Lactic acids sears my arms and legs, my body and mind totally spent as I haul myself up onto the staircase and ascend ten feet. I watch a bearded, horse-sized man nicknamed “Defcon,” one of the Roof Hogs, wave and whistle to me. I do the slightest of bows as he and his men begin winching up the leader that’s attached to the solar generator we’d clipped moments before. Sitting on a rung of the staircase, a satisfied smile twitches up my mouth as the generator is hauled out and up in one piece.
“Score one for the good guys!” Del Frisco says from the middle of the Dream Catcher.
Ignoring this, I nimble up and hook onto the master tendril that leads over to the roof of a building that rises up into the sky like the horn on some great beast. This is the place I’ve called home for most of my life, the Vertical City’s mother building, “VC1.”
The wind buffets me as I edge laterally across the master tendril. As a youngster I was terrified of heights, but years of forced training cured me of it and now I wouldn’t think twice about crawling across a single strand of wire twelve-hundred feet off the ground. A few moments later I drop down onto the roof of VC1, the forty-fifth floor, and roll over onto my side as Defcon waddles over peers down at me.
“You boys did real good down there, Wyatt.”
“Nearly ate it.”
“How many you encounter?”
“Least a hundred, maybe one-fifty.”
“And we took down all of ‘em, gents,” Del Frisco bellows while somersaulting dramatically onto the top of VC1.
A kind of etiquette is observed atop the buildings. The Hogs have witnessed so much death and despair over the years that they loathe anyone who gloats or excessively celebrates after an op. This is the reason why Defcon raises an eyebrow at Del Frisco while leaning down and hoisting me up to my feet.
“Your partner over there still doesn’t get it, does he? The stalkers down under? They got the time and the watches.”
I nod, recognizing how much the older folks in the building loath the notion of body-counts and an all out battle royal with the Dubs. Fighting a war of attrition was attempted unsuccessfully in the past, including the time one summer when a looted armory provided survivors with ten-thousand rounds of ammunition that they used up over the course of a five-day turkey shoot. Then there was the middle-ordeal weekend where incendiaries were hurled onto faraway buildings to start structure fires that everyone hoped would smoke the Dubs permanently from their spider holes. None of it significantly dented the pustulant packs, and those still around from the early years liken the whole thing to trench warfare: lots of carnage, but no real forward progress.
Defcon slaps me on the back and hands me a metal thermos filled with chilled water that I take a long pull from before pouring over my head.
Thanking Defcon I most past his colleagues, ten colossi in all, who are admiring the generator. Stopping near the edge of the roof, I look down over my city.
It’s dusk now, which is an excellent time of the day. The sun has turned blood red and the tops of the city’s buildings shine like they’re ablaze. Most of the city was carbonized in the fires after the ordeal, save for VC1 and about ten surrounding blocks. Nobody knows why our block was saved although there are plenty of rumors, including that the block housed bigwigs or branches of some intelligence or military units that called the shots up till the bitter end.
Life stirs overhead. Flocks of carrion birds circle the skies, their numbers so great they nearly blot out what little light is left. They dive-bomb past me, heading toward the ground to feed on deceased Dubs or those the Dubs have dispatched. I’ve always thought that when we see the last of the birds we’ll know the ordeal is over, but every day seems to bring more of them.
The sun fades and I scan what used to be one of the world’s most beautiful skylines. In the twilight the city resembles one long, jagged scar, and the sections that weren’t burned or otherwise destroyed during The Awakening, lie dormant. I close my eyes and draw strength from an image of how it all used to look. Back when my mother would take me out onto our terrace to listen to the cacophonous sounds as the city-dwellers moved briskly down the clamorous streets. The wind coos and for a moment I can almost smell the sweet scent of Mom, there for an instant and then gone.
My jaw locks and I look down to see if there’s anything else moving in the lower buildings or on the ground. Maybe the girl I imagined before, possibly someone else. Every night I do this and every night it’s the same: nothing truly alive moving on two feet. It’s like Odin, the man in charge of VC1 always says: death holds sway below the tenth floor.
