Blood Runners

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  It had always begun the same way. Somebody, whether a blood relative or a close confidant of those in power, did something bad. Murders, mostly, but also assaults and other crimes of the flesh. If bad things were done to them on the lowest societal rungs, the Mudders or any of the other mutts inhabiting New Chicago, the wheels of justice turned very slow indeed. A cursory review of the crime scene might be had and a few skulls knocked for information, but beyond that the crimes would be of no moment to what passed for the State.

  But if something befell a person of some station, the Brahmin sent out investigators — just as in the times before First Light – men and women who collected the smallest details of what had gone wrong. The materials collected were then given to the elite, who spent hours trolling through the minutia before they began preparing the subrogation papers, the investigatory and other procedural documents that provided support for Absolution. The process was as painstaking as Moses heard it had been thousands of years ago, when done in a time when men like Longman Heller lived in fortified castles made of wood and stone.

  "Good day, Moses," Ephraim remarked. Moses manufactured a smile and offered Ephraim a hand-rolled cigar, even though he new Ephraim would never partake. Moses fired up his own cigar as Ephraim slid the papers across the desk. The papers were printed on a heavy parchment that was processed using plant fiber and a gelatinous matter extracted from the carcasses of dead animals. The front of the parchment was sealed with wax embossed with the raised lightning bolts that Longman used as his crest. The seal carried the force of law; breaking the seal, except by Moses or anyone specifically functioning at his behest, would warrant death. Moses slipped a long nail under the seal and sliced it open and studied the documents contained therein. The facts meant little, the name even less. Moses didn’t recognize the perpetrator or the victim, but both came from good families that controlled some measure of commerce that impacted Longman and his operations. Otherwise, the crime at hand would not be of any concern.

  "Who’s it this time, Mo?" Moses looked up at Ephraim, who grinned at him from the other side of the desk.

  "Who’ll do the deed this time?" Ephraim said. "Who’s your stallion?"

  Moses folded up the documents and cradled them near his midsection. "You know I can’t talk about that. Insider information and all."

  "I hear things, Mo," Ephraim continued. "I hear that you’ve got a new one. A real gamer."

  Moses nodded, smiled slyly at the thought of Elias. "True. I’ve got some new blood."

  "How fast are they?" asked Ephraim.

  "Faster than gossip, brother, and twice as nasty," Moses said, as Ephraim steepled his fingers under his chin and laughed like a child privy to a secret.

  Ephraim glanced around, fished in a pocket, and pulled out a reed-thin sliver of silver, still precious, still able to be traded for goods and services. Moses snatched up the silver and nodded. "I got ya down for the usual, Eph." Ephraim sniggered and nodded, and rose and exited. Moses watched him go and then deposited the silver in a small tin-punched box that he secreted under a section of flooring beneath his desk. Moses pivoted and glanced out an old truck windshield that functioned as the only window in the room. He could see the low-slung dwellings that marked the beginnings of downtown New Chicago. Out there, somewhere, the beast Longman prowled, thought Moses. And the beast was always hungry.

  CHAPTER 6 — Longman

  "Whosoever does this to the least of these, my brethren, has done it unto me."

  Longman Heller looked out over a space where all was mostly darkness save a few lamps hanging from metal crossbeams in the ceiling. The space was industrial, a great room, an annex of a foundry stuffed with Men and Women who sat before him at tables piled high with the kind of food rarely seen after First Light. Brightly-colored root vegetables and sides of cured meat and sweetened breads and other whole grain foods. The audience, haggard clans that gazed longingly at the vittles before them, were of the same general rank and came from the city’s second-tier families. Powerful, yes, but not accredited members of any Guild. The kind of people pulling themselves up through the grime, readying to move into the next tier, to join one of the Guilds that held real power in New Chicago. Potential allies. Possible enemies. Longman had ostensibly invited them for food and drink to discuss the harvest and all manner of rumors and conjecturing, including war between other city-states and purported sightings of the Thresher on the outskirts of the city.

