Gears of War: The Slab (Gears of War 5)

by Karen Traviss

  Prescott smiled at them. When accompanied by harsh words, his father had told him that it always chilled the blood more than a display of temper.

  “Understand this,” Prescott said. “You will treat Fenix humanely. If you don’t, and I see the slightest hint that he’s been mistreated again, I’ll personally ensure that you’re all conscripted and given a hazardous deployment alongside Fenix’s comrades, who will be told who you are and that you abused him. They’re Royal Tyran Infantry. They’re very loyal to their brothers, and they’re not squeamish. Do I make myself clear? I’ll include inmates in that, too.”

  Jarvi didn’t blink. Prescott respected that. Campbell, the one Dury had identified as bearing the grudge, looked sullen. The other two warders just stood and took it.

  “Yes, sir,” Jarvi said. “Understood.”

  “Very good. I’ll see you next time, then.”

  Prescott swept out and didn’t look back. He probably would never need to visit in person again. He waited until Dury shut the car door behind him and took a deep breath. Dury started the engine and headed back to what they both knew simply as Sovereigns.

  “Never seen you rattled before, sir,” Dury said. “Unless you wanted to be seen that way, at least.”

  Prescott wondered why he’d dropped his guard even by a fraction. Sometimes he found it hard to distinguish between accidental displays of emotion and those deliberate ones so practiced that they’d become unnoticed, automatic.

  “Yes, it’s hard to see a man with that pedigree reduced to such squalor,” he said. “So I’m only letting my class prejudices show, Paul. Don’t mistake me for a kind man.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, sir. Just not callous. Or sadistic.”

  “Necessity, Paul. Necessity.”

  When it came to saving what was left of Sera—of Tyrus—Prescott was willing to do anything, and nobody could doubt that after the Hammer strikes nine years ago. Marcus Fenix was just collateral damage.

  But at least it would make talking to Adam on the phone tonight that much easier. Marcus would survive. Prescott was certain of that.

  THE SLAB: LATE FALL, 11 A.E.

  “Did you hear?” Leuchars said. “Campbell’s son’s been killed. Grubs ambushed his patrol.”

  He was on his hands and knees on the flagstones next to the boiler room, taking his turn to move the spoil from the tunnel while Vance did some digging below. The distant thump of artillery and the occasional noise of a Raven high overhead penetrated from the outside world.

  “Oh, shit.” Vance’s voice wafted up from the hole. “Campbell’s going to be Fenix-hunting to make himself feel better, then.”

  Campbell had backed off Marcus since he put him in the infirmary, or at least Reeve hadn’t seen any attempt at physical violence. The verbal abuse was pretty consistent, but words never killed anybody. Maybe it was because Marcus had changed. Reeve wouldn’t have described it as perking up, because Marcus still looked as miserable as sin, but he definitely had something on his mind, and it had all followed Prescott’s visit. Maybe he’d been promised parole. Maybe it was nothing at all. For all Reeve knew, Prescott might have been his dad’s best buddy. Whatever it was, it seemed to have lifted the guy just a little.

  “Well, Jarvi’s going to have to keep Campbell on a leash,” Reeve said. “I only signed up to keep you assholes from killing our soldier boy.” He paused. He didn’t want to look like he’d gone sentimental on Marcus. “Smokes available in return for reading material.”

  “Does Fenix know something we don’t?” Leuchars knelt back and looked toward the door that led out to the kitchen gardens. That was where Marcus spent his work time when he wasn’t on the cleaning roster. When he couldn’t dig or rake or weed another square centimeter of soil, or when it got too dark to work, he’d quit, take a shower with his back to the wall, and shut himself in his cell until it was time to start all over again. “He’s eating and doing his exercise. What did they do, threaten to shove that half-assed feeding tube up his nose and make him eat?”

  Vance nodded absently. “Yeah, maybe he heard what happened to poor old Brendan. Get that tube wrong and those fucking things kill you.”

  Edouain kept looking toward the door to the gardens. “So go ask the COG if he’d like to contribute to the effort now.”

