Vertical City (Book 4)

by Mahaffey Jr. , George S. .

  My harness tightens as we zigzag over a sidewalk to bypass an overturned demolition truck with the words “We’ll knock your block off!” painted on the side. Brixton’s still firing out his gun, Naia cursing, her eyes hopping in every direction.

  The road widens up ahead and Naia wrenches the machine in gear, accelerating, the motorcycles keeping pace. Donkey and Asian Phil fire back through the busted rear windshield as Del Frisco and me keep low. Through a gap in our seat I can see our drone in the distance, flying twenty feet above the road. Below that are five motorcycles gaining ground. At the lead is Matthais, his bloody neck wrapped in some kind of scarf, machine-gun in one hand, a backpack over his shoulders.

  Brixton screams for us to get down as Naia flips the wheel at the moment the motorcycles blast forward and we streak across the first bridge, swerving around sandbags and the wreckage of the city’s last battle.

  The motorcycles close and the machine swings out wide and clips one of the bikes, sending it fireballing into a deserted storefront on the other side of the bridge.

  We cheer and Matthais riddles the back of the machine as Asian Phil fires a burst at him as we race through the city.

  Matthais nearly eats a streetlamp, able to drift-slide to his left. He rights his bike and swivels and shoots down our drone and then vanishes into an alley.

  Three motorcycles are left, the first working to get past us. Asian Phil leans out and shoots the driver through the neck, the man’s bike hitting a toppled hot-dog cart, shotputting the soon-to-be dead driver into an orange street sign.

  And then there were two, one motorcycle driven by a woman, the other by two smaller men, one piloting the bike while the other fires from behind, assassin-style.

  One of their bullets bounces off the interior of the machine’s roof and rips into Donkey’s shoulder. Donkey barely registers it, clamping a hand around the wound while firing, the four of us forced to disengage from our harnesses so that we can continue to keep low and out of sight.

  I turn back and catch a quick look from Brixton.

  “How far to the freeway?!” I say.

  Brixton throws up a hand as we crest a rise, the freeway looming in the distance, maybe a mile or two away.

  Naia swings the wheel again, weaving down to the left, smashing through a crude barricade made of stacked dumpsters.

  The collision jars us, but we continue on, Del Frisco looking left to right.

  “Where is he?” he asks of Matthais. “Where’d that slippery bastard go?!”

  Asian Phil shouts and I look back to see the motorcycle with the two goons slowing. The shooter unsheathes something long and metallic, a tube of some sort, that he rests on his shoulder.

  “RPG!” Asian Phil screams as—

  BOOM!

  The shooter fires a rocket that bursts from the metal tube in a flash of smoke.

  I can hear Del Frisco’s panicked breathing as the rocket soars directly at us, Naia veering off to the left, clipping a push-cart that divests the machine of its side-view mirror. Metal eats metal, the cart gouging into the side of the machine as the rocket corkscrews past and detonates against a junked yellow cab.

  The debris from the detonation spiderwebs every window on the side of the machine closest to it, Brixton recoiling, pieces of glass lodged in the side of his face.

  Pissed, he kicks at his frosted window, nearly climbing out of the machine, screaming, squeezing out an arc of bullets at the two-person motorcycle.

  One of his slugs hit the shooter just as he’s preparing to fire another rocket.

  The round evidently hits an explosive because the motorcycle disappears in a greasy, orange fireball.

  Before we can cheer we’re tossed around like quarters in a washing machine, Naia driving over a section of asphalt rutted with deep potholes.

  The motorcycle with the female assassin accelerates a final time, the woman spraying her gun wildly at us and then Naia slams on the brakes as—

  WHAM!

  Female assassin’s bike jackhammers into the back our machine, the woman launched through the shattered rear windshield.

  Without missing a beat, the female assassin brings her gun up at us and Zeus thrusts at her.

  She plants the gun between Zeus’s eyes and pulls the trigger.

  The gun rolls over empty.

