Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  He glanced at the complex and the tents and other crappy structures nearby where the lower classes of New Chicago lived and died and engaged in underground commerce. For a second, he wondered how it was that a man like Longman could hold power and instill such fear. Certainly he had the guns, but didn’t the others have the numbers? Wasn’t it only a matter of time before someone picked up a stone or a brick or a knife?

  But then he remembered the influence Longman had over the city. It wasn’t just the armed thugs and the scattered surveillance cameras. It was the capacity to erase the past and disseminate various stories, some real, most fake, so that nobody who lived in the city ever knew what was true and what wasn’t. Elias had heard his father recall something from a famous book that said if you aren’t conscious you’ll never rebel and until you rebel you can never be conscious. Longman undoubtedly knew this. He knew that true power lay in his ability to mold reality and the perceptions of his subjects and until that changed, his rule would last forever.

  Elias cased the outer fencing and then advanced under cover of moonlight, hopping between buildings, keeping himself small and out of sight. He swept the exterior of the apartment complex, and then kicked in a wooden barrier and entered through a lower window, mindful of what might be lurking inside.

  He discovered several hungry homeless people prowling in an inner corridor, wailing to themselves as they crashed past, foraging for something to eat. He waited until their screams grew distant, then dropped down into a lower apartment, past the rotting corpses of two unfortunates entangled in a bed, and then kicked out a screened window that provided an avenue into Zone 3.

  He met another inner section of fencing. His fingers stuttered across its metal links as he lifted it up and climbed under and checked the map on the cellphone. He was exactly where he needed to be. The sounds he made on his nocturnal mission were small, but not so slight that Marisol could not easily track him. She’d been watching him ever since he’d crept away from the Pits. She waited for Elias to melt into the shadows, and then she followed his trail down into Zone 3.

  Elias moved like a wraith as he followed the path set forth on the cellphone, making excellent time when someone called for him.

  “Kid? Hey, kid?”

  Elias peered into the pitch and saw a man gesturing to him.

  The man inched forward, filthy hat hiding most of his face, moonlight reflecting off yellowed teeth.

  As he advanced, he communicated in so low a tone that it was clear his words were evidently intended only for Elias’s private ear.

  “You ain’t from here, is you?”

  Elias remained silent as the man drew closer, moving with an awkward gait. “Tell true, kid,” the man continued. “You’re from the outside, right? Outside the fence. I mean, you gots all your digits and hair and teeth and whatnot. You’re from back in the world?”

  Elias nodded and the man sniggered to himself.

  “Take me back with you. Show me the way out.”

  Elias shook his head and clenched a balled fist, expecting hell as the Man stepped into the light and Elias was seized with a fluttering of nerves. He could see that the man was being held aloft on primitive wooden prosthetics. The man tottered sorrowfully like a drunk, a wrathful change coming over his countenance as his smile became a nasty sneer, his voice rising above a whisper.

  “How come ya won’t take me back?”

  “Cause you don’t belong out there,” Elias offered.

  “Maybe you don’t either,” the man chuckled. ”Maybe you’d like to stay here with me.”

  The man shook his body and the prosthetics broke away and the man fell on his stumps and then flopped on the ground and used his momentum to slither toward Elias like a snake, metal shank out that — WHACK! — he swung at Elias, who avoided the blade and booted the man in the face. The man grunted, hands covering the nose which Elias partially reversed into his skull. Elias recoiled, then sidestepped the horror and ran as the man screamed for help. Elias was so distracted by the horrid clamor and in such a hurry that he failed to spot the closed-circuit cameras that dangled far overhead from blackened telephone poles, hooked to still-functioning solar panels.

  Elias ran past an old textile mill and by misbegotten architecture, shells of former enterprises that the Crazies had tried to reanimate into something functional with little training and less supplies. He studied the cellphone and followed the route set forth on the digital map until he was standing outside an old storage facility. The kind of place where his father had placed a goodly bit of Elias’s family’s possessions in the days before it all went under.

  Gripping the key, Elias shimmied between a chain lock on the exterior of the building and made his way inside. The halls were as black as the belly on a seal as he navigated by light from the cellphone. He stopped periodically, eyes roaming the shadows. He listened. Nothing. All was quiet. He continued to follow the map on the phone, turning right, then left, moving straight ahead until he reached the back of the building.

  Looking at the phone, it appeared that he was right on top of his final destination. He tried the key in every lock within sight, but it wouldn’t engage. Sweat beaded his forehead. He began to think that the whole thing was a terrible mistake. He’d have to make it back past the man whose nose he’d broken and the other Crazies, who were no doubt just waiting to taste his blood and savor his flesh. His eyes skipped up beyond the lockers to an alcove at the end of the hall, hidden amongst the other lockers. Possibly a space used by whoever once owned the building.

  A metal ladder led up to this alcove, where a door was visible. On the door was a padlock. Elias pulled himself up the ladder and angled the key out and slipped it into the lock. The corner of his lips pulled back in a rictus when the key fit perfectly and engaged. He opened the lock and removed it, before grabbing the doorknob and opening it. Holding up the cellphone for light, his eyes went wide when he saw what Caleb had hidden inside.

