Piston stood by my side as we and forty others of our gang shoved our way past the mass of opposing gangers through the pitch dark of the night. It was another street war and a bad one. We were outnumbered but the four-way battle kept the numbers off us. It was a goddamn mess. So tightly packed in, we couldn’t see past the mob of bodies swinging and lunging weapons past ten meters. It was that of an old Viking battle, carnage at close range. But Judgments were necessary in balancing the power struggle. I saw Piston take a few blows to his gut by a club; it surely damaged some ribs. I quickly shoved my way past some opposing gangers, striking them quickly and hard. I helped Piston to his feet and then he looked at me. His expression of relief when he saw me was also one of trust. It made me feel guilty to a degree. I couldn’t help but think of what my goal was as I stood there on that battlefield. Had I accepted who I was? Was I content with any outcome consequential of that? And who was that person I had become? Before we knew it, the battle had concluded. The factions began to retreat, the clear victors being Gardener’s bloody Gangers. As we began to pick our spoils from the fields, I stopped to look at the Lost hiding in the buildings, waiting patiently in desperation, hoping we’d leave any kind of useful scraps for them.
“That was us,” Piston said as he noticed me staring.
“Once,” I said. I looked back to him and nudged his shoulder. “What, you think it still is?”
His spirit was lifted a bit. I think he was thinking what I was. Had we changed into something else? Once a clan of the Lost, supporting a community, now warring gangers, killing for spoils. We were both happy to be alive.
“Grab what you can. We head back to main camp in fifteen!” another ganger yelled out. “And Dill!” I stopped what I was doing and stood up. “The Gardener himself wants to see you.”
I had worked my ass off in my time there. I took any dirty task, any supply run I could do between outposts, any shakedown or beatdown I could volunteer for. And any Judgement I could participate in. All to get some sort of prestige. If there was one thing I could definitely say about the undercity gangs is that life was simple, yet brutal. All the gangs cared about was prestige. I’ve lost friends on the street from “simple” prestige killings. I nodded at the ganger. Piston and a few other gangers looked at me with surprise. The word was that none of the gangers ever met The Gardener himself, only a handful of his most trusted lieutenants. Some of the others whistled and patted me on the back as it more than likely meant becoming a Lieutenant myself. Little did they know, I had no interest in such promotions.
“The Gardener?” Piston chuckled. “You’re a celebrity now.” He was happy for me, I could tell. Generally, when something good happens to a friend, you feel such wellness for them.
“Only the richest spoils for you now, good sir!” another ganger said as he slapped my shoulder, passing by to pick up more spoils.
Piston nodded and looked away towards the battlefield, crows and buzzards already circling to claim their own spoils. I knew what he was thinking, but I had to ask him anyways.
“What’s wrong?” I said. The two of us had a moment away from the listening ears of the others. He looked to his hands and then tried to scrub the dried blood and caked dirt from them.
“Can’t say anyone’s earned it more,” Piston said. “You’ve outgunned even the veterans by so much. Maybe even strangely so.”
“Even if it does mean ascending in the ranks, it can only be good for the both of us.”
“The Gardener has over ninety lieutenants. How many do you see shoveling the shit with the rest of us? How many do you think told their mates something similar as you?”
The Lieutenants didn’t normally lend themselves to the normal scouting and supply runs, nor were they much present during the Judgements. This is exactly what was bittersweet for Piston. He didn’t speak with distrust or anger. It was a respectable trait to speak plainly and honestly. A trait that wasn’t befitting of someone in the lower sectors.
“I’m not those men, Piston. You know I’m not.”
Just then the ganger who announced our departure did so again. “Alright, let’s move out!”
We all began to pile into the rovers and Piston looked at me with stern eyes. “I never had anyone better at watching my back.”
We had each other’s backs for only a short while by normal standards. But the life expectancy of a ganger was cut in half to that of an uppercity citizen, if you were worth your salt, so you got to know people damn quick. You picked your friends quickly and your enemies even faster. Although he was somewhere around my age, Piston couldn’t help but remind me of Caine. My brother and I made a similar promise. Keep each other safe. Look after each other with our lives.
On the way to the main camp, Caine swirled in my head. I thought of what he was doing, where he was. Wherever he was, he was fairing much better than I, that had to have been fact. Me going off to train felt like a betrayal to him, he hardly said a word to me. He knew what becoming an Infiltrator entailed. Not sure if Dad told him, or he was smarter than he looked. Training away from home, long assignments. Of course, he questioned how’d I’d look after him if I was gone. Luckily for him, he was too young and too stupid to remember our lives down there. Maybe he was trying to tell me something. Or he knew he had to distance himself from me as much as possible. Maybe I just didn’t know shit. As trivial as two brothers swearing an oath may be, and one we recognized as such, we understood the importance of it. No one was going to watch out for us in this world and it was foolish to expect it. Maybe that was his message to me. Reminding me of just that. Even brothers can’t protect each other. Just like how I couldn’t protect Piston forever, nor he return the same. That was the undercity way.
