Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  Elias took the knife back and slammed it into the man’s stomach, and then just stared, because it was the first time he’d ever done such a thing to another person. Longman’s man grimaced and groaned and let out a little gasp of air, looking down at the knife protruding from his chest, which was matted red.

  The goon lost his grip and fell away as the car turned over and started waterfalling down the overhang, gripped in the arms of gravity. Elias and Marisol were tossed like coins in a washer.

  Back upon firmer ground, Cozzard, Lout, and Longman’s other men perched on the hoods of the junked cars. They were ready to head down over the overhang when they heard a trumpeting sound echoing in the distance that sounded like a herd of pissed-off elephants.

  The men immediately tensed, they knew what the sound was and what it meant. Cozzard looked over his men and noted the glaze of panic spreading over their faces and so he signaled for a general retreat as everyone wormed through the car-yard and over the grassland’s circulatory system of tiny paths and crossovers, headed back toward the wall and the relative safety of the disemboweled city.

  32

  When they’d shrugged off the shock of the rapid descent, Elias and Marisol peered around and thought themselves no worse for wear, save Elias, who was ensnared in a section of seatbelt that enveloped him like a constricting snake. He dragged with exhaustion and every struggle seemed to wrap him more tightly in the elastic umbilicus. Marisol worked to free him while watching the bleak fog that hovered over the bottomlands like a cloak.

  “How come you didn’t do it? How come you didn’t stab that dude when you had the chance?” Elias asked her.

  “I … I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Let me see if I got this right. You worked and lived with the Apes? You hunted with them even though you’re too scared to do the deed? To actually kill someone, to cross them over?”

  Her gaze bored through him like an auger through soft wood, but she refused to rise to the bait.

  “My father always used to say that the people who talk about things a lot are the ones who never really did them.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “That I wouldn’t be here right now if I hadn’t done dirt to somebody. I just choose not to talk about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I like sleeping at night that’s why.”

  She looked up and saw a figure rise unsteadily out in the darkness. Longman’s man; wounded, yes, but not dead. He stood and stared in their direction mutely. He had one hand over his bloody chest, the other gripped on the blade.

  He stumbled forward with the gimp-legged stride of a physical therapy refugee, mumbling incoherently, pointing at them. Strange sounds echoed out in the distance. Elias’s face went wooden as he immediately recognized them as the bleats of the creatures that had taken his second parents. The Thresher.

  Elias ducked low, fighting to free himself from the belt. The sounds of movement were audible, then more bellows. Marisol peeked up and gasped at the sight of Longman’s man, who was on the hood of the car now. His fingers clawed for purchase as he jammed the knife into the bent metal of the car, willing himself forward, blood sheeting the hood from his stomach wound. The man’s head moved for the battered windshield and Marisol thrust up a forearm that rocked the man’s chin. He flailed in anger, bringing the knife back, when a vaulting shadow grabbed and pulled him back in the blackness.

  Marisol recoiled in horror at the barely visible sight of black-mouthed, milky-eyed, shambling hulks with razor teeth. A whole army of them were moving out and around the junked car. They massed quickly and overcame the man, pinning him to the ground. More of them came running from the darkness. The scent of blood, of food, drew them in. They went to work on the man, ripping off pieces of him as he tried to lope away in a sloppy run. He lunge-stepped a few paces before they pulled him back down in a fury of carnage that Marisol could mercifully see little of as she looked back at Elias who whispered the word, “Thresher,” which chilled her blood.

  When she looked back up, the feeding was largely over. She stared with detached fascination as one of the beasts, a bald quasi-man with one ear and a disjointed arm who’d just looted the remaining flesh from the dead man’s ribcage, spun and looked in her direction.

  The thing seemed to grab its privates and then it squealed and grunted to the others, who looked over. Now Marisol was in panic mode, fear-meter revving as she grabbed hard at the belt that locked Elias in place, whispering, “They’re coming, they’re coming, they’re coming!”

