by S. T. Moon
“That’s a good question,” he laughed. “Can I trust you?”
She realized she needed to earn his trust if she could. “Do you know what Trevor Niles was doing off the grid?”
Abel and the brothers froze.
“I need an answer,” Victoria said.
“We heard rumors,” Abel said. “None of us have been there for a while. It’s not so easy to slip away when you’re on double secret probation.”
“He was making it look like off-grid settlements were constantly at war with each other,” she said.
“And how did he do that?” Joseph asked, still watching his zone.
“Murdering a lot of people. Spreading lies about who did it.” Victoria remembered how she had met Hanson Breaker, Jonathan’s father, and the girl called Strider. “Nothing has been the same since then.
“What about you, Sam? What’s your story? And how are Joseph and Uriah involved if they’re not from off-grid settlements?” she asked.
“Joe and Uriah are easy to understand. They were raised inside the grid geographically, but without being connected. They came from a very rare subset of society. You may learn more about their people if you stick with us. As for my story, it’s pretty simple too.”
Victoria held up a hand for silence. A Death Angel stalked down a nearby street. After a time, she motioned for him to continue.
“I was rescued when I was about eight years old,” Abel said.
“Rescued?”
“That’s what they called it. I had a troubled childhood, always running away. I’d sneak off the grid and get brought back within a day or two. Until I was fourteen. That time I got in with a settlement not far from the Breaker clan. But when I was sixteen I got rounded up by a 6Corps survey team because I was careless. When I was seventeen I tried again and managed to stay out for another two months.”
“I’m surprised you made it into corporate service,” Victoria said.
“I think they let me in just to see what I knew. They never gave me a good posting. This was my chance to see if I could rise above my history. Kind of feel like a dumbass right now.”
“You know Breaker?”
“We never got along. I lived in a nearby village, like I said. We didn’t see him or his people much. They were always kind of stuck up if you ask me.”
CHAPTER SIX
Hidden in Plain Sight
Martial law fell on downtown D.C. like a tidal wave. Citizens welcomed the parade of tanks and heavily armored infantry. They were corporate mercenaries, which seemed to reassure the desperate faces peering from their hiding places. It looked like an army, but it wasn’t the Army.
The procession gave Victoria anxiety, her understanding being greater than the uninformed public’s. It was such an obvious power play. She wanted nothing to do with it but understood she was caught in the middle.
“I’m beyond my military training. What size force is that?” she asked.
Samuel Abel answered her. “The tanks deploy in squadrons of four. I see four squadrons. If I remember correctly from my military school days, that’s a platoon. The heavy infantry looks like about four companies, battalion strength, more or less.”
The Red-6 Army drove the trio of death Angels into a recently evacuated neighborhood. Despite her trepidations, Victoria felt enormous relief. She and her men headed toward temporary headquarters.
“Victoria!”
Jonathan Breaker’s voice stopped her in her tracks.
He was with a squad but didn’t seem to be one of them. Ignoring their suspicious looks, he caught up to her and lifted her off her feet with a hug.
“What are you doing here? I thought Irene was evaluating you.”
“Every available asset has been moved to the D.C. operation. I’m still being evaluated. I have no doubt she’s watching us right now,” he said.
“It’s good to see you, Jonathan.”
She introduced her team. “I have more, but we were separated during the first contact. It was mayhem.”
“We watched some of that on the way in,” Jonathan said. “Looked pretty hairy.” He nodded at Sam Abel. “Sam.”
“Johnny.”
Victoria didn’t miss the tension between them. They were clearly rivals. In a way, it was refreshing to have this out in the open.
Victoria turned her attention to a Red-6 captain who seemed to be in charge of the mall now that it was thoroughly occupied by company mercenaries.
“Commander Victoria Mayer, reporting with three of my team,” she said.
The captain eyed her. “No salute?”
“Nope. I didn’t join the military. I’m wounded and so are my men. Can you direct me to the aid tent?” she asked.
“Sergeant, please escort Commander Mayer and her men to the aid tent. Let’s make sure she gets reunited with the rest of her team. And she needs to be debriefed,” the captain said.
Breaker stayed with her as she had her wounds cleaned and re-bandaged. The field nurse left to deal with other casualties—some civilian, some corporate.
“I can’t believe you did this without me,” Breaker said.
“I wasn’t given a choice.” Her tone of voice should have warned him this was a dangerous topic.
“Since when did you just take orders? You could have insisted—you and I fought the first Death Angel outbreak together and we should be teamed up. Instead you go out there with this bunch of misfits? Sam Abel? Really?”
“He probably saved my life three or four times during this cluster,” she snapped.
“While he was saving his own. He was always a tough kid, but never really picked sides. No one trusted him off the grid. And it doesn’t look like anyone trusts him on the grid,” Breaker said dismissively.
She changed the subject, her voice cold. “How’s your retraining going?” She was surprised at how much he was annoying her. She was tired and injured, and he wanted to argue.
