Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4]

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  It seems to be coming from the outer edges of the room and is followed by a series of pops that are not unlike the sound sheets of ice make as they break apart.

  Hustling ahead, I grab Del Frisco who’s sixty feet from the glass-cased honeypot.

  “Stop bracing me, man,” he says with a roll of his shoulders.

  “Shut up.”

  “Wyatt…”

  “Shut the hell up!”

  I hold my finger up in a shushing gesture and we both listen. The sounds, of course, are gone. “I swear I heard-”

  “Silencio, brother, that’s what you heard. Like the song says, the beautiful sounds of silence.”

  We listen for a beat longer, but all is indeed very quiet.

  “You’re getting paranoid, bro. There’s nothing here but some trinkets for big Frisco.”

  Del Frisco treks merrily ahead and reaches the glass cage and throws it open. He grabs the goodies inside.

  His face falls.

  The boxes and bottles and everything else inside are perfectly positioned and enticing, but empty. Every single one of them.

  The hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. It’s almost as if the case has been left here on purpose.

  As what?

  A trap?

  Bait?

  The sound of pops echo all around once again and even Del Frisco hears it this time.

  “Gimme a ball,” I whisper.

  He hands me another orange one and I drop it on the ground and the ball immediately zips back in the direction from which we’ve just come. Like it was being pulled on an invisible string.

  Del Frisco turns, mouth unhinged as he mutters the words “Oh, shit,” and then the floor bucks and drops a foot.

  We run and then our speed picks up because in a flash we’re sprinting downhill and then everything seems to wildly tilt.

  “JUMP AND GRAB!” I scream as we both plant our feet and heave ourselves up and grab onto the thick ceiling cables as the floor completely falls away under our feet.

  2

  Before we fully can comprehend what’s happened, we’re dangling like worms on the ends of hooks, staring down as the floor that was beneath our feet only seconds before, explodes onto the floor below.

  A great, blinding cloud of dust and debris mushrooms up.

  Seconds pass before I see movement in the din, a seething mass of arms and legs and lolling tongues fighting through the rubble.

  The floor beneath teems with hundreds of angry Dubs.

  It’s like staring down at a pen of famished lions at the zoo, the Dubs howling and snatching at the air and jumping and swinging for us.

  “Jesus,” Del Frisco says, “look at those mothers go.”

  He grins at the sight, nonplussed by our predicament since he’s possessed of freakish upper body strength for someone his size. He just hangs there from a thick ceiling cable by one hand, which I’ve seen him do before from the window ledge of a thirty-store building. I, on the other hand, was not blessed with his brawn and struggle to maintain my bodyweight. I know I can’t hang up there indefinitely and so I swing myself like a child on a set of monkey-bars, moving back toward the staircase.

  “Wyatt.”

  I ignore him as I swing forward, focusing on the staircase which is still several hundred feet away.

  “Hey, Wyatt.”

  “Shut the hell up! You got us into this!”

  “Think you need to see this, hoss.”

  Breaking for a second, I suck in a mouthful of air. My arms burn, but I cast a look sideways at Del Frisco whose gaze is pinned straight down.

  “You’re gonna appreciate this, cause they’re, like, scheming, man. I can tell. They’re totally coming for us.”

  “They’re too far down.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well checkity check that,” Del Frisco replies.

  My sight wanders down to where a lithe Dub studies me and then shoves one of his brethren to the ground. He mounts the other’s back and then, I kid you not, launches into the air at me.

  The Dub misses, but it’s closer than I’d anticipated.

  Another Dub follows and then another and in a flash they’re scrambling up onto each others’ backs like spiders.

  Before I can react, another flings itself at me.

  I clench the muscles in my core and punt the thing in the face, nearly losing my grip, as it falls down on top of the others

  “Go!” I scream at Del Frisco. “GO!”

  We turn and snag wires and cables, swinging back toward the staircase as the sound of the angry Dubs reverberates below.

  I don’t dare look down, but the Dubs sound like they’re tearing the floor beneath us apart.