  The pair were in the middle of it now, in the eye of the chaotic storm, screams and shrill sounds pounding in every direction as Elias motioned for Marisol to be silent.

  The mad, hungry eyes of the Thresher glared at the car, sensing movement inside, smelling blood, feeling the heat from beating hearts. The monsters grunted and moaned as they moved toward it, bodies half on the ground, faces and frames a ruin of ragged flesh and exposed musculature.

  In the car, Elias heaved and bucked, and with one final burst of energy ripped free from the belt as the first body hit the hood, flopping across the rusted metal. He and Marisol watched the first lurching wave of monsters converge toward them, and then they jumped out of the car, and ran.

  33

  Longman hated leather straps. They just didn’t wear as well as synthetic materials and the inner fibers, when splashed with blood, seemed to somehow separate and pull apart. The straps holding Moses O’Shea to the wooden chair were double-strength nylon. The kind used back in the glorious days of enhanced interrogation. They would hold.

  Moses sat rigid in the high-backed chair, seated in an anteroom of the Codex Building created especially for moments like this. Insulated walls designed to muffle screams. A slanted floor that ran to metal gutters designed to sluice away blood and other bodily fluids. An oval table with a glass top so that anyone seated therein could view the various objects pressed under the glass. Fingers. Noses. Ears. A variety of other digits and pieces of anatomy. Some flesh ragged and blackened from recent blood, others shriveled and fossilized nubs of bone and flesh. The remnants of those who’d crossed Longman in the past.

  Longman strolled around Moses and the table, running down a list of what he knew and what he believed to be fact. Moses repeatedly nodded and said, “yes, sir,” “no, sir,” “I don’t know, sir,” and hoped he’d be able to exit the space with all of his vitals intact and in good working order.

  Longman pulled up a wooden chair and sat, slouching casually, to the right of Moses. So many men and women had sat where Moses was, Longman thought. Only a handful of faces could he remember. There was the older man with the tumor protruding from his belly who begged Longman for forgiveness, even as he told the man that such a thing could not be freely given. Then there was the ink-riddled woman who’d tried to detonate a crude car bomb near the rear of the Codex Building. He’d had her head shaved and both elbows shattered and still she sat before him and still wouldn’t reveal who else had plotted with her. She was brave. He admired that. He had her doused with rapeseed oil and set her ablaze, and then had her brittle remains mashed up with hammers and mixed with stone-ground grains dappled with wild honey that he ate for breakfast.

  “So how is it, O’Shea,” Longman whispered, “that one of your best and brightest just happened to be in league with a radical?”

  “Didn’t know anything about it, sir.”

  “And yet it brewed right under your nose, didn’t it?” He paused and when Moses offered no response, asked, “You know what I’m about, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You know how I function.”

  “Indeed I do.”

  “The people that cross me?”

  “Are there any, sir?”

  Longman smiled, ear-to-ear.

  “None that are left in the land of the living.”

  Moses didn’t respond to this.

  “Tell me, Mose
s, and I’d really like you to be honest with me. Are you afraid?”

  “Of you, sir?”

  “Of what I represent.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “What do you think it might be?

  The answering of a question with a question was reflexive for Longman. Something that had been drilled into him in law school and a very effective method of dredging up information.

  “I think in a way you represent truth, sir,” Moses slowly said.

  Longman hadn’t been expecting this and he smiled.

  “That’s very interesting.”

  “Would you like me to go on, sir?”

  “Can you?”

  Moses nodded, sensing an opening.

  “What I mean, Mister Longman, is that there were others before you. Men, and some women, who said they’d bring order out of chaos and make things right … make things they way they used to be. And all of this was gonna be done in the spirit of brotherhood with no sweat and no tears. But not you, sir, you never said that. You came to us and said I’ll give you what you need, but it’s gonna come at a price.”

  “There’s always a price,” Longman whispered.

