by Adam Steel
She looked back at the door they had exited.
The fading text read: “No Unauthorised Personnel”
Someone had added “OR wat?” underneath it.
The group were ushered down the stairs towards a flickering light. They could hear the sound of many hushed voices. The sounds of the movement of people had gotten louder. It mixed with the distant hum of machinery. Ellie could hear a metallic sound of banging coming from ahead. A dreadful smell drifted up to greet them. It was the smell of a great mass of unwashed bodies, smoke, and other foul things. Ellie screwed her nose up.
Skinny Edd breathed in hard.
‘Ahhh. Nothing like home,’ he sniffed.
Max hesitated before Lucian’s shotgun poked him hard in the back.
‘Move,’ he prompted.
Max spat at him through the filthy sock.
When they got closer to the flickering light, and the end of the stairway, it opened out into a huge stone archway. They stepped into an enormous cavernous space and Ellie’s eyes widened. Max struggled when he saw what was in front of them. The cavern was immense. It had once been an underground railway station. A broken railway track ran through the middle of it. The ceiling extended far up and was covered in a line of broken, electrical lights. Large stone pillars held the roof up. The walls had collapsed or broken through, in many places, to expand the massive chamber. It was so large that it had its own wind currents. Tunnels went off in every direction. It was like a nightmarish rabbit warren. A giant sign hung from the ceiling.
It read:
“UNION CITY”
“A nice place to live,” had been added to it by some sarcastic resident.
There were people everywhere. They huddled down in corners, or sprawled across the floor. They were looking down on immense city which had been built from garbage. Barefooted children of all ages ran around on the broken floor. They were filthy. It looked like a scene from the poor streets of London in Victorian times. People were living in squalor. They had rigged up homes from old tattered sheets, bits of wood and anything else that they could scavenge. Open fires burned amidst the homes. Ellie retched when she saw what was being cooked over one of their fires. It was a row of several large rats. The group of people cooking them looked on hungrily whilst turning the makeshift spit.
An old subway train dominated the middle of the cavernous space. It had been stripped, and had no windows. There were people inside of it. They had built makeshift homes in the old carriages. The entire cavern was lit by candles and the same kind of torches that their captors were carrying. The wax from the candles had ran down the walls and pooled across the floor. Here and there, small children were gathering the old wax into small bags, and running off into the darkness with it. There did not seem to be any electricity, and nothing to run on it, even if there was. A few of the people had noticed the newcomers and were staring up at them curiously.
Drago stepped forward and drew one of his pistols. He held it up and fired into the ceiling. The noise was deafening in the cavern. A cascade of dust floated down. Ellie noticed that that particular piece of ceiling had a lot of holes in it. The people stopped what they were doing immediately, and looked up. Their grubby faces lit up with pleasure when they saw Drago standing on the stairs above them with his smoking gun. Voices resonated around the chamber. They scrambled up to see him. A large crowd began to form at the bottom of the stairs.
‘Greetings Union City!’ his voice rang out.
It was met with a defiant resounding cheer in response.
Ellie caught a glimpse of his smile. It was warm, and his face changed from the monster that she had seen earlier to a more human expression. She thought that he could have had them killed back in the disused shop if he had wanted to. They had a chance, if they could persuade him that Jon Li was not a mason. But then, thought Ellie, he’s yet to explain himself to us.
Birdman hopped down the few steps into the lair that was Union City, leaving Skinny Edd to shoulder Jon Li on his own.
Skinny Edd turned to Lucian and said, ‘Tell him won’t you? He’s such a fuckwit.’
Lucian merely laughed at Birdman: who was hopping around the children as if he were one of them. The children clapped at his presence as if he were a performing clown.
Lucian slotted his shotgun into a thick leather strap that was attached to his thigh. He put his arm under Jon Li’s waist, and the group descended the stairs down to the earthen floor below. The people parted to let Drago through as though he were Moses parting the Red Sea.
‘See what I have brought you comrades of Union City?’ Drago announced.
