Underdogs

by Chris Bonnello

  ‘Things need to change,’ he began, with droplets of sweat emerging on his forehead, ‘and fast. McCormick must think we’re dead, Grant’s up to something with the food, and before long the locals will turn on us. And we’re putting the Rowlands in danger by sheltering under their roof.’

  ‘Then there’s your arm,’ said Jack. ‘You need antibiotics or you’ll be dead in a week.’

  Ewan stared at him, wide eyed.

  ‘You didn’t think we’d notice?’ asked Kate. ‘We’ve got to break out. For your sake, even if nothing else.’

  It wasn’t a subject Ewan wanted to talk about. But he smiled on the inside. It was good to have friends looking out for him.

  ‘That hole we made to the Outer City,’ he said. ‘It’s the only way out.’

  ‘Now why on Earth didn’t we think of that before?’ asked Charlie with exaggerated sarcasm.

  ‘Because an hour after we broke in, we lost our weapons. There’s a right way to get through that hole, but it’s not by copying the locals. The clones covered the hole with wood so they can rebuild it from the inside, which means they won’t see us approaching. But time’s running out.’

  Jack took the group’s last two pistols from his belt, and held one lightly in each hand.

  ‘I’m up for it if you are,’ he said, ‘but the probability of success is pretty much zero.’

  ‘Not if we get the minigun back,’ said Ewan. ‘I’m going to find The Lord. It’s time to negotiate.’

  Chapter 20

  Half of the crowd had dispersed by the time Ewan made his journey. The other half had probably worked out that their owners didn’t plan to feed them that day, but their desperation was powerful enough to keep them in place.

  Ewan stood a hundred metres from The Lord’s current shelter, his hands fidgeting beyond his control.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ said Charlie at his side. ‘You’re betting your life on it working.’

  ‘We’ll never break out with two handguns. And besides,’ Ewan said, showing his arm with its pus-filled sacs lining the podcopter wound, ‘I’d rather die today if I’m dying here at all.’

  Ewan had already said his goodbyes to Kate, Jack and the Rowlands, pretending not to believe they were final. Kate had demanded he go unarmed, claiming that The Lord would see any weapon as a sign of aggression rather than protection. Her insistence had only triggered Ewan’s PDA, and guaranteed he would be defiant enough to take one.

  He wondered how much of his defiance had been because of her relationship with Raj. Over the last couple of days he had come to realise that his warm feelings for Kate were of friendship rather than romance, but she had still turned him down. That was OK, she had every right to, and in her position Ewan would have done the same. But he wasn’t going to lie to himself and pretend it didn’t hurt.

  But he had taken the news better than he had predicted, largely because he cared about Kate and her right to make her own decisions. Ewan may have had a great myriad of problems, but misogyny was not one of them. His parents had left him under no illusion about the importance of respecting women.

  Maybe Mum and Dad were lucky. If Major George West and his wife were going to die anywhere, at least they died without seeing this place.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ asked Charlie. ‘I mean… stupid question I know, but it’s fine to be scared.’

  Ewan closed his eyes, and tried his best to put his thoughts into words.

  ‘I know that death should scare me,’ he started, ‘but it doesn’t. There’s something scarier, and I’ve seen it in here.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  It was a topic he didn’t feel comfortable discussing, but somehow it seemed OK to tell his Temper Twin.

  ‘Death’s bad enough,’ Ewan said, ‘but surviving and losing your humanity? Tiptoeing around death long enough to lose yourself as a person? It’s happened to people we’ve met here. It happened to The Lord and his guys. And if you stay here, it’ll happen to you. That’s my biggest fear. Including death.’

  Charlie placed a hand on Ewan’s shoulder. Affection was rare from Charlie. He neither gave hugs in his best moods nor received them in his worst.

  ‘Before Oakenfold,’ Charlie said, ‘the teachers spent years trying to make us act like everyone else. We couldn’t do it back then, and we won’t do it now.’

  Ewan couldn’t help but smile. His friend had a point.

