The Society (A Broken World Book 1) (7 page)

It felt for a second like my arms were going to be ripped out of their sockets, and then the jolt of pain from my cracked ribs was competing with the agony shooting through my shoulders and up my arms. The bar tore itself free of my grasp, and then I was falling again—even faster this time because I was still carrying a significant amount of momentum from the first stage of my fall.

I had a split second to wonder exactly how hard I was going to hit, and then I crashed into a wooden shanty that had been built right up against the side of the building. It was sheer dumb luck that I'd found that window to jump out of, but the plywood roof was the only thing that allowed me to survive the fall as well as I did.

I hit with the unmistakable crack of breaking wood, and then screamed out as my feet made contact with the concrete and I felt the bones in my lower right leg break. It was a fracture rather than a complete break, so I knew I could still move. It hurt, but I needed to get to my feet if I wanted to avoid having Piter's goons shooting at me from above.

I made it half a dozen steps away from the building before a guard in all black appeared out of the darkness.

"Freeze!"

I knew that it was useless to try to explain. Every warlord in the city probably had the same industrial-strength paranoia when it came to people willing to desert one section of the city for another. I raised my hands above my head, grimacing from the pain, and waited for the guard to close.

He was much better equipped than anyone I'd seen on Piter's side of the barricade. Rather than just a collection of worn-out fabric, he had an actual uniform, including a utility vest and a rifle that looked like it was brand new.

Even more incredibly, he seemed to be by himself—something that would have been almost unimaginable for one of Piter's enforcers, all of whom probably had so many people gunning for them that they wouldn't dare walk around by themselves. He moved well too—almost as well as the Society weapons instructors who'd trained me.

Too bad he was no more than human.

I waited until he was within five feet of me and then threw myself to the right as I swept my hand across his barrel, knocking it to the side. He got a single burst of shots off—all of which slammed into the building I'd just left—and then my palm-strike took him in the base of the throat and he was gasping for breath.

Unlike the strike that I'd used against Bash, the base of the throat wasn't a killing blow, but I couldn't just leave him conscious and potentially able to follow me into the darkness once he recovered from the shock to his system. I slammed my forearm into the side of his neck, compressing the carotid artery and causing his body to react by decreasing blood flow to his brain.

My instructors would have killed him to make sure that he wouldn't be able to identify them later, but I wasn't one of them. There'd already been enough killing tonight.

I disappeared into the shadows, quietly working my way deeper into my target's territory. My face was already shifting back to the one I'd worn into the city. Within five minutes the swelling would start to go back down. My ribs and the bones in my leg were going to take longer than that, but I'd just successfully completed the first phase of my mission.

Chapter 6

I knew from my briefing that the warlord who controlled this stretch of the city was a guy named Brennan. Interestingly enough, the streets were much less dirty and cluttered in Brennan's territory than they'd been inside of Piter's. It was still nothing like the city back home, but it was obvious that an effort was being made to clean up the refuse left behind from decades of bombing and neglect.

Under other circumstances I would have been overjoyed. I was invulnerable to nearly every virus, parasite and bacteria known to mankind, but that didn't mean that I liked the idea of living in what amounted to a garbage dump. Despite that, as I walked through the flickering lighting of the city I found myself wishing that Brennan didn't run quite as tight a ship. The lack of shanties meant that there were fewer places to hide.

Luckily things got a little less orderly within a few blocks of the border I'd just left. I found the remains of a plywood shanty that looked abandoned and pulled a couple of the sheets of wood over me. It was too cold to sleep very deeply, but it got me out of sight and gave me time off of my feet so my bones would have a chance to heal.

The sun rising was one of the more welcome sights I could remember seeing. I pulled myself to my feet and started working my way deeper into Brennan's territory.

One of the first rules anyone living under the equivalent to martial law learned was to keep your head down once the shooting started, but there was still a chance that someone had gotten a look at me when I'd taken out the guard after jumping out of Piter's building. It was a loose end that I didn't like—something that I couldn't control—but all the reports I'd read indicated that the technology base inside of the city was fragmented.

There were no televisions and only a few aging radios for receiving centralized announcements. With no telephones or other forms of wired communication, most of the information flow was carried the old-fashioned way—by foot.

That meant the further I could get away from the incident, the less likely it was that it was going to come back to haunt me. Besides, I didn't know exactly where Brennan had set up his headquarters, but it was going to be roughly in the center of his territory.

The street signs had all been scavenged and used for other purposes decades ago, but it wasn't like I was trying to follow a set of directions or anything. I counted blocks, figuring that once I knew exactly how far Brennan's territory ran from south to north, I could measure the distance the other direction and then work out where his headquarters was likely to be located.

I was shocked to see how much the streets changed over the course of just three more blocks. They went from looking like the site of an industrial chemical spill, to clean and rubble-free. Even more astonishing was the gleaming wall that ran through the middle of the road a few blocks deeper in from that.

None of that had been in my briefings. Either this was a new development or my trainers had been keeping it from me. Neither possibility was particularly comforting.

I meant to keep moving once I saw the wall, to act as though it wasn't a surprise, but my feet ground to a stop despite my best intentions. I knew that it made me stand out, that it made me a potential target for Brennan's enforcers, but I just couldn't help it. This was too much like civilization—the last thing I'd been told to expect in one of the grubber cities.

"You must be a new arrival."

I spun around in the direction of the voice, hands up as though expecting an attack, but the woman who'd spoken looked anything but threatening. Her curly white hair was a shocking contrast to dark skin that didn't look anywhere near as wrinkled as her eyes seemed to suggest it should.

"Don't worry, Brennan doesn't worry about deserters like the rest of them do. He doesn't have to—not given the way that he's sealed off his inner compound from the rest of his territory."

