by Justin Sloan
They crawled for what seemed like an hour, worming under the Baltimore city streets, the sewer eventually spooling to a larger space, an area big enough to stand up in, a spot where a dozen sewer pipes drained into a rank lagoon. Haskell slumped to the ground, nonplussed about the swampy ledge that she was sitting on. Gibbs stood while Gene also sat down, Haskell’s rucksack was thrown open, and soon everyone was chowing down on the food that Haskell had brought.
“Does it get any better than this?” Gene asked. “Eating carrots down in a sewer while the world dies screaming.”
“World ended a long time ago,” Gibbs replied, his eyes cast to the ground. “It ended the moment people stopped believing in the future.”
“Bullshit,” Gene said.
“Think about the reason you used to get up every day,” Gibbs said, loudly biting into his carrot.
“I was hungry and I needed to take a leak,” Gene answered with a smirk.
“Nah, you did it because you thought that tomorrow was gonna be better than today.”
Gene opened his mouth as if he wanted to respond, but didn’t. Gibbs continued:
“The day the scuds made it clear that tomorrow was gonna be worse, much fucking worse than today, is the day the world ended.”
“So then we need to change that,” Haskell said, zipping her rucksack. “We need to give people something to believe in.”
“You actually believe we can change the future?” Gene asked.
She thought about this and vaguely remembered the events on the ship, which seemed like a million years ago, and smiled. “I know we can.”
Something flashed down in the dark water of the lagoon and Haskell stood and waded forward. She reached a hand down and felt metal and tugged back on an object that was lying concealed in the water. It was a machine of some kind and after she wiped away a rooster tail of mud and slime she knew what it was.
“Sentry drone,” Gene said before Haskell could utter a word.
Haskell nodded. There’d been hundreds, maybe thousands of the four-foot tall sentry drones positioned around the city in the days leading up to the invasion. She ran her hands over the drone’s rusted parts, including what was left of its infrared thermographic camera and weapons interface. The machines had been no match for the Syndicate army which barely batted an eyelash as it rolled right over Baltimore. She reached down again and lifted up a pod-like, three-foot long portion of a cannon that once had been mounted on the side of the drone and intended to fire twelve small rockets at the enemy. The cannon was waterlogged, but in surprisingly good condition. She handed it to Gene.
“Believe it or not, the first ones were developed over in Korea a long time ago,” Gene said, examining the cannon. “SGR-AI-2 it was called. World’s first autonomous surveillance and sentry drone. They used ‘em to monitor the DMZ. Shit lotta good they did when the scuds came.”
Gene tossed the cannon into the air and Haskell snagged it and secreted it inside the rucksack. Sounds echoed from the direction they’d come from. The grunts and hisses and clucks that the Syndicate soldiers and their drones made. The three tensed, then quickly waded through the fetid water and climbed a metal ladder bolted into a stone wall on the opposite side.
They mounted the ladder and crawled up into an antechamber, pausing, allowing their eyes to acclimate to the murkiness. They forged on, creep-running through a utility-man’s work tunnel, Gibbs leading the way. Haskell was amazed at how he seemed to know every nook and cranny in the underground, moving left, then right, kicking open access doors and crawling over piping, jogging past small colonies of dog-sized rats and delegations of spiders that were larger than sparrows. Eventually, the trio came to a stop near another wall with another ladder bolted onto it. At the top of the ladder was what looked like a manhole cover.
Gibbs pointed up. “That’s it. That’s the way.”
Haskell mounted the ladder and pulled herself up. Braced against the far wall, she placed her head under the steel manhole cover and pushed up. The pressure was immense and she was scared that the muscles in her neck were going to explode.
“Step aside,” Gene said from below.
She looked down at him. “Anything you can do, I can do better.”
She grimaced and grunted and pushed again, moving the manhole cover a few inches. She repeated this again and again and finally the cover groaned and moved aside. Haskell thrust her fingers into the gap she’d created and shoved the cover aside to reveal the edge of what had once been a courtyard at the front of the federal court building.
The court’s carbonized shell had partially protected the courtyard which was nonetheless full of debris and moldering bodies, the remnants of the “Battle for the Harbor,” the last great struggle waged in Baltimore, what what was left of the military and Maryland National Guard were surrounded and massacred by thousands of Syndicate soldiers. Haskell remembered watching the end of the battle from a hiding spot near the top of Druid Hill, the drones, the gliders, the men and women fighting and dying in the heart of the city, everything eerily silhouetted against the fires burning in the harbor which had been intentionally set ablaze by Baltimore’s defenders.
She shrugged off these memories and crawled out into the courtyard, searching for the drone she’d seen shot down. Peering up, she studded a section of the courthouse’s outer wall which was blackened, and mentally traced the angle of the fallen drone. The others called out for her to stop, but Haskell crouch-ran forward and that’s when she saw it.
Tucked under a pile of wreckage.
The edge still shimmering in the dirt.
The grail!
The fallen drone!
She threw up a hand and waved for the others to follow.
Soon the trio were kneeling around the drone, pulling away rubble, trying to pull free the enemy machine which was roughly nine feet long by five feet wide.
