"Damn," Lucy said, her lower hands on her hips, the uppers, still holding the enormous pistol. "This is new."
"Can't we just go around?" Jon asked. "I'm sure that if we keep going the direction we were going and then cut back this way after another block or two, we can get to wherever you're taking us."
"You're right, except we are at the edge of Easel territory," Lucy said, studying the scene before her.
"Easel?" Carbine asked, stepping up to Lucy.
"E. S. L. Easels. East Side Lords..." Lucy said, her voice soft and dream-like. She was distracted by the obstacle and seemed to be studying it intently, her gaze wandering up and down the adjacent buildings. "They are a gang of thugs. Cooks."
"Cooks?"
"Weaver-makers. The only ones as far as I know. Big time. They make all the Weaver that ends up in the Shanty."
"Oh," Carbine and Jon both said.
"I'm on their shit list. Not a good idea to run into them with you two in tow. We're in a hurry, and besides," she sized them both up, "I don't need you getting killed just yet."
"Yet?" Carbine asked, annoyed.
"What if we go through the buildings?" Jon offered.
"I thought of that, but look closely at them. They are flush, sure, but they are separate. I think they used to be called apartments or something. I'll have to ask Ratt. The point is, there most likely isn't a path through them, only one way up and down within each one. But…" She paused, looking up. "Maybe we can get to the rooftops. Let's see if there isn't roof access in this one here." She pointed at the building to their immediate right. It alone, out of all the nearby units, didn't have its front door and windows obscured by the ubiquitous refuse.
Upon crossing the building’s threshold, Jon and Carbine re-lit their electric torches, the yellow-green light of which only accentuated the ghostly feel of the empty place.
"Are there people in here?" Jon whispered, following Lucy deeper into the entry room of the building, one slow step at a time. Underneath the thick layer of dust and cobwebs, the room was decorated and furnished to an almost Ziggurat standard, at least when compared to the simplicity of the Near Rough farmhouse, or what he had spied in the Shanty.
"Not this close to the East Side Lords. No way. But still, stay on your toes," Lucy said and continued to probe the depths of the first floor, searching for the stairs up.
Although seemingly devoid of occupants, they passed countless examples of graffiti. Pictures, still entombed behind thin panes of faded and milky glass, bore smiling faces of people long dead. A clock, still as the carpet of dust they unsettled as they walked, hung on the wall across from the opening to stairs. The time read 11:23. Jon's eyes moved down the length of the chains dangling from the large clock, to the pendulum-like weights at their bottom, one slightly higher than the other. He wondered what their function was, and whether or not 11:23 was the moment of the Great Storm, the exact minute Earth got sent to Hell.
Finding the stairs, the trio began the short hike to the top floor. Jon stayed with Lucy the entire time but stole glances into the other floors as they passed each opening. A mélange of haunting images greeted his snapshot observations into a world long gone. An old table, its white paint cracked and peeling, its chairs pulled out, one on its side. Ceramic plates still sat upon the table's surface. Once, each must have held some home-cooked meal, made with love. Now it was nothing but a feast of ashes. Farther on, Jon spotted a child's doll, left on the floor near the stairs’ entrance; the lone sentinel of the household, doomed to watch over the empty halls that once rang with its owner’s laughter. Where did they go? Jon wondered. What happened to them?
"I'd sure feel better if I had a gun with me," Carbine mumbled.
"Keep quiet and chill. We are almost there," Lucy scolded. A minute later they exited the stairwell onto the ninth floor. Lucy led the way into the room beyond. Jon could see tiny lights on the ceiling; they reminded him of the electric lights that had been hanging on the ceiling of the enormous cavern, and then he realized that they were. The ninth floor's roof had been blown away by time or forces unknown.
He then noticed a structural support beam that once supported the missing ceiling had fallen in and was resting at a thirty-degree angle. All things considered, it would provide rather easy access to the remaining neighboring roofs.
"I don't like it," Lucy said to herself. She didn't turn around to leave or move forward, but from where she was looking, it was obvious to Jon that she too had noticed the beam.
"What's not to like?" Carbine asked, shuffling his feet back and forth and soundlessly clapping his hands together.
