by Andy Graham
“I told you already, Nasty. Don’t call us bucket-heads.” Orr’s voice was laced with menace.
“I didn’t. I used the word bucket. Is that off-limits completely? What about pail? Or scuttle or can? While we’re on the subject, I’m not too keen on the nickname Nasty. Wanna have a little chat about that?”
The Unsung legionnaires shuffled, muttered. One mentioned odds. The prospect of a fight between their new patrol leaders was even more appealing than assaulting a one-legged veteran.
“You’ve never beaten me,” Orr said, the snarl on his face was obvious even though Ray couldn’t see him.
“Training doesn’t count, Baris.”
Orr’s rifle swung away from Martinez. He flicked the safety on and laid it on the ground.
“Keep it, Baris,” Nascimento said. “You’ll need it.”
The odds being passed around the Unsung doubled.
“This is gonna be sweet,” one man said. Another called to the men in the kitchen. A circle formed. The two ex-Rivermen stood immobile as a demand for an update hissed into the air. Dan’s feet were scuffing on the floor. Ray wrapped his legs around the other man’s.
“Keep still!” he hissed. Dan arched his back as he struggled to break Ray’s grip.
“You two friends going to kill an unarmed man in cold blood before or after you have your tiff?” Martinez limped between his former colleagues. “Is that what the Unsung do? Bicker and round up crippled vets and put them down?”
“He’s not my friend.” Orr’s radio crackled into life: demands for an update and recalling all men. Orr scooped up his rifle. “Later, Nasc. Later.”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
(And if Ray could have seen him, he would have seen Nascimento’s wink to Martinez.)
“There’s nothing behind the bar,” a legionnaire said. “Not much in the stock room either. Few beer barrels. Loads of spirits, though.” He shook his backpack and it clinked heavily. Ray guessed there were fewer spirits in the storeroom than before. “Didn’t know this place had so much bathtub brandy,” the man continued. “There’s practically buckets—”
“Careful, son,” Nascimento warned. “You know Baris Orr here doesn’t like that word.”
“—pails of the stuff,” the legionnaire finished with a nervous glance at Orr. “There was flour all over the place. Glass, too. Peanuts, dried food. The patrol that was here before wrecked this place good.”
Martinez had moved into Ray’s eyeline. The former legionnaire’s face flickered briefly. Orr poked him in the shoulder with his rifle. “You ain’t just a vet, Tino, and we both know it. When I find out where you’re hiding Franklin, I’ll be back.”
“Why not shoot me now?”
Orr leant closer to Martinez. “The Kickshaw leaves drinks hanging for those who can’t afford their own. I’m leaving a bullet hanging.” Baris Orr, in a lazy movement, swung his rifle up and squeezed the trigger. Bullets crashed through the air. There was a brief, intense squeal of white noise. Red glass showered the men. It skittered to a halt in front of Ray. Dan fastened his teeth around one of Ray’s fingers and snarled.
“My jukebox,” Martinez said as a cloud of smoke rose to the ceiling.
“You got a bullet hanging, Tino. Remember that.” He spun on his heel and pointed to one of the flour-covered men. “Check behind that waxed table. That’s where that noise was.”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
Footsteps got closer. Dan’s body went limp. Sweat poured into Ray’s eyes, blood thrashing in his ears. “I’ll do it. I’m closest.” A big face, olive-skinned with a rash of stubble along the jaw, appeared inches away from Ray.
Nascimento’s eyes widened for a second before his mouth split into a grin. “Dude,” he mouthed. “Seriously. What the f—”
“Anything?” Orr asked.
“Rats, Baris. Little ones sneaking through a hole in the floorboards.” Nascimento pushed himself to his feet and dusted his combats down. “Probably gone to tell their buddies over the water about the peanuts in the back room.”
Orr’s radio crackled. “Move out.”
13
The Sub-Metro
The clip and squeak of feet echoed back off dirty white wall tiles that were split by burgundy lines. Some tiles were missing, revealing the cracked and pitted concrete underneath. Faded posters dotted the walls. There were adverts for mints your grandfather would have eaten, cigarettes that soldiers had smoked, and concerts for behatted, pearled women strolling arm in arm with men in ties and fedoras. The men, naturally, were smoking the cigarettes that soldiers smoked. Most numerous amongst these paper windows into a previous time were the recruitment ads. One depicted a platoon of young recruits struggling under the weight of a white feather, another featured a stern-faced moustachioed man wearing a cap. He pointed an abnormally large finger at the group as they walked past. Is the recruiting sergeant watching us? It hurt Brennan’s head to look.
