Underdogs

by Chris Bonnello

  Ewan turned the handle, threw the door open, and aimed his weapon around the side of the door. He saw Charlie a few metres away, bloody, wide-eyed and taking panicked breaths. But nothing of Roth was visible except for a hand that poked around the side of the desk, holding Charlie’s assault rifle.

  At the sight of Ewan it fired, spraying a flurry of bullets into Charlie’s chest.

  Chapter 26

  ‘Surprise, retard!’

  Ewan took his eyes from his best friend’s dead body and saw Oliver Roth jumping to his feet, his pistol in one hand and Charlie’s assault rifle in the other.

  As Roth opened fire, Ewan ran from the entrance door, scrambled over the leather cushions and sheltered behind the sofa. His rifle shook in his grip. There was no way he could aim accurately in his panicked state.

  A barrage of aggressive, echoing bangs kept him in place. Bullets punctured their way through the sofa and smashed the flatscreen television on the back wall. Ewan pressed himself to the carpet, Roth’s bullets zipping inches above his body.

  At the sound of the first click, he threw his hands over the ruined sofa and opened fire, only to find that Roth had hidden himself behind the door. Anger forced Ewan to keep firing – uncontrollable anger just like the old days – and he swore at the top of his voice once his chamber was empty. He had wasted the only clip he had.

  I fought for years to be less impulsive… Roth has brought out the worst in me.

  When Ewan inhaled, he noticed he was crying. In the background, he heard a clip of bullets sliding into Roth’s handgun. Something large hit the floor, possibly Charlie’s empty assault rifle.

  ‘Hiding behind the sofa, mate? Seriously? This is war, not an episode of Doctor bloody Who!’

  Ewan heard the click-clack of the pistol’s topside, followed by a high-pitched laugh. It was difficult to remember that Oliver Roth was fourteen, except when his voice did that. Ewan sneaked out from behind the sofa, and stood at the side of the door.

  ‘You’ve lost, mate,’ Roth snarled as he walked through the doorframe. ‘Might as well come out and face–’

  Ewan answered with the electric guitar in his grip, which he swung by its neck straight into Roth’s face. The shock was enough for Roth to drop the pistol, but not enough to knock him unconscious. Another swing of the guitar struck him at the side of the neck, and Roth couldn’t react before Ewan reached under his helmet, grabbed a fistful of his red hair and dragged him inside the room. His clumsiness sent them into the sofa, which toppled backwards and threw them to the carpet. Before he could find his bearings, Ewan found himself pinned to the ground. When he looked up, Roth reached for the knife in his belt.

  As his hand snatched at the assassin’s wrist, the podcopter wound tore itself even wider. Ewan let out a scream, but kept his grip firm. The knife inched closer anyway.

  Ewan noticed his assault rifle next to the sofa. He thrust out his spare arm, his fingers touching the muzzle tip and stroking it closer, millimetres at a time.

  Roth’s twitching blade was so close to Ewan’s face that two blurred knives appeared in his vision, held by two blurred hands. But his rifle had been brought close enough.

  ‘It’s empty, you idiot,’ Roth said, with the voice of a 1950s schoolteacher to a dunce student, ‘guns don’t tend to harm people when they don’t have any bullets.’

  Ewan wrapped his fingers around the butt of the rifle, thrust it into Roth’s face and broke his nose.

  As the screaming assassin tended to the cartilage in several pieces inside his face, Ewan drew back his feet and kicked Roth into the air. Before his enemy could steady himself, Ewan leapt over the sofa, dashed into the reception and snatched the nearest dead clone’s assault rifle. He span around, his thirst for revenge filling the friend-shaped hole in his heart, and aimed at the rising figure with the blooded nose. Ewan West and Oliver Roth made eye contact, but it did not last long.

  Ewan pulled the trigger.

  The bullet may have travelled at hundreds of miles per hour, but he had fired too late. By the time it had left the chamber Roth had delivered the jumping kick of his life, sailed over the sofa, and knocked the security door shut. The bullet ricocheted off the door and settled somewhere on the ground.

