Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  He watched all of this like God, occasionally picking winners and losers with the push of a button that deposited fire and brimstone down on the unlucky. And by the end of it all, when the power finally winked out and his ammo ran dry, Longman peered around and realized he was it.

  He was the last man standing.

  He watched the drone flit over downtown New Chicago and past the Pits and the Apes’ barracks and the Zones set aside for Absolution. The world would soon be stitching itself back together, Longman thought while looking at the sky overhead. The hunt would soon begin, and blood would be spilled and then all the wrongs committed before the new day would be washed as white as snow.

  18

  Adrenaline leavened Marisol’s steps she churned through the tall grass that blanketed her in every direction.

  The sun was faint overhead, little more than ambient light as Marisol streaked past, barefoot, unarmed, following a path on the ground, moving across lozenges of stone with the grace of a dancer.

  She paused and heard the sound, the unearthly grunts of pursuers. They were coming, the same things that haunted her on occasion in the light and always in her nightmares.

  A flap of movement at the periphery of her vision.

  The tail end of something clutching the shadows, staying low to the ground.

  Her pulse quickened, and then there they were — dark cutouts at first, then mottled forms with rotting flesh. Nearly indefinable, they stumbled up into the light, clawing their way across mounds of fresh earth. Spider holes and duck-backs. Their movements more humanoid than animal, eyes as white as piano keys and sheathed in a layer of loose skin.

  She screamed and turned and ran through the grass that rippled all around her. They were closing fast as Marisol skirted forward, bursting out the other end of the grass maze, and then she was tumbling, falling down an embankment until she came to a rest in a windfall of tombstone-white tree branches.

  Her vision was spotted white and swarmed with stars as she rolled over and pushed herself up on a stout branch that was revealed to be a human bone, a femur.

  She shrieked, recognizing that she was hip-deep in a never-ending boneyard. A pale netherworld of bleached bones and flesh-starved corpses that lay like twisted sculptures.

  Marisol squinted up as her pursuers paraded down the embankment, following her like the fodder from some POV-shooter vid game. The sound of the things echoed behind her, beside her, all around her. They were everywhere now, an immense force that careened down toward her as she grabbed a bone to use as a club, bringing it over her head as she wailed and brought it down. She felt the heft of the bone as it split flesh and cracked bone and then it splintered, but she didn’t stop. She continued to batter her attackers before one of them reared back, mouth open, clamping down on her arm, tearing away a large flap of skin as she roused into consciousness.

  She leapt from this liminal state, fell from her bed in the barracks, and shook off the nightmare.

  Looking through a slit in a faraway wall, she can just make out the sun beginning to peek through. It was nearly time for Absolution to begin. She reached over and plucked up her tactical vest and swung a hand out for her rifle. As the alarm sounded, she lurched from her bed and grabbed her gun and the rest of her gear and made for a nearby exit.

  Elias was already awake and in the back of a militarized Range Rover, driven by Max, his trainer, who’d been conscripted to drop the Runners off at the starting point. Unlike many of the trainers, Max wasn’t a screamer or a brow-beater or “hands on.”

  He preferred to soft pitch everything, and took the time to gently encourage Elias, building him up, reminding him how he’d succeeded with lesser natural talent than that possessed by Elias.

  “Listen, El,” Max said, “You’re gonna do fine, okay? Y’hear me? You’re smarter than them. You’re faster, better, you’re aces, bro, comprende?” Max would’ve made an excellent salesman in the days of old, Elias thought. Elias nodded, his mind wandering as he thought back on the past and his parents and all that he’d done to make it to this point.

  He was glad he could muster some small measure of confidence and honest affection for his accomplishments, but still. His heart was pounding in his ears and he felt something he hadn’t felt in a very long time. Fear.

  Marisol sat with her head bowed in the middle of the tac vehicle as it clipped through the city.

  “What say, girl?”

  She looked up, saw the other Apes snoozing, then shot a sideways glance at Farrow.

