Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  114

  Bennie moved at a brisk clip, snaking through the more industrial areas that ringed the outer edge of the Q-Zone. The central sections of the grasslands, the ones that sprouted up out of the urban wastelands and which sloped to the wall were coming up fast. Maybe a quarter mile away.

  Out of his peripheral vision he could see Elias, tagging along behind him like a wayward puppy.

  He stopped and spun around and Elias came to a halt too.

  The pair just stood there, staring at each other.

  “Jessup lied about there being a settlement,” said Elias.

  Bennie scrunched his lips and nodded.

  “Okay. So you know now. You pissed off about that?”

  “Hell yes I am.”

  “Why?” asked Bennie.

  “Cause he’s a liar.”

  “I’m gonna say something to you, kid, and you’re probably gonna get fired up and salty as all get out, but here goes, anyway. Yeah, Jessup lied to you and yeah maybe he used you and Marisol a little bit, but so what?”

  Elias’s cheeks chapped red.

  “So he’s full of shit, that’s what,” Elias replied.

  “So what?”

  “You gonna keep saying ‘so what’?”

  “Just as long as you keep refusing to answer my question,” Bennie said.

  “Which is?”

  “Which is why does it matter if someone made a little lie for the greater good?”

  “I guess… it’s just not right,” said Elias.

  “He broke the Golden Rule?” asked Bennie.

  “Something like that.”

  Bennie spat on the ground.

  “Y’know what I think the biggest difference between now and the times before is, kid?”

  Elias shook his head.

  “The length of your memory. What I mean is, in times before the Unraveling everybody had long memories. Bad stuff happened, you just held onto it. Squirreled it down inside. Let it build into a grudge until it ate you up. That, in a way, was a luxury, a terrible one, but a luxury just the same. But now, you gotta have a short memory cause so many bad things happen if you let one thing fester it might be enough to take you down.”

  “So what are you saying?” asked Elias.

  “Short memory, long life,” came Bennie’s response. He smiled, continued, “I like the sound of that a lot. Maybe I’ll put it on a T-shirt one day.”

  He turned and took a step and then looked back at Elias.

  “Don’t think another minute about what’s happened prior to right now. You got a chance to maybe do something important here. This is the last time I’m gonna say this: I’d like you to come with me. I could use your assistance and I respect your skills, kid.”

  “I might go on my own,” Elias said.

  “I tried that once, back before. I wasn’t always down on my luck, y’know? Had a job, had a wife and kid too and then it got to be too much. I walked out on them which is the worst thing a man can do. No matter how many good deeds I do, I will never be forgiven for that. Don’t be like me. Don’t turn your back.”

  Before Elias could respond, Bennie dropped to his knees. He held two fingers up and gestured off to the right. The grass swayed and they caught the tail end of something as it slinked into the semi-gloom, maybe two-hundred yards away.

  A female Thresher.

  “They’re following us,” Elias whispered.

  Bennie shook his head and drew Elias in close to him.

  “They’re going in the other direction.”

  Elias looked again and saw that the woman was indeed heading away from them.

  “You know I just had the craziest idea,” Bennie said.

  “I don’t like that sound of that.”

  “To defeat an army, you need your own army, right?” asked Bennie.

  Elias slowly nodded.

  “Well, we got us our own army already don’t we?”

  “Um, no,” Elias replied.

  “Sure we do,” Bennie answered pointing to the Thresher. “We got thousands of willing recruits right under us.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” asked Elias.

  “What happens if, instead of letting the Thresher move away from us, we bring ‘em into the city?”

  “You – you’re crazy,” said Elias.

  Bennie grinned, flashing a mouth full of yellow teeth. “Crazy like a goddamn fox.”

  The decision was quickly made to get the attention of the female Thresher and then, God willing, she’d get the attention of one of her brethren and then another and another and so on until there were dozens, maybe hundreds of Thresher, following at the heels of Bennie and Elias to the gates of New Chicago.

  It was a dangerous, calculated risk, but Bennie believed they would be able to harness the herd to sow confusion and panic amongst Longman’s men. After all, why the hell would they bother trifling with a black dude and a kid when they were busy firing at a thousand deadeyes?

  Elias followed Bennie as they crept through the grass, following the trail of the Thresher.

  “This makes perfect sense if you think about it,” Bennie whispered. “A female, a lady leading the way I mean.”

  “I don’t understand,” Elias replied.

  “It’s natural, kid. Happens all the time in the animal kingdom. When you’re on the streets you got lots of free time and I used to spend some of mine in the city library. Remember reading about elephants packs, how they’re always led by a female.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t exactly remember but after all they go through to bring us into the world I guess they’ve earned the right to show us the way forward, huh?”

  Elias nodded.

  “You ready to do this?” asked Bennie.

  Elias reluctantly nodded and then Bennie rose and held up a balled fist.

  Three-hundred feet away from them, rising from a depression in the ground was a lithe, used-to-be-woman. They watched her sniff the air and drop on all fours and gallop forward until her form was hidden behind a ruined metal sign that had tipped and fallen from a burger joint.

  Bennie hesitated, before firing a burst from his machine-pistol.

