Underdogs

by Chris Bonnello

  ‘So you’re gonna be a detective or something?’ asked Mark with a short, mocking laugh.

  I’m pretty good at thinking, thanks. They just put me in Oakenfold because I couldn’t get my thoughts down in writing. I’m only stupid on paper.

  ‘Well what do you think?’ Raj asked. ‘An impossible girl appears in the Hertfordshire countryside, carrying nothing but a knife covered in clone blood and a list of our names. She’s run for miles without shoes, Keith Tylor was obsessed with her, and all we know is her name. How do you find out who she really is?’

  Raj heard the ruffle of Mark’s clothes as he shrugged in the darkness.

  ‘You ask her.’

  And that’s why I’m the one playing detective.

  ‘Mark, I’ve had another idea. Want to help me?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Well McCormick may have taken the notes in her pockets, but maybe he didn’t find everything. The investigation begins tomorrow.’

  *

  Green beans for breakfast. It wasn’t enough for a fifteen-year-old, but they were fresh from the farm that morning. And that was a luxury the New London prisoners couldn’t possibly have had.

  Raj glanced to his right. Thomas was sitting next to him, awaiting his cue.

  I told you to look natural. Lorraine can see right through you. Ask because you’re curious, not because I told you to.

  Raj looked around the kitchen and found everyone present. Gracie the lazy chameleon was munching her beans as if they were a disgusting flavoured chewing gum. Mark was slouched on a wooden chair, a typically frosty expression on his face, chugging his second mug of something. Lorraine was doing her dishes and Shannon was standing in the corner, refusing to sit down.

  In case she needs to run, I imagine.

  A night’s rest seemed to have done Shannon some good, although Raj doubted she had slept. Either way she looked healthier, and Lorraine had spared some water for a quick hair wash. She looked younger with a fresh face: perhaps seventeen, by Raj’s estimate.

  ‘So Gracie,’ Mark muttered, ‘what happened with the generator last night?’

  ‘What?’ she answered, after a few seconds of looking at other people in confusion.

  ‘We all had to go to bed early because you abandoned the generator and the lights went out. Want to explain?’

  An argument between Mark and Gracie was like a fight between a wolf and a rabbit. Mark was well-versed in putting together an argument and totally unafraid of being aggressive, while Gracie had neither the wits nor the courage to fight back. Nonetheless, she scrambled a sentence together.

  ‘Jack told me I could leave it early and no one would mind…’

  It was a lie. Raj could tell by the mismatch between her tone of voice and her facial expression.

  The seeds had been sown for an argument. Mark was preparing his response. Lorraine had turned her head away from the sink, ready to leap in and tell him to stop picking on Gracie. Mark’s reaction to that would be predictable. It was so obvious that even Thomas recognised it as a good time to change the subject.

  ‘Lorraine?’ Thomas asked, stretching out the last syllable like only a child could.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘…How did they take over?’

  The dishes paused in Lorraine’s hands. Mark and Gracie looked in his direction, the brewing argument already dismissed.

  ‘Grant’s people?’

  ‘Yeah. I kept asking Mum but she never answered. But it’s like, one day everything was fine and suddenly this army of clones took over. They couldn’t have done it in one day, so what happened?’

  Raj bit his lip, and wondered whether Beth’s soul would be angry.

  I’m using him Beth, I know. But for the right reasons.

  Besides, he thought, Beth’s overprotectiveness had stopped Thomas from learning a crucial part of British history. If you didn’t put your trust in children, they wouldn’t grow up to be trustworthy.

  Raj’s glance shot over to Shannon. There was already a little hatred in her eyes.

  Hate more than fear. That’s interesting.

  ‘You’re sure you want to know?’ asked Lorraine.

  ‘Yeah…’

  Lorraine lay down her dishes, and took a deep breath.

  ‘They made it look like it happened in one day,’ she started, ‘but the clones must have existed long before Takeover Day. Grant was the head of a company called Marshall-Pearce Solutions.’

