Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant (17 page)

The underground passages were more extensive than anyone had realized, Marcus told him; they extended under the city, and parts were hundreds of years old, built when the dockyard was first constructed. A lot of the things stored down there were useless, but it was still worth checking every nook and cranny for anything that could be reused. People were starting over with almost nothing they’d been used to having even in the worst days of Jacinto, and no way to manufacture it for maybe years to come.

How the hell did the Locust queen know Adam Fenix?

Dom cradled his Lancer one-handed and stuck his other hand under his arm for warmth. The cold ate through his gloves like acid.

She just said that to fuck with Marcus’s head. The bitch was probably the one who killed his dad anyway
. Well, she was gone now, with pretty well all her stinking kind. Dom was disappointed that he hadn’t come across more grub stragglers. He hadn’t had any closure at all, not even seeing the tunnels flooding, and he understood Bernie’s rare loss of discipline in wanting to carve up that grub.
God knows what they did to Marcus’s dad, then. And I bet Marcus is still chewing that over, but he’ll never say
a word about it. Funny—me and him, we know every damn thought the other has by now, and yet there’s still
some shit we never talk about. His mom. His dad. Anya. Prison
.

Dom made up his mind there and then. He’d have a serious talk with Marcus when he rostered off. He’d finally tell him to stop dicking around over Anya, and that he ought to have learned his lesson when he thought she’d been killed. One minute he was distraught when he couldn’t contact her, and the next it was back to we’re-justfriends business as usual.
Bullshit. You’ve got no idea how much life will hurt without her, Marcus
. A broken bottle lay in the gutter opposite the checkpoint. Dom watched it for a while, trying to work out how long it had been there, why nobody had collected it to reuse it like every other precious scrap of material in Port Farrall, and why it was glittering in the faint light from the checkpoint post. Then he realized it was moving. Every so often, it would shiver.

It’s the wind
.

He kept watching, gradually more engrossed in it. It rattled against the curb.
No
.

It looked like it was vibrating.

Shit
.

Dom didn’t trust his own eyes at the moment. He’d seen some weird and wholly unreal things since the assault on Landown, mostly centered on Maria, and the medic had told him it was concussion and stress. He pressed his radio earpiece, just to make sure he wasn’t seeing things again.

“Checkpoint Eight to Control, Santiago here.”

Don’t say it. It’s the wind, you know it is
.

He didn’t get an immediate response from Mathieson. Things were quiet in Port Farrall compared to the usual comms traffic that CIC was used to, so Dom expected some acknowledgment right away. He switched to the open radio circuit to see if there was something happening elsewhere, and the chatter of civilian drivers, Gear loadmasters, and perimeter sentries filled his ear. Proper radio procedure had gone to ratshit now.

“Five-Seven here. Three-Nine, are you gonna move that heap? I need the ramp.”

“Three-Nine to Five-Seven—sorry, man, give me two minutes.”

“Control, those goddamn dogs are back in the storage vaults. I can hear them scratching. Any chance of some
assertive pest control?”

Dom noticed that the city at his back was suddenly silent. It wasn’t just the general quiet of a bitterly cold night. It was like a scared, suddenly held breath.

Oh God, it’s not just me …

Dom felt it with senses sharpened by fifteen years of practice. It made him look down at the road beneath his boots. It made him check his Lancer and start looking around him, 360 degrees. It put him on full alert. The broken bottle was now tapping gently but insistently against the concrete curb,
chink-chink-chink-chink-
chink …

And then voices erupted in his earpiece, and he knew he wasn’t crazy.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God—”

“Shit, they’re here.”

“Where are you? Where the fuck are you?”

“Fire!”

The screaming and yelling lasted five chaotic seconds before the ground under him shook and he started running. He bolted back into the city, not even thinking, letting his reflexes take him. The pavement ahead collapsed into a long narrow trench like opening a zipper, and he jumped clear, but the subsidence was streaking away from him, sucking down concrete and paving slabs as it made for the center of the Port Farrall camp. He could hear screaming already. The civilians were packed into the southern part of the abandoned port, and they knew as well as any Gear what was happening.

The grubs were back.

And all he wanted to do was get at them the moment they broke through the surface. He couldn’t
see
them. There was no more radio traffic from the underground stores, so he guessed that was where they’d entered; they’d come in under the city using tunnels obligingly dug for them by humans years before. It didn’t matter that these were just a handful left out of a vast army. They could still kill. They’d effectively been let loose in a cage full of humans, at a time when humans were an endangered species.

I wanted to take a crack at them one last time, didn’t I?

Tell me I didn’t make it happen somehow
.

“Control, Santiago here—I’m following the tunnel collapse. You got any sightings?”

“They’re emerging around the communal buildings. Food center, medical stations, latrines. All squads, engage.”

“How many? I said,
how many?”

Dom lost track of the welter of voices. He could pick out Mathieson, and then he heard Marcus calling for fire support. A battle had erupted in the center of town. Dom could see the flashes of light and hear the explosions. He was now running against a tide of civvies heading down the street toward him, women carrying kids bundled in just their nightclothes, some folks clutching the grab bags they’d been so thoroughly drilled to snatch and run with when disaster struck. It was blind flight; Dom was still looking for something to kill. The civvies could have been running into more grubs, but he had no way of knowing or stopping them. He just needed to hook up with his squad.

Where’s Anya? Oh shit. Did she make it back to CIC?

