by Adam Steel
Lucian smiled broadly at Drago.
The door swung open to admit a pair of sparkling, red, high-heels. Even a thin layer of dust from the passages had failed to spoil their obviously ‘brand-new’ gleam. The heels clipped into the room one, after another. Jon Li slowly raised his exhausted head and followed the heels up. They changed into long, smooth legs. Jon Li looked up from the chair at the smartly dressed young woman. She had short, blonde hair, and she had the deepest red lipstick on her luscious lips. She was carrying a brand new lap top under her arm and she looked totally out of place in Union City. Ellie noticed that Jon Li was staring at the women in total disbelief. From his shocked expression, Ellie realised that he knew who she was.
Lucian smiled broadly at the voluptuous, young woman.
She pulled him close to her and with one hand grasping his balls, and her lips thrust up to his smiling face, she said, ‘Have you missed me babe?’
Lucian put his thumb on her bottom lip, and she licked it.
‘Who are you today? Marcia? Othelia? Angel? Or, maybe the real thing?’ he said and kissed her hard on her inviting lips.
They were locked in a passionate kiss for a few seconds until Drago interrupted.
‘For Christ’s-sake. Get a room why don’t you?’
Sparks looked fascinated at the pair.
‘Marcia?’ Jon Li said: sounding shocked.
‘Not exactly,’ she replied, letting go of her lover.
‘But hey! Maybe we could have that interview now Mr Li?’ she said sarcastically. ‘Or maybe you prefer Marcia?’ she teased wickedly, and cast a glance at Ellie.
Jon Li just stared back looking dumbstruck. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It can’t be. Marcia? What the hell?…He thought that his mind was playing tricks on him. She looked to him as though she had stepped out from his memories. The filth of Union City was completely absent on her.
‘You’re looking a bit worse for wear Mr Li. Names Abigail,’ she said, and held out her hand.
Jon Li could dimly remember something that Aya had mentioned about an ‘Abigail’, but the thought escaped him. She looked down at him and smiled. She was thinking that he looked a wreck: bruised and bloodied. His clothes were torn and blood stained. His hair, which she recalled had been expertly finished, was a matted mess of dried blood. He hadn’t shaved for days and he had a nasty swelling on his forehead. Someone had broken his nose. She found it hard to believe that she was looking at one of the top executives for Fin-Sen, who, only days before, had been rubbing shoulders with Mason Royale. Serves him right, she thought.
Jon Li shook her hand absently.
Drago got up from his chair and stood next to Sparks.
‘Did you get everything we needed?’ Drago asked, leaning on Sparks’s shoulder, and almost crushing him.
‘Hello Abigail,’ Sparks said shyly.
Jon Li frowned.
‘Hi-ya sweetie,’ she replied to Sparks.
Abigail patted the side of the lap-top.
‘Utopia’s finest. Hopefully you should be able to get into it with this. It’s the best I could find with the short notice,’ she said to Sparks. ‘Also, I got some food and meds…Usual bits and pieces. It’s gone to the store-room. You know I can’t bring too much out,’ Abigail said to Drago.
Drago nodded: satisfied.
‘Yeah. All too well.’
‘Nobody followed. I still think we’re okay this time,’ she said, placing the lap-top in front of Sparks.
His black goggles eyed the new lap-top.
Abigail looked intrigued by the silver key lying on Spark’s workbench.
‘Sweet,’ she quipped.
Drago nodded again: satisfied.
Lucian looked relieved and happy.
Ellie watched Abigail and Lucian fooling around. She wanted to ask Jon Li where he knew her from. She wanted to ask Jon Li a lot of things about his recent activities with women.
‘I see your hospitality is as good as ever,’ Abigail quipped to Drago, as she examined Jon Li’s broken nose. ‘Yup. That’s Jon Li alright, or whatever’s left of him. He works for Fin-Sen. He’s Mason Royale’s executive. A close one too. I heard he had to leave in a bit of a hurry: summoned by her. Bit late at night for a meeting heh?’ Mr Li, if you get my drift. Someone's been a naughty boy,’ Abigail teased
Ellie glared venomously at Jon Li from behind Abigail and he could feel her eyes burning into him. It hurt.
