

### Vertical City

### A Zombie Thriller

### Part 1

By

George S. Mahaffey, Jr.

# Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

About The Author

www.georgemahaffey.com

Copyright 2015 by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

Cover design by: Exclamation Innovations

This is a work of fiction and all rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

BLOOD RUNNERS: ABSOLUTION (Book 1 of 3)

BLOOD RUNNERS: DESIGNATED SURVIVORS (Book 2 of 3)

AMITYVILLE: ORIGINS (Book 1 of 2)

RAZORBACKS I

RAZORBACKS II

THE PACT

THUNDER ROAD (Books 1)

THUNDER ROAD (Books 2)

Then they said, "Come let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

\- Genesis 11:4

#  Prologue

Wherever people gather there's a story about how things began. A creation myth. Most seem to involve lots of semi-darkness and swirling mists and a celestial tinkerer who swoops down to get the party started with great sound and fury. For those of us who survived "The Awakening," I guess you could say it was pretty much the same. It began with a bang alright, the crash of a helicopter.

I was a little over three years old when Mom and Dad rushed into my room and roused me awake. They were out of breath, faces flushed, bags slung over their shoulders. Mom's eyes were wet and the smell of her sweat tanged the air as she leaned down into my crib.

"Wyatt, sweetie, it's time... time to go."

Reaching up, Mom took me into her arms and jimmied a pacifier into my mouth marked "Heartbreaker" which I thought was weird since I'd kicked my binky addiction nearly six months before.

We were living on the sixteenth floor in a high-rise in the middle of the city. A sleek twenty-storey steel and stone silo birthed by the latest and hottest real estate development concern, perfectly positioned for transport and easy access to the city's most desirable districts.

My folks bought their coop before I was born and kept it even as they made plans to retreat to the suburbs. It was close to work after all, which was important to Dad who massaged money for members of what passed for the American nobility. I rarely saw him, but Mom seemed happy and we'd wanted for very little.

I knew something was wrong that night because my folks were together, side-by-side even, which was highly unusual. They'd also left a bag of Mom's low-fat popcorn popping in the microwave near our dog Shemp who barked at a flatscreen as we made for the front door.

Mom tried to keep me from looking back, but I broke free of her grip and stared at the screen. There was yet another breathless story about the ancient mass grave unearthed after the ice sheets receded somewhere in the wilds of Russia. I watched a few talking heads sputtering about this and that before the story was interrupted for "Breaking News."

Shaky, handheld footage splashed across the screen. A female reporter on a street appeared and pointed and then the camera spun to reveal a mob of men and women who were moving spastically like the apes I'd seen when Mom took me to the zoo. Everyone on the screen looked incredibly angry (or hungry, I couldn't tell which) and a few seemed to be missing parts. In seconds they rolled right over the reporter as spurts of red speckled the camera. I thought it was all make-believe of course, but then the screen went to snow and starting beeping out emergency tones.

Turning back, we pushed out through the front door, greeted by a phalanx of big men clutching weapons. Dad whispered and handed them a folder of money and they ushered us down the hallway, using hand gestures to communicate. The power winked out and red emergency lights flashed.

I rubbed my rheumy little eyes as screams and thumps echoed from somewhere under us. Mom covered my ears, but I heard everything, including the piercing wail of what sounded like a woman on a floor directly below us shrieking, "WHA – WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY?!"

Mom's chest rose and fell as she followed my father and some of our neighbors down the long, twisty corridor that ended at a steel door. My folks stopped to catch their breath, flinching at the sounds of things popping – gunshots, I soon surmised – from somewhere below. This went on for a few seconds and then I heard the sustained echo of automatic weapons fire interspersed with concussive blasts and then... silence, followed by the triumphant, angry roar of what I thought were animals.

"You know what that is, baby?" Mom asked, pointing toward the door at the end of the hall.

"Do – door," I said.

"We're going through that door, Wyatt, okay?"

I nodded.

"Can you do something for me when we go through that door?"

Another nod from me.

"Whatever you do, do not look down, okay? Keep your eyes on mommy. Do. Not. Look. Down."

For the first time real fear panged me and my eyes began to get misty as I caught sight of my father, a broad-shouldered man who'd never shown a modicum of emotion in all the time I'd known him, begin to weep. Whether he was crying for himself or us, or simply because the mini-empire he'd built was likely on the verge of collapse, I didn't know, but it hardly mattered. There's nothing worse than seeing your old man wilting when you're a kid.

Dad wiped his tears and set his jaw and then we were on the move again, following our bulky guards who stopped at the steel door. They traded looks and checked their weapons before looking back at us. I saw one of them, a bearded brute who resembled a black bear, mouth "one, two," and then he kicked open the door.

The hazy light of dusk washed over us as we filtered through the door that led to a skywalk suspended several hundred feet off of the ground. A bridge of metal and glass that connected us to the roof of a sister building.

The roof of the other building had been established as a hideaway for the young and wealthy. There was a restaurant there that served small bites of food on smaller plates and one of those open-air lounges with firepits and cabanas for what Mom called "canoodling." On either side of the restaurant's roof were two enormous helicopters that had just begun to power up.

As we moved across the glass bridge a sound boomed from below until it seemed to envelope everything. A deep, haunting note that resembled the roar that a huge wave makes before it crashes onto the beach.

"Don't look down, my sweet baby boy," Mom said, "whatever you do, do not look down."

Tears were in her eyes and ripples of fear pulsed over her body and I of course, being a child, did exactly the opposite of what she'd implored me not to do. I looked down and immediately wished I hadn't.

Through the glass the streets below were visible. A great horde of people rampaged from north to south, headed in the general direction of our building.

Mom grabbed my chin and forced my line of sight up, though I was still able to clock a nearby building where people were hurling themselves out of windows.

"Oh, Jesus God," Mom whispered, before imploring me to close my eyes as we moved across the glass bridge.

My eyes shut and then snapped open again, skipping from one abomination to another. Planes slicing through the air followed by explosions that swept across the skyline, and the desperate scene unfolding on a nearby building's fire-escape. It was a sad looking structure, one of the originals in the neighborhood. A tenement without armed guards and secure doors and glass bridges for easy getaways.

There was a mother and father and a little girl my age standing there on the escape. Staring at us. I was just a child, but even then I knew death was speaking to me through their eyes. The mother mouthed something that couldn't be heard and turned back to a window as two men launched themselves through it from the inside. In a flash the father was fighting with these men and then he was falling with them through the air, their bodies intertwined like lovers before they hit another fire-escape several stories down and smeared across the pavement.

I watched the mother grab her young daughter (whose eyes never left me) even as more people poured through the broken window and collapsed on top of them in a heaving mass of arms and legs and open mouths. Looking away, I began to weep. Why was this happening?! What was going on?!

In a flash we crouch-ran toward one of the copters whose rotor-wash made it seem like we were standing in the middle of a cyclone. Potted plants and cabana tents were sucked up into the air as Mom clamped down on my wrist, willing the two of us forward.

Dad grabbed me around the waist as Mom was helped up into the belly of the copter. He pushed me up to her and then hauled himself in as we sat scrunched with a few people I recognized and many more I didn't. Maybe two dozen souls in all, mostly families.

The men in charge wore no uniforms or insignias, garbed instead in black body-armor and tan pants. All carried weapons, most of which were slung across their chests on nylon slings, except for the colossus in a knit cap who manned a machine-gun on a metal tripod near an open bay door.

My face was nestled snugly against Mom's chest and I felt momentarily secure when another sound, a sustained wailing, arrested our attention.

We looked up and saw an angry mob of people moving through the glass bridge. They were close enough that their faces could be made out. The look on them was bone-chilling, simultaneously vacant and ravenous. Most were clad in soiled clothes, others marinated in gore, flesh flapping as they juggled ropes of intestines that seeped from jagged gashes.

None of it looked real.

The helicopter lifted up and then the man in the knit cap opened fire with his machine-gun. Mom covered my ears as the gun barrel spit fire, orange tracer-rounds shattering the glass bridge which bucked and heaved.

As we pulled up and banked hard, I watched the man continue to rake the glass bridge with gunfire until it simply broke apart. The rampagers inside tumbled through the air like spores from a smashed dandelion head.

Our transport arced to the right, forced to run a gauntlet below the roofs of other adjacent buildings. A man next to me pointed to those roofs where people were gathered. They gesticulated and shrieked and then jumped at us. Our copter jolted as the bodies hit the rotors and were instantly atomized.

