Silent City

by G R Matthews

  I needed to get out and had nothing on me to help. That meant whatever was in those mechanic’s drawers, by the far wall, were it. A laser cutter, a chainsaw, even a great big hammer would be something. With hope in my heart and holding my head with one hand, to make sure it didn’t fall off, I staggered over to it.

  I checked the drawers, one at a time and then spread out all the finds on the floor to consider my options. There were not many. Certainly no cutting tools, not even a pair of scissors, and no hammer. In fact, the only things I found were a monkey wrench, no blood on this one, and a strap, one those things people used to tie objects down with. On one end of the strap was a metal ring.

  What was I supposed to do with these? Make a primitive weapon by attaching the strap to the wrench and swinging it about? Wrap the strap around my head, to keep the hair out of my eyes, and use the wrench as a club? I knew that worked. I had the lump and the headache to prove it. Both pointless ideas.

  Another check of the drawers just proved that I had done a thorough search the first time. I ran my hands around the walls and door, just to see if I had missed a weak spot or, and I knew it was desperation thinking, a secret door. There wasn’t one.

  Me, a strap and a wrench. A mostly empty room and door locked from the outside. I was trapped. No two ways about it, the only way that door was being opened was by someone on the outside. I had to hope that someone did, and I had to be ready to do something when they did.

  I sat back against the wall, opposite the door, and pondered. A little time later, I had an idea. Not necessarily a good one, but it was the best I had.

  My head hurt, it throbbed, ached and sent the occasional wave of pain through my skull. None of it mattered. The pain meant I was, for the moment, alive and it was better to suffer than to be dead.

  The metal drawer unit was heavy. Even empty, it was hard to move. I scraped it across the floor, wincing at the noise it made, certain it would draw Keller back to the room. However, I did not have a choice. Staying in here to die was not how I wanted to go.

  Once it was in position, I clambered on top and stood up. My legs hurt, everything hurt, and the increased altitude made my head dizzy. I placed my hands on the wall and waited for the moment to pass.

  The strap, about two centimetres wide and made of tough plastic strands woven together, I wrapped around the lowest pipe, just next to the hexagonal nut. The pipe was hot and I had to wait to see if the it would melt the plastic. It didn’t, which I suppose made a lot of sense. Who makes straps that melt when they get a little hot? No one, that’s who. The end of the strap passed through the ring and I pulled it tight.

  The next task was to undo the nut with the monkey wrench. It resisted at first, and it took all the strength I had left in my arms to get it moving. It squealed and complained when it finally gave way. When a whistle of steam started coming from the loosened nut, I stopped and reversed the rotation a little. The whistle died away.

  After climbing back down and resting for a few minutes, I dragged the drawers back into the corner where they had come from.

  All I could do now was wait. Well, that and hope.

  Chapter 25

  The scratching of the key in the lock snapped me out of the daydream. A shame really, Elena was just about to take her top off.

  I rolled and scrambled to my feet, took quick steps over to the door and grabbed the dangling strap. There were a few clunks from the lock as the tumblers moved and the block slid back. The door opened inwards, shielding me from sight, and I held my breath.

  At the sound of the first footstep into the room, I took a strong hold on the strap, wrapping it around my fist. On the second click of a heel on the concrete floor, I pulled hard. All my weight dragging the strap towards the floor. The edge cut into my palm, but I couldn’t stop. It had to be done now and as quick as possible. I could hear the scrape of a shoe as Keller turned and an indrawn breath as he prepared to speak.

  The pipe and nut gave way with a metallic snap that echoed in the small room. It was followed by a serpentine hiss and a scream as the superheated steam sprayed down on to Keller. The door kept me safe from the initial scalding and as the steam billowed around the door it had already cooled enough to be painful but not dangerous.

  Keller, by the screams and thumps, was in great deal of pain, something that I felt no sympathy for. The urge to race round the door and put a few well-placed boots into any soft parts of his body I could find was great, but I had to wait.

