Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  43

  As dawn’s light broke, Moses O’Shea rode in the back of what had once been a Ford Explorer. The top had been chainsawed off and reinforced with a roll-bar, similar to the other four machines that chugged under the wall and out into the grasslands in a ragged procession. There were fourteen men and three women inside the various machines, all heavily armed.

  He glanced to his right and viewed Big Bob Pope and Ricky Keys, who were ostensibly Longman’s point-persons on the excursion. Pope had been a mechanic back in the day, claiming to have once worked on the Presidential limo detail, servicing “The Beast,” as the President’s mechanical chariot was known.

  As for Ricky Keys, he’d been a middle-school science teacher who’d traded in his elements chart and pocket protectors for a bunker and office near the torching pits. There he combined the gnashed up bones of the deceased with black powder and chemicals to concoct strange new explosives for Longman. Not surprisingly he was missing a good portion of one foot and most of the fingers on his right hand, but some service technician had grafted aluminum digits for him, which gave him the appearance of a balding, slump-shouldered cyborg.

  And then there was the jack-ass Hendrix, who manned the jump-seat in the rear of Moses’s Explorer. Hendrix reeked of urine and smoke and fetid food, and it was obvious to Moses that he’d been brought along solely to spy on him and report back to Longman.

  Moses had loathed the man ever since he’d caught wind of Hendrix talking smack about him. A few of the other Runners had bedded women in the upper Guilds who flapped their gums, whispering about how Hendrix was spreading rumors that Moses was running a crooked operation. Of course he was. This was New Chicago and vice was virtue, but still, there was an unwritten rule amongst those who served Longman to turn a blind eye to minor crime, to anything that didn’t threaten to upset the apple cart. Hendrix was little more than a weasel, a snitch.

  The machines chugged slowly out through a hidden exfiltration point at the very west end of the wall in the slivers of pre-dawn light. Guards wedded to high-powered machine guns closed an eighteen foot tall section of chain-link topped by razor-wire behind them, as they waved them on. They heaved and bucked over cracked asphalt and past a half-dozen booby traps and explosives that had been planted for Thresher and anyone else who might want to sneak under the wall.

  The caravan clipped across flattened grass and onto what was once a highway. It was still knotted by the machines driven by ill-fated civilians who’d either attempted to exit old Chicago or gain entrance to the new version of it. They were shot down by Longman’s Guards and snipers, or fell prey to the Thresher. Moses gawked at the rusted cars they’d driven in, now little more than plastic and metal shells decaled with black blood and ichor spatter. The bodies of the unlucky and their Thresher attackers lay scattered in grisly abundance like the insides of a seed pod that’d been stepped on.

  “It’s like that old book says!” Hendrix shouted from behind.

  Moses looked back at Hendrix who grinned and gestured at the bodies. “Death and decay and the finger of Longman hold illimitable dominion over all!”

  He should shoot Hendrix, Moses thought. Just put one right between the bastard’s eyes and end it. Disgust swelled in him and he exhaled deeply several times, realizing now was not the time. Instead he simply smiled and nodded.

  They were perhaps seven miles from their destination, which would take several hours to reach, the roads being barely passable. Moses worked this area for many moons before the collapse, and he alone knew the way forward. He’d been employed as an assistant at a junior college nearby back before, training athletes on the track and field squad. They’d often spend their early mornings and afternoons running the very routes that the procession was following. Moses had developed a relationship with one of his students, a biracial girl named Alicia only a few years younger than himself (a “Halfrican-American” he called her), but such things were verboten, so he was fired and became a personal trainer for hire, moving up and down these very streets, running boot-camps for suburban ladies eager to maintain that low-mileage look.

  The relationship with the student ended badly, but it bore him a son, Malik, the light of his life, who disappeared with the child’s mother in the days after First Light. That was why Moses had stuck around New Chicago when so many others had bolted, because he hoped that his boy might be out there waiting for him. The dream of being reunited with his son might be bullshit, but it was something. It kept him going.

  If truth be told he’d been stalking his son’s mother in the days leading up to the end. He’d tracked her down and found the apartment where she was holed up. He’d even gone so far as to call her phone a hundred times and slash one of her tires. He wasn’t proud of that last thing, but it was a reaction when he saw her with another man. White dude. Cracker. Younger, bigger, the sight of them together pissing Moses off no end. Her friends didn’t much care for the new relationship. They were the ones who’d tipped him off and fed him information. Whereabouts of his son, who was watching him, how he was doing, where she was working. She’d gotten some low-level gig at one of those hush-hush, government outfits. Kind of place where they zapped your eyes and your prints before they let you inside. The kind of place, if the whispers were true, where they kept those codes he’d always heard about. Same kind that were strapped to some unlucky’s wrist 24/7 as he followed the President around. He knew exactly where the building was, hidden in broad daylight in an old office park that had been retrofitted and made secure, but before he had a chance to scope it all out, the world ended. He would have the chance to examine it now, because that’s where they were headed.

