Underdogs

by Chris Bonnello

  ‘Hurry up, you old hag!’ came a yell from an impatient prisoner a few rungs below.

  Ewan stopped breathing. These prisoners had never seen the Outer City before, and couldn’t have known it would be even more dangerous than the prison. The chop-chop-chop of approaching podcopters sounded in the distance. There was only one option.

  ‘Thank you, Ruth,’ said Ewan, as kindly as he could. ‘Now hold on tight.’

  Ruth obeyed, and with gritted teeth Ewan pushed the ladder until it toppled. He watched as Ruth and the rest of the prisoners fell to the concrete below, and the ladder hit the nearest roof and snapped in half. Insults were hurled at Ewan like rotten fruit, from prisoners who honestly believed they could have escaped and lived. He switched off any sorrow that crept into his head, turned his back on the hole and sprinted down the corridor, minigun in hand.

  ‘Straight for the exit?’ yelled Charlie as he tried to catch up.

  ‘No!’ Ewan screamed back. ‘Not yet!’

  ‘Not yet? Why the hell not?’

  Ewan slowed down to wait for Kate and Jack, who were equally confused.

  ‘We just spent three days in Hell,’ said Ewan, ‘and a load of people died because of it. If we don’t complete our mission, it was all for nothing.’

  There were no objections on his friends’ faces. They worked out what his next sentence would be, and they all agreed.

  ‘Let’s burn that clone factory to the ground.’

  Chapter 24

  They did not take long to find the first platoon, and one spray from the podcopter’s weapon ripped them to pieces. Ewan ran to their remains and plucked the assault rifles from the mess. Four of the six weapons had avoided damage. He picked them up and threw them out to his team like sweets at a pantomime.

  ‘OK, we’re armed,’ he said. ‘Not much left in the minigun though. Definitely not worth carrying, with my arm the way it is.’

  He checked his forearm again, and swore under his breath. The weight of the gun had split the wound, and a build-up of runny pus had spilled over his skin.

  ‘Cover your ears, guys,’ he said. ‘I’m emptying it into the ground so it can’t be used against us.’

  ‘No way,’ said Jack. ‘Three quarters of the Rowlands died for us to have those bullets. If you won’t take it, I will.’

  Ewan pushed away the realisation that he was being commanded, and held the weapon out towards his friend. Jack slung his rifle over one shoulder, and tried to work out how best to carry a two-handed minigun. A moment later, voices cried out from the clones’ radios.

  One of the voices must have been Iain Marshall. Ewan could tell by the authority in his voice: authority which relied on volume and anger. Like so many bad teachers from his mainstream days.

  ‘No, I don’t care how many of you are feeling cranky. This morning, shift hours don’t matter! I need one of you to send a team to keep the prisoners contained, and the rest of you to rally some troops and send them rebel-hunting. We don’t have long before they escape.’

  Another voice entered the fray. A weasel-like tone, that sounded like someone who’d never stepped outside the evil lab they were born in.

  ‘You think they’ll just flee? There’s plenty they could do to us at four in the morning, if your men are as unprepared as you say. You told Nick yet?’

  ‘You can bloody tell him.’

  Ewan looked up, and found a sight he had not witnessed since their sleepover in Lemsford. All of his friends were smiling. It was always fun listening to enemies as they snapped at each other in panic.

  ‘Keep Floor Z well-guarded just in case,’ said the voice that was probably Nathaniel Pearce. ‘In the meantime, everyone keep close to your radios. The moment someone reports activity, Marshall will send in his biggest weapon.’

  ‘Don’t give me commands, Nat. Don’t you dare.’

  The conversation descended into bickering. It was no longer worth Ewan’s time.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘teams of two. Charlie, you stay with me.’

  ‘Splitting up?’ asked Jack. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. You and Kate hit the factory, Charlie and I will cause a distraction. We’ll find the nearest officers’ sector and go hunting for info.’

  ‘Info on what?’ asked Kate.

  ‘Does it matter? We’ll get there before you get to Floor F. Once they detect us, all eyes will be on us instead of you.’

