by T. K. Malone
“To get them out?” Molly butted in. “Really, Kenny, me, you and Sticks are the only ones who know their way around.”
“Nonsense,” said Kenny. “What about Byron and Connor?”
Molly put her hands on her hips. “You know full well that Byron is about eighty, and Connor, well, he’s far too important, so…so shut the fuck up and get suited up.” A spark of mischief suddenly popped into her eyes. “Or would you rather go to the preppers’ compound and face down an entire army hell-bent on your slow and painful death?”
“Well, I…”
Molly looked at Zac. “Hey, Zac, did you leave a hole Kenny could squeeze out of?”
Zac looked at Kenny. “Sure, we could squeeze him through somewhere.”
“Well?” Molly challenged Kenny. “What’s it to be? Looking after some gridders or fighting The Free World army.”
Kenny coughed. “Now you put it like that—”
“Just put your combat gear on.” She sighed, and went back to lacing her boots.
“Doubt one’ll fit me,” Kenny noted, his cloud of doom now even darker than usual.
Zac himself had a share of that cloud’s pervading gloom. He wondered if Teah knew he’d been unfaithful to her, if it could even be construed as that, given that she’d just abandoned him? Could a woman tell when a man had a thing for another woman? Zac now thought so, deciding that Teah had dumped him in this Godforsaken hole just to get back at him.
“Nursemaidin’ fuckin’ gridders,” he muttered under his breath as Sticks reappeared in the room.
“I think we’ve got problems,” the man gasped.
Zac stood at the top of the ventilation shaft. The helmet made little sense to him. It itched, he felt sick with its three-sixty degree vision, and he couldn’t turn his head enough to see over his shoulder. Kirk had called it an HUD—a Heads-Up Display. They were supposed to have call signs like Two-zero, and shit like that. But Noodle and Billy had just fucked around, calling Loser Zero-zero, and Pauly Sixty-nine. Kirk had given up, thinking them just flippant. He hadn’t realized that that was how they acted when they got nervous. Sticks had then told them it was a shit-storm in the compound—from what he’d heard: machine gun fire, small explosions and plenty of screaming—and he’d only got to the bottom of the first shaft. He said, even from there, it had sounded like absolute chaos.
But no one had a clue as to why.
Strangely, it had brightened Zac’s mood.
Kirk had told him how to program their names into the HUD, but Zac had just told him he could recognize all his boys' voices. Pebbles and Pogo had objected to that, but then he thought of them as men in times like these, because they were bastard-good fighters, better than most of the men, anyhow. Now he stood at the top of the ventilation shaft, and he couldn’t wait to get down. The frustration he’d felt earlier had left him, for now he had a purpose.
The shaft was about ten feet wide—if anything, too wide, the ladder looking insubstantial within its seemingly never-ending drop. Kirk had programmed the HUDs to display the schematic of the route Zac had to take to come out in the security quadrant on the upper floor, and for that he was thankful. No one had realized what a maze Kirk and Charm had gone through to escape; without thinking, they’d just assumed the pair had simply popped out of the top. Zac wondered if Charm had broken sweat on the way out, but somehow doubted it; Josiah Charm didn’t look the type to sweat. He told himself only the honest sweated. He’d heard that somewhere.
Billy and Noodle were already fucking around on the HUD. Zac wanted to shout at them, to tear their heads off, which then made him realize just how scared of going down into the pipe he was. It looked like a one-way trip. He definitely didn’t do “scared,” so he swung his leg over the side and climbed onto the ladder, the nozzle of his machine gun clattering against his HUD. His scalp itched, and he knew that was going to piss him off.
“Come on, Zac,” he chided himself, but something about the helmet isolated him from the camaraderie he usually felt going into situations with Billy Flynn. He wondered how Teah had done it all those years, how she’d stormed warehouses, emptied pipelines, and cleared docks, and all while encased in one of these damned helmets. It just felt wrong, yet he needed it to show him the way.
Zac looked to see where Billy was. Third. Sticks was directly above him, then Noodle with Billy next down. Zac descended, each step making him breath harder, the drop tangibly real now. The strength seemed to vanish from his legs, like they were made of water, like his knees could bend both ways. Maybe he did do “scared,” after all. He reached the first intersection, two farther ladders branching out like an inverted “Y,” and took the left hand one without thinking, the green blip in his HUD signifying he was still on track. Then he realized he’d done it all without moving his head.
“Well, whaddya know?” he thought to himself. “Maybe these things are useful.”
He could now hear gunfire, screams and explosions, faint at first but getting louder. Above him, Billy Flynn and Noodle fell silent.
