Underdogs

by Chris Bonnello

  ‘Laser cannon!’ he screamed.

  All four Underdogs left the blast radius moments before a circular wall of light roared through the Inner City and shattered the remains of the shelter. Dust and wooden splinters filled the air, along with the screams of a thousand civilians who had no idea why they were being fired upon.

  ‘Can we run out of range in half a minute?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘The other end of New London won’t be out of range!’ shouted Ewan. ‘We have to get out of sight!’

  Ewan accelerated again, questioning how much energy remained in his tiring body. The conflicting sensations of the Inner City made him sick: the prison was expansive beyond imagination, but every square metre was cramped. It gave him claustrophobia and agoraphobia at the same time.

  He checked over his shoulder. The hole in the Outer City wall was out of sight, hidden behind the walls and ceilings of the makeshift houses.

  Roth wouldn’t hesitate to fire blindly on the prisoners, just on the off-chance of getting us.

  But they’re all safe. Roth won’t have the patience to wait half a minute for each shot.

  ‘Guys, inside!’ he heard Kate squealing from the front, with her arm stretched towards the nearest collection of wood and iron. Ewan refused to think of it as a building. One of the walls had been a fence in its former life. Grant must have harvested materials from dead towns to drop to his subjects, then just left them to it.

  Ewan stood guard until Jack and Charlie made it inside, and only then did he notice the home’s owner. He was storming in their direction with some kind of pointed object in his grip.

  ‘Get away from here!’ he screamed, thrusting his arm towards the nearest invader. The fork in his hand missed Charlie’s face by half an inch. Saggy-skinned with baggy clothes, as if he had once been obese, this man had no better weapon to defend himself. Ewan barged forwards, readying himself for combat against a man he had entered this war to save.

  Somewhere outside, the air was humming. The laser cannon must have been close to firing.

  ‘I watched you break in – I’ve heard people die!’ the man screamed. ‘Whatever you’re doing here, you brought war with you!’

  Ewan raised his assault rifle. It was enough to silence him.

  ‘Guys,’ said Jack from a hole in the wall, ‘the laser cannon’s gone.’

  Ewan did not check for himself. His eyes stayed on the man with the fork.

  ‘Seriously? They’ve given up already?’

  ‘It’s just clones now. Shooting people as they climb for the hole.’

  Ewan closed his eyes in disgust, but sprung them open again in case the man tried to attack. Those despairing prisoners must have known the futility of trying to escape. They were willing to face death for a one-in-a-million chance of success. Normal Londoners, who once had homes and careers and livelihoods, were ending their time on Earth by firing squad.

  ‘The clones won’t have given up on us,’ Ewan muttered. ‘They’ll have chosen something else to hunt with.’

  Once he stopped talking, Ewan noticed the hum still in the air. It had not been the laser cannon after all.

  Seconds later, the hum had changed to a whirr. When the whirr changed to a chop-chop-chop audible through the roof, Ewan swore again.

  ‘Podcopters…’ whispered Kate.

  Back when Ewan had wanted to follow his father into the army, he had seen countless videos of M134 Miniguns spraying bullets. The sound could not be mistaken as the podcopter opened fire through the roof.

  The walls and ceiling exploded into shards. Ewan could only slam his hands over his ears, dive for a corner and trust his friends to do the same. The podcopter randomised its fire like a toddler scribbling over paper. Ewan pressed his face to the concrete ground: the only stable part of a world that shook as if mid-earthquake.

  When the gunfire paused, Ewan gazed back to the middle of the room. The dead body of the homeowner lay in a growing puddle of his own blood, large chunks of his flesh separated from the rest of his corpse.

  ‘We’re dead if we stay here!’ shouted Kate, above the sound of a wooden beam collapsing from the roof. Charlie shouted something in return, but nobody heard his words. Ewan peeked upwards and saw the podcopter: egg-shaped, dark green, big enough for a pilot and controls but nothing else, and twice as close as he had predicted. He couldn’t see through the tinted window glass – fitted in the shape of frowning, intimidating eyes – but the pilot inside was redirecting the miniguns towards Ewan’s face. Ewan sprung to one side, and the podcopter let loose a second round of bullets that sent the rear wall tumbling onto him.

