Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  “Forgive me,” Farrow said under his breath.

  Cozzard leaned his greasy face to within an inch of Farrow. Farrow could smell the funk of sweat and piss on Cozzard who was smirking, brushing back a lock of his greasy hair, licking his lips.

  “Forgive ya, for what?” Cozzard hissed.

  “For what I’m gonna do to you.”

  Longman’s men cackled and Cozzard jammed his fist into the middle of Farrow’s back, but his smirk had melted away.

  A similar scene unfolded at the Pits, where Longman’s men tossed the joint, shaking everyone down, snuffing out the celebratory fires and aiming their guns at anyone who cracked back.

  Moses was there. He couldn’t say that he didn’t expect this, but how quickly it all unfolded was a surprise. He didn’t put up a struggle, didn’t offer any salty words in reply. Nope, he simply kept his eyes downcast, led off at gunpoint, protesting all the while, telling anyone who’d listen that he had no idea where Elias was.

  25

  At that very moment, Elias peeked outside the door and saw and heard nothing. Whatever had been there before was long gone. He was just about to turn the knob when a hand grabbed his wrist. His eyes enlarged at the sight of… Marisol!

  It was his turn to yell “YOU?!” as she emitted an unearthly shriek and shoved Elias back on his ass. Her immediate reactions were born more out of fear than anger, and when he spit at her, she raised a fist and threw a haymaker that Elias deftly stepped under.

  Marisol dropped her rucksack and swung repeatedly at Elias, who groped for anything and found a length of rubberized conduit that he gripped in his right hand. He swung it at Marisol, wildly at first, then with measured scythes, connecting against her shoulder as she dipped and punted him in the ribs. Elias fell backward, crashing through the diorama. Marisol jumped at him and he planted a boot in her midsection and flicked her back into a wall.

  Marisol rolled over. A low-throated snarl escaped from her mouth, and in a blitz of tangled limbs she was on the attack again. Right punch, then left, all manner of jabs following.

  Marisol’s wrists and hands were chopping the air like the blades on some mechanized machine. Elias fought her off even as she landed blows, bloodying his lip and his nose as he flat-palmed her forehead, sending her back.

  He grabbed the leg of a fallen table, wrenched it free, and brought it around like a baseball bat, cracking Marisol across the knees so that she dropped like a bag of bricks. He moved over to her, unsure of what to do, as she whipped out a collapsible baton and cracked him across the ankles. Down he fell until he was resting near her, the two side-by-side, gasping for air, faces twisted in pain.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Elias groused.

  “Following you,” she said.

  “You tried to kill me before, you crazy bitch!”

  “That’s my job.”

  “The hunt’s over. I won.”

  “Because I failed.”

  Elias smirked and whispered, “I beat you. I beat all of you.” She remained silent as he righted himself and looked at the trashed room.

  “I saw you before,” Marisol eventually responded. “That’s how I knew. I saw you kill that boy back in the alley.”

  Elias flipped her Caleb’s badge. “He was dead when I found him.”

  “Didn’t look that way to me.”

  Elias pivoted and looked at her as she stood and dusted herself off. “How come you didn’t step in if you were so damn concerned about him?”

  “Wasn’t my fight.”

  “And what? This is?”

  “No,” she replied. “I guess this is something else. This is… personal.”

  “Why? You pissed because I kicked your ass during Absolution?”

  “You wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t willed it.”

  Elias laughed at this, shaking his head.

  “You gonna finish the job right now, girl?”

  “I’ll get back to you on that,” she said.

  She brushed warily past Elias and looked around the room, making sure to keep her baton in one hand, her eyes glued on Elias. “What is this?”

  “The dude who died, Caleb. This was his.”

  “How’d you find it?”

  “I just did, okay?”

  They traded a long look, Elias unwilling to offer up any information on the cellphone and key as she asked, “Was he a Crazy?”

  “Looks that way, huh?”

  She scanned the photos of Longman, the images of him engaged in brutality. Her attention turned to the diorama of the city and the tunnel, which she picked up as it broke into pieces.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the city,” he said.

