Gears of War: The Slab (Gears of War 5)

by Karen Traviss

  Marcus glanced over his shoulder at the noise. “Shit—”

  Reeve darted forward and scraped under the gate. It was a simple reflex, nothing calculated, just catching up with Marcus and not getting separated from him, but then the next gate at the far end dropped down and the metal clips slammed closed with a clunk. Marcus looked around, checking out what was now a cage. All the exits leading off the passage were kept locked, keeping the inmates’ territory separated from the staff’s. Reeve’s gut knotted.

  “Hey, open the goddamn gates, will you?” Reeve yelled. Only the warders could operate these gates and they almost never came down here. This wasn’t going to turn out well, he knew it. “Yeah, funny, Campbell. It’s you, isn’t it? Stop jerking us around. We’ve got work to do.”

  “Shit.” Marcus looked from door to door. “I think this is for me, Reeve.”

  “Well, I’m stuck in here with you. Great.”

  “He’s just going to come in and smack me around.” Damn, Marcus took it as a minor inconvenience. He was watching the side doors. That was the only way Campbell could come in without Marcus getting out. “Don’t get involved. Stand back. I know how crazy losing someone can make you.”

  “Campbell?” Reeve didn’t know if he could hear him because he didn’t know where he was. “Campbell, just stop this shit, okay? You’re not an asshole. Just fucking stop it, okay?”

  “Leave it,” Marcus said. “Just stand back.”

  “He better have some back-up.” Reeve wasn’t going to do any damn standing back. “Because he’s not built to take me on his own, let alone you.”

  Marcus was watching the end door. There were two on the right, one on the left. They all led out to the main lobby by one route or another. Marcus spun around to the door nearest him like he could hear something, then Reeve heard a thud and the sound of a latch swinging back.

  Suddenly he was looking straight at two charging Pellesian guard dogs, a split-second, a blur of black and tan and white. He hadn’t even heard them bark.

  They hadn’t. It was silent and instant. One cannoned into his chest and knocked the breath out of him. He hit the floor, cracking the back of his head, and the next thing he felt was red-hot searing pain in his raised arm, then in his leg. Maybe he shrieked: it was all noise and slow motion pain as if his arm was pulling apart like cooked meat, hot and wet. One dog’s muzzle was right in his face. Reeve felt its teeth sink to the bone of his forearm as it shook him like a rag. He could feel his leg being ripped apart, too, but the sensation was somehow a long way away and happening to someone else.

  Marcus was yelling at him. “Curl up, Reeve! Goddamn it, curl up!” Shit, he was trying to. Then the light above him was blotted out and all he could see past his arm was Marcus astride the dog. Its bite started slackening off. It took Reeve a moment to work out that Marcus was throttling the animal. He was twisting something one-handed, then brought his fist down hard on the dog’s snout. The pain shook through Reeve from arm to spine to leg and the dog slid off him like a heavy sack of potatoes. Reeve raised his head, suddenly aware of the other dog again. It broke off from him and went for Marcus.

  Marcus was on one knee when it sprang. He ducked but It caught him full in the face. For a moment Reeve thought it had him by the throat, but Marcus gripped its scruff in one hand, stopping it from pulling away, holding it so tight to him that Reeve wondered if he was trying to crush its windpipe the hard way. For a moment it looked like he was punching it in the gut. He was yelling his head off like he was bayonetting an enemy. By the time Reeve had dragged himself clear, the dog was yelping and twitching on the floor between Marcus’s knees. Reeve tried not to look at his own arm.

  “Is that piss?” Reeve asked. There was a puddle. It was a dumb question but the first one that came into his head. “Fuck, Marcus, are you okay?”

  Marcus knelt back with his hand pressed hard against the right side of his face. He was clutching a short strip of metal in his other hand. The spreading puddle wasn’t piss. It was blood, and both Marcus and the dog were covered in it. His blood? Mine? The dog’s? Someone was yelling and arguing behind the door. One of the security gates lifted, clanking and squeaking.

  “Yeah, the bastard’s bitten me, that’s all.” Marcus took his hand away and looked at his palm. A bite? Shit, it was way more than that. There was a jagged rip from his right eye all the way down through his lip, raw and bloody, but he didn’t seem to realize the mess he was in. “If I ever see a frigging dog again it’ll be too soon.”

