Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  “I won’t,” she said, and then added softly, “Thank you, Elias.”

  She reached out and hugged him tightly. Elias, not knowing how to respond, simply blushed and fell back in line with the others.

  55

  When the smoke from the explosion cleared, Moses peered into the hole where the door once stood. All was dark and crypt-quiet inside.

  “Anything?” Big Bob asked and Moses shook his head. He squinted and his eyes recalibrated. He checked the magazine on his machine-pistol and signaled for the others to follow as he headed inside.

  Moses counted his breaths as he slithered through the twilight of the inner corridors of the building, half expecting to see Alicia’s shriveled body lying on the ground. They soon reached a spot where gauzy afternoon sunlight filtered through the ballistic glass on the silver-skinned building as Ricky Keys, Hendrix, Big Bob Pope and the others eyed the inner sanctum filled with cubicles and gear and peripherals. It all appeared to have been untouched since the world ended.

  “This place is mint!” Ricky Keys shouted, his voice echoing off the walls. “Hasn’t been touched in forever!”

  They moved past internal power transformers that were spotless, but fused together, some of the initial victims of the sun storm that caused energy centers to overpower and melt.

  Hushed silence filled the space as they crossed a bullpen awash in banks of high-resolution monitors and light tables. Laid out on the tables were fastened transparencies and satellite imagery and yellowing documents marked “DIA” and “TOP SECRET/SCI” and “NRO,” all left over from when Roger Parker had failed to incinerate them in his burn box. There were no weapons visible, but plenty of documents and banks of communications gear.

  Big Bob had read somewhere that nearly all dust is human skin, and he wondered how many must have died here given the sheer volume of the stuff. He picked up a sheaf of the yellowing documents, which crumbled in his hands as he blew a fine coating of detritus away, much like making a wish on a ladybug.

  He waited for Moses and the others to disappear ahead, then reached in a hip pocket and pulled out a small .22 pistol. Next he threaded what he called a “can,” a silencer, onto the end of it.

  Once they found whatever it was they’d been sent to retrieve, Big Bob had been given strict orders to put a slug in Moses’s head. A single shot right behind his ear.

  Big Bob hadn’t been told why he was to do this, but then again, that was Longman’s modus operandi. The man’s machinations were layered like onions and he made sure to never tell everyone everything. He related enough so that you could carry out your end of a particular job.

  All he knew at that moment was that Moses was now some kind of threat and had to be terminated. He felt a pang of regret. O’Shea wasn’t his cup of tea, but he’d never messed with him personally. Still, the rules were the rules, and it was either O’Shea or him.

  Moses suspected that it was already in the wind. It was coming up fast for him. He didn’t know who’d been chosen to do the deed, but it was only a matter of time before someone tried to ice him. He’d served his purpose, he’d guided them to what Longman needed, and now he was what? Just another witness. And everyone knew what happened to witnesses in New Chicago.

  Moses continued down corridors, stopping when he spotted a form stirring in the darkness. An object with an exterior as pale as moonlight as he strode forward and BOOM! a body swung down at him like a pendulum, a flesh-ragged corpse still covered in a moldering military uniform whose decals and insignias had been whited out by the sun. The body twisted and turned to reveal the withered, garish face of Captain Farber.

  “Jesus!” Hendrix shrieked, spooking some of the others who fired their weapons. Moses dropped to his knees and covered his ears.

  “Cease fire!” Big Bob shrieked.

  When the last metal casing had hit the ground, Moses stood and saw that the corpse was a soldier, swinging slowly from side-to-side, a length of electrical wire around his neck.

  Moses used his machine pistol to nudge the body aside, and then stepped beyond another body. It was Roger Parker, who lay on his back, cleaver protruding from his chest. Moses guessed that everyone inside had turned on each other.

  He wondered about Alicia. Had she made it out? Was she still out there, stumbling around, searching for him?