  “Goddamn right,” Moses replied with a tip of the head. “And the price you quoted us is how it’s been. Now others may take issue with it and the way in which you brought us back from the brink, but you were open and honest with everyone about how hard it was gonna be. You always were.”

  Longman considered this, a faint smile playing with his lips.

  “Those are some rather remarkable observations, Moses.”

  “Kinda obvious to me.”

  “Well, you certainly see more than most, so I think I can be frank with you,” Longman said. “For what’s happened I could certainly punish you. It would be well within my rights to take something. A hand maybe. Maybe something more. You know that, right?”

  Moses slowly nodded. It was the “more” part that troubled him most.

  Longman stood and pulled what looked like a small sword from a desk at the edge of the room. He moved over and slammed this down into the chair, directly between Moses’s shaking fingers.

  “I could do that and worse, O’Shea, but I’ve got a different idea.”

  Moses suppressed the urge to wet himself and thought that, if this was his time, he wouldn’t give Longman the pleasure of watching him beg.

  “What might that be, sir?”

  “Before you came here, what was it you did?”

  “I trained folks,” Moses said.

  “Is that all you did?”

  “I ran boot camps.”

  “Where?”

  “Out in the suburbs,” Moses answered.

  “Beyond the confines of our glorious wall?”

  Moses nodded. Longman smiled and plucked up the knife, and tilted it at Moses’s neck, running the honed edge along the major arteries that thumped in the black man’s neck.

  “You’re going to guide an expedition, O’Shea,” said Longman. “You’re going to help me find something I’ve been looking for, for a very long time.”

  Even though Moses was well aware of the Thresher and the death that held sway beyond the wall, he had a great talent for saying the right thing at the most opportune moment. It was what saved his neck on multiple occasions since the sun burst and the abominations began. More importantly, he didn’t want to lose a finger or an ear or something dearer to him. Not yet at least. He would tell Longman whatever he wanted to hear, placate the bloody philistine. In fact, at that moment he had little doubt that he’d rather take his chances over the wall than with Longman, and so he nodded as Longman’s goons entered and undid his bonds and muscled him off.

  He was directed down another hallway by Longman and some of his men. They moved through another door and into a space that was lit by concealed lamps that emitted a cold, hazy light.

  On the other side of the room stood three silhouettes, two large, one small. Longman clucked his tongue and the two larger silhouettes stepped aside as the small one tiptoed forward. The small figure stopped in place and the light danced off a face whose features were discernible only to Moses for a fraction of a second. In that instant, Moses gasped and realized that he truly had no choice. He would have to do whatever it was that Longman asked of him.

  34

  The hands of a Thresher rocketed out of the gloom, reaching for Marisol’s hair as Elias punched them off. The pair kicked at the monsters and then shimmied between a passel of rusted cars and out onto open ground as the Thresher gave chase. Elias and Marisol ran blindly between and over additional cars, the sound of their pursuers growing louder directly behind them.

  Marisol darted out ahead, her ability to recalibrate space and movement invaluable as she weaved left and right, seemingly able to stay one step ahead of the creatures that roared toward the pair like the waters of a flood. Elias looked sideways and spotted the Thresher funneling through the grass toward them, taking bad angles, allowing him and Marisol to outpace the horde as they threw themselves into a cornfield.

  They nosed headfirst through the thick stalks. As the ground dipped, Elias watched Marisol ease back, losing her balance as he reached for her, and now they were falling out the other edge of the cornfield down a slippery slope that was without vegetation or cover. They slid on their backs down the mud, hit a rise, and were propelled into the air before being dunked in a runoff pond.

  The first thing they noticed when they hit the water were the bodies. They were everywhere, putty-colored, bobbing in grisly repose as Marisol and Elias screamed and batted them away. Whether they were victims of the Thresher or some other horror, neither could tell, and neither cared. But the smell — oh, the smell! The whole area was aromatized by rotting flesh such that it stunk like the inside of a pig-rendering operation set ablaze.

