For a few seconds, Odin contents himself with studying my face, then, with a rueful smile, he leans in and whispers.
“Wyatt… do you mind if I call you, Wyatt?”
We’ve never conversed before, but I nod.
“Do you know what would have happened to you if you hadn’t told us the truth?” Odin asks, pointing to the blood.
I don’t, although I have a sneaking suspicion it might involve my untimely demise. I stare into his shark eyes and ask, “What are you gonna do, sir?”
A few seconds of silence and then he laughs and slaps me on the shoulder.
“Not a thing. Not one damn thing. Go get yourself cleaned up and get ready for the next op.”
I’m a little shocked at this so I hesitate, backtracking, waiting for the other shoe to fall and when it doesn’t, I make for the door. Of course Odin waits till the last possible minute and then calls after me.
“Wyatt?”
I stop, rooted in place. Slowly I look back over a shoulder and Odin has the pointer on. The red dot circles a spot on my chest.
“Do you know what?” Odin asks.
“I… no, sir.”
“You owe me now,” he says, punctuating the words with a zippered grin.
My face somehow manufactures a ghost of a smile that’s returned by Shooter. Taking two steps back, I spin on my heels and get the hell out of there.
Chapter 6
Jason Sullivan’s hands are greasy and hotter than metal hinges in hell as he grips my arm and examines my cut. I’m propped up on an old door that lies over a clutch of cinderblocks, what passes for an examination table down on the twenty-eighth floor.
Sully’s good peoples, blue-eyed and fair, with thick brown hair that curls in waves about his ears. He does a little black market medicine work on his off hours, but during the day he’s a “Burner,” one of the guys who sweats his nuts off around the incinerator shaft on the tenth floor.
After the Dubs rose up, there was a period of mass violence and general unrest. Basically what you’d expect on the eve of civilization’s end. Somebody, and nobody knows whether it was deliberate or accidental, ruptured the city’s primary gas line which produced an unquenchable tsunami of fire that cooked a good portion of thirty city blocks.
At first the fire consumed everything within its reach below ground, but eventually it just fed off the seemingly inexhaustible supply of gas from the pipe. It’s burned for as long as anyone can remember.
Darcy said there was a town in Pennsylvania called Centralia where the same kind of thing happened, but I don’t know anything about that. What I do know is that there’s a business elevator shaft on the rear of VC1 that leads down directly into a section of the fire. That’s where we toss our trash, general refuse, the bodies of our deceased, and any Dubs we take down. Don’t go down there if you can avoid it. The entire place has an odor for which there are no polite words.
Anyway, Sully labors down there during the day, but in the evening, for a few bucks, he’ll clean off any wound that doesn’t require stitches, disinfect the thing, and then run a little homemade test to determine whether you might be infected. He’s got one of the whirly medical things called a centrifuge that he freed from the backpack of a dead physician. He claims he found out years ago that Dub blood differs from the red stuff that pumps through our veins. Something about it having a different texture or viscosity, whatever that means. What he does is take a sample of your crimson and mix it with some from a Dub and run it in the centrifuge. If the samples separate, you’re platinum, but if they become one, you’re presumably a few hours away from snacking on your best buds.
Sully closes his door and locks it and I pass him a few bucks because even though my injury wasn’t caused by a bite and Shooter didn’t seem to think much of it, I need to know. I ask him to run the test.
He turns to a collection of buckets he has at the back of his coop. There’s a shitload of plastic and metal pails, probably thirty in all, of various shapes and sizes. Sully reads my look, shrugs, and says, “You can never have too many buckets, Wyatt.”
He hoists a three-gallon jobber and flips it over and sits. He’s smoking when he takes a sample of my blood with a lancet and powers up the centrifuge. The blood separates – meaning I’m apparently not infected – and Sully high-fives me as he disinfects my wound and wraps it up in gauze and sends me on my way. I honestly don’t know if any of what Sully says is true, but it’s reassuring, and that’s worth something.