He pushed Jon Li’s head back, and tore the sides of his shirt open for all to see. A unified gasp rose up from the crowded room as they saw the mason’s key. The crowd stepped back as though they had been electrocuted.
‘Kill him!’ someone screamed from the back of the crowd.
The others joined in and started chanting.
“Kill the Mason! Kill the Mason! Kill the Mason!”
Aya’s eyes flitted back and forth: confused. The final, slender fragile threads of sanity within her snapped at the sight of the baying crowds. In those last moments of horror, she could see a hangman’s noose in the middle of them and the dead bodies of her father and sister. They beckoned her forwards with dead fingers. Aya let out a shrill scream and fainted as her mind fractured. Max became frantic at the sight of Aya lying by his feet. He struggled and spat angry threats through the gag. Drago cast him a harsh glance.
Drago snatched the mason’s key from Jon Li’s neck (and with the silver chain dangling and broken) he held it up in the air. The crowd stopped chanting. When he had his hands in the air, Ellie caught sight of the other implements that he had tucked into the waistline of his coat. It made her feel weak. She had a desperate image of the objects being used on them as instruments of torture, and she felt dismally afraid.
The mob inched closer to the newcomers. They had blood in their eyes. Ellie looked despairingly at Drago. He had a curious expression on his face. It was hesitant, disturbed and searching. She held his eyes with hers, and pleaded her innocence to him. She was desperate to make him understand their meaning.
Drago turned the key over in his hand and whispered to Lucian.
‘Stick them in the brig - better make it fast too. We need to question them before the family lynch 'em.’
Lucian nodded at the key in Drago’s hand.
‘And that? What’ll we do with it?’ Lucian queried.
Drago held the key up and examined it.
‘This is what we’ve been waiting for. Contact one of our people. Tell them we need the equipment right away.’
Lucian nodded curtly and signalled another of the mob to come forward to take his place supporting Jon Li. Lucian pulled the shotgun back out of its place against his thigh, and poked it hard into Max’s face.
‘Time to go ‘Soldier-Boy. Any trouble on the way and you won’t make it to the cells. I’ll let them have you,’ he threatened, gesturing at the crowd.
Max glared back at him at the mention of “Cells,” and he remembered his time in Vigilance.
This prison’s gonna be a whole lot worse, he thought.
Lucian looked at the unconscious form of Aya on the floor. Some of the crowd were already closing in on her.
‘Irish, Pick her up,’ he said, and pointed to a giant of a man who was standing in the front of the crowd.
The colossus heaved Aya over his shoulder as though she were no more than a doll. Aya’s long hair, swung from side to side down his strong back as he moved.
‘Irish! What you got there? Fresh meat?’ someone jeered from the crowd.
Max and Ellie were pushed through the jeering crowds towards one of the tunnels. They left Drago behind on the steps examining the key. He looked hypnotised by it.
The colossus that was carrying Aya followed them closely, along with the two men who were dragging Jon Li along. Jon Li had been dragged so far that the
tops of his shoes had worn completely out. Ellie was quaking with fear at the prospect of where they were being taken. She had overheard Lucian say that they were going to the cells.
Max had struggled so much, that the rope had cut into his wrists and they were oozing blood. He still had splinters of wood sticking out of one of his arms. He was desperate to get to Aya who was being carried by the monster of a man behind them. He kept turning around to see where she was. Every time he did, Lucian poked him in the back with the shotgun.
Lucian pushed his way through the crowds trying to keep his shotgun pointed at Max as they went.
Ellie was surrounded by leering faces with missing teeth. They spat at her as she marched. A heavy object hit her in the back. She looked back to see a dirt-covered child picking up another rock.
‘Kill the Masons!’ the child cried and threw another rock.
An elderly woman pounced on Skinny Edd She was wringing her hands in despair. She tried to get at Jon Li.
‘Please!’ she begged at the unconscious man. ‘Please, you must tell me where my son is! What did you do to my son?!’
Skinny Edd struggled to pull the woman off him.
Lucian turned on the crowd and said, ‘Okay, guys back off. Drago says we need 'em alive.’