  The steam was still screeching out of the pipe. There had to be an automatic cut off somewhere in the system. A sensor that said, “hey, the pressure in that pipe has dropped all of sudden. There must be a problem. Best shut it off and send a workman to fix it.” Something like that.

  A minute later the steam stopped. By then, I was soaking wet and, no doubt, my pores were open. Some people pay a fortune for this kind of beauty treatment. I got mine for free, if you disregarded the bruises, headache and all those dead people.

  I gave up trying to dry my hands on my sodden jumpsuit and settled for a firm grip on the monkey wrench. Keller had stopped screaming a few seconds ago and I could hear him moaning in agony. The steam misted the doorway and it was a careful few steps through it until Keller’s boots came into view.

  His legs were jerking and kicking at the floor. The mist cleared further and more of Keller came into view. He was face down on the floor, hands clasped to his head, chest heaving, and little childlike whimpers escaped between his fingers.

  At that moment, in that second, I wanted to say something about all the deaths he had caused. All the suffering the people in the Silent City had gone through. How this was his just desert, his justice, the punishment for his crimes. I wanted to shout at him. Scream at him. I couldn’t. So, I hit him with the wrench. Just below his ear, not hard enough to kill, I hoped, but enough to knock him out. It was almost a mercy.

  The mewling stopped and much of the twitching agony left his body. Not all, even unconscious, his body still felt the burns and scalds. I knelt down and turned Keller over.

  The man’s hands were blistered. Some had already burst and a clear liquid, the serum, wept from those wounds. With care, I pulled his hands away from his face. Even knocked out, he offered instinctive resistance.

  Vomit raced up my throat and splattered onto the floor. Keller’s eyes were gone. I mean they were there, but boiled, exploded, destroyed. A runny, gooey, mess. The exposed skin had split, but blood had not run. Instead, the very edges of each split had been broiled and sealed in great lumpy, splotched lines and curls. The tip of his nose had dissolved and below it, his lips had peeled back to reveal shockingly white teeth. No one would recognise him.

  The decent thing, the human thing, the ethical and moral thing to do, would be to put him out of his misery.

  I left him.

  # # #

  The corridor was empty when I stepped out. To my left, the control room where I had been hit and to the right was the route to Keller’s sub. And I would need that sub if I was to going to get back home. The suit would never get me that far.

  Still shoeless, I crept down the corridor past the lab and meeting room to the left hand turn that led to the docks. A quick glance round the corner showed it to be likewise empty and the docking bay door was closed, just as I had left it.

  As far as I could figure, the base should be deserted. The cameras had shown nothing, only Keller and that large fellow, who was hopefully still unconscious, had been in the base. I should consider myself lucky, I suppose.

  Slipping round the corner and keeping my back against one wall, I started down the corridor towards freedom. Despite my assumptions, there remained the need to be cautious. Check, double-check and when you’re really sure, check again. That’s what I was taught when I learned to use the suit and right about now it seemed a safe way to operate.

  I checked the first door. It was quiet and when I peeked into the room it was the same undisturbed bed and chest of drawers I had
seen on the way in. Two quick steps across the corridor and I ran the same check on the door opposite, to the same result. Two more to go, and I moved forward.

  The door ahead, on my right, opened and green jump-suited figure stepped out. Her hair was mussed from sleep and her reactions were slow. It was the perfect opportunity to take her out. A simple couple of steps, push her into the room, hold her down and tie her up with the bed sheet. From there, just move on to the moon-pool, steal the sub and head out. Easy.

  The thing is, I didn’t move. I just stood there. In shock. How in the hell was she here? She was dead. I know she was.

  “What are you...” her voice petered out.

  “I was about to ask you the same thing. You’re dead,” I said.

  She looked around, back into the room she had come through, behind her to the closed doors, both large and small, to the moon-pool and then her gaze returned to me. I couldn’t read the look in her eyes with any precision. Confusion was my best guess.

