Blood Runners

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  Elias and Marisol hit the ground as the Loons were riddled all around them. Marisol looked up at some of the crazed attackers. It appeared as though they were dancing in the hail of gunfire, marionettes kept aloft by the hot lead fired by Longman’s men. Marisol rolled over and spotted Elias making a break for it, and so she ran after him and tackled him down a hillside that was just out of sight of Cozzard, Lout, and the others, even as the battle raged all around them.

  "The hell’s the matter with you?!" Elias screamed.

  "I’m not taking the fall for this!"

  "Yeah, well, you’re on your own, whatever your go-by is."

  "It’s Marisol. My name’s Marisol, whatever your name is."

  "Elias," Elias said through clenched teeth.

  "Well, Elias, we both know a secret, don’t we? We’re involved in some pretty bad stuff and it looks like everybody knows about it. What’re the odds that Longman lets us live after this?"

  Elias didn’t respond. He didn’t have to. They both knew the answer, and so the two rose together reluctantly and watched the Loons move like an army of gypsies, grabbing up anything they could to confront Longman’s men, who continued to spray gunfire in every direction. Elias and Marisol roamed quickly down the hillside, over unpaved streets and dwellings assembled out of scrap. They could see the outer perimeter fence in the distance, the faint lights of Zone 4 farther out, and the faintest outline of the wall farther still. They were ready to make their way over or around the fence when a voice boomed, "Stop where you are!"

  The two skidded on the gravel and slowly turned as Farrow morphed out of the darkness, hands around the pistol that Lout had given him. Marisol’s mouth hung open in shock.

  "Farrow!"

  He nodded, and now Elias could see that the big man in front of him had been one of the Apes that had stalked him back during Absolution. His body tensed as he plotted a way to turn the tables on Farrow who just shook his head.

  "I can tell you’re thinking, boy," Farrow said. "Running down some spreadsheet in your head, thinking of how you can pull a fast one on the old man." Elias didn’t respond as Farrow kept his pistol aimed at his head. "You can’t. I’ve seen it all. You move, you lose."

  Marisol pointed back at the storage locker. "There’s a room up there, Farrow. There was a boy. Longman’s men murdered him. He’s got evidence, papers, all kinds of stuff that show what he’s doing. Horrible things. Killing people!"

  "And this is news how?" Farrow responded.

  "B-but," she stammered, "H-he’s evil."

  Farrow lowered his gun, the din of the battle echoing from behind. Slowly he nodded, "I know what he is," Farrow whispered. "I also know there’s the way things should be and the way they are. Longman walks the land like a goddamn lion, girl. He looks for people to devour. I know all of this and I also know right now, there’s nothing any of us can do about it."

  "Come with us," she said.

  "To where?"

  "Under the wall."

  "There’s no good way under the wall."

  Marisol fished in Elias’s pocket and plucked out the hand-drawn set of instructions that detailed how to get to the tunnel and waved them at Farrow who looked unimpressed. He’d seen such things before. Sadness gripped his face and then in a flash Farrow raised his pistol and aimed at their heads and squeezed off two quick shots.

  CHAPTER 41

  The bullets sliced through the air over their heads as Farrow swung the gun and shouted, "Go. GO!"

  Elias and Marisol shot off into the night as Farrow watched them go, the two spinning past plundered building shells and empty parking lots and clutches of tin-punched shacks where Loons of all shapes and sizes stood outside and marveled at these two, who surely were as mad as the rest of them.

  When they’d vanished from sight, Farrow turned and held his gun up to Cozzard and the others, who were needling down the hillside, clothes splotched red, rifles still smoking. Lout grabbed the pistol from Farrow and smelled its barrel and shoved it under Cozzard’s nose for good measure.

  "What the hell happened?!"

  "I saw ’em," Farrow said.

  "And?"

  "And then I fired and missed ’em."

  Longman’s men cursed and shoved violently past Farrow, reloading their weapons as they went by, faces twitching with delight, eager for the next kill.

