by Frankie Rose
“Battery,” Seth says. “Sometimes we find one with some juice left in it. I can usually figure out a way to make ’em hold a charge for a while, if they’re still active.” He sets off down the stairs, blood drip, drip, dripping from his hand as he goes, and I am hit with an unwanted sense of remorse. Damn stupid remorse. What purpose does it serve? If I were Seth, I would want to hide my suffering so as not to make myself look like a weak target. Instead he just seems thoroughly depressed. We travel down four flights of stairs in silence. At the bottom of the final staircase, the tiny lights run out. Seth tuts and stumbles off into the dark, complaining under his breath.
“Do you think we ought to let him do that?” I ask.
Ryka, still glowing from the lights behind us, shakes his head. “I don’t know. To be honest, he seems kind of harmless.” A loud snapping noise fills the void in front of us, and then blinking strips of lights sputter into life overhead. One of the lights explodes five feet away, sending a shower of sparks cascading to the ground.
Seth gives us a half-hearted smile. “Oops.” He scratches his head. “Bigger battery.”
The room we find ourselves in is vast, the size of the arena floor. And in it, row upon row of desks are coated in thick layers of dust, covering dated computer equipment, paper, stacks of books with peeling covers, boxes of small, square pieces of plastic with strapping threaded through the back. Seth stoops and picks one up out of a box, blows the dust off. He loops the thing over his head so the plastic hangs down and hits him mid-chest. On the plastic, the faded, unsmiling face of a woman stares out at us. She’s barely visible, blonde-haired and blue eyed. She looks pissed, and I can’t help but think of Miranda.
Ryka paces the room, taking everything in. “There are no windows,” he states. “There were windows on the ground floor.” He turns and raises an eyebrow at Seth.
“This is a basement level,” he tell us, still clasping hold of his hand. “Below ground. We found it yesterday. Lots of things in here Rudy was excited about.” Ryka and I do the same thing: we scan the room, trying to figure out what is so interesting about this place. I come up blank, and from the nonplussed confusion Ryka wears, he doesn’t see anything to get excited about either.
A loud banging sound overhead startles Seth so badly that he nearly rockets back up the stairs, but Ryka reaches out and grabs hold of his arm. The three of us glance upwards, tensed, still and listening, as further banging and shouting reaches us.
“You should go,” Seth breathes. “It’s Rudy. He’ll be looking for you.”
“It’s not Rudy,” I tell him, still listening. Seth reacts like a cornered wild animal when the sound of running boots start charging toward us, barrelling down the stairs into the basement. Ryka has to use two hands to keep ahold of him. Luke is the first to arrive at the base of the stairwell, swiftly followed by Lettin and Callum. They all have knives in their hands, and they all look confused.
“We heard screaming,” Luke says breathlessly. “It sounded like a girl.”
Seth looks away, faintly embarrassed, while I glare at my brother. “You really think I’m the type to scream? And what have you done to yourself?” He has blood all over his hands. In fact all of them are covered in small cuts and scrapes, up their arms and covering their hands.
“The barricade fell. It was blocking the way. We moved it as quickly as we could,” Callum says. He sounds deeply apologetic, which makes me feel terrible. They must have heard the sounds of the fight. I know how useless I would have felt in their position, if I were unable to help my friends. My brother.
“Sorry. We weren’t expecting trouble.”
“Yeah, well, looks like you got it.” Lettin points his blade at Seth, who has gone completely limp in Ryka’s grasp. It’s like a defence mechanism or something. Play dead.
“He’s not half as much trouble as his other friends were,” Ryka says stiffly. “They should still be passed out upstairs, but I don’t know how long that will last for. Seth was just about to tell us what his friends were guarding in here so closely.”
Lettin quickly assesses our surroundings. “Yeah. No food, no blankets. Nothing of any value.”
“Not true, not true,” Seth jabbers. “This way. Over here.” He shrugs out of Ryka’s grip, shooting him a filthy glance, and scurries off, weaving a path between desks and toppled, broken chairs. Luke starts sneezing and doesn’t stop until Seth pauses in front of a large, square door in the wall. It’s painted grey and made out of heavy steel. A round, rusted wheel protrudes from its centre.