“Lucky shot,” Gibbs said, pointing to a panel on the side of the drone, a joint between two larger, alien-alloyed panels, where a round, either a sabot or an old-school bullet, had penetrated the machine, likely bringing it down. Haskell moved toward the rear of the machine which was obscured by mounds of building material.
“Don’t even tell me we’re dragging this goddamned thing back with us,” said Gene.
She shook her head and Gene grabbed the end of the drone and deadlifted it out of the rubble as the belly of the drone ripped open. Like a pod spilling its seeds, dozens of small alien rockets tumbled out of the drone. Haskell and Gibbs scooped up a handful of the rockets and placed them inside the rucksack. Then Haskell dropped to her knees and studied the rear of the craft, her fingers tracing the outline of the compartment just above where its engines were likely housed.
She opened the rucksack a final time and hunted inside, withdrawing a small pry bar that she slotted into the joint near the drone’s engine compartment.
Manipulating the pry bar, Haskell was soon able to open the hatch on the engine compartment. Inside was a pair of silver, cylindrical objects cocooned in various lengths of webbing and wires. She leaned in and noted the scorch marks at the end of the cylinder. This was it, she thought. This was one of the drone’s power sources, its engine. She grabbed at one of the cylinders as a series of bombs landed just down the street.
“We’ve got two minutes, maybe less,” Gibbs said.
Haskell tugged again on the cylinder, but it didn’t give.
“Help me,” she said and Gene grabbed the cylinder and yanked it free.
More bombs fell.
Shouts echoed.
The whine of drones in the air reverberated.
“Hurry, Haskell!” Gibbs whisper-screamed.
She grabbed the other cylinder, and with Gene’s help, tugged it free.
“Let’s go!” she shouted.
Gene gripped the cylinders, one in each hand as they ran back toward the manhole cover. Haskell was the last one in, catching sight of a Syndicate soldier on the other side of the street. She froze because
the soldier removed his battle helmet to reveal a man.
A human.
What. The. Fuck?
What was a human doing fighting for the scuds?
The man traded looks with her and scowled, raising his rifle as Haskell jumped down through the manhole cover. Gene grabbed her, the two tumbling down, barely avoiding turning their ankles.
“They spotted me!” Haskell shrieked.
Panicked, the three charged headlong back down the sewer as a roar grew behind them. Haskell looked back in terror as a light built. She’d seen this before, she’d watched the scuds fire incendiary munitions into the tunnels in East Baltimore to root out the resistance.
“They’re burning it!” she screamed.
They blitzed forward as something, some alien munition detonated behind them, likely flung down through the open manhole cover by the man she’d locked eyes with. The fine hairs on the back of Haskell’s neck ridged as a fireball swept through the sewer. Haskell could feel the heat building as she ran, expecting to be barbecued at any moment when—
Gibbs suddenly weaved to the right.
Slipping through an ante-chamber that was almost invisible in the shadows.
Barely more than a cleft in the stone walls.
Haskell tripped and staggered back and out of the cleft.
Her arms windmilled.
She saw Gene, mouth open in a silent scream lurch for her.
He grabbed her arms and pulled her into the cleft just as—
BAROOM!
A wall of fire filled the space she’d just been standing in only seconds earlier.
She could hear the howl of the flames behind her as Gene grabbed and pulled her in close. The air was soon tanged with the odor of whatever chemical the aliens had used to create the fireball, the wolf-like shriek of the fire echoing off the walls. Haskell turned and watched the flames lick at the edges of the cleft, before burning out. The three just stood there in silence for several seconds, realizing how lucky they were to be alive.
“I … I saw a man,” Haskell finally whispered.
She looked over at Gibbs and Gene. “Outside. Before. I saw one of them, a Syndicate soldier, only it was a man … a white guy. He stared right at me.”
Gibbs nodded. “I heard about that. Rumor is the aliens are conscripting soldiers, people who know how to fight, and pressing them into service.”
“Nguy,” Gene whispered.
Haskell turned to him. “What?”
“It’s a Vietnamese word. It means a person who looks like us on the outside, but has the soul of a stranger … an alien.”
Silence filled the space. Haskell sucked in a breath and inched back down and out of the cleft and looked both ways into the sewer.
Nothing stirred.
The aliens probably thought the three of them had been charbroiled.
“We are not going that way,” Gene said, gesturing at the sewer. “We’ll have to take the long way back.”
She moved back, squeezed Gene’s hand, mouthing “thank you” for saving her life. Then she gestured to Gibbs who nodded. She knew he’d been all over the city before. After a few minutes of discussion, Gibbs nodded and led everyone away from the sewer through a passageway that split from the cleft, the trio melting into the shadows of the underground.
MINUTES LATER, the passageway connected to a route that Gibbs claimed he was intimately familiar with from his days as a Snout. It would take them longer, but it was safer and they wouldn’t have to expose themselves by running in the open down the streets. Soon the adrenaline from the fire-bombing had ebbed and they were dragging themselves through a tunnel-like corridor, exhausted, running on empty. Haskell’s vigor was renewed, however, when she spotted a few bars of light up ahead. The three stopped and stared.
“Um … there’s light,” Gibbs whispered.