  Ewan’s last sight before darkness was Charlie springing to his feet and charging through the exit away from the team. Ewan couldn’t tell whether it was selfishness or heroism. It was probably the latter. Charlie must have known the gunfire would follow him.

  ‘Kate? Jack!’

  ‘I’m OK,’ Kate’s voice shouted, dulled by the debris. ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘Charlie legged it. The copter’s firing at him. I don’t know about Jack…’

  ‘Digging you out,’ Jack grunted. ‘You’re welcome.’

  Once Jack had lightened the pile of wood and concrete, Ewan forced his way out like a dusty zombie from its grave. Jack turned in the direction of Kate’s voice, revealing blood all over the back of his head. It must have been the debris.

  The podcopter was only two or three metres above, retraining its guns towards Charlie’s new shelter. It was too high to jump up and grab, and its hull too strong for petty rifle bullets.

  There was another way, but it would be a massive risk. Then again, Ewan’s last massive risk had saved four lives in that corridor.

  ‘I can do this,’ he muttered to himself with his face to the sky.

  Charlie is three days from his sixteenth. He should live to see it.

  By the time the podcopter released its first wave of bullets into Charlie’s shelter, Ewan had hauled himself onto the low roof of a neighbouring house. He scrambled to his feet, took a careful glance at the corrugated metal beneath him, and began his run.

  The pilot was facing the other way, and could not see Ewan as he charged along the rooftop and leapt from the edge. He thumped into the cold, hard back of the podcopter, his head just half a metre below the spinning blades. His left foot was balanced precariously on a joint between the titanium shell and one of its miniguns.

  Three thousand bullets per minute. Blades spinning rapidly enough to press his helmet deep into his scalp. The most agile and manoeuvrable helicopter ever devised. Everything about the machine screamed ‘fast’, and Ewan was faced with a massive sensory overload. He clung on for dear life as the podcopter swung from the unexpected weight, its miniguns still blazing but its aim less accurate.

  Ewan gritted his teeth, lifted his left foot and stamped it down, dislodging what appeared to be a safety guard on the casing of the left-hand minigun – a guard which prevented the bullets being aimed too high. He then pushed with all his bodyweight against its back end, and the muzzle of the weapon flew upwards. Fifty bullets per second screamed up into the sky, and shattered the rotating blades above them.

  The air was filled with shrapnel. One of the giant shards zipped downwards and slashed its way down Ewan’s left arm. With his brain paralysed by noise, vertigo and searing pain, Ewan’s hands released their grip and he tumbled to the ground.

  The podcopter fell like a boulder, landing on the concrete with a piercing clang. Ewan, too dizzy to stand, bent his weary head towards his shrapnel wound. The metal had glided through his skin with zero difficulty. Lorraine would have a hell of a lot of stitches to perform, if he ever made it home.

  A door on the podcopter fell open against the concrete to reveal an angered shaking hand. Ewan had landed in front of Charlie’s shelter, and a thump against the collapsed roof revealed that his friend was still alive.

  The pilot stumbled out of the capsized cockpit, fumbling a pistol into his hands. Disori
ented, confused and consumed by his own fury, he was unprepared for the girl approaching from behind. Kate, unarmed since entering the Inner City, marched over the rubble with the dead man’s fork clutched in her hand. When the clone turned in surprise, she planted it firmly into his neck. Her other hand grabbed the pistol from the clone’s loosening fingers, tugged it free and shot him dead.

  Charlie emerged from the ruins of his shelter, coughing the debris dust from his lungs.

  ‘You OK, mate?’ he asked, pointing to Ewan’s blood-soaked arm.

  ‘Me? What about you after your suicide charge?’

  ‘Kate?’ Charlie asked, distracted again.

  Ewan turned around. The colour was gone from her face, and the pistol in her hands dropped to the ground.

  We don’t get to choose when anxiety strikes, or why. But stabbing a clone in the neck with a fork is a pretty good reason.

