Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  “What do we do?” Liza asked.

  Marisol’s eyes wandered. She noticed the bulge at Liza’s midsection. It was barely noticeable, but Marisol remembered an aunt looking the same several months before giving birth to a little boy. She’d missed it before under the layers of bulky clothing Liza had always worn.

  A moment passed between them and Liza tugged her shirt down over her tiny belly.

  “Did you hear me?” Liza asked, ignoring Marisol’s look. “What the hell do we do?”

  “We have to find a way out.”

  “We’ve got no weapons, Marisol.”

  Marisol looked around and then down. She took in the glass bottles of blue and green cleaning supplies. Several had hazard labels affixed to them. She grabbed several of them and handed one to Liza.

  “We do now.”

  They both sucked in several breaths and nodded and then Marisol unlocked and opened the door. Footfalls and snatches of conversation echoed as people ran past, shouting, panicked.

  There was a whistling sound outside and another explosion that shattered nearby windows as Marisol grabbed Liza’s wrist and helped her down a corridor. Gunfire continued to resonate and Marisol hazarded a look out one of the broken windows. She saw dozens of men running up the street, firing at the Codex Building. There was indeed some kind of revolt underway.

  “Who the hell are you two?!” a voice shouted.

  Marisol looked back to see a broad-shouldered, balding man with a sneer on his face appearing out of a stairwell.

  One of Longman’s shock troops.

  The man was dressed in tactical garb and held a sword in his hand with a black blade that was as long as Marisol’s arm.

  For an instant, the man appeared as flummoxed to see Marisol and Liza as they were to see him. Then his eyebrows rose and it was clear he recognized Marisol.

  “I know you,” the man sneered. “You’re the Ape that ran out on us.”

  “Please. Just let us past,” Marisol said. “We don’t want any trouble.”

  The man daggered the blade over his head. “Looks like you found a heap of trouble anyway, bitch.”

  The man smiled, advancing on them and Liza flung one of the bottles of cleaning supplies at him. The bottle smashed against the man’s forehead, showering him in a liquid that was as blue as an unclouded sky. The man dropped his sword and screamed and fell back, trying to fist the liquid out of his eyes.

  Marisol and Liza ran by him, Marisol stopping to retrieve the man’s sword. It felt good in her hand, as if it had always belonged there. The man was curled up in a ball at her feet, blubbering, his eyes filling with blood. He tried to swing at Marisol but she kicked him in the nose. She grabbed Liza’s hand and together they disappeared down the stairwell.

  121

  Longman was in an elevator, headed toward the lower level of the Codex when the explosion from Locks’s SUV rocked the building. The elevator ground to a halt, the power winking out momentarily.

  Cozzard and Lout were flanking him. The elevator was plunged into blackness for eight seconds and they looked around anxiously

  “What the fuck was that?” Cozzard snarled.

  “A truck backfiring?” offered Lout.

  Longman had a guess as to what it was. He’d put two and two together after hearing about the earlier loss of the city’s closed circuit cameras. He knew that there was an element in the city that was readying to revolt and overthrow him.

  The strangest thing was that he was fine with it, oddly overjoyed at the thought that by launching their attack, they had done him a favor. They had fallen into his trap. They’d come to help him fulfill the prophecy.

  Longman stood there, the others talking around him. He was supremely at peace, serene even. He was a god after all wasn’t he? A divine ruler who’d established his own kingdom, an empire, and all empires had to eventually come to an end. In centuries past when the kingdom or the crops began to fail, the ruler, the man-god, was sacrificed, slain to take away the misfortunes of his people. This was a concept as old as civilization.

  Longman had no qualms about bearing the sins of his subjects, with one very important variation. If he was going out in a blaze of glory, he was hell-bent on taking as many people with him as he could. To that end, he suddenly had an idea. If indeed there was some kind of rebellion, why not give his men every advantage?

  The power came back on and, as the elevator lurched back into life, Longman heard screams on the other side of the doors. He ordered his men to stop the elevator and it opened to the third floor. Some of his lesser charges, soldiers and office workers were cowering in fear from whatever had caused the explosion on the outside. The people reacted upon seeing Longman who hopped up onto a stool near the entrance to a hallway. From where the people stood, Longman looked to be eight-feet tall. There was a woman trembling near him, and he held her hand.

  “Why are you troubled?” Longman asked.

  The woman couldn’t answer and Longman looked to the others.

  “What troubles you? The situation that’s happening outside? Are you fearful?” Longman asked.

  Some of those gathered nodded and Longman realized he needed to nourish them with words. It was something he’d learned back in law school. Spoon-feed emotion to the many and reserve reason for the few. The people gathered around him needed to hear stirring words, regardless of whether they were grounded in fact.

  “Do not lose heart, my friends,” Longman said. “There has risen up amongst us, a small group, a band of traitors that want to pry away from us all that we’ve built, and lead us away from the light and back into the darkness.”

  Someone shouted and raised a fist. Longman continued, “But we won’t let that happen will we?”

  Others shouted “no!” and soon a tremor seemed to pass over the onlookers who began to cheer and nod.

