LP AU fic, Mike/Chester
Um, yeah. Like I'll ever finish this thing.
2012
Sixteen floors underneath the sidewalk wound a staircase of steel, spiraling up to the surface like a double-helix, the zenith a white circle of light that promised life like the goodly dead were promised the light of heaven. Chester’s worn boots crunched on shards of glass and scraps of tin foil, waste that gathered on the cold floor from the population above.
He had gotten used to the cold and isolated feeling years ago, but it still didn’t make things any easier. Every day he was tempted to climb up those stairs and embrace ignorance, turn the other cheek, look the other way. But he couldn’t, no matter how many times or hard he tried, he failed to make it up past the first few steps. It would take every impulse in his body shutting down and his will cut into a million, tiny pieces before he could forsake everything that used to be.
This was how hard and resilient pain has made his skin, and how bone-bleached the pigment was since the sun no longer provided him with her rays.
He felt like a hollowed out husk, a corpse walking for the sole purpose of feeling alive again. Pretend was fifty percent of it. Hope seemed to be like that north star, pointing to you the way home, but you never could quite follow it, unsure if where you were going was true north because the universe is so vast.
But he won’t waste away doing nothing; the memory of Mike burned too deep and too dark behind his eyes for that to happen.
Being down there, in the cold and the grit and the dank dark, was a decision that he made and will not abandon. He hadn’t been fighting for years for nothing. Quitting wasn’t even something he knew how to comprehend anymore, and he would rot down there in the dust before he rejoined humanity. In fact, he stopped considering himself a part of humanity when the clones were first revealed nationwide. It was one hell of an entrance with explosions and everything, live news coverage on every television set, into every living room of every house.
Subtlety clearly wasn’t an issue.
Chester remembered the shock and immediate terror that had made bile rise in the back of his throat, meaty and thick and sour at the same time, and how Mike’s clone had stared him in the eye and raised a gun to Chester’s head.
2006
Socks were frustrating beyond belief to sort and find matching mates to when they were all white, and Chester ended up with at least three extra of different sizes without a match every time they did this.
He promised to get colored ones the next chance he got.
Mike swung the clothing hamper over his shoulder and scooped up his pile of clothes.
“Throw ‘em away,” he offered as he nudged past Chester by playfully bumping him out of the way, and received a nasty look for his trouble.
“Their mates will turn up somewhere, and then you’ll be sorry about tossing them!” Chester called as Mike’s socked feet ascended the stairs directly above the laundry room, the dull thump thumps obviously exaggerated in what Mike hoped to be in an annoying way, but Chester found it cute. Yes, Mike could behave like a child sometimes, yet Chester loved him all the same. It was endearing how Mike would go to the trouble.
He figured Mike would know the right buttons to push by now if he wanted Chester truly upset.
He tossed his clothes into a messy pile on top of the dryer and decided that if they couldn’t fold themselves, he’d have to do it later, preferably after dinner.
Dinner was cooking in the oven, and the vegetables were steaming on the stove. The dogs were out back napping in their dens. Everything seemed to be in order.
Except, when Chester went upstairs to drag Mike down for dinner, he had opened the door to Mike’s room and found it empty. Except, after searching through the house, upstairs and downstairs, front and back yard, Mike was nowhere to be seen.
The first thought was immediate panic, the sure and white-hot kind that seared Chester’s heart and ripped through his body, shaking him. The second was a more rational one – Mike had merely stepped out to run an errand. Perhaps get new socks.
It wasn’t normal however for Mike to be gone for five hours. Chester waited. It was 1 in the morning by the time he heard a car pull up outside. He sat in the dark as Mike stepped in the house, the door softly shut behind him.
Chester had merely flipped on the light. Mike was caught with a guilty expression on his face and a slight shameful hunch to his shoulders.
“I’m sorry, I had to take care of something before I forgot.” Was all he said.
A wave of nausea rolled over Chester, and he let it go, but he was becoming aware.
_____
That was the beginning. Chester would start cataloging Mike’s frequent disappearances afterwards, marking a small, black dot on the calendar in the bathroom corner that no one besides him would ever look at for each day Mike would vanish. Mike would always have an excuse ready, but Chester never failed to see through it. He knew him too well.
