Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  “What about the boy?” Cozzard asked.

  “What about him?” came Longman’s response. “If you don’t erase him, if you don’t wipe away the seed, how can you prevent the spread of the disease?”

  Cozzard grinned and Longman held out his hands as if he was giving a blessing.

  “And so it comes to this,” Longman said to her. “You were lost and now you’ve been found.”

  “I’m going to kill you,” Marisol said.

  “You can certainly try,” Longman whispered. “But I assure you, it will not be easy.”

  Longman whistled and Marisol saw someone move at her peripherally, bringing a cudgel down onto the back of her neck, violently knocking her out.

  Several floors above this, Liza moved through a dimly lit hallway that was barely larger than a footpath. Sweat smudged her face, obscuring her features, making her appear like just another worker bee in the Codex Building.

  Mechanical sounds intermixed with shouts and snatches of conversations, and here and there, the building itself seemed to groan and murmur.

  Scanning the schematics, Liza made for whatever doors appeared closest, hoping they’d lead down and out of the building. Her hands trembled with every step, errantly moving down from her hips to her midsection. She prayed that nobody would notice her in the smock or the small bump around her midsection.

  Thankfully, her tummy wasn’t bulging, but she was incredibly self-conscious, keeping her head down as a pair of men marched past her.

  She turned a corner and entered a small storage room, flicking on the light switch. The space was the size of a bathroom at a rest-stop and filled with plastic jugs of multi-colored liquids marked with hand-scrawled signs. Cleaning supplies of some kind. The supplies were on metal shelving and Liza’s eyes narrowed as she took everything in.

  There was a thump on the other side of the door and she quickly turned the key, locking it behind her. She killed the light, praying that she would find a way out of the building.

  104

  Jessup dragged Terry through the grass as the shouts of Longman’s men drew near. They gathered up the weapons and ammunition they’d left behind, along with the two rucksacks in which the weapons were placed.

  Then they scrambled through a notch in a grouping of trees and pulled themselves up behind a burned out barbecue joint. Crawling behind a series of industrial smokers, Jessup kept a finger pressed to his lips, his other wrapped around the stock of his rifle.

  Terry’s ears and head were still abuzz. Still humming from the explosion, the clatter of automatic weapons firing, the screams. His clothes were pockmarked with shrapnel, his face and hands bloody from a thousand tiny pricks caused by the grit and debris flung into the air by the two bombs. Still, he was in one piece and could pull a trigger and that was all that mattered at the moment.

  “You should see the other guy,” Terry whispered, pointing at himself, offering a smile to Jessup that wasn’t returned.

  They sat there, Jessup listening for Longman’s men, but what sounds they made were very faint. Terry immediately recognized from his time in the service that the men pursuing them were not general purpose. Not the usual yahoos who fire out their guns and then shriek like banshees before charging headlong into the fray.

  Those that hunted them were not like that.

  These hunters were taking their time.

  They were patient.

  They were probably professionals in another life

  and that’s what scared Terry the most.

  If they rose and tried to escape or ambush the men following them they’d be shot to shit. Their only chance was to stay low and silent.

  Jessup crawled over next to Terry and watched as Terry’s tiny wounds oozed into little puddles at his feet.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Terry said. “I’ll be fine. Looks worse than it is.”

  “We need to get the hell out of here,” Jessup said.

  “You are the master of all things obvious, J.,” Terry said, forcing a smile.

  “I’ve got a plan,” Jessup said.

  “Does it involve running away?”

  Jessup looked up.

  “Do you want it to?” Jessup asked.

  “Hell, no,” Terry replied. “I’m done running, m’man. I think it’s time to throw caution to the wind and find a way to attack our attackers.”

  A tight smile formed at the corner of Jessup’s mouth. He reached a finger down and drew a tiny diagram in the dust under them.

  “We wait here,” Jessup said. “And God willing if the guys looking for us head in the other direction, we shoot back and hit the truck and gather up as much gear as we can.”