  Longman shook his fist. “Because the truth is with us. We know that death is the solution to all of our problems!”

  The soldiers amongst those assembled grabbed their guns and began heading downstairs to fight. Longman looked back at Cozzard and Lout.

  “Go and open up the stores,” Longman said to Lout.

  “Sir?” asked Lout.

  “The drugs, you imbecile. Open the goddamn gates and give everyone capable of carrying a gun as much of the White as they want and as much ammunition as they can carry.”

  Lout nodded and turned to do as he was ordered, against the sounds of combat outside. Longman and Cozzard, with five of his best men bypassed the elevator and headed down a central stairwell. The deafening roar of gunfire greeted them as he arrived upon the scene to witness his soldiers battling the ragtag group that were trying to force their way into the Codex. Into his building!

  Pure, unadulterated rage boiled up inside Longman. He watched one of his men shot dead, falling near his feet. Longman grabbed the dying man’s rifle and he felt the weight of it in his hands. It felt good, as if it had always belonged there. His eyes frenetically jumped between possible targets and then he was firing his gun. He was firing and screaming and signaling for his men to do the same.

  Longman cut a path across the foyer of the Codex Building, the sounds of boots soon interknitting with the thump of bullets striking human flesh. He shot his way toward a far stairwell that led down into the lower reaches of the structure. His lungs burned as he changed out a magazine in his smoking rifle, spinning to see that he’d lost two of his men in the running battle. Longman shouldered his weapon and headed down into the stairwell, taking the long, slow route down to the chamber where the nuclear warhead was stored.

  Accompanied by four of his best fighters, he ran dropped through the stairwell and entered the lowest level of the building. Before heading to the warhead, he stopped before a set of thick doors which were thrown open to reveal a large mechanic’s bay inside. A light was tugged on and Longman smiled, staring at a row of eight-foot tall robotic platforms, fighting machines, metal exoskeletons with two limbs and two large, o
versized legs that were powered by fuel cells and a battery of heavy pistons.

  At the end of the arms were Gatling-gun type cannons and a pod that held a pack of small surface-to-surface rockets. Longman had found the exoskeletons two years earlier in a secret military R&D lab and had been brought them back, waiting for the fight moment to unleash them. The moment was at hand.

  He ordered his men to climb up into the fighting machines and prepare to fight to the death. Then he turned, listening to the sound of pistons snapping and hissing as the machines powered up. What a lovely sound it was, he thought. He smiled and closed his eyes and then he moved down toward the chamber where the warhead was hidden.

  122

  As the fighting raged around the Codex Building, Bennie and Elias ran raggedly down through the darkened interior of the tunnel with the Thresher horde close on their heels.

  Elias lobbed his cellphone to Bennie who held it up, lighting the way forward as they followed the tunnel down into the ground. In several places, there were holes in the ceiling and the ground above, which provided a small measure of light.

  They came to a crossroads in the tunnel and Bennie consulted the map on the phone, then went to his right. Elias remained behind, squinting.

  Something stirred in the darkness.

  Then more things.

  The Thresher were moving slowly now, searching for the scent of the men. They would find it soon. Elias just hoped it wouldn’t be before they’d found a way under the wall.

  Tracking back, he ran after Bennie blasting under the monumental archways and across T-junctions that sloped into dark nothingness. The Thresher followed their scent, massing like locusts as they staggered through the passageways, scattering delegations of rats and other things that preferred to dwell in the darkness.

  Water misted from a punctured pipe, dousing Elias and Bennie as they ran on. The air soon grew heavy, the surroundings dusty and dank. More pipes had burst from the walls and there was water up to Elias’s ankles.

  The two men sloshed through the filthy liquid, the sound of the Thresher growing louder.

  They climbed up a ladder and scooted through a narrower tunnel and past an intersection of pipe.

  Bennie stopped to catch his breath and consult the phone as Elias scooted past him. Bennie was worried. He’d lost the screen with the map and was unable to recover it and then the battery died. Just like that the phone’s screen slammed to black and the semi-darkness flooded the tunnel.

  “We’re out of juice!” Bennie shouted.

  “Doesn’t matter, we’re almost there,” Elias said, his eyes have sufficiently adjusted to the murkiness.

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “Because I can smell New Chicago,” said Elias.

  He looked back and waved at Bennie and then he took another step and vanished from sight.

  123

  Blood splashed the walls and floor of the Codex Building’s lobby as Farrow and his men shot their way inside. Lock’s car-bomb had gutted much of the lobby and killed all of the guards inside, but others had taken their place.

  A pitched gun-battle was soon being waged between Farrow and his men who’d taken cover behind the twisted carcass of the SUV where it lay after being propelled through the front of the building.

  Farrow felt an overpowering need to kill surge within him, just as it had when he’d hunted down his wife’s killers so many years before. Holding a machine-pistol in each hand, he stood and fired measured bursts, riddling scores of Longman’s men who fell twitching to the ground, their bodies blossoming a deep red.

  More guards appeared from a stairwell and one of the partisans lobbed a crude grenade that atomized the attackers, gore and body parts filling the air as Farrow signaled for everyone to follow him.

