After the sky fell and that first endless night smothered the land, an America that had been slowly sipping at perdition finally lost its way. Those that survived the attendant riots, looting, fire-bombings, convulsions, and general trying times hunkered down in fortified keeps in the interior of Chicago, a kind of permanent Gaza Strip/flea-market meld inhabited by bug-eyed survivalists and roaming packs of the traumatized downtrodden. The buildings by this time had ruptured, the pipes throughout the city burst, and thick grass and foliage had sprouted up in great abundance through nearly every inch of buckled asphalt and cement. The living kept to themselves and shared "leftover logs" — lists with the names of survivors who’d lived through the Unraveling — along with vegetables and other goods they managed to scavenge and grow in greenhouses and small plots of green up on the tops of towering buildings bearded with soot that rose out of the smudged sky like the horns on some great beast. They bivouacked and kept vigil behind boarded-up windows and bolted doors and lived for the light. They ceded the night and the streets and all the lower lands beyond them to the things that moved under cover of darkness.
Out beyond the city limits and over the sinuous banks of the river, nature reclaimed much of what it had given up in the prior centuries. Vast prairie-fields that had been denuded in the rush for farmland and acreage for corn and soy biofuels sprang up once again. Illimitable vegetation took hold in the prairie-fields, along with other things, creatures that survivors only whispered about at first. Rumors. Nightmarish, rapacious, brain-cleansed beasts. Human animals called "Threshers," long-limbed abominations with skin as white as mushrooms and burned-out eyes that hid a demonic madness bubbling up within. Stragglers and hardy trekkers from the far lands, those fortunate enough to survive a night marooned out in the tall grasses, spun tales of these things. They purportedly hunted in pods, some running on all fours like primates, and sniffed the air for hints of blood and decay like pigs.
The fear of the Thresher was the primary impetus for the rebuilding, which was admittedly slow at first. The city-dwellers emerged five years after the Unraveling from their hiding spots and urban spider-holes, moving like packs of mules, shouldering carts and push-barrows heavy with material and scrap and salvage.
They built the incongruity of metal and wood, the ponderous wall on the other side of what was once the South Branch of the Chicago River, out on the banks opposite the ramshackle wharves speckled with dock canoes and skiffs and dugouts. They began their work where the river split, beyond a concrete path and aside a series of dead electrical pylons that poked out of the ground beneath crumbling storage silos and the ribs of forgotten salt warehouses. Everything was covered in tufts of windblown trash, the water still runny with grease and dappled with sedimentary slag, a post-script from the time of the machines.
Over the years, the wall was strengthened with lengths of stout wood, cinderblock, metal beams, and whatever could be pried loose from the city’s industrial past. Checkpoints were added and haphazardly built turrets constructed over low points, the wall soon dividing "New Chicago" from the Q-Zone, the land of the Thresher, and all the mysteries that lay beyond.
Within the wall, an armed encampment sprang up, overseen by a leader of men who came forth out of the wilderness in the lurid heat of an August day. Marching in from a swell of land of which savage beasts and savage men were as yet the sole possessors he arrived, oversized rucksack slung over a shoulder, assault rifle in one hand, weighty tome in another. This man marched at the head of his own bedraggled army and called himself Longman Heller. Soon, he birthed a bustling new borough whose currency was narcotics, violence, and a brutal yet efficient system of justice that the Girl was an integral part of.
The Girl hunted with the Apes mostly at dusk and in the blue light of pre-dawn. This was the time when they received their orders and moved out in their biofuel-belching tac vehicles, clad in their moldering Nomex gear, strike helmets, polyfiber boots, and lugging their well-lubricated assault rifles.
Their predecessors worked to restore law and order after First Light (the local euphemism for the Unraveling, the purported solar storm that ended the old ways) and all the wickedness that came thereafter. The populace, upon seeing them and their totems of war arrive for the first time in their then-shimmering black gear, had nicknamed them "Apes." The name stuck and the youngest of the Apes, the Girl, took some small measure of satisfaction from seeing images in the basin of the long-dead creatures with their muscle-quilted bodies and silver backs and faces seemingly screwed up in perpetual disgust. They were strong and powerful, and so was she.
The operations always began the same way. An alarm would sound overhead, a teeth-chattering howl from a metal box bolted to a spit of thick wood, and then the Girl and the Apes would be roused from their bunks and on the move, gathering up their gear and rations and weapons and heading out of what passed for barracks to their rides. The Girl was always on point, for she was the tracker. She was the one who’d been blessed with the power to smell and to discern and to notice the small things that others missed. The Olders sometimes called her Sling, on account of the nylon strap wreathed around her rifle that she wore at all times, and though her given name was Marisol, she didn’t object; she’d been called worse in the past.
She was a year beyond her eighteenth birthday and of indeterminate ethnic origin in a world full of dour-faced, knuckle-dragging men. Born several summers before First Light, she was a few inches shy of six feet, with a wave of dark hair knotted on top, the tiniest piercing on the right side of her nose, and arms and legs that were sinewy and limber after years of successful hunts. It could be said that she was simultaneously young and old for her years.
One of only two female Apes, the Olders looked upon her with equal parts lust and contempt. She had skills that they would never know, and it pained them to acknowledge that her aptitude lay in the things which the Olders could not do well, particularly the catching of the prey scent, that change in the air which indicated the closeness of the Runners. Some of the Grizz mocked her, saying the trait of the smell must be the result of being born of laborers, those who worked and trawled the earth, their noses in the fruit that they undoubtedly plucked as illegals down south on the other side of the wall before the world ended.
She called the male Olders "Grizz" because they were grizzled and hanky and smelled of rot and sweat and things that she could not place. To a man, they had lived by the way of the gun before First Light; that is, each had survived in an occupation that required a firearm. What these occupations were she knew not, and none of what they had done before was of any import now, save for the trades undertaken in the service of the man who ran the Codex Guild, the Guild of Guilds: Longman, the king of kings and lord of hosts in what was called New Chicago.
Before she was taken with some of the others into the Q-Zone (the land on the other side of the wall wedged between New Chicago and the domain of the Thresher), her mother had told her that Longman was like a figure in a long-forgotten book scribed for little ones: A book detailing the journey of a lost girl and her dog to see a strange man who pulled strings from behind a curtain in an emerald city. New Chicago was no emerald city. It was a hardscrabble little outpost of civilization plopped down amidst fields whitened with alkali and peopled by the downtrodden and those beholden to Longman. The ruby-tipped plants that he cultivated inside what was once a mighty sporting arena kept the machines humming and Longman in power and the system called Absolution in place.
Borrowed from a period that existed in a time before memory known to some as the Middle Ages, Absolution was the method by which crimes and wrongs committed by the offspring of the powerful were resolved. While not clean or bloodless or without controversy, Absolution resulted in something much prized in the days after First Light: certainty. Closure. No chance for endless appeals or investigations, no manipulation of evidence or words of the accused by high-minded judges or honey-tongued expert witnesses or interpreters of the law.
For a not-insignificant fee, the wrongs done by the scions of the Guilds were placed upon younger men and women called Runners that had been trained from a young age to run and hide and evade capture from those who would hunt them down in the name of the Guilds. Marisol was one of these, an Ape: a hunter whose job it was to stalk and bring down the Runners, to mete out justice, to do what was right on behalf of those that had been wronged. For all she knew, Absolution had always been the way, and the way was right.
The tac vehicle bucked and fussed as it clipped through downtown New Chicago. Marisol pressed her face to a cracked cube of glass wedged over a gun-slot. She stared outside and watched a decaying bridge of metal and stone as it whipped past. Beyond this, she observed the Mudders, who labored retrieving grainy sludge from the river in buckets to be stacked like ice blocks in igloos to form low-density dwellings. Beside them labored Scrappers, hearty men who hiked to the outer reaches of the city to strip the remaining fragments from the corpse of the old world. One of the Mudders, a boy who looked as thin as a strand of hair, gestured, and Marisol offered an indifferent wave in return. She’d heard Farrow and the other Apes mention the times before, when there was a growing movement by the well-heeled to utilize all things local. She watched the laborers through the window, as they plied all they could from what remained of the past, and smiled wistfully. Everything was localized now, the world picked apart, condensed to a few dozen city blocks.
“You’re obsessed with the way things used to be, girl,” said Farrow, the colossus who sat to Marisol’s right. Her gaze ratcheted to the big man, who was busy feeding bullets into an ammo magazine that dangled from a bandolier that wreathed his midsection.
"It was better, wasn’t it?" she asked. "The times before?"
Farrow registered this and shook his head. "The only time that matters is right here and now." It was a lie and Marisol’s muted reaction intimated that she recognized it as such, but to acknowledge this would be to diminish their folie à deux that somehow the present was something other than a slick of bare gruel barely worth fighting for.
Farrow had lost his own child and wife in the months when the world went to hell…when the cities fell and the marauding began and precious word slipped out about abominations being committed on the high plains. Twice he’d lost heart and looked down the barrel of a pistol, and twice he’d crawled and whimpered back from the abyss. He’d heard others say that from the worst conditions come the strongest men. Bullshit. If he was lucky, he was half the man he used to be, getting by now in a world where time seemed undone, existing on adrenaline, prayer, and a fervent (and most likely delusional) hope that life still had some meaning for those left alive.
He shrugged off thoughts of pre-catastrophe and returned to his bullets. Marisol watched him fill the mag and smack it against his helmet to test if the rounds were full and true. She chose Farrow to make friends with not because they held much converse, but simply in light of the fact that he didn’t make a run at her when she first joined, and he kept the others away when she showered and suffered from the cramps and ordeal that came to her every month, and he was the only one she’d think twice about killing. Such small things passed for friendship after First Light.
The others, however — the motley mishmash of Apes that lazed in the tac — she’d gladly prang if it was professionally acceptable. The brute named Sikes and the long-haired pederast named Harrigan and the other mugs who leered and slobbered when she doffed her armor and cleansed the grime from her weapons. They lusted after her since she possessed beauty as well as serenity. The kind of young woman whose presence had a way of stifling the air in a room, her mother used to say. They also ogled her body, which was not the sort sprung from machines and trainers that she’d seen sported by the wives and lady-friends of the highest members of the Guilds. Her muscles were taut, the joints small and full-bellied; the kind of body made by real work.
"What say?"
She looked back and asquint at Farrow. "Death is our overwatch," she replied, and he nodded, grinned, continued.
"Palms up, hands flat, everyone out returns home."
She smiled back and smacked his palm as they steeled themselves and checked the safeties on their guns and waited. Her eyes clocked the red lights on the roof of the tac that suddenly flashed green, and then it began.
The rear of the transport car dropped and the Apes crashed down the metal plank and formed ranks as Marisol swiveled and snugged on her battle helmet with a half-assed Heads-Up Display on the inside that showed the ground before her and the elevation and intermittent infrared images. The HUDs only revealed so much, and Marisol was wont to disable hers except for the commo system that linked her to the other Apes. She raised her head and took in everything: cool, partly cloudy, a light breeze flapping the weeds near her boots.
Somewhere in the distance, an air-raid siren of the kind used to warn of impending wars in the past shrieked, and everyone took up defensive positions save Marisol, who alighted onto the savaged hull of a rusted SUV.
She lifted her nose and sniffed at the air, which was filled with a flurry of dust and ash from the great foundries built on the edge of the poisoned river that snaked under the wall. She could see a ribbon of dust rising several thousand yards ahead, then a flock of startled birds that signaled the Runner was probably already on the move, well ahead of them. The other Apes were busy firing up smokes and tossing back shots of hooch made from water, old bread, and sugar or readying pressed wads of the plants that the Guilds grew that gave them energy and an exaggerated sense of self. Marisol disdained these vices, preferring instead to harness the excitement of the hunt itself. In a flash, she held aloft a balled fist and signaled for the others to follow.
Marisol led the others down a narrow artery and across an urban switchback that lay on the wrong side of New Chicago, a few klicks south of the Q-Zone. She took in what was left of the once great city, her recollection straying drowsily as a flashstorm of images from the past assaulted her.
She remembered very little before First Light, save that it had not been a time of want. She had a Papa the size of a brick wall and a mother and an older brother and a small dog that she had carried in a backpack that her uncle had handed down. She could see her mother still, stooped over a small fire at the back of their house, roasting peppers and chicken that she combined with a thick black sauce made of mashed tomatoes and golden taters and sweet onions with a hint of cumin and dark chocolate and slivers of yucca.
Her father was part of the last great wave of migrants who moved over the border during the times of plenty before joining the military and quickly binning out. He was a "stick man," a framer who helped build homes in Colorado during the crest and collapse of the housing market in the days before the sun burst and voided its load on all that lay beneath it. When the power died, he corralled Marisol and her family and explained that things invariably fall apart when the middle cannot hold, and then they doped off in a camper Marisol’s father five-fingered from a neighbor who’d washed out and committed a crime against himself in a moment of weakness.
In the days before it all came crashing down, the country’s resources were focused more on the land near the great oceans. The left and right coasts were the major population centers. That’s where unemployment was highest and most of the country’s military elements were housed. Not so in the middle and upper-middle west, those central-corridor states unburdened by pesky taxes and regulations and pension obligations, flush with easy money from oil and gas concerns. At least that’s what Marisol’s father surmised. He read the papers, he watched the tube. He heard the stories of burger-flippers in the Dakotas netting twenty dollars an hour and companies paying for people from the South and East to flood their newly infrastructured boomtowns and work the phones at their processing centers. If any place could make it in the new times, it would be somewhere like that.
They traveled the backroads for weeks, headed north, with Marisol ensconced inside the camper, playing dolls and word games with her brother, feeding treats to her dog, and trying to avoid the terrified looks shared between her father and mother. They listened to the radio for the first ten days and then were forced to silence it when the news became grim and then stopped being broadcast altogether.
They eventually ran out of fuel close to what she would later know as the far corner of the Q-Zone near the Great Plains. They made the place their camp — their "coop," as Marisol’s father liked to say.
It was here, out beyond a bone-dry gas station, where her father took every doll, every plaything she’d taken with her and set fire to them. Marisol wept, but her father said it was the only way. Fun and games were a luxury that could no longer be abided. He told her that she would have to start learning new things. New exercises, new ways of looking and examining and reacting.
She wanted to know why he was forcing her to become something that she wasn’t and he smiled and hugged her. He said, "Most people have no purpose in this life. They’re just…travelers. Bystanders. Do you understand?" She nodded. "But you, Mari, you’re different. You were sent for some reason. You have purpose."
"But what is it?"
Her father couldn’t answer, but he whispered in her ear that he believed it was no accident that he had been forced to bring the family to this very spot and that, in his words, "It’s never too late to be who you were really meant to be."
For the next week, he trained her and her brother day and night, teaching them to listen to sounds and discern portents on the ground and in the air. He taught them how to box, how to use their hands as weapons for defensive purposes, how to craft utensils from hunks of wood and the bones of dead animals. He revealed how to clean guns and how to range a rifle by measuring wind and humidity and ballistic prediction. How to calculate the delta of aiming points in a crosshairs while sitting squinched in a self-built blind. Her brother was a decent shot, but Marisol was a natural, born with off-the-charts dexterity and hand-eye coordination that her father helped her hone.
At night, the family sat on the top of the camper and watched the horizon go from blackness ("As dark as the bottom of the devil’s well," her father said) to ablaze with brilliant fires, punctuated every now and again with the thud of ordnance or the screech of some aerial machine overhead. Six months in, the machines stopped flying. She told her father that she hoped it was the end of the conflict and her father told her that it was likely that only the dead would see an end to the fighting.
Two months later, her father was caught trying to jimmy a truck belonging to a farmer who nearly blew his head off. The farmer refrained from killing her Papa only because he sensed that he might be a man who could be more than he was. A fighter, maybe. A tracker. In truth, the farmer spared her father’s life because his hands were calloused and his neck thick and he looked like he knew his way around a gun.
The farmer forced Marisol’s father to give up the group and all of them were taken at gunpoint to see Longman, who was by this time encamped on the outskirts of old Chicago.
One of Longman’s lieutenants tested Marisol’s father, and when he passed, when he showed them that he could run and fire and had his wits about him, they gave him and Marisol’s brother drab surplus-style jackets and patches emblazoned with red bolts and well-worn assault rifles with four mags of ammo each. They were soldiers in Longman’s army now. Marisol remembered watching them stand in rows of twos in the last shards of light before they headed out to battle the forces of a nearby settlement that had allegedly taken to cannibalism.
Marisol hugged and waved to her father and brother and gave them both loops of metal she’d found that they wrapped around their wrists to ward off harm. They marched off into the late-day sun, her mother staying behind, brought low by a respiratory sickness that spread like fire through the camps. It was the last time she’d see her father and brother alive.
In the coming days, only a portion of the soldiers returned, and those that did told tales of battle and how Longman had performed brilliantly and bravely in leading his men to victory. She pressed for information about her kin, but was only given vague information: They’d died defending a hillock that overlooked the final field of fire. They were heroes in the camps. It was all too much for her mother, who soon passed into the great void, either from illness or heartache, and Marisol was left to fend for herself.
She let her little dog go free in the wilds and then sacked up with the other survivors and began the march toward the wall surrounding old Chicago, which was still a work in progress. Those inside gave up without a fight. There really was nothing worth fighting for, and besides, many of them had been waiting for someone to lead. Longman seemed the fulfillment of many wishes. Once inside the wall, she was just another survivor until Farrow spotted and rescued her from a mob of young men who were intent on doing her all kinds of wrong. Farrow brought her inside the barracks and introduced her to his superiors and soon tested her to find that she had abilities the others didn’t.
She could, for instance, detect changes in her surroundings and discern patterns in the lower sub-zones that formed the areas where the hunts occurred. She could spot people hiding behind foliage and blinds, footprints on the ground, an errant branch broken by an unlucky Runner. She knew these things just as she’d sensed the times of misery were coming before it all went bad. Just as she’d known she was never going to see her father and brother again when they tromped off under Longman’s banner. She’d always had the gift to decipher things before they happened and now her natural abilities were of great use to what passed for the State. The thought of it brought a bemused smile to her lips, for it was as if everything she’d done in her prior life had led up to this moment. A dry run for Absolution.
Marisol’s head suddenly snapped up and she made a quick read of her surroundings. An unfamiliar vibration hung in the air, a faint hum. A sense of movement. None of the others felt it, but Marisol did. She waited. Listened. Smelled the Runner before she saw him, caught wind of the sulfurous scent of fear and then, a half-click later, she saw him: a rangy boy about her age with a scarf covering his face.
He stealthed behind a truck and nimbled over a low-slung wall that circled the shell of what was once a factory. He hedged left, then scampered up a fire-escape when Marisol, without uttering a word to the others, snapped off her HUD and blasted forward, using the hood of a car as a springboard to launch herself onto the base of the building that looked down on an endless warren of exposed rooms and duckholes.
She grabbed hold of the rusted bars of the fire escape. The Runner saw her and, not unsurprisingly, started running, slowly at first, then faster, finding his feet, minnowing through the maze of debris that littered the interior of the building. The rules of the hunt were simple. Marisol and her brethren had one hour to pursue the Runner. If the Runner lasted longer than an hour or slipped four miles downfield, into what was the lower section of Zone 5, he was permitted to live another day to run and the sin placed upon him would go unpunished. The Runner had to be aware of more than just the Apes, however. Crude traps were placed at strategic locations throughout the Zones. A toe-popper mine or IED here; a pit filled with sharpened stakes there. The traps varied, depending on the mood and attitude of the craftsmen and bomb-builders.
The Runners were without weapons, sans the few inches between their ears, and Marisol was not surprised when the boy picked up a length of pipe and turned and swung it hard enough to make the air bleed. Marisol anticipated this and slide-stepped under the pipe as it breezed her head. She juked to the right and shouldered through a moldering hunk of drywall and planted boots on a bathtub and somersaulted toward the boy. She crashed into him, her raised elbow meeting his nose, loosening the blood housed inside. Red spraying, the boy freaked as he staggered toward the back of the building. Marisol pushed herself up and bumrushed the boy, lowering her head, hitting him hard as the Runner’s feet left the ground.
They pitched over and fell together through the air like broken dancers as their bodies plummeted from the naked rear of the building, smashing through the wood and metal railings that lay below. Momentum catapulted the two sideways. Marisol hit the ground hard, rolled over, and was back on her feet in a flash and sprinting. The Runner was somehow up and ahead of her, arms and legs chopping the air, vaulting over cars and parkouring past and off the side of a building as Marisol struggled with her sling and the piece of sharpened rock that she snugged in a groove in the palm of her hand.
Marisol whipped her hand back and let fly the rock. The granite shard snapped past and struck the Runner just below his right ear, freeing a ropy spurt of red, slowing him just enough as he stumbled into the intersection of car corpses. Marisol was upon him in seconds, to the spot where he’d just fallen. But he was gone. Disappeared. A sound split the silence, a guttural screech as she turned to see the Runner coming at her with a jagged stone raised over his head. He brought the stone back at the instant that the first bullet struck him below his chin and an artery ruptured like a punctured beer can. Pulses of gore followed, then the Runner crumpled in a fusillade of slugs fired by Farrow and the other Apes.
Marisol turned from this — she always turned during the "lettings." Biting back a sob, she whispered a prayer for the dead that she remembered from her mother, hands over her ears as her comrades riddled the Runner and absolved someone unknown of their sins. And then, when it was over, when the last bit of brass had pinged the ground and the smoke had cleared, Marisol stood and began marching back toward the tac vehicle, shrugging off her armor and rubbing the bruises that purpled her flesh as the lactic acid churned and burned within her. It always burned after the killings, but she’d gotten used to it. Used to the ancient sights and sounds of a new kind of hunting that had become all too common in New Chicago.
The Boy was of average height with long, corded stems, a tight, laddered midsection, and a mop of ungovernable loose curls that shaded his face. By all measure, he appeared ungathered, yet full of brio. He had an easy smile, however, and all who struggled in the Pits knew even at a young age that he came from hearty stock that would serve him well when his time was up. He was the fleetest of foot in his class and ran with a fluid athleticism that made him a favorite of Moses O’Shea, the black man with skin like sandblasted teak who oversaw and trained the Runners.
O’Shea was robust and brawny, unfettered by excess poundage, with a face that testified to the pain experienced since the time of the machines.His fiefdom was the Pits, which were located south of the wall and river in an intermingled series of dingy gray towers and soft domes twined abruptly with concrete remnants, hunks of brick, and wide shafts of plexi that had been salvaged since the Unraveling. He was known to move like a shadow, communicated as much with gestures and expressions as with words, and his movements were often so fluid that it appeared his body was conjured up out of smoke. In the olden days, he claimed to have trained world-class athletes, but what was once done for sport was now a matter of life and death.
He had first taken notice of the Boy after a cattle call was placed for fresh fodder. An unusually lengthy session of Absolution had disposed of much of O’Shea’s stock, and so he needed to reboot and replenish his stores. A call went out to those far and near to offer up their youngest or any who were orphaned or in need of direction down in the Pits. Dozens had appeared for the call, but it was the Boy who wowed. He appeared out of the haze of a late day like an apparition, sans parents or papers or anything else that proved he existed save his slender frame and balled-up feet and eyes that looked copped from some great bird of prey.
Yes, Moses could tell immediately that the Boy (first names were generally only used after Runners successfully completed a first run) was a natural after he ran him through some light sprints and got him to sparring with the other putative Runners. Soon he was taken in by Moses and forced to endure an indoctrination program devised by one of Longman’s henchman who’d worked in a circus in Southeast Asia. The program was akin to phajaan, a ritual used in Thailand to break the spirit of elephants. It involved starvation and structured beatings until the subject reached a purgatory-like state where the will to resist was no more.
Unlike the others, the Boy never completely broke. He rebuffed most of the attackers and constantly displayed the economical gait shared by all successful Runners. Moreover, he seemed to anticipate the movements of others which caught Moses completely by surprise. He’d won his first real heat, charged ahead of the others in a preliminary race and fended off attacks by older Runners sent in thereafter by Moses. It was then that the Boy was recognized as a true prospect and brought into the fold, which meant free lodging and food in return for an agreement to train and fight and do his best not to be killed quickly when he began running in earnest.
Moses was (in his own mind) the linchpin of Absolution, the one who trained those that actually carried the sins of the wealthy on their backs. In return for providing Runners, Moses was given lodging, three squares a day, a stipend paid for by the Guild families (as diyya, blood money for any sin their offspring might commit), and allowed by Longman and his thugs to do things that others were not. He was, for instance, permitted to wager, in the form of barter, on the outcome of Absolution, even though there were those who claimed such a practice amounted to a conflict of interest.