  “I can see that.”

  “Then why’d you ask?”

  She pointed to the tunnel. “It goes under?”

  He swiped the piece of the tunnel away. “It’s nothing, okay? That kid, this whole thing, it’s bullshit.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the instructions to the tunnel that peeked out of a pocket on Elias’s pants.

  “None of your business.”

  She grabbed for them and he shoved her back, and now the two were facing off again like prizefighters. That’s when they heard it. The sound of the front door to the building being ripped off and then a blitzkrieg of voices shouting in disparate tongues.

  “They’re coming! The Crazies!” Marisol cried as Elias searched for a way out. Marisol closed and locked the door to the room, but it would only hold for a few moments as she turned over tables, looking for something, anything to use as a barricade.

  Elias grabbed a poster-sized image of Longman and ripped it down to reveal a trapdoor hacked into a section of fiberboard on a rear wall.

  He pulled on a cord that centered the faux wood, and the door opened to reveal HVAC ductwork that he climbed into. Marisol cast one last look over her shoulder and saw the door being pried open and then the first face poked in. The face of a Loon, one of the Crazies, whose eyes were saucering. Long strings of saliva dripped from a mouth that hung perpetually adroop. The Loon pointed at Marisol, and the others rampaged past him as she turned toward Elias, who’d vanished into the ductwork. She crawled and grabbed her rucksack and headed in after him.

  26

  Moses O’Shea sat cuffed with a loop of metal wire in the back of one of Longman’s SUVs. He was breathing heavily, but felt things could be much worse. The morons that Longman sent hadn’t found his stash under the floor of the desk, and therefore didn’t know the full extent of his wagering on the hunts or how he’d occasionally manipulated them (and Ephraim Jax would never rat on him, for to do so would also mean his own death).

  He mentally scrolled through various scenarios and realized most would not end particularly well for him. Still, there was no evidence linking Moses directly to anything (not that there had to be in Constitution-less New Chicago), and he could always fall back on the argument that should Elias be found unharmed, he would make sure that he was immediately pressed into service for Longman, whatever that might mean. Moses watched the lights from the Codex Building stabbing the black sky through the windshield and he muttered a prayer to himself, for whatever it was worth.

  Several people, including two spies, had spotted Marisol and Elias entering Zone 3 and this, coupled with the footage that Hendrix had viewed, allowed Longman’s men to roughly determine Marisol’s and Elias’s position.

  Believing that the girl might be surprised to see a friendly face, the decision had been made to have Farrow accompany the dictator’s pursuit team and soon he was at the head of the procession, twelve men in all, leading Longman’s enforcers down through the paths that snaked to Zone 3. His eyes skipped around in the semi-gloom, trying to discern whether there was a way out of this. He saw no good end, not with eleven of Longman’s thugs, all heavily armed, keeping an eye on him.

  He heard the shouts before they got within a thousand yards of the Zone 3 fencing. Howls and guffaws and soul-sh
attering screams. Longman’s men readied their guns and snapped back firing bolts as they crested a hill of crud that loomed over Zone 3. All of them could see the bedlam taking place within the fencing, the Crazies flooding the building where Elias and Marisol were struggling to exit.

  “There!” Cozzard shouted. “She’s in there!”

  Lout jammed a gun in Farrow’s back and handed Farrow a pistol. “Don’t go gettin’ any ideas, big man,” Lout hissed. “Only two rounds in it. Just enough to do the job.”

  “What job?”

  “You’re gonna do it, you stupid bastard. You’re gonna light that friggin’ girl up.”

  Elias flew through the ductwork on his hands and knees, Marisol closely behind him. The metal passage sagged under their weight, zigzagging across the structure until it hit a section of grating. They paused, still listening to the sounds of the Loons echoing far behind them.

  “What now?” Marisol asked.

