VERTICAL CITY: A ZOMBIE THRILLER (BOOK 1 OF 4)

by George Mahaffey

  Vertical City

  A Zombie Thriller

  Part 1

  By

  George S. Mahaffey, Jr.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  About The Author

  www.georgemahaffey.com

  Copyright 2015 by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  Cover design by: Exclamation Innovations

  This is a work of fiction and all rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

  BLOOD RUNNERS: ABSOLUTION (Book 1 of 3)

  BLOOD RUNNERS: DESIGNATED SURVIVORS (Book 2 of 3)

  AMITYVILLE: ORIGINS (Book 1 of 2)

  RAZORBACKS I

  RAZORBACKS II

  THE PACT

  THUNDER ROAD (Books 1)

  THUNDER ROAD (Books 2)

  Then they said, “Come let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

  - Genesis 11:4

  Prologue

  Wherever people gather there’s a story about how things began. A creation myth. Most seem to involve lots of semi-darkness and swirling mists and a celestial tinkerer who swoops down to get the party started with great sound and fury. For those of us who survived “The Awakening,” I guess you could say it was pretty much the same. It began with a bang alright, the crash of a helicopter.

  I was a little over three years old when Mom and Dad rushed into my room and roused me awake. They were out of breath, faces flushed, bags slung over their shoulders. Mom’s eyes were wet and the smell of her sweat tanged the air as she leaned down into my crib.

  “Wyatt, sweetie, it’s time… time to go.”

  Reaching up, Mom took me into her arms and jimmied a pacifier into my mouth marked “Heartbreaker” which I thought was weird since I’d kicked my binky addiction nearly six months before.

  We were living on the sixteenth floor in a high-rise in the middle of the city. A sleek twenty-storey steel and stone silo birthed by the latest and hottest real estate development concern, perfectly positioned for transport and easy access to the city’s most desirable districts.

  My folks bought their coop before I was born and kept it even as they made plans to retreat to the suburbs. It was close to work after all, which was important to Dad who massaged money for members of what passed for the American nobility. I rarely saw him, but Mom seemed happy and we’d wanted for very little.

  I knew something was wrong that night because my folks were together, side-by-side even, which was highly unusual. They’d also left a bag of Mom’s low-fat popcorn popping in the microwave near our dog Shemp who barked at a flatscreen as we made for the front door.

  Mom tried to keep me from looking back, but I broke free of her grip and stared at the screen. There was yet another breathless story about the ancient mass grave unearthed after the ice sheets receded somewhere in the wilds of Russia. I watched a few talking heads sputtering about this and that before the story was interrupted for “Breaking News.”

  Shaky, handheld footage splashed across the screen. A female reporter on a street appeared and pointed and then the camera spun to reveal a mob of men and women who were moving spastically like the apes I’d seen when Mom took me to the zoo. Everyone on the screen looked incredibly angry (or hungry, I couldn’t tell which) and a few seemed to be missing parts. In seconds they rolled right over the reporter as spurts of red speckled the camera. I thought it was all make-believe of course, but then the screen went to snow and starting beeping out emergency tones.

  Turning back, we pushed out through the front door, greeted by a phalanx of big men clutching weapons. Dad whispered and handed them a folder of money and they ushered us down the hallway, using hand gestures to communicate. The power winked out and red emergency lights flashed.

  I rubbed my rheumy little eyes as screams and thumps echoed from somewhere under us. Mom covered my ears, but I heard everything, including the piercing wail of what sounded like a woman on a floor directly below us shrieking, “WHA – WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY?!”

  Mom’s chest rose and fell as she followed my father and some of our neighbors down the long, twisty corridor that ended at a steel door. My folks stopped to catch their breath, flinching at the sounds of things popping – gunshots, I soon surmised – from somewhere below. This went on for a few seconds and then I heard the sustained echo of automatic weapons fire interspersed with concussive blasts and then… silence, followed by the triumphant, angry roar of what I thought were animals.

  “You know what that is, baby?” Mom asked, pointing toward the door at the end of the hall.

  “Do – door,” I said.

  “We’re going through that door, Wyatt, okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Can you do something for me when we go through that door?”

  Another nod from me.

  “Whatever you do, do not look down, okay? Keep your eyes on mommy. Do. Not. Look. Down.”

  For the first time real fear panged me and my eyes began to get misty as I caught sight of my father, a broad-shouldered man who’d never shown a modicum of emotion in all the time I’d known him, begin to weep. Whether he was crying for himself or us, or simply because the mini-empire he’d built was likely on the verge of collapse, I didn’t know, but it hardly mattered. There’s nothing worse than seeing your old man wilting when you’re a kid.

  Dad wiped his tears and set his jaw and then we were on the move again, following our bulky guards who stopped at the steel door. They traded looks and checked their weapons before looking back at us. I saw one of them, a bearded brute who resembled a black bear, mouth “one, two,” and then he kicked open the door.

