Ascendant Unrest

by Matthew S. Cox

  The van glided down the street in the post-commuter surge hour. They stopped to pick up a light breakfast of fast-food egg sandwiches and ate on the ride. At 10:44 a.m., Pope pulled over by a metal railing where a stairwell led down to a sunken concrete trench full of industrial machinery, fat grey-painted pipes, and windblown trash.

  Genna and Pope changed into the BPA workers’ uniforms before getting out. He walked around to the back doors, grabbed a toolbox, and jogged down the steps. Maya followed, anxious but not frightened, more wanting to get it over with and go home than being scared to do it. Sarah hovered close behind.

  One story below street level, the walls radiated the stench of piss and mildew. Scraps of fabric and char marks gave away where vagrants had camped or cooked. Several dubious stains caused Maya to look away before she tried to figure out if someone died there or merely threw up. A minute’s walk from the stairs, they reached a forest of intertwined pipes that ranged from two-inches in diameter to big enough for Pope to crawl into. He approached a spur leading off from a longer pipe with a smooth, curved endcap labeled ‘SEWER.’ Though it had a bolt fitting every three inches around the outside, only five had nuts securing them.

  Pope hesitated, walked past it surveying the other pipes in the area, and backed up once more to stare at it. He leaned past the end cap to study the pipe itself, then checked and rechecked his minicomputer. “This has got to be the one. It looks larger than he described it.”

  “Still ain’t that big.” Genna walked back and forth around it, shaking her head.

  Maya ducked under the pipe end and traced her fingers over lettering raised out of the metal that repeated ‘water main’ every three feet along the length. “Hey… it says water main on the pipe.”

  “Hope ‘sewer’ is a dissuasion tactic, or this is about to get stinky.” Pope set down the toolbox and took the giant ‘beat a guy to death’ wrench from it.

  While he attacked the pipe cap, Genna helped Maya into the harness, fitting it around her chest, waist, and thighs. “How’s that feel?”

  “Annoying.” She smiled.

  “Yeah, well.” Genna grasped the harness and lifted her off her feet. “It’ll support you.”

  “You know our first jump in training, this guy Private Randall screwed up his harness.” Pope almost lifted himself off the ground by pulling on the wrench. “Come on, bastard. Crack. Anyway, when his ’chute deployed, all his weight came down on his balls.”

  “Ugh.” Genna cringed. “If I had a NuCoin for every time I heard that story.”

  “Heh. Ain’t a story, I was there.” Pope winked.

  “Nah, I mean there’s a lot of dumbasses.” She chuckled. “My group had one too.”

  “Randall was a piece of work.” The wrench screamed as the nut gave and the motor spun to full speed. “Poor bastard’s name was Randall Randall. Bet his parents thought that was cute. We called him R2.”

  Maya rolled her eyes.

  Sarah kept her back to the wall of pipes, watching the top of the other side. Her hair and skirt fluttered in a light breeze.

  A few minutes later, Pope finished fighting with the last nut and dropped the wrench back in the toolbox. “Well, that’s a good sign. Cap didn’t blast off in a torrent of horror.”

  Genna grabbed handles on one side, Pope the other, and they pulled the endcap free of the pipe and eased it to the ground. When no foul smells emerged, Maya stepped up and stood on tiptoe to peer over the bottom. A six-foot length extended downward at an angle to the main pipe underground, which had an inch-thick blue cable run along the bottom.

  “This is it,” said Maya. “Boost please.”

  “Wait.” Sarah bounced. “That’s big enough for me. I’m going with her.” She picked at her fluffy sweater. “Lemme change.”

  “Hurry up,” said Pope.

  Sarah ran across the drainage channel and up the stairs.

  “Pink angora is so out of style for crawling through old pipes,” said Maya.

  Pope clipped a carabiner to the harness, connecting her to a coil of rope in the toolbox.

  Genna gathered Maya’s hair into a scrunchie before putting a headband on her that held a small flashlight. “You sure you wanna do this, baby?”

  “Yes. We’re here already anyway. If Vanessa won’t make money on Fade, she won’t bother.” She looked up at Pope. “Give me a boost? I wanna get this done and go home as fast as possible.”