  “It’s ripped your face open.”

  Marcus didn’t seem to be taking any notice. “You just got to keep your head. Don’t let them pull away. That’s how they tear flesh …”

  “Nice plan, but it didn’t do you much good.”

  “Have you seen the state of your arm, Reeve?”

  Reeve tried not to look. He knew it was shredded but as long as he didn’t look, it wouldn’t hurt. Then he looked, couldn’t work out what was shredded flesh and what was torn shirt, and felt his gut start rolling.

  Boots clattered down the passage and Reeve found himself looking up at Jarvi and Chalcross. “Holy shit,” Chalcross said. “Parmenter’s going to do his nut about the dogs.”

  “Just shut it, Dan. Get Reeve on his feet.” Jarvi hauled Marcus upright. “Bollocks. This is all we need. Come on, Fenix. Press your hand on it. Come on, hard.”

  So this was shock, was it? Reeve was losing chunks of time. He couldn’t remember stumbling down the passage and through another set of security doors, but he was in the infirmary now, lying on a bunk and trying to look at his ripped arm while Chalcross kept pushing it down and swabbing it with a wet rag. Reeve twisted his head as far as he could and saw Marcus sitting with his arms folded tight across his chest while Jarvi did something to his face.

  Jarvi was putting in stitches. Marcus took it with a slight twitch each time the needle went in.

  “Keep still.” Jarvi finished stitching. He tried to stick a dressing over the whole length of the wound, but it wouldn’t adhere. “You need to go to JMC, Fenix.”

  “What, so they can do this all over again? Just give me some antibiotics.”

  “Yeah, and what am I going to tell Prescott?”

  “Your problem. How about Reeve? He’s lost blood. Get him to JMC.” Marcus got up and walked over to Reeve, leaning over him and ignoring Chalcross. God, his face was a mess. He was lucky he hadn’t lost an eye. His speech sounded slurred. “How do you feel, Reeve?”

  “I think I’ve lost my smokes for this week, Marcus. Anyway … hey, I could have bled to death back there. Thanks.”

  “No sweat. Sorry you got caught up in it.”

  Chalcross stepped back. “I’m going to call a medic. Both of you, damn well shut up and lie down. You’re still losing blood.”

  Chalcross disappeared. Jarvi took a look at Reeve’s leg, shook his head, and went after Chalcross without comment, slamming the orderly station door behind them. No wonder they were shitting themselves if what Jarvi had told him about Prescott was true.

  “Well, that gets me off kitchen roster.” Reeve felt his stomach shaking as if he was going to laugh, but he wasn’t. “You’re going to have a hell of a scar, Marcus.”

  “Yeah.” Marcus looked different now, and it wasn’t just the blood still trickling down his face. He looked lit up. It was the only way to describe it. It was like he’d forgotten how good adrenaline felt, but now he remembered and he was on top of the world. “So, when Jarvi lets us out of here, you need some help digging. I’m in.”

  Did I hear him right? Reeve couldn’t work out what had turned him around so fast. Maybe he’d misunderstood him. “I thought you wanted to rot here for your sins, all noble and shit.”

  “I can rot later.” Marcus straightened up with a real set to his shoulders. He was talking to himself now. Reeve realized he must have been through a lot worse than this on a pretty regular basis, because he now seemed absolutely calm, completely focused on the next thi
ng he had to do. “I need to get out of here. I need to kill some fucking grubs.”

  CHAPTER 10

  The patient sustained a serious laceration to the right side of his face, approximately 11 centimeters in length and extending from the lower right orbit to the upper lip, the result of an animal bite. I was asked to treat him approximately two days after the wound was sustained. There was no damage to the eye. The laceration was relatively superficial with no damage to the bone, but the buccinator and orbicularis oris muscles required dissolving sutures. The nerves of the zygomatic and buccal branches were undamaged, so he should regain full facial movement when the wound heals, although he may experience permanent loss of sensation. Scarring will be conspicuous but discoloration and depth may reduce over time. Early intervention by the prison staff with oral antibiotics appears to have prevented infection, always a considerable risk with animal bites. I have enclosed a series of photos of the wound for your records. May I remind you that treating such injuries within a facility like CPSE Hesketh is unsatisfactory and all future incidents should be handled by JMC ER.