My line of sight creeps to the right where a small forest of high-rises are visible. While none of us love the idea of never being able to touch solid ground again, our lives were made immeasurably better by the copter’s fortuitous crash on the top of one of the largest buildings in the city, tucked amidst other high-rises on a few city-blocks, all within a stone’s throw of each other. The roof of VC1, an immense, slightly sloped asphalt plaza, provided an excellent roost in those first years and would soon enable us to increase the territory under our control.
For the first five years of the unraveling we all lived in VC1, but then we took in a few dozen other survivors. Mostly people who’d lived and worked in the lower floor of the building. After that, those within the group started to couple and reproduce, swelling the population, which caused some of the other survivors to expand the settlement.
Dad and most of the other adults were for expansion years ago, but those a decade or so younger, were not. They wanted to keep everything under one roof. There were a lot of heated exchanges and then a bunch of the older survivors simply said that in a communal setting each member could do as he or she chose to do and so they were moving out.
I was probably eight or nine when some of those hearty folks, mostly engineers and those who’d done upkeep on the buildings, began stripping the lower levels of the building for material.
As for VC1, the Dubs had infiltrated the building (as they’d done in every other building), but we’d sealed everything off at the tenth floor with welded metal plate across entry points that the Dubs would never be able to get through. But recognizing that the flat lands were overrun by the Dub hordes, the settlers knew that they needed a way to bypass the Dubs and move onto the adjacent rooftops. They soon began prying the ropes from the elevators, and after many months of trial and error (and multiple deaths), The Dream Catcher was born.
Once the first ropes were stretched, pull-carts and mini-sleds were balanced on the tendrils, added to increase the ability of the settlers to haul goods and other materials between buildings. Soon tents and other structures and huge flower-beds and rain-barrels and whole rooftop vegetable gardens and mini-farms were erected. As with VC1, these buildings were sealed off at the tenth floor as the settlers carved out the structures’ innards and built rickety catwalks and ladder-paths on their facades that were supposed to provide easy access between floors.
Presently, the far end of the Dream Catcher extends to the other six buildings in our community which now resemble sprawling squatter villages, with the nearest street twenty-nine stories below.
Of course, the farther away folks move, the less fealty there is toward Odin and the others that are in charge of VC1. There’s also less desire in the other buildings for violence, with Roger Parker, de-facto leader of the outer buildings, preaching about ending the ops and the ground sweeps and bringing everyone together even as they move farther apart.
There has been talk, mostly whispers and the like, of forcibly resettling those in the outer buildings to VC1 or some other closer structure, but I think that’s just tongue clucking by those who know they don’t have the stones or mandate to do it.
Striding past a field of solar panels and wind-turbines (erected over the hallowed ground where our copter first crashed), I wave to a pair of black-clad Prowlers who oversee the far corners of the roof. There are at least two and sometimes four Prowlers atop each building,
depending on the time of day and circumstances. They’re led by a long-haired knuckle-dragger named Matthais who’s eagle-eyed and quick on the trigger.
Matthais totes around this massive black rifle with an oversized scope and is rarely seen, preferring instead to hide behind blinds he’s constructed on several of the roofs. I don’t particularly care for the guy, he’s got homicide in his eyes and a meanstreak a mile wide. In another life he’d probably be behind bars, but give the devil his due: he’s saved some of the others before. Darcy, for instance, told me once about how Strummer got hung up on a ladder, cornered between ledges full of Dubs when Matthais came to the rescue. She said she never even saw the guy, just listened to the thump of his gun as he dropped the attacking Dubs one at a time from somewhere up on high.
Matthais is nowhere to be seen so I head through a rooftop doorway and down a set of stairs that spill to the armory manned by Big Sam and Teddy. The pair oversee the depot where Ledge Jumpers and Prowlers store their gear.
