A pair of wooden dowels fall from out of a sack of trash and clatter on the floor. The trash haulers don’t bother to turn back and I pocket the dowels, staring at the far end of the floor. There’s a brace of ironhard men with weapons and beyond them, a gunmetal hunk of steel, positioned floor-to-ceiling.
On the other side of that wall are presumably a thousand famished Dubs, just waiting to surge up through the building and finish us all off. I imagine if I placed my ear to the metal I could hear them on the other side, clucking their tongues, conspiring, searching for a way in.
I follow the sound of cheers echoing behind me and peer in through an open door where I see two-dozen men and women, swilling Shine and bellowing at a pair of Dubs that are fighting each other.
One of the Dubs is tall with long brown hair and the other one is short and broad-shouldered, wearing a camouflage jacket with sprung elbows.
Each is missing pieces: the tall one’s mouth cratered, its jaw ivory and exposed, while the shorter one’s spinal column has begun to protrude from a deep divot in his back.
The Dubs stand in a pit encircled by a three-foot brick wall. They’re chained at the ankles and clutch sharpened lengths of metal with which to do battle. I watch the tall one batter the other about the face until a section of skull flies off in a spurt of black liquid. Gus is right, it’s a grisly thing to defile the dead. The skull lands in the pit and the people cheer and I wonder what kind of impact this close quarter’s brutality has on those who live here?
What happens when you know that the place you live in is being besieged by the Dubs; who come, literally, by the thousands every single morning, fighting with each other for a chance to devour you? Blizzards and colds make no difference to these demons, they’re always on hand. Gus says the specter of death desensitizes you to suffering and I think he’s right. Slowly but surely, the humanity is being stripped away from the folks down on ten.
One of the men watching the battling Dubs, a bearded Burner named Sid Saab who I’ve seen on the upper floors, gapes back at me. Sid’s face is nearly hidden behind a layer of soot and grease as he cocks an eyebrow and rises. His frame nearly blots out the ambient light.
“The hell you from?” he asks.
“Twenty-eight.”
“High-minders,” Sid sneers, referencing a slur that’s used by those down here to refer to anyone living or working above ten (I’ve also heard “High-Horsers” used before as well, which never really made any sense to me).
“You think it’s smart to do that?” I reply, wagging a finger in the direction of the chained Dubs. I watched as the shorter Dub dips low and then shoves his sharpened metal shaft into the chin of the tall one. He works it into the tall one’s neck meat until there’s a rush of putrid liquid as the Dub topples over in stages. To his knees first, then to the ground.
“Smartest thing I done all day,” Sid says, watching the Dub’s body lie in a puddle of black ooze.
“Smart doesn’t necessarily mean right,” I reply.
Sid’s face turns a few shades of red as he registers this. He takes a step toward me and it dawns on me just how big he is. Gus read me a story once about some magical creature called a Golem, and Sid looks to be about the same size. A stone statue come to life.
“Right and wrong don’t cut no ice down here and they don’t carry no currency anymore,” the big bastard breathlessly mutters. “Where the hell you been, boy?”
I point up and then hands shoot out from behind me and latch on my wrists. Before I know what’s happened my arms are pinned behind my back. Sid’s leering at me, spittle flecking the corners of his mouth.
“I think you need to be baptized.”
“But I’m not religious.”
“Religion ain’t got nothin’ to do with it,” Sid says with another sneer.
He whistles and a knee lodges in the middle of my back as I’m hurled forward. My legs smack against the edge of the pit, momentum carrying me face-first into it. Crashing to the ground, I slide across the bloody slick left by the dead Dub. The others surrounding the pit cheer and jeer in my general direction.
There’s a low trailing moan that echoes from above me and I elbow myself up as the shorter Dub stares at me. At this close distance I’m privy to every raised vein pulsing in the thing’s bluish-white flesh. But it’s the eyes that get me. I’d expect to glimpse some semblance of humanity in them, but it’s not there. What is there, however, is a vacant, hungry look that signifies one desire: to feed.