  Del Frisco surges forward and punches the woman in the face.

  She falls back through the open windshield and lands horribly on her head, her neck cracked, her body rolling into a garbage-strewn gutter.

  “We’re there!” Naia screams and we all look up to see the freeway’s metal and cement skeleton. The freeway connects downtown to the outer boroughs, curling like an arched eyebrow over the river.

  Sparks spray as we hit the interchange that leads onto the freeway proper, the path ahead becoming visible.

  It won’t be easy to cross the freeway, the cement dotted with ruined cars and trash and moldering corpses and the wreckage of at least one airplane whose tail-section caved in a section of ramp fifty yards ahead. And to make matters worse there are mines hidden amidst the debris. Carefully placed there before the city’s fall by the final military units that wanted to prevent the Dubs on the outside from getting in.

  Naia slows, scanning the road ahead.

  “You sure you know the way?” Brixton says.

  She nods and then there’s a note in the distance.

  The whine of a motorcycle.

  We look back to see Matthais, gunning his bike at us.

  “That fucker is incredibly persistent,” Brixton says.

  Naia gives the machine some gas and we jolt off, tacking around the junk and the hidden spaces where I presume the mines are hidden.

  We fire back at Matthais who expertly uses the debris as cover. His shots are well-placed, a few thumping into the machine’s tires and rims even as Naia juices the engine.

  I watch Matthais drop down on the side of his bike, shooting at us while simultaneously revving his engine.

  Brixton and his men reload, returning fire, Del Frisco holding onto Zeus, Naia searching for an angle.

  I think she finds one and realizes there are only seconds to act, because she vrooms forward and then lets up on the gas as Matthais draws close, Naia sucking him in.

  She flips the wheels, taking a harrowing curve in the freeway, the concrete side-barriers gone, the river, a hundred feet below us, visible.

  Naia feigns turning right as Matthais swings left, shredding the rear of the machine with his gun, tires blowing out.

  Matthais nears us, plucking a grenade from his tactical vest as the still-intact concrete side-barriers draw closer.

  Naia turns the wheel and our tires lock with Matthais’s bike.

  “GET DOWN!” she screams, the machine and the motorcycle yoked in a kind of metal-twisting ballet.

  Matthais drops his grenade, fighting to extricate his bike, Naia refusing to disengage, riding both of the machines down a decline, everything blurring past.

  I look out my window and Matthais glares at me.

  Every inch of his body looks like a monument to pain and suffering. His neck is a catastrophe, the wound caused by Gus now black and bloody and bubbling. The skin on his face and neck and arms is webbed and charred and lacerated, just starting to go gray which means it’s only a matter of time before he joins the ranks of the undead.

  He raises his gun at me and then Naia breaks contact and we fishtail away from him, Del Frisco whispering into my ear:

  “Villains always blink their eyes, Wyatt.”

  And then Matthais does exactly that as his bike drifts back and to the left, momentarily disorienting him.

  That’s when I notice the mines behind him.

  The ones partially concealed under a pile of Dub bodies.

  He raises his gun a final time and I hum the old rhyme that Gus taught me as a child:

  Tiger, tiger, burning bright …

  The front wheel of his bike trips a mine and—
r />   In the forest of the night…

  BOOM!

  Matthais and his motorcycle vanish in a percussive explosion that sends portions of his corpse and the bike’s front tire a hundred feet into the air.

  Naia doesn’t stop, flooring the machine, slaloming around the mines until we come to a section of the freeway that’s collapsed.

  By the time we reached the collapsed section of freeway we’re riding on rims, the machine shrieking from the damage, the sound of gears shredding and metal folding under itself. Our ride sputters and stops and so we dismount and I take a step and crumple to the ground, overwhelmed by everything.

  I watch Brixton meander over and grab something lying on the buckled cement.

  It’s the Dub skull that Matthais used to hold his ammunition.

  Brixton holds the skull up and then drops it to the ground and stomps it to pieces with his mighty black boots.