  Ewan glanced at the destroyed dialpad, then yelled to the ceiling and sent an angry kick against the reception desk. When it didn’t move, he lifted its edges and hauled it onto its side, scattering its contents across the floor. Charlie’s murderer was sealed inside the officers’ sector, and the duel was over. Oliver Roth would live to fight another day.

  The trail of Charlie’s blood touched the tip of Ewan’s boots. Ewan looked at his friend, and wiped the mixture of tears and sweat from his face. He wouldn’t be able to close Charlie’s eyes like heroes did in war movies: his eyelids were already squeezed shut, his final expression stuck to his face.

  Ewan racked his brains for something to say, to pay his final respects to his friend and Temper Twin. But it would mean nothing and he knew it. He picked up Charlie’s radio from the floor – Roth had dropped it in favour of holding two weapons – then reached into Charlie’s pocket and retrieved his mobile phone. It contained photos the survivors at home needed to see: New London’s Inner City, the prison that Charlie Coleman had entered and left with barely a scratch, only to wind up dead an hour after his escape.

  There were no words. Ewan simply turned away from his friend, opened the first security door and fled into the depths of Floor S.

  *

  Kate was in panic mode. She had run to the top of the stairwell, Jack following with the minigun, and they had been collapsed together on Floor F when Oliver Roth’s voice had come through Charlie’s radio. Their friend was wounded, and Ewan had been given sixty seconds. That was the last they had heard.

  McCormick had not taken it well. She had broken the news while phoning for instructions on using the memory stick, leaving him in no fit state to give guidance, and her in no fit state to listen. Thankfully, the instructions weren’t complicated.

  ‘You’re sure there wasn’t a thinner stairwell?’ Kate asked, pointing down through the hollow chamber in the middle that allowed large objects to be transported.

  ‘It’ll be ten times quicker on the way down,’ replied Jack between gasps, ‘trust me.’

  He rose to his feet, and picked up the minigun in two tired hands.

  ‘Time to go, Kate. The others have been enough of a distraction.’

  Kate stood up, wondering how much their friends had sacrificed to give them an undetected run to the clone factory. She opened the door and allowed Jack into the corridor first, the huge barrel of the minigun leading the way.

  Five minutes passed without incident, an incredible luxury for a floor so high. Kate reached the door that she and Alex had broken through several days earlier, back in the innocent times before she had known the Inner City.

  New London Clone Factory – Alpha Control Room, its sign read.

  Kate scanned her keycard over the pad, but was greeted with a red LED. Perhaps Grant had learned from his mistakes, and locked down the factory as soon as they had escaped the Inner City.

  ‘Out the way, Kate,’ said Jack.

  ‘Are you going to–’

  ‘Yep. Cover your ears.’

  Kate stepped out of the minigun’s path, and did as Jack advised.

  Jack squeezed the trigger and emptied the last of its ammunition into a door that couldn’t possibly have been built to resist it. Through squinted eyes, Kate noticed that Jack was concentrating his fire around the edges of the lock. The strategy worked: a hand-sized chunk of door remained attached to the electromagnetic lock, but the rest of the door broke free and swung open.

  The sights, the sounds, and the smell of burned metal were overwhelming. Kate’s brain felt like it was under attack, as if the clones inside had thrown some kind of sensory grenade into her face.

  No matter, she thought in an almost drunken stupor. I’m doing this anyway.

/>   Kate staggered through the door as Jack dropped the minigun behind her, which released a sudden clang on the floor that almost tipped her over the edge. She aimed her assault rifle at the surprised clones in the control room and opened fire, killing two of them instantly.

  As she tried to steady her balance, the third clone shot her.

  Kate fell to the floor as if the bullet had killed her instantly. As far as she could tell she was still alive, and her bloody hands crawled around her to seek out the wound. But her brain would not let her feel where it was. It was too busy dealing with a traffic jam of overwhelming sensations.

  This is why James never felt pain during a meltdown… why he never knew he was injuring himself…

  James… I left you again…

  I still love you. More than anyone.