Conflict of interest. A protean term that carried weight in the old days, but little now. Everything was a conflict of interest in a world turned on its axis, and besides, Moses’s own bushido, his personal code of conduct was, out of necessity, jettisoned in the years after the Unraveling. He was part of the system now, invaluable so long as he produced Runners suitable to Longman’s liking. Fast enough to make the hunts appear fair, yet not so otherworldly in their skills that they might actually win more than a few races. Moses usually bet against his own charges, but the Boy was different. Moses smiled to himself and thought that he might actually wager on this skinny white boy’s back.
The Boy was doing a set of chins on a horizontal metal bar fixed between two 8x8 beams. He was working out with the only other Runner he’d made friends with, a young buck named Erik who had a face as flat as a spade and red hair cropped close like a Marine.
Erik watched as the Boy’s arms pumped furiously, but he knew enough not to swing his body. Rather, the key was to keep the pressure on the lat muscles that cobra-d out from the sides of his back. Form and function had been drilled into him.
Keep the eyes fixed on a target ahead.
Don’t swing the legs.
Don’t try to use the biceps too much.
Don’t cheat.
If it’s easy, it ain’t goddamn right.
This was his mantra as he chinned, over and over, piston-like, feeling a good burn in his lats (and even in his biceps), a pump which the older runners said signaled the development of muscles that would be important when the true races began.
A murmur rose as he finished his last set of chins. The murmurs turned to squalls and cries that caused the Boy to drop down from the chinning bars. He navigated through the crush of people to see an object being held aloft by four men, a body covered in a blanket that was marinated in red. Having seen his share of killing since the Unraveling, the Boy was nonplussed.
The body of the Runner that Marisol helped to bring down was lowered to the ground and, as was customary, heads were bowed and prayers silently offered. Moses swapped looks with the boys and the others and said, "That’s why we train."
That’s it. He said nothing more. Didn’t need to.
A few words, and then Moses was back to barking orders and commands as the Boy and some of the younger Runners-to-be, including Erik, traded glances. Before the body was plucked up and taken away, the Boy called out, "Where will you take him?" All eyes skipped to the Boy, who had breached the unspoken etiquette in the Pits: Never speak before the burying. The other Runners and trainers just stared at him as Moses shielded his eyes with a hand (the Boy’s face being partially obscured) and bellowed, "You there! What’s your name?"
The Boy held Moses’s gaze and replied coolly, "Elias."
Moses nodded. "You thinking about dealing me a big helping of misery, Elias?"
Elias stared quizzically and then shook his head as Moses iced him with a look and then motioned for the body to be carried off. Elias followed the procession for a thousand yards and hopped up onto a wall and watched like a perched crow as the dead Runner was carried to the place of burying. The land where unsuccessful Runners found their final end. A field out behind the Pits, marked by stones. Hundreds of stones.
Moses took a last look at Elias and then sucked on his teeth as he moved under a crossbeam that marked the way through the alley that led to his office, a verminous space the size of a cattle cage that contained a desk and fragmented, scattered memories from life in the time of machines. A nonfunctional phone. A coffee mug. CDs. Restaurant coupons. A cracked photo of Moses and his son.
He was barely back in his room for an instant when in walked a nugget-sized man named Ephraim Jax. Ephraim was clad in threadbare trousers and sported the red-and-blue cap worn by those that directly served Longman. Ephraim was a runner of a different sort, a bearer of news from on high whose deliveries preceded the commission of a new run, a new hunt.
It had always begun the same way. Somebody, whether a blood relative or a close confidant of those in power, did something bad. Murders, mostly, but also assaults and other crimes of the flesh. If bad things were done to them on the lowest societal rungs, the Mudders or any of the other mutts inhabiting New Chicago, the wheels of justice turned very slow indeed. A cursory review of the crime scene might be had and a few skulls knocked for information, but beyond that the crimes would be of no moment to what passed for the State.
But if something befell a person of some station, the Brahmin sent out investigators — just as in the times before First Light – men and women who collected the smallest details of what had gone wrong. The materials collected were then given to the elite, who spent hours trolling through the minutia before they began preparing the subrogation papers, the investigatory and other procedural documents that provided support for Absolution. The process was as painstaking as Moses heard it had been thousands of years ago, when done in a time when men like Longman Heller lived in fortified castles made of wood and stone.
"Good day, Moses," Ephraim remarked. Moses manufactured a smile and offered Ephraim a hand-rolled cigar, even though he new Ephraim would never partake. Moses fired up his own cigar as Ephraim slid the papers across the desk. The papers were printed on a heavy parchment that was processed using plant fiber and a gelatinous matter extracted from the carcasses of dead animals. The front of the parchment was sealed with wax embossed with the raised lightning bolts that Longman used as his crest. The seal carried the force of law; breaking the seal, except by Moses or anyone specifically functioning at his behest, would warrant death. Moses slipped a long nail under the seal and sliced it open and studied the documents contained therein. The facts meant little, the name even less. Moses didn’t recognize the perpetrator or the victim, but both came from good families that controlled some measure of commerce that impacted Longman and his operations. Otherwise, the crime at hand would not be of any concern.
"Who’s it this time, Mo?" Moses looked up at Ephraim, who grinned at him from the other side of the desk.
"Who’ll do the deed this time?" Ephraim said. "Who’s your stallion?"
Moses folded up the documents and cradled them near his midsection. "You know I can’t talk about that. Insider information and all."
"I hear things, Mo," Ephraim continued. "I hear that you’ve got a new one. A real gamer."
Moses nodded, smiled slyly at the thought of Elias. "True. I’ve got some new blood."
"How fast are they?" asked Ephraim.
"Faster than gossip, brother, and twice as nasty," Moses said, as Ephraim steepled his fingers under his chin and laughed like a child privy to a secret.
Ephraim glanced around, fished in a pocket, and pulled out a reed-thin sliver of silver, still precious, still able to be traded for goods and services. Moses snatched up the silver and nodded. "I got ya down for the usual, Eph." Ephraim sniggered and nodded, and rose and exited. Moses watched him go and then deposited the silver in a small tin-punched box that he secreted under a section of flooring beneath his desk. Moses pivoted and glanced out an old truck windshield that functioned as the only window in the room. He could see the low-slung dwellings that marked the beginnings of downtown New Chicago. Out there, somewhere, the beast Longman prowled, thought Moses. And the beast was always hungry.
"Whosoever does this to the least of these, my brethren, has done it unto me."
Longman Heller looked out over a space where all was mostly darkness save a few lamps hanging from metal crossbeams in the ceiling. The space was industrial, a great room, an annex of a foundry stuffed with Men and Women who sat before him at tables piled high with the kind of food rarely seen after First Light. Brightly-colored root vegetables and sides of cured meat and sweetened breads and other whole grain foods. The audience, haggard clans that gazed longingly at the vittles before them, were of the same general rank and came from the city’s second-tier families. Powerful, yes, but not accredited members of any Guild. The kind of people pulling themselves up through the grime, readying to move into the next tier, to join one of the Guilds that held real power in New Chicago. Potential allies. Possible enemies. Longman had ostensibly invited them for food and drink to discuss the harvest and all manner of rumors and conjecturing, including war between other city-states and purported sightings of the Thresher on the outskirts of the city.
"Do you understand what that means? Do you know what I say when I mention these words?"
A jug-eared Man in the audience raised his hand.
"It means if you do something for the least, you’ve also done it for the most.”
Longman grinned hugely at this and pointed. "Winner! I see we have a winner, as well as a scholar," he replied and those at the tables chuckled as the Man returned Longman’s smile and leaned back in his seat.
"There is talk," Longman continued, "that some amongst you have taken to threatening the boys that run the water trains below the eastern trestle."
"They’re brigands," a woman murmured out in the audience. "Thieves. They want us to pay tribute when we cross," said another.
Longman nodded at this. "Is this not the way it’s always been?"
A man with a fever blister trenching his lip stood and said, "It was. But that was before. In the days when we were few and hadn’t formed a collective."
"But now you have," Longman offered, and Fever Blister nodded. "You’ve gained members, gained power, and soon you too will want to form your own first-tier Guild I’d imagine," Longman continued, as he panthered the space like a preacher.
"I suppose it’s a fair accounting to think that once you’ve moved up a rung, you can kick sand in the faces of those beneath you. That, to paraphrase, the least you can do is the absolute most that you will."
Half-hearted nods and uneasy murmurs of agreement in the audience as Longman finished, "There are some, however, who’d make a play on the words I said before. That is, if you do evil to the least, you’ve also done it to the most."
Those in the audience shared confused looks as Longman forced a smile and dipped his head.
"Words to discuss another day, I suppose. Please eat, drink, and enjoy yourselves, my friends. All that I have is yours."
Longman turned from the audience and moved slowly toward a side door that led from the great room. He stepped into a pane of light that illuminated lived-in features that were a monument to Middle-America. He was large-jointed and nearing the autumn of his years, with a mass of wild hair that he slicked with animal fat, parted down the middle, and tied off at the back. It gave him the mien of a hippy from the days of old. The spectacles that he wore on certain occasions were cracked in one lens, but fit with the grime and dirt that dotted his exposed flesh, making him look like a well-heeled survivalist.
He was a posthumous child, given little by his father other than a name. Longman Justis Heller. Longman was what some would have called in the past a warlord, a landowner who governed from a perch that rested upon his money crop, a brightly-topped flower that his people grew out in the decaying field of a once-grand sporting arena. A flower that when pressed gave up its nectar, an oozing white effluvium that Longman mashed and dried into a narcotic that kept the masses subdued. He was a student of man and of history and he knew many things that others had forgotten.
He knew, for instance, that an Unraveling had arguably occurred at least once in the past. Back in 1859, sleepers were roused from their bunks by a cosmic light so bright that newspapers were said to have been able to be read outdoors at midnight. It was called the "Carrington Event," and the storm that belched the charged plasma triggered a fierce geomagnetic eruption that spilled across the Earth. The 1859 aurora fried what little communications then existed. The Unraveling, a storm thought to have been at least ten times as strong as the 1859 storm, ended the world as everyone knew it.
Longman had read about the "Carrington Event" in a treatise on property rights. In the days before First Light, he’d been an interpreter of the law and worked at a firm with enough lawyers to fill a basketball court. He spent many days bathed in the soft glow of a computer in an office in the wounded part of Chicago, defending cases on behalf of mammoth insurance concerns. He was made to be friendly with those on the other side. The enemy. Plaintiffs’ lawyers. His firm had office parties and would invite these lawyers and the end result would always be the same. Litigation without end. It was bad for clients but good for the lawyers, and Longman often left his office in disgust with the knowledge that he and his colleagues were little more than well-paid lampreys, parasitic creatures plentiful in the Great Lakes that suckled off the fat of a host.
The legal system was already broken by that point. He and his brethren produced nothing but paper and hot air and endless rivers of steaming bullshit. He was a member of the brotherhood of the lie. A practitioner of the dark art of deceit, whether outright, or some lesser form of falsehood like suggestio falsi (leaving false impressions) or suppressio very (tacit lies). The others at the firm took particular delight in the former, and sharp practices like unnecessary discovery during litigation, endless appeals, pointless report letters, and forgotten phone calls.
His days were broken down into fragments of time. Billable hours. Longman loathed it and considered himself unique at the firm because he was the only one who saw things for what they were. He was a beacon in a fog of fools and crookery. No tears were shed when he gave notice several months later. He couldn’t shill for the plaintiffs’ bar, and he would no longer take refuge in lies or stoop to befriending the water-weak phonies who litigated the shady slip-and-falls on behalf of shadier clients. He binned out of law-firm life and circulated his resume and soon found a new position.
He became a civilian lawyer who worked for a military element that flew machines. He found order there. Routine. Some sliver of purpose. He rose through the ranks and obtained clearances and civil service promotions and soon became someone that the elite trusted with secrets. He was given access to SCIFs — sensitive compartmented intelligence facilities — as well as great rooms at the skirt of a military base, storage areas filled with legal texts and ponderous treatises and other great books.
What he remembered most, however, was not a treatment on the law, but a book he once read on ancient history. A tome about the rise and fall of men like him, men with power. This book described a ritual from the days of old, a practice where each of the men in power was succeeded by another who had brought them down in a act of ultraviolence. Ritualized succession by murder. Kings killing kings. "The Golden Bough."
Longman recalled this daily, and lived his life with the knowledge that he would never let this happen. He would never allow another to flower who might challenge his grip on the levers that controlled all that lay before him.
Unlike many of the others in the old days, Longman was prepared when the world ended. He’d been what the old world called a "prepper," a derogatory term that referred to those who stirred in the shadows, spending their time hoarding food and fuel and weaponry while the others sang and danced in the years of plenty. He’d convinced a few others to prepare in the outer burbs and when hell came, he eventually left his deserted base and rallied himself and others, men and women, who became like his extended family. His flock. His burgeoning army. His small band grew little by little until it was a seasoned fighting force that would eventually rechristen the world in New Chicago, a mostly stable city with food and shelter and even commerce. It was the means by which the shit-speckled masses could make a go of it, to forget the bad times and forge a new way ahead. To reboot the future. Their little experiment could be duplicated elsewhere, Longman whispered to the others. New Chicago was just the beginning, a nursery for all that lay ahead.
Most of his colleagues lost heart and died in the initial days of ruination. Many of the others simply lost their bearings in the mayhem and offed themselves, or were ripped to shreds at night by the armies of dispossessed marauders whose eyes had been fried by the bursting of the sun. But not Longman. He gathered up supplies and munitions and took refuge with a posse of like-minders in a silo that once housed a device capable of tearing the world asunder. He had an attachment to "low and common company," as one of his favorite writers, an Englishman, had once said. The kind of simple people who were more transparent, more malleable. He was a student of man and of the old ways and an understudy of the horrors to come.
Longman passed through the metal door and stopped on a dime. A cherubic young girl of about five stood before him. He smiled, and with some effort took a knee and extended a hand.
"Are you lost, child?" The girl shook her head and pointed toward the great room.
"My da and my ma," she whispered.
"Your parents? They’re in there?" Longman asked, and after the girl nodded, "They’re my guests?"
Another nod from the little one and Longman grinned and nodded and took the girl’s hand and strode a few paces and ushered her into the great room. He watched the girl run raggedly toward her parents who scooped her up and gazed with some uncertainty in Longman’s direction. A beautiful girl, Longman thought. She might’ve been something one day. He turned and flung a look at his duster-clad enforcers who waited on either side of the doors that led to the great room: the crow-faced piker named Cozzard, and a thick-necked imbecile named Lout who possessed an omnipresent sneer and reeked of violence.
Cozzard and Lout sniggered and slammed the metal door shut and fastened a rusted padlock across it and bolted it down with a metal bar for good measure. Longman continued to move away as the shouts began echoing behind him. The sound of hands pounding on the door and walls soon grew. He knew that those inside the great room had just realized there were no windows to the space. No means of egress save the one door that was now shut. He wondered how long it would take them to recognize the incendiary devices he’d planted inside. More shouts, screams, unearthly booms — and then his nostrils flared at the hint of smoke. He moved out a door as the sound of Cozzard’s and Lout’s footfalls echoed behind him. Down a flight of stairs he rumbled, until he was standing near a loading dock in the middle of an industrial area.
He turned and watched the first flicker of fire spring from the roof over the great room. Cozzard and Lout trundled down the steps, still clutching the gas torches that they’d used to ignite the Molotov cocktails that they’d lobbed into the great room through slits in an upper wall. Longman watched as the fires within the great room roared and smothered the space in greasy balls of flame. The roof collapsed in seconds, then the support structure, as all of those inside carbonized, becoming one with the charred remnants of the building as they wailed and cried out to their God. To an outsider this spectacle, this mass killing was shocking, but it had to be this way, Longman thought. These people posed a threat and he would not abide by that just as he wouldn’t tolerate dissent. He had to take a stand to ensure the survival of New Chicago. To follow the new law was to believe in rebirth and reconstruction. It was the only way that could be. His way.
Cozzard and Lout suddenly spun in a flourish and pointed as Longman looked sideways to see a teen boy watching everything from the shell of a rusted car. The teen held what looked like a camera and ducked low and out of sight as Longman whistled and gestured and Cozzard and Lout withdrew what looked like homemade pistols with oversized silencers from their dusters and took off. They’d have to act quickly, determine whether the teen was from a family that mattered. Either way, they’d have to put the boy down; he’d seen (and probably heard) far too much. What the boy saw was a threat to Longman, and anything that might negatively impact his rule did not have a long shelf life. Even if they did have to drop the boy, Longman would simply "guide" the resulting investigation and pay a bribe for Absolution and then all would be made right.
The teen boy clambered around the side of a building, chest heaving, as he hooked his leg and slid down an embankment while the first bullets kicked up the sandy soil all around him. He dove to his right and managed to come up on the balls of his feet in a full sprint, making for a tin shack, which he catapulted through. Cozzard and Lout fired as they blasted down the embankment, peppering the tin shack with rounds, reloading, then emptying their silenced pistols out again. They split, taking either end of the shack, pulling their weapons around. Cozzard licked his lips. He hoped to God that he’d be able to plug the young punk in the head.
He’d done time in the iron house in the days before. Unlike most, Cozzard learned to thrive in the new chaos. Free from the confines of societal mores and the stickiness of the law, he was free to largely do as he pleased. He took great pleasure in the kills and specialized in headshots. For some perverse reason, he loved aiming at and hitting the head. It was a vascular area; the tissue there engorged from the chase, ready to release great fonts of red as soon as he fired the first slug. Even though the area from the neck up was his primary target, he was mindful of avoiding contact with his targets’ eyes. The eyes troubled him and he agreed with whomever it was that once said therein lies hidden the last shreds of a victim’s humanity. He held up a handful of brown powder and hoovered it and thought that when he shot down the boy, he’d make sure to focus his gaze on the top of his head and fire low and then he’d do a bastardized version of counting coup over the corpse.
Cozzard swallowed hard, then kicked open a door to reveal…nothing. The teen was gone. Cozzard toed at the dirt and checked the slide on his pistol when Lout whooped with joy. There was a wending blood-trail on the ground leading under a bent section of wall. The boy might have escaped, but he was wounded.
Aside from his interaction with his comrade Erik, Elias kept to himself in the Pits for the first few months. There was no other way, what with all the training, resting, and rhetorical conditioning. His days were evenly divided as he waited for his first run: half spent in a crude cube with a cement floor, stacked with weights and hand-crafted exercise devices, the other half spent running or listening to speeches from past Runners who’d been through Absolution and lived to tell about it. While rare, there were at least four former Runners who’d survived so many sessions of Absolution that they’d been given retirement by Longman himself, along with jobs as trainers under Moses.
He finished his time in the room of weights, achieving some measure of bulk in the last few weeks, bench-pressing much more than he weighed. Two hundred and twenty-five pounds. "Two wheels," his trainer had called it. He did this for reps and then "super-setted" with an exercise that involved pulling a sixty-five-pound dumbbell high over his chest, and then he worked his legs, doing sets of barbell squats and hack squats and stiff-legged deadlifts and all sorts of extensions, weighted and unweighted. When he was finished, he wiped the sweat from his brow and flicked it away, and asked for permission to run outside.
The summer air was not yet heavy as he exited the room and smacked his legs to warm the blood and sustain the pump, and then he was off, moving slowly at first, then jogging. Elias enjoyed the late days the most, the hours just before twilight when the light went golden and he was given license to roam outside the Pits. By directive, he was permitted only to run on preordained paths, curved trails of asphalt and hardened dirt that paralleled the river or the man-made ridgeline that fell below sections of the wall. He was so good, so fast, that the trainers often permitted him to run on his own, and it was in this time that he deviated from his orders and took shortcuts and switchbacks that led to the edge of downtown New Chicago. He was forever curious, though he’d never actually visited the belly of the city before.
Elias wended out away from the Pits and along the river, and then he cut back past rowhouses and backyards and small businesses and former houses of worship. He stopped and stared at the ragged wall that lined the horizon, keeping New Chicago in the middle between it on one side and the Great Lakes on another. He crested a hill and stopped at a series of giant wooden poles that stood at the edge of a roundabout like sentries. Posted to the wood were hundreds of pieces of plastic-sheathed paper. Survivor logs, yellowing lists of names of those who’d made it through the Unraveling. He scanned these often, looking for a sign. Searching for a sibling’s name, even though he suspected none of them had made it.
He was barely at the age of memory, living in the outer burbs in a nice house with a mother, father, and two brothers when the sky exploded. He and his family had been caught up in the city when the grids went down and he was amazed at how quickly everything had changed. How the lights had flickered off, and the stores, once filled with plenty, shuttered. How fast friends quickly became faster enemies. His father didn’t panic. He had a plan. They would wait out the initial chaos and then make a run for a small hovel (his father’s "bug-out" shelter, as he called it) that he kept hidden in a section of woods in the country at the edge of a trout stream that ran clear and cold and deep.
They didn’t have to wait long. The food ran out after a few weeks, the water a few days after that. When a group of neighbors tried to force their way inside, his father picked up a gun and did what he had to do. It was time to go.
They packed their world into the back of an SUV the size of a small school bus and thundered off in the dark of the night, taking back roads and staying off main thoroughfares and other arteries overseen by what was left of the National Guard. They listened to the radio and heard politicians and scientists offer words of calm assurance while pontificating about how things were going to be rebuilt and order restored, even though his father was convinced the fabric of society was torn beyond repair. His old man was a bootstrapper and believed the world had gone soft, too reliant on handouts and bailouts. "The safety net’s become a hammock," he was known to say. He was eternally pessimistic, a purveyor of black tidings in the later days, but Elias and his family nevertheless prayed that the tide would turn.
It didn’t and they never made it to their shelter. They were run off the road by a cordon of men and boys in pickup trucks who descended on them like wolves as a carful of dirty cops watched and laughed and egged them on. The attack was sudden and swift, but Elias’s mother and father were ready. Elias’s father told the boys to stay low in the backseat as he pulled a sawed-off shotgun out and gutshot the first man through the driver-side window. The man’s stomach opened like a sandwich bag as Elias’s father kicked his door open and dropped to a knee and began giving and receiving.
He dropped three more attackers before one of their rounds blew out his neck in a foam of red, and down he went for good. Elias’s mother screamed as a sweat-salved man slid over the hood, heaved her door open and pawed at her. As she was spun around by the attacker, she drew a dagger hidden near her ankle and plunged it into the man’s eye, as blood pulsed onto Elias’s pants. She stabbed two more men and sliced open a third before she was ripped, screaming and gnashing, out of the car. The doors were pulled open, and Elias dropped to the ground in the confusion and secreted himself under the SUV.
They stole his two brothers away as Elias clutched the underside of the SUV and held on for dear life as it was driven off and deposited inside a nearby impoundment lot. He dropped from the car when the attackers left and looked inside the only building of any measure within sight. Seeing no sign of his mother and brothers, he ran off through an industrial yard and collapsed at the edge of a field hemmed on all sides by an orchard. He was taken in by a childless couple beyond the middle term of life that owned and farmed the land.
His new dad was fair, but stern. His mind was differently circumstanced from Elias’s congenital father and despite the deep intelligence on his part, there was no approach to intimacy between himself and Elias. He was less a real father and more like a guardian, a trainer of sorts. He focused on core principles, basic things related to the elements and the land and survival. He taught Elias how to work hard, how to craft things from refuse, how to live off what could be grown or gathered. The years went by and Elias grew and worked in the fields and orchards, harvesting and canning and readying for the unknown. He also ran. He’d sprint around a circular path his new father had pounded into the ground around the orchard. His new father had been a runner in his younger days, you see. Times were good, at least for a short while.
His new father and mother knew much, but nobody at that point had heard about the Thresher. It was by that time many years after the Unraveling, and stories had only recently begun to filter out: rumors about other "survivors," great masses of people who’d lost their sight and had their minds somehow murderously reformatted when the sky fell. Word was these roaming packs had taken root out in the suburbs and the lands beyond, but were now constantly in motion, hunting, searching for sustenance, moving in such great numbers that they trampled the grass and vegetation like the reaping machines of old. Hence their nickname: "the Thresher."
They came for Elias’s family, dozens of them, in the hushed silence of a cool, crisp autumn evening.Elias saw the first one in the candlelight from the kitchen. It was once a man, now bald, with skin as tight as a drum-cover, snugged down over bony appendages and with jagged teeth that had been whittled down naturally over time to points. Smiling at him before he punched his way through a window.
Elias’s new father fought like a force of nature, dispatching many of them that night, the house clouded with plumes of cordite and explosive backwash as he fired out guns and tossed homemade incendiaries and explosives. Elias watched as the things burst into flames from the firebombs, running to and fro like ambulatory torches. They crashed and burned in droves and set the fields afire, but there were too many. When one fell, another took its place. Over and over they kept coming, like the brooms after that mouse in an animated movie that Elias had once watched.
