Vertical City (Book 2)

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  Chapter 6

  We plod across the roof past a battered American flag that flaps in the wind and under a sky that looks like it’s been shanked: black, swollen, ruptured, dribbling down a dark, icy rain.

  Sliding on gloves, I fix my climbing gear, checking to make sure my clip’s fastened to The Dream Catcher and my Onesie secure in my rucksack.

  Strummer and Darcy move over to discuss the game plan. Strummer consults his ruggedized, waterproof handheld scanner that shows a digital map of the nearby city blocks. The map’s important because it also details potential escape and exfiltration routes, concealed duckholes, weapon caches (put in place years ago), and the locations our teams have already swept.

  Strummer scrolls over the streets and buildings with a stylus made from the end of a coat-hanger wrapped in duct tape.

  He points to a building barely visible down below us, eight blocks over, maybe twenty-seven stories tall. From what I can discern at least half of the building has been explored before, half has not.

  The scuttlebutt is that there was some kind of hi-tech design shop on one of the lower, unexplored floors, what was called an “incubator.” Still, it’s a haul in this kind of weather so I point to a closer building that’s got five middle floors that haven’t been foraged.

  “Too close,” Strummer says of my suggestion.

  “Nobody said so,” I reply.

  “I’m not fucking arguing with you, Wyatt,” Strummer hisses. This startles me because even though I’ve got a salty tongue on occasion, I rarely, if ever, drop eff-bombs. I guess that’s because Gus always said hard profanity’s the last vestige of the inarticulate.

  “You heard Shooter,” Strummer continues, “it’s hit the bricks and bring back something solid or we’re all gonna be out on our asses.”

  “I didn’t hear him say that.”

  “That’s ‘cause you got no ears, man.”

  “Vote,” Darcy offers.

  “Who’s in favor of hitting my joint?” Strummer says, referencing his building.

  Everyone’s hand goes up except mine. Even Del Frisco’s. I fling a look his way, but it isn’t returned.

  “Settled, dude,” Strummer says, one of his long fingers tapping me on the nose.

  Reluctantly I gather up my gear, moving toward Def Con and some of the other Roof Hogs who are milling around the edge of the building, obscured in rubber slickers.

  Def Con makes the sign of the cross and nods at me and the others. I juke over and wrap my hands around the master tendril. It’s like gripping a fish. I close my eyes, saying a prayer to Mom as I always do before I look down. The streets under us are impossible to see in the mist and rain. Out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of a shadow at the highest point on VC1. I assume it’s Matthais, looking down at us, the ultimate arbiter of who lives and dies.

  I smack my legs to speed up the circulation of blood in them and then swing out onto the master tendril, every neuron in my body firing at once. The others follow, with Del Frisco spidering on point, leading us down. Even though I’d probably prefer the safety and warmth of VC1 on a day like this, I’m stoked as we descend. Words can’t describe what it’s like to basically rat-rappel down from five-hundred feet in the sky.

  Vertical drops are called “pitches,” and we’ve got to make around a dozen of them before hitting our target spot. Mist sprays my face and my muscles move like gears in a machine as we descend. The air, without the pollution of the times before the Awakening (and the noxious fumes from the rotting bodies in the years after), invigorates us.

  Though we’re juiced by the drop, everyone’s on edge and understandably so. Aside from the Dubs, there are a wide range of things that can potentially snuff you out on an op: fatal falls, hypothermia, crumbling infrastructure, rabid bats, microbes, hurricane-force winds, barometric pressure shifts, you name it. That doesn’t even include possible equipment failure which becomes more important the lower we go.

  What I mean is, below a certain point we’re going to have to go off the grid which means we’ll have to set a number of fixed nylon ropes (which we carry in our rucksacks) at strategic points on the facades of several buildings.

  To do this, we’ll need to secure routing anchors which will require one of us, probably Del Frisco, to do the following: use a handheld drill to bore a three-inch hole into the façade; blow out the debris; hammer in a metal sleeve; insert a threaded bolt into the hole and secure it to the sleeve; then repeat.

