Underdogs

by Chris Bonnello

  Ewan opened his eyes, which came into focus on Patrick Rowland’s smile.

  I’d never say it out loud, thought Ewan’s sleepy brain, but I’m going to miss you, Patrick.

  The sun usually peeked over the Citadel walls around nine, but the sky brightened several hours earlier. Daybreak was coming, and their assault on the Outer City would be imminent.

  Ewan looked around to see Aidan and Benjamin waking up his friends. The Lord’s armed henchmen stood at the entrance, unwilling to involve themselves. Perhaps they were unhappy with their master’s orders: to rescue his friends from certain death, and protect them all night against threats from the public.

  Ewan didn’t know where his idea had come from, but it had saved their lives.

  There were stomping, confident footsteps approaching the entrance. The Lord must have thought there was enough light to attack. Or more likely, he had run out of patience.

  ‘Time to go,’ he barked. ‘Looking forward to what you promised, “Private” West.’

  Ewan’s lie about his military background had been exposed by Nicholas Grant’s announcement, but The Lord had not seemed to mind. He had bigger priorities, and bigger opportunities. A moment later he was gone, taking his henchmen with him.

  ‘Ewan?’ asked Kate while rubbing her eyes. ‘What did you promise him?’

  ‘The chance to kill Grant’s men,’ Ewan answered as he got to his feet.

  It had been the first idea Ewan could spit out in the moment. In those short seconds between The Lord raising his pistol and almost pulling the trigger, Ewan had worked out what his would-be murderer truly wanted: the chance to watch enemy soldiers die, while still having their weapons at the end of it. Ewan had only needed one sentence: ‘What if you do the killing, we escape and you keep the weapons anyway?’ The Lord had dipped his weapon, and negotiations began.

  Ewan grinned, unable to believe his suggestion had worked. Being manipulative was one thing, but being quick-witted and manipulative had been a literal lifesaver.

  ‘There’s a logical side to The Lord,’ he continued. ‘He knows if we escape, New London gets its food back whether we die or not. Grant wouldn’t gain anything from starving his people to death. He wants control, not extermination. Then I told him where you guys could be found, and he sent his mates to rescue you.’

  ‘Didn’t feel like a rescue,’ mumbled Charlie, pointing to the bruise on his jaw. ‘And did you have to give them all the weapons?’

  ‘It’s not like I had much say in the matter, Charlie.’

  Ewan had tried, but his one request had resulted in a gunshot being fired past him. A bullet missing his ear by inches had been stressful enough, but The Lord had followed it with a speech that triggered his pathological demand avoidance enormously. ‘That bullet would have killed you if I’d chosen it to,’ The Lord had said. ‘From this moment, the only reason you’re breathing is because I gave you permission to live. You will go through the hole unarmed. And if you don’t like it, remember who your life belongs to now.’

  After that, Ewan’s brain had been in too much of a mess to negotiate.

  ‘Even if we get inside,’ Charlie continued, ‘we’re dead the moment we meet our first patrol.’

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ answered Jack. ‘Once we’re up there, we’ll take the rifles from the dead clones’ bodies.’

  ‘And what if there aren’t any clones guarding the hole?’

  Ewan snorted, and gave no answer. Charlie was asking negative questions just for the sake of asking.

  ‘So, how are we feeling?’ asked Ruth from the front door.

  ‘Fan-bloody-tastic,’ answered Ewan.

  ‘Did you guys sleep OK?’ asked Kate.

  ‘With your big day in the morning?’ said Aidan. ‘Not a chance.’

  Ewan felt just a twinge of love: something he had not felt much of in recent days. Against their own safety and against common sense the Rowlands had given the Underdogs everything they could offer, from the moment they had landed in prison. They had even pleaded their way into spending the night alongside them, out of nothing but loyalty.

  ‘You don’t have to put yourselves out like this, you know.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Benjamin. ‘We may not be part of your army, but we’re in this together. United by our differences, right?’

  ‘…United,’ answered Ewan, trying to hide his confusion.

  Aidan walked to the far wall, beckoning for his brother to follow. Benjamin smiled at the team before leaving them alone, and Ewan took his chance to whisper.

  ‘Someone taught them our motto?’

