Ascendant Unrest

by Matthew S. Cox

  Sarah murmured and cuddled tighter.

  Dolls, teddy bears, or anything of the sort had been a mystery to Maya. Her former home had been so austere it could’ve passed as a demonstration unit for prospective tenants. Having Sarah squeezing her like some overgrown stuffed animal did make her feel somewhat better, and lessened her worry that Genna would get hurt enough to let her eyelids become heavy.

  The apartment hung in deathly silence. Her head felt detached from her body, as if floating off.

  Thump, thump, thump. “Quiet down in there,” muttered The Dad on the other side of the wall.

  Approaching sleep backed off, leaving her fully awake. Maya rolled her eyes. We couldn’t be any quieter unless we stopped breathing. She scowled at the wall. He’s probably hearing the rats two apartments over.

  Drone fans approached outside the window.

  Maya pulled the sheets up over her head, scooting down to hide.

  “Mmm?” whispered Sarah. Moonlight striking the white sheet illuminated the small igloo of bedding. “What?”

  Wide-eyed, Maya pointed toward the window and whispered, “There’s a drone outside.”

  The buzzing became louder and faded, grew louder again, and trailed off the other way.

  “It sounds small,” whispered Maya.

  “Rat killer?” Sarah yawned.

  The Dad bumped the wall again, though the single, softer thump most likely happened by accident while he tossed and turned. A minute or so later, he grunted. The squeak of a door came from the hallway, and shuffling went by their room. After the clank of a toilet seat, the echo of nocturnal urination came from the hallway.

  Sarah grinned.

  “It’s so loud!” whispered Maya, also smiling.

  “Yeah.” Sarah put a hand over her mouth and giggled.

  That got Maya laughing. She bit her arm to muffle herself.

  When The Dad farted, Maya wanted to laugh aloud so badly she cried. Sarah made a gagging face before muffling herself in the pillow, shaking the whole bed with the giggles. The echo of peeing ceased.

  Bweee. Bweee. Bweee.

  The electronic beeping from the other side of the wall killed Sarah’s smile as fast as a light switch. She shot upright, a look of pure terror on her face.

  Maya, not quite done laughing, glanced up at her. “He set his alarm for the middle of the night?”

  “No.” Sarah put her hand over Maya’s mouth and whispered, “Someone just opened the front door; we need to hide.” She leapt over Maya and pulled her out of bed, heading for the closet.

  “No,” rasped Maya, setting her heels in an effort to resist being dragged. “That’s the first place they’ll check.”

  Sarah searched around for a second before diving at the closet and grabbing the Hornet pistol.

  The Dad grumbled something unintelligible and ran by, heading to his bedroom.

  Maya crept up to the door and peered into the hall. Two men in black with facemasks had entered the apartment. One stood in the center of the living room with a small rifle pointed in the general direction of the hallway while the other one edged up to the kitchen.

  No! Maya rolled away from the door, back to the wall, hoping they hadn’t seen her.

  Sarah backed out of the closet, holding the yellow-and-black striped gun.

  “We gotta run!” whisper-yelled Maya, running over to grab Sarah.

  The Dad glided past the door, fired a rapid barrage from his rifle, and shouted, “Sons um bitches! P’rim-ter breach!”

  Maya screamed and clamped her hands over her ears as the rapport of gunfire smashed the silence. Puffs of white dust burst out of the wall by the door. Sarah tackled her to the floor and crawled back against the bed, dragging her.

  “Think ya kin sneak me?!” shouted The Dad during a brief pause in the firing.

  Sarah pushed Maya down. “Stay here.”

  As soon as the girl took a step toward the door, Maya sprang up and grabbed her from behind. “No!”

  The Dad roared in pain and broke into coughing, though his gun kept going off.

  “Dad!” screamed Sarah. She thrashed, trying to get away from Maya.

  Maya refused to let go but lacked the strength to stop her friend from dragging her to the doorway. They caught a fleeting glimpse of The Dad taking cover at the corner, shooting down the corridor, blood oozing from his back.

  Muzzle flare flashed in the living room, and The Dad ducked a spray of plaster.

  Sarah froze, trembling on her feet.

