Not a peep was heard about it at first, however, but then somebody discovered that the resurrected virus contained genomes that were modifying, allowing the sickness to be spread more efficiently and rapidly from person to person. A Saudi whistleblower got the story out and the newspeople picked it up from there. Soon the illness had a three-letter acronym, which stood for something nobody remembers, but by the time the media knew what to call it, it was too late.
The virus spread faster than gossip and was infinitely more deadly. It was only eighteen or nineteen days after first contact that it did a victory lap around the globe, laying low more than half of the population with a contagion, that once inside, murderously reformatted your gray matter. The infection brought on death in a matter of hours, but not before the brain had been wiped clean and rebooted to a more primitive state where hunting and killing and eating (emphasis on killing) were the only impulses that mattered.
After the world ended, there was some speculation amongst the survivors that the Dubs wouldn’t make it through the winter or would just drop dead – for a second time – once their primary source of food (us), became scarce. So not true. Turns out there’s an endless supply of vermin under the city’s streets. Probably enough to keep the Dubs’ bellies good and full for another sixteen years.
Del Frisco’s omnipresent grin slips away and he holds up two fingers while checking his earpiece. Some of our colleagues looted a tech company that specialized in experimental military armaments a few months back and obtained small earpieces, among other items, that amplify human hearing. The earpiece is synced to a solar battery pack and when it’s working – which is infrequent – enables us to hear the Dubs well before we ever see them. Del Frisco wags one finger, then another, then one more, to signal more Dubs are on the way.
Sure enough, the female Dub’s soon joined by two enterprising males who quickly commence rooting around inside desks, bumbling into each other and making quite a racket. We see they’re a good twenty feet away from what we’d spotted and hoped to acquire: a small solar-powered generator that had slipped out of a packing crate.
We’ve been sent to tag and clip items like the generator for later use by the others. That’s what me and Del Frisco and a guy named Strummer and Darcy (she’s a chick) and several others do to earn our keep now. We’re “Ledge Jumpers,” salvagers, which means we risk our asses every day, scaling down buildings and swinging across high-rises to find items of value for the community we live in, what’s collectively called the “Vertical City,” to folks in the know.
I squat and look in the direction from which we’ve just come. There’s an enormous gaping hole on the other side of the building, visible down a long, straight corridor. We came in through that hole, bopped up through an elevator shaft, rummaged around three floors above without finding anything of real value before heading back down.
A lot of our ops are hit or miss since most of the really good stuff has either been smashed up by the Dubs or looters or slowly beaten down by time and the elements. But at least once a week we’ll happen upon something that’s really useful – tools, weapons, electronic gadgets of all shapes and sizes – stuff that needs to be tagged and bagged.
Once we find something cool, we thread a really long metal leader around the item, clip that to a carabiner and then let the “Hogs,” the big, bulky dudes who man the manual and electrical winches up on top of the buildings, take over. There’s really only one hurdle we ever face: how to get past the Dubs to clip the loot. Del Frisco, always ready with a suggestion or quip, has an answer for that.
I’ve come to learn that Del Frisco suffers from some fairly significant mental illness which makes sense if you knew the guy. He claims garden variety bi-polar, but I heard Strummer and some of the others say he’s a full-blown, bay at the moon schizoid. Most of the time his demons are kept at a safe distance via meds we forage from our jumps (Seroquel, Ativan, Risperdal, etc.), but occasionally he goes long stretches without.
These factoids are germane because Del Frisco has this crazy theory about how the Dubs hunt and feed. He posits, without proffering anything other than what Gus calls ‘anecdotal evidence’, that the Dubs track by an invisible brain frequency only they can hear. For instance, they don’t attack other Dubs because their brain-waves have been rejiggered. They only go after the living, those relatively sound in mind. So, Del Frisco surmises that those who are not sound in mind (i.e., folks like him), give off another “scent” and are unattractive to the Dubs (“Who wants a broken car? Who wants to eat spoiled meat?” I’ve heard him say). Even though some of the others think his theory’s bullshit, I have to admit I’ve seen Del Frisco tiptoe between two or three Dubs before without incident.
Three more Dubs appear and I shake my head and motion for us to fall back. We haven’t gone down a floor yet, so the plan is we’ll come back for the generator once we’ve reconned a bit.
We crab back through the long straight corridor, sidestepping tributaries of dark oil that drip from a severed fuel pipe partially pried out of a wall. The scent of fuel pricks my nose as we stop before a metal staircase door that I hadn’t noticed before. Staircases are significantly more dangerous than elevator shafts, but a helluva lot easier to access. We caucus for a bit on the pros and cons of going down and then decide to take a risk and pull back the door while opening our rucksacks and removing the only real weapons we’re given on our ops, our “Onesies.” Yeah, I know, terrible name for a death-dealing device, but even Del Frisco’s stumped on a better one.
