“Who?”
“A boy and girl. A pair of outlaws. Murderers. They did some very bad things here in the city and have to pay for them.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Liza said.
Longman cracked his knuckles and placed a hand on Liza’s knee and squeezed it until Liza thought the kneescap might burst.
“I think you want me to believe, really believe, that you don’t know what I’m talking about. But I’ve got evidence that says otherwise. Images that tell me that the truth is not in you, woman. Tell me, are you at all familiar with the doctrine of respondeat superior?”
Liza shook her head.
“It’s an ancient thing, a way of establishing liability and exposure. It means the master is responsible for the actions of the servant.”
Liza didn’t understand as Longman stood and stooped and whispered into her ear, “I think you took my wayward subjects in. The two of whom I speak. As such, you’re ultimately responsible for all that they’ve done. I’m going to give you an hour to think things over. If you continue to lie or endeavor to lead me astray I’ll have to do some things I’d rather not do. There’s something unique about what we’ve created here. This city, this new beginning, it’s collective. The ways of the old world, the rugged individual, the cowboy on the plains, those were part of the reasons that we failed before. But now, it’s all shared. We’re one big village, each a part of the whole. We share things here. Goods … even people. If you don’t tell me what I need to know I’ll be forced to remove my circle of protection, and then you and your friend will be cast down onto a floor in this building and shared with some very bad men who haven’t seen the likes of you in years. Death would be preferable to that.”
Liza’s lip trembled, but she fought to hold it steady as she gaped up at Longman.
“I heard someone say once that the soul is a well with a light at the bottom. The more evil you do, the deeper that well becomes, the harder it is to see the light,” Liza whispered.
“I like that,” Longman said, grinning. “But it’s based on the assumption that there was a light to begin with.”
She didn’t respond and then he flashed his teeth and said, “Know this: in my house we are one flesh. From this day forward, there is no more you. There is only me.”
Longman then reached out a finger and traced a symbol only he could see on her cheek before exiting the room. Her mind raced as she struggled to come up with some plan of action. But what could she do? Two women locked in a building surrounded by a madman and his army. On the surface they didn’t stand a chance. But their status also meant that there were possibilities. Men tended to let down their guard when their victims gave them little reason to keep it up. She’d need to come up with a plan.
Liza peered at Ava who had crawled deep inside herself. For all intents and purposes she was catatonic. Liza realized she was on her own.
68
There was no debating it this time. Marisol would lead the other men forward, the group largely retracing their steps for five or six miles and then veering off into the interior of the grasslands, headed toward the armaments vault. After some discussion of the pros and cons, they decided to camouflage and stash the metal briefcase under a depression that had formed at the edge of a charred post-office truck just in case they were ambushed. They wanted to make sure that if anything happened, somebody might have a chance to circle back and retrieve it.
Turning to the east, they fanned out, making excellent time into the grasslands and past coils of water left by storms in sinkholes that were once slathered in blacktop.
They sidestepped a small menagerie of bones, bodies lying where they had fallen next to circles and cairns where the remnants of cremation fires still zebra-striped the ground. They paused here and then Marisol motioned with her eyes, and they advanced at a more rapid clip moving past abandoned subdivisions, vinyl-sided Colonials and Capes, Terry shaking his head, muttering “plastic houses” as they swept up an embankment.
Marisol led them up a steep acclivity and over a summit capped by thin woods. She stopped on the spur of the rise and looked down. The land before her was completely shrouded in woods or vegetation except for a natural valley that was devoid of anything. It had been hollowed into a bowl. And in the bowl were what looked like remains. Human remains. The remnants of something out of an earlier century when wholesale killing and genocide were common practice.
Marisol gasped, thinking back to her nightmare when she was sleeping in the barracks, the one where she was alone and confronting a swarm of monsters at the bottom of a depression filled with bones. She skidded down the reverse of the rise, all of the colors before her desaturated, as if the world’s life essence had instantaneously dribbled away.
Churning with unceasing motion, Marisol left the others well behind. She ignored the dull pain she still felt from her wound, hurtled over fallen trees and stutter-stepped past sinkholes and streams. Soon she was standing on the edge of the killing fields.
Jessup brought up the rear, shocked when he saw the sheer scope of what lay before him. This was like something out of the past. The Nazis. Rwanda. Cambodia. Hundreds, thousands of bleached bodies lay in great heaps. He stood still, and it came slowly upon him that these were no victims of plague or infection. Most of the bodies bore signs of trauma. Bullet holes in shattered skulls, raggedly hacked limbs, ribs that bore the telltale signs of guttings or stabbings.
Marisol heard Elias calling for her, but she was too far down to turn back. She planted her heels and skidded down the sandy slope and moved through the bodies, focusing on something that shimmered out in the distance. She dashed between the rows of the fallen, tumbling, rising and continuing on. She crept through the haunted landscape and dropped to her knees in front of the skeletal corpses.