  “Don’t forget these. I don’t want you cuttin’ your hand on any of that nastiness in there.” Genna handed her a pair of military gloves with rigid panels on the palms and knuckles, the smallest women’s pair Pope could find on his preparatory run. Maya pulled them on despite feeling ridiculous with such oversized mitts. She grabbed the spool of Cat-5 cable and hung it around her neck on a string.

  He chuckled, but hoisted her up into the spur.

  Maya crawled ahead while adjusting her flashlight so the beam pointed where she looked. The offshoot held a minimal amount of gunk, but the older pipe it intersected had a crusty layer of rust flakes, corrosion, and sediment along the bottom. Thankful for the gloves, she set a tentative hand forward. The layer crunched but didn’t hurt her knees. Maya advanced into the main pipe, her shoulders and butt brushing the top. She couldn’t quite crawl at full height, but at least she didn’t have to drag herself like a worm. Within a minute, the taste of metal settled on her tongue with each breath, and the dark, tight confines got under her skin. The little light on her headband gave her a view only twenty or so feet ahead, before the feeble glow drowned in the darkness.

  Crawling fifty meters deep into a pipe too small to turn around in didn’t seem like such an awesome idea anymore. She halted, staring down at the blue cable as thick as her wrist. I gotta do this. Crunching filled the silence, despite Maya not moving.

  “Hey!” Sarah’s voice echoed past her, frighteningly loud despite not being a shout.

  Maya bowed her head and peered between her legs to the rear.

  “Ack!” A short distance behind her, Sarah raised an arm to shield her eyes from the forehead-mounted flashlight. She’d changed to her black tee and probably her BDU pants, not that Maya could see her legs. Sarah crawled ahead on her elbows, her hands wrapped with fabric scraps for protection—most likely Pope’s doing. The pipe didn’t have enough room for her to get up on her hands and knees. “That’s bright.”

  “You can wait outside,” said Maya.

  “Uhh, how about no.” Sarah stopped right behind her. “Come on. This place sucks.”

  Maya grinned and lifted her head to face forward. Not being alone made the dark tube stretching in front of her much less frightening. She made her way forward, the crunch of debris underneath and Sarah’s soft grunts and gasps filling the quiet.

  “I can’t believe we’re letting them do this,” said Genna, her voice carrying down the pipe.

  Pope muttered something too low to make out.

  Confident the plated gloves would protect her hands, Maya crawled as fast as she could, straddling the blue cable. Every so often, a flake of corrosion above snagged on her harness and broke off.

  “It smells better in here than it did outside,” whispered Sarah.

  “Yeah.”

  Minutes later, the rope attached to her harness stopped short, almost making her kiss the pipe.

  “Oof.”

  “Sorry,” whispered Sarah. “My fault. Put my arm on it.”

  Maya pushed herself up. “’Kay.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “A little, but only of getting caught.” Maya resumed crawling. Determined grunts and the occasional crunch of rust flakes breaking away from the pipe echoed for several minutes. Eventually, a flash of white up ahead caught her eye. “I think I see it!”

  “Good. I can’t wait to get out of here.”

  Maya laughed. “It was your idea to come along.”

  “I saw the way you looked at the pipe. You were gonna chicken out.”

  “Was not.” />
  Sarah poked her in the butt. “Were too.”

  “Yeah… Okay. Maybe I would have.”

  As she drew nearer, the spot grew into the front face of an electronic component in a space where the pipe expanded to a small chamber. Fittings on the top and bottom suggested a pump used to be here, but the turbine had been removed when they repurposed this pipe for a network conduit. Maya scooted up to the component and rolled on her side, the spindle of Cat-5 wire around her neck almost in her lap. The fat blue cable she’d been following went into the left side of the repeater unit and came out the other, continuing ahead into the dark. A row of status lights on the top right corner of the box fluttered with network activity on twenty channels, offering a feeble amount of visibility.

  Sarah dragged herself out of the pipe into the wider section, but didn’t have enough room to get her legs all the way out of the pipe, so she propped herself up on her hands like a landed mermaid.

