Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  Jessup grabbed one side of the tarp, Terry the other, the men gritting teeth, pulling the tarp as it snapped free to reveal a monstrous metal machine that glimmered under a shaft of beatific half-light that eased in through a gapped plank in the barn’s roof. What appeared to be the bastard spawn of an armored car and a farm combine sat there waiting.

  “Holy God,” Terry muttered, momentarily unfazed by the thrashing of the Thresher as they tried to force their way in.

  “Will you take a look at this puppy. It’s a piece of technological divinity,” Terry continued, bunching a fist, tapping on the underside of the machine, listening to a dull thud near the fuel reservoir which indicated that the big machine’s tank was damn near full.

  “It’s called a ‘Feller.’” Jessup responded, “A tree feller buncher combo. I saw one like it once on my uncle’s farm and another on a TV show about these people who cut down logs in a swamp.”

  Terry nodded, remembering the stacks of wood outside. He rubbed his hands over the lacquered exterior filled with numbers and stenciled words and a metal ladder grafted to the stern of the machine that led up to a raised cockpit and controller’s booth. He bent and saw that the black slick was actually from an undermounted overflow valve, the remnant of some change of machine oil in the past.

  He stood and took in the full scope of the Feller. Stretching out from the sides of the machine were lengths of ruggedized piping that fed two metal arms. On one arm was a colossal pincher, a steel buncher that could be manipulated by controller gyroscopes to pick up large pieces of timber. On the other arm dangled the largest circular blade Terry and Jessup had ever seen before. As big and shiny as the hood on an SUV. Jessup reached up and touched the edge of the blade which was still wickedly sharp.

  Terry scampered up the ladder and nearly fell into the controller’s booth, hooted and lifted up his hand, from which dangled a set of keys. He leaned over the lip of the booth and peered down at Jessup who stood beside his battery charger.

  “You got a plan?” Jessup asked.

  Terry nodded. “Don’t I always?”

  “Rarely.”

  “Okay, well, have I ever let you down?”

  “Constantly.”

  Terry frowned. “Just get ready to climb aboard when I crank this mother up. Cause we are about to bring the noise, J.”

  71

  Elias stood, rooted in place for a long beat before he realized Marisol was gone. The world seem to flash past as he yelled and ran forward and dove to the edge of what he could see now was a camouflaged Thresher duck-hole. Elias peered down over his slippery perch and scrutinized the darkness that lay below. He could see a form maybe twelve feet down and then he heard Marisol’s muted voice as she called out for help. Moses took a knee beside Elias and looked back, machine-pistol at the ready.

  “What’s the good word, El?” asked Moses in a worried voice.

  Elias looked over, his eyes dancing in their sockets. “I’m going down after her.”

  “How you gonna get back up, troop?” Moses asked.

  Elias measured the distance to Marisol, his mind racing.

  “I’ll drop down five feet, grab her, and you’ll pull us up.”

  “Asking a lot of me, kid,” Moses replied.

  “You got a better idea?” Elias asked.

  Moses didn’t respond as Elias punched his hand into the ground and wedged his body into the hole. The earthen walls nearly collapsed as Elias planted a boot in a depression on the side of the hole. A natural foot-hold. He slid down the sloping face a few feet and spotted Marisol’s face for the first time. “Hurry” she whispered, “there’s something else down here.”

  Several thousand yards away, Jon lay on his stomach, listening to the symphony of insects as they emerged for the coming night. He watched a solitary Thresher, a tall, stalk of a once-upon-a-time man with a half-head of hair, sniff and root a thousand yards away from his hiding spot. He could easily take the man down with a single shot, but to do so would invite the wrath of the others that were undoubtedly hiding, just out of eyesight. Alone, outnumbered and down to his last magazine of ammo, Jon said a silent prayer and then plucked a round out of his spare magazine. A gift for himself if things got really bad.

  Seven feet below Elias, Marisol was staring at a miasma of bones and strings of dried ligature and scraps of baked entrails that littered the ground. She’d caught a glimpse of this horror show on the way down, right before the stench hit her.

