by Natalie Reid
Once he was inside, he went to a bathroom stall, emptied the two drinks into the toilet, and flushed them away. When he came back out to the sinks, he placed his hands under the facet, and watched in a daze as they began to pool with water. He was tempted to duck his head inside, close his eyes and pretend he was back home in his own bathroom. He couldn’t believe, after all this time longing to go on a date with Melissa, now he was finally here, and he was wishing himself away.
He glanced up to the mirror above the sink and saw that a stall behind him opening up. He planned to ask the man coming out what he had ordered for dinner, reasoning that it would have to be better than anything he might pick at random, when he recognized the man coming out of the stall. It was the man that had been sitting in the corner, drinking the Purple Wave or whatever it had been called. Griffin remained hunched over the sink with his hands filling with water, but his eyes caught the stranger’s in the mirror. The man stopped directly behind him and stared intently at Griffin’s reflection, making him uncomfortable.
“You look really familiar,” the man finally said. His voice was hoarse and confrontational.
“Yeah, I was the guy across the restaurant.”
The man shook his head. “I know that, idiot. I mean I know you from somewhere else.”
“No, I haven’t been anywhere else,” he insisted.
The man raised his eyebrows in amusement. Then his expression changed a shade darker. “Now I remember. I knew your father.”
Griffin gulped. No one had even spoken about his father except his mother, and she had been dead for three years now.
“It must be hard on you, knowing why he died,” the man mumbled.
Griffin could smell the faint odor of the liquor on his breath. He wasn’t sure if this man was so drunk that he had mistaken him for someone else, or if he really did know how his father died.
The man stepped around him to come to the sink. He began scrubbing his hands with soap, and continued speaking under his breath. “I never did racking like him. But still, must be hard to live with that. Even I’d feel guilty.”
Griffin looked to the man, then over to the door. He knew he should go, but his feet wouldn’t move. The mention of his father had him rooted to the spot. His mother had always told him that his dad had died in an accident during an expedition, that his air supply had run out and there was no one around to help him replenish it. But the way this man spoke, he made it seem as if his father’s death was somehow his fault.
“What do you mean?” Griffin asked.
The man glanced at him sideways, and then looked back to his hands, chuckling. Griffin’s shoulders slumped to his sides. It was clear he wasn’t going to get a coherent answer from him. He grabbed his glasses with two hands and made for the bathroom’s exit. Before he could reach the door, it swung open and a young man stepped in.
“Excuse me,” Griffin said to the man. “Do you know what’s good here?”
The young man looked down at the glasses in Griffin’s hands. “What?” he asked incredulously.
“It’s just. I don’t know what to get, and I don’t want to make a fool of myself,” he explained.
The young man shook his head and brushed past him, saying, “It’s a little late for that.”
By the time Griffin and Melissa finally left The Jardo, he was more than ready for the night to be over. The conversation in the bathroom, coupled with his tireless efforts to get rid of the rest of his drinks by intermittently spilling them down an electrical hole he had found in the floor near their table, had left him with a tired feeling of dread.
When they reached the spot where they had parked his bike in the back of the restaurant, he had planned on driving her home and then going straight back to his place to collapse on his bed. However, Melissa seemed to have other plans. She reached for his arm before he could get on the bike, and drew him to her, kissing him.
“My room-mate’s got company over for the night,” she said when she broke away. “So I was thinking we could go to your place.”
Griffin’s mouth grew dry and his back stiffened. “My place?” he asked helplessly. “Why would you want to go there? It’s a mess.”
“It’s not the place I want, Griffin,” she said, teasingly.
He gulped. He hadn’t planned on any of this. He thought that The Jardo would be the end of it. Was he really expected to keep this night going? And what if they came home and Harper had finally decided to come back? That might just spell the end of their friendship right there.
“We could just ride around for a while,” he offered weakly.
She looked up at him quizzically, but then her smile returned. “Okay. Why don’t you surprise me?”
They got on the bike and he took off. He gave The Jardo one last glance back, hoping that nothing bad would happen to the electrical wires that were down the hole he had poured his drink into. He took a left down the first street without thinking about where he was going, and just kept driving forward. Melissa had said to surprise him, but it looked like he was also planning on surprising himself.
After a few more minutes of aimless driving and randomly choosing turns, he knew with a fair degree of certainty that they were lost, and with an even greater degree of certainty that they were not in a good part of town. He felt Melissa tighten her arms around his chest as they drove down the streets, watching in apprehension as people trudged by and glanced up at them. Griffin figured that the people walking on the streets here could be separated into two categories. The first were people who were drunk, and the second were people who were up to no good because they wanted money in order to get drunk. He almost wished he had kept his Saturn Wheel. Maybe then he would have something to distract them with if things got ugly.
“Griffin, maybe we should go home now,” Melissa whispered out to him when he had stopped in front of a fork in the road.