  “I’m not dead,” she said.

  “We have to get out of here.” I regained power over my legs and moved forwards. “Keller’s dead. I killed him. Just now. We have to go. There could be more of them. Why did he bring you?”

  “Keller?” her voice trembled.

  “Dead. After he destroyed the city, I searched the ruins then hooked on to his sub. It dragged me here. We have to go. I don’t know if there are any more of them around.” I started to drag her down the corridor, but a thought occurred to me. “Elena, why are you here? What happened?”

  “Happened?”

  “How did you get here? Why did Keller bring you?”

  “Corin,” she cast a worried glance over her shoulder, “let’s get out of here. It was horrible. I’ll tell you when we are far away from here.”

  The small door within the large dock door opened on its silent hinges. I motioned Elena to wait, hefted the wrench and ducked through. It was empty apart from the sub and, after closing the door behind Elena, I told her to get in whilst I retrieved my suit.

  In hindsight, I should have asked her to help me move it. That thing was bloody heavy.

  Chapter 26

  Once the little two man sub had cleared the tunnel, I killed the lights. The world went dark and my eyes had to adjust to the dim light from the subs control panel. A few flicks of my fingers and the course was set, back to Base 1 and home. With a girl in tow. How was I going to explain that to Derva? Why did I think she would care?

  “91 hours,” I said.

  “Till what?” Elena answered.

  “Until we are back in a NOAH city and safe.” I slid the pilot’s seat back a little further, getting comfortable and settling in. Keller must have had short legs. “Why did he bring you?”

  “Keller?” she said.

  The subs green lighting changed the tone of her skin and hair. It did not steal her beauty. I could see her, in profile, focusing upon the navigation screen in the middle of the console.

  “Yes.”

  “He told me he needed some help on the sub. When the city started to collapse, he turned the sub around and ran for it. I’m not sure what else he could have done. We did go back and search for survivors.” She met my eyes at that point. “They are all dead aren’t they?”

  I nodded. “And then?”

  “He said he knew of a private company base not too far away. It had been set up a few years ago and wasn’t used much. The city kept a watch on it, he said, but they hadn’t shown any knowledge of us.”

  “You know he destroyed the city? There were explosives on the supports. I tried to contact him, but he didn’t respond. The city tried too. Nothing.”

  “How do you know he set off the explosives?” she asked.

  “Who else? He didn’t like it when I turned up. We had a fight the first night, in the canteen. And I caught him fiddling with my suit. No one touches another’s Fish-Suit. I think he knew that I would find them and had to move his plans forward,” I explained.

  “But he took us back in to find survivors,” she said.

  “No. He took you back in to make sure that everyone was dead.” I shook my head. “I think he expected me to have been killed in the explosion or the collapse. Even if I hadn’t, the Fish-Suit is not enough to survive out in the open ocean for long. It hasn’t got the reserves or the range.”

  “Keller was trying to kill everyone?”

  “It seems so. Which leads us back to the reason he brought you along. Why?”

  “To help him on the job. That’s what he told me,” she replied.

  “No, that doesn’t make sense.” I tapped at the console, achieving nothing but giving my brain time to work. “How was Keller before I turned up?”

  “He wasn’t there long. After our old foreman left, you know that story?” I nodded in response. “Of course you do, sorry, not thinking straight.”

  “What was he like?”

  “He was all right, a bit creepy sometimes, but you know how the gangs are. It takes a while to settle into a new one,” she said.

  “Creepy. How?”

  “He kept talking to the others and not me. But I would catch him looking at me sometimes. I thought he was just shy or something. Men can be like that, you know. Some are all confident and talkative, others are just quiet and shy. You see everything, right up front, which is fine because you know what you’re getting, with the first lot, but you have to dig for the gold with the second. Gold you’ve found yourself is worth a lot more than the stuff that is thrown at you.”