Our pilots reacted, bellowing, monkeying their controls as a strange whine issued from somewhere near the copter's roof. More bodies hit the rotors. Red slush spilled across the copter's windshield and then the first wisps of smoke appeared.

Time and sound seemed to slow as the helicopter corkscrewed violently. Banners of smoke filled the cabin as the copter listed to one side and the first passenger slipped out through the open bay door and fell spiraling down through the air.

I heard Dad shout and then I no longer felt Mom who was sliding across the floor as reality smashed back in like a punch to the face. I was always a cautious child, but instinctively I let go of Dad and snapped out for my mother's hand. My fingers briefly locked around hers and she smiled and then my strength ebbed and my grip broke.

Her nails dug trenches in the soft rubber floor of the copter, leaving permanent marks before she skidded away from me, her mouth open in a silent scream. In a blur she was freefalling, pinwheeling down like the other people. I shrieked as Dad's hands grabbed and pulled me back.

I continued to scream because this was the person who gave me life. The first woman who ever told me she loved me and the first I would ever love back. She was my everything and then she was just... gone.

Dad held me close to his chest, sobbing, as the copter turned over on its side and the roof of a nearby building (which seemed as big as a football field) rushed up to greet us. 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.

#  Chapter 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 apropos 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-storey 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 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."

"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 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 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 story out and the newspeople picked it up from there. Soon the illness had a three-letter acronym, which stood for something nobody remembers, but by the time the media 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 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 (she's a chick) and several others do to earn our keep now. We're "Ledge Jumpers," 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, 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."

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."

"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. It seems to be coming from the outer edges of the room and is followed by a series of pops that are not unlike the sound sheets of ice make as they break apart.

Hustling ahead, I grab Del Frisco who's sixty feet from the glass-cased honeypot.

"Stop bracing me, man," he says with a roll of his shoulders.

"Shut up."

"Wyatt..."

"Shut the hell up!"

I hold my finger up in a shushing gesture and we both listen. The sounds, of course, are gone.

"I swear I heard-"

"Silencio, brother, that's what you heard. Like the song says, the beautiful sounds of silence."

We listen for a beat longer, but all is indeed very quiet.

"You're getting paranoid, bro. There's nothing here but some trinkets for big Frisco."

Del Frisco treks merrily ahead and reaches the glass cage and throws it open. He grabs the goodies inside.

His face falls.

The boxes and bottles and everything else inside are perfectly positioned and enticing, but empty. Every single one of them.

The hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. It's almost as if the case has been left here on purpose.

As what?

A trap?

Bait?

The sound of pops echo all around once again and even Del Frisco hears it this time.

"Gimme a ball," I whisper.

He hands me another orange one and I drop it on the ground and the ball immediately zips back in the direction from which we've just come. Like it was being pulled on an invisible string.

Del Frisco turns, mouth unhinged as he mutters the words "Oh, shit," and then the floor bucks and drops a foot.

We run and then our speed picks up because in a flash we're sprinting downhill and then everything seems to wildly tilt.

"JUMP AND GRAB!" I scream as we both plant our feet and heave ourselves up and grab onto the thick ceiling cables as the floor completely falls away under our feet.

#  Chapter 2

Before we fully can comprehend what's happened, we're dangling like worms on the ends of hooks, staring down as the floor that was beneath our feet only seconds before, explodes onto the floor below.

A great, blinding cloud of dust and debris mushrooms up. Seconds pass before I see movement in the din, a seething mass of arms and legs and lolling tongues fighting through the rubble. The floor beneath us is swarming with hundreds of angry Dubs. It's like staring down at a pen of famished lions at the zoo, the Dubs howling and snatching at the air and jumping and swinging for us.

"Jesus," Del Frisco says, "look at those mothers go."

He grins at the sight, nonplussed by our predicament since he's possessed of freakish upper body strength for someone his size. He just hangs there from a thick ceiling cable by one hand, which I've seen him do before from the window ledge of a thirty-store building. I, on the other hand, was not blessed with his brawn and struggle to maintain my bodyweight. I know I can't hang up there indefinitely and so I swing myself like a child on a set of monkey-bars, moving back toward the staircase.

"Wyatt."

I ignore him as I swing forward, focusing on the staircase which is still several hundred feet away.

"Hey, Wyatt."

"Shut the hell up! You got us into this!"

"Think you need to see this, hoss."

Breaking for a second, I suck in a mouthful of air. My arms burn, but I cast a look sideways at Del Frisco whose gaze is pinned straight down.

"You're gonna appreciate this, cause they're, like, scheming, man. I can tell. They're totally coming for us."

"They're too far down."

"Oh, yeah? Well checkity check that," Del Frisco replies.

My sight wanders down to where a lithe Dub studies me and then shoves one of his brethren to the ground. He mounts the other's back and then, I kid you not, launches into the air at me.

The Dub misses, but it's closer than I'd anticipated. Another Dub follows and then another and in a flash they're scrambling up onto each others' backs like spiders.

Before I can react, another flings itself at me. I clench the muscles in my core and punt the thing in the face, nearly losing my grip, as it falls down on top of the others

"Go!" I scream at Del Frisco. "GO!"

We turn and snag wires and cables, swinging back toward the staircase as the sound of the angry Dubs reverberates below.

I don't dare look down, but the Dubs sound like they're tearing the floor beneath us apart. I hear a keening whine and the sound of flesh being slapped and the scurrying that comes when the vicious revenants think they've got an easy meal.

Del Frisco has no problem pumping his lats and making excellent time, beating me by a good minute and a half. He torques himself up onto the still-stable ledge of the staircase without even breaking a sweat.

My vision's woozy and I'm nearly out of gas as I near the ledge, where Del Frisco smiles and offers me a hand.

"Need a lift?"

My middle finger greets him as I grunt and roll up and onto the cement pad. I catch my breath, listening to another ominous sound of footfalls pounding on the floor above us.

From what we can discern, there's something – probably a lot of things - moving down through the hall on the floor directly overhead. My guess is that a legion of Dubs heard the sound of the floor dropping away and are headed down the stairwell to investigate.

"Awesome," Del Frisco says while whipping out his Onesie, readying to do battle. I do likewise and we crouch after locking the stairwell door behind us to prevent any Dubs from following. Darkness sucks us in as we slip silently up the stairs like a pair of thieves.

The menacing sounds that we heard seconds before, the stomping of things overhead, have stopped. An eerie silence smothers the space. We take the steps one at a time, Del Frisco on point.

"Wyatt, hey, Wyatt."

I look up and catch his face in the gloom, his eyes twinkling like blown glass.

"Never look into it, m'man, never gaze into the eyes of the goddamned sun."

Reflecting on this, I realize he's paraphrasing yet another, old song, which I'm pretty sure he does to calm his nerves.

"Yeah, but that's where all the friggin' fun is," I reply, playing along.

Del Frisco cackles, grinning crookedly before turning and kneeling. He inserts his earpiece and closes his eyes. A sound emanates from the earpiece: a droning from somewhere up above us that's downright elemental, a sound seemingly made up of ten thousand little sounds. Like the murmuring of bees inside an enormous hive before they attack.

I reach over and kill the power to the earpiece. Slowly, the two of us peer up to the door at the top of the stairs. A sheet of wood and metal that's a mere blob of black in the gloom. It seems to pulse like a human heart. Gus and the others ask what keeps a Jumper on his toes and I always tell them it's the fear of the crocodiles closest to the canoe. The crocs are here all right, plotting near that damn door. Del Frisco hums another old rock tune and I whisper a rhyme that Gus taught me as a child:

Tiger, tiger, burning bright...

There's breathing up at the top of the stairs. I can hear it. My eyes squint and seize on things in the murk:

The door cracking open. What might be an eyeball shimmering. Saliva on blackened teeth.

The rhyme pounds in my ears:

In the forest of the goddamn night.

Two deep breaths from me in pregnant intervals and then door rocks back and forth and explodes off its hinges.

#  Chapter 3

The door crashes down and past us. Our eyes ratchet back to the black hole at the top of the stairs and every muscle in my body clenches. We wait for something to happen and when nothing does, we take tentative steps forward. My senses heighten and I can hear the droning has morphed to an almost imperceptible humming, a faint buzz, the electricity that Dubs purportedly cast when moving in sizable numbers.

Del Frisco holds up two fingers to stop me. My eyes scan the stairs ahead and I can see figures toiling in the shadows. I count whatever's lurking there, but stop at eleven, which means there's undoubtedly double that number that can't be seen.

A head snaps back in the shadows and a tongue juts out as a Dub wiggles its nose, as if sniffing the air for the scent of our live blood and warm flesh. Another two seconds of silence follows and then the Dubs wail and stab their hands against the walls when they spot us.