Elias’s father sensed the inevitable and shoved Elias out an upstairs window as a gnarled talon hooked around his neck and snapped his neck back. Elias hazarded a final look back to see the things bent over his father and mother, snatching up hunks of flesh and handfuls of dark, shiny gore out of their still-writhing bodies like crazed pickers at a swap meet. He could have gone back to help, but seized by fear, he chose flight over fight.
Elias dropped to the ground and dove between the legs of a Thresher and rolled over and peered up at a slavering frenzied mass of veins and gangrenous, snapping teeth. Elias combat-rolled to his left and was off and running faster than anyone his age should’ve been able to run. Across the rotting fields and down through the treeline he scrambled, the Thresher giving chase behind him, bellowing like herds of panicked swine. Elias was faster than any of them would ever be as he met the Chicago River and took cover along its matted banks.
He soon fell in with a disreputable flock of river bandits for a hot minute, but when the going got too rough and the Thresher began closing in, he left them one night. He thought it might be because the desire to fight back had left him after his parents died, but he was always leaving somewhere behind. Always running. And so he came to abandon the bandits and experienced a number of small adventures and close encounters with the Thresher as he followed the river into the city and eventually fell under the watch of Moses O’Shea. Most of those in New Chicago had no earthly idea what lay on the other side of the wall, but Elias did. He knew all too well about the things that shambled around in the dark, but he mostly kept those traumatic memories to himself.
He shrugged off thoughts of the past and continued his run past a former municipal sewer system that still reeked of death and decay. He stopped to catch his breath and stared into the water. Still dirty, but a few fish swam there now. Overhead, there were flocks of birds, including larger ones that dropped down and plucked up smaller surface fish every now and again. Without man, the air was cleaner. Some of the water was beginning to grow clearer, and animals that most had not seen in many years were reappearing in greater numbers. There were some days Elias wasn’t entirely convinced that the Unraveling hadn’t been a blessing in disguise, at least on some cosmic level. There seemed to be so much more life after all the death.
He trotted down over a ridgeline to see the city’s skyline, maybe two miles distant. Faster he ran, past concrete drainpipes and defunct water purification plants, Elias supremely in the zone, running at a level where thought and action were nearly seamless when the teen boy staggered into him and down he went.
Elias pitched sideways, crashing to the ground in an alley as the boy fell on top of him. Elias reflexively pushed the boy aside and felt swatches of his hot blood as the boy crumpled into a fetal ball. It was the teen boy from before, the very one that Cozzard and Lout fired at.
Elias remained in a defensive crouch as the boy moaned and shivered. Elias had seen enough over the years to know the boy was severely injured; his outer jacket was stained a deep, gory red, and his balled right fist lay extended. Elias froze as he looked at the boy whose features were separately striking almost to grotesqueness, the whole of his facing leaving a deep impression in the memory. A small puff of blood and spittle bubbled from the boy’s lips as his countenance drained of color. His eyes fluttered open for an instant and fixed on Elias as he fought against the slow approach of death. His fist opened, and a tiny cellphone (what his pursuers wrongly assumed was simply an old-school digital camera) and key fell from it. The boy forced himself to head-bob in the direction of the phone and key as Elias took them up, wiping a smear of blood from the face of the phone. The boy gestured for Elias to draw near, and as he did, the boy’s breath rattled in his throat and then he whispered, "T-they’re coming."
The not-too-distant sound of pounding footfalls forced Elias to look up and then crab back into the shadows of the alley. He caught the faint outlines of Cozzard and Lout drawing near. He slithered back a few more feet and cast a final look at the boy. Some impulse, some voice audible only to himself, commanded him to go back and help, but he realized the boy’s death hour was surely at hand. He shuffled back and turned a corner, listening to the sounds of silenced gunshots as Longman’s brutes finished off their prey.
Elias stopped and pressed himself against a garage, making his form as small as possible. He waited, and then cursed when he saw his jacket was stained with the boy’s blood. He looked down at the phone and key, listened, heard nothing, and then ran with all his might back from whence he’d come.
Marisol waited in line for lunch along with the other Apes. They were receiving their rations from the sustenance couriers that worked for the Codex Guild. The Guilds got their shares first, then the soldiers that guarded the wall and downtown, then those owed favors by Longman, and finally the Apes.
She grabbed a plate of mashed root vegetables and some steaming gray meat and sat down next to Farrow at a long table. She looked down the table where Jimmy Sikes sat and cleaned his rifle, sucking on the half of his tongue that was left after Marisol had bitten the other half off during an ill-fated attempt to go at her. Sikes had learned his lesson, as had the others. They all went at her back when she was green and unsure of herself, lunging at her in the shower and in the barracks, making feels for her in the shadows of the tac vehicle and even when they were out on their hunts. But no longer.
Marisol was strong now. Stronger than she knew and far more skilled than any of the Grizz or the other Apes. Farrow was kind to her if for no other reason than he wanted to find favor in her eyes. Indeed, the scuttlebutt said that the men of means in the Guilds were reportedly keeping a fast eye on her, and Farrow had every reason to believe that one day she would be plucked up and seated at the right hand of Longman as head of what amounted to his Praetorian Guard. He hoped she remembered him when she came into her kingdom.
Farrow knew much more than he let on. He knew, for instance, about how bad things had been after First Light. About how society had taken a knee two weeks after the grids collapsed and then crumpled to its belly two weeks later when the food stopped flowing and the power failed to come back on. He knew how men like Longman had risen up. Men with connections, with access to the only remaining things that mattered: weapons and fuel and the lack of hesitation to use both with force and impunity.
There were many legends about just exactly how Longman came to assume his position at the head of the Guilds. Stories about how the "Lord of Misrule" had led a great force of irregular soldiers out to confront warring masses from a violent city to the south. A great pitched battle was supposedly fought out on the Plains, a mini-war of attrition that ended with the Longman bravely leading a final charge that resulted in close-quarters combat and the ancient sounds of fighting, the echo of stone and wood against bone and flesh.
Marisol’s family had been part of one of the battles, her father allegedly a soldier fighting at the foot of Longman. He’d died somewhere out beyond the wall, along with the rest of Marisol’s family. This was what Marisol had confided in him, but Farrow suspected different. Farrow was not yet a part of the system back then. He’d only recently been forced to seek shelter inside the wall, taken in by a veteran of the battles, a former Army Ranger who confided to Farrow that history was written with the blood of the vanquished and that all was not as he’d heard.
The Ranger told Farrow that Longman hadn’t been any defender, but an aggressor. A man who was a purveyor of "FUD," the Ranger said. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. A feckless tyrant who’d ginned up an army of the downtrodden and raided several weapons caches (that only he knew about) and then moved out to confront any encampment that lay before him. Longman and his army, the Ranger said, had laid siege to nearby settlements, waited them out, then breached their defenses, murdered their inhabitants, and set the torch to anything that couldn’t be consumed or carried off. They’d done the same to any settlers or stragglers they’d encountered, stealing from them and then putting them to the sword.
Though he’d never seen it himself, the Ranger confided that there was allegedly a great open pit in the middle of the Q-Zone where all of Longman’s victims had been dumped. There was even talk that the Thresher did not exist, but merely had been conjured up as a way of preventing people from venturing out into the Q-Zone.
"But surely there were those who could’ve taken a stand against Longman," Farrow wondered. The Ranger acknowledged the logic of this, but whispered that Longman had been made aware of military secrets in the days before the Unraveling. He was able to utilize this information to gain access to some great weapon (which was unknown to the Ranger, though he harbored dark suspicions) whose very existence, whose threat of use, was sufficient to force the other survivors and members of the Guilds to fall in behind Longman, lock-step. Farrow knew all of this and much more, but kept it to himself.
"I’m going outside," Marisol said.
Farrow, slurping up a pool of food, cocked his head sideways.
"What’s out there?"
"Something new," she responded. "Don’t you get tired of sitting in here?"
He considered this, shook his head. "No, I know what’s out there."
"And?"
"And that’s why I stay in here," he grinned as she played with her food, not amused by his response.
He could see her pout and so Farrow leaned over the table. "Listen, kiddo, if you really wanna see what the bright lights and big city are all about, have at it."
She perked up. "You mean it?"
"Sure. Ole Farrow’ll see the head honchos myself, put in a good word, hook you up with a pass so you can follow the course and detour it down past the greenery."
She smiled and nodded. It was in moments like these that Marisol most reminded him of his daughter.
Later that afternoon, Farrow approached her as she was doing one-armed pushups in the barracks and handed her a scroll with a red stamp. "Good to go, young lady," he said. She hugged him, grabbed a flak jacket and a pistol, checked her Sigil, the unique I.D. tattoo branded on the palm of her hand that identified her as a Runner, and then she looped a rucksack over one arm and was off through a side door.
She moved briskly on a path stamped by the Guild for the Apes, a protected trail that snaked through a snarl of vegetation that was off-limits to the general populace. It was one of the few nice things afforded the Apes, and Marisol loved its view of the cityscape. She clipped past the outer hub of moldering apartment buildings, beside a rusted sign for South Ashland Avenue, and toward a crude suspension bridge that spanned the river. She moved across the bridge and eyed a few acres of land in the middle of it; what was once a park was now choked with weeds and sunbleached signs that spoke of the history in the times of the machines.
She walked down sidewalks, past gawkers who gave her a wide berth when they spotted her Sigil, and beside great farms that had been built upon cubes of asphalt and concrete. Continuing on, she dodged sinkholes and marveled at the streets and byways and alleys, now broken up and invaded by thick grass and natural vegetation, having returned to the Earth much faster than anyone would’ve imagined. She shimmied up a decaying telephone pole and glanced at the Great Lakes that glimmered like a mirage out in the distance. She stopped and gaped into the taped windows of stores that once sold household goods and liquor and tickets for games of chance. She moved aside a piece of detached plywood and eased through a gap and into a store she’d secretly visited many times before.
Marisol waited for her eyes to adjust to the gloom inside what had once been a store for young women just like her. Lots of water-damaged but still flashy signage with impossibly-perky thin girls, most holding up phones or throwing their heads back in laughter, wearing tights and jackets and silly boots made from animal skin from a country thousands of miles away that were the de facto dress code for those aged nineteen through thirty-four back before. Marisol made sure there was no one in sight or within earshot and then she went shopping, sorting through her tiny honeypot of trinkets and bygones.
She scooped up a ratty dress that lay in the ash of the busted building and held it up below her neck in front of what was left of a shattered mirror. Her head flopped to the side, she mustered a smile, imagining some beat-heavy music playing, and for an instant she was just like any other girl her age, trying on clothes for events that no longer mattered.
Marisol stared up at the signs of models and mimicked their poses and pouty looks, holding up a blouse, a sweater, a shiny little jacket that had the name of some long dead designer filigreed across the back in cheesy sequins. She caught sight of a pair of speakers for music lying under an overturned endcap display and danced a slight dance to a tune only she could hear, until a crashing sound out somewhere behind the building abruptly ended her daydreams and forced her to draw her pistol and snap the safety off.
Marisol moved through the building shell to a rear metal door that was pocked and warped. Using the barrel of the pistol, she pushed the door open and saw two figures in the alley across the way. Elias was there, stooped over the teen boy who lay in an expanding pool of red. She saw the teen boy’s spasm and then she watched Elias take the phone and the key from him and vanish behind a wall as Cozzard and Lout appeared and searched the boy and then pumped silenced rounds into him.
She’d seen so much killing that she didn’t react even as the door blew in on her and the sound forced Cozzard to look her way as she stealthed back inside the building and melted out onto the street. In a flash, she was running full-speed away from the building, replaying the image of Elias as he snuck off away from the dead boy.
Longman received news of the boy’s death as he stalked the outer edge of his office like a lion at the zoo. His inner sanctum was hacked into the middle of what had been a skyscraper in the old days. The 12th"floor in a twenty-five-floor building. It was hidden deep inside the offices of the Codex Guild, the management concern that, for all intents and purposes, ran New Chicago like Capone and his brow-beaters ran Old Chicago in the days before.
In movies and books, the future had always been bright and shiny and sterile with impossibly handsome boys and girls running around with magical powers and silly names. In reality, the candles had been blown out on Chicago long before Longman arrived, the skin of the city shriveled and pocked. It was an ugly, horrid place ("Calcutta on a lake," Longman had called it), filled largely with two kinds of people: hunters and prey.
Shortly after he and his army arrived, Longman planted a flag and rebaptized the city and chose the heartiest amongst his crew to take charge of any endeavors that might resurrect commerce. But the small groups of survivors who’d been in the city before Longman appeared — the "seething rabble," as Longman called them — they were happy living by themselves in some of the tallest buildings downtown, the ones that occupied the high ground in the city and afforded those inside unparalleled views of the Great Lakes and the fledgling wall and all the lands that lay beyond.
Longman was initially patient with the small sect. He recognized that he had the watches and the time, but soon realized if he were unable to work it out, he’d have to sure as shit act it out. After all, he thought to himself, violent change was the essence of human history. When negotiation and bargaining ultimately bore no fruit, when Longman was unable to make medicine with the thorn in his side, he held a secret meeting filled with his most loyal cohorts and then sent a host of menacing men out one night, armed with blades and cutting devices and small explosive devices.
They darkened their solar lanterns and doused their pine-knot torches and under cover of a torrential downpour, they blew up two of the buildings, and stormed the final, tallest one. The two sides battled to the death in the high rise, and by daybreak Longman and his people were moving across blood-soaked floors and readying for rebuilding. The bodies of those they’d dispatched in the "death-hour" (the young, the old, even the sucking babies) were walled up inside the building and it was made punishable by execution to even whisper about the letting. Longman ordered that a few sickly animals be slaughtered and roasted and then feasted on by all his subjects in a grand rally one night. It was here that he proclaimed the year was Zero. He called an end to the violence and chose the ancient guilds of Europe as a model for his new Eden and bestowed titles on those who’d done his killing for him. They would operate community branches of the umbrella Codex Guild.
They partitioned the city into Zones and made certain portions off-limits, setting aside one section of cityscape for punishment and another for the "Crazies," those citizens who, without proper psychotropic medication and cerebral conditioning, were unable to function (and after life as they’d known it had ended, their numbers were legion).
Rather than put them all down as many called for, Longman chose, in his eyes, a more benevolent path (spurred by the memory of his mother, who’d struggled for years with mental health issues) , and cordoned off a sliver of cityland with tall fencing and left them there to fend for themselves in what became Zone 3.
Zones 1 and 2 were for set aside for living and working, while Zone 4 was readied for storage and supplies. Zone 5 was initially proposed as a place to deal with the perpetrators of crime, and initially it was. But as with any fledgling enterprise, the burdens of crime and punishment began to overwhelm the Guild, which was without proper law enforcement or lawyers (whom Longman, via one of his first edicts, banned along with politicians and priests, for he despised ideology and those who incessantly clucked their tongues above all other things). Upon reading a book about the Great Plagues in the days of old, Longman proposed a system be created to quickly and efficiently deal with right and wrong. He had heard tales during his military years of a similar system being used in the Middle East, one that was premised on blood money. He called it Absolution, a mash-up of the old and new. No appeals. No second opinions. No bullshit. Certainty. Closure. What people were crying out for. That was five years ago.
In the days since, the city’s population steadily increased. Over a thousand people currently worked and lived and huddled together in the building that housed the Codex Guild. The Codex Building had been crudely connected to other nearby structures with metal and other materials to form walkways and flaccid catwalks and ladders that allowed those inside to never touch the ground below unless they so chose. The edifice was akin to a misshapen middle finger of steel and cement to all those on the streets below. Like something out of the mind of a great architect gone made.
The roofs of the buildings had been shorn off and lengthened and fortified with massive rain barrels and then filled with soil and seeds to form gardens and hydroponic plants that fed all who lived inside. Snipers guarded everything, watching down over the hi-rise dwellers with sniper rifles and NODs (night-observation devices) that permitted them to see in the dark. They sat in blinds built into the base of the thicket of wind turbines and solar panels that spasmed half a day’s worth of electricity to those who lived inside.
Longman had personally overseen the construction of his own dwelling. One quick look at his space revealed that impenetrability had conquered aesthetics. He made sure to place his living quarters inside walls built of steel and brick strong enough to withstand a round from any weapon and able to hold back a small army, which would buy him enough time to slip out through one of the numerous hidden passages that lined the walls and corridors of the great halls of the Guild like termite runs inside an old piece of festering wood.
Outside, in the halls and corridors, his men stood forty strong at all times. Not used-up mongrels like Cozzard and Lout, who were Longman’s street brawlers (his Brownshirts), but former professional soldiers who knew what it meant to take a bullet and carry out orders. None were what were called "tier-one operators" in the old world; rather, they were general-purpose soldiers.
Longman was well aware of the omerta possessed by spec-ops soldiers, how unlikely it was they would fall under his spell or do his bidding. He knew that those highly prized soldiers had been some of the very last to fall, protecting the gates of Washington, D.C., for those ungrateful windbags who gave fork-tongued speeches on that accursed hill. Honorable men and women gave their lives for politicians on both sides of the aisle who’d never once had the brass or common decency to don a uniform or carry a gun. He kept a mental log of these soldiers, and any he encountered from well-recognized elements (SEALs, Delta Force, etc.) he poisoned or put down with much cunning and effort. The soldiers that did remain, the forty strong, were more than adequate and formed Longman’s last line of defense. His own private squad of hired killers. They were excellent for a final stand, but for pedestrian matters, street killings and night shankings and the like, he relied on the brawlers.
Cozzard and Lout shared images on a handheld device of the teen boy’s dead body. They also handed Longman the boy’s identification, which showed he came from a family of some repute. Longman pursed his lips and gnashed his teeth and stared out a window that allowed a beautiful view of the Great Lakes.
"Did anyone see either of you chase the boy?" he asked his two enforcers. Both men traded looks and then shook their heads.
"You’re certain?" They nodded.
"He’s just some fodder, boss," Cozzard muttered.
"You think I don’t know that? I know exactly who he is and what stock he comes from. He’s an agitator, comes from a long line of them."
"The Clement Guild," Lout noted sourly.
Longman nodded. "I’ve had trouble with his old man and mother for the better part of three seasons. Silently chastising me, complaining about the runs, the operations, everything," he continued while waving a hand.
"Nothin’ that a few grains of good ole black powder can’t cure, eh? We should get rid of all of ’em," Cozzard said. "Kill ’em all and line their fields with saltpeter."
Longman considered this and then shook his head. "I appreciate your enthusiasm, but we’re not there yet. We need to take care of this in the old manner. Call Hendrix and the Brahmin, have the investigators do what they do and get another hunt together."
"Absolution?"
Longman nodded, dead-eyed his goons, and said, "Make sure O’Shea gets an extra allocation this time. The family’s going to want a spectacle. Their only son and all. Make sure the best runner and the best hunter face off. We need legitimacy for this one. We need to put this thing to rest and then worry about the consequences of the fire."
Cozzard and Lout nodded and pivoted to leave, when Longman whispered, "What happened to his camera?"
The two men froze and slowly turned.
"Sir?" they both said.
"He had something with him, you idiots. A camera, something that he was recording things with."
"We didn’t find nothing’ on ’im, sir," Lout muttered. "I swear to Christ there weren’t nothing."
Longman’s face fell and then he waved them off and turned back to the window, his mind racing, seeded with thoughts of vast conspiracies being plotted against him.
Elias slid the cellphone and key into a pocket on the inside of his Nomex jacket as he neared the outskirts of the Pits. He knew that the phone and key would be immediately confiscated as contraband and that he might be soundly beaten, or, at a minimum, his privileges to venture beyond the confines of the Pits revoked. The exterior Sentries recognized him, but failed to notice the thin smears of blood on his dark clothing and nodded as he slipped inside and beelined it to his sleeping quarters, where he immediately doffed his blood-speckled clothes and hid them under his sleeping mattress that lay on the floor.
He thought about sharing his treasure with Erik, but had learned over the years that trust was a luxury that rarely could be afforded. Plus he didn’t want to risk getting Erik involved to the extent there was any blowback for possessing the device if it was found on him.
He waited for his roommates to shower and then fumbled with the cellphone. It had been several years since he’d seen such a device and this one differed markedly from those. He pressed various buttons until he heard the click and whir of internal machinery and then a glow overtook the face as it powered up. He stared at the screen and the tiny icons embedded therein. He remembered mention of something called "apps" in the days before the world fell and he touched that initial screen as a sub-window propagated out. There were dozens of files saved inside the sub-window. Elias touched the first one, and after a few seconds, images played with sound as Elias scrambled to mute the device (which he did), gazing upon the video as if it were a thing of unparalleled beauty.
The video showed various shots of Longman and the men Elias had seen back in the alley, Cozzard and Lout, mingling with dozens of people who emerged from hand-me-down cars and trucks and other machinery that belched diesel exhaust. Everyone was being ushered up into the building as the images abruptly cut to some junction later on the same day. The images showed smoke billowing from the building, the audible sound of screams and shrieks, and then Longman, Cozzard, and Lout emerged and pointed as the video ended.
He trawled to another file and pressed it and up emerged images shot at a distance showing Longman overseeing a firing squad, men with guns mowing down people standing at the base of a white wall. Blood spattered the wall and Elias reacted and closed this file and opened another. More videos, more images of death and devastation, all of them involving Longman in some form or fashion. Direct evidence of his misdeeds.
Elias looked to see if anyone was coming, then turned back and opened a final folder, which showed an image of a huge field out in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of the field was what looked like a colossal sinkhole, a pit that was filled with what looked like a million bleached tree branches. The angle jumped, the person recording the images obviously spooked and on the run, as the image abruptly cut to the dead boy staring at the screen (directly at Elias) and whispering. Elias ticked up the volume and heard the boy say, "There’s a way out. I found it. A path out beneath the wall and to the lands that lie beyond. There’s nothing to fear if you know where to look. Everything they tell us is a lie."
A sound caused Elias to shove the phone down his leg as he wheeled to see his roommates jabbering, preparing to enter the quarters as he turned off the phone and drop it into a pocket. He wondered what the boy meant, and what the key was for, and why the man who’d led the city out of its darkest days was involved in so much bloodshed.
Marisol was late from her run and it was only the intercession of Farrow that saved her from the wrath of Teddy Brusker, one of the brooding commandants who ran the barracks and reported directly to Longman.
"What the hell, girl?!" Farrow kept saying as he took her aside. "What the hell?!"
"I’m sorry," was all she could offer in return.
"Care to tell me what were you doing out there?"
She dipped her head and then tossed Farrow a quick look. "There were so many things to see. I was down past the river and I – I lost track of time… lost my way."
Farrow shook his head, smirked, "I don’t buy that. Not for one minute. You can’t lose your way. It’s genetically impossible. You’re like a bloodhound for Crissakes."
She bit her lip and said, "What’s a bloodhound?"
Farrow hesitated at this, then mussed her hair, his anger melting away as he slapped her shoulder. Sometimes he forgot, but she was still only a young girl after all.
"Never mind," he said, and then, "What’s out there is gone now anyway. It’s in the past. Forget about it. It’s the way it was. The only thing that matters is the right here and now. The way it is."
He took a few steps away and then she said, "Why?" and he paused and turned, for this was the first time Marisol had ever asked him why. "Why is it that way? Why do we have to forget about the way it was?"
"What’s gotten into you?" he asked.
"Nothing, it’s just ... is there something wrong with wanting to know more?"
He mad-dogged her, buying time, rummaging for some trenchant point or simply the right words. Finding neither, he simply growled, "Okay, alright. You want to know why? You really do? You’re not gonna like it, but things are the way they are because I say so. Because that’s the way they have to be right now, that’s goddamn why."
Marisol scowled and took a look to the ground and pushed past him. He knew she was pissed and he almost called after her, but then he let her go. For all he cared about her, she wasn’t blood. True, she reminded him of his daughter, but she wasn’t really his. At the end of the day, she was just another Ape. Marisol slipped down a hallway and mustered forbidden thoughts of music and dancing.
At the same that Marisol was thinking of a life beyond Absolution and New Chicago, Longman’s familiar, a man known simply as Mister Hendrix was busily at work. Hendrix was what might have been deemed a bureaucrat in the old days. He was perpetually unshaven, junkyard filthy, and resembled a greyhound, with long, crooked pins that looked built for speed. He sported tweed trousers and iron-tipped boots and carried a metal attaché case purloined from some oily hedge-fund guy he’d shot in the back under a subway trestle two days after it all went bad.