  I hear a keening whine and the sound of flesh being slapped and the scurrying that comes when the vicious revenants think they’ve got an easy meal.

  Del Frisco has no problem pumping his lats and making excellent time, beating me by a good minute and a half.

  He torques himself up onto the still-stable ledge of the staircase without even breaking a sweat.

  My vision’s woozy and I’m nearly out of gas as I near the ledge, where Del Frisco smiles and offers me a hand.

  “Need a lift?”

  My middle finger greets him as I grunt and roll up and onto the cement pad. I catch my breath, listening to another ominous sound of footfalls pounding on the floor above us.

  From what we can discern, there’s something – probably a lot of things - moving down through the hall on the floor directly overhead. My guess is that a legion of Dubs heard the sound of the floor dropping away and are headed down the stairwell to investigate.

  “Awesome,” Del Frisco says while whipping out his Onesie, readying to do battle.

  I do likewise and we crouch after locking the stairwell door behind us to prevent any Dubs from following.

  Darkness sucks us in as we slip silently up the stairs like a pair of thieves.

  The menacing sounds that we heard seconds before, the stomping of things overhead, have stopped.

  An eerie silence smothers the space.

  We take the steps one at a time, Del Frisco on point.

  “Wyatt, hey, Wyatt.”

  I look up and catch his face in the gloom, his eyes twinkling like blown glass.

  “Never look into it, m’man, never gaze into the eyes of the goddamned sun.”

  Reflecting on this, I realize he’s paraphrasing yet another, old song, which I’m pretty sure he does to calm his nerves.

  “Yeah, but that’s where all the friggin’ fun is,” I reply, playing along.

  Del Frisco cackles, grinning crookedly before turning and kneeling.

  He inserts his earpiece and closes his eyes.

  A sound emanates from the earpiece: a droning from somewhere up above us that’s downright elemental, a sound seemingly made up of ten thousand little sounds. Like the murmuring of bees inside an enormous hive before they attack.

  I reach over and kill the power to the earpiece.

  Slowly, the two of us peer up to the door at the top of the stairs.

  A sheet of wood and metal that’s a mere blob of black in the gloom.

  It seems to pulse like a human heart.

  Gus and the others ask what keeps a Jumper on his toes and I always tell them it’s the fear of the crocodiles closest to the canoe. The crocs are here all right, plotting near that damn door.

  Del Frisco hums another old rock tune and I whisper a rhyme that Gus taught me as a child:

  Tiger, tiger, burning bright…

  There’s breathing up at the top of the stairs.

  For God’s sakes, I can hear it.

  My eyes squint and seize on things in the murk:

  The door cracking open.

  What might be an eyeball shimmering. Saliva on blackened teeth.

  A tongue stabbing the air.

  The rhyme pounds in my ears:

  In the forest of the goddamn night.

  Two deep breaths from me in pregnant interva
ls and then door rocks back and forth and explodes off its hinges.

  3

  The door crashes down and past us.

  Our eyes ratchet back to the black hole at the top of the stairs and every muscle in my body clenches.

  We wait for something to happen and when nothing does, we take tentative steps forward.

  My senses are on overdrive. I can hear the droning has morphed to an almost imperceptible humming, a faint buzz, the electricity that Dubs purportedly cast when moving in sizable numbers.

  Del Frisco holds up two fingers to stop me.

  My eyes scan the stairs ahead and I can see figures toiling in the shadows. I count whatever’s lurking there, but stop at eleven, which means there’s undoubtedly double that number that can’t be seen.

  A head snaps back in the shadows and a tongue juts out as a Dub wiggles its nose, as if sniffing the air for the scent of our live blood and warm flesh.

  Another two seconds of silence follows and then the Dubs wail and stab their hands against the walls when they spot us.

  In an instant it’s impossible to hear over the frantic screams of the Dubs as they swoop down on us like a pack of wild animals.

  Even though I’ve had serious misgivings about the wholesale slaughter of creatures that used to be our neighbors and loved ones, I’ve got no current plans to become a meal and so I drop low, measure my weight and wait for the signal.

