Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  “I found him though. I didn’t put him down if that’s what you’re thinking,” Elias added.

  “It’s got a map inside, Elias. Something that probably came from someone in the

  military.”

  Terry stepped forward. “We’re thinking we’re gonna go and check it out.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s a place that’s got stuff we could use. Guns and gear and other equipment that

  might be handy.”

  “Why do we have to go back?” Elias asked. “Why can’t we just leave?”

  He noticed a bevy of looks shared by the others.

  “We just can’t right now,” Jessup replied.

  “It ain’t only about snagging weapons,” offered Jon, the Latino with the deep-throated voice who sounded as if he’d just gargled with sandpaper.

  “Basically we need vitals,” said Bennie, the black man who was busy hand-cranking an ancient-looking machine that Elias recognized as a radio.

  “We could use some extra goods, food, supplies, whatever we can get,” said Blake, now wearing gloves and carrying the strong aroma of dead fish and stagnant water.

  Jessup nodded, then looked at everyone.

  “If we’re going back out, we do like we always do. We vote on it.”

  Liza shook her head. “We’ve lost too many before. It’s too dangerous. Even for a few. I say no, no way I’m going to authorize another expedition to the interior.”

  Terry thrust his hand up. “I’ll go."

  “Me too,” said Bennie.

  “Me three,” offered Jon.

  Ava and Riley shook their heads and slowly moved closer to Liza.

  Blake and Harry disagreed, Blake shaking his wan head, Harry voting to go. It was down to Jessup and Elias.

  Jessup glanced at everyone, then shook his head. “It’s too risky. Insufficient intel and … I just can’t go along with the plan, I can’t do it.”

  Terry muttered under his breath as Elias slowly raised his hand.

  “I’ll go,” Elias stated, “I won’t go back into the city, but I’ll head out into the grass. I’ll help you guys.”

  “No dice, Elias,” Jessup offered in reply. “There’s a tie. Five against five. When there’s a tie, the request is denied. Them’s the rules.”

  “What about me?” said a voice and all eyes immediately skipped sideways to focus on Marisol who was just emerging from the hold. She had one hand on a railing, but otherwise looked good, the color having finally returned to her face.

  “You’re insane,” said Liza, “you just recovered from a gunshot wound. You’re in no condition to go anywhere.”

  “I … I’ll be okay,” Marisol said. “I can walk. Besides, I’m the one who leads the way.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Jessup said while striding forward and appraising the girl, who, he had to admit, had some serious brass. “You lead the way, huh? Says who?”

  Marisol thought about this for a moment, glanced at the others, then responded calmly.

  “That’s how it’s always been,” she said.

  50

  Longman and his sanctioned life-takers, Cozzard, Lout, and a half dozen others, moved down a black bitumen pathway that ran through the center of New Chicago. They were garbed in quasi-battle dress, crude fatigues over ancient flak jackets and boots with vulcanized soles stripped from industrial tires. Longman clutched his LeMat pistol, Cozzard wore a machine pistol on a cinch sling, Lout cradled a short-barreled pump-action shotgun, and the rest of the men sported handguns positioned gunfighter-style in thigh holsters.

  Longman was generally disgusted by Cozzard and the others. They were, at best, base, common, brutal men, but they served a purpose. He’d studied military history long enough to know that the use of criminals in war was common. The demonic Dilewanger Penal Unit employed by the Nazis, for instance, or the roving band of scalphunters led by John Joel Glanton. These irregulars were brutal and effective, particularly against partisans and the civilian populace.

  The citizens of New Chicago gave Longman and his thugs a wide berth as they strolled by a coagulation of street vendors selling fried meats and meager allotments of fruit and vegetables and grains that grew on the outskirts of town. Longman had ordered the destruction of any establishment that existed prior to the rechristening of New Chicago except for one landmark. A smallish outfit called “Hot Doug’s,” which Longman had visited and loved before the world ended. He gave the shop special dispensation even though he’d had the owner murdered and appropriated the premises. Still, the building remained and the new tenants sold a variation on the musky smoked meats and other goodies that were hawked when things were right.