Max finally spoke up.
‘Alright. I’m sick of this. What’s going on here? If you hick-crazy-bastards are going to kill us, then just get on with it. Anything’s better than sitting in this shit-hole not knowing what the fuck is going on!’
Drago waved a hand at Max.
‘Cool off ‘Soldier-Boy’. All in good time. We ‘ain’t the bad guys here boy, an’ we just had to make sure you ain’t either.’
Drago gestured at Sparks, who looked up briefly to give a quick nod. Sparks resumed his task of hooking up Abigail’s lap-top with his rats-nest of cables.
‘Abigail here…’ Drago said, and nodded at her, ‘is one of our go-betweens. She gives us the news from the cities and generally helps us stay one step ahead of the shit.’
Abigail smiled sweetly at Max before saluting him sarcastically.
‘…and shit seems to be exactly what you four have stepped in lately,’ she finished.
‘Four more refugees for your cause…huh Mr D?’
Drago did not respond. He carried on looking at Max.
‘We’ve got people inside Coney and Eden. Keeping an eye on the Masons. We’ve known for a long time those fuckers are up to no good, but if what Li here tells us is true, it’s a lot worse than we thought,’ Drago explained.
‘We’ve been trying to get the truth out. But up until now we haven’t really known what their plan is, or where they’ve been taking people,’ Abigail cut in.
‘The Masons are paranoid. We can’t get close to 'em. The last time we tried that it didn’t go so well…’ Drago continued.
Ellie swallowed hard. She remembered the imposter back at the Genie plant on his failed assassination mission. She did not like to confirm his fate to Drago.
Abigail hoisted herself up onto Spark’s bench and crossed her legs.
‘Lately the Masons seem to be changing their plans. They’re bringing in outsiders such as that foreign prince, Aarif. Whatever it is they’re planning, it looks like their expanding it. We’ve been trying to find out what their up too.’
Jon Li said nothing.
Abigail smiled across at him.
‘Unfortunately nobody who seems to know is very talkative. Right, Mr Li?’
Jon Li looked uncomfortable.
‘I didn’t know. But I have a pretty good idea now. They’re going to build more reactors. They’re going to build them all over the world.’
Ellie and Max looked confused and Drago and Lucian fell silent at the prospect. Drago cut the conversation off. It wasn’t a subject that he wanted to discuss any further. He wanted to see for himself. He slapped Sparks so hard on his bony back that his glasses fell forward. Sparks caught them before they flew off.
‘Sparks - see you got a job for this load of old junk at last,’ Drago mocked.
Jon Li could see that Sparks was visibly shaken by the contact. Sparks laughed nervously and muttered something so quietly, that no one heard it. Sparks crouched over the system as if to protect it. He started fiddling with the leads.
‘So. Let’s see it,’ Drago said grimly to Sparks: all the humour had gone out of his voice.
‘Alright, we should be good to go now,’ Sparks proclaimed.
He made one more adjustment to a lead which was stuck in the side of Abigail’s brand new laptop. He reached up for a large switch which was hanging off the wall. With one confident movement, he pulled it down to the “On” Position. A loud ‘pop’, accompanied by a bright spark, shot from one of the boxes on the wall. Nothing happened except a small wisp of escaping bl
ack smoke which came from the unit.
Lucian sniggered.
Drago growled impatiently.
Sparks got up from his seat and began hastily unplugging the blown unit.
‘Sorry…Sorry. You think it’s easy trying to convert this kind of voltage?’ he said nodding towards the fat, vibrating ‘snake-mother’ in the corner. ‘Half of this stuff is fried anyway,’ he muttered.
He pulled the leads and threw the blackened unit into a cardboard box which was full of other blackened units and a minute or two later Sparks was ready again. The switch went down and the room came to life. A steady whirring noise came from the different fans and mounted circuit boards which were spread across the wall. There was a burst of static from the yellowed monitor and then it came to life. Abigail’s lap-top started up silently next to the huge lumbering computer which it was connected too. Ellie did not recognise the system which was booting-up the old monitor. She thought that it must have been custom written because it looked old compared to the slick functionality of Abigail’s lap-top.