  Once this is done, we can loop our ropes and swing down below the reach of the tendrils to access other points. It’s dangerous work because of the conditions and the fact that we’ll be exposed at a relatively low level. If there are any Dubs lurking about, they’ll have a shot at us.

  We make good time, however, hopping from tendril to tendril as we hit the first building and take the staircase down to a lower portion of The Dream Catcher.

  Me and Strummer are winded, trying to keep up with Darcy and Del Frisco. Darcy’s showing off, undoing her clips so that she can freestyle across the master tendril without any safety backup. She’s nuts, but blessed with incredible balance.

  Del Frisco on the other hand is basically running down the adjacent building’s face, daring us to follow as he hits another staircase and slides down in and then crosses over, three-hundred feet off the ground.

  Helmets are always optional, but when the weather’s bad I like to snug one on. My current helmet’s a black graphite jobber I took from a dead bike messenger in another building five months ago. It’s reinforced on the inside and has a bit of a slope to the back that Del Frisco says makes it look like the head on a crow. I’ve done up the helmet since I found it, painting red eyes on the front and a set of fangs on the back.

  The others snigger as I slide my helmet on, the rain increasing as we continue our descent. Because we’re going down the block it’s necessary for us to maneuver lower than we normally would. We swing down from tendril to tendril, swapping out our carabiners as we shuttle to the last staircase which lies about a hundred and fifty feet off the ground.

  As Del Frisco secures the first of three routing anchors, we take a breather and I remove my helmet and secure it in my ruck. I scan the land beneath us which is probably the closest I’ve been to the ground in years. I lie when the others ask me, but if truth be told, I’ve barely set foot on the Flatlands since the lights went out.

  Peering down, the cement resembles an alien landscape. Some of the buildings nearest the ground are in ruins, most smothered in vegetation, the streets cratered. Mounds of trash and debris are visible, providing a steady buffet for the city’s vermin.

  I vaguely remember how it was before, a bustling city full of vibrant people, tiny shops, bodegas and an explosion of colors, particularly the emerald green of the little park with a blue fountain situated across the street. Mom took me there at least once to feed the pigeons and a brace of carp that rose to gorge themselves on popcorn and bits of bread in a shallow pond on the far end.

  None of that remains now, everything cast in a gray mist, the park a blighted, hellish place. The fountain’s smashed and every piece of flora is gone. When I say it’s gone, I mean it. Anything green on the ground was ripped up by survivors in those first terrible months to be used as food or fuel. Whatever wasn’t taken was eaten by the Dubs, including the bark on trees, which we’ve seen them strip off and munch on.

  I turn from this as the wind whips trash over a carpet of bodies and body-parts in various states of decay that clog the streets and sidewalks. There was a time many years ago when the corpses lay in piles that were as high as the tops of tractor-trailers. The body stack has been compressed over the years and I watch the rain lash a jellied corpse. The putrefying flesh breaks apart, the water carrying it into a sewer that’s choked with garbage and human waste.

  Glancing up, I shiver from the rain, feeling small and insignificant in the shadow of monolithic structures that seem to touch the clouds. Right up until the end the city was
jettisoning zoning laws and buying up “air rights” that enabled companies to construct high-density buildings and apartments that cast hundred-acre shadows over whole swaths of neighborhoods.

  Back in the olden days things were different and the tops of churches were the tallest buildings around. This was done out of fear supposedly, because once upon a time, God punished some folks who’d built a giant tower, a memorial to worldly things rather than celestial. I’ve always had my doubts about this story, however. I mean, if you’re the creator of the universe my guess is you’ve got better things to do than be a glorified building inspector.

  Someone whistles and I turn to see the others gesturing for me to follow. I swing over to a fire escape which we use to rappel down into an opening in the target building.