Anyway, the Onesies are “Six-In-Ones,” what look like three-foot, hand hammered, steel tomahawks. On the business end of the Onesie is a shimmering axe head, on its reverse a curved blade with a three-inch spike at the tip. Down the shaft of the Onesie there’s a set of brass-knuckles that lay aside a black button, which if depressed, releases a barbed metal ball (housed inside the shaft and welded to a loop of chain) that can be swung to batter various parts of an attacker’s body. Finally, if things get really dicey, there’s a metal trigger near the base of the tomahawk that activates a powerful flare lodged inside the lower portion of the weapon’s handle.
While most of us would prefer some kind of gun (which only the “Prowlers,” the snipers who do overwatch on the tops of buildings, are permitted to have), the Onesies are pretty righteous in close-quarters combat and besides, without handguns or rifles we never have to worry about friendly-fire incidents or running out of ammo.
Del Frisco and I grip our Onesies and my thumb activates a thin penlight as a swarm of flies buzz past me. A ghastly stench bombards us next, so we cover our mouths and slip through the door and down the staircase. We lapse into silence as we slink through the darkness, stepping over the funky, flesh-starved bodies of Dubs and the skeletal corpses of their long-dead victims.
My light sweeps walls covered in scratches and indents and smeared with splotches of ochre, spatter from battles fought in the past. I spot a single tooth lodged in a section of drywall and it chills me for reasons I can’t really explain.
As we descend, we stop and look up at something visible on the wall that looms over the bottom of the stairwell. A marking. A design. A ribbon of numbers: N4043.11815W740.46998.
“More of them,” I whisper and Del Frisco nods. To the extent you can call the numbers a design, we’ve seen similar ones in other buildings.
“What do you think it means?”
Del Frisco’s silent, just like he’s been with all the other numbers we’ve encountered.
“Think it’s old or new?”
“You always ask that, Wy.”
“Yeah, cause you never answer.”
He bites his lip and it looks like he’s running down some invisible checklist.
“Well, it’s gotta be old. I mean, there ain’t no way the Dubs are smart enough to do it, unless they’re, like, what’s the word, genius?”
“Evolving?” I say.
“Righto,” Del Frisco replies, snapping his fingers.
There’s enough half-light from holes in the ceiling that the penlight is no longer needed. We can see that the “intestines” are actually cables and wires from the floor above that have been pushed down as the building slowly compresses. From where we stand to the other side of the floor’s probably twenty yards, but it’s impossible to see what lies in the middle because of the cubicles and the sections of ceiling that have fallen onto them.
Del Frisco reaches in his rucksack and removes an orange bouncy-ball, one of two-dozen he five-fingered from a toy store called “Crackerjacks” two months before. He likes to use them to gauge the vibe of any new floor we venture across. He palms the ball and flings it through the center of the room. It bounces and ricochets and makes just enough noise to draw the attention of any Dubs that might be lying in wait.
We wait for a minute or two and hearing and sensing nothing, we move across a lumpy and uneven floor that’s squishy in certain places from pools of stagnant water. The air’s heavy and reeks of mold and I begin to breathe hard as Del Frisco jabs me in the gut.
“You’re getting fat, dude.”
“That’s called marbling.”
He stops and we both survey the space again, but nothing stirs.
“I’ve been thinking,” I mutter.
“Hate when you do that.”
“Maybe we can reach a truce with them.”
Del Frisco looks back at me.
“Y’know, some kind of peace arrangement,” I continue.
“With what? With… them?
“That’s right.”
“The Dubs?”
I nod.
“They’re dead, man.”
“So?”
“So there was this dude back before, this big baller rapper who had a song that said something about the dead feeling no pain. I been thinking about that and the way I figure it, violence equals pain, so if you don’t feel no pain you ain’t got no reason to stop the violence.”
I’m surprised that Del Frisco’s gotten almost philosophical on me as I bat aside the dangling ceiling cables and quickly check the cubicle hive, but it’s filled with computers and high-tech crap that instantly became worthless when the world stopped.
Del Frisco whistles and I look up to see him gesticulating. Mounting a wingback chair, I look over a partition to see him pointing to the other end of the space where a glass case is visible, filled with what appears to be medical supplies.
“Score!” Del Frisco shouts, moving with alacrity through the cubicles.
Hesitation grips me, my fear-meter rising, something feeling off about the whole thing. We’ve worked together for the last seven months, Del Frisco and me. We’ve gone out on dozens of ops, and not once have we found a stash just sitting out in the open like this. It all seems just a little too easy, but then Del Frisco’s giddiness dulls my senses and it strikes me that sometimes the gods do smile on you.
Five steps later I’m kneeling in front of a sodden, overturned desk. In an open drawer within the desk’s warped carcass, there’s a solitary picture which I pluck out. It’s of a young woman standing arm-in-arm with what were probably her mother and father. A sliver of sunlight gilds the young woman’s face, birthing a sly smile that for some reason brings back a rush of emotions. I wonder what happened to her. Did she make it out or is she in this building or another, watching and waiting to nibble on our flesh? The uncertainty of whether a stranger might be one of them means there are very few true friends in the new times. Nope, mostly just allies and enemies.
