Underdogs

by Chris Bonnello

And with those supplies, he was tasked with creating an escape route for his friends.

  The phone rang. Gracie, with unusual enthusiasm, seized the phone first. The smartphone screen showed grass beneath Alex’s boots, before he switched the camera to show his squinting face.

  I can barely imagine how he feels, with sunlight above his eyes and soil beneath his feet for the first time in half a week.

  ‘Hello?’ Gracie said.

  ‘Gracie,’ said Alex, ‘I still don’t believe you. Are you sure it wasn’t all a pretty little dream?’

  ‘No, I heard it right from Ewan! They’re on their way out!’

  ‘They spend three days in the Inner City prison, find an exit that nobody else can use, and now they’re frolicking towards the exit like the whole thing never happened. Try again, dear.’

  ‘Don’t call me dear!’

  ‘Sorry dear. But you have to admit–’

  ‘Alex, you chauvinistic bloody know-it-all,’ McCormick barked, leaning his face in front of the phone’s camera. ‘Stop belittling Gracie and do something useful. Where are you right now?’

  ‘About ten minutes from the water place, and I still don’t think it’s a good idea. Can’t you find them a different exit?’

  ‘No. And if the water treatment centre’s guarded, you’ll be needed there even more.’

  ‘It will be guarded, sir,’ Alex said, miserably. ‘I shot my way out through the same route. I’m the reason the odds will be against the others.’

  It was unlike Alex to blame himself for anything. McCormick could not afford for him to wallow in misery when his position was so important, so he changed the subject.

  ‘Alex, your camera’s not moving around. Why are you stood still?’

  ‘Because of these.’

  Alex switched the camera to the floor again. McCormick and Gracie were met with the disgusting sight of decomposed clone bodies on the grass. There was nothing recognisable left of them: just bone dust inside three empty uniforms.

  ‘Shannon killed these guys the night we found her. Hopefully one had the same size clothes as me. But first, give me a second. I just need to prove that I’m right…’

  McCormick couldn’t quite see what Alex did next. He knew he was heading to the peak of the grass bank, and had lain himself down to the ground. But the phone saw only sky.

  ‘Yeah,’ Alex whispered into the phone. ‘There are dozens of snipers on top of the Citadel walls. Their barrels are pointed at the water treatment tunnel.’

  ‘How can you–’

  ‘Telescopic handgun, remember? They’ll be covering the emergency exits. In case the water treatment centre troops flush them out.’

  McCormick lay his head in his hands. To his left, Gracie’s smile had vanished.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

  ‘My father taught me a ton of lessons about fighting,’ Alex said. ‘The moral of the story is don’t lose, people who give up don’t have souls–’

  ‘You’ve said all this before,’ said McCormick, hoping it would hurry him.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. But you were bleeding out at the time.’

  ‘Oh. Fine. Dad may have been an authoritative tyrant, but some of his lessons were useful. And right now his voice is in my head, telling me what kind of fights to avoid. The water place is one of them. There’s no win here.’

  Alex picked up the phone, shuffled down the grass bank, stood up and started to walk.

  ‘You’re abandoning them?’ gasped McCormick.

  ‘Not a chance. I’m just doing this my way.’

  McCormick gave a reserved smile. The Underdogs’ self-appointed lone wolf was isolated, vastly outnumbered, and the only one in a position to come up with a workable plan. But on the plus side, that was how Alex operated best.

  Alex’s hand entered the camera’s field of vision, bent down to one of the dead clones and ripped the radio from its pocket.

  ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to shake the dust out of these uniforms and try them on. I’ll try not to think about the little clouds of clone powder I’ll be breathing in. See you soon.’

  ‘Stay safe, Alex.’

  ‘Safe?’ asked Alex, in preparation for hanging up the phone. ‘Do you want the others rescued or not?’

  *

  Ewan knew it was just a reception – an interim room before the proper officers’ sector – but he had still expected more. The computer desk and telephone on his left, even the A4 watercolour painting on the opposite wall, were quite an anticlimax.