Like many in Longman’s unholy entourage, Hendrix embraced his dark side in the days shortly after the Unraveling. Unlike some of the others, however, his was corruption by choice, driven principally by a latent talent for hunting and killing that announced itself as soon as the world broke.
Most of those he’d put down in the days after "The Great Shat," as he called it, deserved it, but the first few he’d dropped with blade and bullet just to see if he could do it. He’d had terrifying visions and dreams of running amok in the days before, but was unable to act on any of his more demonic impulses because of the law and societal pressures and the legion of pills he took from various mental health practitioners to keep his demons in check.
The Unraveling had been the opportunity of a lifetime for Hendrix, and he’d fully embraced it, immediately going off his meds, and gathering up weapons and blackening his face and setting off at night to kill and take trophies from his targets. In the quiet times when he reflected, Hendrix remembered the Chinese maxim of "original sin." That is, there was no one of any measure who had not gotten to where they were without committing some dark act. He was like this, he felt — someone truly coming into his own, though it was indisputable that he’d done more evil than most.
His days of killing were mostly over now, and he functioned in his current capacity as an Absolution investigator for Longman and the other elites. Inside the attaché case were the tools of his trade. A half-broken digital camera wrapped in duct tape, a magnifying glass, a set of steel tweezers, a foldable knife, parchment, a small bottle of baby powder (for testing prints) and a writing utensil to scrawl and sketch the death scene.
Hendrix bent beside the boy shot dead by Cozzard and Lout and tossed his pockets and catalogued every object and piece of pocket litter found inside. He flipped the boy’s wrist over and gazed at the tattooed numbers that all of the citizens of New Chicago now bore. He matched the numbers up to those on a paper list and mused that the deceased was the ne’er-do-well son of a fairly well-respected member of an upper Guild.
Caleb was his name and his father controlled trade on the river and owed all that he had to Longman. Caleb’s father had no other sons, but a bevy of fine-looking daughters borne by several women. He wouldn’t miss Caleb. Not really. Hendrix smiled, for he knew that the death of the Boy would not be connected to Longman. It would be pinned on some unlucky Mudder or other fodder, some poor soul who scraped by on the leftovers jettisoned down by the upper caste. In order to obscure the facts underlying the death and obstruct any true investigation, Longman would pay the blood money (what Hendrix personally liked to call a "Death Gratuity") and O’Shea would ante up the Runner and then the Apes would gun the Runner down and the money would be paid to Caleb’s family and all would then be right with the world. That’s all the other members of the Guild wanted. To make sure that if they lost a life, another would be offered up in sacrifice for it. That’s how people were placated now. Flesh for flesh. Blood for blood. Take a life give a life.
Hendrix recorded all the relevant information and placed it inside his case and then turned to two broad-shouldered workers who placed dowels under Caleb’s body and hoisted the boy up into a long burlap sack. He would be shown to his father and then incinerated and his ashes spread, like those of everyone else, over the source of "The White": poppies at what was once called Soldier Field.
Hendrix was partially responsible for "White" or "The White," as it was called (even though, amusingly enough, it was light brown in color). He’d been a soldier and a part-time chemist, a promising drummer in a punk band called "Failure To Thrive" and a lover of drugs and violence and vice back when the world was real. An addict since the time when he was half of forty, he sobered up in the years after his murderous rampage and the Unraveling when the supply of drugs and other goodies slowed to a trickle. He carried seeds with him, however. Poppy seeds he’d gathered in a nameless war fought overseas and then secured in a rucksack that he carried in his bag when he set out after the initial riots began.
He spent many years in the wilderness, half-mad, living off of what he could grow or source or steal from anyone unlucky enough to make his acquaintance. One of Longman’s sycophants shot him in the ass when he tried to steal a jug of lamp oil from a truck and the only thing that had saved his life was when he showed Longman those seeds. Longman knew what they were, what they meant (and what they could mean), and Hendrix lied and told Longman that he knew how to plant and grow the seeds. The lie saved Hendrix’s hide and quickly after Longman’s forces took over New Chicago, Hendrix was made to grow those seeds in the fertile soil of Soldier Field. The weather was unforgiving, but modifications were made and soon the crop took hold and blossomed into a beautiful batch that was cured and pressed and used as currency to buy and sell and snort and inject and generally partake of.
Various Guilds controlled trade in New Chicago, some overseeing it on the river, others in the outer boroughs where much of the vegetables and fruit, herds of lower animals, and valuable timber was grown and cultivated. The Birken, Kratzos, Millios, and Occidio Guilds controlled the more rural areas.
In the city, the Hammurabi, Sagan, and Locksley Guilds controlled smithing and mongering and the foundries where fires were stoked and metal bent, and brick manufactured from the river sludge to use in buildings. These various goods would be brought to market and paid in kind with other goods or ounces of the powder, which was disbursed to workers and the lower castes to keep them numb. The population of New Chicago was perhaps forty thousand, and more than half of those were addicted to the narcotic. Longman controlled all of it — all of the trade in drugs.
Funny thing was, Hendrix rarely used an ounce of the stuff. Same with Longman. They were too busy making plans and getting rid of those who stood in their way. After several years, the crop was self-sustaining and Longman moved Hendrix into a position as lead investigator as he resurrected Absolution to deal with the growing problem of crime, lawlessness, and inter- and intra-Guild disputes. Hendrix knew most of the hunts were rigged and utter bullshit, but it gave Longman’s system a veneer of legitimacy, and sometimes that was all that mattered. He snapped closed his case and thought, "What the hell," so he snorted a bump of The White, and made his way to a waiting car to deliver the news to Longman and begin preparations for Absolution.
This is how the hunt always began.
Hendrix would arrive back at the Guild offices and move briskly up fourteen flights of stairs (elevators were, like morality and soap in the days after, an indulgence). He drifted down guarded corridors and entered a bullpen brimming with men and women who formed the small teams who functioned solely as cogs in the Absolution machine. Hendrix sat at his desk and filled out forms detailing all of the pertinent facts from the death scene as his assistant, Michael, hefted thick folders on prior hunts, along with photos of potential Apes to use.
Michael showed Hendrix how much blood money had been paid in prior sessions and Hendrix did quick calculations, taking into consideration the dead boy’s family, the Guild, in order to ascertain how much he was worth. He reached a number. The boy was worth at least ten thousand dollars in old money, or several kilos of White. An impressive sum. One of the largest amounts of diyya in recent memory. Longman would not be pleased. Hendrix circled the number as Michael held up the photos of the Apes and Hendrix smiled broadly as he was immediately drawn to a photo of Marisol. He’d never really noticed her before and pointed.
"You friggin’ kidding me? Some… girl?" He tittered at Marisol’s photo. "Goddamn chicklet doesn’t look old enough to sell me cookies."
Michael did not return Hendrix’s smile. "She’s the best there is. A tracker. She leads the older ones now."
"That so?" Michael nodded as Hendrix squinted, attracted to the girl certainly, but also cognizant of the impressive list of kills and half-kills attributed to her.
"She’s never been on a hunt that didn’t end successfully, Mister Hendrix."
Hendrix nodded. Just what he wanted to hear. He signed off on the paperwork, and neatly folded it three times, then pulled a mighty iron stamp with Longman’s seal from his desk. He used a lighter to fire up a wedge of red wax and then he pressed the seal in the wax and stamped the Absolution papers and handed them to Michael for processing.
Michael took a step and Hendrix lashed out and grabbed his wrist. "Who’s gonna run?"
Michael shook his head. "I don’t — I mean, you know that the decision on who—" he said before Hendrix snapped, "You tell that bastard O’Shea that I want someone green, okay? I don’t want anyone to know, but I want a first-timer on this one. One of the young runners. Some wet-behind-the-ears punk. Some sweet-pea."
Michael nodded uneasily and then hustled off through the bullpen as Hendrix leaned back and smirked. The game was afoot and he wanted to make damn certain that blood was spilled.
Elias furiously pumped his arms as he crawled up a faux hillside, a climbing board forty-feet high that was secured to tall wooden poles on the east side of the Pits. Sweat riveted his brow and muscles as he climbed all the way to the top, secured in place with nylon ropes that hung like entrails from the poles, protecting him in the event of a fall.
"You got some serious skills," a voice echoed.
Elias peered down over a shoulder to see Moses standing and watching him, arms folded across his thick chest.
"Thing is, it’s easy to make that climb with a safety net."
"What do you mean?" Elias asked and Moses grinned, "Oh, I think you know."
Elias looked to the ropes that were fastened with rusty clips to the harness pack he wore. He sucked in a gulp of air and knotted his brow and then he undid those clips and spidered down the face of the climbing board freestyle, dropping the final ten feet and coming down low and rising on his haunches at the feet of Moses, who clapped.
"I wanted to let you know personally that you’re on deck," Moses said. Elias froze; a pulse of energy, equal parts fear and excitement, snaked up through his body.
"Me?"
"You, kiddo. They damn near specifically asked for you. I mean, don’t tell anyone, ’cause people think there’s this deep, dark lottery, but the Brahmin, the mighty men on the council who’re in charge know who they want, and they asked me for you. You’re running and gunning for me in the next hunt. The next session of Absolution. ‘The Harrowing.’"
Elias nodded, "When?"
"One day from today," Moses said. "Time enough to get your stuff squared, m’man. You feel me? Y’know what I’m saying?" Elias had absolutely no idea what Moses was saying, but he rarely was slapped or verbally abused for nodding, and so he nodded as Moses clapped his shoulders. "You’re going to do just fine."
Moses spun to exit as Elias called after him.
"Elias."
Moses stopped and turned and replied, "Come again?" and Elias said, "I told you before, but…my name’s Elias."
Moses grinned and tipped his head. "Elias it is," he said, and then he paused, and for some strange reason asked, "You got kin, Elias?"
"I did. Before. You?"
Moses nodded and Elias noticed his knuckles for some reason. They weren’t ridged like normal knuckles, rather, they had all been flattened. Elias knew from this that Moses was not a man to cross, but wondered what he must have done to wear them down that much. He had a guess, but held his tongue.
"Your family," Elias asked. “Where are they?"
"Gone."
"Long gone?"
Moses nodded again, a quiver of misty red in his eye. "So far away I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to find them."
Elias chewed on his lip.
"You afraid you won’t ever see them again?" he asked.
"I’d be lying if I said anything other than ‘yes.’"
Moses dipped his head for an instant, then looked back, searching Elias’s face for hints of fear.
"Are you afraid of running tomorrow?"
Of course Elias was, but he didn’t want Moses to know that even as the black man’s face puckered up into a half smile in recognition.
"I read somewhere, Elias, where a man much smarter than me wrote, ‘So long as we love life for itself, we seldom will dread the losing of it. It’s only when we desire life for the attainment of an object or something else, we recognize the frailty of its texture.’ I always felt like that kinda summed the whole thing up."
"I guess we just need to focus on the now and live for what we’ve got," Elias replied.
"I think you just nailed it, kid.”
They shared a moment, and then Moses whispered, "It’s kinda weird, but in the old days I think you and me might’ve actually been friends. I just got that feeling ‘cause of what we would’ve had in common, y’know? But now the only thing we share is harsh times and an enemy. Sucks, don’t it, Elias?"
Elias didn’t know how to unravel what Moses had just said, and so he nodded yet again as the black man whispered, "Good boy" and pivoted and moved back inside the outer ring of the Pits, smiling as he went. The kid most definitely had stones, Moses thought. God knows he would need them.
Marisol moved deftly between the obstacles in the Kill House, the shell of a building that had been retrofitted as a training ground for the Apes. It was three stories tall, chopped up into various rooms where targets and traps were laid, with closed-circuit cameras capturing all the action and beaming it back to the Commandants, who scored the performance of each of the Apes as they made their way through.
Marisol’s assault rifle nosed through a door, bright orange mag of "sim-ammo" — simulated ammunition — clipped in place. She spirited up a staircase and sharked down a corridor, nose to the air, waiting for any sign. She felt it, that electricity the others couldn’t feel, and then she planted a foot and dove to her right as — WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! — sim-ammo and tracer fire raked the spot where she just stood. One of the other Apes was hunting her. She shouldered her way through a limp barrier of engineered sheathing and came up on her knees, sighting her rifle down. She could sense movement through another wall as the lights went out and everything was plunged into outer-space darkness.
She counted to herself, heard the nearly imperceptible creak of a floorboard, and then she took off, barreling forward — BOOM! — jackhammering through the particle board wall to surprise Harrigan, the Ape who’d been stalking her. Marisol double-tapped Harrigan with the simulated ammo, orange paint splotches etched across Harrigan’s chest. For purposes of the training op, Harrigan was dead. He was also half-pickled from the cheap swill he rifled down that was made of equal parts sodium water and paint thinner — "agua verde," he called it — and it affected his mind and made him hotter than hell at high noon. At that moment in the Kill House, he was in no mood to be upstaged by a pencil-necked girl.
Marisol lowered her gun, and in a flash he torched her with a glare and said, "You think you’ve got the best trigger in the Windy, girl? Huh?"
She didn’t respond and this only seemed to increase Harrigan’s fury.
"We gonna keep cuttin’ bait, girl, or we gonna fish?" he said, cracking his knuckles, bunching and unbunching his fists.
"I don’t think it has to be like this," she said, hard gripping her gun.
"And I don’t think it can be any other way."
"You’re sure you want to do this?" she asked, taking a step back.
Harrigan couldn’t believe what he was hearing as he breathed loudly through bared teeth, his body coiled like a serpent, ready to strike.
"You know how this is gonna end, don’t you, bitch?"
She nodded.
"Me on my two feet. Looking down at you."
Harrigan roared in anger and charged and swung his rifle at her head. The aft of the gun clipped her hair, Marisol barely avoiding it. She swept a foot that stoned Harrigan’s ankle, bringing the thug down on his ass. In a blur of movement, Harrigan threw a punch that Marisol blocked and then Harrigan was back on his feet, coming at Marisol, punch, kick, chop, repeated over and over. He was inebriated, but his bulk sustained his momentum as he kept coming at her.
She parried everything he threw at her and then replied in kind, torqueing a toned leg back and bringing it across Harrigan’s chest, right below the ceramic plate he kept fastened across his vitals. The kick loosed the air from Harrigan, who gulped like a drowning man as Marisol jumped and planted an elbow against his neck, and then Harrigan was falling through space and tasting his own coppery blood before he hit the floor and blacked out.
Marisol barely needed to catch her breath. She dappled the dusty ground near Harrigan with spit, and briefly considered finishing Harrigan off once and for all with a blade to the prominent vein that pulsed on one side of his neck. If she did, would it be considered murder? Self defense? Did any of those distinctions even carry any currency anymore? The lights flickered back on and Marisol noted a camera hanging from a nearby ceiling like a gargoyle. She stepped over Harrigan and exited the Kill House.
Farrow and the others were waiting for her. They’d seen much of what she’d done via a monitor on the outside that showed images of what was taking place inside, and most clapped and hooted for her, save for Sikes (who was friendliest with Harrigan) who grumbled and iced her with a nasty look. For some reason, she intentionally feigned a lunge at Sikes, who flinched and tripped back on his heels as Farrow watched and nodded and grinned.
He took her aside and mussed her hair and whispered, "We’re going out again tomorrow." She looked at him and replied, "A new hunt?" He nodded, glanced at the other Apes to make sure they couldn’t hear, and then he whispered again, "A big one this time. And from what I can tell it’s someone linked to the Codex." She took this in as a sound rose and Marisol swiveled to see Harrigan emerging from the Kill House, wobbly, weak-kneed, getting razzed by the other Apes for having his hind end kicked by a girl barely eighteen years of age. Marisol stood her ground, holding Harrigan’s gaze, ceding nothing to him or any of the other men.
In the days long past, the area around New Chicago had been first settled by native peoples. Some had called them "Indians," though that term had fallen out of favor, replaced a half-dozen times by other words depending upon the direction of the winds of political correctness. Longman remembered they called themselves Algonquian and they chose the area principally because of the portage, a finger of swampy land, verdant and flat, that connected the Chicago River with the Great Lakes. Here, the Algonquian kept great pens filled with all sorts of animals that they bred for sport and for food. In the days since his Guild had taken control of the city, Longman had done the same, establishing a zoo and breeding pens out near an old amusement park on the lip of the Lakes.
Longman was many things to many people: a leader, a killer, a prophetic destroyer of dreams and worlds, and, surprisingly, a lover of animals. He hadn’t always harbored such feelings, but in his adult years he’d held a place in his heart for lower creatures. There was no guile in them. They either were for you or against you. There was no duplicity or manufactured affection. There was no in-between.
He strode between the locked slips full of deer and pigs and barnyard animals, along with more exotic creatures that he rescued from the zoos after his reign began. A smattering of African animals, strangely-colored birds, and a half-dozen truculent wild hogs that someone had given to him in return for not killing their son. All of these were housed in a high tent made of woven metal mesh with gaps at the high sides where food (and other things) could be tossed in. The sound of an engine drew his attention to a battered Town Car that stopped and disgorged Hendrix, who slithered out and moved past the animals, many of which bayed and hissed in his direction.
Hendrix handed Longman his Absolution file, which Longman quickly fanned, stopping at the photo of Marisol.
"This is her?" Longman asked. Hendrix nodded and said, "She’s a straight-up heartbreaker and life-taker ain’t she?"
"I don’t remember seeing her," Longman responded.
"You haven’t watched in ages, boss, and when you did, she was offscreen. She was a tracker before, but now she hunts with the rest. And the best thing is her scores."
Hendrix’s mouth peeled into a satanic smile. "They’re…perfect."
Longman nodded and handed the file back to Hendrix. "How much?"
Hendrix’s face went wooden for a beat, then he looked out over the animals and whispered, "Ten thousand, sir. We’ve explained to the family and to their Guild that Caleb — that was his name — was cut down by some mugger out past the river, an unsolvable, but the family, they hold you responsible because security’s gone to hell of late, as we both know."
"Your cover story, did they buy it?"
Hendrix nodded, sniffed the warm air, and continued. "It’s worth it to pay the money and end the whole thing anyway though, ‘cause if the hunt should prove unsuccessful, they’ll undoubtedly want more answers and then they’ll start digging."
Longman’s gaze hopped from the animals to Hendrix. He thought back on the notion that violence can only be concealed by a lie and the lie only maintained by violence. How very circular. He nodded to Hendrix. "We can’t have them digging into what happened to that little spy."
"No, sir," Hendrix responded. "Bad for business and all."
Longman duly noted this, then placed a hand on Hendrix’s wrist. "If this doesn’t work out, Hendrix, I’ll be honest. It won’t end well for you." Longman said this with absolutely no affect, no emotion in his voice or face such that he looked less like a living man than a statue wrought by some dark-imagined sculptor. Hendrix was terrified, but slowly nodded as Longman set out, strolling along a boardwalk he’d had built that snaked between the pens of animals. The stench of the farmyard burned his nostrils and he stopped and reached in a pocket and pulled out a half-eaten vegetable and tossed it to the hogs. The giant beasts rolled and fought over the morsel and Longman nodded and grinned. He loved these sludge-slicked low-dwellers. They were like him. Willing to do almost anything to survive.
The dim light of day had withdrawn, relinquishing all of New Chicago to the evening gloom. Elias was down in the Pits, training as hard in the last hours before his first run as he’d done in the many months leading up to it. No changes in eating or routine. He did an hour of sprints (many of them with weights strapped to his back), then ran several miles and downed various protein and carb drinks made of goat’s milk and shredded grain and the concentrated pulp from the multicolored fruits that Moses grew in an old greenhouse near the edge of the river.
He listened to speeches from a trainer named Max who’d survived an unheard-of nine hunts, read reports of those who didn’t make it back, and studied crude topo maps of the land where the hunt would be. When he lay himself down to rest that night, he made sure to check the hiding spot inside the mattress for the phone and the key. His plan was this: he would vanquish all of the Longman’s men tomorrow and then, after returning in triumph, would explore the secrets of the phone and key in greater deal.
Even when he was a child he exhibited a knack for visualization, for plotting out the way things were to unfold. So he continued to think on his plan and had no doubt that he was more than prepared for tomorrow and would be returning victorious with his head held high. On two feet.
As Elias continued to train and prepare, Marisol sat in an ordnance vault in the barracks with an oversized blade and cut notches in the tips of 5.56-millimeter bullets. Acting upon the advice of a younger Ape, she proceeded to pour molten wax on top of the notches. The wax was supposed to give the bullets extra stopping power. She’d never used her rifle on a Runner before, but her intuition told her that tomorrow might be different. She needed to be ready.
When the wax cooled, she collected the bullets and fitted them into two ammo magazines that she taped together and slapped into the receiver on her assault rifle. She hefted her gun and it felt good in her hands as she placed it next to her body armor that she doused in alcohol and scrubbed clean. Her hands quivered as she worked the alcohol into the grooves on the outside of the armor that would encase her on the hunt like an individual fortress. She hoped that tomorrow would go smoothly, but her intuition said it would be different, that this next hunt might be the start of something, rather than the end of it.
Longman lounged on a chair at the top of the Guild building, listening to a dented iPod muted low and the sounds of the night as it cloaked the city. He fiddled with a small machine that resembled a metal bird, a mini-drone made of carbon fiber and high-tech plastics that was built for eavesdropping and surveillance. He checked the lithium batteries bolted inside the drone, then the aperture camera that captured ground-level images. He smiled at the shimmering exterior of a device he used on rare occasions to track the progress of the Absolution hunts.
Satisfied that all was well, he hoisted the drone and ran a short distance and flung the device like a javelin as it soared off and away from the roof. Micro-electrical motors hummed to life inside and soon the drone was flying out and away and over New Chicago.
Longman returned to his seat and admired a small monitor fastened to a harness that he strapped around his shoulders. The monitor showed top-down footage shot by the drone and enabled Longman to control the drone via a tiny joystick and dial. He was not unfamiliar with the technology, having used it during a period of "all hands on deck" at his air base directly after the Unraveling. It was a time of great uncertainty when all able-bodied men and women had been asked or ordered to stay on, to move on base with their families and significant others to monitor events happening on the ground. Recognizing an opportunity, Longman volunteered to man the twenty-four-hour flocks of drones that High Command sent out over the cities and the lands in between. The satellites were still in orbit (and fair number continued to be in orbit far overhead, though only Longman knew this), and the wind and algae-charged batteries that powered the drones in full vigor, and the whole of Middle America became a kind of free-fire zone in the months after the Unraveling.
There were some at the base who couldn’t take it, who broke after seeing all they held dear crumble and burn into nothingness. Not Longman. He volunteered for drone training when others dropped out or stopped showing up for work, and soon he was consorting with "Reachback Operators" in Nellis and Creech Air Force bases via encrypted sat links and flying Predators and Reapers and raining Hellfire (quite literally) down on unsuspecting "Crows" (which meant, in military parlance, the bad guys), their luminous forms running in the darkness before his IR sensors locked on and he banished them into the void.
Adopting the handle "Icarus," Longman was soon in charge of the "Disposition List," the initially electronic (and then paper) log that contained the names of people the High Command wanted liquidated. He was ruthlessly efficient, though he spent most of his days watching the collapse of civilization in real-time and striking marks on a wooden desk to denote his "kills."
He observed the futile attempts to power the grids back up. He watched them glow and then fall permanently dark. He studied the lines that formed in the cities and the burbs, and then tracked those lines as they collapsed into frenzied mobs that ransacked and pillaged and fought against law and order until there was none left to fight.
He perused the news flashes that ran for a spell on backup generators, detailing the fatal disease birthed by the solar storm that hit the economy and stopped the oil from flowing. Solar storm. Solar flares. Magnetic tsunami. Terrorism. Preemptive strike. Act of God. EMP. The party of the donkeys believed one thing; the elephants, another. And none of the geniuses or talking heads or people with no real discernable skills who got paid for jabbering on shows could quite agree on what had happened, but it mattered not. No power meant no jobs, no transport, no buying of plastic goods from faraway lands, no living beyond means. The engine of America locked and burned in a few quick months. It had not been too big to fail, after all.
As the final seconds ticked down, Longman sat alone and watched at the air base as stories unfolded after the news went dark. He watched the death of the golden calf as the stock market dropped thousands of points in a matter of days, the technorati throwing up their hands, unable to massage their money and manipulate sectors and industries in a world without power. He poured through top-secret databases called SIPRNet and JWICS and Anchory and Broadsword and all of the various internal portals and networks connecting groups and elements nobody had ever heard of, like the National Correlation Working Group, and the Proactive Preemptive Operations Group, the Strategic Support Branch, and all of the other entities with their cute little acronyms that were birthed by tax dollars to compress the kill chain.
