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

by Karen Traviss

  He dropped one length of pipe on the tiles, took two strides forward with the other gripped tight in both fists, and brought it down hard on the nearest spider. It took him five or six blows to kill it. Then he seemed to spot the rest of them, and took a pace or two back like he was counting them.

  “Are you going to stand there just goddamn watching them?” he growled. “They’re Corpsers. Kill them. Grab something heavy and kill them before they get away.”

  Van Lees got the idea fast and grabbed the pipe Marcus had dropped. “You’re shitting me.”

  “You’ve never seen a fucking Corpser before? Seriously?” Marcus smashed the pipe down on another one trying to climb out of the toilet and sent legs flying in one direction and chunks of cracked porcelain in the other. By now, the other inmates were showing up to see what the noise was about. “What is this, a nunnery? Come on, get on with it. Kill ’em.”

  Reeve grabbed the first thing he could find, an old tin dustpan, and battered one of the Corpsers trying to scramble behind the pipes. No, they weren’t spiders at all. They fought back. This one wasn’t giving up without a struggle and jumped at him. It sank its fangs into his pants and he had to smash the dustpan against his leg to get the thing to let go. There had to be two dozen of the bastards scuttling around the toilets now, dodging between the partitions and getting stomped, battered, and skewered. The shouts and noise of clanging metal was deafening. Eventually it ground to a halt. Marcus was the last man left beating the crap out of one of them and he didn’t seem to be satisfied that it was dead until it was a greasy smear across the floor. Then he went from toilet to toilet, looking down each pan and waiting a few moments before moving on to the next. Bang. There must have been one last straggler trying to make it out of the crapper. Marcus brought the copper pipe down on it and knocked it onto the floor before finishing it off with his boot.

  He stood staring at the mess, breathing heavily, and then looked up at the stunned faces around him.

  “None of you have ever seen a goddamn grub or anything like this for real, have you?” he said, like it was their fault they’d been locked up in here for life since before E-Day. “Shit.”

  “We’ve seen Reavers.” Chunky emerged from the knot of shell-shocked inmates. Armed robbery and arson was easy, and they’d take that in their stride, but giant spiders with teeth was something else entirely, something they really didn’t have the measure of. “I thought Corpsers was real big things.”

  “They are.” Marcus went straight into sergeant mode, giving them a pep talk as he paced up and down looking for more movement. “Corpsers excavate e-holes. They’re five, six meters high, maybe more, and they’ll tear your fucking head off. But they’ve got to come from somewhere. These are probably babies. And they’ve dug their way into this place.”

  “Glad I wasn’t taking a dump when that happened,” Merino said, wandering in. “Have we got trouble?”

  “You bet,” Marcus said. He walked out into the cell wing, clutching the pipe like a cosh. Reeve followed him. It felt like the safest thing to do. “Officer Jarvi? You there?”

  Jarvi jogged out along the gallery and leaned over. “What the hell’s going on down there? Anybody hurt?”

  “Not yet,” Marcus said. “We’ve got Corpsers. You need to call Sovereigns, make sure they put you through to Colonel Hoffman or CIC, and tell him we’ve got grubs digging their way in via the sewer system. Tell him it’s twenty-centimeter Corpsers. Probably newly hatched. He needs to know in case it’s the run-up to a big attack.”

  “Oh, shit,” Jarvi said. “Okay. Got it.”

  Jarvi jogged off and Reeve could hear him yelling for Parmenter and Campbell. Forty inmates were now gathered on the main floor, silent and bewildered, and this time they were all looking to Marcus, not Merino. He knew about grubs. They were going to hang on his every word.

  “What do we do now?” Merino asked. “You got a plan, Fenix?”

  “Grab whatever weapon you can find and watch every goddamn hole in this place,” Marcus said. “And if you see something come up—you just kill it. And you keep killing until they stop coming up.”

  Marcus came to life in a way that Reeve had rarely seen in the last three or four years. This was what he was made for: but it was also what he’d intended to do, to go down fighting these things and take as many of them with him as he could because he couldn’t go back to the life he had before. There was a disturbing finality about him. This was the closest he could come to wiping away his disgrace and atoning.