  “And then?”

  “We find a way over the wall and kick some fucking ass.”

  Terry nodded and sighed and leaned his head back and began thinking back on a tune that a man named Tap Proudfoot taught him when they served together at the Holloman air base. Tap was a Native American and the tune was an eerie little ditty.

  It was, Tap said, sung by warriors of old from his tribe before they went into battle.

  It was a death song.

  Terry began humming the song to himself as he rose and followed after Jessup.

  105

  Dawn broke overhead, the land cast in the usual partial twilight as Elias moved in a daze through the weed-strewn lots of old Chicago that bordered the coastline. He was consciously moving this way, eyes flat and devoid of emotion. He used the water as a guide, staying as far away from the grasslands as possible.

  With every step, the anger he was feeling intensified. It had always been so when it came time to leave something behind. He’d felt the sharp pangs when his parents were taken and the others at the farm thereafter, and even a hint of it, when he exited the tunnel to leave New Chicago with Marisol. His fists were white and his brow creased as he tried to reconstruct the day’s events in his mind.

  He’d gone back and helped them, hadn’t he? If it wasn’t for him, they never would have survived, never would’ve had the means to even attempt to take on Longman and the others. He’d risked his neck in that regard. He did all that he felt obligated to do. It wasn’t his fault that the others had been killed and the two taken away. Sure, one could argue that Longman’s men had only focused on the boat because he and Marisol had been taken there, but that argument didn’t carry any weight. None of it was his fault, was it?

  He suddenly lifted his head and screamed as loud as he could, overwhelmed by everything. His bellow left his throat raw as he jump-kicked a carbonized motorcycle that lay at the edge of a neighborhood street. Flocks of birds streaked into the sky with witch-like screams as Elias stood there, alone.

  Elias collapsed on the ground and looked at the pistol in his right hand. For the first time in his life he considered what it would be like to end it. Just finish the whole damn thing once and for all. What use was it to live this kind of life anyway? An outcast, a scavenger hunted by men and monsters in a world that had gone to hell. Nobody would blame him for giving up, for quitting. The world had quit on him and everyone else a long time ago. He raised the gun and closed his eyes and then a deep-throated moan interrupted his thoughts.

  He looked down the middle of a ruptured and dilapidated street and saw what had once been a woman, now a partially flesh-denuded Thresher, crawling out of an open sewer like a naked rat. She was on the ground, maybe sixty feet from him.

  He watched the woman jerk to her feet and raise her nose as if sniffing the air.

  Her mouth crooked open and a tiny river of viscous fluid dribbled out. Elias shuddered and flipped the safety off his pistol.

  The Thresher heard this and turned. A look of confusion and pure anger gripped her visage. Her head lolled to one side and her milky eyes rotated over to Elias.

  She moved on him and Elias felt anger, pure white hatred well up inside him as the pearl-eyed monster rampaged down the street. His mind was muddied and he forgot that firing often attracted more of the
things, but he wasn’t concerned with that at the moment. He was acting out, seeking to transfer his grief to something else and so he pulled his pistol up, loosed a scream and advanced. Using the shelled cars as cover he knelt and fired two shots.

  The first bullet hit the female Thresher in the side, spinning the former woman around like a top.

  She didn’t stop.

  The second bullet passed through bone and brain and lodged in the nasal cavity of the woman. An arterial spurt plumed the air and down she went.

  A few fleeting seconds and then notes echoed. The sound of flesh being dragged across cement and dirt. Soon more of the beasts appeared. Some from the sewers, others from grass-covered spider-holes and concealed depressions. A dozen, maybe more.

  Elias considered taking them all on, going down in a hail of gunfire, but then he instinctively spun and kicked his legs into high gear.

  Were it not for his incredible speed and elusiveness, Elias never would have made it to the end of the street.