He studied the mass suicides that took place on the great bridges in San Francisco and New York. He observed penitents with bent knees in broad fields seeking a sign from some higher power that never came. He analyzed the standoff at the Mall of America two months into the collapse. Armed bands had taken it over and forced the hand of the remnants of some second-tier military element, which burned it all down in a conflagration that made the events at Waco look like a Fourth of July barbecue.
He clocked the grotesque ferocity of the battles over the bridges that connected Detroit and Canada and Maryland from the Commonwealth of Virginia, the sieges that ensued around the oil fields in Texas (which moved unsuccessfully to secede from the Union) and the viaducts and fracking pools in Pennsylvania, the wild firefights across the high-tech campuses in the greenery below San Francisco, and the murders of various reality stars in the hills of Beverly by vengeful and long-suffering viewers. He watched all of this like God, occasionally picking winners and losers with the squeeze of a trigger that deposited fire and brimstone down on the unlucky. And by the end of it all, when the power finally winked out and his ammo ran dry, Longman peered around and realized he was it. Last man standing.
He watched the drone flit over downtown New Chicago and past the Pits and the Apes’ barracks and the Zones set aside for Absolution. The world would soon be stitching itself back together, Longman thought while looking at the sky overhead. The hunt would soon begin, and blood would be spilled and then all the wrongs committed before the new day would be washed as white as snow.
Blood roared in Marisol’s ears as she ran through the tall grass that blanketed her line of sight in every direction. The sun was faint overhead, little more than ambient light as Marisol streaked past, barefoot, unarmed, following a path on the ground, moving across little cubes of rock with the practiced grace of a professional dancer. She paused and heard the sound, the unearthly grunts of pursuers. They were coming, the same things that haunted her on occasion in the light and always in her dreams. A flap of movement at the periphery of her vision. The tail end of something clutching the shadows, staying low to the ground. Her pulse quickened, and then there they were — dark cutouts at first, freaks of imagination, mottled forms with rotting, talcum-colored flesh. Nearly indefinable, they stumbled up into the light, clawing their way across mounds of fresh earth. Spider holes and duck-backs. Their movements more humanoid than animal, eyes milky and sheathed in a layer of loose skin.
She screamed and turned and ran through the grass that rippled all around her. They were closing fast as Marisol skirted forward, bursting out the other end of the grass maze, and then she was tumbling, falling down an embankment until she came to a rest in a windfall of tombstone-white tree branches. Her vision was spotted white and swarmed with stars as she rolled over and pushed herself up on a stout branch that was revealed to be a human bone, a femur. She shrieked, recognizing that she was hip-deep in a never-ending boneyard. A pale netherworld of bleached bones and flesh-starved corpses that lay like twisted sculptures. Marisol squinted up as her pursuers paraded down the embankment, following her like animated targets from some horribly violent, first-person, mow-em-down video game. The sound of the things echoed behind her, beside her, all around her. They were everywhere now, an immense force that careened down toward her as she grabbed a bone to use as a club. The horrid clamor rang in her ears as she brought the bone back over her head, wailing, before she roused into consciousness.
She leapt from this liminal state, nearly fell from her bed in the barracks, and shook off the nightmare and looked through a slit in a faraway wall. The sun was just beginning to peek through. It was nearly time for Absolution to begin. She reached over and plucked up her tactical vest and swung a hand out for her rifle. As the alarm sounded, she lurched from her bed and grabbed her gun and the rest of her gear and made for a nearby exit.
Elias was already awake and in the back of a militarized Range Rover, driven by Max, his trainer, who’d been conscripted to drop the Runners off at the starting point. Unlike many of the trainers, Max wasn’t a screamer or a brow-beater or "hands on." He preferred a lighter touch, and took the time to gently encourage Elias, building him up, getting between his ears, reminding him how he’d succeeded with lesser talent than that possessed by Elias.
"Listen, El," he said, "You’re gonna do fine, okay? Y’hear me? You’re smarter than them. You’re faster, better, you’re aces, bro. Comprende?" Max would’ve made an excellent salesman in the days of old, Elias thought. Elias nodded and then Max cracked wise, mentioning something about society’s hunger for heroes rising up in the darkest of hours as Elias’s eyes hovered over his hands, which were clenched tightly together. Elias’s mind wandered and he thought back on the past and his parents and all that he’d done, the good and the bad, to make it to this point. He was glad he could muster some modicum of confidence for his accomplishments, but still. His heart was pounding in his ears and something came over him that he hadn’t felt in a very long time. Fear.
Marisol sat with her head bowed in the gullet of the tac vehicle as it clipped through the city.
"What say, girl?"
She looked up, saw some of the other Apes snoozing, heard the harsh, uncouth tones of others as they whispered. She glanced sideways at Farrow.
"I had a nightmare," she said.
Farrow chuckled. "Just one?"
"I dreamed I was on the other side."
"Of the wall?"
She shook her head.
"The Grasslands?" he offered, and she nodded.
"When I came with my family we stopped at the edge of it."
"Thank God you didn’t go in."
Her head canted and she froze him with a look. "What’s on the other side of the Grasslands?"
The slightest of smiles tucked up the corners of his lips and then he shook his head. "That’s for another day."
"You’ve been there? Tell true. You’ve seen what’s beyond?"
He leaned into her, whispering conspiratorially, "Nobody goes over the wall, squid. At least nobody who ever makes it back to talk about. As such, now is not the time to talk about things that aren’t good for either of us."
"When, then?"
"Later."
"It’s always later with you," she said with some heat.
He grabbed her wrist with such force that she nearly yelped and touched her forehead with his. "You know why it’s not smart to ask so many questions? Sometimes you get answers. Understand? So if you wanna live to see another sunrise, you’ll let it go."
Her eyes never strayed from his. "I don’t care if I see another sunrise."
Farrow nodded and smirked, "So now you’re what? A natural hardass, Marisol? A true warrior?" She didn’t respond, surprised that he’d used her real name. He clapped his hands and said, "Guess it’s all meant to be, huh? This whole thing’s perfect for you. You’re the star of Absolution and it don’t matter what the outcome is because warriors were meant to die in battle, right?" She turned from him in a slow-burn and gripped her rifle and spotted Harrigan watching her while simultaneously grabbing a cylindrical grenade-launcher as the ceiling lights flashed green and the rear of the machine dropped open with a thunderous roar.
Elias already had his nose pressed to the ground when the siren ripped the air, signaling the beginning of the run, what some called "The Harrowing."
He was watching Marisol and the others exit their transport machine from a nook nearly a quarter-mile away, hidden adjacent to a scarp of rock that jutted out behind an old smelting plant. His gaze blurred into middle distance, enabling him to barely make out their forms. He couldn’t discern faces or details, just the faintest outline of the Apes as they formed ranks and moved out.
He wrapped a scarf that resembled a keffiyeh around his face and donned a pair of black sports goggles so that his eyes looked like two small fires burning inside a cave. He reached in a disposable plastic pouch and held up a thin needle which housed a dose of epinephrine — "liquid scream," as Max called it. He chewed off the cap on the needle and exposed a bit of thigh flesh and plunged the needle in.
Tossing the spent needle aside, he wormed down the rock and checked the watch that had been strapped to his wrist, which started blinking down… 59:58. He had to last an hour or make it past the Apes into the safe-lands near the bottom of Zone 5. He hopped onto a wall cast of cement and dropped to his haunches and glassed the land that spooled out in front of him with his hands.
Elias watched the Apes tread through a narrow corridor between blocks of former two-story buildings that had gone to seed. They were bottled up with little room to maneuver, but were fanning out. Down to his left lay a rusted metal chute that jutted out of the broken windows of a building that once housed a drywall manufacturing plant. Elias’s real father was a construction hand in the old era, and he remembered seeing such a place, where glops of slurry were squirted onto the chute and then dried and cut and stacked to form sheetrock.
The chute angled down perfectly, allowing Elias (if he could remain unseen) to nimble past the Apes and then drop to the ground and blow past the Apes and sprint to safety. He held the high ground presently, but it was only a matter of time before one of them spotted him. From his perch, he could see the tall, thin figure sprinting out ahead of the other Apes. The figure, whose face was obscured, moved faster than the others and seemed to be leading them. He would have to act quickly. He sunk to his belly and began crawling down the chute, which was suspended twenty feet off the ground but visible to the Apes through gaps in the building’s shattered windows.
Flinty eyes swept the streets and grounds ahead. Farrow was on point behind Marisol, searching for any hint of movement. The Apes had itchy trigger-fingers. Harrigan errantly let loose with a flurry of grenades from his launcher which collapsed a shuttered liquor store whose inventory and fixtures had been pilfered during the calamity. Marisol cocked her head and checked the display on her HUD and then jogged out ahead of the others. She turned a corner and stopped and did what she did best: she listened.
She heard Elias before she saw him, the purr of fabric flapping as she ducked through an alleyway just in time to see Elias tuck his elbows and prepare to drop from the chute. He hung suspended in the air and then dropped, his hands snapping out for a drain pipe that he grabbed and used to whip his body forward. She pulled up her rifle and sighted it down, but a second of indecision was all it took and Elias was gone from view. Without alerting the others, she ran laterally through a wasted storefront, heading toward the rear to cut Elias off, a back door coming up fast. Marisol jump-kicked it open as — BOOM! — the door exploded into Elias, knocking him sideways.
Elias dropped to the ground and assumed a position akin to a person doing pushups: hands out shoulder-width, feet planted and cocked in the soft soil. He was shocked to see Marisol and she to see him. Elias resembled some kind of insect with his goggles and scarf. He hesitated, rose to his knees, and then she was on him.
The butt of her rifle came down across his trap muscles, instantly timbering him back to his knees. Her curled leg caught him in the face next as he spiraled back onto his ass as she brought the rifle around and aimed as — WHACK! — he flicked a boot at the last second, tipping the rifle barrel up as Marisol fired a burst that ripped the air, the recoil unsteadying her, buying Elias precious seconds.
He scooped a handful of dirt and flung it in her face as she crabbed back, and he took off like a tailback, lowering a shoulder, upending her. He drove her into the ground and then slugged her jaw as she took the punch and returned it with a nasty jab that knocked his throat and sent him reeling. Marisol’s hands ripped the scarf from Elias’s face and she gasped audibly when she saw him under it. "YOU?!" she shrieked.
Elias had no idea who she was, and so he pulled back a fist to strike a more serious blow, girl or no girl, and that’s when he saw them: the other Apes appearing in the distance, trailing the faint echo of Marisol’s gunfire. Elias reacted, spun on his heels, and took off across a weed-strewn lot as the Apes took up firing positions. Harrigan was the first to fire, bellowing as he let loose with his launcher, flinging a grenade that spun past and air-burst in the vicinity of Elias. The explosive backwash threw Elias sideways with such force that it looked like he’d been pulled on an invisible string.
Grunting to catch his breath, Elias shook off the shock and the thrumming in his ears and sprinted across open ground as bullets churned the ground all around him. He dove into an empty sewer pipe and elbowed forward and out the other end, and then clipped to his feet and hit a perimeter fence.
He hauled himself over, bloody and torn by tangles of razor wire, as Marisol watched the Apes fire a blizzard of bullets at him, emptying out their rifles, slapping clips in, firing again. Farrow lowered his smoking rifle and turned to gauge Marisol’s reaction, but she was nowhere to be seen. He smacked his commo device to get a spike on her, but she’d disabled it. She was on her own. Moving in for the kill.
Overhead, Longman’s drone was capturing the action in real time, beaming it back to Longman who reacted at the sight of the grenade exploding. He blanched when he saw Elias rise and run off, wondering just who the hell this boy was to survive an explosive detonation nearly right above his head. He watched the images change as the drone circled, the time clock counting down at 41:24 and dropping as Elias entered the lower Zones that were awash in booby-traps. It was only a matter of time, Longman thought.
He gaped back at the handful of people who were similarly watching the macabre spectacle of the hunt from one of the verandas on the Codex building. Other principals in the Codex and various other lesser Guilds, along with Hendrix and Moses O’Shea. People who had an interest in maintaining order and the new ways. Longman thought, for an instant, that they resembled the revelers who came out to watch the First Battle of Bull Run in another war that was long forgotten.
He turned and moved through the onlookers like some illustrious potentate, taking in their anxious, wide-eyed faces. They appraised him with various looks: fear, hatred, and something that bordered on adoration. It was far better to be feared than loved, and most feared Longman. A few were even bold enough to whisper that they knew Longman’s secret, that he alone had possession of a small device (allegedly kept on his person at all times) synched to still-functioning satellites that could trigger a weapon and end the world. Whether this was a black lie or simple hearsay, it had the unmistakable ring of truth to it, especially in light of all that Longman had done. He turned from his followers, not a hint of panic or urgency in his face as he gazed upon the downtown cityscape and wondered how long it would be before the blood of the boy would be shed.
The echo of gunshots and the dull thud of Harrigan’s grenade caused necks to crane down in the industrial hinterlands that bordered the Absolution Zones. A passel of Scrappers of various ages turned from prying piping and wires from the wreckage of a former consumer-electronics showroom. The Scrappers, three adults and a teen, hustled over to a section of fence that wreathed Zone 5 and gazed at Elias as he streaked by on the other side, maybe 100 yards away.
The Apes appeared next, pouring down over an embankment like fire ants as they took potshots at Elias, who bobbed and weaved to avoid their bullets. The Scrappers took it in and, all of them being of low station and having run afoul of what passed for law enforcement under Longman’s reign at some point in the past, were not naturally inclined to root for the Apes, and so they thrust fists up into the air and cheered for Elias. Still, they were in awe of the sight of the Apes who looked like the personification of war with their body armor and heavy weapons.
Elias galloped down a hillside, leg clipping an exposed root that sent him into an unchecked swoon as he tumbled elbows-over-ass past and down until he lay splayed on an old, soiled mattress. He bellied across it and bolted to his feet as bullets shredded the foliage around him. Back up on the hillside, emotion had overtaken Marisol, who triggered her gun, the wax-laden bullets inside lasering down at Elias like tracer-rounds. Her line of fire followed him as he juked across a field and into a building, the bullets shattering brick and mastic just behind his head and across the façades of big-box and franchise stores that had been built back during the years of gentrification. More bullets flew and a section of wall fell like a cataract of ruin, barely missing Elias who tumbled ahead.
Elias plunged through a section of cement conduit that was tall enough to fit three men side-by-side. His vision whited out as he burst from the other end and skidded to a stop in a section of downtown that had been walled off in the past with concrete jersey walls. Catching his breath, he checked his watch — 38:39 left — as he looked over his shoulder and caught the faintest hint of one of the Apes signaling for the others to follow.
He turned and scanned the road before him. Formerly asphalt, now little more than dirt and gravel. He discerned a section of the road where what appeared to be fresh soil had been packed. The slightest of lumps was covered by the soil and Elias bent and grabbed a clutch of wet newspaper and nimbled up to the edge of the fresh pack and used the paper to conceal it.
He was making sure to avoid the wires that jutted out of the pack, the telltale sign of an IED, as he hopped onto a sidewalk of segmented concrete when — CRACK-BOOM! — the building next to him vanished in a titanic grenade blast. Elias covered his head and clawed his way through the dust kicked up by the explosion, using it as cover, listening to the invectives and war cries of the Apes grow louder behind him.
Marisol broke from the Apes and loosed a fusillade in Elias’s direction, shell casings pinging the cement beneath her. She’d never seen a Runner move with such dexterity, and was shocked at how Elias seemed to be able to run between her rounds. Her peripheral vision fixed upon a pair of Apes that were bounding out and away from Farrow and the others. They moved in patterns, checking lines of sight, clearing them. Scan. Sweep. Repeat. Moving heel-to-toe, knees bent, bodies angled forward, searching for targets. Typical Ape movements that were preached back in the barracks and writ in forgotten training books.
Marisol saw the hidden IED before they did, raised a hand to signal for them to stop when — BOOM! — one of them triggered the hidden bomb, which turned both men into bone-confetti. Farrow and the others instantly dropped to the ground as the blast echoed off the storefronts and buildings. It was in that instant that Marisol and the other Apes knew this Runner was different. He’d taken down more of them in one session than had fallen in the prior three years. Infuriated, Sikes, Harrigan, and the other Apes wove forward, bloodlust in their eyes, as Farrow swapped glances with Marisol, who headed in another direction.
Elias nodded with grim satisfaction as the IED blast echoed and then faded into nothingness. He checked his watch — 34:45 left to go. He scooted across a dusty verge, spotting the Apes dashing to cut him off. Doubling back, Elias rattlesnaked through the broken front window of a garage and headed toward the back when he noticed the ground giving way underfoot. He looked down and saw that the floor was one sheet of metal, rigged to drop: a booby-trap!
Spinning like a dervish, he pushed forward as the floor dropped. Elias vaulted forward through the air, landing hard against the rim on the other side, grasping for purchase, finding a handhold. He looked back and down to see that the metal floor had fallen away to one side of a pit awash in sharpened pieces of rebar. With great effort, Elias utilized his chinning abilities and pulled himself up. As he flopped on the other side, he heard the sickening sound of a depression plate lowering.
His eyes skipped left and right, and he watched hidden weights fall down metal shelving. As he bopped to his feet, the weights fell, triggering guns lodged in the recessed walls. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! The guns fired in what seemed like slow-motion to Elias, who ducked and covered and managed to avoid the slugs as he rolled out a rear door that nearly came closing down on top of him before he squirted out, leapt to his feet, and took off into a stand of shrubbery.
Marisol was gliding down over bricked walls and past the ruined façades of franchised and corporate eyesores, reloading her rifle on the run. Time was running out. She bulled through an alley as a tree-trunk arm snagged her midsection and she brought her rifle up into the face of Farrow.
"Stand down, girl," he said. "Stand down."
She did, her face flushed, red as a candy apple. He half-smiled and said, "You only know how to play the game at one speed, huh?"
She nodded and wiped back her sweaty locks and looked for the other Apes, who were nowhere to be seen.
"How long?"
He checked his watch. "Less than thirty ticks."
"He’s headed for the maze," she said with certainty.
"How can you be sure?"
"Because I can feel it. Because that’s where I’d go."
"This grunt ain’t like you, Marisol."
"I know," she responded. "He might be better."
"Charlie Mike," was all Farrow said. Marisol nodded, repeating, "Charlie Mike." Continue mission.
Moses O’Shea could barely contain his glee as he watched his boy Elias make fools of the mighty Apes. He’d already vanquished two of the galoots and was certain to take down a few more. At this rate, Moses would have more money than he could spend. His elation was muted only when Longman’s shadow fell over him and he heard the words, "Are the tales true, O’Shea? Is your Runner really green?"
Moses looked up and took in Longman’s grave and decorous demeanor and nodded. "S’all true, Mister Heller. The kid’s first run."
"Lovingly, I would say his abilities are hardly… suboptimal."
"He’s a dandy indeed, sir. Got real nice instincts."
Longman noted this, his eyes straying upward to heaven, then back to Moses as he replied, "Oh, I think we both know it’s a little more than that. I think he had an awful good trainer."
O’Shea didn’t know whether to smile or grind his teeth. Others had gone mad trying to divine the meaning in Longman’s cryptic responses, and so he simply lowered his head and went back to watching the imagery shot by the drone, hoping like hell that the bet he’d placed on Elias’s back would pay off.
The minutes blurred past as Elias sought cover in the remnants of a forgotten stock-yard, and a rusted tin warehouse littered with overturned rail-cars, before running down a ramp that curved through a toy store before stopping at a ledge that dropped away to a basement twenty feet below. Elias ran down a ramp that curved through a toy store and ground to a stop at a ledge that dropped away to a basement twenty feet below. Time and the elements had crushed the store like a tin can, exposing another ledge eight feet away that led to safety. Elias crabbed back, then took off in a dead run. In one fluid motion, he sprung across the chasm and grabbed the ledge and directed his momentum up and over it, where he collapsed to the ground and checked his watch, which showed 4:29. A thrill passed through his frame. He was nearly home free.
He looked up, and sensing no movement anywhere hurtled toward a stairwell and slid down the metal railings and caught sight of Longman’s drone prowling lazily across the sky above.
He ran through the burned and pallid landscape, sensing victory as the seconds counted down. He’d done it. He’d bested the bastards who had the gall to send a girl after him. A girl! He smiled at the thought of her, hidden behind her guns and body armor that made her look like some kind of cocooned beetle. She was something to look at, though. He couldn’t deny that she was pleasing to the eyes as he checked his watch, which showed he was under one minute as he rounded a bend and stopped when he caught sight of Zone 3, the area where Longman had "relocated" the Crazies. There was a visible pall over the space, nearly 10 city blocks hidden behind a patchwork of rusted fence. The entire area was peopled with strange and terrible sounds, screams, guttural laughter, and what sounded like deep-throated voices lifted up in fervent prayer. The echo made Elias shiver as he studied his clock. Down to ten seconds.
He jogged hard right, smile blossoming across his face, when, without sound or warning, Marisol lunged and punched him in the side of the head. He careened to his left, the shock and kinetic energy of his fall forcing him over. Marisol skidded out in front of him and assumed a shooting stance as Elias looked in every direction. There was nowhere left to run. She brought her rifle up, finger quivering around the trigger, hesitating, when a horrific sound shrieked from her HUD, causing her to tear her helmet off. It was a sound she’d never heard before. The end of the run. The end of Absolution! Elias had won!
"End it!"
Marisol wheeled to see Sikes appearing behind her, pistol out, racking the slide, bringing it up.
"It’s over," she said.
Sikes grunted, "I don’t give a damn if it’s over or not, end it!" He moved to shove her aside when she grabbed his pistol and wrenched it free.
"It’s over!"
He swung at her and she dropped low and fisted his throat with such forced that he passed out and hit the ground in a heap, a dark stain spreading down the leg of his pants. Elias watched this in wonder and then levered himself up. The two stood and shared a look in brutal silence and Elias thought, for an instant, that his moment of release had come.
Marisol pursed her lips as images from the hunt flitted and flashed in her mind. She had him in her sights for an instant and couldn’t do it. Couldn’t pull the trigger. She seethed as she swung around and made her way back through Zone 5, hoping that no one of means had seen her fail when it mattered most. She would remember this moment for the rest of her days. The distinct sounds and smells of her first, true defeat and how her world had been turned upside down. Yet even though she’d been sent to hunt the boy down, she could not deny that she’d immediately sensed some kinship, some strange connection to him.
On the top of the Codex Building Longman cursed the day Elias was born and rebuked everyone who’d gathered to watch the hunt with a volcanic look. He took refuge in his office, dark thoughts forming. The wheels turning, Longman recognized that he needed to address this situation post-haste. No session of Absolution had ever ended this badly for him. He needed to cut his losses quickly. Something passed over his face: a squall of pure anger. He railed against himself, and then realized what had to be done. The boy and the little harlot that failed to shoot him dead when given a chance had betrayed him and made a mockery of the system and everything New Chicago stood for. Both of them had to die. It was as simple as that.
Elias was carried on the shoulders of Max and the other Trainers through the Pits in the day’s paling light. A celebration was in progress, the other Runners raising voices to his name, flinging words of encouragement, grinning, pumping fists. Bonfires were lit and instruments oiled and plans made to make merry into the wee hours of the night.
It wasn’t just that Elias had won. It was the manner in which he’d won. A pure, unalloyed triumph. He’d beaten the very best the Apes had and dispatched two of their nastiest assassins. His session of Absolution was instantly elevated to legend. Even Moses O’Shea partook in the festivities, beaming like a man who’d won more than he could have imagined, though he harbored worrisome suspicions that Longman would make Elias pay a terrible price. He’d seen how Longman had slinked like a beaten cur away from the other watchers as soon as he saw that Elias had won. Yes, there certainly would be hell to pay, but that worry was for another night. This eve was for drink and laughter and the building up of Elias and the all the others who shared in his victory.
Marisol and the Apes limped back to their barracks in the tac vehicle, which was burdened with body-bags containing the chunks of the two Apes downed by the IED. She was uncertain whether Farrow and the others knew what had transpired between her and the boy, but she heard snatches of conversation, Sikes mumbling to Harrigan, who head-bobbed surreptitiously in her direction as he nursed a flask of hooch. She suspected they were plotting against her and would tell the commandant what had happened during the hunt. She was fine with that. The rule were the rules and technically time was up before she had a chance to trigger her rifle, but still. Questions would be posed and she plumbed her mind for some semblance of a reasonable answer as to why she didn’t down the boy when she’d had the chance.
