by M. R. Forbes
Hayden glared at her, holding in his anger. He was stuck. Trapped.
“Thanks for the advice,” he said.
Sally pointed her rifle at him. “Let’s go.”
11
“THAT BITCH!” Chains shouted, the moment the door of their room was closed behind them. “All I wanted to do was get my shit to Haven and get the hell back to Lavega. Those grepping Scrappers. Grep them all!”
She stormed around the room, cursing and shouting while Hayden took in their surroundings. The room was on the second floor of Crossroads, one of a number of living spaces that branched off from two main corridors. It had a bed against one wall, a separate toilet and shower in a room to the left, and a small table opposite them. A pair of bulbs hung from wires over their heads, providing all of the light.
Hayden returned to the door and tried to turn the knob. As expected, it was locked. He was sure one or more of the guards had been left outside as well.
“‘Pick up the parts,’ he said,” Chains said, still yelling. “‘It’ll be a piece of grepping cake,’ he said. ‘Easy grepping money,’ he said. ‘Just don’t let the Enforcers see what you’re carrying.’”
“Can you possibly calm down?” Hayden said.
She whirled around to face him. “Calm down? Your shit got me stuck in this prison with you.”
“It was your trouble that got us both stuck in here. If I hadn’t tried to help you, we-”
“And who the grep asked you to try to help me?” she said. “I don’t remember requesting a guardian angel.”
“You seemed grateful twenty minutes ago.”
“That’s before I got locked up by the owner of Crossroads. She may want you to help her plunder some old wreck. She wants me for something else entirely.” She shook her head. “Ewww.”
“She said she would let you go in a couple of days.”
“Said the spider to the fly. Yeah, right. I believe that. You might have just crawled out from under a rock yesterday, but I didn’t. She’ll let me go right to her boudoir, and that’s about it. No thank you.”
“In that case, we both want the same thing, which is to get out of here as soon as possible. So why don’t you take a few breaths and then we can start working on this problem together?”
Chains glared at him for a moment, and then nodded and sat on the edge of the bed, closing her eyes and taking the requested breaths.
Hayden used the time to enter the bathroom. A dirty mirror was propped against the wall behind the sink, and he was able to see his face for the first time in days. He hadn’t realized Jake had shaved him. He put his fingers on the smaller bruises there, and a sewn up cut below his eye. When had that happened? He looked awful.
“I’ve seen asses that look more like a face than your face,” Chains said, entering the bathroom. She unbuttoned her pants, pulling them down and sitting on the toilet, starting to pee before he could move.
“Don’t mind me,” he said.
“Clearly, I don’t,” she replied.
She grabbed a small bit of tissue from beside the toilet, wiping herself and then standing.
“I figure a man who left the warmth and safety of a protected colony and mixed it up with Pig to find their wife has no interest in anyone else, so why be shy? Am I right?” She pulled her pants back up, buttoning them closed.
“That’s not the point,” Hayden said.
“Isn’t it, though?” She laughed. “So you really came from inside a starship?”
“Yes,” Hayden said.
“And the other people there really don’t know they’re on Earth?”
“No.”
She kept laughing. “That’s rich. So, you’re like a planetary virgin. You’re more of an alien than the grepping aliens are.”
“I guess you could put it that way. Can we focus on finding a way out of this?”
“How do you like our little ball of dirt so far?”
“I’m not convinced it’s our ball of dirt.”
“True enough. We’ve had to learn to share. It can be a hard life, I’m a prime example of that, but us humans are an adaptable lot. We keep fighting, and one day we’ll get rid of the trife and the goliaths.”
“Do you really believe that?” Hayden asked.
“Sure, why not? Either that or maybe we can take a starship like yours and get the hell out of here? Is that what you were planning to do once you found your woman?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t gotten that far yet.”
“You need a plan, Sheriff,” Chains said. “What is a Sheriff, anyway? Wiz said you’re a man of the law?”
“I was. I made sure people followed the rules that were put in place for the health and safety of everyone in the colony.”
“Rules. A quaint notion.” She smiled. “The only rules here are King’s, and his only rule is what he wants, he gets. Takers or givers, like Wiz said.” She rolled her eyes. “Except I don’t want her to take me.”
“Then we need to get out.”
“There’s no getting out. Not right now. We’re stuck here together until daybreak at the least. I’d say we could play cards or something, but we haven’t got any cards.” She paused, eyeing him mischievously. “There is a bed. Are the people in your colony monotonous?”
“You mean monogamous, and yes, we are.”
“Okay, so that’s out, too. Damn, I wish I had something to do. I go crazy when I’m awake and not moving around.”
“So do I,” Hayden said, regretting helping her more with every word out of her mouth. “I want to get out now.”
“Funny,” Chains said, still smiling. “At least we still have our sense of humor, right, Hayden?”
“I’m not joking.”
The smile vanished. “No. Uh-uh. No way. I know you’re new around here, but going out there at night? That’s suicide. Even if the trife aren’t massing, the turrets will tear you to shreds. And that’s assuming we can get past the guards, you know, like the one standing right outside the door?”