  Del Frisco pumps a fist and we both explode up, bringing our Onesies around like swords.

  Del Frisco plants the axe head of his Onesie in the neck of the first Dub, decapitating it as a thick rope of black blood paints the right wall. The head rolls past me as I glance up to see a female Dub bypassing Del Frisco to get at me.

  My arm pulls in tight to my chest and I drive the spike on the end of my tomahawk into the soft part under the Dub’s chin, making a sound like a mallet striking a brick wall.

  The Dub exhales, her breath smelling of fetid meat which churns my stomach as I work the spike into her gray matter.

  Gore spurts in great abundance as something pops in her cranium and the dark glow in her eyes vanishes.

  The female Dub folds like wet cardboard and I use her corpse to springboard forward, splitting open the skulls of two more Dubs, slashing wide the throat of another as Del Frisco pushes the black button on his Onesie.

  I crouch defensively as the barbed metal ball drops from the tomahawk and Del Frisco twirls it so fast the air seems to sing.

  The ball slices through foreheads as blood geysers and bodies fall in twos and threes.

  I finish off the Dubs that Del Frisco misses, braining a young man with my brass knuckles before jamming my spike into the ear of an elderly gent before WHOMPH! a young girl flies past my head, talon-like fingers barely missing me, tickling the fat of my neck.

  She bounces off a wall and rolls over, her right arm shattered horribly, bone poking through splotched, pellucid flesh.

  She finds her equipoise as I slam my axe into her forehead before planting a foot on her shoulder to lever it free.

  Turning back, I bull up the stairs, whipsawing the heads of another two Dubs, including a blue-bloated woman who’s missing both of her hands.

  A fist comes out of nowhere and rocks my jaw, sending me fumbling back against the far wall. This happens all the time by the way. Del Frisco and me aren’t like those bullet-proof toughs you used to see in the movies. The ones who never got nicked, who always seemed to glide right between the raindrops. I get my ass handed to me on the regular by the Dubs, which is one of the many reasons I respect them.

  I blink away the fireworks that accompany the punch, my vision clouded with stars as I look up into the milky eyes of what was once an Asian gent. He’s whey-faced and wearing black shorts, combat boots, and a grubby T-shirt with the word “Dope” stitched across it in sequins.

  The Asian’s missing his lower jaw, but man can he move his pipe-cleaner-like arms.

  The guy throws a series of ill-timed, yet impressive chops and haymakers.

  It’s obvious he was quite the shit-kicker back in the day, cruising now on instinct, as he drops toward me and I swing my Onesie.

  My blade takes a big scoop of flesh out of his chest, opening up some vitals that spill maggot-flecked sludge onto the stairs.

  The Asian looks down at the wound and in his moment of hesitation I lop the top of his skull off.

  This takes the fight out of him as he timbers to his knees, his eyes never parting from mine.

  Blood bubbles from his mouth and I hear an inflection from his lips that sounds eerily like the words “kill me.”

  He blinks twice, shivers, and collapses. I’ve seen this before and told the others about it, but they say it’s just a reflex. Like how a bug’s legs twitch when you peel them off. I don’t believe that. In fact, I’ve always thought that some of the Dubs retain a portion of their humanity.

  Looking down, I see the Asian’s got some green-splotched bracelet wrapped around one wrist. I slide it off and a hint of gold glimmers under the green, so I pocket the thing and follow after Del Frisco who appears to have the situation well in hand.

  In seconds, we’re mopping up, jumping from body to body to make sure the Dubs are crossed over.

  Del Frisco leads me up until we’re standing victoriously atop a small hillock of bodies that rises up out of a moat of Dub blood. Del Frisco holds his tomahawk out to tap mine, his lips pulled wide, teeth shining like tombstones in the murk.

  That’s when I see it.

  The line of dark red running down Del Frisco’s forearm.

  Del Frisco’s mouth freezes in place.

  His eyes and body follow shortly thereafter.

