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

by Karen Traviss

  She didn’t elaborate. The lift reached the fourth floor and she left him sitting in a reception area, staring down a brightly lit corridor lined with swing doors. From the sign on the wall, he guessed the operating theaters were on this floor. What did he say to Mathieson? Would he even be conscious? And why him, out of all the Gears who ended up dead or crippled? Everybody liked Mathieson. Maybe that was it. He was irrepressibly positive about every damn thing even in the face of evidence that would have convinced any sane man to put a gun to his own head. He was a Gear because he wanted to be, not a conscript, and he loved army life.

  It was another ten minutes before Dr. Ademi came back, time enough for Hoffman to realize that he was sitting here because Mathieson was his personal touchstone for the course of the war. If that kid didn’t survive, then nobody would.

  “He’s in recovery,” Ademi said. “They’ll be keeping him heavily sedated so you can’t talk to him, but he might well be aware you’re there.”

  “Do I have to scrub up or anything?”

  “No, just don’t touch him.”

  Recovery was a small side room off one of the operating theaters, whitewashed and tiled, and as brightly lit as the corridors. It took Hoffman a second longer than he expected to spot Mathieson. There were various steel trolleys standing around the room and a long counter against the wall on one side. Then he realized one of the trolleys was a gurney of sorts, and the drips, oxygen line, and old-fashioned monitor trailing from it were plugged into a human being. He simply hadn’t registered the fact that it was Mathieson, not because he couldn’t see much of his face under the oxygen mask but because he expected to see a man who was nearly two meters tall. The guy on the trolley was a lot shorter than that.

  Oh God.

  It was hardly the first time that Hoffman had seen terrible injuries. But for some reason the clean, white environment made this all the worse. He stared for a moment. A theater nurse came out and glared at him over the top of her surgical mask.

  “He can’t talk to you,” she said.

  Dr. Ademi nudged Hoffman. “But he’s going to make it, yes?”

  The nurse shrugged. “He shouldn’t have made it this far, but he has. So maybe.”

  “Mathieson, it’s me,” Hoffman said, edging forward as far as he dared. “It’s Colonel Hoffman. You hang in there, Donneld. Soon as you’re out of here, we’ll have you back at work, okay? Don’t you worry.”

  “Terrific,” said the nurse, unimpressed. Hoffman always checked out names instinctively, and hers was stenciled on her scrubs: M. JARVI. “Now we’ve got to get him to a ward. Off you go, Colonel.”

  Hoffman had worked out that his rank counted for nothing here, but he didn’t care. He backed out of the recovery room. Dr. Ademi led him down the corridor. It was good of such a busy girl to spare him the time, he thought.

  “You meant that about having him back as Gear?” she asked. “Does that matter to him? What’s he going to do in a wheelchair?”

  “Plenty of support roles need filling,” Hoffman said. “And now I’ve made a promise to him, I intend to keep it whether he heard it or not.”

  Dr. Ademi didn’t comment. They walked in silence toward the elevator, but halfway down the corridor the lights went out and the whole floor was plunged into gloom and sudden silence, broken a second later by a muffled chorus of swearing from behind doors. A nurse burst through a set of doors to the right of Hoffman, looking around like she was checking if the power was out on all floors.

  “Damn outage,” she called to someone through the doors. “Get the generators going.”

  It happened. There were rolling power cuts throughout Jacinto all the time to save fuel at the generating stations, but JMC was one of the places the utility company kept operational. Hoffman hoped this wasn’t a sign of even worse to come. He made his way down the almost pitch-black stairwell with Dr. Ademi, feeling for each step with his boot.

  “You’ll be calling to check on that young man, won’t you?” she asked. “You don’t have to see Dr. Hayman again.”

  “Count on it,” Hoffman said. “Hayman or no goddamn Hayman.”

  D WING, THE SLAB.

  Reeve heard the yelling and cursing start up just after breakfast.