  More hallways, more alcoves, more sterile, empty spaces. Moses led the others through numerous doors which had automatically opened when the solar and geothermal went out.

  He advanced down a corridor that ended at a black door that appeared to be set on the kind of thick hinges used to secure bank vaults.

  Moses caught an eyeful from Big Bob and nodded. Ricky Keys went ahead and fixed another explosive in the middle of the hinges, setting his explosives kit down before blowing the door off just as he’d done before. The explosion rattled the walls, the roof, the floor, shockwaves reverberating for several seconds.

  It was here that Moses realized his opportunity had arrived. The explosive backwash gave Moses enough time to charge forward and grab Ricky’s blast kit and dive through the avalanche of dust and smoke into the room on the other side of the black door.

  Big Bob, Ricky, and the others caught the tail end of Moses entering the room and went after him, Big Bob clutching the .22 pistol, no longer hiding the fact that he’d been marked to blow Moses’s brains out.

  Big Bob frog-stepped through the din, pistol up and ready, expecting hell as he entered the room to see Moses clutching, in his right hand, what looked like an oversized metal briefcase, the same one Roger Parker had witnessed, the very kind you used to see drug couriers lug around on TV shows back in the day.

  In Moses’s left hand was a wad of homemade C-4 that was studded with a blasting cap and det cord and hooked to a plunger-thingie. whose trigger Moses had his thumb over.

  The black man grinned at Big Bob.

  “Today is your lucky day, Robert.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Big Bob (who loathed being called “Robert”), “Why’s that?”

  “The fates, working through me, have allowed you to live this day. All you and the others gotta do is back up. Just … back the hell up.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  Moses smiled like a sphinx. “I will bring the hammer down.”

  Moses took on the others’ stares, then slipped past them and backed down the corridor, doing the only thing he could think of to do. He tight-gripped the briefcase and spun on his heels, then ran for his life.

  56

  Marisol, Elias and the others moved swiftly like a hiking party out on a weekend jaunt, curling up and over the crest and down the reverse slope.

  Jon and Bennie walked alongside Jessup and Terry as Elias and Marisol moved out ahead.

  They crossed sections of fallen billboards near an abandoned overpass that had collapsed and accordioned a dozen cars. Jessup gestured to one that showed the doughy face of a smiling man in a suit next to a 1-800 number and the words “Get in a wreck? Get you your check.”

  “I heard the kid say the one who’s pulling the levers behind that wall was a man of the law,” Jessup said while pointing at the billboard.

  Jon looked over and cocked an eyebrow, “Get out. You mean, what? A lawyer?”

  Jessup nodded.

  “I ever tell how you I was in charge of a whole team of the bloodsuckers back before?” Jon said.

  “No shit,” muttered Terry.

  “Business affairs they called it,” Jon said. “Out on the left coast. We spent all our days working on contracts for films and shows and thinking up exotic ways to keep some people in deals while cutting other people out.”

  “You miss it?”

  Jon shook his head.

  “Toward the end they’d run out of ideas. They strip-mined all the good stuff and crowded out the original thinkers. How many times can you remake a story about a guy with a cape and spider-webs?”

  The others chuckled at this and then anger furrowed Bennie’s brow.
“We should’ve snuffed them out even before it all went to hell,” he said. “Lawyers never did shit.”

  “Never created anything,” Jon continued, “that’s for sure.”

  “Traffickers in misery and despair,” Bennie added.

  “Then I guess it makes perfect sense that they’re the last ones standing,” Jessup said with a grin.

  The group moved through stands of bloated apple trees, Jessup watching the others pick a few as they traipsed across the countryside. He lifted a canteen to quench his thirst and caught his reflection in its shiny, metal belly. Skin stubbled, but tanned and firm. Lush hair spilling well past his ears and beyond his collar.

  “Definitely not regulation,” said a voice.

  Jessup shot a look back to see Terry. Terry moved forward and gestured to Jessup’s locks. “Your hair, I mean. That would definitely not pass muster back in the day, soldier.”

