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  14

  Marisol moved deftly between the obstacles in the Kill House, the shell of a building that had been retrofitted as a training ground for the Apes.

  It was three stories tall, chopped up into various rooms where targets and traps were laid, with closed-circuit cameras capturing all the action and beaming it back to the Commandants, who scored the performance of each of the Apes as they made their way through.

  Marisol’s assault rifle nosed through a door, bright orange mag of “sim-ammo” — simulated ammunition — clipped in place.

  She sprinted up a staircase and sharked down a corridor, nose to the air, waiting for any sign. She felt it, that electricity the others couldn’t feel, and then she planted a foot and dove to her right as — WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! — sim-ammo and tracer fire raked the spot where she had just stood.

  One of the other Apes was hunting her.

  She shouldered her way through a limp wall made of pressed wood and came up on her knees, sighting her rifle down. She could sense movement through another wall as the lights went out and everything was plunged into outer-space darkness.

  Counting to herself, she heard the nearly imperceptible creak of a floorboard, and then she took off, barreling forward — BOOM! — jackhammering through the particle board wall to surprise Harrigan, the Ape who’d been stalking her.

  Marisol surprised and double-tapped Harrigan with the simulated ammo, orange paint splotches etched across Harrigan’s chest.

  For purposes of the training op, Harrigan was dead. He was also half-pickled from the cheap swill that he habitually downed, made of equal parts sodium water and paint thinner — “agua verde,” he called it — it affected his mind and made him hotter than hell at high noon. At that moment in the Kill House, he was in no mood to be upstaged by a goddamn girl.

  Marisol lowered her gun, and in a flash he torched her with a glare and said, “You think you’ve got the best trigger in the Windy City, girl? Huh?”

  Marisol didn’t respond and this only seemed to increase Harrigan’s fury. He hated the way she held his gaze and stood with her shoulders squared, her body, unlike his, betraying no infirmities. Somebody had to break this uppity bitch down. Why shouldn’t it be him?

  “We gonna keep cuttin’ bait, girl, or we gonna fish? You and me. What’s it gonna be?”

  “You really sure you want to do this?” she asked.

  Harrigan couldn’t believe what he was hearing as he breathed loudly through bared teeth. Some little kid who squatted when she took a piss was gonna mock him? He couldn’t let this stand. He wouldn’t.

  “You know how this is gonna end, you little whore?”

  She nodded. “Sure do. Me on my two feet. Looking down at your sorry, fat ass.”

  Harrigan roared in anger and charged and swung his rifle at her head.

  The aft of the gun clipped her hair, Marisol barely avoiding it.

  She swept a foot that stoned Harrigan’s ankle, bringing the thug down on his ass.

  In a blur of movement, Harrigan threw a punch that Marisol blocked and then Harrigan was back on his feet, coming at Marisol, punch, kick, chop, repeated over and over. He was inebriated, but his bulk sustained his momentum as he kept coming at her.

  She parried everything he threw at her and then replied in kind, torquing a toned leg back and bringing it across Harrigan’s chest, right below the ceramic armor plate he kept fastened across his vitals.

  The kick loosed the air from Harrigan, who gulped like a drowning man. The kick hurt much more than he imagined it would, it had stolen his vigor.

  Marisol smirked, gestured at him. “If you apologize for what you said to me, I promise not to beat your ass.”

  He paused, shocked at her words, and Marisol used the moment to jump and hammer an elbow down against his neck. Harrigan felt spikes of pain shooting through his body and then he was falling and tasting the bitterness of his sweat as it melded with blood. He hit the ground hard and all went black.

  Marisol barely needed to catch her breath. She dappled the dusty ground near Harrigan with spit, and briefly considered finishing Harrigan off once and for all with a blade to the prominent vein that pulsed on one side of his neck. Would this be murder? Self defense? Did it matter any longer? The lights flickered back on and Marisol noted a camera hanging from a nearby ceiling like a gargoyle. She stepped over Harrigan and exited the Kill House.