  Before a second bullet could strike, Jack leapt in and finished off the final clone. The sound of the gunshot, loud and uncomfortable as it was, signalled the end of the sensory assault. She tried to ground herself, lay her hands on the cold floor, and focused on the air as it whistled through her throat.

  As she did so, a throbbing pain emerged from the right side of her waist.

  ‘It’s a flesh wound, Kate,’ said Jack as he knelt down beside her. ‘Not deadly. Just a pain in the neck. Well, a pain in your side, actually.’

  Kate found the wound with her right hand. It felt like Jack was right. He certainly didn’t seem panicked, as far as she could tell.

  ‘Overload?’ he asked with an outstretched hand.

  ‘Yeah…’

  In Kate’s chaotic head, it helped to know that Jack understood. Not many others would have done. She grabbed his wrist, and winced as he pulled her to her feet.

  Kate found herself wobbling to the computer chair, where she sat down and retrieved Shannon’s memory stick.

  Better Days… I guess that’s what Shannon was hoping for.

  She inserted it into the computer, correctly on the third attempt.

  ‘Jack,’ she mumbled, ‘throw the kill switch.’

  ‘Look out the window when I do. You’ll want to see this.’

  Kate lifted her head. The view to the factory floor below was as incredible and horrifying as it had been the first time: the uncountable pipes and tubes that kept the system in order, the glowing lights of the pods, the fitness of the two-minute-old clones that strolled out of them.

  There was a creaking noise behind her as Jack pulled the red lever. One moment later, everything stopped on the factory floor. The humming noises fell silent. The lights on the pods went out. The clones themselves, whether guards or freshly grown recruits, began to wander around the dead factory in confusion.

  ‘We’ve not got long before they come for us, Kate.’

  Kate nodded, and opened the computer’s database. The file on the memory drive was easy enough to find.

  BetterDays.exe. Hardly imaginative, but it doesn’t need to be.

  She ran the software that had sparked their half-week mission, expecting some kind of onscreen victory display. Instead she got a normal and boring progress bar, which ended with a simple message.

  Updates installed. Please restart clone factory hardware.

  It was hardly a fanfare. It just seemed like a regular run-of-the-mill update. Then again, that must have been deliberate.

  ‘Jack… it’s time.’

  She turned around to see Jack twitching in either excitement or nervousness. He took a deep breath, and pushed the lever back into its original position.

  Before Kate could turn around, there was a dreadful metallic groan from the factory floor. She looked down, and grinned.

  The confused clones were backing towards the emergency exit. Pipes were splitting and flooding the factory floor with different-coloured liquids. Awkward whirrs and rupture sounds came from inside the clone pods. Some of them tremored in place until their glass sides shattered, spreading soups of thickened slush and half-grown bodies across the floor. Electrical equipment on the ground began to short-circuit.

  ‘You’ve got a lighter in there, right?’ asked Kate, pointing to the rucksack.

  ‘Waterproof matches.’

  ‘And we’ve still got the dynamite?’

  ‘Let me guess what you’re thinking.’

  Jack lifted his assault rifle and shattered the front window as Kate rose to her feet. Somehow, her flesh wound had stopped bothering her. She reached into the rucksack, then plucked out the matches and the small stick of dynamite. It didn’t need to be big to do its job.

  Kate tossed the lit dynamite through the window, and awaited the fireworks. They did not disappoint. The flames rippled outwards, lighting up the entire factory in a blaze of orange and blue, stretching as far as Kate’s eyes could see. Pods exploded across the factory floor like popcorn in a pan, streaks of white-hot fire lit up along the rows of burning pipes, and the sight of the flaming sea was underscored by beautiful crackles and roars.

  ‘Woah,’ said Jack in amazement, his fingers stimming like never before, ‘that is the coolest thing I have ever seen.’

  Kate grinned.

  ‘Didn’t you once see an ankylosaurus at the Natural History Museum?’

  Jack laughed, and corrected himself.

  ‘Ok, fine. That is the second-coolest thing I have ever seen.’

  Chapter 27

  Ewan launched himself down the stairwell without checking behind corners, not even trying to stem the blood that flowed from his opened arm wound. His intellect told him there was still more to lose, but the rest of his mind disagreed.