  “Grr!” Maya snarled, wrapped herself around Sarah’s middle, and hauled her across the bedroom to the window. “Fire escape!”

  Sarah looked back and forth between the window and the door. “But….”

  “They’ll kill you!” Maya shook her. “We have to run!”

  As if on cue, a bullet burst out of the wall above them in a spray of plaster dust.

  Maya shoved the window open and climbed out onto the chilly metal fire escape. She turned back to help Sarah, but the girl stared at the doorway, sobbing. “Sarah! Come on! We gotta run!”

  The snap of a nearby ricochet startled a high-pitched scream from Sarah. She leapt up and through the window. Maya hugged her for a split second before running to the stairs. The entire metal scaffold along the side of the building clattered with their meager weight, threatening to break off. With gunfire still raging overhead, Maya scurried down the first ramp to the sixth floor, rounded the railing, and came eye-to-camera with a drone the size of a housecat.

  “Shit!” screamed Maya.

  Sarah crashed into her from behind, almost taking her off her feet.

  I knew it! Maya’s anger flash burned, consuming panic and fear. The drone would trail them outside. The window on that level had been left open, the apartment below Sarah’s unused. She climbed halfway in before she realized Sarah had continued past her to the next set of stairs.

  “Here!” she yelled.

  Her friend backpedaled, shrieking and waving her arms at the drone as if it were a giant wasp. Maya jumped down from the windowsill, stepping on something hard that crushed into slime. The drone glided up to the window as if it would follow them straight inside. Without bothering to look, she grabbed the first object she spotted, an old trophy of some kind, and threw it at the buzzing annoyance.

  The block of wood and crystal clipped the drone’s left side, sending the small remote camera into a spin. It bounced off the metal gridding of the sixth-floor fire escape and tumbled out into the air over the street. From the pitch change in the fans, she figured it recovered in a few seconds.

  Sarah came in the window head first, slithering forward until her hands touched carpet.

  When Maya took a step back to help her up, she again stepped on something hard that burst into a patch of slime. “There’s a lot of roaches in here, aren’t there?” She didn’t look down.

  “Daddy!” whimpered Sarah. “They shot him.”

  “They’re gonna shoot us too. We don’t have time to be sad right now.” Maya grabbed her by the hand and ran.

  Somewhere between nine and fourteen roaches died to her bare feet between the back bedroom and the front door. Maya squealed in disgust for the whole sprint, and continued gagging as she ran down the corridor to the elevators.

  “What are you doing?” whispered Sarah. “They’re broken.”

  Maya punched in the code on the up/down buttons, and shoved the fake elevator door open inward. “No time to explain.” She grabbed Sarah and pulled her into the doorway. “Ladder. Down. Go!”

  Without a word, Sarah extended her leg to the ladder and nervously shifted her weight onto it. Maya bounced on her toes, gaze locked on the stairway behind them, dreading those men would show up before she could get out of sight. Sarah needed to move faster. As soon as the girl went down a rung, Maya jumped in and slammed the door behind her.

  “Gah!” Sarah wailed. “It’s dark!”

  “Shh! If they come looking, they’ll hear us,” whispered Maya.
>
  “I’m scared,” whispered Sarah.

  “It’s okay. We’re safe in here. We don’t have to break our necks. You can climb slow, just stay quiet.”

  “’Kay.”

  The tromp of boots echoed in the shaft from above. Maya peered into the dark, imagining the two men going right past the elevator without giving it a second look. The dented and warped doors had been good enough to fool the Authority for years. If two men went by, that probably meant that Sarah’s father… She swallowed the lump in her throat. Maybe it’s a whole team, or they backed off. The drone saw us go out the window. They didn’t need to keep shooting at him.

  Minutes passed in a gradual descent. Her feet stuck to the rung from the bug guts on her soles, but she kept quiet. Too much adrenaline in her system made worrying about cockroach germs trivial. Eventually, the glow from the weak LEDs at the bottom lifted the elevator shaft out of total darkness, and Sarah moved faster.

  At the bottom, Sarah stepped off the ladder into a spin, surveying the chamber. “What is this?”