  ‘Charlie,’ he said, ‘there’s something I need to give you.’

  ‘I don’t do kisses, mate.’

  ‘Yeah, as if you’re my type. Here, take this.’

  Shannon’s USB stick had been zipped inside Ewan’s left pocket for two days, his hand patting it once an hour to double, triple and quadruple-check it was still there. He fetched it out, the words Better Days worn and smudged, and handed it to Charlie.

  ‘I don’t have a clue what to do with this. If this meeting goes wrong but you guys escape anyway, work out what to do.’

  Charlie bit his lip, but took the device from his friend regardless.

  ‘This doesn’t give you permission to die,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not your permission to give. Anyway, you’ve still got your phone, right?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Take photos of this place. The others need to see what the prisoners are going through. Then go to the toilet block… and guard Kate while she phones McCormick.’

  Charlie took a confused step backward. The constant threat of tracking technology had kept their phones in their pockets for two days straight. In Grant’s position, Ewan would have been scanning the whole Citadel non-stop, waiting for the Underdogs to give their location away by phoning home.

  ‘You sure?’ Charlie asked. ‘One frequency scan and we’re caught.’

  ‘It’s been two days. They might have given up scanning for us. But knowing McCormick, he’ll have kept the comms unit guarded since the beginning. He deserves to know we’re alive.’

  ‘Why don’t you make the call before you leave? You know, just in case…’

  ‘Because I’m leaving now. Besides, it might be Raj who answers.’

  ‘Yeah, so?’

  ‘I… kind of made a move on his girlfriend a few days ago. He doesn’t know, but I’d feel awkward. Just do this for me, mate.’

  Ewan took advantage of Charlie’s confused pause, and started his jog.

  According to the Rowlands, The Lord and his henchmen didn’t have a home. The last gang in power had made that mistake. Don Maggio and his mafia-style ‘family’ might as well have drawn a giant target on the door of their shelter, and were helpless when The Lord, Dave, Shawn, Gareth and Potts struck in the early hours. The Lord had learned from Don Maggio’s mistake, and commanded his empire under the roof of a different prisoner each night. It kept him safe from planned attacks, and his subordinates were forced to see their self-proclaimed master face-to-face while personally catering for his needs.

  But Ewan didn’t take long to find him. He had never seen the bodyguards’ faces, but he recognised superiority complex when he saw it. The guards were stood on the thin streets as if they owned them.

  He had no idea which henchman he met eyes with, but it did not matter. The four couldn’t have shared a full personality between them.

  If you spend enough time pretending to be someone you’re not, eventually your real personality fades away. It’s happened to these guys, and now their tough-guy disguises are the only part of them left. Sad, really.

  Stood before a tall, shaven-headed bringer of death, he did his best to remember that he was the great Ewan West: the leader of countless charges against the greatest foe Britain had ever known. Oh, and the young man who had destroyed a podcopter with his bare hands.

  ‘I would like to speak to The Lord,’ he breathed, in a voice that balanced respect and confidence in the best way he knew how. It was difficult, given that he didn’t respect them and didn’t feel confident either.

  His polite gesture was me
t with a predictable flurry of hands searching his body, and he was pinned against the wall by the muzzles of half a dozen firearms. He recognised three of the guns from the armoury back at Spitfire’s Rise, one of which had the knife mark he had placed there himself. He supressed his bubbling anger as well as he could. That had been his weapon, even among his peers.

  The Lord poked an interested pair of eyes around the entrance, saw Ewan’s combat gear and grinned.

  ‘Parasite’s armed,’ a henchman snarled. Ewan felt a sharp jerk from the back of his trousers as his handgun was ripped from its holster, and he heard the cocking of several firearms before The Lord raised a firm hand.

  ‘You dun’ touch ’im, Potts,’ he said. ‘That’s their leader. If he wants a chat he can ’ave one. Disarm ’im and let ’im in.’

  After a search for bladed weapons, Ewan was permitted inside the house under armed guard from Potts and one of the others. The Lord sat in the centre of the one-roomed shelter, at a table that had once been somebody’s back door. The original homeowner sat trembling at his side.