In an instant it's impossible to hear over the frantic screams of the Dubs as they swoop down on us like a pack of wild animals.

Even though I've had serious misgivings about the wholesale slaughter of creatures that used to be our neighbors and loved ones, I've got no current plans to become a meal and so I drop low, measure my weight and wait for the signal.

Del Frisco pumps a fist and we both explode up, bringing our Onesies around like swords.

Del Frisco plants the axe head of his Onesie in the neck of the first Dub, decapitating it as a thick rope of black blood paints the right wall. The head rolls past me as I glance up to see a female Dub bypassing Del Frisco to get at me.

My arm pulls in tight to my chest and I drive the spike on the end of my tomahawk into the soft part under the Dub's chin, making a sound like a mallet striking a brick wall.

The Dub exhales, her breath smelling of fetid meat which churns my stomach as I work the spike into her gray matter. Gore spurts in great abundance as something pops in her cranium and the dark glow in her eyes vanishes.

The female Dub folds like wet cardboard and I use her corpse to springboard forward, splitting open the skulls of two more Dubs, slashing wide the throat of another as Del Frisco pushes the black button on his Onesie.

I crouch defensively as the barbed metal ball drops from the tomahawk and Del Frisco twirls it so fast the air seems to sing.

The ball slices through foreheads as blood geysers and bodies fall in twos and threes. I finish off the Dubs that Del Frisco misses, braining a young man with my brass knuckles before jamming my spike into the ear of an elderly gent before WHOMPH! a young girl flies past my head, talon-like fingers barely missing me, tickling the fat of my neck.

She bounces off a wall and rolls over, her right arm shattered horribly, bone poking through splotched, pellucid flesh. She finds her equipoise as I slam my axe into her forehead before planting a foot on her shoulder to lever it free. Turning back, I bull up the stairs, whipsawing the heads of another two Dubs, including a blue-bloated woman who's missing both of her hands.

A fist comes out of nowhere and rocks my jaw, sending me fumbling back against the far wall. This happens all the time by the way. Del Frisco and me aren't like those bullet-proof toughs you used to see in the movies. The ones who never got nicked, who always seemed to glide right between the raindrops. I get my ass handed to me on the regular by the Dubs, which is one of the many reasons I respect them.

I blink away the fireworks that accompany the punch, my vision clouded with stars as I look up into the milky eyes of what was once an Asian gent. He's whey-faced and wearing black shorts, combat boots, and a grubby T-shirt with the word "Dope" stitched across it in sequins.

The Asian's missing his lower jaw, but man can he move his pipe-cleaner-like arms. The guy throws a series of ill-timed, yet impressive chops and haymakers. It's obvious he was quite the shit-kicker back in the day, cruising now on instinct, as he drops toward me and I swing my Onesie. My blade takes a big scoop of flesh out of his chest, opening up some vitals that spill maggot-flecked sludge onto the stairs.

The Asian looks down at the wound and in his moment of hesitation I lop the top of his skull off. This takes the fight out of him as he timbers to his knees, his eyes never parting from mine. Blood bubbles from his mouth and I hear an inflection from his lips that sounds eerily like the words "kill me."

He blinks twice, shivers, and collapses. I've seen this before and told the others about it, but they say it's just a reflex. Like how a bug's legs twitch when you peel them off. I don't believe that. In fact I've always thought that some of the Dubs retain a portion of their humanity.

Looking down, I see the Asian's got some green-splotched bracelet wrapped around one wrist. I slide it off and a hint of gold glimmers under the green, so I pocket the thing and follow after Del Frisco who appears to have the situation well in hand.

In seconds, we're mopping up, jumping from body to body to make sure the Dubs are crossed over. Del Frisco leads me up until we're standing victoriously atop a small hillock of bodies that rises up out of a moat of Dub blood. Del Frisco holds his tomahawk out to tap mine, his lips pulled wide, teeth shining like tombstones in the murk.

That's when I see it. The line of dark red running down Del Frisco's forearm. Del Frisco's mouth freezes in place. His eyes and body follow shortly thereafter.

There's ice in my veins as well because the contagion, the virus, whatever the hell it was that brought the world to its end, is still out there somewhere: in the wind, in the water, probably in the soil. As such, it's exceptionally easy to become infected after contact with the undead. There are tales of others, mostly the bottom-feeders that chuck the Dub bodies into the incinerators, testing positive after inhaling their torched ashes. I have no idea whether that's true, but none of us Jumpers like to take chances.

If you're bitten or suffer a material scratch, best practices dictate a massive course of anti-biotics the moment you get back to base. Of course all of that's on the down-low since those in charge of the Vertical City have zero tolerance, the buildings supposedly sterile, meaning no one who's infected is allowed inside. If you're bleeding you better keep it to yourself or you'll likely to wind up on the wrong side of one of the Prowlers' high-powered sniper rifles.

"Go on, man," Del Frisco says, "go on and do it."

I reach in my ruck and pull out a plastic water bottle as Del Frisco waits with baited breath. The bottle squirts his arm, the water washing away the Dub blood. Both of us can now see that Del Frisco's flesh is intact. No wound, no infection, just Del Frisco holding his Onesie out like a gun, mimicking filling the dead Dubs full of holes with imaginary bullets.

"Del Frisco one, the Dubs a big fat, zero, baby, all day long!"

I manage a half-smile, more relieved than anything as he clamps down on my wrist and pulls me forward. We creep up through the door and drop to our knees to look back into the bullpen. The female Dub and her colleagues we'd spotted earlier have disappeared so we jog forward, intent on clipping the solar generator.

Kneeling before the generator, I throw open my ruck and remove the metal leader housed inside on a thick plastic wheel. The leader is tossed Del Frisco who slaps a pair of magnetic, oversized ball-bearings on the metal underside of the generator which will make it easier for the Hogs to haul it out of the building.

Del Frisco secures the leader to the generator and ties it off and places the wheel with the excess leader back in his sack so that it will automatically pay out as we exit the building. I'm feeling better about the whole thing when I turn and bite back a scream.

The hallway that leads to the open wall – our only way out – is blocked by a shambling mass of Dubs, twice as many as we'd faced in the stairwell. The Dubs are lurching around and grunting, but apparently haven't noticed us.

"They went ninja on us, Wy," Del Frisco whispers, reading my perplexed look.

I nod and reach for my Onesie as Del Frisco shakes his head. The Dubs are so closely packed, standing cheek-to-cheek, that it would be impossible to chop our way through them.

Del Frisco points to the floor, to the streams of oil that are visible, dribbling from the severed fuel pipe, running nearly the length of the space.

Directly under the feet of the Dubs.

"You know what we gotta do, cowboy," he whispers.

The two of us fish through our rucksacks again, hoping to prepare for our exfiltration before the Dubs catch wind of us.

Inside our sacks, lying amidst a smattering of tools and other devices, are sections of hand-crafted plastic on metal balls that resemble something Strummer called a "luge sled," an apparatus used for sport in the days before the world ended.

We zip up and snug our rucksacks around our backs and position the sleds tight to our chests. Del Frisco winds a rubber band around his pony-tail and then we slide on our Kevlar gloves. One of the Dubs spots us and pounds on its chest, squealing like some kind of demonic pig. My finger loops around the metal trigger on my Onesie and I watch the Dubs rampage down the corridor toward us. Del Frisco checks to see that the wheel with the excess leader's secure in his sack and then his eyes hop back to mine.

"Let's do this."

I pull my Onesie up and yank on the trigger as the flare inside erupts in a retina-searing blast.

The ball of fire curls down the corridor and detonates near the severed fuel pipe, causing a percussive secondary blast that guts a portion of the ceiling and collapses a nearby wall. Whole sections of Dubs are set ablaze, running around like ambulatory torches, while others are flung onto their asses as if smacked down by a giant hand. We've done this a time or two before so we we're well aware that the margin is narrow. The bedlam we've just caused gives us only seconds to make our move.

By the time the flames begin to lick the walls we're already on the run, blitzing directly at the Dubs, dropping onto our sleds. Before the Dubs know what's happened, we're slipstreaming past them, ground-surfing at an incredible rate of speed.

We cover our heads and feel the warmth of the fire, my eyes watering from the sulphurous smoke as we slash through the sea of chaos right past them!

Our sleds eventually slow on the pocked cement floor and we roll off a hundred feet from the gaping hole in a Dub-free zone.

