Weekly Drabble #228: Underneath (Patreon)

This week's prompts are 'the sun never shines' from EBB and 'broken bones' from Xpholia. With those, it's a little trip back to Horrak-Sarn, and a part of the city that, until now, has been reference but never seen. Enjoy!

Underneath:

The light swept across the tunnel, over the mushy sewage that trickled away. It caught the source of the sounds in its stark white beam: a pair of tar hound pups, fighting over a pile of bones. Their eyes glinted red in the reflected light, they barked and snapped at the intruders before dropping their prize and fleeing back into the shadows.

Behind Siegfried, Anna was bent over, one hand on her knees, the other hovering over the breather that covered her mouth and nose. “Don’t take it off,” Siegfried told the newbie. “Don’t do it. You get a whiff of this and you really will start puking.”

He nodded to George, the big man putting one around around Anna’s shoulders to steady her, while the other held her mask in place, keeping her from pulling it off. “Work through it,” he said in his deep Afrikaaner rumble. “Cough all you want, but keep the rest down. There you go, that’s a good girl. Just work through it.” Like Siegfried, George was a veteran Beneather. Unlike Siegfriend, he was Earth-born. Siegfried had been born here in the City, just like his father. Probably his father’s father, too. His mother was Earth-born, one of many slaves the Masters took whenever the whim struck them. Or maybe it wasn’t a whim and they acted upon some inscrutable alien timetable. Who could say?

Siegfried’s mother had never spoken of his father, not in any but the most vague ways. At thirty-eight years old, he knew as little about him as he had at seventeen. He’d never known if his parents had loved each other and his father’s death was too painful for Serilde to speak of, whether he’d been the result of a hurried one-night affair between slaves seeking what comfort they could find, or if he was a child of rape. Any of those were possible here and he’d never pressed, letting his mother take her secrets to the grave.

She’d been very proud that he’d been elevated from the slave populations to servants’ quarters, but she’d remained among the cattle for her entire life. Too defiant, too wilful. Too many of the Earth-born were like that, even after they’d been broken in. Some, like George, learned and prospered. Others didn’t. The jury was still out on Anna. Her technical skills had gotten her elevated from the pens, but she hadn’t been properly broken in, so it fell to Siegfried and his crew to keep an eye on her. If she fucked up they all looked bad. If she tried to run or sabotage them, they’d all be in a world of shit. He’d seen work crews get sent back to the pens because they couldn’t control their teammates. He’d also seen crews go down into the Beneath with a troublesome worker and come back up without them. When asked, they shrugged and said‘Things happen.’If pressed, you might get a story about the missing man or woman having an accident, or being attacked by one of the creatures that called the under-city home and that might even be true... but it was just as likely, if not more so, that the troublesome worker’s end had come at the hands of their fellow workers.

Better that then they all pay the price. Fortunately for her, Anna wasn’t that kind of trouble. She was just annoying, complaining about the work, talking about Earth, running her mouth. She’d learned not to say anything about the Masters. She’d thought she’d find camaraderie there, but she’d learned different. The one time she’d started talking about them, George slapped her so hard his hand-print was left on her face for the rest of the day. No matter what he, Siegfried or anyone else thought about the Masters, they knew not to speak of them.

Anna had gotten that message, but she was still getting acclimated to her new life and talked too much. Much as Siegfried occasionally fantasized about staving in the back of her head with a wrench to put an end to that, things didn’t happen to people just for being annoying. At least not on his crew. As long as Anna did her work and didn’t stir shit, he could put up with her complaints. They’d peter out eventually and if they didn’t, she’d find herself assigned to a work crew with the rest of the irritants and given the really shit jobs.

Finally, the woman got a hold of herself, her gasping and coughing turning to harsh but steadier breaths through the rebreather. They worked wonders, purifying the reeking sewer atmosphere into fresh, clean air. But they couldn’t do anything about the stink that clung to you, or the greasy, damp feeling that make you feel like you were pushing through a thin film of shit with every step. Nothing for it, though. The sewers were as vital a part of the city as anywhere else and someone had to tend to them. Checking power lines, pumps and water treatment centers. Clearing and maintaining the underground rail lines and subways. Cleaning out vermin infestations.It all had to be done. That was where the self-styled ‘Beneathers’ came in, those hardy souls who worked in the City’s most dangerous regions.

Other work teams went on about the threats topside like Watchers, but Siegfried had never lost a man to one of them. He’d seen men get torn to pieces by tar hounds, dragging screaming into muck by swamp-crocs, butchered by the muties that lived down here and a hundred other horrible ends. The topside workers went on about some feather-winged mutants like they were the be-all and end-all of dangers. Oh, he knew they were dangerous, but not as much as what Siegfried and his fellow Beneathers risked on the daily. There was a reason every man on Siegfried’s team had a pistol on their hips, and he and Bill carried short-barrel shotguns. Anna wasn’t allowed to carry. On Earth, she’d been privileged and she barely knew which end of a gun the bullet came out of. She was as apt to shoot one of them in panic as any threats that presented themselves. Even if that wasn’t a concern, she wasn’t trusted enough to be allowed a weapon.