  Turning from this, I see that I’ve dropped Dad’s old cellphone which lies on its side, flipped open, powered up, but running out of juice.

  The old folders are still open, the photos I glanced at before still there. All the ones with the horrible angles and blurry images along with the video file, the one I chose not to play before.

  For some reason I tap the file and up pops a video, the POV swinging wildly, an interior shot of room. The POV pans around and there I am, just a little kid. Probably a few months before the world ended, focused on opening up a wrapped box under a big, green tree. I can hear Mom’s voice off-screen as she’s apparently recording everything and I hear her say, “Why so serious, Wyatt?”

  In the video I look up at her and my frown turns upside down (I’m at that age where you’re all head and teeth), and then someone swoops in from off camera and plops down next to me. It’s Dad. Jesus, but he looks happy. Hamming it up and smiling and helping me open a wrapped box that’s filled with a big plastic truck. The image fixes on me and Dad and I watch him lean down and kiss my head and whisper something with his eyes closed that I don’t remember and can’t make out.

  And then the battery dies and I just sit there staring at the phone.

  “Memories?” someone says as I look back to see Naia.

  “I guess … more like ghosts.”

  “Can’t be,” she says with a flick of her head. “Ghosts are dead, Wyatt. I’m thinking the stuff you’ve got on that phone is the stuff you keep in here,” she continues, pointing to her chest. “Things like that are always vital, always alive. They’re the opposite of ghosts.”

  I smile and she helps me up and without thinking I hug her and she pauses and then hugs me back. Some of the others are doing the same and I think I see a tear or two fall from Brixton’s eyes.

  My adrenaline buzz quickly fades and I can feel every ache and blow and pricked nerve-ending as I lever myself up. All the muscle that’s been punched or kicked over the last few hours, every inch of flesh scraped and gouged, seems to burn and bark at the same time.

  “Which way?” I ask Naia as we move out, the sun sinking blood red over the horizon.

  She points to the tail-end of the freeway that loops around the fringe of the city and continues on through an industrial area and little pockets of houses nearly stacked on top of each other. Out in the distance is a buffer area of green and beyond that a bar of sand and the ocean.

  “There’s a boat out there,” she says. “The same one we came in on.”

  We squint and the sun dips behind a bank of clouds and there it is. A small boat anchored out in the middle of the water, bobbing back and forth.

  We hop over a sewage culvert and hike by sections of fallen billboards near an abandoned overpass and past packs of wild dogs and coyotes foraging in the distance.

  It take me a few moments to notice that the air is cleaner here, almost sweeter, the colors somehow more vibrant.

  And the ground is largely free of trash and debris, no black carrion birds in sight, and not a single Dub corpse.

  Minutes later, we slip silently over buckled streets where small trees and tall grass sprout from holes in the asphalt. We leave the cement behind, Naia guiding us over a gravel path that ends at the green buffer which lies between the helter-skelter of the city and the beach.

  It’s here that Brixton spots a single dead Dub, lying at the peak of a sand dune, the man’s nude body lying shriveled and husk-like around a piece of driftwood. Zeus scents the body and looks back at us, his tail wagging.

  Brixton removes the metal canister from inside of his vest and plucks out the rusted tweezers. Naia asks me what he’s doing and I tell her that he’s trying to predict the future.

  Brixton uses the tweezers to hunt inside a wound on the Dub’s back. He reaches down and picks out a Dub Popper that he holds in the air. Unlike every other Dub Popper I’ve ever seen, this bug is a whey-colored, spindly little thing.

  “It’s dead,” Brixton says.

  “What from?” asks Naia.

  “I could be wrong, but I think … malnutrition,” Brixton says with a smile.

  We descend the reverse of the dune and stand and admire the boat which is ten or twenty yards offshore.

  Then we peer down at our boots and shoes, slicked in viscera and the unholy stench of Dub fluids and human decay. It’s something that you wouldn’t know unless you’ve lived through it, but it’s impossible to get the smell of death off of your shoes.