  Even when he was a child, Hendrix had trouble sleeping. It was a byproduct of waiting for his mother, who stayed up till all hours with various gentleman callers, only coming back to the flat she shared with young Hendrix in the wee hours of the morning. He functioned now on only a few winks of sleep, and spent his nights poring over CCTV and other footage shot by the old cameras that were still hooked to turbines and solar panels. The footage was from various sections in the city: the former financial district, Zones 1 and 2; the lands surrounding Zones 4 and 5; and, most interesting off all, the footage from Zone 3.

  Hendrix and a few of the others made a nightly ritual of watching the imagery from Zone 3. They cackled with delight at the abuses the Crazies, or “Loons,” as some called them, suffered on themselves, the grotesque parade of the diseased and deformed and brain-addled as they fought over scraps and places to sleep and defecate. It was a hoot watching these freaks, and Hendrix believed in his heart of hearts it was a healthy outlet that kept his darker impulses at bay.

  But the footage he saw tonight was something altogether different. Somebody, some boy, ostensibly normal and in possession of his faculties, could be seen sneaking into Zone 3. What the hell? The images were from a sufficient distance that Hendrix couldn’t make out the boy’s features even after he zoomed in and pulled back and rotated, but when he caught sight of another, a girl, following the boy, his mind began to race.

  What were the odds of two people sneaking into Zone 3? He’d never heard of it happening before, and after all the commotion from the Absolution session only a few hours ago — could it be possible? The two from the hunt today? Hendrix copied a clip of the footage and checked his watch. Longman would be sleeping, and death had come to those who’d roused him too early in the past, but still. He had to risk it. Longman would want to see this.

  Elias gazed in wide wonder at the inside of the room where Caleb kept his stash. A few old computer monitors and metal housings for other devices were piled on a table next to printers. The walls were shingled with printed pages a
nd hand-scrawled messages and various maps of the city. A tattered copy of Atlas Shrugged. A table filled with bottles of pills and dirty magazines and stacks of crinkly paper money.

  In the back of the room sat a tiny 3 kW diesel generator, with red signage on its side that said, “Now Whisper-Quiet!”, vented to the outside for carbon monoxide purposes. Elias flicked a switch on the generator, which turned over and, while hardly whisper-quiet, buzzed softly to life, providing power and full illumination for the room.

  Elias stared at the printed pages, many of which were shots of Longman and his goons engaged in myriad acts of violence and wrongdoing. He ran his fingers over a model, a diorama of the city. Of the wall. Of a tunnel that seemed to lead under the wall to the lands that stretched beyond. The diorama was made of wood and melted plastic and fabrics that had been affixed to various areas. It was crudely crafted, but well detailed, and somebody had written small notes and words in strategic spots. Asides about the number of guards being located here, the lethality of a trap or traps hidden there. Everything that Caleb, presumably, had experienced as he explored the city.

  Next to the diorama were moldy pages from some city manual marked “MWRD – TARP – Tunnel & Reservoir Plan – City Of Chicago.” The pages were dated 1972, which seemed like a million years in the past. He hoisted the manual and fanned the pages, which fuzzed and crumbled and flurried into the air like dandruff. Under the manual sat a plastic badge with a photo of Caleb and his full name, “Caleb J. Lavey.” Elias recognized the last name as belonging to a Guild of means, then pocketed the badge and surmised that Caleb must have blown a fuse and been exiled here with all the other Crazies.

  Surely everything in this room, while interesting, was the work of a troubled mind. Then again, what better place to hide your secrets than in the one area of the city that was largely beyond the purview of Longman’s all-seeing eyes? Elias snatched up a hand-drawn set of instructions that mirrored the diorama, with details of how to get to the tunnel (and what lay beyond), when a loud crash outside caused him to flinch.

  24

  Longman moved with alacrity down a hallway in the Codex Building, Hendrix at his heels. His senses were overloaded, his brain chiming like a tuning fork. The footage was proof that a plot was in the works. Whether it involved O’Shea and others effectuating some kind of coup was unknown, but he knew one thing. The time had come to summon Farrow and the other Apes and get to the bottom of this before heads rolled.

  He sent Hendrix and some of his men to question the Apes and then moved into his office, which had been fitted with a still-functioning retina scanner. He peered into it. A red light flashed green, a metal door hissed open, and Longman stepped through a pressure-lock without sound into his Holy of Holies, the place where he made decisions and weighed evidence and rolled the dice. Scientia est potentia, “knowledge is power,” his superiors used to say, and by God they’d been right.

  He moved through an inner chamber toward a hidden panel that opened to an elevator hooked up to the roof turbines. He pressed a button and descended through the Codex Building and exited onto the 12th floor. The Circles of Dante’s Inferno consisted of nine levels. The Codex Building contained twenty-five.

  Guards nodded and tensed when they saw Longman exit the elevator and move across a catwalk. He looked from side to side to see the rooms where agitators and political prisoners were kept for re-education and interrogation. He heard the moans and spastic supplications of these forgotten and strolled past them, along with heavily armed guards who clutched metal cudgels and oiled pistols. He took a flight of short stairs past men in lab garb who were prepping and binding packages of the White for distribution and barter, and past weapons vaults filled with rifles, explosives devices, ammo crates, ghillie suits and all manner of devices he’d freed from National Guard armories.

