Blood Runners: Box Set

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  “You alive, bitch?” one of them said.

  “Don’t you know who that is?” another said.

  “She was one of his,” a third person exclaimed. “She was an Ape!”

  Several more of those surrounding Marisol seemed to recognize her and others wondered whether she’d participated in the Absolution runs. Sensing that she might have been someone of importance, none of those around her were immediately willing to go at her.

  Then one of them, a shit-kicker with partially burned skin that resembled sand-paper, stepped toward her.

  “She don’t look like much now does she?” the man giggled.

  WHACK! he smacked Marisol across the lip, splitting it open, causing her to taste her own blood.

  The man smiled and the others around her jeered as Marisol moved her head from side-to-side. She held out a finger and weakly beckoned the man to lean close to him. When he did, Marisol punched the man in the face.

  Her vicious fist-blow rearranged the man’s nose, smashing it open and unleashing a torrent of red as the man fell to his knees.

  The men behind Marisol grabbed her arms and pulled them tight behind her back, forcing her face down. She looked up and saw the man who’d smacked her whimpering on the ground, his face splotched with gore. Just for the hell of it, she booted the man in the jaw, knocking him unconscious.

  Marisol laughed and gritted her teeth, whispering a prayer to herself as she prepared to be put down, ready to see her mother and father and brother in the next life. Her thoughts also flashed to Elias and the others, and she wondered if they were still alive.

  The men behind her forced her head lower, but no blade or bullet was forthcoming. Instead, somebody shouted, “DON’T TOUCH HER!”

  A hush fell over the crowd as Longman appeared, looking like war personified as he held up an assault rifle that shimmered against his body armor.

  There was pin-drop silence as Longman waded through the onlookers, sans guards or any other form of personal protection.

  “She was one of us before, wasn’t she?” Longman asked to no one in particular.

  Several onlookers nervously nodded, several more recognizing Marisol for the very first time.

  “She was exalted above most,” Longman continued. “She was a trained killer … she was one of our Apes.”

  At this, Longman turned and motioned to those who were gathered around him.

  “She was also part of a conspiracy, a small little group that murdered the Lavey boy!”

  “She escaped us!” someone shouted and Longman nodded, egging on the crowd.

  “What does this prove?!” Longman bellowed. “What have I showed you here?!”

  “That none are beyond your grasp!” shouted someone in the crowd.

  At this, Longman smiled.

  He held his rifle up again and an older woman in front of him fell to her knees. Then another. And another.

  In an instant, rows of those gathered had prostrated themselves on the ground in reverence for the man who was almost godlike, as still more pumped their fists and cheered on Longman who turned to Marisol who’d been forced to kneel as well.

  “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, isn’t it, girl?” Longman said.

  Marisol angled her head and spit on his boots.

  Longman grinned and the last thing Marisol remembered seeing was his fist coming down to greet her jaw.

  Elias watched everything transpire from a hidden blind in the foliage. He saw Marisol surrounded and Longman knock her unconscious. Dumbfounded and enveloped in a curtain of smoke that still filtered over the grass from the explosion, he stepped back as Longman’s men turned their attention from Marisol to the others.

  He saw more guards appear through the opening in the wall. Coldcocked by the bombings and overcome with grief at the death of his friend, Erik, and Ava, and the downing of Marisol, Jon, and Terry, Elias dropped to the ground and crawled into a choked bunch of burned out cars and trucks where he curled up into a ball.

  Jessup was a hundred yards away from Elias’s hiding spot. He was creep-running through the grass. Calculating the distancehe realized he wouldn’t be able to reach Marisol, who was already being gathered up Longman’s men. She was just too far away, so he dropped on the ground next to a semi-conscious Terry who was scraped and bloodied, but otherwise in decent shape. He grabbed Terry’s arms and dragged him to his feet as they beat a hasty retreat. Jessup looked back a final time and watched as Longman’s men carried Marisol through the opening in the wall.