Coming up on the balls of our feet, we look ahead and spot the two lengths of thick wire that were embedded on the exterior of the building, just on the other side of the open exit hole. That's how we first climbed in.

Opening pockets on our compression suits, we pull out leaders attached to four-point harnesses wrapped around our torsos. On the end of the leaders are carabiner clips that we secure around the thick wire. The leaders are fifty-three feet long which gives us plenty of room to move.

Suddenly, the sounds of the Dubs have merged into a great booming chord. We swivel to see that they've regained what little senses they still possess and are coming for us, squirming clumsily through the fire and smoke. There's something pitiable in their cluelessness (something I find entirely human), as they howl their displeasure at our efforts to circumvent them.

The ghouls' moaning grows in intensity, their numbers augmented as others drop down through holes in the ceiling and wall. In seconds, the corridor fills with the spastic movements and hungry eyes of a hundred flesh-eaters tracking our every move.

We could exit the building if we wanted to, but to leave that many Dubs behind would hamper the ability of the Hogs to get the generator out. For that reason alone, Del Frisco motions for me to follow and we veer down toward the Dubs and then, when they're a dozen feet from us and supremely pissed, we reverse course and run toward the hole in the wall as the Dubs charge after us.

Before the brain-suckers realize what's happened, we're leading them toward the hole. I look back over a shoulder and see their mouths unhinged, tongues lolling over blackened teeth as they grin. The fools actually believe they've got us pinned in.

Del Frisco looses a rebel yell and I do likewise, pivoting as the Dubs reach for me. I hesitate for an instant and in that interval a Dub snares and rips off a handful of my hair which means I don't feel sorry for what comes next.

And what does come next?

Panting hard, I look down as my feet kiss the last bit of building and then there's a feeling of pure weightlessness as I fly through the air, hundreds of feet off the ground.

#  Chapter 4

I hang, suspended over terra firma for what seems like an eternity, looking down onto the city streets below. Then gravity cinches my arms and legs and I'm falling, rocketing straight down as the Dubs fumble through the hole in the wall after us like lemmings.

Del Frisco and me drop like fallen angels, screaming fifty feet down, silhouetted against the dying sun when WHAM! our momentum stops. We snap back and up, the leaders around our harnesses finally pulling taut.

I spin in my harness, dazed and blinking. I watch the Dubs that followed us out of the building soar several hundred feet down toward the city streets which are swarming with thousands of other Dubs. The airborne Dubs slam onto their brethren in a thrashing heap, scattering them across the ruined blacktop like gory pins in a bowling alley.

"Erase my name off the grave cause you've just been Del Friscoed!" Del Frisco says while pointing toward the ground.

I look over at him as he dangles on the wire like a marionette.

"How many you think we took out?!" Del Frisco shouts, breathless, supremely pumped.

My gaze fixes on him and then swings out to the periphery. I see something I might've ordinarily missed. A face, the visage of a young girl framed in the hollowed out window on a ten storey building several blocks over.

Watching us.

Watching me.

Pebbles of sweat assault my eyes and I blink them away and when I look back, the girl's gone.

These kinds of mirages happen on a daily basis, so I don't give it a whole lot of weight, but still. It's been a while since I've mistakenly seen anything alive this close to the ground.

"What up, Wyatt?!"

"What?"

"Two-hundred? You think we crossed over two-hundred of 'em?!"

Fighting the urge to respond and mention the girl, I turn instead and look up at the gap between two immense buildings which is crisscrossed with a dozen separate lengths of thick wire (a portion of which we're suspended on), that everyone calls "The Dream Catcher."

The Dream Catcher, which resembles an industrial spider's web, is composed of elevator cable (or "Ropes" as Jumpers call them), that have been pried out of elevator shafts and carefully separated by worker's in the physical plant into "tendrils."

Tendrils are made of several individual strands of rope that have been heated until pliable then covered in various epoxies until they're ready to be threaded around sharpened, eight-inch long stainless steel masonry darts. The darts are fitted into pneumatic guns that resemble harpoons and which are bolted onto the roofs of several buildings and then fired into the faces of adjacent buildings. Once the tendrils are secured to the other buildings, they're pulled taut and then permanently tied to posts on the tops of the other buildings.

I'm nineteen now and the cables were first stretched between the buildings when I was four of five. That was around the time the survivors realized we'd never be able to inhabit the lands below us, the flat lands, again.

Our only hope was to live above the infected.

The cables were strung as a means of colonizing new buildings when the foodstuffs in the original building ran low in the third year of our ordeal. Now they're our only real means of transportation, meticulously maintained every night by members of the physical plant.

Reaching up, I grab the tendril above me and clip my carabiner to it which allows me to pull across to another building where a metal staircase has been affixed to a stone lip that protrudes from the structure's façade.

There's a network of metal staircases all over the various buildings in eyesight along with metal cleats that have been driven into stone and brick to provide us with footfalls and perches as we move up and down. Darcy's father used to be a serious scaler of stone back in the day, and she always says we're like him now, urban rock-climbers.

Lactic acids sears my arms and legs, my body and mind totally spent as I haul myself up onto the staircase and ascend ten feet. I watch a bearded, horse-sized man nicknamed "Defcon," one of the Roof Hogs, wave and whistle to me. I do the slightest of bows as he and his men begin winching up the leader that's attached to the solar generator we'd clipped moments before. Sitting on a rung of the staircase, a satisfied smile twitches up my mouth as the generator is hauled out and up in one piece.

"Score one for the good guys!" Del Frisco says from the middle of the Dream Catcher.

Ignoring this, I nimble up and hook onto the master tendril that leads over to the roof of a building that rises up into the sky like the horn on some great beast. This is the place I've called home for most of my life, the Vertical City's mother building, "VC1."

The wind buffets me as I edge laterally across the master tendril. As a youngster I was terrified of heights, but years of forced training cured me of it and now I wouldn't think twice about crawling across a single strand of wire twelve-hundred feet off the ground. A few moments later I drop down onto the roof of VC1, the forty-fifth floor, and roll over onto my side as Defcon waddles over peers down at me.

"You boys did real good down there, Wyatt."

"Nearly ate it."

"How many you encounter?"

"Least a hundred, maybe one-fifty."

"And we took down all of 'em, gents," Del Frisco bellows while somersaulting dramatically onto the top of VC1.

A kind of etiquette is observed atop the buildings. The Hogs have witnessed so much death and despair over the years that they loathe anyone who gloats or excessively celebrates after an op. This is the reason why Defcon raises an eyebrow at Del Frisco while leaning down and hoisting me up to my feet.

"Your partner over there still doesn't get it, does he? The stalkers down under? They got the time and the watches."

I nod, recognizing how much the older folks in the building loath the notion of body-counts and an all out battle royal with the Dubs. Fighting a war of attrition was attempted unsuccessfully in the past, including the time one summer when a looted armory provided survivors with ten-thousand rounds of ammunition that they used up over the course of a five-day turkey shoot. Then there was the middle-ordeal weekend where incendiaries were hurled onto faraway buildings to start structure fires that everyone hoped would smoke the Dubs permanently from their spider holes. None of it significantly dented the pustulant packs, and those still around from the early years liken the whole thing to trench warfare: lots of carnage, but no real forward progress.

Defcon slaps me on the back and hands me a metal thermos filled with chilled water that I take a long pull from before pouring over my head.

Thanking Defcon I most past his colleagues, ten colossi in all, who are admiring the generator. Stopping near the edge of the roof, I look down over my city.

It's dusk now, which is an excellent time of the day. The sun has turned blood red and the tops of the city's buildings shine like they're ablaze. Most of the city was carbonized in the fires after the ordeal, save for VC1 and about ten surrounding blocks. Nobody knows why our block was saved although there are plenty of rumors, including that the block housed bigwigs or branches of some intelligence or military units that called the shots up till the bitter end.

Life stirs overhead. Flocks of carrion birds circle the skies, their numbers so great they nearly blot out what little light is left. They dive-bomb past me, heading toward the ground to feed on deceased Dubs or those the Dubs have dispatched. I've always thought that when we see the last of the birds we'll know the ordeal is over, but every day seems to bring more of them.

The sun fades and I scan what used to be one of the world's most beautiful skylines. In the twilight the city resembles one long, jagged scar, and the sections that weren't burned or otherwise destroyed during The Awakening, lie dormant. I close my eyes and draw strength from an image of how it all used to look. Back when my mother would take me out onto our terrace to listen to the cacophonous sounds as the city-dwellers moved briskly down the clamorous streets. The wind coos and for a moment I can almost smell the sweet scent of Mom, there for an instant and then gone.