“I’m willing to take my chances. I killed plenty of trife getting out here.”
“With varying levels of success,” Chains said. “You lost your hand, and you’re covered in cuts and bruises.”
“Pig cut off my hand. If we can get to Wiz’s armory, she has enough firepower to keep the trife at a distance, at least long enough for us to escape in your car.”
“Us? My car? I don’t think so. We can break out together, but then I'm going it alone.”
“You said you were going to Haven.”
“I am.”
“So are we.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
She stared at him, biting her lip.
“Trust me, it isn’t because of your winning personality,” Hayden said. “But we have two common enemies and a common goal. It makes sense for us to stick together, at least until we get to Haven.”
“What’s wrong with my personality?”
Hayden didn’t answer.
“Go ahead; you can be honest.”
“You’re a little abrasive,” he said.
“Abrasive? What you call abrasive, I call interesting. You’re duller than a 50cc scooter.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It doesn’t matter. The point is, if we try to escape now, we die. Period. End of story.”
“We need to catch them off guard. They won’t be expecting us to try to run right now.”
“For good reason.”
“When it comes down to it, do you want to take your chances in here or out there?”
“Honestly? I like being alive.”
“More than you like being free?”
She sighed. “Damn. You got me there, Sheriff. This is crazy, you know?”
“I’m desperate.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Can you fight?”
She smiled, reaching up to the chains connected at her elbows. She disconnected a few of t
hem on each side, quickly wrapping them around her knuckles.
“They don’t call me Chains for nothing.”
12
NATALIA DUKE LEANED her head to the side to look out of the front windshield of the car as it began to slow. A pile of old cars had been assembled ahead of them, a stack ten husks tall that stretched from a chokepoint in the center of the wide road to both the left and the right, extending twenty meters in each direction. A separate vehicle sat in the middle of the barrier, an armored behemoth of a truck, heavily armored and featuring a long barrel that extended from the center. A dozen men and women in sand-colored robes, half of them wearing breathing masks and tinted glasses, stood on the armored car and on the junk pile, rifles in hand, waiting for her vehicle to near.
“Where are we?” she asked, looking over at the other passenger in the car, a lanky man in a white suit. His large brimmed hat was resting in his lap, his hands hidden beneath it.
He barely turned his head to look at her, but his eyes shifted far to the left. He paused deliberately before he spoke.
“We call it Sanisco,” he replied. “It is King’s home city. You’ll be able to see the Fortress once we’re beyond the checkpoint.”
Natalia didn’t respond. She continued watching the people on the wall. She didn’t want to see the Fortress. She didn’t want to meet King. She didn’t want to be here at all.
Her hands rubbed the hem of the dress they had given her. It was a white, frilly thing with a high collar and an elaborate checkered pattern, in better condition than anything she had ever worn in her life. A gift from King, to hear her captor tell it. A peace offering. A welcome.
She hated it.
She looked down at her active hands. There were marks on the backs of her fingers where she had dug in her nails, creating a small sense of pain there to help manage the pain of her present experience. There were bruises, too, sustained when she had resisted, first when the large, tattooed man had grabbed her from the other side of the secured hatch in Section C, and then maintained by every other effort she had made to escape from these people.
She didn’t belong here. None of the people of Metro belonged here.
She closed her eyes. They were supposed to be in space, on the way to their new home. They were supposed to have escaped from Earth, a planet she had learned was overrun with alien creatures bent on destroying them. She should have been with Hayden, back in their cube, in the bedroom making good on the Governor’s gift.
Not here. She would rather be anywhere than here.
The truth hadn’t completely settled. Not yet. There was a part of her that still felt like she would wake up, turn her head to the right, and see Hayden there, sound asleep. She would listen to him snore for a few minutes. Then she would close her eyes and pass the entire thing off as a bad dream.
Only it wasn’t a dream.
It wasn’t a nightmare, either.
It was worse.
It was reality.
She could feel the tears welling in her eyes. Hayden had been real, too. She could still see him there, sitting on the back of a horse of all things, a gun in one hand and… he only had the one hand. The other was a stump, bloody and burned. How could he even survive something like that?
He had come for her. He had found a way out of Metro and had given chase to the people who had taken her. She was as amazed by that truth as she was afraid of it. She would have given anything for Hayden to be back in the city, to be safe and sound behind the heavy doors that divided them from this harsh truth. She would have given anything for him to remain ignorant and in the dark, unaware that there was no new home, only the old one.
He had come for her, bruised and bloody and desperate, only to lose her at the last moment because he had a horse, and his captors had a car.
She opened her eyes, glancing over at the man on the seat beside her. Ghost. That was what they all called him. The tattooed man, Pig, had treated him with all the deference in the world. He had been afraid of Ghost.
Terrified of him.
Natalia hadn’t known why when he came to meet the Scrappers inside the Pilgrim. There was nothing about him that looked particularly frightening. He was skinny instead of muscular, soft-spoken instead of loud. His movements looked clumsy, not easy and smooth. He reminded her of Hoskins, one of her Engineers. He was smart, but he was no fighter.
