Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

They packed their world into the back of a school-bus-sized SUV and thundered off in the dark of the night, taking back roads and staying off main thoroughfares and other arteries overseen by what was left of the National Guard.

  They listened to the radio and heard politicians and scientists offer words of calm assurance while pontificating about how things were going to be rebuilt and order restored, even though his father was convinced the fabric of society was torn beyond repair. His old man was a bootstrapper and believed the world had gone soft, too reliant on handouts and bailouts. “The safety net’s become a hammock,” he was known to say. He was eternally pessimistic in the later days, but Elias and his family nevertheless prayed for good tidings.

  They never made it to their shelter. They were run off the road by a cordon of men and boys in pickup trucks who descended on them like wolves as a car full of dirty cops watched and laughed and egged them on.

  The attack was sudden and swift, but Elias’s mother and father were ready. Elias’s father told the boys to stay low in the backseat as he pulled a sawed-off shotgun out and gutshot the first man through the driver-side window. The man’s stomach opened like a sandwich bag as Elias’s father kicked his door open and took a knee and began giving and receiving.

  He dropped three more attackers before a round chewed into his neck, and down he went for good.

  Elias’s mother screamed as a sweat-salved man slid over the hood, heaved her door open, and pawed at her.

  As she was spun around by the attacker, Elias’s mother drew a dagger hidden near her ankle and plunged it into the man’s neck. A cord of red glazed Elias’s pants as he stared at the blood, wondering whether what he was seeing was real.

  Elias’s mother stabbed two more men and sliced open a third before she was ripped screaming and gnashing from the car.

  The doors were pulled open, and Elias dropped to the ground in the confusion and slid under the SUV to hide.

  He watched in horror as they stole his two brothers away. Each breath felt like it would be his last as his muscles clenched and insides churned, but he held on, still hiding. He held on for dear life as the vehicle was driven off and soon deposited inside a nearby impoundment lot.

  After he was sure the attackers were gone, he dropped from the car. Rolling aside and stretching to get his aching limbs to move again, he looked inside the only building of any measure within sight. Seeing no sign of his mother and brothers, he ran off through an industrial yard and collapsed at the edge of a field hemmed in on all sides by an orchard.

  It wasn’t much later when he was taken in by a childless couple that owned the land.

  His new dad was fair, but stern. His mind was differently circumstanced from Elias’s real father. He focused on core principles, basic things related to the elements and the land. He taught Elias how to work hard, how to craft things from refuse, how to live off what could be grown or gathered.

  The years went by and Elias grew and worked in the fields and orchards, harvesting and canning and readying for the unknown.

  He also ran. He’d sprint around a circular path his new father had pounded into the ground around the orchard. There wasn’t a reason to run back then, other than health, but his new father had been a runner in his younger days. If Elias thought there was a way to connect with this man, to keep him closer, he was damn sure going to do it.

  He even remembered a time, just that one time, when he had come running around the bend to find his father standing there, hands in his pockets, a broad smile spread across his face. But more than that, it was the look in his father’s eyes that had made the memory stick--that look of pride.

  Times were good, at least for a short while.

  His new father and mother knew much, but nobody at that point had heard about the Thresher. It was by that time several years after the Unraveling, and stories had only recently begun to filter out: rumors about other “survivors,” great masses of people who’d lost their sight and had their minds somehow murderously reformatted when the sky fell.

  Word was these roaming packs had taken root out in the suburbs and the lands beyond, but were now constantly in motion, hunting, moving in such great numbers that they beat down the grass and vegetation like the reaping machines of old. Hence their nickname: “the Thresher.”

  They came for Elias’s family, dozens of them, in the slow and hushed silence of an autumn evening.

  Elias saw the first one in the candlelight from the kitchen.

  The thing had once been a man, now bald, with skin as tight as a drum-cover, snugged over bony appendages and with jagged teeth that had been whittled down naturally over time to points.

  His new father fought like a force of nature, dispatching many of them that night, the house clouded with plumes of cordite and explosive backwash as he fired out guns and tossed homemade incendiaries and explosives.

  Elias watched as the things burst into flames from the firebombs, running to and fro like ambulatory torches. They crashed and burned in droves and set the fields afire, but there were too many. When one fell, another took its place. Over and over they kept coming, like the brooms after that mouse in an animated movie that Elias had once watched.

  His father sensed the inevitable and shoved Elias out through an upstairs window as a gnarled talon hooked around his neck and snapped it back.

  Hazarding a final look over his shoulder, Elias saw the things bent over his father and mother, snatching up hunks of flesh and handfuls of dark, shiny gore out of their still-writhing bodies. He could have gone back to help, but seized by fear, chose flight over fight.

  Elias dropped to the ground and dove between the legs of a Thresher and rolled over and peered up at a slavering frenzied mass of veins and gangrenous, snapping teeth.

  He combat-rolled to his left and was off and running faster than anyone his age should’ve been able to run. Across the rotting fields and down through the treeline he scrambled, the Thresher giving chase behind him, bellowing like herds of panicked swine. Elias was faster than any of them would ever be as he met the Chicago River and took cover along its matted banks.

