The Block

by Ben Oliver

  Before I know what’s going on, Sam has darted to the next car. She stands up and fires, then moves again. In no time she’s twenty yards away and aiming at the soldiers from a whole new angle. She fires relentlessly, screaming as she pulls the trigger. I stand up too. Knowing that I can’t waste a single shot, I take my time, trying to ignore the blasts of energy that thump into the car and whoosh past my head. Sam kills another soldier and then ducks back down behind the solar charge panel she is using as cover.

  Time seems to slow down as I fire; it’s almost as if I can see the path of the bullet as it misses to the right of the closest soldier. I adjust my aim and pull the trigger twice, but both rounds miss by centimeters. I move a millimeter to the left and fire three times, hitting the young man twice in the neck and once in the jaw. He goes down, and I fall back behind the vehicle.

  The last remaining soldier has retreated behind the house. We have to get out of here right now.

  “Hey, Regulars,” the final soldier calls, his voice gruff and perhaps a little panicked. “I have an offer for you. How about you put your guns down and come over here, nice and easy?”

  “I didn’t hear any offers when there was four of you,” Sam calls back.

  “No, but in about thirty seconds there’s going to be about a hundred soldiers backing me up. You can either wait and let them kill you, or I can arrest you right now. You get to keep your lives and I look like a hero. Everyone’s a winner.”

  Sam looks over to me. I shake my head. “Fuck that,” I call back.

  Sam points to herself, mimes firing her weapon, and then uses two fingers to simulate running away toward the spiral road. I nod my head.

  Sam stands and begins firing the old USW gun at the house. I get to my feet and dart toward the road. Sam walks backward, still firing, pinning the Alt soldier to the corner of the building.

  We have to move fast, I think, before the other soldiers arrive.

  The road tilts down as I hit the start of the decline.

  And then the screech of ultrasonic rounds ceases.

  I stop running, my feet skidding on the road, and I turn to see Sam pulling the trigger of her old USW over and over again, but only a weak electronic buzz emanates from the weapon.

  “Shit,” she breathes.

  “That must be a very old model,” the soldier calls, and I can hear that he is smiling. “Overheating was an issue with USWs one through six. Luckily I have a nineteen.”

  And then he’s running toward Sam. I’m thirty, maybe forty yards from her, and with only one bullet left in my antique pistol. Sam stands there, the sun setting in front of her, shock and fear in her eyes, pulling the trigger of the burned-out rifle over and over again, and still no sonic rounds come blasting out of the barrel.

  Run, I think. Run, Sam!

  But she doesn’t, and the Alt soldier, with his robot lungs and robot heart, is closing the gap at near-impossible speed.

  There’s no more time to think. I sprint from behind the car, trying to close the gap. Any second now the Alt’s Lens will pinpoint a spot right between Sam’s eyes, and he’ll fire a round of pure concentrated sound into her, turning her brain into soup.

  I make it to the next car as the distance between me and the Alt narrows. I climb up to the roof and raise my pistol to eye level. I see his head in my shaking sights just as he raises his USW to his shoulder. I’m aware that Sam has stopped pulling her trigger. She has let the gun fall to her side and her mouth is slightly open in shock.

  “Wait,” she pleads, her hand moving protectively to her stomach.

  One shot, I think. You get one shot at this.

  I see the look of triumph in the soldier’s face, the satisfaction in his narrowed eyes.

  I squeeze the trigger.

  The soldier turns into a marionette with its strings cut, and flops down onto the hood of an orange Skyway 15.

  We stand there, unmoving, for a full three seconds, before Sam bursts into frenetic laughter.

  “How the hell did you make that shot?” she yells, and though she’s laughing, there is a world of alarm in her eyes.

  She puts her hands to her face and falls to her knees. She cries for five or six seconds before taking a deep breath and pulling herself together.

  “We have to move. More will be here soon,” she says.

  I nod and dash back for the headset. I glance at the dead soldier’s gun, only ten yards away, but the sound of more military vehicles fills the air, and we sprint away as fast as we can, down the spiral road. I’m certain we won’t make it out of here without being spotted.

