that a pack of Dubs spent a good deal of time trying to scratch their way into the cabinet which is locked. Whatever was inside must have been enticing.

  I look back for the others who are out of sight and then I whack the cabinet lock once, twice, and then it splinters.

  Peering into the cabinet, darkness upon darkness stares back and then I see something.

  What is it?

  A form in the shadows… an outline.

  There is definitely something in the damn thing as I lean forward and then…

  The door swings out and the man hidden inside springs at me.

  Chapter 7

  I swing my Onesie like a scythe, sending the hidden man’s head flying. His body ricochets off mine and hits the ground. The corpse is gray and shriveled, bones just beginning to peak out of leathery flesh like the shoots on a row of seedlings. The head lands several feet away, bouncing off a wall before spinning around and splitting open with a sound that reminds me of Gus’s dogs breaking wind.

  Examining the body, images race through my mind of what must have happened: corpse man marooned in the building, no way down or out as the Dubs rampaged around.

  Corpse man was evidently smart enough to secrete himself inside the cabinet, but eventually his pursuers caught the prey scent, found him, and tried to force their way in. Since the monsters had the time and the watches, they just sat or stumbled around, waiting patiently for him to pop out. He never did and I wonder why the hell they simply wouldn’t move on as his body fed on itself. How long had he survived in the metal coffin? Two weeks? Four?

  Someone whistles and Strummer appears, holding up a finger, gesturing for me to follow. I take a final look at the dead man’s head and trundle after the others who are trekking down a stairwell into yet another passageway that’s demarcated by two offices and a boardroom. A nearby window’s been smashed out and we can see another roof maybe six feet down.

  Our target’s three blocks closer, so we drop onto the roof and move past silo-like wooden water tower propped up on metal supports that stand like sentries. Up ahead there’s a building shell, ten stories of barren cement studded with rebar, wreathed by orange warning fences. Probably an office concern that was being erected when the clocks stopped.

  Del Frisco nudges me and whispers “Shish,” as I look over to see the bodies of three Dubs, shishkebabed on the rusted rebar. They apparently were frisking around on the upper floors before falling off.

  Strummer twirls his Onesie and decapitates the Dubs. Then he takes their heads and positions each of them on a piece of rebar, so that they’re looking back in the direction we’ve come from. I’ve seen him do this many times before, but never thought to ask why.

  “Show a little respect, man,” I mutter.

  “Respect’s got nothing to do with it.”

  Strummer calmly and methodically wedges bits of debris under the eyelids of the Dubs, accentuating the size of their sockets.

  “I read a book on old-time wars once,” Strummer says. “There was a big fight before this country was even founded,” he continues. “This bunch of colonists fought an Indian, this dude named King Philip.”

  “Since when did Indians have kings?” Del Frisco asks.

  “Can I finish the goddamn story, Del Frisco?”

  Del Frisco mimes yawning as Strummer wedges the last eyelid up.

  “So what the Indians would do is lop off the heads of the dead colonists because they believed it messed with the Cowwewonck.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  Darcy shoots me a look.

  “The soul, you idiot.”

  “They thought the soul was in the brain,” Strummer continues, “so by separating head from body you denied the dead a way into paradise. Way I figure it, by leaving these heads up we’ll spook the ones still alive and mess with the souls of the ones who’ve passed on.”

  “Shit, man,” Del Frisco mutters, “we got enough trouble with the Dubs and now we gotta worry about their ghosts?”

  Strummer cackles and signals for everyone to fall out as I stay back and stare at one of the heads. The wind blows and catches a fold on an eyelid, making it look like the Dub is winking at me.

  Fifteen feet later, we’ve stepped over the fence and move single-file past a collection of other dead Dubs toward a construction tower crane whose opposite end reaches to the roof of the building that fronts our final destination, the incubator. Strummer consults his handheld scanner and map of the nearby blocks to confirm things. He nods. We’re exactly where we need to be.

  “Someone needs to test the waters,” Strummer says, pointing at the crane.

  “Whoever smelt it delt it, captain,” Del Frisco replies with a lazy smile.

  “You’re an asshole, Del Frisco.”

  “Come from a long line of ‘em,” Del Frisco replies with a nod.

  Strummer grabs the sides of the crane before inching out. Del Frisco whispers to me that Strummer’s old man did construction work in the way back and that the arm he’s moving across is called a “jib.” He points out other pieces of the crane including an operator’s cab, trolley, and the various counter-weights and machinery used to ferry building materials from one place to another.

  Strummer moves cleanly and without incident until he stops halfway across the jib and motions for us to follow. Darcy goes next and not surprisingly glides across the metal with the grace of a jungle cat.

  I’m the last to go and the jib’s surface is much more slippery than I originally thought. I grab the metal cage that cocoons the jib, but it ends five feet up which means I’m going to have to trek across ten or so feet of open space. Looking down, I see that we’re a little less than a hundred and fifty feet off the ground. There are a dozen ill-defined shapes stumbling around below and one of them, a female Dub, looks up and points.