  Marisol covered her mouth as one of the corpses, a dead woman with a half-eaten face and vascular, blue-bloated arms, appeared to swim toward her. She kicked the body back with a forceful thrust of her boot that popped the woman’s head off, releasing a small well of black gore. Marisol looked away and crawled up a faraway bank. She turned and helped Elias up, and that’s when the bawling cries pierced her ears.

  A moment later, she saw them. The Thresher. Spilling down the slope from the cornfield. Some jumping headfirst into the pond.

  Elias and Marisol turned and ran, and the chase was on again. They looped through a clearing. Elias was having trouble keeping up with Marisol, who was running forward. The treeline was coming up fast when Elias tripped and fell. Marisol turned and grabbed his wrist and helped him up. The Thresher were bearing down, ready to overtake them, when fireballs blazed out of the darkness, setting some of the brush and trees on fire and blinding Elias and Marisol, who hit the ground, face-first.

  WHOOSH!

  The two looked up as additional gaseous clouds of fire spewed out of the gloom, smothering the Thresher in flames, their bodies pirouetting as they fell, hitting the ground hard and going up like dancing sparklers.

  Elias and Marisol caught sight of the boots first: dark and heavy and laced tightly around the feet of four figures clad in ancient gas-masks and garb that resembled tactical armor mixed with biohazard suits, holding flamethrowers whose tips were still aglow. They could see from the light of the flamethrowers that these figures bore no tattoos or Sigils, and therefore likely could not have come from inside the wall.

  “I don’t know who the hell you two are, but if you move, if you even freakin’ breathe,” said one of the figures, “you’re brisket on a plate. Dig? You’re fricassee.”

  The figure aimed the tip of his flamethrower at Elias and Marisol, who held hands as they stared up into the mesmerizing, bluish light of the flame. It was at that moment that Elias noticed it for the first time. A bib of blood. A pool of red spreading out around Marisol, who saw it too, and ripped off her outer-armor to reveal a small hole under her armpit. Cozzard’s shot before had indeed been true. She just hadn’t reali
zed it in all the commotion.

  She’d been shot.

  The hole pumped red and she felt her head go light. Her pupils shock-dilated as Elias, feeling some kinship for the smack-talking girl after all they’d been through, screamed for assistance while watching her life seep out all around and under her.

  35

  Longman sat in his safe-room, his inner keep, his Sterncastle, staring at a book and the high-tech tablet positioned on the table before him. He was wide awake. He never needed sleep. A few winks every night at most. There was too much to do. He would sleep when they were all dead. He thumbed the first page of the book, which was a work of his own construction, the very same book he’d been holding the first day he marched into new Chicago. What he’d done was take the Holy Book, the Bible, and remove every instance of the supernatural or morality, similar to what an ancient ruler of the country had done centuries before.

  Longman’s new book, however, differed in that it was filled only with the pages that centered on brutality and violence. Events that demonstrated that everyone sprang from the same evil root. Deuteronomy 20:16-18, for instance, which praised the practice of genocide; the book of Numbers 31:7-19, that spoke of the campaign against Midian; and Joshua 6:21, that told of the fall of Jericho and all the evil and bloodshed that followed thereafter. Longman memorized these sections, laboring over the smallest details of the acts committed at the behest of what he deemed a jealous, tribal deity. He’d learned many lessons in ruling from reading the book.

  He closed what passed for a dust jacket and turned the crypto-ignition key on his tablet. A brilliant green light flooded the device as it hummed to life and then beamed an intricately detailed, three-dimensional map of the city and the surrounding area into the air in front of his face.

  Longman peered at the map as if consulting a crystal ball. Onto his hand, he fitted a glove with metal fingertips hooked to a ruggedized leader that he plugged into the tablet as signals, the divine skein uploaded by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, were received from a satellite (using Lacrosse and Onyx systems) that was still orbiting overhead.