“No, man, you don’t want to go out there,” I reply with a soft smile. “It’s better training Dixie and the others. It’s safer and way more rewarding.”
He nods, resigned.
“So how’s life otherwise, kiddo?” he asks.
“The usual. Just got back from down the street a little while ago.”
“Hairy?”
“Like the skin on a three-week old peach.”
“Anything worth discussing?”
Nodding, I pull out the digital camera I snapped the markings on the other building with.
Gus beams and gestures for me to follow him.
“I’ve got something I want to show you,” he whispers.
I follow Gus who crests a little ramp at the back of his place. Here it looks like the workshop of a madman: several benches cluttered with tiny parts and machines and pieces of scrap and metal and things for the dogs. Behind these, however, on the other side of a hunk of faux wall made of fiberboard sits a handle. Unless you absolutely knew where the handle was, you’d never spot it, not even if you were only two feet away.
Me and Gus hoist the benches and move them just enough so that we can pass and then Gus grabs the handle, his teeth bared as he pulls back. The faux wall complains, its hidden hinges needing to be oiled, before they comply and a doorway pops open.
The space behind is just big enough for a man to crouch-crawl through. Gus hops up into the doorway and I follow him, the two of us shimmying through a corridor winnowed between two walls that leads to the exterior of the building. The corridor ends at a window that’s been busted open and the next closest building is visible, maybe ten feet away.
The two of us move to the edge of the opening and look down into an alley which is a mere twelve stories beneath us. There are no fire-escapes, ladders, or any other hand or footholds on the exterior of the building. This was done intentionally years ago, because if the Dubs learned how to climb and realized the hidden points of ingress and egress, it’s possible, highly unlikely, but possible, that they could find a way past the Keep.
Gus snaps his fingers and I look up. Even though we’re only up twelve stories, it’s a pretty damned good distance to the ground. Gus jabs a finger at the ledge on the other building, which is where we’re headed. It’s dangerous to even think about trying to make that jump, but we’ve done it before and besides, what isn’t dangerous in a world where the dead outnumber the living ten million to one?
Gus jogs back behind me so that he’s got about nineteen feet to work with and then he takes off on a ragged run and hurtles off toward the other building. He’s not gonna make it, I’m certain of that and then somehow he extends those impossibly long arms and hooks onto something I can’t see and flops out of sight.
The bravado and adrenaline from my earlier adventures have seeped away, so I have to psyche myself up for yet another jump. I slap my thighs to get the blood running and then I breathe deeply and do a little visualization, imagining making the successful jump. I make my mind to dissolve into pillowy black nothingness (a tip Shooter taught me) and then I backtrack and blaze down the narrow space and take off into the air.
The wind whips my hair as the other side rushes up to meet me and I land on my side and roll to my feet. I look down and catch sight of a single Dub staring up at me. The building we’re in isn’t fortified like VC1, but there’s only one Dub so I’m not really worried he’s going to alert his brethren.
I track after Gus who pulls out a section of bed sheet near a long ladder that he’s painted to match the exterior of the building. He hangs it up on hooks near the ceiling to conceal the entry point. I follow him into a circular space that he’s made into his own personal library. An immense sanctuary filled with books and other periodicals and compact discs and even a flat-screen TV hooked up to various players and speakers. This is Gus’s “Fortress of Solitude,” the place where he likes to lay low from time-to-time.
This is also where Gus tried to give me a proper education when I was younger. One of the few things I got from my Dad was his stubbornness which meant I wasn’t always the best student, but Gus was very patient and worked with me as best he could. He did customer service at an electronics store back when the world was right, so taking incoming fire from jackasses like me was kind of like second nature to him.
I spin and stride past boxes filled with dust-smothered newspapers. My hands go down and up come yellowing newspaper pages with headlines like “India’s Swine Flu May Have Mutated,” and “H7N9 Virus Found In Mammals,” and more about viruses like the H5N1 and H5N2 and how they’d been found in poultry markets in China and turkey flocks in Missouri and Minnesota.
“More things change, more they stay the same,” Gus says as I look over at him.
“Same thing happened in Africa way back in the seventies,” he continues.
“Same plague that raised up the Dubs?”
“Similar, but different,” he replies. “Had other names back then. Ebola was the big enchilada.”
“Think I heard of that.”
“You should, bozo,” he says with a smile. “I taught you about it.”
I’d forgotten that as he points at more articles, stories about viruses emerging from the jungle.
“Turns out that the virus was in infected bats,” he says. “And the bats liked to eat this one particular kind of jungle fruit. Guess what?”
I shake my head.
“All the other animals in the jungle liked the fruit too. So the bats ate the fruit and relieved themselves-”
“And all the other animals started rolling around in the shit,” I add, finishing his thought.
He cocks an eyebrow and nods.
“Still doesn’t explain how it got into people,” I say.
“Well, some poor sap wanted protein, killed one of the tainted animals, ate some of it, and sold the other as bush meat which infected everyone else.”
“Makes you feel sorry for the bat.”
