Rooms and ante-rooms continued to blur past until they were on the 8th floor. Farrow knew what was there. People. Lots of people. The kind of people who’d committed lesser crimes and generally run afoul of Longman.
Meaty hands grabbed Farrow’s back and forced him down more stairs as the procession humped across a catwalk, toward an oversized door manned by two men that Farrow recognized. His former colleagues, Sikes and Harrigan. The “Terrible Twos.” The pair smiled demonically at Farrow.
“The man of the fucking hour,” Sikes said.
Harrigan pulled a baton from his belt and ran a hand down its length.
Farrow’s eyes remained locked on Harrigan’s. “You ever heard of the word backpfeifengesicht?”
Harrigan shook his head. “The hell does that mean?”
“It’s German. When I look at you, Harrigan, I think of it.”
Harrigan’s brows knotted. “Why? What’s it mean?”
“Roughly, it translates to hideous face that needs a good punching.”
Farrow swung his head and slammed it into Harrigan’s mouth, splitting his lip open. Harrigan brought the baton down on Farrow’s shoulder, doubling him over.
Harrigan eased the tip of his baton under Farrow’s chin, forcing his face up. “And all this time we thought you were one of us, you fuck,” Harrigan said.
“Well I was never like you, Harrigan,” Farrow said. “I mean, I was never that big of an asshole.”
Harrigan clubbed Farrow in the gut with his baton. Then he grabbed Farrow’s hair and pulled his head back and positioned it toward the still shut door.
“You smell that?” Harrigan snarled.
“You mean that horrible stench?” Farrow asked.
Harrigan nodded. “You know what it is?”
“I assumed it was you or Longman’s cock-holster over there,” Farrow said, gesturing at Sikes.
Harrigan kicked Farrow to the ground.
“Always quick with the joke,” Sikes said, threading a key into the door.
“Let’s see how funny you think the hole is,” Harrigan said. He grabbed Farrow’s back as Sikes wedged the door open. Farrow gasped when he heard and saw what was within.
A wall of sound, a din of voices echoed from what looked like hundreds of people garbed in clothes that a thriftstore would be embarrassed to hawk. Both sexes and all races were well-represented inside, prisoners of all shapes and sizes packed in a space that took up nearly a whole floor of the Codex Building. Walls were of metal, the floors of thick mesh that sloped so that waste and water and various bodily fluids could easily drain into scuppers that dribbled off the backside of Longman’s lair.
Harrigan lifted Farrow up, his spit-flecked mouth inches from Farrow’s ear.
“This is for all the times that you took the side of that whore over us,” Harrigan hissed, referencing Marisol.
He planted a boot between Farrow’s rear delts and kicked him forward before slamming the door shut.
Farrow stutter-stepped and then pitched to the ground on his side. One of his mangled fingers caught in the mesh, reopening the wound. The other prisoners stared at him, some guffawing, others peering on, not a one willing to lend a hand. He stood and tugged at the crude sutures on his fingers and ambled by himself to the rear of the prison.
He surveyed the sad sacks, some shifty-eyed, others jabbering to themselves, long strings of saliva hanging from open mouths as objects dropped from the ceiling. Pieces of fruit. Rotten vegetables. Maggot-flecked meat. Feeding time. Bile churned inside Farrow’s gut as he watched the other prisoners pounce on the food, a frenzy unfolding as men and women did battle for the scraps.
“Go and get some, son,” said an older prisoner with a pinkish scar running from his head down to his chin.
“I’ll pass,” said Farrow.
“That’s what I said eighteen months ago,” the older prisoner replied, grinning, nearly all of his teeth gone. “Now look at me.”
Farrow watched the older prisoner wade forward, throwing fists and elbows, screaming and biting at the other men, fighting for the garbage.
Farrow turned from this and willed away the bad thoughts. He would not become like these people. He’d learned all his life to fight, to not give up and it would be no different now. He had no plans to betray his core principles, which were the only earthly things he had left. The fear of becoming a fraud, like Longman and the others was palpable. No matter what the black hats did to him, he wouldn’t submit. He would fall back on his own innate strengths. Natural stuff. Cunning. Even a bit of brute violence. No matter what they did he would fight and somehow find a way to get his revenge. They wouldn’t be able to do it. They would never break him.
48
Terry took the boat’s steps to the hold two at a time. He hadn’t been this excited since the time two summers ago when he was saved by Jessup and the others after falling into a camouflaged pit left by some inner-city mud people out beyond the Detroit badlands.
Jessup was moving ahead of him, swerving toward an alcove that housed some of the boat’s electronic innards.
“Whoa, whoa, slow down, J," Terry said.
Jessup did, slowly turning as Terry whispered, “Spare a minute?”
Jessup wiped a snail of grime from his forehead and nodded as Terry took him by the arm and ushered him into a side room.
When the door was shut and the mens’ eyes had adjusted to the semi-darkness, Terry held up the phone. It had no measurable impact on Jessup.
“Yep. I remember those.”
“This is a little different. The boy, Elias, he let me borrow it.”
“Where’d he get it from?”
“Wasn’t real interested in the how, if you know what I mean,” Terry said with a slight shrug.