The sound of their passing was mixed with another noise now, someone singing, in that hissing voice that was not quite a whisper, not quite real speech. Someone was weeping, too.
They turned left, out of sight of the recruitment poster. The crawling, being-watched feeling vanished from between Brennan’s shoulder blades. The group of three adults and one child passed a green sign of a stick figure that was following an arrow to an emergency exit. In case of fire? Brennan thought. Or something much simpler? Run. The party crunched their way down some gravelly stairs and stopped at an old lift shaft.
“It’s this one.” Randall Soulier pulled out a key as long as his hand. The key had a wolf engraved into it with spots of rust above one of its eyes. It was identical to the pox marks Brennan’s sister had had above one of her eyes, marks that might have worms burrowing through as Lena was turned into soil. Brennan squeezed his own eyes shut and rubbed his temples with the heel of his hand.
The recruitment sergeant’s voice, dusty with time, rustled in his ear. “Lena looked to you to protect her, Brennan. Your parents looked to you to protect her. You wanted to protect her just as no one could protect you. Now she’s dead. There’s no symmetry in that, no balance, no breath or life, just an eternity of a desperate, aching loss.” A pointing finger, yellowed with age, floated behind his eyelids, calling his name. “What are you going to do, Brennan? Brennan—”
“Brennan! Are you just going to stand there?”
“Sir?” Brennan snapped to attention. In front of him, the lift door was open, a gaping expanse of rotting leather and scuffed metal. Thick cables choked the shaft, twisting through a mesh of wire that plunged down into the darkness.
Randall’s odd-coloured eyes gleamed in the underground half-light. “Did you hear what I said, Captain?”
“No, sir.” The shame of failure coloured his cheeks.
“Stay here with the new kid—”
“Private Malakan, sir.” The new kid butted in, finally stopping his sibilant whisper-singing. “From the Donian Mountains. My big sister joined up, not that she had much choice, to be fair, and I thought . . .”
The VP raised one finger. Malakan’s voice died to a whisper.
“Stay here with the new kid and the boy, Captain Brennan. I’ll go down first.”
“Safety, sir.”
Randall held up the wolf-key. The rust spots danced in front of Brennan’s eyes. Just as his younger sister had danced for the Brennan family one Sunday morning. “When I grow up,” she’d said, “I don’t want to be a princess. I want to be a queen. I want to be the queen. And then I’ll make everyone dance once a day. Except you, Jamie.” She’d grabbed Brennan’s rough hands in her soft ones, pulled at his callused heart with her innocent one and dragged him to his feet. “You’ll have to dance twice a day.”
The VP wiped a speck of rust off the wolf’s head. “I have the only key, Brennan,” he said in a bored voice. “I know exactly who’s down there and my ears need a break from his mouth.” He jabbed the key towards Malakan, who had started his tunele
ss singing again.
The grill rattled shut. The shadows split Randall’s face into unequal segments. “Try not to lose Stella Swann’s boy on the way down. But if you lose the new kid down the lift shaft,” — his eyes flicked towards Private Malakan — “all the better.”
With a screech of metal and a knee-buckling lurch, the lift shuddered down into the hole. The grind of its cable was accompanied by whimpering and a slap of flesh on flesh. Brennan heard a voice: “Keep still.”
Struggling. Grunting. Another slap.
Private Malakan’s voice again: “That can be our little secret. Mustn’t tell, now, must we? You’ll get into trouble. Or you want me to go after your little sister, too? What’s her name? Emily?”
Mustn’t tell. Mustn’t tell. It’s our secret.