A frown etches the snub-nosed Dub’s face and the thing’s mouth wrenches back. It snaps at me, but isn’t close enough to do any harm. That changes as another Burner cuts the Dub’s shackles with bolt-cutters.
The Dub doesn’t come at me from the front. Rather, it spiders sideways and only on sheer instinct do I lurch back at the moment that the Dub’s jaws snap at the air. Bile from the Dub’s mouth daubs my face. I combat-roll sideways and spring to my feet. The Dub bull-rushes me, slashing the air with its hooked hands. I throw an elbow and block its hand, but the thing’s momentum forces me back.
My eyes catch sight of the audience and I can see they want blood. There’s a fat woman closest to me with a shaved head clutching a baby doll. She points and shakes a fist and curses me. I dodge the Dub and run in a circle as the air explodes with the furious cries of the onlookers. The Dub takes up its metal club and swings at me.
Whoosh! the club glides past my head.
I duck and dart and kick the Dub in the chest. He goes down to his knees, dropping his metal shaft. I grab the shaft and swing it like a baseball bat as the Dub rears back up in a rage.
The shaft’s sharp metal edge opens a fissure in the Dub’s chest. He wobbles, then there’s a rush of gas and foul-smelling liquid issues forth as the thing throws itself against me. Dub viscera sheets the ground as the thing rains blows down on my head, opening a cut near my eye.
Somehow I’m quickly on my knees, vision cloudy, murmuring a nonsensical children’s rhyme that Gus taught me. Another punch smashes my lip. I roll over and gape up. I can see the Dub’s baleful eyes, irises constricting into dots.
I can hear the meat-eater hissing at me, lips drawn back, its freakshow face mere inches from mine. For an instant, the gnashing of the thing’s teeth sounds like a primitive language. As if the Dub is trying to talk to me.
It backtracks and then impulse sends it springing at me a final time. I withdraw the wooden dowels I’ve got in my pocket and bring them against the Dub’s head like cymbals.
There’s a tremendous explosion of flesh and bile, the dowels exposing the Dub’s skull. The monster doesn’t slow, however, raging forward as a shadow falls over us, some figure rising up behind me.
Before I can look back, the Dub’s glassy eyes have rolled up. A look of bafflement comes over the Dub as a hammer violently shatters its forehead.
Rust-colored gore splatters me as the Dub’s body falls on mine. I shrug the corpse aside and spin in every direction, blinded by blood and body fluids.
The roar of the crowd further disorients me as someone, presumably the bearer of that hammer, mutters the word “pussy.” There’s a fusillade of footfalls all around and then a heavy object thumps my neck.
Pain shoots through every quadrant of my body and my legs turn to jelly. Crashing to the ground, the last thing I see is a man leering down at me.
I raise a finger to object to whatever it is that’s about to happen next, but the words die on my lips. I swoon, falling unconscious as darkness smothers me like a blanket.
The End Of Part 1
Thanks for reading VERTICAL CITY, Part 1. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review (yes, it’s a bit of a pain, but reviews are much appreciated).
About The Author
George S. Mahaffey Jr. is a practicing lawyer and screenwriter. His script HEATSEEKERS was bought by Paramount with Michael Bay producing and Timur Bekmambetov directing. In addition, he’s sold or written scripts for Arnold Kopelson, Jason Blum, Benderspink, dir
ector Louis Leterrier, and is the creator of IN THE DUST, an action-horror graphic novel in the vein of 30 DAYS OF NIGHT to be published by Top Cow with art by Christian Duce, and the author of BLOOD RUNNERS, Book 1, and the horror novellas, AMITYVILLE: ORIGINS, RAZORBACKS, RAZORBACKS II, THE PACT, VERTICAL CITY (Parts 1 and 2), as well as the THUNDER ROAD action series (Books 1 and 2).
VERTICAL CITY: A ZOMBIE THRILLER (BOOK 1 OF 4) Page 7