  Behind her, Jack leaned against the podcopter and applied all his strength to one of its miniguns.

  ‘Guys,’ he said, ‘help me break this off. The other’s destroyed, but we can still take this one.’

  Charlie ran for the destroyed podcopter. Kate didn’t move. Ewan ran to her and returned the clone’s pistol to her hand, keeping a close eye on the locals. At that moment, he barely trusted the prisoners more than the clones.

  Overhead, something else started to hum.

  ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ he snarled. ‘Guys, we need to hide. Now.’

  Ewan gazed at the slash on his arm that was painting his hand red. There would be no chance of repeating his trick with another podcopter.

  ‘You lot!’ came a distant shout. ‘Here!’

  Ewan turned towards the voice. It came from a short, thin man in an ageing shirt and the remains of a pair of jeans, outside a shack that lay within sprinting distance. One of his hands pointed towards his own entrance.

  There was nothing to lose. Ewan called his friends and ran for safety.

  He ran to escape more than the gunfire. He ran to escape the mental images of his last five minutes: images that would never, ever fade once they had solidified in his head. The woman next to the wall who had asked about their guns. The screams that had fallen silent in that first house. The prisoners who had tried climbing the ladder. The man with the fork.

  If we’d died in the corridor, all those people would still be alive.

  Well, for a while at least.

  We’d better end up winning this war. It’s the only way to make this worth it.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ewan gasped on arrival, as the gentleman ushered him inside with a hurried pat on the back.

  ‘Your friends had better hurry.’

  As Charlie, Kate and Jack passed through the front door, a detached minigun shared between their arms, Ewan tried to phrase the question in his head. Thankfully, the man already knew what he was thinking.

  ‘Because Grant’s people are after you,’ he answered. ‘I really can’t think of a better reason to trust someone.’

  Chapter 14

  Raj could read chessboards far better than books, but he was still losing. The moves just weren’t coming to him.

  Normally, his brain could see straight through to the root of any problem. Amongst all the famous disadvantages of dyslexia, he had been blessed with the ability to see past all the frilly, unnecessary bits of a dilemma and see problems for what they really were. Not all dyslexic people were chess wizards, but problem-solving, pattern-spotting and thinking in shapes came naturally to Raj.

  Except, he was up against Mark. The icy eighteen-year-old giant in front of him had a few advantages of his own: a three-year age bonus, an aggressive approach to basically everything, and a cool, calculating brain.

  No learning difficulties. No diagnosable conditions. How exactly did he get into Oakenfold?

  Raj stared at the board with a hand rested on his jaw, nursing the lump that Shannon had given him that morning. Wow, she could throw a punch.

  And wow, Lorraine could yell.

  Raj thought nurses were supposed to be gentle and caring, but Lorraine had hardly been sympathetic when he had woken up. Her voice had given him a bigger headache than Shannon’s fist. The moral of the story was probably not to look through a girl’s clothes, even for valid investigation reasons.

  Raj returned his attention to the game. He had run out of attacking options, and Mark’s extra pawn was in danger of reaching the end of the board.

  ‘Would you like a draw?’ asked Raj.

  ‘Would you like to shut your pie-hole?’

  Thomas gave a high-pitched laugh from the sofa. Clearly the boy thought Mark was joking. Mark made his closed fists visible at the edge of the table, and Raj knew what that meant. It wasn’t to threaten him with physical violence – Mark wouldn’t see it as worth his time or energy – but simply to remind him where the power lay. Raj placed his bishop on the long diagonal, to guard the queening square.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Mark, sending his rook straight to the end of the board and taking out Raj’s last remaining knight.

  Argh, I forgot about that. He made me nervous, and it completely slipped my mind.

  Raj couldn’t help but respect that about Mark. He knew the value of winning battles by removing the opponent’s confidence.

  Before Raj could assess his options, loud footsteps came from the cellar stairs. He stared towards the door with an eyebrow perked. It couldn’t have been Gracie, who was upstairs sleeping off a bout of laziness. Or Lorraine from the farm, who was too slow for the speed of the footsteps. It might have been Shannon, but only if Lorraine had let her out of her sight.