  (Dr. Jay Assandris, senior MHO, COG DoH, in a report to Chairman Richard Prescott regarding Prisoner B1116/87 Fenix, M.M. Archive note from Ms. J. Beston, Secretary to Chairman Prescott: not to be included in redacted file.)

  THE SLAB: GALE, 12 A.E.

  “There’s a word for you,” Reeve said. “Obsessive.”

  “Forty.” Marcus grunted under his breath, hauling himself up again with an overhand grip. “Forty-one, forty-two …”

  Marcus was doing chins from the exposed steel joist in the ceiling. The joist ran through every cell on the main floor and should have been boxed in, but maybe the governor who supervised the last half-assed refurbishment fifty years ago had decided the inmates would appreciate a nice sturdy beam to hang themselves from. Reeve found it handy for drying laundry. It was in the right position to hang a sheet for some privacy, too, but if he put up a screen it only encouraged some bastard to find out what he was doing behind it. The screws hadn’t been down on the floor to check inmates at lights-out for years, anyway.

  “Forty-four, forty-five …”

  The dogs started barking somewhere else in the building, a noise that was routine to Reeve but always seemed to put Marcus on alert. This time, he barely broke his rhythm. The fight was back in him and Reeve could trace it back to an exact moment. He’d watched it ramp up: a little more steel in Marcus’s spine after Prescott spoke to him, enough to make him read the letters from his girl, and then the clincher, the dog attack. Looking back, it was like Marcus needed to convince himself that he could still fight and that he had a reason to, and then the adrenaline of fighting for his life and winning had thrown that switch again and made him realize what he did best. He was a Gear. His purpose was to kill grubs, and he could probably do it with his bare hands, if only he could get out of here.

  And that seemed to be what he was working toward now. The guy wouldn’t let himself off the hook, though. He was only keeping himself combat-fit and helping dig the tunnel because he was planning to get out and kill as many Locust as he could before they finally killed him. It was slowly starting to make sense to Reeve, but only because he’d finally managed to see the world as Marcus saw it.

  Or a glimpse of it. Nobody really gets inside his head, I’ll bet. Not so sure I’d want to, either.

  Reeve could set his watch by Marcus. He had the zeal of a guy with a deadline to meet. He finished his set, dropped back onto the floor, shook out his arms, pulled his elbow across his chest a few times to stretch out, right then left, then stepped up onto the bunk to reach the joist again. It was an underhand grip this time. He did another fifty chins, then dropped down and took a breather, hands braced on his thighs. The big scar from his run-in with the dogs was still a canyon across his face, a deep gouge with ragged edges, but somehow he made it look like an accessory instead of a disfigurement. They said your life story showed on your face. Reeve was pretty sure he could read Marcus’s.

  “I’m charging admission,” Marcus said, straightening up. He still sounded slightly slurred. His mangled cheek was going to be stiff and numb for a long time. “You should try it. Physio for that arm of yours.”

  “I can’t fucking grip now and you know it.” Yeah, the arm was a mess and some of Reeve’s fingers still had no feeling in them. He’d have been an out-of-work assassin now. “We’ve got bigger problems.”

  “What?”

  “They’re shutting the psych wing. We’re going to be down to six warders soon.”

  Marcus just looked at him, then swung onto the joist again, one-handed this time. “Why?”

  “Jarvi says they’ve drafted some screws.”

  Marcus’s face fell as much as an already unsmiling guy’s ever could. It was one of the few times Reeve was certain he knew what he was thinking: it should have been him going back to the front line, a proper Gear, a man who wanted to fight again and knew exactly how.

  “Campbell?” Marcus asked at last, grunting with effort.

  “Nah.”

  Marcus went silent for a moment, probably counting. Reeve waited for him to finish his set and drop down.

  “Shit.” Marcus dusted off his hands with more concentration than was necessary. “Can’t be their reward for taking chunks out of me, then.”

  That didn’t mean anything to Reeve. “He’s backed off you, hasn’t he?”