  Many of the venders doffed their caps when they saw Longman, a few damn near genuflecting in fear as he feigned smiles and waved like a proper ruler, even stopping to kiss the cheeks of a small girl who was playfully riding on the shoulders of her father.

  He envisioned the day when this present ordeal involving the boy and girl was over, when he and his men would return with their heads held high, and they would be given some form of Roman triumph. A spectacle where all of the city’s denizens would filter out into the streets and he would ride at the front of his men, followed by another wearing what would amount to a prospective death mask of him. All those who gazed upon the procession would have no choice but to refer to him as a triumphant leader.

  They passed swaths of greenhouses connected to open-air laboratories where batches of “The White” were grown and processed and made ready for distribution.

  Steam and smoke rose from huge vats of chemicals and boiling liquids, filtering out over the bricks of burned out buildings and by the foundries where the lesser Guilds plied their trades beside the running course where the Runners (who continued to train in the absence of Moses O’Shea), were sprinting and doing functional weight training.

  In a moment of irony, Longman nearly barreled over Jesse Lavey, the father of the dead boy, Caleb, who had set in motion the events of the last few days.

  Longman bowed his head and muttered platitudes about Caleb being a special boy (“He was formed from the iron of which martyrs are made,” Longman said, stealing a line from another time), and about how justice delayed was still justice served and this seemed to assuage any momentary concerns Mr. Lavey had.

  Cozzard and Lout marveled at the ability of Longman to soothe even the most savage beast with just his tongue. They rightly chalked it up to his years spent spinning lies as an officer for a judicial system that was no more. How could they say it was worse now, Cozzard thought, when men like Longman were officially stamped and paid well to tell lies in the days before? Cozzard thought back to an old joke that he heard many years before that centered on why they’d made the courts get rid of those Ten Commandments plaques. The reason, of course, was that prohibiting lying and stealing in a place that housed lawyers would’ve created a hostile work environment. He laughed at this and fell back in line with the others and marched on.

  At the end of town they kicked down into a concrete culvert, slipped under a train portal and followed the culvert until it emptied into a retaining pond nestled above a section of dark woods.

  What lay beyond was hidden by clots of unruly trees, mostly trashy softwoods that had sprouted on the edge of the wall here, an area where it met the coastline near Lake Michigan. Longman, Cozzard, Lout, and another five thugs dismounted a rough path and slipped between the trees into a grove of ancient revenants, a forgotten cluster of fruit trees, many of which had simply laid down over time and were returning to the soft ground. Longman led the way forward, his LeMat pistol dangling from one hand, rotten fruit mashing underfoot. He pointed to a long shed where a slew of pencil-thin skiffs were kept.

  Doors on the shed were pulled open and the men grabbed the boats and oars and small battery-powered mosquito motors. Cozzard checked the footage shot by Longman which had been triangulated over a digital map of the coastline so that he knew exactly where to go.


  “When you find them, it’s imperative that the boy and girl, if they’re there, be brought back alive.” He made this his order because others, namely his subjects, had watched the boy in action. If the boy and girl were allowed to escape, it might lesson his mandate or motivate others to follow their lead. Plus he needed something real, an actual scapegoat to parade in front of his people, to demonstrate that a plot from those within and without was real.

  Cozzard nodded and whistled to Lout and some of the other men who threw the boats over their shoulders to carry down to the water that was barely visible through the treeline.

  “This ain’t right,” a voice said.

  Longman paused and looked back at the only man who’d remained behind. He knew the young man, an orphan, a fair-haired boy barely twenty years of age who had the last name of Stoneburner.

  “I mean no offense, sir, but sending a hunting party to do dirt to two of our own ain’t the right thing to do,” Stoneburner added.

  “And why might that be?” asked Longman.