  ‘So you come here to kill me,’ The Lord said without aggression or alarm.

  ‘That’s not the way I do things.’

  ‘Then what are you doin’ here, whatever ya name is?’

  ‘West. Private West.’

  Ewan hoped that faking a military background would earn a little respect. He knew enough from his father to blag his way through most questions.

  ‘Bit young, ain’t you?’

  ‘I’ve come with peaceful intentions on behalf of my squaddies,’ Ewan continued, ‘to ask for our minigun back. You have my word, it will never be used against you or your interests.’

  The Lord spat out a laugh, so loud and so sudden that the other two henchmen ran to the door.

  ‘Y’know, there was summink wrong with every sentence there! You came in peace carrying a gun! You asked for your minigun when it fell from the sky! You say you won’t act against our interests, while asking for our biggest weapon!’

  ‘Does this mean you won’t negotiate?’

  The Lord gave a loose glance to the ceiling, considering the question. He then pointed a thumb towards their frightened host, who sat deep in his seat as if magnetised to it, and spoke to one of his men.

  ‘Dave, get rid of him.’

  His command was followed by a single bullet, fired from the gun that had once belonged to Charlie. With no time for a reaction before he died, the homeowner fell from his chair with the same scared expression on his face.

  ‘You idiot!’ The Lord shouted, rising from his stool. ‘I meant get him out the house, not get rid of him!’

  ‘Oh…’ answered Dave. ‘Sorry bruv, you just said–’

  ‘I just what?’

  ‘…Nothing, mate. Sorry.’

  ‘Put him outside. Shawn, help him.’

  Dave tucked Charlie’s weapon back in his belt, and nudged for Shawn to help him with the body. The Lord returned his glance to Ewan, the dead host forever gone from his mind.

  In the short silence that followed, Ewan realised he had been no more shocked by the man’s death than The Lord had been. The Inner City was eating his humanity, and the fear he had confessed to Charlie had taken gentle steps closer to reality. He had to get his team out of here.

  I spent my whole life thinking I was less human than other people, thanks to everyone telling me my brain was faulty. Today, I’m fighting to remain one of the most human people in New London.

  ‘So you came to negotiate,’ continued The Lord, ‘but there’s nothin’ to say. You’ve nothin’ to offer me–’

  ‘There’s a way out of the Citadel,’ said Ewan, his heart leaping up his chest when he realised he had interrupted The Lord. ‘But not without weapons. You have my word as an honourable British soldier – if you return our weapons, we will fight our way out and you will never see us again.’

  The Lord’s expression changed, his lips pressing together and his eyebrows deepening. Ewan tried to read his scarred face, but it was difficult to interpret. Did he think Ewan was lying? Insane? Did he see this as a pathetic attempt at deceit?

  ‘Tell me the way out, private,’ he commanded.

  ‘You must have seen that hole in the Outer City wall,’ answered Ewan.

  ‘The one that’s been boarded up, about to be concreted, with scum soldiers guarding every square inch of it?’

  Ewan noticed that The Lord had lost his grunting, lazy tone. He sounded like an actual person, with a hint of a Welsh accent.

  ‘Every day there’s a nice pile of bodies building up beneath it,’ The Lord continued. ‘They all had the same idea as you.’

  ‘They weren’t armed.’

  ‘You won’t be either,’ answered The Lord as he slouched back and put his feet up on the dead man’s chair, ‘because there’s no way in Hell you’re taking our weapons. Why would you want to escape anyway? There’s nothing out there anymore. Here we’ve got free food, no taxes, no morning rush hour, no parking tickets and no reality TV! Living the dream.’

  Living your dream. Nobody else’s.

  ‘Our friends are on the outside,’ Ewan answered, ‘and we have to get back to them.’

  ‘Then why’d you come here in the first place?’

  ‘Unhappy accident. Look mate, you say there’s nothing I can offer, but there is. You’d get to have a front row seat in watching loads of enemy soldiers getting slaughtered. You and your friends can watch in glee as those prison guards get what’s coming to them. Tell me honestly, can you really resist that?’