  The procession continued on, passing areas that were rapidly gentrifying in the years before. There was a bank here and a chicken place that advertised “Good Food Fast!” there and word was that one of those grocery stores that white folks enjoyed, the ones with crazy-priced organic food and polished concrete floors and tidy little mission statements, was soon to come. Damn shame, Moses thought, this side of town had finally started on the upswing when the bloody bottom fell out.

  “This is a big opportunity for you,” a man’s voice said.

  Moses looked back at Hendrix who smiled up at him. His breath smelled like death and the jackass’s lips were pulled so far back that Moses could see each and every one of Hendrix’s teeth. The man’s mouth was a catastrophe. Intermittent brown or black molars and incisors, most chipped or ground down, silver and pewter fillings that needed to be changed, a few high-tensile wires on either side that snugged it all in place and gave Hendrix the appearance of a ventriloquist’s dummy come to life.

  “I appreciate the chance to make things right,” Moses lied.

  Hendrix stood and moved closer and held out the coordinates that they were searching for.

  “What is it?” Hendrix asked. “What exactly are we going after?”

  “Figured you’d know,” Moses replied.

  “Longman don’t necessarily explain himself to me.”

  “Same here.”

  “Oh, but I hear things though, Mo,” Hendrix continued. “That what we’re after is the cat’s pajamas as they used to say. The end all and be all.”

  “Translate.”

  “Means,” Hendrix said, “that once we get what we need, the man’s gonna come into his own. He’s gonna gain possession of some device that’ll allow him almost unlimited power.”

  “Ain’t he already the top dog?”

  “Within the walls, yes, but outside …” Hendrix trailed off, gesturing to the lands far and wide.

  “He’s gonna take it over?”

  Hendrix just smiled and rubbed his hands together. “That, or he’s gonna burn it all down. I mean, a righteous fire consumes everything, right?”

  Hendrix cackled like a loon and slouched back down in his seat as Moses’s thoughts drifted to the kid. Elias. He wondered where he was and what he was up to. He hoped like hell that he’d made it out of the grassland
s and was headed west where it was rumored that some semblance of proper civilization had taken root. Better to be there than out on the water. The scuttlebutt said Longman’s hunting parties were headed that way.

  Something about people and a boat being spotted. Bottom line was he hoped to God that Elias had been smart enough to use his opportunity to get as far away from New Chicago as he could.

  44

  Marisol lay on her back in the hold of the darkened ship, blankets tucked up to her neck. She was tired. Alone. The feeling of utter exhaustion permeated every inch of her body slowly like a steady drip from an IV bag. She could hear voices and movement overhead and realized she was weak, but alive. They had saved her. Elias and the others. The strangers.

  She pushed herself up and whispered his name, “El … Elias?” Nothing. No response.

  She gasped at the pain from her gunshot wound and slumped back and closed her eyes and fell into semi-consciousness.

  Where Marisol was worn and asleep, Elias was energized, even a little bored after spending more than a day on the boat. He’d thoroughly explored the ship’s deck, which was at least fifty-feet long, with a concealed sail and a bank of diesel engines strapped to the back near a sticker of a smiley face in yellow and another that simply said “Margaritaville.” Elias wondered whether the face was some sort of crest and the word a town where the people who owned the boat were from. Margaritaville. He liked the name. The sun began to set overhead. The boat bobbed languidly as Elias strode past, keeping an eye on his new minders, especially Jessup who seemed to have it out for him.

  “You want something, Elias?”

  He turned, hand wiping his forehead, to see Liza cocking an eyebrow his way. “Food? Something for that head? An aspirin?”

  He looked at her blankly.

  “Y’know … aspirin … helps with the pain,” she added.

  “Moses says pain is weakness leaving the body.”

  “That’s a lovely, yet troubling little sentiment,” Liza replied. “And who might this Moses be?”

  “He oversees the Pits. It’s a place back in New Chicago. It’s where we trained.”

  “Back inside that wall of yours?”

  Elias nodded.

  “I never did ask before, but what were you doing out there when we found you?”

  “Running away from them.”

  “From who? The people inside of the wall?” Liza asked.

  He nodded.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because they were after us. The ones in charge.”

  “Why? Did you do something bad?”

  “No, I had something they wanted I guess.”

  “Wanna share?”

  He shook his head.

  “What would have happened if they found you?”

  “They would’ve been pissed for sure. We were never allowed to go outside of the city and the wall.”

  “How come?”

  “They said it was too dangerous.”

  Liza took this in.

  “You didn’t really answer my question, Elias.”

  He looked up.

  “What would have happened if they found you?”

  “They would have put us down,” replied Elias, matter of factly. “Me and Marisol. They would’ve crossed us over, slabbed us, pronto.”

  “Behind the wall sounds like a super fun place to grow up.”

  “It’s worse than you can think.”

  “Couldn’t possibly be,” she replied, before proffering an aspirin and patting him on the head. She then moved over to Jessup, who was fiddling with the rear motors. “You’re unusually quiet, mister.”

  “I’m practicing what you preach," Jessup said.

  “If you’ve got nothing good to say, don’t say anything at all?”

  “That’s the one,” Jessup replied, gently tapping Liza on the nose. His eyes strayed to Elias. “You know what I think about taking on strays."

  “They’re practically kids, Jessup.”