I had never been that deep into the main camp before; the most I’d seen was the runner’s shack where I’d deliver messages from other outposts. Our gang was split into numerous campsites several kilometers apart, often with at least a hundred men each. But the main encampment was a large village with several hundred gangers inside the crude but effective walls made of debris and trash.
Just like the other camps, this one smelled of wet metal, rust, and grass weeds growing from the ancient and cracked asphalt which served as the foundation, but oddly, a beautiful green grass flourished in the center of the village, an old playground, centuries old. The grass was perfectly cared for although a little on the long side. A ring of bright red poppies encircled the playground, also perfectly cared for. It was one thing I took notice of every time. At first, I thought how, in the midst of despicable human beings and their conditioning, could there be something so beautiful? The rest of the camp dulled the experience, unfortunately. There were musty green canvas tents and old bio-bubbles scattered in no particular sense for various purposes. Common areas, training, eating, prayer, and merchant stands. Old Earth office buildings were the housing for the pack leaders, the Lieutenants. Half-assed remodeling was done time after time, the concrete turning from gray to a confusion of grimy green and brown, but such aesthetics weren’t important there. And the largest building in the center, for the big cheese himself, The Gardener.
As I disembarked the rover just in front of the main building, a few things were off to me. The guards protecting the center building wore our colors but were much better equipped. Rifles and gear that an Earth Marine could take seriously. While their clothing was ragged and their faces dirty, they had another look about them, not like the other lot of us, but faces and bodies hardened from years if not decades of experience. I was ushered by two gangers through the building which must have been a school at some point in its forgotten past.
As some of the guards saw me and nodded, a sign of recognition, I felt more pride than the day before I first arrived here in the VTOLs. It was an incredible feeling. Very oddly, it made me feel good. I felt proud to become a person of worth. Proud to be some ganger across the world. Up the stairs and at the end of the hall was the office of The Gardener. Seeing the door, I became nervous. M
y feeling of pride and accomplishment slipped away. My hand twitched ever so slightly, but only for a moment. And nervous why? How would anyone feel, knowing they were going to meet their death? In that moment, I was ready to kill The Gardener. And I knew, once I struck, I wasn’t getting out alive. But revenge was always bittersweet, always two sides to the story. But revenge was all I had.
The two guards escorting me stood near the door, turning to face me while one banged on the metal door.
“Come in,” I heard a voice say from the other side.
Just hearing the voice sent a shiver down my spine. I had been stripped of my weapons before coming in, so it’d have to be only with my hands or whatever I could find in there. But nothing could prepare me for when that door opened.
The door shut behind me, starling me, leaving only me and him alone in the room. I expected something, although I couldn’t tell you what exactly. The room had very little in terms of decoration. The room was dark in a few corners. A bit of light came in through the window, a perfect view of the playground outside. A lot of maps and organizational charts were pinned to several boards and on some of the walls. Not what I expected from a gang leader. A metal table in the middle of the room had a couple of terminals lit on it. I saw a cork board on wheels near where The Gardener was standing, his back to me, too occupied with something more important than giving me his full attention. Several printouts of coordinates and satellite imaging were pinpointed in the photos. Each with a picture of someone underneath it, almost all with a red X over the faces.
“This is your first time here?” The Gardener said, his back still to me. It broke my concentration, but I answered him without hesitation.
“No,” I said. “I was a runner not long ago. But I’ve never had the privilege this deep into the camp.”
“You were a runner?” I saw him clipping thorns off a few roses in a small planter. His name fit rightfully so. “You must be fast. Dangerous job, that.”
“It’s nothing after a while. You get used to it.”
“I suppose that’s true. And if you don’t, you end up food for the buzzards, as you’ve seen.” The shadows cast over his face, but he was a tall man. Slender and a proper posture. “A runner. A scavenger. A brawler.” He held a rose up to the moonlight, revealing the gorgeous, blood red petals.
“Whatever was needed. I’m happy to find my place here.”
“So you’ve proved,” The Gardener mumbled. “Do you like the garden out there?” I looked to the grassy playground outside again.
“I don’t see something quite like that elsewhere,” I said as I surveyed the room again.
“No, of course you don’t. You know what makes us different from them? The uppercity folk? The other colors?” he said as he moved to the window. The light revealed more of his face, somewhat familiar but I still couldn’t place it. It made me give him my full attention again. “Take a lock of grass, for example. We have an abundance of it on the ground floor. But up in the cities? Patches. Squares of dirt and seed placed by hand in a concrete container, grown in uniformity. But down here, it’s free and wild. Genuine. Just like us, our genuine need for survival is apparent. The uppercity is full of people who walk on autopilot, never searching for truth, blind themselves with little things that matter little to us.”
“But the grass in your garden out there isn’t free and wild. You tame it, don’t you?”
“A good observation. My family loved to be outside. As dangerous as it is to an upper-dweller, laying in the grass was something of an adventure. That garden down there is a symbol from another life so as not to forget who you are.”