  I let her talk for a while, though I wasn’t entirely sure who she was talking too, me or herself. When she paused, I prompted her with Keller’s name.

  “He came to me in the morning. Before you’d left and said he’d like me on the sub to help him move you around. You know, one to drive and one to operate the winches and cables. That’s it.”

  “He didn’t say or do anything else?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “What about when you got to that base? Anything seem strange then?”

  “Not a lot. It was just a small operation. I didn’t see many people. Just Keller and one other man, I never got his name, and a few of the miners from the lower levels. I still can’t believe Keller did that.” She shook her head, dark hair swirling about her face for a moment.

  “Anything else? Did he make a pass?”

  “He was a little awkward when he showed me the room, the one you found me coming out of, but I thought that was just delayed shock.” Her hand reached out and took mine, softly enfolding it. “Do you think he was going to hurt me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said and squeezed her hand in reassurance. “Any man that can destroy a whole city could probably do anything.”

  I checked the readout again. The sub was on autopilot, following a route back to Base 1. The seascape around here wasn’t documented well enough to stick to the canyons and avoid the ridges, the way I would have preferred. Instead, I’d had to rise up the water column to be clear of the peaks and set a straight course. Once we got away from the volcanic area, the maps would be more reliable and I could lower us again.

  “This is not going to be comfortable,” she said.

  “Does the sub have a bunk or a head?” I asked.

  “It has a single hammock that Keller said could be strung up and the head, well, its got a receptacle one just behind the bulkhead. Not pretty or private,” she said.

  “Great.” She was right, this was not going to be a comfortable trip. 91 hours in a tiny tin cigar. One bed, hammocks always give me back ache, and a toilet which was not really designed to be used. I checked the air scrubbers, just to make sure they were working. Rogue smells in the cabin had nowhere to go if the scrubbers didn’t work. Chalk up one piece of luck on my personal scoreboard, they were, according to the computer, in perfect order. “I’ll string up the hammock. Do you think you can search for any food and water? I reckon he must have brought some. Just in case it didn’t all go quite to plan.”
/>   I watched her shuffle out of the chair and start to search. The green jumpsuit pulled tight in all the right places, shame about the colour. I had to take a deep breath and remind myself that this wasn’t the time.

  The hammock was packaged in a tiny little nylon bag and next to that a first aid kit. I opened the kit, dug through it to find the painkillers and popped two, dry swallowing them. The nylon bag, I unzipped and pulled the hammock out.

  A lattice work of plastic coated cord that would cut into your back as you tried to sleep. I’d slept in a few like it during my short military career, usually on subs a bit bigger than this one. Having said that, I was normally surrounded by a bunch of other men and women trying to get some sleep, belching, scratching and farting the whole night through. Not my happiest memories.

  The first string I wrapped just above a nut on the one of the pipes running floor to ceiling and the second I tied around a pipe opposite. The sub was not as wide as I was tall, comfort was not going to be forthcoming.

  On a bright note, Elena had found some food and water. Not a lot, but it was better than nothing. We sat in the seats and chewed at some of the pickled seaweed and lab grown beef jerky, sipping a little of the water to wash it down. Keller had had strange tastes.

  Between the groaning sounds of the hull and the soft whir of the motors, the ping from the comms panel was shockingly loud.

  Chapter 27

  I scrabbled back into my seat. The message light was blinking. This was not good news. No one knew where we were. This had been the only sub in the base, the city was destroyed, and Keller was dead. The big guy I’d knocked out might have come round and got out of his restraints, but who would he have called?

  Communication in the oceans is not like in the cities. In those, you could tap a comm panel and get in touch with someone else’s home easily enough. Many folks, those with more money than I had, had handheld devices that used the city-web signal. Between cities, the best method of communication was via fibre cable. I’d done a few jobs repairing the cables, but they’d been laid before I was born.