  Maya removed the gloves, set them aside, and pulled at the hatch, but it wouldn’t open. “Uh oh.” She tugged at it again. “Damn.”

  “What?”

  “It won’t open.”

  Sarah pressed closer. “Let me see.”

  “’Kay.” Maya leaned to her right.

  “It’s locked.” Sarah pointed at a silver keyhole at the center of the bottom.

  “Can you pick it?” asked Maya.

  “My bag’s back home, and I lost the spare when my dress fell apart.” She grumbled. “This can’t be a complicated lock. I should be able to rake it.”

  Maya closed her eyes and thought bad words.

  After a minute or three of hunting around, Sarah picked up a thick metal flake. She wedged it in a ventilation slat on the box and snapped off a thin, toothpick-sized fragment. After making a second thicker one, she dropped the remainder. She scooted deeper into the chamber and rolled on her side, head in Maya’s lap. After a bit of squirming to adjust her angle, she inserted both improvised tools in the keyhole, using the thicker spur to tension the lock while raking the thinner one back and forth.

  “Is that going to work?” whispered Maya.

  “I don’t know. I gotta be careful. These picks are brittle. If they break off inside the lock, we’re going to be stuck.”

  Maya nodded. The scratch of metal scraping made her squirm, like an itch somewhere deep inside her body she couldn’t reach.

  “Crap!” whispered Sarah. She dropped one scrap and pinched a broken end between two fingernails, managing to wiggle it out of the lock. “Whew.”

  She made a replacement sliver, and tried again.

  Maya held her breath.

  “I’m getting some of the pins.” Sarah’s extreme concentration forged a stone-faced glower. She let a hint of a whine out her nose. Maya stared wide-eyed, not even breathing in case that faint sound would distract her. As if body language could somehow speak to the lock, Sarah twisted her entire body along with her effort to turn the picks.

  The lock rotated with her, and she pulled the hatch open.

  “Awesome!” Maya held her fists up.

  “Okay. All you. We’re lucky that was a super-crappy lock. Like an old vending machine.” Sarah wriggled backward into the pipe they’d come out of, clapping rust off her hands.

  “We’re almost done.” Maya pulled the cartridge from her thigh pocket, held it up with the circuit-board side facing to the right, and socketed it in the third port down from the top. She leaned close, squinting at tiny plastic letters in the dim light to figure out which port had the ‘AUX’ label.

  Sarah pulled the Cat-5 cable, unwinding a little and connecting it to the dangling cord protruding from the back end of the add-on module.

  “Got it.” Maya plugged in the AUX cable, and a bunch of flashing green lights lit up on the cartridge.

  Sarah rolled flat and pushed herself backward into the pipe. Maya, small enough to turn around in the pump housing, put her gloves back on and crawled after her, face to face. The spindle hanging from her neck rotated as they progressed, network cable unwinding and trailing off between her legs. Sarah’s eagerness to get out of the pipe showed clear on her face and in her rapid backward shuffle.

  The pipe shook with a sudden, loud clank.

  “Eep!” yelled Sarah, stopping short. She tried to look behind her. “Crap! I think I kicked something.”

  Maya leaned forward, peering over her. Light glinted from a barred grate a few inches past Sarah’s sneakers that must’ve snapped down like a guillotine. Fortunately, it jammed three-quarters of the way closed, tilted at an angle, higher up on the left. “Bars behind you.”

  “What was that noise?” yelled a distant Genna.

  “A grate shut on us,” shouted Maya. “We’re stuck!”

  A flurry of chickpea-sized pellets fell from above, bouncing off Maya’s head before collecting on the bottom of the pipe.

  Sarah picked one up and held it into the beam of the flashlight strapped to Maya’s forehead. “Rat poison. It thinks we’re big rats.”

  “What thinks we’re big rats?”

  Sarah shrugged. “Whatever I just stepped on.”

  “Rat gate,” shouted Maya. “How long do they stay down?”

  “Shit!” yelled Genna. “I knew this was a god damned stupid idea.”

  “I don’t think it’s gonna open,” whispered Maya. “It looks broken.”

  “I’m sorry.” Sarah shivered. “I should have waited outside.”