"It's too easy. Smells like an ambush." She paused in thought, perhaps weighing her options. "But we don't have a lot of other choices. Come on." Lucy pointed the way with her oversized pistol and walked up the beam to the roof as nimble as a cat. Jaguar, thought Jon, watching her.
Once on the roof, Jon again had a clear view of the surrounding corpse of a city, as he’d had before from the rim, when riding the elevator. Only now, he was in a different part of the Underground, and much closer to the ground. The trash in the road below was piled up to half the height of the building, but only in that one spot by the intersection. Like a barrier, or wall. Deliberate. These gangs that Lucy spoke of, perhaps?
"Hold here," Lucy ordered. She stepped up to the edge of the broken roof and scanned the next roof over. Jon and Carbine waited in silence as Lucy used whatever hidden sensors at her cybernetic disposal to search for trouble. Finally satisfied, she signaled the boys to follow her and began to trot across the rooftops. They headed in their original direction, following along the blocked road, but nine stories up. They had traversed the width of several buildings, identical in shape and size to the one they had penetrated and ascended when they came to a gap. The row of buildings they had been running across ended; below, an alleyway bisected the block they were on with the next block over.
"Don't think you boys can make that jump. I guess now's as good a time as any to head back down to the street. We've cleared that wall," Lucy said and set about looking for a way off the roof into the building. "There must be a door or hatch or something."
Pausing in his efforts to help find a way down, Carbine stared out across the dark city and slowly shook his head side to side.
"Man. It sure is a graveyard down here. There aren't even any of them crawly things."
Lucy jerked to a halt and turned to Carbine. "What did you just say?"
"Crawly things," Carbine said defensively. "You know, like the rodents and bugs ‘n stuff back in that cellar."
Lucy's eyes narrowed, and her body language started to give Jon the spooks.
"There should be rats and bugs here..."
Just then they heard a loud crash, followed by a low grinding noise. It sounded like large chunks of metal rubbing on each other, dragging, catching and snapping free.
"What the he—" Carbine started to ask, but was cut off by Lucy, shushing him loudly through clenched teeth. She ducked into a low crouch, pistol at the ready, her lower set of arms inching slowly and silently to her Macuahuitl's saddle. The grinding noise continued and seemed now to be coming from directly under them. It stopped abruptly and the graveyard quiet again returned to the lonely rooftops. Suddenly Lucy sprang up, bolting for the edge of the roof, yelling, "Spread out, you idiotas!"
It was too late. The rooftop under their feet disintegrated instantly into so much dust. It was as if the very laws of physics that held mass together on the molecular level had just stopped. One second, the roof was completely solid, the next, like sand. The sand-like material that used to be the roof expanded somewhat and remained floating in midair while Jon, Carbine, and Lucy fell straight through.
Wired for combat in ways beyond the human potential, Lucy was the first to react. She was halfway across the roof when the ground beneath her gave way. She launched herself into a forward leap but lacked the purchase to make the jump as strong as it needed to be to escape. She f
ell short, and the rooftop's edge caught her right above her breasts and sent her into a violent backflip. Jon and Carbine, caught completely off-guard, simply fell straight down.
When the fall didn't end right away, Jon panicked, but he was already crying out in alarm. He had dropped his torch when the ground first disappeared, and it was falling along with him, casting its sickly light down the interior walls of the building. The building, more of an oversized shaft now, had been hollowed out. All the floors that should have been there were gone. Overcoming the white-lighting fear that soaked his mind, he twisted his falling body, craning his neck in an attempt to see what fate lay in store for him below. The second his face came around to see below him, it met the floor.
The floor turned out to be liquid, a fact that no doubt saved Jon's life. Rotten garbage and stagnant water rushed up Jon's nostrils and nearly peeled his eyelids back. His fall was broken, but the impact was still a far cry from a soft landing. He sank for what seemed like just a second but proved to be much farther than he’d thought when he attempted to swim and pull himself back up to the surface, desperate for air. His lungs screamed in a pain that nearly rivaled the massive slap to his face. He was disoriented and cold, praying that the direction he struggled in was indeed upward.
