Vertical City (Book 4) Read online

  Vertical City

  A Zombie Thriller

  Part 4

  By

  George S. Mahaffey, Jr.

  www.georgemahaffey.com

  Copyright 2016 by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  Cover design by: 187designz ([email protected])

  This is a work of fiction and all rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

  BLOOD RUNNERS: ABSOLUTION (Book 1 of 3)

  BLOOD RUNNERS: DESIGNATED SURVIVORS (Book 2 of 3)

  AMITYVILLE: ORIGINS (Book 1 of 2)

  RAZORBACKS I

  RAZORBACKS II

  THE PACT

  THUNDER ROAD (Books 1 & 2)

  VERTICAL CITY (Part 1)

  VERTICAL CITY (Part 2)

  VERTICAL CITY (Part 3)

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  Waking to the snarl of an engine, I find myself trussed with nylon cord across the rear of a motorcycle driven by one of Matthais’s longhaired goons.

  A whirlpool of light from the bike splashes me and I blink while craning my head. We’re moving at an incredible rate of speed, knifing over the bridge, slipstreaming between mines and a choker of rusted-out car carcasses and abandoned military machines.

  There’s another motorcycle with a single driver trailing us. The engine whines on the second bike, the driver powering his motorcycle out and around, the man cackling and sharing a fist-bump with the longhair transporting me.

  We drop down from the bridge and blur through the city in the blue of night, driving for what seems like hours over main arteries and ghost roads and little lanes of cement slowly being retaken by nature.

  The engine thrums and my driver laughs while veering between bunchings of Dubs who bite and swing at me. The rear wheel is only inches from my face, spitting road grit into my eyes. We weave down a main promenade against the howls of the things hiding in the shadows.

  I try to block out all of the bad things that have just happened: the confrontation with the Dubs and Odin’s men, the separation from Gus and Naia. I try to free myself, but my bindings don’t budge. I pass the time by counting off the miles in my head and the tiny fissures that run through the blacktop that we’re motoring over.

  Suddenly the motorcycle grinds to a stop, the other bike aside us, the oily-smelling exhaust from the machines hot against my cheeks.

  With great effort I lift my head to see that the street in front of us is thronged with Dubs. More than I would’ve imagined at this hour and, based upon his mumblings, more than the goon driving me probably expected.

  The laughter and fist-bumps are replaced by worried, knowing looks.

  The sounds of the engines obscure whatever plans are being made and then the longhair wheels our motorcycle around only to stop once again.

  The road behind us, the direction from which we’ve just come, is similarly blocked with Dubs.

  The drivers curse and blame each other and rev their bikes and then I hear the longhair shout “Fuck it!” and wheel around yet again.

  We jolt off, my body snapped back, the bike swiggering down the road.

  The longhair’s piloting us on a collision course with the Dubs.

  And then he slices off and heads toward a section of wooden planking near a sidewalk that was being rehabbed when the lights went out.

  We hit the planking head on and go airborne.

  Our bike gets some serious air, the two of us flying over the outstretched arms of the Dubs.

  We land hard and skid sideways and peer back as the second bike tries to follow our path.

  The other driver launches his bike just as we did, but it comes down awkwardly.

  The front wheel hits a divot in the road and jimmies hard to the left, the driver overcompensating, the bike locking, the driver catapulted over the handlebars.

  He somersaults forward and smacks against the pavement and rolls over several times, his grunts followed by soft moans.

  The longhair doesn’t make a move toward him.

  Not even after the injured driver pushes himself up on a bum leg and gimp-runs toward us, crying out for help.

  The Dubs gang-tackle him and two of the monsters grab his arms and pull him apart like someone making a wish with a chicken bone.

  The other Dubs stagger by the carnage and the longhair raises a machine-pistol and fires a few quick bursts. Then he spins our bike around and jets off through the city. I listen to snippets of conversation between the longhair and someone he’s communicating with via walkie-talkie. The longhair lies about what’s just happened, claiming he doesn’t know where the other driver is and then he’s silent and nods and tells whomever he’s talking to that we’re coming in.

  Later, the sound of motorized doors echo and I’m able to glimpse the rear of VC1 as we rumble around and disappear through a back entrance that I never knew existed.

  The motorcycle comes to a stop inside a garage or work bay and I see a half dozen men and women moving toward me. They’re chuckling, twirling batons and cudgels. Most are strangers, but one of them I have seen before, a scarecrow of a brute named Shaw.

  Shaw’s a tall buck with an enormous domed head and long, spindly legs like a grasshopper. When I’ve seen Shaw he’s been capering around down on ten and jawing with the other workers even though he never seems to do any real work. He’s missing most of his upper teeth and blows smoke through the gap at me, taking a long drag before holding the glowing cigarette tip a few inches from my right eye.