  Reeve knew the old war hadn’t gone away for Edouain. He still called Gears “COG” like it was their rank. He regarded himself as a political prisoner, as if what was in his mind when he blew the shit out of Dormera made him better than Reeve, who didn’t have his mind on anything at all when he squeezed the trigger except getting paid and not getting caught.

  “He doesn’t want to escape,” Reeve said. “He’s doing his penance.”

  Edouain watched the debate, calculating something on the back of a piece of cardboard. Reeve loaded the soil and stones into a small bucket and walked them out casually via the latrines and into the lean-to toolshed by the exit to the gardens. From there, it was simply a matter of scattering the soil on the vegetable beds. Few of the closed-circuit TV cameras still worked, and the guards didn’t give a shit anyway.

  The trees were busy dumping their leaves in the yard and the air smelled of damp decay. It was only outside that Reeve connected with time and was reminded that it wasn’t the same day he was experiencing over and over again, but the unstoppable procession toward death. He could do without all this connection to the seasons shit, thanks.

  The artillery noise was a lot louder today. It was so frequent, such a part of the daily soundtrack of life, that Reeve didn’t pay much heed. Sometimes he really didn’t even notice it. It was only the way Marcus reacted to it that made him take an interest; those sounds said something different to him. That was his old life, his buddies, his family, and he stopped digging to watch. Reeve could almost see him filling in the gaps and reading information from the sound that Reeve never could. He looked up in the direction of the noise as he broke up the soil, lips slightly parted as if he was going to say something to himself, a different man from the one who’d walked in looking like everyone’s worst nightmare. He still looked intimidating in a bar-brawl kind of way, but the pants that had been a proper fit were now loose, and his belt—yeah, he could have ended it for himself any time—was several notches tighter. He’d lost a lot of muscle. The end drooped from the buckle, ten centimeters at least.

  “Hey, Marcus?” Reeve called, but Marcus didn’t look up. Maybe he hadn’t heard him. He went on digging, occasionally bending down to fish something out of the soil, brush the dirt off with his thumb, and put it in his pocket. Reeve had found his own blade that way, a broken kitchen knife that could still be honed and used defensively. “Marcus?”

  Marcus finished turning over the soil and stood staring at it like he’d dug a grave. Then he stepped back and leaned on the shovel, looking up into the sky. A lot of guys did that, but not in the way Marcus did. Reeve saw what had grabbed his attention. A Raven helicopter chattered overhead and Marcus tracked it, slowly and sadly, watching it until the sound faded and it was gone. Maybe he had a way of recognizing individual choppers and realized he knew the pilot or something. Then he wiped his hands on his pants, shouldered the shovel like a rifle, and looked across the garden at Reeve.

  “What?” he called.

  “You done?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You want to join us?”

  “Yeah, cocktails on the terrace.” Marcus stabbed the shovel in the dirt again and went back to digging. “Sorry. No tux.”

  “We’re doing some home improvements. Plumbing.”

  “I know.”

  “Come on, Marcus. For fuck’s sake, buck up. Or at least help us out.”

  Marcus froze with the shovel just above the soil and gave Reeve that look, the one where he turned his head really slowly as if he was daring him to repeat some insult before ripping his head off. Reeve could read bits of him now—not the whole man, because this guy was an expert at keeping the shutters drawn, but
enough to understand the landscape of where he could and couldn’t tread.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “You shouldn’t be in here. You of all people. They need you outside whether they admit it or not.” Maybe provoking him, pressing that machismo button, would put some fight back in him. He had a temper. He just had to harness it. “Don’t let the motherfuckers win.”

  It didn’t work. Marcus looked unmoved, not galvanized. “Thanks for the concern but don’t try to psych me up.”

  Okay, I tried. “And when are you going to read your goddamn letters?”

  Marcus went on digging like a machine and didn’t respond.

  “You ought to know,” Reeve said. “Campbell’s boy’s been killed. Try and stay out of his way and don’t piss him off.”

  Marcus’s rhythm faltered for a second. “Poor bastard,” he said.