  We run and run. We make it to the end of the road and back onto ground level. Above us the sound of the Alt soldiers yelling orders echoes out over the city.

  “This way,” Sam calls, taking a hard right, leading us away from the sewer behind the courthouse.

  “But the library!” I yell.

  “No time!” she calls back, and then shoulders her way through a boarded-up doorway, splintering the wood and disappearing through a spiral of dust.

  I follow her into the building. It’s an old shop of some kind, with a tiled floor and a smashed glass display cabinet—perhaps an old butcher’s shop from long before I was born, when people used to buy animal meat. Sam is shoving part of the counter aside, revealing a set of rotted wooden stairs that leads down into darkness.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  Sam doesn’t answer, just carefully and quickly climbs down into the gloom. Outside, I hear the Alt army mobilizing: more vehicles, more footsteps, more orders being barked out. I follow Sam down, using my fingertips to pull the heavy counter as far as I can back over the staircase.

  I move quickly, reaching the bottom of the stairs and walking right into Sam’s back in the darkness.

  “Pander has mapped out a bunch of these old tunnels,” she whispers, “but they’re dangerous, they’re like mazes. We found some books on them. Apparently, politicians and royalty from a thousand years ago used them. Others were made by smugglers. One of them used to be a tunnel to the gallows where criminals were hanged.”

  “Wow,” I say, still whispering despite the fact that we’re deep underground.

  “And now they’re used by us,” Sam says. “Stay close—you do not want to get lost down here.”

  It’s hard to know how close I am to Sam in the darkness, but I reach out every now and then to make sure she hasn’t gotten too far away from me. The thought of making a wrong turn and being trapped in a labyrinth of pitch-black tunnels terrifies me.

  Tunnels, I think, I’m haunted by goddamned tunnels. If this thing ever ends and I’m still alive, I will never go near another tunnel again!

  We turn left, then left again. A particularly long stretch curves slowly to the right for about a quarter of a mile before Sam hesitates. There are three right turns close together; she seems about to take the second, even takes a few steps into it before changing her mind and taking the third. We go up a set of six steps and then the tunnel curves downward and around to the right again.

  After another ten or so minutes of walking, Sam feels the wall until she finds a ladder.

  “Here,” she says, and leads my hand to it. “And be quiet when you get to the top; we’re not far from the Arc.”

  “The Arc?” I repeat, remembering Galen Rye’s words: It might surprise you how effortless it was to enlist soldiers, to convince humans to join our cause. Offer them a hierarchy in which they can belong—Tier One, Two, or Three—tell them they will earn their place on the Arc, where they will be safe from the end of the world. “What is it?” I ask. “Some kind of bunker?”

  “You’ll see,” she says.

  I climb up the ladder. It’s greasy with moss and moisture, and made even harder to climb by the fact I’m still carrying the LucidVision in one hand, but I make it to the top, where my head hits against a metal grate. I lift it up and carefully guide it to the floor. I look around and see an old cellar, a portion of the floor covered in
dirty tiles. Steel beer and cider kegs are piled high among a web of tubes and valves.

  We climb out of the tunnel and make our way to the rotting wooden staircase against the brick wall.

  We emerge behind the bar of a wooden-floored old pub. It has been long abandoned, but the ancient varnished oak of the bar still curves majestically through the middle of the room. Champagne flutes still hang like icicles from racks above the beer taps. The tables and chairs arranged around the room look as though they are waiting for clientele to walk through the boarded-up doorway at any second. If it wasn’t for the dust that rests over everything like snowfall, this place could be merely closed for the evening, rather than shut down for decades.

  Sam joins me behind the bar and we both look around, mesmerized by this place that has been frozen in time.

  The sound of marching boots from the street outside snaps us both out of our reverie, and we move quietly to the storage area behind the bar and into a long-defunct walk-in refrigerator in the back room. I sit on an ancient crate of beer as Sam pulls the door shut, careful not to close it all the way.