Sparks fiddled with the tiny connections that he had made to the key. They were attached to a small circuit board on which a small LED flickered on and off.
‘We should be able to circumvent the security if we use a jump circuit…and then of course, we’ll need the lap-top to read the Utopian file system…’
He broke off into a mumbling dialogue that none of them could rightly follow. Nobody even tried.
Drago lit a cigarette and pulled hard on it. He watched the reams of data stream across Spark’s screen. Sparks was working to bypass the key’s security. Nobody said anything, but Ellie could clearly see Spark’s excitement at the challenge. Max wasn’t looking at the screen, he merely eyed Jon Li angrily from the back of the room. After a few minutes of frantic typing by Sparks, the LED on the jump circuit, turned a bright red, and the reams of information on-screen stopped abruptly. Sparks sat back from the screen and pulled the work light and magnifier from his head.
‘We’re in,’ he said triumphantly.
Drago and Lucian leaned in closer as the screen on Abigail’s lap-top changed. In its centre, was a spinning silver key, and below it, was a list of sub-categories. The fans on the wall built up speed. They emitted a constant whine as the ageing circuitry struggled to ream off the huge amounts of information from the key, and transmit it to its smaller, far more powerful, cousin.
Jon Li edged forward and showed Sparks where to go. The screens changed as they dug into the information being streamed from the key. A wire frame structure appeared. It was rotating on the screen. It was followed by a bunch of schematics. Jon Li squinted at the diagram. It appeared to be construction blueprints. His eyes widened when the image came together in three dimensions to form a building.
Max glanced at it and shrugged. It meant nothing to him.
Abigail caught her breath.
Ellie looked at her and whispered, ‘Genie’.
The blueprints showed that the building went much deeper than Ellie and Jon Li had seen on the tour. She concluded that the tour hadn’t even been half of the true scale of the complex. It had huge underground chambers that ran off from the reactor room and an underground transit system which entered the structure.
She frowned: confused.
Drago eyed the blueprints with keen interest.
‘That’s the power station. This must be how they get people in there…’ he said, and pointed at a set of thin, blue lines.
The lines marked out an underground tunnel system that led into the bowels of the plant.
‘This is everything we need...’ he said thoughtfully.
Jon Li’s finger shook as he guided Sparks down the directory structure of the file system. It stopped wavering over a file name.
‘There. Play that,’ Jon said simply.
Then Jon Li moved away: retaking his seat and sat with his head in his hands.
Sparks began the playback of the file.
The small audience leaned in to watch.
Chapter 40: Soldier Boy
A few Days Later
The Sump: Union City
Max leaned back against the cavern wall; working steadily with the hunting knife. He was carefully scratching away the TALOS symbol on his battered uniform. The flickering candlelight of the cavern illuminated his work. He had already removed the symbol of the mason’s key from its knee pad and chest section.
He paused to take a drag off a battered cigarette. It had gone out. He leaned absently over and re-lit it from a small fire which was burning off to his left. It sparked hungrily back into life.
Max wasn’t sure how long they had all been living at Union City because the days and nights had blurred into one in the darkness of the underground. He figured that it must have been around three days, but the only indication for him was how long it had taken for his wounds to heal. In that time he had brooded heavily on Drago’s invitation for them to remain at Union City. ‘Invitation’ had seemed the wrong word to him, ‘sentence’ would have been more appropriate.
Max ran Drago’s words over in his tortured mind.
“You see – there is no going back for you – and – we can’t let you leave because if they capture you, they’ll most likely torture you until you lead them right back here…to Union City. We can’t take that risk – we have lost enough of our people. You can stay here with us – it’s for the best. You do understand don’t you?”
Max understood all too well.
