The Lost & Damned 1

by Keira Michelle Telford

  Silver almost dies laughing.

  Embarrassed, Jax tries to hide the redness in her face by turning her back and opening up the gate. “Bullies,” she mumbles.

  With the power off, all of the fence’s security features are offline, including the maglock on the gate. A soft click indicates when the magnetic seal is broken, and the gate swings open with little more than a gentle tap.

  Wiping tears of laughter away from her eyes, still giggling to herself, Silver gears up the truck and heads for the building. Jax gives the side of the truck a good kick as it passes by her, trying to knock the persistent smirk off of Silver’s face.

  It doesn’t work.

  Jax closes the gate behind them and follows in the truck’s wake, dodging fleeing vermin. A swarm of rats, frightened by all the sudden noise and movement, scurries frantically back and forth in front of the truck.

  Squelch.

  The decimation of many tiny, little rat bodies is one audible ‘pop’ after another, and it sounds like the tires are rolling through a sticky mud puddle. In the back seat of the truck, Red helps Dylan to blow his nose, since he only has one arm to work with.

  “I still don’t understand why we had to bring the boy,” Red grumbles. “Don’t you think he’s been through enough?”

  “It’s character building.”

  “It’s torture.”

  “He’ll live.”

  “You promise?”

  No answer for that.

  By the time the truck reaches the building, Alex has already manipulated the entry system from the inside, and the bay door is opening in front of them. The truck pulls in, Oz and Jax running behind it to catch up.

  Once everyone’s safely inside, Alex resets the lock on the bay door and restores power to the fence. “I hope no-one saw us.”

  “So what if they did?” Silver shrugs. “People aren’t exactly lining up to get in here and take a swim with some toxic sludge.”

  She notices a jumble of wires where Alex has taken apart the keypad entry system and hacked a code to get them inside.

  “You haven’t lost your touch, then?”

  Alex’s mind leaps into the nearest available gutter. “You tell me.” He wraps his arms around her.

  Flip.

  Blush.

  Focus: task at hand.

  She peels herself away. “We should get going.”

  She lets Jax drive, and Oz rides shotgun. He helps her navigate through the tunnels using one of Alex’s GPS devices, with the map programmed into it. Their path takes them under the Sentinel District and beneath Old World Hell Gate Bridge, into an area of the Out District known to be heavily populated with Chimera. According to First Reclamation records, the Chimeran population here was the reason why the main Old World bridge connecting the two districts was destroyed.

  After twenty minutes of bumping and rattling along the old dirt ‘roads’, they reach their final destination. At this end of the line, there are no Omega steel doors to blast through. Abandoned since the Old World occupation of this land, the entrance to the old subway tunnel is clogged with centuries of dirt and debris. Parts of it have collapsed, and it’s completely impassable.

  Jax kills the engine and reaches for the C-4.

  “No.” Silver stops her. “Not here.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too dangerous. It’s going to be crawling with Chimera out there, and if we tear a hole beyond the city walls, all we’ll be doing is opening up a one way street to carnage in the city. Besides which, this part of the tunnel system hasn’t been reinforced by Omega. An explosion here would be more likely to cave in this whole stretch of tunnel, rather than open up an exit route.”

  “So your suggestion is?”

  “We need to use the drainage system.”

  “That’s gross.”

  “That’s tough.”

  “And on the other side?” Red helps Dylan out of the truck. “He won’t be able to walk far, and he needs to rest.”

  “Lya-bill-it-ee,” Jax sing-songs under her breath.

  Silver ignores her. “We just need to find a building above ground that we can use as a safe house. It’s all part of the plan, don’t worry.”

  Alex’s eyebrow darts up. “There’s actually a plan?”

  He sounds relieved, and a little shocked.

  Silver is a little insulted. “The four of us are going to try and lure out the Fusions, while Red and Dylan man communications and keep an eye out for any stealth offensives headed in our direction.”

  “You think they’ll try and ambush us?”