  “What’s the plan?” I ask quietly.

  “We wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “Wait until it’s properly dark. Wait until there’s not as many soldiers looking for us. If I’m right, we’re just inside the surveillance scanner, so we should be safe.”

  “And if you’re wrong?” I ask.

  “Mosquitoes will find us in about five minutes.”

  “We should’ve taken Apple-Moth with us,” I say.

  “Yeah, right,” Sam laughs. “That stupid thing would draw attention to us in a heartbeat.”

  I smile, remembering the drone’s irritating voice and enthusiastic personality that refused to be wiped out.

  And then something occurs to me: We’ve been traveling toward the center of the city.

  “How far are we from the financial district?” I ask.

  “About four miles that way,” she says, pointing to one side of the cold room.

  “Right,” I say, staring at the wall as though I can see right through it, all the way to where Molly is.

  I think about leaving, about sprinting all the way to the financial district, making my way to the hidden vault and finding my sister, but the sound of soldiers swarming the streets tells me that I’d not only be captured immediately, but they’d find Sam too.

  “You okay?” Sam asks. “You look like you’ve got something on your mind.”

  I smile and half laugh. “I have so many things on my mind,” I tell her.

  “The end of the world will do that to you,” Sam replies, smiling back. She reaches into a faded old box and pulls out a cardboard tube. She opens it up and produces a bottle of whiskey.

  “Go get two of those glasses from the bar,” she says. “We’re going to be here awhile.”

  “What? We can’t drink, we have to stay alert. And you’re preg—” I stop myself as Sam’s eyes narrow. “Yeah, all right, we could have one, I suppose.”

  I move quietly to the bar and grab two dusty glasses from a shelf. I find a packet of old dishcloths, take a relatively clean one from the middle of the bundle, and use it to wipe the grimy glasses inside and out.

  I take them back to Sam, who pours a generous measure of the ancient whiskey into each glass.

  “You go first,” she says, looking suspiciously at the amber liquid.

  I hesitantly hold the glass up to my nose and smell the alcohol. It’s sharp, but not at all unpleasant. It’s like burnt wood and strong coffee. I take a sip and it lights up my mouth. My tongue feels at once hot and cold; the alcohol surrounds my teeth and clings to the inside of my cheeks.

  “Whoa,” I choke out, my voice sounding like I have Drygate flu.

  “Good whoa, or bad whoa?” Sam asks.

  “It’s pretty good,” I say, my voice still hoarse. I steel myself and take another sip.

  Sam takes a drink from her glass and handles it far more calmly than I did. “Yep,” she breathes, “that’ll work.”

  There’s no way we can make the rendezvous with Akimi with so many soldiers on the streets, so instead, we drink for the next three hours. Or rather, I drink for the next three hours. I only intended to have one or two, but I must have lost track. Sam stopped after one and moved on to water.

  “All right, all right,” Sam says, swirling the water in her glass around as though it were a fine wine. “How many times have you almost died since the end of the world?”

  I think about this, laughter escaping my lips as I remember Wren trying to kill me, two trips through the rat tunnel, Smilers attacking me in the village on the outskirts of town, Tyco Roth trying to end my life twice, falling into the ice river, and many, many more. “Honestly,” I tell her, “I’ve lost count.”

  We both laugh hysterically at this, and I lean so far to the side that all my whiskey pours from my glass onto the floor. We stop laughing, look at the mess, and then laugh some more.

  “Okay, okay,” she gasps, “your turn, what do you want to know?”

  I think about it for a while and then an obvious question pops into my head. “How the hell did you survive the end of the world? Ebb users survived because they were on Ebb, prisoners survived because of the Delay, the Alts survived … I don’t know, because they’re Alts. How did you survive?”

  “Junk barges,” she replies nonchalantly.

  “Junk barges?” I repeat.

  “Junk barges.”

  “Care to expand?” I say, and this makes her laugh once again.