  ‘I did,’ answered Jack. ‘No point in saying “united by our differences” unless we share it with people different from us.’

  There was no denying Jack’s logic. And once his possessive thoughts subsided, Ewan realised how little he minded. He looked over to the Rowlands, who would have been miles away from the battleground if they’d had any common sense. Most other people would have been.

  You’d have been welcome in McCormick’s army, he thought towards the family.

  *

  When The Lord wanted something, there was no denying his efficiency. Ewan’s team had been given perfect accommodation, right next to the hole. After the original slaughter, the survivors had spent minutes mourning their dead neighbours, then hours harvesting the remains of their shelters. The Lord had found the shack with the biggest extension, and scared its owners away for the night.

  Ewan stood next to the shelter’s exit, and tried to judge the distance to the wall. At the first sound of gunfire, the sleeping locals would awake to see his team making a break with the ladder: a thick wooden board with crude footholds, broken off the Rowlands’ roof. Unless Ewan and his friends were quick, the hunt would be short and painful.

  Outside, The Lord and his four henchmen were positioned atop their roofs, weapons in hands and grins on faces. It would not be long.

  ‘Charlie,’ Ewan said, ‘happy birthday mate. One year closer to death and all that.’

  ‘Cheers,’ his friend answered with a well-humoured grin. ‘You know what’s weird? I’m finally old enough to join the army now!’

  Ewan smiled, and walked over to Kate at the far window. Her stare seemed unfocused. Someone was on her mind, and he didn’t think it was Raj.

  ‘Just concentrate on yourself,’ Ewan whispered. ‘Trust me.’

  Kate looked across at him, almost offended by the suggestion.

  ‘I never realised how many people look like him,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve seen his face a dozen times in the crowd, but every one of them ended up being a stranger. And now I’m abandoning my brother again. Just to keep myself safe.’

  ‘You’ll do more good for him out there than in here.’

  ‘Hardly makes it easier, does it?’

  Ewan took a step towards Kate, who allowed him to give her a hug. He made it as brief and non-emotive as he could. She would need her wits about her.

  Jack was at the rear of the house, waiting for Ewan to approach.

  ‘Don’t ask me how I am,’ he whispered once Ewan was next to him. ‘Tell me how you are.’

  Jack was trustworthy enough. Ewan checked around him for listeners, and found none.

  ‘I’m probably the most scared of all of us,’ he whispered. ‘I set up this deal. If it goes wrong, your blood’s on my hands.’

  ‘Not Grant’s, then?’

  He could always rely on Jack to be blunt and logical. In fact, sometimes that Asperger’s-style bluntness was just what he needed.

  ‘We could have died in that corridor three days ago,’ said Ewan. ‘Instead we lived, and prisoners died. If we get killed this morning, our extra three days on Earth will have cost dozens of lives for no reason.’

  ‘Best not die then. Chin up, mate.’

  ‘Hey,’ interrupted a gruff voice at the door, ‘y’ready for this?’

  The Lord stood with the podcopter minigun under one arm, grinning like a child about to meet Sa
nta.

  ‘Ready when you are,’ answered Ewan.

  ‘Better make this worth it. ’Parently the murder rate exploded last night. Everyone’s killing their neighbours and dressin’ ’em in black to look like you guys. Getting hungry, I guess.’

  ‘They’ll get their food back. Just get us through that wall.’

  ‘With pleasure…’

  The Lord leapt for the roof, and lifted himself up with a single arm. When the footsteps on the ceiling above stopped, Ewan took a long sigh.

  ‘Everyone line up,’ he said. His friends formed a queue at the shelter’s exit, Ewan at the back. Usually leadership meant being first in line. But sometimes it meant putting your friends first.

  ‘Guys,’ said Aidan as he exited the shack, ‘all the best.’

  ‘Aidan, you OK there?’ came Benjamin’s voice beside him.

  ‘…Yeah.’

  Ewan felt a sudden stillness in the atmosphere. Aidan’s foul-mooded response had not gone unnoticed, nor had the tone of Benjamin’s words. Even Ewan West, the worst people-reader in New London, had detected it.

  The brothers knew something.

  ‘Give ’em fiery hell!!’ screamed The Lord from the rooftop above.