I looked at the corkboard again and saw all the faces in the photos crossed out. As a sliver of moonlight hit the photos, I realized it was all my comrades in my class. Everyone who landed here with me was crossed out, except for me. The Gardener turned around and walked towards me.
“Something to remind me that not everything is as it seems,” he said in English, dropping the local dialect as his face was revealed by the light in the center of the room. “A sane practice this far down the hole, wouldn’t you agree, Dillon Roberts?”
I was absolutely stunned when I saw his face. It was Lieutenant Grange. I hadn’t seen his face since we shipped off to this piss hole. He could see it too. I walked in there ready to take the bastard out and now I felt a less intense rage, an anger fueled by burning questions.
“Lieutenant Grange…” I stuttered in English. “How..?”
“My question to you, Sergeant Roberts, have you lost yourself down here? Have you reminded yourself of a clear goal you still had to accomplish?”
“What the hell is this?” I snapped out of my dumbstruck trance and fired back. “Who the hell are you, Grange? An Interpol officer? A ganger? A fuckin’ florist?!”
He moved to the chair behind the table and took a seat, a frown on his face. “I suppose you deserve some answers. Infiltration training is the most difficult of Earth’s special units. I suppose I’m both. But what are you?”
I smiled at the lunacy of the situation. “Oh, and the blokes outside of the door are your pet gangers? How many know who you are?”
“Enough know. And, for your information, every ganger in this building is an Interpol officer. This exercise isn’t without safeguards.”
“We were bloody attacked!” I shouted as I leaned over the table. “Beaten and broken! How many did you kill?!”
“Don’t be foolish, no one was killed. As I said, this exercise is the most complex system of training. Although, sometimes there are accidents.”
“I was shot at. Explain that. I felt the bullets whiz past my fucking face!”
“Did a round meet its mark? Or strike any of your comrades for that matter? What did you see? What did you hear?” I stepped back, taking it all in. “What you saw was a façade. Tricks in front of the curtain. But I am always pleased to hear our methods are still convincing.”
“You bastard. I was out there for months, for… I don’t even know how long now. How long was it going to go on?”
“Let’s talk about that, Roberts,” he said as he reached for a cigarette in a small aluminum case on the table. “Why were you out there? Why separate yourself from your classmates? Why didn’t you seek them out when time had passed?” He lit the cigarette with a match and took a long drag. I wondered how many times he had this conversation with others, but it was the first time I’d received the talk.
“Because I…” I fumbled. I branded myself as a coward since that night. Something I couldn’t quite live with. “A coward. I’m a coward.”
“No. You saw a way out. You were beyond petty titles like that of a coward. Thinking on another level. Survival was all that was important then, and you did that. Exactly what was necessary. And here you are. Alive and well.”
“But it was all a trick, wasn’t it? No harm would ever befall me?”
“I didn’t say that. I said no one would be killed,” Grange said as he stood up to retrieve a dossier behind him. He dropped the file on the table and showed me various recon pictures of me from my time of arrival to walking up the stairs of the building to meet him. “Not that you knew that until now. Did you have a plan? At what point did you accept your situation?”
“First it was survival.”
“And second?”
“To kill you.”
Grange shrugged and tapped the ashes of his cigarette in the ashtray. “Expected. Revenge can be a powerful sedative. Focus and resolve become so clear. Even through the muddy waters that you can find down here. And so here you are. So, what now?”
I shook my head and felt relief finally find its way to my senses. What could I say after that?
“I just want to go home, sir.”
Grange nodded his head.
“I can do that. I’ll get you on a VTOL and on your way to Freedom. But in what manner will you return there?”
“Sir, frankly, I don’t care what you have to say.”
“Robe
rts, you are the only one out of your group to have infiltrated this gang without any of them suspecting you. Your methods were your own. You distanced yourself from anyone who could make you, scavenged to support yourself, made an ally with the Lost, and earned your tribute to land yourself in this office. You think that was luck? Happenstance? You think it was rigged for you to make it here? You’re here because you have what it takes. You’re the best Interpol can craft. You’re an Infiltrator now.”
I looked at him and, despite the nightmarish training I had endured, I understood. I knew very well the massive dropout rate of the program before signing on. I honestly didn’t think I’d make it. But one thing was certain: I signed on to be the bloody best. And now, I was.
“Of course, it is an offer. And you can choose to decline,” Grange said as he stood. “But you didn’t come all this way for nothing, did you?”
He extended his hand. When I stared at it, thinking of the offer, I wondered about Caine, Piston, my dad, my mum. I hoped and I prayed that the sacrifices and betrayals I made to those around me to become this new tool would be forgotten, because they would never be forgiven. Knowing the veterancy that Grange possessed, I wondered if he had himself forgets who he is at times. But seeing the garden out the window, it was clear he needed it still despite his experience. I looked at my pendant of St. Jude and hoped I'd never go as far down as to forget where it came from. I stared at it for a few moments until, finally, I shook his hand.
The Bloodlust: (Volume Three of the Virion Series) Page 14