by Liam Clay
One of the soldiers slips as he crosses a stretch of mildewed planking. It takes four bullets fired in succession, but I eventually manage to hit him. Then I duck behind the parapet to readjust my mask. Five, meanwhile, is staring at me wide eyed. He knows what I used to do for a living, but has never actually seen me do it. His expression makes it clear that a line has just been crossed.
I break cover again and something white flashes past me, missing by inches. I force myself to ignore it. Glancing down, I spot a soldier treading water just below my position, a green canister held in one hand. I shoot him in the shoulder and he drops the grenade mid-throw. The detonation throws a wave up against the barrier.
“I can’t do this!” Five is shouting. He has ripped his mask off, hunting rifle slipping from palsied fingers. “I just can’t.”
It’s hard to blame him. Until a few hours ago he was a relatively happy, moderately wealthy nightclub owner. Now he’s just cannon fodder. We all are.
A woman on our line stands up to throw a Molotov cocktail, but a bullet takes her in the chest before she can get it off. There is no blood, but the impact throws her backward off the walkway. The cocktail shatters against the wall as she falls, dousing her in liquid fire. She vanishes into the water and doesn’t resurface. What the fuck... oh.
“Rubber bullets and concussion grenades!’ I shout to whoever might be listening. No one, as it turns out. An arm reaches over the parapet, followed by the soldier attached to it. I plant one of my guns against his temple and pull the trigger, but it clicks empty, so I smash him over the head with the butt instead. He falls away with a muffled grunt.
One of the enemy has gained our walkway. He is carrying a model of gun I’ve never seen before, aiming at the local beside me. He fires. His quarry collapses under a web of white netting, but is still able to unload his shotgun into the soldier’s chest. I feel an odd moment of pity for the Topsider, forced to bring a netgun to a bullet fight. Who would have thought they’d be so humane? But there is no time to dwell on the point; the battle here is lost.
“Come on!” I yell into Five’s ear, pulling him back to our side of the wall. He follows in a daze. But when I motion for him to jump, he balks, shaking his head in mute refusal. So I push my friend off the edge and dive in after him, water shooting up my nose on impact. I try to keep hold of both guns - which I’ve been assured will work wet - but it’s hard to swim with them and I’m forced to drop one before long. I’m pretty sure it was the empty one anyway.
We resurface in the lee of an old dinghy. No one else has abandoned their positions yet, and I feel a moment of shame for ditching out. But Five is in a bad way. His eyes are rolled up in his head and he’s not even swimming, just bobbing along like a piece of broken cork. I have to get him out of here.
This canal looks much like any other: a morass of brown water lapping at pitted concrete walls, the soup encroaching overhead. Bullets rip through a derelict houseboat nearby; no way to tell if they’re rubber or not. I grab Five by the collar and circle the dinghy, hoping to put something between us and the advancing army. From our new position, I see that a narrow alley bisects the canal here. I swim down it until the battle noise falls away. This is one of those border neighborhoods only the truly desperate call home. Makeshift sleeping nests have been erected on a few patios, but the buildings themselves are uninhabitable, floors rotted out and collapsing. As good a place as any to hide.
With much subdued cursing, I manage to haul Five onto a canvas awning. Once inside, our asses hang down into the water, but we are relatively well hidden at least. My friend immediately rolls over so that he’s facing away from me. The glow from an old holoboard plays strangely across the scar tissue on the side of his head.
The funny thing is, Five was born without that ear. Genetic defect. There was just a smooth expanse of flesh where it should have been, with a tiny hole for the ear canal. People used to tease him about it constantly when we were younger. And he got tired of the mockery, I guess, because one day he took a knife and starting carving up his own temple.
I know because I walked in on him doing it. There was blood everywhere, and I remember thinking he’d gone off the deep end. But it turned out he had a plan. People who met him afterward assumed the ear had been cut off during a fight, or in a workplace accident maybe. It took a while, but everyone eventually forgot the truth.