  A full-throated, primordial funk that nearly peeled her nose back. This was it, she realized. The place where the Thresher lived, where they brought their kills to devour. She looked up at Elias dangling above her, clutching one side of the hole while angling another hand down. She jumped and missed his hands by inches, then planted a boot on a ledge and moved upward when the sounds boomed underneath.

  She looked down and the face of a Thresher leered back from a bottom side hole. The thing’s mouth pulled open, teeth painted red, ready to savor her warm insides as Elias grabbed her wrist and pulled her up, Marisol struggling, swinging her boots.

  She twirled like a marionette as the beast emerged below her from the muck. Marisol bit back a scream when she saw it moving toward her. Hands in the walls, pawing the earth, tongue lolling over shark-like teeth as Marisol urged Elias to hurry.

  Closer now.

  The Thresher below moved like a spider, grinning, making piggy sounds as it zeroed in on Marisol’s heat-source.

  The hole was in full shadow, Elias clutching Marisol’s wrist as dollops of dirt dribbled down, stinging her forehead and eyes.

  At the rim of the hole Moses watched the two struggle. He leaned himself down and grabbed Elias’s wrist, the trio forming a daisy chain as each pulled the other up. More and more Thresher spewed out below Marisol, planting hands against the dirt walls, forcing themselves up. Moses roared in pain and planted his feet and bucked back, dragging Elias up at the instant that the closest Thresher jumped and barely missed Marisol who torqued back and was tugged up by Elias and Moses until the three were lying on the ground as the Thresher continued to climb up out of the hole.

  Pure misery lay in Marisol’s eyes as she reconned the exterior of the vault, looking for any way in as Moses and Elias shot down the remaining Thresher who were emerging from the hole. Discerning no means of ingress, she turned to Elias and Moses who were reloading, looking over their shoulders, expecting another attack at any moment.

  “There’s got to be some way into this damn thing,” Moses said.

  He spotted a single piece of piping rising out of the concrete dome and waved for the others to follow as the sun set in the haze overhead, the landscape turning sepia with the fast-approaching dusk.

  Moses hacked his way through stands of bull-briars and vines, searching the outside of the vault in the spectral light. He emerged from the undergrowth and continued in a lope around the backside of the vault where he knelt and fixed his eyes on piece of conduit hidden in a frieze of stone and landscaping. A fresh air pipe! A way in!

  “There!” he said, pointing to Elias and Marisol. “Right over there! Yeah, baby, yeah!” he bellowed with delight.

  The three highfooted it over and examined the conduit and found a section of strong mesh that encircled a six-inch pipe rising out of the ground. The mesh was secured in place by several stout padlocks that Elias and Marisol quickly went to work on with the bolt-cutters.

  A host of sounds, garbled and indistinct, and punctuated by repeated howls and yammering echoed out in the woodlands and grass. Moses knew that more Thresher were on their way. How long? Minutes? Seconds?!

  He saw the first head bob out of a gap where the branches of young trees were bowered low. The face of what had once been a woman. Now contorted in anguish and anger.

  “C’mon!” Moses yelled, “They’re coming!”

  Elias and Marisol were working as fast as they could, but the padlocks were military-grade and not easily cut.

  They managed to snap the f
irst two before Moses tried opening fire on them with his machine-pistol, Elias grunting, taking over from Marisol, fighting to cut the last bullet-starred lock. With one final heave, Elias cut the last lock and Marisol grabbed the mesh and pulled it up to reveal a gap big enough to fit a person.

  She dropped inside as Elias screamed for Moses who followed him and Geronimoed down into the space that resembled a gallows trapdoor before cutting down the remaining Thresher and fitting the mesh back into place.

  Marisol crawled headlong down into the gap below the vault, Elias, and Moses on her heels. The first few feet were outer-space dark, the ground soggy, tanged with a wretched smell that assaulted their noses. Marisol kept her head up, not wanting to see exactly what it was that they were crawling through. At one point, something slimy and long and thin crawled over her hands and she had to fight the urge to shriek at the top of her lungs.

  The three raced through the unseen space below the vault at breakneck speed. On more than one occasion Moses glanced backward and saw what he thought were eyes gleaming in the semi-darkness like sniper dots. He swallowed hard and fought off the images and continued on after the kids as they worked their way forward.