“Ah, that’s the kicker,” Gus says, tapping a finger on his forehead. “The bat was a reservoir host.”
Gus reads my quizzical look.
“It means they carried the virus, but weren’t killed by it, Wyatt.”
“I wonder if some of us are reservoir hosts,” I say. Gus doesn’t respond and I turn back to the articles to see sentences underlined in red. I hold one of the articles up and it disintegrates.
“Temporal dandruff,” Gus says as I make a wish and blow away the debris from my hands.
Turning, I mentally note that Gus has added to his collection of periodicals which is stacked on shelves of all sizes and in piles on the floor. The books cover a variety of topics, everything from agriculture to zoology, whatever Gus could find on clandestine (and illegal) trips out into the city at night.
He’s also got at least twenty of the most popular zombie books in two stacks off to one side of the room, their pages dog-eared and full of notations. We used to get a kick out of reading those, but most of them are just disappointing since the real Awakening differed so much from what the authors posited.
For starters, the Dubs run neither incredibly fast nor agonizingly slow; rather, they move at the same speed they did in life, which makes an awful lot of sense if you think about it. Why the authors of those books believed an illness that impacted some region in the brain would affect locomotion is beyond me. Further, and this is a biggie, not everyone who’s killed is eaten. The Dubs, like mosquitoes, seem to take a particular shine to certain individuals. Gus thinks that’s because some folks’ blood has a stronger scent than others, but I’ve just chalked it up to the dead having different palates.
Gus sets an old wind-up phonograph, what he calls a “Seabreeze,” down, and fits a 45 record on it as some classical music that makes me think of summer fields in Europe scratches and plays.
Gus crawls over and picks up a section of the floor that conceals a cavity where he keeps his goodies: a few gold coins, some packets of weed, an old German Bible filled
with woodcuts, and a large, black pistol. The gun (unmarked and numberless), is the most significant piece of contraband since all weapons have to be registered with the Administrators. Gus is a damn liberal dude which is why I’m surprised he’s got the gat, but he keeps it around, in his words, “just in case.”
“Planning on taking on the Dubs?”
He stares at the pistol, which looks decidedly out of place in his pasty hands.
“How many of them have you put down, Wyatt?”
“Jesus, Gus.”
Gus sets the gun back down.
“Does it ever make you feel bad?”
I lie and shake my head.
“What about if they were… not bad or evil or harmful, just… different.”
“This got something to do with what you were talking about before?
“Can you answer my question?”
I consider it.
“I guess it would bother me, yeah.”
“It might be wrong to kill them then, huh? It might be almost like… murder.”
I don’t know how to respond to that.
“Why do you do it?”
“It’s my job. I got no choice.”
“We’ve all got choices,” he whispers.
I think about that and there’s a certain truth to what he says, but I don’t respond and hope like hell that he changes the subject.
“I think you do it, you go out on those ops, because you need that camaraderie to fill the hole left by your father.”
“You’re the one that pitched me for the gig way back when,” I respond, some heat in my voice.
He waves his hand dismissively and casts an icy look in my direction, but doesn’t say anything.
“What you just said, Gus, it isn’t true by the way.”
“Okay, so then it’s your mother that you miss. That’s your wound, that’s why you do it, right?”
I’m silent, but my throat tightens at the reference to Mom. My God, it’s been almost twenty years and the grip she has on me is as strong as the day she died. It’s there and will always be there, probably until the moment I slip off into the great void. I’m pissed at Gus for dredging it all up and I’m pissed because he’s absolutely goddamn right.
Gus eases his head back and peers at the ceiling.
“What makes a person kill another living thing? I guess it’s because sometimes it threatens the person or has something he wants.”
He looks over.
“Those things out there no longer really threaten us so maybe we’re killing them because they have something we want.”
“Like what?”
“Freedom.”
My head sinks. I’m beginning to think maybe the others are right. Maybe Gus is nutzo.
“Del Frisco, and Strummer and some of the others, they worry about you, man,” I finally say.
“Doubtful.”
“They think you spend too much time alone.”
“Maybe I should leave.”
“Don’t be stupid, Gus.”
“Have you ever considered leaving?”
“Leave where?”
“Here. This place.”
Laughing, I half expect that Gus is pulling my leg, but his face is screwed up, deadly serious.
“Why the hell do we have to talk about this?”
“Because we’re all getting older.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Nobody wants to talk about it.”
“Because we all know how it ends.”
I stare at him, but he doesn’t break gaze.
“Change the subject.”
“How can you change the subject when it’s the only one we’re talking about?”
“Move on, Gus.”
“Fine, okay, you want me to change the subject, buddy boy? I will. Satellites,” he blurts out after a moment. He holds up a small circular device made of plastic and glass. He presses a button on the back of the object and it glows and hums to life.
“You ever heard about them? Satellites I mean.”
I shake my head.
“Christ, I never told you about GPS?” he asks.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s not a ‘who’?” he says with a smirk. “It’s a thing. Global positioning satellites. GPS. Back in the day the sky beyond what we can see was filled with satellites constantly roaming around the planet. Up there in space,” he says, pointing to the ceiling.