I enter the depot which is windowless, the floor covered in black mats retrieved from a kiddie gym. The walls are adorned with metal lockers and hooks and all kinds of compartments to store stuff. Big Sam and Teddy are standing behind a long counter that’s raised so that they look down on me.
I always get a kick out of seeing the two because they’re such a contrast. Big Sam’s a giant, nicest guy you’d ever want to meet with these long corded arms, whereas Teddy’s a smack-talking runt, flinty-eyed, bald as an infant, always running his gums and seeming to do something with his hands.
“You made it back in one piece, Wyatt,” Teddy says with a sly grin.
“How many is it?” I ask.
Big Sam consults a blackboard on a wall with white marks and does a tally.
“We haven’t lost one in a hundred and three days.”
“Hundred and four,” I say, removing my compression jacket and handing it over to Teddy along with my rucksack, Onesie, and other gear.
Teddy, who’s surprisingly fastidious, makes a face when he sees that the Onesie’s streaked with blood, fluid, and flesh-residue.
“What the hell, Wyatt?”
“Ran into a nest.”
“You have to be this messy?”
“Battlefield conditions,” I say with a shrug.
Teddy sucks loudly on his yellow teeth.
“One of these days I’m gonna go out with you Jumpers and show you how it’s done.”
“We’d love to have you,” I say with a weary smile as Big Sam chuckles.
Teddy scrunches his nose and slides on a glove and removes a moist towel from a plastic tub. He plucks off an errant piece of Dub bone-confetti and wipes down the Onesie before depositing it in the locker that’s been assigned to me.
Big Sam checks all of the gear off and hands me four twenty dollar bills, remnants of a stash that was liberated from a Federal Reserve Bank by Del Frisco and a Jumper named Edwin Spoke who was KIA eight months ago.
Given the misery brought about by the Awakening, paper currency is essentially worthless, but we still use it to exchange for goods and services. Somebody tried introducing some kind of fake money made of metal ingots, but that went nowhere real fast. People just felt more comfortable with paper money, so that’s what we continue to use.
As for the concept of remuneration, every time I go out and come back in one piece I get eighty bucks which amounts to a salary. The cash is then exchanged for food, gears, etc. Same as the days of old. If I bring something back on top of that I get an extra fifty.
Big Sam slaps my regular eighty bucks down on the counter and then the other fifty for the generator as I hand him the small gold bracelet copped from the Asian Dub. This seems to make Big Sam’s day as he holds the bracelet up and wipes off some of the green residue and grins. Seeing that Teddy and Big Sam are the ones who safeguard and repair the equipment upon which the lives of each Jumper depend, it’s just good business to grease their palms every now and again.
Flush with cash, I exit the depot and amble down a corridor, passing sleeping quarters and kitchens and indoor greenhouses that perfume the air with the fragrance of vegetables and fertilizer. There’s a gray metal door at the end of the hallway and my first order of business after returning from a jump and doffing my gear is to debrief the man who works behind it. Odin’s right hand man, Ben Shooter.
My hand shakes as I reach up and pound on the metal door. A voice on the other side tells me to come in as a buzzer sounds and the door clicks open and I enter.
Chapter 5
Shouldering the door open, I enter another hallway and pad up yet another staircase that opens to a space centered by an intricately-detailed diorama of the city.
Shooter’s there, panthering around the diorama, searching for something only he can see. He turns which allows me, for an instant, to study his face in profile. The first thing that comes to mind is racing dog. Seriously, that’s what Shooter looks like: a greyhound, long and lean with closely mown hair. He appears thirty years older than me even though he’s only eleven. Of course running from an army of the undead on a nearly daily basis has a way of prematurely aging you.