  “Because they served us before, sir. They were part of Absolution.”

  “And yet, are they not terrorists now?”

  “I have no evidence that they are,” Stoneburner said.

  “You have my word.”

  “Yessir, that’s true, but a man’s word is not necessarily the same as cold, hard proof. I ain’t that old, but I’ve lived long enough to know that. I also know that God has recently laid something on my heart.”

  “God,” Longman snickered. “Can you look around at all that has befallen us and say with a straight face that God still exists?”

  “The fool says in his heart, sir, that there is no God.”

  Longman stiffened. His face clouded. “Are you calling me a fool?”

  “I’m not, sir, but God surely is.”

  Stoneburner continued to speak, telling Longman about his recent religious conversion. He offered words about the wickedness he’d engaged in and how he’d repented. He invoked the name of God and several saints and teachings from the Holy Book and told Longman that there was somebody that would be waiting to judge him, maybe not now, but most definitely in whatever lay beyond the physical world if he continued on his current path.

  Longman’s expression darkened as he thought back on the ancient principle that mighty men bold enough to form new states should not hesitate to destroy those who might cause them harm. Of course, the idea of destroying things was at odds with his desire to avoid bloodshed in the short-term, but sometimes violence was unavoidable.

  “Are you familiar with principle that he who lives by the sword shall also die by it?” Longman asked.

  “Yes, sir, I am,” answered Stoneburner.

  Longman smiled and then he shot Stoneburner through the neck with the pistol barrel on his LeMat.

  Stoneburner gurgled, lying face down in a slurry of mud and rotten fruit and then craned his head up and whispered the word “Death.” His body bucked as if in the grip of some powerful current and then Longman finished the boy off with a shotgun blast that carved a deep depression in the small of his back. He hated the idea of using violence against one of his own, but he had no choice. Examples had to be made from time to time.

  The echo of the shots tickled the fruit and shade trees and caused Cozzard and the others to stop and look back. But only for a moment. They were used to it. They hesitated, then hitched up the skiffs and continued on down to the water as Longman watched them go.

  Through the trees they moved like specters, Cozzard at the front. The men skidded down an embankment and stared white-eyed at the sheer immensity of what lay before them. Peaked cliffs scooped away from the ground by the pounding of the waves. The men surveyed the cliffs, then dropped their boats into the water and paddled out into it.

  The waves flushed against the boats as the men made for deeper water. Lout reached to the side of his boat and drew up a wad of algae-slicked muck and daubed it across his face to form some kind of primitive war paint. They paddled with weapons across their knees, communicating only with hand gestures. Lout knew that violence and degradation waited for them and those they were to meet somewhere out across the fog-shrouded water. He and his boys were steeped in brutality. Practitioners of it some might say. That was the way it was and would always be.

  51

  A shadow flowed past Moses, a tremulous blur he spied out of the corner of one eye. There for an instant, and then gone. He squinted, searched the ground for the small mounds of fresh earth that signaled a Thresher hole (“Thresher Huts” the mounds were called). He cocked his head like a dog trying to locate a squirrel, but all was quiet. Seeing nothing out in the mini-steppe, he held aloft a balled fist and signaled for the others to stop.

  Hendrix was nowhere to be seen and so Moses swung out through the grass and found him stooped over a dead Thresher, slicing off its ears and carving it up like a slaughtered chicken.

  When Hendrix looked up and spotted Moses, he grinned and pulled a length of wire from a hip-pocket. He plunged it into the thing’s ears and looped it all up and stood, necklace of ears dangling across his chest. “Whaddaya think, Mo?” he said. “You want me to make you one?”

  Moses conjured up a half smile.

  “I’ll pass, but thank you, Mister Hendrix. In the meantime, I think we need to keep moving.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “It’ll be dark soon.”

  “C’mon, Mo,” Hendrix said as he draped an arm around Moses. “You gotta relax, brother.”

  “I’ll relax my ass off once we’re back inside the wall.”

