Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  “Base?”

  “Yep. I grew up on a military base out west," Harry said.

  "A military base? For real?"

  Harry laughed, in that sad, raspy laugh sort of way. "Yes, indeed. Base was kinda remote so there wasn’t much to do aside from playing sports and fishing and hunting. Course I hated a lot of it then, but you have no idea how many times my familiarity with weapons has saved my hind-end, including the time when I rescued Blake from a sinkhole near an old amusement park that had attracted a small pack of those pearl-eyed monsters."

  "You went up against the Thresher?" Elias asked.

  A new emotion took over Blake's eyes, one not normally there, and then Blake nodded weakly, mumbling his words incoherently. The only word Elias could discern was “aliens.”

  Elias scrunched his nose. “Aliens?”

  Harry laughed and nodded. “Brother Blake here is big into alternative facts. He thinks the Serks were created by the aliens that caused the Unraveling.”

  “Aliens?” asked Elias.

  Blake nodded. “Didn’t you ever wonder why nobody was ready for it? Didn’t you ever wonder how it hit at exactly the right time, at the right locations, to knock all of the grids out? I mean, how the hell did a solar storm destroy the world and cause the Serks? It’s just not possible. Russians and the Chinese didn’t have the ability to do all that, and they were affected just like us. Yeah, pardon my language, but the official story on that solar storm is some serious bullshit.”

  “Man, and don’t get him started on the drugs,” Harry replied with a laugh.

  Elias looked over. “What drugs?”

  Harry put a hand on Elias’s shoulder. “You’re too young to remember, Elias, but there was a huge problem with this drug called Black Sunshine a long time ago. Some folks, including Blake, thought the drug was made from stuff dropped out of the sky by aliens. The people that used the drug, the addicts, looked and acted a lot like the Serks. They were called something else back in the day. ‘Weeper,’ and they damned near overran the country.”

  “I don’t remember hearing about any of that,” Elias said.

  Blake nodded. “That’s by design, kid. There was an old book where the writer said, and I’m paraphrasing, that once people start accepting a lie it passes into history and becomes the truth. That says all you need to know about how we got to where we are.”

  “And that concludes Doctor Blake’s lessons in conspiracy theories for the day,” Harry added, grinning hugely.

  Ava and Riley soon joined them and talk of the conspiracy theories ended. Elias immediately discerned that something was off about the two girls. Even though they were sitting just a few feet away, they acted as if they were in their own little world. Whispering to each other, giggling, drawing tiny animals and symbols on the deck of the boat with a piece of charcoal. It was the matter-of-factness of their behavior that surprised Elias the most. They acted as if they were out on a summer cruise in the days before. For a moment Elias was jealous of them, wondering what it must be like to live now with blinders on. But then he realized that the veneer of normality and leisure, the hallmark of the old ways, was probably a garment that the two could not easily shed.

  He sat and watched the four fish and play, aware that time crept by slowly on this side of the wall. No need for training, eating, running, or worrying about whether your next moment might be your last. Elias could feel his muscles slackening and every now and again he’d think that it almost felt like the times before.

  Almost.

  Liza soon sat down next to him and didn’t utter a word about anything that didn’t concern Marisol. She did her best to explain, in greater detail, exactly what she did to sew Marisol back up. Elias listened, understood very little, and nodded his head. From the corner of his eyes, he glimpsed Jessup crossing the boat, keeping an eye out like a shepherd over his flock.

  At night they doused most of the lights and dined on fresh fish and swilled bottles of home-brewed buzz made from pressed, semi-pickled apples that made Elias’s throat super mossy.

  “You think the kid should be guzzling that?” Jessup said, gesturing to the bottle in Elias’s hand.

  “Drinking age was rescinded once the world went to hell,” Terry replied, smirking, aiming his bottle at Jessup.

  “All I meant was, somebody’s gotta be responsible for him.”

  Jessup moved over and took the bottle from Elias.