“I wasn’t ready.” He says abruptly, back still to me. “I would have fought, but - it all just happening so fast...”
My mind is a blank and it’s an effort just to speak, but he needs to hear something.
“There was nothing you could have done, Five. Seriously. Whatever this is about, it’s way too big for people like me and you.” I slap the awning in frustration. “Why don’t they just kill us and get it over with? I’m sure the public has given Korezon carte blanche down here, considering what they think we did.”
“And what makes you so sure we didn’t?” Five whispers back.
“What? No one down here would -”
“You’re wrong.” He interrupts bitterly. “I’m not surprised you can’t see it, though. You have never really understood what it means to be an Underworlder.”
I feel the hair on my arms stand up. The main reason Five and I became friends, way back when, was because he never once asked where I came from.
“Hey, that’s not fair. I’ve lived here for well over a decade.”
He rolls over, and I see that his cheeks are running with sweat, eyes too wide. “Oh cut the crap.” He hisses. “You spend more time Topside than you do in the soup. And since we’re on the subject, how come you never talk about your life up there, huh? Worried I’ll try to come up for a visit?”
He’s hit it in one. Ever since my first trip up the ladder, I’ve been afraid Five would ask to come Topside with me. I tried passing it off to myself as a business decision at first, but my conscience called bullshit some time ago. The truth is, I’ve been cutting ties to the Underworld for years, and Five’s friendship is a sacrifice to the cause. But obviously I can’t tell him any of that. Better to deflect the question.
“Five, I may live Topside these days, but my loyalties will always be to the Underworld. And I don’t believe that anyone here would try to blow up Opacity. You don’t care enough about the Topsiders to bother.”
He shakes his head so hard that water sluices from his hair. “That’s not true. You’re just regurgitating the hype we all feed each other.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean how we pretend we’re happy down here. Like we enjoy wearing gasmasks; eating food grown under lamps; having a life expectancy of fifty. But it’s all a pack of lies, believe me. Deep down, every last one of us wants to live Topside. And since we can’t, it might be fun to ruin it for the bastards who do.”
His rant recalls a random detail. The Ladder, the one who tried to blow up Letiva, said that I looked familiar. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but what if he recognized me from the Underworld? Or he could just have gotten me confused with someone else. But either way, there is no point obsessing over it now.
“You may be right, but can this wait for another time? Our instructions were to fall back to the Kaleidoscope if the enemy broke through.”
“Why bother? You saw what happened out there plain as I did. The Underworld is done for.”
“Maybe so. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to wait around for these fuckers to tie me up like some bondage enthusiast.”
He barks out an unexpected laugh. “Hey, remember the time we were working the Perfumed Canal and you convinced those guys to buy that vintage fetish porn? We thought they were going to be pissed off, but those idiots lapped the stuff up like it was A-list!”
This is more like the Five most people see: telling dirty stories, reliving shared adventures.
“Of course.” I reply. “I thought their retcoms might burst they were so excited. But can we please go? My ass is getting all wrinkled f
rom sitting in this scummy water.”
“Oh, unwad your diaper. I’m coming.”
“Thank you.”
I climb to my knees only to have a wave of nausea hit me, vision skewing right, stomach left. I collapse back onto the awning with a groan. Five looks me over with a critical eye.
“I’m not going to lie, that didn’t look good. When was the last time you slept? Or ate, for that matter?”
“Too long ago on both counts. But I can’t exactly stop for a snack and a siesta. By the time I wake up, the Underworld could be a pile of burning rubble.”
“And how do you expect to stop that from happening? I’d be surprised if you can even walk right now, never mind fight.”
I hold out a shaking hand. “So give me something to get my adrenaline pumping again. Come on, I know you’re carrying.”
“Not a chance.” He points back down the alleyway. “In case you hadn’t noticed, there are people out there trying to kill us. Or capture at the very least. I need you sharp.”
“Don’t you think I know that? I never used to drop before a pistol job. The drugs were for afterward. For forgetting. But I’ve got no choice - we have to get back.”