  “Wall,” Hendrix grumbled. “Goddam wall has programmed the bite out of us, ain’t it? I remember how it was during that first year and it ain’t like that no more. We lost it. The thrill of the kill.”

  “Only thing worse than getting’ nothin’ is losin’ somethin’,” Moses replied after some thought.

  “What the hell does that even mean?”

  “It means it’s time to go.”

  Moses gestured to the others and moved ahead, the woods out in front deathly still and partially illuminated by the saggy sun, giving it the appearance of an open-air cathedral as tendrils of light drooped down through the trees.

  Branches snapped and small things scurried underfoot, causing Ricky Keys and some of the other men to jump and giggle nervously. Moses heard safeties on guns snap off, and a woman panting (whether in fright or because of lack of conditioning, he couldn’t tell). Before long, the woods narrowed to a natural path that emerged into a clearing on the banks of a trickle of water populated by peepers and low-throated bullfrogs whose mating calls boomed and provided a weird backbeat to the hike.

  Moses parted a swatch of branches and caught a first glimpse of the rusted chain-link fence that surrounded a compound of low-slung buildings maybe two football fields away. In the center of the compound, barely visible, was a separate structure shaped like a top hat with glistening silver skin. Moses didn’t know its proper name, but to others the compound had once been called Site 181. What they were sent for was hidden deep inside that building.

  Moses’s mouth tucked into a concerned frown as he glanced about for any sign of movement, human or Thresher, and hearing and sensing nothing, he hopped over the creek and up a hillside and past signage that warned that one was about to enter classified government property and that “working dogs” had once been used here.

  Moses and some of the others pulled aside a loop of chained fence and went past raw-looking outer shacks, before crossing an inner plaza with glassed buildings and security bodegas that had been defiled in the days after the Unraveling. Everything in sight had been picked clean, like one of those military compounds you used to see on the news that were overrun by revolutionaries and became the playgrounds of Third World latchkey kids. Moses stopped and took it all in. This was the last place he’d seen her in. Alicia. The mother of his child, Malik. She’d worked here and he’d heard about what went on inside and about how
she’d taken refuge behind its walls when it all went to hell.

  They reached the silver-skinned building that had a lower skirt, maybe 15 feet high, of what appeared to be steel. Above that, thick plates of ballistic, gelled glass. The advanced cameras, sophisticated motion detectors, and other security equipment were all dormant, dangling uselessly from the upper portions of the buildings.

  “Look at this sucker,” Big Bob said, running his hand over the lower skirt.

  “Uranium infused steel,” said Moses.

  Big Bob looked over.

  “How do you know?”

  “I knew someone that worked here once upon a time.”

  Big Bob looked at the lower section of the building where burns marks and indentations on the steel were visible from where looters likely tried to unsuccessfully slash and shoot their way in. They circled around the only door they could find, a slab of concrete with a handle bolted that was smeared and defaced with graffiti and crude drawings of genitalia.

  Big Bob grabbed the handle and tugged on it. It didn’t budge. He knocked on the door and some of the others laughed. Then he looked back at Moses.

  “Maybe your friend can let us in,” Big Bob said with a grin.

  Moses forced a smile.

  “Highly unlikely,” Moses replied.

  Big Bob grimaced. “Then we’re gonna need us a key.”

  All eyes swung to Ricky Keys who Moses watched fix an explosive to the door and ready it to blow. Moses was not a man of terrible learning, but he did recall a quote from some artist, or poet, or writer who essentially said the man who comes back through the door will never be quite the same as the one who goes in. Moses thought this might be the truest thing he’d ever heard in his life as he covered his ears, and turned his head as Ricky shrieked “Burning!” and the door burst from its hinges.

  In the subterranean gloom fifty feet below Moses and the others, abominable things staggered and hissed. Noses cocked upward and feverish white eyes strained for the slightest vibration, the faintest sound that would indicate things moving on two or four legs.