Underdogs

by Chris Bonnello

  Charlie nodded. He opened the door, and Ewan almost leapt out of his skin.

  There were at least twenty clones in the corridor.

  Ewan’s heart made a solitary beat before twenty fingers pulled back on twenty triggers.

  ‘Watch it!’ he shrieked, firing off the few rounds he could without endangering his friend. Charlie emptied his chamber into the crowd, and Ewan counted three falling bodies before Charlie leapt back behind the door and kicked it shut.

  Ewan got to work on the filing cabinets, pulling a whole column of drawers outwards to provide cover. On the opposite side of the archive, Charlie began to mimic him.

  ‘Pretty sure these aren’t bulletproof!’ he shouted.

  ‘What else have we got? There’s literally nothing else in the room!’

  Ewan opened the final cabinet in front of his face as the remaining soldiers surged through the door. Charlie was the first to open fire. He shut the cabinet at the bottom of his column, and sprayed a hail of bullets that turned five clones into falling bodies. When the survivors took aim towards Charlie, Ewan slammed a drawer shut from the top of his ladder and attacked from a second angle. He fired enough bullets to distract the crowd, and by the time Charlie resurfaced at the ceiling they had narrowed the death squad down to five.

  The angriest soldier at the front – the short model with the long black hair – began a final charge to the other side of the room, hoping an attack from the other side of the cabinets would be less futile. When his bravery was rewarded with a hail of bullets to both sides of his body, the last four clones fled through the entrance into the safety of the corridor. Not out of fear, but from cold strategy.

  ‘Clear?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘For now. Still think we have time for that officers’ sector?’

  Charlie didn’t answer. Ewan slid down the side of his ladder, and landed two-footed on the ground with his eyes fixed on the closed entrance.

  ‘Why were they waiting for backup?’ asked Charlie. ‘There was already a ton of them!’

  ‘Obviously they didn’t think twenty was enough,’ Ewan answered.

  ‘Well, to be fair…’ said Charlie with a laugh, waving his assault rifle towards the corpses on the archive floor.

  ‘Don’t relax just yet, Charlie.’

  Ewan reached into his rucksack of gadgets and took out a smoke grenade. He pulled the pin, counted to three, jerked the door open and threw the grenade as it started to smoke. He slammed the door a moment before a string of bullets rattled into the metal, and by the time he had counted to five and opened it again, the room was filled with thick, unnavigable smog. Charlie opened fire alongside him, and they escaped through the cloud to the sound of all four bodies hitting the floor.

  ‘Was it left or right at the T-junction?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Left. Back the way we came until we reach–’

  Ewan was interrupted by a discreet, high-pitched whine from the end of the corridor, like the wheels on his late cousin’s remote-controlled car.

  ‘Speed mine…’

  Ewan poked his head around the left side of the T-junction. A crudely shaped metal package on wheels scuttled along the metallic floor, faster than a running man and bumping against the walls as it charged.

  Ewan’s first bullet penetrated the metal casing and broke the mobility circuit, and the mine’s response was instant. The explosion spilled balls of erupting fire through the corridor, wobbled the walls and ceiling panels in a violent Mexican wave, and threw the shattered body of the mine into the air like a tossed pancake.

  ‘I think their backup just arrived!’ cried Charlie, bolting down the right-hand path.

  Ewan followed, running backwards to guard their rear against a second approaching speed mine. Ewan fired a second bullet, answered by a second explosion.

  Through the dying flames, the mines’ controller appeared from around the next corner alongside a group of his squadmates. He held a third speed mine under his arm, his remote control occupying both hands. It was the short clone with the long black hair again, grown from the same model as the one who had charged between the filing cabinets. This one had the exact same expression of controlled anger on his face.

  ‘It’s just not your day, is it?’ muttered Ewan, as he aimed his rifle with millimetre precision and shot. The bullet popped through the metal casing of the speed mine under the clone’s arm. The walls shook again with a welcome boom as the mine’s explosion tore the clone to pieces, and engulfed his friends in a searing wave of fire.

