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

by Karen Traviss

  “For fuck’s sake …”

  Campbell’s voice carried down the passage behind them. “Fenix? How long are you going to be?”

  Marcus didn’t look back. There wasn’t any hint of bad blood in Campbell’s question, which was weird in itself. “An hour, maybe,” Marcus said. “But if the grubs get into the wing first, run like hell.”

  Reeve thought it was a pull-it-out-your-ass kind of figure, but it might have been Marcus’s way of trying to be polite to Campbell for reasons best known to himself. Marcus seemed the kind of guy who couldn’t be assed to waste his time holding grudges. He exploded, he threw a punch or five, and that was it. It didn’t fit with the marathon-length brooding that went on over other issues, but the one thing he never seemed was vengeful. He’d never have made it in organized crime. A guy had to have a good memory for a slight in that business or else he just had a big target painted on his back marked WEAKLING.

  They reached the doors to the basement. The outer door was dogged back by clips. Marcus stopped to listen, holding his rifle one-handed.

  “Try the lights.”

  Reeve fumbled around for the switches. “They’ll know we’re here.”

  “They know already.”

  “Okay … there you go.”

  There was a dim light somewhere in the corridor ahead. Reeve could now see the long row of doors, either locked shut or dogged open. When he walked through the outer door, he realized that the light was actually coming from a passage with internal windows that ran parallel to the main one.

  “These are external deadbolts, right?” Marcus asked. “Slam them and they lock you in. Key to get in, key to get out.”

  “Yeah. Probably because you need to be able to bang the nutters up fast in an emergency. Because while you’re looking for your keys, some guy’s eating your face off.”

  “Okay. Let’s clear this place a cell at a time.”

  Reeve never worked in a team. When he went on a job, he had to do it alone. The targets he was given weren’t always sitting in happy ignorance of the round that was about to turn their brain to mush, and quite a few of them had guys employed to stop guys like him, but this soldier stuff was a lot more systematic. He tried to use his common sense in working out what Marcus was signaling him to do and where he needed him to go. It was a case of thinking what he’d do if he was a Wretch or a grub watching them, and doing it to the Wretch before the Wretch did it to him.

  Yeah, it all came down to the same thing. It was just technique.

  “So some of these things have guns and some don’t.” Reeve covered Marcus’s back as he stood to one side of each door and then stepped in with the rifle raised. “I’ve led a sheltered life, obviously.”

  “No wonder you guys didn’t have much of an escape committee.”

  They moved down the passage almost back to back, checking the ceiling as well. Wretches could cling anywhere. That changed the game a bit.

  “There’s no water on the floors,” Marcus said. “It’s drained out somewhere.”

  “How long have we been down here?”

  “No idea. Twenty minutes. Half an hour.”

  “Yeah, time flies when you’re enjoying yourself.”

  Marcus aimed his rifle at the ceiling. Some of it was stone, but some was the metal grid that was installed just about everywhere in the Slab. Reeve had never worked out why they used it unless it was to make the place colder and more miserable, or to let the warders spy on or piss over the inmates. It certainly wasn’t to keep fresh air flowing. But it did allow more light into places like this, and when Reeve looked up to see what had spooked Marcus, he was staring at a Wretch’s ass, and the Wretch was staring down at him.

  Reeve fired.

  Shit, that was messy. Reeve ducked the spatter. The Wretch managed to scramble away for a few meters, shedding blood and all kinds of stuff over the corridor, then slumped dead. Marcus didn’t turn a hair. “So where does that conduit they’re using actually start?”

  “Yeah, it was a good shot through a metal grating, wasn’t it? Don’t mention it.”

  “How do I get in there?”

  “You don’t.”

  “They’re not coming in through the cells. They can’t get into them.” Marcus shook his head. “All the shit I took for granted. Radios. Lancers. Decent boots.”

  “And maybe we shouldn’t have eaten the dogs after all.”

  “I didn’t. Okay, what’s behind this?”