  “I was one of the Junk Children,” Sam says, her eyes moving to the floor as if she’s embarrassed by this fact.

  “I heard that you prefer to be called refuse adolescents,” I say, breaking the tension.

  Sam snorts water out of her nose. This sets us off again and we’re rolling on the floor laughing. Sam, finally managing to get ahold of herself, hits me in the arm.

  “You bastar—” she starts, and then falls silent, grabbing my hand as the sound of soldiers patrolling the streets outside the abandoned pub drifts through from the main room.

  We stare at each other as we lie on the floor, fear in our eyes.

  A minute later, all is silent once again.

  We get to our feet and then take our makeshift seats (me on an old crate, Sam on a small side table).

  “Happy sent the Smiler poison through the rain,” Sam says, her voice quieter now, “and the rain was concentrated on the populated portions of the world. I had swum a mile out to sea. I was foraging one of the barges at the time, looking for electronics, or clothes, or anything valuable I could fix and sell. Happy didn’t send the rain that far out, and so me and the other Junk Children on the barges, we survived. Got a hell of a shock when we made it to shore, though, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Hey, did you know Pod before all of this? He was a Junk Child too.”

  “What, you think just because we both grew up in the homeless villages we had to have known each other?” she asks, a note of anger in her voice once again. “Well, we did, as it happens, but that’s just coincidence.” She laughs, quietly this time, at the expression on my face.

  “Okay, okay,” I mutter, “your turn.”

  She thinks for a second, tapping a finger against her chin affectedly. “What did they lock you up for?” she asks, and then leans forward, raising her eyebrows in an exaggerated questioning expression.

  My smile turns into a sigh as my humor fades. As usual when anyone brings up the topic of my incarceration, the vivid image of the boy falling from the roof appears in striking clarity in my mind. I see my sister standing there, near the edge of the Black Road Vertical, the impossibly high tower block where we used to live, her face covered by a Halloween mask. I see the boy falling back, a look of incredulity in his eyes, a look of disbelief, of denial.

  “I took the blame for something my sister did,” I reply.

  “And what did your sister do?” Sam asks.


  “That’s two questions,” I say, taking another drink.

  “Fine. Your turn.”

  “What’s the deal with the baby?” I ask, without hesitation.

  “That’s perhaps the most incoherent question I’ve ever heard,” Sam says. “What do you mean ‘what’s the deal’?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, the alcohol giving me more confidence than is good for me, “like, who’s the dad, and how long until it’s born, and is it a boy or a girl, and how come you’re not exhausted, carrying it around all the time?”

  “That’s three … four questions,” Sam says, a sadness sweeping over her.

  “You don’t have to answer,” I tell her, reaching for the bottle and finding that there’s only a quarter of the whiskey left.

  “Pick one question,” she says. “Maybe I’ll answer.”

  “Who’s the dad?” I ask.

  She sighs. “A dead man.”

  She reaches out a shaking hand and grabs the almost-empty bottle from the floor. She lifts the bottle to her lips and then changes her mind, puts the cork back in, and sets it down.

  “Sam, I …” I start, but I don’t know what to say.

  “I know,” she says. “You’re a good person, Luka. You care, and you want me to be good too, but I’m not, I’m not good. I don’t care, I won’t ever care.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” I tell her. “You are good—and you do care. About your friends and about your baby. Every time you were in danger back there on Level Two, your hands went to your stomach, like you wanted to make sure it was safe. Did you know that?”

  Sam runs her hands through her hair. “Yeah, whatever, maybe.” She takes a breath and then stands up. “We should get moving, try to get back to the library before you’re too drunk to walk.”

  I look to the doorway, to the small crack where light from the streetlamps had been seeping in, and see that the sky is pitch-black. I try to guess the time and figure it must be after 10 p.m.

  “Okay,” I agree, and stand on unsteady legs, the world seeming to shift and tilt in front of my eyes. I realize, suddenly, that I am drunk. I had felt okay, a bit overconfident, but it has shifted, very quickly, into full-blown inebriation.