At the end of the year, Chester was mildly surprised by all the dots lining his calendar, but he pulled it down and hid it under the bed with his dirty socks and old sneakers, and hung up a new one. 2007 was the year he would later come to identify as the year that he’d stopped caring for Mike.
And of course he didn’t ask questions. He knew better than that.
Mike was smart, and he’d shut him out if he did. So Chester kept quiet and read a lot. He watched the news rather than movies like he would when Mike was around. Once he started reading articles in the paper citing a rash of disappearances across the nation of ordinary people with happy and uncomplicated lives, and how cloning seemed to have reached its peak, Chester clipped them out and started a collection.
When the time came to piece everything together, Chester found it wasn’t so hard. His first conspiracy solved, or nearly so, but he never felt the pride and joy he should’ve for figuring it out. Sometimes he even convinced himself things could have gone better had he never known the truth.
He guessed that some point in late 2007 and early 2008, the real Mike had been successfully tossed and a clone had stepped into Chester’s life, though he thought himself insane for believing it. It gave Chester some comfort to know at the time that he had only been living with it for a short while, that it’d only invaded his privacy, his home, for a little over six months.
Besides, Mike was hardly home to have intercepted or even know about his investigation. He didn’t even suspect.
It was clone-Mike’s one fault that Chester found: he sank too much trust into the relationship, blind spots regarding Chester’s loyalty to him.
And when the buildings on television exploded in succinct synchronization with the buildings a block away from their L.A. home that fateful day in 2008, it only cemented the fact that Mike was no longer who he used to be. That, and the world was about to be turned upside down.
2008
It was smoke and mirrors – everything – and Chester had finally understood that Mike was a stranger to him. More like accepted, probably. Maybe he had known it all along but had never been completely honest with himself. Denial was a useful tool to have a grasp of.
Rain pelted California’s sidewalks and smothered the buildings that had just exploded, leaving trails of black smoke to billow in the slight breeze. Chester had never seen anything like it, as if the whole world had caught on fire and the apocalypse had come, like Nostradamus was actually more than just far-fetched prophecies for the New Age.
In any other life, at any other time, Chester might’ve laughed at the absurdity of it all. It wasn’t too amusing at the moment, though. Not even on his wide-screen TV.
Then several things happened in rapid succession.
Helicopters flew in overhead, the whirring of their propellers entirely too loud, and Chester scrambled outside to catch a glimpse of the mayhem. At this point he wasn’t even thinking about Mike any longer, focused on the war that seemed to have erupted in front of his eyes. He ran down the street, zipping past local news vans already parked on the curb, dodging microphones and shoving foreign bodies out of his way, all the while feeling like he should be pleading insanity. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’d appreciate it if you would get out of my fucking way, thanks. Far too much action for a Sunday.
He stopped abruptly a safe distance away from the debris that used to be a bank and a small shopping outlet, and tried to catch his breath. His heart was pumping in sporadic little bursts, and if he weren’t careful, he’d end up passing out for lack of oxygen.
Before, the idea of mass destruction was just a thing he witnessed on television with third world countries, or epic war movies that were based on events that had happened way before his time.
Crumbling before him now were buildings razed from fire dropped out of the sky, but for what purpose, Chester had no clue.
He turned, only slightly, unaware that he had been followed, and Mike’s face stared back at him, entirely too close.
“Mike?”
Mike didn’t look pleased; Chester wasn’t sure how to describe his expression. Perhaps cold was the fitting word. Detached.
“I’m sorry it had to come to this,” Mike said, and Chester really did feel like he was in a Hitchcock film when his best friend and lover raised a gun to his head, barrel aimed right between Chester’s eyes. He imagined the bullet shattering the bridge of his glasses, cracking the lenses into spider-like webs, and the clear, white void that would come after. He imagined it all too easily.
Lucky for him the next bomb to hit smashed into the nearest news van and it exploded into a fire-eaten carcass.
Chester swung his fist blindly, taking Mike by surprise as he went sprawling down into the ground. He was running on pure adrenaline, pumping through his veins like molten-hot lava, and it felt good. Liberating, almost, although he didn’t know why.
Chester shook off the sudden, throbbing pain in his hand – and vaguely somewhere in his chest – and ran like hell through the maze of cars, vans, and journalists’ voices that blurred into one constant pounding that reverberated inside his head.
Get out, it said. Get away.