  The hazy light of dusk washed over us as we filtered through the door that led to a skywalk suspended several hundred feet off of the ground. A bridge of metal and glass that connected us to the roof of a sister building.

  The roof of the other building had been established as a hideaway for the young and wealthy. There was a restaurant there that served small bites of food on smaller plates and one of those open-air lounges with firepits and cabanas for what Mom called “canoodling.” On either side of the restaurant’s roof were two enormous helicopters that had just begun to power up.

  As we moved across the glass bridge a sound boomed from below until it seemed to envelope everything. A deep, haunting note that resembled the roar that a huge wave makes before it crashes onto the beach.

  “Don’t look down, my sweet baby boy,” Mom said, “whatever you do, do not look down.”

  Tears were in her eyes and ripples of fear pulsed over her body and I of course, being a child, did exactly the opposite of what she’d implored me not to do. I looked down and immediately wished I hadn’t.

  Through the glass the streets below were visible. A great horde of people rampaged from north to south, headed in the general direction of our building.

  Mom grabbed my chin and forced my line of sight up, though I was still able to clock a nearby building where people were hurling themselves out of windows.

  “Oh, Jesus God,” Mom whispered, before imploring me to close my eyes as we moved across the glass bridge.

&nb
sp; My eyes shut and then snapped open again, skipping from one abomination to another. Planes slicing through the air followed by explosions that swept across the skyline, and the desperate scene unfolding on a nearby building’s fire-escape. It was a sad looking structure, one of the originals in the neighborhood. A tenement without armed guards and secure doors and glass bridges for easy getaways.

  There was a mother and father and a little girl my age standing there on the escape. Staring at us. I was just a child, but even then I knew death was speaking to me through their eyes. The mother mouthed something that couldn’t be heard and turned back to a window as two men launched themselves through it from the inside. In a flash the father was fighting with these men and then he was falling with them through the air, their bodies intertwined like lovers before they hit another fire-escape several stories down and smeared across the pavement.

  I watched the mother grab her young daughter (whose eyes never left me) even as more people poured through the broken window and collapsed on top of them in a heaving mass of arms and legs and open mouths. Looking away, I began to weep. Why was this happening?! What was going on?!

  In a flash we crouch-ran toward one of the copters whose rotor-wash made it seem like we were standing in the middle of a cyclone. Potted plants and cabana tents were sucked up into the air as Mom clamped down on my wrist, willing the two of us forward.

  Dad grabbed me around the waist as Mom was helped up into the belly of the copter. He pushed me up to her and then hauled himself in as we sat scrunched with a few people I recognized and many more I didn’t. Maybe two dozen souls in all, mostly families.

  The men in charge wore no uniforms or insignias, garbed instead in black body-armor and tan pants. All carried weapons, most of which were slung across their chests on nylon slings, except for the colossus in a knit cap who manned a machine-gun on a metal tripod near an open bay door.

  My face was nestled snugly against Mom’s chest and I felt momentarily secure when another sound, a sustained wailing, arrested our attention.

  We looked up and saw an angry mob of people moving through the glass bridge. They were close enough that their faces could be made out. The look on them was bone-chilling, simultaneously vacant and ravenous. Most were clad in soiled clothes, others marinated in gore, flesh flapping as they juggled ropes of intestines that seeped from jagged gashes.

  None of it looked real.

  The helicopter lifted up and then the man in the knit cap opened fire with his machine-gun. Mom covered my ears as the gun barrel spit fire, orange tracer-rounds shattering the glass bridge which bucked and heaved.

  As we pulled up and banked hard, I watched the man continue to rake the glass bridge with gunfire until it simply broke apart. The rampagers inside tumbled through the air like spores from a smashed dandelion head.

  Our transport arced to the right, forced to run a gauntlet below the roofs of other adjacent buildings. A man next to me pointed to those roofs where people were gathered. They gesticulated and shrieked and then jumped at us. Our copter jolted as the bodies hit the rotors and were instantly atomized.

  Our pilots reacted, bellowing, monkeying their controls as a strange whine issued from somewhere near the copter’s roof. More bodies hit the rotors. Red slush spilled across the copter’s windshield and then the first wisps of smoke appeared.

  Time and sound seemed to slow as the helicopter corkscrewed violently. Banners of smoke filled the cabin as the copter listed to one side and the first passenger slipped out through the open bay door and fell spiraling down through the air.

  I heard Dad shout and then I no longer felt Mom who was sliding across the floor as reality smashed back in like a punch to the face. I was always a cautious child, but instinctively I let go of Dad and snapped out for my mother’s hand. My fingers briefly locked around hers and she smiled and then my strength ebbed and my grip broke.

  Her nails dug trenches in the soft rubber floor of the copter, leaving permanent marks before she skidded away from me, her mouth open in a silent scream. In a blur she was freefalling, pinwheeling down like the other people. I shrieked as Dad’s hands grabbed and pulled me back.