  ‘How do we get to Floor F now?’ yelled Charlie.

  Ewan bit his lip in disgust before shouting his answer.

  ‘We don’t! We tell the others to get the hell out of New London!’

  ‘What about the clone factory?’

  ‘We’ve got Shannon’s weapon, and we’re still alive. That’s enough.’

  Chapter 11

  Kate’s legs complained, but she ran anyway. The five-minute walk from the summit of Stairwell 42 had turned into a two-minute jog, with at least seven dead clones along the way. They wouldn’t have long until their victims failed to check in, and swarms of others would head to their last known location.

  ‘Well that’s an anticlimax,’ Alex gasped in front of her.

  They slowed to a halt at a door that read New London Clone Factory – Alpha Control Room. It was a regular, nondescript door, far from the grandeur Kate would have expected from such an important cog in Grant’s machinery.

  Alex opened the door using a dead clone’s keycard. The door was half-open by the time Ewan’s screams came through the radio.

  ‘Guys, abort mission! Get back to the Floor Z exit now!’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Kate.

  ‘We were found. We got out safe, but there’s no way in Hell we can finish this today. If we’re getting out alive, it has to be now.’

  Alex shrugged, and jogged through the door. Kate jammed her foot in the entrance before it closed and locked itself.

  Is he doing this to undermine Ewan, or just because he likes doing things alone?

  Or maybe it’s to get away from me. Probably all three.

  ‘Did you find anything down there?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ewan, ‘I’ll explain on the way home. Now get Alex – he hasn’t answered so I assume he’s ignoring me. I’d say good luck, but–’

  ‘–it’s never luck.’

  ‘You got it.’

  The radio fell silent, and three gunshots sounded on the other side of the door. Kate rushed inside.

  Alex was standing at the front of the Alpha Control Room, with three dead clones on the floor behind him. His eyes avoided the enormous desks and complicated panels before him, and stared out of the front window. Kate ran up to him, had a look for herself, and gasped.

  The clone factory was below them, spread across what must have been the size of eight football fields. Not one square metre of the floor went to waste: rows and columns of vertical pods stood upright like airport security scanners, all connected by long cylindrical pipes which fed them whatever chemicals Nathaniel Pearce had designed to be the stuff of life. Each pod was accompanied by its own computer station, all operated by cloned soldiers. Clones, growing more clones.

  Fresh troops were staggering out of the pods, their leg muscles acclimatising to sudden new life – if it could truly be called life. A load of them, perhaps sixty, were seated in a monorail carriage ready to depart. Kate guessed the track would head straight for the training rooms. Four months was not a long time to live, and they would need readying for active duty within days.

  The view from the control room was spectacular, in the most horrible way.

  The clones that took Oakenfold were grown here.

  The clones that captured my family… they walked out of those machines.

  ‘Alex,’ she said to interrupt her own thoughts, ‘it’s time to go. Ewan’s orders.’

  ‘What’s he going to do if we disobey him?’

/>   ‘Plan our funerals. Alex, go.’

  Alex jogged to the exit, dental mirror in hand, and opened the door inwards. Kate did not see what happened as Alex inspected the corridors, but there were gunshots, and he jumped.

  ‘Bloody hell, they’re good,’ he gasped. ‘Do I get the seven years’ bad luck, or do they?’

  ‘What? How many are there?’

  ‘Enough to hit the mirror.’

  Alex launched his telescopic handgun around the doorframe and fired indiscriminately. Beyond the door, Kate saw the beautiful sight of an empty corridor in the other direction, and worked out why the platoon had been so quick to open fire. The control room was not yet surrounded, and they were not yet pinned down.

  ‘Kate, go first. I’ll cover you.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’ll cover myself, duh. Ready on three!’

  Kate took nervous steps towards the entrance, and took deep breaths while she was still able to.