“That’s right,” Haskell said.
“Why is there a light in the tunnel.”
“Because I needed some juice for what I was doing.”
She grinned and motioned for the others to follow her, angling to her left and through a doorway that had been fashioned into the rubble. The others followed, the three entering what looked like a grotto, a low-ceilinged space that had been burrowed into the mountains of rubble. The space was narrow, but long, several orange extension cords visible, tethered to various tools and a small rechargeable battery pack that sat in the middle of the room. At the outer edges of the room were stacks of what looked like building material: lengths of metal, sections of alloy, bundles of wires of all shapes and sizes, and small benches cluttered with tiny gizmos and all manner of machine parts. She had memories of collecting all of this at some point in the recent past.
“This is like the Santa’s workshop,” Gibbs said.
“Yeah, if Santa was on crack,” Gene added, hoisting up a length of entrail-like wire.
“I built this place,” Haskell said.
Gibbs looked over. “Why?”
“To fight back!” Haskell shouted triumphantly.
She dramatically lifted up a section of circuit board.
“I give you a part of what will soon be … Ex Nihlio!” she shouted.
The circuit board broke apart in her hands and clattered to the ground.
“Is ‘Ex Nihlio’ Latin for crap, Haskell?” Gene asked with a smirk.
“Screw you,” Haskell said, dejected, bending to scoop up the pieces of the circuit board. She watched Gene out of the corner of her eye as he moved over and inspected portions of the materials lying near a far wall: several lengths of steel that she’d pried from the frame of a fallen building, a motherboard that she’d extracted from a sentry drone, bundles of coiled cable and conduit that she’d spent hours methodically plucking from a wrecked industrial machine.
“What the hell are you doing with all this stuff?” Gene asked. “Getting ready for the world’s shittiest yard sale?”
“It’s all parts for my machine,” Haskell said.
“What kind of machine?”
“The one I designed,” Haskell said, removing a stack of paper from a plastic snap case lying on the floor. She held the paper up for the others to see.
Gene and Gibbs moved into the light, squinting, examining sheets filled with numbers and calculations and schematics and the sketch of what looked like a cross between a robotic machine and an exosuit used for combat operations. It was crude, but full of notations and cross-sections juxtaposed with lists of materials and parts. In the middle of the paper was the outline for what looked like a robot, complete with arms and legs.
“Since when did you draw?” Gibbs asked.
“I was studying to be an engineer,” Haskell said.
“Right,’ cos you’re sure as shit not an artist,” Gibbs snickered.
Haskell smacked him in the head and handed the sketch to Gene.
“I’m pretty sure we’ve got the parts and tools to build it,” Haskell said.
“But what does it do?” Gene asked, taking the sketch, scanning it.
“It fights.”
“Fights what?”
“The scuds.”
At this, Gene and Gibbs roared in laughter, slapping each other on the back. Haskell was not amused by this. She grabbed the sketch back from Gene and did a slow-burn.
“What the hell’s the matter with you two?” she asked.
Gene threw up his hands. “What’s the matter with … us? You’re the one that dragged us halfway across the city to grab some engines for what? A soda machine you’re building to take on the Syndicate?”
“It’s a ‘Boomslang,’” Haskell said.
“Excuse me.”
“That’s what I’m calling it. A mechanized fighting machine. A ‘Boomslang.’”
“I’ll give it to you. That is a kickass name,” Gene said.
“Yeah, well, whatever it’s called, have fun building it,” Gene said, turning on his heels to exit the workshop. “I’m outta here.”
“You’ve still got family
in Trenton don’t you!” Haskell shouted.
Gene stopped dead in his tracks. Slowly, he turned to look back at her.
“They’re still down in that FEMA bunker aren’t they?” Haskell asked.
“So what if they are?”
“So once the scuds are done flattening Baltimore where do you think they’re going next.”
“Why don’t you tell me,” Gene said, some heat in his voice.
“Word on the street is they’re heading north again.”
“The word is wrong,” Gene snapped.
Haskell jabbed a finger in the air at Gene. “You willing to take that risk? You willing to sit back with the old ladies over in the outpost and suck on it? Maybe sit around in your skirt mashing up carrots and potatoes? Playing defense, hiding down in that hole while those motherfuckers up in the sky shit on our world?”
Gene’s face flushed. “I don’t gotta listen to this.”
“Do you squat when you piss, Gene? C’mon, tell the truth.”
“Fuck you, Haskell.”
“You know I’m right,” she replied, giving no ground. “Maybe I’m a little nuts. Maybe there’s no way in hell we’ll ever be able to build anything to fight back, but we won’t know unless we try. To keep doing what we’ve been doing, running and hiding, is insanity. In another month we’ll all be dead, but if we work together, we can change the future.”
“So what do you want from me?” Gene asked.
“Two weeks of your time. If we can’t start getting it together by then, we’ll stop.”
Several seconds of silence stretched between them.
“I got one thing to say to you,” Gene said through bared teeth, moving in close to Haskell.
“What’s that?” she asked in response.
“In the event that you’re crazy ass is right, I get to take whatever we build for a ride first.”
Haskell sighed and smiled.