“Why, though? We’re safer here if you ask me. Wait, is this about Kalana and Sophie?”
“And why shouldn’t it be? They’re still the closest thing to family I’ve got. Sophie actually is family, from a genetic perspective.”
“But you’re being ridiculous! Even if you manage to find them, what good could you possibly do in this state?”
“That’s why I’m asking for your help.”
A lull in the gunfire forestalls Five’s response. He scrambles to the awning’s edge and peers out.
“We’ve lost the wall.” He says quietly. “Korezon’s soldiers are pushing inward.”
“Are they sweeping the alleys as they go?”
“No, it looks like they’re in a hurry. I think they’ll pass us by.”
Crawling back to my side, he gazes at me intently, as though hoping to interpret my thoughts via facial musculature. Then he pulls out a ziploc bag.
“The kid who sold me these called them spirals.”
“What do they do?”
“Not a clue. All I know is they’re uppers of some kind.”
I gratefully accept three pills, but something makes me ask why he gave in. Five tries for a smile. “Hard to say. Maybe all that protecting your family garbage struck a nerve.”
Ten minutes later I feel ready to travel. This is some potent stuff Five has given me. Every sound, every movement feels amplified, as though my body has been tuned in to the world’s true frequency. Gone is the fatigue caused by two days on the move and under the influence. I’m going to pay for this later, I know that. But ‘later’ is a fluid concept that I will need luck even to reach, so what have I got to lose?
The West End has become a ghost town. We swim long blocks with only corpses for company, khaki clad soldiers all. Finding that my jeans are weighing me down, I take a buck knife off a body and use it to pare the legs away at the knees. Five seems to have overcome his fear. He swims beside me, eyes scanning our path, breathing close to steady. But he still refuses to take a weapon - not even one of the non-lethal varieties clutched by the dead soldiers. He also shakes off my attempts to make him wear my mask.
We swim right into the back of the ambush.
Turning onto the NGO Strip, we encounter a group of enemy soldiers poling a flotilla of skiffs toward the Kaleidoscope. The armada is a hundred meters distant and moving away from us, but my heart still does a stuttering double take. They are shortly to have bigger problems than us, however.
My head snaps up as a fourth floor window bank shatters overhead, raining shards of glass onto the soldiers. From our vantage point we can’t tell who is busting them out. What we can see though are rifle barrels, clearing away the remaining glass. Taking refuge behind the support post of an elevated soup kitchen sign, we wait for the fireworks to begin.
A muzzle flash precedes a booming report, the sound reverberating through the maze of buildings. The entire corridor lights up a second later. After a brief moment of panic, the enemy soldiers start poling toward the building the shots are coming from. Casualties are heavy while they maneuver into position, but they are rewarded with a precious respite as our snipers adjust to the new angle. The ensuing battle is an odd one: almost completely in the vertical, with shots fired in both directions.
Down seems to be the preferable of the two.
The enemy must realize this, because we soon hear more breaking glass, this time from down near water level. I feel my pulse buck and kick.
“They’re moving in through the kitchens! We’ve got to go help our guys.”
“Are you fucking insane? No we don’t!”
But I’m already scaling the sign, which is situated beside the high rise where the Constant’s fighters are holed up. Reaching an elevated service catwalk, I leap through a broken skyscraper window onto the moldy carpet within. Then I’m jogging through sagging hallways, head on a swivel, gun held loosely at my side.
A door ahead of me bangs open and a soldier steps through, rifle up. Unfortunately for him, he chooses the wrong direction to check first. My gun runs empty after three rounds but the man is already down, blood pouring from a hole in his mask. It is of a strange design, the mask: all condensers and tubes, some of which I could swear are protruding directly from the man’s neck. On impulse I kneel down and try to strip off his gear; but the armor is like a wetsuit, with no visible seams or zippers. Whoever these douchebags are, they’re really starting to creep me out. The assault rifle I do take.