  Farrow and the others were waiting for her.

  They’d seen much of what she’d done via a monitor on the outside that showed images of what was taking place inside, and most clapped and hooted for her, save for Sikes (who was friendliest with Harrigan) who grumbled and iced her with a nasty look. She intentionally feigned a lunge at Sikes, who flinched and tripped back on his heels as Farrow watched and nodded and grinned. The girl had brass he thought, no doubt about it.

  He took her aside and mussed her hair and whispered, “We’re going out again tomorrow.”

  She looked at him and replied, “A new hunt?”

  He nodded, glanced at the other Apes to make sure they couldn’t hear, and then he whispered again, “An important hunt this time. Maybe the biggest we’ve done in years. From what I can tell it’s someone linked directly to the bigshots in the Codex.”

  She took this in as a sound rose and Marisol swiveled to see Harrigan emerging from the Kill House, wobbly, weak-kneed, getting razzed by the other Apes for having his hind end kicked by a girl barely eighteen years of age.

  Marisol stood her ground, holding Harrigan’s gaze, ceding nothing to him or any of the other men. She quickly took in their looks and saw something she’d rarely seen in their eyes: fear. Not only did they respect her, but they were scared of her.

  15

  In the days long past, the area around New Chicago had been first settled by native peoples. Some had called them “Indians,” though that term had fallen out of favor, replaced a half-dozen times by other words depending upon the direction of the winds of political correctness.

  Longman remembered the first people called themselves Algonquian and they chose the area principally because of the portage, a finger of swampy land, verdant and flat, that connected the Chicago River with the Great Lakes. Here, the Algonquian kept great pens filled with all sorts of animals that they bred for sport and for food. In the days since his Guild had taken control of the city, Longman had done the same, establishing a zoo and breeding pens out near an old amusement park on the lip of the Lakes.

  Longman was many things to many people: a leader, a killer, a prophetic destroyer of dreams and worlds, and, surprisingly, a lover of animals. He hadn’t always harbored such feelings, but in his adult years he’d held a place in his heart for lower creatures. There was no guile in them. They either were for you or against you. There was no duplicity or manufactured affection. There was no in-between.

  He strode between the locked slips full of deer and pigs and barnyard animals, along with more exotic creatures that he rescued from the zoos after his reign began. A smattering of African animals, strangely-colored birds, and a half-dozen truculent wild hogs that someone had given to him in return for not killing their son. All of these were housed in a high tent made of woven metal mesh with gaps at the high sides where food (and other things) could be tossed in. The sound of an engine drew his attention to a battered Town Car that stopped and disgorged Hendrix, who slithered out and moved past the animals, many of which bayed and hissed in his direction.

  Hendrix handed Longman his Absolution file, which Longman quickly fanned, stopping at the photo of Marisol.

  “This is her?” Longman asked. Hendrix nodded and said, “If you don’t mind me saying so, sir, that girl is straight-up heartbreaker and life-taker.”

  “I don’t remember seeing her before,” Longman responded.

  “You haven’t watched in ages, boss, and when you did, she was offscreen. She was a tracker before, but now she hunts with the rest. And the best thing is her scores.”

  Hend
rix’s mouth peeled into a satanic smile. “They’re…perfect.”

  Longman nodded and handed the file back to Hendrix. “How much?”

  Hendrix’s face went wooden for a beat, then he looked out over the animals and whispered, “Ten thousand, sir. We’ve explained to the family and to their Guild that Caleb — that was the dead boy’s name — was cut down by some mugger out past the river, an unsolvable, but the family, they hold you responsible because security’s gone to hell of late, as we both know.”

  “Your cover story, did they buy it?”

  Hendrix nodded, sniffed the warm air, and continued. “But if the hunt should prove unsuccessful, they’ll undoubtedly want more answers. They’ll start digging.”