My jaw locks and I look down to see if there's anything else moving in the lower buildings or on the ground. Maybe the girl I imagined before, possibly someone else. Every night I do this and every night it's the same: nothing truly alive moving on two feet. It's like Odin, the man in charge of VC1 always says: death holds sway below the tenth floor.

My line of sight creeps to the right where a small forest of high-rises are visible. While none of us love the idea of never being able to touch solid ground again, our lives were made immeasurably better by the copter's fortuitous crash on the top of one of the largest buildings in the city, tucked amidst other high-rises on a few city-blocks, all within a stone's throw of each other. The roof of VC1, an immense, slightly sloped asphalt plaza, provided an excellent roost in those first years and would soon enable us to increase the territory under our control.

For the first five years of the unraveling we all lived in VC1, but then we took in a few dozen other survivors. Mostly people who'd lived and worked in the lower floor of the building. After that, those within the group started to couple and reproduce, swelling the population, which caused some of the other survivors to expand the settlement.

Dad and most of the other adults were for expansion years ago, but those a decade or so younger, were not. They wanted to keep everything under one roof. There were a lot of heated exchanges and then a bunch of the older survivors simply said that in a communal setting each member could do as he or she chose to do and so they were moving out.

I was probably eight or nine when some of those hearty folks, mostly engineers and those who'd done upkeep on the buildings, began stripping the lower levels of the building for material.

As for VC1, the Dubs had infiltrated the building (as they'd done in every other building), but we'd sealed everything off at the tenth floor with welded metal plate across entry points that the Dubs would never be able to get through. But recognizing that the flat lands were overrun by the Dub hordes, the settlers knew that they needed a way to bypass the Dubs and move onto the adjacent rooftops. They soon began prying the ropes from the elevators, and after many months of trial and error (and multiple deaths), The Dream Catcher was born.

Once the first ropes were stretched, pull-carts and mini-sleds were balanced on the tendrils, added to increase the ability of the settlers to haul goods and other materials between buildings. Soon tents and other structures and huge flower-beds and rain-barrels and whole rooftop vegetable gardens and mini-farms were erected. As with VC1, these buildings were sealed off at the tenth floor as the settlers carved out the structures' innards and built rickety catwalks and ladder-paths on their facades that were supposed to provide easy access between floors.

Presently, the far end of the Dream Catcher extends to the other six buildings in our community which now resemble sprawling squatter villages, with the nearest street twenty-nine stories below.

Of course, the farther away folks move, the less fealty there is toward Odin and the others that are in charge of VC1. There's also less desire in the other buildings for violence, with Roger Parker, de-facto leader of the outer buildings, preaching about ending the ops and the ground sweeps and bringing everyone together even as they move farther apart.

There has been talk, mostly whispers and the like, of forcibly resettling those in the outer buildings to VC1 or some other closer structure, but I think that's just tongue clucking by those who know they don't have the stones or mandate to do it.

Striding past a field of solar panels and wind-turbines (erected over the hallowed ground where our copter first crashed), I wave to a pair of black-clad Prowlers who oversee the far corners of the roof. There are at least two and sometimes four Prowlers atop each building, depending on the time of day and circumstances. They're led by a long-haired knuckle-dragger named Matthais who's eagle-eyed and quick on the trigger.

Matthais totes around this massive black rifle with an oversized scope and is rarely seen, preferring instead to hide behind blinds he's constructed on several of the roofs. I don't particularly care for the guy, he's got homicide in his eyes and a meanstreak a mile wide. In another life he'd probably be behind bars, but give the devil his due: he's saved some of the others before. Darcy, for instance, told me once about how Strummer got hung up on a ladder, cornered between ledges full of Dubs when Matthais came to the rescue. She said she never even saw the guy, just listened to the thump of his gun as he dropped the attacking Dubs one at a time from somewhere up on high.

Matthais is nowhere to be seen so I head through a rooftop doorway and down a set of stairs that spill to the armory manned by Big Sam and Teddy. The pair oversee the depot where Ledge Jumpers and Prowlers store their gear.

I enter the depot which is windowless, the floor covered in black mats retrieved from a kiddie gym. The walls are adorned with metal lockers and hooks and all kinds of compartments to store stuff. Big Sam and Teddy are standing behind a long counter that's raised so that they look down on me.

I always get a kick out of seeing the two because they're such a contrast. Big Sam's a giant, nicest guy you'd ever want to meet with these long corded arms, whereas Teddy's a smack-talking runt, flinty-eyed, bald as an infant, always running his gums and seeming to do something with his hands.

"You made it back in one piece, Wyatt," Teddy says with a sly grin.

"How many is it?" I ask.

Big Sam consults a blackboard on a wall with white marks and does a tally.

"We haven't lost one in a hundred and three days."

"Hundred and four," I say, removing my compression jacket and handing it over to Teddy along with my rucksack, Onesie, and other gear.

Teddy, who's surprisingly fastidious, makes a face when he sees that the Onesie's streaked with blood, fluid, and flesh-residue.

"What the hell, Wyatt?"

"Ran into a nest."

"You have to be this messy?"

"Battlefield conditions," I say with a shrug.

Teddy sucks loudly on his yellow teeth.

"One of these days I'm gonna go out with you Jumpers and show you how it's done."

"We'd love to have you," I say with a weary smile as Big Sam chuckles.

Teddy scrunches his nose and slides on a glove and removes a moist towel from a plastic tub. He plucks off an errant piece of Dub bone-confetti and wipes down the Onesie before depositing it in the locker that's been assigned to me.

Big Sam checks all of the gear off and hands me four twenty dollar bills, remnants of a stash that was liberated from a Federal Reserve Bank by Del Frisco and a Jumper named Edwin Spoke who was KIA eight months ago.

Given the misery brought about by the Awakening, paper currency is essentially worthless, but we still use it to exchange for goods and services. Somebody tried introducing some kind of fake money made of metal ingots, but that went nowhere real fast. People just felt more comfortable with paper money, so that's what we continue to use.

As for the concept of remuneration, every time I go out and come back in one piece I get eighty bucks which amounts to a salary. The cash is then exchanged for food, gears, etc. Same as the days of old. If I bring something back on top of that I get an extra fifty.

Big Sam slaps my regular eighty bucks down on the counter and then the other fifty for the generator as I hand him the small gold bracelet copped from the Asian Dub. This seems to make Big Sam's day as he holds the bracelet up and wipes off some of the green residue and grins. Seeing that Teddy and Big Sam are the ones who safeguard and repair the equipment upon which the lives of each Jumper depend, it's just good business to grease their palms every now and again.

Flush with cash, I exit the depot and amble down a corridor, passing sleeping quarters and kitchens and indoor greenhouses that perfume the air with the fragrance of vegetables and fertilizer. There's a gray metal door at the end of the hallway and my first order of business after returning from a jump and doffing my gear is to debrief the man who works behind it. Odin's right hand man, Ben Shooter.

My hand shakes as I reach up and pound on the metal door. A voice on the other side tells me to come in as a buzzer sounds and the door clicks open and I enter.

#  Chapter 5

Shouldering the door open, I enter another hallway and pad up yet another staircase that opens to a space centered by an intricately-detailed diorama of the city.

Shooter's there, panthering around the diorama, searching for something only he can see. He turns which allows me, for an instant, to study his face in profile. The first thing that comes to mind is racing dog. Seriously, that's what Shooter looks like: a greyhound, long and lean with closely mown hair. He appears thirty years older than me even though he's only eleven. Of course running from an army of the undead on a nearly daily basis has a way of prematurely aging you.

Shooter's a legendary figure amongst the Jumpers, one of the first and the only one of the original group to still be alive. He helped string many of the first sections of The Dream Catcher and would often volunteer to go out on long-range patrols, usually by himself. There are stories about how he was nearly killed dozens of times, yet able to miraculously find some point of exfiltration while single-handedly smoking hundreds of the undead. After breaking his back, pulverizing several vertebrae, and nearly losing an arm, he "retired" and became Odin's watchman, overseeing the day-to-day operations of the Jumpers and the Hogs and several of the other trades related to The Dream Catcher.

With some effort, Shooter turns and acknowledges me with a bob of his head. I've always tried to be as succinct as possible in my jump debriefs since Shooter's a mercurial sonofabitch; nasty as a bag of broken glass on one day and cool, yet enigmatic on another. The kind of dude who prefers to say "someone put a period on their sentence early," rather than use a word like "suicide."

Shooter hunts in a pocket and tosses me a laser-pointer.

"Show me where you trekked, troop," he says.