Jon breached the slick surface of the foul pool and sucked in a ragged breath. His eyes were still closed, swollen from the fierce splash they had endured. He heard something hard bouncing down the wall like a pinball, and then a crash that didn't sound like a splash. Perhaps it's not all water?
"Rene?" Jon called out. A hoarse moan of pain came in reply. Jon forced his eyes open, blinking them in rapid succession, squeezing the swamp water and pain away. One of the two electric torches had landed nearby and besides partially illuminating the pit—for that's what it seemed to be—it showed Jon the way to solid ground. He performed a sloppy breaststroke, his body still in shock from the fall and sudden chill and made his way to the ledge. The ledge proved to be nothing more than where the trash in the bottom of the hollowed-out shell of a building was piled high enough to form islands.
Jon clawed his way up and out of the filth and onto the heap of trash.
"Carbine?" he yelled but was still gasping for breath, lying on the rubble shore. Carbine moaned again, and Jon thought he heard his friend say his name, but it was warped, muffled. Jon rolled over onto his back and summoned the strength to get up. As he rose, he assessed his surroundings.
The light from the torch cast eerie shadows up the walls of the pit, making the place look like the setting from a fevered madman's nightmare. He couldn't see Lucy anywhere, nor Carbine, but he was able to pin down the source of the moans. Another pool of stagnant water, its surface nearly covered over, lay between the patch of trash he stood on and the one where he thought Carbine was. Jon nearly stepped into the pool and would have sunk again, its surface being completely covered with floating bits of flotsam, but he saw its obscured waters were aglow from somewhere underneath. The second torch. He went carefully around the pool’s edge.
He hadn't gone two steps when something small hit his face, hard. It stung. Then another hit scored, and another. He could hear the pitter-patter of minuscule objects pelting the ground and water around him. He raised his arms in defense, realizing that the floating bits that had comprised the roof were now falling en masse. A second later, the deluge had ended. Jon ignored what he could not understand and finished making his way to Carbine.
"Hey. You alright?" he asked as he neared. Carbine didn't answer, nor did he need to, for even in the low light of the nearby torch Jon could see that Carbine was not, in fact, all right. Carbine was on his ass and back, reclined as if seated in a leaned back chair. A long, bent rod of rebar jutted out of the top of his thigh and reached a meter into the air above his supine body. His eyes were closed, his hands wrapped around the bloody rod, his lips issuing a low and constant moan of agony.
Shit. "Hang on, man. We're gonna get you out of here."
Then he heard it.
Scraping, a lot of scraping, like a platoon of people behind him dragging metal bristle brushes over sheets of dirty aluminum.
Please tell me that's Lucy.
When he turned around, his eyes caught the movement. What looked to be a small tornado was spinning in the corner of the pit across from them. Spinning, and growing. Jon watched in growing alarm as the tornado, now as tall as three men, split into two columns, then grow a third, then become roughly man-shaped, each limb spinning like the tornado that gave birth to it.
The tornado, or whatever it was, was not made of dust and wind. It's body, if one could call it that, consisted of a million motes, tiny pieces of debris. With horror, Jon realized that it had been the ceiling, the roof that they had fallen through. All this—the blocked road, the obvious path, the pit; they had all been this creature’s hunting trap. Some unknown spirit, some poltergeist had lain this trap, possessed the bits of trash and formed them into shape, and now meant to menace them somehow. What exactly the Beastie had in mind Jon could not imagine.
Then a mouth formed, jagged and amorphous, seeming to float in the center of the spinning tornado's head. It let loose a howl of grinding metal, sparks flying from its gaping maw. Jon now thought he had a good idea of the thing’s intentions. Mouths are for eating...
Jon glanced around in a panic, trying to ascertain whether any of the trash within arm's reach could make a good improvised weapon. The creature finished its bear-like roar and plowed its fist into the floor of trash. Jon watched in sheer amazement as the Beastie’s fist did not so much go into the ground, but instead transferred its debris-possessing ability into the ground. Into and through. With the speed of a hurled stone, the essence of the Beastie shot through the ground straight towards Jon. Just before coming to where Jon's quickly retreating feet were, the essence shifted upwards. A fist-shaped column of hard metal trash grew out of the ground before Jon's eyes, delivering a massive uppercut which sent him flying backward into the wall. Jon landed with a thud and sank to the ground.