  “I had a nightmare,” she said.

  Farrow chuckled. “Christ. Just one?”

  “I dreamed I was on the other side.”

  “Of what? The wall?”

  She shook her head.

  “The grasslands?” he offered, and she nodded.

  “When I came with my family we stopped at the edge of it,” she said.

  “Thankfully you didn’t go in.”

  She inclined her head, freezing him with a look. “What’s on the other side of it? The grasslands, I mean. I’ve heard about The Tanglewood and the Forest of the Night, but do you really know what’s out there?”

  “Monsters,” he replied, his eyes glassy.

  “There are no real monsters,” she replied.

  He fixed a look on her. “What lives and breeds in the far lands is a discussion for another day.”

  “So you’ve been there then? Tell true. You’ve seen what’s beyond it?”

  He leaned into her, whispering conspiratorially, “Nobody goes over the wall, squid, without specific permission.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s for our own good.”

  “But why?” she asked.

  His face clouded.

  “Now is the not the time to talk about things that aren’t good for either of us.”

  “When, then?”

  “Later.”

  “It’s always later with you,” she hissed.

  He grabbed her wrist with such force that she nearly yelped and touched her forehead with his. “You know why it’s not smart to ask so many questions? Sometimes you get answers. Understand? So if you wanna live to see another sunrise, you’ll let it go.”

  Her eyes never strayed from his. “I don’t care if I see another sunrise.”

  Farrow nodded and smirked, “Oh, so you’re a natural hardass, eh, Marisol? A true warrior?” She didn’t respond, surprised that he’d used her real name. He clapped his hands and said, “Guess it’s all meant to be, huh? This whole thing’s perfect for you. You’re the star of Absolution and it don’t matter what the outcome is because warriors were meant to die in battle, right?”

  She turned from him and gripped her rifle and spotted Harrigan watching her while simultaneously grabbing a cylindrical grenade-launcher as the ceiling lights flashed green and the rear of the machine dropped open with a thunderous roar.

  Elias already had his nose pressed to the ground when the siren ripped the air, signaling the beginning of the run, what some called “The Harrowing.”

  He was watching Marisol and the others exit their transport machine from a nook nearly a quarter-mile away, hidden adjacent to a scarp of rock that jutted out behind an old smelting plant.

  His gaze blurred into middle distance, enabling him to barely make out their forms. He couldn’t discern faces or details, just the faintest outline of the Apes as they formed ranks and moved out.

  He wrapped a scarf that resembled a keffiyeh around his face and donned a pair of black sports goggles so that his eyes looked like two small fires burning inside a cave.

  Elias reached inside his disposable plastic pouch and held up a thin needle which housed a dose of epinephrine — “liquid scream,” as Max called it. He chewed off the cap on the needle and exposed a bit of thigh flesh and plunged the needle in.

  Tossing the spent needle aside, he wormed down the rock and checked the watch that had been strapped to his wrist, which started blinking down… 59:58.

  He had to last a
n hour or make it past the Apes into the safe-lands near the bottom of Zone 5.

  He hopped onto a wall cast from cement and dropped to his haunches and glassed the land that spooled out in front of him with his hands.

  Elias watched the Apes tread through a narrow corridor between blocks of former two-story buildings that had gone to seed. They were bottled up with little room to maneuver, but were fanning out. Down to his left lay a rusted metal chute that jutted out of the broken windows of a building that once housed a drywall manufacturing plant. Elias’s real father was a construction hand in the old era, and he remembered seeing such a place, where glops of slurry were squirted onto the chute and then dried and cut and stacked to form a building material called drywall.

  The chute angled down perfectly, allowing Elias (if he could remain unseen) to nimble past the Apes, then drop to the ground, blowing past the Apes and sprinting to safety.