  Baiting Ruskin or one of the other psychiatric cases had been a big sport when they were first transferred into the main wing, but soon it got to be just too much effort, and nobody could be assed to keep it up unless they were really bored. Boredom set in in winter along with the freezing weather, though. Seffert was standing outside Ruskin’s locked cell, raking a tin plate up and down the bars. Reeve just wished he’d shut the fuck up. For once, the dogs were relatively quiet. It was humans making the racket for a change.

  “Special delivery!” Seffert hammered on the bars. “Hey, fucknugget, I got a parcel for ya …”

  Ruskin yelled his head off. “Warder? Warder! Get this bastard away from me! You hear me? Get him out!”

  The noise was really grating on Reeve now. His hands were so cold that he could barely hold the needle he was darning his socks with, icy water was seeping up through the floor in the shower block, and the kitchen supplies were down to canned pork, kale, and barley. He didn’t need one more pain in the ass right then.

  “Seffert, you asshole.” He stuck his head out the cell door. The floor seemed to be empty, which meant most of the inmates had moved to the kitchen block for warmth. “Shut your yap, will you?”

  Seffert blithely gave him the finger. Then Reeve realized what he was doing. He was slinging shit into the locked cell, human shit, chuckling to himself in a malicious schoolboy kind of way and lobbing it at Ruskin with a roll of newspaper like some perverted game of scoop-ball. Reeve tossed the darning onto his bunk and stormed up the hall.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Ruskin was flattened against the far wall of his cell, cowering from the barrage, screaming at Seffert to stop. “You better clean that up. We’ve got to live in here twenty-six hours a day, buddy.”

  “Ah, it’ll dry out,” Seffert said. “Besides, I can’t get in there.”

  “You hear me? Pack it in. You think if we fuck up the place enough that the screws will come down here and clean it for us?”

  “How are we gonna notice either way?” Seffert seemed to have run out of ammo. He crushed the newspaper into a ball and took aim at Ruskin. “Look at the state of it, man. The plaster’s falling off the goddamn walls and the wood’s rotting.”

  “Yeah, great, so why not make things worse, then? Frigging great idea. Just wait until Merino gets hold of you. Chunky’s going to go nuts, too. He’s downwind.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” Seffert ambled away. “Maybe you better start digging another tunnel. Because this place is going to collapse before the goddamn grubs get here.”

  Reeve turned to go back to his cell but then stopped to take another look at Ruskin. The guy was now crouched in the far corner of the cell, blanket over his head, sobbing quietly. The psychiatric cases were in the five end cells on each side of the floor with a couple of empty units to separate them from the sane residents. Reeve wasn’t sure if the psychological dividing line was that clear-cut any longer, though. Nobody ever looked like a murderer or a rapist, and the nutters didn’t all look mad either. Ruskin was the only one who had the decency to give the world a clue that he was crazy by huddling under that blanket. The other assholes looked as normal as the next guy, but normal—no, there was nothing normal in the Slab. There never had been. Nobody was getting out and it changed everything inside a guy’s head. Reeve suddenly realized he wasn’t holding on to anything. He’d abandoned it all. He’d reached the stage where a guy pelting another guy with shit like a demented monkey was a minor annoyance.

  And I feel sorry for a guy who kills and eats mailmen.

  The smell of shit was too much for him. He went into the yard and the cold air stung his eyes. Marcus was squatting by the fishpond, messing around with the surface of the ice. Reeve hovered in the shelter of the
doorway.

  “What are you doing?” he called.

  “Got to let the pond gases escape.” Marcus was busy pouring boiled water around a float stuck in the ice. “Gets messy down there.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “Used to watch the gardener when I was a kid.”

  “Oh, yeah, you had a gardener. You had staff. I bet you had a fucking lake.”

  “Yeah. Big estate.” Marcus tilted his head to one side, watching the float bobbing in the small hole. “I was on my own a lot. Got bored.”

  Reeve looked up. The helicopters were always passing overhead, pretty well on the same flight path most days, and the artillery sounded like it was getting closer. But it was hard to tell if it was just the wind direction today. The grubs still hadn’t come.