  I continued to scream because this was the person who gave me life. The first woman who ever told me she loved me and the first I would ever love back. She was my everything and then she was just… gone.

  Dad held me close to his chest, sobbing, as the copter turned over on its side and the roof of a nearby building (which seemed as big as a football field) rushed up to greet us. We barely even had a chance to scream.

  The blades on our helicopter snapped off, the machine gouging across the roof, fire and smoke obscuring everything as we lurched to a bone-shattering stop. My head slammed hard against Dad’s shoulder and my eyes blurred into darkness. I’d heard Dad say in the past that silence equaled death and in the stillness that ensued, I was sure all of us had crossed over. I was waiting for Mom to reappear and then someone, one of the other survivors, rose up and booted open the mangled bay door as we collectively staggered out of the copter.

  We soon learned that those of us who’d survived the crash were marooned, trapped on a concrete island as a struggle for survival raged below. Since the first rule of any war is to take the high ground when your opponent seizes the field of battle, that’s precisely what we did. Instead of going down and out we stayed put, entering the building and eventually sealing it off at the tenth floor. We ceded the streets and all the land beneath us to the hordes and the misshapen agents of slaughter that craved our flesh.

  And then, when that was finished, we waited for the world to turn over and help to arrive and when none came, we did the only thing left to do. We made our home permanently in the sky.

  That was a little over sixteen years ago.

  Chapter 1

  Del Frisco always says pretty girls make slaves. Of course it’s only lately that I’ve discovered the words come from a long-forgotten song and aren’t entirely accurate. The actual song speaks about them making “graves,” which is certainly apropos given our present predicament.

  The two of us have our rucksacks on, garbed in climbing gear and dark compression suits. We’re positioned in a pocket of deep shadows on the nineteenth floor of a thirty-storey skyscraper honeycombed with offices and alcoves and little galleys. Situated smack dab in the middle of it all, peering through an open door into a bullpen filled with boxes and dust-dappled stacks of shipping materials.

  A lone female Dub’s visible maybe twenty-yards away from us. She moans like she’s in heat, hands scratching exposed flesh the color of bleu cheese.

  “Whoa, baby, she must’ve been something else back in the day, huh, Wyatt?”

  I run a hand through my unruly locks, which have grown shaggy in the years since the collapse. My head cants and I study the once-upon-a-time woman.

  “She’s totally out of your league.”

  “Maybe before, but not now.”

  “That’s cause she’s dead, Del Frisco.”

  Del Frisco looks at her and grins which always annoys the shit out of me since this is hardly a laughing matter. He’s five years older than me, twenty-five going on forty, with a lean face that, depending on circumstances and lighting, gives him a commanding appearance. He always seems to be on the move, however, capering about, and the furtive glances he casts make others say that he looks like a person who’s hunting something much larger than himself.

  “Is it weird that I think she’s still kinda hot?” he says.

  “That used to be somebody’s daughter or wife.”

  “Not now.”

  “She had a family once.”

  “Stop talking.”

  “Why?”

  “Cause you’re sapping my buzz, dude. Shut it and get fierce,” he snaps.

  People tell me I’m passive, but it’s not so much that I retreat or roll over as that I don’t care for direct conflict with the living. I like to get along with people and them with me and if that’s passivi
ty, well, then I guess they’re right.

  Realizing there’s no percentage in debating the finer points of why I occasionally sympathize with those we dispatch, I do indeed shut my trap. Del Frisco being Del Frisco, totally forgets our minor argument and grins again, twirling his pony-tail as he makes an off-color joke about removing the Dub’s teeth so that she can perform a variety of unwholesome acts on him. He’s forever going on about stuff like that while concocting new names for the things.

  Initially, the dead were called “The Woken” but then Del Frisco got tired of having to say the “double u” in the first letter of “Woken,” and shortened it to “Dub,” and then the “Dubs” (my suggestion) which is what pretty much everyone calls them now.

  We’ve been knee-deep in Dubs ever since the copter crash, although the first ones popped up almost a year before that. That was almost seventeen years ago, back when a group of scientists held their first press conferences and produced their television specials about the gray-splotched corpses they’d plucked out of the thawed tundra.

  Mom said there was probably a good reason why those bodies were where they were and she was right. Whatever evil had been locked down under the ice with them was released into an unsuspecting and unprepared world.

  Later, we found out that one of those involved was from another country, Saudi Arabia, and supposedly transported a virus from the bodies back there. I was very little then, but Saudi Arabia was pretty much closed off to the rest of the world and I remember Dad always saying with a smirk that “what happens in S.A. stays in S.A.”

  Apparently the hospital conditions in the Middle East were suboptimal back then (as well as infection control protocols and the like), such that when the infected scientist initially developed a respiratory sickness, things quickly got out of hand.