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  She held up her hands and said, “You two can still run away.”

  When the one with the beard charged, she swept him aside with her hands in an alternate half-moon sweep, then caught him by the back of his head and slammed him hard onto an apron of concrete.

  A kick nearly caught her head, but she dodged under it, felt a rush of dizziness as the alcohol hit her, and then grabbed the foot and twisted, sending the final attacker to the ground. Not so easy, she thought as she stood and twisted on the ankle again. It snapped and the man screamed, his foot dangling limply.

  Farrow was on him, stomping at the man’s face, until his cries became guttural moans and then nothing.

  “Will these people never learn?” asked Farrow.

  “We gave them a chance to run.”

  A quick glance around showed they had done their fair share of damage, but the screams had drawn attention, and Farrow motioned her to follow, close.

  “Speaking of running. If someone finds out we did this, we’re screwed.”

  “Don’t have to tell me twice,” she said, and took off into the night.

  2

  Early the next morning, Marisol’s head still hurt from where the guy had sucker-punched her the night before, and it was made worse by the bumping of the biofuel-belching tactical vehicle as it made its way down the pot-hole covered street.

  The Apes often hunted at dusk, or in the blue light of pre-dawn, though this time she had hoped for a bit of rest before being woken up and told to grab her gear. But like the good Ape she was, she had pulled herself together and here she was just like the rest of them, clad in molded Nomex gear, strike helmets, poly-fiber boots, and lugging their well-lubricated assault rifles.

  She was at work and 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 the Apes would be roused from their bunks and on the move, gathering up their equipment, rations and weapons, before heading out of what passed for barracks, to their rides.

  Marisol was always on point, the team’s 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. Nothing super-human, but a heightened awareness like many had found themselves with after the world had collapsed around them. Some found it affected their sight, others strength, but for Marisol, it was a keen sense of smell.

  Sometimes, especially when stuck in a vehicle with the other Apes, she thought it was more a curse than a blessing. But when it helped her in the hunt, she wouldn’t trade her sense of smell for all the muscles or speed in the world.

  “Staying alert up there, Sling?” a large, mercurial man named Harrigan bellowed. The nickname “Sling,” was given her by some of the Olders on account of the nylon strap wreathed around her rifle that she wore at all times. That was fine by her. Hell, she’d been called worse in the past.

  “I’m always alert enough to smell your stench,” she replied.

  “That’s called musk,” Harrigan replied, no emotion in is bearded, scarred face.

  “Yeah, well, you ever think of cleaning your pits before coming on a run?”

  He laughed. “Wouldn’t wanna deprive the world of my natural body odor.”

  “Gotta admit, Sling,” Farrow said, “Harrigan’s funk is so bad, we can’t help but know where the man is at all times. Group accountability is a plus.”

  “The silver lining, huh?” Marisol laughed. “I don’t know how you always see it.”

  “I was born to a family of love, Sling. Is it my fault all of ya’all’s lives were depressing as shit?”

  She laughed, though the reference to family stung. Her family… well, she had no idea where the hell they were. No real idea anyway. They were most likely dead, but she’d never been given definitive proof. In actuality, they’d gone off one day to fight for the dictator when she was only a child, and hadn’t been heard from since.

  She struggled to think of something else and kept coming back to her place amongst the Apes. She was a year beyond her eighteenth birthday, a young woman in a world full of dour-faced, knuckle-dragging men. One of only two female Apes, those that hunted, the Olders looked upon her with equal parts of 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 they could not do well, particularly the catching of the prey scent, that change in the air which indicated the closeness of those they pursued, the Runners.

  A scent of Farrow caught her attention—heavy but smooth, like fresh cut pine—and she found herself smiling. He was the only one really that was ever there for her. He wasn’t blood, but he was the only thing that passed for family now.

  Some of the other Apes had a habit of mocking her, sometimes because of her sex or age, but mostly because of her heritage. They teased her, saying her innate sense of smell had to 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 another mighty wall that had been constructed before the world ended.

  She called the male Apes “Olders” or “Grizz” because they were grizzled and hanky and smelled of rot and sweat and things that she could not place.

  To a man, her colleagues had lived by the way of the gun before First Light; that is, each had survived in an occupation that required a firearm. Some, like Farrow, had been cops, others general purpose soldiers or security guards and the like. All of them now labored in the service of the man who ran the Codex Guild, the Guild of Guilds: Longman, the king of kings and lord of hosts and the unquestioned ruler of New Chicago.

  She shuddered at the thought of Longman.

  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 oppressed and those beholden to Longman.

  The entire city was built on the back of the ruby-tipped plants that Longman’s men cultivated inside what was once a mighty sporting arena.

