The menacing sounds that we heard seconds before, the stomping of things overhead, have stopped. An eerie silence smothers the space. We take the steps one at a time, Del Frisco on point.
“Wyatt, hey, Wyatt.”
I look up and catch his face in the gloom, his eyes twinkling like blown glass.
“Never look into it, m’man, never gaze into the eyes of the goddamned sun.”
Reflecting on this, I realize he’s paraphrasing yet another, old song, which I’m pretty sure he does to calm his nerves.
“Yeah, but that’s where all the friggin’ fun is,” I reply, playing along.
Del Frisco cackles, grinning crookedly before turning and kneeling. He inserts his earpiece and closes his eyes. A sound emanates from the earpiece: a droning from somewhere up above us that’s downright elemental, a sound seemingly made up of ten thousand little sounds. Like the murmuring of bees inside an enormous hive before they attack.
I reach over and kill the power to the earpiece. Slowly, the two of us peer up to the door at the top of the stairs. A sheet of wood and metal that’s a mere blob of black in the gloom. It seems to pulse like a human heart. Gus and the others ask what keeps a Jumper on his toes and I always tell them it’s the fear of the crocodiles closest to the canoe. The crocs are here all right, plotting near that damn door. Del Frisco hums another old rock tune and I whisper a rhyme that Gus taught me as a child:
Tiger, tiger, burning bright…
There’s breathing up at the top of the stairs. I can hear it. My eyes squint and seize on things in the murk:
The door cracking open. What might be an eyeball shimmering. Saliva on blackened teeth.
The rhyme pounds in my ears:
In the forest of the goddamn night.
Two deep breaths from me in pregnant intervals and then door rocks back and forth and explodes off its hinges.
Chapter 3
The door crashes down and past us. Our eyes ratchet back to the black hole at the top of the stairs and every muscle in my body clenches. We wait for something to happen and when nothing does, we take tentative steps forward. My senses heighten and I can hear the droning has morphed to an almost imperceptible humming, a faint buzz, the electricity that Dubs purportedly cast when moving in sizable numbers.
Del Frisco holds up two fingers to stop me. My eyes scan the stairs ahead and I can see figures toiling in the shadows. I count whatever’s lurking there, but stop at eleven, which means there’s undoubtedly double that number that can’t be seen.
A head snaps back in the shadows and a tongue juts out as a Dub wiggles its nose, as if sniffing the air for the scent of our live blood and warm flesh. Another two seconds of silence follows and then the Dubs wail and stab their hands against the walls when they spot us.
In an instant it’s impossible to hear over the frantic screams of the Dubs as they swoop down on us like a pack of wild animals.
Even though I’ve had serious misgivings about the wholesale slaughter of creatures that used to be our neighbors and loved ones, I’ve got no current plans to become a meal and so I drop low, measure my weight and wait for the signal.
Del Frisco pumps a fist and we both explode up, bringing our Onesies around like swords.
Del Frisco plants the axe head of his Onesie in the neck of the first Dub, decapitating it as a thick rope of black blood paints the right wall. The head rolls past me as I glance up to see a female Dub bypassing Del Frisco to get at me.
My arm pulls in tight to my chest and I drive the spike on the end of my tomahawk into the soft part under the Dub’s chin, making a sound like a mallet striking a brick wall.
The Dub exhales, her breath smelling of fetid meat which churns my stomach as I work the spike into her gray matter. Gore spurts in great abundance as something pops in her cranium and the dark glow in her eyes vanishes.
The female Dub folds like wet cardboard and I use her corpse to springboard forward, splitting open the skulls of two more Dubs, slashing wide the throat of another as Del Frisco pushes the black button on his Onesie.
I crouch defensively as the barbed metal ball drops from the tomahawk and Del Frisco twirls it so fast the air seems to sing.
The ball slices through foreheads as blood geysers and bodies fall in twos and threes. I finish off the Dubs that Del Frisco misses, braining a young man with my brass knuckles before jamming my spike into the ear of an elderly gent before WHOMPH! a young girl flies past my head, talon-like fingers barely missing me, tickling the fat of my neck.
