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

  Gus also said they were serious pot stirrers, which is, I suppose, what the artist is trying to suggest about Roger Parker.

  Graffiti, especially the kind that’s taking a veiled swipe at Odin and the other honchos, is illegal and there have been rumors about “snouts,” snitches in the employ of Odin who roam the halls, reporting on people.

  As a result, I look both ways and then wipe my hand and smudge the images, blurring them into nothing.

  Then I hop down a short corridor that ends at three metal steps near the rear of the building. It’s relatively deserted here and the door above the steps is painted red which I’ve been told represents good luck in another culture.

  The door greets me in a few steps as I knock three times. A voice bellows “S’open!” from the other side. The door opens with a push, the dogs barking as I step down into a long, narrow space lit by votives.

  Treading lightly, I pad inside, the room filled with second-hand furniture and lots of metal cages for the aforementioned canines.

  Near the back, stooped over one of the cages is Gus Abrams, a gangly, bespectacled cur trainer with a bland, sloped face that I’ve always thought resembles a shovel.

  Gus turns in my direction and smiles as I fight to hide my grimace.

  Gus is a helluva guy, but he’s never cottoned to personal hygiene so his mouth, filled with brown, cleat-like teeth, is a catastrophe.

  Gus rises and removes thick gloves and presents his hand, which I shake. I peer down into the cage nearest him where a one-year old English Springer Spaniel stares back at me.

  “How’s Dixie?”

  He waggles a few fingers in the air and Dixie jumps up and nips at them. “Chomping at the bit.”

  Gus makes some strange hand gestures and Dixie’s eyes goggle. As if on cue, she stifles herself and sits at attention.

  Someone realized many years back that dogs trained to find bodies, (Gus calls them “HRDs,” Human Remain Detection dogs), were particularly effective at spotting the deceased before so why not try them on Dubs? They’ve proven to be incredibly effective, supposedly able to scent a Dub from a half mile away, and the grunts forced to recon on the Flatlands take at least one or two with them on every op. Gus is in charge of overseeing all the dogs in VC1.

  I follow Gus as he does a lap around his quarters.

  He’s always seemed to enjoy keeping me in the loop on the latest training techniques and whatnot. I don’t like to talk about it much, but Gus is probably as close to a father as I’ve ever had. After the copter crashed, Dad was never really the same. Sure, he put in his time and killed his share of Dubs while helping to build what most of us take for granted now, but by the third year of the Awakening, he was in the checkout line, at least mentally.

  It all makes sense if you think about it. Dad’s life-partner dies and then the world ends and pretty soon thereafter, a bunch of his new acquaintances are torn to pieces and eaten by the undead. It was enough to drive anyone nuts and for more than a year after we crashed, sickness and death seemed to stalk us.

  Soon thereafter, Dad’s hair, which had always been immaculately coiffed, was long and stringy, his face perpetually unshaven, cheeks creased like an old road map.

  We barely spoke when I got a little older and the times we did were undertaken mostly in anger.

  It took me a year or two to figure it out, but then it became obvious that the only thing me and Dad ever really had in common was Mom.

  Once she was gone, our bond was severed.

  It’s pretty shitty to say your Dad’s fallen out of love with you and even worse to think about, but on my seventh birthday Dad volunteered to go out on a Flatlands op with a bunch of the older Sweepers.

  He’d never done it before and not one of them came back.

  Some of the others said they did it on purpose – “Suicide by Dub” – but I never saw any indication that Dad wanted to end it all. Still, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I’ve had nightmares about whether he’s out there somewhere. Watching, waiting for me to give him one, final embrace.

  When someone’s orphaned like I was, lots are chosen and one of the more seasoned persons in the community takes you in.

  Gus volunteered to adopt me and most of everything I have I owe to him. You have to remember that my formal education consisted of nothing. Nada. I wasn’t old enough to go to school when the world ended, so everything I know was taught to me by Gus. Thankfully, he was a super curious dude, a learned man, with an excellent library and cerebral lounge that only he and I know about. More on that later.