  A handful of birds rocketed up from a stand of shrubbery and then the female Thresher was visible. Peeking her head from behind the ruined metal sign.

  “It worked,” Bennie said, smiling.

  And then the face of another Thresher appeared. And another. And five more. And then the ground all around Bennie and Elias shook and they could see more of the demons rising up from their spider-holes.

  “It worked too well,” Elias said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  Bennie reached out a hand and grabbed Elias’s wrist.

  “RUN!” Bennie screamed.

  115

  Jessup and Terry reached the truck and unloaded everything of value they’d copped from the armaments vault. There was an impressive array of weaponry: rifles, all manner of small arms, grenades, sections of body armor, and a six-shot revolver-like grenade-launcher on a black sling that received 40 millimeter rounds, of which there were two-dozen, including high-explosive and incendiary rounds.

  Jessup grabbed the grenade launcher and studied it, fumbling with the weapon before Terry took it from him.

  “Let me show you,” Terry said.

  Jessup watched as he released the launcher’s cylinder axis pin and swung the steel frame away from the cylinder. In so doing, Terry exposed the chambers into which he slid, one-by-one, three high explosive rounds and three incendiary rounds. That finished, he jacked the frame back into place and re-engaged the axis pin before handing it back to Jessup.

  “You sure you can handle it?”

  “I can handle anything,” Jessup replied, sighting the weapon down.

  Terry was fatigued from battle and his wounds, so he was unable to don any body armor. Instead, he carried a rifle and a rucksack into which he dropped a machine pistol, several grenades and two bandoliers of ammo.

/>   The pair took off down into the grass, following the coastline. They soon trod the ground they’d covered before, slinking past the rusted school bus and the garbage truck, beyond the secret location where they’d hidden their flamethrowers and some of their other, bulkier weapons.

  The flames throwers, while effective, were too unwieldy, and so they were left behind. Jessup knew they had to travel lightly if they had any chance of finding a way inside the wall.

  Soon, they found the place where they’d come ashore. The skiff was still there and Jessup and Terry boarded it. They took a final look at the sailboat, still drifting out where they’d anchored it. Jessup had fleeting thoughts about heading out to the boat and trying to use it to infiltrate the wall, but he knew that would never work.

  It was too large and the canals, over which he planned to cruise, were too shallow. Realizing the skiff was their only chance, he powered up the whisper-quiet electric motor on the aft of the boat.

  Jessup and Terry zipped down the coastline and in mere moments they were at the mouth of a small canal that bled from a swampy section of the grasslands. The canal was probably ten feet wide and two feet deep, but it was large enough for them to enter. Better still, the banks of the canal were obscured by tufts of grass and shrubbery that were tall enough to conceal a crouching man.

  Jessup piloted the skiff up into the canal where Terry snapped a few sections of thick branches from the shrubbery to use as push-poles in the even the canal grew shallower.

  Twenty feet into the swamp, the canal became so shallow that the skiff was no longer operational. The two men disembarked from the skiff. Holding their weapons and gear, they took cover along the overgrown banks and looked up at the wall that was only a few hundred yards away now. Jessup squinted and was surprised not to see any obvious signs of guards standing watch.

  “Please tell me the trip down here was the hard part,” Terry said.

  “Got any good ideas of how to get inside?” Jessup asked.

  “We could ring the doorbell.”

  Jessup grinned darkly.

  He rose slightly and moved through the brush, scanning the wall. He saw several areas where the fortifications appeared to be in a state of disrepair, but couldn’t discern whether there was a way through to the other side. Further, he could see the telltale signs of traps near these locations, places undoubtedly, where the killers on the other side had left behind mines and other booby traps.

  He was about to return to Terry when he saw it. An earthen embankment off to his left, a slab of concrete and a wall studded with what looked like the rungs of a ladder. These things looked out of place to Jessup who studied the area a little more. His eyes followed the ladder which rose to what seemed like a landing. For an instant, Jessup saw something. What was it? Maybe not a door, but definitely an entrance of some kind.

  Retracing his steps, he dropped down next to Terry. “There’s something out there, Terry.”

  “Care to be more specific.”

  Jessup pointed and Terry followed his line of sight. He spotted the embankment, the ladder rungs, the potential entrance.

  “The location is across an awful lot of open ground,” Terry said.

  “I know,” Jessup replied.

  “We’d be exposed for a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty yards.”

  “I know that too.”

  Terry turned to Jessup. “Only a goddamn lunatic would try to make that run,” said Terry.

  A few heartbeats as Jessup took this in, then he fixed a gaze on Terry.

  “Care to come with me?” Jessup asked.

  Terry grinned.

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  116

  Marisol woke and shook her head. There were stars in her eyes and blood running down her cheek from a gash near her hairline. She paused, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the semi-darkness.

  She closed them, waited, then opened them again to see the ceiling at least twelve or fourteen feet above her, and the end of the chute perhaps four feet below that. There was no way she’d be able to climb back up the chute. A note echoed, a machine humming to life. Marisol assumed it was an air-handler of some kind, and when it kicked on it brought forth a stench that was not unlike rotting eggs.