Then the monsters had come.
They had attacked Ghost, Pig, and the others, surrounding them with a force nearly two dozen strong. The Scrappers weren’t afraid of them, not the way they were afraid of Ghost. She had seen the result when of the demons killed one of their number. It had charged past her and into Metro in the dozen or so seconds the hatch was open. Just long enough for it to enter. Just long enough for Pig to pull her out. She hadn’t intended to tell him she was an Engineer, but he had threatened to kill and eat her, and in her surprise and fear she had believed him. She didn’t know then the Pilgrim had never left Earth, and Engineers were important on a starship.
She had learned they were equally important planetside, in the wake of humankind’s loss to the creatures, a story Ghost told her in that whispering, gentle voice of his. She had seen how important firsthand when Ghost had jumped in front of the creatures, two small knives transferring from somewhere on his body to his hands. He had cut them down with a measure of dexterity and power she had never witnessed before.
By the time the last of them was dead, she was afraid of him, too.
She had begged him not to kill Hayden when her husband appeared on the horse, static in front of them in a state of surprised shock. She had whispered to him, “Please. Please don’t.”
She was still surprised he hadn’t, but she had come to understand why later.
He didn’t expect Hayden to survive.
Not in the middle of a Scrapper camp.
Not injured the way he was.
Not with an even bigger, more frightening monster bearing down on him.
Ghost had spared her from having to watch her husband die. That was all.
She reached up to wipe the tears from her eyes. In twelve seconds, her entire life had changed. In twelve seconds, she had lost her innocence. She had lost her husband. She had lost her freedom.
She didn’t know what came next, but she had already decided on one thing:
One way or another, she was going to kill the man who had killed Hayden.
She was going to kill the one they called King.
13
THE ARMORED VEHICLE was driven out of the way, giving the car the space it needed to pass through the barrier and into the outer reaches of Sanisco. There was an eight-meter high, solid wall here, made of concrete and steel, wrapping around this portion of the city all the way back to the water. A gaping wound was visible directly ahead, a jagged cliff of bent metal and sharp stone. The junked cars had been piled one on top of the other to help seal it.
“They built the wall too late,” Ghost said quietly. He always seemed to know when she had a question on her mind before she could begin to ask it. “And they didn’t build it high enough. The trife, they stormed up to it, hundreds of thousands strong, if you can imagine. An entire sea of black-skinned bugs, scaling one another to reach the top. They fired a uranium tipped missile into this section. It killed thousands of them, and plenty of people, too. It didn’t stop them. Not in the end.”
“You mean the creatures got in here?” she asked.
“It was a long time ago. The smart ones hid like they always did. The smart ones didn’t trust the wall.”
“Why patch it, if it doesn’t keep them out?”
“Trife aren’t the only things we have to worry about.”
“You mean the goliaths?”
Ghost had told her about those monsters, too. About how they had appeared one day and started feeding on the trife, eating enough of them that humankind was able to staunch the bleeding, even if they still hadn’t been able to stop it completely.
“This
wall won’t stop a goliath,” Ghost said. “Other people. King’s enemies.”
“Does he have enemies?”
“Everyone has enemies.”
“It seems counter-productive, doesn’t it? For humans to be fighting with one another when the trife are out there trying to kill us all?”
Ghost shifted his eyes to look at her. Then he shrugged. “I don’t make the decisions. I do as I’m told.”
“Why?”
“Because it gets me what I want.”
“Which is?”
“Respect.” He paused a moment. “Four hundred years, Engineer,” he said. “That’s how long the trife have been here. We weren’t able to win with the best military on the planet. How are we supposed to win with a few hundred thousand women and children?”
“There are fewer trife now.”
“They still outnumber us ten to one. Why spend your life on a lost cause, when you can focus on enjoying the time you have? Believe me, Engineer. People tried. They failed. King is giving the common people something to work for. That’s more than they’ve had in awhile.”
“I don’t want to work for King. I want to go back to the Pilgrim.”
“I don’t blame you. If I were you, I would want the same thing.”
He turned his head away from her, indicating he was done talking. Natalia continued staring out the window, watching the first rows of worn and decayed buildings approaching. Most of the structures on the outskirts of Sanisco had been reduced to rubble, cleared and replaced with shanty houses of corrugated steel and plastic, cheap construction for the poorest of residents. She could see them there now, huddled together in worn and torn roughspun cloth, dirty and tired and too skinny. They stared at the car as it passed, and she could imagine them dreaming of one day being able to move around in such luxury.
The shanties gave way to buildings that were still occupiable, though they often had missing walls and large breaks, the frameworks that supported them exposed on the edges, worn and dirty from the years. There were families gathered in those spaces, some with old and tattered mattresses, some with nothing but the floor. A lot of the children she saw running around were naked, their parents unable to afford even meager clothes for them, or trying to preserve them while the weather was warm.