2012
“I wasn’t gone long, was I?” Chester asked as he turned a sharp, dark corner and spotted two of his men crouching in the darkness, machine guns held to their chests like life preservers as if they might drown in a pool of their own blood at any moment. Chester didn’t think such a thing was impossible.
Brad pushed his cap back and wiped his arm over his forehead, the silver bands on his wrists clinking in the quiet of the underground. “Ten minutes or so. I’ll scout the area again in a little while.”
“No need. It’s like a ghost today—so quiet. We should be glad Hahn’s clones aren’t popping out of the woodwork.” Chester sighed and leaned against the opposite wall, adjusting his thigh holster. It was shabby and starting to unravel at the seams. Four years of wear and tear will do that.
“Where’s that supply of ammo you promised we’d get?” Phoenix had an unhealthy amount of paranoia, and Chester discovered that keeping his men well-armed and full of ammunition served as a security blanket for Phoenix.
“Have patience. They should be in by tomorrow, or they’re gonna have to give us a free box next time.” Chester reassured him, and Phoenix visibly relaxed, sitting his weight down fully on the chilly floor and giving his legs the luxury to stretch out before him.
Lately, boxes full of various munitions had been delivered every five days or so from other subterranean networks. They were down to one box every time, so that had to mean something, though Chester wasn’t sure if that meant their enemies were multiplying or if the good guys were winning. Maybe a little bit of both.
And he thought, yeah, that might be a little scary. Well, a lot scary.
He didn’t care to die a martyr, because to be frank, Chester could care less if the rest of the world died with him. He just wanted to make certain Joseph Hahn, leader of the so-called Cloning Revolution, got to see Chester’s smiling face before he died. It was one of those sick things Chester liked to play over and over in his head at 3 o’clock in the morning, the time when most people die, sleeping on the cold, dirty floor while listening to the rodents scurry on small, clicking feet. Occasionally, it even replaced what he thought was his reason for fighting, which was mostly avenging Mike’s ‘death.’
Mike would be proud.
Sometimes, he subconsciously replaced Hahn with Mike in his head, and he might’ve dreamed of splitting that pretty face in two, shooting bullets that ripped through his chest and spiraled out the other side trailing blood like debris. And Chester always woke up with cold sweat matting his shirt to his skin, adrenaline pounding in him, pouring out of him in waves.
The dreams were always profound and vivid. Scary as hell, but it kept him sane. It kept him on his toes, the reminder that one day, if he succeeded, if his men survived and they resurfaced again, he might meet Mike one last time, and he might be able to pull the trigger if everything else failed.
War was something real, had been for years, and it flowed in his veins like blood. Chester and his men were merely field operatives who set things into action, but it was the most dangerous position to be in.
Their strategy team was a three-man work crew up in level 2 beneath the heart of old downtown, composed of two blond-haired men named Timberlake and Lance and a brunette named J.C. The three would send their men down occasionally to Chester with information and tactical maps of the latest major cloning activities aboveground along with detailed plans for takeovers and sieges. Chester would then pass the information on to a handful of men who would help his team and him execute the plan. Their specialty was seizing and destroying places of significance to cloning technology and advancement labs, test-buildings that had Joseph Hahn’s sticky, invisible fingerprints all over them. It was a difficult task; the tactical and strategists had it easy, staying relatively out of the line of fire.
He saw them once when they first went underground. They’d been dragging in two prisoners to the lab for testing and alteration, and they had looked a little too young and a little too pretty to survive. Although it was evident then that Timberlake had an iron-fist, and J.C. had promise in his eyes. Chester had assumed from the get-go that Lance was the brains of the operation by default.
But Chester was still too wary to trust them completely, despite all the help they had provided his crew in the past.
Chester wouldn’t trust anyone outside of his immediate family, who were essentially Brad and Phoenix, and his 9-millimeter Beretta 92F, tucked inside his boot. It had saved his life more times than he cared to admit.
“Hey,” Phoenix cast him a worried look, “I heard some shit went down today with our level 2 guys.”
Chester frowned and switched his assault rifle to his other shoulder to keep the left one from cramping up any worse than it already had. “What do you mean?”
Phoenix looked slightly green, but it might’ve been a trick of the—non-light. Things were always so dark, it was hard to tell what real, vibrant colors looked like, and the sewers were fairly close to them, so it could’ve been just that. Still, it wasn’t especially comforting.