Someone else had said those words to Brennan a long time ago. A man with soft, pale skin and groping fingers that had touched Brennan. Squeezed him. Stroked him. The rage of a child boiled through his adult body. Brennan lashed out, the back of his knuckles catching Malakan across the temple. The private staggered and let go of Jake Swann. The boy’s shirt was scrunched up from Malakan’s grip. A red mark blossomed on Jake’s cheek. The look he shot his captors was identical to the one Young Brennan had seen in his mirror the day he’d woken to find a shiny gun under his pillow, the day he’d realised he could end his torment.
With an effort, Brennan linked his hands behind his back. The urge to strike Malakan was throbbing in his head. He’d learnt his limits. One strike was a warning. Twice was tempting. Three times was followed by a rapid slide to violence. “The boy is to be unharmed. We kill him, we lose a bargaining chip.”
“Was only going to slap him around a bit,” Malakan said, affronted. “A bit of physical never hurt no one.”
“My dad could have you,” Jake Swann said, his face defiant under the tears. “My mum, too. And one day, when I’m bigger, won’t need to be too much bigger, I reckon, I’m gonna have you, too.”
Malakan’s eyes flared. “You little sh—”
“Shut up,” Brennan snapped.
Malakan’s hand thumped back to his sides. “Was just gonna slap him some,” he muttered. “World’s going soft if an adult can’t slap a child.”
The words hit Brennan over the back of his head. His sister had said something similar once but with a very different meaning. Before he could react, small fingers squeezed into his hand. Jake gave him a quick look that Brennan recognised. “You’re the safer option,” the look said. “For now. But once I’ve grown and finished with him, you’re next.”
“Where are we, anyway?” Malakan asked, failing miserably at shutting up.
The lift shaft shuddered as the carriage clanked to a halt far below them. Brennan had a vision of it discharging Randall Soulier like vomit. Brennan punched the call button. “The sub-metro. Successive layers of the capital have been built on and around previous versions of Effrea-Tye. This underground system predates the First Great Trade Conflict. There are rumours it dates back thousands of years to before the Floods that almost drowned humanity.”
“Ancient tunnels. Floods. One moon. Two moons. What next? Three? Nonsense.” Malakan threw his hands up in the air and kicked at a loose tile. The echoes as it clattered to the floor seemed to take an eternity to die. Unlike Malakan’s attempt at silence. “Impossible. Not just gonna wake up and see a new moon in the sky. How did it get there? Lunar tow truck? Aliens? Magic? Magic aliens with lunar tow trucks? And I’m supposed to believe humans lived in tunnels like this for hundreds of years until the sea levels dropped about two thousand years ago? These tunnels can’t be that old. How did those posters survive? Answer me that? You can’t because it’s nonsense.”
The being-watched sensation crawled up Brennan’s back again. He resisted the temptation to check over his shoulder to see if the recruitment sergeant was there.
“Humans couldn’t have sheltered from floods in these tunnels, on account of us being right next to the River Tenns and rivers connect to the sea. One floods, they all flood. That means these overgrown ratholes flood. Donian Mountains were a better bet, ‘cos mountains are higher, aren’t they? But then my people are scientifically retarded so I don’t know how they got the jump on you back then. Do you know what my all-seeing, all-knowing, all-wrinkled bitch of a grandmother used to say?”
Brennan didn’t. He didn’t care, either. But he was letting the fool speak because when it finally came to shutting the man’s mouth, it would be even more satisfying. Delayed gratification was a fading art.
“My ever wise grandmother, and she’s another one that deserves a good slapping, used to tell us stories that after the Floods humans emerged ‘blinking in the sunlight into a world where swords had replaced guns and magic had usurped science.’” Malakan snorted. “And don’t get me on that whole fiery-whirlpool-of-spells-draining-magic-from-the-world nonsense. Worse than myths. Crap. Nonsense. Superstitious peasants. She said that—”
At this point, Malakan appeared to realise that his mouth was putting the rest of him in mortal peril and his ranting disintegrated to mutters. Jake stared up at Brennan. His big brown eyes said that he was curious about Malakan’s story, no matter how inexpertly told. And in that look Brennan saw how easy it would be for him to break Jake Swann the way he had been broken. Start with the truth, twist it a little, then lie. It didn’t matter if the lie was spotted — deny it, laugh it off or use a more outlandish lie to distract from the earlier one. Sprinkle in a few bribes and threats, maybe mix in a promise that Jake was desperate to believe, just as Hamilton had done to Brennan. There was a reason this approach had been used since before the Floods — it worked. From con-artists to sellers of snake oil, from politicians to paedophiles, it worked. And in Brennan’s case the latter pair had been the same man. Brennan smiled, wanly, and ruffled the kid’s hair. “There have been a few attempts to use the sub-metro stations,” he said. “Some were converted, most were abandoned.”
