Vertical City Box Set [Books 1-4] Read online

  We barely even had a chance to scream.

  The blades on our helicopter snapped off, the machine gouging across the roof, fire and smoke obscuring everything as we lurched to a bone-shattering stop.

  My head slammed hard against Dad’s shoulder and my eyes blurred into darkness.

  I’d heard Dad say in the past that silence equaled death and in the stillness that ensued, I was sure all of us had crossed over.

  I was waiting for Mom to reappear and then someone, one of the other survivors, rose up and booted open the mangled bay door as we collectively staggered out of the copter.

  We soon learned that those of us who’d survived the crash were marooned, trapped on a concrete island as a struggle for survival raged below. Since the first rule of any war is to take the high ground when your opponent seizes the field of battle, that’s precisely what we did.

  Instead of going down and out we stayed put, entering the building and eventually sealing it off at the tenth floor. We ceded the streets and all the land beneath us to the hordes and the misshapen agents of slaughter that craved our flesh.

  And then, when that was finished, we waited for the world to turn over and help to arrive and when none came, we did the only thing left to do.

  We made our home permanently in the sky.

  That was a little over sixteen years ago.

  1

  Del Frisco always says pretty girls make slaves.

  Of course, it’s only lately that I’ve discovered the words come from a long-forgotten song and aren’t entirely accurate. The actual song speaks about them making “graves,” which is certainly appropriate given our present predicament.

  The two of us have our rucksacks on, garbed in climbing gear and dark compression suits.

  We’re positioned in a pocket of deep shadows on the nineteenth floor of a thirty-story skyscraper honeycombed with offices and alcoves and little galleys. Situated smack dab in the middle of it all, peering through an open door into a bullpen filled with boxes and dust-dappled stacks of shipping materials.

  A lone female Dub’s visible maybe twenty-yards away from us. She moans like she’s in heat, hands scratching exposed flesh the color of bleu cheese.

  “Whoa, baby, she must’ve been something else back in the day, huh, Wyatt?”

  I run a hand through my unruly locks, which have grown shaggy in the years since the collapse. My head cants and I study the once-upon-a-time woman. “She’s totally out of your league.”

  “Maybe before, but not now.”

  “That’s cause she’s dead, Del Frisco.”

  Del Frisco looks at her and grins which always annoys the shit out of me since this is hardly a laughing matter. He’s nearly five years older than me, twenty-five going on forty, with a lean face that, depending on circumstances and lighting, gives him a commanding appearance. He always seems to be on the move, however, capering about, and the furtive glances he casts make others say that he looks like a person who’s hunting something much larger than himself.

  “Is it weird that I think she’s still kinda hot?” he says.

  “That used to be somebody’s daughter or wife.”

  “Not now.”

  “She had a family once,” I say.

  “Stop talking.”

  “Why?”

  “Cause you’re sapping my buzz, dude. Shut it and get fierce,” he snaps.

  People tell me I’m passive, but it’s not so much that I retreat or roll over as that I don’t particularly care for direct conflict with the living. I like to get along with people and them with me and if that’s passivity, well, then I guess they’re right.

  Realizing there’s no percentage in debating the finer points of why I occasionally sympathize with those we dispatch, I do indeed shut my trap.

  Del Frisco being Del Frisco, totally forgets our minor argument and grins again, twirling his pony-tail as he makes an off-color joke about removing the Dub’s teeth so that she can perform a variety of unwholesome acts on him. He’s forever going on about stuff like that while concocting new names for the things.

  Initially, the newly-risen dead were called “The Woken” but then Del Frisco got tired of having to say the “double u” in the first letter of “Woken,” and shortened it to “Dub,” and then the “Dubs” (my suggestion) which is what pretty much everyone calls them now.

  We’ve been knee-deep in Dubs ever since the copter crash, although the first ones popped up almost a year before that. That was almost seventeen years ago, back when a group of scientists held their first press conferences and produced their television specials about the gray-splotched corpses they’d plucked out of the thawed tundra.