“I’m not sure.” said Phoenix as he took in a deep breath, and Chester could practically see him figuring things out, hypothesizing what might’ve happened with Timberlake, Lance, and J.C. “This is all word-of-mouth, but I heard they went up and foraged some surveillance footage of Hahn’s lab facilities. They lifted it from Hahn’s computer terminals.”
Chester’s head snapped up and he moved toward him with curiosity.
“Do they still have it in their possession?”
Four years, and they had only been able to uncover a relatively small amount of information that could serve to destroy Hahn’s empire. This could be their biggest chance yet to take him down.
His cloning facilities were airtight and infallible, impenetrable, and there innocent people—because there were still free-borns every day, and untainted people still walked in cities where the putrid smell of decay and oiled machinery lingered as a way of life—were turned into drones and copied. Copied, as if they were shareware.
“I think so,” said Phoenix, looking more and more as if the blood was completely draining out of his face.
“Don’t tell me we gotta go up to confront that bastard.” Brad huffed irritably, looking up at some distant spot.
“Hahn? No,” Chester considered his options. “Maybe later, when he’s more vulnerable.”
“And when would that be?”
Smiling, Chester ignored Brad’s question and squatted down in front of Phoenix instead, patting his shoulder appreciatively, “Good job, Phi. We’ll pay our strategists a little visit tomorrow, but tonight—” he looked to Brad then and stood, “You guys should get some sleep. We’ll have to jump-start that old computer in storage tomorrow morning, see if we can dig up a little more dirt. And find some disks so we can copy the footage, just in case.”
_____
The levels underground were divided into subdivisions which covered two miles for every division. Chester and his men had to travel six miles, a quarter mile up vertically, to reach level 2.
Two guards were standing at the entrance to what looked like a tunnel leading to a larger sewage system when they arrived, the guards’ arms carrying a Mac10 each. Chester eyed the Glocks in their thigh-holsters warily. He supposed such heavy weaponry was a precaution and a necessity. Still, he could tell Brad and Phoenix were already starting to twitch with unease.
tbc....
don't be afraid to tell me it's bad. no really, don't.
2012
Sixteen floors underneath the sidewalk wound a staircase of steel, spiraling up to the surface like a double-helix, the zenith a white circle of light that promised life like the goodly dead were promised the light of heaven. Chester’s worn boots crunched on shards of glass and scraps of tin foil, waste that gathered on the cold floor from the population above.
He had gotten used to the cold and isolated feeling years ago, but it still didn’t make things any easier. Every day he was tempted to climb up those stairs and embrace ignorance, turn the other cheek, look the other way. But he couldn’t, no matter how many times or hard he tried, he failed to make it up past the first few steps. It would take every impulse in his body shutting down and his will cut into a million, tiny pieces before he could forsake everything that used to be.
This was how hard and resilient pain has made his skin, and how bone-bleached the pigment was since the sun no longer provided him with her rays.
He felt like a hollowed out husk, a corpse walking for the sole purpose of feeling alive again. Pretend was fifty percent of it. Hope seemed to be like that north star, pointing to you the way home, but you never could quite follow it, unsure if where you were going was true north because the universe is so vast.
But he won’t waste away doing nothing; the memory of Mike burned too deep and too dark behind his eyes for that to happen.
Being down there, in the cold and the grit and the dank dark, was a decision that he made and will not abandon. He hadn’t been fighting for years for nothing. Quitting wasn’t even something he knew how to comprehend anymore, and he would rot down there in the dust before he rejoined humanity. In fact, he stopped considering himself a part of humanity when the clones were first revealed nationwide. It was one hell of an entrance with explosions and everything, live news coverage on every television set, into every living room of every house.
Subtlety clearly wasn’t an issue.
Chester remembered the shock and immediate terror that had made bile rise in the back of his throat, meaty and thick and sour at the same time, and how Mike’s clone had stared him in the eye and raised a gun to Chester’s head.
2006
Socks were frustrating beyond belief to sort and find matching mates to when they were all white, and Chester ended up with at least three extra of different sizes without a match every time they did this.
He promised to get colored ones the next chance he got.
Mike swung the clothing hamper over his shoulder and scooped up his pile of clothes.