  Back outside, Jon, without much contemplation, rose from his hiding spot at the sound of Moses’s gunfire. To his sheer and utter amazement, the guns’ reports were close. He looked in every direction, momentarily disoriented, then remembered the once-upon-a-time man, the Thresher who was running full-bore, bearing down on him. Jon didn’t even have a chance to get off a shot as the thing rammed headfirst into his solar plexus. The wind was knocked out of him as he rolled over, staggered, fists balled up. The nightmare charged like a bull and Jon pulled back his fist and balanced his weight, bringing down the Thresher with a flurry of fist-blows before finishing it off with a meaty punt to the head.

  He pulled his brain-goo-soaked boot from the creature’s dented skull, readying his gun when he heard it. The noise of an engine thrumming in the distance. What the hell?! Thinking it highly unlikely that his attackers had mastered the ability to drive a machine, Jon sprinted off, following the roar of the engine.

  Marisol, Elias, and Moses met a section of grating below signage that screamed “Authorized Personnel Only!” They smashed through the grating and found themselves in the squat, drab tail-end of the vault.

  Elias’s eyes narrowed to slits as he moved through a rear room that had been ransacked. The others followed through a half-open steel door and out onto a bullpen where several decomposing bodies lay. Hands reflexively covered mouths to ward off the stink of rotting flesh, Marisol noting handguns next to the bodies. The three people, whatever they had once been, killed each other in what was most likely a suicide pact. She also spotted a security keycard still looped around a bloated finger and snatched it up as Elias yelled “Over here!”

  On the other side of the room was an oversized, blast-proof door fixed with a dormant security scanner.

  “Shit!” Moses shrieked. “That thing runs on juice! We need power to open it!”

  Elias and Moses looked for something, anything, to use to open the door as Marisol silently lifted her keycard and placed it under the scanner. It fit perfectly. All she needed was some electricity to open the damn thing.

  A few feet away Moses spotted a glassed emergency handle. He wrapped his right fist in his shirt and smashed it. Reaching his hand up he grabbed a metal handhold that was painted red and traded looks with the kids, then he tugged the handhold down as WONK! a back-up generator fired to life, red lights flashed and monitors hummed alive and security sirens wailed. Marisol’s blood froze. She realized immediately that the sound of the sirens would draw anything and everything directly to them.

  In a flash she juked sideways and placed her keycard to the security scanner as the blast-proof door rocketed up to reveal a sight that was beyond her wildest dreams.

  Marisol, Elias, and Moses looked down on a formerly secure, sunken space, cemented on all sides, that resembled Santa’s workshop by way of a SWAT armaments room.

  Row-upon-row of cobweb-covered crates and containers and cars and machines. Every conceivable weapon and totem of war was visible: machine-guns, rocket launchers, ammo, grenades, blocks of explosives, night-vision goggles, body-armor, tactical vests, and communications gear. And on the far side of the space, near a metal roll-up door was what appeared to be an armored SUV cum truck that resembled a Cadillac Escalade on steroids covered in an inch of dust.

  Crashing sounds echoed from back in the vault as Moses dropped down and began grabbing goodies.

  “Everything in the truck! As much as you can snag!” Moses shouted.

  Elias and Marisol followed suit, grabbing pistols and shotguns, rifles and ammo crates, a cylindrical grenade launcher, ballistic knives, bandoliers of Teflon-coated, frangible blended hollow-point bullets, the list went on and on.

  Marisol moved to the other side of the SUV and removed the tattered, grime-splotched shirt she’d been wearing since they escaped New Chicago. She stood in her leggings, just an old black bra on, shrugging on a skintight compression shirt. Elias caught her reflection in a mirror on the side of the SUV. His eyes roamed over the dressings that still covered her wound, the purpling of her muscled flesh, the general topography of her body. She glanced up and he quickly looked away.

  “Hurry now! Hurry!” Moses bellowed.

  Elias grabbed some additional gear and helped Moses hoist sets of body armor and set them in the truck. Elias changed out of his old soiled shirt into a tactical vest and glanced at the SUV. His gazed fixed on the steering column and his face went wooden.

  “Oh, no.”

  “What is it?” Moses asked.

  “Keys,” Elias replied. “I don’t see any keys!”