Shooter’s a legendary figure amongst the Jumpers, one of the first and the only one of the original group to still be alive. He helped string many of the first sections of The Dream Catcher and would often volunteer to go out on long-range patrols, usually by himself. There are stories about how he was nearly killed dozens of times, yet able to miraculously find some point of exfiltration while single-handedly smoking hundreds of the undead. After breaking his back, pulverizing several vertebrae, and nearly losing an arm, he “retired” and became Odin’s watchman, overseeing the day-to-day operations of the Jumpers and the Hogs and several of the other trades related to The Dream Catcher.
With some effort, Shooter turns and acknowledges me with a bob of his head. I’ve always tried to be as succinct as possible in my jump debriefs since Shooter’s a mercurial sonofabitch; nasty as a bag of broken glass on one day and cool, yet enigmatic on another. The kind of dude who prefers to say “someone put a period on their sentence early,” rather than use a word like “suicide.”
Shooter hunts in a pocket and tosses me a laser-pointer.
“Show me where you trekked, troop,” he says.
The pointer clicks on and I maneuver its red beam over the diorama until the building Del Frisco and me escaped from is located.
“What floors did you recon?”
“Eighteen through twenty-two.”
“Anything?”
“A generator.”
“Gas or solar?”
“Solar.”
Shooter nods approvingly at this, taking back the pointer before crouching on his heels and drawing a mark on the diorama building with a black grease pencil.
“How many of the bad guys did you encounter?”
“Unknown, sir.”
“More than fifty?”
I nod.
“More than three-hundred?”
I shake my head and he looks up at me.
“Both of you make it back?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Del Frisco’s a wild card isn’t he?”
I stare at Shooter who smirks.
“I’m not asking you to rat on the guy, Wyatt. You can tell true.”
My head sinks.
“His methods are… unorthodox, sir.”
Shooter laughs at this and I’m glad he’s in a good mood as he sidles up next to me.
“Did you see anything else? Anything out of the ordinary?”
I feel like screaming at Shooter that everything nowadays is out of the ordinary, but thinking better of it, I simply ask, “Like what, sir?”
“You tell me.”
I know exactly what Shooter’s asking about. He’s fishing for info on the numbers we saw scrawled on the inside of the building. One of the other Jumper teams spotted some of them in another building and reported back to Shooter. But not me. For some reason, my natura
l bent is to keep certain things to myself.
“No, sir,” I lie, “didn’t see nothing out of the ordinary.”
Shooter pats me on the shoulder like a child and then his eyes drop to the ground. There’s a single droplet of blood that’s just pinged my boots. My guts seem to spring up high into my chest all at once. I can barely breathe as Shooter reaches a finger out and nudges aside my right elbow brace. There’s a nearly imperceptible cut there, courtesy of the Asian Dub whose bracelet I snagged. I was praying that nobody would spot it before I cleaned up, but of course Shooter does.
“You know this whole area is supposed to remain sterile, don’t you?” he says.
“Yes, sir.”
He studies the cut closely.
“That wound doesn’t look particularly serious does it?”
I shake my head.
“Was it caused by one of them?”
“I believe so, sir.”
“You knew that before you came in here?”
I nod, petrified he might put me down at any moment.
“I’m glad you didn’t lie,” a voice booms and I look up to see a man well over six feet tall emerge from behind a wall of frosted glass at the back of the room. It’s Odin, the head honcho, and with his long, dark hair and piercing eyes, he resembles some kind of Old Testament prophet.
Odin nears me, giving off a funk that reminds me of blood mixed with herbs. I glance at his hands as a wide grin stitches his face. I make a second perusal of his hands and notice the nails. Manicured, flesh firm and unblemished. Beautiful hands. Delicate even. The kind of hands that are not used to physical work.
“We’re pleased that you’ve told us the truth, aren’t we, Mister Shooter?”
Instantly I detect a slight softening in Shooter’s face. He nods and my eyes stray to that wall of frosted glass. Odin was back there the whole goddamn time, snooping on our convo.
VERTICAL CITY: A ZOMBIE THRILLER (BOOK 1 OF 4) Page 4
