Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4]

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  My hand unclenches and he flicks a finger at the floor.

  “What happened before was all for show. It’s an opiate for the masses, just like professional sports was in the days before. I assume you know that.”

  “Where are Gus and Naia?” I ask.

  “You’re going there already?”

  “There’s nowhere else to go.”

  “My hands were tied on Gus. He broke the rules and that girl you sided with possesses some very damaging information, so I had to make an example out of him. He had to take the fall. After all, once a name always a threat.”

  I think back on what Gus mentioned about the need to find a scapegoat.

  “You lied. Everything you told the others was a lie.”

  “Please tell me you aren’t this stupid.”

  My face flushes and out come the words: “Fuck you, Odin.”

  Odin seems momentarily shocked, as if he never expected me to say that in a thousand years. And then a belligerent grin tugs at his mouth.

  “Jesus, you aren’t very bright are you?”

  “People will know,” I say. “People will figure out what’s happening and then they’ll frag your sorry ass.”

  “No, they won’t,” he replies, and then steepling his fingers under his chin, “oh, maybe one or two will. There’s always one or two who fit the pieces together. Outliers. Probably that black English fellow or your old pal Del Frisco.”

  He can tell he’s hit a nerve.

  “Del Frisco’s missing how many fingers now? Two? Three? Ever seen a Jumper do his job without any fingers? I suppose maybe he could book a gig here or there, but what if I was to take a few more fingers from him? Or maybe one of his hands?”

  “Leave him out of it.”

  “And that dog that was with you on your last op. A real throat-tugger. What was its name? Zeus? I’m thinking we’re probably going to have him for dinner.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  Odin stands and I catch a whiff of his musk. He smells somehow of fire. “The average attention span of one of our citizens is approximately the same as a goldfish, fifteen seconds, give or take. They can only focus on one or two things at a time, usually big-ticket items, real concerns such as whether the Dubs are going to kick down our doors.”

  “But they’re not. The Dubs can’t.”

  “You know that and I know that, but the people outside do not.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We need an enemy, Wyatt. It helps to destroy what I call ‘The Gray Zone,’ the area where things are murky. Once you do away with the haze it becomes easier to see things, to sort the good from the bad. Think about the Flood in the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, swarms of locusts, wicked kings. Every society needs an enemy, something horrible to happen so they can band together to prevent it from happening again.”

  My head swims and my mouth hurts and I’m in no mood for his word games.

  “What the hell do you want from me?” I ask.

  “Two things. First, I want you to publicly ask for forgiveness. I promise you there won’t be any weepy scenes or you having to get down on your knees to lick my boots. Just a simple statement that you were wrong and have seen the error of your ways.”

  He judges my reaction and when I don’t say anything he looks pleased.

  “Assuming you do the first thing, I also want you to provide details on the new threat.”

  “There is no new threat.”

  “No true. There are the tribes from upstate. The ones who sent a raiding party into our city.”

  “What? Naia?”

  He nods and smiles.

  “But that’s a lie too.”

  “Alternative facts,” he says, correcting me. “You need to realize that truth is always in the eye of the beholder.”

  “Why would I say any of that?”

  “Because soon the Dubs will decrease in number. A moldering body can only stay erect for so long. It’s science. And thereafter, people will stop being afraid of them and turn their attention to, shall we say, other matters.”

  “You.”

  “Possibly.”

  “They’ll see things for what they are.”

  “But not if we divert their attention to a new enemy.”

  “You’re insane.”

  He laughs. “Any stage in life beyond your own is often impossible to understand. What you don’t get is that I’m a leader. And all leaders know that what’s best for society are docile workers, enthusiastic consumers, obedient soldiers, and civilians who will believe almost anything for a few minutes.”

  Odin moves over and drops to his haunches and peers into my eyes. “Now. What say?”

  Somebody much smarter than me said no fool has ever made a deal with the devil. The fool’s either too much of a fool or the devil too much of a devil. I think that’s about right and I have a shitload of things I’d like to say in response to Odin’s proposition, but fear nibbles at me. I’m afraid of what he’ll do to Naia and Gus and if truth be told, I’m afraid of dying.

  “What happened to my father?”

  “Jesus – you – you’re asking me – seriously, Wyatt?”

  “I need to know.”

  “I think you already know what happened to him,” he says with a sneer.

  He turns from me, bored and then I reach out a hand and grab his wrist.

  “You used to say something, Odin.”

  “I used to say lots of things.”

  “‘The living don’t kill the living.’ That’s what you used to say.”

  “Oh that,” he says with a tight smile. “That was just a marketing slogan.”

  I’ve always heard the expression about “seeing red,” and never believed in it until now.

  I swear to God that everything suddenly turns blood red.

  It’s as if I’ve been dunked in a crimson pool under a scarlet sky, the anger rising up in me, animalistic rage, and then, without thinking, I slug Odin as hard as I can.

  I put everything I have into that punch, flattening Odin’s nose, feeling the crunch of cartilage as blood flows and I roll off the couch and smash through the diorama.

  I find my feet and fling myself forward and then a buzzer sounds and the door opens and two of Odin’s goons tackle me.

  My boot shoots out and I punt one in the groin, but the other, a rotund bruiser who’s missing an ear, belly-flops on me.

  My hands are pulled behind my back and zipcuffed and then I’m hoisted to my feet as Odin shrieks in the background.

  The rotund brute jams a knuckle in the back of my neck and I’m forced out the door and down the hallway.

  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 ca
reful 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.

  8

  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 back 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 h
ave 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.