“There are good people upstairs and in the other buildings—”
“Where were they when we needed them? Where were they for your friend, Gus?”
“They’re scared.”
“Scared people aren’t worth saving.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Then you’ll die.”
“Better to live one day as a lion than a thousand as a lamb.”
“That’s cutesy, bumper-sticker bullshit.”
“It’s what Gus used to say.”
“And look where it got him.”
My fists ball up and she reads my look, but doesn’t back down.
“Once I go through this door I am not turning back for anything. Not for you, not for anybody. You need to know that so stay or go, cause I’m rolling out.”
She slams an elbow against the door and shoulders it open and I follow after her.
The sunlight’s blinding as we barrel onto the street at the rear of VC1.
There are no Dubs in sight as we sprint raggedly across the road. My eyes are everywhere, scanning every building façade, every low-level rooftop and alley, but nothing looks out of place. We’re headed toward a secondary street and there’s not a Dub in sight. I can’t believe how easy the whole thing is, how we were able to tiptoe right out the door and under Odin’s nose and make it to safety on the Flatlands.
And then Naia stops up ahead and jerks back in surprise.
I spin and something glints off the top of the building.
Then the window on the car next to me blows out.
And the trunk implodes.
And then the ground between my legs and the air over my head hums with the steady drone of bullets.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“GET DOWN!” I scream, diving evasively behind a fire-hydrant as bullets chew up the ground up and down the street.
Naia’s twenty feet from me, lying under a pickup truck jack-knifed in a gutter.
Bullets star the front of the truck, tires bursting, rounds ricocheting off the streets and adjacent building fronts.
Grit showers me as the bullets kick up off the blacktop and snap past my head.
The angle of the sun’s terrible, so I can’t tell where the shots are coming from, but my guess is the various blinds on top of VC1 manned by Matthais and his snipers. I guess I was wrong about Odin and his muscle preferring to do their killings in the safety of the shadows.
I roll over and peek from behind the hydrant and sure enough there are winks of light, sniper-scope flashes from the upper reaches of the building. Lots of them.
“Snipers!”
Naia looks over at me.
“And you wanted to go back and save everyone, huh?”
“Just the good ones.”
She rolls her eyes and I measure the intervals between shots.
The snipers fire in volleys spaced six seconds apart.
I count to five and then the bullets fly again, rounds hitting near me, tiny pieces of hydrant-shrapnel whizzing past my head.
More bullets ratchet down, pummeling every inch of space around me.
One slug whines off the pavement and kisses the tip of my nose and another grazes my eyebrow and draws a bead of blood that curls down my cheek.
Naia’s shouting something to me, but I can’t hear her because I’ve slipped down into the zone.
It’s as if I’m up again on The Dream Catcher.
Sounds are muted and when a shadow passes overhead I lever myself up.
I wait for the last bullet to hit and then I take a chance and bomb across open ground.
There’s a lull, no sounds except for the screech of a pair of birds on a lamp-post. Blood roars in my ears and my feet suddenly feel heavy, as if they’d been dipped in cement.
I’m close to a safe place, maybe three seconds away, but I’ve lost count and pray that I’ve got enough time when the firing begins again and I belly-flop as the first bullet whines past me.
I crash to the ground beside Naia as the truck absorbs more incoming fire.
“What the hell did you do that for?!” she says.
I don’t respond and she reaches a finger up and gently blots a pearl of blood from above my eye.
“You’re wounded.”
“Nicked.”
“You’re lucky.”
“So are you.”
“Which one’s gonna run out sooner? Our luck or their ammunition?”
I point to the edge of a building that’s maybe thirty feet from our present position.
The building’s probably twenty-stories high which means it’s a natural barrier between whatever is on its far side and the top of VC1.
“If we can hit that corner, we’ve got a shot,” I say.
“Big if.”
“Got a better idea?”
She breathes deeply and shakes her head. I roll over and spy around the rear wheel-well of the truck as a bullet takes off the side-view mirror.
“We’re blind right now. They’ve got the sun to their backs so we need to wait for the next shadow.”
She purses her lips.
“That’s a pretty solid plan, Wyatt.”
“Thank you.”
“Only one problem.”
She points and I follow her gaze down the street.
A small delegation of Dubs have apparently heard the firing and are coming to investigate.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I ask.
“That I wish I’d never come into this goddamn city?”
“Besides that.”
She shakes her head.
“We wait until they’re almost on top of us and then we use them as cover.”
“Can I tell you something, Wyatt?”
“Please do.”
“That is the worse plan I’ve ever heard.”
“The way I figure it, the snipers don’t have enough ammo to shoot all of the Dubs and us.”
She registers this.
“That’s super comforting.”
Naia gulps and I wave at one of the Dubs. It’s a kid, or was, garbed in a moth-eaten tracksuit and hoody, a pair of cracked sunglasses rammed into the gray flesh above his right eye. The teen ghoul barks and lurches forward.
The others follow and soon there’s bedlam in the middle of the street as the congregation of the risen sweeps toward us.