She bounces off a wall and rolls over, her right arm shattered horribly, bone poking through splotched, pellucid flesh. She finds her equipoise as I slam my axe into her forehead before planting a foot on her shoulder to lever it free. Turning back, I bull up the stairs, whipsawing the heads of another two Dubs, including a blue-bloated woman who’s missing both of her hands.
A fist comes out of nowhere and rocks my jaw, sending me fumbling back against the far wall. This happens all the time by the way. Del Frisco and me aren’t like those bullet-proof toughs you used to see in the movies. The ones who never got nicked, who always seemed to glide right between the raindrops. I get my ass handed to me on the regular by the Dubs, which is one of the many reasons I respect them.
I blink away the fireworks that accompany the punch, my vision clouded with stars as I look up into the milky eyes of what was once an Asian gent. He’s whey-faced and wearing black shorts, combat boots, and a grubby T-shirt with the word “Dope” stitched across it in sequins.
The Asian’s missing his lower jaw, but man can he move his pipe-cleaner-like arms. The guy throws a series of ill-timed, yet impressive chops and haymakers. It’s obvious he was quite the shit-kicker back in the day, cruising now on instinct, as he drops toward me and I swing my Onesie. My blade takes a big scoop of flesh out of his chest, opening up some vitals that spill maggot-flecked sludge onto the stairs.
The Asian looks down at the wound and in his moment of hesitation I lop the top of his skull off. This takes the fight out of him as he timbers to his knees, his eyes never parting from mine. Blood bubbles from his mouth and I hear an inflection from his lips that sounds eerily like the words “kill me.”
He blinks twice, shivers, and collapses. I’ve seen this before and told the others about it, but they say it’s just a reflex. Like how a bug’s legs twitch when you peel them off. I don’t believe that. In fact I’ve always thought that some of the Dubs retain a portion of their humanity.
Looking down, I see the Asian’s got some green-splotched bracelet wrapped around one wrist. I slide it off and a hint of gold glimmers under the green, so I pocket the thing and follow after Del Frisco who appears to have the situation well in hand.
In seconds, we’re mopping up, jumping from body to body to make sure the Dubs are crossed over. Del Frisco leads me up until we’re standing victoriously atop a small hillock of bodies that rises up out of a moat of Dub blood. Del Frisco holds his tomahawk out to tap mine, his lips pulled wide, teeth shining like tombstones in the murk.
That’s when I see it. The line of dark red running down Del Frisco’s forearm. Del Frisco’s mouth freezes in place. His eyes and body follow shortly thereafter.
There’s ice in my veins as well because the contagion, the virus, whatever the hell it was that brought the world to its end, is still out there somewhere: in the wind, in the water, probably in the soil. As such, it’s exceptionally easy to become infected after contact with the undead. There are tales of others, mostly the bottom-feeders that chuck the Dub bodies into the incinerators, testing positive after inhaling their torched ashes. I have no idea whether that’s true, but none of us Jumpers like to take chances.
If you’re bitten or suffer a material scratch, best practices dictate a massive course of anti-biotics the moment you get back to base. Of course all of that’s on the down-low since those in charge of the Vertical City have zero tolerance, the buildings supposedly sterile, meaning no one who’s infected is allow
ed inside. If you’re bleeding you better keep it to yourself or you’ll likely to wind up on the wrong side of one of the Prowlers’ high-powered sniper rifles.
“Go on, man,” Del Frisco says, “go on and do it.”
I reach in my ruck and pull out a plastic water bottle as Del Frisco waits with baited breath. The bottle squirts his arm, the water washing away the Dub blood. Both of us can now see that Del Frisco’s flesh is intact. No wound, no infection, just Del Frisco holding his Onesie out like a gun, mimicking filling the dead Dubs full of holes with imaginary bullets.
“Del Frisco one, the Dubs a big fat, zero, baby, all day long!”
I manage a half-smile, more relieved than anything as he clamps down on my wrist and pulls me forward. We creep up through the door and drop to our knees to look back into the bullpen. The female Dub and her colleagues we’d spotted earlier have disappeared so we jog forward, intent on clipping the solar generator.
