Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  Terry considered this, measuring his words. “I guess we’re like everyone else now. Just a bunch of people who fell in with each other, stragglers mostly, coming together to try and see if we can reboot the mission.” Terry gave him an economical smile.

  Elias registered this as Terry put a hand to his mouth as if confiding a secret.

  “Wanna see somethin’ cool, Elias?” he asked.

  Elias nodded and Terry jiggered the phone, then handed it over. Elias looked at a gaming app that had been hidden deep inside the phone. A minute game involving computerized men hurling imaginary pies and bundles of money at each other, ringing up points for each object thrown.

  “It’s pretty sweet, man,” Terry continued, touching the phone’s screen, initiating the game while giggling. “Checkity check that.”

  Elias couldn’t help but smile. It was the first time he’d had a chance to play with anything since First Light.

  “Tell you what, pardner,” Terry continued, “you let me show Jessup what’s what with your phone, and I’ll show you how to play that game and more. Deal?”

  Elias had the sudden urge to snatch the phone back. A man he barely knew was asking him to give him some trust.

  Never trust.

  Ever.

  That was what he’d been taught in New Chicago. That was the mantra that was literally beaten into him. But because he was willing to do the opposite now of everything he’d learned there, he slowly nodded. He decided to take a chance, which made Terry smile and hold out a hand for a high-five, that Elias smacked gently.

  Terry damn near jumped across the boat, cradling the cellphone, making for Jessup who was emerging from the hold.

  He held up the phone so that Jessup could get a good look.

  “You’re gonna wanna get a load of this, J.”

  “What is it?” Jessup asked.

  Terry smiled. “Might just be the ticket to the promised land.”

  45

  Cozzard, Lout, and a pack of nameless goons followed Longman through corridors splashed in bug-lighting inside the sagging confines of the Codex Building.

  “He wants to know, boss,” said Lout, “the father of the one who got killed. Caleb. Sonofabitch is demanding him some answers. Apparently, someone told him that the girl had the chance to shoot the boy down and didn’t. He mentioned somethin’ about the fix being in.”

  Longman stopped and pivoted until he was looking down at Lout like an angry father at his child.

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “Exactly like we planned. That everything was good and proper, and that we were getting things squared and would have another Absolution run ready to go, asap.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t think he bought it.”

  Longman licked a few specks of spittle from his chapped lips. “Did you sell it?”

  “I sold the shit out of it, sir. Pardon my language, but I swear I done it.”

  Longman’s breathing suddenly went shallow. His vision darkened and narrowed. “Did you drop the ball on me, Lout?”

  Lout stared at his boots. “I dunno … maybe a little, sir.”

  “So pick the goddamn thing up.”

  Lout raised his head. “It was the others that confused me. His woman. Some of them members of their Guild. They ain’t believed me. They said I was bullcrappin’ and worse. They said the rules was broken and asked for a proper investigation.”

  Investigation? Just the word sent a ripple of fear snaking up Longman’s back.

  “I mean,” Lout continued, trying to vanquish Longman’s baleful look, “me and the boys can get rid of ‘em if need be.”

  Cozzard nodded, and added, “We could smithereen ‘em good. It’d be some work, but we could do ‘em all. Snuff the whole goddamn guild out, I mean, kill ‘em all and then burn up the bodies.”

  Longman gnashed his teeth and for an instant, a spillage of light from the fluorescent tubes overhead strobed across his face. His mind flickered and flashed and, God help him, he was back in suburbia with his family many years before the world fell apart. How had it come to this? How had he acquired the power over life and death? He remembered being a boy of no more than eight or nine. He was in the backyard of his house, where he came upon a snake that snapped out to strike him. He picked up a stick and beat the thing to death.

  He’d cried himself to sleep that next night. Even at that age, whether because of Sunday school or some innate knowledge, he recognized how precious life was. But by the fifth or sixth time he’d destroyed the smaller things, rats and a squirrel and a bird or two, he was all numb inside. He no longer felt anything. And that made it easier. He’d been doing it so often, for so long, that it was like slipping on an old, trusted pair of socks.