“Yeah,” he breathed out. “I was thinking that for the past ten minutes.”
He placed his legs down from the bike, a little difficult because it was hovering in the air, and tried to turn them around with his feet. The bike did not want to make such a sharp turn, and he had to steer the bike in a wide arch, ending up on the sidewalk. He realized now that he could turn safely around without the aid of his feet (in fact, he probably could have done that in the first place, but his feet had come down almost on a will of their own). However, they were now looking down a narrow street that was dimly lit only by the lights in the dirty windows from the buildings above. In the shadows of the alley, he could make out a crowd of men gathering around something. They were muttering phrases and cursing, and appeared to be hitting something.
Before he could tell his brain “no” and inform it of the repercussions, his mouth was shouting out, “Hey!”
The group of men looked over, and Griffin was suddenly stricken with horror. Yelling out like that was something Harper would have done, but he was supposed to be the more rational of the two.
He thought he had just sealed his own death sentence, when the men began fleeing away from him, scattering like a band of rats that had spotted a predator. A feeling of elation rose in his chest. He did it! He scared them away! But how? Then he remembered the bike. They must have thought he was Task Force.
“Griffin, let’s go!” Melissa whispered out urgently.
“Sorry!” he said, raising his feet back up on the bike.
He looked down the street one last time and saw a shadow move. There was a person leaning against the side of the wall. It must have been what the men were hitting. He wanted to go over and see if they were alright, but he could feel Melissa’s body shaking behind him. Giving the figure in the shadows one last glance, he pushed the bike forward and zoomed down the street in a hurried blur.
Chapter 6
Manufacturing Despair
Jessie breathed a silent sigh of relief as the Task Force agent took off on his bike. For a moment she was afraid that he had recognized her, but she had been far enough
in the shadows that he could not see her face.
She wiped the back of her hand along her lower lip, drawing away with blood. The skin under her left eye burned from where one of the drunken men had taken a forceful punch at her. It had taken tremendous self-control not to fight back when they had started to surround her after she had provoked one of the men with a rather rude comment about looking uglier than a Bandit. But the results had been worth it. The fight had left her bruised and bloodied enough for her to take on the role of a desperate fugitive.
When the Task Force agent had travelled far enough away so that she could no longer hear the whir of his engine, she began walking north towards Axel Street. It took her several minutes before she spotted something that looked like the shack Jason had told her about. She turned her head from side to side to make sure that no one was watching her. Satisfied, she walked up to the shack. She opened the door and looked down before she entered, wary of holes that might be hiding. Then, trusting that the ground wasn’t about to take a plunge into the heart of the mountain, she stepped in and closed the door behind her.
The shack was no more than a few feet in length and width, but it was enough for her to stand comfortably inside. There was a large phone sticking out of the wall, one that seemed like it came from long before the Contamination. It was resting on a hook and had a wire going from its base to a hole in the wall. She picked it up and placed it to her ear. She couldn’t hear anything, but Jason had said that someone was always listening.
“This is Jessie Fifty-Fifty,” she spoke into the phone. She winced, hoping she wasn’t making the wrong decision, before saying, “I’ve changed my mind.”
There was silence. For a moment she wondered if Jason had been lying, or if she had gotten the place wrong. Then a voice finally spoke. “The corner of Knot and Axel. There’s a building there with an eagle in its window. Go over to the purple chair in the corner and press the button for the recliner three times.”
The line was silent, so Jessie hung up and walked back outside. She closed her eyes, trying to remember if she had ever seen a street called Knot. It didn’t take her memory long to come up with the answer. It ran just several streets south of here.
A few minutes later, she was standing under the street sign that divided Knot and Axel. She glanced up at it, and it squeaked in the chilling wind that was blowing from the north. She stuffed her hands in her jacket and turned around.
She saw the eagle even before she saw the building. It wasn’t a large eagle. In fact, it was just a small sticker that was stuck to the corner of the window and had faded deep with time. She walked up to the door, but hesitated to open it. A small part of her mind feared that she might never come back up if she went down there.
She turned to look out at the night sky. In the distance, she could just make out the dark silhouettes of the rocky peaks that stood as the guardians of Aero City. She wondered if her mom could see them from where she was being held. With one last lingering look, she sent out a silent promise to her mom that she would be back.
The interior of the building resembled an Expedition Depot that had been closed down for years, yet was unable to get rid of all its items, and so left them there to collect dust. Jessie walked past several bins of nick-knacks and a strange looking artificial pine tree that had lost most of its plastic needles. Going forward, she came upon a few odd machines that had large screens and only a couple buttons on their panels. One of the screens had been cracked and was filling up with cob-webs. There was a painting on the side of this machine of what looked to be a large yellow dot with an open mouth and a red bow on its head. Jessie ran her hands over the clumsy red buttons and joy-stick that jutted out from the panel and wondered what this machine had done when it was still in working condition.