  ‘Marshall Pearce sounds like a person.’

  ‘It was named after the two men who started it. They’re probably living in luxury on Floor A right now. Anyway, Marshall-Pearce was a private defence contractor.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘…Think of it as a private army.’

  ‘So they were mercenaries?’

  You know that word?

  ‘Well,’ answered Lorraine, her fingers clutched against the worktop in thinly disguised anger, ‘that’s what people thought of them. At first the government used them to send anti-riot squads to public protests. Before long they had them guarding the Houses of Parliament, helping the armed forces, taking on top-secret missions and so on.’

  Raj looked at Shannon. Her face did not move. But it was like she was trying not to move it.

  ‘Isn’t that what the army’s for?’ asked Thomas.

  ‘We were fighting two wars at the time. But with these handy people, it was easier for the government to get jobs done–’

  ‘Besides,’ Mark interrupted without apology, ‘the government always looked bad if British soldiers died in combat. But there’d be no headlines if Marshall-Pearce employees got killed.’

  Thomas looked confused by the idea of shifting blame. Gracie looked confused too, but only in her regular way.

  ‘Before long,’ Lorraine continued, ‘Marshall-Pearce were almost a division of the army. And that’s when Grant got clever.’

  ‘What did he do?’ Thomas asked. His voice was tinged with worried curiosity, as if he were lifting the lid from Pandora’s Box.

  ‘He asked the prime minister to fund his scientific research. He told them it would be passed on to the British Army for their use… and maybe they even believed it.’

  Shannon’s a human statue, but the hate in her eyes is alive and active. She can’t even hear his name without getting angry.

  Grant’s done more to her than to us.

  ‘So Grant had government money coming out his ears,’ Lorraine continued, her concerns about oversharing long forgotten, ‘and nearly as many weapons as the actual army. We depended on them so much that we couldn’t afford to say no. When Grant asked for bigger labs, the prime minister agreed. When Grant asked for research centres that were miles wide–’

  ‘Those became the Citadels, right?’

  He’s interested for his own reasons. That’s good.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Lorraine. ‘We didn’t know it at the time, of course.’

  ‘The wimpy prime minister should have stood up to him.’

  Raj sighed. Even after the dreadful decisions the final prime minister had made, he missed the days of politicians. But deep down, he knew that the old parliament must have been executed on Takeover Day.

  ‘By that time it was too late for us to cope without Marshall-Pearce,’ said Lorraine. ‘Grant was a household name.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone complain when he started building in the countryside?’

  ‘Thousands. But the government kept telling them about this new Cerberus missile defence system that would make Britain invincible. Giving Grant some of our countryside felt like a small price to pay.’

  The expression on Shannon’s face twitched, just for the shortest of split-seconds, and Raj saw her eyes.

  Wait… was that guilt?

  ‘But Grant didn’t build Cerberus to block our enemies. He built it to block our allies. The Cerberus system went up at dawn on May 20th last year.’

  ‘Hey, that was Takeover Day!’

  Shannon left the
room.

  Thomas did not notice, Lorraine did not mind, and neither Mark nor Gracie cared.

  Raj noticed, minded and cared. He stood up and started to walk.

  ‘Grant didn’t waste any time,’ said Lorraine’s fading voice behind him. ‘That morning, everyone discovered where all that funding had really gone. Clones, millions of them. They poured out of those ten-mile-wide research centres and raided our cities, towns and villages…’

  Raj could not see Shannon anywhere. She moved pretty fast when she wanted to. But the conversation had triggered a couple of theories in his mind.

  She was definitely one of Grant’s victims rather than one of his friends. But despite her silence, there was aggression. This girl wanted to fight back.

  But Raj was no closer to finding out where she had come from. He headed towards the bathroom where the washing had been hung out to dry.

  Shannon’s clothes stood out as the only unfamiliar ones. Raj recognised all the others from eleven months of sharing them, and watching them switch from Underdog to Underdog as their original owners died.