  “They’re of majority age, and need to talk and tell us what’s what.”

  “Okay, so you want to interrogate them now?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Her mouth drooped slightly as she considered this. “No … not yet at least.”

  “They obviously were up to something inside that damned wall. Who’s to say there aren’t others out looking for them?”

  Liza shook her head as Jessup’s eyes wandered to the deck. It was as if he could see right through the wooden planking to where Marisol slept.

  “What are the girl’s odds?” he asked.

  “She’s a freak, Jessup. I mean, I can’t believe how quickly she’s recovered. There’s barely any additional bleeding and no sign of infection. She’s out of the woods, but we still need to play it safe.”

  “What happens if we set sail?”

  “Too risky. You know how the waves bite this time of year. We should stay put for the next sixteen hours at least. My patches look good and, unless she takes a turn for the worse, she’ll be in even better shape and then we can leave.”

  “And until then we’re sitting ducks, eh?”

  “What do you want me to say?” she asked.

  “Oh, I imagine you’ll say ‘it’s a risk we have to take.’”

  Liza’s gaze smoked into Jessup’s.

  “Don’t be an ass, okay?” she whispered. “We’re strays. All of us. One way or another.”

  He eyed her as she grabbed a box of crackers and disappeared into the hold, then looked back into the sky, searching for any sign of the drone.

  Elias watched the conversation end between Liza and Jessup. He had the sudden impulse to dive from the boat and swim to shore. It would be easier that way wouldn’t it? “But what about Marisol?” a voice whispered. “What about her said another? For Crissakes! She’d tried to kill him only a few days earlier, hadn’t she?”

  The other voice countered that Marisol had simply been following orders. She’d just been doing her job, right? And besides, that was all before they’d escaped and worked together, not quite as a team, but there was back and forth. They’d helped each other hadn’t they? It was a strange thing to say, but they’d somehow worked well together.

  He realized she could have cut him down, could have triggered her gun in the meta-instant before the siren sounded during the Absolution hunt, but she didn’t. That had to count for something.

  Elias moved behind a bulkhead and crouched low in the shadows. Reaching into his pocket, he felt Caleb’s cellphone, smooth as a stone. He pulled the phone out and powered it up.

  “What ya got there, young fella?”

  Elias nearly fumbled the phone overboard. He squinted over his shoulder to see Terry, the bullet-faced man whose words came out with a Tar Heel twang.

  “Noth-nothing,” Elias muttered.

  “Haven’t seen one of those military-style jobbers in years. One that worked I mean.”

  Terry drew near and Elias pulled back, which caused Terry to throw his hands up reflexively in a gesture of goodwill.

  “I never did formally introduce myself. Terry Bender,” he said with a smile and a half salute. The action allowed Elias to see the ink on Terry’s arm, a few military insignias, plus the green leaf of a plant that Elias didn’t recognize next to the numbers 4/20.

  Elias looked at him warily, without uttering a word or moving an inch.

  “I was a Major in the Air Force if that helps at all," Terry said. "Probably doesn’t but I always throw that out there since it comforts some. Like I said before, I grew up on a base and eventually served mostly at Holloman if you’ve heard of it. That is … was, an air base in New Mexico, but I did some time in Langley too. That used to be a pretty jumpin’ spot down in the ole Commonwealth … Virginia.”

  Elias nodded as Terry glanced at the phone.

  “That don’t exactly appear store bought, if you know what I mean.”

  Elias didn’t, and gaped at the phone as it illuminated his head in a bluish-gr
een nimbus.

  “May I?” Terry asked.

  Elias reluctantly handed him the phone. “Got it from … a friend," he muttered.

  “Must be some friend, huh? Only ones who still got Lithiums and chargers are well-heeled, ex-military, or something else.”

  Terry held up the phone and turned it over and around and around, studying it as if it were an object of unparalleled beauty.

  He tapped the screen and his eyes went as wide as a Chihuahua’s as he took in just a sliver of the information held within the phone.

  “Jesus,” Terry said in a whisper. “You take a good look at this thing?”

  “There’s a map in it,” Elias replied, not sure why he was confiding anything in someone he barely knew.

  “I’ll say,” Terry said, whistling in surprise

  He tapped and pinched and drew a finger repeatedly across the phone’s screen, mouthing numerous words silently as he read them.

  “The man’s gonna wanna see this for sure,” Terry said before looking up at Elias and whispering the name, “Jessup.”

  “I don’t think he likes me,” Elias said.

  “Who? Jess?”

  Elias nodded and Terry waved his hand.

  “Nah, Jessup’s a pretty righteous dude actually, if you get to know him. I mean, like he had this boat and then he found a bunch of us and took us back to the place beyond the Lake. Guy like that can’t be that bad.”

  Elias angled a thumb at the lake. “Must be something very important out there.”

  Terry’s mouth hung open. He paused, as if running down some mental checklist, and then he said “Hell, kid, I know it sounds weird, but I been given orders not to talk about what’s out there, okay? Ain’t like it’s a big deal to me, but the powers that be don’t want word of it leakin’ out. Comprende?”

  Elias nodded and replied, “Who are you guys? Who are you really?”