  101

  Elias was still hidden in the wreck of machines, listening to the faint sounds of gunfire, of shouts, of men laughing and bellowing.

  His face was full of anger and fear because he knew now that Moses had tricked them. He surmised that Moses had been planning on double-crossing them the whole time. He thought back on their conversation the night before and knew that must have been Moses’s way of warning him, telling him he needed to run. If only he’d listened, if only he’d convinced Marisol to join him, most of this wouldn’t have happened.

  But it had and now he was largely on his own, outmanned, outgunned, nobody left to count on but himself. What good would it do to charge forward to try and help Marisol? He was fast, but he wouldn’t be able to outrun the bullets from Longman’s men.

  He knew she’d have done it if the tables were turned. She’d have gone back for him if he was the one who’d been captured and this realization knotted his stomach. He stood and crawled onto the hood of a charred truck and looked out over the grasslands.

  He saw Longman’s men hoist Marisol up and carry her toward the wall like a trophy. As they did so he saw a dozen of Longman’s killers advancing towards his position.

  It’s over he thought to himself. There’s no way he could save her. There’s nothing he could do.

  Rolling away from the truck, he dropped to the ground and bellied forward. Then he was on his feet again, doing what he’d done so many times in the past.

  Running away.

  He ran without thinking or feeling, galloping headlong through the grass until something sprang from the foliage and violently tackled him.

  Elias rolled over and looked up into the barrel of a rifle held by Jessup.

  “What the hell are you doing?!” Jessup shouted.

  Elias laid on his back, hands out in front of his face.

  “It’s all over,” Elias said.

  “It’s not over yet,” Jessup hissed. “Terry’s still alive and they took Marisol, and they’ve still got Liza inside.”

  Elias pushed himself up.

  “The only thing we can do is run.”

  “Where the hell you gonna run to, kid?”

  “Back across the lake! Back to your settlement and then maybe we can get the others to-”

  Jessup grabbed a fistful of Elias’s shirt and yanked him in close.

  “There are no others and there isn’t any other settlement to go back to,” Jessup said, teeth bared.

  Elias’s jaw dropped open.

  “But you said-”

  Jessup released Elias. “There was a settlement, okay? But then someone else like Longman came one night and all those good people went away.”

  Elias was shell-shocked.

  “How – how far a-away?” he stammered.

  “They are not in the land of the living anymore, Elias. Everyone we ever knew is dead.”

  Elias considered this as Jessup pointed back toward the wall.

  “There’s nothing else out there. We are all that’s left. We have to go forward and fight, to get back what those fuckers took from us.”

  Elias shook his head, inching back, the anger bubbling up inside him. “But I saw you make that call with your satellite phone.”

  Jessup cut his eyes away from Elias. “It was an act. I made it all up. I was talking to ghosts, kid.”

  “You lied to me,” Elias said. “You lied about the other settlement.”

  “I lied bec
ause I needed your help.”

  Anger churned spittle that flecked the corners of Elias’s mouth.

  “You – you’re – I don’t believe anything you say anymore!”

  “And I don’t give a damn if you do or you don’t, kid, but we have to work together on this. We have to find a way to go back— “Go back? Go back where?!”

  “To the wall!” Jessup shouted.

  Elias violently shook his head.

  “They’re all dead and there’s nothing we can do for them.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Elias shook his head.

  “I’m not going back.”

  Elias took a step and Jessup snagged his arm.

  “You’re gonna bail on your girl?” Jessup asked.

  “She’s not my girl. She never was,” he said, shrugging off Jessup’s hand as the big man looked at him with utter contempt.

  “Go on then. Run,” Jessup growled. “Run away and turn your back on everyone.”

  “I told you-”

  “I know what you told me, you piece of shit. That she wasn’t yours and you weren’t hers, but we both know different don’t we?”

  Elias was back on his heels, silent, red-faced.

