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. She now had the blade in one hand, the wooden pole in the other.
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, but there was no time to savor the victory. He spun and 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, nursing Loon babies.
More rooms were 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 below in 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 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 big man back there—”
“Oh, you mean the mother who almost shot us?” Elias asked.
Nodding, she responded, “He didn’t, though. He could’ve put us down, 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. You think what? That I’m gonna sing his praises? You’re a 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. You’re worse than us.”
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. You’re on your own. No more you and me. Understand?”
“Good,” she replied.
“Great.”
“Super fantastic,” he responded with a smirk.
Marisol stared at Elias who had a look of easy arrogance about him, the kind of annoying little smirk she’d smacked off the faces of lesser people a dozen times before.
“You think an awful lot about yourself don’t you, Elias?”
“Actually, I pretty much think just the right amount about myself, but thanks for asking, Marisol.”
A nasty look was exchanged between them and then they crouch-ran through rows of containers brimming with equipment for the rebuilding efforts. 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 threatening blackness of the night.
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 had 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.
27
Elias and Marisol snuck through a Zone 4 that curled around the city’s extensive quagmire of garbage plains and junkyards, and then dropped down a switchback. 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 the fires, keeping beyond the flames, taking in the bones fused with accretions that ringed the area like some demonic mosaic. Bodies splayed in all 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 the unfortunates 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.”
“Girls can’t kick ass
,” he said with a snicker.
“Um, excuse me, but I kicked yours didn’t I?”
His face flushed red, but she didn’t back down.
“And it wasn’t just a little was it?”
“Shut your mouth.”
She smiled. “I kicked the crap out of you.”
“You wanna go again?” he asked, fists balled up.
“I mean, I could’ve done worse before,” she said, ignoring him. “Back during the hunt. Only reason you’re right here, right now, is because I allowed you to live. I totally could’ve done way worse. That’s a fact.”
“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?”
“I’ve done what I had to do to survive. 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.
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 over 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. 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 thirty 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 had used this tunnel on more than one occasion, sending out war parties that nobody ever knew about to scout the grasslands, search for the Thresher and spy on the encampments that allegedly had been sited 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 discounted what others had said about aliens, and surmised that the Unraveling was 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, the psychiatrist 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 the doctor murdered after hearing him make plans to break camp on a balmy summer night. His services would have been very valuable in New Chicago.
“What is it, boss?” asked Lout after Longman was silent for a longer than usual.
Longman shook his head, and Lout trembled because there was gravity in Longman’s manner. Even when he was just standing and staring, his eyes were always wide and rapt and eerily unblinking.
“I just had the feeling, Mister Hendrix,” Longman said, “that after this night nothing will be as it was before.” He watched as Cozzard fired up the evidence in a metal stove, destroying it forever, as he waited to hear word from those that guarded the only way under the wall. If the boy and the girl made it through, it would be time to ready the men and prepare to potentially lead a punitive expedition out into the great unknown. Just as he’d done in the years before he took over the city.
28
Marisol watched Elias part the branches in a small copse and duck down along a streambed that the two followed, the wall rising in the distance. Elias studied the directions, which called for them to wade across the stream. Tree branches from nearby embankments acted as umbrellas, fanned over the water, protecting their silhouettes from the guards who could be seen patrolling the wall.
Their figures swam in and out of focus in the darkness as they pushed upstream, Elias keeping the directions above water as the stream dipped to his chest. He fought his way up the opposite bank and collapsed to the ground. He could see a giant metal vent down an embankment across from him. The vent protected a spillway that funneled runoff from the old sewage impoundment lakes that lay just underfoot. Elias crawled a few feet forward and spotted an old sewer grate with a metal wheel on top that looked as if it had been intentionally camouflaged with branches and underbrush. Unless you knew what you were looking for, this spot, this grate, would be impossible to find.
“Mind if I ask you a question,” Marisol uttered as Elias’s head canted to one side.
“No problem,” he responded, “long as you don’t mind if I don’t answer.”
Ignoring this, she said, “What are you doing? I mean, what’s the plan?”
“What do you think it is? I’m going in.”
“Then what?”
“Then what the hell do you think? We’ve seen and done too much. We’re dead if we stay here, so I’m going under the wall.”
“Then what?”
“You said one question!”
“I never said just one,” she replied.
“Well, that’s all you’re getting.”
Marisol thought about this, kicking the ground as Elias pointed at her rucksack.
“You had your questions, now it’s my turn. What’s in the
bag? Weapons? Eats? White? C’mon.”
“Need to know,” she responded.
“I almost got shot saving your ass, so I’d like to know.”
She shook her head and Elias bared his teeth as he twisted the metal wheel, which wouldn’t budge until Marisol grabbed a corner of it and helped. With the two of them working together, the wheel complained, then shifted, finally swinging open to reveal a ladder leading down into the dismal obscurity that lay beneath them.
Elias didn’t wait to enter. If he had, he would have noticed it. Would have seen the string of two-cent wire laid a foot down across the second rung. But he didn’t, and it wasn’t until her eyes sought his face with a trouble and anxiety that he could by no means account for that he realized he’d made a serious mistake.
The hush was shattered as Elias’s shoe clipped the trip-wire, which ignited a toe-popper flare that screamed into the sky like a bottle rocket before exploding. Marisol grabbed his arm.
“Was that part of your plan? Letting the bad guys know where we were? Because if is was, it worked perfectly.”
“Shut up,” he replied, shrugging off her hand.
Shouts quickly followed the burst. Klaxons shrilled in the distance. Marisol pointed at the guards on the wall as they fidgeted for spotlights and guns.
Marisol followed Elias down onto the ground. The pair moved deliberately, rung by rung, their eyes searching the ground below for any sign of movement. Marisol slipped on a moss-slicked rung, losing her balance before Elias grabbed and steadied her. She caught sight of his eyes, which shone like black buttons. “Thanks,” she said, as he held up two fingers and clambered straight down.
The ladder ended at a concrete landing that they dropped onto. Steam hissed from nearby, and still functional, geothermal piping, and generators thumped from alcoves that they couldn’t see. The space here was supersized; the landing led to a pipe that was thirty feet in diameter and which appeared to have been hacked directly into the bedrock.
Blood Runners: Box Set Page 14