The slanting ladder led him to a vertical one, the pipe in which it descended only about half the size of the one he’d just left. When he came to the bottom, he jumped the last few rungs and landed on a metal walkway. Instantly, his HUD display showed him a 3-D view of the numerous horizontal pipes that led away from where he was, the one he needed to take glowing a pale green. It soon narrowed, becoming quite restrictive and forcing him to crawl on his hands and knees. The noise from below had now become deafening, the shrill screams bloodcurdlingly as loud as the sounds of gunfire, and running through it all, the call of shouted commands. Zac checked the HUD and concluded they were just above Project Firebird’s uppermost level, and that maybe the regular vents he crawled past were amplifying the noise. Regardless, his HUD told him to carry on the way he was going.
What seemed a good hour later, the green route finally ended at a round access door set in the floor. Twisting its handle, he heaved it up and instinctively ducked back, out of the way, before peering cautiously over its lip. The military-green painted and furnished room beneath was empty but for a bed, a table and chairs, and a small kitchenette to one side. Against the drab color, only the black-and-white-checkerboard chess set on the table stood out, its pieces all neatly arranged, ready for a game. The room was quiet, though: the noise of the mayhem elsewhere, clearly muted. A bit of luck, he decided.
Zac swung his legs over the edge and dropped through the hole.
The room was cramped by the time they were all down, Zac having guided each one in, then he barged his way through to the only door, where Sticks now stood with Kirk. He lifted his visor and motioned for Sticks and Kirk to do the same.
“We need a plan. I’m guessing this is the security quadrant.”
“Almost,” Kirk told him. “Charm’s quarters.”
“Can we make contact with anyone?”
“Nope. Might be wise to let me and Sticks do a little recce. If we bump into my troops, then fine. His, and we should be okay. Some kinda rebellion’s gone down here. We just can’t be sure what.”
“Unless Banks has got through…”
“No; haven’t had enough explosions yet. Definitely an internal problem.”
“Makes sense,” Zac agreed. “Noodle, Billy, you tw
o with me.”
Neither Billy nor Noodle moved, so Zac pushed through and flipped up their visors. Both were laughing.
“I swear…” Zac groaned, but then Kirk opened the door and the gunfire became even more real, sporadically echoing off the walls in the corridor outside. A waft of cordite drifted into the room, along with the acrid stench of burning plastic. Zac’s mouth went dry and his heart pumped even faster. This was the buzz he loved, the kind he’d felt in the tunnels or when being harried by the drones, and when he'd seen his father. This was life, not a wasted day behind a bar counter or the tedium of a flimsy ladder in a huge pipe. Kirk marched straight out into the corridor, Sticks on his heels, Zac bringing up the rear, his visor down, alone with his fears again.
Like the room, the deserted corridor was olive green. It ran for a few hundred feet, lined with doors on both sides that became more closely spaced as they all hurried down it. The fighting appeared to come from beyond the end. Zac hugged the wall.
“Kick the doors as you go. Don’t want no asswipes jumpin’ out behind us.” Zac looked back, seeing Pauly directing his men. And that was what they were: Pauly’s. Sure, they were now following Zac, but he wasn’t so dumb as not to know it was because Pauly had told them. Heck, Zac thought, he and Billy and Noodle might get that open road after all, might just be able to ride off into the sunset. By now they were halfway down the corridor, but Kirk then held his hand up.
Zac looked at the nearest door. It was black, embossed with gold lettering declaring “Free World Radio.” “Unbelievable,” he muttered to himself. His back against its doorframe, machine gun in hand, Zac peered down the corridor, watching Kirk and Sticks edge their way farther along it. Noodle shouted instructions to Billy, his words abruptly cut off by the firing of his machine gun. Zac swung around to see Billy giving the thumbs-up from beside one of the doors; clearly not all the rooms had been deserted. He relaxed a bit, not too worried by the surprise encounter, for they were attired head to toe in damn-near bulletproof garb, and they were good at this urban warfare. They could do it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Then Kenny and Molly slipped past Zac and through the door he was standing by, the big man only just squeezing in. Zac pushed his visor up.
“Used to be our old room,” Kenny told him, by way of explanation, and he began switching on consoles and screens, firing up the computers. When Zac only stared at him, Kenny said, “Might be able to get a take on what’s happening.”
Zac finally understood and nodded, looking back out into the corridor. If this was Charm’s compound, surveillance would be like the drab, green paint: everywhere.
<’Part from Pebbles; fuckin’ woman’s a psycho.>
Zac noticed Sticks and Kirk had got to the end of the corridor and had taken off their HUDs, now looking at each other, but then they slipped from view. Zac instinctively wanted to join them but then realized why they’d taken their helmets off—to be recognized. Zac held his breath and his position: the appearance of a load of strange bikers dressed as commandos wouldn’t help one bit.
Behind him, Noodle and Billy were still wittering away, Pauly, Pebbles and Pogo all impatient to get on with it—Pebbles definitely had her psycho on. And then Sticks reappeared at the end of the corridor and sauntered back to them, as if taking a stroll in the woods. He signaled Zac into Connor’s old studio and followed him in, sitting heavily on a sofa set tight up against a coffee machine.