My eyes are so fixed on the Dubs that I barely feel Naia’s hand grip mine. When the Dubs are close enough to smell we take in four deep breaths and rise up and the shooting begins almost instantaneously.
The Dubs, who are staggered in lines across the street, provide a crude barrier between us and the top of VC1. The zombies fall in waves, smithereened by bullets that tear through poisoned flesh.
Heads burst.
Torsos erupt in sprays of black and gray.
Ragged limbs drop to the ground.
Naia grabs my hand and pulls me back and I trip and roll over as a female Dub wheels on me.
She reaches down and her neck blows out, smothering me in gore.
Naia shrieks at me and I weave between the falling Dubs, rushing toward the edge of the cover building as the brick right behind my head is stitched with bullets, fragments of stone whistling past my ears as I duck for cover.
We rifle through the scraps of the world’s unwinding, sliding by machines and structures landscaped by the elements and time-worn hills of trash and jellied rivers of sludge seeping from piles of the decaying dead.
We’re about to cross over an intersection when two items catch my eye: a section of a red shirt lying discarded and torn and a broken crown smeared with blood.
The very same things Gus wore when he was shunned.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
If Gus fell here, he did so only after a struggle.
I can tell this by the way the shirt is ripped with at least one bullet hole in the side, the crown cracked in half. There are little rivers of black Dub blood on the ground going in all directions which makes me certain
Gus gave as well as he received.
Bloody boot-prints lead across the street and my gut seizes as I picture Gus, wounded by a sniper round and harassed by the Dubs, making a last stand in what was once a small bodega. The fact that the rucksack he was given is nowhere in sight bolsters my suspicions that he survived whatever ambushed him here.
“Gus was here,” I say solemnly.
She examines the clothes, the trails of blood.
“If he was, he’s gone.”
I point to the bodega.
“There’s no time, Wyatt.”
“If he’s hurt, I need to help.”
“Then go help,” she says softly. “But I’m not coming.”
Before I can respond there’s the roar of engines and then we spot some of Matthais’s killers driving motorcycles down the street. They’re a good two blocks away, but see us and open fire.
We cover our heads and dash across the street and into the bodega and are nearly dropped by the stench of death and decay.
Every inch of the narrow space was ransacked years ago, the aisles nearly impassable, coolers and display cases turned over on their sides and stripped of metal.
We hurtle the refuse, listening to the shouts of Matthais’s men behind us melding with the soulless screams of the approaching Dubs.
Naia grabs my shoulder and I turn to eye the battle raging on the streets outside.
Nothing is crystal clear, but we can see rows of Dubs being cut down by bullets fired by Odin’s men.
The rounds thud into Dubs, skulls splitting apart like rotten vegetables, ropes of blood and entrails flung into the air.
An explosive detonates in the middle of the road and diseased bodyparts soon litter the ground and spatter the inside of the bodega.
Suddenly, one of Odin’s killers appears at the entrance to the bodega.
He’s a sick-looking man in a black vest with a sponge of brown hair and uncovered, tatooed arms that seem as thin as blades of grass.
He also holds up an assault rifle and aims at me.
I blink and wait for the bullet to cleave my head.
If I’m lucky I’ll have crossed over before my body hits the floor.
There’s a muffled shout and I jump, thinking that the kill shot has already been fired.
When I open my eyes the killer is on the ground under the weight of two Dubs who are plunging their hands into the man’s chest.
One of the Dubs looks back, a long string of flesh hanging from its black lips.
It points and screams and several of the Dub rearguard appear and head toward us.
Naia calls for me and I follow her voice toward the rear of the bodega which is steeped in shadows.
Everything looks menacing in the murk, our reflections in a wall of mirrored glass causing me to jump in fright.
There are three Dub bodies on the ground in front of a walk-in cooler, so much blood on the floor that it looks like some kind of abstract painting.
The necks on the Dubs are either hacked open or slit and I can tell the kills are fresh because the feet of one of them still pulses with half-life.
Clutching the only thing in sight that could be used as a weapon, an old coat-hangar, I grab the handle on the cooler and throw it open.
Sheer reflex, that’s the only thing that prevents the teeth belonging to the thing hiding inside the cooler from tasting the meat near my forearm.
Jerking to the side, my arm slams into the lower jaw of the Dub, violently pushing its mouth closed.
I’m about to put the hangar through its eye when I realize to my horror that it’s him.
It’s Gus.
He’s shirtless and bloody and sports two wounds: an angry looking exit wound (undoubtedly caused by a bullet) near his upper chest and the bloody outline of a Dub’s mouth just below his right bicep.
But the thing that really causes my stomach to spasm is his head.
He’s bald, his skull crowned with blood from where his hair was taken.
The bastards actually did it.
They either wounded or killed him and then, just for the hell of it, they scalped him.
Memories of all the years we had together wash over me and my muscles go slack. I know Gus has turned and I should be moving to put him down, but I can’t do it. I won’t even as I note the gore-smeared knife the size of a lawnmower blade in his right hand. The one he probably used, after being wounded by Odin’s men and seeking shelter here, to kill the Dubs at our feet.