  Maya wiped her feet on the concrete after she got off the ladder. “You can’t tell anyone about this. It’s top-secret Brigade stuff. Only for emergencies.”

  “What are we supposed to do now?” Sarah, shivering, stared at her.

  The older girl appeared frightened, small, and vulnerable standing there in the dim light, a far cry from the little mother who always looked out for the smaller kids. The sight of her lost and confused, clutching the Hornet to her chest like some twisted child’s toy, broke Maya’s artificial courage. She clasped her hands over her mouth and wept.

  Her tears got Sarah’s flowing.

  Maya hurried over and held on. The girls clung to each other, shaking in the dark with a gentle side-to-side rocking, chins resting on shoulders. Every so often, the noise of someone moving past one of the elevator doors made her twitch. Eventually, crying gave way to staring into space.

  “Why did the Authority try to kill us?” whispered Sarah.

  Maya sniffled. “They aren’t Authority.”

  “Who are they?” whispered Sarah.

  She shivered. “I don’t know. Bad guys.”

  They didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen before. Not military, not Ascendant, not Authority. Clinging to Sarah, Maya gazed up at the damp, moldy ceiling.

  A forgotten, crumbling tunnel didn’t feel like such a scary place after all.

  8

  Bee Stings

  On a cot beneath the ground, under a coarse wool blanket, Maya and Sarah held each other, trying to stay quiet and motionless.

  A cluster of camping beds and locker cabinets lined the walls of a larger tunnel beyond the dangerous narrow section that appeared ready to collapse, where the Brigade had tunneled from the bottom of the elevator shaft into an existing subway or sewer. There, they had created a small sanctuary.

  Maya stared at the wall, rubbing Sarah’s shoulder whenever she cried and staring over her at the wall during stretches of silence. She jerked awake with a start, realizing she’d passed out at some point. The gloomy space robbed her of any sense of time. Sarah had gone from hugging her chest-to-chest to mostly lying on her back with one arm across her forehead. The girl’s hand had turned black from the filthy ladder. Maya watched her breathe, battling a growing sense of guilt that what had happened to The Dad had been her fault.

  “What time is it?” mumbled Sarah, not opening her eyes.

  “I don’t know.” Maya pushed herself up to sit and looked around. “There’s no clocks down here.”

  “I think I fell asleep.” Sarah moved her arm from her forehead to rest at her side.

  “Yeah. Me too, but it could’ve been only a few minutes.”

  Sarah yawned. “I don’t think so. I gotta pee real bad.”

  “Mmm.” Maya pulled the blanket aside and got up. She frowned at her T-shirt nightdress and scratched at her shoulder where it peeked out the neck opening. “That man….”

  “What man?” Sarah sat up and swung her legs over the side.

  “The one we saw leaving Mr. Mason’s apartment. He looked at me weird. I think he knew who I was.”

  “So?” asked Sarah. “Everyone in every city knows who you are.”

  Maya waved her hands on either side of her head for emphasis. “No, I mean he recognized me and probably sent those guys.”

  “Why would he do that? He seemed to get mad about Mr. Mason.” Sarah stood and looked around.

  Maya forced herself to sit up and let her feet dangle over the side of the cot.

  “Can we go back up?” Sarah bit her lip. “I wanna find Dad.”

  “I dunno. They might be waiting for me. That little drone.” Maya shivered. “There’s a way out at the end of the tunnel. They won’t be watching that.”

  Sarah wandered to the left, deeper into the dark. “They shot him.”

  “I still heard him cursing when we went out the window. The drone saw me. Those guys probably ran after us and left your dad alone.”

  “You think?” Sarah made a sudden turn and jogged a few steps to an exposed toilet against the wall. She lifted her dress without hesitation and sat.

  Maya whirled away. “Uhh, I hope so.”

  “Sorry. I couldn’t wait. What’s a little lack of privacy after being shot at?”

  Maya let out a sad chuckle but still didn’t look.

  Once the (sort of) flush happened, Maya slid off the cot and walked over to take a seat on the toilet, grateful the lack of light hid all the frightening details of what she must be touching. Sarah hovered protectively close.

  “Maybe we should stay here until Genna comes back?” asked Sarah. “Is there food?”