“It is what it is. That’s not what we were talking about.”
“That’s not what you were talking about,” she corrected. “I’m in the middle of an operation and you show up out of nowhere to criticize me. We can do it that way. My turn. Where the hell were you? You weren’t here. You’re blaming me that you weren’t here. Why didn’t you use all your special training to figure out what was going on and get yourself assigned where it mattered?”
“Unbelievable,” he said.
His wrist watch vibrated and three red lights blinked. A casual observer would be unlikely to even notice. Victoria felt a pang of guilt. He was wearing a GPS monitoring device like a common criminal. This one looked sophisticated. For all she knew, Irene Vail was listening to their every word.
“I have to go,” he said.
“I’m sure you do. Tell her I said hello,” she said, regretting her words almost before they were out.
He walked away.
She gathered her gear and noticed a woman watching her.
“Name’s Monica,” the woman said.
Victoria shook her hand. “Victoria Mayer.”
The woman didn’t have an obvious injury but wore a patient wristband. She jerked her chin. “That your boyfriend?”
Victoria treated the woman to a blank expression. She wanted this conversation about as much as she wanted to gouge her own eyeballs out. “I’m sorry, who are you?”
“He looks like a stud,” Monica said. “Can you confirm?”
“Opinions vary. Maybe if you weren’t lurking in the shadows, you could’ve just asked him yourself,” Victoria said.
She shrugged. “He might’ve recognized me from around HQ. That would have been awkward.”
“You’re from HQ?”
“I get around.”
“I bet you do.”
“I suppose I had that coming. I’ll talk to you later, Victoria Mayer. You better check on your team, I heard they’re a bunch of misfits.”
Victoria puzzled over her words but by the time she was able to formulate a question the woman
was gone.
Victoria checked on the rest of her team, then joined Sam Abel and the Randall brothers for a meal.
“Sorry about Breaker,” Abel said.
“What do you mean?” Victoria asked.
“He seems pissed off. Hope it wasn’t because of me,” Abel said. “I wasn’t always a good guest in the Breaker village. Typical teenage runaway, rebel without a cause type. Never met a rule I didn’t want to break and thought I’d make a name for myself with the other young men by stealing their girlfriends and sisters.”
“How’d that work out for you?” Victoria asked.
He smiled. “Not so good. There’s a reason I got picked up so easily. Took me a while to figure out challenging everyone didn’t endear me to the locals. They probably could’ve warned me about the survey crew that picked me up but they didn’t.”
“Did you learn your lesson?”
He held his left hand parallel with the ground and tilted it side to side. “Yes and no.”
On her tactical vest, Victoria’s phone vibrated. The orders were simple and direct.
“Going on patrol. Reconnaissance.”
The Randall brothers rose immediately, checked their gear in seconds, and were ready to go. Abel was slower and seemed more interested in Victoria’s reaction to the order than the order itself.
“This might be a good opportunity,” he said.
“For what?”
“To look at things for ourselves. The Randall brothers were selected for this mission because they know the area. I’ve been trying to get them to give me a tour but they always beg off. I think the place brings back bad memories,” Abel said.
“Wrong,” Joseph said.
“Don’t want you going after our sisters,” Uriah added.
Victoria studied them. “Always good to have local talent on the scout team.”
They topped off ammunition, water, and drew two days of field rations and headed out.
“Joseph, take point. Show us something good,” Abel said.
They moved at a respectable, if not spectacular, pace away from headquarters, quickly reaching the new forward observation posts which were set up with military precision. Trucks continued to deliver sandbags and other materials to fortify them. Victoria and her team passed them without comment.
* * *
Toward the end of the day, she considered turning back. “It’s getting dark.”
“Might be the best time to see something,” Joseph said.
“Or get killed,” Uriah said.
Victoria didn’t want to go back. A return to base would mean a confrontation with Oden, Breaker, Irene, or possibly this Monica person. There were too many people she didn’t want to see at headquarters.
“Let’s stay in the field. We might be able to get some good intel on the targets,” she said.
Joseph and Uriah bumped fists and smiled. The two young men were completely in their element, relaxed and confident.
“I told you this was their home turf,” Abel said as the two brothers ranged ahead to scout around a subway entrance.
“Do you think they’re taking us someplace specific? Back to their old stomping grounds?” Victoria asked.
“Something like that.”
The city around them wasn’t as dark as she had anticipated. The population had been evacuated from this area but the power was still on. The region was powered with wind farms, geothermal heat sinks, and some hydroelectric, although the hydro wasn’t as abundant here as it was in the mountains. If every man, woman, and child left the D.C. area, the lights would run until they returned. Food would stay refrigerated. Battery packs would still be charged.
Victoria considered breaking a few bicycles free from the charging stations. If she had a citizen card for this part of the grid she could simply check them out, but she didn’t. Abel had the same idea.
“We could make good time on bicycles,” he said. “Joseph, how much farther? Do we need to consider transportation options?”