Thunder rumbled ahead. He saw what he thought was billowing smoke, but it was dust; he inhaled it as he ran on, dodging lumps of masonry in the road. A building had collapsed. By the time he got out of the cloud of debris, he’d reached the city square where the food center had been set up, and then he found his grubs. The center was always busy. It took all day to serve meals and allocate rations, so there were plenty of people pinned down there. Bernie and Baird were easy to pick out among the Gears firing from cover because they never wore helmets, but Dom couldn’t see Marcus or Cole. He would have tried to raise Anya on the radio, but that wasn’t what his body was telling him he had to do, and he ended up flat against the nearest wall, taking shots from the cover of the corner of a derelict bank.

A couple of dozen drones sprayed the food center with gunfire as civvies tried to escape or run back inside. A Berserker lurched around the square in a killing frenzy; the chain from her harness flailed wildy. She’d probably tracked the human scent, because that was all the female grubs were good for—mindless, savage bitches, even by grub standards. Dom waited for her to swing around, blocking him from the main direction of the drones’ fire, and then ran for Baird’s position.

The Berserker stopped and turned to focus on Dom.

Oh shit…

Now he’d find out how many reloads it would take to drop her. He was caught in the open. Suddenly he didn’t care.

So what?
So what?
I’m going to kill them all, and if I take out a female, I stop her from dropping any more
litters
.

Dom ran at her, firing with some half-assed idea that he could hit her underbelly, and knew he was going to die doing it. At that point, life became perfectly clear, sane, the calm eye of the storm. He knew what he had to do, and there was no need to worry about what he would have to live with afterward when the adrenaline stopped pumping.

There wouldn’t be an
afterward
.

The Berserker closed the gap. Dom could smell her. He was sure he wasn’t imagining how bad grubs smelled even when they weren’t dead.

And I’ll die, and so will you, bitch
.

He sidestepped to reload, weirdly relaxed and easy. Someone yelled at him and he caught the word
asshole
, but he took no notice until a Centaur roared past on his right. The next thing he knew, he’d been slammed flat on his back with a weight across him, winded, and a massive explosion showered him with wet debris. The firefight carried on. He tried to get up. Grenade rounds flashed over him.

“Are you fucking
insane?”
It was Marcus. He pinned Dom to the ground.
“Stay down!”

Huge tires passed so close to Dom’s head that he could smell them, as pungent as the stink of the Berserker, a choking stench of rubber that caught the back of his throat. He struggled to turn his head to see what was happening. The tanks had moved in to finish the grubs.

Shit
.

“Clear! Suck on that, assholes.” That was Cole, a few meters away. “Yeah, we’re done, baby. Anyone got a flamethrower? Let’s clean the drains …”

Marcus got up and looked down at Dom for a moment before giving him a hand up. Dom was lobbed back into reality, his detachment suddenly gone, leaving him with a pounding heart and ragged breath.
Oh shit. I’m crazy
.

“Dom, don’t do this.” Marcus grabbed his shoulder one -handed as if he was going to shake some sense into him.
“You’re going to get through it
. There’s no point beating these assholes if you throw your life away.”

Dom could decode Marcus well enough by now. Guilt crashed in on him again, but this time it wasn’t about Maria. He tried to be his old self, as much for his own reassurance as for Marcus.

“Sorry, man. I just get mad.”

Marcus let go of his shoulder, then walked from grub to grub as if he was tallying the corpses, nodding. “I know. Just remember that a Centaur round up the ass is going to ruin your day, and mine.”

The Centaur gunner leaned out of the tank’s top hatch and called down to them. She had a good vantage point way up there.

“There’s not many. I make it less than forty.” She pushed back her goggles and pressed her earpiece, listening for a moment. “Yeah, small raiding party. We’re going to keep getting stragglers, but at least they’re down to their womenfolk now.”

“Small by the old standards,” Marcus said. “But not when they get loose among civvies.”

Dom watched casualties being carried away. “They’ve got to stop sometime. The numbers are dropping.”

A woman with bright red curly hair walked up to him carrying a little boy in her arms, maybe four or five years old. Dom thought she was just going to ask him for help until she got closer and he realized that the kid was dead. The boy’s head lolled right back; there was a clean entry wound in the upper chest. Dead kids were the hardest thing Dom had to cope with.

“We were supposed to be
safe
here,” the woman said, completely dry-eyed but shaking with shock.
“You
were supposed to keep us safe, you bastards. What am I going to tell his father?”

She might as well have backhanded Dom across the face. It felt like she had, and he wanted to tell her he knew exactly what it felt like to lose your kids, but he didn’t even know where to start. The woman walked off, straight into the arms of one of the civilian medical team, and Dom teetered on the edge between tearful grief and complete shutdown. Then he blanked the whole thing, because he had to. Marcus steered him back toward the barracks.

They were still passing civilians with bags. They were heading out, or at least it looked like it. Marcus stopped a middle-aged man with two teenage boys as they passed.

“It’s over,” Marcus said. “You can go home now.”

“Home, my ass,” the man said. “There’s no
home
anymore. We’re going to find the nearest Stranded community. They seem to survive okay.”

Dom watched them disappear down the road. They weren’t alone; he passed a few dozen on the walk back to the old school. Whatever had held people together in Jacinto was starting to come unraveled.

“Vote of no confidence,” Marcus muttered. “Over to you, Mr. Chairman …”

Dom wasn’t sure that even Prescott’s spin skills could make people feel good about Port Farrall. Like a car wreck, you were relieved to stagger out alive, but then you realized you were hurt and a long way from home with no way of getting back.

This was the core of what was left of humankind, and there was no rescue service on the way.

“Yeah, shit,” said Dom.