  As such, we remove our footgear, deciding to leave the aroma of the old city behind and wade into the icy water. Del Frisco hums an old rock song about little pink houses by a singer named Mellencamp as we swim for the boat.

  A long rope ladder dangles from the edge of the boat which we use to climb aboard. Naia does a quick search of the vessel and reports it being much the same as when she left it, aside from some water and debris in the cabin.

  Del Frisco and I admire the polished, fiberglass exterior of the boat when someone whistles and we look back. Mounting a raised platform at the rear of the boat, we spot little curls of smoke still rising up over the city from the fires burning in the Vertical City.

  “Looks awful small from here, don’t it?” says Del Frisco.

  I nod and am suddenly conscious of dozens of different odors floating in the air, each one connected with a thought or a hope or a memory. There is the salty smell of seawater and the acrid stench of fire.

  I say a prayer for Gus and all the other good people that lived and died in VC1, crying as the smoke rises into the sky. I cry because the Vertical City was the only place I called home for most of my life. I could still walk the upper floors blindfolded, still guide you down through the shortcuts and switchbacks we used to play and work in. I cry as I remember the good times I had there, because there were some, although most occurred long ago.

  My mental time machine transports me back and I think about the day Dad left me and all the people I loved and lost there. I think about Mom and hope that wherever she is I’ve made her proud and I hope like hell that Roger Parker is able to make a go of it and avoid falling prey to the same things that gave rise to Odin. I hope that he’s able to put down the sword and finally make peace with the Dubs and Gus, because there’s plenty of room for both of them.

  I’m handed a blanket and bandages from a tiny first-aid kit for my wounds and a few protein bars from a stash that Naia and her people left aboard before they came into the city. Then I slump in a seat near Brixton, Del Frisco, Zeus, and the others.

  With much effort, Naia finally powers up the boat and we debate for a time where to go. Some say we should travel south and Brixton says we should head for his home island, on account of him having heard of numerous fortified buildings in London and Liverpool (at or around some place he says is called “Three Graces” where his brother and parents were seeking shelter), but Naia shakes her head. She says we can eventually travel there once we get resupplied, but that at least for the time being, we should set off back up the coast to regroup at her settlement, which everyone agrees to.

&
nbsp; And so there I am, seated at the back of the boat, the wind whipping in my hair. I think back on what Gus said, that wherever people gather there’s a story about how things began, a creation myth that seeks to convey some profound truth about the human condition.

  A compelling story designed to help people make sense of the world.

  The crash of the helicopter will soon be forgotten, replaced by our tale which, the more I think about it, the more remarkable it becomes. It centers on our imprisonment in a skyscraper of stone and steel in a once mighty city, our scapegoating by a dictator, banishment, and eventual victory over him and the legions of the dead.

  Wherever we end up, this will be our origin story. A myth about how a small group of people who refused to lose their humanity triumphed over the powers of darkness. It is a story that’s probably been told hundreds, maybe thousands of times down through the ages, but this myth, at least as it applies to us, happens to be true.

  THE END

  Thanks for reading VERTICAL CITY, Part 4, the final book in the series. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on Amazon.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  George S. Mahaffey Jr. is a practicing lawyer and screenwriter. His script HEATSEEKERS was bought by Paramount with Michael Bay producing and Timur Bekmambetov directing. In addition, he’s sold or written scripts for Arnold Kopelson, Jason Blum, Benderspink, director Louis Leterrier, and is the creator of IN THE DUST, an action-horror graphic novel in the vein of 30 DAYS OF NIGHT to be published by Top Cow with art by Christian Duce, and the author of BLOOD RUNNERS, Book 1, and the horror novellas, AMITYVILLE: ORIGINS, RAZORBACKS, RAZORBACKS II, THE PACT, VERTICAL CITY (Parts 1, 2, and 3), as well as the THUNDER ROAD action series (Books 1 and 2).