  He soon fell in with a disreputable flock of river bandits for a hot minute, and when the going got too rough, he left them one night. He thought it might be because the desire to fight back had left him after his parents died, but he was always leaving somewhere behind.

  Always running.

  And so he came to abandon the bandits and follow the river into the city and eventually, after several months of being a petty criminal and street urchin, fell under the watch of Moses O’Shea.

  Most of those in New Chicago had no earthly idea what lay on the other side of the wall, but Elias did. He knew all too well about the things that shambled around in the dark, but he mostly kept those traumatic memories to himself.

  He shrugged off thoughts of the past and continued his run past a former municipal sewer system that still reeked of death and decay. He stopped to catch his breath and stared into the water. Still dirty, but a few fish swam there now.

  Overhead, there were flocks of birds, including larger ones that dropped down and plucked up smaller surface fish every now and again. Without man, the air was cleaner. Some of the water was beginning to grow clearer, and animals that most had not seen in many years were reappearing in greater numbers. There were some days Elias wasn’t entirely convinced that the Unraveling hadn’t been a blessing in disguise, at least on some cosmic level. There seemed to be so much more life after all the death.

  He trotted down over a ridgeline to see the city’s skyline, maybe two miles distant. Faster he ran, past concrete drainpipes and defunct water purification plants, Elias supremely in the zone, running at a level where thought and action were nearly seamless when something else, a teen boy, staggered into him and down he went.

  6

  Elias felt pangs of panic as a boy fell on him. He pitched sideways in the alley, struggling to recover his footing and get a view of his attacker.

  B
ut before he was even free, he felt swatches of hot blood as the boy crumpled into a fetal ball.

  A deep, pained moan escaped the boy and he was clearly shivering.

  Elias had seen enough to know the boy was severely injured; his outer jacket was marinated in gore, and his balled right fist lay extended.

  The boy’s eyes fluttered open for an instant and fixed on Elias. His fist opened, and a tiny cellphone—that could almost be mistaken for a camera—and key, fell from it.

  The boy forced himself to head-bob in the direction of the phone and key as Elias took them up, wiping a smear of blood from the face of the phone.

  The boy gestured for Elias to draw near, and as he did, the boy whispered, “They’re coming.”

  “I can help you.”

  “It’s … too late,” the boy said, his eyes rolling back.

  The not-too-distant sound of pounding footfalls forced Elias to look up and then scamper back into the shadows of the alley. He caught the faint outlines of Cozzard and Lout drawing near. He slithered back a few more feet, cast a final look at the boy, and then turned a corner, listening to the sounds of silenced gunshots as Longman’s brutes finished the boy off.

  Elias stopped and pressed himself against a garage, making his form as small as possible. He waited, and then cursed when he saw his jacket was stained with the boy’s blood.

  Staring at the phone and key, he wondered what the hell could be so important, so worth dying and killing over.

  Finally, when he had strained his ears and heard nothing more, he ran with all his might back in the direction he’d just come from.

  7

  Marisol waited in line for lunch along with the other Apes. They were receiving their rations from the sustenance couriers that worked for the Codex Guild. The Guilds got their shares first, then the soldiers that guarded the wall and downtown, then those owed favors by Longman, the Runners, and finally the Apes.

  She grabbed a plate of mashed root vegetables and some steaming gray meat and sat down next to Farrow at a long table.

  She sighed. ‘Sitting down for lunch with a bunch of sweaty men eating mystery meat. Does it get any better than this, Farrow?”

  “You don’t have to stay if you don’t like it,” Jimmy Sikes replied. “There are worse things than being an Ape.”

  Her eyes found his. “Like what, Sikes? Being the unlucky lady who’s got to sleep next to you at night?”

  Farrow guffawed at this, but Sikes seethed. Farrow watched Marisol eye down Sikes who sat cleaning his rifle at the end of the table, sucking on the half of his tongue that was left after Marisol had bitten the other half off during an ill-fated attempt to assault her.

  Sikes had learned his lesson, as had the others. They all went at her back when she was green and unsure of herself, lunging at her in the shower and in the barracks, making feels for her in the shadows of the tac vehicle and even when they were out on their hunts. But no longer.

  Marisol was strong now, stronger than she knew and far more skilled than any of the Grizz or the other Apes.

  Indeed, the scuttlebutt said that the men of means in the Guilds were reportedly keeping a fast eye on her, and Farrow had every reason to believe that one day she would be plucked up and seated at the right hand of Longman as head of what amounted to his Praetorian Guard.

  He hoped she remembered him when she came into her kingdom.

  Farrow sat munching his food, contemplating the fact that he knew much more than he let on to most people. For example, he knew firsthand how bad things had been after First Light.

  He remembered in vivid detail how society had fallen to its knees two weeks after the grids collapsed and then crumpled to its belly three weeks later when the food stopped flowing and the power failed to come back on.

  He recalled how after Washington fell largely silent and the military focused on New York and Los Angeles and Dallas and the rebuilding that eventually proved futile, the gangs and roving packs of anarchists began to gain ground and sack smaller cities like Hartford, and Trenton, and even Baltimore.