  But still, that painting was the first hint of culture he had ever seen inside the Citadel walls.

  ‘An unmanned reception?’ asked Charlie. ‘Looks like today’s on our side.’

  ‘Yeah,’ muttered Ewan. ‘We should invade at four in the morning more often.’

  He jogged to the second security door, and dialled in the same eight-digit code. Ewan and Charlie barged their way through the unlocked door, and found themselves surrounded by pure magic.

  There was friendly wallpaper spread across the walls, and sky blue paint on the ceiling as if to imitate the outside world. There were no corridors: just rooms like in a normal house. They were separated by wooden doors, the contours from their original trees still visible. The entrance room had two leather sofas, a widescreen television with a vast DVD and videogame collection, and an electric guitar in the corner.

  ‘I’m absolutely taking that guitar home,’ declared Charlie.

  ‘Mate, keep your eyes on the door,’ Ewan commanded. ‘I need to run.’

  ‘Maybe I should watch a movie while I’m waiting. I’ve missed those.’

  ‘You’ll get us killed if your attention span lets you down. Ignore the rest of the room, as awesome as it is.’

  Ewan turned to run, as Charlie picked up a sofa by one end and turned it to face the entrance.

  ‘Charlie,’ Ewan shouted behind him, ‘stand near the first security door, not the second. You don’t want to give away the reception area for free.’

  ‘Come on, Ewan. It’s a good sofa!’

  ‘Not got time to argue, Charlie. Just do it.’

  Ewan made a point of not looking back as he left the room.

  The officers’ sector may have been important, but it wasn’t big. It took Ewan less than two minutes to find the most promising room: the only office with a light switched on. The person inside had probably worked all night.

  Ewan burst through the door and planted three bullets in the man at the desk, who fell forwards without resistance. Ewan pushed his chair into the far corner, trying his best not to look at the man’s name badge.

  He failed. The human he had killed was called Steven Elcott.

  Three humans now.

  The first was a Takeover Day screw-up. The second was to defend Ruth Rowland. This was my first kill that felt quick and emotionless.

  Bloody hell, the Inner City must have scraped away my humanity after all.

  As Ewan always did with thoughts he didn’t like, he pushed it to the back of his mind and pretended it didn’t exist. He looked at the computer, still logged on with a wealth of humans-only information at his fingertips. His first stop was the CCTV cameras. Elcott must have been the highest-ranked man in the area, since he had video access to everywhere in the officers’ sector. Ewan found Charlie sat in reception as commanded, fidgeting in the swivel chair behind the desk.

  Ewan bit his lip. That meant Elcott might have seen them coming and called for help. It was impossible to tell.

  ‘OK,’ he said to himself, switching the screen away from the cameras and navigating to the personnel database. ‘Let’s go.’

  It didn’t take long to find the search option. First name ‘Shannon’, last name ‘Rose’, click search.

  There were plenty of results, none of them useful. Some were about random people called Shannon, and others were about people with the surname Rose. Some had Rose as their first name or Shannon as their last, their names o
rdered wrong in the database. There were over a hundred profiles, and reading through two per minute would take half an hour, maybe. Ewan didn’t have time to do the maths.

  ‘Screw it,’ he said, and returned to the search box to try something else.

  First name ‘Ewan’, last name ‘West’, click search.

  That did the trick. The top result was clearly him.

  Ewan did not have time to read, but trembled at what he saw. His school history was there. His father’s military background was there. The death of his eight-year-old cousin Alfie was there.

  His time with ‘Terrorist Faction 001’ was also there. That obviously meant the Underdogs, because one click led him to everybody else’s names too.

  A further search returned no results for any Terrorist Faction 002. Ewan felt a moment of despondent loneliness, upon realising how isolated he and his friends truly were. But that feeling was such familiar territory that he was able to move on from it quickly.

  The list of names was identical to the one Shannon had brought to Spitfire’s Rise. And a click on the ‘Additional notes’ tab confirmed what Ewan had feared.