  Farther down the hill, Marisol and Elias were confronted by the perimeter fence. It was too tall to scale, and they didn’t see any way under. They spotted a series of rectilinear box houses that abutted the fence and realized that if they reached the very peak of one of the buildings, they might have enough juice to hurtle onto the top of the fence and climb over.

  The inside of the housing was in a slow state of disassembly, as the Loons had evidently pried boards and bricks free from the walls and floors. Elias was the first one through the imploded front door. His eyes raked the plywood subfloor, which was patched and full of holes in various spots. One errant step could send either of them crashing twenty feet into the basement. He had spotted a staircase and made for it when a figure curled down a banister and grinned like an idiot at him. A Loon, a tall Crazy clad in ratty jeans and an old ripped flannel who looked as muscled as a bobcat. Then another appeared behind him, and another. Three Loons in all, raving and slavering like denizens of some primate house.

  Elias stared at a section of the floor that’d been torn up for scrap or for firewood. There were hunks of wood here, sections of flooring and ceiling, including a length of wood that resembled a thick, splintered broom-pole. Elias stamped his foot with such force that this pole sprung into the air, and then he grabbed and broke the wood over his knee and handed one thick piece to Marisol and kept the other for himself. The wood was heavy and fit perfectly in the cup of his hand. He looked up and the Loons were on them.

  Elias cut down the muscled Loon first, bashing him across the neck as the man pitched to the ground, making sucking sounds and clutching at his ruined windpipe. The second Loon bit the air near Elias’s ear, barely missing him as — WHAM! — Marisol clubbed him. When the Loon spun to her, she saw he had a crude knife out, and so she broke his wrist with her baton and kicked him with such force that he dropped the knife. His body rocketed through the air four feet, fell through a gap in the floor and disappeared from sight.

  Marisol dropped her bent baton and grabbed the knife. As the third Loon panicked and made for her, she crumpled him with a series of body shots from the pole, and then swung her leg around and booted his head until the man fell to the floor unconscious. Elias was in awe of her raw skill. He watched her dagger the knife in a large hip-sheath, then he vaulted up the stairs in two bounds as she followed.

  At the top of the stairs, they passed a patchwork of rooms where a few female Loons quivered and quaked in fear and nursed Loon babies. More rooms they passed: sleeping quarters, a spot where a dying Loon lay under a blanket, still one more room where weird stews and burbling soups were being cooked on hotplates over canned heat. They saw a window at the end of a hall that dropped to a deck with a torched-down bitumen roof that could use a good resurfacing. Crawling outside, they saw that the deck extended eight feet off the roofline, suspended on a pair of rotting 4x4s. The fence lay five feet beyond that. If they could just get a good running start…

  BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Bullets snapped and whined as Elias and Marisol ducked, catching sight of Cozzard, Lout, and the others as they opened fire from down the street. The brutes had snapped on laser sights, the eerie red beams cleaving the darkness.

  "What do we do?!" Elias whispered.

  "I can make it," Marisol said.

  "So can I!”

  "Then we know what we have to do."

  He nodded, and the pair looked down at the pieces of wooden pole in hand and shared a glance. They rose collectively and fired the hunks of wood at the approaching thugs. The wooden projectiles did no harm, but momentarily flustered the attackers, buying Elias and Marisol precious time. They bolted back
to the edge of the roof and then turned and ran at full speed, kissing the edge of the roof, going airborne, silhouetted against the night sky.

  They hit the top of the metal fence and suppressed screams as the nest of wire atop the fence sliced at their arms. They willed themselves over as bullets pinged the fence, and then they let go and dropped thirteen feet through the air to hit the ground. Unfortunately, the ground where they hit was sodden from a recent rain and it gave way. Elias and Marisol were yanked down on their backs, flying over a muddy ridgeline as if they were on a water slide in the days of old.

  They spun to a stop at the bottom of the rugged ridgeline that lay at the skirt of Zone 4, the nexus of reconstruction initiatives for New Chicago. The wall was clearly visible in the distance, past a vast storage area that resembled a frontier town. They moved like hunters down through a culvert, seeking cover and the safety of shadows and staying out of all potential lines of fire and sight. They roamed past rows of greenhouses where tiny opium-bearing plants were being groomed, and ducked behind a row of metal cargo containers as a sentry ambled by in the distance.