  “If we’re lucky. Otherwise, who knows how long it could take us to hunt down their colony out here.” She checks her weapons, making sure that every clip is full and that she has plenty of extra ammo, encouraging the others to do the same. “Don’t forget, it’s going to be like the front line out there. Be on guard at all times.”

  “And don’t get bit,” Alex reminds them.

  The scent of cannabis tickles at Silver’s nostrils. Behind her, she finds Jax rolling a joint on the hood of the truck.

  “And you think that’s appropriate, why?”

  Jax responds with a spittle-loaded raspberry, vaguely aimed in Silver’s direction, while Oz delves in his pockets for a lighter.

  “Hey, you’ve got your connections, we’ve got ours.” He winks at her.

  Silver’s jaw tightens. She’s not in the mood for setbacks, and she doesn’t have the patience to fight with either of them.

  Red reaches into a backpack and pulls out some tiny wireless headsets. Barely visible, they clip onto the top of the ear and fit inside the ear canal, just like a small hearing aid.

  “Alex modified them with GPS trackers,” she explains. “As long as we’re all switched on, Dylan and I will know exactly where you are at all times.”

  No arguments.

  All plugged in, Silver digs a crow bar out of the back of the truck and tries to pry the grating off the entrance to one of the drainage pipes.

  No such luck.

  The grating bends around the crow bar, but the bar doesn’t give her enough leverage to force the grate off completely.

  “Need some help with that?” Alex offers.

  Silver notices a little smirk on his lips, and takes pleasure in rebuffing his shining armor advances. “Nope.”

  She abandons the crow bar in favor of a steel girder she finds in the dirt, and jams one end of the girder into the gap made by the crow bar. Taking a few steps back, she gives herself enough room to take a running jump at the girder. She gathers momentum and strikes the protruding end of it with a powerful flying back kick.

  The steel girder slams back against the tunnel wall, Silver using it as a foothold into a back flip away from the wall, landing adeptly on her feet as the grate becomes an airborne weapon.

  Her friends dive for the dirt as the grate tumbles through the air, slamming into the side of the truck with some force. The titanium plated armored truck wins, but the impact is enough to set off the alarm.

  Jax spits dirt, fumbling for the remote to shut off the ear-piercing siren.

  Got it!

  Silence.

  Alex, crouched just a few inches away from the grate’s final resting place, uncovers his face. He looks first at the grate, up to the dent it made in the truck, and then across at Silver. “Really? You could’ve killed me!”

  “It was an accident,” she pouts.

  “That’s what you said when you dislocated my hip almost twenty years ago. Funnily enough, ‘sorry’ didn’t make it better then, either.”

  “I made it up to you.”

  He can’t deny that.

  Silver heads for the drainage pipe and hops confidently inside. The rest of the group follows, with Jax and Oz taking up the rear, retrieving the joint from the tunnel dirt before catching up to everyone else.

  A few hundred meters in, Silver locates a manhole cover and climbs the ladder. Lifting the lid just slightly, she looks out into a worl
d she’s never before laid eyes upon.

  The remnants of unreclaimed Old World New York City are all around. This is a piece of land in the borough of Manhattan, jutting awkwardly out from beneath the Bronx. Dilapidated buildings in the far north of the Old World Wards Island area are overgrown with weeds and other greenery. Old, rusty cars litter the streets, and wildlife watches her from the shadows.

  This place is way more wild than it ever was human, and it appears as though Fusion occupation here hasn’t even been attempted. There aren’t enough residential buildings—and certainly not enough resources—to make it worth their while.

  Silver doesn’t see any Chimera.

  She moves the manhole cover out of the way and climbs out. Crouching by the hole, she listens. There are sounds, but she can’t identify them, and although she can’t see it, she senses something stalking her in the undergrowth. She takes her gun in hand, fixes a silencer on the barrel, and spins around.

  Just in time.

  A Chimera is in mid-air, leaping toward her.