  “You know what, Elias? That girl, Marisol, she should count herself lucky that she ain’t yours. She’s nothing like you. She runs after things. You, you run away from ‘em. You’re a little bitch. You’re a goddamn coward.”

  It wasn’t his words which stung the most. It was the look of shock and sheer disappointment in Jessup’s face, a look of ‘you can’t leave, not now, not like this.’ The sort of look that cut to the quick.

  Elias had witnessed a version of that look on his real father’s face once when he told him he wasn’t going to play baseball anymore. It was back when he was a child trying to play T-ball, but the older kids bullied him and Elias decided it wasn’t worth it anymore. He’d told his old man that he didn’t want to play anymore, expecting sympathy or a soft ear, getting neither. His dad frowned and shook his head and told Elias that one of the few things he couldn’t abide by was quitting (“Winners never quit and quitters never win”).

  But Elias held firm, once he’d decided to bolt there was no turning back, and so he refused his father’s pleas and did not rejoin his team and this birthed a rift between father and son that would always be there, even up until the bitter end.

  Elias held Jessup’s look and when he wouldn’t react or say the words that Jessup wanted to hear, the big man spat at the dirt near Elias’s feet and ran two fingers down his exposed fore-arm which Elias assumed had some meaning. Jessup then tossed two pistols to the ground, a handful of magazines, and a canteen. Finally, just as he was turning, he stopped and hunted in one pocket and pulled out the cellphone. Caleb’s cellphone. He chucked this to the ground at Elias feet.

  “There you go, Elias,” Jessup said. “You’re dead to us now. You know that? It’s like we never even met.”

  Elias watched Jessup stalk off and then cursed under his breath and plucked up the cellphone and hoisted up his rucksack, moving off in the other direction. Screw them. Screw them all he thought. He didn’t need Jessup and the others, or New Chicago, or even Marisol. No, not anymore. He didn’t need any of them.

  102

  Marisol was dragged, kicking and screaming through the gate in the wall. Someone yanked her to her feet by her hair, the pain unbearable as hands spun her around. Her vision wandered as she twirled, catching sight of those gawking at her. There were Mudders and Scrappers and vagrants caught up in the confusion as Longman’s soldiers and goons worked to beat them back. She heard someone in the audience shriek “Get you down, woman,” and then her line of sight locked on a face out in front of her as she was wrestled to the ground.

  Moses.

  She could see him plainly. Standing amidst Longman’s men. Next to what looked like a smaller version of himself. A young man, a teenager with onyx skin, who was holding Moses’s hand.

  Moses caught her look and quickly turned his head in shame. Then she was tugged in another direction and came to a stop. Face-to-face with Lout and the wounded Cozzard, whose eye was covered by a thick, blood-stained bandage.

  “Welcome back,” Lout said.

  Hands grabbed Marisol’s hair and wrenched her head back to expose her ivory neck. Lout licked her neck as the crowd hooted and cheered, until Marisol whipped her shoulders and shrugged aside Lout. She turned to face him and the others who surrounded her, bringing her clenched fists up near her face as Cozzard bear-hugged her and gripped her arms behind her back.

  “Longman or no Longman. You make another move and I’ll bleed you,” said Cozzard.

  She didn’t and he wrapped loops of wire around her wrists as she was dragged off.

  Moses watched on in shame, standing beside his son Malik, an acidic taste on his tongue, his stomach turning over. He couldn’t look Marisol in the eyes, so he turned away but then caught glances from the others gathered there. Some of the looks were curious, others were filled with hate.

  He could sense it now. Maybe they didn’t know all of the details, but Moses surmised the people in the crowd knew he’d cut some deal with the powers-that-be. How else was it that he’d gone out and been allowed back in?

