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  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 planning on dealing me misery, Elias?”

  Elias stared quizzically and then shook his head. 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.

  He stood there 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. This verminous space, no bigger than a cattle cage, 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.

  It had always begun the same way.

  Somebody, whether a blood relative or a close confidant of those in power, did something bad. Murders, mostly, but also assaults and other crimes of the flesh. If bad things were done to them on the lowest societal rungs, the Mudders or any of the other mutts inhabiting New Chicago, the wheels of justice turned very slow indeed. A cursory review of the crime scene might be had and a few skulls knocked for information, but beyond that the crimes would be of no moment to what passed for the State.

  But if something befell a person of some station, the Brahmin sent out investigators — just as in the times before First Light, men and women who collected the smallest details of what had gone wrong. The gathered materials were then given to the elite, who spent hours trolling through the minutia before they began preparing the subrogation papers, the investigatory and other procedural documents that provided support for Absolution. The process was as painstaking as Moses heard it had been thousands of years ago, in a time when men like Longman Heller lived in fortified castles made of wood and stone.

  “Good day, Moses,” Ephraim said.

  Moses manufactured a smile and offered Ephraim a hand-rolled cigar, even though he knew Ephraim would never partake.

  Moses fired up his own cigar as Ephraim slid the papers across the desk.

  The papers were printed on a heavy parchment that was processed using plant fiber and a gelatinous matter extracted from the carcasses of dead animals. The front of the parchment was sealed with wax embossed with the raised lightning bolts that Longman used as his crest. The seal carried the force of law; breaking the seal, except by Moses or anyone specifically functioning at his behest, would warrant death. Moses slipped a long nail under the seal and sliced it open, then studied the documents contained therein.

  The facts meant little, the name even less. Moses didn’t recognize the perpetrator or the victim, but both came from good families who controlled some measure of the commerce that impacted on Longman and his operations. Otherwise, the crime at hand would not be of any concern.

  “Who’s it this time, Mo?” Ephraim said.

  Moses looked up at Ephraim, who grinned at him from the other side of the desk.

  “Who’ll do the deed this time?” Ephraim said. “Who’s your stallion?”

  Moses folded up the documents and cradled them near his midsection. “You know I can’t talk about that. Insider information and all.”

  “I hear things, Mo,” Ephraim continued. “I hear that you’ve got a new one. A real gamer.”

  Moses nodded and smiled slyly at the thought of Elias. “True. I’ve got some new blood.”

  “How fast is he?” Ephraim asked.

  “Faster than gossip, brother, and twice as nasty,”

  Ephraim steepled his fingers under his chin and laughed like a child privy to a secret. He glanced around, fished in a pocket, and pulled out a reed-thin sliver of silver, still precious, still able to be traded for goods and services, still used to wager on Absolution.

  Moses snatched up the silver and nodded. “I got ya down for the usual, Eph.” Ephraim sniggered and nodded, then rose and moved his way to the exit.

  Moses watched him go and then deposited the silver in a small tin-punched box that he secreted under a section of flooring beneath his desk. There were many pieces of silver inside the box, betting proceeds collected by Moses. Even though he’d been permitted to wager in certain circumstances, he was wary of letting people know the full extent of his bets. The appearance of this would be bad and sometimes that was all that mattered. Appearances had a way of being lethal in New Chicago.

  Moses pivoted and glanced out an old truck windshield that functioned as the only window in the room. From here, he could see the low-slung dwellings that marked the beginnings of downtown New Chicago.

  Somewhere out there, the beast Longman prowled, thought Moses.

  And the beast was always hungry.

  4

  “Whosoever does this to the least of these, my brethren, has done it unto me,” Longman Heller said, pacing before a room full of people.

  Longman was tall, large-jointed, and nearing the autumn of his years, with a mass of wild hair that he slicked with animal fat, parted down the middle, and tied off at the back. It gave him the mien of a hippy from the days of old. The spectacles that he wore on certain occasions, such as this, were cracked in one lens, but fit with the grime and dirt that dotted his exposed flesh, making him look like a well-heeled survivalist.

  He was a posthumous child (his mother having died while giving him life), who was provided little by his father other than a name: Longman Justis Heller. He was what some would have called in the past a warlord, a dictator, a landowner who governed from a perch that rested upon his money crop, a brightly-topped flower that his people grew out in the decaying field of a once-grand sporting arena. A flower that when pressed gave up its nectar, an oozing white effluvium that Longman mashed and dried into a narcotic that kept the masses subdued.

  Longman looked out over a space where all was mostly darkness save a few lamps hanging from metal crossbeams below the ceiling.