Having gone out on an op, I should probably catch some rack-time, but I’m still amped from the jump and don’t really sleep much anymore. Besides, I’ve got a few errands to attend to.
Exiting Sully’s quarters, I shuffle through the tight hallways of VC1, waving to acquaintances. Though the building’s fortified, we’ve still got to be on guard at all times because of the Dubs. As such, half of us work during the day, while the others take over at night. It’s early evening now so everything’s at its high tide of activity as shifts change. At least 523 people call VC1 home and another 70 or 80 come here from other buildings to work so things do get cramped.
In addition to the Prowlers and Jumpers, there are those like Sully who work at the incinerator and pods of people that grow the food that we eat, clean out our refuse, keep The Dream Catcher in tip-top shape, monitor the condition of the building, do our laundry, monitor our sources of power and communication, each of us functioning like cogs in a contained machine.
A good number of us work in VC1’s middle floors, as the top floors are set aside for Odin, Shooter, and the rest of upper management. The bottom floors, mainly at or around the ten, are where, as I’ve mentioned before, the bulwark against the Dubs lies.
The tenth floor is often called the “Keep” because it’s a secure area and policed by hulking guards and the “Sweepers.” The Sweepers are the unlucky men and women whose job it is to actually venture out onto the flat lands and sweep the streets within ten city blocks. Search and destroy stuff. Nobody will admit it, but there’s serious class resentment in VC1 between those above and those below. Odin and the top dogs are all descended from folks who were in charge before the world fell: tech gurus and money manipulators and the like.
Guys like me were scions of middle management, while those in the lower floors were birthed by men and women who worked with their hand and backs. Gus says wherever people live together inevitably there’s gonna be a caste and I guess he’s right, but then again he also says stuff like we’re living in a seething cauldron of jealousies and hatreds which seems awfully dramatic to me. Either way, there have been some grumblings about inequality of late, but nobody has the brass to challenge Odin on it.
I pass a steady stream of workers and various sleeping quarters. We’ve started to run out of room so some of the populace have taken to running what you might call flop houses, which are really just large, gutted rooms filled with mattresses. It’s by no means unusual for two men to have the same mattress in common, one working by day and using it by night, and the other working at night and using it in the daytime. Staring through a door into one of the flop houses, twenty mattresses are visible on the ground, stacked next to each other like headstones at a cemetery.
Aside the mattresses are a handful of laborers, smoking, reading books, shooting the shit. Beyond them, on the far side of the space, there’s a sad-eyed girl in her late-20s holding the room’s communal satellite phone to her ear. For the first few years after it all ended, some of the grids and servers and computer networks were still up so it was possible to call and check on voice-mails.
I was too young then to partake, but anyone over twenty-five remembers the daily routine of calling to listen to the voices of loved ones and leaving messages in the hopes that somebody called back. Nobody ever did.
I feel for the girl, watching her mumble into the phone, calling out for her mother (like so many of us do at night). There are others like Del Frisco who think it’s pathetic, holding onto the past like th
at (“wasting time jawing with ghosts,” he says), but not me. I get it. Sometimes it’s impossible to move forward without going back.
Slipping past this, my access card provides access through another door and into a “tankage” room which is awash in industrial-sized metal drums filled with waste products of all sorts. There has been an effort to repurposes everything given our limited space, so what we do is dry out a portion of the crap that we produce and then grind it into a fine powder and mix with some other stuff to fertilize the vegetable and fruit banks and indoor aqua fish farms.
Exiting the tankage room, I hop down staircase after staircase, popping my head through the door that leads to the physical plant. The air here seems to almost be on fire it’s so heavy and warm, suffused with the gamey smell of perspiring bodies and burning metal.
Three giant cauldrons, big enough for all the devils of hell to brew their broth in, roar in one corner as if volcanoes were blowing through them. Liquid fire leaps from the cauldrons, flinging out jets of hissing, roaring flame.
I watch as workers pull apart the elevator ropes. Most folks think a dude named Otis built the first elevators back in the day, but Gus told me a guy named Archimedes did it first, followed by some bigshot in France who wanted to use one to see a chick he was banging.