  Reeve wandered off and watched from the door, waiting for Marcus to give in out of boredom, but he just finished digging and walked over to the carp pond to stare into the murky water and lob small things to the fish. He was probably feeding them leatherjackets or other pests he’d dug up. Reeve gave up and went back into the maintenance area, working out another tack to try later.

  “So the COG sends his regrets, does he?” Edouain said. He held out his hand to help Vance out of the hole. “Pity. Everybody needs a hobby.”

  Reeve shoved the buckets into the janitor’s closet, not that anyone was going to be checking. “The screws must know we’re up to something. Nobody spends this much time cleaning the place.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you keep saying that, but they’re not going to rock the boat.” Vance squeezed out of the hole like a gopher. “If they weren’t here, they’d be cuddling a Lancer with a bunch of drones up their asses. And so would we.”

  And so would everyone who got out of here, probably. Escaping was the less suicidal of two options, but it still meant walking straight out into a war zone. Reeve kept trying to recall the routes and safe houses he used in the city, but that had been before E-Day and everything he saw from the outside world told him that once he got beyond the Slab’s walls, there’d be nothing left that he recognized except the landmark buildings in the center of Jacinto, like the Octus Tower, the Ginnet Mausoleum, and not much else. He’d be like a paratrooper dropped into enemy territory without a map. They all would, except Marcus, and he didn’t look as if he was planning to come along for the trip.

  Gallego and Parmenter were up on the gantry when Reeve walked back into the cell block. Parmenter had Jerry with him on a leash. That was unusual in itself, because the dogs normally stayed on the ground floor. Reeve could see the mutt shifting unhappily from foot to foot on the metal grid, probably because his pads kept slipping between the gaps. Or maybe he didn’t like heights: that was interesting. Reeve was watching for Campbell. He was definitely back, despite losing his son, because Reeve had seen him walk past the security doors.

  Merino sidled up beside Reeve and stood watching too. “We’re all back to normal again, are we?”

  “No. Campbell’s son bought it.”

  “Oh. He’ll want to express his feelings to Fenix, then.”

  “Fenix is the Chairman’s anointed. Campbell can’t touch him now.”

  “Chairman’s an hour away in heavy traffic and only knows what he gets told. Takes a minute to settle a score.”

  “He hasn’t got a score.”

  “Got to take it out on someone.”

  Reeve was still watching Jerry, trying to work out how to make use of the dog’s weakness. It might come in useful one day. The animal was standing still, ears pricked forward and staring down through the grid, but then he threw his head up and looked around as if someone had yelled at him.

  Parmenter put out a hand to steady him. “You okay, boy? What is it?”

  The other dogs started barking somewhere behind the wooden shutter. Reeve looked around to see who was coming in, but the main security doors stayed shut. Jerry started whining.

  Marcus stepped out of his cell and took slow, careful paces down the hall with his eyes fixed on the paving slabs as if he was looking for lost keys or something. Reeve watched him. He tilted his head slightly, not focusing on anything. The dogs were still barking. It wasn’t their usual crazed frenzy sound, more sporadic and hesitant, a kind of whistling in the dark for dogs.

  Marcus pointed down at his boots. “You can’t feel that?”

  “No.” Merino had suddenly taken an interest. “What is it?”

  “Grubs.” Marcus shrugged and turned back to his cell. Reeve realized he had something in his hand, a strip of metal or something that he was fiddling with. “Must be excavating something big.”

  “Goddamn it, underneath us?”

  “No. A few klicks away, probably.”

  Merino wasn’t easily rattled. Reeve wondered if Marcus was just winding him up, but the dogs seemed to be able to sense it too. Maybe Gears were more attuned to small vibrations because they had to react to them. Nobody in the Slab had ever had to learn and read the danger signs for real. They were still cocooned in granite.

  “Is he fucking with me?” Merino demanded.

  “No, he’s just being a Gear,” Reeve said. “Another reason to get off his case. You think the screws are going to hang around and evacuate us if those things show up? Watch Marcus. He’ll know before we do.”

