Surviving the Dead 03: Warrior Within (33 page)

“You are looking better, maggot. You are not being dead, or screaming like madman. That is good. Most maggots becoming like beasts, beating walls and crawling in dirt. There is being strength in you.”

“On your feet,” Tommy said. “Kas, cuff his hands behind his back.”

I stood up and stayed quiet while they adjusted my restraints. Rat-Face looked on with a smile on his ugly mug, practically beaming with perverse delight.

“You are smelling like shit,” Kasikov muttered. He gripped my arm and pulled me toward the door.

I followed them out into the corridor, and then left at the intersection with the other three tunnels. They were taking me back to the warehouse. Along the way, I again studied the way the tunnel had been constructed.

The air in my cell had been thick, but breathable, which coincided with what Morrow had said about the Legion’s crude ventilation system. Most of the tunnels they dug were only a few feet underground, which made it a simple matter to connect pipes to the surface and hide them under the abundant foliage. I also knew that the tunnels immediately around the warehouse were much larger and better maintained than most of their other tunnels. From what Morrow had told me, compared to the mines, this place was like the Hilton.

The passageway terminated at the ladder to the warehouse, where Kasikov gripped my arm and ordered me to wait while Tommy and Rat-Face climbed to the surface. Once they had turned and trained their rifles down the ladder, the Russian unlocked my cuffs and motioned for me to climb up. At the top, they cuffed me again, and marched me toward the Legion’s living area.

As the light grew brighter, I saw a man seated at a table with two others, all dressed in combat fatigues. I didn’t recognize any of them. A bottle of whiskey sat in the middle of the table, and all three men had full glasses in front of them. Miranda sat upon one of the men’s knees, stripped completely naked. The dirt was gone from her skin, and her long blond hair hung clean and untangled down her shoulders. She kept her face blank and stayed still as the man she sat on casually fondled her breasts. 

“Is this the new meat, Tommy?” he called out. The other two turned to look.

“Yes sir. Caught him snoopin’ around here ’bout a week ago. Got him broke down nice and docile.”

Keep telling yourself that, you fat piece of shit
.

Tommy dragged me into the light. The man at the table looked me up and down and nodded. “He’ll do. He give you any trouble?”

“Nothing we couldn’t handle,” Tommy replied.

The man nodded again, and turned his attention back to the girl on his lap. Now that I was up close, I could make out his features. He was older, maybe late forties or early fifties. His hair was straight and black, with the exception of a smattering of gray at the temples, and cut close to his scalp. He was taller than I am, and powerfully built. The hands he used to grope Miranda were large and strong, and square, chiseled features defined his face. After spending so much time around military types, I had learned to spot them from a mile away. This guy was definitely military.

“What do you think, Aiken?” he said, looking at the man seated across the table from him. The two of them bore a strong resemblance. Brothers, maybe?

“Pickings are getting slim around here, Lucian. We have to take what we can get.”

Yep. Definitely brothers. Even their voices sounded the same. The only way to tell them apart was that Aiken had a short, neatly trimmed beard.

Lucian flipped a hand at Tommy. “Fine, fine. The three of you can have my private stock for the week, and a couple of cases of booze. Be gentle with my property, though. I expect them to be returned in serviceable condition.”

“Thank you, sir. Very generous.” Tommy had a smile on his face when he turned and shoved me toward Kasikov. “Take this piece of shit to the mines.” He jerked a thumb toward a shack behind him. “Hurry back, though. We gonna have us a party.”

As Kasikov began leading me away, I peered over my shoulder through the dim light to see what Tommy was talking about. Inside the shack, I saw several women huddled together, all of them young, healthy, and attractive. Shackles hung from their wrists and ankles, and their faces were uniformly dull and expressionless. No light shined in their blank, staring eyes.

“Come on,” the big Russian said irritably. “You are being keeping me from my reward.”

As he dragged me toward the ladder, I heard Tommy and Rat-Face laughing lasciviously, and the soft whimpers of the women in the shack.

Bastards. Sick fucking bastards
.

*****

Back in the tunnels, Kasikov led me past the corridor to the isolation cells and then left at the intersection. The tunnel was new to me, and was much narrower than the one that connected to the warehouse. The Russian had to turn his broad shoulders sideways a few times to avoid striking the support beams.

“Soon you will to be missing your cell, I am thinking,” he said, grinning. “The mines are not being so nice place.”

I kept my mouth shut and focused on not falling down. Kasikov was setting a fast pace and, with the leg irons limiting my stride, I had to run in short little steps to keep up.

As he dragged me through the darkness, the lantern in his hand only chased the inky black away for a few feet. The ground became wetter as we walked, the hard-pack of the main tunnels giving way to slick mud that threatened to send my feet flying out from under me with every
step. Even Kasikov had to slow down to keep his footing. Eventually we reached a T-intersection with a crudely drawn sign hanging on the wall in front of us. Two spray-painted arrows pointed in either direction, one of them labeled “CNCTR LP,” and the other “HR AXS.”

We turned in the direction labeled “CNCTR LP,” where the tunnel became even smaller, and we both had to duck our heads to avoid hitting the support struts in the ceiling. Along the way, I thought about the writing on the sign, and what the labels meant. It reminded me of something I had seen in an Anthropology class in college.

The class had been one of those easy A’s that padded the elective requirements of countless legions of lazy college students. The instructor, being one of those professors who believed that his fieldwork was far more important than a task as menial as teaching, deferred most of the classroom time to a show called “The Naked Archeologist.” I guess the producers thought that including “Naked” in the title would make it more interesting. I don’t think it worked.