She’d always thought that time heals all wounds, and those things which are out of sight are out of mind. Marisol had been true-blue to those maxims for as long as she’d been in New Chicago. She’d shoved aside the bad thoughts associated with her family. But now those nightmares were reality once again. All the pain, all the bad thoughts came rushing back as scarlet slapped her cheeks and she gasped for air and looked down.
The corpses lay in front of her where Longman and his men had murdered them. Scraps of material still clung to bone, drab fabric with just the faintest hint of the color red. The same color, the same insignia worn by those who had fought for Longman so long ago.
Her quaking hands reached down and she saw the rusted loops of metal still hanging where wrists had once been. These were them. Her father and brother. She bit back a sob and knew immediately after examining the backs of their skulls and legs what had happened. They hadn’t died in battle. They’d been bound and shot in the back of the head, execution-style, and kicked down into this hole of alienation, of that she was certain. For an instant, her heart sank and she wondered what their last moments were like. Were they in pain? Were they scared? Did they cry out for mercy only to be bludgeoned and shot down like dogs?
A passage from the Bible flashed in her mind, something her mother used to say. That where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Her treasure was gone and her heart was broken, all because of the man who pulled the strings behind his fortified wall. He couldn’t be permitted to get away with it. She would find a way to make Longman pay for what he’d done.
She undid the metal loops and placed them around her own wrist and kissed a finger and touched both bodies before turning and looking up at the lip of the hole where the others were waiting.
“You okay?” Elias asked.
She shook her head, barely able to stand or breathe. He reached for her and she drew back. “I just – do you need anything?”
“No,” she replied while walking up the slope. “Everything I need is already gone.”
She took a step to move past him, and he caught her wrist.
“What was down there?” he asked.
She hesitated for
a beat, and then a shadow passed over her face and, for an instant, Elias was frightened. Marisol looked like she was capable of almost anything. The world had gone red for her.
“Everything I ever had,” she said. “My father and brother. They were back there.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be. The time for being sorry is over.”
And with that she marched up and past the others, without saying a word, and then set out on point once again. Elias paused, looking back down at the bottom of the pit, remembering that the past had a variety of ways to make an entrance in the new times. He lingered for a moment, and thinking it the prudent thing to do, he took video and still photographic evidence of the killing pit with the phone and then hustled after the others who were climbing over a series of metal rods used to hold in place a row of locust fencing.
They decided to keep moving, exiting the grasslands and sliding between the sorry-looking chaos of old Chicago, past forests of forgotten buildings and tenements. They followed a natural trail of packed earth that Elias thought they could make excellent time over if only they had a driving machine of some kind.
They continued on their journey, hiking past crashed passenger planes (the circuitry having been fried during the Unraveling, many planes simply dropped from the sky), and packs of wild dogs that were fighting over human remains tugged from the middle of mass, open graves.
Elias stopped for an instant and stared at two filthy children with sooty faces who were standing in the middle of an alley. The children appeared to be holding the charred remains of a corpse. Elias blinked, and when he looked back, the children were gone.
Marisol moved faster than any of them, trying to remain focused, resigned to the fact that if happiness was a sanctuary from pain, she would never be happy again. Not until the whole thing played out and her pain was soothed. Not until Longman had been made to pay for what he’d done.
Terry and the others gave Marisol her space, reading the sorrow in her hooded eyes. Terry in particular studied Marisol and marveled at how a girl barely out of her teens was running point for them. Something crunched under Terry’s boots, and he stopped at the rim of what was once a kid’s store. Bending, he fished an old rotten baby rattle out of the ground debris. He held it up in the haze and shook it once and the rattle brought back memories of his own son.
Terry’s boy Jake was just fourteen months old when the end came. In the weeks after the Unraveling, Big Army had used up the last stores of fuel to recall troops from around the globe in an effort to circle the wagons domestically. Terry was part of the recall, ostensibly on leave, heading back to South Dakota from some new war in an old part of the world to be reunited with his son and girlfriend. He wasn’t married to Jake’s mother, and that didn’t sit well with her parents who were members of an end-times church called “Wide Wonder Religious World” (which sounded less like a church and more like an amusement park to Terry).
Convinced the Unraveling was the Second Coming, they’d abandoned the damned (Terry and his girlfriend) and kidnapped Jake and headed toward Minot, North Dakota, which they believed was destined to be a new Canaan where all of the true believers would be plucked up into the sky.
The world was going to hell by that point, kidnappings and thievery and all manner of crime commonplace. There were, what seemed like, a million Amber Alerts a day, so Terry’s pleas for assistance from local law enforcement fell on deaf ears. He received word of the whereabouts of the grandparents from a former church member who’d had the good sense to bolt when the Rapture fizzled out. He found his son’s grandparents in an RV park that they’d fortified. When a rag-tag group of locals moved to flush them out, a firefight ensued and many died.
Terry was in the middle of it when he found the grandparents. Clutching compound bows and hand-made knives, readying for a last stand around a cluster of propane tanks. Rather than turn the child over to Terry (a blasphemer destined for the Lake of Fire they’d often said), they killed the boy. Just snuffed out his little life with a roll of towels that they pressed over his mouth as Terry fought his way through a hail of arrows.