  ‘Info on what?’ repeated Kate, demanding eye contact as strongly as she could bear. ‘If you’re attracting Marshall’s “biggest weapon”, it had better be for something good.’

  ‘Info on Shannon, for starters,’ answered Ewan. ‘Who she is, where she came from, how she knows so much. Then there’s the list she was carrying. I want to know what else they’ve found out about us. Jack, pass me the combination hacker. The officers’ sector will have a code. You can keep everything else.’

  Jack reached into the rucksack, found the combination hacker and passed it over.

  ‘Have fun, guys,’ finished Ewan. ‘Charlie, pass them the memory stick.’

  Charlie reached into his left-hand pocket. After a few moments of spreading his fingers around, he started to dig deeper.

  A look of abject horror spread across his face as he pulled his empty hand back out.

  ‘It’s not in my pocket…’

  Ewan’s body lost all its feeling, and his jaw fell open.

  ‘…It’s in my other pocket,’ Charlie said with a grin, reaching into his right-hand pocket and waving Shannon’s memory stick between his fingers.

  ‘Charlie, don’t be an arse,’ said Ewan, snatching it from his hand and passing it over to Kate.

  ‘It was pretty funny, to be fair,’ laughed Jack.

  ‘Whatever. You guys had better get going. It’s a long way to Floor F.’

  Jack handed the rucksack to Kate. The minigun alone must have been heavy enough.

  ‘Good luck, both of you,’ said Kate.

  ‘It’s never luck,’ said Ewan. ‘Enjoy the destruction.’

  He couldn’t help but feel a twinge of envy as Kate and Jack set off. The death of the clone factory would be a joy to behold, but he would serve the mission better as the live target. It had worked with the laser cannon, after all.

  Ewan brought out his phone and switched it on as he started to run.

  ‘Charlie, time me.’

  ‘Sure. But why don’t we take one of those clone radios? We could listen in!’

  ‘They’re GPS tracked. We want to give them clues about where we are, not tell them.’

  Ewan found the stairwell entrance by the time the phone had powered up. Charlie checked the second hand on his watch.

  ‘Three minutes. Go.’

  Three minutes to tell comms we’re alive, deal with the emotions of talking to them again, ask for directions and memorise them. Easy.

  The phone rang. Barely a moment passed before a voice answered, with a joyous tone like a dead man raised back to life.

  ‘Hello?’ asked McCormick, his face appearing onscreen a moment later.

  For a moment, Ewan choked on his own breath. He had not gone for three days without McCormick since Takeover Day. A whole world ago.

  ‘S-sir?’

  ‘Ewan…’

  There was a short, magical moment where neither Ewan nor McCormick could string a sentence together, and were content to watch each other’s faces and listen to each other’s silence. Then Charlie pointed at his watch, and Ewan tried to force the conversation forward.

  ‘Sir, I’ve got so much to tell you, but it’ll have to wait until we’re back home.’

  ‘Raj told me you’d probably died…’

  ‘Nah, we’re in the walls now. All four of us. And we need help.’

  ‘Tell me where you are and I’ll direct you to the exit. Alex is still close by, so I’ll get him to help from the outside.’

  ‘No, not yet. Give me the nearest officers’ sector to Stairwell 59.’

  There was a moment
’s silence as McCormick’s off-camera companion rustled through the collection of maps. It must have been Gracie, going by the passive tone of her voice. Charlie opened the door to the stairwell, and Ewan followed him inside.

  ‘So what’s the plan?’ asked McCormick. ‘By the sounds of it, you’re not doing the sensible thing and escaping.’

  ‘Just heard Marshall and Pearce on the radio. They’re expecting a break-in, so me and Charlie are giving them one. And while they’re looking for us, Jack and Kate…’

  He looked up and around the stairwell. They were probably alone, but the risk wasn’t worth it.

  ‘…They’re preparing for better days.’

  ‘I understand,’ said McCormick.