  “You got the lock, and I wouldn’t have been brave enough to keep crawling if you weren’t here.”

  Sarah managed a worried grin.

  After a nervous delay, Genna yelled, “Zero said a couple hours.”

  “Crap,” yelled Maya. “We’re going the other way. I don’t wanna sit here for hours.”

  Silence hung in the pipe for a moment before Genna replied, sounding worried. “Nearest cap is two miles.”

  “Should we wait for the rat-killer robot?” shouted Maya. “And I think the grate is broken. It’s tilted and didn’t close all the way. It might not open again.”

  “Shit!” yelled Genna. “Okay. Go. We’ll meet you on the other end.”

  “Wait!” Maya unhooked the carabiner from her chest and looped it through the lanyard holding the Cat-5 spindle before clipping it around the rope. “Pull the rope out. The wire’s on it. The box is turned on.”

  “Don’t disconnect your safety line,” shouted Genna.

  Sarah covered her ears.

  “Do you have two miles of rope?” yelled Maya.

  Pope’s laughter echoed back.

  The rope went taut, and gently tugged the spindle over Sarah. She shifted to the side so it could roll along the pipe instead. It became stuck at the grate, but she kicked it through the higher side.

  “We’re so lucky that thing jammed.” Sarah whistled.

  “I don’t think you understand what lucky means.”

  “If it came down all the way, we wouldn’t have been able to get the wire out. That spool’s bigger than a rat.”

  “It would’ve been annoying, but we could’ve done it.” Maya waved her hand around. “Unwind it all, tie the wire to the rope and leave the spool behind.”

  “Oh.” Sarah scratched at her head. “Does it hurt?”

  Maya crawled backward to the pump chamber and turned to face the other way. “Does what hurt?”

  “Being smart.”

  “Hah.”

  Maya crawled backward for a few meters until they reached the pump area, where she turned around to face forward. Seams on the opposite side from the network box suggested a hatch that likely led to the outside, though couldn’t be opened from the inside—at least not without a plasma cutter. That left only the pipe as an option.

  Her fear grew, not knowing what waited for them deeper in. Rat-killing robots, rats, electronic sensors, another rat-grate that worked and would trap them for real, or something worse. Sitting here won’t get us out. Maya crawled forward. At least having Sarah with her kep
t worry at a manageable level. She rambled about random, happy things like video games, or Emily talking to the faeries that lived in their building.

  “I bet Marcus is worried about you,” said Sarah.

  “Shut up.” Maya grinned. “Eww.”

  “He really likes you.”

  “Eww.” Maya rolled her eyes. “Eww. Eww. Eww.”

  “You don’t like him?”

  She huffed. “He’s okay. But eww. I’m not kissing a boy.”

  Sarah giggled.

  After a few silent minutes of crawling, Maya blurted, “Maybe when we’re older.”

  “So you do like him.”

  “Eww.”

  Sarah’s laugh echoed for seeming ever.

  More crawling.

  “How many meters is two miles?” asked Sarah. “Is this going to take long?”

  “A mile is 5280 feet, meter’s about 3.2 feet … about 1600 meters. Two times.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “Yeah. I think it’ll take us about two or three hours. Feels like we’re going about one meter per second.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Sarah. “The pipe keeps trying to pull my pants down.”

  “Are you claustrophobic?”

  Sarah hesitated for a few seconds. “Was that a real word?”

  “Yeah. Means afraid of tight places.”

  “Is there a word for being sick of tight places but not scared?”

  Maya pondered. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, whatever that is, I am.” Sarah grunted. “Watch out for anything sticking up that could be another rat trap. My foot hit something.”

  “Okay.”

  Maya slowed a little, sweeping her head-mounted flashlight around to study the pipe for any signs of traps or grates.

  “I hope they don’t turn the water back on,” said Sarah, a long while later.

  Maya shivered. A spike of fear made it momentarily hard to breathe from the mere idea of being stuck in a pipe while it filled with water. “Don’t say that….”

  “Are you afraid of drowning?”

  “Uhh, yeah.” Maya scoffed. “What kind of question is that? It’s a horrible way to die.”

  “Sorry. I’m getting scared now. Saying stupid things.”