Having nothing to lose, I scream until my lungs burn. I yammer and curse and shout all of the horrible things that Odin and the other have done. The brute reaches his hand around to stifle me.
I bite his fingers and taste his blood and one of his knees finds my spine.
Minutes later, I’ve been hustled down a few flights of stairs toward a deserted section of twenty-one.
A gray metal door’s yanked open and I’m kicked inside into a boxy, windowless room whose walls are shingled with newspaper and magazine articles from the days before the Unraveling.
I turn back and Odin’s looming over me.
His front has vanished.
The façade of professionalism and propriety that he has always wielded like a sword has melted away and in its place is raw hatred.
His eyes are like two candles in a mine and the blood streaking his face and dripping between his teeth makes him look like a Dub for a second.
“This is your last chance,” he says.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I know who you are.”
I expect Odin to shout or lash out at me, but he does neither.
He just smiles, not even bothering to blot the blood that runs down the tiny valleys in his cheeks.
“You wanted to know what happened to Gus, didn’t you? Well be careful what you fucking ask for,” he says.
Then he chuckles and the door slams shut and I press my face against the far wall. Time slows and I pace around my cell, forced to scan posters from some long ago billionaire candidate who bought himself the throne to the country along with pictures of half-naked women and articles about movies and events that I have no memory of.
There are stories about the very beginnings of the Unraveling and how famous people reacted, including one about a group of sisters who were celebrated for no other reason than they were, inexplicably, well-known. These sisters were living somewhere out west in the hills of Beverly and were filming a reality show when they were attacked and feasted on by a pack of Dubs. Apparently the cameras continued to roll as they were eaten and the ratings for the show went sky high.
Something powers up behind me.
I pivot and spot something I failed to notice before.
A single, small monitor hanging from the ceiling to my left.
There’s snow on the screen, the volume barely audible.
Footage flashes, black and white images.
A night-time shot of the city.
A sense of absolute dread creeps over me, my genitals retracting, my knees bunched together.
Gus totters out into the city on the screen.
He’s clothed in the crap they gave him when he was shunned.
The crown is still pinned to his head and the rucksack is slung across one shoulder.
He looks small and insignificant in the shadows of the buildings.
He glances back and shouts something and stumble-runs.
A dozen paces later he’s fallen to the ground.
I want to look away, but I have to know.
Gus rises and a bullet rips through him, spinning him sideways.
He pushes himself up and runs sideways in an erratic manner and then vanishes from the camera POV.
My heart shudders and then another angle flashes on the screen.
A shot of Gus staggered by his wound, limp-running at breakneck speed through a maze of vehicles, a hundred Dubs closing in on him.
The screen goes dark.
I slam my fist into the wall.
I jump and swing at the monitor, but it’s too high to reach.
I shout and scream and curse the names of Odin and Shooter and all the others in the building who turned their backs on Gus and then I hear it.
The sound of gears engaging somewhere behind one wall.
There’s a click and the rush of air.
I take a step and then…
The floor opens up under me like a gallows trapdoor.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I fall straight down and hit something hard and slam onto my back.
Slivers of light from a bulb somewhere overhead reveal that I’m riding a metal chute straight down into the blackness.
The murk rushes past at an incredible rate and then there’s the flash of something down below and—
WHUMP!
I’m flying off the end of the chute, catapulted into the air.
For a few horrible seconds it feels as if I’ve been shot out of the building, that I’m pinwheeling down through the air toward the Flatlands.
And then I hit the ground hard and spin to a stop.
My ears ring and I lose a layer of skin from my elbows and arms, but otherwise I’m fine.
I don’t move a muscle as my eyes narrow to slits and I wait for them to acclimate to the darkness.
The gloom seems to conspire against me for a good five seconds and then I catch sight of the ceiling.
It’s at least fourteen feet above me.
And then a burst of air hits me along with a stench that’s like rotting eggs.
I look around and it appears, for an instant, like I’ve been tossed down into one of the immense storage rooms that dot VC1’s middle floors. But then I see bars over one set of windows and a sheet of scrap metal and blackout fabric over another and I begin to think that maybe I’m in some kind of prison.
I back myself against the far wall.
The metal scrap looks as if it’s been hastily nailed over the window.
I can’t see any of the other sides of the prison because of whorls of gray, almost odorless smoke that hover over everything like mist.
On the ground are boxes and huge shipping containers and on the far side of the space, beyond my line of sight, I can hear the electronic hum of what might be a generator or a room-conditioner of some kind.
The chute is at least ten feet above me so I won’t be going back up the way I came in.
My first thought is that Odin’s decided to leave me down here to die a slow, agonizing death.
There’s no food and probably no water aside from whatever condensation I can scrounge from the floor or windows.
I take a step and the electric hum cuts out and the smoke thins.
That’s when I see the finger at my foot.
An index finger.
Long and pink and raggedly severed.
