Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  Farrow shook his head and Locks plunged the shank into the drywall, breaking off the tip of the crudely crafted blade, opening up the sheetrock so that Farrow could see a section of hidden pipe, pipe that carried water throughout the building. As Locks punched the shank in and the PVC splintered and broke open, water poured in, flooding the space, covering their tracks as Farrow and Locks continued on. They climbed down metal ladders that connected floors and crawled through more ductwork and past fans and beyond grating that allowed them to see that they were making progress. It also allowed them to see what was transpiring inside the building.

  They observed Longman’s men stacking drugs and weapons in one room, another where a family was being tortured for stealing food, and still others where upper members of the Guilds were reveling, drinking, whoring and gambling at games of chance. They clipped down through and across other floors, Farrow thinking that the space was like a labyrinth, wondering at any moment whether a Minotaur might appear to finish them off. Locks eye-signaled him to follow, moving left, right, up for a stretch, then straight down.

  On an unknown floor they passed a section of wall mesh and Farrow stopped to catch his breath and look inside. He saw two women seated. One older, one younger, their eyes expressive but rheumy, their hair a nest of kinks and knots. Still, both were fetching in their own way. Not the kind he’d normally seen in New Chicago. For a second he thought about calling out to them, about trying to save them, but Locks grabbed his wrist and shook his head. Farrow gazed one final time at Liza and Ava and then he followed Locks toward another ladder that led down into the darkness.

  77

  The truck driven by Moses stopped to pick up the hidden clanker box and then continued on over hard-packed paths until it pulled to a rise that afforded an excellent view of the lake. Elias and Marisol dismounted the truck and stared at the folds of grass, fringed with beach shadowing the dark ribbon that was Lake Michigan.

  Terry opened a rucksack and handed out small canteens of water and wedges of dried meat to everyone. Then he took a small plastic puck from his back pocket and removed a wad of what looked like Oregano and wedged it, in trembling hands, between his lip and gum.

  “We did it,” Elias said, turning, munching on what passed for dinner as Marisol made a sudden movement in his direction. He nearly threw a punch before realizing she was hugging him.

  It was a strange sensation, one he hadn’t felt since before it all ended, but after a second or two he hugged her back.

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?” he asked.

  “For coming back for me.”

  “You always come back for someone who’s saved your life,” he replied.

  “Says who?”

  “Nobody says,” Elias whispered, “that’s just something you know.”

  They turned their gaze back in the general direction of the wall, which could not be seen. They watched Jessup and the others as they surrounding Moses, peppering him with questions that they couldn’t hear.

  “Whatever debt we owed them’s been paid back and more. We saved their tales back there,” Elias whispered to Marisol.

  “So?”

  “So we could leave right now if we wanted to,” he offered. “You know that right?”

  “We used to leave all the time when I was little,” she replied. “Me and my family, we went from place to place. Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, you name it.”

  She looked over at Elias whose breath plumed a little in the chilly night air.

  “You know why?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Because there was always some other better place to go to,” she said. “What’s the better place to go to now, Elias?”

  He thought about this for a moment, looked sideways to see if the others could hear him, then whispered, “I could head north, that’s what I could do.”

  “What’s there?” she asked.

  “Bitter cold. Way I figure it, you gotta head where other people don’t wanna go. Nobody can take that kinda cold ‘cept me.”

  She bit off a hunk of the dried meat. “I lived in Colorado before during the winter,” she replied.

  “Yeah, well they got these huge rivers up north too. All kinds of big, deep ones in the Dakotas.”

  “My dad taught me how to swim in the Chama River in New Mexico,” she mused.

  “And talk about winds, Marisol,” Elias quickly added. “They say the north winds get over sixty miles an hour.”

  “They’re way worse in Wyoming. We were there once and they blew the drums right out of my ears.”

  He finished his food and looked over. “You messing with me?”

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t walk for two weeks and had to sit in the RV with wet towels over my head while my mama fed me soup made from this orange, squishy squash.”

  “And then?”

  “I got used to it. I had a ringing in them for a while, but you can get used to a lot of stuff if you just stick with it.”

  He thought about this and slowly nodded and smiled softly and looked over. Her eyes were waiting and then she said, “I loved the way they talked to each other.”

  “Who?”

  “My mom and dad. My Uncle said they spoke in half words, like they had their own language. I loved that about them and I loved the way that my brother would get up extra early in the morning to beat me to the bathroom because he knew how long it took me to wash my hair.”

  “I loved the way my mother would come into my room when it was time to go to school and pull up the shades and say ‘Daylight in the swamp,’” Elias said.

  “What does that even mean?” she asked, smiling.

  He shook his head.

  “I miss them,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Me too,” Elias said.

  He looked over and caught sight of something wet and shiny forming at the corners of her eyes. She was grateful he didn’t say anymore, but instead, turned and laid down on his side in the cool of the night. Marisol leaned over and listened to what sounded like a soft sob coming from Elias, who was totally and unexpectedly overcome by the day’s events.