  Mom said there was probably a good reason why those bodies were where they were and she was right. Whatever evil had been locked down under the ice with them was released into an unsuspecting and unprepared world.

  Later, we found out that one of those involved was from another country, Saudi Arabia, and supposedly transported a virus from the bodies back there. I was very little then, but Saudi Arabia was pretty much closed off to the rest of the world and I remember Dad always saying with a smirk that “what happens in S.A. stays in S.A.”

  Apparently, the hospital conditions in the Middle East were suboptimal back then (as well as infection control protocols and the like), such that when the infected scientist initially developed a respiratory sickness, things quickly got out of hand.

  Not a peep was heard about it at first, however, but then somebody discovered that the resurrected virus contained genomes that were modifying, allowing the sickness to be spread more efficiently and rapidly from person to person.

  A Saudi whistleblower got the news out, but things were hampered on account of constant political infighting and the rampant spread of fake stories in the press. Nobody knew what was real anymore. Ultimately, the illness was given a three-letter acronym, which stood for something nobody remembers, but by the time people knew what to call it, it was too late.

  The virus spread faster than gossip and was infinitely more deadly. It was only eighteen or nineteen days after first contact that it did a victory lap around the globe, laying low more than half of the population with a contagion, that once inside, murderously reformatted your gray matter. The infection brought on death in a matter of hours, but not before the brain had been wiped clean and rebooted to a more primitive state where hunting and killing and eating (emphasis on killing) were the only impulses that mattered.

  After the world ended, there was some speculation amongst the survivors that the Dubs wouldn’t make it through the winter or would just drop dead – for a second time – once their primary source of food (us), became scarce.

  So not true.

  Turns out there’s an endless supply of vermin and creepy-crawlies under the city’s streets. Probably enough to keep the Dubs’ bellies good and full for another sixteen years.

  Del Frisco’s omnipresent grin slips away and he holds up two fingers while checking his earpiece. Some of our colleagues looted a tech company that specialized in experimental military armaments a few months back and obtained small earpieces, among other items, that amplify human hearing.

  The earpiece is synced to a solar battery pack and when it’s working – which is infrequent – enables us to hear the Dubs well before we ever see them.

  Del Frisco wags one finger, then another, then one more, to signal more Dubs are on the way.

  Sure enough, the female Dub’s soon joined by two enterprising males who quickly commence rooting around inside desks, bumbling into each other and making quite a racket.

  We see they’re a good twenty feet away from what we’d spotted and hoped to acquire: a small solar-powered generator that had slipped out of a packing crate.

  We’ve been sent to tag and clip items like the generator for later use by the others. That’s what me and Del Frisco and a guy named Strummer and Darcy (Darcy’s a chick) and several others do to earn our keep now. We’re “Ledge Jumpe
rs,” salvagers, which means we risk our asses every day, scaling down buildings and swinging across high-rises to find items of value for the community we live in, what’s collectively called the “Vertical City,” to folks in the know.

  I squat and look in the direction from which we’ve just come.

  There’s an enormous gaping hole on the other side of the building, visible down a long, straight corridor. We came in through that hole, bopped up through an elevator shaft, rummaged around three floors above without finding anything of real value before heading back down.

  A lot of our ops are hit or miss since most of the really good stuff has either been smashed up by the Dubs or looters or slowly beaten down by time and the elements. But at least once a week we’ll happen upon something that’s really useful – tools, weapons, electronic gadgets of all shapes and sizes – stuff that needs to be tagged and bagged.

  Once we find something cool, we thread a really long metal leader around the item, clip that to a carabiner and then let the “Hogs,” the big, bulky dudes who man the manual and electrical winches up on top of the buildings, take over. There’s really only one hurdle we ever face: how to get past the Dubs to clip the loot. Del Frisco, always ready with a suggestion or quip, has an answer for that.