Three emaciated children watched him work from behind a pile of garbage. Max returned to filing off the symbol. The cigarette hung from his mouth. His stomach growled hungrily. He tried to ignore it. He hadn’t spoken to Ellie or Jon Li about the prospect of spending the rest of their lives down in the bowels of Union City, but he gathered by Jon Li’s reaction that he was depressed about the prospect.
Lucian had arranged a cave-house for Jon Li and Ellie to stay in and Mother Esme had gathered together a few simple things. Max had declined the items and the offer of a cave-dwelling and supplies. It hadn’t seemed right to him. Instead he had found a spot in The Sump and crashed down in there amongst the garbage.
The unloaded shotgun, which Lucian had given him, rested beside him like a faithful companion.
The people of The Sump gave Max a wide berth. They left the dangerous looking man alone to his troubles. Drago had given his permission that Max could stay and that was enough for them.
One of the children edged closer to Max over the mountain of garbage that covered the cavern floor. He tossed the lit cigarette at him. Three children pounced on the prize and jostled with each other trying to grab the trophy. One of the children ran off with the cigarette in his mouth and puffing furiously. The others were in hot pursuit. Max watched them disappear amongst the piles of junk.
Max had learned very quickly, how life worked in Union City. Everything worked on the barter system. There were two classes of citizens. The people who traded what little they had between each other and the outright beggars who had nothing useful to trade, and who tried to scrape by upon the limited charity of the others. The beggars seemed to outnumber the traders almost a hundred to one.
Max had earned the cigarettes in The Scrapper. The Scrapper was a large hole in the ground that was once an underground car park, but was now the equivalent of a scrap yard, repair garage and forge. On the top of the underground car park there used to be a theatre, but now that was no more than four teetering walls and rows of burnt out and rusted metal seats, where once an audience had sat and watched plays by Shakespeare. Rust and Jeevo worked in The Scrapper, trying to repair salvaged materials into a half useful state. It was the place where Lucian had given him the shotgun.
Max had worked on the mangled metal from Jon Li’s limo: cutting it into useful sheets which could be used to improve the meagre housing situation. From the work he had earned himself a pack of cigarettes and something which resembled soup. He hadn’t asked what was in it. He had used one of the
metal sheets to build himself a low wall, so that he could shield himself from the main cavern when he slept. He kept his knife close to his side during those times.
Lucian had approached him with another job offer earlier in the day. Lucian had explained that he wanted strong men to assist in some new demolition work that was being done near The Scrapper. Lucian had offered Max his hunting knife and his Apexir supply back as a reward for the work. Max had been surprised at the offer. He realised that Lucian was placing a great deal of trust into him with the task. He thought that Lucian was taking a big risk and he admired him for that. He had jumped at the chance of the work.
He had been taken down to the tunnels surrounding The Scrapper to meet with Irish. Irish was Union City’s ‘unofficial’ demolitions expert. In his previous life he had been a quarry man and his job had been to set the charges. Irish had been there in the beginning when they had first built Union City. Irish like to blow up things. It was more than just a living to him. His handiwork was evident everywhere in the holes that had been blasted out through the tunnels and passageways, to create links and cave-houses. He was a man of Herculean proportions. His ginger hair curled closely to his skull and he wore a wide leather waistband. It reminded Max of the ones that heavy weight champions wore at boxing matches. Max could imagine Irish in the boxing ring beating the crap out of his opponents one minute and afterwards drinking with them like they were the best of friends. Max recalled the task of assisting Irish with his new demolition project earlier that day.
Max’s face had hardened at first when he had recognised the orange giant who had carried Aya off on the day that they had first arrived. Irish’s face had been covered in black powder and oil from whatever he had been working on.
He had regarded Max with a sloppy yet confident grin.
“Ah hey there Soldier-Boy. I see the boss ain’t whacked you yet. Ready to blow up something up?” he had quipped.
Max had assured him that he was. Starting with you, he had thought.
At first the relationship had been frosty, but Irish’s directness and humour had slowly melted through it while the two men had worked together. Drago had assigned them the task of blasting a new tunnel through to the surface. It was to lead from near The Scrapper, up and out of the underground city. It was to be a bigger tunnel than usual.