On one episode, the host—a pretentious, annoying type who, thankfully, was fully clothed—explored the history of written language. One of the most significant advancements in written language was the invention of vowels, but according to the host, this was a bad thing. He felt that written language had far more style and nuance when it consisted only of consonants. Personally, I thought the guy was full of shit. But the examples of consonant-only writing that he displayed were very much like the sign back at the intersection.

“CNCTR LP,” if said aloud, would sound remarkably close to Connector Loop. But what about “HR AXS’? “Her Axis” didn’t make any sense. Maybe it was initials? Ignoring the HR for the moment, I focused on AXS. The only word other than “axis” that fit was “access.” HR access …

Shit. HR Access. Hollow Rock Access? The town was nearly fifteen miles away. That would be a huge undertaking and, from what I had seen so far, I wasn’t sure that the Legion had that kind of manpower. At least not at this site.

By counting to sixty over and over again in my head, I estimated that it took us nearly two hours of hard walking to get where we were going. At the pace we were setting, that could have been anywhere from seven to nine miles, again confirming what Grayson Morrow had told me.

Finally, we came around a corner and I saw light up ahead of us. As we got closer, I saw that the source of the light was a set of lanterns, much like the one carried by Kasikov, all of them hanging from the ceiling. There were three men standing at the edge of the light brandishing AKs, and passing a bottle back and forth. The bottle disappeared as we came within shouting distance.

“
Zdravstvujtye
, shitworms,” the Russian shouted jovially. “I am to be having new meat for you.” He thrust me at the three men hard enough to make me lose my footing. I landed on my side in the mud at the nearest man’s feet. “You are to be chaining him and making him to work. You,” he pointed at the man who had tucked the bottle away, “be giving me that booze.”

Reluctantly, the guard handed it to him. “You are not to be drinking this shit on duty,” Kasikov said. “Are you to be forgetting that those maggots will cut your throat if you let them?”

He made a gesture to the far end of the corridor, and I craned my neck to look. Ahead of me, barely visible in the distance, were the struggling forms of at least a dozen men, all wearing chains and toiling away.

“Hey, we got this covered Kas,” one of them said.

The big Russian’s friendly demeanor vanished in an instant. His eyes went hard, and his lips curled back from his teeth as he got in the man’s face.

“Do not be telling me what you are fucking covering,” he hissed, and grabbed the man by the front of his shirt, nearly lifting him off the ground. “You will to be doing what you are told, or I will to be breaking your goddamn neck.”

“Okay, okay. Shit, Kas, what the fuck?” the man said, holding his hands up in surrender.

Slowly, the Russian let him go. He looked around to each man in turn, favoring them with a wintry scowl. “You are to be taking this shit seriously. No fucking up,
da
?”

They all nodded, not risking speech for fear of angering the big man. A few tense moments passed before Kasikov turned on his heel and marched off back the way he came, leaving me on the ground with the three Legion troops.

One of them reached down the hauled me to my feet. “Let’s go, maggot,” he said. “You got work to do.”

I followed along down the corridor toward the clinking of chains. The light of the lanterns faded behind me, and soon, I had my first introduction to life in the mines.

I had to give the Legion credit; they had quite the operation going.

The crew I worked with consisted of fourteen men: two to dig new sections of tunnel, four to install the support beams and ventilation pipes, and the rest to haul away dirt. Most of the jobs rotated out from day to day, but for the first five days, all I did was carry buckets.

It was tedious work that first week, to say the least. Bucket after endless bucket. The dirt we dug out of the ground was stored in the warehouse, where another crew, working only under cover of night, would haul it away and dump it in a nearby lake. The pace of dirt coming out of the ground was always faster than the pace at which it could be hauled away, which explained the huge piles accumulating on the warehouse floor. Not that it mattered, really. The warehouse was massive, and the piles only took up a third of the floor space.

On the rare occasions when it was my turn to carry buckets up the ladder, I noticed that there was a huge stockpile of ventilation pipes, wooden beams, and other materials on the opposite end of the floor. Where the Legion had gotten all of it from I had no clue, but it looked like enough for at least a hundred miles of tunnel.

The other captives and I worked, ate our one meal a day, drank our inadequate supply of water, and slept on wooden pallets down in the tunnels, all under the watchful eyes of Legion guards. There were only three of them, rotating out every four hours, but they were heavily armed and under orders to execute anyone who so much as thought about starting trouble. As long as we stayed quiet, kept our heads down, and did as we were told, the guards left us alone. I think they found the duty to be only marginally less miserable than those of us doing the actual work.

In those first few days, I noticed that there was very little talking among the captives. They only spoke to one another in the course of work, and even then only in whispers. And only when absolutely necessary. I tried starting up conversations with a few of them, but they just gave me a horrified look and scuttled away. On one occasion, one of the guards saw me doing it, and rewarded my efforts with a rifle stock to the kidney.

“Don’t you know the rules, maggot?” He laughed as I dropped my bucket and fell to the ground. “No talking. Period. Let me catch you doing that again, and I’ll beat you to fucking death.”

Lacking anything else to do, other than backbreaking slave labor, I devoted my time to studying each Legion soldier and assigning them a name. Some of them I learned from overheard conversations, and others I simply made up based on some quirk or physical attribute. I didn’t name them because I cared who they were, or because I felt the need to humanize them. It was simply a means of coming up with an accurate count.

From what I gathered, there were sixty men stationed here at the warehouse, and another fifty that patrolled between underground bases along the perimeter of Legion territory. This location seemed to be one of the least popular ones among the soldiers, and I always heard them complaining about how long it would be before they rotated out to a place they called Haven. It struck me as a remarkably innocuous name for a den of thieves, rapists, and murderers.