  Anyway, after Dad vanished Gus learned me up and when I turned sixteen he pitched me as a Jumper to Shooter. He did this knowing that it was probably that or a Sweeper gig for me, and the life expectancy of a Jumper was significantly greater. In support of me he argued that my father gave his life for the community and that had to count for something.

  Gus’s voice snaps me out of my reverie and I look over to see him gesturing at the dogs. It takes me a moment to get my bearings as he points to another cage where two shepherds are facing off. The dog closest to us, the younger and smaller of the two, has adopted a pose that Gus calls “play bow.”

  “You see him do that?”

  I nod, having seen this kind of stuff before.

  “That’s an instigation, warning, apology, and clarification all wrapped up into one.”

  “How do you know?”

  “‘Cause I’ve lived with these guys for the last twelve years and I know the canine code.”

  Gus circles the cage as I follow. “It’s their way of saying I’m gonna nibble on you, but it won’t hurt cause we’re playing.”

  Gus points to other cages where some of the dogs are rollicking around, barking, fighting. It all looks sort of the same to me, but I can tell it’s got a much deeper meaning for Gus.

  “Everyone thinks they’re just screwing around, but they’re not. If you look close enough you can see they’re experiencing the full range of emotions: joy, guilt, anger, jealously, even a touch of sadness.”

  He looks over at me and smiles sheepishly. “I know you’re thinking I’ve totally gone off the deep end.”

  “I don’t think that at all, Gus,” I say, pausing for maximum affect, “I know you have.”

  He grins a mouthful of dead teeth, brushes past me, closes the front door, and draws a heavy bolt across it. Then he shuffles back and leans in close.

  “The dogs aren’t the only things I watch.”

  He points down. “Sometimes, during breaks, I watch the Dubs. The ones those thick-necks got brawling down on ten-”

  “That’s not true.”

  “The hell it isn’t,” he says. “I’ve seen it myself. They catch a couple of the damned things and chain ‘em up and make ‘em square off for money or barter in some half-assed boxing ring.”

  My head sags.

  I’ve heard that Odin and the others look the other way as to what happens down around the tenth floor.

  The men and women have it hard down there, so the normal strictures aren’t really enforced. Course I don’t know if any of that is true. It’s probably just scuttlebutt repeated by guys like Gus.

  “Anyway, I think they’re different than we all thought,” he continues. “They’re no longer people-”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “What I mean is, I think the Dubs are closer to animals, dogs. They live and move in packs and I’m beginning to believe the stuff we think is just them going psycho is their way of communicating.”

  I try to suppress a snort at this, but it comes out anyway. Instantly I regret it, because I can see the pain in Gus’s eyes. He probably thought I was the one person he could confide in about all this. Even though I’m somewhat sympathetic to the plight of the Dubs, it’s kooky to think they can communicate.

  “I’m sorry, man, it’s just you don’t know how it is out there.”

  “I want to.”

  For the last year or two, Gus has had this crazy id
ea of wanting to be a Jumper. I’ve done my best to dissuade him, but he claims he’s been cooped up for all these years. He says he’s just gotta experience it one time before he shoves off for the happy hunting grounds. I’ve seen the way he moves, however, his stooped posture, flabby muscles, and creaky bones. Ain’t no way in hell he’d last ten seconds on The Dream Catcher.

  “No, man, you don’t want to go out there,” I reply with a soft smile. “It’s better training Dixie and the others. It’s safer and way more rewarding.”

  He nods, resigned. “How’s life otherwise, kiddo?”

  “The usual,” I say. “Just got back from down the street a little while ago.”

  “Hairy?”

  “Like the skin on a three-week old peach.”

  “Anything worth discussing?”

  Nodding, I pull out the digital camera I snapped the markings on the other building with.

  Gus beams and gestures for me to follow him.