  The end of the passage was blocked off by what looked like a plastered brick wall, but when Marcus tapped it, it sounded more like hollow wood. That got his attention. He kicked it a few times and cocked his head to listen. Reeve could hear the Wretches skittering around above but it was impossible to pin down the direction. They could have been near the roof for all he knew. Maybe they were just coming in over the walls after all.

  “Ever thought of just going back to A Wing and asking Jarvi if he knows what’s behind that, rather than kicking it in?” Reeve asked.

  Marcus shook his head and fished in his pocket for the blade he always kept on him. “Or I could just look.” He started scraping away at the plaster with the blade and exposed wooden battens. It was plasterboard, a pretty useless material for a wall in a prison. “Reeve, you stand back and shoot anything that comes out past me.”

  Marcus began kicking at the plasterboard in a steady rhythm and opened up a small hole at the bottom. Between kicking, ripping with his hand, and cutting into the plaster with the blade, he made an inspection hole about a meter square. A flashlight would have been handy. He got on his knees to peer in, rifle still in one hand.

  “I think I can see light,” he said. “You got any matches?”

  “I’ve got my fire-starter.”

  “What are you, an arsonist now?”

  “Let me find something I can burn.” Reeve backed away, reluctant to turn his back on the hole until he knew what was inside. He went through the cells looking for paper or bedding, not expecting to find anything after the floor had been flooded, but there was an old pillow that might burn for a while. He set it down by the plasterboard wall and started striking the fire-starter over it.

  “Hey, I’m getting reflections off something.” Marcus tore back more plasterboard. He was covered in pale gray gypsum. “Metal joists or bars or something.”

  The pillow smoldered. Then a small flame leapt up from the grimy fabric and the fire took hold.

  “There you go,” Reeve said. The heat was nice, too, but it smelled like burning hair. “What can you see?”

  “Goddamn,” Marcus said. “It’s an old elevator shaft.”

  Reeve warmed his hands by the fire for a few moments while Marcus seemed to be working something out. “You know, we could still just all hole up in A Wing and wait, right?”

  “Wait for what?” Marcus muttered. “The cavalry’s not coming, Reeve. We either stop these assholes getting in and treat this like a siege, which we can’t do in A Wing because it’s got no water. Or we take our chances outside.”

  He started ripping at the plasterboard with renewed vigor. Reeve shoved his pistol in the back of his belt and gave him a hand. They ended up ripping out nearly the whole wall and found themselves looking at elevator machinery, the really fancy old variety with decorative metalwork. The pillow was putting out a lot of smoke now but it had done its job.

  “Could have done with a damn mirror to take a look,” Marcus said. “Okay, I’ll stick my head in and check above. You check below at the same time. Might both get our heads ripped off. Might not.”

  “That’s inspirational. I’ll do it.”

  And they did it, right on cue. Reeve was getting used to working with this guy. Reeve aimed his sidearm down but couldn’t see much apart from faint lights that could have been reflections. Marcus sighted up on something above.

  “Clear,” he said. “The shaft must be capped off at the roof, because I never saw any winch mechanism up there before. But whatever it’s covered by, it’s
glass or mesh. I can see some light.” He looked down. “What’s below here? I thought this was the basement level.”

  “So did I.” Reeve stood up and fanned the smoke away from his face, then kicked what was left of the pillow over to the wall. “You think they’re coming up or down?”

  There was a loud, heavy, metallic clang. Reeve couldn’t place it for a moment. Then the reality hit him at the same moment it seemed to dawn on Marcus.

  “Some bastard’s locked us in,” he growled, and started running down the passage. “Campbell, you fucker, is that you?”

  Reeve was right behind Marcus, thinking the same thought. “Campbell? Open the damn door.”

  It was shut, all right. Marcus rattled it furiously but he wasn’t going to shift it without a key. There wasn’t a lot of point yelling, either. If everybody else was in A Wing now, nobody would hear a thing if the Hammer of goddamn Dawn struck the basement.

  “Campbell?” Marcus hammered on the door. “Reeve’s in here. You can fuck around with me all you want, but he’s not involved. Open the frigging door. Let him go.”