  The space was industrial, a great room, an annex of a foundry stuffed with men and women who sat before him at tables piled high with the kind of food rarely seen after First Light. Brightly-colored root vegetables and sides of cured meat and sweetened breads and other whole grain foods.

  The audience, haggard clans that gazed longingly at the vittles, came from the city’s second-tier families. Powerful, yes, but not accredited members of any Guild. The kind of people pulling themselves up through the grime, readying to move into the next tier, to join one of the Guilds that held power in New Chicago.

  Potential allies.

  Possible enemies.

  Longman had invited them for food and drink to discuss the harvest and all manner of rumors and conjecturing, including war between other city-states and purported sightings of the Thresher on the outskirts of the city.

  He held the silence long enough to see them squirm, then finally asked, “Do you understand what that means? Do you know what I say when I mention that if you do things unto another you do them unto me?”

  A jug-eared Man in the audience raised his hand. “It means if you do something for the least, you’ve also done it for the most.”

  Longman grinned hugely at this and pointed. “Winner! I see we have a winner, as
well as a scholar.” He chuckled as the Man returned Longman’s smile and leaned back in his seat. “There is talk,” Longman continued, “that some amongst you have taken to threatening the boys that run the water trains below the eastern trestle.”

  “They’re brigands,” a woman murmured out in the audience. “Thieves. They want us to pay tribute when we cross,” said another.

  Longman nodded at this. “Is this not the way it’s always been?”

  A man with a fever blister trenching his lip stood and said, “It was. But that was before. In the days when we were few and hadn’t formed a collective.”

  “But now you have,” Longman offered, and Fever Blister nodded. “You’ve gained members, gained power, and soon you too will want to form your own first-tier Guild I’d imagine.

  “I suppose it’s a fair accounting to think that once you’ve moved up a rung, you can kick sand in the faces of those beneath you. That, to paraphrase, the least you can do is the absolute most that you will.”

  Half-hearted nods and uneasy murmurs of agreement in the audience.

  Longman waited, then added, “There are some, however, who’d make a play on the words I said before. That is, if you do evil to the least, you’ve also done it to the most.”

  Those in the audience shared confused looks as Longman forced a smile and dipped his head.

  “Words to discuss another day, I suppose. Please eat, drink, and enjoy yourselves, my friends. All that I have is yours.”

  Longman turned from the audience and moved slowly toward a side door that led from the great room. He stepped into a pane of light that illuminated lived-in features that were a monument to Middle-America.

  He was a student of man and of history and he knew many things that others had forgotten.

  He knew, for instance, that an Unraveling had arguably occurred at least once in the past. Back in 1859, sleepers were roused from their bunks by a cosmic light so bright that newspapers were said to have been able to be read outdoors at midnight. It was called the “Carrington Event,” and the storm that belched the charged plasma triggered a fierce geomagnetic eruption that spilled across the Earth. The 1859 aurora fried what little communications then existed. The Unraveling, a storm thought to have been at least ten times as strong as the 1859 storm, ended the world as everyone knew it.

  Longman had read about the “Carrington Event” in a treatise on property rights. In the days before First Light, he’d been an interpreter of the law and worked at a firm with enough lawyers to fill a basketball court.

  He spent many days bathed in the soft glow of a computer in an office in a gentrifying section of Chicago, defending cases on behalf of mammoth insurance concerns. He was constrained to be friendly with those on the other side. The enemy. Plaintiffs’ lawyers. His firm had office parties and would invite these lawyers and the end result would always be the same. Lawsuits and more lawsuits. Litigation without end. It was bad for clients but good for the lawyers, and Longman often left his office in disgust with the knowledge that he and his colleagues were little more than well-paid lampreys, parasitic creatures plentiful in the Great Lakes that attached themselves to a host.

  The legal system was already broken by that point.

  He and his brethren produced nothing but paper and hot air and endless rivers of steaming bullshit. He was a member of the brotherhood of the lie. A practitioner of the dark art of deceit, whether outright, or in some lesser form of falsehood. The others at the firm took particular delight in the former, and practices like unnecessary discovery during litigation, endless appeals, pointless report letters, and forgotten phone calls.

  His days were broken down into fragments of time. Billable hours. Longman loathed it and considered himself unique at the firm because he was the only one who saw things for what they were.

  He was a beacon in a fog that confused the others and concealed their crookery.

  No tears were shed when he gave notice to his law firm several months later.

  He couldn’t shill for the plaintiffs’ bar, and he would no longer take refuge in lies or stoop to befriending the water-weak phonies who litigated the shady slip-and-falls on behalf of shadier clients. He binned out of law-firm life and circulated his resume and soon found a new position.