  Maya hopped back to her feet, taking a moment to wipe imagined contamination off the backs of her legs before reaching up to the improvised flush valve. “I don’t think so. If they stored food here, there’d be rats. Maybe those ration things, but I don’t think people are supposed to camp in this place for days. And if those men are waiting for us, I have to warn Genna and the others before they go inside.”

  Sarah looked down.

  “And find an Authority officer to get help for your dad.”

  “What?” Sarah gawked at her. “They’ll just finish him off if he’s even still alive. And it could’ve been them last night!”

  “No. Blueberries wouldn’t have snuck inside at night. They’d have kicked down the door and walked right in―after locking down the whole building. And they hate guns more than they hate Nons. Don’t forget your dad’s a veteran. He’s still a Citizen. They’ll care.” Maya grabbed her hand. “Come on.”

  “Veterans are allowed to have guns,” said Sarah.

  “They are?” Maya glanced at her.

  “Yeah. That’s what Dad says.” Sarah stuffed the Hornet under her dress. Without the holster, she kept her hand on it so it didn’t fall. “Someone will definitely want to steal this.”

  Chunks of concrete littered the tunnel ahead, with the occasional bit of pipe or cluster of plastic bottles for variety. Maya stepped with care, wary of putting her unprotected feet down on something sharp. It made her think of the first time Genna wanted to carry her into the Hab, worried she’d cut herself on glass or something.

  “Ow,” said Sarah. “You’re gonna break my hand.”

  “Sorry.” Maya stopped squeezing so hard.

  “I’m scared too.” Sarah wiped her nose on the back of her left arm but didn’t let go of Maya’s hand. “Dad was gonna go to the VA. He’s too sick to get shot.”

  “Getting shot sucks no matter how sick you are or aren’t.”

  Their voices echoed off the mold-stained walls, devoured by the darkness in front and behind. The deeper they went, the heavier the stink of mildew and dirt became. Feeble LED bricks gave off only enough light to reveal the walls and some of the bigger rocks in the way. The passageway took on a gradual curve after several minutes of walking. A cluster of metal cabinets on the wall bore labels reading ‘High Voltage
,’ ‘Maryland Transit Administration,’ and an inspection sticker dated June 2031.

  “Wow, this is long,” said Sarah. “Are you sure there’s an end?”

  “Genna said it goes to the outside. It’s how they escape the Authority. You can’t tell anyone about it. She made me promise not to tell anyone.”

  Sarah squeezed her hand. “Sorry.”

  “No way was I gonna leave you there. Mom can yell at me all she wants. Getting shot at was an emergency.” Maya stopped, bug-eyed. “Oh, shit.”

  “Stop swearing. You’re too little.”

  Maya turned her head slow, looking up at her with dread in her eyes. “I think they wanted to kill me. They were shooting into your room.”

  “They fired at Dad. If they wanted to hit us blind, they’d have gone full auto.”

  “’Kay.” Maya swallowed hard, not quite believing that but finding it more appealing.

  “Look.” Sarah pointed.

  A thin rectangle of daylight ahead suggested the presence of a door leading outside. Around it, down-angled shafts of sun illuminated swirling particles of dust. Without another word, Maya hurried up to a jog, tugging Sarah along until they reached a metal-and-wood barricade braced against the floor by thick beams that blocked off the end of the tunnel. At its center, a steel door with a push bar had been mounted to a hand-built frame. The soft moan of wind emanated from the other side, raising rattles and clinks from all the junk. A faint breeze slipped past the gap around the door, brushing her face with fresh air.

  Maya gave the bar a shove and the door opened with a scrape. The sudden bright light made her squint at a huge crater of dirt and concrete chunks, strewn with old furniture. From where she stood, the ground continued downward in a bowl shape, pale swirls of dust appearing and vanishing in the breeze. A pathway of dumpsters, ladders, and desks led up to the ground surface on the right side of the collapse. At the far end, the mammoth shapes of two decrepit boilers slept like long-dead dragons under a layer of silt.

  “There must’ve been a skyscraper here.” Sarah looked straight up. “Dad said some of the old subways had stations right in the basements of important buildings. Guess this one blew up, or a bomb hit it.”