“What’s…” Zac muttered, then took his helmet off. “What’s going on?”
“Kirk’s met up with a man called Garrett, his second-in-command. There was a bit of a disagreement about Kirk just high tailin’ it outta here, but Kirk put his mad eyes on, and it was soon settled. We’ve dropped into a secure-ish corridor, this and one angling off it to the left. There are a few skirmishes going on down the one opposite and the one to the right, but other than that, this floor’s mostly ours.”
“Mostly?”
Sticks nodded. “Mostly. The…rebels, I suppose you’d call them, came from Prime’s men, according to Garrett. Plants.”
“What’s their plan?”
“To stop Croft blowing the stairwell. My troops…well, his, are by all accounts still trapped in the military area.”
“Got it,” shouted Kenny.
When they both looked over at him and Molly, they were hovering over a desk, on which a screen had blinked into life.
“Now, if I could just…” Kenny was now saying, but then a feed came on, showing a stairwell riddled with bullet holes and blood smears. “That’s the stairwell from levels two to one; we’re in one at the moment. So…” He looked across at Zac and Sticks. “What do you want to see?”
Molly looked confused. “How did you know how to…”
Kenny shrugged. “Charm was making a laughing stock of me, keeping all my…my faux pas recorded. Had to learn to hack his camera network and switch them off. Couldn’t—” but Molly pulled his face toward her and kissed him on his cheek. “Couldn’t be the compound fool, now could I?” He grinned at her.
Sticks got up. “Can you get us a look at the military area?”
“I think so. He had access to everywhere from somewhere. If that was his quarters we dropped into earlier, then, if I know Charm, there has to be a secret room accessible from there. He certainly wouldn’t have lived in such a simple room as that.” He stared at Molly but was clearly seeing beyond her. “Give me a minute,” he mumbled, then they both shared a smile. “Got it.”
For a moment static filled the screen, but then the hangar bay came into view. The scene was chaotic and serene all at the same time, all the activity by the stairwell door, where Croft’s men were relaxing, sitting in a group that was clearly out of the line of fire. Behind them was a line of men crouching behind their shields, who then dashed forward and fired into the stairwell, only to be forced back by unseen gunfire. Then they tried again, repeatedly, like the ebb and flow of an incoming tide.
“Croft’s too kind to ‘em, always has been,” Sticks muttered. “Needs to sacrifice a few to save the rest.”
“A living, breathing, fuckin’ nightmare,” Zac said under his breath. They’d clearly been at it for a while, attacking by rotation, something that shouldn’t be done when the men were dead on their feet.
“I think that’s about it,” Kenny said. “It would seem Charm wasn’t too worried about what they'd gotten up to, as long as he could see the door and the Hell’s Gates.”
“But we’ve got everything else?”
“Pretty much.”
“Then let’s get this floor cleared, and then start on the next,” Zac said. “And I’ve got just the crew to do it.”
He winked at Sticks.
“Hell, yeah!” Pebbles shouted.
11
Zac’s Story
Strike time: plus 12 days
Location: Project Firebird
Kirk’s men controlled the central s
tairwell and most of the four corridors that quartered the floor like a pie. They’d secured the one they’d arrived by, and Garrett had already been in control of another to the left. A few of the traitors were holed up in the corridors opposite and to their right, but who was who was hard to know until Garrett programmed their HUDs. Then it became clear, Zac’s own men appearing as gold heat signatures, all others red. Zac was warming to the HUDs.
Molly had told him the sectors were the “industrial quads,” or as industrial as it got down here. She said it housed the micro farms, maintenance, laundry, engineering, and the like. It reminded Zac of how Black City used to be divided up, or at least the shit bit off the grid.
Every now and then, bursts of gunfire came from those very corridors as one or more lone gunmen summed up the courage to attack. It hadn’t taken Zac’s group long to get fed up with their baiting, and Kenny’s cameras had isolated the rooms they were hiding in. Now Zac and his men had put their HUDs back on, they were ready to roll.
Kirk had had some reservations about the plan, concerned about the gridders’ safety. Zac had just shrugged and pointed out that if they weren’t already dead, they soon would be. There was no arguing with that.
They exploded out of their corridor and into the one opposite, a hail of gunfire issuing from Zac, Noodle, Billy, Loser, and Pebbles, instant death for any who chanced a look out. Behind them, doors were being kicked in, rooms searched, unseen one-on-one battles being fought. Yet it wasn’t all straight forward. The corridor stretched on and on, each room larger than the last as the quadrants increased in size. Zac’s men were becoming stretched.
The inter-HUD channel became a confusion of folk shouting, barking and screaming. Zac was beginning to wonder if they’d bitten off more than they could chew, but the