Kneeling before the generator, I throw open my ruck and remove the metal leader housed inside on a thick plastic wheel. The leader is tossed Del Frisco who slaps a pair of magnetic, oversized ball-bearings on the metal underside of the generator which will make it easier for the Hogs to haul it out of the building.
Del Frisco secures the leader to the generator and ties it off and places the wheel with the excess leader back in his sack so that it will automatically pay out as we exit the building. I’m feeling better about the whole thing when I turn and bite back a scream.
The hallway that leads to the open wall – our only way out – is blocked by a shambling mass of Dubs, twice as many as we’d faced in the stairwell. The Dubs are lurching around and grunting, but apparently haven’t noticed us.
“They went ninja on us, Wy,” Del Frisco whispers, reading my perplexed look.
I nod and reach for my Onesie as Del Frisco shakes his head. The Dubs are so closely packed, standing cheek-to-cheek, that it would be impossible to chop our way through them.
Del Frisco points to the floor, to the streams of oil that are visible, dribbling from the severed fuel pipe, running nearly the length of the space.
Directly under the feet of the Dubs.
“You know what we gotta do, cowboy,” he whispers.
The two of us fish through our rucksacks again, hoping to prepare for our exfiltration before the Dubs catch wind of us.
Inside our sacks, lying amidst a smattering of tools and other devices, are sections of hand-crafted plastic on metal balls that resemble something Strummer called a “luge sled,” an apparatus used for sport in the days before the world ended.
We zip up and snug our rucksacks around our backs and position the sleds tight to our chests. Del Frisco winds a rubber band around his pony-tail and then we slide on our Kevlar gloves. One of the Dubs spots us and pounds on its chest, squealing like some kind of demonic pig. My finger loops around the metal trigger on my Onesie and I watch the Dubs rampage down the corridor toward us. Del Frisco checks to see that the wheel with the excess leader’s secure in his sack and then his eyes hop back to mine.
“Let’s do this.”
I pull my Onesie up and yank on the trigger as the flare inside erupts in a retina-searing blast.
The ball of fire curls down the corridor and detonates near the severed fuel pipe, causing a percussive secondary blast that guts a portion of the ceiling and collapses a nearby wall. Whole sections of Dubs are set ablaze, running around like ambulatory torches, while others are flung onto their asses as if smacked down by a giant hand. We’ve done this a time or two before so we we’re well aware that the margin is narrow. The bedlam we’ve just caused gives us only seconds to make our move.
By the time the flames begin to lick the walls we’re already on the run, blitzing directly at the Dubs, dropping onto our sleds. Before the Dubs know what’s happened, we’re slipstreaming past them, ground-surfing at an incredible rate of speed.
We cover our heads and feel the warmth of the fire, my eyes watering from the sulphurous smoke as we slash through the sea of chaos right past them!
Our sleds eventually slow on the pocked cement floor and we roll off a hundred feet from the gaping hole in a Dub-free zone.
Coming up on the balls of our feet, we look ahead and spot the two lengths of thick wire that were embedded on the exterior of the building, just on the other side of the open exit hole. That’s how we first climbed in.
Opening pockets on our compression suits, we pull out leaders attached to four-point harnesses wrapped around our torsos. On the end of the leaders are carabiner clips that we secure around the thick wire. The leaders are fifty-three feet long which gives us plenty of room to move.
Suddenly, the sounds of the Dubs have merged into a great booming chord. We swivel to see that they’ve regained what little senses they still possess and are coming for us, squirming clumsily through the fire and smoke. There’s something pitiable in their cluelessness (something I find entirely human), as they howl their displeasure at our efforts to circumvent them.
The ghouls’ moaning grows in intensity, their numbers augmented as others drop down through holes in the ceiling and wall. In seconds, the corridor fills with the spastic movements and hungry eyes of a hundred flesh-eaters tracking our every move.
We could exit the building if we wanted to, but to leave that many Dubs behind would hamper the ability of the Hogs to get the generator out. For that reason alone, Del Frisco motions for me to follow and we veer down toward the Dubs and then, when they’re a dozen feet from us and supremely pissed, we reverse course and run toward the hole in the wall as the Dubs charge after us.