  He held the high ground presently, but it was only a matter of time before one of them spotted him. From his perch, he could see the tall, thin figure sprinting out ahead of the other Apes. The figure, whose face was obscured, moved faster than the others and seemed to be leading them. He would have to act quickly.

  Elias sunk to his belly and began crawling down the chute, which was suspended twenty feet off the ground but visible to the Apes through gaps in the building’s shattered windows.

  Flinty eyes swept the streets and grounds ahead. Farrow was on point behind Marisol, searching for any hint of movement. The Apes had itchy trigger-fingers. Harrigan errantly let loose with a burst from his grenade launcher, collapsing a shuttered liquor store whose inventory and fixtures had been pilfered during the calamity.

  Marisol cocked her head and checked the display on her HUD and then jogged out ahead of the others. She turned a corner and stopped, then did what she did best: listen. The sounds came to her.

  Heavy breathing.

  Shoes pounding on concrete.

  She registered the purr of fabric flapping as she ducked through an alleyway just in time to see the boy tuck his elbows and prepare to drop from the chute.

  The boy hung, suspended in the air, and then dropped.

  His hands snapped out for a drain pipe that he grabbed and used to whip his body forward.

  Marisol pulled up her rifle and sighted it down, but a second of indecision was all it took and Elias was gone from view.

  Without alerting the others, she ran laterally through a wasted storefront, heading toward the rear to cut Elias off, a back door coming up fast. Marisol jump-kicked it open as — BOOM! — the door exploded into Elias, knocking him sideways.

  The boy dropped to the ground and assumed a position akin to a person doing pushups: hands out shoulder-width, feet planted and cocked in the soft soil.

  He resembled some kind of insect with his goggles and scarf.

  He hesitated, rose to his knees, and then she was on him.

  19

  Elias groaned, picked himself back up, and then braced himself as he realized someone was standing over him.

  The butt of Marisol’s rifle came down across his trap muscles, instantly timbering him back to his knees.

  He felt something waver the air near his head and then Marisol’s leg caught him near his right ear.

  Elias threw out his palms and fought to stabilize himself.

  Glancing up, he saw Marisol bring the rifle around to aim at him

  WHACK!

  He flicked a boot at the last second, tipping the rifle barrel up as Marisol fired a burst that ripped the air.

  The recoil unsteadied her, buying Elias precious seconds.

  He scooped a handful of dirt and flung it in her face as she crabbed back. He staggered to his feet like a newborn colt and took off on a run, lowering a shoulder, upending her.

  He drove her into the ground and then slugged her jaw.

  She absorbed the blow and returned it with a nasty jab that pistoned his throat and sent him reeling. He was shocked at how much power the girl packed in her punches.

  Marisol’s hands ripped the scarf from Elias’s face and she gasped audibly when she saw him under it.

  It was the same boy she’d seen take the cellphone from the other one who’d been murdered by Longman’s men!

  “YOU?!” she shrieked.

  Elias had no idea who she was, and so he pulled back a fist to strike a more serious blow, girl or no girl, and that’s when he saw them: the other Apes appearing in the distance, trailing the faint echo of her gunfire.

  Elias spun on his heels, and took off across a weed-strewn lot as the Apes took up firing positions.

  Harrigan was the first to fire, bellowing as he let loose with his launcher, flinging a grenade that spun past and air-burst in the vicinity of Elias.

  The explosive backwash threw Elias sideways with such force that it looked like he’d been pulled on an invisible string.

  Grunting to catch his breath, Elias shook off the shock and the thrumming in his ears and sprinted across open ground as bullets churned the ground all around him. He dove as little geysers of dirt rose up from the Apes’ bullets.

  He fumbled his way into an empty sewer pipe and elbowed forward and out the other end, and then clipped to his feet and hit a perimeter fence.

  He hauled himself over, bloody and torn by tangles of concertina wire, as Marisol watched the Apes fire a blizzard of bullets at him, emptying out their rifles, slapping clips in, firing again.