  One well-placed shot and the Chimera falls to the ground, lying there crumpled and twitching. Silver gets to her feet and takes a better look at her surroundings. There’s hardly any place here that could be used as a safe house, and everything left still standing is going to be crawling with nests of Chimera.

  Except for one.

  Tucked away beneath an overpass is an Old World military check point that was erected during the apocalypse. Constructed from reinforced, quake-proof, bomb-proof, radiation-proof materials, it’s one of the few manmade things that’s actually managed to stand the test of time.

  Silver crosses the street and tries the handle.

  It’s stuck.

  She jiggles it.

  The noise attracts some unwanted attention, and two Chimera take a run at her on the right side.

  Aim.

  Fire.

  Repeat.

  One clip later, and both Chimera are on the ground, blood pooling around them. While Silver changes the clip, an adult male Chimera darts out from her blind spot and launches itself at her. It brings her to the ground with very little effort, and pins her there, knocking the gun from her grasp.

  The Chimera shrills to its brethren.

  A shot is fired.

  Blood trickles down between the Chimera’s eyes as death claims it, and its tear ducts release their load of abstergent fluid, completely covering both eyeballs. As its other muscle functions begin to shut down, Silver pushes the dead weight of the beast off her chest before it urinates all over her, and she rolls over to look behind her.

  Alex.

  His head and shoulders visible above ground level, he lowers his HK .45 ACP and gives her a sharp nod. Silver recognizes the expression on his face—she’s seen it a hundred times before. It’s ‘I’ve got your back’ mixed with a pinch of ‘you need me, so don’t even bother pretending otherwise’.

  She jumps to her feet and tries the door again. This time, with a bit of force, it comes unstuck. Checking inside, she finds it to be dirty, but probably quite safe. Things have been left exactly as they were in the last days of the Old World. There’s a small, unhygienic washroom at the far end, and a human skeleton sitting in an old desk chair by the front window.

  The corpse was once wearing a United States army uniform, but that’s long since rotted to shreds. Partially mummified in the dry tomb of the check point booth, old leathery skin is desiccated and clinging to the bones, keeping the remains almost completely intact.

  An old army issue handgun is at the floor by his right arm, and two holes in his skull show an entry wound behind his right ear and an exit wound just above his left eye.

  “Cozy,” Silver mutters to herself.

  It could be much worse anyway.

  Alex leads the rest of the group into the building, just in time to see Silver wheel the chair over to a trash can in the corner of the room and dump the corpse inside.

  “Respectful.” He rolls his eyes at her.

  “He’s past caring.”

  “His people died for ours. You do realize that?”

  “I think it’s the least they could do, since they were the ones who caused the problem in the first place.”

  No argument there.

  Dylan claims the desk chair. It’s stained from the leakage of the soldier’s bodily fluids centuries ago, but he doesn’t care, he just wants to sit. Red digs a laptop out of her bag of supplies and sets it up on the desk in front of him.

  “I should be able to tap into Omega’s border control.” He gets straight to work. “That’ll give me access to their thermal imaging cameras. They’re not sensitive enough to show individual heat sources, but they’re designed to detect large swarms of heat. Omega uses it to monitor Chimera packs outside the city. We should be able to use it to locate the Fusion colonies as well.”

  Silver watches him activate the border control surveillance footage on the laptop. He’s still lightning fast, even with only one arm, and he starts by pulling up a map of Wards Island.

  Silver shakes her head. “I think it’s pretty clear that the island’s uninhabited.” She taps on the screen. “Try here, just over the bridge.”

  She’s pointing to the southernmost point of the Bronx, and Dylan finds an old warehouse that’s glowing like a Christmas tree.

  “It’s something all right.”

  Inspecting the corpse’s mummified head, Jax pries open its mouth and releases a giant cockroach. Before it can disappear inside an eye socket, Jax grabs it, and discards the skull in favor of it. “How do we know it’s part of the Fusion colony, and not just a massive nest?”

