The rivulet of red held for a moment and then slipped across the spot where the child’s nose once was and fell once again into a space that could not be seen from up on the bridge. A chasm, a channel that looked as if it had been carved through the bodies with a set of oversized teeth. Things grunted, hissed, and lurched around down in the darkness here. Reacting to the corpuscle of blood.
69
The others moved with Marisol across the swing bridge, guided by the maps on the cellphone. They exited the bridge onto the island which was 160 acres of raw scrub, alligator grass, and juvenile trees.
They slogged through a woodlot and past rows of burned out houses and buildings. Marisol noted the berms of earth and fill material that formed barriers on one side of the island. The entire space was man-made, having been formed out of dredged clay hundreds of years before.
In the early days of the island, squatter communities had sprouted up, small clots of farmers who grew cabbages and potatoes. Industry moved in after that, large commercial concerns whose fires lit up the night sky, causing the locals to label the area, “Little Hell.”
Marisol headed past great swaths of fallen trees and the remnants of industry, from a more recent time, right before the sky fell, when the island was designated a Planned Manufacturing District.
Elias watched Marisol stop on the remnants of a charcoal pyre and hold up a fist. She pointed to the ground, to what looked like congealed blood and other bodily fluids staining the soil like crimson tributaries. Next to this were pools of blood speckled with fat and gristle and bloody prints, spreading off in a dozen directions. The Thresher were close. She could feel them.
Marisol dropped low and advanced over a rise, listening to the soft beep of the cellphone behind her, signaling that they were nearing their destination.
Marisol inched over the other side of the rise and then dropped to her stomach. The others did likewise, Elias on the ground, elbowing up toward her. They both looked out and saw it.
The scattered remains of some abandoned government complex hidden in the middle of the island. A fallen metal fence, a few curls of asphalt separating squat buildings of glass and gun-metal office blocks that had largely been ripped down and shattered and hidden behind a field of seven-foot grass. But out beyond this, at the base of a thickly-vegetated slope, rose what looked like a ziggurat in the jungle. A squat, camouflaged monstrosity of cement and reinforced steel that was just coming under siege by time and geology. The vault. Jessup smiled to himself when he saw it, chuckling at the fact that the government had hidden their stash of goodies damn near in plain sight. Right in the middle of the city!
The vault was sloped, with a low dome in the middle, strangled in creepers and overgrown shrubs, perched on the side of a slope. In another fifty years it would all slough off down the hillside and vanish from sight as if it had never been there. But there was one problem. The sun had vanished behind its heavenly veil as it had done in the centuries before when the sky was filled with coal-smoke. There was little if any organic light which meant the Thresher had made an early appearance. There was a whole herd of them out in the distance. Maybe two-hundred strong, less than a quarter mile away, outside the perimeter of the vault, stumbling in post-traumatic euphoria.
They all moved back down the reverse of the ridgeline and huddled out of sight and smell of the Thresher.
Bennie and Jon immediately wondered whether it might be better to head back to the boat, but Jessup was opposed to that option.
“There’s no time,” he said, “we’ve got to find a way to draw the Serks off and then hit that vault head on.”
“I’ll go,” Terry said. “I’ll take what we’ve got and make a helluva ruckus and then someone can run right through the bastards.”
Jessup nodded at this, “So who’s the main attraction?”
“You should go, J.,” Bennie said. “You should hit the vault with me and Jon.”
Jessup considered this and then turned his attention to Elias and Marisol. He’d never noticed it before about the two kids, but there was an intelligence and daring in their eyes that made them seem much older than their years.
“I’m … we’re too old and too slow,” he said with a knowing glance to the youngsters.
“So what then?” Jon asked.
“So we’ll go,” Marisol replied while pointing at Elias who nodded and continued, “You clear the way and we’ll go ahead and scout it out.”
“And if there’s a problem?”
“We’re too fast for problems,” Elias said, bringing a smile to the others’ tight faces.