The pointer clicks on and I maneuver its red beam over the diorama until the building Del Frisco and me escaped from is located.

"What floors did you recon?"

"Eighteen through twenty-two."

"Anything?"

"A generator."

"Gas or solar?"

"Solar."

Shooter nods approvingly at this, taking back the pointer before crouching on his heels and drawing a mark on the diorama building with a black grease pencil.

"How many of the bad guys did you encounter?"

"Unknown, sir."

"More than fifty?"

I nod.

"More than three-hundred?"

I shake my head and he looks up at me.

"Both of you make it back?"

"Yes, sir."

"Del Frisco's a wild card isn't he?"

I stare at Shooter who smirks.

"I'm not asking you to rat on the guy, Wyatt. You can tell true."

My head sinks.

"His methods are... unorthodox, sir."

Shooter laughs at this and I'm glad he's in a good mood as he sidles up next to me.

"Did you see anything else? Anything out of the ordinary?"

I feel like screaming at Shooter that everything nowadays is out of the ordinary, but thinking better of it, I simply ask, "Like what, sir?"

"You tell me."

I know exactly what Shooter's asking about. He's fishing for info on the numbers we saw scrawled on the inside of the building. One of the other Jumper teams spotted some of them in another building and reported back to Shooter. But not me. For some reason, my natural bent is to keep certain things to myself.

"No, sir," I lie, "didn't see nothing out of the ordinary."

Shooter pats me on the shoulder like a child and then his eyes drop to the ground. There's a single droplet of blood that's just pinged my boots. My guts seem to spring up high into my chest all at once. I can barely breathe as Shooter reaches a finger out and nudges aside my right elbow brace. There's a nearly imperceptible cut there, courtesy of the Asian Dub whose bracelet I snagged. I was praying that nobody would spot it before I cleaned up, but of course Shooter does.

"You know this whole area is supposed to remain sterile, don't you?" he says.

"Yes, sir."

He studies the cut closely.

"That wound doesn't look particularly serious does it?"

I shake my head.

"Was it caused by one of them?"

"I believe so, sir."

"You knew that before you came in here?"

I nod, petrified he might put me down at any moment.

"I'm glad you didn't lie," a voice booms and I look up to see a man well over six feet tall emerge from behind a wall of frosted glass at the back of the room. It's Odin, the head honcho, and with his long, dark hair and piercing eyes, he resembles some kind of Old Testament prophet.

Odin nears me, giving off a funk that reminds me of blood mixed with herbs. I glance at his hands as a wide grin stitches his face. I make a second perusal of his hands and notice the nails. Manicured, flesh firm and unblemished. Beautiful hands. Delicate even. The kind of hands that are not used to physical work.

"We're pleased that you've told us the truth, aren't we, Mister Shooter?"

Instantly I detect a slight softening in Shooter's face. He nods and my eyes stray to that wall of frosted glass. Odin was back there the whole goddamn time, snooping on our convo.

For a few seconds, Odin contents himself with studying my face, then, with a rueful smile, he leans in and whispers.

"Wyatt... do you mind if I call you, Wyatt?"

We've never conversed before, but I nod.

"Do you know what would have happened to you if you hadn't told us the truth?" Odin asks, pointing to the blood.

I don't, although I have a sneaking suspicion it might involve my untimely demise. I stare into his shark eyes and ask, "What are you gonna do, sir?"

A few seconds of silence and then he laughs and slaps me on the shoulder.

"Not a thing. Not one damn thing. Go get yourself cleaned up and get ready for the next op."

I'm a little shocked at this so I hesitate, backtracking, waiting for the other shoe to fall and when it doesn't, I make for the door. Of course Odin waits till the last possible minute and then calls after me.

"Wyatt?"

I stop, rooted in place. Slowly I look back over a shoulder and Odin has the pointer on. The red dot circles a spot on my chest.

"Do you know what?" Odin asks.

"I... no, sir."

"You owe me now," he says, punctuating the words with a zippered grin.

My face somehow manufactures a ghost of a smile that's returned by Shooter. Taking two steps back, I spin on my heels and get the hell out of there.

#  Chapter 6

Jason Sullivan's hands are greasy and hotter than metal hinges in hell as he grips my arm and examines my cut. I'm propped up on an old door that lies over a clutch of cinderblocks, what passes for an examination table down on the twenty-eighth floor.

Sully's good peoples, blue-eyed and fair, with thick brown hair that curls in waves about his ears. He does a little black market medicine work on his off hours, but during the day he's a "Burner," one of the guys who sweats his nuts off around the incinerator shaft on the tenth floor.

After the Dubs rose up, there was a period of mass violence and general unrest. Basically what you'd expect on the eve of civilization's end. Somebody, and nobody knows whether it was deliberate or accidental, ruptured the city's primary gas line which produced an unquenchable tsunami of fire that cooked a good portion of thirty city blocks.

At first the fire consumed everything within its reach below ground, but eventually it just fed off the seemingly inexhaustible supply of gas from the pipe. It's burned for as long as anyone can remember.

Darcy said there was a town in Pennsylvania called Centralia where the same kind of thing happened, but I don't know anything about that. What I do know is that there's a business elevator shaft on the rear of VC1 that leads down directly into a section of the fire. That's where we toss our trash, general refuse, the bodies of our deceased, and any Dubs we take down. Don't go down there if you can avoid it. The entire place has an odor for which there are no polite words.

Anyway, Sully labors down there during the day, but in the evening, for a few bucks, he'll clean off any wound that doesn't require stitches, disinfect the thing, and then run a little homemade test to determine whether you might be infected. He's got one of the whirly medical things called a centrifuge that he freed from the backpack of a dead physician. He claims he found out years ago that Dub blood differs from the red stuff that pumps through our veins. Something about it having a different texture or viscosity, whatever that means. What he does is take a sample of your crimson and mix it with some from a Dub and run it in the centrifuge. If the samples separate, you're platinum, but if they become one, you're presumably a few hours away from snacking on your best buds.

Sully closes his door and locks it and I pass him a few bucks because even though my injury wasn't caused by a bite and Shooter didn't seem to think much of it, I need to know. I ask him to run the test.

He turns to a collection of buckets he has at the back of his coop. There's a shitload of plastic and metal pails, probably thirty in all, of various shapes and sizes. Sully reads my look, shrugs, and says, "You can never have too many buckets, Wyatt."

He hoists a three-gallon jobber and flips it over and sits. He's smoking when he takes a sample of my blood with a lancet and powers up the centrifuge. The blood separates – meaning I'm apparently not infected – and Sully high-fives me as he disinfects my wound and wraps it up in gauze and sends me on my way. I honestly don't know if any of what Sully says is true, but it's reassuring, and that's worth something.

Having gone out on an op, I should probably catch some rack-time, but I'm still amped from the jump and don't really sleep much anymore. Besides, I've got a few errands to attend to.

Exiting Sully's quarters, I shuffle through the tight hallways of VC1, waving to acquaintances. Though the building's fortified, we've still got to be on guard at all times because of the Dubs. As such, half of us work during the day, while the others take over at night. It's early evening now so everything's at its high tide of activity as shifts change. At least 523 people call VC1 home and another 70 or 80 come here from other buildings to work so things do get cramped.

In addition to the Prowlers and Jumpers, there are those like Sully who work at the incinerator and pods of people that grow the food that we eat, clean out our refuse, keep The Dream Catcher in tip-top shape, monitor the condition of the building, do our laundry, monitor our sources of power and communication, each of us functioning like cogs in a contained machine.

A good number of us work in VC1's middle floors, as the top floors are set aside for Odin, Shooter, and the rest of upper management. The bottom floors, mainly at or around the ten, are where, as I've mentioned before, the bulwark against the Dubs lies.

The tenth floor is often called the "Keep" because it's a secure area and policed by hulking guards and the "Sweepers." The Sweepers are the unlucky men and women whose job it is to actually venture out onto the flat lands and sweep the streets within ten city blocks. Search and destroy stuff. Nobody will admit it, but there's serious class resentment in VC1 between those above and those below. Odin and the top dogs are all descended from folks who were in charge before the world fell: tech gurus and money manipulators and the like.

Guys like me were scions of middle management, while those in the lower floors were birthed by men and women who worked with their hand and backs. Gus says wherever people live together inevitably there's gonna be a caste and I guess he's right, but then again he also says stuff like we're living in a seething cauldron of jealousies and hatreds which seems awfully dramatic to me. Either way, there have been some grumblings about inequality of late, but nobody has the brass to challenge Odin on it.