The workers use giant metal tongs to separate the individual strands of elevator rope before others drag the rope over to furnaces where the strands are made malleable and then reformed into tendrils. One of the men, a mountain of flesh with a welder’s mask on, spots and flips me off as I duck outside and continue down the stairs until I’m just above the Keep.
Moving over a ramp, I stop before a wall that’s tagged with graffiti. In black chalk, somebody has scrawled outlines of the heads of three people. There’s enough detail that I recognize one of the three as Roger Parker, the head of the outer buildings. He’s sandwiched on the wall between two other guys who were famous in the days before. Gus said one was called Che and the other Fidel. Gus also said they were serious pot stirrers, which is, I suppose, what the artist is trying to suggest about Roger Parker.
Graffiti, especially the kind that’s taking a veiled swipe at Odin and the other honchos, is illegal and there have been rumors about “snouts,” snitches in the employ of Odin who roam the halls, reporting on people. As a result, I look both ways and then wipe my hand and smudge the images, blurring them into nothing. Then I hop down a short corridor that ends at three metal steps near the rear of the building. It’s relatively deserted here and the door above the steps is painted red which I’ve been told represents good luck in another culture.
The door greets me in a few steps as I knock three times. A voice bellows “S’open!” from the other side. The door opens with a push, the dogs barking as I step down into a long, narrow space lit by votives. Treading lightly, I pad inside, the room filled with second-hand furniture and lots of metal cages for the aforementioned canines.
Near the back, stooped over one of the cages is Gus Abrams, a gangly, bespectacled cur trainer with a bland, sloped face that I’ve always thought resembles a shovel. Gus turns in my direction and smiles as I fight to hide my grimace. Gus is a helluva guy, but he’s never cottoned to personal hygiene so his mouth, filled with brown, cleat-like teeth, is a catastrophe.
Gus rises and removes thick gloves and presents his hand, which I shake. I peer down into the cage nearest him where a one year old English Springer Spaniel stares back at me.
“How’s Dixie?”
He waggles a few fingers in the air and Dixie jumps up and nips at them.
“Chomping at the bit.”
Gus makes some strange hand gestures and Dixie’s eyes goggle. As if on cue, she stifles herself and sits at attention.
Someone realized many years back that dogs trained to find bodies, (Gus calls them “HRDs,” Human Remain Detection dogs), were particularly effective at spotting the deceased before so why not try them on Dubs? They’ve proven to be incredibly effective, supposedly able to scent a Dub from a half mile away, and the grunts forced to recon on the flat lands take at least one or two with them on every op. Gus is in charge of overseeing all the dogs in VC1.
I follow Gus as he does a lap around his quarters. He’s always seemed to enjoy keeping me in the loop on the latest training techniques and whatnot. I don’t like to talk about it much, but Gus is probably as close to a father as I’ve ever had. After the copter crashed, Dad was never really the same. Sure, he put in his time and killed his share of Dubs while helping to build what most of us take for granted now, but by the third year of the Awakening, he was in the checkout line, at least mentally.
It all makes sense if you think about it. Dad’s wife dies and then the world ends and pretty soon thereafter, a bunch of his new acquaintances are torn to pieces and eaten by the undead. It was enough to drive anyone nuts and for more than a year after we crashed, sickness and death seemed to stalk us.
Soon thereafter, Dad’s hair, which had always been immaculately coiffed, was long and stringy, his face perpetually unshaven, cheeks creased like an old road map.
We barely spoke when I got a little older and the times we did were undertaken mostly in anger. It took me a year or two to figure it out, but then it became obvious that the only thing me and Dad ever really had in common was Mom. Once she was gone, our bond was severed.
It’s pretty shitty to say your Dad’s fallen out of love with you and even worse to think about, but on my seventh birthday Dad volunteered to go out on a flat lands op with a bunch of the older Sweepers. He’d never done it before and not one of them came back.
