Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  Marisol waited for her eyes to adjust to the gloom inside what had once been a store for young women just like her. Lots of water-damaged but still flashy signage with impossibly-perky, painfully thin girls, most holding up phones or throwing their heads back in laughter, wearing tights and jackets and silly boots manufactured in a country thousands of miles away that had been the de facto dress code for those aged nineteen through thirty-four back before. Marisol made sure there was no one in sight or within earshot, and then she went shopping, sorting through her tiny honeypot of trinkets and bygones.

  She scooped up a ratty dress that lay in the ash of the busted building and held it up to her neckline, standing in front of what was left of a shattered mirror.

  Her head nodded to an imaginary rhythm as she imagined some beat-heavy music playing, and for an instant she was just like any other girl her age, trying on clothes for events that no longer mattered.

  A smile crept across her face and for the first time that she could remember, she saw herself as beautiful.

  But she wasn’t done yet.

  Marisol stared up at the signs of models and mimicked their poses and pouty looks, holding up a blouse, a sweater, a shiny little jacket that had the name of some long dead designer filigreed across the back in cheesy sequins.

  She caught sight of a pair of speakers for music lying under an overturned endcap display and danced a slight dance until a crashing sound out somewhere behind the building, abruptly ending her daydreams, forcing her to draw her pistol and snap the safety off.

  Marisol moved through the building shell to a rear metal door that was pocked and warped. Using the barrel of the pistol, she pushed the door open and saw two figures in the alley across the way. Though she didn’t yet know his name, Elias was there, stooped over a teen boy.

  She watched Elias take the phone and the key from the boy before darting away behind a wall. A moment later, Cozzard and Lout appeared searched the boy, and then pumped silenced rounds into him.

  Marisol had seen so much killing that she didn’t react even as the door blew in on her and the sound forced Cozzard to look her way.

  Tiptoeing back, she stealthed into the heart of the building and then melted out onto the street.

  In a flash, she was running full-speed away from the building, replaying the image of Elias grabbing up the phone and key as he snuck off away from the dead boy.

  Her curiosity tugged at her and she knew she needed to understand, to get the story of what she had just seen. But for now, she simply needed to make sure she was safe, and that meant being as far away from those two goons as possible.

  9

  Longman received news of the boy’s death as he stalked the outer edge of his office like a lion at the zoo. His inner sanctum had been built into the middle of what had been a skyscraper in the old days. The 12th floor in a twenty-five-floor building. It was hidden deep inside the offices of the Codex Guild, the management concern that, for all intents and purposes, ran New Chicago like Capone ran Old Chicago in bygone times.

  In movies and books, the future had always been bright and shiny and sterile with handsome boys and girls running around with magical powers and silly names. In reality, the candles had been blown out on Chicago long before Longman arrived, the skin of the city shriveled and pocked. It was an ugly place, horrid, filled largely with two kinds of people: hunters and prey.

  In the days after he and his army had arrived, he planted a flag and rechristened the city and chose the heartiest amongst his crew to take charge of any endeavors that might resurrect commerce. But the small groups of survivors who’d been in the city before Longman arrived — the “seething rabble,” as Longman called them — they’d been happy living by themselves in one of the tallest buildings downtown, the one that occupied the high ground in the city and afforded those inside unparalleled views of the Great Lakes and the fledgling wall and all the lands that lay beyond.

  Longman was initially patient with the small sect. He recognized that he had the watches and the time, but soon realized if he were unable to work it out, he’d have to act it out. When traditional concepts of negotiation and bargaining ultimately bore no fruit, when Longman was unable to make medicine with the thorn in his side, he held a secret meeting filled with his most loyal cohorts and then sent a host of menacing men out one night, armed with blades and cutting devices and weapons that could silently kill.

  They doused their pine-knot torches and, under cover of a torrential downpour, stormed the building.

  The two sides battled to the death in the high rise, and by daybreak Longman and his people were moving across blood-soaked floors and readying for rebuilding.

  The bodies of those that had been dispatched in the “death-hour” (the young, the old, even the sucking babies) were walled up inside the building and it was made punishable by execution to even whisper about them or the blood-letting that had taken place there. Longman ordered that a few sickly animals be slaughtered and roasted and then feasted on by all his subjects in honor of the victory. He could still remember the taste of the grease and spices, and the way he’d felt he could never eat another meal after that, and been quite content.

  It was here that he proclaimed the year was Zero.

  He called an end to the violence and chose the ancient guilds of Europe as a model for his new Eden and bestowed titles on those who’d done his killing for him. They would operate community branches of the umbrella Codex Guild.

  They partitioned the city into Zones and made certain portions off-limits, setting aside one section of cityscape for punishment and another for the “Crazies,” those citizens (and there were many of them after the world ended) who, without proper psychotropic medication and cerebral conditioning, were unable to function. Rather than put them all down (as many called for), Longman chose, in his eyes, a more benevolent path, and cordoned off a sliver of city land with tall fencing and left them there to fend for themselves in what became Zone 3.