He raised the shotgun to show that he meant it.
Birdman ‘whooped’ in the background as if in agreement and the crowd slowly began to disperse. They were grumbling angrily. A woman broke through the dispersing crowd. Her hair was matted, and one of her eyes was white. There were burn marks across one of her cheeks. She charged at Max slashing a sharpened piece of metal at him.
‘You bastard!’ she screamed, ‘I’ll get you!’
Lucian grabbed her with one hand, while she struggled to get at Max.
‘That’s enough Lola. Let it go,’ he said flatly.
He shoved the women back and she glared at him. Hate blazed in her one good eye.
‘Why do you care Lucian? He killed Mac. He’s mine!’
Lucian stared at her and said, ‘No. He belongs to Drago. Just deal with it.’
Lola ‘growled’ at him and stood back. Lucian led the prisoners past her and she spat at Max as he passed.
‘Murderer!’ she whispered.
They were marched across the floor of the massive cavern until they reached the other side of it. As they marched Ellie looked around at the structure of Union City. She would have been impressed if she hadn’t been terrified. The central cavern was so vast that it was capable of holding a thousand people quite comfortably. Ellie guessed that Drago was the ‘unofficial’ leader of the underground city people. The only place in the cavern that was empty was the old station master’s office which overlooked the main cavern. She guessed that it must be Drago’s private quarters.
Union City was a vast underground city which spread out for miles. Many tunnels led out of the main cavern. They had been carved out of the basements of the old city. It was connected together by a network of tunnels which had been blasted out of the concrete and earth below the old city that had once existed. It was comparable to a coal mine. The tunnels were supported with timbers and there were regular tracks that had been made through them by tens of thousands of footfalls over the years.
All along the tunnels were gullies, which had been carved out to form crude sewers and drainage systems. They were covered with wire mesh to prevent the people stepping into them and intermittently there were candles sighted along them to light the way. Air currents moved along the tunnels signifying that they were connected to outer spaces at some points. The multitude of tunnels led into the basement levels of old buildings. They were the homes of the citizens of Union City.
The builders of the city had mined out the tunnels in line with the buildings above. Some of the tunnels expanded out into huge basement rooms which had once been museums, libraries, hospitals, engineering plants, town halls, cinemas, shopping centres, and many other old buildings. One of the tunnels emerged into the crypt of an old Cathedral. That route led upwards through the crypt, and out into a church yard above. Every tunnel that led to a basement or underground building was rigged in such a way, that if there were any breach from above ground, they could be sealed off permanently.
The citizens of the underground world had scavenged everything that they could from above, and had stored in the city below for the generations to come. They had even developed their own crude industries in the vast city below the ground.
Ellie, Aya, Max and Jon Li had been marched through the tunnels for half an hour before they reached the area that had been designated as ‘The Brig.’ They had passed many citizens and makeshift homes on the way. Each time they had been met with hostility. Ellie could see that the people of Union City were starving. Even with her limited medical experience on diseases, she could see they were rife in the underground realm. She had had to step over several people who had been lying in the tunnels. Ellie had been unable to tell if they had been alive, or dead.
She thought of her home in Coney City and compared it to Union City. There were no homeless people in Coney City and even the underclass of reformers looked rich compared to the people in Union City. The citizens of Union City wore rags. She could see that the gang that had brought them to Union city were well dressed compared to the people she had seen on the way through the passages. She guessed that Drago had taken some of the fitter members of Union City out to deal with the intruders. She also figured that their method of transportation had been outlandish enough to warrant investigation from Union City’s leader personally. The sorry state of the denizens of Union City shocked her to the core. She found it almost impossible to comprehend the level of squalor that existed secretly underground and only a hundred or so miles from Coney City.
The Brig had been adapted from what used to be a public toilet in an underground sub-way station. The signs for Ladies and Gents had deliberately been left on the wall. The main doors had been reinforced with heavy iron bolts. Lucian used his torch to light a single candle at the end of the passage. An old wooden chair was at the end of the passage. Ellie suspected that had been put there for whoever they assigned to stand guard over the prisoners.