I shook my head in amazement. "How did he do this?"

"He took down the building next to the one where he set up his headquarters. He had the other gang leaders frothing at the mouth. They figured that he wouldn't be able to hold his territory for very long, and they were worried he was destroying perfectly good housing."

"But he wasn't?"

The woman shrugged. "I don't know. It provided him with the metal he needed to build a wall and ever since then he's done nothing but bring more people into his compound—faster even than he's expanded the size of his inner sanctum. It kind of seems like he's finding somewhere to put all of those people, but nobody on the outside knows for sure. For all I know, he's a cannibal."

"Wait, you mean he recruits people, brings new bodies into his compound?"

She nodded, and gestured off to the right with her chin. "There's a recruiting center two blocks that way. Don't say that I didn't warn you though. Nobody but his guardsmen come out of there once they go in—at least not alive."

"What are you trying to say? You don't really believe that he's eating people, do you?"

"Doesn't matter if he's eating them or not, there are always at least two or three new bodies on our side of the gate every morning. Some of them are incredibly disfigured, missing limbs or fingers. You go in there, and as far as the rest of the world is concerned, you're dead."

The woman gestured around at the buildings to either side of us. "You don't have to go in there, you know. Whatever else anyone says about Brennan, he runs a tight ship. Even here, outside of his compound, things are better than they are anywhere else in the city—unless you're some warlord's favorite.

"We have food, all grown on the upper floors of the buildings, way more than the last place I lived. Brennan doesn't even make us carry the water up the stairs—he uses the pumps on the fire-suppression system. Murderers are hunted down, rape is punishable by death, and he doesn't turn a blind eye to thievery. There's no reason to go inside the compound when we're already living nearly as good as ants out here."

For the first time since I'd agreed to my mission, I was tempted to turn back. I was more than a match for any single enforcer. In a pinch, I was even capable of taking down two at the same time, but that was an entirely different proposition from walking into a fortress full of well-armed, well-trained men. I'd been in danger before now, but once I was inside, a single slip would blow my cover and get me killed.

"Don't you wonder whether or not the people inside of the compound are living even better than you are out here?"

"Sure, I wonder, but it doesn't matter if they are. I'm an old woman, old enough to know this isn't the first time something like this has happened. Brennan might have bigger ambitions than most, but there's one immutable law to our existence. If you try to climb above your station you get punished. For you and me the punishment comes from some enforcer or gang leader. For someone like Brennan, the punishment will come from the ants. You walk inside of there and sooner or later the bombs will be dropping right on your head."

"Maybe you're right, but I don't have anywhere else to go."

"Yeah, that's what your type always thinks. If you change your mind, I'm in this building here on the second floor. You just ask for Gladys and I'll put you to work in my garden."

I nodded my thanks to her and then headed towards the gate. A few minutes later I was standing on the outskirts of a crowd of more than forty people, all of whom were milling around as though unsure how close they dared get to the gates.

It wasn't until I got closer that I realized they weren't just scared—they were also keeping a respectful distance from the trio of corpses resting less than a dozen feet from the gate.

All three of the bodies were covered up. Part of me wanted to go check them for a cause of death, but that would just draw attention to me. Attention that would probably result in me joining them under a similar shroud before I ever got a chance to finish my mission.

"I'm looking to fill five positions this morning. Which of you are looking for a job?"

While I'd been staring at the three shrouds, the gates had swung open with a soundlessness that would have been enviable even back home. The man who stepped out of the compound to address us looked like he was in his late forties. He had dark hair and the slight build of someone who survived based on his wit rather than his fists.

This was my chance, but I knew that I couldn't just volunteer without asking about the deaths. Even the most desperate of volunteers would be concerned about the mortality rate inside the compound.

"What would I be doing?"

The man—the foreman—shrugged. "It depends on your abilities. Everyone starts at the bottom of the food chain unless they enter with some kind of specialized skill. You'll probably start out doing manual labor."

"Dangerous manual labor?"

The question came from someone deeper in the crowd which was good because it meant that the foreman's attention shifted away from me.

The foreman shook his head in response. "Everything about our lives is dangerous. Do you see that building looming behind you? It's more than two hundred years old and it hasn't seen any kind of significant maintenance for at least the last century. The superstructure has been exposed to the elements for decades now. Honestly, I'm surprised it hasn't already collapsed—probably killing hundreds or even thousands in the process."

More than one person in the crowd looked up at the buildings around us in fear—as though they'd never considered the possibility that our very surroundings might turn against us. The foreman wasn't done though.

"That's just the start of the risks we all face. Even if you didn't have to worry about being mugged or murdered in some senseless turf war, your life expectancy isn't much past forty-five. The water supply is contaminated. Not with bacteria—we could deal with that. It's got a thousand different chemicals in it that would have caused riots in the street back before the breakdown. Back then drinking water this filthy would have killed millions, but there aren't millions of us left to kill anymore. The Desolation saw to that, and those of us who are left have developed tolerances to the toxicity of our environment.

"There are a thousand different ways that you could die, most of which you've never even stopped to consider. Starvation, exposure, disease, they are all just warmup shows for the main event. Even if you do everything right, you're still going to be killed by the ants."

A low rumble of anger greeted his words, and I joined the nodding I saw all around me. That drew a smile out of the foreman.

"That's right. It doesn't matter how smart you are, how hard you work, in the end they hold all the cards. They fly in with their fancy planes and they drop bombs that we can't even see coming. These cities are kill zones, but there is no leaving them. We can scavenge within a mile or two of the city, but if you stay out past dark their drones will get you. They'll sniff you out in the darkness, see the heat coming from your body, and execute you from a mile away. We're here in this hellhole because the ants—the Society—don't give us any other choice."