  Jessup smirked. “I look like I’m homeless, but the weird thing is I’m in the best shape of my life.” This was true, Jessup was at least twenty pounds below his usual two-hundred and ten pounds, maintaining his fitness by keeping on the move and doing exercises that relied on his bodyweight.

  “They call it the ‘First Light Diet,’” Terry replied, chuckling. “It’s like Cross-Fit, only you never get to eat and are constantly chased by flesh-eating monsters and cannibals. I’m planning on franchising it once the world gets its shit back together again.”

  Jessup laughed and handed Terry his canteen.

  “If my old lady could only see me now,” Terry muttered, checking himself out in the canteen.

  “She wouldn’t know who the hell you are, brother,” said Jessup.

  Terry nodded and Jessup thought back on Jill, his companion from the days before the Unraveling. She’d barely recognize him now and if she did, she’d be pissed about the hair and the half-beard and the people he’d surrounded himself with.

  She’d been a hard charger in the old world, a definite type-A personality back when everything centered around finance in Bethesda, Maryland.

  They’d met at an intra-office happy hour at a mega financial services company (one that invested only in socially and environmentally responsible companies of course) after both binned out of the Service a few years before (he from the Air Force, she from the Navy).

  Jill was in compliance. He was a lowly Series 7 slacker who cold-called people in selected zip codes to see if they wanted to buy the latest and hottest stock. He’d screwed up a trade one day, forgotten to fill out some useless form and had been marched into the back office where Jill was to read him the riot act. He instantly fell for her, what with her long, twisty brown hair and light eyes and body that made it clear she had a close, personal relationship with a stair-stepper.

  They’d been hot and cold in the months after they met, but in the weeks leading up to the end of it all, they’d made a commitment to make things right. To get married. Work was the majority of her life and she’d taken it personally when the sky fell and the machines and trading desks sputtered and stopped.

  Mandatory curfews were in place by then, and the police out in full vigor to stop the looters and wilders who’d just started moving north from the city. It was too dangerous to jog, but Jill had grown stir-crazy and announced to him that she was going out for a walk an hour before curfew. Jessup remembered her standing there in the amber light of the late day and telling him that she was heading out past Suburban Hospital and then would circle back over Wisconsin Avenue. He pecked her on the cheek, and then she was gone, never to return.

  Her face became one of hundreds plastered on telephone poles and the sides of buildings. He searched with others until the groups of searchers became smaller and smaller, people picked off by gangs during the day, or robbers at night, or victims of street-to-street battles that raged in the later months as Bethesda and North Rockville and other communities went to war.

  When the neighborhoods were put to the torch, he’d taken refuge in the local mall and then a car dealership and finally, when those were gone he grabbed an SUV and loaded it up with bladders of fuel and driven for his family’s ancestral home on the shores of one of the Great Lakes.

  He’d stopped and checked for relations in Pennsylvania and Ohio (all gone without a trace) and then kept on going, staying off the major highways, making for Michigan. The cities and hamlets and nameless hollows whipped by, some still with power, others without, some ransacked and ablaze, others looking exactly as they did the day before First Light.

  He’d stopped for a few minutes outside a commuter train station where a group of men, still clad in jackets and ties, waited up on a platform, flummoxed looks on their faces. They’d lived to work rather than work to live. They still hadn’t accepted that it was all over.

  He drove on, barely missing roving packs of vandals and murderers who were everywhere and all around. He blew out a tire south of Toledo and was rescued by a family of backpackers who were heading out into the country to live off the land. They told him tales of mini-wars in Wisconsin and the lands beyond. Battles fought between the remnants of paramilitary forces that had been hired to guard mining and other industrial concerns in the years leading up to the Unraveling.