  “I can handle myself,” Elias said, holding Jessup’s gaze.

  “You think so?”

  Elias nodded. “I know so. I mean, I survived ‘The Harrowing.’”

  Jessup looked at the others, then back to Elias.

  “The hell does that even mean?” Jessup asked.

  Elias gestured in the general vicinity of the wall. “Back in the city, a crime would be committed, and it would be one of our turns to run. I did it and survived.”

  “Who were you running from?” Terry asked.

  Elias’s eyes dropped to the floor. He could see the recognition in Terry’s eyes.

  “Get the hell out - the girl? It’s like you said before … the girl actually hunted you?”

  Elias nodded.

  “What would have happened if she’d caught you?” Liza asked. Elias didn’t answer, but his expression spoke volumes. Jessup hesitated, then handed the bottle back to Elias.

  Slowly, over the next day, Marisol rapidly gained back her strength, and her color and attitude improved. Elias couldn’t believe how quickly she’d recovered. He watched her from a distance, listening to her lecture him on the finger points of tracking someone. For a moment it felt like he’d been friends with her for his whole life. But then he remembered where he was and given the fact that they were not too far from the wall, he thought it might only be a matter of time before something important happened.

  There were only two directions in which he could see himself moving. Forward and back. He didn’t know what might be ahead, but he knew what lay in store for him behind, back in the direction of New Chicago. Hell was there. His mind drifted to the wall and to thoughts of Longman who increasingly seemed like a distant nightmare.

  42

  5 Months After First Light

  Roger Parker leaned back in his chair at the classified government facility called “Site 181” and massaged a week’s worth of beard while examining the communication cables that gurgled out of the routing box at the side of what was once an intelligence analyst’s room.

  There was some very spooky shit in the cables. Classified information about what some were calling the end of the world, intelligence documents that reported the sky had, for all intents and purposes, fallen.

  Roger smiled at this because the whole thing had become a game for the last few months, taking guesses at why the machines had stopped. Some said the grids were melted, others said the GPS was shot to hell, still more just blamed it all on mass psychosis, or terrorist attacks.

  Roger wasn’t buying it. He thought the whole thing revolved around the perpetual dusk that had come after the solar storm. Sure there were days here and there where you could catch some nice rays, but largely the sun seemed hidden behind a veil. As a result, the smallest things seemed to suffer the most. Insects. Bees. Something like eighty percent of all food required pollination by bees, Roger had heard, and with the perpetual dusk came the colony collapses, fuel shortages, and the end of the times of plenty. It was just a theory, but Roger was sticking to it. His dad had been a farmer and used to tell him that bees and bugs were the canaries in the coal mine. As the tiniest of God’s creatures went, so too did the rest of civilization.

  Regardless of what end theory you believed in, the Government knew things weren’t getting better and so various ‘Continuity of Operations’ plans had been implemented by the big dogs in D.C. The President, the VP, all the top brass, whisked away to a location called Site R in Pennsylvania, their hands figuratively up in the air, waving to the masses like a band exiting the goddamn stage.


  He’d worked for the CIA domestically (in the Natural Resources Division) and overseas for years as a Technical Operations Officer (mainly in Australia, in the Agency’s “Pine Gap” facility), so he was used to treading bullshit. He knew he was expendable (that came with the terrain), but it was still shocking to see it in black and white, which is the meaning he discerned from reading the cables. Essentially, all lesser tier elements and intel collecting sites were largely on their own. Well, that’s some fucked-up shit ain’t it? he thought. The greatest country on earth had been buckled by a “disturbance” that blew all the fuses. No good way had yet been found to flip the switch back on.

  The cables also revealed that key technological pieces of the old regime were being broken up and transported to secure locations for safe-keeping via a network of unmarked tractor-trailers, the same folks who transported nuclear materials around the Lower-48 during the years of plenty. Like squirrels hording away nuts for the winter, the Pentagon and the folks at the various Directorates were covertly securing key operations equipment in the event that some way was found to reverse the effects of the Unraveling.