  The information really had come from a reliable source. Daniel Amopoulos, his friend and former Oakenfold student, really had been the one who gave Nicholas Grant their names. Daniel had always been a headstrong guy, so the torture he would have endured before his death must have been unspeakable.

  Over the course of five minutes, Ewan spammed the printer with a long queue of demands. The Underdogs’ page, his own page, each of his housemates’ pages. And all the while he tried to answer the three-day-old question in his mind.

  Why aren’t we dead?

  Daniel was taken almost a month ago. He didn’t know our location, but he knew everyone’s names. Our old houses would be the most obvious place for Grant to check. Why didn’t they send an army to McCormick’s listed address and annihilate us?

  In fact, what’s stopping them from doing it tomorrow?

  There would be plenty of time to panic back at Spitfire’s Rise. In the meantime, he had the opportunity to print off some plans. The really useful ones would be classified, but Elcott probably had access to some interesting hints.

  With yet more documents sent to the printer, Ewan tried to think of more topics to research. Last time he had checked, there was still a health centre in Hertford that needed searching.

  A thought struck Ewan like a flash of lightning. There may have been no results for Shannon, but…

  First name blank, last name ‘Lambourne’, click search.

  Six results, but only one was a lieutenant.

  And the report about him was damning.

  Lieutenant Lambourne was a traitor?

  More than that, he was a code-writing genius. Probably explains where Better Days came from.

  And for unknown reasons, he fled New London with his girlfriend. His girlfriend being… oh bloody hell.

  Just like that, Ewan had stumbled across a link to Shannon. Without hesitation, he clicked and read. The report was completely censored except for the essentials – name, gender, date of birth, nationality – but that information alone was enough.

  I guess this explains why my first search didn’t work.

  It also explains why she killed Keith Tylor. And why she killed him mid-sentence. ‘This lovely lady is Shannon Rose ack-ack-uuuurgh’, as I think he phrased it.

  Ewan took a deep breath. This was bound to change things.

  He reached for his phone. McCormick needed to know this at the first opportunity. But before he could switch it on, Charlie’s voice sounded in his radio.

  ‘Ewan, problem.’

  Ewan grabbed his radio with one hand, and used the other to switch back to the CCTV cameras. Charlie was at the back of the reception, his assault rifle pointed at the closed entrance.

  ‘Talk to me, Charlie.’

  ‘Footsteps outside. Sounds like they’re dragging the bodies somewhere.’

  ‘Any idea how many?’

  ‘No. But more than one.’

  Ewan flipped between the CCTV channels to find that, unforgivably, there were no cameras outside the officers’ sector entrance.

  ‘Ewan,’ came a faint whisper, ‘they’re using the dialpad.’

  When he flipped back to the reception camera, Charlie was next to the entrance door and shielding himself against the wall.

  ‘Charlie… you know the door will open straight into you, right?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Ewan checked the printer. It was almost done. By the time he ran to Charlie, helped him then ran back, his papers would be ready.

  But time had already run out. The security door opened before Ewan could take his first step, and six clone soldiers flooded into the reception.

  Thankfully, each of them was facing the wrong direction. Charlie leaned out from behind the entrance door and opened fire into their backs. Four went down straight away, and the other two staggered for a few more seconds before Charlie finished them off.

  ‘Clever move,’ Ewan said into his radio.

  Charlie did not answer, and started to push the door closed. It wouldn’t budge at first, thanks to the legs of a dead clone blocking its path.

  Ewan collected the centimetre-thick pile that the printer had finished during the fight. Since Kate had the rucksack, he stuffed the paper inside his combat clothes, his belt holding it against his body.

  That was the moment a thought occurred to Ewan: an important one that had not yet occurred to Charlie. The attack in reception had involved six clone soldiers, but only humans could open doors to officers’ sectors. Which meant…

  ‘Charlie–’

  Ewan watched as the security door crashed into his friend’s body, throwing him against the wall. Charlie could only stumble around in dizziness and pain before Oliver Roth leapt into the reception, pointed his handgun at Charlie’s abdomen, and fired twice.