Word of Elias’s run spread like wildfire through the lower reaches of New Chicago, an area where any news (let alone good news) was exceptionally rare. The Scrappers who’d witnessed the run jawed with others, sharing images of the deaths of the Apes caught on a chewed-up smart-phone that was decidedly no longer smart, but still functioning. Blackened gums were bared for smiles as the downtrodden reveled in this boy from nowhere cutting down two of the Beast’s best men. Maybe the boy wasn’t precisely one of their own, but he was close enough, and he’d done what none of them had yet been able to do: Stick a finger in the eye of Longman, the devil. The images of the Apes falling gave the destitute some small measure of satisfaction along with something that was in far shorter supply in New Chicago. Hope.
The night was warm when Marisol exited the rear of the barracks. A few spokes of heat lightning ripped the sky, moonlight gilding the ground as she hopped onto a pair of tree-trunks that had been lashed together as part of a mini-obstacle course. She could see fires burning in the distance in the direction of the Pits. The Runners always celebrated after a successful hunt (an exceedingly rare event), which never quite made sense to Marisol because sooner or later, they’d eventually be crossing over.
Even the best of them would pull a muscle or tweak a tendon or pull up lame in some other fashion. It was just a matter of how and when they were added to the Apes’ scrapbook commemorating those killed in action. She squinted in the darkness and made out a form, barely visible, moving out and away from the Pits. Intrigued, she ducked back inside the barracks and snagged her rucksack and moved out and away from all that she knew.
Elias stole away from the Pits, which were now bathed in the retina-searing light from the great bonfires that had been set in his honor. Kegs of mashed cider and thick, dark beer had been tapped and opened and sides of meat roasted by swineherds who’d been bused in by Moses for the occasion. All in celebration of what he’d accomplished. The partiers would likely be inebriated till dawn, affording Elias the perfect opportunity for unfettered city exploration. He jaunted around the back of the Pits, dipped inside his room, closed and locked his door, and booted up the cellphone he took from Caleb.
He swiped past the screens and files he’d seen before and tapped an icon hidden within a sub-folder. On the face of the phone sprung a digital GPS-linked map of some area in the middle of the city. A map! Elias gasped when he saw the map automatically zeroing in on Zone 3. The place where they kept the Crazies. He pinched the screen and zoomed down into the city and the images, which were incredibly detailed. Using his forefinger, he was even able to trace a path outside the city wall. He thumbed across the screen to get a better idea of what the map led to, and then he saw the key resting on the floor and surmised that whatever secrets that key kept presumably lay hidden in Zone 3. He pocketed the phone and nearly jumped out of his skin when he turned and saw the person hidden in the shadows near a door, staring at him.
"What happened to you?" Erik asked while emerging out of the darkness. Beads of sweat dappled Elias’s forehead. He had no idea how long Erik had been standing there or how much he’d seen.
"Moses and some of the others were looking for you," Erik continued.
Elias tucked the phone in a pocket, the screen still glowing through the fabric on his pants as he searched for something, anything to say.
"I was tired, Erik," Elias said. "The run and all, it took a lot out of me."
Erik nodded, his eyes drifting to the place where the now-darkened phone rested in Elias’s pocket. For a brief instant Elias wondered what he might do if Erik asked about it.
"You need to be careful tonight," Erik said as Elias moved slowly past him. "Hey. You hear me?"
Elias stopped and looked back at his friend.
"Moses said ‘it’s in the wind.’"
"What’s that mean?"
Erik shrugged his shoulders, face clouded with fear.
"I'm serious, Elias."
"I know you are."
"You kicked the crap out of the man," Erik offered. "I mean, I don’t think you understand what … you showed up the best of his trained killers, that’s what you did today. All I’m saying is don’t forget who runs the show around here, okay? They’re gonna be pissed and the people that mess with Longman, they got really short futures if you know what I mean."
Elias flashed a high-wattage smile.
"You worry too much, man. Those lifers don’t scare me. Truth is, they couldn’t catch me even if they wanted to," he replied before spinning and exiting the room.
Elias felt himself at peace as he stole silently away from Moses and the celebration, taking in the outer ring of the city under a half moon. He struck off down forgotten pathways, energized, excited, his heart thumping like a metronome.
He sprinted through the urban jungle, listening to the sounds of New Chicago after dark. The city was generally as deadly as a pit of vipers, but Zone 3, his destination, was something else. It was downright feral. Elias heard the loud booms and satanic cackling emanating from the land of the Crazies before he saw anything. And then, moving over the crest of a fallen overpass he saw this: a sprawling apartment complex that formed a natural barrier between Zone 3 and the rest of the city, then tall fencing, at least fifteen feet high and topped with concertina wire that sprang out from either end of the complex and ringed the whole area off from the world. He glanced at the complex and the tents and other crappy structures nearby where the lower classes of New Chicago lived and died and engaged in underground commerce. For a second, he wondered how it was that a man like Longman could hold power and instill such fear. Certainly he had the guns, but didn’t the others have the numbers? Wasn’t it only a matter of time before someone picked up a stone or a brick or a knife? How long would it be until someone took a stand against Longman? How bad did things have to get before someone had finally had enough? He pondered this for a moment, then slipped into the darkness, following the map.
Elias cased the outer fencing and then advanced under cover of moonlight, hopping between buildings, keeping himself small and out of sight. He swept the exterior of the apartment complex, and then kicked in a wooden barrier and entered through a lower window, mindful of what might be lurking inside.
He discovered several hungry homeless prowling an inner corridor, wailing to themselves as they crashed past, foraging for something to eat. He waited until their screams grew distant, then dropped down into a lower apartment, past the rotting corpses of two unfortunates entangled in a bed, and then kicked out a screened window that provided an avenue into Zone 3.
He met another inner section of fencing. His fingers stuttered across its metal links as he lifted it up and climbed under and checked the map on the cellphone. He was exactly where he needed to be. The sounds he made on his nocturnal mission were small, but not so slight that Marisol could not easily track him. She’d been watching him ever since he’d crept away from the Pits. She waited for Elias to melt into the shadows, and then she followed his trail down into Zone 3.
Elias moved like a wraith as he followed the path set forth on the cellphone, making excellent time when someone called for him.
"Kid? Hey, kid?"
Elias peered into the pitch and saw a man gesturing to him.
The man inched forward, filthy hat hiding most of his face, moonlight shimmering off staggered, yellowed teeth that glimmered like tiny Chiquita tombstones. Instantaneous revulsion bubbled up inside Elias.
"You ain’t from here, is you?"
Elias remained silent as the man drew closer, moving with an awkward gait. "Tell true, kid," the man continued. "You’re from the outside, right? I mean, you gots all your digits and hair and teeth and whatnot. You’re from back in the world?"
Elias nodded and the man sniggered to himself.
"Take me back with you. Show me the way out."
Elias shook his head and clenched a balled fist, expecting hell as the Man stepped into the light and Elias saw that he was being held aloft on primitive wooden prosthetics. The man tottered like a drunk, his smile now a nasty sneer.
"How come ya won’t take me back?"
"Cause you don’t belong out there," Elias offered.
This took a second to sink in, and then the man shook his body and the prosthetics broke away and the man flopped on the ground and used his momentum to slither toward Elias like a snake, metal shank out that — WHACK! — he swung at Elias, who avoided the blade and booted the man in the face. The man grunted, hands covering the nose which Elias just reversed into his skull, as Elias sidestepped the horror and ran as the man screamed for help. Elias was in such a hurry that he failed to spot the closed-circuit cameras (CCTV) that dangled far overhead from blackened telephone poles, hooked to still-functioning solar panels.
Elias ran past an old textile mill and by misbegotten architecture, shells of former enterprises that the Crazies had tried to reanimate into something functional with little training and less supplies. He perused the cellphone and followed the route set forth on the digital map until he was standing outside an old storage facility. The kind of place where his father had placed a goodly bit of Elias’s family’s possessions in the days before it all went under.
Gripping the key, Elias shimmied between a chain lock on the exterior of the building and made his way inside. The halls were as black as the belly on a seal as he navigated by light from the cellphone. He stopped periodically, eyes roaming the shadows. He listened. Nothing. All was quiet. He continued to follow the map on the phone, turning right, then left, moving straight ahead until he reached the back of the building.
Looking at the phone, it appeared that he was right on top of his final destination. He tried the key in every lock within sight, but it wouldn’t engage. Sweat roped his forehead. He began to think that the whole thing was a terrible mistake. He’d have to make it back past the man whose nose he’d broken and the other Crazies, who were no doubt just waiting to taste his blood and savor his flesh. His eyes skipped up beyond the lockers to an alcove at the end of the hall, hidden amongst the other lockers. Possibly a space used by whoever once owned the building.
A metal ladder led up to this alcove, where a door was visible. On the door was a padlock. Elias pulled himself up the ladder and angled the key out and slipped it into the lock. The corner of his lips pulled back in a rictus when the key fit perfectly and engaged. He opened the lock and removed it, and grabbed the doorknob and opened it, and held up the cellphone for light. His eyes went wide when he saw what Caleb had hidden inside.
Even when he was a child, Hendrix had trouble sleeping. It was a byproduct of waiting for his mother, who stayed up till all hours with various gentleman callers, only coming back to the efficiency she shared with young Hendrix in the wee hours of the morning. He functioned now on only a few winks of sleep, and spent his nights poring over CCTV and other footage shot by the old cameras that were still hooked to turbines and solar panels. The footage was from various sections in the city: the former financial district, Zones 1 and 2; the lands surrounding Zones 4 and 5; and, most interesting off all, the footage from Zone 3.
Hendrix and a few of the others made a nightly ritual of watching the imagery from Zone 3. They cackled with delight at the abuses the Crazies (or "Loons," as some called them) suffered on themselves, the grotesque parade of the diseased and deformed and brain-addled as they fought over scraps and places to sleep and defecate. It was a hoot watching these freaks, and Hendrix believed in his heart of hearts it was a healthy outlet that kept his darker impulses at bay.
But the footage he saw tonight was something altogether different. Somebody, some boy (ostensibly normal and in possession of his faculties) could be seen sneaking into Zone 3. What the hell? The images were from a sufficient distance that Hendrix couldn’t make out the boy’s features even after he zoomed in and pulled back and rotated, but when he caught sight of another, a girl, following the boy, his mind began to race.
What were the odds of two sneaking into Zone 3? He’d never heard of it happening before, and after all the commotion from the Absolution session only a few hours ago — could it be possible? The two from the hunt today? Hendrix copied a clip of the footage and checked his watch. Longman would be sleeping, and death had come to those who’d roused him too early in the past, but still. He had to risk it. Longman would want to see this.
Elias gazed in wide wonder at the inside of the room where Caleb kept his stash. A few old computer monitors and metal housings for other devices were piled on a table next to printers. The walls were shingled with printed pages and hand-scrawled messages and various maps of the city. A tattered copy of Atlas Shrugged. A table filled with bottles of pills and dirty magazines and stacks of crinkly paper money.
In the back of the room sat a tiny 3 kW diesel generator (with red signage on its side that said, "Now Whisper-Quiet!"), vented to the outside for carbon monoxide purposes. Elias flicked a switch on the generator, which turned over and, while hardly whisper-quiet, buzzed softly to life, providing power and full illumination for the room.
Elias stared at the printed pages, many of which were shots of Longman and his goons engaged in myriad acts of violence and malfeasance. He ran his fingers over a diorama of the city. Of the wall. Of a tunnel that seemed to lead under the wall to the lands that stretched beyond. The diorama was made of wood and melted plastic and fabrics that had been affixed to various areas. It was crudely crafted, but well detailed, and somebody had written small notes and words in strategic spots. Asides about the number of guards being located here, the lethality of a trap or traps hidden there. Everything that Caleb (presumably) had experienced as he explored the city.
Next to the diorama were moldy pages from some city manual marked " MWRD – TARP – Tunnel & Reservoir Plan – City Of Chicago." The pages were dated 1972, which seemed like a million years in the past. He hoisted the manual and fanned the pages, which fuzzed and crumbled and flurried into the air like dandruff. Under the manual sat a plastic badge with a photo of Caleb and his full name, "Caleb J. Lavey." Elias recognized the last name as belonging to a Guild of means, then pocketed the badge and surmised that Caleb must have blown a fuse and been exiled here with all the other Crazies. Surely everything in this room, while interesting, was the work of a troubled mind. Then again, what better place to hide your secrets than in the one area of the city that was largely beyond the purview of Longman’s all-seeing eyes? Elias snatched up a hand-drawn set of instructions that mirrored the diorama, with details of how to get to the tunnel (and what lay beyond), when a loud crash outside caused him to flinch.
Longman moved with alacrity down a hallway in the Codex Building, Hendrix at his heels. His senses were overloaded, his brain chiming like a tuning fork. The footage was proof that a plot was in the works. Whether it involved O’Shea and others effectuating some kind of coup was unknown, but he knew one thing. The time had come to summon Farrow and the other Apes and get to the bottom of this before heads rolled.
He sent Hendrix and some of his men to question the Apes and then moved into his office, which had been fitted with a still-functioning retina scanner. He peered into it. A red light flashed green, a metal door hissed open, and Longman stepped through a pressure-lock without sound into the Holy of Holies. His "Sterncastle": the place where he made decisions and weighed evidence and rolled the dice. Scientia est potentia, " knowledge is power," his superiors used to say, and by God they’d been right.
He moved through his office toward a hidden panel that opened to an elevator hooked up to the roof turbines. He pressed a button and descended through the Codex Building and exited onto the 12th floor. The Circles of Dante’s Inferno consisted of nine levels. The Codex Building contained twenty-five.
Guards nodded and tensed when they saw Longman exit the elevator and move across a catwalk. He looked side to side to see the rooms where agitators and political prisoners were kept for re-education and interrogation. He heard the moans and spastic supplications of these forgotten and strolled past them, along with heavily armed guards who clutched metal cudgels and oiled pistols. He took a flight of short stairs past men in lab garb who were prepping and binding packages of the White for distribution and barter, and past weapons vaults filled with rifles and explosives devices and ammo crates and ghillie suits and all manner of devices he’d freed from National Guard armories.
He passed by glass-pebbled offices where workers watched surveillance footage from the city Zones, and through an ironclad door, and beyond the smoke-filled rooms where the upper members of the Guilds, men and women alike, partook in sins of the flesh. He breezed past a bare-chested fat man, who genuflected before him, and noted that life here was not much different than it was in the days of old. Those in power, the one-percent, still lived high on the hog, while the unfortunates below flopped and flitted in their own filth.
Longman signaled to four guards, who stepped aside as he keyed open a titanium door that he had transported here on the back of a pack of draft horses from a Federal Reserve building downtown. The blast-proof door swung open and Longman entered dead space, a concealed gangplank that stretched across open air to another cube of metal and glass wedged onto the side of an adjacent building. He stopped halfway across the gangplank, which was buffeted by howling wind, and looked down on the city streets, hundreds of feet below.
He crossed the gangplank and opened another door and entered what amounted to his office and closed the door. It was quiet here. Becalmed. He sat in a swivel chair and took in the room, whose walls were covered in thick wood fastened over iron plates that were three inches thick. In the old days, it would have made a perfect bug-proof SCIF at the airbase. Always, when faced with hardship or a threat to his rule, the same ritual. Longman looked to the floor.
He opened a safe in a concealed cavity in the floor and removed a small, ruggedized object that appeared to be what was known as an iPad back in the day. A tablet. This device, however, came with a black crypto-ignition key that, when turned, would power up a multisensory display screen embedded with software called FalconView (and other various other applications) that could set in motion things that the others in the city couldn’t even dream about.
This was the knowledge only Longman possessed. This was his true power. The notion (known at only the highest levels of the Guild) that Longman alone still had the ability and will to bring the hammer down on anybody who threatened his reign. He set the iPad-like device back in its hiding spot and thought of all the ways he would hunt down the boy and girl and crush this putative uprising before it could coalesce into something of true substance.
Cozzard, Lout, and a dozen of Longman’s brawlers had already been sent streaking through the city in their begrimed SUVs. Half were paying a visit to Moses O’Shea, while Cozzard and Lout were flashing official badges and moving into the Apes’ barracks. They had paperwork and the force of law behind them and immediately sought out Farrow. They found him in a cafeteria, fork speared through a cube of braised meat, barely able to turn his head before Cozzard used his pistol to pin Farrow’s head to the table. Ordinarily, Farrow would have gutted Cozzard and the others before they knew what hit them, but Farrow ceased all movement when Lout dropped what amounted to a warrant from Longman himself on the table.
Farrow wasn’t worried. At the moment the slugs burst through the doors, he’d already crawled into an inner space that he often retreated to when times were bad. A space where time had stopped some ten years before, back when everything made sense and Farrow was a suburban cop with a nurse for a wife and a little girl who loved her daddy more than anything and a last name that hadn’t been uttered in nearly a decade. Blackstock.
Farrow had done multiple tours on the mean streets of East Baltimore, breaking down perps back in the days before. He was reminded of the ancient saying that a jeweler working on a hunk of stone is not dissimilar from the seeker of information. They both have to tap at the right point, to chip away the rough areas to see the value that lies hidden inside. Longman’s men were anything but surgical, and no matter what rough justice they sought to dispense, he would never break. They could do what they wanted, but they would never reach his core. They’d never take his honor. It was the last thing to go, the last thing that was his. He’d never help them, he’d never rat Marisol out.
Cozzard’s pistol pulled back as Farrow looked up to see the thugs leering down at him like fairy-tale giants.
"Where is she?" they said.
"Where’s who?"
Cozzard snapped the slide back on his pistol as Lout mouthed "Five, four, three-"
"She’s gone if, that’s what you mean," Farrow mumbled.
"Gone where?"
"Outside."
Cozzard planted the tip of his pistol in Farrow’s cheek.
"Get up and get your gear. You’re coming with. You’re leading the way. We’re going after her."
A similar scene unfolded at the Pits, where Longman’s men tossed the joint, shaking everyone down, snuffing out the celebratory fires and aiming their guns at anyone who cracked back. Moses was led off at gunpoint, protesting all the while, telling anyone who’d listen that he had no idea where Elias was.
At that very moment, Elias peeked outside of the door and saw and heard nothing. Whatever had been there before was long gone. He was just about to turn the knob when a hand grabbed his wrist. His eyes enlarged at the sight of… Marisol!
It was his turn to yell "YOU?!" as she emitted an unearthly shriek and shoved Elias back on his ass. Her immediate reactions were born more out of fear than anger, and when he spit at her, she raised a fist and threw a haymaker that Elias deftly stepped under. Marisol dropped her rucksack and swung repeatedly at Elias, who groped for anything and found a length of rubberized conduit that he gripped in his right hand. He swung it at Marisol, wildly at first, then with measured scythes, connecting against her shoulder as she dipped and punted him in the ribs. Elias fell backward, crashing through the diorama, as Marisol jumped at him. He planted a boot in her midsection and flicked her back into a wall.
Marisol rolled over. A low-throated snarl escaped from her throat, and in a blitz of tangled limbs she was on the attack again. Right punch, then left, all manner of jabs following. Marisol’s wrists and hands were chopping the air like the blades on some mechanized machine. Elias fought her off even as she landed blows, bloodying his lip and his nose as he flat-palmed her forehead, sending her back. He grabbed the leg of a fallen table, wrenched it free, and brought it around like a baseball bat, cracking Marisol across the knees as she dropped like a bag of bricks to the ground. He moved over to her, unsure of what to do, as she whipped out a collapsible baton and cracked him across the ankles. Down he fell until he was resting near her, the two side-by-side, gasping for air, faces twisted in pain.
"What the hell are you doing here?" Elias groused.
"Following you," she said.
"You tried to kill me before, you crazy bitch!"
"That’s my job."
"The hunt’s over. I won."
"Because I failed."
Elias smirked and whispered, "I beat you. I beat all of you." She remained silent as he righted himself and looked at the trashed room.
"I saw you before," Marisol eventually responded. "That’s how I knew. I saw you kill that boy back in the alley."
Elias flipped her Caleb’s badge. "He was dead when I found him."
"Didn’t look that way to me."
Elias pivoted and looked at her as she stood and dusted herself off. "How come you didn’t step in if you were so damn concerned?"
"Wasn’t my fight."
"This is?"
"No," she replied. "I guess this is something else. This is… personal."
"Cause what? You’re pissed that I kicked your ass during Absolution?"
"You wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t willed it."
Elias laughed at this, shaking his head.
"You gonna finish the job right now, girl?"
She considered this, shook her head. "Maybe later."
She brushed warily past Elias and looked around the room, making sure to keep her baton in one hand, her eyes glued on Elias. "What is this?"
"The dude who died, Caleb. This was his."
"How’d you find it?"
"I just did, okay?"
They traded a long look, Elias unwilling to offer up any information on the cellphone and key as she asked, "Was he a Crazy?"
"Looks that way, huh?"
She scanned the photos of Longman, the images of him engaged in brutality. Her attention turned to the diorama of the city and the tunnel, which she picked up as it broke into pieces.
"What is it?"
"It’s the city," he said.
"I can see that."
"Then why’d you ask?"
She pointed to the tunnel. "It goes under?"
He swiped the piece of the tunnel away. "It’s nothing, okay? That kid, this whole thing, it’s bullshit."
"What’s that?" she asked, pointing to the instructions to the tunnel that peeked out of a pocket on Elias’s pants.
"None of your business."
She grabbed for them and he shoved her back, and now the two were facing off again like prizefighters. That’s when they heard it. The sound of the front door to the building being ripped off and then a blitzkrieg of voices shouting in disparate tongues.
"They’re coming! The Crazies!" Marisol cried as Elias searched for a way out. Marisol closed and locked the door to the room, but it would only hold for a few moments as she turned over tables, looking for something, anything to use as a barricade.
Elias grabbed a poster-sized image of Longman and ripped it down to reveal a trapdoor hacked into a section of fiber board on a rear wall. He pulled on a cord that centered the faux wood, and the door opened to reveal HVAC ductwork that he climbed into, Marisol following closely behind. She cast one last look over her shoulder and saw the door being pried open and then the first face poked in. The face of a Loon, one of the Crazies, whose eyes were saucering. Long strings of saliva dripped from a mouth that hung perpetually adroop. The Loon pointed at Marisol, and the others rampaged past him as she turned toward Elias, who’d vanished into the ductwork. She crawled and grabbed her rucksack and headed in after him.
Moses O’Shea sat cuffed with a loop of metal wire in the back of one of Longman’s SUVs. In times like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, the imagination morphs into an amplifier that imparts vividness to ideas. Moses’s mind was full of bad thoughts. He was breathing heavily, fighting to make those evil notions slumber, struggling for reassurance that things could be much worse. The morons that Longman sent hadn’t found his stash under the floor of the desk, and therefore didn’t know about all he’d wagered on the hunts (and Ephraim Jax would never rat on him, for to do so would mean death). He mentally scrolled through various scenarios, none of which ended particularly well for him. Still, there was no evidence linking Moses directly to anything (not that there had to be in Constitution-less New Chicago), and he could always fall back on the argument that should Elias be found unharmed, he would make sure that he was immediately pressed into service for Longman, whatever that might mean. Moses watched the lights from the Codex Building stabbing the black sky through the windshield and he muttered a prayer to himself, for whatever it was worth.
Farrow led Longman’s men down through the paths that snaked to Zone 3. His eyes skipped around in the semi-gloom, trying to discern whether there was a way out of this. He saw no good end, not with eleven of Longman’s thugs, all heavily armed, keeping an eye on him. He heard the shouts before they got within a thousand yards of the Zone 3 fencing. Howls and guffaws and soul-shattering screams. Longman’s men magged their guns and readied firing bolts as they crested a hill of crud that loomed over Zone 3. All of them could see the bedlam taking place within the fencing, the Crazies flooding the building where Elias and Marisol were struggling to exit.
"There!" Cozzard shouted. "She’s in there!"
Lout jammed a gun in Farrow’s back and handed Farrow a pistol. "Don’t go gettin’ any ideas, big man," Lout hissed. "Only two rounds in it. Just enough to do the job."
"What job?"
"You’re gonna do it, you stupid bastard. You’re gonna light that friggin’ girl up."
At the same time, Elias flew through the ductwork on his hands and knees, Marisol closely behind him. The metal passage sagged under their weight, zigzagging across the structure until it hit a section of grating. They paused, still listening to the sounds of the Loons echoing behind them.
"What now?" Marisol asked.
"We choose what’s behind the first door," Elias responded, gesturing to the grating. They worked as a team, each grabbing one side of the grating and prying back until zip screws popped free. They peered into the abyss on the other side of the grating. All was dark and without form. After a beat, their eyes adjusted and they could see that a metal chute led directly down. They exchanged a look; Elias nodded and entered first, whooshing down into the blackness as Marisol followed.