  Zones 1 and 2 were for set aside for living and working, while Zone 4 was readied for storage and supplies.

  Zone 5 was initially proposed as a place to deal with the perpetrators of crime, and initially it was. But as with any fledgling enterprise, the burdens of crime and punishment began to overwhelm the Guild, which was without proper law enforcement or lawyers (whom Longman, via one of his first edicts, banned along with politicians and priests, for he despised ideology above all other things).

  Upon reading a book about the Great Plagues in the days of old, Longman proposed a system be created to quickly and efficiently deal with right and wrong. He’d also heard tales during his military years of a similar and more modern system being used in the Middle East, one that was premised on the remittance of blood money to right certain wrongs. He called his new system Absolution, a mash-up of the old and new. No appeals. No bullshit. Certainty. Closure. What people were crying out for. That was more than five long years ago.

  In the days since, the city’s population steadily increased.

  Over a thousand people currently worked and lived in the building that housed the Codex Guild. The Codex Building had been crudely connected to other nearby structures with metal and other materials to form walkways and flaccid catwalks and ladders that allowed those inside to never touch the ground below unless they so chose. A misshapen middle finger of steel and concrete to all those on the streets below. Like something out of the mind of a great architect gone mad.

  The roofs of the buildings had been shorn off and lengthened and fortified with massive rain barrels and then filled with soil and seeds to form gardens and hydroponic plants that fed all who lived inside.

  Snipers guarded everything, watching down over the hi-rise dwellers with long-barreled rifles and NODs (night-observation devices) that permitted them to see in the dark. They sat in blinds built into the base of the thicket of wind turbines and vast arrays of solar panels that spasmed nearly a day’s worth of electricity to those who lived inside.

/>   Longman had personally overseen the construction of his own dwelling. One quick look at his space revealed that impenetrability had conquered aesthetics.

  He made sure to place his living quarters inside walls built of steel and brick strong enough to withstand a round from any weapon and able to hold back a small army, which would buy him enough time to slip out through one of the numerous hidden passages that lined the walls and corridors of the great halls of the Guild like termite runs inside an old piece of festering wood.

  Outside, in the halls and corridors, his men stood forty strong at all times. Not used-up mongrels like Cozzard and Lout, who were Longman’s street brawlers, his Brownshirts someone had once commented, but former professional soldiers who knew what it meant to take a bullet and carry out orders. None were what had been called “tier-one operators” in the old world; rather, they were general-purpose soldiers.

  Longman was well aware of the omerta, the code possessed by spec-ops soldiers and how unlikely it was they would fall under his spell or do his bidding. He knew that those highly prized soldiers had been some of the very last to fall, protecting the gates of Washington, D.C., for those ungrateful tongue-clucking snowflakes who gave long-winded speeches from a raised building on an accursed hill. These soldiers had been honorable men and women who gave their lives for politicians on both sides of the aisle, people who’d never once had the brass or common decency to don a uniform or carry a gun. He kept a mental log of these soldiers, and any he encountered from well-recognized elements (SEALs, Delta Force, etc.) he poisoned or put down with much cunning and effort. The soldiers that did remain, the forty strong, were more than adequate and formed Longman’s last line of defense. His own private squad of hired killers. They were excellent for a final stand, but for pedestrian matters, street killings and night shankings and the like, he relied on the brawlers.

  Cozzard and Lout shared with Longman the images on a handheld device of the teen boy’s dead body. They also handed Longman the boy’s identification, which showed he came from a family of some repute.

  Longman pursed his lips and gnashed his teeth and stared out a window that allowed a beautiful view of the nearest lake that that appeared as large as an ocean.

  “Did anyone see either of you chase the boy?” he asked his two enforcers. Both men traded looks and then shook their heads.

  “You’re certain?”

  They nodded.

  “He’s just some fodder, boss,” Cozzard muttered.

  “You think I don’t know that? I know exactly who he is and what stock he comes from. He’s an agitator, comes from a long line of them.”

  “The Clement Guild,” Lout noted sourly.

  Longman nodded. “I’ve had trouble with his father and mother for the better part of three seasons. Silently chastising me, complaining about the runs, the operations, everything,” he continued while waving a hand.

  “Nothin’ that a few grains of good ole black powder can’t cure, eh? We should get rid of all of ‘em,” Cozzard said. “Kill ‘em all and line their fields with saltpeter.”

  Longman considered this and then shook his head. “I appreciate your enthusiasm, but we’re not there yet. We need to take care of this in the old manner. Call Hendrix and the Brahmin, have the investigators do what they do and get another hunt together.”

  “Absolution, boss?”

  Longman nodded, dead-eyed his goons, and said, “Make sure O’Shea gets an extra allocation this time. The family’s going to want a spectacle. Their only son has mysteriously died. Make sure the best Runner and the best Ape face off. We need legitimacy for this one. We need to put this issue to rest and then worry about the consequences of the fire.”

  Cozzard and Lout nodded and pivoted to leave, when Longman whispered, “What happened to his camera?”

  The two men froze and slowly turned.

  “Sir?” they both said at the same time.