With as much reverence as I can muster, the photo is placed back where I found it and ten steps later I’m standing, rooted in place, listening to a very troubling sound. A deep-throated groaning that resembles the sound I heard whales making on a documentary Mom liked to watch. It seems to be coming from the outer edges of the room and is followed by a series of pops that are not unlike the sound sheets of ice make as they break apart.
Hustling ahead, I grab Del Frisco who’s sixty feet from the glass-cased honeypot.
“Stop bracing me, man,” he says with a roll of his shoulders.
“Shut up.”
“Wyatt…”
“Shut the hell up!”
I hold my finger up in a shushing gesture and we both listen. The sounds, of course, are gone.
“I swear I heard-”
“Silencio, brother, that’s what you heard. Like the song says, the beautiful sounds of silence.”
We listen for a beat longer, but all is indeed very quiet.
“You’re getting paranoid, bro. There’s nothing here but some trinkets for big Frisco.”
Del Frisco treks merrily ahead and reaches the glass cage and throws it open. He grabs the goodies inside.
His face falls.
The boxes and bottles and everything else inside are perfectly positioned and enticing, but empty. Every single one of them.
The hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. It’s almost as if the case has been left here on purpose.
As what?
A trap?
Bait?
The sound of pops echo all around once again and even Del Frisco hears it this time.
“Gimme a ball,” I whisper.
He hands me another orange one and I drop it on the ground and the ball immediately zips back in the direction from which we’ve just come. Like it was being pulled on an invisible string.
Del Frisco turns, mouth unhinged as he mutters the words “Oh, shit,” and then the floor bucks and drops a foot.
We run and then our speed picks up because in a flash we’re sprinting downhill and then everything seems to wildly tilt.
“JUMP AND GRAB!” I scream as we both plant our feet and heave ourselves up and grab onto the thick ceiling cables as the floor completely falls away under our feet.
Chapter 2
Before we fully can comprehend what’s happened, we’re dangling like worms on the ends of hooks, staring down as the floor that was beneath our feet only seconds before, explodes onto the floor below.
A great, blinding cloud of dust and debris mushrooms up. Seconds pass before I see movement in the din, a seething mass of arms and legs and lolling tongues fighting through the rubble. The floor beneath us is swarming with hundreds of angry Dubs. It’s like staring down at a pen of famished lions at the zoo, the Dubs howling and snatching at the air and jumping and swinging for us.
“Jesus,” Del Frisco says, “look at those mothers go.”
He grins at the sight, nonplussed by our predicament since he’s possessed of freakish upper body strength for someone his size. He just hangs there from a thick ceiling cable by one hand, which I’ve seen him do before from the window ledge of a thirty-store building. I, on the other hand, was not blessed with his brawn and struggle to maintain my bodyweight. I know I can’t hang up there indefinitely and so I swing myself like a child on a set of monkey-bars, moving back toward the staircase.
“Wyatt.”
I ignore him as I swing forward, focusing on the staircase which is still several hundred feet away.
“Hey, Wyatt.”
“Shut the hell up! You got us into this!”
“Think you need to see this, hoss.”
Breaking for a second, I suck in a mouthful of air. My arms burn, but I cast a look sideways at Del Frisco whose gaze is pinned straight down.
“You’re gonna appreciate this, cause they’re, like, scheming, man. I can tell. They’re totally coming for us.”
“They’re too far down.”
“Oh, yeah? Well checkity check th
at,” Del Frisco replies.
My sight wanders down to where a lithe Dub studies me and then shoves one of his brethren to the ground. He mounts the other’s back and then, I kid you not, launches into the air at me.
The Dub misses, but it’s closer than I’d anticipated. Another Dub follows and then another and in a flash they’re scrambling up onto each others’ backs like spiders.
Before I can react, another flings itself at me. I clench the muscles in my core and punt the thing in the face, nearly losing my grip, as it falls down on top of the others
“Go!” I scream at Del Frisco. “GO!”
We turn and snag wires and cables, swinging back toward the staircase as the sound of the angry Dubs reverberates below.
I don’t dare look down, but the Dubs sound like they’re tearing the floor beneath us apart. I hear a keening whine and the sound of flesh being slapped and the scurrying that comes when the vicious revenants think they’ve got an easy meal.
Del Frisco has no problem pumping his lats and making excellent time, beating me by a good minute and a half. He torques himself up onto the still-stable ledge of the staircase without even breaking a sweat.
My vision’s woozy and I’m nearly out of gas as I near the ledge, where Del Frisco smiles and offers me a hand.
“Need a lift?”
My middle finger greets him as I grunt and roll up and onto the cement pad. I catch my breath, listening to another ominous sound of footfalls pounding on the floor above us.
From what we can discern, there’s something – probably a lot of things - moving down through the hall on the floor directly overhead. My guess is that a legion of Dubs heard the sound of the floor dropping away and are headed down the stairwell to investigate.
“Awesome,” Del Frisco says while whipping out his Onesie, readying to do battle. I do likewise and we crouch after locking the stairwell door behind us to prevent any Dubs from following. Darkness sucks us in as we slip silently up the stairs like a pair of thieves.
VERTICAL CITY: A ZOMBIE THRILLER (BOOK 1 OF 4) Page 2