Blood Runners Read online

  Blood Runners: Absolution

  by George S. Mahaffey, Jr.

  Copyright © 2013 by George S. Mahaffey, Jr.

  All rights reserved.

  www.BeverlyDrivePress.com

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from THE AUTHOR or the Publisher.

  Cover art by Beth Varni

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 — The City

  Chapter 2 — The Hunter

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5 — The Runner

  Chapter 6 — The Longman

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  About the Series

  CHAPTER 1 — The City

  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.

  CHAPTER 2 — The Hunter

  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 Ligh
t, 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.

  CHAPTER 3

  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.

  CHAPTER 4

  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 fir
ing 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.