  “Yeah. So who’s left?”

  “Jarvi, Parmenter, Ospen, Chalcross, Campbell, and the nightshift guy. What’s his name—Ling.”

  Marcus seemed to be checking the list mentally, frowning. Then he shrugged. “This shithole runs itself. They just watch. Why’s it a big deal?”

  “Do the math, Marcus. It takes twelve of them to run this place, and that’s because they need to wrangle the loonies in the secure wing. Two guys per shift can’t do that. So they’re either going to let ’em mix with us—”

  Marcus looked around like he’d heard something and went to the cell door to look up in the direction of the gantry. He always seemed to pick up sounds Reeve missed. Maybe it was all that practice at listening for grubs.

  “Yeah, that’ll pass the time,” Marcus said, distracted, and walked out onto the central floor. He called out. “Officer Jarvi? Any mail?”

  Reeve stepped back to watch. It was the first time he’d ever heard Marcus raise his voice by even a fraction. Jarvi, scarf wrapped around his neck and arms folded tight against the cold, looked down over the rail with an apologetic expression.

  “Nothing today, Fenix.”

  Marcus just nodded at him and looked lost for a moment. It was the kind of exchange that would have earned a few catcalls—at the very least—for anyone else. But Marcus had somehow managed to step outside the pecking order of the prison.

  In the world, but not of it. Who said that? Ah, can’t remember. But true.

  Merino ambled down the hall like an NCO coming to see what all the noise was about. Marcus never made eye contact with him now. Reeve studied their body language with the eye of an expert, because there wasn’t much else to do except watch other people. Merino walked like he owned the place, as he pretty well did, but he never stood too close to Marcus, blocked his path, or crossed the invisible line that marked the boundary of his open cell door. For his part, Marcus didn’t do that square-on gesture, the way he’d sometimes stand with his shoulders set and fists clenched at his side as if he was spoiling for a fight. The agreement was silent. Marcus wasn’t going to kiss Merino’s ass, but he wasn’t interested in being top dog either. He had other things on his mind.

  That didn’t stop guys treating him as if he had some authority, though. Merino was still visibly edgy about that. Marcus seemed to be reassuring him that he could keep his poxy job as King of Turd Hill.

  “You got a problem, Fenix?” he asked.

  It was the sort of question that could erupt into a fight without the slightest effort. Reeve’s arm was too damaged now to be usefu
l in breaking up a brawl so he just prayed that Marcus wouldn’t take the bait.

  “Yeah, I’m not getting any letters from …” Marcus skipped half a beat. “My girlfriend.”

  Reeve realized it was the first time he’d actually used the word. He hadn’t even said her name, not once. If Merino had been working up to try to put Marcus in his place once and for all, the answer had totally disarmed him.

  “Shit, man,” Merino said. He shook his head. “Ah, they take time to get used to it. She’ll write. And if she doesn’t—you can forget her.”

  So it was Marcus’s turn to be taken aback. He blinked a couple of times. “Yeah.” Then he went back into his cell and carried on with his exercise routine.

  Merino looked at Reeve and tilted his head slightly. What’s up with him?

  Reeve did a discreet head jerk for Merino to follow and walked a little way down the hall. There was an argument going on somewhere. It sounded like Seffert and Van Lees going at it in the kitchens over that goddamn radio and who had broken it. The kitchens were the warmest place in the Slab and it attracted too many volunteers for the space available. Tempers frayed.

  But shit, no radio. That was their last independent link with the outside world.

  “Look, all Marcus is interested in is getting out and killing grubs,” Reeve said. “He’s made it his mission.”

  “Yeah, he’s unhinged, I know. I feel kind of sorry for him. Still loyal to the assholes who put him in here.”

  “I don’t think it’s that simple.”

  “Maybe not,” said Merino. “Now let’s get down to the real problem in here. Not that we have any formality going with the screws, but what are we going to do when our new guests arrive from the psych wing, as they surely will?”

  “Your call, Dan.”

  “Who’ve we got in there?”

  Reeve tried to remember. It hadn’t seemed important to know who the criminally insane were, except out of idle curiosity and something to gossip about, because everyone had assumed they’d never have to rub shoulders with them. They had to be kept separate.