  “You’s a troublesome little mo-fo ain’t ya?” Shaw says. “Done a lot of dirt to Odin and the others what raised you up.”

  I spit at the cigarette to extinguish the tip.

  “Get that away from me.”

  “This ain’t nothin’ compared to what the man got planned for you,” Shaw titters.

  “Where are Gus and Naia?” I say, struggling with my bindings.

  “The dog lover and the bitch have been taken care of.”

  “Where are they?”

  Shaw kneels and grabs my face and squeezes my cheeks together.

  “I’ll ask the fuckin’ questions, prole.”

  I spit in his face and he punches me so hard two of my back teeth fall out in a gush of gem-bright droplets of blood. A bovine-like woman next to Shaw reaches down and picks up the less than pearly whites and swallows them, gory drool and all.

  “That’s what’s gonna happen to you, boy,” the woman sneers. “You gonna be gobbled up whole.”

  “Get ‘im up,” Shaw says as the cords around me are loosened and I’m pulled back by my arms.

  A knee is planted in my spine and strong hands ratchet around my wrists and I’m shoved forward. A door flies open to reveal a staircase so narrow only one person can fit inside.

  I count
the floors as I’m marched up, the figures behind me delighting in sharing stories about all the horrible things that await me.

  “We’re supposed to be a free community,” I call out to Shaw.

  “Since when?” I hear him reply from somewhere behind me.

  “There’s no crime in going outside the wire.”

  “It ain’t necessarily what you done, but what you found,” Shaw says.

  I’m stopped and my blood freezes when a hand, Shaw’s I assume, wiggles Naia’s thumb-drive near my right eye. The thumb-drive is greasy and slicked with little tendrils of blood and sweat.

  At that moment I’d like to scream and confront my guards. Ask them whether they know about the murders of our friends and colleagues; ask them how far back it all goes; ask them whether my father was one of the first victims. Instead, I’m almost too shocked to say anything, but when I do it comes out as barely a whisper.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Because in order to maintain a community,” Shaw says, “ya gotta do shit like this.”

  The thumb-drive disappears and I’m muscled up near a door at the tenth floor which swings open to reveal a long corridor, a section of VC1 with heavy metal plate welded to one wall that was sealed off from the areas peopled by Burners and the like.

  I can only assume this is the place that Brixton alluded to before where folks are taken and never heard from again. The place Del Frisco always said was like something he called The Hotel California: easy to enter, damn near impossible to get out of.

  The metal plate on the walls must be shitty at snuffing out sounds, because people are screaming on the other side of a red door in the middle of the corridor marked 101 in dripping black paint.

  And the worst thing is that I think I recognize who the screams are coming from.

  A man and woman.

  Gus and Naia.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The door to Room 101 opens and the smell of urine and things I can’t place curls up my nose.

  The room is windowless and constructed of unadorned cinderblocks that were probably placed inside of an already existing structure in order to make the spot more sound-proof.

  A man and a woman, their faces below their eyes covered by bandanas, are strapped in metal chairs that have been cemented into the ground.

  Both of them are redeyed and weary, appearing to have been worked over by Mercer, a long-haired Prowler who panthers the space between them. Mercer’s part of Matthais’s posse and I’ve often seen following the big man outside on ops.

  The man in the chair has a face that’s lumpy and purpled with bruises. His lip is busted and blood has erupted down his shirtfront.

  The woman’s cheeks are splotched crimson, her hands pulled tight behind her back, weighted down by iron balls attached to lengths of chain.

  Mercer turns to me, naked from the waist up, body oiled with torture sweat and speckled red. There’s a loop of leather around his clenched right fist, threaded between his fingers, which has been stained with so much blood it looks black.

  “What the hell are you doing?!” I say.

  “Following orders,” Mercer replies.

  I cry out to the man and woman, struggling to reach them, as they acknowledge me with soul-battered looks.

  A sound behind me arrests my attention.

  Turning, a rear wall slides open to reveal Odin, clad entirely in white. He’s flanked by two of his blunt-faced bodyguards and Strummer and beside them are Gus and Naia who are bound, ball-gags strapped across their faces.

  Odin begins a leisurely circuit of the room as I turn back, wondering who’s in the chairs.

  My eyes find Odin who reaches me and shakes his head, face weary with disappointment. He places a hand on my shoulder and purses his lips, as if I’m a child who’s just spilled a drink on the kitchen floor.

  “How did you know?” I ask.

  Odin’s gaze wanders to Strummer.

  “I knew where you were the moment you left the mother building.”

  I knew it! It was Strummer that saw us leaving. The bastard, he was the one back in Gus’s room, the person I saw up on the building spying on us.

  “If you knew, why’d you let me go?”

  He flashes a smile.