  ‘One-two-three!’ Alex yelled. In the next instant he was half inside the corridor pumping out bullets, not to hit specific targets but to force the clones into hiding. Kate seized her chance, tore through the exit and sheltered herself behind the wall of the vacant corridor.

  She turned around just in time to see a bullet burrow through Alex’s shoulder, and pop a bloody exit wound out of his back.

  Alex flinched and let out a squeal – Kate had never heard him squeal before – and his handgun dropped to the floor. The bullet must have torn through the nerves in his shoulder like a water cannon through a bunch of daffodils. There was no time to reach for his weapon before the next wave of bullets scared him back behind the door.

  Alex locked himself inside the control room. It was a dead end, other than a three-storey fall to the factory floor, but Kate knew he had had no other choice.

  The clones were approaching: a horde of them against Kate’s single assault rifle. She could imagine Alex on the other side of the door grasping a sticky shoulder wound, scanning around for any kind of second exit. Air vents, secret passages, stairways to Heaven, anything at all. Except the drop from those windows, which would be even more certain to kill him than the bullets.

  Kate fired until her ammunition ran out, reached for her next clip, and then remembered the weapon was not her own. She was carrying that rifle from the first clone’s dead body, and her own ammunition was incompatible. She was as good as unarmed.

  Come on Alex! She yelled in her mind. Your dad forced you through so many taekwondo lessons that you don’t know what giving up feels like! If you were the type of person to give up you’d have died in this war a hundred times!

  But Kate knew Alex’s martial arts skills and strength of mind would not last long against automatic weapons. The clones were advancing with confidence, and there was only one thing she could do to avoid dying along with Alex.

  Kate, with tears in her eyes, turned and ran for the stairwell.

  *

  Jack’s single-mindedness was as much an advantage as a disadvantage. It allowed him to focus relentlessly on any problem, as if the rest of the universe were placed on pause. But while he was hyperfocused on one particular task, someone could almost perform surgery on the back of his head without him noticing. This meant that Ewan’s screams through the radio had not registered in his mind as he had kept his focus on the entrance door.

  He had been pointing his handgun towards the doorframe for somewhere between five minutes and one hour. Oliver Roth was somewhere between five miles and two feet away from him.

  Jack’s thoughts buzzed through his head like torturous little lightning bolts. His helmet pressed down on his brain a little harder each minute. He couldn’t satisfy his fingers’ need to flick each other. In front of him, the entrance to Floor Z stood in silence. Every survival instinct told him that retreat was the best option, but his loyalty got in the way.

  By the time his thoughts were exhausted, the mechanical mind of Jack Hopper found only three options.

  Number one: open the door, run into the Citadel, and be trapped in the same chaos as the rest of the group. If he found them.

  Number two: open the door, get shot by Oliver Roth and die.

  Number three: turn around and run home. Escape was unlikely for the others anyway. Maybe if he fled, the mission’s death count would be four rather than five.

  Jack made his decision.

  After eleven months in Spitfire’s Rise, he had built a reputation for himself. When people thought of the word ‘Jack’, their first thought was of the geeky young man with the dinosaur obsession, bizarre sense of humour and permanently bad hair. But there was more to him than that. Jack was honest: brutally honest, even when it made him unpopular. And he was loyal: underneath the teenager who understood machines better than people, there was a young man who stood by his principles far better than most others.

  For all his issues, Jack was a good guy. And good guys didn’t run when four of their friends needed help.

  He lowered his aching arms, and felt the warmth of blood flowing back to the veins in his hands. His fingers touched the door’s entrance bar, and leapt off as if from an electric shock. Within ten seconds, he might be dead. If he had made the wrong decision, his existence in the universe would be over. Jack could not bear the thought. He did not fear the inevitability of death: it was stupid to fear something that happened to everyone. But the thought of empty nothingness, an eternity without awareness or consciousness… the thought of no longer existing…

  It had been all he had wanted during his worst days. But with the bullies gone forever, he had come to realise how horrifying it was.

  Jack gritted his teeth, and pushed against the bar.