  A whistle sounds and my gaze swings back up to Del Frisco who’s waving at me. Beyond him, Strummer and Darcy are nearing the end of the jib as my speed picks up. I look down because I’m accelerating, gravity taking hold, the jib tipping down because of the weight of the other three.

  Before I know what the hell’s going on, it’s as if I’m running fullspeed down a hill, willing myself not to look side-to-side, because if I do, I’m a goner.

  Del Frisco windmills his arms, providing a target to lock on as my right boot slips and I lunge forward, my chest slamming into the metal jib.

  Skidding forward, my jaw hits a metal rivet that causes my teeth to ratchet down on my tongue.

  Blood fills my mouth as I scrabble for purchase. Del Frisco lurches out and grabs my wrist as I dangle over the edge of the crane.

  “Pull me up!”

  Del Frisco leans down, that easygoing smile still plastered across his face.

  “Slippery, no?”

  “Jesus, man.”

  My grip slowly gives way.

  “Hurry the hell up, Del Frisco.”

  “Don’t look down.”

  “Wasn’t planning to,” I reply, scanning to my right to see Strummer and Darcy staring.

  Del Frisco grunts and hoists me just enough so that I can latch onto a raised, welded section of the jib that I bear-hug. A curtain of rain lashes me as I pull myself up in full and snake-crawl the rest of the way.

  “No way in hell I’m coming back this way,” I grumb
le, reaching the other side.

  “None of us are,” Strummer says, arm up, raised finger guiding me back to the unfinished building we’ve just left.

  There’s a clutch of Dubs there, hissing at us, pawing at the air. One of them, a girl with rusted headgear still mounted to yellow teeth, slithers out onto the jib and instantly slides off, hitting the building and breaking apart on the street below. The other Dubs watch this and I swear to God they appear to huddle and contemplate what to do next before turning and melting into the building’s inner shadows.

  “You see that?” I ask, but there’s no response from the others who are already hopping from the crane onto a black fire-escape that ends at the next building’s roof.

  I trot after them, lowering myself from the fire-escape, still adrenalized from my near death experience. Dropping fully from the escape, I’m greeted by the outer edges of a forest of green.

  What was once somebody’s rooftop garden has morphed into a maze of vegetation, some of it planted, most growing wild, seeds probably having been blown about over the years. Lots of it is stuff I’ve either seen back in the growing rooms in VC1 or in Gus’s books: tomatoes and little raised beds of cucumbers and rows of mounded earth with tiny stakes upon which peas and beans dangle limply.

  The first frost came a week or so ago, so most of the stuff is beginning to rot, but there are some goodies here and there. Technically we’re supposed to account for everything we encounter out on an op, but all of us think that rule’s bullshit, so we don’t abide by it. All of us except Strummer of course. Like I said, he’s a big believer in following Odin’s rules and whatnot so he casts withering stares at us (especially Darcy) as we gather up the veggies.

  I grab a few tomatoes mottled with black spots and a handful of still firm beans as the others do likewise and we quickly commence getting our chow on. Del Frisco makes sure to chew loudly in front of Strummer who grumbles and remarks how he’d tattle on us if he wasn’t such an upstanding kind of guy. The veggies are mushy, but that’s cool since some of my teeth are beginning to go bad for three primary reasons.

  For one, the water we drink doesn’t have fluoride or any of the other cavity-fighting additives people took for granted back in the day. Two, we’ve long since depleted our stores of toothpaste and mouth-rinses, and three, there ain’t a one of us that was properly trained on how to fix teeth. There’s this lifer named Marvin Mullins up on nineteen who fancies himself a dentist, but I’m pretty sure he’s just a sadist with a nice collection of pliers and a few canisters of lidocaine.

  We finish eating and bushwhack across the rows of vegetables which lead to a gardener’s shack on the other side of the roof. There’s a catwalk just beyond the shack that will get us near the incubator.

  Strummer thrusts up a hand and we all stop. He points to the ground and there’s a slick of bile that leads up to the rear door of the shack. We crouch and note the faintest hint of movement inside the shack. Strummer clutches his Onesie and tip-toes forward when the rear door swings open and what was once a woman appears.

  The woman is tall and seemingly as thin as a blade of grass. She was in her middle years when she turned and is dressed in overalls, one foot bare, another in a black boot, cracked glasses on a chain around a neck that’s missing a scoop of flesh. Her mouth is open in the shape of an O as she drags herself forward and then looks past us.

  “Check it,” Del Frisco says as he dips forward and breezes right past the Dub. She doesn’t react, doesn’t take one menacing step toward any of us. Just stares out over the garden, locked in a trance. I wonder about the impact of the Dub having been marooned up here, away from all of the violence down below. Has it caused her to become passive, to lose her desire to kill and feed? Del Frisco seems to read my look as he returns to us, slapping me on the shoulder.

  “Shit, man, I think she might be a vegetarian now.”

  He smiles. Strummer and Darcy do not.

  “You know the rules,” Strummer intones.

  “Leave her alone,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s not bothering anyone.”