  “I’ve got something I want to show you,” he whispers.

  I follow Gus who crests a little ramp at the back of his place. Here it looks like the workshop of a madman: several benches cluttered with tiny parts and machines and pieces of scrap and metal and things for the dogs.

  Behind these, however, on the other side of a hunk of faux wall made of fiberboard sits a handle.

  Unless you absolutely knew where the handle was, you’d never spot it, not even if you were only two feet away.

  Me and Gus hoist the benches and move them just enough so that we can pass and then Gus grabs the handle, his teeth bared as he pulls back.

  The faux wall complains, its hidden hinges needing to be oiled, before they comply and a doorway pops open.

  The space behind is just big enough for a man to crouch-crawl through.

  Gus hops up into the doorway and I follow him, the two of us shimmying through a corridor winnowed between two walls that leads to the exterior of the building. The corridor ends at a window that’s been busted open and the next closest building is visible, maybe ten feet away.

  The two of us move to the edge of the opening and look down into an alley which is a mere twelve stories beneath us. There are no fire-escapes, ladders, or any other hand or footholds on the exterior of the building. This was done intentionally years ago, because if the Dubs learned how to climb and realized the hidden points of ingress and egress, it’s possible, highly unlikely, but possible, that they could find a way past the Keep.

  Gus snaps his fingers and I look up.

  Even though we’re only up twelve stories, it’s a pretty damned good distance to the ground.

  Gus jabs a finger at the ledge on the other building, which is where we’re headed. It’s dangerous to even think about trying to make that jump, but we’ve done it before and besides, what isn’t dangerous in a world where the dead outnumber the living ten million to one?

  Gus jogs back behind me so that he’s got about nineteen feet to work with and then he takes off on a ragged run and hurtles off toward the other building. He’s not gonna make it, I’m certain of that and then somehow he extends those impossibly long arms and hooks onto something I can’t see and flops out of sight.

  The bravado and adrenaline from my earlier adventures have seeped away, so I have to psyche myself up for yet another jump. I slap my thighs to get the blood running and then I breathe deeply and do a little visualization, imagining making the successful jump. I make my mind to dissolve into pillowy black nothingness (a tip Shooter taught me) and then I backtrack and blaze down the narrow space and take off into the air.

  The wind whips my hair as the other side rushes up to meet me and I land on my side and roll to my feet.

  I look down and catch sight of a single Dub staring up at me. The building we’re in isn’t fortified like VC1, but there’s only one Dub so I’m not really worried he’s going to alert his brethren.

  I track after Gus who pulls out a section of bed sheet near a long ladder that he’s painted to match the exterior of the building.

  He hangs it up on hooks near the ceiling to conceal the entry point.

  I follow him into a circular space that he’s made into his own personal library.

  An immense sanctuary filled with books and other periodicals and compact discs and even a flat-screen TV hooked up to various players and speakers. This is Gus’s “Fortress of Solitude,” the place where he likes to lay low from time-to-time.

  This is also where Gus tried to give me a proper education when I was younger. One of the few things I got from my Dad was his stubbornness which meant I wasn’t always the best student, but Gus was very patient and worked with me as best he could. He did customer service at an electronics store back when the world was right, so taking incoming fire from jackasses like me was kind of like second nature to him.

  I spin and stride past boxes filled with dust-smothered newspapers. My hands go down and up come yellowing newspaper pages with headlines like “India’s Swine Flu May Have Mutated,” and “H7N9 Virus Found In Mammals,” and more about viruses like the H5N1 and H5N2 and how they’d been found in poultry markets in China and turkey flocks in Missouri and Minnesota.

  “More things change, more they stay the same,” Gus says as I look over at him.

  “Same thing happened in Africa way back in the seventies,” he continues.

  “Same plague that raised up the Dubs?”

  “Similar, but different,” he replies. “Had other names back then. Ebola was the big enchilada.”

  “Think I heard of that.”

  “You should, bozo,” he says with a smile. “I taught you about it.”