  When Silent Simon burst through the living room door, Raj knew it was time to forget about the chess game.

  Simon stood at the side of the board with a sheet of paper quivering in his hands, mouthing a word that was probably ‘Lorraine’.

  ‘Gimme that,’ said Mark coldly, reaching for the paper. Simon mouthed ‘Lorraine’ again, but surrendered the paper as commanded.

  When Mark read the note, he frowned. Even more than his default expression.

  ‘Thomas,’ he said, ‘get out.’

  The child didn’t try to negotiate like he did with everyone else. He knew Mark better than that. Raj watched him leave the room, passing Shannon on the way out. She must have followed the loud footsteps to see if anything was wrong.

  When Thomas was gone, Mark read the note aloud.

  ‘Dear Lorraine, I’m sorry to report this bad news with paper, but you deserve to know quickly. Contact has been lost with all five of our friends. They had to go into New London to find Tylor’s belongings, and Ewan found a USB stick in his backpack. But Kate’s last call told me that Alex is most likely dead, and the other four are trapped in the corridors with almost zero chance of escape.’

  Oh bloody hell, God… please not them! Not the best fighters we have. And not Kate…

  The war’s pretty much over if they’re dead.

  ‘I’d like you to break the news very gently to the others,’ Mark finished. ‘And don’t tell Shannon. She needs to feel safe.’

  Mark threw the paper back to Simon, and turned to the young woman at the door.

  ‘So yeah, sorry about that.’

  Shannon turned and ran, her face streaming with tears. Raj did not have the motivation to follow, until he heard a child’s voice shouting ‘Shannon, wait!’ and rapid footsteps following her into the cellar.

  Suppose I’d better watch over him. For all the good it’ll do.

  Raj left the chessboard, and Mark took the time to push his opponent’s king over before following.

  By the time Raj was halfway down the steps, Thomas had placed himself firmly between Shannon and the exit to Spitfire’s Rise, his arms and legs spread across the improvised door. Shannon reacted like a caged animal, with a supermarket of weapons within arm’s reach. She ignored the unloaded guns and seized the nearest hunting knife.

  Unbelievably, Thomas didn’t move. The blade, pointed in his direction,
quivered in Shannon’s hand as if it had already been thrown.

  She’s killed a human before, Thomas…

  Raj’s breath held itself in his throat. He and Mark were only partway down the cellar steps: easy for Shannon to spot if she turned around, even in the cellar’s natural darkness. But Raj wasn’t worried about whether Shannon would come for them. He had spent enough time around single-minded people to know how committed they could be when they only had single objectives.

  And only one thing stood in the way of Shannon’s.

  ‘Please,’ came the boy’s voice, bleating like a sheep, ‘please just listen.’

  If Thomas gets stabbed, Lorraine won’t be able to save him. I can’t just stand here. He’s not ready for Heaven yet.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ Mark whispered from the step behind him, as much as he was capable of whispering. ‘If she gets pinned on two sides, she’ll panic and stab her way out.’

  Raj closed his eyes. He was not ready to accept his own helplessness any more than he could accept the deaths of Kate and the others. But Mark was right and he knew it. Everything Raj knew about combat strategy, hand-to-hand fighting and people in general, told him there was nothing he could do. The last free child in Great Britain stood at knifepoint, threatened by an adolescent girl who could kill him in the belief that she was defending herself.

  ‘I don’t know what’s worrying you,’ Thomas said, ‘but everyone cares for you here. Outside there’s nothing! Here you have everything you could want!’

  Shannon’s unarmed hand swiped out and anchored itself onto the side of Thomas’ head. Before the child could react he had been thrown aside, and he yelped as his spine rammed against the Memorial Wall. Raj winced as Thomas’ eyes squeezed closed, and his mouth locked open in pain. The boy spent a helpless moment regathering his senses before a metal blade rested against his throat.

  Give up, Thomas. Let her go. And for once in your life, shut up!

  ‘Can I… I please say one thing before you leave?’ Thomas asked, the larynx of his throat rising and falling over the blade.