  It was another part of Ewan that made him feel like a walking contradiction. Despite struggling with everybody else’s hints, he was adept at dropping his own.

  Gracie leaned into the camera’s field of vision and whispered to McCormick. Her voice was too quiet to decipher, as if she didn’t think herself worthy of giving instructions to the team.

  She was the kind of girl who waited for the adults to get her equipment out of her pencil case each lesson. And they did it, too. But now the adult support has gone, independence is hardly her thing.

  ‘Floor S,’ said McCormick. ‘Not far at all. Now listen carefully.’

  *

  Ewan took the third right as instructed. If McCormick and Gracie were correct, there would be one more corner then a two-hundred metre sprint to the security door. Ewan had often wondered what the insides of an officers’ sector looked like. Those fabled humans-only areas must have held a luxury or two.

  ‘Kate,’ he whispered into his radio, ‘updates?’

  ‘Not even halfway up the stairwell,’ she answered.

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Hey,’ gasped Jack, ‘have you ever tried lugging a minigun up twenty flights of stairs?’

  Charlie dashed around the corner and fired a shot for each clone on guard. Not long after their bodies had fallen, he and Ewan had reached the security door.

  ‘Keep us posted, guys,’ Ewan said, raising the door combination hacker and slapping it over the dialling pad before him. A press of the power button revealed eight blank spaces on its miniature screen, and a jumble of changing numbers flashed in front of his eyes.

  ‘You know, I’d love to know the science behind those things,’ said Charlie behind him.

  ‘Dad wasn’t a technician,’ answered Ewan. ‘He just swiped it from the barracks with the thermal blocker and a bunch of other things. All I know is that when the numbers freeze, it’s good.’

  Ewan stared at the screen before him, and let out an impatient huff. All the spy movies of his youth had told him that secure gateways could be hacked and unlocked in just one camera shot, but his own experience had never matched that.

  ‘You got a minute to talk?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Could have between five and ten. Better watch those corridors, mate. We passed at least two cameras on the way here.’

  ‘Yeah… anyway, I was just wondering something.’

  The fifth digit along froze on ‘3’. The other digits kept going.

  ‘So it was PDA, after all that?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘What?’

  ‘All that secrecy for so long, then Grant just announced it to New London. Can’t remember what words he used, but I know he meant PDA. What does it stand for again?’

  Ewan focused his face against the hacker, in an effort to hide the anger on his face. There was no longer a way to avoid the conversation he had put off for years.

  ‘Pathological demand avoidance,’ he snarled. ‘Means I can’t take instructions well. Other people’s orders make me anxious.’

  ‘Ha, so that’s why McCormick made you head soldier!’

  ‘It’s not that I like leadership, Charlie,’ Ewan said with a sigh, ‘it’s just how I avoid feeling threatened. I can’t even handle orders I give to myself… “Get up”, “Get dressed”, and so on. Teachers told me to do things at primary school, and I got so nervous I threw chairs and tables. Older kids told me I wasn’t allowed on the muddy field and I kicked the crap out of them. Keith Tylor… he almost made me lose it when he was holding Shannon. He told me he was in charge and…’

  He must have known my weakness all along.

  ‘But you’re fine with McCormick ordering you about?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘That’s what trust does. My trust in him… and his trust in me. And just the way he acts and talks. He commands without commanding, if that makes sense.’

  Ewan paused, as he started to understand exactly what McCormick had done to him. Ewan had never considered himself a leader, but was not capable of following either. By all rights, teamwork should have been beyond him. Instead…

  If he ever met his younger self, he might have recognised the Ewan West from Takeover Day but only in the literal sense. The two had little in common beyond appearance.

  ‘Nobody ever trusted me like McCormick did,’ Ewan continued. ‘He actually gave me chances to show what I could do. Before him, people weren’t interested in that. If they kept me from exploding, their job was done. Oakenfold wasn’t bad, but the six schools before it? They saw my PDA as a problem, not a personality trait.’

  ‘Well, let’s be honest,’ said Charlie with a daring laugh. Ewan ignored him, and continued.