  Farrow lowered his smoking rifle and turned to gauge Marisol’ s reaction, but she was nowhere to be seen. She was on her own, moving in for the kill.

  Overhead, Longman’s drone was capturing the action in real time, beaming it back to Longman who reacted at the sight of the grenade exploding. He blanched when he saw Elias rise and run off, wondering just who the hell this boy was to survive an explosive detonation nearly right above his head. He watched the images change as the drone circled, the time clock counting down at 41:24 and dropping as Elias entered the lower Zones that were awash in booby-traps. He’d seen older, more experienced Runners survive the Harrowing, but never one as young as the boy. The odds were good Longman thought. It would be only a matter of time before he was struck dead.

  He gaped back at the handful of people who were similarly watching the macabre spectacle of the hunt from one of the verandas on the Codex building. Other principals in the Codex and various lesser Guilds, along with Hendrix and Moses O’Shea. People who had an interest in maintaining order and the new ways. Longman thought they resembled the revelers who came out to watch the First Battle of Bull Run in another war that was long forgotten.

  He turned and moved through the onlookers like some illustrious potentate, taking in their anxious, wide-eyed faces, listening to their murmurs.

  They appraised him with various looks: fear, hatred, and something that bordered on adoration. It was far better to be feared than loved, and most feared Longman. A few were even bold enough to whisper that they knew Longman’s secret, that he alone had possession of a small device (allegedly kept on his person at all times) synched to one of still-functioning satellites that could trigger a weapon that would truly end the world. Whether this was a black lie or simple hearsay, it had the unmistakable ring of truth to it, especially in light of all that Longman had done (and the fake stories he had his propaganda officers spread). He turned from his followers, not a hint of panic or urgency in his face and gazed upon the downtown cityscape, wondering how long it would be before the blood of the boy would be shed.

  20

  The echo of gunshots and the dull thud of Harrigan’s grenade caused necks to crane down in the industrial hinterlands that bordered the Absolution Zones. A pack of Scrappers of various ages turned from prying piping and wires from the wreckage of a former consumer-electronics showroom.

  The Scrappers, three adults and a teen, hustled over to a section of fence that wreathed Zone 5 and gazed at Elias as he streaked by on the other side, maybe 100 yards away.

&n
bsp; The Apes appeared next, pouring down over an embankment like fire ants as they took potshots at Elias, who bobbed and weaved to avoid their bullets.

  The Scrappers took it in and, all of them having run afoul of what passed for law enforcement under Longman’s reign at some point in the past, were not naturally inclined to root for the Apes, and so they thrust fists up into the air and cheered for Elias.

  Elias galloped down a hillside, leg clipping an exposed root that sent him into an unchecked swoon. He tumbled elbows-over-ass past and down until he lay splayed on an old, soiled mattress.

  He bellied across the mattress and bolted to his feet as bullets shredded the foliage around him. Back up on the hillside, emotion had overtaken Marisol, who triggered her gun, the wax-laden bullets inside lasering down at Elias like tracer-rounds.

  Her line of fire followed him as he juked across a field and into a building, the bullets shattering brick and mastic just behind his head and across the façades of the big-box and franchise stores that had been built back during the years of gentrification.

  Elias plunged through a section of cement conduit that was tall enough to fit three men side-by-side. His vision whited out as he burst from the other end and skidded to a stop in a section of downtown that had been walled off in the past with concrete jersey walls. Catching his breath, he checked his watch — 38:39 left — as he looked over his shoulder and caught the faintest hint of one of the Apes signaling for the others to follow.

  He turned and scanned the road before him.

  The artery was once a thick strip of asphalt coated cement, but now was little more than dirt and gravel. He discerned a section of the road where what appeared to be fresh soil had been packed. The slightest of lumps was covered by the soil and Elias bent and grabbed a clutch of wet newspaper, some of the fake newspapers that Longman had distributed, and crept up to the edge of the fresh pack and used the paper to conceal it.