  He passed by glass-pebbled offices where workers watched surveillance footage from the city Zones, and through an ironclad door, and beyond the smoke-filled rooms where the upper members of the Guilds, men and women alike, partook in sins of the flesh. He breezed past a bare-chested fat man, who genuflected before him, and noted that life here was not much different than it was in the days of old. Those in power, the one-percent, still lived high on the hog, while the unfortunates below flopped and flitted in their own filth.

  Longman signaled to four guards, who stepped aside as he keyed open a titanium door that he had transported here on the back of a pack of draft horses from a Federal Reserve building downtown.

  The blast-proof door swung open and Longman entered dead space, a concealed gangplank that stretched across open air to another cube of metal and glass wedged onto the side of an adjacent building. He stopped halfway across the gangplank, which was buffeted by howling wind, and looked down on the city streets, hundreds of feet below.

  He crossed the gangplank and opened another door and entered what amounted to his office and closed the door. It was quiet here. Becalmed. He sat in a swivel chair and took in the room, whose walls were covered in thick wood fastened over iron plates that were three inches thick. In the old days, it would have made a perfect bug-proof SCIF at the airbase. Always, when faced with hardship or a threat to his rule, the same ritual. Longman looked to the floor.

  He opened a safe in a concealed cavity in the floor and removed a small, ruggedized object that appeared to be what was known as an iPad back in the day. A tablet. This device, however, came with a black crypto-ignition key that, when turned, would power up a multisensory display screen embedded with various software applications including one called FalconView, that could set in motion effects that the others in the city couldn’t even dream about.

  This was the knowledge only Longman possessed.

  This was his true power.

  The notion, known only at the highest levels of the Guild, that Longman alone still had the ability and will to bring the hammer down on anybody who threatened his reign.

  He set the iPad-like device back in its hiding spot and thought of all the ways he would hunt down the boy and girl and crush any putative uprising before it could coalesce into something of true substance.

  Cozzard, Lout, and a dozen of Longman’s brawlers had already been sent streaking through the city in their begrimed SUVs.

  Half were paying a visit to Moses O’Shea, while Cozzard and Lout were flashing official badges and moving into the Apes’ barracks.

  They had paperwork and the force of law behind them and immediately sought out Farrow.

  They found him in a cafeteria, fork speared through a cube of braised meat, barely able to turn his head before Cozzard used his pistol to pin Farrow’s head to the table. Ordinarily, Farrow would have gutted Cozzard and the others before they knew what hit them, but Farrow ceased all movement when Lout dropped what amounted to a warrant from Longman himself on the table.

  Farrow wasn’t worried.

  At the moment the thugs burst through the doors, he’d already crawled into an inner space that he often retreated to when times were bad. A space where time had stopped more than ten years before, back when everything made sense and Farrow was still a cop with a nurse for a wife and a little girl who loved her daddy more than anything, and a family name that hadn’t been uttered in nearly a decade. Blackstock. That was his last name wasn’t it? How long had it been since anyone had said it?

  Farrow thought back on his days breaking down perps in East Baltimore. He was reminded of the ancient saying that a jeweler working on a hunk of stone isn’t dissimilar from the seeker of information. They both have to tap at the right point, to chip away the rough areas to see the value that lies hidden inside. Longman’s men were anything but surgical, and no matter what rough justice they sought to dispense, he would never break. They could do what they wanted, but they would never reach his core. They’d never take his honor. It was the last thing to go, the last thing that was his. He knew what they wanted and he wouldn’t do it. He would never rat Marisol out.

  Cozzard’s pis
tol pulled back as Farrow looked up to see the thugs leering down at him like fairy-tale giants. He remembered the look from the time when he’d confronted the men and women who’d taken his wife and daughter away. Only the look had been on his face and he was the one peering down at the kidnappers, contemplating how to pay them back for what they’d done to his family, before ultimately blowing them away into eternity.

  “Where is she?” Cozzard said.

  “Could you be more specific please…”

  “The goddamn girl.”

  “Which one?”

  Cozzard snapped the slide back on his pistol as Lout mouthed “Five, four, three-”

  “She’s gone if that’s what you mean,” Farrow mumbled.

  “Gone where?”

  “Outside.”

  Cozzard planted the tip of his pistol in Farrow’s cheek.

  “Get up and get your gear. You’re coming with us. You’re leading the way. We’re going after her.”

  Longman’s men grabbed Farrow violently and hauled him to his feet. Farrow had to fight the urge to kill all of them. He’d done that to those kidnappers so long ago. The ones who’d murdered his wife and strung her up from an overpass outside of Youngstown, Ohio. They’d begged him for mercy after he’d hunted them down and Farrow had told them that mercy was not his to give. He hadn’t felt the urge to kill like that in years, but he felt it at that moment as he swapped looks with Cozzard. He wanted to warn them, to tell Longman’s men that it was a mistake to trifle with him, but the words collapsed in his mouth. Instead, he locked his jaw and shuffled a few feet before stopping.