He hands the object to me. I can see digital numbers on the face of the thing.
“If you had certain numbers, digits, you could type them into that little machine and it would tell you where to go.”
Internal machinery whirrs inside the device as a map of the city appears. I hand him back the device and the digital camera and he inputs the coordinates I photographed into his little machine. Then he holds it up to I can see a digital map of the city being created.
“Those numbers you’ve been seeing. They’re kind of like a code. They lead to a spot in the city, probably a building if you want my guess,” he continues.
“Where?”
He gestures to the map on the tiny machine.
“Close. Maybe six blocks from here.”
I examine the map, trying to discern something I might recognize, but the map isn’t incredibly detailed so I can’t make out much of it.
“It’s not pinpointing anything,” I say.
“That’s because you’re missing a few digits. Find those and you’ll find the location.”
I squint at the map as Gus powers it off.
“There’s one more thing,” he continues. “I’m pretty sure those numbers were meant to be found. Somebody probably left those for us… for you.”
“You don’t – the Dubs?” I ask.
“Dunno,” he says with a shrug. “But my guess is there’s someone else out in the city besides us. Somebody who’s leaving numbers around, somebody who wants one of us to find something.”
“What?”
Gus pockets the tiny GPS device and smiles.
“That’s yet to be determined, kemosabe.”
Over the course of the next hour we debate the finer points of why someone would leave those numbers behind and how this and how that. I share with him my thoughts and he shares his and then, when we can babble no more, Gus procures us a few bottles of suds from a wall stash. We sit back and down the down the room temperature beers and watch a film.
Gus has his screen and recorders and stuff hooked to a camouflaged wind turbine, so at least once a week we sneak down to watch a pic. Tonight’s feature is a movie called “The Sound of Music” that Gus said he always loved as a child. I’m not necessarily into the story, but I hang because I feel sorry for Gus, who doesn’t really have anyone aside from the dogs, and besides, I kinda dig the songs in the movie. Gus sings them off key, slugging beer after beer.
Two hours later, Gus is three sheets to the wind as I slip away. I’ve gotta get moving. The others will be wondering where I am if I’m not back soon, but not Gus. He could sit down in his lounge for a few days and nobody would miss him, which I guess is the blessing and the curse of being a dog handler.
Chapter 7
Stealing away from Gus’s room, I’m careful to push the work-benches back to conceal the hidden doorway. Then I’m out and moving briskly into a stairwell. Beneath me is the tenth floor and I can hear sounds coming from behind the metal door near the landing below. I haven’t been down there since I was a child, a particularly terrifying time when the Keep was breached and several dozen Dubs managed to get inside. Dad was still around then. I remember him frantically grabbing me as sirens screamed and we ran into a panic-room somewhere nearby.
Faint cheers rise up on the other side of the door and curiosity getting the better of me, I descend and move through it.
Ribbons of smoke and steam greet me as I’m dead-eyed by an axe-wielding guard who looks carved from granite. I hold out a plastic identification badge and he mumbles “Jumper” to himself
and waves me past.
In comparison to the upper floors, it’s a damned hard life down here as I’ve alluded to before. During the summer it’s brutally hot and then with the winter comes pneumonia and what some call the “grippe” that seems to seek out those with weak constitutions; there’s also tuberculosis and the cruel, cold, and biting winds and blizzards of snow, all testing relentlessly for failing muscles and impoverished blood.
A significant portion of the male and female Burners labor near the incinerator by artificial light, lugging sacks of trash and Dub bodies. It’s a fearful kind of work. They keep warm by the residual glow of the incinerator and vis-à-vis the cheap hootch called “Shine” that’s made by straining various epoxy residues through cheese-cloth and then mixing it with distilled water and vinegar. The number of men and women I’ve seen drinking themselves sodden on Shine has increased of late, and it’s only a matter of time before there’s some sort of official intervention.
In addition to the Burners, there are those who safeguard the Keep, the giant slabs of steel that were welded down over the elevator shafts and stairwells to secure the floor permanently. There are also men who guard these men and others who make sure that the walls and ceilings and floors are in good condition and still others who roam around the incinerator positioning and repositioning fans – as the supply of trash and bodies is renewed every few hours - to blow cinders and the remnants of the burnings out holes that have been hewn into the walls.
For their efforts, these folks are given the lion’s share of the protein that’s grown in VC1. Protein in the form of beans and the like, by the way, because the little amount of meat we’re able to produce, goes directly upstairs. Still, there’s enough good stuff to go around as evidenced by the muscle-quilted frames of most of those in sight. I slip between the titans as they carry hundred-pound sacks of trash and the palsied bodies of dead city-dwellers and Dubs.
The hands of these laborers are so criss-crossed with cuts and raised lacerations, that it’s impossible to count or trace them. Most of them also don’t have any fingernails, having worn them off in fights and various ops; their knuckles swollen so that their fingers spread out like fans.
VERTICAL CITY: A ZOMBIE THRILLER (BOOK 1 OF 4) Page 6