  “A good player, no matter the game, never reveals his full hand, Wyatt.”

  It dawns on me like some kind of revelation that I’ve been played, manipulated. But for what purpose and for how long? I wonder how many of the things I’ve experienced over the last few days and months were set in motion without me knowing about them? I do my best to reconstruct the events in my mind, to uncover the invisible hand of Odin, but my thoughts are disordered.

  As if sensing my confusion Odin touches my hand.

  “I saw what was on the thumb-drive.”

  “Then you know.”

  “I always did.”

  “You killed them, Odin. You killed them all.”

  “I’ve never killed anyone in my life.”

  “You ordered it then. You made it happen.”

  His face hardens.

  “Where was it downloaded?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s try this once more time—”

  “I swear I don’t,” I lie.

  He sighs and peers up at the ceiling and I catch a glimpse of his head in profile. He’s a lunatic, I can tell that now. The light leaking from his bugged-out eyes seems unholy, his gaze dancing around the room until it fixes on the two people in the chair.

  “Did you know that human sacrifice is the foundation of civilized society?”

  I just stare at him.

  “It’s a story as old as the crucifixion. If you remember the story, Jerusalem was this tiny little tinderbox on the verge of exploding and what happened? The people in charge decided to offer up a lowly little carpenter and poof! the balance was restored.”

  “Let them go, Odin. Let the people in the chair and Gus and Naia go and I’ll take their place. I’ll be your sacrifice.”

  Odin shakes his head.

  “You never target the true guilty party, Wyatt. If you do that it awakens the spirit of vengeance. The key is to find another to blame.”

  His line of sight swings over to Gus and then he waves his hand again and Mercer resumes pummeling the man and the woman in the chair. I look away, but someone behind me wrenches my face back so I’m forced to watch in nerve-brutalized wonderment. Odin whispers that the two in the chairs have eaten a portion of my sins and then they’re battered and punched for so long even he’s forced to look away.

  Thirty minutes later, Gus and Naia are taken away and fifteen minutes after that I’m led out of Room 101 and marched down the building’s main corridors. Word has apparently spread about us sneaking out, because the residents are out in full force, gawking, whispering.

  Fabricated stories of what Gus and I did have been planted, I can tell this when I hear residents jeering us, asking why we killed Melissa (and countless others before her) and why we wanted to find a way to let the Dubs in. None of that makes any sense, but it doesn’t really need to. Odin has seeded VC1 with these stories to cause confusion, to gin up a problem, a threat to the whole community that only he can solve.

  Some of my friends are visible, Stanley Storch and Big Sam and Teddy. They cry out, asking me if the tales are true. Asking me why I betrayed the building. I answer that it’s all lies, but I don’t think they believe me and quickly I’m shouted down by handfuls of belligerent residents who were probably planted by Shooter.

  Eventually, I’m led into a room somewhere near the upper floors that’s windowless and barren except for Naia who sits slumped against the far wall.

  Someone kicks me to the ground and then the door slams shut. I crawl toward Naia who favors me with a look. My assumption was that she’d be terror-stricken or on the verge of a meltdown, but instead, she sports a defiant look.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “Have you looked around?” she replies.
r />   I examine her face which looks unscratched.

  “They didn’t hurt you?”

  “Not yet. They just kept asking about where I came from and what I was doing here.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “What they wanted to hear.”

  “What about Gus? Did you see what happened to him?”

  “They took him away,” she says. “They carried us into another room and then a bunch of other guys snagged and took him through another door. They said they had to get him ready.”

  “Did Odin say that?”

  “Is Odin the tall asshole in white?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah, he said it. Helluva leader you’ve got here by the way.”

  “I didn’t elect him.”

  “So how’s he in charge?”

  I think about this, about how ridiculous it is that I don’t even remember how or why Odin took charge. The days in the Vertical City are a blur and if pressed I couldn’t even tell you how long Odin’s been behind the wheel. Honest to God I have no real memory of how he actually came to power.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how Odin’s in charge or how long he’s been in charge.”

  She scowls and scans the walls and pounds on the paneling.

  “How many floors is this building?”

  “More than thirty.”

  “Gonna be a bitch to get down,” she says.

  “We can’t get down. There’s no way out.”

  She pins me with a look.

  “Your parents still around?”

  “No.”

  “What did your father do for a living?”

  “He managed money for people.”

  “Well mine was a farmer and a mechanic and owned a restaurant that specialized in fried chicken called Mother Cluckers. Before that he played in a rock band called ‘Involuntary Commitment.’ There was some singer from the way back named John Lennon who said something that’s kinda appropriate given our present situation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That there are no real problems. Only solutions.”

  I think about this for a few seconds.

  “That doesn’t even make – that John Lennon guy’s full of shit.”