  I’ve come to learn that Del Frisco suffers from some fairly significant mental illness which makes sense if you knew the guy. He claims garden variety bi-polar, but I heard Strummer and some of the others say he’s a full-blown, bay at the moon schizoid. Most of the time his demons are kept at a safe distance via meds we forage from our jumps (Seroquel, Ativan, Risperdal, etc.), but occasionally he goes long stretches without.

  These factoids are germane because Del Frisco has this crazy theory about how the Dubs hunt and feed. He posits, without proffering anything other than what Gus calls ‘anecdotal evidence’, that the Dubs track by an invisible brain frequency only they can hear. For instance, they don’t attack other Dubs because their brain-waves have been rejiggered. They only go after the living, those relatively sound in mind. So, Del Frisco surmises that those who are not sound in mind (i.e., folks like him), give off another “scent” and are unattractive to the Dubs (“Who wants a broken car? Who wants to eat spoiled meat?” I’ve heard him say). Even though some of the others think his theory’s bullshit, I have to admit I’ve seen Del Frisco tiptoe between two or three Dubs before without incident.

  Three more Dubs appear and I shake my head and motion for us to fall back. We haven’t gone down a floor yet, so the plan is we’ll come back for the generator once we’ve reconned a bit.

  We crab back through the long straight corridor, sidestepping tributaries of dark oil that drip from a severed fuel pipe partially pried out of a wall.

  The scent of fuel pricks my nose as we stop before a metal staircase door that I hadn’t noticed before.

  Staircases are significantly more dangerous than elevator shafts, but a helluva lot easier to access. We caucus for a bit on the pros and cons of going down and then decide to take a risk and pull back the door while opening our rucksacks and removing the only real weapons we’re given on our ops, our “Onesies.” Yeah, I know, terrible name for a death-dealing device, but even Del Frisco’s stumped on a better one.

  Anyway, the Onesies are “Six-In-Ones,” what look like three-foot, hand hammered, steel tomahawks.

  On the business end of the Onesie is a shimmering axe head, on its reverse a curved blade with a three-inch spike at the tip. Down the shaft of the Onesie there’s a set of brass-knuckles that lay aside a black button, which if depressed, releases a barbed metal ball (housed inside the shaft and welded to a loop of chain) that can be swung to batter various parts of an attacker’s body. Finally, if things get really dicey, there’s a metal trigger near the base of the tomahawk that activates a powerful flare lodged inside the lower portion of the weapon’s handle.

  While most of us would prefer some kind of gun (which only the “Prowlers,” the snipers who do overwatch on the tops of buildings, and “Sweepers” are permitted to have), the Onesies are pretty righteous in close-quarters combat and besides, without handguns or rifles we never have to worry about friendly-fire incidents or running out of ammo.

  Del Frisco and I grip our Onesies and my thumb activates a thin penlight as a swarm of flies buzz past me.

  A ghastly stench bombards us next, so we cover our mouths and slip through the door and down the staircase.

  We lapse into silence as we slink through the darkness, stepping over the funky, flesh-starved bodies of Dubs and the skeletal corpses of their long-dead victims.

  My light sweeps walls covered in scratches and indents and smeared with splotches of ochre, spatter from battles fought in the past. I spot a single tooth lodged in a section of drywall and it chills me for reasons I can’t really explain.

  As we descend, we stop and look up at something visible on the wall that looms over the bottom of the stairwell. A marking. A design. A ribbon of numbers: N4043.11815W740.46998.

  “More of them,” I whisper and Del Frisco nods. To the extent you can call the numbers a design, we’ve seen similar ones in other buildings.

  “What do you think it means?”

  Del Frisco’s silent, just like he’s been with all the other numbers we’ve encountered.

  “Think it’s old or new?”

  “You always ask that, Wy.”

  “Yeah, ‘cause you never answer.”

  He bites his lip and it looks like he’s running down some invisible checklist.