  No, you’ve got to survive this. You’ve got to win. You’ve got to redeem yourself and go back to your girl and start again with a clean slate, because that’s what heroes do. That’s what we all need. Even guys like me. We need to know that real heroes exist and that they win in the end. Because we can’t save ourselves without you.

  “What else is going to come up?” Chunky asked.

  “I don’t know,” Marcus said. “Anything that’s going to dig its way in needs to be able to fit in the pipes and conduits. The granite won’t keep them out forever, but they’ll take the easiest route in, just like humans.”

  “So what can get in?”

  It was all different on the TV. When the Slab had still been getting news, the footage was mainly recon images, all man-sized grubs and the big Brumaks like walking tanks and generally things that were two-legged and looked like some kind of weird human. Reeve couldn’t remember even seeing a proper Corpser in the footage. He realized he didn’t have a clue what else was out there.

  “We could get Tickers, too,” Marcus said. “Wretches, maybe. Drones would have to come in via the front door. But don’t rule out anything.”

  “Drones are big bastards,” Merino said. “What happens if they get in here?”

  “Then you’re going to die.” Marcus was completely matter-of-fact. “Because even I need a Lancer or a fighting knife to put one down.”

  “Hey, we’re mostly in here because we’re really good at killing,” Reeve said. “Maybe we stand a chance.”

  Marcus nodded. “Yeah. We do.”

  Reeve had been right about the caliber of guys in the Slab, though. Society might not have been too keen to have them as neighbors, but when it came to violence, they all had a use. Inmates went back to their cells and dismantled metal bed frames, grabbed knives and hand-made blades from under mattresses, and went to stand guard by windows and drains and conduits. Parmenter came out on the gallery with his rifle, looking like he’d never handled one before in his life, with Campbell beside him. Campbell looked around the floor of the wing. Reeve kept an eye on him to see if he was checking out where Marcus was. Marcus looked up at the gallery as if he had the same thought.

  “You won’t have time for that if the fucking grubs get in here,” Marcus murmured. “Asshole.”

  Jarvi came onto the gantry and banged the butt of his rifle on the metal rail to get everyone’s attention. “Okay, I’ve alerted the army that we’ve got Locust coming up in the building,” he said. “We’re late to the party. They’re already under attack on the south side of the city and they say they’re getting reports of grubs massing on the western side of the escarpment. Yeah, that’s us. So we’re on our own. But you all knew that anyway.”

  “Who did you speak to?” Marcus asked. “Hoffman?”

  “Lieutenant Stroud,” Jarvi said.

  The name didn’t mean a thing to Reeve but he watched Marcus’s reaction, and suddenly it all made sense. That was her, his girl: Anya Stroud. It was a really personal war, so few people left now that guys like Marcus couldn’t help but fall over people they knew all the time. Reeve almost envied that connection, however painful it had to be. There was nothing outside waiting for him. He was going to survive for himself, nothing else, because he didn’t have anybody waiting.

  Jarvi must have known who she was, though. Maybe it was his way of letting Marcus know he’d told her he was okay.

  “Better stand by, then, guys,” Jarvi said. “Par
menter—give Fenix your rifle. He’ll make better use of it than you will.”

  “You’re fucking joking,” Parmenter said.

  “I am not. Do it.”

  Parmenter looked pissed off but threw a box of rounds over the gantry and lowered the rifle to Marcus on the end of a line. Reeve felt instantly better for seeing Marcus check the weapon, shove the ammo in his jacket pocket, and look every inch the fighting Gear. Maybe that was all part of his sergeant thing too, that he could make a nervous, ramshackle group of men feel a lot more confident about a fight most of them a probably wouldn’t survive.

  Reeve was almost embarrassed to ask. He scratched his chin. He had to try.

  “I’m the other marksman in here,” he said. “Mind if I have a sidearm or something?”

  Jarvi shrugged. “I’ve done a dozen other crazier things.” He drew his handgun from his belt and gestured toward the doors for Reeve to come and collect it. “Why not?”