  There’s ice in my veins as well because the contagion, the virus, whatever the hell it was that brought the world to its end, is still out there somewhere: in the wind, in the water, probably in the soil. As such, it’s exceptionally easy to become infected after contact with the undead. There are tales of others, mostly the bottom-feeders that chuck the Dub bodies into the incinerators, testing positive after inhaling their torched ashes. I have no idea whether that’s true, but none of us Jumpers like to take chances.

  If you’re bitten or suffer a material scratch, best practices dictate a massive course of anti-biotics the moment you get back to base.

  Of course, all of that’s on the down-low since those in charge of the Vertical City have zero tolerance, the buildings supposedly sterile, meaning no one who’s infected is allowed inside. If you’re bleeding you better keep it to yourself or you’ll likely to wind up on the wrong side of one of the Prowlers’ high-powered sniper rifles.

  “Go on, man,” Del Frisco says, “go on and do it.”

  I reach in my ruck and pull out a plastic water bottle as Del Frisco waits with baited breath.

  The bottle squirts his arm, the water washing away the Dub blood. Both of us can now see that Del Frisco’s flesh is intact.

  No wound, no infection, just Del Frisco holding his Onesie out like a gun, mimicking filling the dead Dubs full of holes with imaginary bullets.

  “Del Frisco one, the Dubs a big fat, zero, baby, all day long!”

  I manage a half-smile, more relieved than anything as he clamps down on my wrist and pulls me forward. We creep up through the door and drop to our knees to look back into the bullpen. The female Dub and her colleagues we’d spotted earlier have disappeared so we jog forward, intent on clipping the solar generator.

  Kneeling before the generator, I throw open my ruck and remove the metal leader housed inside on a thick plastic wheel.

  The leader is tossed to Del Frisco who slaps a pair of magnetic, oversized ball-bearings on the metal underside of the generator which will make it easier for the Hogs to haul it out of the building.

  Del Frisco secures the leader to the generator and ties it off and places the wheel with the excess leader back in his sack so that it will automatically pay out as we exit the building. I’m feeling better about the
whole thing when I turn and bite back a scream.

  The hallway that leads to the open wall – our only way out – is blocked by a shambling mass of Dubs, twice as many as we’d faced in the stairwell. The Dubs are lurching around and grunting, but apparently haven’t noticed us.

  “They went ninja on us, Wy,” Del Frisco whispers, reading my perplexed look.

  I nod and reach for my Onesie as Del Frisco shakes his head. The Dubs are so closely packed, standing cheek-to-cheek, that it would be impossible to chop our way through them.

  Del Frisco points to the floor, to the streams of oil that are visible, dribbling from the severed fuel pipe, running nearly the length of the space.

  Directly under the feet of the Dubs.

  “You know what we gotta do, cowboy,” he whispers.

  The two of us fish through our rucksacks again, hoping to prepare for our exfiltration before the Dubs catch wind of us.

  Inside our sacks, lying amidst a smattering of tools and other devices, are sections of hand-crafted plastic on metal balls that resemble something Strummer called a “luge sled,” an apparatus used for sport in the days before the world ended.

  We zip up and snug our rucksacks around our backs and position the sleds tight to our chests.

  Del Frisco winds a rubber band around his pony-tail and then we slide on our Kevlar gloves.

  One of the Dubs spots us and pounds on its chest, squealing like some kind of demonic pig.

  My finger loops around the metal trigger on my Onesie and I watch the Dubs rampage down the corridor toward us.

  Del Frisco checks to see that the wheel with the excess leader’s secure in his sack and then his eyes hop back to mine. “Let’s do this.”

  I pull my Onesie up and yank on the trigger as the flare inside erupts in a retina-searing blast.

  The ball of fire curls down the corridor and detonates near the severed fuel pipe, causing a percussive secondary blast that guts a portion of the ceiling and collapses a nearby wall.

  Whole sections of Dubs are set ablaze, running around like ambulatory torches, while others are flung onto their asses as if smacked down by a giant hand.