  There were shouts, and more of Longman’s troops ran down the stairwell. These men were part of Longman’s inner guard. They were better armed and better trained. They fired expertly-placed shots that struck many of Farrow’s compatriots.

  Farrow dove for cover when a figure blurred past him. He glanced up to see one of the women wearing a suicide vest. She pulled her arms in tight to her chest and dropped her head, making herself a smaller target. Bullets from Longman’s men bounced all around her, a few striking her in the lower body. She faltered once, then summoned up a final burst of energy and rolled toward them—

  BOOM!

  The women’s vest detonated, shrapnel eviscerating Longman’s men who died where they stood. The echo of the explosion ricocheted off the walls of the Codex Building as Farrow stood and led the way forward. He saw movement peripherally, heard a shot, saw a muzzle flash and felt the air move near his head.

  A bullet kissed his ear as he turned and dropped. There was a kid staring at him from the other side of the foyer. Maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, holding a smoking revolver. The kid looked at Farrow with dead eyes, fumbling with his gun before raising it. Farrow blasted him back against the wall where he left a red smear as he smacked against it and slid to the ground.

  There was a part of Farrow that knew he should have some modicum of feeling for the kid he’d just shot down, but that still, small voice was faint and growing fainter by the second. He was a reaper now, sent on a mission to avenge Marisol and all the others who’d fallen at the feet of the dictator.

  More guards appeared and Farrow shot these down as well. His bullets shattered the kneecaps on one man and chewed up the necks of two more. Figures toppled before Farrow who whirled into the stairwell, firing at anything that moved.

  He shot into the darkness, firing at shadowy figures who crumpled and slid down the stairs as screams and shouts and gunfire echoed above him. The partisans surged behind him, the stairwell soon packed, echoing with the sound of boots on metal treads.

  Somebody lobbed a grenade down and Farrow felt the heat from the blast on his neck, the shockwave from the resulting explosion propelling him forward as screams from his dying comrades reverberated off the stairwell walls. Farrow climbed higher as the lights overhead flickered off and then back on.

  Everything bad, all the violence of Farrow’s past had found a voice in his head. It was as if he was on the outside of himself looking in, a litany of trained reflexes suddenly snapping into motion.

  Farrow discerned figures in the darkness and shot them down before they could do violence to him. He seemed to perceive things seconds before they occurred: the flash of muzzles, the trigger-snaps on guns. He was able to attack his attackers, killing all of Longman’s men before they killed him. He felt the concussion of his shots all the way down to the soles of his feet, heard the patter of spent shell casings bouncing off the metal flooring.

  Farrow didn’t stop, scrabbling ever higher up through the stairwells, charging headlong into the gloom, slapping magazines into his guns. He was mustering the last of his strength, putting the pedal to the floor, sweeping his weapons left and right and that’s when he saw it.

  Saw her.

  His first instinct was to blast the figure to pieces, but then he blinked.

  The guns came down.

  The figure was a girl … a young woman.

  Standing out in front of him.

  Holding her hands up.

  For an instant he thought it was a mirage, a figment of his fractured mind. He almost fired his gun at her, at Marisol. She was there, standing in the middle of a corridor next to another woman Farrow had never seen before.

  Farrow lowered his weapons and blinked his eyes.

  “Is that really you?” Farrow asked.

  She smiled and nodded and he ran to Marisol, grabbing her up in his arms. He held her tightly, just as he’d once done with his little girl, so hard that she could barely breathe.

  “You’re alive,” he said. “My God, you’re alive.”

  He set her down and looked from Marisol to Liza.

  “Her name’s Liza, Farrow.”

  Farrow smiled. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Not given t
he circumstances,” Liza replied.

  Marisol’s face had darkened and Farrow turned back to

  her. “It’s Longman, Farrow.”

  “What? What about him.”

  “He said something to me,” Marisol said.

  “What?”

  “He said he had codes to a weapon. A weapon that would bring a fire that would destroy the entire city. A weapon that he’s got in this building.”

  “Jesus,” Farrow said, taking a step back, mentally linking the need for codes to activate a weapon to stories he’d always heard about Longman. That the madman had a nuclear device hidden somewhere in the Codex Building.

  124

  Jessup and Terry streaked through the tunnel, weapons at the ready, following a length of concrete, expecting to be confronted at any moment. They ran through the tunnel’s silty light, listening to the sounds of mechanisms engaging in the darkness.

  They passed a wide trench running off to their left, funneling water and sewage and sediment away from the city. Jessup slid to a stop, and so did Terry. Jessup motioned with his hand. There was a figured up ahead. An older man inspecting a section of pipe.

  Jessup took aim at the man and whistled and the man turned, startled, and threw up his hands. Jessup drew up on him.

  “How the hell do we get to the other side of the wall, friend?” Jessup said.

  “W-why the h-hell would you want to go in?” the man blubbered.

  “Where is it?” Jessup demanded.

  “They’ll kill us all if I show you the way.”

  “That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

  The man hesitated and then he motioned for Jessup to follow and guided the two through the steamy mist until they were standing at an intersection near a maze of piping and industrial equipment.