  “We choose what’s behind the first door,” Elias responded, gesturing to the grating. They worked as a team, each grabbing one side of the grating and prying back until zip screws popped free. They peered into the abyss on the other side of the grating. All was in formless darkness. After a beat, their eyes adjusted and they could see that a metal chute led directly down. Elias reached for the chute and then hesitated.

  Marisol appraised him. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” he replied, shaking his head. “It’s just I used to climb through a chute like this every afternoon when I first got here.”

  “You mean to New Chicago?”

  “No, to Disney Land.”

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “I wasn’t like you okay,” he replied. “I had to sneak into the city with a bunch of stragglers. Guards didn’t even see me. First time I saw downtown I thought this place was gonna be a paradise.”

  Marisol rolled her eyes. “Boy were you wrong.”

  “I had nothing, nobody, and so I had to steal food at first. Found a way to sneak through the sewer chutes and heist food from the city supplies down past Zone 3. Took the lifers four months to catch me.”

  “You’re lucky you’re alive.”

  Elias nodded. “One of the guards saw something in me. Said he admired the way I moved. He was the one who told me to try out to be a Runner.”

  He thought about this and laughed to himself. “I guess once a criminal always a criminal, huh?”

  Screamed echoed behind them and Marisol nodded. Elias entered first and let himself fall. She watched him whoosh down into the blackness and then followed after him.

  They whipped past and down in the chute, moving at incredible speed. Elias bit back a scream when — WHOOMPH! — he hit the end of the chute and was propelled through the air and through a section of styrofoam and thin, wooden sheathing before crashing to a stop on a grassy knoll behind the building. Marisol landed on top of him. He grunted and shoved her aside, only to be kicked when she rolled over and pressed to her feet.

  They barely had a chance to see where they were when the beams from the flashlights held in the hands of Cozzard and the others streaked overhead. Elias grabbed Marisol and pulled her to the ground, a finger pressed to his lips.

  “Stay down, idiot. God you’re dumb.”

  She smacked him in the side of the head and fixed a look on Longman’s men, then grabbed a handful of Elias’s shirt when the first Loon burst out of the building behind them. Then another, and another… a whole retinue of marauders barreling out through sections of storage walls that collapsed like wet cardboard.

  Farrow clutched his pistol, disoriented by the lights and the keening whine of the Loons and the forms that swung in from the shadows. Cozzard and Lout overreacted like the unprofessional boobs that they were. Rather than taking the time to properly target, they hitched up their rifles and urged their brethren to lay down suppressive fire as their weapons spit tongues of orange and red.

  Elias and Marisol hit the ground as the Loons were riddled all around them. Marisol looked up at some of the Loons. It appeared as though they were dancing in the hail of gunfire, marionettes kept aloft by the hot lead fired by Longman’s men. Marisol rolled over and spotted Elias making a break for it, and so she ran after him and tackled him down a hillside that was just out of sight of Cozzard, Lout, and the others, even as the battle raged above them.

  “The hell’s the matter with you?!” Elias screamed.

  “I’m not taking the blame for this!”

  “Yeah, well, you’re on your own, whatever your go-by is.”

  “It’s Marisol. My name’s Marisol—”

  “Elias,” Elias said through clenched teeth.

  “Well, Elias, we both know a secret, don’t we? We’re involved in some pretty bad stuff. What’re the odds that Longman lets us live after this?”

  Elias didn’t respond. He didn’t have to. They both knew the answer, and so the two rose together reluctantly and watched the Loons move like an army of gypsies, grabbing up anything they could to confront Longman’s men, who continued to spray gunfire in every direction.

  Elias and Marisol ran quickly down the hillside, over unpaved streets and dwellings assembled out of scrap. They could see the outer perimeter fence in the distance, the faint lights of Zone 4 farther out, and the faintest outline of the wall farther still. They were ready to make their way over or around the fence when a voice boomed, “Stop where you are!”

  The two skidded on the gravel and slowly turned as Farrow morphed out of the darkness, hands around the pistol that Lout had given him. Marisol’s mouth hung open in shock.

  “Farrow!”