  Reeve held his breath. It was hard to tell if there was any movement outside because the door was so damn thick and heavy. Then something scraped against it.

  “Come on, Campbell. Joke over.”

  The narrow eye-level hatch started to slide. Reeve resisted the urge to shove his pistol through it and blow Campbell’s brains out. And then it slid all the way back.

  Marcus had his rifle in both hands. Maybe he was finding it tough to resist too. Reeve waited, trying to peek through without getting too close. Suddenly weird yellow eyes and a gray, scaly slash of a nose filled the opening and eye-wateringly bad breath wafted in.

  “Groundwalker …” a voice rasped. “Hur hur hur!”

  Marcus squeezed off a burst through the hatch and dropped to the floor. Shots spat back through the opening. Reeve flattened himself against the door and watched the rounds strike the granite walls and ricochet. No doubt about that, then: the big grubs had shown up.

  “Okay, Campbell, I take it all back,” Reeve said. “So what is that thing?”

  “That’s a grub,” Marcus said. He kept looking around like he was planning a way out. “A drone.”

  “Well, we’re in here, and they’re out there, so … have they overrun the place? Are they in A Wing? Yeah, I get your point about missing radios.”

  “If they get in here, we can shut ourselves in a cell and just stay clear of the door.”

  “And starve to death.”

  “They’re not that patient. Plus there’s plumbed water.”

  “I’m not drinking out of the toilet bowl.”

  “You can last three weeks without food, easy.”

  “So you’re not going to make some noble last stand that they’ll toast in the officer’s mess, then.”

  “Depends what comes through that lift shaft.”

  The grub was still taking pot shots through the hatch, making that hur-hur-hur noise, and Reeve finally realized the bastard was laughing. That pissed him off more than he could ever have imagined. He tried to think of something he could shove through the opening, because the passage was pretty well dead straight and that meant there was nowhere to take cover except the cells. It was like a fairground shooting gallery for grubs.

  “Okay.” Marcus jerked his head. “When I say go, crawl along the edge of the wall and into the first open cell. Then we work our way from cell to cell until we reach the shaft.”

  “At least I’m learning to think like you.”

  “I’d see a shrink about that. Ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Go.”

  Reeve went first. It was amazing what a guy could crawl in and not care about if there was a grub firing over his head. But the good news was that all the time the drone had its rifle jammed through the hatch, it couldn’t see where it was firing. Reeve scrambled into the cell and Marcus slid in behind him. The firing carried on for a while, then stopped.

  “One cell at a time,” Marcus said. “If he’s looking through, he’s not firing. He can’t look and fire at the same time. Short runs. Got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then we check out the lift shaft. If it’s not the ingress point, we try going up and out. If it is—then we’ve got the lock-in option.”

  “Okay.” Reeve didn’t like that much. Out sounded a lot better. “Ready?”

  “Go.”

  The grub hadn’t given up. Rounds spat off the walls and hit the floor randomly, and Reeve settled for dashing, not crawling. There was a run of three closed cells that made for a pretty pants-pissing run to cover, but eventually they worked their way down to the end cell and sat with their backs against the wall, sweating and panting despite the chill.

  “Now you can cover me,” Marcus said. He handed him the rifle. “I’m going to check out that lift shaft. Distract him while I get in there. And unclip the door in case we need to slam it in a hurry.”

  “You’re going to break your neck.”

  “Better than letting a grub do it for me.” Marcus indicated the wall outside. “I don’t have to tell you how to do it, do I?”

  “I think I remember.”

  Reeve crawled out and squatted against the open metal door, reaching up to dislodge the hooked bar that held it open flat against the wall. Then he sighted up on the hatch at the far end, just a small letterbox of dim light. He wished he hadn’t switched on the light in the parallel corridor, but it was too damn late now to do anything about it. Marcus darted out from the cell.

  Crack. A round struck short, about halfway down the passage. Reeve fired twice.

  “I’m in,” Marcus said.

  Reeve didn’t dare take his eyes off the door at the far end. He could hear Marcus sliding over stone, the rasp of material on a hard surface, and then a faint noise that sounded like someone polishing wood.