  Longman grimaced, for he knew that the only way to stay in power was to keep people from asking questions. The key didn’t necessarily lie in creating an alternate reality, but in eroding his subjects’ basic ability to distinguish truth at all, the inability to sort fact from fiction. “Non-linear” warfare is what this had been called back in the days before the Unraveling.

  Longman’s gaze hopped from the animals to Hendrix. “We can’t have anyone digging.”

  “No, sir,” Hendrix responded. “Bad for business and all.”

  Longman duly noted this, then placed a hand on Hendrix’s wrist. “If this doesn’t work out, Hendrix, it likely won’t end well for you.” Longman said this with absolutely no affect, no emotion in his voice or face, and that was what always scared Hendrix the most. Hendrix slowly nodded as Longman set out, strolling along a boardwalk he’d had built that snaked between the pens of animals. He stopped and reached in a pocket and pulled out a half-eaten apple and tossed it to the hogs. The giant beasts would eat anything, and they rolled and fought over the morsel as Longman nodded and grinned. He loved these sludge-slicked low-dwellers. They were like him. Willing to do almost anything to survive.

  16

  The dim light of day had withdrawn, relinquishing all of New Chicago to the evening gloom. Elias was down in the Pits, training as hard in the last hours before his first run as he’d done in the many months leading up to it. No changes in eating or routine.

  He did an hour of sprints (many of them with weights strapped to his back), then ran several miles before allowing himself a few minutes to catch his breath and down various protein and carb drinks made of goat’s milk, shredded grain, and the concentrated pulp from the multicolored fruits that Moses grew in an old greenhouse out beyond the Pits.

  He listened to speeches from a trainer named Max who’d survived an unheard-of nine hunts, read reports of those who didn’t make it back, and studied crude topo maps of the land where the hunt would be. He made mental notes of places to hide and obvious areas for ambushes, while pinpointing the locales where boobytraps had been placed in the past.

  When he laid down to rest that night, he made sure to check the hiding spot inside the mattress for the phone and the key.

  His plan was this: he would vanquish all of the Longman’s men tomorrow and then, after returning in triumph, would explore the secrets of the phone and key in greater detail.

  Even when he was a child he exhibited a knack for visualization, for plotting out the way things were to unfold. So he continued to think on his plan and had no doubt that he was more than prepared for tomorrow. He had no doubt that he would be returning victorious. On two feet.

  Marisol sat in an ordnance vault in the barracks with an oversized blade and cut notches in the tips of 5.56-millimeter bullets. Acting upon the advice of a younger Ape, she proceeded to pour molten wax on top of the notches.

  The wax was supposed to give the bullets extra stopping power. She’d never used her rifle on a Runner before, but her intuition told her that tomorrow might be different. She needed to be ready.

  When the wax cooled, she collected the bullets and fitted them into two ammo magazines that she taped together and slapped into the receiver on her assault rifle. She hefted her gun and it felt good in her hands as she placed it next to her body armor that she was now dousing in alcohol and scrubbing clean.

  Her hands quivered as she worked the alcohol into the grooves on the outside of the armor that would encase her on the hunt like an individual fortress. She hoped that tomorrow would go smoothly, but her intuition said it would be different, that this next hunt might be the start of something, rather than the end of it.

  17

  Longman lounged on a chair at the top of the Guild building listening to a dented iPod muted low and the sounds of the night as it cloaked the city. He fiddled with a small machine that resembled a metal bird, a mini-drone made of carbon fiber and high-tech plastics that was built for eavesdropping and surveillance.

  He checked the lithium batteries bolted inside the drone, then the aperture camera that captured ground-level images. He smiled at the shimmering exterior of a device he used on rare occasions to track the progress of the Absolution hunts.

  Satisfied that all was well, he hoisted the drone and ran a short distance and flung the device like a javelin as it soared off and away from the roof. Micro-electrical motors hummed to life inside and soon the drone was flying out and away and over New Chicago.