She drew her eyes away when she noticed the purple chair in the corner. It was faded, like everything else in the building, but she noticed that there was a ring around it on the floor that was not covered in dust. The chair itself was facing the wall, and another of those strange, bulky machines with the yellow dot had been placed in front of it to block it from the view of anyone passing by on the street.
Carefully slipping past the machine, she stood in front of the chair and sat down. There was a brown button on the base of the chair, poking out from its cushions. She pressed it in three times and waited. The chair shuddered. Levers underneath her creaked. Then the chair was moving down, and the room slowly receded from her view. Like before, she was led down a dark tunnel of rock and did not catch any glimpse of light until she reached the bottom. Instead of coming down into a dimly-lit cave, she found this part of the underground tunnel system lit with built-in florescent lights. Standing under one, with a smile playing across his lips, was the leader of the Resistance himself.
“I wasn’t expecting you for at least a few more days,” Jason commented in amusement. “What happened?”
She got up from the chair and walked over to him. “I got some sense knocked into me,” she said, gesturing to her face and playing it off as a joke.
His mouth widened into a grin. “Well I’m glad you did.” He extended his hand, confident she would take it this time. “Welcome to the Resistance Jessie.”
She shook his hand. “Call me Chance.”
The name felt odd in her mouth, like some foreign flavor she had half-forgotten from her child-hood. It had felt like so long since someone had called her by that name. It was a name from another life, yet she knew she would need it down here. This was a war she was entering. They didn’t need the fragility of the broken girl that had lost her friend; they needed the soldier Chance. They needed a fighter. And for the prospect of seeing her mom again, she was willing to take back that role.
Jason led her down the lighted hallway until they came to a large metal door. A phone like the one in the shack was hanging off to the side. Jason picked up the phone, saying, “The eagle has fallen.” Immediately the door buzzed and unlocked itself. They stepped inside and entered a large, metal cage with a control panel at one end.
As Jason went over to it, Jessie asked, “What does the eagle mean?”
He glanced back at her in surprise. “You mean you don’t know? I thought the military might have still remembered.”
She shook her head in reply.
“It used to be the symbol of the land that we live in,” he explained. “A symbol of freedom. When people saw it, they felt…safe.” He shrugged his shoulders and pressed a button on the control panel, causing the cage to descend further down the mountain. “People just forgot, I guess.”
“And you’re trying to remind them?”
He turned around to face her. “I know you don’t agree with everything we’re doing, but our intentions are in the right place. We just want to remind the world of what it was before this. Before Ward and his special-interest empire took over and reduced friendships to no more than commodities. People aren’t bartering with money anymore, they’re bartering with people. And people are worth more than that. We aren’t…” He cut himself off, shaking his head. “Listen to me, I sound like my dad.”
Jessie rubbed a sore spot on her nose and looked down at her feet. Purple light began to stream in from the bottom of the cage. Soon they emerged from the tunnel of rock, and she found herself looking at a spectacular sight. It seemed that whoever built Aero City must not have realized that there was a huge cave sitting right underneath it. But what Jessie saw was not just a secret underground cave; it was more like a small village. There were buildings lining streets, purple lamps lighting every corner. They were far enough above everything that Jessie could see the full magnitude of the underground city. She doubted anyone on Task Force knew just how big the Resistance was.
She looked up and saw giant stalactites hanging from the arched ceiling. What made them even more spectacular was that, winding around each of them, were bands of purple lights. They seemed to act as the city’s sun in the day and stars at night. From below, she suspected that it
looked like a dozen or so swirling spirals of light.
The entire spectacle was amazing. She wished she could have stared up at the ceiling for hours, but she had a job to do. Looking back down to the lay-out of the city, she tried to memorize every building. From above, it was hard to tell which ones would be best suited to holding prisoners.
“Amazing, right?” Jason commented when the cage had slowed to a stop at the city’s ground floor.
“How did you build all this?” she asked, glancing back up the chasm they had just come from. “To get all this down here without anyone noticing…” She shook her head in admiration.
He opened the cage and motioned for her to step out. “This was built long before I was born. I just helped renovate it.”
They stepped out onto a road that led straight into the city. A small building stood a few yards ahead of them. The door opened, and a man stepped out, hurrying towards them. It didn’t take her long to recognize the bearded face of the man called Benny.
“Jason!” he called out urgently. “Teresa just found her way into the…” He stopped himself when he realized who Jason was with.
“I’ll be right there,” Jason told him. He turned to Jessie, saying, “This isn’t the way I wanted to welcome you to Bunker City, but it can’t be helped. There’s a building just up the street, second on the right. Go inside and the woman there will make sure you have a place to stay the night.”
Before she could call out a thanks, the two men were running down the street and rushing inside the building that Benny had come out of.