He drops the knife.
I drop the hangar.
I notice words scrawled on the metal behind him in blood: “We die as we dream: alone.”
I’m sure it’s the very last thing he ever wrote.
Time and sound slow and emotion wells up inside me.
“Jesus, Gus.” I say. “Jesus.”
Gus’s lifeless gray eyes open and there’s something there, some flicker of light. It’s like he’s wearing the costume of another man. The old Gus is still in there somewhere in the background, peeking out from behind a curtain, and then he opens his mouth and part of his tongue is missing and his jaw moves back and forth as if he’s trying to speak.
At that moment he looks more curious than dangerous.
That’s when Naia rises up peripherally.
She’s got a long metal bar raised over her head.
“NO!” I scream, extending an arm to block her.
She drops the bar and I throw a punch that hits Gus’s jaw and snaps his head back.
Gus flaps to the ground, unconscious, and I pivot to Naia who’s just standing there, clutching herself.
“I don’t want to alarm you, but…”
She points and I glance back to see the bodega filled with Dubs who’ve herded together and are marching toward us. My eyes roam over their faces, bloated and leprous with disease, some shouting or screaming, others barking like dogs or raving and tearing themselves in delirium.
I take another look at poor Gus and then I hop over his body and follow Naia out through a back door that leads to a circle of cement surrounded by a warped wooden fence.
We hit the fence hard and scale it as the back door of the bodega explodes off its hinges.
There are hundreds of Dubs tracking us as we roll over the top of the fence and run down an alley.
I expect to hear the sound of engines and the triumphant shouts of Odin’s killers, but none appear and I’m hopeful they licked their wounds after engaging the Dubs and retreated back to VC1.
We race through the alley and across the open shell of another building. There’s a yellow interior door up ahead that we kick open to reveal a set of metal rails and stairs that drop to a landing dock.
I plant my hand on a section of railing and drop down over the side to the bottom of the dock, coming to a rest on the balls of my feet.
Naia follows my lead, soaring through the air before screaming in frustration as she awkwardly lands.
Her foot turns at an odd angle and she hop-falls forward into me.
“Turned my damn ankle,” she says.
I swing an arm around her and we thread between a pair of red-bricked buildings and into the rear of a metal shed connected to the back of a warehouse studded with solar panels.
We close a rusted door behind us and walk through the shed, an overhead light connected to the solar panels snaps on and Naia’s hand goes to her mouth.
There are bodies stacked like wood on either side of the shed.
Some of the corpses are relatively intact, others are swollen or deflated and festering, their skin resembling the jackets on sweet potatoes I once saw left outside to rot. I imagine the fallen were a group of people who took refuge here and simply chose never to leave.
There’s a loud POP! which startles both of us and I look over to see the belly on one of the bodies split open. Out come a knot of worms and a line of black beetles.
“It’s death-bloat,” Naia says. “The gas in the body has nowhere else to go and so it builds up in the gut and
bursts. Usually takes a few months, but if the space is sealed off, it can take years.”
“How do you know?”
“That’s how long it took to happen to my father.”
I open to mouth to ask the specifics, but Naia silences me with a look.
Then she kneels before a woman who lies against a wall. The woman’s chin is pressed to her sunken chest, a yellow liquid pouring out of her ears and mouth.
“That’s the brain liquefying,” Naia says, pointing at the yellow liquid.
She studies the woman’s face and pushes down the folds of skin over the woman’s eyes which look like egg yokes.
“I don’t mind if it’s one of those things back there or just a part of someone’s body, ‘cause then it’s just meat, y’know? But when I see dead people pretty much whole like this—”
“It’s way worse.”
She nods.
“It’s like I can … see into their past life, see a part of who they once were.”
She leans near the woman and then hands pound on the door behind us and we slip ahead, exiting through a pocket-door into an interior of the metal-clad warehouse.
We run through the warehouse and stop near a drain cover in the middle of the room.
Suddenly, a section of brick skirt on a faraway wall crumbles in and a jumble of Dubs appear. We both take a step onto the drain cover which breaks apart under us.
We drop straight down, landing in a moat of water, one of the city’s many sewer channels.
We hit the bottom of the channel and fall to our sides, sloshing in the putrid ditch that smells like a rotten swamp.
It’s almost impossible to see in the subterranean space, but peering up I spot the shadows of one or two Dubs hunting for us. I urge Naia to duck back and out of sight and pray that they didn’t see us.
“Which way?” Naia asks softly.
“The opposite of where they’re going,” I reply, pointing to the ceiling.
We crouch and fight our way down through the sewer, past small forests of fungi and colonies of rats and huge, floating blooms of flesh and chunks of hard tissue and bone that have sloughed or broken off from hundreds of Dubs bodies.
The frail light from the hole we fell through ebbs and I try and orient myself by creating a crude map in my head of a safe way forward. The underground space is uncharted territory, however, and the shadows swamp my vision.
Vertical City (Book 4) Page 7