  As it was, the two or three fastest of the things were nearly on him when he hurtled a luxury sedan, feet mashing in the spiderwebbed windshield as he somersaulted forward.

  Bouncing over the trunk, Elias rolled to his feet and was forced back into the grasslands where he skidded down an embankment and launched himself into a natural tunnel that had been winnowed into the grass. He stopped and looked back. He could hear the grunts of the approaching Thresher getting nearer and nearer.

  Elias plunged headlong through the grass, his bare flesh bloodied from the razor-like blades. Glancing down, he recognized that he was leaving a trail of crimson dots on the ground.

  Scrambling up over a knoll carpeted with thick foliage, Elias grabbed a tree and looked to see more Thresher, maybe three dozen in pursuit.

  He stomped across an open industrial field, taking cover behind a rusted bolt of metal, a warped hull that had been tipped on its side. He used the wreckage as a firing blind and emptied out his pistols, downing a handful of Thresher as more joined the pack.

  The booming sounds grew as Elias jack-knifed through a tin-roofed warehouse, the Thresher gaining on him. Elias drew an elbow to his side and crashed through a wooden door at the far end of the warehouse.

  He barreled down a hill and darted toward a section of girders that had fallen out of a storefront. Elias threw out his hands for balance, climbing up. He skittered across the girders, ten feet off the ground.

  The Thresher pursued below as Elias shot forward, shuttling down toward the end of the girders that drooped toward the roof of a one-storey building.

  Elias launched himself off and landed on the roof, which was spongy, waterlogged. Elias took three steps and the roof gave way so that he lost his balance and tumbled over the edge, falling twelve feet to the ground.

  By some miracle, he managed to land on his feet. The impact caused him to roll to his right where he lay in the grass and checked his gun. He only had two bullets left.

  Faster now, Elias rose and took off through the grass, churning so violently his abs began to cramp, his face running a gamut of emotions: fear, anger, confusion. He barreled behind an overturned cement truck, listening to the pattering of feet chasing after him. He looked up and saw a Thresher dive at him from the top of the truck. The beast hit the ground in front of Elias, mouth open as Elias raised his pistol. Black teeth jammed together over the metal barrel as Elias jammed it into the thing’s mouth and fired, vanishing the Thresher’s face.

  Hot gore sheeted Elias’s face, blinding him as he fumbled back. He lost his footing as the ground gave way and Elias groped his way back down toward the edge of a small sinkhole.

  His gun went spinning away as he slid back and down until he was falling through the air—

  WHAM!

  He landed hard at the bottom of the hole which was perhaps twelve feet deep and eight feet wide.

  Partially in shock, he looked around and spotted his gun up on a small ledge, maybe nine feet above him. And beyond that was the lip of the hole where sounds reverberated. Footsteps. Something moving through the grass just above him.

  Something coming for Elias.

  The footfalls sounded like a solitary figure and Elias thinking that the Thresher always preferred to move in groups, felt some relief.

  The footfalls grew louder.

  Grew closer.

  And then…

  He looked up to see the drooling face of a Thresher, leering down at him. The thing’s mouth opened and distended and Elias threw up his hands, screaming.

  106

  Farrow cat-eyed his way through an alley, running alongside Locks, leading the partisans away from the smoking building that housed the generator they’d just attacked. The group slid down an embankment and sliced through an exposed sewer pipe, then out the other end where they took cover behind the shell of what had once been a coffee shop.

  Farrow worked to catch his breath, but he couldn’t suppress the feeling of pride that welled up inside him. How long had it been since he’d actually done something? Something real?

  “Feels good to actually do something that matters doesn’t it?” Locks whispered.

  “It’s been so long, I think I forgot what good felt like.”

  Locks smiled as the sun passed behind a veil of clouds, shadowing their position.

  Locks turned and gestured for the other partisans to move forward as they huddled and then crouch-ran up to a swell of land that jutted up out over one of the many sinkholes that plagued the city after the Unraveling.