Lettin slaps a huge hand against the door, and a hollow thum sound rings out on the other side. “What’s behind it?”
Seth grins. “Open it and see.”
“It’s locked.”
With a shake of his head, Seth starts tutting again. He places his hand on the rusted steel wheel and spins. The thing rattles around for three full rotations, making a heavy clunking noise, before it suddenly crashes to the floor. We all nearly jump out of our boots. Seth casts a sheepish look around our group. “Oops.”
The door swings back before anyone can try and kill him, and Seth points inside. “See. Now that’s exciting. Right? Right?”
We all peer inside, and not a single one of us can disagree with him. The kid’s right. It really is exciting.
Survival beyond the walls of the Sanctuary depends on the answer to three questions. One: Can you sustain yourself? Do you have access to food, water, shelter from the elements? Two: Can you defend yourself? Can you protect what is yours, including your life and the lives of your loved ones? Three: Are you relentless? Are you willing to do whatever it takes to beat the odds, so heavily stacked against you?
The contents of the once secured safe go a long way toward helping with question number two. The look on Ryka’s face—sheer determination—says he’s having no problems with question three now. I wish I could say the same.
Guns. Assault rifles to be exact. Four rows of them line the room, muzzles pointed into the air, bristling to attention. The sleek black barrels, stocks and actions are covered in dust.
“How…how many are there?” Ryka breathes.
Seth tiptoes into the room, like the weaponry inside might notice him and shoot him dead if he makes a sound. “Forty-three,” he whispers.
“And ammunition?” Lettin stalks into the room and runs his hand down the body of one of the rifles, rubbing his fingers together when they come away dusty. “Without ammunition, this is all useless.”
Seth eyes a rotten cardboard box on the floor close to the entranceway. “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.” Callum, closest to the box, nudges the flap open with the toe of his boot and grins at what he sees inside. “Yeah, I don’t think it’s going to be a problem, either. We can man all of the new checkpoints with these now. We won’t just have to signal; we can defend.”
The colour drains from Seth’s face. “What? You can’t actually take them.”
“Of course we’re taking them,” Ryka tells him.
He shakes his head. “I told you. Rudy’s already going to be furious when he wakes up. If you take his guns, he won’t just kill you,” he says, stabbing a finger into Ryka’s chest. “He’ll kill all of you.” There’s something a little slow about Seth that I’m only just realising now. Maybe it’s the way he swings his arm around when he says all, stretching out the word. Blood splatters to the floor, and he seems to remember his wounded hand. He shoots me a rankled look and tucks his hand underneath his arm. “I told you we were waiting. Waiting for the others. More of us are coming to carry these out.”
Ryka places his hands on Seth’s shoulders, angling his body so the boy has to stop glowering at me to look at him. “How many of you? And when are they coming?”
Seth manages a shrug, glancing up at the ceiling. “’Bout fifty, I suppose. And they’re coming now.”
******
I can only carry six rifles. The straps on the guns are not very trustworthy, too old, too moth e
aten and rotten, and so we have to carry most of them in our arms. They’re unwieldy to say the least, and really heavy. Lettin somehow carries twelve, while Ryka and Callum carry eight apiece. Luke, much to his disgust, can only manage four. In an unspoken agreement, Seth trails behind us carrying just one rifle in his good hand, complaining bitterly the whole time. Lettin was concerned about leaving the remaining ten rifles behind, until Ryka removed the bolts from each and every one of them, sliding them into his pockets.
“Can’t work without these,” he said, smirking. The bolts clank together, still in his pockets, as we walk. Coupled with the sound of the shifting ammunition in our rucksacks, our journey back to base is hardly a covert one.
“How do we know he isn’t gonna bail and tell his buddies where we are?” Callum whispers to me as we walk. He nods over his shoulder at Seth.