I pass a steady stream of workers and various sleeping quarters. We've started to run out of room so some of the populace have taken to running what you might call flop houses, which are really just large, gutted rooms filled with mattresses. It's by no means unusual for two men to have the same mattress in common, one working by day and using it by night, and the other working at night and using it in the daytime. Staring through a door into one of the flop houses, twenty mattresses are visible on the ground, stacked next to each other like headstones at a cemetery.

Aside the mattresses are a handful of laborers, smoking, reading books, shooting the shit. Beyond them, on the far side of the space, there's a sad-eyed girl in her late-20s holding the room's communal satellite phone to her ear. For the first few years after it all ended, some of the grids and servers and computer networks were still up so it was possible to call and check on voice-mails.

I was too young then to partake, but anyone over twenty-five remembers the daily routine of calling to listen to the voices of loved ones and leaving messages in the hopes that somebody called back. Nobody ever did.

I feel for the girl, watching her mumble into the phone, calling out for her mother (like so many of us do at night). There are others like Del Frisco who think it's pathetic, holding onto the past like that ("wasting time jawing with ghosts," he says), but not me. I get it. Sometimes it's impossible to move forward without going back.

Slipping past this, my access card provides access through another door and into a "tankage" room which is awash in industrial-sized metal drums filled with waste products of all sorts. There has been an effort to repurposes everything given our limited space, so what we do is dry out a portion of the crap that we produce and then grind it into a fine powder and mix with some other stuff to fertilize the vegetable and fruit banks and indoor aqua fish farms.

Exiting the tankage room, I hop down staircase after staircase, popping my head through the door that leads to the physical plant. The air here seems to almost be on fire it's so heavy and warm, suffused with the gamey smell of perspiring bodies and burning metal.

Three giant cauldrons, big enough for all the devils of hell to brew their broth in, roar in one corner as if volcanoes were blowing through them. Liquid fire leaps from the cauldrons, flinging out jets of hissing, roaring flame.

I watch as workers pull apart the elevator ropes. Most folks think a dude named Otis built the first elevators back in the day, but Gus told me a guy named Archimedes did it first, followed by some bigshot in France who wanted to use one to see a chick he was banging.

The workers use giant metal tongs to separate the individual strands of elevator rope before others drag the rope over to furnaces where the strands are made malleable and then reformed into tendrils. One of the men, a mountain of flesh with a welder's mask on, spots and flips me off as I duck outside and continue down the stairs until I'm just above the Keep.

Moving over a ramp, I stop before a wall that's tagged with graffiti. In black chalk, somebody has scrawled outlines of the heads of three people. There's enough detail that I recognize one of the three as Roger Parker, the head of the outer buildings. He's sandwiched on the wall between two other guys who were famous in the days before. Gus said one was called Che and the other Fidel. 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 flat lands 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 wife 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 flat lands 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 idea 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.

"So how's life otherwise, kiddo?" he asks.

"The usual. 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 shine 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."

"Okay, so then it's your mother that you miss. That's your wound, that's why you do it, right?"

I'm silent, but my throat tightens at the reference to Mom. My God, it's been almost twenty years and the grip she has on me is as strong as the day she died. It's there and will always be there, probably until the moment I slip off into the great void. I'm pissed at Gus for dredging it all up and I'm pissed because he's absolutely goddamn right.

Gus eases his head back and peers at the ceiling.

"What makes a person kill another living thing? I guess it's because sometimes it threatens the person or has something he wants."

He looks over.

"Those things out there no longer really threaten us so maybe we're killing them because they have something we want."

"Like what?"

"Freedom."

My head sinks. I'm beginning to think maybe the others are right. Maybe Gus is nutzo.

"Del Frisco, and Strummer and some of the others, they worry about you, man," I finally say.

"Doubtful."

"They think you spend too much time alone."

"Maybe I should leave."

"Don't be stupid, Gus."

"Have you ever considered leaving?"

"Leave where?"

"Here. This place."

Laughing, I half expect that Gus is pulling my leg, but his face is screwed up, deadly serious.

"Why the hell do we have to talk about this?"

"Because we're all getting older."

"You think I don't know that?"

"Nobody wants to talk about it."

"Because we all know how it ends."

I stare at him, but he doesn't break gaze.

"Change the subject."

"How can you change the subject when it's the only one we're talking about?"

"Move on, Gus."

"Fine, okay, you want me to change the subject, buddy boy? I will. Satellites," he blurts out after a moment. He holds up a small circular device made of plastic and glass. He presses a button on the back of the object and it glows and hums to life.

"You ever heard about them? Satellites I mean."

I shake my head.

"Christ, I never told you about GPS?" he asks.

"Who's that?"

"It's not a 'who'?" he says with a smirk. "It's a thing. Global positioning satellites. GPS. Back in the day the sky beyond what we can see was filled with satellites constantly roaming around the planet. Up there in space," he says, pointing to the ceiling.

He hands the object to me. I can see digital numbers on the face of the thing.

"If you had certain numbers, digits, you could type them into that little machine and it would tell you where to go."

Internal machinery whirrs inside the device as a map of the city appears. I hand him back the device and the digital camera and he inputs the coordinates I photographed into his little machine. Then he holds it up to I can see a digital map of the city being created.

"Those numbers you've been seeing. They're kind of like a code. They lead to a spot in the city, probably a building if you want my guess," he continues.

"Where?"

He gestures to the map on the tiny machine.

"Close. Maybe six blocks from here."

I examine the map, trying to discern something I might recognize, but the map isn't incredibly detailed so I can't make out much of it.

"It's not pinpointing anything," I say.

"That's because you're missing a few digits. Find those and you'll find the location."

I squint at the map as Gus powers it off.

"There's one more thing," he continues. "I'm pretty sure those numbers were meant to be found. Somebody probably left those for us... for you."

"You don't – the Dubs?" I ask.

"Dunno," he says with a shrug. "But my guess is there's someone else out in the city besides us. Somebody who's leaving numbers around, somebody who wants one of us to find something."

"What?"

Gus pockets the tiny GPS device and smiles.

"That's yet to be determined, kemosabe."

Over the course of the next hour we debate the finer points of why someone would leave those numbers behind and how this and how that. I share with him my thoughts and he shares his and then, when we can babble no more, Gus procures us a few bottles of suds from a wall stash. We sit back and down the down the room temperature beers and watch a film.

Gus has his screen and recorders and stuff hooked to a camouflaged wind turbine, so at least once a week we sneak down to watch a pic. Tonight's feature is a movie called "The Sound of Music" that Gus said he always loved as a child. I'm not necessarily into the story, but I hang because I feel sorry for Gus, who doesn't really have anyone aside from the dogs, and besides, I kinda dig the songs in the movie. Gus sings them off key, slugging beer after beer.

Two hours later, Gus is three sheets to the wind as I slip away. I've gotta get moving. The others will be wondering where I am if I'm not back soon, but not Gus. He could sit down in his lounge for a few days and nobody would miss him, which I guess is the blessing and the curse of being a dog handler.

#  Chapter 7

Stealing away from Gus's room, I'm careful to push the work-benches back to conceal the hidden doorway. Then I'm out and moving briskly into a stairwell. Beneath me is the tenth floor and I can hear sounds coming from behind the metal door near the landing below. I haven't been down there since I was a child, a particularly terrifying time when the Keep was breached and several dozen Dubs managed to get inside. Dad was still around then. I remember him frantically grabbing me as sirens screamed and we ran into a panic-room somewhere nearby.

Faint cheers rise up on the other side of the door and curiosity getting the better of me, I descend and move through it.

Ribbons of smoke and steam greet me as I'm dead-eyed by an axe-wielding guard who looks carved from granite. I hold out a plastic identification badge and he mumbles "Jumper" to himself and waves me past.

In comparison to the upper floors, it's a damned hard life down here as I've alluded to before. During the summer it's brutally hot and then with the winter comes pneumonia and what some call the "grippe" that seems to seek out those with weak constitutions; there's also tuberculosis and the cruel, cold, and biting winds and blizzards of snow, all testing relentlessly for failing muscles and impoverished blood.

A significant portion of the male and female Burners labor near the incinerator by artificial light, lugging sacks of trash and Dub bodies. It's a fearful kind of work. They keep warm by the residual glow of the incinerator and vis-à-vis the cheap hootch called "Shine" that's made by straining various epoxy residues through cheese-cloth and then mixing it with distilled water and vinegar. The number of men and women I've seen drinking themselves sodden on Shine has increased of late, and it's only a matter of time before there's some sort of official intervention.