“And besides,” Moses offered, “I’ll be out there with them.”
Elias caught a knowing look from Moses, secure in the knowledge that the man who’d trained the best Runners there had ever been would be fighting at his side.
Using hand gestures and drawings in the dirt, it was quickly decided that Jessup and Terry would swing left, Jon and Bennie to the right, making sufficient noise to attract and draw the Thresher away from the vicinity of the vault, allowing Elias and Marisol time to dash right through the soft middle; through the maze of grass that separated their present position from the vault. They would get to the vault first and open it, or find a way in. Even if nothing of value was hidden inside, the vault looked solid, and would provide ample cover until the others arrived. It was a calculated risk, but taking a risk was often the difference between success and failure.
Terry, Bennie, and Jon duck-ran to their starting points as Jessup stayed behind with Elias, Marisol and Moses.
Elias watched Jessup secure his gear for an instant, taking in his weathered face, his powerful frame. Elias wasn’t sure that he cared all that much for Jessup, but for some reason the big man threw off a strong fatherly vibe. Close up, Elias smelled the hint of what might be tobacco tinged with sweet sweat and it instantly brought back memories of his own father, his real father.
“Last chance,” Jessup said to the three of them. “Nobody says you gotta go dance with the Serks.”
“But we’re the only ones who can,” Marisol offered.
Elias nodded and said “I faced worse.”
“When?”
Elias nodded in Marisol’s direction. “When she was hunting me.”
Jessup wanted to continue the conversation, wanted to make sure these neophytes were absolutely certain what they were getting into, but then he looked at the two and saw that the muscles in their faces had gone slack and their pupils were as flat as slate. He could tell they were reaching inside. Preparing. Climbing down into their respective “zones,” readying for the bad things that were about to happen. He’d seen it before in others. Back in the service. This boy and girl were like those he’d encountered before. They had the intestinal fortitude of Specops warriors.
“Remember,” he said to them, “What’s out there ain’t human anymore so do not lose a beat. Do not fret. Those things, they’re all impulse, they’re … hunger. Do not hesitate to dispatch.”
They nodded and then Jessup helped them to lighten their load. He discarded all the non-essential items Elias and Marisol had been carrying save what they would actually need.
Gone were the small shovel and axe that Elias had, the canteen and flashlight that Marisol was humping. He laid pistols on the grounds (with home-made silencers made of rolled aluminum fitted crudely to the barrels), along with extender mags of ammo that had been taped together, long-bladed slashing knives and a set of shortened bolt-cutters with newly sharpened carbide teeth that had proven useful dozens of times in the past. Moses picked up a machine-pistol with a flash suppressor and a set of brass-knuckles, and then they were ready to roll.
Jessup placed his hands on their shoulders and left them with these parting words. “If anything goes wrong, if you can’t make it, you circle back around and come here and we’ll find you. Okay?”
They nodded and broke their mini-huddle and headed up as the group disbursed and headed over the ridgeline.
As they went, Elias and Marisol moved nearly as one, on their hands and knees initially as they crested the rise and took in all that lay before them. They stopped and surveyed the path ahead, the position of the Thresher. Elias could see that Marisol appeared to be in some kind of trance. She had her head tilted, nose lifted up to the wind, breathing deeply. She grabbed a handful of grass and flung it up and watched it fall in order to determine the angle of the breeze. Marisol’s senses were on overload. She could hear the high-pitched chittering of insects, the soft plodding and muted grunts of the Thresher, the slap of the grass down in the maze as the blades brushed against each other.
“What do you think?” Elias asked.
Marisol instinctively glanced at Moses who nodded. “Your call, young lady.”
She turned and drew a straight line in the ground.
“We move on my signal, we move fast, we move right through the middle and don’t stop for anything.”
He nodded and whispered, “There are two-hundred steps between us and the vault.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“I’m good at figuring out stuff like that. I was a Runner before, remember?”
He put out a hand and she placed her fingers on it and a moment passed between them, before they began to creep forward.