  "Do you understand what that means? Do you know what I say when I mention these words?"

  A jug-eared Man in the audience raised his hand.

  "It means if you do something for the least, you’ve also done it for the most.”

  Longman grinned hugely at this and pointed. "Winner! I see we have a winner, as well as a scholar," he replied and those at the tables chuckled as the Man returned Longman’s smile and leaned back in his seat.

  "There is talk," Longman continued, "that some amongst you have taken to threatening the boys that run the water trains below the eastern trestle."

  "They’re brigands," a woman murmured out in the audience. "Thieves. They want us to pay tribute when we cross," said another.

  Longman nodded at this. "Is this not the way it’s always been?"

  A man with a fever blister trenching his lip stood and said, "It was. But that was before. In the days when we were few and hadn’t formed a collective."

  "But now you have," Longman offered, and Fever Blister nodded. "You’ve gained members, gained power, and soon you too will want to form your own first-tier Guild I’d imagine," Longman continued, as he panthered the space like a preacher.

  "I suppose it’s a fair accounting to think that once you’ve moved up a rung, you can kick sand in the faces of those beneath you. That, to paraphrase, the least you can do is the absolute most that you will."

  Half-hearted nods and uneasy murmurs of agreement in the audience as Longman finished, "There are some, however, who’d make a play on the words I said before. That is, if you do evil to the least, you’ve also done it to the most."

  Those in the audience shared confused looks as Longman forced a smile and dipped his head.

  "Words to discuss another day, I suppose. Please eat, drink, and enjoy yourselves, my friends. All that I have is yours."

  Longman turned from the audience and moved slowly toward a side door that led from the great room. He stepped into a pane of light that illuminated lived-in features that were a monument to Middle-America. He was large-jointed and nearing the autumn of his years, with a mass of wild hair that he slicked with animal fat, parted down the middle, and tied off at the back. It gave him the mien of a hippy from the days of old. The spectacles that he wore on certain occasions were cracked in one lens, but fit with the grime and dirt that dotted his exposed flesh, making him look like a well-heeled survivalist.

  He was a posthumous child, given little by his father other than a name. Longman Justis Heller. Longman was what some would have called in the past a warlord, a landowner who governed from a perch that rested upon his money crop, a brightly-topped flower that his people grew out in the decaying field of a once-grand sporting arena. A flower that when pressed gave up its nectar, an oozing white effluvium that Longman mashed and dried into a narcotic that kept the masses subdued. He was a student of man and of history and he knew many things that others had forgotten.

  He knew, for instance, that an Unraveling had arguably occurred at least once in the past. Back in 1859, sleepers were roused from their bunks by a cosmic light so bright that newspapers were said to have been able to be read outdoors at midnight. It was called the "Carrington Event," and the storm that belched the charged plasma triggered a fierce geomagnetic eruption that spilled across the Earth. The 1859 aurora fried what little communications then existed. The Unraveling, a storm thought to have been at least ten times as strong as the 1859 storm, ended the world as everyone knew it.

  Longman had read about the "Carrington Event" in a treatise on
property rights. In the days before First Light, he’d been an interpreter of the law and worked at a firm with enough lawyers to fill a basketball court. He spent many days bathed in the soft glow of a computer in an office in the wounded part of Chicago, defending cases on behalf of mammoth insurance concerns. He was made to be friendly with those on the other side. The enemy. Plaintiffs’ lawyers. His firm had office parties and would invite these lawyers and the end result would always be the same. Litigation without end. It was bad for clients but good for the lawyers, and Longman often left his office in disgust with the knowledge that he and his colleagues were little more than well-paid lampreys, parasitic creatures plentiful in the Great Lakes that suckled off the fat of a host.

  The legal system was already broken by that point. He and his brethren produced nothing but paper and hot air and endless rivers of steaming bullshit. He was a member of the brotherhood of the lie. A practitioner of the dark art of deceit, whether outright, or some lesser form of falsehood like suggestio falsi (leaving false impressions) or suppressio very (tacit lies). The others at the firm took particular delight in the former, and sharp practices like unnecessary discovery during litigation, endless appeals, pointless report letters, and forgotten phone calls.