  Ewan’s lungs lost all their air and his stomach caved in, as if he had been the one Roth had shot. He found himself hopelessly rooted to the floor as the red-haired assassin grabbed Charlie’s assault rifle, tore it from his grip and smashed the butt of it into his face.

  They said Marshall would send his ‘biggest weapon’… how could it have been anyone else?

  Somehow it was worse to watch the events in silence. The CCTV was video only, and Charlie’s radio was silent. The shots, the yells and the rifle smash had not made a sound, and the inability to hear them made Ewan feel even more helpless.

  Charlie managed to scramble to the other side of the reception desk before falling. For a reason Ewan couldn’t understand, Roth did not stop him. Maybe he saw no point in worrying over a wounded, unarmed enemy with a mangled face. Instead, he marched for the second security door.

  For as long as Ewan had known Charlie, his ADHD-related impulses had been categorised as bad behaviour. They had only ever been the reasons behind his dreadful judgements, his behavioural problems, and everything else that made people see him as the ‘wrong kind of person’. But once in a while, his impulses served him well.

  Against all the screams that must have come from his nervous system, Charlie jumped to his feet, ripped the phone from its cord and threw it straight at Roth’s head. While the assassin shielded himself, Charlie ran for the second security door with the desk lamp in his hand, and smashed its heavy base against the dialpad until there was nothing left of it. Roth would have no access to the officers’ sector, and no access to Ewan.

  A third bullet to Charlie’s side dropped him to the floor.

  Ewan threw up in his mouth, but swallowed it. Charlie fell out of shot against the wall, under the CCTV camera. Roth leant down next to him, then came back into view with Charlie’s radio in his hand.

  ‘Ewan, I assume?’ asked Oliver Roth.

  Ewan did not answer.

  ‘I know it’s you. It’s your name he’s screaming.’

  Roth strolled through the room with the overconfident body language of a sc
hool bully, like the boy he must have been a year or two earlier. After moving the dead clone’s leg and pushing the security door shut, he turned back to Charlie and spoke to Ewan over the radio.

  ‘Let’s play a game of “Where are the bullets”! Are they buried in his muscles? Have they drilled through his intestines? Has one of them touched a kidney?’

  Roth’s taunts were touching the pressure points in Ewan’s brain. Regardless, he gave no response.

  ‘I take it Steven Elcott’s dead? Poor guy. His family will have to be thrown into the Inner City now. Got any tips for them?’

  Ewan broke his silence, for no reason other than anger.

  ‘So Grant didn’t kill you after you fell for my laser cannon trick…’

  ‘Nope, sorry. And nice work with the blood footprints, by the way. They kept me guessing for almost ten seconds.’

  Roth stepped backwards and looked up at the camera, tilting his helmet back so Ewan could see his whole face.

  ‘Those bullets won’t kill him, you know. If I wanted him dead I’d have done it. Still, got to admire him for taking that third bullet to stop me getting to you. Now he’s smashed the dialpad, it has to be you who comes to me.’

  ‘And why the hell would I do that?’

  ‘Partly because it’s your only way out. And partly because every sixty seconds, your friend gets an extra bullet. I’ll see you in a minute, Ewan.’

  Roth switched off the radio, leaned back against the reception desk, and checked his watch. At the lowest part of the screen, Charlie’s feet could be seen trembling.

  Ewan checked the ammunition in his assault rifle. He had only used five bullets that morning, so there were plenty left. But his infected arm remained in bad shape, so any hand-to-hand combat would not go well.

  Ewan bolted from Steven Elcott’s office with his rifle held high, wondering how many seconds remained before bullet number four. He ran through the neat rooms of the officers’ sector, which somehow didn’t seem so beautiful anymore.

  Before long he was back in the entrance hall, catching his breath between the leather sofa and the electric guitar. It was time to take on Oliver Roth single-handed, and do whatever he could to save his Temper Twin.