by Justin Sloan
Just as she remembered doing in the past, Haskell made sure to position the fiberboard dividers so that nobody could see into her nook and then slumped on the air mattress and grabbed the only thing that she called her own, an old canvas rucksack that had been gifted to her by a gnarly resistance fighter named Pope. She placed the vegetables she’d copped from the mess hall inside where they joined a mishmash of other vegetables and assorted foodstuffs that she remembered collecting over a period of time. It was a good amount of food and for some reason, she knew she’d need it very soon. She felt a vibration in the air and often knew someone was going to speak before they did.
“Drop that contraband, young lady!” a voice said.
Haskell flinched, then slowly looked back over her shoulder to see Gene Hong, a Korean dude with a shotputter’s build who was two years her senior. Gene was clad in a ratty compression shirt and camouflage pants, a loopy grin on his face. She recalled how he’d been one of the first resistance fighters to welcome her into the outpost, teaching her the ropes, hooking her up with the gig down in the mess hall which was coveted by many because there was little chance of getting whacked by the scuds.
“Shut the door,” Haskell replied in the broken Seoul dialect that Gene had worked to teach her.
“That’s the problem,” Gene said. “You don’t have one.”
Haskell crawled over and pulled the fiberboard in tight. Gene crouched on the mattress and Haskell had the strangest sensation that the words she was speaking were not her own. They were words she’d surmised she’d spoken at some point in the past. She handed Gene one of the stolen carrots, the two whispering conspiratorially.
“You shoot the shit with Stringer?” Gene asked.
Haskell nodded. “We’re good to go. He said we could take the tools.”
“Sweetness,” Gene said, biting into the carrot. “Now all we need is someone who can show us the way.”
“Gibbs,” Haskell said under her breath. “I been thinking and … he knows the area where I saw the drone go down better than anyone.”
Gene sighed. “Gibbs is a few bubbles off plumb.”
“Translate.”
“He’s fucking nuts.”
Haskell waved a hand. “One man’s psychotic is another man’s visionary.”
“That makes absolutely no sense at all.”
“Does to a crazy person,” Haskell replied with a sly smile.
THE BUILDING WAS SHAKING AGAIN as Haskell and Gene slipped down a stone staircase at the far end of the parking garage. Haskell stopped, clutching her rucksack, eyes closed, counting the seconds between blasts, reckoning that the bombing was closer now, probably six or seven miles off. In an hour, maybe less, the bombing would likely be closer, which was just fine with her. The nearby blasts would mean that the exterior guards and scouts, the ones that watched for signs of Syndicate soldiers, would be forced to leave their posts. Once they were gone, Haskell, Gene, and hopefully Gibbs, would be able to head outside, unseen.
“Have we done this before?” she asked, her eyes still closed.
“Done what?” Gene replied.
Her eyes opened. “I mean … what we’re doing now. Have we done this before?”
Gene snickered. “You’re starting to lose it, girl.”
“Am not.”
“You totally are. Pretty soon you’re gonna be stashed down under with Gibbs.”
Haskell frowned and continued on, threading down the staircase that led to an inner chamber at the bottom of the parking garage, a place called the “Depository,” a relatively secure area in the outpost that held the infirm and the mentally unsound, people who’d cracked either before the invasion or because of it.
Haskell recalled Gibbs had been a “Snout” for the resistance in the months after the initial invasion, a unit of vertically challenged men and women who knew the city better than anyone and were able to spot angles and paths and things others generally missed. They’d been tasked with helping create tunnels under the fallen cityscape, safe zones where the resistance could hide and ambush the aliens. Haskell had heard that Gibbs had been inside one such tunnel when it collapsed, killing everyone but him. Rumor had it that the little man was trapped underground for the better part of three days, lying side by side with his pancaked comrades. Suffice it to say, Gibbs was never the same after being retrieved. Instead of going outside the wire now, Gibbs spent his days down in the Depository in the fog of what was probably PTSD, following a beat only he could hear.