Human Maintenance would decide that, probably asking Siegfried his opinion. He wasn’t about to sign off on arming her. A few months in the soup and then they’d see. If she lasted that long. “God,” she whimpered like the cow she’d once been. “How do you none of you...?” she pointed to the pile of broken bones and scraps of cloth. “That was a child.”

“Or a midget,” Bill said. “Just think of it that way. Some midget with a long, fulfilling life came down here and had a heart attack, passing away peacefully and painlessly.”

Anna glared daggers at the man. She knew mockery when she heard it. “Fuck you,” she snapped.

“It happens,” Siegfried told her. “Kids get separated from their parents, get scared and they try and find a hiding spot. Sometimes they find the wrong one. It won’t be the last set of bones you find here in the Beneath, newb.”

Andre piped up from the rear. “One of the air maintenance teams got called in to a tower. Got told there was a weird smell coming from the ducts. Went in and found a little girl wedged inside. Probably wa slooking for a warm place to spend the night and got spooked by security, ducked into the vents. Got stuck and died there.” He shrugged. “Shit happens. It happened before we got here and it’ll happen long after we’re gone. Probably happen to some of us, too.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“No one said it did,” Siegfried told her.“What do you want, newb? You want us to have a nice little sit-down and cry for whatever kid was dumb enough to come to this deep into the Beneath? You want to explain why we’re running behind to the supervisor?”

She glared at him over her mask. He wasn’t intimidated. He’d seen a lot scarier shit than one former slave. “No,” she told him. “No. I just want...” she hesitated here. “I want someone to acknowledge how fucked-up this is!”

“Fine. It’s fucked up. We good? Okay. Now that we’ve done that, I don’t want to hear anything out of your mouth for the rest of the shift that isn’t work related. Not one word, newb. Think you can handle that?”

The woman’s gaze turned incendiary, but she nodded. “Good,” Siegfried said. “Then let’s keep moving. There’s a fault in the lines somewhere past the perimeter and it needs to be fixed before sundown. Lots of nastier shit than tar pups lives down here and a lot of it wakes up at that time.”

The group continued along in silence; in Anna’s case, it was a sullen and hostile silence, but Siegfried didn’t let that bother him. Like he said, they had a job to do. George was from Earth. He’d learned. Anna would too. Or things would happen. Easy as that.

They arrived at the outermost of the pump stations that serviced this section of the City. Siegfried didn’t know where the water came from; it ran through the Beneath like a river with no beginning or end. Filtration stations and treatment facilities cleaned the sewage and industrial waste from it, making it as pure as any water from Earth. Most of the time. Siegfried could hear the humming and pulsing of the pumps as they pulled water from the aquifers and underground pools up into the facility, cleaning it and diverting it to algal pools for slave food or further up to the towers, where it would be drunk, bathed in, used for hydroponic farms and kept the great city alive.

There were guards here. House guards, not general security forces. Some might have found it odd for household troops to be stationed so far from the Masters, and assumed this was some kind of punishment detail, but the Masters were smarter than that. These troops were here not only to protect the station, but to secure the borders and keep their territory safe. Or safer,at least. Every day a unit would leave this station, stalking out into the darkness and every day they would come back to meet their comrades, smiling,covered in blood and shit and carrying the heads of mutants, monsters and free-range cattle. The next day, the units would switch up, the hunters remaining behind and the guards going out to kill.

Men and women with faces obscured by rebreathers and top of the line night-vision goggles watched Siegfried and his people approach. He showed them the work orders. The senior guard on duty, a tall stocky woman, looked over them. “Glad you’re here,” she said. Her voice was a monotonous buzz through her speaker. “The last two days the station’s been jumping to emergency power randomly because of the short. A couple of our own techs went out to find the fault. We only got one back.”

“That’s why we’re here. We’ll run it down.”

“Hopefully. The survivor said there was something out there. He didn’t see what it was, but we’ve had mutie problems of late. One of the grounded gangs pushed them out of their territory and they’re looking for a new roost. They keep trying to get in this sector.”

Siegfried nodded. If there was one thing the grounded – the so-called ‘free’ humans – and the Masters’ servants agreed on, it was keeping the mutants in their place. “They probably tapped the line for power and shat up the job.”

“Maybe. Bravo team is out on sweep and cleanse right now. In the last two days, we’ve brought in five heads. Those kinds of losses usually scare off the little tribes, so they might be on the run now.”

“Or they might be a bigger problem.”

The guard’s head tilted. “That’s why we’re here.” She led the work team to the reinforced double gate that led from the station out into the unclaimed Beneath. “Bravo’s expecting a work team in their area, but I’ll remind them to check their targets. Last thing we want is blue on blue.”

“Definitely.” The soldier didn’t offer Siegfried and his people an escort. That wasn’t her job, and the work teams that went deep in the Beneath were expected to look after themselves. That was why they carried a small arsenal on their persons. So far, Siegfried had never come up against anything he and his people couldn’t handle. “You have our radio frequency, but comms can be spotty. If you see something, call it in.”

“Thanks, mom,” Bill said. George cuffed him across the back of the head. The work team, five of them in their heavy, padded overalls, headlamps, flashlights, toolkits and assorted weaponry looked back at Siegfried as he checked over them one last time.

“All right,” he said to them and to the soldiers at the gate. “Let’s go.”