  “I can still see lights below.” Marcus’s voice was muffled and echoey. “And I mean lights. Not reflections. Seen that way too often.”

  “More grubs.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where are you, exactly?”

  “Hanging on the cable.”

  “Holy shit, Marcus, get out of there.”

  “I’m going to climb up.”

  “You’re okay with that?”

  “Yeah.”

  The polishing noise started again, a slow regular rhythm until it faded. Marcus must have been shinning up some cable. He took it all so casually. It gave Reeve a brief insight into the kind of day a Gear had in a war like this. Yeah, Marcus Fenix would never be a civilian. Nobody was going to take the army out of him. The grub fired off a few more bursts from the door and Reeve checked his own magazine. Nineteen rounds left now: he was eking them out carefully.

  Marcus seemed to have been gone for a long time but Reeve could still hear him moving and twanging the cable. Eventually the polishing noise started again. “Okay, Reeve cover me.”

  “Ready.”

  The grub wasn’t watching this time. Maybe it was reloading or calling its buddies to come and watch the show. Marcus darted across the passage and squatted in the open doorway behind Reeve.

  “It’s climbable,” he said. “But the cap of the shaft is mesh. There’s a gap between it and the flat roof. It isn’t big enough for me to push through.”

  “You know that a mouse can squeeze through a hole the diameter of a pencil?”

  “Well, that’s fucking terrific news if you’re a mouse.”

  “So …”

  Reeve stopped. He could hear a noise, echoing and thudding, and Marcus looked at him. It was coming from the shaft. Whatever was down there was coming up, and even if it was Wretches and not the big armed bastards, that was very bad news.

  “That’ll be our guests for dinner,” Reeve said, standing up very slowly.

  Damned if I’m going to get my head torn off.

  Damned if I’m going to let anyone lock me up again, either.

 
; Marcus straightened up. They were just out of the line of fire if the grub decided to play shooting gallery again, with a small margin of error when they stuck their heads out to look forward or behind. The noise from the shaft was getting louder.

  “Time to repel boarders,” Marcus said. “Better shut the door.”

  No. I can’t face that. I haven’t been through all this shit to go back to square one. “You sure they can’t break in?”

  “As sure as I can be. Otherwise I’d be saving the last round for myself.”

  “Should have brought sandwiches.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  No. You’ll be okay, but not me.

  Marcus was a really big guy, not designed for half the things a smaller man like Reeve could do.

  “Sure, Marcus,” Reeve said. He had the rifle and the pistol. He’d done what he promised himself he’d do, smokes or no smokes. He’d done the right thing for a guy who’d done enough right things of his own to deserve a little forgiveness for one shitty decision. Now he was going to do what he needed to, and without having to cause one more death to do it. “I watched your back okay, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” Marcus was distracted, trying to keep an ear on the lift shaft and an eye on the grub at the door. “Never thought any asshole in here would.”

  Reeve kept his hand on the edge of the door. He didn’t have weight on his side, but damn it, he’d give it a go. “Good, because that means you won’t kill me and eat me if we get stuck in here longer than we planned,” he said, and pushed Marcus into the cell like he was joking with him.

  Then he jumped back and slammed the door shut.

  “Hey, what the fuck are you playing at, Reeve?”

  “You’ll be okay in there.”

  “Open the goddamn door.”

  “Come on, you know how it works. Can’t. Now, I’m out of time, so you shut up and wait there, okay?”

  “I said open the door.”

  “See you around, Marcus.”

  “Don’t. Don’t do this. Get in a cell. Lock yourself in, for fuck’s sake, Reeve. You won’t make it out. Reeve!”

  Reeve didn’t answer. He aimed the rifle down the lift shaft and opened fire. The grubs—whatever they were—had to climb up just like he did. He heard thuds and roars as something fell. There were still lights moving below, but a lot further down now. He knew two things for sure: he couldn’t get out along the passage, and he was never going to have a door slammed and locked behind him again, no matter what. He squeezed off a few more rounds, looked down the shaft, and decided he had a few minutes’ head start.