After being waved through security, Haskell and Gene waded through two dozen people with zombified eyes, some shuffling past, others seated on buckets, or lying on the ground in fetal balls. There was a racial component to the whole thing, Haskell thought. Everyone down here was mostly white. On the outside, a good portion of the city’s resistance was made up of browns and blacks and lower class whites. Someone asked her why she thought this was and she replied that they were the people who were used to the bottom falling out. They were familiar with the struggle, with looking over their shoulders, and were probably better prepared when the world turned over. In a sense, she said, they’d been preparing for something like the invasion their whole lives.
Haskell and Gene found Gibbs at the back of the Depository, pounding out a rhythm on a metal bucket, going to town on the thing with a pair of rusted spoons.
Gibbs heard them and looked back. He was small of stature, probably five inches shorter than Haskell’s five feet eight inches, and with a mop of brown hair and a large mouth, resembled a ventriloquist’s dummy come to life. Full of manic energy, he continued drumming as Haskell and Gene drew near him.
“What it is,” Gibbs said.
“What it shall be,” Haskell replied.
Gibbs mimicked hitting a high-hat on his drums and then stopped drumming. He bumped fists with Haskell as another bomb thudded somewhere off in the distance.
“The scuds are probably four miles away,” Gibbs whispered, his eyes closed.
“More like five,” Haskell said.
Gibbs’s eyes flapped open.
“Is it on?” Gibbs asked. “Are we heading out?”
Haskell nodded.
Gibb’s gaze wandered to Gene.
“Why’s he coming?”
“He’s the muscle,” Haskell said.
“Then what are you?”
“The brains,” Haskell replied.
“Okay … so what does that make me?” Gibbs asked.
“The crazy ass white guy,” Gene answered.
“Every team needs one,” Haskell added with a wink.
Gibbs took this in, pursing his lips, stashing the spoons in his pockets. “Crazy white guy, huh? Yeah, okay, I’m cool with that.”
HASKELL AND GENE lied to the Depository’s guards, telling them that they were checking Gibbs out for a few hours, just like they’d done the prior five days during dry runs. Ostensibly they’d be walking him around for exercise and socialization, but in reality they’d be sneaking outside, following a course that Haskell had plotted in the past.
First, they went to the room with the tools and placed into a large duffel bag all the things that Haskell thought they might need, an impact driver, some wrenches, and several other items, including the welding gear. Then, with Haskell carrying the bag and Gene humping the portable set of welding gear (grumbling all the way), they moved down through a partially collapsed hallway toward a secured exterior blast door. Because the door was one of only two authorized exits out of the outpost, it would likely be guarded, so they angled under a staircase twisted by a Syndicate bomb, before crawling through a natural chute that had been left by the explosion.
The entrance to the chute was partially concealed by a flap of aluminum ductwork, and unless you knew precisely where it was, you’d never be able to see it. The chute zigzagged forward, eventually snaking through a hole in the building’s outer shell and attendant debris wall where it led to the outside world, and eventually intersected with a length of fallen se
wer pipe that jutted up partially out of the ground. Haskell recalled coming this way many times in the recent past.
The three crawled on their hands and knees through the chute, Gibbs in the lead, everyone showered by the dust falling from the ceiling as the bombs struck just down the street, the vibrations from the strikes scything through the chute and the mounds of building material that lay all around.
Gibbs suddenly stopped.
“You feel that reverb?” he said.
The others paused, feeling a nearly imperceptible pulse of energy that shot through the sides of the chute.
“The bombs are getting closer,” Gibbs said. “We need to move it.”
Gibbs shot off ahead of the others, snake-crawling toward the end of the chute. He was the first one into the sewer pipe, a colossal length of cast iron which was nearly large enough for a grown man to stand up in. There was a gaping hole in the center of the pipe which the trio pulled themselves through, a section where it had been struck and broken apart by a Syndicate bomb. The blast had forced the lower portion of the pipe into the ground, while simultaneously causing the upper portion, which was more than ten feet long, to partially stick up out of the rubble that lined the streets above like a periscope.