  “Listen to the bleeding heart,” Darcy says with a sneer.

  Strummer raises his Onesie and I gently grab his wrist.

  “We don’t have to do this, y’know. It’s not like she’s gonna tell on us or anything.”

  “We can’t take any chances,” he says before turning and flicking his blade which severs the woman’s neck.

  Her head goes flying and her body timbers to its knees and then crashes down in a row of beans. A little tributary of black ooze and rancid body fluids flows from the headless corpse, spreading out across a row of naked earth.

  The others continue on and I stand and stare for a heartbeat, wondering what will sprout from soil that’s been watered with Dub blood.

  Chapter 8

  We hit the catwalk and scale over to a raised platform, a series of plastic planks covering the base of what was once an elevated railway. Years ago, a real locomotive used to come this way. At some point, maybe ten years before the Awakening, the train was supposedly shuttered and the platform became a path that people took to and from work.

  Wending our way to the end of the platform, we cross over to a point near the destination building. The bolts holding the planks under us are loose, so rather than risk collapsing the platform, we drop ten feet down onto the destination building. The roof we land on is surprisingly solid, far sturdier than most roofs whose waterproofing began to fail a few years after the power winked out.

  We march over to a roof door which is securely protected with a stout, rubber-coated lock. I take a knee and study the door and it all begins to add up. The good functional roof, the expensive lock, and the overall appearance of the building make it clear that a lot of money was spent erecting and securing it. It isn’t the normal, water-riddled structure filled with builder-grade material that’s beginning to return to the streets. This place, or at least the upper floors that I can see, are solid and stand to be around for a decade, maybe longer. Odds are there’s something worth protecting inside.

  Strummer pulls his Onesie out and begins working on the door, spittle flooding his mouth as he bashes the lock, then the hinge surrounding it. He gouges the door which Del Frisco finishes off with a jump-kick.

  The darkness is thick on the other side of the door, but nothing stirs. The hallway fills with the metallic rattle of Onesies as we hold our weapons out, the blades dragging along the interior walls. We make sure to spread out yet remain close enough to assist each other if we encounter anything on the way in.

  We thread over a cement floor that terminates at another door which is gunmetal gray, secured by an electronic access control door system, an ACDS, which we’ve encountered before. In days past, office types could only gain access to the ACDS by swiping a proximity card embedded with an access chip against the e-reader that was mounted near the door.

  These kinds of access systems can either be stand-alone units or a whole octopus of wiring and software that’s connected to some processor or computer in another part of the building.

  Stand-alones are the easiest to deal with, though both present challenges because they sometimes remain locked, even if the building is de-energized (which mostly everything is these days). Better still is if the door is on a magnetic lock versus an electric strike. Magnetic lock doors need power to properly function so if the electricity goes out, the magnet won’t work and it’s easy to get past the door.

  An electric strike on the other hand, is usually powered by a 12 or 24 volts, and oftentimes has a battery back-up. Even though it’s been years since the darkening, we’ve encountered a good many back-ups that are still functioning. They can be a real pain in the ass.

  I’m the guy tasked with getting us past doors most of the time and as I scope the door’s metal exterior, I think back on the door’s one glaring mistake. By all appearances heaps of money was spent in the old days protecting buildings at the
ground level. Apparently most of these high-tech companies poured their security resources into the lobby entrance, never thinking that anyone would circumvent the whole thing by coming down through the roof. So, they generally used lesser magnetic locks for the interior doors, especially those from the tenth floor on up.

  “What do you think, Wyatt?” Strummer asks.

  Looking up, I spot the metal cassette hidden high above the door which usually houses the magnets for the magnetic locks.

  “We’re good,” I say, “maglock.”

  I run my hands over the face of the door, stopping at the sex bolt which is located on the outside of the door. The sex bolt has a mushroom-style smooth head and is threaded into the door to secure the catch-plate on the internal maglock. It all sounds pretty technical, but basically the sex bolt holds the whole thing together. With the power out and no battery backup visible, all we have to do is make a chop or two and disable the sex bolt and boom, we’re in.

  Holding my Onesie up, I run my finger along the drywall surrounding the door and make two vertical chops near the e-reader. Since there’s no power, the door isn’t energized and I reach my hand it and grab the sex bolt. It takes a few minutes and the edge of my Onesie blade inserted between the door and jamb, but eventually I pull the bolt out and grab the handle as the door pops open.

  Strummer and Darcy stride past me and down a breezeway that still smells like the clean carpet that covers the floor. The protective tape is still stretched across portions of the carpet and I realize whoever was in charge of this place probably had it changed out right before everything fell apart.

  The hallway ends at another door that’s ajar. We push into a large rectangular opening that’s crammed with all sorts of cubbies and weirdly constructed workstations.

  The surrounding tables and desks are still flush with laptops and other devices that Strummer calls tablets. The ground is dusted with a quarter inch of grime, but there’s no sign of violence anywhere. And more surprisingly, no bodies. Not a one of them. I’m shocked, because this is one of the few places we’ve ever been to that looks as if it’s remained untouched.