  The wooden boards on the wall crumbled against the spray of the minigun. The Lord’s barrage of bullets chopped them to a thousand splinters, and sent a flood of wet concrete spilling out onto the ground below. A second layer of wood was chipped away to reveal the grey corridors of the Outer City. As a troop of surprised clones rushed to the newly opened window, The Lord’s henchmen joined the chaos and opened fire with their assault rifles. There was anger and laughter in their screams: they had dreamt for eleven months about a meaningful protest against their oppressors, and now had enough weapons to make their point.

  One of the angrier clones, leaning too far out of the hole as the bullet passed through his head, fell to the floor of the Inner City like an unstringed puppet. The weapon that replaced his right forearm was dark green, and the LED on its side flickered off. Ewan’s heart almost stopped.

  ‘Oh no,’ muttered Charlie.

  ‘Biorifles,’ snarled Ewan. ‘We are so screwed.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Patrick.

  ‘Marshall invented weapons, Pearce did genetic engineering. The biorifle’s the one thing they made together. The guns are wired into their owners. When the clone dies, the weapon dies.’

  Another body fell to the ground, with a similar green forearm and a blank LED.

  ‘Grant’s planned for this,’ finished Ewan. ‘He knew our ammo wouldn’t last in here. Those bioguns cost a ton of resources so there’s not many of them, but he’s chosen the perfect time to bring them out.’

  There would be no weapons available on the other side. But it was better to be unarmed in the walls than unarmed in the prison. Ewan let out a rallying cry, picked up his end of the makeshift ladder, and his friends charged into the breaking light. They steadied the ladder next to the fallen clones, and secured its top rung against the hole in the wall. Aidan Rowland, architect extraordinaire, had calculated the ladder’s length to perfection.

  The last of the clones fell silent and Kate began to climb. Around them, the locals stirred.

  ‘Goodbye, Inner New London,’ Ewan snarled as he gripped the sides of the ladder. ‘Screw you and everything you did to us.’

  Ewan followed his friends upward and through the laser cannon hole, ignorant of the cuts on his hands from the chipped wood and the stains of wet concrete, and fell into the warmth of the Outer City corridors. The inside of the Citadel walls had never felt so welcoming.

  The relief faded when he looked at the dozen dead clones, and saw not one usable firearm among them.

  Ewan had only one idea: to poke his head back into the Inner City prison, and plead with The Lord for just one weapon. Just a handgun. Something.

  He looked back through the hole just in time to see it happen.

  Benjamin leapt up and grabbed the side of the nearest roof with one hand. Then with the other, he brought out a sharpened length of corrugated iron and slashed Gareth’s calf. When the screaming henchman fell to his back, Benjamin aimed the tip with millimetre precision and stabbed him through the neck.

  Benjamin, what the hell are you doing…

  Gareth’s body fell to the concrete without complaint, and Benjamin leapt onto the roof. Aidan held up his hands as his brother tossed one of Gareth’s rifles down to him, and then vanished behind the walls. Ewan suspected he was running to the other end of the battleground, to open up a second front.

  Potts opened fire towards Benjamin, his aim enraged and approximate.

  Ruth was screaming, asking her sons why.

  Aidan shouted something about getting weapons for the Underdogs.

  Ewan struggled with the conflicting thoughts in his mind: wanting the Rowlands to be safe, yet urgently needing firearms. He watched Patrick and Ruth’s horrified faces as Benjamin Rowland, a harmless young lawyer in the old days, killed a second human being. He grabbed Gareth’s second assault rifle and used it to shoot Dave.

  None of them had seen The Lord as he turned around with the minigun, and opened fire into Benjamin’s chest.

  Ewan felt a hollowness in his own torso as Benjamin’s back started to spit blood. The vengeful young man turned into a falling corpse, which toppled out of view somewhere onto the concrete ground.

  ‘Benjamin!’ Patrick screamed. He ran out of sight, Aidan’s gunfire distracting Shawn and Potts from taking aim. Ewan watched in fearful amazement as Patrick defied his age and climbed onto the rooftop behind The Lord. There, the bed and breakfast owner from Croydon engaged in combat against a murderous gangster with an M134 Minigun.