  Raj knelt down next to Shannon’s clothes and poked around. Her pockets may have been emptied, but the fabric could still tell a story.

  There was little difference between Shannon’s clothes and everyone else’s. They were dirty enough to have been worn for consecutive days.

  That popped one of Raj’s theories. If she had lived in New London’s luxurious residential quarters, she would have had fresh clothes every morning.

  It left two possibilities: she was either a countryside survivor, or an escapee from New London’s giant prison.

  Raj’s mind wandered further. Thomas and Lorraine’s conversation had shone a light on the question that had burned in his mind – in everyone’s minds – ever since Takeover Day.

  Why did Grant do it?

  There was no answer so far. Eleven months of sabotage missions and intelligence grabs had revealed no motive for Nicholas Grant. McCormick had always used the Josef Stalin comparison: that Grant might have had an obsessive thirst for power, driven by his own paranoia about others plotting against him. But as a spiritual young man who always looked for deeper reasons, that answer had never satisfied Raj. There had to be another answer, whether or not he lived long enough to find out.

  In the corner of his eye he saw the clinic door open. Shannon turned and saw him poking through her clothes, and screamed.

  ‘No, it’s–’

  Before Raj could think of an excuse, Shannon had leapt into action. For an instant, he saw the fear and anger that must have been in her eyes when she had killed Keith Tylor.

  Thankfully, she only knocked him out.

  Chapter 7

  Seven in the morning, and Ewan was awake. A drowsy, just-five-more-minutes kind of awake.

  His brain told him to get to his feet, so his team would feel motivated to follow suit once they awoke.

  His body told his brain to get stuffed. Apparently, even his own demands were demands to be avoided.

  He decided to play his trump card. Reliving the memories of his worst day on Earth always woke him up.

  ‘Let’s do this…’

  Another couple of months of this strategy and he would hate the very thought of sleeping in. Ewan squeezed his eyes closed, and remembered.

  The morning he refused to go to Oakenfold because screw it.

  Dad bursting through the front door, home early from the barracks with a ton of weapons in the back of his car, yelling something about Marshall-Pearce Solutions. Ewan didn’t think to ask why nobody had stopped him taking the firearms.

  His aunt, uncle and little Alfie finding their way to the house, and barricading it for some kind of last stand. They had believed the soldiers were human back then, which made it harder to open fire.

  Escaping through the bathroom window with an assault rifle – the last survivor of the West family – and avoiding gunfire as he ripped through the garden hedge.

  Heading to Oakenfold with no better ideas, then finding his schoolmates in a field along the way. Just students, no staff.

  An argument about whether to protect the Block One group – the students with severe learning difficulties – as enemy soldiers approached from the edge of the field. Then Mark’s voice, the same Mark who lay comfortably in Spitfire’s Rise at that moment, ending the debate with the words, ‘Get bloody running, they’re not worth it!’

  Everyone obeying him, believing there was no other choice, and leaving the Block One students to be captured.

  Ewan scouting ahead of the pack, and a confrontation that ended in the death of a human.

  But why, why in the name of Hell did it have to be that human?

  And then McCormick.

  Ewan returned to his senses, all tiredness gone from his head. The story of Takeover Day ended there, or at least the story he retold himself, and he brought himself back to the Hunters’ house.

  The early sun was lighting up Lemsford, as far as Ewan could see through the grubby windows. The Hunters’ living room looked dull and dead, the decaying heart of a dusty corpse of a building.

  He rolled over to find Charlie’s sleeping body hanging off the sofa. Ewan may have been trapped in a frightening, unforgiving world, but at least he was in good company.

  Alex wandered down the stairs, letting out a casual belch.

  ‘Morning mate,’ he said. He was usually friendlier in the mornings for some reason. ‘So, are we going to New London today or what?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Figured so. Do comms know yet?’

  ‘They’re about to.’

  The conversation had awoken Kate at the far end of the room. Jack made noises through the floorboards upstairs, his watch over. Just one person left.

  ‘Hey. Charlie.’