  He nodded, and now Elias could see that the big man in front of him had been one of the Apes that had stalked him during Absolution. His body tensed as he plotted a way to turn the tables on Farrow who just shook his head.

  “I can tell what you’re thinking, boy,” Farrow said. “Running some spreadsheet in your head, thinking of how you can pull a fast one on the old man.” Elias didn’t respond as Farrow kept his pistol aimed at his head. “You can’t. I’ve seen it all. You move, you lose.”

  Marisol pointed back at the storage locker. “There’s a room up there, Farrow. There was a boy. Longman’s men murdered him. He’s got evidence, papers, all kinds of stuff that show what he’s doing. Horrible things. Killing people!”

  “And this is news how?” Farrow responded.

  “B-but,” she stammered, “H-he’s evil.”

  Farrow lowered his gun, the din of the battle echoing in the distance. Slowly he nodded, “I know what he is,” Farrow whispered. “I also know there’s the way things should be and the way they are. I know this. But right now Longman has the power and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”

  “Come with us,” she said.

  “To where?”

  “A secret way under the wall.”

  “There’s no secret way under the wall,” Farrow replied.

  Marisol fished in Elias’s pocket and plucked out the hand-drawn set of instructions that detailed how to get to the tunnel and waved them at Farrow who looked unimpressed. He’d seen such things before. Sadness gripped his face and then in a flash Farrow raised his pistol and aimed at their heads and squeezed off two quick shots.

  The bullets sliced through the air over their heads as Farrow swung the gun and shouted, “GO!”

  Elias and Marisol shot off into the night as Farrow watched them go, the two spinning past plundered building shells and empty parking lots and clutches of tin-punched shacks where loons of all shapes and sizes stood outside and marveled at these two, who surely were as mad as the rest of them.

  When they’d vanished from sight, Farrow turned and held his gun up to Cozzard and the others, who were needling down the hillside, clothes splotched red, rifles still smoking. Lout grabbed the pistol from Farrow and smelled its barrel and shoved it under Cozzard’s nose for good measure.

  “What the hell happened?!” Lout shouted.

  “
I saw ‘em,” Farrow said.

  “And?”

  “And then I fired and missed ‘em.” Farrow shrugged.

  Lout palmed the gun. “You were able to hear what you just said, right?”

  “Sure was, but I was never a particularly good shot.”

  Cozzard swung a nasty look in Farrow’s direction. “You think we’re buying that shit? How stupid do you think we are?”

  “You really want an honest answer?” Farrow replied.

  Lout had to hold Cozzard back from swing at Farrow. The brutes caucused for a few seconds and then shoved violently past Farrow, reloading their weapons as they went by, faces twitching with delight, eager for the next kill.

  Farther down the hill, Marisol and Elias were confronted by the perimeter fence. It was too tall to scale, and they didn’t see any way under. They spotted a series of rectilinear box houses that abutted the fence and realized that if they reached the very peak of one of the buildings, they might have enough juice to hurtle onto the top of the fence and climb over.

  The inside of the housing was in a slow state of gently falling apart, as the Loons had evidently pried boards and bricks free from the walls and floors. Elias was the first one through the imploded front door. His eyes raked the plywood subfloor, which was patched and full of holes in various spots. One errant step could send either of them crashing fifteen feet into the basement. He quickly spotted a staircase connecting to the second floor and made for it when a figure curled down a banister and grinned like an idiot at him. A Loon, a tall lunatic clad in ratty jeans and an old ripped flannel who looked as muscled as a bobcat. Then another appeared behind him, and another. Three Loons in all, jabbering and slavering like denizens of some primate house at the zoo.

  Elias stared at a section of the floor that’d been torn up for scrap or for firewood. There were hunks of wood here, sections of flooring and ceiling, including a length of wood that resembled a thick, splintered broom-pole.

  Elias stamped his foot with such force that this pole sprung into the air, and then he grabbed and broke the wood over his knee and handed one thick piece to Marisol and kept the other for himself. The wood was heavy and fit perfectly in the cup of his hand. He looked up and the Loons were on them.