  Ewan admired Patrick’s bravery, but it was clear he had no plan beyond wrapping his arms around The Lord’s neck. Ewan’s screams could not be heard as Potts, unwilling to fire a bullet in the direction of his master, leapt across the gap between the rooftops and plunged a knife into Patrick’s spine.

  ‘No!’ Ewan yelled, supressing the need to vomit.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Kate.

  Ewan didn’t answer. He gazed over to Aidan, who staggered over Shawn’s dead body with blood pouring from his neck. Ewan had not seen how Shawn had died, nor why Aidan was wounded, but the details made no difference. Aidan used his last moments of life to empty his bullets across New London, some of which found their way into Potts. Both bodies fell, and The Lord ran out of henchmen.

  Ruth appeared at the corner of the shelter, unarmed, just in time to watch The Lord finish off her husband. The minigun bullets ripped through Patrick’s chest at point blank range, and his body collapsed onto the corrugated roof.

  Ewan’s vision turned blurry as tears formed in his eyes. He wiped them away and saw Ruth cowering in the street, set to be The Lord’s final target. She didn’t seem to care. Her whole family was gone. It was not the terror of a deer in headlights that kept Ruth in place, but the acceptance of a lamb led to the slaughter.

  In the corner of Ewan’s eyesight, something grabbed Jack’s foot.

  Ewan leapt in fright – he had almost forgotten his own corridor even existed – and he looked down at the almost-dead body of a clone soldier. One of the patrol was still alive, and determined to murder at least one of Grant’s enemies before the end.

  ‘Guys, help!’ Jack yelled, his hands wrestling against the biorifle that was loosely aimed towards his face.

  A good man named Joseph McCormick had spent eleven months teaching Ewan to take control of his anger issues. But at that moment, anger was the only response he knew how to give. Anger at the slaughter of decent people. Anger at his role in the Rowlands’ deaths. Anger that, even now, some crappy clone soldier was trying to murder his friend. Ewan’s Temper Twin instincts resurfaced, and he leapt with a year of supressed rage at the surviving clone. He wrapped his hands around the biorifle, jerked it away from Jack’s head, and dragged the clone towards the hole.

&n
bsp; As angry as Ewan was, he knew what he was doing. It was a skill he had never learned back at Oakenfold: the ability to feel angry but remain capable of thought.

  He forced the clone’s arm in the direction he wanted to aim, and pinched his fingers against one of the bullet wounds. The clone flinched, the biorifle fired, and a glob of blood left The Lord’s throat.

  The Lord’s aim fell away from Ruth, and he twisted his wobbling head towards the hole in the wall. Ewan pinched again, and another bullet punctured The Lord’s stomach.

  The third pinch had no impact. The LED on the biorifle had gone out, and the clone was dead. But the first two bullets were enough.

  Ewan’s eyes met The Lord’s in a shared moment of hatred. Then Paul Green, former painter-decorator turned mass murderer, fell to the rooftop and ceased to breathe.

  That makes two. Two humans dead through my actions.

  He was a monster though. He shouldn’t count as human like she did.

  But that’s how it begins, Ewan. When you stop seeing people as human, you let anything happen to them.

  Ewan glanced around the prison. The gunfire had stopped, and heads started to poke out from doors and windows. Hungry prisoners were a short run from the firearms that littered the battleground, and the ladder into the city walls.

  ‘Ruth,’ Ewan yelled, in the closest voice he could manage to sympathy, ‘we don’t have much time.’

  The shell of a woman that was once Ruth Rowland started to move, slowly. The heads in the doorways became whole bodies.

  Come on Ruth… if you don’t give us something, your family died for nothing!

  She reached up to the low roof, and plucked the minigun from The Lord’s dead hand. She was the first prisoner to the ladder, and was four rungs up when the next prisoner began to follow. A steady stream of armed escapees formed a queue behind her, yelping in excitement.

  Ruth came within arm’s reach and held up the minigun. Ewan seized it before Patrick’s blood could drip off its barrel onto her weakening hands.

  ‘I’m so sorry…’

  ‘I don’t want your apologies,’ Ruth gasped. Ewan thought those were her words, anyway. It was difficult to tell through the trauma in her voice. ‘Come back here one day, and tear this place apart. Make this–’