  It was that easy, the killings, only now he wouldn’t lay a hand on an animal. He’d moved on. It was no longer sporting.

  His mind tore back to the present and his eyes bore right through Cozzard.

  “Didn’t you hear me earlier, Cozzard? Don’t you remember what we discussed?”

  “What would that be, sir? That stuff about them stories.”

  Longman nodded.

  “The reason we can’t kill our own is because we need to get our people to rally around a common threat.”

  “Which threat would that be?”

  “The enemies from the other side of the wall.”

  Cozzard squinted.

  “You mean … the Thresher?”

  Longman wanted to strike Cozzard down. The man was so incredibly stupid that he couldn’t process any of what was being told to him. He’d probably have better luck chatting up one of the pigs he kept at his zoo.

  “No, not the Thresher, the groups of spies and insurgents that may soon be trying to break down our wall.”

  This was a lie of course. There were no forces on the outside threatening New Chicago, but Cozzard and the others didn’t know this. It was one of Longman’s oldest tricks, the creation of a scapegoat, some stranger that only Longman could defeat. It would soon be “us” versus “them,” and the people would be so terrified, so whipped up into a frenzy as a result of his propaganda, that they’d throw their support behind him. When the threat was over, they’d adore him once again. Just as he remembered it being back in the early days.

  “We won’t let the terrorists win, sir,” Cozzard said. “I swear to God, we will protect the city with our lives.”

  “It heartens me to hear you say that, Cozzard.”

  Cozzard clucked his tongue and grinned. “Should I tell the boys, Mister Longman? Should I tell them we’re going to war?”

  “Not yet. And in the meantime, you tell the dead one’s father and his mother that there’s no need for an investigation. We’ll pin it all on them.”

  “Who?”

  “The bitch and the boy,” Longman said, referring to Marisol and Elias.

  “But they’s gone, sir,” said Lout, “slipped under the wall, gone far away now.”

  “Ah,” Longman said, curling his fingers under his chin, “it’s like the old song of praise says, Mister Lout. The two of them were indeed lost, but now they’ve been found.”

  Cozzard chuckled. “You think they’s on it, eh? The ones we’s looking for? They’s on that goddamn boat?”

  Longman nodded. “I’ll be needing you and the others to bring the girl, the hunter, the one who escaped us, back to me if she’s indeed on that vessel.”

  “And any others we should … stumble on?” Cozzard asked, licking his lips.

  “Do with them,” Longman said, “what you will.”

  46

  The procession of vehicles with Moses as guide continued along a rutted path of packed earth that resembled a glorified deer trail through the grasslands. He wasn’t sure if the others knew why the grass was depressed here, but he knew. The Thresher, the ivory-eyed monsters, they’d come and gone this way in great numbers at some point recently. This area, he reckoned, was likely akin to some kind of migratory path.<
br />
  Moses held a wireless communication device and barked directions to the drivers as the machines wormed their way through the guts of the grasslands that separated clusters of crumbling civilization, strip-malls, and a few clusters of boxy vinyl-clad housing and the like.

  He could see Ricky Keys off in another vehicle, fumbling with a leather pack that he carried. It contained his tiny bottles and long needles, filled with a liquefied version of Longman’s drugs. It was well known that Ricky didn’t fancy firearms. He preferred his courage in a syringe.

  He swung a look at Hendrix and the others who, being outside the wall and all, had been set free from their inhibitions and were snapping together sniping gear and hi-powered scopes and taking pot-shots at anything that moved as they rolled past. An errant deer here, a straggling Thresher there.

  They missed the deer, but pulped several Thresher including a woman with a bulbous head that exploded against a broken windshield like an overripe pumpkin. Moses observed this, and the men, as they cheered “Score!” and slapped palms.