“Throw ‘em away,” he offered as he nudged past Chester by playfully bumping him out of the way, and received a nasty look for his trouble.
“Their mates will turn up somewhere, and then you’ll be sorry about tossing them!” Chester called as Mike’s socked feet ascended the stairs directly above the laundry room, the dull thump thumps obviously exaggerated in what Mike hoped to be in an annoying way, but Chester found it cute. Yes, Mike could behave like a child sometimes, yet Chester loved him all the same. It was endearing how Mike would go to the trouble.
He figured Mike would know the right buttons to push by now if he wanted Chester truly upset.
He tossed his clothes into a messy pile on top of the dryer and decided that if they couldn’t fold themselves, he’d have to do it later, preferably after dinner.
Dinner was cooking in the oven, and the vegetables were steaming on the stove. The dogs were out back napping in their dens. Everything seemed to be in order.
Except, when Chester went upstairs to drag Mike down for dinner, he had opened the door to Mike’s room and found it empty. Except, after searching through the house, upstairs and downstairs, front and back yard, Mike was nowhere to be seen.
The first thought was immediate panic, the sure and white-hot kind that seared Chester’s heart and ripped through his body, shaking him. The second was a more rational one – Mike had merely stepped out to run an errand. Perhaps get new socks.
It wasn’t normal however for Mike to be gone for five hours. Chester waited. It was 1 in the morning by the time he heard a car pull up outside. He sat in the dark as Mike stepped in the house, the door softly shut behind him.
Chester had merely flipped on the light. Mike was caught with a guilty expression on his face and a slight shameful hunch to his shoulders.
“I’m sorry, I had to take care of something before I forgot.” Was all he said.
A wave of nausea rolled over Chester, and he let it go, but he was becoming aware.
That was the beginning. Chester would start cataloging Mike’s frequent disappearances afterwards, marking a small, black dot on the calendar in the bathroom corner that no one besides him would ever look at for each day Mike would vanish. Mike would always have an excuse ready, but Chester never failed to see through it. He knew him too well.
At the end of the year, Chester was mildly surprised by all the dots lining his calendar, but he pulled it down and hid it under the bed with his dirty socks and old sneakers, and hung up a new one. 2007 was the year he would later come to identify as the year that he’d stopped caring for Mike.
And of course he didn’t ask questions. He knew better than that.
Mike was smart, and he’d shut him out if he did. So Chester kept quiet and read a lot. He watched the news rather than movies like he would when Mike was around. Once he started reading articles in the paper citing a rash of disappearances across the nation of ordinary people with happy and uncomplicated lives, and how cloning seemed to have reached its peak, Chester clipped them out and started a collection.
When the time came to piece everything together, Chester found it wasn’t so hard. His first conspiracy solved, or nearly so, but he never felt the pride and joy he should’ve for figuring it out. Sometimes he even convinced himself things could have gone better had he never known the truth.
He guessed that some point in late 2007 and early 2008, the real Mike had been successfully tossed and a clone had stepped into Chester’s life, though he thought himself insane for believing it. It gave Chester some comfort to know at the time that he had only been living with it for a short while, that it’d only invaded his privacy, his home, for a little over six months.
Besides, Mike was hardly home to have intercepted or even know about his investigation. He didn’t even suspect.
It was clone-Mike’s one fault that Chester found: he sank too much trust into the relationship, blind spots regarding Chester’s loyalty to him.
And when the buildings on television exploded in succinct synchronization with the buildings a block away from their L.A. home that fateful day in 2008, it only cemented the fact that Mike was no longer who he used to be. That, and the world was about to be turned upside down.
2008
It was smoke and mirrors – everything – and Chester had finally understood that Mike was a stranger to him. More like accepted, probably. Maybe he had known it all along but had never been completely honest with himself. Denial was a useful tool to have a grasp of.
Rain pelted California’s sidewalks and smothered the buildings that had just exploded, leaving trails of black smoke to billow in the slight breeze. Chester had never seen anything like it, as if the whole world had caught on fire and the apocalypse had come, like Nostradamus was actually more than just far-fetched prophecies for the New Age.
In any other life, at any other time, Chester might’ve laughed at the absurdity of it all. It wasn’t too amusing at the moment, though. Not even on his wide-screen TV.
Then several things happened in rapid succession.