  “We don’t.” Silver shrugs. “And it doesn’t matter. We just need to get up there and make our presence known.”

  “Draw them out.” Alex supports her method.

  Oz gets it, too. “Same tactics, different enemy.”

  Sneaking up behind Red, Jax releases the cockroach onto her shoulder and smothers a giggle. The cockroach doesn’t get far.

  Swat.

  Red feels the pressure on her shoulder and sweeps the bug away. It lands on the desk in front of Dylan, but before he has a chance to shriek like a frightened child, Silver stabs it with her knife.

  Dylan looks pale.

  “You good?” Silver asks.

  He gives her two thumbs up and a forced smile.

  Good enough.

  She pats him on his uninjured shoulder, grabs her knife, and heads for the door, ushering Oz, Jax and Alex outside.

  “We’ll head for that warehouse. Keep the door locked and try not to draw attention to yourselves,” she calls over her shoulder. “If you stay inside, you’ll be safe.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Divide & Conquer

  At this time of day, Chimera are usually caught sleeping.

  With the exception of one juvenile found napping in the back of an abandoned station wagon on the bridge, the trip to the warehouse passes without incident. Alex puts a bullet in the creature before it even has a chance to rub the crumbly sleep out of its eyes.

  Passing through an old parking lot, littered with battered and rusted FedEx trucks, the Hunter quartet approaches the main entrance of the warehouse with their guns drawn.

  It used to be an old FedEx depot, but it was commandeered by the military during the final few months of the Old World viral crisis. Parcels were moved out, hospital beds and hazmat teams were moved in.

  The runic code for ‘safety’ is painted on the door, but ever skeptical Silver isn’t convinced by it.

  “Somehow, I doubt that.” She nods toward it.

  Alex’s wrinkled brow is an instant reminder to Silver that he hasn’t shared her Fringe experience, but that’s not all he’s confused by.

  “Fringer code? In the Out District?”

  “I guess the exiles have to go somewhere, when they opt to be cast out rather than enforced.” Quickly deflecting away from the topic, she fires a question at Dylan over the headsets. “Wh
at is this place anyway?”

  “The Federal Emergency Management Agency took it over in a panic, and turned it into a makeshift quarantine and research facility. The other buildings to your right are staff lodgings, and two massive incinerators.”

  Jax lights up a cigarette. “So how do you wanna do this?”

  “We should split up.” Silver tips her head to the staff lodgings. “You and Oz go check out slumber land over there. Alex and I will take the slice and dice.”

  Nodding agreeance, Jax saunters off with Oz in tow behind her. Alex waits until they’re alone, and pulls Silver back just before she reaches the door to the warehouse. Catching her off-guard, he plants a brief kiss on her lips.

  It lasts just a moment, and then he pulls back.

  “Just in case,” he whispers.

  “Save it.” She pushes him gently away from her. “We’re not gonna die today.”

  She reaches for the door handle, and it doesn’t give her the least bit of resistance. She pokes her head inside, slightly irritated that Alex is standing so close behind her.

  She hip checks him. “Do you have to stand so close?”

  “I find comfort in body heat,” he teases.

  “That’s sexual harassment, you perv—”

  Alex smothers her mouth with his hand and pushes her up against the door frame. She doesn’t know if he’s about to chastise her or kiss her, but he does neither. Gun in hand, he pushes open the door all the way …

  On the other side of it is a swaggering adult male Chimera, awaiting them with bared teeth and one badly swollen testicle. Dangling between its back legs like a squishy purple coconut, it looks about ready to pop.

  Alex raises his gun on the creature, but waits for a clear shot. It keeps swaggering, the heavy left nut swinging in and out of view.

  In and out.

  In.

  One shot.

  It looks like a giant exploding pimple, with puss and blood flying everywhere. The Chimera gives out one loud, high pitched yelp and tucks its head beneath itself to inspect the damage.

  Silver pulls Alex’s hand away from her mouth. “You’re disgusting.”