Now heavily armed, I put my shoulder into the door the soldier entered through. The stairwell beyond is draped in shades of black, but that doesn’t stop me from taking the stairs two by two. The fourth floor is one huge, vaulted space. Concrete columns squat in a wide grid, staring sadly down at the remnants of the ceiling they failed to uphold.
There are about twenty-five Underworlders here, over half of whom look to be wounded. One of the uninjured is a Fractal I recognize from the meeting. I think his name is Denzen, or Drezel, maybe. Word has it he’s some kind of kung fu master - a real head kicking, leg sweeping type. The others must be his crew.
Then someone shouts, “They’re here!” and I have to dive behind a chunk of fallen ceiling to avoid a spray of bullets.
“Hey guys, could you please stop firing?” I call out during the first respite. “I’m on your side!”
“What’s your name then?” The Fractal demands after a pregnant pause.
“Don’t have one! I’m a dealer, you know how we operate.” Some indistinct muttering followed by, “Fine, what are you selling right now?”
“Anex!”
“Jesus, really? Heard you were climbing the ladder these days.”
“I am, most of the time. Was back for a visit when this shit flared up. But say, shouldn’t you get back to firing on the enemy?”
“Can’t! They’re inside the building now - burrowed in like a bunch of goddamn termites. Speaking of which, you might want to get over here before they show up.”
I climb to my feet and cross the room to join them. The leader steps forward and holds out a heavily calloused hand.
“Name’s Delez.” He says. (Oh well, at least I was close.) The Fractal is a tall, lean man made entirely of planes and undercut angles, like an M. C. Escher drawing made flesh. He’s wearing jeans and a faded T-shirt under a bullet proof vest that is either second hand or has saved his life multiple times. His crew are similarly attired.
“Nice to meet you.” I reply. “Shouldn’t you guys be up in the abandoned floors, though? Not that I’m telling you your business or anything.” I add quickly.
“Don’t worry, we were. Gave those fuckers out there a proper fight when they showed up, and killed their leader too, we’re pretty sure. That must’ve pissed them off, because they sent a second squad around to flank us after
that, and switched to live ammunition too. So we came down here and set up this little surprise.” He looks at me curiously. “What about you, though? I don’t remember the boss assigning anyone to this neighborhood.”
“Oh, me and -” I turn to introduce Five, who of course is nowhere to be seen. My recent actions slide into focus and I almost let out a sob. I’m about to go back for him when he bursts through the doorway.
“You are such an unbelievable dickhead!” He says, stopping in front of us. “We’re not all top athletes like you - I almost got killed jumping that gap.” He seems prepared to carry on in this vein, but devolves into a coughing fit instead. The others start to laugh, but stop when gunfire rings out in the stairwell below.
“Positions!” Delez calls out. His crew reacts at speed, appropriating whatever cover is closest to hand. Five and I both happen to run for the same pillar. I get there first, but I’m feeling pretty shitty about leaving him behind so I change course, aiming for the next one over.
Which makes me the preferred target of the soldiers now pouring into the room. Bullets fly and concrete shatters, but by chance I make it to safety unharmed. The next few minutes are pure anarchy. We have superior numbers and cover, but the Topsiders are better trained and equipped. The fight is too even. Even if we do win, there will only be a handful of us left to celebrate the victory. A woman goes down not far from me, blood spurting from her leg, screaming loud enough to wake the dead. (Or just announcing her intent to join them.) If Five goes the same way, it will be 100% my fault. He hasn’t stopped coughing either.
I reach a decision. Slinging the rifle across my back, I take off my mask and force it over my friend’s head. Then I drop to the ground and start crawling. The soup is creeping in through the broken windows, obscuring vision, protecting me as I slither away. When the side wall appears, I turn right and keep going until I reach the chamber’s corner. I’m behind the enemy now. The buck knife appears in my hand as if by magic, edge gleaming faintly in the fog. It is a beautiful piece of craftsmanship: Prison made, if I’m not mistaken, and therefore highly valuable. Time to go.