The boy doesn’t even look up from his worn and holey boots when he says, “We already know where you are. You’re lit up like a signal flare.” His eyes travel to the tallest building on the silhouetted night skyline, our building, and of course he’s right. Faint light glows in the windows of at least half the storeys, a beacon in the night. Seth gestures vaguely in the direction of our new base of operations as he stumbles behind us.
“Rudy says you’re smart. You know the nuts and bolts. It’s all nuts and bolts.”
Ryka slows, studying the boy. “What do you mean?”
“The workings of things. High ground, easy to defend. Clean water source close by. Stocking up on food. He thinks you’ll be ready soon.”
A nervous itching rises in my belly. “Ready for what?”
“For a siege. To be trapped inside.” He shrugs, like his words mean nothing. “To last a week. A month. Not a year, though. Rudy says there’s no way you’ll last a year.”
Oh boy. That doesn’t sound good. Ryka’s brow furrows. He stops dead in his tracks. “They’re going to trap us inside?”
Seth rocks his head from side to side—an I-don’t-know gesture. “That was before this,” he says, holding up his rifle. “Now he might just set the city on fire. He likes to watch things burn.” The casual tone of his voice gives the impression this wouldn’t be a huge deal for this Rudy person. Who knows, maybe this has happened before. “You should have done what I said before. You should have killed him while you had a chance.”
“And you would have been okay with that? With us killing your friend?” Luke says. Disbelief colours his voice.
“He’s not my friend. He’s just the first person who didn’t make me leave.” Seth’s shoulder blades protrude through his shirt as he pulls ahead a little and walks in front of us. His compliance to our will, answering every question we have, gives the impression he suspects we won’t be like Rudy, that we will make him leave, and that he doesn’t want that to happen.
“Why did he let you stay?” Luke asks. They’re close in age, as far as I can tell, and Luke seems keen to know more about him.
“’Cause I can fix things,” Seth mutters. “I can fix a lot of things. Make them run. Useful, Rudy says. That’s what I am. A commodity.” He tips his chin up at the building we’re heading toward and grins. “He wanted me in the Det before he realised you people had claimed it. That’s where the others used to fix things, to make the whole city run before everything changed. Rudy said I belonged in there. Now I get to go after all.”
The rooms and rooms of toppled computer equipment on the ground floors, wires, cables, smashed plastic and glass, so ancient looking and utterly broken—this is what he must be talking about. Rudy was mistaken if he thought Seth would be able to fix any of that. Time and the elements have had their way with the machines the people before used to operate their vast city. There’s no way any of it can be utilised now.
“The Det?” Luke hefts the rifles in his arms, trying not to drop them.
“Yeah. The letters up there; D.E.T.” He creates each letter with his hands, showing the shapes his fingers make to Luke. “Rudy says lightning strikes ’em all the time. They’ve always called it the Det.”
Those towering letters were the first thing I noticed about the building, aside from its height. Luke’s been up there with Opa nearly every day since he arrived, so he’s more than acquainted with them, too. “Yeah! They’re up there, rusting on the roof! It must have been a sign or something. I wonder what it used to say,” Luke wonders out loud. The news that we now have a name for our new home seems to amuse him. By the time we reach the lower entrance of the Det—I accept the term only because no one else blinks at it—I have questions brewing on my mind.
“When you say they’ve always called it the Det, how long are we talking here, Seth? Does your camp live in the city? Are they going to be staying here for good? How many of you are there?” Before today, I haven’t seen a single soul inside the ruined city limits. Apparently neither have Foster or Caius, otherwise they would have mentioned it to someone.
“They’ve always called it that because they’ve always been here,” Seth informs me. He’s still cautious of talking to or even looking at me. “Since forever.” He stamps his foot on a rusted steel cover that rests at an odd angle, poking up from the buckled, cracked concrete. “They live down there. Underneath. There are thousands of them.”