  I’d forgotten that as he points at more articles, stories about viruses emerging from the jungle.

  “Turns out that the virus was in infected bats,” he says. “And the bats liked to eat this one particular kind of jungle fruit. Guess what?”

  I shake my head.

  “All the other animals in the jungle liked the fruit too. So the bats ate the fruit and relieved themselves-”

  “And all the other animals started rolling around in the shit,” I add, finishing his thought.

  He cocks an eyebrow and nods.

  “Still doesn’t explain how it got into people,” I say.

  “Well, some poor sap wanted protein, killed one of the tainted animals, ate some of it, and sold the other as bush meat which infected everyone else.”

  “Makes you feel sorry for the bat.”

  “Ah, that’s the kicker,” Gus says, tapping a finger on his forehead. “The bat was a reservoir host.”

  Gus reads my quizzical look.

  “It means they carried the virus, but weren’t killed by it, Wyatt.”

  “I wonder if some of us are reservoir hosts,” I say. Gus doesn’t respond and I turn back to the articles to see sentences underlined in red. I hold one of the articles up and it disintegrates.

  “Temporal dandruff,” Gus says as I make a wish and blow away the debris from my hands.

  Turning, I mentally note that Gus has added to his collection of periodicals which is stacked on shelves of all sizes and in piles on the floor.

  The books cover a variety of topics, everything from agriculture to zoology, whatever Gus could find on clandestine (and illegal) trips out into the city at night.

  He’s also got at least twenty of the most popular zombie books in two stacks off to one side of the room, their pages dog-eared and full of notations. We used to get a kick out of reading those, but most of them are just disappointing since the real Awakening differed so much from what the authors posited.

  For starters, the Dubs run neither incredibly fast nor agonizingly slow; rather, they move at the same speed they did in life, which makes an awful lot of sense if you think about it. Why the authors of those books believed an illness that impacted some region in the brain would affect locomotion is beyond me. Further, and this is a biggie, not everyone who’s killed is eaten. The Dubs, like mosquitoes, seem to take a particular shi
ne to certain individuals. Gus thinks that’s because some folks’ blood has a stronger scent than others, but I’ve just chalked it up to the dead having different palates.

  Gus sets an old wind-up phonograph, what he calls a “Seabreeze,” down, and fits a 45 record on it as some classical music that makes me think of summer fields in Europe scratches and plays.

  Gus crawls over and picks up a section of the floor that conceals a cavity where he keeps his goodies: a few gold coins, some packets of weed, an old German Bible filled with woodcuts, and a large, black pistol. The gun (unmarked and numberless), is the most significant piece of contraband since all weapons have to be registered with the Administrators. Gus is a damn liberal dude which is why I’m surprised he’s got the gat, but he keeps it around, in his words, “just in case.”

  “Planning on taking on the Dubs?”

  He stares at the pistol, which looks decidedly out of place in his pasty hands. “How many of them have you put down, Wyatt?”

  “Jesus, Gus.”

  Gus sets the gun back down. “Does it ever make you feel bad?”

  I lie and shake my head.

  “What about if they were… not bad or evil or harmful, just… different.”

  “This got something to do with what you were talking about before?

  “Can you answer my question?”

  I consider it. “I guess it would bother me, yeah.”

  “It might be wrong to kill them then, huh? It might be almost like… murder.”

  I don’t know how to respond to that.

  “Why do you do it?”

  “It’s my job. I got no choice.”

  “We’ve all got choices,” he whispers.

  I think about that and there’s a certain truth to what he says, but I don’t respond and hope like hell that he changes the subject.

  “I think you do it, you go out on those ops, because you need that camaraderie to fill the hole left by your father.”

  “You’re the one that pitched me for the gig way back when,” I respond, some heat in my voice.

  He waves his hand dismissively and casts an icy look in my direction, but doesn’t say anything.

  “What you just said, Gus, it isn’t true by the way.”