They whipped past and down in the chute, moving at incredible speed. Elias bit back a scream when — WHOOMPH! — he hit the end of the chute and was propelled through the air and through a section of styrofoam and thin, wooden sheathing before crashing to a stop in a grassy knoll behind the building. Marisol landed on top of him. He grunted and shoved her aside, only to be kicked when she rolled over and pressed to her feet.
They barely had a chance to see where they were when the beams from the flashlights held in the hands of Cozzard and the others streaked overhead. Elias grabbed Marisol and pulled her to the ground, a finger pressed to his lips.
"Stay down, idiot. God you’re dumb."
She smacked him in the side of the head and fixed a look on Longman’s men, then grabbed a handful of Elias’s shirt when the first Loon burst out of the building behind them. Then another, and another… a whole retinue of marauders barreling out through sections of storage walls that collapsed like wet cardboard.
A few hundred yards away, Farrow clutched his pistol, disoriented by the lights and the keening whine of the Loons and the forms that swung in from the shadows. Cozzard and Lout overreacted like the unprofessional boobs that they were. Rather than taking the time to properly target, they hitched up their rifles in joyous derangement and urged their brethren to lay down suppressive fire as their weapons spit tongues of orange and red.
Elias and Marisol hit the ground as the Loons were riddled all around them. Marisol looked up at some of the crazed attackers. It appeared as though they were dancing in the hail of gunfire, marionettes kept aloft by the hot lead fired by Longman’s men. Marisol rolled over and spotted Elias making a break for it, and so she ran after him and tackled him down a hillside that was just out of sight of Cozzard, Lout, and the others, even as the battle raged all around them.
"The hell’s the matter with you?!" Elias screamed.
"I’m not taking the fall for this!"
"Yeah, well, you’re on your own, whatever your go-by is."
"It’s Marisol. My name’s Marisol, whatever your name is."
"Elias," Elias said through clenched teeth.
"Well, Elias, we both know a secret, don’t we? We’re involved in some pretty bad stuff and it looks like everybody knows about it. What’re the odds that Longman lets us live after this?"
Elias didn’t respond. He didn’t have to. They both knew the answer, and so the two rose together reluctantly and watched the Loons move like an army of gypsies, grabbing up anything they could to confront Longman’s men, who continued to spray gunfire in every direction. Elias and Marisol roamed quickly down the hillside, over unpaved streets and dwellings assembled out of scrap. They could see the outer perimeter fence in the distance, the faint lights of Zone 4 farther out, and the faintest outline of the wall farther still. They were ready to make their way over or around the fence when a voice boomed, "Stop where you are!"
The two skidded on the gravel and slowly turned as Farrow morphed out of the darkness, hands around the pistol that Lout had given him. Marisol’s mouth hung open in shock.
"Farrow!"
He nodded, and now Elias could see that the big man in front of him had been one of the Apes that had stalked him back during Absolution. His body tensed as he plotted a way to turn the tables on Farrow who just shook his head.
"I can tell you’re thinking, boy," Farrow said. "Running down some spreadsheet in your head, thinking of how you can pull a fast one on the old man." Elias didn’t respond as Farrow kept his pistol aimed at his head. "You can’t. I’ve seen it all. You move, you lose."
Marisol pointed back at the storage locker. "There’s a room up there, Farrow. There was a boy. Longman’s men murdered him. He’s got evidence, papers, all kinds of stuff that show what he’s doing. Horrible things. Killing people!"
"And this is news how?" Farrow responded.
"B-but," she stammered, "H-he’s evil."
Farrow lowered his gun, the din of the battle echoing from behind. Slowly he nodded, "I know what he is," Farrow whispered. "I also know there’s the way things should be and the way they are. Longman walks the land like a goddamn lion, girl. He looks for people to devour. I know all of this and I also know right now, there’s nothing any of us can do about it."
"Come with us," she said.
"To where?"
"Under the wall."
"There’s no good way under the wall."
Marisol fished in Elias’s pocket and plucked out the hand-drawn set of instructions that detailed how to get to the tunnel and waved them at Farrow who looked unimpressed. He’d seen such things before. Sadness gripped his face and then in a flash Farrow raised his pistol and aimed at their heads and squeezed off two quick shots.
The bullets sliced through the air over their heads as Farrow swung the gun and shouted, "Go. GO!"
Elias and Marisol shot off into the night as Farrow watched them go, the two spinning past plundered building shells and empty parking lots and clutches of tin-punched shacks where Loons of all shapes and sizes stood outside and marveled at these two, who surely were as mad as the rest of them.
When they’d vanished from sight, Farrow turned and held his gun up to Cozzard and the others, who were needling down the hillside, clothes splotched red, rifles still smoking. Lout grabbed the pistol from Farrow and smelled its barrel and shoved it under Cozzard’s nose for good measure.
"What the hell happened?!"
"I saw ’em," Farrow said.
"And?"
"And then I fired and missed ’em."
Longman’s men cursed and shoved violently past Farrow, reloading their weapons as they went by, faces twitching with delight, eager for the next kill.
Farther down the hill, Marisol and Elias were confronted by the perimeter fence. It was too tall to scale, and they didn’t see any way under. They spotted a series of rectilinear box houses that abutted the fence and realized that if they reached the very peak of one of the buildings, they might have enough juice to hurtle onto the top of the fence and climb over.
The inside of the housing was in a slow state of disassembly, as the Loons had evidently pried boards and bricks free from the walls and floors. Elias was the first one through the imploded front door. His eyes raked the plywood subfloor, which was patched and full of holes in various spots. One errant step could send either of them crashing twenty feet into the basement. He had spotted a staircase and made for it when a figure curled down a banister and grinned like an idiot at him. A Loon, a tall Crazy clad in ratty jeans and an old ripped flannel who looked as muscled as a bobcat. Then another appeared behind him, and another. Three Loons in all, raving and slavering like denizens of some primate house.
Elias stared at a section of the floor that’d been torn up for scrap or for firewood. There were hunks of wood here, sections of flooring and ceiling, including a length of wood that resembled a thick, splintered broom-pole. Elias stamped his foot with such force that this pole sprung into the air, and then he grabbed and broke the wood over his knee and handed one thick piece to Marisol and kept the other for himself. The wood was heavy and fit perfectly in the cup of his hand. He looked up and the Loons were on them.
Elias cut down the muscled Loon first, bashing him across the neck as the man pitched to the ground, making sucking sounds and clutching at his ruined windpipe. The second Loon bit the air near Elias’s ear, barely missing him as — WHAM! — Marisol clubbed him. When the Loon spun to her, she saw he had a crude knife out, and so she broke his wrist with her baton and kicked him with such force that he dropped the knife. His body rocketed through the air four feet, fell through a gap in the floor and disappeared from sight.
Marisol dropped her bent baton and grabbed the knife. As the third Loon panicked and made for her, she crumpled him with a series of body shots from the pole, and then swung her leg around and booted his head until the man fell to the floor unconscious. Elias was in awe of her raw skill. He watched her dagger the knife in a large hip-sheath, then he vaulted up the stairs in two bounds as she followed.
At the top of the stairs, they passed a patchwork of rooms where a few female Loons quivered and quaked in fear and nursed Loon babies. More rooms they passed: sleeping quarters, a spot where a dying Loon lay under a blanket, still one more room where weird stews and burbling soups were being cooked on hotplates over canned heat. They saw a window at the end of a hall that dropped to a deck with a torched-down bitumen roof that could use a good resurfacing. Crawling outside, they saw that the deck extended eight feet off the roofline, suspended on a pair of rotting 4x4s. The fence lay five feet beyond that. If they could just get a good running start…
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Bullets snapped and whined as Elias and Marisol ducked, catching sight of Cozzard, Lout, and the others as they opened fire from down the street. The brutes had snapped on laser sights, the eerie red beams cleaving the darkness.
"What do we do?!" Elias whispered.
"I can make it," Marisol said.
"So can I!”
"Then we know what we have to do."
He nodded, and the pair looked down at the pieces of wooden pole in hand and shared a glance. They rose collectively and fired the hunks of wood at the approaching thugs. The wooden projectiles did no harm, but momentarily flustered the attackers, buying Elias and Marisol precious time. They bolted back to the edge of the roof and then turned and ran at full speed, kissing the edge of the roof, going airborne, silhouetted against the night sky.
They hit the top of the metal fence and suppressed screams as the nest of wire atop the fence sliced at their arms. They willed themselves over as bullets pinged the fence, and then they let go and dropped thirteen feet through the air to hit the ground. Unfortunately, the ground where they hit was sodden from a recent rain and it gave way. Elias and Marisol were yanked down on their backs, flying over a muddy ridgeline as if they were on a water slide in the days of old.
They spun to a stop at the bottom of the rugged ridgeline that lay at the skirt of Zone 4, the nexus of reconstruction initiatives for New Chicago. The wall was clearly visible in the distance, past a vast storage area that resembled a frontier town. They moved like hunters down through a culvert, seeking cover and the safety of shadows and staying out of all potential lines of fire and sight. They roamed past rows of greenhouses where tiny opium-bearing plants were being groomed, and ducked behind a row of metal cargo containers as a sentry ambled by in the distance.
"Where’d you learn how to fight like that?"
"My father," she said as Elias nodded.
"Where’d you learn to run like that?" she asked.
"The same," Elias said, then hesitated, "Not from my real father, I mean. From another man who took me in when it all went bad."
"Farrow did that," she said.
"What?"
"The man back there—"
"The big mother who almost shot us?"
Nodding, she responded, "He didn’t, though. He could’ve, but he didn’t."
"Nice father."
"I didn’t say he was my father, you ass. I said he took me in. He’s a good man."
"Had a funny way of showing it," Elias said, rubbing his ears, which continued to echo from the shots Farrow fired. "Still can barely hear out of my left one."
He turned from her and she grabbed his wrist and forced his gaze back to her. "He could’ve turned us in. He could’ve killed both of us."
Elias shook his head, "He’s an Ape. So are you. Think I’m gonna sing his praises? Buncha thugs working for a murderer."
"What about you? You’re part of it. You run so that someone else can be forgiven for committing a crime. That’s what you do."
This sunk in for a beat. Elias leaned in close to Marisol and whispered, "As soon as we get outside the wall, I’m done. We’re on our own. You and me. Understand?"
"Good," she replied.
"Great."
"Super fantastic," he responded with a smirk.
A nasty look was exchanged between them and then they crouch-ran through the pathless night where they crossed rows of containers brimming with equipment for the rebuilding efforts. Hunger pleaded loudly within both of them, so they stopped near an open food container and found three cans of beans. Elias punched the blade they had through the top of one and sawed it off and dipped a finger inside. Marisol made a face, which Elias ignored as he opened another can and gave it to her. They sat in silence, eating the beans, enjoying them with a sack of half-rotted fruit that they found hanging from the wall, as night animals yammered out in the minatory blackness.
At the same time, Longman’s men successfully swept the storage facility, gunning down any Loon stragglers they found, inside or out. They’d lost only one man (accidentally shot down by Cozzard) and while Longman would be livid, his anger would be tempered by the things they found inside the room once kept by Caleb.
Lout was busy inside for most of the night, retrieving documents and papers and any and all computer equipment he could salvage, while Cozzard filmed everything on a tiny flip camera. Longman would want to see everything as soon as possible.
Elias and Marisol snuck through Zone 4, curled around the city’s garbage plains and junkyards, and dropped down a gravel hillside. They stood silently, watching flames burn in the distance. Cremation fires, rows of them, out beyond a section of lime pits filled with the bodies of the dead or those disposed of at the direction of Longman. They slid past this, keeping beyond the firelight, taking in the bones fused with accretions that ringed the area like some demonic mosaic. Bodies splayed in various attitudes of death. Marisol spotted a charred corpse with its arms raised toward the sky. Her stomach soured and she bit back tears at the sight of the killing fields, realizing that the dictators and killers in the days of old couldn’t hold a candle to Longman Heller. She turned away, embarrassed, feeling that she and Elias had somehow broken the silence of this place, or eavesdropped on the last moments of those who lay before them.
They followed their shadows past the fires. Elias held up the directions he took from Caleb’s room and matched them up with his current surroundings. In a splash of moonlight, Elias looked over and saw Marisol’s Sigil when she reached to examine the directions.
"What’s that mean?"
She held up her palm. "That I’m a luchador."
"A what?"
"I can fight … I can kick ass."
"Yeah, right," he snickered.
"Kicked yours, didn’t I?"
His face flushed red, but she didn’t back down.
"I mean, I could’ve done worse before. Back during the hunt. Only reason you’re right here, right now, is because I allowed you to live. Oh yeah, I could’ve done way worse. That’s a fact, Elias."
"Why didn’t you, if you’re such a bad-ass?" he asked.
She thought about this for a beat. "I guess I got tired of all the killing."
"There’s a difference between seeing killing and doing it. You ever done it? You ever killed anyone?"
Slowly she shook her head. "You?"
"Course," he replied, his fingers trembling. "I’ve been in on kills before. Lots of times."
She didn’t believe him for a second as he took the directions back and she whispered, "One way or another, I got a feeling that the killing’s just started." His gaze smoked into hers and then he bolted through a stand of dense foliage.
Longman quickly scanned all of the materials brought back by Cozzard and Lout after their recon. He was particularly taken with all of the surveillance images the boy had taken of him. His first thought was that it was a shame Caleb was dead. He could’ve used his skills to spy on his enemies. This flicker of admiration quickly turned to white-hot anger when he realized the boy had enough material to expose him and his operations. All the killing and lies and the various sundry acts that Longman and those under his command had engaged in lo these many years. If the other Guilds caught wind of any of this, there might be some kind of revolt or attempted putsch, and though he’d undoubtedly put it down, there would be so much unnecessary bloodshed. That concerned him little, however, for it was the specter of uncertainty that really gnawed at him.
"Kid thought there was a tunnel, sir."
Longman turned to Lout, who held up a hunk of the diorama.
"Tunnel?"
Lout nodded and handed over the piece, and Longman furrowed his brow, even though he already knew what it was. On or around 2029, the city fathers had finally seen the completion of what was called the "Deep Tunnel," a spectacular engineering feat that involved hundreds of miles of tunnels dug through bedrock, a gigantic subterranean pit to house and treat the billions of gallons of wastewater spewed out from the city every day. The runny discharge from the den of inequity that was old Chicago.
Longman knew there had been myriad pumping stations, some with elevators that traveled 30 stories down, connecting the vast network of sewage canals. Most of the stations had been put to the torch during the fall (or smashed for scrap), but one still remained. It was this one station, secreted out near a rural section of the wall that Caleb had apparently uncovered. And down at the bottom of this station was a long, thin tunnel that led directly under the wall and out onto the Grasslands. Longman himself used the this tunnel on more than one occasion, sending out war parties that nobody ever knew about to scout the Grasslands and search for the Thresher and spy on the encampments that allegedly had been cited like mirages out in the lands past the Q-Zone. The encampments were of little import, but the Thresher was a constant source of concern. Even though many believed they did not exist, Longman knew the truth.
One of the first stragglers Longman accepted into his band after the lights flickered out had been a psychiatrist at a prison for the criminally insane. In the firelight, this doctor proffered his own theory about the proto-humans, the Thresher, talking not about biological and chemical warfare as reasons for the Unraveling and the Thresher, but things like the DSM-IV and "identity diffusion," the concept of the self splitting into all-good or all-bad. Longman understood this to mean that some traumatic events had the ability to permanently cause a negative primitive idealization to take hold in certain individuals. An indelible stain, a switch in some dark recess of the mind that, once flipped, brought about things that could never be undone.
The doctor surmised that the Unraveling was such an event, an epochal happening that caused such trauma to the brains of those who witnessed it as to place them back in a state of nature, a primitive, permanent psychosis from which there was no return. There was no more learning in these things, only naked instinct, a manic current that pulsed throughout the nether regions and dark backwaters of the new, mutated biology. The Thresher were now little more than animals, the doctor theorized, having returned to behavioral patterns essential to survival in the ancient days, hunting and killing out in the Grasslands.
Things like this had happened before, he told Longman and the others, during a time of hardship many decades before when the land in the Midwest had been stripped of vegetation. The Dust Bowl. Silicosis, dust pneumonia… "dirt fever" they’d called it then. People were driven mad by grit belched from the sky that buried them like a winter blizzard. He was a man of terrible learning, this doctor, and Longman regretted on more than one occasion that he’d had him put down after hearing the Doc make plans to break camp on a balmy summer night. His services would have been very valuable in New Chicago.
"What is it, boss?" asked Lout after Longman was silent for a weighty beat.
Longman shook his head, and Lout trembled because there was gravity in Longman’s manner. Even when he was just standing and staring, his eyes were always wide and rapt and eerily unblinking.
"I just had the feeling, Mister Hendrix," Longman said, "that after this night nothing will be as it was before." He watched as Cozzard fired up the evidence in a metal stove, destroying it forever, as he waited to hear word from those that guarded the only way under the wall. If the boy and the girl made it through, it would be time to ready the men and prepare to potentially lead a punitive expedition out into the great unknown. Just as he’d done in the years before he took over the city.
Marisol watched Elias part a copse of branches and duck down along a streambed that the two followed, the wall rising in the distance. Elias studied the directions, which called for them to wade across the stream. Tree branches from nearby embankments acted as umbrellas, fanned over the water, protecting their silhouettes from the guards who could be seen patrolling the wall.
Their figures swam in and out of focus in the darkness as they pushed upstream, Elias keeping the directions above water as the stream dipped to his chest. He fought his way up the opposite bank and collapsed to the ground. He could see a giant metal vent down an embankment across from him. The vent protected a spillway that funneled runoff from the old sewage impoundment lakes that lay just underfoot. Elias crawled a few feet forward and spotted an old sewer grate with an iron wheel on top that looked as if it had been intentionally camouflaged with branches and underbrush. Unless you knew what you were looking for, this spot, this grate, would be impossible to find.
"Mind if I ask you a question," Marisol uttered as Elias’s head canted.
"No problem," he responded, "long as you don’t mind if I don’t answer."
Ignoring this, she said, "What are you doing? I mean, what’s the plan?"
"What do you think it is? I’m going in."
"Then what?"
"Then what the hell do you think? I’m going under the wall."
"Then what?"
"You said one question!"
"I never said just one," she replied.
"Well, that’s all you’re getting."
Marisol thought about this, kicking the ground as Elias pointed at her rucksack.
"You had your questions, now it’s my turn. What’s in the bag? Weapons? Eats? White? C’mon."
"Need to know," she responded.
"I almost got shot saving your ass, so I’d like to know."
She shook her head and Elias bared his teeth as he twisted the iron wheel, which wouldn’t budge until Marisol grabbed a corner of it and helped. With the two of them working together, the wheel complained, then finally swung open to reveal a ladder leading down into the dismal obscurity that lay beneath them.
Elias didn’t wait to enter. If he had, he would have noticed it. Would have seen the string of two-cent wire laid a foot down across the second rung. But he didn't, and it wasn't until her eyes sought his face with a trouble and anxiety that he could by no means account for that he realized he'd made a serious mistake.
The hush was shattered as Elias’s shoe clipped the trip-wire, which ignited a toe-popper flare that screamed into the sky like a bottle rocket before exploding. Shouts followed the burst. Klaxons shrilled in the distance. Marisol pointed at the guards on the wall as they fidgeted for spotlights and guns.
Marisol followed Elias down onto the ground. The pair moved deliberately, rung by rung, their eyes searching the ground below for any sign of movement. Marisol slipped on a moss-slick rung, losing her balance before Elias grabbed and steadied her. She caught sight of his eyes, which shone like black buttons. "Thanks," she said, as he held up two fingers and clambered straight down.
The ladder ended at a cement landing that they dropped onto. Steam hissed from nearby (and still functional) geothermal piping, and generators thumped from alcoves that they couldn’t see. The space here was supersized; the landing led to a pipe that was thirty feet in diameter and which appeared to have been hacked directly into the bedrock. Fetid pools of sewage from the old days filled troughs that ran on either side of the pipe next to dormant pumps that once whirred and whooshed and pushed the sludge out to be treated elsewhere. This was the once and final resting place for all of the detritus of the old city.
They stumble-charged through the pipe, melting into the vaporous mist rising from the sewage in the manmade cavern, when a form shapeshifted out of a blackened alcove and grabbed Elias around the neck.
Heavy diesel generators filled with biofuel powered the twin elevators as Cozzard, Lout, and ten of Longman’s best men rode fifteen stories down. They had a general idea where Elias and Marisol were headed. There was only one primary way in and out of the tunnel, and with some luck, they’d catch the punks and string out their necks before they exited out into the Grasslands.
Cozzard’s lips curled up in a demonic smile, his face evincing a plethora of emotions. Anticipation. Trepidation. Seething anger. Whether their mission ultimately proved successful, the boy and the girl were as good as dead. If their bullets didn’t bring them down, they wouldn’t last half a night out with the evil that hunted beyond the wall when the sun went down. It was a secret known only to Longman’s inner circle and a few others, but they routinely exiled troublesome members of the Guilds out in the Grasslands. Just brought them under the tunnel and bound their arms with wire and set them off before night fell. In the morning, they’d come and find the bodies — what was left of them. The Thresher begun the work that the carrion birds finished. Same thing would happen to these two. The elevator reached its end and the doors pinged open. Cozzard tugged on what looked like a velvet skullcap, signaling to the others as they funneled out into a dank space, ready to draw first blood.
Elias stagger-stepped in the grip of a hulking figure who picked him up a foot off the ground. Marisol reacted quickly and threw a punch that hammered the figure in the back, forcing Elias to the ground as the figure threw up his hands to reveal a soul-worn man. A Scrapper. A "taker" from Longman’s new paradise who subsisted on refuse and crafty repurposing.
"You," the scrapper said to Elias while pointing. "I know you."
Elias shook his head and stood defensively as the Scrapper grinned a mouth full of blackened, festering teeth. "I seen you run, boy. Oh, yes. I seen you run and take down them bastardly Apes."
Elias looked over at Marisol, then whispered to the Scrapper, "I did an Absolution run yesterday."
"I know and I watched every second of it," the Scrapper snorted. "Me and a whole lotta others. Gods in Heaven, we was rootin’ for you the whole way, if you’ll permit me to talk true."
The Scrapper removed his sodden hat and took up Elias’s hand and shook it vigorously as Elias’s cheeks reddened.
"We’re looking for a way out," Marisol muttered, breaking the moment. The Scrapper eyed the directions Elias had and shook his head. "You don’t wanna go that way, for it surely leadeth to destruction," he intoned, before motioning. "Follow me. I got eyes for another joint. I’ll show ya the way. Come on, hurry now, this way."
Elias and Marisol jogged at the heels of the Scrapper, who moved briskly through the space, heading right, then left, ducking behind obstacles, following a path only he could see.
They veered through the underground passages in the silty light as sounds echoed in the distance. Shouts of men, metal doors opening, colorful obscenities being hurled. Someone was most definitely coming. Elias looked up; not much to see at first blush, but then he spotted a long, dark, reaching form that only a hyper-alert man would notice. A wide trench running off to the side, carved into the bedrock, funneling water and sewage and sediment out to the Great Lakes. Elias pointed, and as Marisol looked, her foot caught the edge of the trench and her rucksack went flying.
"My bag!"
Elias grabbed the bag before it could fall into the watery scum and hauled it back onto the path, where it opened and tossed its contents. Dolls and girly items spilled onto the path. Lots of them. Elias held up a faded Hello Kitty doll as Marisol grabbed it all back. Elias giggled.
"Ha! So this is your deep, dark secret?!"
"Shut up."
Elias threw his head back and barked out a laugh as Marisol snatched up the bag and held it close to her chest. The Scrapper watched this and seemed to enjoy the sight of the two bickering immensely. He pointed to a stout door that was visible down a short flight of steps.
"That’s the way," he said. "You wanna get you some freedom, it’s on the other side of that door."
"What’s out there?" Marisol asked.
The Scrapper’s complexion suddenly bleached at the thought of how to answer this, at what he knew lay on the other side of the door and in the lands beyond.
"Freedom," he said. "There is freedom there, but it does come with a price."
Before he could respond further, Elias heard a snap, an echo, then a rush of air as a bullet hammered into the Scrapper’s chest which yawned red as he pitched backward, dead before he hit the water in the trench. Time and sound seemed to slow for Marisol, who watched the man’s arms fan out as he plunged into the sewage, disappearing under its swift currents as Elias pointed and shrieked, "They’re here!"
Cozzard lowered his smoking rifle and signaled for the others to double-time it as he stayed behind and fired at the girl and boy.