  "Where’d you learn how to fight like that?"

  "My father," she said as Elias nodded.

  "Where’d you learn to run like that?" she asked.

  "The same," Elias said, then hesitated, "Not from my real father, I mean. From another man who took me in when it all went bad."

  "Farrow did that," she said.

  "What?"

  "The man back there—"

  "The big mother who almost shot us?"

  Nodding, she responded, "He didn’t, though. He could’ve, but he didn’t."

  "Nice father."

  "I didn’t say he was my father, you ass. I said he took me in. He’s a good man."

  "Had a funny way of showing it," Elias said, rubbing his ears, which continued to echo from the shots Farrow fired. "Still can barely hear out of my left one."

  He turned from her and she grabbed his wrist and forced his gaze back to her. "He could’ve turned us in. He could’ve killed both of us."

  Elias shook his head, "He’s an Ape. So are you. Think I’m gonna sing his praises? Buncha thugs working for a murderer."

  "What about you? You’re part of it. You run so that someone else can be forgiven for committing a crime. That’s what you do."

  This sunk in for a beat. Elias leaned in close to Marisol and whispered, "As soon as we get outside the wall, I’m done. We’re on our own. You and me. Understand?"

  "Good," she replied.

  "Great."

  "Super fantastic," he responded with a smirk.

  A nasty look was exchanged between them and then they crouch-ran through the pathless night where they crossed rows of containers brimming with equipment for the rebuilding efforts. Hunger pleaded loudly within both of them, so they stopped near an open food container and found three cans of beans. Elias punched the blade they had through the top of one and sawed it off and dipped a finger inside. Marisol made a face, which Elias ignored as he opened another can and gave it to her. They sat in silence, eating the beans, enjoying them with a sack of half-rotted fruit that they found hanging from the wall, as night animals yammered out in the minatory blackness.

  At the same time, Longman’s men successfully swept the storage facility, gunning down any Loon stragglers they found, inside or out. They’d lost only one man (accidentally shot down by Cozzard) and while Longman would be livid, his anger would be tempered by the things they found inside the room once kept by Caleb.

  Lout was busy inside for most of the night, retrieving documents and papers and any and all computer equipment he could salvage, while Cozzard filmed everything on a tiny flip camera. Longman would want to see everything as soon as possible.

  CHAPTER 42

  Elias and Marisol snuck through Zone 4, curled around the city’s garbage plains and junkyards, and dropped down a gravel hillside. They stood silently, watching flames burn in the distance. Cremation fires, rows of them, out beyond a section of lime pits filled with the bodies of the dead or those disposed of at the direction of Longman. They slid past this, keeping beyond the firelight, taking in the bones fused with accretions that ringed the area like some demonic mosaic. Bodies splayed in various attitudes of death. Marisol spotted a charred corpse with its arms raised toward the sky. Her stomach soured and she bit back tears at the sight of the killing fields, realizing that the dictators and killers in the days of old couldn’t hold a candle to Longman Heller. She turned away, embarrassed, feeling that she and Elias had somehow broken the silence of this place, or eavesdropped on the last moments of those who lay before them.

  They followed their shadows past the fires. Elias held up the directions he took from Caleb’s room and matched them up with his current surroundings. In a splash of moonlight, Elias looked over and saw Marisol’s Sigil when she reached to examine the directions.

  "What’s that mean?"

  She held up her palm. "That I’m a luchador."

  "A what?"

  "I can fight … I can kick ass."

  "Yeah, right," he snickered.

  "Kicked yours, didn’t I?"

  His face flushed red, but she didn’t back down.

  "I mean, I could’ve done worse before. Back during the hunt. Only reason you’re right here, right now, is because I allowed you to live. Oh yeah, I could’ve done way worse. That’s a fact, Elias."

  "Why didn’t you, if you’re such a bad-ass?" he asked.