They advanced swiftly, Moses bringing up the rear, Elias standing next to Marisol, whispering, “Hey, Marisol,” as she looked over, “Try and keep up.”
She smiled and hunched and so did he and Moses, the trio shifting their weight to the heels of their feet like sprinters, and then they waited for the other men to do their jobs.
Jessup and the others split and tumbled down the ridgeline and took up positions a few thousand yards away from the Thresher. Jessup and Terry were loaded down with weapons and gear and moved slowly. Jessup was burdened with his blowtorch, Terry the battery-charger.
Bennie and Jon maneuvered their piping around and readied to fire pockets of partially masticated, rotting fish. Jon’s gun fired true, but Bennie’s jammed and he could find no good way to get it to work.
“Figures, huh?” he said to Jon who nodded.
“We’ll have to improvise.”
“Which means what?”
“Which means follow me!”
Jon stood and ducked to the left and hopped up onto a stone farmer’s fence that separated what had once been a farm on the other side of the island and waved his arms and shrieked.
The Thresher immediately spotted him and reacted and a chill sashayed up Jon’s spinal column when he realized just how many of the monsters there were.
Jessup and Terry saw this and dropped their tubing and followed Jon’s lead, making as much sound as possible before running for cover.
Up on their hillside nook, Marisol, Elias, and Moses watched this, saw the Thresher stream out after both groups, and then they rose and shot down the reverse of the ridgeline.
They bolted down and into the grassland like quarter horses, adrenaline quickening their breath, shoulders squared, arms tucked into their torsos to maximize speed. Moses was shocked at how fast the two were. He’d been a competitive sprinter back in the day, but these two would’ve definitely challenged him in his prime.
The three encountered only two errant Thresher that were quickly dispatched with knife thrusts on the run, the trio passing the bullet-starred doors and walls of the government buildings, peripherally eying a few remaining Thresher who roamed an old ghost-road outside the wire, like ushers at a sporting arena.
Jessup and Terry ran for their lives. They could hear the grunts of the beasts, could see the vacant, fathomless eyes of the Thresher as they chased them through the field of rotting cow corn, tripping in the soft soil which still bore traces of tillage. Here and there Jessup and Terry stopped to catch their breath and fire out a few rounds. They barely made a dent in the horde as they continued through a rotting orchard. Jessup donned his mask, then Terry helped him fire up his blowtorch as he set fire to apple trees and scorched a half dozen monsters before his torch tank ran dry.
Discarding his torch, Jessup and Terry headed over a stone fence toward an old farmstead visible amidst a deadfall of cut timber that stood like a sentry at the edge of the fallow field.
Jon and Bennie formed a firing line near the carcass of a FEMA truck, using it as cover as they blasted the Thresher pack. The barrels of their machine-pistols began to steam as they fired out their magazines at the monsters that rampaged toward them like wolfhounds. They continued to strafe the hordes, emptying their mags, re-loading, strafing again.
One of the things, rangy, domed, mouth distended like a dump-truck, made it past the wall of lead as Bennie removed a long blade and slashed the beast’s neck open, a mixture of blood and bile foaming in great, billowing clots from the wound.
“There’s too many!” Jon screamed. “Back. GET BACK!”
Bennie worked to remove his blade from the fallen Thresher, failing to notice another that leaped and tackled him. Jon tried to get a clean shot, but forty more of the things zeroed in on him as he emptied out his gun. Bennie, by this time, appeared to be covered in a dervish of snarling teeth and flailing limbs and talon-like claws.
Jon lost sight of Bennie and thinking the end had come for him, dipped into a bower of honeysuckle, tumbling down a rain-washed gully, reloading, praying the monsters didn’t follow, fighting to make his way to the rendezvous spot.