  His days were broken down into fragments of time. Billable hours. Longman loathed it and considered himself unique at the firm because he was the only one who saw things for what they were. He was a beacon in a fog of fools and crookery. No tears were shed when he gave notice several months later. He couldn’t shill for the plaintiffs’ bar, and he would no longer take refuge in lies or stoop to befriending the water-weak phonies who litigated the shady slip-and-falls on behalf of shadier clients. He binned out of law-firm life and circulated his resume and soon found a new position.

  He became a civilian lawyer who worked for a military element that flew machines. He found order there. Routine. Some sliver of purpose. He rose through the ranks and obtained clearances and civil service promotions and soon became someone that the elite trusted with secrets. He was given access to SCIFs — sensitive compartmented intelligence facilities — as well as great rooms at the skirt of a military base, storage areas filled with legal texts and ponderous treatises and other great books.

  What he remembered most, however, was not a treatment on the law, but a book he once read on ancient history. A tome about the rise and fall of men like him, men with power. This book described a ritual from the days of old, a practice where each of the men in power was succeeded by another who had brought them down in a act of ultraviolence. Ritualized succession by murder. Kings killing kings. "The Golden Bough."

  Longman recalled this daily, and lived his life with the knowledge that he would never let this happen. He would never allow another to flower who might challenge his grip on the levers that controlled all that lay before him.

  Unlike many of the others in the old days, Longman was prepared when the world ended. He’d been what the old world called a "prepper," a derogatory term that referred to those who stirred in the shadows, spending their time hoarding food and fuel and weaponry while the others sang and danced in the years of plenty. He’d convinced a few others to prepare in the outer burbs and when hell came, he eventually left his deserted base and rallied himself and others, men and women, who became like his extended family. His flock. His burgeoning army. His small band grew little by little until it was a seasoned fighting force that would eventually rechristen the world in New Chicago, a mostly stable city with food and shelter and even commerce. It was the means by which the shit-speckled masses could make a go of it, to forget the bad times and forge a new way ahead. To reboot the future. Their little experiment could be duplicated elsewhere, Longman whispered to the others. New Chicago was just the beginning, a nursery for all that lay ahead.

  Most of his colleagues lost heart and died in the initial days of ruination. Many of the others simply lost their bearings in the mayhem and offed themselves, or were ripped to shreds at night by the armies of dispossessed marauders whose eyes had been fried by the bursting of the sun. But not Longman. He gathered up supplies and munitions and took refuge with a posse of like-minders in a silo that once housed a device capable of tearing the world asunder. He had an attachment to "low and common company," as one of his favorite writers, an Englishman, had once said. The kind of simple people who were more transparent, more malleable. He was a student of man and of the old ways and an understudy of the horrors to come.

  Longman passed through the metal door and stopped on a dime. A cherubic young girl of about five stood before him. He smiled, and with some effort took a knee and extended a hand.

  "Are you lost, child?" The girl shook her head and pointed toward the great room.

  "My da and my ma," she whispered.

  "Your parents? They’re in there?" Longman asked, and after the girl nodded, "They’re my guests?"

  Another nod from the little one and Longman grinned and nodded and took the girl’s hand and strode a few paces and ushered her into the great room. He watched the girl run raggedly toward her parents who scooped her up and gazed with some uncertainty in Longman’s direction. A beautiful girl, Longman thought. She might’ve been something one day. He turned and flung a look at his duster-clad enforcers who waited on either side of the doors that led to the great room: the crow-faced piker named Cozzard, and a thick-necked imbecile named Lout who possessed an omnipresent sneer and reeked of violence.