  We unclip completely from the last tendril and the nylon rope that Del Frisco synched to his routing anchor. This is where the seriousness of the situation really sucker-punches you. The fact that you’re no longer hooked onto a safety net, that it’s just you against whatever might be waiting for you down in the dimly lit building cavities made darker by the skyscraper shadows.

  This is what causes the friction with the Sweepers, the fact that, at least in their eyes, they’ve got the most dangerous job in the city: free-running down and over streets potentially aswarm with tens of thousands of hungry dead.

  We enter the lower floor of another building that’s a few stories off the ground. We barricade the metal door in a rear room and sit in silence, sharing our plastic pouches of babyfood which are a month away from going rancid. I suck down a mouthful of watery roasted pumpkin and chickpea paste, listening to the water drop down through the ceilings holes and ping on the warped floors.

  The sound of the water petering down is hypnotic and soon Strummer and Del Frisco have closed their eyes. I do likewise for a few moments, only opening them when something thumps off to my left. Looking up, I see the metal door is wide open.

  Tiptoeing down a hallway, I remove my Onesie and shift the weight to the balls of my feet. This is the way Shooter taught me to proceed, coiled like a snake, ready to strike anything that moves.

  There’s a woman visible at the other end of the corridor. She stares up at an immense broken window, bathed in tatters of light. It’s Darcy, stroking the neck of a fat-bodied male rat while its brethren run laps around her boots.

  Darcy tosses a backwards look at me as I sidle up next to her. There’s a woman’s hat visible just on the outside of the window, flapping in the breeze. It’s impaled on a long, twisty strand of rebar that’s erupted from the side of the building. It was probably an expensive accessory back in the day, but now it’s smeared with dark stains and what might be bite marks.

  “My mother had one like that,” she says.

  “My mom always hated hats,” I reply. “Something about it covering up her crowning glory, whatever that means.”

  She smiles at this.

  “You know that old saying about absence making the heart grow fonder? About how you love people more when you’re away from them?”

  “I’ve heard of something like that.”

  “It’s bullshit,” she says. “All of it. Total and complete bullshit made up by people who never lost anyone before.”

  “You miss your mom?” I ask, casting about for something to lengthen the conversation.

  “So much I can barely breathe sometimes,” she says with a nod.

  “I had a chance to save mine.”

  Her eyes sweep over to mine.

  “What? Seriously?”

  “I was really young.”

  “You’re really young now.”

  “Just a kid I mean. It was in the early days, back when the copter came down.”

  Her eyes go wide.

  “God…”

  “She was there holding my hand, but I wasn’t strong enough. I was weak then. I had her for a few seconds and I couldn’t… I just… I let go.”

  Her hand reflexively reaches for mine and she gives it a little squeeze. For a brief shimmering second there’s something in her eyes. A soft, radiating glow that cleaves the darkness and hovers over us. It’s as if the better part of her has fought its way up from some underwater cave and is stabbing out, trying to breach the surface.

  My nose burns and my throat tightens, emotion getting the better of me. I have the strangest desire to grab Darcy and unburden myself. Tell her about my fears and desires, about Mom, about the numbers I’ve seen scrawled on walls during our operations. About the things I discussed with Roger Parker. I have this image in my mind of me talking and her listening and smiling and whispering back that she’s longed to confide certain things in me as well.

  I compose several sentences in my head and open my mouth, but the words die on my lips. I’ve waited too long. The moment has passed as has the light that once seemed to embrace us. She snatches back her hand and whatever was soft and beautiful in her seconds before has hardened and grown cold. And those eyes? Black marbles now.

  “If you mention what I said to you just now I’ll deny it,” she says.

  I wonder if she’s serious, if she’s so steeped in loss that she’d actually expend the energy to deny the petty little conversation we just had.

  “Who would I mention it to, Darcy?”

  I guess she might mean Strummer. There’ve been beaucoup rumors that they’re an item, but I’ve never seen any evidence of it.