  He left Merino to ponder that and wandered across to Marcus’s cell. Marcus was sitting on his bunk, holding that damn envelope at its corners between thumb and forefinger. Reeve could see what the metal thing was now. It was sitting on the bunk, a broken knife or a piece of metal strap from a crate. It was the first time Reeve had actually seen him with a blade, another subtle hint of a changing attitude.

  Reeve decided to give him another nudge along the path. “What’s this, one of those cabaret acts where you guess what’s written on a piece of paper without looking at it?”

  “I’m wondering how I get back to solitary, since you ask,” Marcus said.

  Reeve ignored the piss-off message. “Ah, come on. Read it. How long have you been incubating that letter under your mattress?”

  Marcus would have punched him out or walked off by now if he’d really been offended, Reeve decided. Marcus stared at him for a few seconds. His expression had upgraded from the usual just-fucking-kill-me look in his eyes to grim distraction, which was progress of a kind. Then he peeled back the flap of the envelope, took out the folded paper, and carefully extracted a photo while keeping it face-down.

  He must have spent forever feeling that envelope and being too scared to look at the photo. And he still is. Poor asshole.

  It would have been good manners to turn away while Marcus read, but Reeve needed to see his reaction. He wanted to watch it transform him. Dumb and sentimental, maybe, but seeing other guys find a way to hang on helped Reeve keep going himself. But Marcus wasn’t transformed, at least not in the right direction. He clenched his jaw, suddenly expressionless again, but his eyes were brimming.

  So she’d either dumped him or not dumped him. It was hard to work out what he really wanted. Then he did the unexpected and held the photo out to Reeve, not even glancing at it. So it had to be one of her.

  Or maybe her now getting married to his best buddy …

  “You going to look at it?” Reeve asked.

  “Are you?”

  Wow. Weird. I thought he’d punch the shit out of anyone for gazing on her frigging sacred countenance. “Okay, but what do you want me to do then?”

  “Just understand,” Marcus said.

  Reeve wasn’t expecting her to be a complete dog, but he wasn’t expecting her to look like that, either. She was the kind of woman that heroes got issued with. It was a strange snapshot in an office, as if that was all she had to send him, or maybe it was a day that had some special meaning for them.

  “Okay, I can see why you’re cut up,” Reeve said. “But I’d keep going if a terrific piece of ass like that was waiting
for me.”

  There was every chance that he’d given the wrong answer and that Marcus was now going to break his neck in a couple of efficient seconds, but the guy just held out his hand for the photo and put it back in the envelope without looking. Then he stuffed the envelope in his pants pocket. Reeve bunched his fingers into a pen grip and mimed scribbling. Go on, reply to her. Marcus shrugged. But there was a definite change in him: the reminder of the world he’d lost had upset him, but he was obviously thinking something over, and maybe that had given him the nerve to finally open the letter.

  “I’ve got KP duty,” he said, standing up. Ah, he hadn’t used that term before. The army in him was seeping out again, which might have been a good sign. “Aren’t you supposed to be nursemaiding me in case I drown in the goddamn soup?”

  “Yeah, I need to guarantee my smokes,” Reeve said. “Is the Chairman going to drop by again to chew the fat with you? Wow, for a social outcast, you still move in some fancy circles.”

  Marcus grunted, walked out, and glanced up at the gantry, Reeve right behind him. Campbell was up on the metal walkway all on his own, elbows resting on the rail, head down, and when he looked up again it was pretty clear that his mind wasn’t on the prison or anything happening inside the walls. All the little tics and gestures that the world outside might miss were magnified here, where there was nothing else to do except focus on the tiny community that Reeve was now stuck in.

  Then Campbell seemed to notice Marcus and spat over the side again.

  Reeve expected Marcus to just ignore it like he’d done before, but he stopped and turned square-on to Campbell.

  “I’m sorry about your son,” he said. “I really am.”

  Campbell looked at him for a second, then just turned his head away. It was hard to tell if that had made things worse or not. Marcus walked off and Reeve thought nothing more of it. They had to pass through a stretch of corridor with open security gates at either end that closed top to bottom, and Marcus was a couple of meters ahead of Reeve when one started to slide down.