There’s a tiny rope of blood leading from the nail that curls off into the shadows.
There’s a shuffling sound and then a vibration in the air.
My fear-meter ticks up.
I’m not alone.
A faint moan echoes.
Shadows rise up on the walls, cast by something or some things that are out in the middle of the space.
Turning to my right, I take five steps and nearly fall over the corpse of a woman who lies on her back.
Her eyes are glassed over and somebody has scooped open her chest and tugged out the gory goodies hidden inside.
It’s an old kill, the blood dull and black, but the strangest thing is the wound.
There’s something about the way the woman’s chest has been canoed, the ribs pried back and the organ tree exposed that doesn’t’ resemble the handiwork of the Dubs.
Footfalls flop behind me and I stumble back, crashing over a collection of plastic lockers, making a real racket.
I grab the only thing nearby that resembles a weapon, a four-foot length of thick plastic pipe marked “PVC,” and dash forward.
Dodging barrels and debris, I scramble toward a mountain of garbage, the source of the rotten-egg stench.
Most of what’s discarded inside VC1 is incinerated or repurposed in some fashion, but there’s other waste that’s stored in certain areas for compost.
The rotten funk curls my nose, but I dive into the fermented trash and fight my way to the top.
I’m twelve feet off of the ground and can see through the smoke.
Catching something out of the corner of my eye, I glance ba
ck to see that I am most definitely not alone.
The shadows have become figures.
A half-dozen of what look like Dubs racing toward me.
I roll over the other side of the garbage pile and hands grab my throat.
I scream and a corpse rises up out of the debris.
What was once a man in his late-thirties, now naked as the day he was born save a rag wrapped around his sex.
He pukes up a ball of bile and thrusts scrawny arms at me.
I’m too shocked to react and he latches onto my throat and drags me in for a bite.
I’m close enough to smell the blood on his lips and then his eyes flap open they’re clear and I realize he’s not a Dub at all!
Judging by the lines creasing the man’s face and the furrows on his brow, he’s probably been down here for too long and seen too much.
There are little streamers of flesh on his teeth and a smear of crusted red on the whiskers below his lower lip.
My gut tells me he killed the woman back there.
He’s gone cannibal.
I’ve heard stories about people like this before, mostly whispers about folks who pissed off the honchos or committed one too many crimes and were simply tossed down into darkened corners of the building never to be seen again.
Regardless of whether it was just a marketing slogan, I have always believed that the living shouldn’t kill the living, but as cannibal man rampages toward me my knee instinctively comes up into his groin and down he goes.
With startling power and speed, the cannibal rolls over and vaults back toward me with a nasty growl. He’s got a section of sharpened metal in his hand, a shank of sorts that he swings at me.
I bring the PVC around like a bat and whack the man in the head and he falls to his side.
He grins, emboldened, fumbling to his feet, the shank daggered over his head.
I retreat a few steps and fall into a pocket in the garbage pile, a pool of warm, liquefied debris that sucks me in up to my stomach like quicksand.
The cannibal rears back and lunges for me, landing on the ground five feet from me and then crawling forward on his hands and knees like an ape.
The PVC comes out and around and now I’m using it to leverage my body as I work to pry my legs free. Pushing down hard on the pipe I manage to torque my body up, my legs slicked in a gel-like sludge produced by the decaying trash. I plant my feet and crab back as the cannibal jumps forward once again.
I kick the man in the face and slide back and down the reverse of the slope.
He pursues and bite-lunges, his flesh-shredding teeth missing my nose by millimeters.
His shank comes around and I parry it with my pipe.
He stabs at me again, locking up with the pipe, laughing, pulling me toward him.
My elbow flies out and connects with the cannibal’s jaw.
He’s momentarily stunned and drops his shank which I snatch up while jump sliding in the other direction.
The cannibal chases me, gibbering and snorting.
I grab my PVC and turn and adopt a defensive crouch, ready to strike him down. That’s when I see his reinforcements are on the way.
What I had assumed were Dubs are now clearly a small posse of cannibals, two men, one woman, all of them with shaved heads and open wounds. They carry pieces of trash they’ve fashioned into weapons and grunt and heave themselves up and over the mountain of garbage in a mad frenzy.
I turn and run full-bore down away from them, hitting the ground, dodging left and right between the mounds of clutter.
I put some distance between me and the ghouls, rounding a bend when a hand grabs my ankle and upends me.
I flop into a mound of trash and the taste of rot fills my mouth.
“Get over here now,” a voice says.
There’s something hiding under the garbage, using it as camouflage.
It’s Naia.
She peeks out from beneath a blind of soggy cardboard boxes, overflowing trash bags, and the eviscerated corpses of at least three Dubs.
“Hurry,” she says.
She pries up the edge of an enormous cardboard box, what amounts to a flap on the blind and ushers me inside where I’m forced to belly through a slick of red and black filth.