Elias, Marisol, and Moses were less than a football field away from the vault when the grass out ahead of them rippled with movement. They merged onto a trail flattened by the Thresher and were immediately confronted by a line of the things as they zoomed from out of nowhere, forcing Elias and Marisol to stop and stand their ground. Elias shot the first Thresher he saw through the temple, sending it crashing back into its comrades as Marisol two-handed her pistol, dropping Thresher left and right, re-magging, continuing to fire.
“Run!” she screamed at Elias.
“WHERE?!”
“RIGHT AT THEM!” she shrieked.
Elias was amazed when she took off on a dead run, spinning forward seemingly in slow-motion, headed directly at the remaining dozen Thresher. Elias remembered someone telling him that when it came to danger, men were more hormonal than women. That is, he’d heard that females only produced ten percent of the hormone that made men prone to taking risks and quick to anger. It was this deficiency that enabled women to make better decisions under pressure.
Amazed at her moves, he followed as she blazed ahead with her gun, Marisol “seeing the field” like an NFL quarterback, able to make expertly timed adjustments at the last second that enabled the trio to take the best routes forward.
She gutshot another Thresher, planting her boots on its opened stomach, using the momentum to launch forward, firing out her pistol, shooting off digits and noses and carving out trenches where eyes and mouths once were. Elias kept up, killing the ones she missed, bringing around the bolt-cutters when his ammo ran low, cleaving off the jaw of another Thresher as Moses scatter-shot with his machine-pistol, finishing off the final Thresher before they could counterattack.
Elias took a knee to catch his breath as a breeze looped through the maze of grass. They had dispatched all of the attacking Thresher, the last one wounded, lying on its back, its filthy claws pawing the air as Marisol stomped its skull into a mass of jellied gore.
She barely hesitated, grabbing the bolt-cutters from Elias before turning and running toward the vault whose exterior was virtually featureless.
“Oh, no,” Elias heard her exclaim.
“What!?”
She spun to a stop and looked back at him and Moses. “There’s no way in!”
Before Elias could respond, Marisol took a step and the ground opened up beneath her. Next, she disappeared from sight before she could even scream.
70
Jessup’s and Terry’s faces were flushed from exertion as they hurdled stacks of cut wood and shouldered open a wooden door at the r
ear of a barn attached to the farmstead. They were severely outnumbered and running low on ammo. The pair quickly slammed the wooden door shut, securing it with a rotting 4x4 post. Jessup traded looks with Terry whose chest was heaving.
“Jesus. You are seriously out of shape,” Jessup said, mustering a nervous smile.
Terry caught his breath and stared down at his midsection. “You body shaming me?”
“Just saying you’re a little plump.”
“Well marbled,” Terry replied with a half smile.
They stood silently, heads pressed against the barn’s wooden door. The Thresher commenced pounding on what sounded like every square inch of the outer walls as Jessup and Terry compared notes. They had five magazines left, not enough to take down the demonic crowd that waited outside. Jessup saw a wooden ladder that led to a bailing loft, but that wasn’t a viable answer. Even if they took refuge up there, the Thresher would eventually force their way in and then it would be a waiting game.
They turned to see what else lay inside the barn. Bails of rotting hay and pigweed, a few farming utensils, signage, a calendar with half-naked chicks dressed up like farmer’s daughters and a series of rusted pieces of machinery.
Terry and Jessup scanned the machinery, flipping and depressing levers and clutches and turning ignition keys where they could find them. Nothing. Not one of the machines turned over or showed the slightest hint of life. Terry cursed, forehead pebbled with sweat as he watched the barn boards bend and sway from the furious fist blows of the Thresher. His line of sight fell to the ground and that’s when he saw it. A thin black slick of what appeared to be oil. Coming from under a wall of bailed hay.
Terry leaped toward the hay and grabbed and pulled down the bails to see a space hidden from view. And in the space was a huge object hidden under an oversized tarp. Terry looked back to see Jessup gazing at the tarp.
“Gimme a hand, boss” Terry said, Jessup watching as he moved to whatever it was hidden underneath.
Blood Runners: Box Set Page 30