  His mind wandered back to something he’d heard from a man who lost an arm and a leg to the Thresher before he literally crawled to the wall. Their vision was blurred, but by God they could hear and smell the scent of blood like sharks. These senses were amplified because of the storm and the fact that many if not all of the Thresher stayed dormant during full daylight, lurching around underground, not unlike the things called Morlocks he’d read about in an ancient time-traveling book as a child.

  The Thresher lived in old buildings, sewers, hollers and duck-holes like desert spiders, emerging mostly at dusk to hunt and feed. Moses had heard tales of Thresher even appearing in the early afternoon once they cottoned to the fact that the sun was low and there was a bevy of warm bodies on the ground above them. If that happened during the expedition, the only question was whether Big Bob and the others had enough bullets to take them all down.

  The procession ground to a stop at an urban windfall, a space where it appeared as if the unwinding of the world had begun. Huge sections of a fallen overpass had been pressed down, and were now mixed with limp power-lines and crumbling storefronts of chains, mom-and-pops, RVs, and wretched FEMA trailers to block the way forward.

  Moses told the others they’d have to exit the vehicles and move through a stand of thick young trees that formed a natural tunnel into the hinterlands. They dismounted their rides and gathered up their weapons and gear. Ricky Keys was shooting up out of sight of the others, as Big Bob Pope unlocked metal footlockers bolted to the rides and handed out wedge daggers and semiautomatic pistols and assault rifles, (including those capable of going fully cyclical), and even an old M-60 machine-gun that he strapped across his chest with a nylon sling.

  Magazines and bandoliers of ammo were shared out. Moses, having been given a machine pistol, slapped in a mag and checked his safety before leading them quickly across a road. They worked their way around stalled machines, sections of a downed helicopter, scraps, trash, and refuse infused with chemicals and plastics that would never disappear.

  An eerie tranquility settled in over the group as they marched in ones and twos up through the courtyard of an old tenement, the sound of their boots and rustling equipment and hushed voices fluttering from wall to wall. They pushed past empty playgrounds and forgotten gardens and parks, feral patches of bramble that segregated the tenement from adjoining sections of grassland that were spotted with decaying corpses, lying scattered and flyblown next to mounds of garbage that acted like banquet halls for vermin and insects with shiny carapaces.

  Big Bob Pope watched Moses move out ahead, running point for the mission. If only his grandpa could see him now. Following a dude whose skin was so black it was almost purple. His gramps had come over in one of the last waves of immigrants back in the day and was smart enough to change the family name from Poplincik to Pope so he wouldn’t catch hell from the various other ethnic tribes when he solicited them for plumbing work.

  His grandfather worked like hell and bought himself a two-bedroom shotgun shack in a neighborhood not too far from where Bob stood. One of those outer ring hoods that the big boys used back after Prohibition to ply their wares and launder their dirty money. Bob remembered the old man regaling his pops and Bob with stories of the times when the whole area was a mini vice-district with sections called “The Black Hole,” “The Bad Lands,” “Satan’s Mile,” and “Hell’s Half Acre.”

  Places overseen by brutes like Jim Sweeney, Joe Sangerman, and the rest of the short-fused Black Handers. They divvied up Chicago, the South Side controlled by Danny Stanton, and the Northwest overseen by William “Klondike” O’Donnel, men who reported, in some form or fashion to those who were in charge. Meyer Lansky and Lepke Buchalter in New York, Big Al Polizzi in Cleveland and Longy Zwillman in New Jersey.

  People were poor back then, his gramps had told him, but they pulled together, they made a go of it even if some of what they did was less than legal. “For Crissakes, Bobby,” his grandfather would remind him, “It’s like Cornelius Vanderbilt said, ‘You can’t build a goddamn railroad by following the statutes.’”

  Wasn’t that what Longman was, Big Bob wondered to himself? Just another man who took what he was given and made the best of it? A boot-strapper in the truest sense of the word. A voice for the voiceless, a later-day Meyer Lansky with a darker smile and a quicker trigger finger? America had been built by men like that, and Big Bob was certain that Longman would ultimately prevail over whatever waited out beyond the wall. And when he did, when he came into his own and realized who’d helped make his ascent possible, Longman would reward his faithful servants. Big Bob firmly believed that he was part of the elect and that his reward was just around the corner.