  72

  Fifty Thresher surrounded the barn, wailing loudly and beating their heads and fists against the outer boards, which then began to splinter and give. It was only a matter of seconds before they stormed inside to finish off Jessup and Terry.

  Inside the barn Jessup studied the controls while Terry worked to juice the big machine’s battery with his portable charger. The first boards on the barn splintered as Terry grunted and connected heavy-duty cables and flipped a switch as a red light on the charger turned green and a small needle whipped to the right. He thrust up a thumb to Jessup who cranked the engine as hands from a dozen Thresher poked through holes in the walls and clawed at the air.

  “C’mon! C’mon!” Terry screamed.

  “Hold your friggin’ horses, Terry,” Jessop bellowed, “I’m doin’ the best I can!”

  Terry stood back from the Feller, casting desperate looks up at Jessup who then finally managed to key the engine. It yammered and chuffed into life, a big, greasy plume of exhaust rising from its backside.

  Outside the barn, the Thresher suddenly fell silent, the beasts stopping, heads canting, hearing something unusual. A sputter, a thrum, then a roar from inside the barn. An older Thresher levered his head up and peered through the pieces of broken board as BOOM! The Feller, the timber-splitting machine driven by Jessup and Terry, rampaged through the side of the barn.

  The concussive blast from the Feller hit the first wave of Thresher, the attendant shockwave tossing them sideways as the machine’s oversized wheels returned them to the earth. Terry loosed a rebel yell as Jessup keyed buttons and toggled controls and gyroscopes, as the Feller rumbled forward. The Thresher were momentarily set back on their heels, then they regrouped and attacked as Jessup swung the saw arm out, the huge blade spinning around like a roiled-up chainsaw, eager to meet the Thresher.

  Cartoonish besplatterings ensued as they fell in waves.

  One. Two. Four. Eight. Over and over the Thresher fell, crumpling in bunches, shorn in half like stacks of cord wood.

  The sharp, oscillating metal sheered through outer layers of Thresher flesh that fell away in strips as bisected bodies hit the ground and Terry tugged on an airhorn as the machine spun in circles. The blade spun as th
e steel buncher engaged and pistoned down, over and over, crushing the Thresher monsters, splitting heads, cleaving bodies in two. Jessup manipulated the buncher to hoist up the final attacker before using the metal teeth to grind it in two as he piloted the Feller forward, across the field in the general direction of the vault.

  Jessup and Terry gunned the Feller across the grasslands and through stands of Thresher, listening to the wet smack of metal against flesh and bone. Still, night was almost here and more of the things were emerging from the ground, Terry glassing the land with his hands, searching for any sign of the others.

  “Where the hell are they?!”

  Jessup shook his head. “Maybe they headed back to the rally point.”

  Terry was about to respond when he spotted a form out in the gathering gloom. A solitary figure running from what looked like hundreds of Thresher.

  “JON!”

  Terry pointed and Jessup spotted him and wheeled the machine hard right as it smoked through the grass.

  Out in the field Jon was running out of gas. He was tired and overcome by the haze, the gloom, and the dizziness of death and destruction that seemed to permeate everything. He looked back and saw a bunching of Thresher spastically running for him, rags of masticated flesh dangling from their whittled-down teeth.

  He could barely make out the sight of the Feller churning toward him as he harnessed the pain and traversed the final dozen yards in a blur. He managed to reach up a hand as the Feller swung around and Terry scooped him up and into the controller’s booth.

  “Where are they?!” Jessup screamed. “Where are the others?!”

  “Bennie’s gone,” Jon replied, “There were so many, Jessup, you have no idea and … the others … I haven’t seen the others!”

  Before Jessup could respond, Terry’s eyes went as wide as a Chihuahua’s as he held up a hand and shrieked. The front end of the Feller was aswarm in Thresher who hung from the metal arms and grating like bugs. Jessup toggled the gyroscopes, the arms swinging wildly, mowing the beasts into bloody jumbles as an arterial broth sprayed the air as the things’ dead weight caused the Feller to become dangerously unbalanced. Jessup fought the controls, Terry and Jon kicking and punching at the Thresher who tried to climb into the controller’s booth.