  ‘Even the name screams “problem”. Pathological demand avoidance. Pathology means disease, you know. It’s like they’re telling me my brain is diseased, and then they criticise me for not acting like normal people, or for getting anxious when they order me around. I’m not a control freak or anything… I just feel helpless when other people make my decisions for me. They don’t realise it feels like my free will is under attack, or…’

  Ewan halted his sentence before he sounded too vulnerable. The point had been made, and he had confessed enough. He looked again at the miniature screen, and found three of the eight digits in place.

  ‘Has to be said, though,’ he continued in an attempt to change the subject, ‘getting over this mission is going to take some time. After eleven months of living with just you guys, I’d forgotten how crap the general public really are.’

  Four digits.

  ‘Because of the whole “trying to kill us” thing?’ asked Charlie. ‘You can’t hold that against them.’

  ‘It’s hard to have faith in normal people when most of them wanted us dead.’

  Five. Then six, a moment later.

  ‘Yeah right,’ answered Charlie. ‘You think they ganged up on us just because they missed lunch? There were still kids left in there. Some people would have been parents. They were trying to kill us for the ones they love. I know it’s difficult to understand when we’re the victims, but… well, it’s not like we’ve never been hated before, is it?’

  What on Earth’s happening to you, Charlie? How are you suddenly getting all compassionate and understanding?

  ‘You’re right,’ Ewan said, ‘but it’ll be a few days before I believe it. If you know what I mean.’

  Seven digits down, one to go. Ewan checked his watch in surprise. His equipment had chosen the perfect day to act fast.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’re about to venture where no clone has ever been. Deal with the bodies, mate. And don’t prop them up on bloody chairs this time.’

  Ewan lowered his gaze to the dead clones, and found two expanding red pools growing from underneath them. His mind was invaded by the image of a similar blood pool seeping across the Inner City, fed at that moment by the leaking bodies of the Rowlands and The Lord’s men.

  ‘We can’t hide them inside,’ said Charlie. ‘Anyone passing will see the blood. Give me a sec.’

  Ewan heard the sound of running footsteps, looked up and found Charlie halfway down the corridor.

  ‘Charlie?’

  Charlie turned around, checked the soles of his shoes and jogged back. At Ewan’s side, an LED lit up next to the compl
eted eight-digit code. Ewan removed the hacker from its position as Charlie arrived back, only to charge off again in a completely different direction.

  ‘Mate, what the hell are you doing?’

  ‘Look at the ground, you numpty.’

  Ewan did so and saw two convincing trails of blood-prints, each running away from the scene of the crime. He smiled.

  ‘If we can’t hide the bodies, might as well use them!’ said Charlie. ‘They’ll think we finished here and ran off already.’

  ‘That might work. OK, prepare yourself.’

  Ewan dialled in the numbers, and was rewarded with a buzz. A smirk crept into the corners of his lips as the door swung open, and he peered into a world that nobody beyond Grant’s inner circle was supposed to see.

  Chapter 25

  The comms unit was as dark as always. But somehow, it felt full of life.

  McCormick was holding back tears of joy. It was ludicrous that Ewan, Kate, Charlie and Jack could all be alive, let alone on their way to destroying the clone factory, but it was happening nonetheless.

  To his side, Gracie was smiling too. It was unusual for her to display positivity so openly. She normally needed permission from her peers before looking too happy.

  ‘How long until Alex calls back?’ she asked.

  ‘Not long.’

  To his credit, Alex had acted fast for a man with a gunshot wound.

  McCormick had called him the moment Ewan had hung up. According to Raj, Kate had said the escape would happen at dawn, so Alex had been instructed to switch his phone on and off every fifteen minutes from four in the morning. It had given decent communication chances without the risk of being tracked.

  He was running to New London at that moment, armed with no more than a telescopic handgun with five bullets, a bread knife that he’d need to use wrong-handed thanks to his shoulder, and a bag of stolen supplies from the house. Very little edible food remained, but lighters and batteries were always useful.