  She thought about this for a beat. "I guess I got tired of all the killing."

  "There’s a difference between seeing killing and doing it. You ever done it? You ever killed anyone?"

  Slowly she shook her head. "You?"

  "Course," he replied, his fingers trembling. "I’ve been in on kills before. Lots of times."

  She didn’t believe him for a second as he took the directions back and she whispered, "One way or another, I got a feeling that the killing’s just started." His gaze smoked into hers and then he bolted through a stand of dense foliage.

  CHAPTER 43

  Longman quickly scanned all of the materials brought back by Cozzard and Lout after their recon. He was particularly taken with all of the surveillance images the boy had taken of him. His first thought was that it was a shame Caleb was dead. He could’ve used his skills to spy on his enemies. This flicker of admiration quickly turned to white-hot anger when he realized the boy had enough material to expose him and his operations. All the killing and lies and the various sundry acts that Longman and those under his command had engaged in lo these many years. If the other Guilds caught wind of any of this, there might be some kind of revolt or attempted putsch, and though he’d undoubtedly put it down, there would be so much unnecessary bloodshed. That concerned him little, however, for it was the specter of uncertainty that really gnawed at him.

  "Kid thought there was a tunnel, sir."

  Longman turned to Lout, who held up a hunk of the diorama.

  "Tunnel?"

  Lout nodded and handed over the piece, and Longman furrowed his brow, even though he already knew what it was. On or around 2029, the city fathers had finally seen the completion of what was called the "Deep Tunnel," a spectacular engineering feat that involved hundreds of miles of tunnels dug through bedrock, a gigantic subterranean pit to house and treat the billions of gallons of wastewater spewed out from the city every day. The runny discharge from the den of inequity that was old Chicago.

  Longman knew there had been myriad pumping stations, some with elevators that traveled 30 stories down, connecting the vast network of sewage canals. Most of the stations had been put to the torch during the fall (or smashed for scrap), but one still remained. It was this one station, secreted out near a rural section of the wall that Caleb had apparently uncovered. And down at the bottom of this station was a long, thin tunnel that led directly under the wall and out onto the Grasslands. Longman himself used the this tunnel on more than one occasion, sending out war parties th
at nobody ever knew about to scout the Grasslands and search for the Thresher and spy on the encampments that allegedly had been cited like mirages out in the lands past the Q-Zone. The encampments were of little import, but the Thresher was a constant source of concern. Even though many believed they did not exist, Longman knew the truth.

  One of the first stragglers Longman accepted into his band after the lights flickered out had been a psychiatrist at a prison for the criminally insane. In the firelight, this doctor proffered his own theory about the proto-humans, the Thresher, talking not about biological and chemical warfare as reasons for the Unraveling and the Thresher, but things like the DSM-IV and "identity diffusion," the concept of the self splitting into all-good or all-bad. Longman understood this to mean that some traumatic events had the ability to permanently cause a negative primitive idealization to take hold in certain individuals. An indelible stain, a switch in some dark recess of the mind that, once flipped, brought about things that could never be undone.

  The doctor surmised that the Unraveling was such an event, an epochal happening that caused such trauma to the brains of those who witnessed it as to place them back in a state of nature, a primitive, permanent psychosis from which there was no return. There was no more learning in these things, only naked instinct, a manic current that pulsed throughout the nether regions and dark backwaters of the new, mutated biology. The Thresher were now little more than animals, the doctor theorized, having returned to behavioral patterns essential to survival in the ancient days, hunting and killing out in the Grasslands.

  Things like this had happened before, he told Longman and the others, during a time of hardship many decades before when the land in the Midwest had been stripped of vegetation. The Dust Bowl. Silicosis, dust pneumonia… "dirt fever" they’d called it then. People were driven mad by grit belched from the sky that buried them like a winter blizzard. He was a man of terrible learning, this doctor, and Longman regretted on more than one occasion that he’d had him put down after hearing the Doc make plans to break camp on a balmy summer night. His services would have been very valuable in New Chicago.