The Beastie now turned its attention to Carbine. It began to come towards him, not walking exactly, but using the same wave-like transfer of self from loose trash here to loose trash there, giving it the appearance of gliding or wading through silt.
"Come on, you bastard!" Carbine grimaced, holding up a broken piece of wood in vain. The entity loomed over him and cocked back a spinning fist. Carbine's face paled as he watched the trash that made up the fist swirl, shift, and rearrange itself until a sharp, hard piece of flat metal protruded from its knuckle line.
Oh shit. Carbine winced, closing his eyes, turned his head slightly and waited for the end.
Brrrraapptt! The deafening sound of automatic weapons fire erupted and filled the room with all its glory. Chunks of trash flew off the entity's upper torso and striking arm. The damage inflicted would have leveled most opponents, would have shredded an infantryman's body armor and maybe even taken out a Hopper. Unfortunately for Carbine, the volley of explosive rounds only slowed the beast.
Both Carbine and the Beastie rolled their heads to see the source of the volley. Jon stood, knee deep in filth, panting, and holding Lucy's pistol.
If this big fucking gun won't stop it, what will? Jon watched in disbelief as the entity repaired itself simply by sucking more trash off the floor. When it had finished the process, which only took two seconds, the thing was even bigger than before. It now stood as tall as four men and was half as wide. All I did was piss it off! Jon fumbled with the gun, trying to figure out why it had stopped firing.
More movement in the corner of his vision caught Jon's attention. Almost afraid to look, he quickly glanced over and saw Lucy. She was rising from the depths of the pit, wet bits of rubbish still clinging to her.
"It's a Tektonic!" she yelled out. "We cannot fight this! We have to get out!" She broke into a run while simultaneously tossing an object at Jon. "Shoot out the wall!" Jon caught the object and recognized it as a magazine. H
is soldier training kicked in, and familiar with it or no, he quickly reloaded the BFG.
Lucy circled the room, leaping from one hard bit of trash to another, making her way towards Jon. "Shoot out the wall!" she repeated, halfway to him now. With the pistol reloaded, Jon pointed it at the wall nearest him. He cocked his head to one side, chin down, eyes closed, and prayed to the patron saint of ricochets to spare his life, then squeezed the trigger. A salvo of explosive rounds erupted from the barrel and ate away at the old brick wall.
Lucy got to him just as he finished the new clip. She pushed him towards the hole in the wall he had just created. Jon lurched, then got out from under her hand and spun around. "I'm not leaving Carbine!" he shouted.
"He's already gone, we have to go, or we die too! Maya only needs you!" Lucy reached out and shoved him a second time. Jon recovered and shot Lucy a determined look. He bolted, running counterclockwise around the room, circuitously making his way to Carbine.
"Fuck," Lucy muttered to herself, then sprang into action. "Come get some, you maldito bastardo pile of junk!" she screamed at the Tektonic, which was tracking Jon. The animated rubble turned to face her as she rushed in, war club drawn. The thing swung a massive fist at her, which she deftly dodged by tucking into a forward roll, then coming up and out of it with a broad, diagonally upward stroke of her weapon. The cut was deep, passing right through the entity from hip to opposite armpit. As quick as the cut was made, the wound sealed itself back up. Lucy gasped. Before she could recover from the committed kill strike, the Tektonic grabbed her face, wrapping its fluid-like wave of trash around her, smothering her and lifting her off the ground.
Jon reached Carbine and looked at him with pity. "This is gonna hurt, bud." Carbine nodded through clenched teeth and furrowed brow. Without wasting another second, Jon dropped into a squat and grabbed the top and underside of Carbine’s impaled thigh. Carbine let out a howl of pain. Jon slowly straightened his legs while pulling upwards on his friend with all his strength, lifting the leg up and off the rebar pole, and practically rolling Carbine backward onto his head in the process. Carbine's screams abruptly stopped as his eyes rolled back in their sockets and he passed out.
The Goddess Gambit Page 20