  Marcus stood up and looked over his shoulder as if he’d heard something. For a guy who’d spent all his adult life around deafening noise, his hearing seemed pretty sharp. Reeve followed his gaze and saw Officer Jarvi leaning out of one of the sash windows in the admin block. The screws didn’t come into the yard very often these days, not even Jarvi.

  “Fenix,” he called. He held something out of the window, a brown paper rectangle about the size of a small shoebox. “Parcel for you. A Packhorse just showed up with it.”

  Marcus almost looked hopeful. His eyebrows raised a fraction. “Cake with a file in it?”

  “From the Chairman’s office. Come on, I can’t stand here all day.”

  Marcus’s looked slightly crestfallen, probably still expecting something from his precious goddamn Anya, but she hadn’t written in years. He jogged over to the wall and Jarvi dropped the parcel for him to catch, before shutting the window again. Reeve decided to poke his nose in. Marcus squatted in the lee of a bush and unwrapped the package carefully, pocketing the string and smoothing out the paper. He examined both sides like he was looking for a message somewhere. Reeve squatted next to him but all he could see over his shoulder was the words PRISONER B1116/87 FENIX M.M.ES. written on it in thick black letters. Reeve had often wondered if they’d stripped him of his medal, the thing that entitled him to have the initials ES after his name. It seemed that they’d let him keep it. The army had never made sense to Reeve and he knew it never would.

  “Cookies,” Marcus growled. “Again.”

  The again threw Reeve. How had he missed that windfall before? “What?”

  “Someone in Prescott’s office sends me cookies once in a while.”

  “Oh … Anya?” Reeve dared say the holy name aloud. “You think it’s her?”

  Marcus paused for a few moments, staring at the plain cardboard packet, then just shook his head. He opened it in a resigned kind of way and took a couple of cookies before holding it out to Reeve. Nobody shared anything in this place. You traded, yes, but handing over something that rare for nothing was unthinkable. Reeve took one cookie. It was richly dark, scented with treacle and vanilla. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d had anything like that.

  “What do you want for it?” he asked.

  “It’s a cookie,” Marcus said. “Just eat the frigging thing.”

  “You’re still not getting the hang of prison economics, are you?” God, that cookie smelled like heaven. “You don’t get something for nothing.”

  “Army economics,” Marcus said, crunching slowly. “Share ammo. Share rations. Stay alive.”

  Reeve bit into his cookie. The slightly bittersweet molasses taste burst on his palate and he almost wished he hadn’t tasted it. It reminded his mouth that he’d forced it to get used to stuff no sane man should ever have had to eat. His mouth remembered the best restaurants in Jacinto, because Reeve’s services hadn’t come cheap.

  “Here.” Marcus tore a careful strip off the sheet of brown paper, folded a pile of cookies in it, and tucked the rest of the box inside his jacket. He held the small packet out to Reeve. “Don’t go flashing them around. I’d hate to see grown men shivving each other over goddamn cookies.”

  Reeve calculated how long the cookies would last in the damp environment and mentally rationed himself to three a day. It was a banquet. He lingered over the one clutched in his hand.

  “How are we going to get out of here?”

  “Won’t be a tunnel.”

  “How long do you think we’ve got, then?” Reeve asked. “You being the grub expert.”

  Marcus squatted back on his heels and looked up at the sky. “No idea.”

  “Lots more Ravens now.”

  “Fewer Ravens doing more sorties.”

  “Well, you’d know that. You can recognize them.”

  “They’re under pressure.”

  “But the grubs have been dicking around on the border for years now.”

  Marcus just looked at him. He didn’t do that much. He was always staring at something or looking past the person he was talking to, not that he talked much. It was odd to look into his eyes and see the thought behind them plain as day: you naive asshole. Reeve could tell he knew what was coming. Marcus still had one foot in the world beyond the walls.

  “They don’t dick around,” he said at last.

  He got up and wandered off to the pond again. Reeve was debating whether to go back to the cells and face the stench when the fire alarm went off. It rang for a few seconds, then stopped.

  “Better see what that is,” Marcus said, heading for the doors.