There’s just enough space in the blind for the two of us, the pocket making me think of what it must feel like to be in the belly of a gutted animal: dark, hot, and sticky, with the overpowering aroma of burnt blood and spoiled meat.
“How many times do I have to save your ass?” Naia says, taking the shank from my hand and inspecting it.
“One of these days I’m gonna return the favor.”
“I won’t hold my breath.”
I maneuver my body around until I’m laying aside her, peering back outside.
“How long have you been here?” I ask.
“Too long.”
“Was Gus with you?”
She shakes her head and asks what happened to him, but before I can respond, things move outside.
She holds a finger to her lips.
Gaps in the blind allow us to see the cannibals that chased me, now only a few feet away from us. Up close it’s apparent that all four have suffered greatly. Indeed, the cannibal closest to us, a teenager with bushy eyebrows and a ragged scar on his cleanshaven skull, has had the flesh below his knees pulled down like the husk on an ear of corn. I can see the little ligaments and deposits of yellow fatty tissue peeking out from under the blackening flesh.
He turns and looks for us.
There are a few wet sucking sounds as another cannibal, a tall man who’s missing his teeth, sputters and moans. One of the others nods and moans back.
My gaze lifts up and I almost scream when I spot a pair of eyes gaping at me. Naia covers my mouth as I realize we’re lying under a dead Dub. I stare into the thing’s lifeless eyes. Time has freed the webbing of flesh near its peepers allowing me to see inside the sockets where a ball of worms has taken up residence.
I think good thoughts and fight the urge to vomit.
The cannibals fish through some of the debris, but my guess is the stink of the trash has masked our scent. They soon shuffle off.
We wait in silence, but there are no more sounds aside from the hum of machines rumbling again above and off in the distance.
“What the hell was that?” Naia asks, nodding in the direction of the cannibals.
“People who’ve probably been down here too long.”
A look of recognition washes over her and we’re silent for another few seconds, but thankfully, nothing stirs outside of our hiding spot.
“They told me they were going to let me go,” Naia says softly.
“You believed that?”
“Course not, but I wanted to buy some time so I acted like I did. Then they led me into this room and gave me something to eat and then the floor just fell out under me. You?”
“Pretty much the same.”
“I almost broke my neck during the fall.”
“You’ve got to go down on your stomach,” I offer.
“I’ll remember that next time.”
“Yeah, well, there won’t be one,” I say in disgust. “No next times.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
She points to her nose.
“Know what that smell is?”
“Dead Dubs and shit?”
“Besides that.”
I shake my head and she smiles.
“That’s the smell of freedom, Wyatt.”
Naia holds up a mold-blackened peeling from an old carrot.
“When I was little we lived on a farm in the sticks and my mom grew these and fed them to the three-dozen cows we kept.”
“For milk?”
She nods.
“One winter was wicked brutal, cold enough to freeze the gasoline in the trucks. So my folks, who were paranoid about the herd dying out in the fields, jammed all the cows into this big old rusted shed. I remember it was two days before Christmas when
the bomb went off.”
“Bomb?”
“A huge one,” she replies. “Shook the windows of our house and set off the car alarms.”
“What was it?”
“Cow farts.”
My face falls.
“You’re making that up.”
“Wish I was. Killed half the cows and blew the roof off the shed.”
“How is that even possible?”
“Methane. It comes from cow farts and lots of other things like trash. It’s highly flammable. An explosion from something as small as static electricity can set the whole thing off.”
I scrunch my nose.
“So what are you saying?”
“What I’m saying, Wyatt,” and here she paused for a moment, “is that we’re sitting on top of a huge, friggin’ bomb.”
CHAPTER NINE
I’m speechless, staring at the rotten carrot peel.
“You … you want to blow us up?”
She arches an eyebrow.
“What I want to do is find a way to focus the methane for a controlled explosion.”
“How?”
She holds up the strand of wire she copped before from behind the socket plate.
“With my detonator.”
Naia slowly lifts the flap on the blind and peeks out. She motions for me to follow and we shuffle outside, the two of us slicked in the blind’s gray gruel.
She tells me there’s no time to waste and that I’m to be the scout while she prepares a way for us to escape.
There’s little room to argue and so I grab a discarded garbage bag and shrug it on like camouflage and then shimmy up the ridgeline of the garbage pile.
Visibility is still poor, but I can see the cannibals that chased me rooting around on the far side of the space. They’ve found something, some scraps of flesh less rotten than the others that they’re making a meal of. They don’t hear or see us and so we’re safe. For the moment.
Turning back, I watch as Naia grabs my section of PVC piping and leans her body on it, shoving it into the side of the garbage pile until it’s lodged three feet down in the muck. After that, she maneuvers the pipe until its open end is facing a faraway wall that includes several windows, including one of the shuttered windows. Then she peers into the open end of the PVC and breathes deeply.
Vertical City (Book 4) Page 4