  “Well, it’s gotta be old. I mean, there ain’t no way the Dubs are smart enough to do it, unless they’re, like, what’s the word, genius?”

  “Evolving?” I say.

  “Righto,” Del Frisco replies, snapping his fingers.

  We trade a nervous glance and then I remove a battered digital camera and record the design like I’ve done before. An orange chem-pen comes out next as I mark the walls with fluorescent “X’s” to denote that we’ve come this way.

  We white-knuckle our Onesies and descend the last few stairs.

  At the bottom we meet a door that grinds open to a room awash in particle board and plexiglass cubicles and what looks like intestines spilling down from the ceiling.

  There’s enough half-light from holes in the ceiling that the penlight is no longer needed.

  We can see that the “intestines” are actually cables and wires from the floor above that have been pushed down as the building slowly compresses.

  From where we stand to the other side of the floor’s probably twenty yards, but it’s impossible to see what lies in the middle because of the cubicles and the sections of ceiling that have fallen onto them.

  Del Frisco reaches in his rucksack and removes an orange bouncy-ball, one of two-dozen he five-fingered from a toy store called “Crackerjacks” two months before. He likes to use them to gauge the vibe of any new floor we venture across.

  He palms the ball and flings it through the center of the room. It bounces and ricochets and makes just enough noise to draw the attention of any Dubs that might be lying in wait.

  We wait for a minute or two and hearing and sensing nothing, we move across a lumpy and uneven floor that’s squishy in certain places from pools of stagnant water. The air’s heavy and reeks of mold and I begin to breathe hard as Del Frisco jabs me in the gut.

  “You’re getting fat, dude.”

  “That’s called marbling.”

  He stops and we both survey the space again, but nothing stirs.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I mutter.

  “Hate when you do that.”

  “Maybe we can reach a truce with them. Make medicine.”

  Del Frisco looks back at me.

  “Y’know, some kind of peace arrangement,” I continue.

  “With what? With… them?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The Dubs?”

  I nod.

  “They’re dead, man,” he says.

 
“So?”

  “So, there was this dude back before, this big baller rapper who had a song that said something about the dead feeling no pain. I been thinking about that and the way I figure it, violence equals pain, so if you don’t feel no pain you ain’t got no reason to stop the violence.”

  I’m surprised that Del Frisco’s gotten almost philosophical on me as I bat aside the dangling ceiling cables and quickly check the cubicle hive, but it’s filled with computers and high-tech crap that instantly became worthless when the world stopped.

  Del Frisco whistles and I look up to see him gesticulating. Mounting a wingback chair, I look over a partition to see him pointing to the other end of the space where a glass case is visible, filled with what appears to be medical supplies.

  “Score!” Del Frisco shouts, moving with alacrity through the cubicles.

  Hesitation grips me, my fear-meter rising, something feeling off about the whole thing.

  We’ve worked together for the last seven months, Del Frisco and me. We’ve gone out on dozens of ops, and not once have we found a stash just sitting out in the open like this. It all seems just a little too easy, but then Del Frisco’s giddiness dulls my senses and it strikes me that sometimes the gods do smile on you.

  Five steps later I’m kneeling in front of a sodden, overturned desk.

  In an open drawer within the desk’s warped carcass, there’s a solitary picture which I pluck out. It’s of a young woman standing arm-in-arm with what were probably her mother and father. A sliver of sunlight gilds the young woman’s face, birthing a sly smile that for some reason brings back a rush of emotions.

  I wonder what happened to her. Did she make it out or is she in this building or another, watching and waiting to nibble on our flesh? The uncertainty of whether a stranger might be one of them means there are very few true friends in the new times. Nope, mostly just allies and enemies.

  With as much reverence as I can muster, the photo is placed back where I found it and ten steps later I’m standing, rooted in place, listening to a very troubling sound.

  A deep-throated groaning that resembles the sound I heard whales making on a documentary Mom liked to watch.