  “You’re not going to let me down, are you, Reeve?” Marcus said quietly.

  “No,” Reeve said. “Because we’re really in the shit now, aren’t we?”

  Reeve hadn’t handled a weapon in years. He preferred a sniper rifle, but the pistol made a lot more sense in here. And then he waited, walking slowly around the floor, checking out the kitchen drains and the toilets, and even waiting by the old tunnel for a while.

  He stood at the open door onto the yard. The distant boom of artillery started up and a Raven droned somewhere north of the walls. Marcus wandered up beside him and stood scanning the sky.

  “It’s started, hasn’t it?” Reeve said.

  Marcus nodded. They shut the doors and walked back through the toilets and showers. It was so quiet that Reeve could hear his own pulse in his ears. Then another noise made him turn around and cock his head.

  It was distant gurgling, like someone had pulled the plug out of a bath. It was a sound he’d heard years ago when they were trying to dig that goddamn tunnel, except this time it had a new significance. The noise was coming from the toilet bowls. Marcus pushed open a door and looked down. Reeve checked the stall next door.

  The water in the toilet bowls had gone. It must have drained out somewhere. For a moment he saw the whole plateau in his mind, a big lump of shiny, speckled rock that was hard as iron but shot through with nature’s cracks and man-made drains, not a solid barrier at all. The sewers and pipes were part of a road network for things Reeve hadn’t even got names for yet.

  “Here they come,” he said.

  Marcus nodded, absolutely still, rifle resting in his hands as naturally as if he’d been born with it.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Here they fucking come.”

  GALLERY LEVEL, THE SLAB.

  “You’re crazy, giving those assholes guns.” Parmenter checked his sidearm. Campbell was a few meters ahead, minding his own business. “You won’t be able to put the lid back on this.”

  Niko gave him a shove in the back to keep him moving down the passage. “It’s two weapons, and one of them’s with a veteran Gear,” he said. “We’re all low on ammo, the assholes in here could have broken out or killed us ages ago, and in case you hadn’t noticed—we’re all in the same shit.”

  “Only takes one round to kill you.”

  “Only takes one frigging moron to not understand that you arm the guys best at shooting grubs.”

  Yeah, if the inmates had put their minds to it, they could have taken out a handful of guards years ago. What was the name for it? Institutionalization. They’d all been in here so long that the idea of getting out made as much sense as it did to a cage-raised chicken. Some guy had once told him that you could open the cage and the chicken didn’t have a goddamn clue that it could just walk out and run away. It couldn’t tell the difference between the artificial rules and reality.

  The Slab did have a harsh reality outside the cage, though, and it was starting to tunnel its way in right now. The three guards reached the top of the stairs down to the ground level. It had been a lovely staircase once, the kind that should have been in a ballroom instead of a place designed to break and destroy people.

  “Makes more sense to stay on the upper floors,” Campbell said.

  “Like grubs can’t climb stairs.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, and when those things have finished ripping up the inmates, then they’ll come and find us.” Niko trotted down the stairs. “That’s what they’re here for, to kill humans.”

  “We could make a run for it now,” Parmenter said. “Just open the gates and go.”

  “Yeah, and you know what’s out there? Whatever gets in through the pipes here will at least be small.”

  “I meant just us. Three guys. We could hide.”

  “If you think I’m leaving human beings in here for those things to kill, you’re an even bigger asshole than I took you for. They’re our own. I don’t care what they did, they’re us, humans, not grubs.”

  But Niko knew he might have to consider abandoning the prison if more of the freak show broke in. There were Reavers—there were always Reavers. Maybe a Brumak could put things over the walls, too. They could certainly fire over them. It was a lot of trouble to go to for forty victims but they probably didn’t know how many humans there were in a big place like this.

  He opened the security gates and left them unlocked. It took a deliberate, conscious effort to do that because locking everything behind him was automatic after all these years. Some of the inmates were hanging around the toilet block with metal bars or kitchen knives in their hands, but he didn’t feel threatened by it at all now. They all knew what they’d have to kill long before they settled any scores with the prison service.