In addition to the Burners, there are those who safeguard the Keep, the giant slabs of steel that were welded down over the elevator shafts and stairwells to secure the floor permanently. There are also men who guard these men and others who make sure that the walls and ceilings and floors are in good condition and still others who roam around the incinerator positioning and repositioning fans – as the supply of trash and bodies is renewed every few hours - to blow cinders and the remnants of the burnings out holes that have been hewn into the walls.

For their efforts, these folks are given the lion's share of the protein that's grown in VC1. Protein in the form of beans and the like, by the way, because the little amount of meat we're able to produce, goes directly upstairs. Still, there's enough good stuff to go around as evidenced by the muscle-quilted frames of most of those in sight. I slip between the titans as they carry hundred-pound sacks of trash and the palsied bodies of dead city-dwellers and Dubs.

The hands of these laborers are so criss-crossed with cuts and raised lacerations, that it's impossible to count or trace them. Most of them also don't have any fingernails, having worn them off in fights and various ops; their knuckles swollen so that their fingers spread out like fans.

A pair of wooden dowels fall from out of a sack of trash and clatter on the floor. The trash haulers don't bother to turn back and I pocket the dowels, staring at the far end of the floor. There's a brace of ironhard men with weapons and beyond them, a gunmetal hunk of steel, positioned floor-to-ceiling.

On the other side of that wall are presumably a thousand famished Dubs, just waiting to surge up through the building and finish us all off. I imagine if I placed my ear to the metal I could hear them on the other side, clucking their tongues, conspiring, searching for a way in.

I follow the sound of cheers echoing behind me and peer in through an open door where I see two-dozen men and women, swilling Shine and bellowing at a pair of Dubs that are fighting each other.

One of the Dubs is tall with long brown hair and the other one is short and broad-shouldered, wearing a camouflage jacket with sprung elbows.

Each is missing pieces: the tall one's mouth cratered, its jaw ivory and exposed, while the shorter one's spinal column has begun to protrude from a deep divot in his back.

The Dubs stand in a pit encircled by a three-foot brick wall. They're chained at the ankles and clutch sharpened lengths of metal with which to do battle. I watch the tall one batter the other about the face until a section of skull flies off in a spurt of black liquid. Gus is right, it's a grisly thing to defile the dead. The skull lands in the pit and the people cheer and I wonder what kind of impact this close quarter's brutality has on those who live here?

What happens when you know that the place you live in is being besieged by the Dubs; who come, literally, by the thousands every single morning, fighting with each other for a chance to devour you? Blizzards and colds make no difference to these demons, they're always on hand. Gus says the specter of death desensitizes you to suffering and I think he's right. Slowly but surely, the humanity is being stripped away from the folks down on ten.

One of the men watching the battling Dubs, a bearded Burner named Sid Saab who I've seen on the upper floors, gapes back at me. Sid's face is nearly hidden behind a layer of soot and grease as he cocks an eyebrow and rises. His frame nearly blots out the ambient light.

"The hell you from?" he asks.

"Twenty-eight."

"High-minders," Sid sneers, referencing a slur that's used by those down here to refer to anyone living or working above ten (I've also heard "High-Horsers" used before as well, which never really made any sense to me).

"You think it's smart to do that?" I reply, wagging a finger in the direction of the chained Dubs. I watched as the shorter Dub dips low and then shoves his sharpened metal shaft into the chin of the tall one. He works it into the tall one's neck meat until there's a rush of putrid liquid as the Dub topples over in stages. To his knees first, then to the ground.

"Smartest thing I done all day," Sid says, watching the Dub's body lie in a puddle of black ooze.

"Smart doesn't necessarily mean right," I reply.

Sid's face turns a few shades of red as he registers this. He takes a step toward me and it dawns on me just how big he is. Gus read me a story once about some magical creature called a Golem, and Sid looks to be about the same size. A stone statue come to life.

"Right and wrong don't cut no ice down here and they don't carry no currency anymore," the big bastard breathlessly mutters. "Where the hell you been, boy?"

I point up and then hands shoot out from behind me and latch on my wrists. Before I know what's happened my arms are pinned behind my back. Sid's leering at me, spittle flecking the corners of his mouth.

"I think you need to be baptized."

"But I'm not religious."

"Religion ain't got nothin' to do with it," Sid says with another sneer.

He whistles and a knee lodges in the middle of my back as I'm hurled forward. My legs smack against the edge of the pit, momentum carrying me face-first into it. Crashing to the ground, I slide across the bloody slick left by the dead Dub. The others surrounding the pit cheer and jeer in my general direction.

There's a low trailing moan that echoes from above me and I elbow myself up as the shorter Dub stares at me. At this close distance I'm privy to every raised vein pulsing in the thing's bluish-white flesh. But it's the eyes that get me. I'd expect to glimpse some semblance of humanity in them, but it's not there. What is there, however, is a vacant, hungry look that signifies one desire: to feed.

A frown etches the snub-nosed Dub's face and the thing's mouth wrenches back. It snaps at me, but isn't close enough to do any harm. That changes as another Burner cuts the Dub's shackles with bolt-cutters.

The Dub doesn't come at me from the front. Rather, it spiders sideways and only on sheer instinct do I lurch back at the moment that the Dub's jaws snap at the air. Bile from the Dub's mouth daubs my face. I combat-roll sideways and spring to my feet. The Dub bull-rushes me, slashing the air with its hooked hands. I throw an elbow and block its hand, but the thing's momentum forces me back.

My eyes catch sight of the audience and I can see they want blood. There's a fat woman closest to me with a shaved head clutching a baby doll. She points and shakes a fist and curses me. I dodge the Dub and run in a circle as the air explodes with the furious cries of the onlookers. The Dub takes up its metal club and swings at me.

Whoosh! the club glides past my head.

I duck and dart and kick the Dub in the chest. He goes down to his knees, dropping his metal shaft. I grab the shaft and swing it like a baseball bat as the Dub rears back up in a rage.

The shaft's sharp metal edge opens a fissure in the Dub's chest. He wobbles, then there's a rush of gas and foul-smelling liquid issues forth as the thing throws itself against me. Dub viscera sheets the ground as the thing rains blows down on my head, opening a cut near my eye.

Somehow I'm quickly on my knees, vision cloudy, murmuring a nonsensical children's rhyme that Gus taught me. Another punch smashes my lip. I roll over and gape up. I can see the Dub's baleful eyes, irises constricting into dots.

I can hear the meat-eater hissing at me, lips drawn back, its freakshow face mere inches from mine. For an instant, the gnashing of the thing's teeth sounds like a primitive language. As if the Dub is trying to talk to me.

It backtracks and then impulse sends it springing at me a final time. I withdraw the wooden dowels I've got in my pocket and bring them against the Dub's head like cymbals.

There's a tremendous explosion of flesh and bile, the dowels exposing the Dub's skull. The monster doesn't slow, however, raging forward as a shadow falls over us, some figure rising up behind me.

Before I can look back, the Dub's glassy eyes have rolled up. A look of bafflement comes over the Dub as a hammer violently shatters its forehead.

Rust-colored gore splatters me as the Dub's body falls on mine. I shrug the corpse aside and spin in every direction, blinded by blood and body fluids.

The roar of the crowd further disorients me as someone, presumably the bearer of that hammer, mutters the word "pussy." There's a fusillade of footfalls all around and then a heavy object thumps my neck.

Pain shoots through every quadrant of my body and my legs turn to jelly. Crashing to the ground, the last thing I see is a man leering down at me.

I raise a finger to object to whatever it is that's about to happen next, but the words die on my lips. I swoon, falling unconscious as darkness smothers me like a blanket.

The End Of Part 1

Thanks for reading VERTICAL CITY, Part 1. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review (yes, it's a bit of a pain, but reviews are much appreciated).

#  About The Author

George S. Mahaffey Jr. is a practicing lawyer and screenwriter. His script HEATSEEKERS was bought by Paramount with Michael Bay producing and Timur Bekmambetov directing. In addition, he's sold or written scripts for Arnold Kopelson, Jason Blum, Benderspink, director Louis Leterrier, and is the creator of IN THE DUST, an action-horror graphic novel in the vein of 30 DAYS OF NIGHT to be published by Top Cow with art by Christian Duce, and the author of BLOOD RUNNERS, Book 1, and the horror novellas, AMITYVILLE: ORIGINS, RAZORBACKS, RAZORBACKS II, THE PACT, VERTICAL CITY (Parts 1 and 2), as well as the THUNDER ROAD action series (Books 1 and 2).