  For a man who spent most of the day avoiding all contact with other inmates, he was quick to plunge in when there was trouble. Reeve wondered if that sergeant’s sense of responsibility was so ingrained that he couldn’t just mind his own business like any regular guy. Reeve followed him back inside, clutching his precious stash of cookies inside his coat, and found himself in a near pitch-black corridor. The dogs were barking somewhere, that scared, uncertain, yappy bark this time.

  “Power outage,” Marcus said. “Must have tripped the alarm.”

  Reeve couldn’t recall the power failing before. They walked toward the faint light from the kitchen, which had plenty of skylights to keep the glucose vat operating. “We’ve got a backup generator. It should have kicked in by now.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Staff side. It’s to keep the security systems powered—you know, the lockdown system.”

  “Shit. What about the dogs?”

  “Never mind the dogs. What about the nutters?”

  Marcus did an about-turn and jogged back down the passage, but Reeve was pretty sure he wasn’t running away. The outer door squeaked on its hinges. A few moments later, Marcus came jogging back with a meter-long stave of wood in one fist.

  “You really don’t like dogs, do you?” Reeve said.

  “I don’t like getting my face ripped off.”

  Marcus strode down the corridor, looking like he meant business. The Slab was so badly lit that it was hard to tell if the lights were out or not, but when Reeve got to the kitchen, fifteen or so guys were clustered around the range, the best source of warmth in this freezing shithole.

  “We go back in there carefully.” Merino leaned against the brick lining of the warm alcove next to the range, giving instructions to Leuchars and his other lieutenants. He gestured with a large serrated kitchen knife. “Check the locked cells. I’m going to get Jarvi to sort this out. We’ll freeze to death once this goddamn range cools down.” He looked past Leuchars at Marcus. “You going to make yourself useful, soldier boy?”

  Marcus never rose to the bait. In fact, he always looked as if he hadn’t even noticed it. He didn’t so much as blink, and indicated the internal doors with a jerk of his head. “I notice you’re not in there checking it out. Want me to do it?”

  Okay, maybe he wasn’t ignoring it after all. Merino stared at him. Marcus stared back. This time Merino looked away first and pushed himself away from the nice warm wall with a show of weary boredom. “Let’s you and me go take a look.”

  Reeve always stuck close to Marcus now. It wasn’t just a need
for smokes in payment, or even that guilty obligation he felt to a misplaced and maybe even misjudged man, but a sense that Marcus was the only guy in here who knew anything about what was coming and who stood a chance of dealing with it.

  Even before they reached the end of the passage, Reeve could hear the growing noise of a mob. When the doors onto the main floor swung open, the inmates were standing in the middle of the floor like angry workers at a union meeting, yelling up at the gallery while Parmenter looked down from the edge and Jerry barked his head off. The combination of the dark, the noise, and the stench of shit suddenly seemed freshly depressing, like seeing the Slab in an awful and even worse new light. Reeve hoped no bastard had stolen his socks and darning kit.

  Seffert seemed to have taken over as convenor in Merino’s absence. “Come on, get the frigging power back on, you assholes!”

  “What about the heating?”

  “Wassamatter, can’t you let the fucking dogs out?”

  Then someone lobbed something. Reeve saw it arc through the air, catching what little daylight there was, and Jerry yelped. Parmenter jerked the dog back from the gap in the balustrade.

  “We’re in the same boat as you!” Parmenter yelled back, almost drowned out by the abuse. “No frigging phones or anything. Just shut up and let us deal with it.”

  Merino shouldered his way to the front. “What about the generator? We’ve got an emergency backup, right? Always had that.”

  “No fuel,” Parmenter said. “We’ve got sweet FA, buddy. Get used to it. We’re the lowest priority in the COG. Just watch the goddamn psychos, okay?”

  Parmenter dragged Jerry away by his lead and vanished into the gloom. Without the pumps, fans, and other background electrical noises that were always there but unnoticed, the place was unnaturally quiet. Marcus walked over to the wooden door that let the dogs loose. It opened from the top like a hatch, so it was hard to tell if it was locked down or not.