  He found Stairwell 42, burst through the door, and was greeted with the sound of a rattling chain echoing from the chamber above.

  ‘Told you it’d be faster on the way down!’ came a voice he recognised as Jack’s.

  Jack’s alive, and he must be talking to Kate. Only one Underdog will be added to the Memorial Wall. For now at least.

  Ewan shielded himself against the wall as the metal pulley ground to a halt above Floor Y. His friends swung the pulley to and fro until they could grab the side railings. Kate winced as she climbed over, her torso clearly in pain. Within half a minute, the three surviving Underdogs were reunited at the bottom of the stairwell, although Ewan refused to be happy.

  ‘What happened with the factory?’ he asked, his voice dull and apathetic.

  ‘Gone,’ answered Jack. ‘Shannon’s trick worked, and now it’s burning. Seriously mate, it was–’

  ‘Didn’t feel like telling me, then?’

  ‘We didn’t want to use the radio,’ said Kate, ‘just in case Roth…’

  She fell silent.

  Ewan held up his and Charlie’s radios in the same hand. Nobody in the stairwell was fluent with hints, but Ewan could see in their misery that they understood.

  ‘Ewan,’ gasped Kate, ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Ewan’s body flinched as her arm landed on his shoulder, and he rejected the oncoming hug.

  ‘He was our friend too–’

  ‘Look… just don’t. Seriously, let’s get the hell home.’

  Kate nodded, her eyes to the floor. Ewan turned and left the stairwell, and as he led the way he found himself beginning to stop to look round corners again. It was as if his friends reminded him of his responsibilities, like those boy racers who drove sensibly when their parents were in the car.

  ‘They must know we’re using the same exit,’ said Jack as he ran.

  ‘What choice have we got?’

  The closer they got to the exit tunnel, the denser the clone patrols became. Thankfully the Underdogs had more than enough stolen rifles between them, and their ammunition was replenished with every soldier they killed. Within fifteen minutes they had arrived at the exit, with even more bullets than they had started with.

  Ewan hauled the door backwards, ignoring the pain of his podcopter wound, and unveiled the exit tunnel like a game show prize. Wordless, the trio began their final run.

  When his chest started to ache, Ewan reac
hed into his combat clothes and retrieved the stack of papers from the officers’ sector. He clenched the papers in his fist, hiding his hatred for them, wishing he could run upstairs again and shove them into the printer in exchange for his friend back.

  ‘Jack,’ he muttered, ‘put these in the rucksack.’

  ‘What did you find?’ asked Jack as he took the papers and packed them away.

  ‘I know who Shannon is. Her whole story. I found the reports written about us too, and a few of Grant’s plans.’

  ‘Woah, nice.’

  Ewan wondered whether to shout at Jack for his optimism, but was distracted when their radios made garbled noises. He raced further down the tunnel until the interference turned into human words.

  ‘Calling teenagers,’ came the voice. ‘Teenagers, come in.’

  ‘Alex?’ asked Jack. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Not far away,’ Alex answered. ‘Spent the last three days getting bored in someone’s house, but it sounds like I got the better deal. Are there still four of you?’

  ‘Three,’ snarled Ewan.

  The radio fell silent. Even Alex was lost for words.

  ‘It was Charlie. Leave the shock for later,’ Ewan continued as the group accelerated. ‘Can you tell us anything useful?’

  ‘Marshall and Pearce know where you’re going.’

  ‘Tough crap, they’re too late. They should’ve run faster.’

  ‘Yeah, well Pearce was just mouthing off over the radio – he’s sent a “specialist unit” up the tunnel. And trust me mate, it’s pretty ugly. On top of that, there’s a hundred soldiers back at the water treatment plant in case you get that far.’

  A low rumble, unlike any sound Ewan had heard before, emanated from not far away. There was a warm glow up ahead, where the semi-cylindrical tunnel bent to the left. Whatever was glowing, it was about to come into view.

  ‘Alex,’ said Ewan, raising his assault rifle, ‘what kind of specialist–’

  ‘Shut up a second. I can get you out of there, but you have to do absolutely what I say. Understand?’