Blood Runners Read online

  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 th
e 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.

  CHAPTER 5 — The Runner

  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.