  The ground here was partially concealed by thickets of undergrowth, but it provided an excellent view of the ragged city-streets that led toward the Codex Building, just visible in the early morning light, maybe a quarter mile away. For a moment Farrow paused. He heard what he thought was the clatter of automatic weapons fire, there for an instant and then gone. He closed his eyes and listened, but heard nothing now.

  “I think we’ve got an hour, maybe two, before they realize what’s happened,” Locks whispered.

  Farrow nodded.

  “We need your boys now.”

  Locks smiled.

  “They’re already here.”

  Farrow glanced sideways and spotted things he hadn’t notice before. Men and women emerging out of the foliage, faces smeared with what looked like cinders for camouflage, cradling weapons, guns, blades, stabbing devices, many of which looked hand-crafted.

  Lennox was visible as well, his bulbous body clad in home-made body armor, face gripped in a scowl.

  “So you’ve done it then, eh?” Lennox said.

  Locks nodded as Farrow motioned to him.

  “Soon it’ll be time to finish this,” said Farrow.

  Lennox shook his head. “You’ve blinded him for the moment. The deal was you hit the building head on and then we’ll be there to join the fight.”

  “If we charge the building, we won’t stand a chance,” said Farrow.

  Locks looked over, smiled and said “Who said anything about charging?”

  He gestured at one of Lennox’s fighters who waved a hand, signaling for them to follow.

  They galloped down a ruined sidewalk toward a line of trashed warehouses and industrial structures. Two of the fighters grabbed the edges of a warped wooden door affixed to a garage and pulled them aside.

  Farrow could see something hidden within the darkened building. He moved slowly forward with Locks and took in the outline of an oversized SUV. He remembered such things from the days before the Unraveling. An old Toyota Four-Runner.

  “What do you think of our wheels?” asked Locks.

  Farrow circled the machine, noting that somebody had recently worked it over. Portions of the paneling had been removed and strengthened with metal scrap and what looked like a new windshield – made of unusually thick glass – rested above the hood.

  “Somebody’s been tinkering on it,” Farrow said.

  “It’s got enough armor to withstand a direct hit from a rocket launcher,” sa
id Locks.

  Farrow smirked. “What kinda mileage does it get?”

  Locks pointed. “Best part is inside.”

  Peering inside, Farrow reacted when he see that the truck was packed to the gills with barrels of explosive powder and metal shards, with a detonator affixed to a plunger that had been duct-taped near the driving wheel.

  “This is it,” Locks said. “This is what we use to strike the final blow.”

  “Who’s the driver?”

  Locks grinned darkly.

  “You’re looking at him,” he said.

  Several seconds of silence stretched between Locks and Farrow.

  “Is that a joke?”

  Locks stood there, stone-faced. “Do I look like I’m joking?”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Farrow said.

  “No, it’s something I’ve chosen to do,” came back Locks’s response. “Somebody has to light the flame and get this going. It’s like my father used to say: a righteous fire consumes all, brother.”

  Farrow slowly nodded and that’s when he heard the whistle.

  He glanced up and spotted the female member of the recon and surveillance team gesturing to him, holding up her small camera. The same one who’d been noticed by Moses.

  Farrow and Locks advanced toward her and the woman held up her camera.

  “What’s the situation report?” Farrow instinctively asked.

  “The g-girl,” the woman muttered. “There was an explosion and some kind of attack and Longman’s men brung in a girl from the grasslands.”

  “What girl?” asked Locks.

  “They brung her back,” answered the woman. “She was on the outside and now she’s back.”

  She held out her camera and tapped an app and footage played showing the commotion near the gate. Farrow’s eyes narrowed. He gasped when he saw Marisol being dragged inside the wall. Christ Almighty, the girl had let herself be captured! His gaze immediately swung over to Locks.

  “This changes everything,” Farrow said. “There’s no time to wait.” He pointed at the SUV. “We hit Longman’s building now and we hit it hard.”