Our group stops. Ryka pauses to look at me and I see it in his eyes—this news is definitely not good. There are thousands of potentially hostile people living right beneath our feet? Movement to my left catches my attention, a half glimpsed flare of colour. I snap my head around, and part of my brain insists it sees the flash of a red shirt, red hair, red something, vanishing around the corner of the Det. Ryka presses close, placing his hand on my elbow.
“What is it?”
“Ahh…nothing. It was nothing.” Because that’s all I can say. I don’t want to admit to being jumpy beyond belief so instead I give him a tense smile. “Let’s just go inside.”
“Well, why didn’t you kill him?” James stalks up and down the corridor leading to the canteen with his hands on hips. The whole level is abandoned, but I can still smell the meal that was cooked here for dinner. It kind of makes the place a little less empty, like the knowledge of the people recently here has left some ghostly recognition of their actions in its wake. Seth sits on the top step of the stairwell while Penny looks over his wounded hand. Every time James speaks, Seth flinches. Thankfully, Ryka doesn’t. He just stares the man down. You would never be able to tell one of them killed the other’s father from the strange relationship they share.
“Because, James, I don’t just kill people randomly, okay? They usually have to be trying to kill me first.”
“Isn’t that just what you told me? That this Rudy guy was trying to kill you?”
Ryka raises both eyebrows. “Only while he was conscious. Once he was out for the count, he was mostly just lying on the ground, defenceless.”
James rolls his eyes, hands on his hips. “Great. So now we have the Sanctuary on one side of us and these lot right underneath.” Seth gives James a baleful look, which James studiously ignores. “We don’t have time or the resources to be fighting another unknown force.”
“They don’t want to fight us. They want to starve us out.”
James cocks an eyebrow, pinning a sharp glare on Seth. “This true?”
Seth nods, hissing when Penny tugs a bandage across his hand. “Rudy’s not very good at waiting, though. Sometimes, the fighting happens anyway.”
Well that answers that question. Seems Seth and his comrades have been in this position before. Penny finishes up with her bandaging, squeezing Seth’s knee, which seems to confuse him more than reassure him. That’s probably because the irritated look on her face conflicts with the comforting gesture.
“We’re supposed to be getting revenge. Freeing more people. The Sanctuary needs to remain our focus,” she snaps.
“And they will. Until Seth’s friends start digging up through the concrete beneath our feet.” James shakes his head. He draws a d
agger from his belt and paces toward Seth. He cowers back into the wall when James crouches in front of him, holding the knife two inches from his skin.
“I sharpen this knife every day,” he says. I can vouch for that. I’ve seen him doing it obsessively, that one knife in particular, and even if I hadn’t, the wicked glint on the edge of the steel speaks for itself. “This is the only weapon I carry that I haven’t used to kill anyone with. I’m saving it for a special occasion, but I tell you now, if you let any of your people in here, if you tell them anything about us, if you do anything that endangers the lives of my people, I will use this on you.”
“Stop it, James, you’re frightening him.” Simone emerges from the shadows, head to toe in black. Black, tight shirt. Black pants. She’s the first girl from Freetown I’ve seen not wearing a skirt. She looks…she looks like she’s Falin. Her gaze travels over our group and I don’t miss the way she skips over Callum. Neither does he. He shifts uncomfortably, averting his own eyes. It must be hard for the two of them to be around each other. Callum is the spitting image of Max, after all. And having Max’s widow around has to be an uneasy reminder of his loss every time Callum lays eyes on her.
“I’m just letting him know there are consequences to his actions around here. Show him to a room,” James tells Simone. His voice is a little softer than usual. In fact his whole demeanour changes when he talks to her. If I didn’t know him so well, I’d think he was actually trying to be nice to her.
Simone holds her hand out to Seth, and he studies it carefully for a moment before placing his own uninjured one. The two of them disappear, leaving myself, Ryka, James and Penny to stand in an awkward silence. James clears his throat.
“Right. Well.” That’s all he says. He powers off down the corridor and takes the exit for the stairs, like he has somewhere pressing to be at four a.m. Penny stuffs her hands into the pockets of her pants, which is when I realise she’s wearing a knife belt. With actual knives in it.