They had been divided into two rows of cells. Lucian escorted Max into one of them. He pulled Birdman’s sock from his mouth before slamming the door shut on him. They could all hear the muffled swearing coming from behind the door. Skinny Edd and the other man man-handled Jon Li into the next Cell to Max. Ellie looked pleadingly at Lucian. She plucked up the courage to try and reason with him.
‘He’s badly hurt,’ she whispered. ‘I’m a Doctor. Let me stay in there with him. Maybe I can help your people too?’ she offered desperately.
Lucian shook his head as Jon Li was squared away.
‘Sorry toots. No deal. We ain’t taking any chances with you city quacks,’ he replied.
The man called Irish came up with Aya across his back.
‘Hey Luce, can I has this one?’ he asked hopefully.
Ellie could see that Aya’s eyes were open again. They stared straight ahead, unseeing and uncaring. A thin line of drool flowed from one side of her mouth.
Poor girl. She’s had it. At least she won’t know what they do to her, she thought.
Lucian dashed Irish’s hopes expertly when he ordered that Aya be put in one of the ‘Ladies’ cells. Irish stomped away muttering.
Lucian turned to Ellie.
‘Okay, your turn. If I take those binds off - you going to be nice?’ he asked.
Ellie nodded reluctantly. She was escorted through the door marked “Ladies”. The cell was more Spartan than she had hoped. There was no bed and a sink which looked as though it hadn’t had running water in it for many years. The toilets had been adapted so that they could be used. The sewage went straight down into a hole in the ground.
Lucian cut her binds before the heavy door of her prison cell slammed shut on her. Without the torch to light the cell, it was almost completely shrou
ded in darkness. Only the light from the edges of the door spilled in. She could just about hear Lucian outside ordering Skinny Edd to keep watch.
‘An remember Edd,’ he said. ‘No paying those ladies any night-time visits. Understand? Drago wants them all in one piece,’ he instructed cautiously.
‘As if I would,’ spat Edd in response.
She could hear Lucian leave and Skinny Edd sit down in the wooden chair. It sounded like it might collapse even under his meagre weight. They were left alone in the dim light of the candle in the passage. She could hear Max thumping on the door of his cell.
Ellie scraped off the dried snot from across her cheek and wiped it off on the wall furthest from her. At least they didn’t put that man, Red, on guard, she thought. She was sure that he would have raped them if given even half a chance. She was not too sure that Skinny Edd wouldn’t also indulge himself. A shrill ‘squeak’ caused her to jump. In the dim light, she could make out the beady eyes of a large black rat. It was filth-encrusted and soaking wet. It had wandered in from a broken hole in the wall that led out to the passage. She shrank away in fear.
Its hungry eyes looked her over. It advanced a little closer. Its long whiskers twitched and it sniffed the cold air. She took off one of her shoes and took aim: hurling it at the hungry intruder.
‘Get away!’ she screamed at it.
The rat ducked out through the hole with a startled ‘squeak’. Its fat body barely squeezed through the hole.
Outside in the passage she heard a cry of delight and the sound of a knife skewering something.
‘Oh you liddle bute. Come to Eddy!’
A thin trickle of blood seeped in under the door jam. She shied away from it and whimpered. Skinny Edd hammered on her door from the passage outside.
‘Will you shut the fuck up in there? Can’t a man eat in peace?’ he stormed.
She cowered in the corner trying her best not to listen to the scrunching of Edd’s noisy meal.
‘Fucking cunt,’ Edd muttered.
The cell fell silent.
Ellie cowered in the corner and held her head in her hands. She was alone with her terrifying thoughts. They’re going to torture us and then kill us…maybe even rape us, or even eat us. Then they are going to beat Max to death, that’s surely what they’ll do with him. But Jon…they’ll torture him until he tells them what they want to know - then they will kill him, that’s if Max doesn’t do it first. I’ll never see him again. I’ll never get to say goodbye and I’ll never know what the truth is.