He fiddled with the phone, tapping it, swiping an index finger, activating the secret things hidden inside the tiny device.
“Jessup, I’m telling you this man-to-man. Vet-to-vet.”
“I’m not so sure I've earned the title of vet.”
Terry looked up. “You served, didn’t you?”
“Never saw a lick of combat.”
“Doesn’t matter. You get what I’m about to say.”
“Which is?”
“We got something serious here. The kid had this on him.” Terry turned the phone around so that Jessup could see all the things on the screen.
“Yes, indeed. I remember these well. They annoyed the bitter hell out of me. One of the few things I’m glad hasn’t made its way back.”
“You’re missing the point, J.”
“Help me with the point,” Jessup said, exasperated.
Terry pecked at the screen, but encountered a few security obstacles he hadn’t noticed before.
“Bare with me. This thing’s got some serious military applications on it.”
Jessup rapped his knuckles against the wall. “You’ve got ten seconds, Terr,” he said.
“Five more than I’ll need, Boss,” was Terry’s reply.
Terry’s nimble fingers danced across the phone’s screen. He pinched the glass and swiped through various screens and tapped a few words of circumvention he’d learned in an Air Force intel unit he’d once served in.
In a flash he brought up a digital map that appeared married to some still-functioning GPS system. The map showed the continental United States so Terry pinched and tapped the screen, which minimized to an overview of the East Coast and then the Midwest. The map showed the surrounding areas and the hidden locales that were hinted at and signified by dropped pins a la those used on Google maps.
“Before it all went down, they put a whole bunch of it in these places,” Terry whispered, gesturing at the pins.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Jessup asked.
“They called ‘em pre-position vaults back in the day, Jessup. Hidden bunkers and safehouses filled with money and ammo and gear and weapons. Lots of weapons. They put ‘em all over the place so they’d have stores, caches for when t
he shit hit the fan. Most of ‘em were overseas, Israel, Jordan, ‘hoods like that. But some of ‘em, ‘specially towards the end, were right here in the good ole U.S. of A.”
“How the hell do you know that?” asked Jessup.
“Heard about it in an intel briefing at Langley.”
He held the phone up very close to Jessup’s face and pointed at the map once again for emphasis.
“This map shows where some of those places are. They’re like stash house for spooks, bro. Big Army layaway.”
“So what?”
“So it’s what we need. It’s all the goodies we been lookin’ for. It’ll help us improve things. Better security, more firepower, God knows we’re runnin’ low on both.”
“That kind of firepower might be dangerous.”
“Oh, bullshit, Jessup!” Terry thundered and immediately looked down, embarrassed at the outburst.
“I’m sorry, man, it’s just … if these joints are real, if they’re untouched, even one of them, it’ll give us a huge leg up. And besides, no offense, but I disagree. Guns are not inherently dangerous … in the right hands. Our hands. I mean, have you looked around? Have you noticed the terrain we currently find ourselves deployed in?”
Jessup frowned. “You been smoking that stuff again?”
“And if I have?”
“Weed clouds your judgment, Terry.”
“If anything, it brings clarity. You should try some.”
“I’ll pass. You get more clarity you start to realize just how bad things are. How far we’ve got to go.”
Jessup took a step to move past and Terry grabbed his wrist.
“We should check it out, Jessup. A small team of us could go in there and see what’s what. I mean, the girl, the injured one’s gotta chill for the rest of the day anyway, right? At the very least there’s probably weapons there, gear, stuff we need and can use.”
“And if there’s not?”
“We won’t know unless we look. I’ll bet it’s the mother-lode. I swear to God, Jessup, I’ve heard about these places. Nobody knew about them. Classified and whatnot. Untouched.”
“It’s too risky,” Jessup replied, moving around Terry, who grabbed him by the shoulder with enough force to spin him around.
“If we bail, who’s to say this Longman guy or whatever his name is won’t come looking for us?”
“We’ll be somewhere else by then. Maybe the other side of the lake.”
“You and I both know that a man who’s got the means to build a wall like that probably ain’t got a lot of qualms about sending out a raiding party. You need me to spell it out for you? More than likely he’ll follow us. Now I don’t know about you, but I lived through the sky falling once. I got no plans to experience it again.”
Jessup took this in, annoyed, but nodded slowly. There was some truth to Terry’s words. He remembered one of the run-ins they’d had up north and farther inland. How long ago had that been? Three years? Four? Either way, they’d been on the water for what seemed like weeks. Jessup was certain that the trying times were likely over so they went ashore. It was by then more than two years after First Light and fairly well-known that whatever it was that had birthed the Serks was neither viral nor bacterial.
Rather, the consensus seemed to be that the Unraveling, whatever the cause, had triggered something hidden deep inside a certain segment of the population. Something unique in the brain structure, some genetic trigger that ripped apart the neural pathways and coaxed out a kind of unhinged violence that hadn’t been seen since the dawn of man.
Jessup had assuaged the others’ fears about infection and contamination and convinced them to go ashore to recon after the dawn peeled away the darkness. They’d found what had once been a small settlement.