Some of the others said they did it on purpose – “Suicide by Dub” – but I never saw any indication that Dad wanted to end it all. Still, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I’ve had nightmares about whether he’s out there somewhere. Watching, waiting for me to give him one, final embrace.
When someone’s orphaned like I was, lots are chosen and one of the more seasoned persons in the community takes you in. Gus volunteered to adopt me and most of everything I have I owe to him. You have to remember that my formal education consisted of nothing. Nada. I wasn’t old enough to go to school when the world ended, so everything I know was taught to me by Gus. Thankfully, he was a super curious dude, a learned man, with an excellent library and cerebral lounge that only he and I know about. More on that later.
Anyway, after Dad vanished Gus learned me up and when I turned sixteen he pitched me as a Jumper to Shooter. He did this knowing that it was probably that or a Sweeper gig for me, and the life expectancy of a Jumper was significantly greater. In support of me he argued that my father gave his life for the community and that had to count for something.
Gus’s voice snaps me out of my reverie and I look over to see him gesturing at the dogs. It takes me a moment to get my bearings as he points to another cage where two shepherds are facing off. The dog closest to us, the younger and smaller of the two, has adopted a pose that Gus calls “play bow.”
“You see him do that?”
I nod, having seen this kind of stuff before.
“That’s an instigation, warning, apology, and clarification all wrapped up into one.”
“How do you know?”
“Cause I’ve lived with these guys for the last twelve years and I know the canine code.”
Gus circles the cage as I follow.
“It’s their way of saying I’m gonna nibble on you, but it won’t hurt cause we’re playing.”
Gus points to other cages where some of the dogs are rollicking around, barking, fighting. It all looks sort of the same to me, but I can tell it’s got a much deeper meaning for Gus.
“Everyone thinks they’re just screwing around, but they’re not. If you look close enough you can see they’re experiencing the full range of emotions: joy, guilt, anger, jealously, even a touch of sadness.”
He looks over at me and smiles sheepishly.
“I know you’re thinking I’ve totally gone o
ff the deep end.”
“I don’t think that at all, Gus,” I say, pausing for maximum affect, “I know you have.”
He grins a mouthful of dead teeth, brushes past me, closes the front door, and draws a heavy bolt across it. Then he shuffles back and leans in close.
“The dogs aren’t the only things I watch.”
He points down.
“Sometimes, during breaks, I watch the Dubs. The ones those thick-necks got brawling down on ten-”
“That’s not true.”
“The hell it isn’t,” he says. “I’ve seen it myself. They catch a couple of the damned things and chain ‘em up and make ‘em square off for money or barter in some half-assed boxing ring.”
My head sags. I’ve heard that Odin and the others look the other way as to what happens down around the tenth floor. The men and women have it hard down there, so the normal strictures aren’t really enforced. Course I don’t know if any of that is true. It’s probably just scuttlebutt repeated by guys like Gus.
“Anyway, I think they’re different than we all thought,” he continues. “They’re no longer people-”
“You’re telling me.”
“What I mean is, I think the Dubs are closer to animals, dogs. They live and move in packs and I’m beginning to believe the stuff we think is just them going psycho is their way of communicating.”
I try to suppress a snort at this, but it comes out anyway. Instantly I regret it, because I can see the pain in Gus’s eyes. He probably thought I was the one person he could confide in about all this. Even though I’m somewhat sympathetic to the plight of the Dubs, it’s kooky to think they can communicate.
“I’m sorry, man, it’s just you don’t know how it is out there.”
“I want to.”
For the last year or two, Gus has had this crazy idea of wanting to be a Jumper. I’ve done my best to dissuade him, but he claims he’s been cooped up for all these years. He says he’s just gotta experience it one time before he shoves off for the happy hunting grounds. I’ve seen the way he moves, however, his stooped posture, flabby muscles, and creaky bones. Ain’t no way in hell he’d last ten seconds on The Dream Catcher.
VERTICAL CITY: A ZOMBIE THRILLER (BOOK 1 OF 4) Page 5