Vertical Run is a novel by Joseph Garber about a man having a very bad day. David Elliot is the vice president of a big company. He gets up, jogs to work, takes a shower in his office bathroom, gets dressed and finds everyone he knows trying to kill him. Now, trapped in a fifty-story office tower with a team of ruthlessly professional mercenaries hunting him and no one to trust, he has to survive long enough figure out why this is all happening to him.
This novel provides examples of:
- American Accents: Robin/John Ransome is described as speaking with a slight Appalachian accent. Colonel John "Mamba Jack" Kreuter, Dave's former commanding officer, possesses a thick East Texas drawl, which is reflected in the text whenever he speaks.
- Badass in a Nice Suit: Ransome and all of his subordinates wear suits and ties.
- Baddie Flattery: Ransome appreciates Dave's skills, and tells him as much multiple times.
- Bavarian Fire Drill: Played with. The Genre Savvy Mr. Ransome expects one, Dave changes his clothes and hair to help him with one, and it's almost mentioned by name. It's called a "Chinese Fire Drill".
- Berserk Button: Dave delivers a groin shot to Mr. Ransome with his handgun. It missed, but narrowly. Cue the normally deadpan Ransome screaming a torrent of enraged profanity and vowing all sorts of unpleasantness at Dave.
- Better to Die than Be Killed: Even after he realizes that he has a terminal disease that will almost certainly result in his death, Dave still works to evade and defeat the men who are trying to kill him, as he would prefer to die his own way.
- Also implied to be the reason that Bernie jumps out the window after he drinks from Dave's cup; he knew that being infected was a death sentence, whether he succumbed to the virus or was eliminated by Ransome's forces, and opted to go out on his own terms instead.
- Betty and Veronica: Marge and Helen respectively. There's even a moment where Dave mentally compares the two, amplifying this.
- Big Applesauce: The setting.
- Big Bad: Mr. Ransome is not very nice.
- Bittersweet Ending and Twist Ending: The book proper ends with the first, with Dave Riding Off Into The Sunset to die of The Plague, at peace with his fate. But a post-epilogue coda implies that due to a previously unknown aspect of the virus, Dave may have survived and is now about to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
- Booby Trap: Dave is extremely adept at making these, quickly manufacturing a whole stairwell full of them out of everyday office supplies.
- Boring, but Practical: It's made clear several times that, in addition to all of Dave's exotic special ops training, one major factor in him being able to survive and evade his attackers is the simple fact that he's a physically fit man who runs every day.
- Clean Up Crew: When Dave backtracks through the site of a shootout he had earlier in the day, he notes that the bullet holes in the wall have all been perfectly patched and painted, and that no one would ever believe him if he tried to tell them what had happened.
- *Click* Hello: Dave does this a few times.
- Cluster F-Bomb: The normally cool and collected Mr. Ransome's reaction to almost having a bullet aerate his testicles. He also has one at the end of the book when his mooks, tired of their leader's slow Villainous Breakdown and disgusted at the grotesque lengths he's gone to to psych out their target, decide to betray him and hand him over to Dave.
- Code Name: The mercenaries hunting Dave all use ones based on birds. Mr. Ransome, the Big Bad, goes by "Robin".
- Combat Pragmatist: Dave all the way.
- Consummate Professional: Mr. Ransome sees himself as this, and acts the part most of the time.
- Counting Bullets: Dave does this during his first standoff with Ransome, and it allows Dave to rush up and incapacitate him.
- Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: The mercenaries' guns are loaded with exotic rounds that are designed to massively expand in the body and cause a One-Hit Kill in anything but a grazing hit.
- Despair Event Horizon: Ransome's final plan to kill Dave involves doing this to him first, in order to make him an easier target. Though, being a man with extensive psyops training, Dave understands and recognizes the tactic."Once you've blown your enemy's mind, blowing his head off is easy."
- Destination Defenestration: Bernie throws himself from a 45th story window when Dave comes back to confront him.
- Et Tu, Brute? and Heroic BSoD: Dave has one when his wife betrays him.
- "Eureka!" Moment: Dave has one about his situation when he sees that the lab that held the monkey that bit him has been sterilized with a flamethrower. And then he immediately throws up.
- Evil Counterpart: Ransome is this to Dave. Both have the same training, were in the same unit in Vietnam, and even served under the same commanding officer, albeit several years apart.
- Explosive Overclocking: Dave does this with a microwave in order to make an improvised antipersonnel mine.
- Extremely Short Timespan: The entire book, save the prologue and epilogue, takes place within a single day and night.
- Godzilla Threshold: Faced with the prospect of Dave Elliot becoming pneumatically contagious and spreading The Plague all over New York, Ransome is prepared to call in a "heavy".
- Good Guns, Bad Guns: Dave invokes this while trying to convince a friend that the pistol he's carrying was stolen from a paramilitary hitman and not a cop. He points out that the high-tech, internally-suppressed, laser-sighted machine pistol with no manufacturer mark or serial number isn't exactly the sort of gun a cop would carry. It doesn't work, as the friend freely admits that he doesn't know anything about guns and such technical distinctions are meaningless to him.
- Gory Discretion Shot: Strongly averted during Bernie's suicide. The effects of a 45-story drop on a human body are lovingly and disturbingly described, including detached limbs, explosive gouts of blood and shredded flesh, vomiting onlookers, and a dog pulling free of his master, drawn by the smell of
freshly ejected internal organs. - Groin Attack: Marge greets Dave with one when he returns to her apartment after she's visited by the "doctors" working for Ransome.
- Happy Place: Dave's is the small lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains he visited shortly before joining the Army. He frequently remembers and references it, and eventually goes back there to die.