  78

  Inside the Codex Building, classical music warbled as Longman slumped in a chair. He had just begun to snooze when he was given word that Hendrix had made it back. While he hadn’t been briefed yet on the particulars, it appeared that Hendrix was the lone survivor of an ambush that involved O’Shea, and the boy and girl. He had been right all along, the two had been involved in some kind of plot. He’d taken both of them in when they were at their lowest and this was how they repaid him. Betrayal. The only sin that was unpardonable in Longman’s eyes.

  And the worst part, the very worst thing was that the object that Hendrix and the others had been sent to retrieve was now in the hands of those who came from the boat. Of that Longman was certain. He rested his head in his hands, realizing that all was not lost. He had the numbers and the power and something that those who might try to do him harm undoubtedly wanted very much. The two women locked up inside his lair, plus a little something extra.

  The notion of them as a potential bargaining chip or the focal point of a ruse had an interesting provenance. In addition, he’d had rounded up anyone who was suspected of ever having spoken with the girl and boy. Whether Ape or Runner they’d been hauled before Longman and worked over.

  Those that he’d found a lie in, were skinned and fed to his animal pack. The others, those who told true, were forgiven their sins. That was how he’d located the Runner named Erik, the one who purportedly had been friendly with the boy. Longman had big plans for Erik if the opportunity presented itself. The wheels were always turning.

  He smiled to himself, a deep belligerent grin, remembering a quote from a book he’d read in college, that said, “the mind of man is capable of anything, because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.” This was perhaps the greatest encapsulati
on of what it meant to be someone like him, Longman thought. And tomorrow, when the sun rose, the boy and the girl and O’Shea and the others whose banner they’d taken up would find out that he was capable of doing anything. That there was no measure as to how far he would go or how much blood he would spill to preserve his kingdom.

  For he was a king wasn’t he? A god, an immortal looking down over all that lay before him. And if he’d learned nothing else from history it was that regardless of societal development, the savagery at the heart of all men was latent. He would harness that savagery, sweep his soldiers and followers up in a mania lashed to his cult of personality and then he would strike back against those that threatened him and close the lid on the Pandora’s box that was threatening to be opened out in the grasslands.

  He thought back on a native chieftain in a conflict fought in the Seventeenth Century. King Philip they had called him. The king made war and battled for his land for a time, but eventually chose to rely on soft power versus hard. He tried to forge alliances with the very men who sought to do him harm. For his troubles he was murdered, his head stuffed on a pike, his body cut into quarters to be hanged from trees, his right hand hacked off and given as a gift to the killer who shot him down.

  Longman wasn’t going to end up like King Philip. At the end of the day he felt certain he alone would be left standing. Because wasn’t that what a victor was in these new times? A person so steeped in brutality that they had learned, first-hand, that it was the only antidote to all of society’s ills. His eyelids fluttered shut and Longman leaned his head back and realized he now had his casus belli and soon, when the time was right, he would be glorified in violence.

  There was a knock at his door and he opened it to see several figures framed in the doorway. Two of the men, Cozzard and Lout, he recognized, but the third in the middle who looked like a scarecrow come to life, he initially did not. Then the light changed and he saw that the scarecrow was Desmond Prophet, the man he’d send out months earlier along with the woman named Scarlet Poe, the one who’d purportedly found a silver object lying hidden in a vast swampland called “The Tanglewood.”

  Desmond was disheveled and gaunt, the skin around his face sucked down over his bones. His clothes were soiled and torn and one of his ears was missing. The only reason he didn’t collapse was because Cozzard had an arm around him.

  “Have him seated,” Longman said.

  Cozzard pulled Desmond over to a couch which he slumped on. Longman stared at the hole where Desmond’s ear used to be. The wound was blackened, festering, and Longman thought he saw small things wriggling around in the necrotic flesh. Cozzard handed Desmond a metal container of water and Desmond downed it hungrily. When he was done, he wiped his mouth with his forearm and stared at Longman for several uncomfortable seconds. Longman thought Desmond had the eyes of someone who’d seen “the other side,” as one of his aunts, a superstitious woman, had once said.

  “We found it, sir,” Desmond whispered. “Me and Scarlet and the others found what you sent us out.”

  “And what is it precisely that you found?”

  Desmond licked his lips. “It was a silver object. A beautiful thing we found buried in the muck out in the middle of the swamp. You can’t imagine the things that have taken root there, sir. Horrible things, monsters that killed Kurtis Black and Jane Spivey and Walter—”

  Longman waved a hand, cutting off Desmond.

  “The silver object, Mister Prophet. Focus.”

  Desmond’s eyes went wide. “There were things inside the object, sir.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “More like … a message about how it all happened. None of it was by accident, sir. The whole goddamn unraveling was caused by them,” Desmond said, pointing up.

  “Where is it?”

  “She stole it, sir. The bitch, Scarlett, she took it and ran off into the wood.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she said you destroy it if we brung it back. Because, she said, you’d not want people to know that there might be a way to make things right. To bring about a change.”