  Steering clear of Toledo, he drove up through Sylvania and Adrian, Ohio, toeing the gas and speeding past torched strip malls and the outer ring of the old suburbia, moving ever northward, compelled by a dream, a faint memory of a postcard beautiful home that he’d visited once as a child. A post-and-beam structure, built by Menonite laborers with cedar shingles, that overlooked the water. A weekend sanctum where his grandfather kept a magnificent sailboat.

  Jessup just stood there in a daze, listening to the shouts. He blinked and looked up at Terry.

  Terry snapped his fingers. “Hey. Anybody in there?”

  Jessup shook off the cobwebs. “What happened?”

  “Just the usual. You zoned on me, big guy.”

  Jessup smiled sheepishly, turning as Marisol breezed by him stood on point. The girl warrior. How many people had she and the boy killed in their limited time on the Earth? He could tell by their eyes that they knew pain. Pain perhaps even greater than he’d experienced.

  Still, she had the cool arrogance of somebody who believed they alone know the correct way forward, he thought. Kind of like his Jill. Jessup was not amused by her taking his spot, however, and rebuked her with a glance before sharing a look with Terry who shrugged.

  Jessup brushed past Marisol who reached out and grabbed his wrist. Without uttering a word she lifted a leg and attempted to move past Jessup, but he was unbudgable, full of bluster. He swiveled and took a step and immediately felt the unsettling, sick to the stomach sensation one feels upon realizing that a serious mistake has been made.

  Jessup’s foot tore through a loose camouflage of leaves and grass and in a flash his oversized frame was falling face first into a nine-foot hole filled with shafts of sharpened wood when a hand reached down and closed on his wrist, stopping his descent. Voices echoed and more hands grabbed him. Then he was moving back up, being pulled away from certain death, the events, his mistake in stepping on the trap replaying over and over in his mind.

  He hit the ground on his back, and all he could hear was his own nervous breathing as he stared up at the person who’d help save his life. Marisol. She was peering down at him, breathing heavily, Elias next to her. He could tell that she’d grabbed his back and Elias had helped her stop him from dropping into the pit. She peered down at him, the corners of her mouth tucked up the smallest of smiles that only he could see.

  “You really should let me go first,” she whispered.

  “You’re still recovering from a damn serious wound, girl.”

  “Yeah, and I’m still better at this than you are.”

  She said this so matter of factly that Jessup had no response. Instead, he shared a quick look and a nod with her. Something unsaid passed between them and she grabbed his wrist with both of her hands to pull
him to his feet. He inspected her frame, the area where her wound was, but didn’t see any blood. Liza was right. Marisol was a freak. She’d recovered from the gunshot in record time.

  With Marisol in the lead, they drifted quickly through the cool and quiet of the grass, avoiding a few other errant traps that appeared to have been set by stragglers many years before. As she went, her senses became engorged. It was always like that when she was leading the others. The world seemed more real, more alive, the colors of the ground, the sky, the trees, more vivid. Whatever lingering pain she felt from her wound had ebbed. At that moment she felt as if she was in total control of every muscle and fiber of her body as she hiked forward.

  Still, as was often the case, her Zen state soon gave way to a slow flutter of fear that built up as it had often done before during the Absolution runs. The concern started as a trickle, chipping at the balls of her feet and then working up over her spine until a nugget of anxiety was securely resting in a nook at the base of her neck. Her head throbbed, her senses overloaded with stimuli. She heard the sounds.

  The whisper of the birds and other animals making merry in the grass.

  The breathing of those that followed her.

  The report of machine guns being fired in the distance.

  Her pace quickened, the others shouting for her to slow as she crested a knoll and spotted the structures visible out in the distance. Framed in the bleary illumination of the late day, she made out a solitary man running away from several buildings, chased by a handful of other people who were firing guns.

  Marisol ran at a full gallop, watching great spasms of violence overtake the compound that was coming up fast. Dropping down a ridgeline, Elias close behind her, she needled to her left and made her way to the man who appeared to be making a break for it. Her breath drew in when she saw the black man who was fighting for cover. The one who was running for his life.