  “Still all clear?” Niko asked.

  Merino appeared from the toilets. The most likely access points were the bathrooms, the kitchens, and service area drains around the boiler room. “We split everyone into teams,” he said. “We’ve got people watching all the main areas.”

  “Where’s Fenix?”

  “Boiler room,” Merino said. “Maybe now’s the time to tell you there’s a tunnel down there. Some guys were trying to dig their way out via the utility conduit a couple of years ago but they gave up.”

  “Well, shit.” Y’know, I’m not sure I would have cared, as long as it wasn’t one of the sick weirdoes. A few armed robbers and gangsters on the loose—so what? “So he’s thinking the grubs might use that as a way in.”

  “Yeah, he says they’re really good at sniffing out tunnels.”

  Niko turned to Campbell. Even now, he still didn’t trust him not to start another ruck with Marcus. “You stay here, okay? You too, Parmenter.”

  There was a short flight of stone steps down to the boiler area. Niko could hear the scraping, sawing, and banging as soon as he went into the outer passage. For a moment he thought Marcus was beating the shit out of more Corpsers, but then he heard the voices, quiet and unpanicked, and realized there was a bit of fortification going on. When he turned the corner, he saw Edouain, Reeve, Vance, and Marcus stripped down to tank tops and sweating as they rigged drainpipes from the boiler room. It was a lot warmer in there than Niko remembered, not that he’d been down here for years. Somewhere inside the room, water bubbled and popped like a kettle being boiled.

  Marcus dragged a metal plate across the flagstones, setting Niko’s teeth on edge. Edouain and Vance looked up from cutting into a piece of plastic drainpipe with a bread knife. Niko could now see the missing flagstones and a damn big hole in the floor big enough to take a man. He stood at the edge and looked in.

  “That was full of water earlier,” Marcus said. Nobody seemed to feel the need to make excuses for the escape tunnel. “Now it’s drained out, which probably means there’s a tunnel somewhere else that’s opened up.”

  “Smart move to dig a hole. Not.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said. But I’ve never been the told-you-so type.”

  “What are you doing? You can’t
even fill it in. They’ll just dig right through.”

  “We’re thinking of getting a little Silver Era on their asses.”

  “What, exactly?”

  Edouain finished sawing through the drainpipe and laid the end into the hole. “Come and admire our ingenuity, Officer Jarvi.” He beckoned to Niko to follow him into the boiler room, where the boiler tank was making angry rattling noises. “Behold the walls of the castle and the boiling oil that awaits the unwary invader.”

  Vance and Reeve looked pretty pleased with themselves. A jury-rigged length of pipes ran from the massive hot water tank to the hole.

  “When they start coming up, we just flood the tunnel with a zillion liters of boiling water,” Reeve said. “We’ve turned up the thermostat to max. You could cook shrimp in it.”

  “And then what?”

  “Well, the tunnel’s logjammed with boiled grubs for a while, the boiler reheats, and if the assholes are dumb enough to try again, we pour more boiling water down there. You ever cleared drains?”

  “That’s an electrical conduit down there.”

  “Like losing the lighting’s our biggest problem.”

  “You’d lose the boiler too.”

  Marcus shrugged. “The wiring survived the last few floods.”

  “Better that I don’t know about that,” Niko said. “So you look like you’re in charge, then, Fenix. Plan? Other than kill everything. Heard that one.”

  “Containment,” Marcus said. He dusted his hands on his pants and picked up the rifle resting against the wall. “Choke points. Stop them at the point of entry. Whatever comes in, it’ll be harder to corner it when it gets loose. The small things tend to move fast. If anything does get in, best option is to clear the area and lock it in. That’s the handy thing about a prison—you’ve got doors to slam on them.”

  “You’ve spent years working this out.”

  “Not really. Just been in plenty of tight spots like this one.”

  “Lucky we got a resident expert,” Reeve said, “or we’d be fucked into a tinker’s bucket by now.”