  Looking down, Marisol could see that she was sitting on top of a small mountain of what looked like garbage and scrap inside a room that was cavernous and shadow strewn. The only light came from holes that had been punched in the sheets of metal that covered a section of faraway windows.

  She rolled over and placed her palms down and turned her nose up. The funk was overwhelming. A perfect meld of slaughterhouse and sewage treatment plant.

  Marisol scrabbled for purchase and pushed herself down the small mountain of trash. She landed on the concrete floor that lay directly beneath the chute she’d fallen down.

  It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. She was barely able to see the other sides of the room because of whorls of gray, almost odorless smoke that hovered over everything like mist.

  There were sounds off in the distance. How close they were, she couldn’t readily tell. Strange sounds, like the echo of a slipper being slapped against cement.

  Something crunched under her hands and when she raised them up to look she could see bits of broken plastic stuck to her sweaty flesh. A moment passed. She squinted. Not plastic at all, but something else. Human finger-nails. Shards of fractured nails of various shapes and sizes. And now she could see that the ground beneath here was speckled with blackened blood.

  Quickly she swatted the nails away, wondering why they were here. Her line of sight drifted over to a nearby wall. The wall was marred by scratches.

  Marisol’s stomach tightened. The thought came to her, and it was a reasonable one given the circumstances, that people, maybe lots of people, had been marooned down here and tried to claw their way out. Had they been successful? The fact that the scratch marks stopped about eight-feet up, and that beneath this was a dried patch of something that had once been shiny and sticky seemed to suggest they hadn’t been.

  Her head spun at a flapping sound. More than one this time. And closer.

  She searched for a way out, a way up, but the walls from the floor to the roofline were slicked metal with no creases, joints or handholds of any kind.

  A crashing sound off in the distance. Grunts. What might be laughter. The hairs on her arms pricked up and she crabbed over to the mountain of garbage and held her breath, hunting for something, anything, to use as a weapon.

  That’s when she heard another sound.

  Smaller this time.

  A skittering note as—

  A throng of flying insects flew directly at her.

  Her hands flew in front of her face, yelping as a flight of fat-bellied flies buzzed past her. And on the ground she saw other things, crickets, ants, and the kind of low-dwelling bugs that prefer to stay in the shadows.

  All moving toward her.

  All moving away from something else.

  Suddenly, the sound of the air handlers stopped and silence filled the space. The silence was soon replaced by another sound.

  The note made by something, or someone, exhaling.

  The tiny hairs on Marisol’s arms stood at attention.

  She took a step and stopped.

  Stopped before she stepped on it.

  Something, some curved object that lay on top of a soiled newspaper.

  Even in the inky light, Marisol could see that the object was pinkish colored and glistened, appearing to be wet and shiny.

  She dropped to her haunches to inspect the item and bit back a scream.

  The thing at her foot, it was … Jesus, what was it?

  A human jawbone!

  The flesh was still ragged and the splintered bone as white as the top on a mushroom. She could see from the puckered edges of the jaw that it had been violently wrenched from someone’s mouth.

  Her hand went to her own mouth and she reeled ba
ckward, falling over a clutch of boxes, making a racket.

  Marisol planted her arms and looked sideways. She saw the freshly slain corpse of a woman. The woman lay on her side, eyes glassy, a small crimson river flowing from her mouth. The woman’s lower jaw had been savagely torn away. Marisol realized the woman had probably been tossed down here by Longman and killed by something. By what? By whatever lived in the mountains of trash.

  Almost instantly came the sounds of things shuffling off in the shadows. Marisol searched the ground for something, anything to use as a weapon. She dove over a hillock of refuse, her hands plunging into the warm, slimy trash. There was so much garbage here. Then her hands hit something hard and she swiped away the rubbish and a pair of eyes opened!

  Marisol tumbled back and something, some form rose up out of the trash and squealed like a barnyard animal. To call the thing a man would be generous as his hair was gone and he was missing pieces, teetering before Marisol, naked as the day he was born, flesh the color of skim milk.

  The man had undoubtedly once been somebody. An enemy of Longman’s, possibly a member of an upper guild once upon a time. But time in the room, and now Marisol realized she was in the Godforsaken place only whispered about, the area called “Hush,” had stripped away whatever shreds of humanity the man once possessed.

  The man grabbed and pumped his privates, his mouth ratcheting back and forth. He groaned and Marisol could see that he was missing his tongue. The stub thrummed against the man’s blackened gums as he made a move for Marisol.

  She hopped onto the balls of her feet and kicked the man in the groin. Down he went and she finished him off with another kick to the head. Sensing movement out beyond her, Marisol retreated, fumbling back.

  She found a length of rusted metal pipe and white-knuckled it, dropping low, ready for anything. She caught sight of something out of the corner of her eye. A raggedy woman who stagger-stepped toward her, arms out like some kind of movie monster.

  Marisol brought the pipe down and gashed the woman above her right ear. There was a spurt of red and the woman moaned and fell. Then another man appeared and Marisol brought him down with a swipe of the pipe, shattering his eye socket.