  Charlie stirred just a little.

  ‘It’s seven. We’re going now.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll meet you there.’

  Charlie pulled the covers over his head, and didn’t see Ewan’s foot before it poked him in the ribs.

  ‘We’re heading off, mate. Up you get.’

  No answer. Ewan looked at his friends and stuck a thumb towards the front door, and the rest of his team started to prepare themselves.

  ‘Authority can only work some of the time, right?’ whispered Kate. ‘Even for natural born leaders.’

  A natural born leader? Is that what Kate thinks of me?

  Ewan remembered the leader of some youth group he’d been kicked out of when he was twelve, who once told him that ‘True leaders are born, not made’. He had said it with such pride that Ewan could almost see his head swelling up like a hot air balloon.

  Shame he didn’t float away.

  If there were such a thing as a ‘natural born leader’, it was not Ewan West. He had been raised in the Dr Joseph McCormick School of Responsibility, and knew that true leadership skills came from being given opportunities and making the most of them. It wasn’t womb magic.

  Experience had also taught him that leadership was about relationships, not loud voices. Within ten minutes Charlie was up and dressed, and it wasn’t because Ewan had commanded him to. It was the result of several years’ friendship between them, and the respect that had come with it. When the time came to leave the Hunters’ house in peace, Charlie had joined the team like the dutiful lad he truly was.

  *

  The countryside had awoken around the Underdogs during their trek, but it was difficult to see any beauty in the spring morning. As much as Ewan liked quiet countryside, he could only take so many miles of overgrown crop fields, wet dewy grasslands and unmaintained tarmac roads.

  The journey had become less boring once they had passed St. Alban’s, as the Citadel’s walls began to dominate the horizon. The closer Ewan got, the less he could see either side of them, until nothing was visible to his east or west except reinforced concrete walls. The team had needed to venture dangerously close to detection range: close enough to see the fields of c
racked mud in the distance. Grass had not grown in the shadows of the northern wall for a long time.

  The Citadel of New London – this gargantuan concrete fortress – stretched out in an eight-by-ten-mile rectangle, the Outer City walls twenty-six floors high and close to a mile thick. Dr McCormick, lecturer in mathematical sciences at two universities, had not taken long to work out the volume of the walls. The number he had used was something like 8.7 billion cubic metres. Ewan couldn’t make sense of the numbers, and only sort of knew what a cubic metre was. He just knew that 8.7 billion was big.

  And it didn’t even include the floor space of the Inner City prison. About two million people must have been forced in there on Takeover Day (another estimation from McCormick), although the number of prisoners must have dropped over the course of eleven cruel months.

  ‘Tell me that’s not what I think it is,’ said Jack out of nowhere.

  Ewan’s eyes lowered to the path ahead, and landed on the distant sight of three navy blue uniforms on the grass. He set off, his weapon held high just in case. Out of habit, he took a moment to check it was the rifle with the knife mark. His rifle.

  The clones were partway through decomposition. The hair had fallen from their rotten scalps, and the blood from their torso wounds had turned from globs to faint red powder. Just like their lives, their decay didn’t take much time.

  Jack had once described Grant’s soldiers as ‘the fast food version of life’, and he had a point. One of the many things Ewan hated about clones was their lifespan of four months. The ones that had slaughtered his family had aged themselves to pieces long ago, and he was powerless to claim his revenge. On them, at least.

  ‘Urgh,’ muttered Alex, ‘they smell like vomit left out in the sun. How long, do you think?’

  ‘Twelve hours,’ Ewan answered. ‘Maybe more. They were stabbed, all three of them.’

  ‘The new girl,’ muttered Charlie.

  ‘Shannon. She must have been here last night. Just a few minutes from New London.’

  Ewan glanced at the clones’ faces, and then wished that he hadn’t. Their white cheeks were covered in skin flakes that blew away in the gentle wind, and their tongues had started to go mushy. Their eyeballs were nearly-but-not-quite fixed in their sockets.