Bullets buzzed over the heads of Marisol and Elias like bees as they combat-ran toward the stout door. Lout and Longman’s men were gaining ground, running like stallions and firing pistols and sawed-off shotguns wildly. Elias heaved open the door as Marisol dove in first. A round from Cozzard’s gun whined off the metal just over Elias’s head as he inched inside, slammed the door shut, and threw a bolt across it. Pounding began on the other side. The bolt wouldn’t last for long.
Elias turned and caught the tail end of Marisol as she scampered down a dark thruway that lay under metal catwalks dripping with water and plumed with steam.
The unadulterated blackness pillowed Elias and Marisol as they continued along the thruway past walls of poured cement that were curved and without angles. The thruway dilated into a high chamber and a bricked wall with another door with a wheeled handle. The two gripped the handle and turned the wheel to reveal the outside world as seen from some point high above.
They peered outside to see that the city of New Chicago stalled here, for beyond was the beyond, the "Land of Nil," as some called it. Nothingness. The Grasslands. The dwelling place of the Thresher. An opening looked them in the face: the end of the tunnel, which was little more than a slab of concrete with an attached earthen embankment. There was a short ledge, and then a wall slapped onto the concrete that dropped to the ground some eighty feet below. The wall was lined with metal rungs. Marisol wrapped her fingers around the first one and cast a final glance back into the tunnel.
"If we go, we won’t be able to come back," she said.
"What’s there to come back to?"
"I… there… there were people I knew."
Elias smirked. "Those Apes? The ones from back there?"
"Farrow was my friend. He saved me from the others."
"Yeah, well, I hate to say it, but good riddance to New Chicago. I thought it might be better in here when I was out there, but I was wrong. I’ll take my chances in the beyond. Ain’t no friends or goodliness inside the wall."
"We could go back and talk to them," she muttered as Elias laughed.
"Yeah, I kinda think the time for talkin’ is over, Marisol."
"We could try and change things," she said, even though she knew it was an impossibility.
Elias shook his head and said, "We don’t have enough bullets to change things. It’s better to run."
She took this in and did what she’d done since she was a child whenever faced with a difficult decision. She grabbed her knuckles and tugged on them until they cracked like splintered wood. She knew Elias was right. She knew that she was finished with the city and the lettings and whole damn thing. Still, there was a part of her, inherited most likely from her father, that made her believe, however ludicrous the thought was, that she had the power to make a difference.
"My papa used to say something to me."
"Yeah," Elias said, looking over. "What’s that?"
"That sometimes you have to kill your own dogs."
"I don’t got any dogs and I don’t see your old man around anymore, Marisol, okay? So get a good look and watch me run."
Marisol looked back over the embankment, steeling herself, realizing she had no choice but to go down.
Elias could see her hesitate. He leaned down and whispered, "You ever close your eyes and try and trick you brain into thinking you’re doing the opposite of what you’re really doing?"
"All the time," she replied.
"Well, this is another one of those times. So take that first step. Do it now or I’m leaving you."
She nodded and climbed down first, gripping the rungs, body and core-muscles tense, winching herself down the side of the wall as Elias followed. The going was slow at first, then the pace quickened.
As Marisol reached the bottom of the wall, she observed the tall, thick grass swaying in a stiff breeze, stretching to the hilly horizon, a vista that appeared immeasurable in the darkness. She looked up at Elias, who nodded and said, "That’s it. We’re officially on our own."
She smirked and dropped from the wall and he followed suit. They hit the ground and heard sounds above them, catching sight of Cozzard first as he opened fire. Bullets slashed the grass as Marisol and Elias ducked for cover. Hands on the ground, they pinwheeled past and threaded through the grass like pickpockets in a parade.
Cozzard and the others made excellent time descending the wall, dropping the last 11 feet. One of the men turned an ankle, but the others strung out and continued the hunt.
A footrace ensued as Elias and Marisol shot through the grass. Marisol yelped as the razor-sharp blades sliced her barren arms. Elias barely noted the blades; he was more concerned with what else might be hiding in the grass. On several occasions, he spotted things out on the edges of his sightline, dizzying shades darting through the grass, everywhere and all around. Yet each time when he blinked and looked back, the shades were gone.
"This way!" Marisol urged him, "This way!"
He squinted sideways and spotted her making for an abyssal region out to the far right, a section of land drowning in rusted cars and all manner of machines and earth-moving devices, stretching to a stupendous overhang that dropped down into bottomlands that he could not yet see.
Marisol trotted forward and then stopped dead in her tracks. Her nose beveled. Something was wrong.
"What? What is it?" Elias asked.
Without uttering a word, she lifted a finger and pointed to the ground where Elias could see a number of things: a partially concealed pit where the corpse of some unlucky hung from a sharpened shaft of metal; a rusted bear-trap containing a flesh-denuded foot; and the top of a pounded piece of metal upon which Marisol’s foot rested. A pressure-plate of some kind. Elias cursed their luck. They were in the middle of some welcome-to-hell section of booby-traps.
Tiny wires led away from the plate, through the grass, toward the treeline. Elias could barely make out a cube of metal the size of a car engine, lodged in a tree. The wires connected to the cube.
"What happens if you let up?" he asked her.
"What happens if I don’t?" she whispered in response.
They both looked back and heard the sound of Longman’s men. Marisol loosed a ferocious sigh and stepped off the pressure-plate as—
ZZZIIPPPP!
The wires twanged and snapped back toward the metal cube as Elias grabbed Marisol and shoved her forward.
The wires plunged into the cube, a Rube-Goldberg-like contraption, made from repurposed automotive parts. The wires unhitched a clutch pedal which slammed down, activating a hydraulic piston that pressed on a release fork to power up a flywheel that spun like a turbine. The flywheel, which operated without batteries or fossil fuels, loosed its kinetic energy, sending out pulses that triggered a series of hidden traps.
In the grass Elias and Marisol spotted movement, Marisol screaming "Cover your head!"
They both ducked low as BOOM! a small IED exploded off to their right, sending them rolling left. Elias stopped to catch his breath when something closed around his ankle and in a flash he was on his back, moving at an incredible rate of speed as the sky raced by overhead.
The hidden trap’s mesh loop gripped Elias’s ankle like a vice as it dragged him screaming through the grass. Elias craned his head so that he could see the ground in front. He was being pulled toward what looked like a pair of metal jaws brimming with saber-sized shafts of sharpened metal when—
WHUMP!
A hand flashed out and grabbed his outstretched arm around the wrist and slowed his movement. Marisol fell across his chest, giving him enough time to shudder his ankle and slacken the trap’s loop. Greasy fingers reached down and pinched the loop as Elias pried his foot free.
He didn’t even have enough time to thank Marisol because she was already on her feet and scampering off.
The pair knifed through a bottleneck of machines and moundings of debris, passing the desiccated corpses of those who’d died in their cars when the world went to blazes. They made themselves small inside a junked car that was once used to ferry little ones around to games of leisure in the times of plenty. They could hear the shouts of Longman’s men in the distance—sometimes drawing near, other times drifting away. Marisol’s mouth dropped open to speak, but Elias placed a finger on his lips for silence. She nodded, using the fabric on one of her dolls to stanch the ribbons of blood that sprung from the grass cuts on her arm. Outside, the voices of Longman’s men drew closer. Elias looked out through a section of spiderwebbed windshield, gripping the knife Marisol took from one of the Loons back in the house.
In the car-yard, Cozzard and Lout stood and paid special attention to the ground. They could make out prints leading this way and that. They followed the prints and soon caught sight of the car concealing Elias and Marisol. They couldn’t discern whether anyone was inside, but they felt good about their chances as they readied their weapons and signaled for the others to move in.
Inside the car, Elias watched Longman’s men move menacingly forward. He looked over at Marisol, who leaned back near the dashboard, easing her frame against the parking brake. The brake, hooked to frayed, rusted wires, hadn’t been applied in nearly a decade, and the pressure from her body caused the wires to snap, and the only thing anchoring the machine in place to give way. The car’s hulking frame began moving; slowly at first, then faster, falling back over the overhang as Cozzard and the others pointed and shouted and sprang toward the car that was falling from sight. Cozzard drew his rifle up, took a knee, laid his face against the stock, aimed at Marisol and fired, though he could not tell if his shot was true in the dust and confusion.
One of Longman’s men dove off the hood of another car and latched onto the machine holding Elias and Marisol. He saw them inside and grinned darkly. His hands shot out and he grabbed a handful of Marisol’s hair and snapped her head back, angling it toward a ridge of broken windshield glass as the car blurred down the overhang. Marisol screamed and threw wild punches as Elias held on for dear life. Longman’s man, cackling now, brought Marisol up, exposing her neck, and fingered a blade that he brought up as Elias inched his hands out, holding the knife he had from before. Marisol grabbed it with trembling fingers, but was unable to use it, screaming, "I can’t do it!"
Elias took the knife back and slammed it into the man’s stomach, and then just stared, because it was the first time he’d ever done such a thing to another person. Longman’s man grimaced and groaned and let out a little gasp of air, looking down at the knife protruding from his chest, which was matted red. The goon lost his grip and fell away as the car turned over and started waterfalling down the overhang, gripped in the arms of gravity. Elias and Marisol were tossed like coins in a washer.
Back upon firmer ground, Cozzard, Lout, and Longman’s other men perched on the hoods of the junked cars. They were ready to head down over the overhang when they heard a trumpeting sound echoing in the distance that sounded like a herd of pissed-off elephants. The men immediately tensed, they knew what the sound was and what it meant. Cozzard looked over his men and noted the glaze of panic spreading over their faces and so he signaled for a general retreat as everyone wormed through the car-yard and over the grassland’s circulatory system of tiny paths and crossovers, headed back toward the wall and the relative safety of the disemboweled city.
When they’d shrugged off the shock of the rapid descent, Elias and Marisol peered around and thought themselves no worse for wear, save Elias, who was ensnared in a section of seatbelt that enveloped him like a constricting snake. He dragged with exhaustion and every struggle seemed to wrap him more tightly in the elastic umbilicus. Marisol worked to free him while watching the bleak fog that hovered over the bottomlands like a cloak.
"How come you didn’t do it? How come you didn’t stab that dude when you had the chance?" Elias asked her.
"Shut up."
"Let me see if I got this right. You worked and lived with the Apes? You hunted with them even though you’re too scared to do the deed?"
Her gaze bored through him, but she refused to rise to the bait.
"You’re gonna have to do something bad sooner or later. Your hands, they’re gonna get dirty. You do know that, right?"
She didn’t respond, just looked up and saw a figure rise unsteadily out in the darkness. Longman’s man; wounded, yes, but not dead. He stood and stared in their direction mutely. He had one hand over his bloody chest, the other gripped on his blade.
He ambled forward with the gimp-legged stride of a physical therapy refugee, mumbling incoherently, pointing at them. Strange sounds echoed out in the distance. Elias’s face went wooden as he immediately recognized them as the bleats of the creatures that had taken his second parents. The Thresher.
Elias ducked low, fighting to free himself from the belt. The sounds of movement were audible, then more bellows. Marisol peeked up and gasped at the sight of Longman’s man, who was on the hood of the car now. His fingers clawed for purchase as he jammed the knife into the bent metal of the car, willing himself forward, blood sheeting the hood from his stomach wound. The man’s head moved for the battered windshield and Marisol thrust up a forearm that rocked the man’s chin. He flailed in anger, bringing the knife back, when a vaulting shadow grabbed and pulled him back in the blackness.
Marisol recoiled in horror at the barely visible sight of black-mouthed, marble-eyed, shambling hulks with razor teeth. A whole army of them were moving out and around the junked car. They massed quickly and overcame the man, pinning him to the ground. More of them came running from the darkness. The scent of blood, of food, drew them in. They went to work on the man, ripping off pieces of him as he tried to lope away in a sloppy run. He lunge-stepped a few paces before they pulled him back down in a fury of carnage that Marisol could mercifully see little of as she looked back at Elias who whispered the word, "Thresher," which chilled her blood.
When she looked back up, the feeding was largely over. One of the beasts, a bald quasi-man with one ear and a disjointed arm who’d just looted the remaining flesh from the dead man’s ribcage, spun and looked in her direction. It squealed and grunted to the others, who looked over. Now Marisol was in panic mode, fear-meter revving as she grabbed hard at the belt that locked Elias in place, whispering, "They’re coming, they’re coming, they’re coming!" They were in the middle of it now, in the eye of the chaotic storm, screams and shrill sounds pounding in every direction as Elias held Marisol and willed her to be silent.
The mad eyes of the Thresher glared at the car, sensing movement inside, smelling blood, feeling the heat from beating hearts. They grunted and moaned as they moved toward it, bodies half on the ground, faces and frames a patchwork of ruined, ragged flesh and exposed musculature. In the car, Elias heaved and bucked, and with one final burst of energy ripped free from the belt as the first body hit the hood. He and Marisol watched the first lurching wave of monsters converge toward them, and then they turned and ran.
Longman hated leather straps. They just didn’t wear as well as synthetic materials and the inner fibers, when splashed with blood, seemed to somehow separate and pull apart. The straps holding Moses O’Shea to the wooden chair were double-strength nylon. The kind used back in the glorious days of enhanced interrogation. They would hold.
Moses sat rigid in the high-backed chair, seated in an anteroom of the Codex Building created especially for moments like this. Insulated walls designed to muffle screams. A slanted floor that ran to metal gutters designed to sluice away blood and other bodily fluids. An oval table with a glass top so that anyone seated therein could view the various objects pressed under the glass. Fingers. Noses. Ears. A variety of other digits and pieces of anatomy. Some flesh ragged and blackened from recent blood, others shriveled and fossilized nubs of bone and flesh. The remnants of those who’d crossed Longman in the past.
Longman strolled around Moses and the table, running down a list of what he knew and what he believed to be fact. Moses repeatedly nodded and said, "yes, sir," "no, sir," "I don’t know, sir," and hoped he’d be able to exit the space with all of his vitals intact and in good working order.
Longman pulled up a wooden chair and sat, slouching casually, to the right of Moses. So many men and women had sat where Moses was, Longman thought. Only a handful of faces could he remember. The older man with the tumor protruding from his belly who begged Longman for mercy, even as he told the man that mercy wasn’t something that could be freely given. The ink-riddled woman who’d tried to detonate a crude car bomb near the rear of the Codex Building. He’d had her head shaved and both elbows shattered and still she sat before him and still wouldn’t reveal who else had plotted with her. She was brave. He admired that. He had her doused with rapeseed oil and set ablaze, and then had her brittle remains mashed up with hammers and mixed with stone-ground grains dappled with wild honey that he ate for breakfast.
"So how is it, O’Shea," Longman whispered, "that one of your best and brightest just happened to be in league with a radical?"
"Didn’t know anything about it, sir."
"And yet it brewed right under your nose, didn’t it?" He paused and when Moses offered no response, asked, "You know me, don’t you?"
"Yes, sir."
"You know how I function."
"Indeed."
"The people that cross me?"
"Are there any?"
Longman smiled, ear-to-ear.
"None that are left in the land of the living.""
Moses didn’t respond to this.
"Tell me. Are you afraid?" Longman asked.
"Of you?"
"Of what I represent."
"And what might that be, sir?"
"An emissary… a diplomat sent from the great void."
"I ain’t exactly fond of the idea of crossing over to the other side just yet, sir, if you know what I mean. I was kind of thinking, hoping really, that I might got a few ticks left in me."
Longman understood what he meant and bobbed his head.
It was here that Moses decided to take a chance. He wanted to cut to the chase, curious as to what the penalty for his transgression might be. It was a risky move, asking this, but he’d heard that Longman admired those who didn’t beg but were ready to take what he was going to give.
"What’s the cost, sir?"
"I could take a hand. Maybe more. You know that, right?" Longman asked.
Moses slowly nodded. It was the "more" part that troubled him most.
Longman stood and pulled what looked like a small sword from a desk at the edge of the roof. He moved over and slammed this down into the chair, directly between Moses’s shaking fingers.
"I could do that and worse, O’Shea, but I’ve got a different idea."
Moses suppressed the urge to wet himself and thought that, if this was his time, he wouldn’t give Longman the pleasure of watching him beg.
"What might that be, sir?"
"Before you came here, what was it you did?"
"I trained folks."
"Is that all you did?"
"I ran boot camps."
"Where?"
"Out in the suburbs."
"Beyond where our glorious wall is?"
Moses nodded. Longman smiled and plucked up the knife, and tilted it at Moses’s neck, running the honed edge along the major arteries that thumped in the black man’s neck.
"You’re going to guide an expedition, O’Shea," said Longman. "You’re going to help me find something I’ve been looking for and bring us that boy and girl back."
Even though Moses was well aware of the Thresher and the death that held sway beyond the wall, he had a great talent for saying the right thing at the most opportune moment. It was what saved his neck on multiple occasions since the sun burst and the abominations began. More importantly, he didn’t want to lose a finger or an ear or something dearer to him. Not yet at least. He would tell Longman whatever he wanted to hear, placate the bloody philistine. In fact, at that moment he had little doubt that he’d rather take his chances over the wall than with Longman, and so he nodded as Longman’s goons entered and undid his bonds and muscled him off.
He was directed down another hallway by Longman and some of his men. They moved through another door and into a space that was lit by concealed lamps that emitted a cold, hazy light. On the other side of the room stood three silhouettes, two large, one small. Longman clucked his tongue and the two larger silhouettes stepped aside as the small one tiptoed forward. The small figure stopped in place and the light danced off a face whose features were discernable only to Moses for a fraction of a second. In that instant, Moses gasped and realized that he truly had no choice. He would have to do whatever it was that Longman asked of him.
The hand of the first Thresher rocketed through the busted windshield, gripping Marisol’s hair as Elias punched it off. The pair kicked at the monsters and then shimmied through the rear of the car and out onto open ground as the Thresher gave chase. Elias and Marisol ran blindly between and over cars, the sound of their pursuers growing louder directly behind them.
Marisol darted out ahead, her ability to recalibrate space and movement invaluable as she weaved left and right, seemingly able to stay one step ahead of the creatures that roared toward the pair like the waters of a flood. Elias looked sideways and spotted the Thresher funneling through the grass toward them, taking bad angles, allowing him and Marisol to outpace the horde as they threw themselves into a cornfield. They nosed headfirst through the thick stalks. As the ground dipped, Elias watched Marisol ease back, losing her balance as he reached for her, and now they were falling out the other edge of the cornfield down a sewered slope that was without vegetation or cover. They slid on their backs down the mud, hit a rise, and were propelled into the air before being dunked in a runoff pond.
The first thing they noticed when they hit the water were the bodies. They were everywhere, putty-colored, bobbing in grisly repose as Marisol and Elias screamed and batted them away. Whether they were victims of the Thresher or some other horror, neither could tell, and neither cared. But the smell — oh, the smell! The whole area was aromatized by rotting flesh such that it stunk like the inside of a pig-rendering operation set ablaze.
Marisol covered her mouth as one of the corpses, a dead woman with a half-eaten face and vascular, blue-bloated arms, appeared to swim toward her. She kicked the body back with a forceful thrust of her boot that popped the woman’s head off, releasing a small well of black gore. Marisol looked away and crawled up a faraway bank. She turned and helped Elias up, and that’s when she heard the bawling cries and pinched her eyes and saw them. The Thresher. Spilling down the slope from the cornfield. Some jumping headfirst into the pond.
Elias and Marisol turned and ran, and the chase was on again. They looped through a clearing. Elias was having trouble keeping up with Marisol, who was running forward. The treeline was coming up fast when Elias tripped and fell. Marisol turned and grabbed his wrist and helped him up. The Thresher was bearing down, ready to overtake them, when fireballs blazed out of the darkness, setting some of the brush and trees on fire and blinding Elias and Marisol, who hit the ground, face-first.
The two looked up as gaseous clouds of fire spewed out of the gloom, smothering the Thresher in flames, their bodies pirouetting as they fell and hit the ground hard and went up like dancing sparklers. Elias and Marisol caught sight of the boots first: dark and heavy and laced tightly around the feet of four figures clad in ancient gas-masks and garb that resembled tactical armor mixed with biohazard suits and holding flamethrowers whose tips were still aglow. Elias and Marisol saw that these figures bore no tattoos or Sigils, and therefore could not have come from inside the wall.
"I don’t know who the hell you two are, but if you move, if you even freakin’ breathe," said one of the figures, "You’re brisket on a plate. Dig? You’re fricassee."
The figure aimed the tip of his flamethrower at Elias and Marisol, who held hands as they stared up into the mesmerizing, bluish light of the flame. It was at that moment that Elias noticed it for the first time. A bib of blood. A pool of red spreading out around Marisol, who saw it too, and ripped off her outer-armor to reveal a small hole under her armpit. Cozzard’s shot before had indeed been true. She just hadn’t realized it in all the commotion.
The hole pumped red and she felt her head go light. Her pupils shock-dilated as Elias, feeling some kinship for the smack-talking girl after all they’d been through, screamed for assistance while watching her life seep out all around and under her.
At that very moment, Longman sat in his safe-room, his Sterncastle, staring at a book and the high-tech tablet positioned on the table before him. He was wide awake. He rarely needed sleep. A few winks every night at most. There was too much to do. He would sleep when they were all dead. He thumbed the first page of the book, which was a work of his own construction, the very same book he’d been holding the first day he marched into New Chicago. What he’d done was take the Holy Book, the Bible, and remove every instance of the supernatural or morality, similar to what an ancient ruler of the country had done centuries before.
Longman’s new book, however, differed in that it was filled only with the pages that centered on brutality and violence. Events that demonstrated that everyone sprang from the same evil root. Deuteronomy 20:16-18, for instance, which praised the practice of genocide; the book of Numbers 31:7-19, that spoke of the campaign against Midian; and Joshua 6:21, that told of the fall of Jericho and all the evil and bloodshed that followed thereafter. Longman memorized these sections, laboring over the smallest details of the acts committed at the behest of what he deemed a jealous, tribal deity. He’d learned many lessons in ruling from reading the book.
He closed what passed for a dust jacket and turned the crypto-ignition key on his tablet. A brilliant green light flooded the device as it hummed to life and then beamed an intricately detailed, three-dimensional map of the city and the surrounding area into the air in front of his face.
Longman peered at the map as if consulting a crystal ball. Onto his hand, he fitted a glove with metal fingertips hooked to a ruggedized leader that he plugged into the tablet as signals, the divine skein uploaded by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, were received from a satellite (using Lacrosse and Onyx systems) that was still orbiting overhead.
With the aid of the glove, Longman was able to manipulate sections of the map, to zoom down and pan out and essentially fly across streets and parcels of real property. With the aid of his technicians, he’d worked feverishly to download the information found inside Caleb’s safe-room. Maps were laid over maps; information sorted, juxtaposed, and cross-referenced. There were a handful of areas ringed in yellow with X’s over them, and then one area blinking in red that he focused on. This was it, he thought; clear proofs. This was the location where a red, double-locked clanker box was hidden that contained numbers and signals and cryptonyms marked SIOP ESI for a weapon he would rely on if things went bad. He knew of the box (one of several) from the time he served back on base, but had spent years trying to track it down.
The box was the key to a device constructed by higher minds in the times before. There were once thousands of these devices in the possession of certain select countries. Some of the devices were placed inside railcars, others gently fitted inside long-distance planes, and more threaded into bunkers built deep into the bedrock, primarily in the Midwest. If events dictated, Longman would most definitely bend a knee before this device, this god of war and deity of mutually assured destruction. A thing that would help "put flies on eyeballs," as his boss back at the base was fond of saying.
He was familiar with it and knew that it was fickle, and like all the other gods of old (including those in his holy book), sometimes demanded blood sacrifice. He switched off the tablet and leaned back in his chair and smoked a heavy pipe laden with The White as he waited to hear word of the boy and girl. The two little Crows. Though he was unaware of the digital map Elias possessed, he wondered how the two knew about the tunnel and what other secrets Caleb had unearthed.
He took a long pull from his pipe and slid a very special handgun out of a drawer. It was called a LeMat, a combination pistol and twenty-gauge shotgun that weighed four pounds, carried nine rounds, and was designed for a war hundreds of years before. He’d looted it from a weapons museum years ago and had not yet had an opportunity to use it. He knew that the day that he would fire the pistol was coming. He would stay awake until it did and fight the urge to sleep. There was too much to do, too many loose ends. He tugged on his pipe and stroked the gun and inserted a cartridge into it, secure in the knowledge that no matter what happened, this was not the end, but merely the beginning. An excuse to extend his reach beyond the wall. A possible pretext for war.
END OF BOOK I
Thanks for reading Blood Runners: Absolution. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on Amazon for it and the next two books in the series when they are published.