  He became a lawyer who worked for a military element that flew machines. He found order there. Routine. Some sliver of purpose. He rose through the ranks and obtained clearances and commendations and soon became someone that the elite trusted with secrets. He was given access to SCIFs — sensitive compartmented information facilities — as well as great rooms at the skirt of a military base, storage areas filled with legal texts and ponderous treatises and other important books.

  What he remembered most, however, was not a treatment on the law, but a book he once read on ancient history. A tome about the rise and fall of men like him, men with power. This book described a ritual from the days of old, a practice where each of the men in power was succeeded by another who had brought them down in a act of ultraviolence. Ritualized succession by murder. Kings killing kings. “The Golden Bough.”

  Longman recalled this daily, and lived his life with the knowledge that he would never let this happen. He would never allow another to flower who might challenge his grip on the levers that controlled all that lay before him.

  Unlike many of the others in the old days, Longman was prepared when the world ended. He’d been what the old world called a “prepper,” a derogatory term that referred to those who stirred in the shadows, spending their time hoarding food and fuel and weaponry while the others sang and danced in the years of plenty.

  He’d convinced a few others to prepare in the outer burbs and when hell came, he’d rallied himself and taken the survivors and half-mad refugees and made a go of it. His small band grew to rechristen the world in New Chicago, a future with food and shelter and even commerce. It was a way for the shit-speckled masses to make a go of it, to forget the bad times and forge a new way ahead. To reboot the future. Their little experiment could be duplicated elsewhere, Longman whispered to the others. A nursery for the days that lay ahead.

  Most of his colleagues lost heart and died in the initial days of ruination. Many of the others simply lost their bearings in the mayhem and offed themselves, or were ripped to shreds at night by the armies of dispossessed marauders whose eyes had been fried by the bursting of the sun.

  But not Longman.

  He gathered up supplies and munitions and took refuge with a posse of like-minders in a silo that once housed a device capable of tearing the world asunder. He had an attachment to “low and common company,” as one of his favorite writers, Charles Dickens, had famously written about one of his characters. The kind of simple people who were more transparent, more malleable. He was a student of man and of the old ways and what some might call an understudy or acolyte of the horrors to come.

  Longman passed through the metal door and stopped on a dime. A cherubic young girl of about five stood before him. He smiled, and with some effort took a knee and extended a hand.

  “Are you lost, child?” The girl shook her head and pointed toward the great room.

  “My da and my ma,” she whispered.

  “Your parents? They’re in there?” Longman asked, and after the girl nodded, he said, “They’re my guests… but not you.”

  “What?” she asked, her voice a whimper.

  “Run,” he said, voice edged with irritation, his head spinning with conflicting emotions. This happened to him only rarely, a tug of the conscience that he’d fought to bury long ago. “GET OUT!” he screamed at the girl, and she ran, tears streaming down her face.

  “Boss?” one of his guards asked, stepping into his line of site.

  “Have someone follow her, see that she’s safely out of the area. Make sure she knows she’s never to be seen around here again.”

  The guard rushed off.

  Longman glared after him for a moment, chest heaving. When his breath settl
ed, he turned and flung a look at his duster-clad enforcers who waited on either side of the doors that led to the great room: the crow-faced piker named Cozzard, and a thick-necked imbecile named Lout who possessed an omnipresent sneer and reeked of violence.

  Cozzard and Lout sniggered and slammed the metal door shut. They fastened a rusted padlock across it and bolted it down with a metal bar for good measure.

  Longman continued to move away as the shouts began echoing behind him.

  The sound of hands pounding on the door and walls soon grew louder and louder.

  He knew that those inside the great room had just realized there were no windows to the space. No means of egress save the one door that was now shut. He wondered how long it would take them to recognize the incendiary devices he’d planted inside.

  More shouts, screams, unearthly booms — and then his nostrils flared at the hint of smoke. He moved through a door as the sound of Cozzard’s and Lout’s footfalls echoed behind him. Down a flight of stairs he rumbled, until he was standing near a loading dock in the middle of an industrial area.

  He turned and watched the first flicker of fire spring from the roof over the great room.

  Cozzard and Lout pounded down the steps to catch up with him.

  They stood there, watching as the fires within the great room roared and smothered the space in greasy balls of flame. The roof collapsed in seconds, then the support structure, as all of those inside became one with the charred remnants of the building, wailing and crying out to their God.

  To an outsider, this spectacle, this killing, was shocking, but it had to be this way, Longman thought. These people posed a threat and he could not abide that just as he wouldn’t tolerate dissent.

  At least the girl had known her parents, if only for a short time. That was more than he could ever claim for himself. And now he had done what was necessary.

  He had to take a stand to ensure the survival of New Chicago. To follow the new law was to believe in rebirth and reconstruction. It was the only way that could be. His way.