  Farrow remembered how only a few months after the machines stopped, the madness that had always been whispered about was out in the streets. The cities had fallen with breathtaking speed, and the void was quickly filled by men like Longman. Men with connections, with access to the only remaining things that mattered: weapons and fuel and the lack of hesitation to use both with force and impunity.

  There were many legends about just exactly how Longman came to assume his position at the head of New Chicago’s Guilds. Stories about how the “Lord of Misrule” had led a great force of irregular soldiers out to confront warring masses from a violent city to the south.

  A great pitched battle was supposedly fought out on the Plains, a mini-war of attrition that ended with Longman bravely leading a final charge that resulted in close-quarters combat and the ancient sounds of fighting, the echo of stone and wood against bone and flesh.

  Marisol’s family had been part of one of the battles, her father allegedly a soldier fighting at the foot of Longman. He’d died somewhere out beyond the wall, along with the rest of Marisol’s family.

  This was what Marisol had confided in him, but Farrow suspected different. Farrow was not yet a part of the system back then. He’d only recently been forced to seek shelter inside the wall, taken in by a veteran of the battles, a former Army Ranger who confided to Farrow that history was written with the blood of the vanquished and that all was not as he’d heard.

  The Ranger told Farrow many things. He mentioned the war that had once been fought against an alien invasion so long ago. The one that had been turned back by a resistance allied with units of Marines led by a female warrior named Quinn. He also told Farrow that Longman hadn’t been any defender, but an aggressor. A man who was a purveyor of “FUD,” the Ranger said. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. A feckless tyrant who’d ginned up an army of the downtrodden and raided several weapons caches (that only he knew about) and then moved out to confront any encampment that lay before him. Longman and his army, the Ranger said, had laid siege to nearby settlements, waited them out, then breached their defenses, murdered their inhabitants, and set the torch to anything that couldn’t be consumed or carried off. They’d done the same to any settlers or stragglers they’d encountered, stealing from them and then putting them to the sword.

  Though he’d never seen it himself, the Ranger confided that there was allegedly a great open pit in the middle of the Q-Zone where all of Longman’s victims had been dumped. There was even talk that the Thresher did not exist, but merely had been conjured up as a way of preventing people from venturing out of the city into the Q-Zone.

  “But surely there were those who could’ve taken a stand against Longman,” Farrow had pondered to the Ranger.

  “Sure,” the Ranger acknowledged the logic of this, then leaned in and whispered, “Longman was made aware of military secrets in the days before the Unraveling. He was able to utilize this information to gain access to some great weapon (which was unknown to the Ranger, though he harbored dark suspicions) whose very existence, whose threat of use, was sufficient to force the other survivors and members of the Guilds to fall in behind Longman, lock-step.”

  Farrow sat there, lost in his thoughts, still pondering how a country that had existed for hundreds of years could collapse in a matter of months. A finger tapped his shoulder.

  “I’m going outside,” Marisol said.

  Farrow shook off his daze. He slurped up a pool of food, cocked his head sideways. “What’s out there?”

  “Something new,” she responded with a shrug. “Don’t you get tired of sitting in here?”

  He considered this, shook his head. “No, because I know what’s out there.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s why I stay in here.” He grinned as she played with her food, not amused by his response.

  He could see her pout and so Farrow leaned over the table. “Listen, kiddo, if you really wanna
see what the bright lights and big city are all about, have at it.”

  She perked up. “You mean it?”

  “Sure. Ole Farrow’ll see the head honchos myself, put in a good word, hook you up with a pass so you can follow the course and detour it down past the greenery.”

  “Anyone ever tell you, you rule, Farrow?”

  “Nope, but I love hearing it.”

  She smiled and it was in moments like these that Marisol most reminded him of his daughter.

  Later that afternoon, Farrow approached her as she was doing one-armed pushups in the barracks and handed her a scroll with a red stamp. “Good to go, young lady,” he said.

  She hugged him, grabbed a flak jacket and a pistol, glanced down at her Sigil, the unique I.D. tattoo branded on the palm of her hand that identified her as an Ape. Then she looped a rucksack over one arm and was off through a side door.

  8

  Marisol moved briskly on a path stamped by the Guild for the Apes, a protected trail that snaked through a snarl of vegetation that was off-limits to the general populace. It was one of the few nice things afforded the Apes, and Marisol loved its view of the cityscape. She clipped along the outer hub of moldering apartment buildings, past a rusted sign for South Ashland Avenue, and toward a crude suspension bridge that spanned the river.

  At its edge she paused to run her hand across the metal and breathe in the fresh morning air.

  Moving across the bridge, she eyed a few acres of land in the middle of it; what was once a park was now choked with weeds and sunbleached signs that spoke of the history in the times of the machines.

  She walked down sidewalks, past a few gawkers who gave her a wide berth after spotting her Sigil, and beside urban farms that had been built upon cubes of asphalt and concrete.

  Shimmying up a decaying telephone pole, she glanced at the Great Lakes that glimmered like a mirage out in the distance. She stopped and gaped into the taped windows of stores that once sold household goods and liquor and tickets for games of chance. Moving aside a piece of detached plywood, she eased through a gap and into a store she’d secretly visited many times before.