  “He had something with him, didn’t he? A camera, something that he was recording things with.”

  “We didn’t find nothing’ on ‘im, sir,” Lout muttered. “I swear to Christ there weren’t nothing.”

  Longman’s face fell as he gestured for them to leave, then turned back to the window. He gazed at his subjects on the streets below, wishing, as always, that he could banish the intrusive thoughts that constantly competed for his attention. Like all men preoccupied with power, he was constantly bombarded with dark thoughts like the ones that came to him now. The paranoid visions of unrest, of people whispering about him, of vast conspiracies being plotted at that very moment.

  There were conspiracies after all. There were plots and secrets hidden in plain sight. For instance, most if not all suspected that the event which brought about the end of the world was natural, a massive “Coronal Mass Ejection,” as the scientists called it. But not Longman. He’d seen two pieces of classified intel before the lights went out which suggested otherwise. One contained the thoughts of several analysts, including some from the National Reconnaissance Office, which intimated that the entire occurrence (which happened at just the right time to inflict maximum damage across the globe), had the appearance of having been orchestrated by a powerful, unidentified force.

  The other piece of evidence was simply a curious email from a listening post in the middle of the country, which reported, hours before the solar storm occurred, that an unusual and unknown object had fallen to Earth.

  Longman never forgot the two pieces of evidence. When he assumed control of New Chicago, he sent out expeditions to try and locate the object that had purportedly fallen from the sky. For years, the missions failed to turn up anything, but a recent one, led by a man named Desmond Prophet and a woman named Scarlet Poe, had reported back that they’d found something. A silver object lying hidden in a vast swampland called “The Tanglewood,” an area located more than fifty kilometers from New Chicago.

  Before their communications had ended, they’d mentioned a secret hidden inside the object and Longman was eagerly awaiting their return. In the meantime, he turned his attention back to the dead boy and the missing camera. Seeing his reflection in the window’s glass, Longman cried out. He punched the window, shattering it, then stared at his knuckles as they dripped with blood.

  10

  Elias slid the cellphone and key into a pocket on the inside of his Nomex jacket as he neared the outskirts of the Pits.

  He knew that the phone and key would be immediately confiscated as contraband and that he might be soundly beaten, or, at a minimum, his privileges to venture beyond the confines of the Pits revoked. The exterior sentries recognized him, but failed to notice the thin smears of blood on his dark clothing and nodded as he slipped inside and beelined it to his sleeping quarters.

  Once inside, he doffed his blood-speckled clothes and hid them under his sleeping mattress that lay on the floor.

  He thought about sharing the phone and key with Erik, but had learned over the years that trust was a luxury that could rarely be afforded. Plus, he didn’t want to risk getting Erik involved to the extent that there was any blowback for possessing the device if it was found on him.

  “Training hard today?” Erik asked, wiping sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. “I mean, I saw you out there and I gotta say, man. You are kicking ass and taking numbers.”

  Elias nodded and the two bumped fists. “It’s the only way to stay alive, Erick. I mean that literally.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t make the rest of us look bad.”

  Elias laughed and said, “I’ll try my best, but you gotta meet me half-way.”

  “Hardy har,” Erick said

  He waited until he heard the door click and the shower start, then fumbled with the cellphone. It had been several years since he’d seen such a device and this one differed markedly from those.

  He pressed various buttons until he heard the click and whir of internal machinery and then a glow overtook the face as it powered up.

  He stared at t
he screen and the tiny icons displayed.

  A memory flickered in his mind, mention of something called “apps” in the days before the world fell apart. For a moment he had a memory of fiddling with his father’s cellphone, spending time in the car playing games and watching cartoons. He touched that initial screen and a sub-window popped up.

  There were dozens of files saved inside the sub-window and Elias, spent untold minutes flipping through them. The more he fiddled with the device the easier it became, and soon he was sifting between screens and exploring the phone’s hidden secrets.

  Eventually he settled on a video file, tapping it until the images played. The volume was up and Elias scrambled to mute the device, gazing upon the video as if it were a thing of unparalleled beauty.

  The video showed various shots of Longman and the men Elias had seen back in the alley, Cozzard and Lout, mingling with dozens of people who emerged from hand-me-down cars and trucks and other machinery that belched diesel exhaust. Everyone was being ushered up into the building as the images abruptly cut to some junction later on the same day. The images showed smoke billowing from the building, the audible sound of screams and shrieks, and then Longman, Cozzard, and Lout emerged and pointed as the video ended.

  He trawled to another file and pressed it and up emerged images shot at a distance showing Longman overseeing a firing squad, men with guns mowing down people, mostly old men and women, who stood at the base of a white wall, that quickly became spattered with their blood. Shocked, Elias reacted and quickly closed the file, before opening another. More videos, more images of death and devastation, all of them involving Longman in some form or fashion. Direct evidence of the dictator’s misdeeds.

  Elias looked to see if anyone was coming, then turned back and opened a final folder, which showed an image of a huge field out in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of the field was what looked like a colossal sinkhole, a pit that was filled with a million bleached tree branches.