  Roger wasn’t entirely familiar with the acronyms or the technology mentioned in the cables, but whatever it was, it was important. It was being shipped to his attention post-haste. Rather than dump the cables in the burn box, Roger turned and made his way down a corridor to brief the others. There were only four people in Site 181 now, most of the others having run for home when it was apparent that the new times were the new normal.

  Counting himself, there was Army Captain Farber, a sneering, weak-kneed NSA squirrel of a man who was known as Bendix, and the admin woman, an African American lady named Alicia Jackson who went by “Lish.”

  Lish was the one with the worst luck, a single mother with a young child named Malik, now under the watch of her sister, after Lish’s ex, some wannabe athlete named Moses O’Shea, had started stalking her. Lish was the last to saddle up, she’d started at the facility only a few weeks before it all went bad. She’d had the misfortune of unwittingly signing on to what was now called “Operation Archangel,” a “SAP,” a half-assed Special Access Program, an “offline” compartmented operation as it was called by the higher-ups.

  All four of them had been walled off from the world for the better part of three weeks after word reached them of the violence taking place in the cities and suburbs. As evidence of the approaching violence, some hooligans had tried to enter the perimeter one night a few months earlier and been blasted down by the security castoffs who’d been hired to patrol the joint.

  Central command told them to effectuate protocol and batten down the hatches. Roger had been in charge of that. He was the one who’d entered the SCIF and punched ciphers into the keypad and listened to the sound of unseen motors and gears housed inside concrete walls as they lowered sheets of reinforced steel and ballistic glass over every entry-point so as to keep the outside world at bay.

  The four subsisted on MREs, canned food, water and juices that had been stashed in various alcoves. Bendix and Farber declared certain sections of Site 181 off limits to anyone but them.

  Roger and Lish rarely saw the others, save for the reading of the day’s electronic mail. Roger and Alicia inhabited much of the same space. Lish was a tough cookie. Smart too. She’d possessed an inner resilience that allowed her to keep her head and continue to do her duties: monitoring chatter, and routing emails and other documents even after the prime generators tapped out. They had solar and geothermal backups that offered a modicum of trickled electricity (the regular transformers and power sources having been fried in the sky storm). About the same level of power they had in places like Iraq. Six, maybe seven good hours a day.

  The unmarked tractor-trailers arrived one night in the middle of a lightning storm. Roger watched men without identification or uniforms haul the equipment inside and stack it in a steel-lined safe-room near the rear of the building. He saw the oversized metal briefcase and the other non-lethal goodies (sophisticated communications and listening devices and the like) marked and stenciled with various words and acronyms, things like SIOP-ESI, which he vaguely remembered meant Single Integrated Operational Plan. Part of the SPECAT stuff the Agency used to assist with. Special category projects with names like “Straight Arrow,” and “Tailback,” and “Crimson Sword.” In short, extremely sensitive shit linked with the various missile wings that had once been housed in Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota. Roger had even heard that the codes that could be used to detonate certain munitions, including nuclear ones, were included in the stash. Why the hell were they securing something like that inside Site 181?

  “How’s it out on the roads?” Roger had asked the lead driver.

  The driver, who was in his 40s, turned and sized Roger up. He was a hulking bruiser clad in jeans and a sweat-stained compression shirt, his face lumpy and scratched. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.

  “You really wanna know?” the driver asked.

  “We’ve been cooped up in here for weeks.”

  “Consider yourself lucky,” the driver said. “We started our haul four days ago from that munitions arsenal not too far away from Albany, in upstate New York. I had eleven men with me.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m down to five.”

  Roger could see the markings on the truck now. The gouge marks, blackened splotches, and holes where bullets and other things had obviously been hurled or fired against it.

  “How are the cities?”

  “Ain’t no more cities, chief,” the driver replied. “Just one big refugee camp.”

  Roger swallowed hard. “You got a next stop?”