  Ricky Keys whistled at Big Bob, startling him out of his reverie. He motioned for Bob to keep trudging forward, as Moses was nearly out of sight. Ricky watched the other gunslingers shuffle past him, mimicking their poses. While he could only barely trigger a gun because of his ruined hand, he knew his way around the “blacks” and the “browns” as he called them. His babies. The explosive mixtures and incendiary and detonation devices he’d helped create—packed carefully in ballistic gel and gently wetted strips of leather—housed in a child’s school backpack that hung limply over one shoulder.

  He was brought along on these kinds of jobs as an entry-person, the man who could breach an obstruction or open up a wall if need be. Moses had whispered to him that there would be doors and other obstacles involved, and Ricky’s hands trembled in delight at the thought of blowing something up.

  Ricky saw Moses up ahead. He watched the black man stop and look back at him and the others. Ricky was mindful of the sun just beginning to drift toward the horizon. They had a good four, maybe five hours until night came. Just barely enough time to reach their destination, assuming there were no surprises. But somewhere back in the inner recesses of his feeble mind, Ricky had the feeling that there would be surprises on this trip. Maybe lots of them. Dark things, horrible shockers. The kind of surprises that meant most of those who were marching with him would never make it back to the relative safety of New Chicago alive.

  47

  After his torture session was concluded, the bloody rags of flesh dangling from Farrow’s fingers were looped like streamers and zippered up by one of Longman’s faux nurses, sans antiseptic or anything to mute the pain. The big man was hoisted to his feet and reminded that he’d be questioned again the next morning. Farrow couldn’t believe he was still alive. He’d bitten one of Longman’s goons and lived to tell about it. He was marched down a corridor that resembled a mine shaft filled with lonely-eyed people who stared at him as if he were an alien who’d fallen from the sky.

  Shuffling down a short flight of barely-used stairs that curled around to the back of the building, Farrow was manhandled down over treads, his feet slapping the worn metal as he continued past floors inhabited by members of various Guilds (the higher the floor, the higher the
Guild).

  His handlers stopped for an instant on Floor 19, the forgotten wing of the building. Intentionally so. Walled off. Sealed off. The place where Longman and the others had taken refuge in that first horrible winter. The time of starving that everyone was forbidden to even talk about. Farrow knew what was on the other side of the wall. Skeletons. Literally and figuratively. Lots of them. Evidence of a time when the first ones, like the settlers in Jamestown hundreds of years before, had done what they needed to do to survive.

  Farrow and some of the other Apes had been given dispensation to venture into Floor 19 on a classified job five years prior and there they’d seen the skulls and bones with the telltale marks of axes and cleavers and roughly-honed knives. They saw temporal bones pried off, femurs and jaws with jagged cuts where muscle and sinew had been stripped away by the cannibalistic settlers. He hoped to God that he wouldn’t end up like those poor bastards.

  Farther down Farrow was prodded, made to straggle along narrow passageways floored with steel grating. They passed through other floors, including one that resembled an indoor bazaar brimming with all manner of black-market goods, another whose air was heavy with the scent of fertilizer, dung and chemicals, and more that were filled with UV lights and hydroponic gear where herbs and vegetables and other leafy things were grown.

  Beyond this they circumvented a locked corridor behind which sat a section of the 9th Floor where the infamous “Silent Room” (or “Hush” as some called it) was located. Though Farrow had never ventured there, he’d heard bone-chilling stories about the space. A primitive isolation chamber devoid of light where Longman’s victims, those whose tongues had been hacked out for committing speech crimes, were housed. The unlucky were cast down a metal chute into the darkened space never to be seen again.

  What went on in the room was anyone’s guess, but an ex-guard once told Farrow that he’d nearly lost his marbles listening to the jabber of the things locked inside. What were once men and women. Utterly broken in spirit and mind, locked forever in a demonic cadence, trying to wail and gnash their teeth without their tongues.