  The door swung half-open to reveal Floor Z in all its ominous glory, neither humans nor clones in sight. It was the emptiness Jack had hoped for. His muscles lowered their guard, and he shook his arms and legs to recirculate his blood.

  But then the door stopped moving. It went from its two-inches-per-second glide to an instantaneous stop.

  Well this doesn’t take a physicist…

  Jack threw himself against the door like a cannonball, and sent it flying into the blockage behind it.

  ‘Gah, you twat!’ it screamed.

  Jack’s throat twisted itself in knots as the killer teenager fell into view, shotgun and all, and collapsed to the ground.

  Without a moment to waste on thought, Jack turned on his heels and bolted.

  Jack had suffered countless dreams of running away from people, and in every dream his legs had turned to jelly and forgotten how to run. He had always been caught in his dreams. Every time.

  Real life was different, but the terror was the same. A hidden reserve of adrenalin propelled Jack towards the next corner, and he reached the junction as a colossal bang sounded from the emergency exit. A hundred little shotgun pellets pummelled into the wall a metre to his left. Admiring his good fortune, Jack leapt around the corner and out of range.

  As soon as Jack believed himself to be safe, rational thought returned to him and he realised that he would never, ever outrun Oliver Roth. Jack Hopper, who had feigned illness through most of his PE lessons and spent his adolescence avoiding exercise like a child avoiding vegetables, would make nothing of his three-year age advantage. All he could do was hide.

  Jack dashed around a second corner, slowed to a halt and grabbed the first door handle he saw. He opened the door with a quiet tug, slipped through and pushed the door back in place with an almost-silent click.

  Jack perked an eyebrow at the sight before him. He had neither known nor cared what lay on the other side of the door, but the truth surprised him.

  He was standing in a communal changing room, like those in the gyms he never went to. A row of showers stretched around the corner, open lockers lined the edge of the room, and a single change of clothes had been draped over the sodden bench in the middle. It was a room for clones, of course. Jack imagined a nearby arena for hand-to-hand com
bat training, treadmills for fitness and endurance, and perhaps weightlifting equipment.

  Jack’s thoughts changed lanes without signalling, and he was hit with a painful realisation.

  Why did I run?

  I had Oliver Roth on the floor, with his shotgun out of his grip, I had a gun in my hand, and I legged it! Why the hell did I run?

  He even fired his second shotgun cartridge at me while I was running! I could have turned around and shot him before he reloaded! Why did I…

  Fear. Such a simple, irritating answer. Oliver Roth was so terrifying that retreat always felt like the best option. Even at a rare moment when victory was certain, Jack had not noticed it was possible.

  Outside the changing room, somebody swore.

  Jack froze every part of himself, right down to his lungs.

  After a long moment of silence, Jack heard the assassin’s voice.

  ‘Iain? It’s me.’

  OK, good, he’s concentrating on his phone. That’s Iain Marshall, right?

  ‘I flushed their guy away from the exit,’ the voice continued behind the door. ‘They’re trapped in the Citadel now… no, he’s still alive. Tell me where the others are.’

  Even when I’m safely hidden, you still scare me, Jack thought towards Oliver Roth. Why?

  ‘Got it. I’ll go up there and meet them.’

  Because you killed Beth Foster… you orphaned Thomas by shooting his mum to death. You got Ben Christie with a sniper rifle, and for weeks we didn’t even know it was you. Miles Ashford, Tim Carson, Joe Horn…

  ‘What do you mean, “not going alone”? I’m not having some test tube creatures take my scalps! I’ve wiped out seven of this crew already, and today I might get double figures.’

  David and Val Riley… our only married couple. You cornered them when they’d run out of bullets. You threw them a knife and promised you’d make it quick if one of them killed the other. I heard you snorting over David’s radio, as he handed her the knife and asked her… and you laughed as Val apologised and stabbed her husband of ten years…

  How did a boy like you become Grant’s head assassin? What the hell will you be like as an adult?