  The plants, and the drugs that could be produced from them, kept the machines humming and Longman in power.

  In turn, Longman being in power kept the system of law and order called Absolution in place.

  Borrowed from a period that existed in a time before memory called 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 powerful, the members of the Guilds, were figuratively 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.

  In a way, she could almost understand it, and feel like she was making a difference in this world. Carrying out justice.

  For 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 was the way now, and the way was right.

  The tac vehicle bucked and fussed as it clipped through downtown New Chicago. Marisol pressed her face to a cracked cube of glass wedged ove
r 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. Working alongside them were 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 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, wondering what their lives were like as they plied all they could from what remained of the past.

  She smiled wistfully, realizing that it was all local now.

  No more commerce between states, no more globalization or international diplomacy.

  No more war, really. Not with other countries anyway.

  Everything around them, everything they knew and could see, that was it. She could see her whole world from the front stoop of the barracks.

  “You’re obsessed with the old days, Sling,” said Farrow, who wedged himself into a position on Marisol’s right. Her gaze ratcheted to the big man, who was busy feeding copper-jacketed metal projectiles, or slugs as they were called, into an ammo magazine that dangled from the 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.”

  Marisol scrunched her nose at the lie, then quickly masked her emotions. It was a lie and she knew it, but to acknowledge that it had been better before would be to diminish their belief that somehow the present was something other than a slick of bare gruel barely worth fighting for.

  She couldn’t blame him though. Farrow had lost his own child and wife in the months when the world went to hell …when the power went out and the cities fell and the looting began and precious word slipped out about abominations being committed on the high plains.

  One night, over a shared meal snuck out back after hours—not worth the risk, but because he’d insisted and she could never say no to him—he’d opened up about it all. He told her all that had happened, including his shock at how the system had collapsed so quickly after the power went out.

  Twice he admitted he’d lost heart in the weeks after the Unraveling and looked down the barrel of a pistol, and twice he’d crawled and whimpered back from the abyss.

  “Others say that from the worst conditions come the strongest men,” he’d said, staring off at the city walls. “It’s all bullshit. Honestly, I’m lucky if I’m half the man I used to be. It’s like I’m just surviving now, getting by in a world where time seems undone, existing on adrenaline, prayer, and a hope, however fucking absurd, that life is still some kind of blessing for the living.”

  She hadn’t been sure of whether to cry for him or laugh at his gift for being dramatic. Everyone had lost their family here, or everyone who wasn’t rich anyway. In the end, she’d taken her last bite and then laid her head on his shoulder and taken his hand in both of hers. It was the most intimate they had ever been, but in her mind it was a brother and sister thing to do, nothing more. She was never quite sure if he interpreted it in the same way.

  Marisol returned from her thoughts to watch him fill a magazine. He smacked it against his helmet to test if the rounds were full and true.

  She’d chosen Farrow to associate with not because of anything they had in common, but simply because he’d been the only one not to make a run at her when she first joined up. He had also fought to keep the others away when she showered, and suffered from the cramps, an ordeal that came to her every month since. Not that she needed his protection anymore, now that she’d earned her place among them. She appreciated him just as much as she had during those first months, though.

  Hell, he was the only one she’d think twice about before killing. Such small things passed for friendship after First Light.

  The others on her team, however — the motley mishmash of Apes that lazed in the tac — she’d gladly stick if it was professionally acceptable.

  There was the brute named Sikes, and of course Harrigan, the long-haired, foul-smelling pederast, kind one moment, brutal the next, along with all the others who leered and slobbered when she doffed her armor and cleansed the grime from her weapons.

  The men lusted after her since she possessed beauty as well as serenity. The kind of young woman who stifled the air when she entered 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, full-bellied; the kind of body made by real work.

  “What say?”

  She looked back asquint at Farrow. “Death watches over each of us,” she replied.

  He nodded, grinned, and then 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 vehicle that suddenly flashed green, and then it began.

  The rear of the tac vehicle dropped and the Apes crashed down the metal plank and formed ranks.

  Marisol swiveled and snugged on her battle helmet, with its half-assed heads-up display (“”HUD”) 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 comms 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 firing up smokes and tossing back shots of booze 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 while on the clock, 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, and they did.

  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 generous Papa with his omnipresent smile, a mother, an older brother and a small dog that she’d carried in a backpack that her uncle had handed down to her.

  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. He’d initially joined the military, but quickly washed out and then became a “stick man,” a framer of houses.

  He’d helped
build several large developments 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 loped 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 natural gas and oil 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.

  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. Finally the broadcasts stopped 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 that place their camp — their “coop,” as Marisol’s father liked to call it.