  The early stages of a smile broke across The Lord’s face. His bodyguards at the entrance had full grins. Ewan had walked into the wolves’ lair just hoping to walk out in one piece, but found himself on the winning side of a negotiation.

  His optimism was shot down by The Lord’s response.

  ‘It’s like this, private. That would be nice to watch. But only today. Tomorrow the guards will be replaced, we’ll be left without our biggest weapon, and the Fatherless are just dying for a chance to jump us and take power. We’re keeping our guns, mate, and there’s not a damned thing on Earth you can say to make me change my mind.’

  The Lord stood up from his chair and headed for the entrance door, bringing the moment Ewan had feared most: his attempt to leave.

  ‘But the thing is,’ The Lord finished, ‘I respect you. You’re not actually a bad guy. You ain’t getting your weapons, but I’ll let you live. Have fun in town, Private West.’

  Ewan dared to smile as he stood up.

  The Lord has blessed me with the gift of life, he thought with a grin. I wonder if Raj would find that funny?

  He had taken three steps towards the doorframe when a voice boomed out from loudspeakers across the Citadel. It must have echoed from one end of the Inner City to the other.

  The Lord and his henchmen leapt in shock. Such announcements must have been rare.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the Citadel, this is Nicholas Grant.’

  Nicholas bloody Grant!

  Up to that moment, Ewan had only known the tyrant as a name and a reputation. Suddenly he had a real voice, and it violated his ears with deafening power and clarity.

  You’ve starved your people for half a day, Ewan thought. What have you been building up to?

  ‘Today’s delivery of food and water has been cancelled,’ continued the voice of Nicholas Grant, ‘and all future deliveries have been suspended. Now, those of you in the northern region may have noticed the sudden presence of four strangers. These teenagers are dangerous… to my soldiers and to all of you.’

  Ewan’s feet anchored themselves to the ground in fright, and his stomach started to weaken. Grant’s voice oozed confidence and authority, in a way that The Lord and even McCormick never managed.

  ‘These strangers are named as follows,’ said Grant. ‘Charlie Coleman, a troublesome boy with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and uncontrolled anger issues. Kate Arrowsmith, an autistic school dropo
ut with a severe anxiety disorder. Jack Hopper, a teenager with Asperger Syndrome who has failed in two suicide attempts so far. And their leader is Ewan West, a sixteen-year-old problem child with autism and pathological demand avoidance, who was permanently expelled from six different schools.’

  Making us sound as worthless as possible. I know where you’re going with this.

  Ewan checked the walls for other exits, but found none.

  The Lord was standing at the entrance, his expression morphing from respect to hostility. A pistol lay gripped in his hand.

  They both knew Grant’s final sentences before they were spoken.

  ‘These four are your enemies,’ Grant finished, as The Lord raised his handgun to the height of Ewan’s forehead, ‘and you will put these parasites to death. There will be no more food or water drops, anywhere across New London, until I have recovered all four of their dead bodies.’

  Chapter 21

  Kate was undecided about the existence of miracles, but there was no other way to describe the timing. She had made it to the toilet block moments before Nicholas Grant’s voice had boomed across the Citadel, and the others had secured the entrance as he had finished his death threat. She switched on her mobile phone, although her quivering thumb needed several attempts to hit the right button.

  The worst dictator in British history just mentioned me by name.

  Then he shared my biggest weakness with millions of people.

  And after that, he told them to kill me.

  She was OK for now. The toilet block had only one entrance for Charlie to guard. Which was fortunate, since he held the team’s last remaining handgun. And there must have been a hundred people in the growing crowd outside, ready to charge the block.

  Even then, Kate still felt the temptation to peek outside. Just in case James was one of them.

  Then a gunshot sounded.

  Kate dropped the phone in fright, and brought her hands to her mouth. The gunshot hadn’t come from Charlie. It had been somewhere in the distance, perhaps a mile away.