  Longman studied Desmond’s face, searching for any hint of duplicity. Seeing nothing in the man’s soul-worn visage, he realized that the expedition must have uncovered some truth. Truth was a dangerous thing in New Chicago, particularly since Longman survived by concealing it. If there was something important hidden in the silver object, the women was right. He would have had to destroy the thing assuming it was brought back to him.

  Longman forced a smile and gestured to Lout. “Take our friend, Mister Prophet, down for a hot shower and a good meal.”

  Lout nodded and helped Desmond to his feet as Longman smiled again. “We’ll talk more,” Longman said even though that was a lie.

  After Desmond had been helped off, Longman gaped at Cozzard. “Give him the meal, skip the shower, and then get rid of him. Do it quickly though and feed his body to the pigs. He’s an honorable man and did almost everything I asked of him. He doesn’t deserve to suffer.”

  Cozzard nodded and vanished though a doorway as Longman closed the door and sat on the couch. There were dark crescents under Longman’s eyes which ticked from exhaustion, Longman ran through the day’s events in a silent monologue. He struggled to make sense of everything, to draw connections between the things transpiring on the other side of the wall. They were connected weren’t they? The clanker box and the silver item that Scarlet had stolen were intertwined, but how? A man whispered terrible things in his ear and he flinched and looked sideways, but there was nobody there. He gnawed on the inside of his mouth and shouted at the shadows and arrived at the conclusion that he would have to kill them all. He would find a way to draw his enemies in, and then he would bring everything down. It was the only thing that made sense.

  Book 3

  Prologue

  The dark forms slipped through a cavity in the deep woods and moved laterally up over an old logging road. The days of rain were over and the world was hushed. Silence welcomed the figures as they emerged from the brush like a pack of feral dogs. They angled across the woodlands and through the remnants of the day’s last light as it spangled down through the canopy. Wrapped in olive-colored uniforms, they hugged the shadows while making sure to avoid sudden movements. They used camouflage and focused movements to obscure any glint off the guns and honed cutting tools that dangled from their hands and hips. The raiding party consisted of a force of perhaps seventy men and a few women.

  Longman was with them, bringing up the rear, surrounded by his war pack. He was younger in those days, the years immediately after First Light, and fully in command of his faculties. His frame was stouter in those days too and his eyes not yet gripped by the mania (not entirely at least) that would characterize him after the first years in New Chicago.

  The procession stopped and Longman moved through the ranks and hopped up on top of a rampart of boulders to address those gathered before him.

  “Brothers and sisters,” Longman said. “Our brave comrades have gone forth and collected intelligence on what lies ahead. There is a settlement not too far from here. A place of depravity where men and women have turned on each other.”

  There were grumbles amongst the people assembled before Longman.

  “It pains me to tell you this, but there is direct evidence that the people in this settlement are keeping men, women, and children in pens like beasts, to fatten and feast upon.”

  Startled cries rose up and a few men shouted and urged violence upon anyone who would do such things.

  “This is the reason why we must go forward,” Longman said, gesticulating wildly. “If we don’t end this depraved urge to feast on human flesh, the sickness will spread like a cancer and the settlement, that sinkhole of depravity, will swallow us all!”

  Longman continued in measured tones, urging his soldiers to follow and help him metaphorically cut the sickness out of their collective body.

  “None of what is to come will b
e bloodless,” Longman said, his voice rising. “No important thing ever is. But now is the time to take our stand. We either move forward into the future or we slip into the dark ages of the past!”

  Longman looked out across the faces of those before him, searching for disputants. He knew as a former lawyer that the evidence against those that they were about to attack was weak. Hearsay, conjecture, outright falsehoods, nothing that would have held up in a court of law. But that was the beauty of it, he mused to himself, he was the sole arbiter now. The judge, the jury and the executioner. The ultimate finder of fact. His soldiers would believe anything he told them.

  Longman’s words lathered up most of those gathered except for a few, including a father and son who watched his speechifying from the outer edge of the rally. The father was called Hernan, and his son Emil, and they were not entirely convinced that what lay ahead was worth fighting, and potentially dying, for. Hernan had left behind a wife and daughter to come here. His wife, Mathilda and his daughter, Marisol were all that he had left in the world apart from Emil, who stood beside him now, shoulder to shoulder.

  Longman ceased talking. The ammunition bearers moved through the small army, handing out magazines filled with bullets. Hernan and Emil received three magazines each and then were prodded to march forward.

  Hernan caught sight of the back of Longman’s head, bull neck roped in sweat, the big man clutching an assault rifle whose outer skin had been worn down to the primer. He’d thought Longman had the makings of a real leader when first they’d met. But that was before the separation from his family and the forced marches and the propaganda speeches that ultimately centered around being reborn and christened in crimson and chaos.

  Hernan’s mind wandered and he thought back on how it used to be. Many years before the Unraveling, a grand bargain had been reached between America and what some considered the lesser countries that lay below its southern border. A treaty that called for cheap goods to be made in the south and then shipped north in strings of trains that rumbled past sleepy Mexican towns like Tenosique, Coatzacoalcos and Medias Aguas.