  What the others didn’t know was what Longman had told Moses. The story of how he’d found Moses’s son some years back near the body of Alicia, the boy’s mother, who’d died from wounds sustained defending Malik from a Thresher pack. Longman’s men had found Malik during a sweeping operation and brought him into the city where he was kept, along with hundreds of other orphans, in a separate wing in the Codex Building until that fateful day that Ephraim Jax waddled in and saw the boy and whispered to Longman about the photo on Moses’s desk.

  Moses gripped Malik’s hand, taking on the stares of those in the crowd. Who were they to judge him? They’d have done the same given the chance. And what of his boy? What unmentionable horrors had he experienced over the last few years? How long would it take to make Malik whole again? To repair the physical and psychological damage? To make things right.

  Moses tugged on Malik’s hand, bringing him in close against his body as Longman’s men corralled Marisol like an animal and spirited her off toward the Codex Building. As Moses watched them disappear he knew for the first time that all of them had been set up, played the entire time by Longman.

  The choice he’d been given by Longman was this: bring back the clanker box or Malik would be murdered and his remains fed to a pack of stray dogs. What Longman didn’t tell Moses was that he’d ordered Hendrix and the others to kill Moses along the way. Moses had survived, but knowing that the only bargaining chip he had was the clanker box, he was forced to turn on Elias, Marisol, and the others who had saved his life back there. In short, he’d traded the clanker box for his son’s life.

  Longman’s plan was simple, but ingenious and Moses felt his heart bump against his chest as he realized just how many steps Longman was ahead of all of them. Longman would have made an excellent investor back in the days before, Moses thought. His strategy was to always buy and hold for the long term.

  For a fleeting moment, Moses had notions about calling out to Marisol, to say he was sorry and ask for forgiveness, but then he recognized that might do more harm than good, so he gripped Malik’s wrist and looked away.

  Moses was suddenly overcome with emotion and he whimpered because he knew that what those in the crowd were whispering about him was all too true. He cried because he knew he was a traitor. He cried because he knew he’d turned his back on people who’d trusted him. But mostly he cried because he knew at that moment he’d become something he vowed he’d never be.

  A coward.

  He turned and tugged on Malik’s hand again and walked through the crowd, right past a woman who he didn’t recognize, but who’d been surreptitiously recording the entire incident. One of the members of the recon and surveillance team sent out by Farrow and Locks.

  103


  A coterie of guards wreathed Marisol as she was dragged into the Codex Building. She looked thoroughly cowed to most of them, but Cozzard thought otherwise. Like a cornered animal, he surmised the girl was acting more than anything. If given the chance she’d spring at them and rip their necks wide open.

  Cozzard drew alongside Marisol and she spat at him. He barked a nasty laugh.

  “I love it. Keep it up and I’ll take you into one of the rooms on the 18th Floor and give you a go.”

  “Try it and you’ll leave the room with one less thing than you had when you entered,” Marisol replied.

  Gales of laughter from the other guards, Cozzard enjoying a chuckle that was cut short when he spotted Longman. Standing up ahead. Surrounded by his bodyguards. The clanker box at his feet.

  When she was a very young child her brother had fallen ill. A mysterious fever of some kind. She was forced to go with her family to some old-country shaman out in the desert who believed the child had fallen under the power of a pack of powerful demons.

  The shaman had crushed herbs and mixed them in a stone bowl with the blood of a butchered rooster and then he chanted and swayed, his arms outstretched as if he was trying to calm a tempest.

  Marisol watched this, enraptured, hypnotized by the shaman’s goggled eyes, the way they seemed to rotate in different directions, yet somehow remain focused on all those before him.

  Longman reminded her of that witch-doctor. He had the same effect. The same unhinged eyes and zippered smile. The Thresher looked more sane than he did, she thought.

  “Bring her upstairs,” Longman said to Cozzard. “I want to have a talk with our special guest.”

  “What about Moses and the boy?” Cozzard asked.

  “They’ve served their purpose. Send out some people to make them go away,” Longman said. “Be sure to tell them to take their time when they put Moses down. Make his ending as unpleasant as possible.”