Before the brain-suckers realize what’s happened, we’re leading them toward the hole. I look back over a shoulder and see their mouths unhinged, tongues lolling over blackened teeth as they grin. The fools actually believe they’ve got us pinned in.
Del Frisco looses a rebel yell and I do likewise, pivoting as the Dubs reach for me. I hesitate for an instant and in that interval a Dub snares and rips off a handful of my hair which means I don’t feel sorry for what comes next.
And what does come next?
Panting hard, I look down as my feet kiss the last bit of building and then there’s a feeling of pure weightlessness as I fly through the air, hundreds of feet off the ground.
Chapter 4
I hang, suspended over terra firma for what seems like an eternity, looking down onto the city streets below. Then gravity cinches my arms and legs and I’m falling, rocketing straight down as the Dubs fumble through the hole in the wall after us like lemmings.
Del Frisco and me drop like fallen angels, screaming fifty feet down, silhouetted against the dying sun when WHAM! our momentum stops. We snap back and up, the leaders around our harnesses finally pulling taut.
I spin in my harness, dazed and blinking. I watch the Dubs that followed us out of the building soar several hundred feet down toward the city streets which are swarming with thousands of other Dubs. The airborne Dubs slam onto their brethren in a thrashing heap, scattering them across the ruined blacktop like gory pins in a bowling alley.
“Erase my name off the grave cause you’ve just been Del Friscoed!” Del Frisco says while pointing toward the ground.
I look over at him as he dangles on the wire like a marionette.
“How many you think we took out?!” Del Frisco shouts, breathless, supremely pumped.
My gaze fixes on him and then swings out to the periphery. I see something I might’ve ordinarily missed. A face, the visage of a young girl framed in the hollowed out window on a ten storey building several blocks over.
Watching us.
Watching me.
Pebbles of sweat assault my eyes and I blink them away and when I look back, the girl’s gone.
These kinds of mirages happen on a daily basis, so I don’t give it a whole lot of weight, but still. It’s been a while since I’ve mistakenly seen anything alive this close to the ground.
“What up, Wyatt?!”
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“What?”
“Two-hundred? You think we crossed over two-hundred of ‘em?!”
Fighting the urge to respond and mention the girl, I turn instead and look up at the gap between two immense buildings which is crisscrossed with a dozen separate lengths of thick wire (a portion of which we’re suspended on), that everyone calls “The Dream Catcher.”
The Dream Catcher, which resembles an industrial spider’s web, is composed of elevator cable (or “Ropes” as Jumpers call them), that have been pried out of elevator shafts and carefully separated by worker’s in the physical plant into “tendrils.”
Tendrils are made of several individual strands of rope that have been heated until pliable then covered in various epoxies until they’re ready to be threaded around sharpened, eight-inch long stainless steel masonry darts. The darts are fitted into pneumatic guns that resemble harpoons and which are bolted onto the roofs of several buildings and then fired into the faces of adjacent buildings. Once the tendrils are secured to the other buildings, they’re pulled taut and then permanently tied to posts on the tops of the other buildings.
I’m nineteen now and the cables were first stretched between the buildings when I was four of five. That was around the time the survivors realized we’d never be able to inhabit the lands below us, the flat lands, again.
Our only hope was to live above the infected.
The cables were strung as a means of colonizing new buildings when the foodstuffs in the original building ran low in the third year of our ordeal. Now they’re our only real means of transportation, meticulously maintained every night by members of the physical plant.
Reaching up, I grab the tendril above me and clip my carabiner to it which allows me to pull across to another building where a metal staircase has been affixed to a stone lip that protrudes from the structure’s façade.
There’s a network of metal staircases all over the various buildings in eyesight along with metal cleats that have been driven into stone and brick to provide us with footfalls and perches as we move up and down. Darcy’s father used to be a serious scaler of stone back in the day, and she always says we’re like him now, urban rock-climbers.
VERTICAL CITY: A ZOMBIE THRILLER (BOOK 1 OF 4) Page 3