  “Denver. The honchos apparently got a base under the airport where we’re supposed to lay low.”

  “Until what?”

  “Until someone finds a way to turn the lights back on.”

  The driver handed Roger a metal-encased manifest.

  “If I was you, I would not open your doors again. You feel me? Whatever you hear, do not open those doors. Trust in the Lord and keep your trigger finger primed.”

  And with that, the driver winked at Roger, entered the truck and drove off into the storm. Roger watched the machine rumble through the solar-powered gates that surrounded the complex. The gates closed behind the truck, and Roger scanned the treeline for any hint of movement. He realized at that moment that they were like the figures in that book by Edgar Allen Poe, the one where a small band of revelers took refuge inside a castle while death held sway outside. The lights from the trucks disappeared from sight and Roger entered the building. He engaged the doors, which closed with a hiss.

  Over the next two weeks, the situation at the outpost devolved rapidly. Cabin fever. Food and supplies had run low ,and the shitter wasn’t entirely operational. Not exactly a time that would tolerate human frailty, and so Roger consulted with Lish and told her it would likely get much worse before it got better.

  “You need to be thinking about getting the hell out of here,” Roger had told Lish.

  Lish peered at him, hands on her hips. “Easy for you to say.”

  “You’ve got a kid don’t you? A little boy?”

  “Malik,” she said, nodding. “I talked to him before the phones went down. He’s safe. With my sister.”

  “So go home to him,” Roger said. “You’ve done your job here, we’ll hold down the fort.”

  “You got a spare pare of wings, Rog? Cause my sis lives twenty miles from here and none of us have a car.”

  Roger had groaned, realizing the cars they’d left outside in a lot had been torched during a spell of looting several weeks before. He continued to plead with Lish to leave, but she thought things would get better in a matter of days, or maybe a week. They didn’t.

  Ultimately, Farber and Bendix began to unravel. They started making unreasonable demands, threatening each other, threatening Roger and Lish.

  It was then, while searching for more food one afternoon, tha
t Roger found a way out. An alternative exit unknown by the others in the event that things went to hell. A small tunnel through one of the geothermal tubes that snaked to a rear wall. Lish saw it, too, and he eventually convinced her that things were not getting better. The phones had stopped. There was no more news, and the only thing that mattered was finding your family and keeping them safe. Lish agreed to bolt when the time was right.

  Thunderheads boomed high overhead that last night as Roger moved through the outpost, down corridors and across tiny catwalks, listening for sounds. He heard nothing, none of the soft chatter or industrial hum that he’d hated in the days before. The faint roar of fans and faraway cooling pumps and dust-suckers and the like. He was never an office type, and he loathed jockeying a desk. But at that moment, he’d give his right arm to hear the comforting white noise of the office. He continued on ahead and found Bendix first. Lying face down in a big soupy splash of his own viscera. He’d been shot at least once and then stabbed with multiple cutting objects, bloody footprints leading off down another hall, evidence left by the guilty one who’d done the NSA squirrel in.

  Roger froze at the sight of the body and plucked a blade from Bendix’s back and held it up in front of his face.

  His head canted, alert, he listened for any sign of movement as he crept down the halls, following the footprints. He realized he was near the small tunnel with the geothermal tube as he knelt and saw that the tube was off-kilter. Someone had definitely crawled through it recently. Hoping that Lish had summoned the courage to make a break for it, Roger white-knuckled his knife and continued forward into a bullpen. There he saw Farber, grinning like a madman from the other side of the space, clothes soiled with Bendix’s blood.

  The Captain was holding a cleaver and a pair of bloody scissors. Roger wanted to run, but he realized there was no where left to go. He had no loved ones, no real friends, not even a goddamn pet to call his own. The outpost, Operational Archangel—they were his and he wouldn’t give them up without a fight. And so it went. Captain Farber squealed and charged Roger, who did likewise, the men slamming into each other like freight-trains as the storm echoed overhead.