  “I’m serious, Wyatt. One word about my mother or anything else and I will gut you. I fucking swear it.”

  For an instant I think she’s joking, but then she collects her rats and heads back toward the metal door. She leaves me there, trembling, dumbstruck, face to the window so nobody catches me on the verge of crying.

  Minutes later I’ve forced myself to forget what happened with Darcy. There’s no time to dwell on it anyway because we’re at it again, descending through an open window into a building with a plaque on the wall that says “Bar Association.”

  “Watch out for Dub balls,” Strummer says, referencing the way we’ve seen Dubs sleep in certain buildings. All coiled together in a pocket of trash or debris, bodies humped up, entwined like a mess of snakes.

  I look side-to-side but don’t see any Dubs as we pad across white and green marble floors littered with corpses, many of which are still wrapped in expensive-looking suits. The entire space was likely filled with lawyers and other tongue-cluckers who probably debated, right up until the bitter end, the finer points of laws that no longer matter.

  We step over the bodies, moving past another room filled with paintings of stern-looking men and women near flags on poles and a giant set of green curtains that hang over imposing walls of limestone.

  I stare at a wooden sign under the paintings that has the following quote:

  The Bar, if is to continue to exist, if it would restore itself to the dignity and honor which it once possessed, must be bold in defence and, if need be, bold in aggression.

  My eyes fix on the very last part of that sentence as I gaze upon a body, presumably that of a former lawyer, garbed in a soiled, pinstripe suit. The guy’s lying on his back, run through with an American flag on a long wooden pole which seems entirely appropriate given the setting.

  We climb a staircase and stop at a landing as Del Frisco chucks an orange bouncy-ball that spins down the hallway. We crouch and wait, but nothing moves and the ball spins to a stop at the other end, the building surprisingly level and apparently abandoned.

  “I read an article a little while ago,” Strummer says.

  “Wow, you actually read something?” says Del Frisco.

  “Yes I did, smart ass. It was a magazine about the way, way back. About how when people changed from hunters to farmers their skeletons became weaker.”

  “Less dense,” I say, correcting Strummer who waves a hand at me.

  “Whatever. The article said because their bones got weaker they couldn’t do all the things our ancestors used to do. Like climb up trees and
jump over cliffs and shit like that.”

  “So what?” Darcy asks.

  “So we’re changing that. I mean it’s like Odin says isn’t it? We’re all hunters and gatherers again. We’re doing something vital here. We’ve gone basic and returned to what we once were. What we should have remained.”

  “Oh, yeah. We are totally bringing it back old-school,” Del Frisco says with a grin.

  “Don’t mock what we do.”

  “We’re glorified repo men, dude.”

  “Don’t - do not say that,” Strummer replies, his face tight. “Jesus, I mean, think about the times before. What would we have been doing back in the day? Sitting on our asses? Watching the electronic box? Smoking shit and playing vid-games.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Del Frisco says.

  “It was. It goddamn is,” Strummer retorts. “God, I heard about how in the end the shows on the box weren’t even about anything real anymore. They were about what? People without skills or talent who were famous for being famous.”

  For some reason he pivots and focuses his gaze on me.

  “You talk about reality, bub? This is reality. This is as real as you can get. We have the power over life and death here and we’re gonna do it. We are going to resurrect the world.”

  “The Dubs might have something to say about that,” Del Frisco chirps.

  “You know those old songs you love so much, Del Frisco?”

  “What about ‘em?”

  “I remember one I liked that had a line about villains always blinking.”

  Del Frisco considers this and smiles.

  “You think the Dubs are gonna blink and wink out on us, Strummer boy?”

  “Everything eventually does.”

  Strummer and Darcy move off together. I see Darcy whisper something to Strummer who shakes his head and smacks his hands together for emphasis. Then the two head up a staircase as Del Frisco and me watch them go.

  “One day that asshole is probably going to be the head of everything,” Del Frisco says, pointing at Strummer. “Thank God I ain’t gonna be around to see it.”