  Cozzard and Lout sniggered and slammed the metal door shut and fastened a rusted padlock across it and bolted it down with a metal bar for good measure. Longman continued to move away as the shouts began echoing behind him. The sound of hands pounding on the door and walls soon grew. He knew that those inside the great room had just realized there were no windows to the space. No means of egress save the one door that was now shut. He wondered how long it would take them to recognize the incendiary devices he’d planted inside. More shouts, screams, unearthly booms — and then his nostrils flared at the hint of smoke. He moved out a door as the sound of Cozzard’s and Lout’s footfalls echoed behind him. Down a flight of stairs he rumbled, until he was standing near a loading dock in the middle of an industrial area.

  He turned and watched the first flicker of fire spring from the roof over the great room. Cozzard and Lout trundled down the steps, still clutching the gas torches that they’d used to ignite the Molotov cocktails that they’d lobbed into the great room through slits in an upper wall. Longman watched as the fires within the great room roared and smothered the space in greasy balls of flame. The roof collapsed in seconds, then the support structure, as all of those inside carbonized, becoming one with the charred remnants of the building as they wailed and cried out to their God. To an outsider this spectacle, this mass killing was shocking, but it had to be this way, Longman thought. These people posed a threat and he would not abide by that just as he wouldn’t tolerate dissent. He had to take a stand to ensure the survival of New Chicago. To follow the new law was to believe in rebirth and reconstruction. It was the only way that could be. His way.

  Cozzard and Lout suddenly spun in a flourish and pointed as Longman looked sideways to see a teen boy watching everything from the shell of a rusted car. The teen held what looked like a camera and ducked low and out of sight as Longman whistled and gestured and Cozzard and Lout withdrew what looked like homemade pistols with oversized silencers from their dusters and took off. They’d have to act quickly, determine whether the teen was from a family that mattered. Either way, they’d have to put the boy down; he’d seen (and probably heard) far too much. What the boy saw was a threat to Longman, and anything that might negatively impact his rule did not have a long shelf life. Even if they did have to drop the boy, Longman would simply "guide" the resulting investigation and pay a bribe for Absolution and then all would be made right.

  The teen boy clambered around the side of a building, chest heaving, as he hooked his leg and slid down an embankment while the first bullet
s kicked up the sandy soil all around him. He dove to his right and managed to come up on the balls of his feet in a full sprint, making for a tin shack, which he catapulted through. Cozzard and Lout fired as they blasted down the embankment, peppering the tin shack with rounds, reloading, then emptying their silenced pistols out again. They split, taking either end of the shack, pulling their weapons around. Cozzard licked his lips. He hoped to God that he’d be able to plug the young punk in the head.

  He’d done time in the iron house in the days before. Unlike most, Cozzard learned to thrive in the new chaos. Free from the confines of societal mores and the stickiness of the law, he was free to largely do as he pleased. He took great pleasure in the kills and specialized in headshots. For some perverse reason, he loved aiming at and hitting the head. It was a vascular area; the tissue there engorged from the chase, ready to release great fonts of red as soon as he fired the first slug. Even though the area from the neck up was his primary target, he was mindful of avoiding contact with his targets’ eyes. The eyes troubled him and he agreed with whomever it was that once said therein lies hidden the last shreds of a victim’s humanity. He held up a handful of brown powder and hoovered it and thought that when he shot down the boy, he’d make sure to focus his gaze on the top of his head and fire low and then he’d do a bastardized version of counting coup over the corpse.

  Cozzard swallowed hard, then kicked open a door to reveal…nothing. The teen was gone. Cozzard toed at the dirt and checked the slide on his pistol when Lout whooped with joy. There was a wending blood-trail on the ground leading under a bent section of wall. The boy might have escaped, but he was wounded.

  CHAPTER 7

  Aside from his interaction with his comrade Erik, Elias kept to himself in the Pits for the first few months. There was no other way, what with all the training, resting, and rhetorical conditioning. His days were evenly divided as he waited for his first run: half spent in a crude cube with a cement floor, stacked with weights and hand-crafted exercise devices, the other half spent running or listening to speeches from past Runners who’d been through Absolution and lived to tell about it. While rare, there were at least four former Runners who’d survived so many sessions of Absolution that they’d been given retirement by Longman himself, along with jobs as trainers under Moses.