“What’s abandoned?” Jake asked, his gaze now fixed on the approaching lift shaft.
“Left alone.”
“Why were they aban— left alone?”
“Because of what lived in them.”
“Like dogs and rats and monsters and ghosts and things?”
Jake Swann hid the shaking in his voice well. He had some of his mother’s steel. In Brennan’s experience, that only meant you would take more unnecessary punishment before you broke. “Worse.”
“Worse than the Cracks?”
“Even worse than the Cracks.” Brennan pulled the lift doors open. “People.”
14
The Antidote
The lift doors rattled shut behind Brennan. As the pulleys ground into action, Private Malakan started singing in his off-colour voice.
“Tall and slim, she likes her gin,
Got an arse that smells like a fishmonger’s bin,
Fat and round, she needs a pound,
’Er tits swing low, an’ close to the ground.
Ohhhhhhhhh, sheeeeee iiiiiiis aaaaaaaahhhhhhhh . . .
Dirty girl, a dirty girl, a dirty girl’s the one for me.
She ain’t no runt, she likes a grunt,
You want a shunt, go do her—”
“Shut up, fool,” Brennan snapped.
“Front,” Malakan finished, obviously dismayed at Brennan ruining the climax of the song. “Corporal Seth taught me that when I joined the 13th,” he added as an afterthought. He hunkered down next to Jake Swann as the lift carriage clanked down the shaft. “Is it true Ray Franklin killed Seth?” Malakan took Brennan’s silence as an affirmative. “Shame that. Corporal Seth was a good man.” Malakan clucked his tongue on the roof of his mouth.
“He was a lazy, sadistic pervert.”
“Followed orders, though. Doesn’t that make him a good soldier?” Malakan tapped his temple as if to say, “Nothing but brains up there.”
Jake, grimy-faced and scared out of his wits, stuck a quivering chin forwards.
“Where we going, anyways?” Malakan asked.
“Down.”
Malakan flashed his nicotine-coloured teeth at Jake Swann. “Captain’s funny.”
“Captain will shove Private’s head through the grill on the lift door and scrape Private’s face off on the bricks of the lift shaft if Private doesn’t start behaving in a way Captain approves of.” The tone was casual, conversational, even. Malakan leapt to attention, conflicting emotions warring through his posture.
The corridor that waited for them was grey and damp. The trio wound their way past an air-conditioning unit that had long since rusted shut, around a scuffed red traffic cone and turned into a service tunnel. A thick cluster of pipes hung off the ceilings. Cobwebs clung to Brennan’s head as he walked into the darkness, Jake’s sweaty hand clutched in his. A crescent slit of yellow illuminated the end of the tunnel, dissecting a bright line out of the shadows. The cold light crawled over Brennan’s skin as they got closer, hiding what lay beyond.
On well-oiled hinges, the door at the end of the corridor opened to reveal:
A square room.
Dirty grey save for a smudged orange shadow in one corner.
Low ceilinged.
Lights — giant, scorching glass eyes that hung from each corner.
The VP stood next to a low table that held a cut-throat razor, a bowler hat, an axe and a multilayered toolbox. It was the type that fanned open as the lid was lifted, and swept shut as it was closed. Except this mechanical butterfly of wood and bronze held hammers and needles, pins and clamps and knives. There were needles and syringes — some were workmanlike and functional, others exquisitely ornate. Vials and bottles held a rainbow of poisons and potions in greens, purples and reds. There was even a garrotte and a dirty gag.
A chair squatted in the middle of the floor. Brennan had sat in the chair once. Just to get a feel for it. It was two sizes too small for him. Somehow, it was two sizes too small for everyone. The sharp corners where the ankles, knees, back and neck should fit would push anyone’s body into a series of uncomfortable angles, angles that after a while would become painful, angles that, with a little overpressure from a helping hand, would become agony.