- Hearing Voices and Talking to Themself: The internal monologues by Dave's sardonic "guardian angel" just barely verge into this territory.
- Hollywood Silencer: The Private Military Contractors hunting Dave have guns equipped with these.
- Instant Sedation: Dave gets his hands on a bottle of Chloral Hydrate pills, and uses them to quickly incapacitate a number of people.
- Invulnerable Knuckles: Averted. Dave's hand usually gets injured — or at least hurts — whenever he punches someone.
- It's Personal: Dave's kids are not to be messed with.
- I Want Them Alive!: After Ransome's Villainous Breakdown, he specifically instructs his mooks to shoot Dave in the legs. He plans on putting Dave in the body-disposing acid bath while he's still alive.
- Laughing Mad: Dave experiences this.
- Man Bites Man: Dave's final revenge on Ransome.
- May–December Romance: Dave (who's in his mid-forties) and Marge (in her twenties) are clearly and instantly attracted to each other upon first meeting. Ultimately averted, however, once Dave realizes that the full extent of the virus's contagion means that any romantic contact would infect Marge as well. Although it's possible that they may have hooked up eventually, as the coda reveals that Marge left New York, presumably to be with Dave, after his implied survival from the virus.
- Mistaken for Gay: Late in the book, Dave changes his appearance by trimming, dying and styling his hair. The hairdo is never fully described to us, but it causes nearly everyone who sees it to assume he's homosexual. He later uses this to his advantage, acting like a flirty Camp Gay in order to unnerve and chase off a homophobic guard.
- Must Have Caffeine: Dave really loves his coffee.
- Noodle Incident: The circumstances surrounding Dave's exit from the Army are only hinted at throughout most of the book.
- Number Two: Partridge, to Ransome.
- Oh, Crap!: Bernie's reaction to discovering that he's actually been drinking Dave's coffee when he confronts Dave in the boardroom. It's so severe that he immediately jumps out the window. Dave later figures out that this is because Bernie had realized that he'd unknowingly infected himself with the virus by drinking from the cup, and was a dead man the second he did.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: The majority of the mercenaries are only ever identified by their avian code names. The only exceptions are Robin (John Ransome) and Thrush (Mark Carlucci), and those names are both aliases anyway.
- Pants-Positive Safety
- Papa Wolf: Oh, Ransome. You really shouldn't have brought Dave's son into this...
- Pistol-Whipping: Dave's preferred way to deliver incapacitating taps on the head.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: One of the first lines we hear from Mr. Ransome has him casually using the word "nigger". We also later find out that, while handing out the bird-themed code names to his team of mercenaries, he assigned "Crow" to the sole black guy on the team as a joke. The black merc is not amused by this.
- Retired Badass: Dave used to be a Green Beret. He may be a businessman now, but he hasn't forgotten any of his old skills.
- Room Full of Crazy: Ransome attempts to drive Dave off the Despair Event Horizon with one of these, namely a room full of women's heads on pikes, a re-creation of the incident that made him quit the Army.
- Running Gag: Dave starts the story wearing a pair of very expensive loafers. After he's forced on the run, he continually tries and fails to find a suitable pair of replacement shoes that aren't so ostentatious. At the end, he finally manages to find a pair: Ransome's.
- Sequel Hook: The book's coda, a memo from within the company that developed the virus, sets one up by revealing that the virus is rendered harmless by exposure to high altitudes, that Dave's last known location was at such an altitude, and that Dave, Marge and Mamba Jack Kreuter have all gone off the grid together, presumably to seek revenge.
- Shoot Out the Lock: Dave does this when he doesn't have time to use his Skeleton Key Card.
- Shut Up, Hannibal!: Dave delivers one when Ransome tries to Break Him by Talking."Up your poop with an ice cream scoop."
- Skeleton Key Card: How Dave opens most doors.
- Sociopathic Soldier and Slowly Slipping Into Evil: It is revealed that Dave left the Army because he was starting to enjoy the killing and feared he would eventually become irredeemably evil.
- Spiritual Successor: From the high-rise skyscraper setting to many of the story's action beats, it's easy to view the novel as one to Die Hard. There's even a scene where Dave recreates McClane's iconic abseil down the building with a fire hose.
- Staircase Tumble: More than one mook meets his end this way during the big Stairwell Chase near the middle of the book.
- Stress Vomit: Dave does it twice — once when his wife is revealed to be working with the assassins, and again when he has his "Eureka!" Moment about why he is being hunted.
- Taking You with Me: At the end of the book, all Dave wants to do is give Ransome a little bite on his leg, thus infecting him with The Plague.
- Tap on the Head: Dave does this to a number of enemy mooks and even a few friends.
- That's an Order!: Uttered several times by Ransome, especially late in the book when his men start getting uneasy at his Sanity Slippage.
- Theme Naming: Ransome and his private military contractor mooks all have code names based on birds, like Robin, Partridge, Thrush and Sparrow.
- The Plague: It is eventually revealed that Dave has been infected with a particularly nasty bioweapon that was being developed by one of his company's subsidiaries. The mercenaries are trying to kill him both to prevent the spread of the virus and to cover up the fact that the company was involved in illegal research.
- The Stoic: Mr. Ransome watches people die and keeps the same expression.
- The Vietnam Vet: Dave Elliot and John Ransome.
- Title Drop: Sort of."David Elliot ran. He ran vertically as he had all day, and thus advanced not one step nearer to freedom."
- Worthy Opponent: Ransome eventually comes to regard Dave as this.
- You Are a Credit to Your Race: Bernie's assessment of an earlier (unheard) interaction with Ransome's forces includes them saying, "Thanks, you're a good American. For a Jew, that is."
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