Helicopters flew in overhead, the whirring of their propellers entirely too loud, and Chester scrambled outside to catch a glimpse of the mayhem. At this point he wasn’t even thinking about Mike any longer, focused on the war that seemed to have erupted in front of his eyes. He ran down the street, zipping past local news vans already parked on the curb, dodging microphones and shoving foreign bodies out of his way, all the while feeling like he should be pleading insanity. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’d appreciate it if you would get out of my fucking way, thanks. Far too much action for a Sunday.
He stopped abruptly a safe distance away from the debris that used to be a bank and a small shopping outlet, and tried to catch his breath. His heart was pumping in sporadic little bursts, and if he weren’t careful, he’d end up passing out for lack of oxygen.
Before, the idea of mass destruction was just a thing he witnessed on television with third world countries, or epic war movies that were based on events that had happened way before his time.
Crumbling before him now were buildings razed from fire dropped out of the sky, but for what purpose, Chester had no clue.
He turned, only slightly, unaware that he had been followed, and Mike’s face stared back at him, entirely too close.
“Mike?”
Mike didn’t look pleased; Chester wasn’t sure how to describe his expression. Perhaps cold was the fitting word. Detached.
“I’m sorry it had to come to this,” Mike said, and Chester really did feel like he was in a Hitchcock film when his best friend and lover raised a gun to his head, barrel aimed right between Chester’s eyes. He imagined the bullet shattering the bridge of his glasses, cracking the lenses into spider-like webs, and the clear, white void that would come after. He imagined it all too easily.
Lucky for him the next bomb to hit smashed into the nearest news van and it exploded into a fire-eaten carcass.
Chester swung his fist blindly, taking Mike by surprise as he went sprawling down into the ground. He was running on pure adrenaline, pumping through his veins like molten-hot lava, and it felt good. Liberating, almost, although he didn’t know why.
Chester shook off the sudden, throbbing pain in his hand – and vaguely somewhere in his chest – and ran like hell through the maze of cars, vans, and journalists’ voices that blurred into one constant pounding that reverberated inside his head.
Get out, it said. Get away.
2012
“I wasn’t gone long, was I?” Chester asked as he turned a sharp, dark corner and spotted two of his men crouching in the darkness, machine guns held to their chests like life preservers as if they might drown in a pool of their own blood at any moment. Chester didn’t think such a thing was impossible.
Brad pushed his cap back and wiped his arm over his forehead, the silver bands on his wrists clinking in the quiet of the underground. “Ten minutes or so. I’ll scout the area again in a little while.”
“No need. It’s like a ghost today—so quiet. We should be glad Hahn’s clones aren’t popping out of the woodwork.” Chester sighed and leaned against the opposite wall, adjusting his thigh holster. It was shabby and starting to unravel at the seams. Four years of wear and tear will do that.
“Where’s that supply of ammo you promised we’d get?” Phoenix had an unhealthy amount of paranoia, and Chester discovered that keeping his men well-armed and full of ammunition served as a security blanket for Phoenix.
“Have patience. They should be in by tomorrow, or they’re gonna have to give us a free box next time.” Chester reassured him, and Phoenix visibly relaxed, sitting his weight down fully on the chilly floor and giving his legs the luxury to stretch out before him.
Lately, boxes full of various munitions had been delivered every five days or so from other subterranean networks. They were down to one box every time, so that had to mean something, though Chester wasn’t sure if that meant their enemies were multiplying or if the good guys were winning. Maybe a little bit of both.
And he thought, yeah, that might be a little scary. Well, a lot scary.
He didn’t care to die a martyr, because to be frank, Chester could care less if the rest of the world died with him. He just wanted to make certain Joseph Hahn, leader of the so-called Cloning Revolution, got to see Chester’s smiling face before he died. It was one of those sick things Chester liked to play over and over in his head at 3 o’clock in the morning, the time when most people die, sleeping on the cold, dirty floor while listening to the rodents scurry on small, clicking feet. Occasionally, it even replaced what he thought was his reason for fighting, which was mostly avenging Mike’s ‘death.’
Mike would be proud.
Sometimes, he subconsciously replaced Hahn with Mike in his head, and he might’ve dreamed of splitting that pretty face in two, shooting bullets that ripped through his chest and spiraled out the other side trailing blood like debris. And Chester always woke up with cold sweat matting his shirt to his skin, adrenaline pounding in him, pouring out of him in waves.