A circuit of wooden fencing around hastily built homes that had recently been torched. The ones that did it were still there. Not Serks or any of the other monsters that lay in wait in the grassland. Ordinary-looking people who had murdered the settlers and were busy taking away parts of them to feast on later.
Jessup and the others were spotted and chased. A terrible, raging fight followed and, by the end, the combatants were down to using sticks and stones to kill each other after their weapons ran dry. They’d barely managed to make it back to the boat and were without any firepower for many days. After that, he’d learned to be more vigilant and collectively discuss and debate any decision that might impact the whole.
“We’ll need to vote on it,” Jessup sighed. “If you want to go out on another mission, I want everyone to listen and have a chance to comment and vote.”
Terry’s face brightened. “Absolutely, Jessup,” he said, “that’s all I’m askin’ for.”
49
The space where Marisol lay on a bare mattress was bereft of all but a few tatters of light that snuck down through gaps in the wooden ceiling boards. Elias sat there in the pitch dark, watching her chest rise and fall.
Without opening her eyes she said, “I know you’re there.”
“Jeez. Do I smell that bad?”
She grinned. “Kinda.”
He muttered under his breath and she smiled. “I was only kidding, Elias.”
He smiled back. “How you feeling?”
“Like I was hit really hard by a super small car.”
“Everybody was wondering how you were doing.”
She pointed to the ceiling. “Were you up there with them?”
He nodded. “Mostly just killing time. It was dumb up there. The others are old and weird and that one dude, the big guy, is a total psycho. Plus, there was nowhere else to go—”
“Well, we are on a boat,” she said.
“So I came here. Had no choice, really.”
Her eyes slowly flapped open and she searched his expression, but his face was as blank as it was when they escaped from the wall and even before, when she’d hunted him during Absolution. But most were like that now, she recognized. Zombified stares, raccoon eyes, like the masks worn by pioneers and survivors of wars and other hardship she’d seen in pictures from the years before the Unraveling. A thousand yard stare her father had called it. Elias wasn’t quite there yet. He had a five-hundred yard stare.
Still, there was something delicate about him that she hadn’t noticed before. Maybe it was the well-honed angles of his face that looked like they’d been shaped from stone, or the way his eyes never left her face. She hadn’t thought about it before, but he had nice eyes. Kind eyes even.
“She’s says you’ll be okay?” he asked.
She looked up at him. “Who?”
He glanced up. “The lady upstairs. The pretty one.”
“The one who fixed me up?”
“Think she’s like a medical person or something,” he said, nodding.
“I could feel her hand inside me,” Marisol said and Elias shuddered at the thought.
“Are we safe here?”
“It’s way better than out there,” he whispered.
“Are they coming, Elias? Do they know we’re here? Longman and the others?”
Elias thought about the drone, Longman’s all-seeing eye in the sky, and then, thinking that it might be unduly traumatic to mention it, simply shook his head. “One of ‘em said they came from somewhere on the other side of the lake. Some other town or city or something I think.”
“Would they take us with them?” she asked.
“You’d want to go?”
She thought about this for a minute, then said, “Would you?”
He didn’t know how to answer that as Marisol, feeling pressure in her bladder, elbowed herself up, arms betraying her as she slipped and nearly fell from the mattress as Elias lunged and, without thinking, reached out a hand and grabbed her wrist and held her.
Marisol looked like she might recoil for an instant, his hand on hers, then she let it be. They didn’t say anything, they just sat there because holding each other was somehow, weirdly reassuring.
“Thanks,” she s
aid.
“For what?”
“For everything,” she replied with a smile. “For helping me back there when I fell.”
He blushed and steadied her. “Don’t go making me regret it.”
“I need to get up now,” she whispered with a slight smile. “I have to pee.”
Moments later, after she’d relieved herself and returned to bed, Elias sat once again in a chair on the other side of the room watching her sleep. No longer thinking about diving overboard or running for cover, he thought only of what might lie ahead. And he knew, somehow deep down in the inner recesses of his mind, that he and Marisol shared an unspoken connection. They had been Ape and Runner in another life, hunter and prey, and that was a twisted bond that would probably never be severed. Wherever one of them might go in the future, the other would most likely follow. These thoughts settled in and were then interrupted by the sound of a whistle being blown overhead.
Up on the deck, Elias found Jessup and the others standing in swirling cones of light cast from a single bulb that dangled from a bare socket hooked to a solar battery. It was designed to cast off the perpetual twilight that came and went, but did little other than attract small insects that flurried the faces of Jessup, Terry, Liza, Ava, Riley, Bennie, Jon, Blake, and Harry, a motley group who stood in a ragged circle. They were discussing a plan of action and it appeared to revolve, in some way, around the cellphone that Elias had given to Terry.
Upon seeing Elias rise from the belly of the ship, a hushed silence filled the deck. Jessup stepped toward Elias and held up the phone. “Real talk time, kid. Is this yours?”
Elias nodded.
“Where’d you get it?”
“Some other kid.”
“What kinda kid?”
“A dead one.”
Ava and Riley exchanged looks and inched back, thinking that Elias was the one who
killed the previous owner of the phone.
Blood Runners: Box Set Page 22