  Longman returned to his seat and admired a small monitor fastened to a harness that he strapped around his shoulders. The monitor showed top-down footage shot by the drone that enabled Longman to control the drone via a tiny joystick and dial. He was familiar with the technology, having used it during a period of “all hands on deck” at his air base directly after the Unraveling.

  It had been a time of great uncertainty when all able-bodied men and women at Longman’s base were asked to stay on, to move on base with their families and significant others to monitor events happening on the ground. Recognizing an opportunity, Longman volunteered to man the twenty-four-hour flocks of drones that High Command sent out over the cities and the lands in between. The satellites were still in orbit (and a fair number continued to be in orbit far overhead and would be for several more years, though only Longman knew this), and the wind and algae-charged batteries that powered the drones in full vigor, and the whole of Middle America became a kind of free-fire zone in the months after the Unraveling.

  There were some at the base who couldn’t take it, who broke after seeing all they held dear crumble and burn into nothingness. Not Longman. He volunteered for drone training when others dropped out or stopped showing up for work. Soon he was consorting with “Reachback Operators” in Nellis and Creech Air Force bases via encrypted sat links and flying the unmanned drones that were raining Hellfire, quite literally, down on the unsuspecting “Crows” (in military parlance, the bad guys), their luminous forms running in the darkness before his infra red sensors locked on and they were banished into the void.

  Adopting the handle “Icarus,” Longman was soon in charge of the “Disposition List,” the initially electronic, and later paper, log that contained the names of people the High Command wanted liquidated. He was ruthlessly efficient, though he spent most of his days watching the collapse of civilization in real-time and striking marks on a wooden desk to denote his “kills.”

  He observed the futile attempts to power the grids back up. He watched them glow and then fall permanently dark. He studied the lines that formed in the cities and the suburbs, and then tracked those lines as they collapsed into frenzied mobs that ransacked and pillaged and fought against law and order until there was none left to fight.

  He perused the news flashes (both real and fake) that ran for a spell on backup generators, detailing the fatal disease birthed by the solar storm that hit the economy and stopped the oil from flowing. Solar storm. Solar flares. Magnetic tsunami. Terrorism. Preemptive strike. Act of God. EMP. Even rumors, including the ones that Longman now believed in, that some alien presence had played a role in the Unraveling.

  Either way, the party of the donkeys believed one thing; the elephants, another.

  And none of the geniuses, or talking heads, or pe
ople with no real discernible skills who got paid for jabbering on shows could quite agree on what had happened, but it mattered not.

  No power meant no jobs, no transport, no buying of plastic goods from faraway lands, no living beyond means. The engine of America locked and burned in a few quick months. It had not been too big to fall, after all.

  As the final seconds ticked down, Longman sat alone and watched at the air base as stories unfolded. He watched the stock market drop thousands of points in a matter of days as the technorati threw up their hands, unable to massage their money and manipulate sectors and industries in a world without power.

  He poured through top-secret networks called SIPRNet and JWICS and Anchory and Broadsword and all of the various internal portals and networks connecting groups and elements nobody had ever heard of, like the National Correlation Working Group, and the Proactive Preemptive Operations Group, the Strategic Support Branch, and all of the other entities with their cute little acronyms that were birthed by tax dollars to compress the kill chain.

  He studied the mass suicides that took place on the great bridges in San Francisco and New York. He observed penitents with bent knees in broad fields seeking a sign from some higher power that never came. He analyzed the standoff at the Mall of America two months into the collapse. Armed bands had taken it over and forced the hand of the remnants of some second-tier military element, which burned it all down in a conflagration that made the events at Waco look like a Fourth of July barbecue.

  He clocked the battles over the bridges that connected Detroit and Canada and Maryland from the Commonwealth of Virginia, the sieges that ensued around the oil fields in Texas (which moved unsuccessfully to secede from the Union) and the fracking pools in Pennsylvania, the wild firefights across the high-tech campuses in the greenery below San Francisco, and the murders of various reality stars in the beautiful hills of Beverly by vengeful and long-suffering viewers.