Everyone thrust their hands out against the sides of the pipe for balance. Haskell looked down, searching the space below that the pipe dropped into, an area full of catacomb-like spaces that she recalled visiting recently. Her gaze ratcheted back up to the other end of the pipe and the tatters of daylight visible beyond it. Having been here before, she knew that if she crawled to the top she’d be able to see the outside, the streets, and any guards from the outpost that might be keeping watch.
“Drop the tools,” Haskell said.
“But they’re gonna fall,” Gene replied.
Haskell shook her head, she was aware that Gene hadn’t been outside the building in a long time. “They’ll be fine. I got us a place down under.”
They lowered their tools and gear down the pipe, letting them go, watching the materials slide gently down into the gloom where they finally clanked to a stop. Haskell knew that they could drop straight down and follow the tunnels down the street to the courthouse. But that would take a significant amount of time and time was something they didn’t have. There was a faster route. She glanced up to see Gibbs eying her.
“I take it you’ve been here before?” he asked.
Haskell nodded.
Gibbs sucked on his teeth. “Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure sneaking out of the outpost ain’t allowed.”
“Little late in the day to be bringing that up, ace,” Gene replied.
Gibbs shrugged. “Just came to me.”
Haskell fixed a look on Gibbs. “So what? So I snuck outside a bunch of times.”
“So you’re breaking the rules.”
“Well-behaved women rarely make history,” Haskell replied.
Gibbs arched an eyebrow. “Is that what we’re doing? Making history.”
Haskell grinned. “We’re sure as shit gonna try.”
She shifted her hands and inched up toward the top of the pipe which was shaking now, a series of explosions echoing nearby. Haskell reached up and grabbed the top of the pipe which was cool and wet from the prior day’s rain. Tensing her lat muscles, she hauled herself up and glanced outside and what she saw nearly stole her breath away.
Where once there had been the intersection of Baltimore and East Redwood Streets was now a never-ending plain of debris, an urban wasteland of rises and runs and small rubble-filled hillocks. In short, all that remained of the city’s charred skyline. She’d witnessed portions of the destruction before, back during the initial invasion and in the weeks thereafter, when the Syndicate seemed to be content with kidnapping all able-bodied adults. But then the resistance continued to fight back and the aliens had punished the planet, engaging in a scorched-earth campaign that was downright apocalyptic. They continued to bomb many locations day and night, but the one thing they apparently didn’t know was that a new world had blossomed under the wreckage of the old. A new world concealed by layers of various building materials, including those covered in lead paint, that purportedly hampered the aliens’ technology, including a microwave-radar device that allegedly detected heartbeats.
Indeed, most of the downtown office buildings, which had been toppled during assaults many months before, had fallen onto their sides, creating enormous pockets of open space that couldn’t be seen from the outside. This was the space that Haskell had long believed the resistance should utilize, a vast area of potentially interconnected, subterranean tunnels that might be perfect for operations. But that was a concern for another day. At that moment, all she cared about was finding a way to scurry across the street and down into a larger sewer that sloped toward Lombard Street and Hopkins Place, the area where the old federal courthouse had once been. Haskell had been outside before and watched a resistance sniper take down an airborne alien drone, a machine colloquially referred to as a “Swan.” She’d sat and waited for many hours, but the stricken drone was never retrieved. There was something Haskell hoped was hidden inside the drone. Something that might help the resistance finally turn the tables on the aliens.
Haskell signaled for Gibbs to crawl up, which he did. The two were soon inches apart, staring out of the pipe. They listened to the familiar buzz in the air, the hint that the high-altitude Syndicate glider-bombers were flying somewhere overhead. Next came the thrum of the low-altitude drones, the Swans and the other mechanized eyes in the sky who acted as spotters for the larger gliders and other assorted alien craft. Bombs soon fell, close enough that banners of smoke could be seen down the street.