The dreams were always profound and vivid. Scary as hell, but it kept him sane. It kept him on his toes, the reminder that one day, if he succeeded, if his men survived and they resurfaced again, he might meet Mike one last time, and he might be able to pull the trigger if everything else failed.
War was something real, had been for years, and it flowed in his veins like blood. Chester and his men were merely field operatives who set things into action, but it was the most dangerous position to be in.
Their strategy team was a three-man work crew up in level 2 beneath the heart of old downtown, composed of two blond-haired men named Timberlake and Lance and a brunette named J.C. The three would send their men down occasionally to Chester with information and tactical maps of the latest major cloning activities aboveground along with detailed plans for takeovers and sieges. Chester would then pass the information on to a handful of men who would help his team and him execute the plan. Their specialty was seizing and destroying places of significance to cloning technology and advancement labs, test-buildings that had Joseph Hahn’s sticky, invisible fingerprints all over them. It was a difficult task; the tactical and strategists had it easy, staying relatively out of the line of fire.
He saw them once when they first went underground. They’d been dragging in two prisoners to the lab for testing and alteration, and they had looked a little too young and a little too pretty to survive. Although it was evident then that Timberlake had an iron-fist, and J.C. had promise in his eyes. Chester had assumed from the get-go that Lance was the brains of the operation by default.
But Chester was still too wary to trust them completely, despite all the help they had provided his crew in the past.
Chester wouldn’t trust anyone outside of his immediate family, who were essentially Brad and Phoenix, and his 9-millimeter Beretta 92F, tucked inside his boot. It had saved his life more times than he cared to admit.
“Hey,” Phoenix cast him a worried look, “I heard some shit went down today with our level 2 guys.”
Chester frowned and switched his assault rifle to his other shoulder to keep the left one from cramping up any worse than it already had. “What do you mean?”
Phoenix looked slightly green, but it might’ve been a trick of the—non-light. Things were always so dark, it was hard to tell what real, vibrant colors looked like, and the sewers were fairly close to them, so it could’ve been just that. Still, it wasn’t especially comforting.
“I’m not sure.” said Phoenix as he took in a deep breath, and Chester could practically see him figuring things out, hypothesizing what might’ve happened with Timberlake, Lance, and J.C. “This is all word-of-mouth, but I heard they went up and foraged some surveillance footage of Hahn’s lab facilities. They lifted it from Hahn’s computer terminals.”
Chester’s head snapped up and he moved toward him with curiosity.
“Do they still have it in their possession?”
Four years, and they had only been able to uncover a relatively small amount of information that could serve to destroy Hahn’s empire. This could be their biggest chance yet to take him down.
His cloning facilities were airtight and infallible, impenetrable, and there innocent people—because there were still free-borns every day, and untainted people still walked in cities where the putrid smell of decay and oiled machinery lingered as a way of life—were turned into drones and copied. Copied, as if they were shareware.
“I think so,” said Phoenix, looking more and more as if the blood was completely draining out of his face.
“Don’t tell me we gotta go up to confront that bastard.” Brad huffed irritably, looking up at some distant spot.
“Hahn? No,” Chester considered his options. “Maybe later, when he’s more vulnerable.”
“And when would that be?”
Smiling, Chester ignored Brad’s question and squatted down in front of Phoenix instead, patting his shoulder appreciatively, “Good job, Phi. We’ll pay our strategists a little visit tomorrow, but tonight—” he looked to Brad then and stood, “You guys should get some sleep. We’ll have to jump-start that old computer in storage tomorrow morning, see if we can dig up a little more dirt. And find some disks so we can copy the footage, just in case.”
The levels underground were divided into subdivisions which covered two miles for every division. Chester and his men had to travel six miles, a quarter mile up vertically, to reach level 2.
Two guards were standing at the entrance to what looked like a tunnel leading to a larger sewage system when they arrived, the guards’ arms carrying a Mac10 each. Chester eyed the Glocks in their thigh-holsters warily. He supposed such heavy weaponry was a precaution and a necessity. Still, he could tell Brad and Phoenix were already starting to twitch with unease.
tbc....
don't be afraid to tell me it's bad. no really, don't.