As a parent, Terry had one job to do. Just one. Keep his little boy safe. He’d fucked up, he’d let him down and when Jake had passed on, a part of Terry was ripped away forever. His temples throbbed and his breathing was labored, which is why he didn’t really like to think about Jake anymore. He kept a tiny, plastic zippered bag, however, in his right front pocket. Inside was a lock of Jake’s hair and twice a year he’d open the bag and inhale. Just one sniff, ultra quick, so that the smell didn’t entirely dissipate. It was something, a balm for the sometimes crippling guilt he felt over the death of his son. The scent of his hair was sweet (“the fragrance of innocence” his mother had said), an odor that only a young child possesses. He fought off a sob and cracked his knuckles and dropped the rattle that fractured into a hundred pieces. It was so goddamn hard to let go.
Tears stung Terry’s eyes as he bunched his fists and hustled forward, climbing with the others between the ribs of a smashed skyscraper. That’s when they spotted it in the distance. A spit of land out beyond the Chicago River that was once called Goose Island.
The group collectively moved beside sagging signs for the Avenues, Chicago and North, both leveled along with Division Street at some juncture in the past. Farther they went, past hunks of upturned concrete and road asphalt that looked as if some great creature had punched its way up from the bowels of the Earth. Creeping closer, they noted the only things connecting their present position to the island: two steel girders and a fraying section of metal dangling between them. The remnants of an old swing bridge that curved out over to the island like a rusted frown.
Marisol roved up onto a natural promontory, a great platform of exposed stone that loomed over the nearest edge of the swing bridge. She bit back a scream. The channel, a dredged trench on the east side of the island that had long since dried up, was filled with innumerable bodies in various states of decay. A veritable carpet of corpses.
She looked down at the ghastly sight and an image of her brother and father flashed before her. She looked up. Looked ahead. Didn’t even hear the others calling for her to wait as she dropped down onto the swing bridge and shuttled toward the island.
Goose bumps ridged the skin on Jessup’s arms as he surveyed the channel and island.
It wasn’t the bodies that spooked him the most.
It was the absence of anything else.
With the dismantling of society the animal population had boomed. Birds especially. Great flocks now blackened the skies. But here there was nothing. No chirps or flutters of wings. Not even a friggin’ insect or peeper.
“So what’s the plan?” Terry asked.
Jessup pointed to Marisol who was walking like a tightrope artist across the bridge.
“There’s something … off,” Jon said.
“This whole goddamn place is off, Jonny,” Terry said.
“What I’m saying,” Jon continued, “is if things get hairy, there’s only one way in and one way out. No backup, nobody watching our ass to close the door.”
“So do something about it,” Jessup replied, pointing to the bridge.
Bennie and Jon swapped glances and removed several small explosive devices from a rucksack. They fixed these at strategic spots on the bridge and then connected them with det cord hooked to a leader that fed to a small plunger they concealed at the other end of the bridge, near the spot they’d just walked over.
While the olders were busy chatting behind him, Elias followed Marisol out onto the bridge. He was not particularly enamored of heights and, even though it was only eight or nine feet down to the first layer of bodies, he had to steady himself. He grabbed hold of the girder, his line of sight forced down. For an instant he thought he saw movement amidst the bodies. An eye rolling. A tongue lolling. A final, spastic limb jigger. He blinked and when he looked back, there was no movement at all. Secure in this, he placed o
ne foot in front of the other and strode forward.
The path ahead was precarious, a narrow band of rusted metal, little more than a steel gangplank over the fetid trench. Marisol reached out and grabbed hold of the ragged girder to steady herself and nicked a finger on an exposed metal barb.
She yelped and Elias reached out a rag and wrapped it around her finger.
“I’m really sorry.”
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“I meant about back there.”
“Didn’t you hear—”
“I heard you,” he said, cutting her off. “Just wanted you to know I had the same thing happen to me. My mom, my dad, my whole family. It sucks big time. I felt the same thing, I know all about it.”
She wrapped the rag tightly and continued on, silent for several steps.
“When did it happen?” she whispered to him.
“Remember when those government people came on the radio and said there weren’t gonna be no more police and soldiers. Remember when they told everyone they were on their own?”
She nodded as the rag splotched red.
“It was maybe two, three months after that,” he continued. “We tried to escape and got run off the road by this bunch of hoods and they came for us and … my dad and mom, they didn’t go down easy.”
“Do you miss them?” she asked.
He nodded, “Only every day of my life. But I know that if my old man was around and I decided to give up, he’d chap my ass.”
The slightest of smiles on her lips and then she said, “So would mine.”
“Two sides of the same coin,” Elias replied.
The two continued on. They didn’t notice the single droplet of blood from the rag around Marisol’s finger that dangled and fell. Straight down. Nine feet. Making a barely audible PING! as it smacked against the forehead of a dead child with scooped out cheeks.
Blood Runners: Box Set Page 29