“Tell me again where you saw the drone go down,” Gibbs whispered.
“Down past the old federal courthouse,” Haskell replied. “Just south of Lexington Market. Near Lombard and Hopkins.”
Gibbs nodded, his pupils dilating. “You do know that area may be heavy with scuds,” he said.
Haskell nodded. “I know that.”
“And there’s just three of us.”
“I know that too.”
“Oh, and there’s the little issue of us not having any weapons.”
“We’ve got Gene,” Haskell said.
They looked down to Gene who grinned and cocked a finger-pistol at Gibbs.
“He’s a kind of weapon,” Haskell added.
Gibbs groaned. “Follow me, follow close, and do not stop, whatever you do.”
Before Haskell could utter another word, the little man had torqued himself out of the pipe and was running across the remains of downtown Baltimore Street, headed in the direction of the falling Syndicate bombs.
HASKELL’S HEART hammered in her chest as she ran raggedly across the mountains of debris, fighting her way through plumes of smoke. She struggled to keep up with Gibbs who was moving like a wraith, following a path only he could see. She glanced back at Gene who was pointing. Haskell wheeled and looked up into a sky that was heavy with clouds and the faint shadows of the Syndicate glider-bombers.
Gibbs was screaming for them to hurry when a bomb landed nearby—
WHUMP-BOOM!
The bomb tore into a clutch of junked cars, filling the air with shrapnel, tossing axles and tires and hunks of metal hundreds of feet into the air.
“GO, GO, GO!” Gene thundered.
Haskell covered her ears and darted forward as—
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The car parts slammed into the ground to the left and right of the trio. Haskell’s ears rang. She spotted Gibbs waving his arms, pointing to the right. Haskell’s gaze swung in that direction and she caught sight of a dozen Syndicate soldiers in their blood-red armor.
“Shit!” she thought to herself. “Have we been spotted?!”
Gunfire rang out from all quarters, the air filled with the snap and hiss of energized sabot rounds which stitched the ground all around them. Gene grabbed the back of Haskell’s shirt and shov
ed her forward as the two dove into the debris. Haskell rolled over and caught sight of a Swan drone slicing through the air overhead, searching for any sign of life on the quiet streets.
Her mouth suddenly went dry.
What a colossal fucking mistake it had been to venture outside during an attack, she thought to herself. What the hell was she thinking? There were just three of them, defenseless, not even real soldiers. On the verge of being hunted down by an alien force that had destroyed the world.
She watched the drone arc lazily down the street and then swing out and around, moving back toward where they were hiding, mercifully concealed by the smoke from the explosions.
Time and sound slowed.
The drone paused mid-air.
A long, shimmering sensor (which resembled a swan’s neck, hence the drone’s nickname) telescoped out of its body. A red laser beamed from the sensor, sweeping the ground, searching for Haskell and the others.
It was only a matter of time, seconds perhaps, before the three were spotted.
Haskell’s eyes widened as the laser hit the ground and began moving slowly forward like a wave, the redness of the beam mesmerizing.
Gibbs whistled and she startled, then saw him signaling for them to roll down an embankment. She and Gene rolled down together, barely avoiding the path of the laser. Gibbs then signaled for them to dig into the ground, which they did, clawing at it, pulling away rocks and gravel and grit to see a sewer grate. Gene grabbed the grate as Gibbs dropped down through an opening in the sewer. Teeth gritted, Gene yanked the grate off as Haskell followed Gibbs down into the sewer, Gene close behind her as the drone passed by overhead.
The sewer was moist and shrouded in darkness and it didn’t fucking matter. Anywhere was better than the ground above. Haskell dropped to her belly and slithered through the muck, listening to Gibb’s whisper-shouts from somewhere out in front. Somewhere off in the distance, they could hear the shouts of the Syndicate soldiers and the cacophonous booms as more bombs exploded.