“I can check out four bicycles if you want, I still have my citizen access. But I don’t think we need them.”
“Up to you, Joe,” Abel said.
“No need. We’re close.”
Before Victoria could ask for clarification, they went into a subway terminal. Nothing was running.
“If we head down this access tunnel, we can take you to that place Uriah told you about the other day,” Joseph said.
“Let’s do it. If that’s okay with the boss?”
Victoria nodded and waited for them to lead.
She kept mental notes of how far they had come, how much time they spent walking at what she estimated their pace to be and counted the turns. She was surprised when the access tunnel opened into a natural cavern.
“I recommend glow sticks for this leg. We can use flashlights, but the glow sticks aren’t really good for anything else. Might as well put ‘em to use here,” Joseph said.
They cracked glow sticks and navigated the ancient cavern in the greenish light.
“We’ll come back to manmade tunnels before long. This area is mostly natural. It was expanded a hundred years ago, then abandoned. We’re definitely off the survey maps 6Corps and Red-C have access to. And those are the only two corporations who considered the old infrastructure at all. The smaller companies didn’t have the assets to devote much time to things like this,” Joseph said.
“But you’re telling me we’re beyond their reach,” Victoria said.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Uriah said. “They could come this way. They probably won’t unless someone tells them to look for a secret civilization off the grid but still inside the grid.”
The brothers laughed and high-fived.
“Off-grid people are proud of their independence,” Abel said. “Did you see that with the Breaker clan?”
“They seemed content with their lifestyle,” Victoria said.
She was hungry when they finally entered a brick-and-mortar passage that appeared to be two or three hundred years old. What surprised her were the modern power conduits running the length of the bricked tunnels.
“Looks like we’re back on the map ,” she said.
“6Corps ran power through here awhile back. They have maintenance bots that keep it clean and tidy, clear away debris and fix infrequent problems. The conduits are made from high quality materials. They don’t corrode,” Joseph said.
“We never take power from them,” Uriah said. “That would lead to dependence on the grid.”
After a time Victoria heard voices. Then music. Then the sound of running water and children playing. Joseph and Uriah led them to an enormous cavern with a skylight hundreds of feet overhead.
“How deep are we and how is there sunlight?” she asked.
“To answer your first question, pretty damn deep. As for the skylight, that’s been there for several generations. It was a major project when the first off-grid group settled here. It opens up near the water reclamation plant. People don’t go there. It’s visible from the air but just looks like another hole in the ground,” Joseph said. “How does this compare to Breaker’s village?”
“It’s a lot more fantastical,” Victoria said.
Joseph and Uriah laughed, pleased with her answer. They went ahead to greet friends and acquaintances.
Victoria, Abel, and the Randalls browsed through the bustling subterranean plaza.
“There must be five hundred people living down here,” she said.
“And traders.” Abel smiled at Joseph and Uriah strutting their stuff. “There’re a lot more off-grid people living within the grid than you realize.”
People greeted the Randall brothers warmly. A baker sent his daughter out with a basket of fresh pastries.
“Thanks, Sylvia,” Joseph said.
Sylvia’s apron fluttered as she curtsied. She smiled shyly and darted back to her father’s shop. Her younger sisters laughed and teased her.
“Good family,” Joseph and Uriah agreed as the
y caught up, stuffing their faces with the sweets. “You have to try these. Won’t find nothing like this on the grid.”
Victoria and Abel helped the brothers finish off the basket.
Joseph grabbed a boy of about twelve by the arm as he passed. “Run this back to Sylvia Baker and tell her thanks.”
“Sure thing, Joseph. Are you and Uriah back to stay? My dad said you weren’t coming back this time,” the boy said.
“Just passing through. But who knows?” Joseph replied.
Victoria watched each interaction carefully. It reminded her of the longhouses in the Colorado district, with a few sharp differences. People were very friendly here. She suspected many of them lived double lives, sometimes going onto the grid to get supplies or seek other services.
She stayed close to Abel and left the brothers to their homecoming as more and more of the local girls manufactured excuses to talk to them.
“It’s not a perfect utopia down here,” Abel warned. “I think I know where the brothers are taking us.”
“Where?”
“Medical ward. There’ll be fresh victims of the Death Angel. We may also see victims of past attacks.”
Victoria felt the mood change as they left the plaza and approached a quieter section of the labyrinth. She marveled at the way they’d redirected light from the surface. They passed beneath marvelous hanging gardens capable of feeding the entire population and generating a surplus as well.
“Are there really this many people unhappy with life on the grid?” she asked.
“People willing to rough it are the minority. The reason I keep going back is because I believe in the responsible use of technology. I mostly trust the social order in our government… but mostly is not completely or blindly.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Victoria said.
“People come here for their own reasons. Many are exiles. I would say fifty to sixty percent were born and raised here like the Randall brothers,” Abel said.
“How big are families here?”
Abel laughed. “Now you’ve touched a demographic that will always be off-grid. The Randall brothers have at least a dozen siblings, last time I checked.”