0326 27 June 2016
Somewhere beneath the streets of Rhydin...
He heard the pop before he felt the pain and knew immediately that he'd screwed the pooch. He went over in a heap and Browen nearly landed on him, somehow avoiding the same fate. "Quit playin' around, we've gotta go!
It hurt enough that trying to stand seemed like a manifestly bad idea, but he did it anyway. It was everything he'd expected. Crosby slid down the ladder and hesitated at the bottom. "...the hell happened to him?"
"Landed wrong," Grey said shakily. "Think it's sprained." There was a layer of debris and litter at least six inches deep at the bottom of the shaft, the usual crap that washed through the streets and collected in storm drains around the city. Crosby gave him a blank, flat look and then shrugged. He hopped off the ladder and vanished into the dark tunnel running underneath the streets.
"You've gotta get up, Grey," Browen was starting to look anxious, not much of a difference from his usual expression of benign, placid confusion. He was hired for his muscles, not his brains or his skill. That was supposed to be Grey's specialty. Grey tried to stand again, teeth gritted, and only Browen's sudden helping hand kept him from faceplanting.
"It's pretty frakked," he managed to speak instead of screaming, but it was a near thing. There was no way to tell in the gloom if it was bruised or broken, but his boot felt far too tight. "You'd better get, Brow'. If Crosby's scuttling like that, the Chechens must be ready to kick down the door, blyad." He hated working with flim-flam men. In Grey's perfect world, everyone got what they wanted and walked away happily - excepting maybe the government, with its talk of taxes, and licenses, and Schedule II narcotics. Con artists like Crosby, though, only gave a damn about themselves at the end of the day. Sociopaths, the lot of them, and usually he knew better....but like they said, you can't con an honest man. He'd let the obvious money potential blind him to the plan's equally obvious stupidity. If he was lucky, the Chechens would just break his other ankle and let him go with a warning.
There was a blast from above that shook the tunnel, followed by a lot of screaming. It wasn't pain that made him wince this time, although his ears hurt. Honestly, the way the night was going, he shoulda known better than to even think about luck...
"Can't leave a man behind," Browen grunted and pulled Grey's arm over his shoulder. "I got ya, buddy." It felt like his arm was going to get popped out of its socket, but he held his tongue. Still better than the Chechens, and the tunnels were low enough Browen was going to have issues as it was; nevermind trying a fireman's carry or a piggy-back ride.
"You're a peach, man. A true droog," he said instead. Browen shrugged, and the pressure on Grey's shoulder was enough to make him bite back a curse. The bigger man didn't notice, intent on following in Crosby's footsteps - long since faded in the distance - down the tunnel. Grey had made it a point to walk out their escape route before the meet; he made it a point to always have a backup plan in effect, and then a backup for the backup. Unfortunately, sometimes the rabbit hole went deeper than his preparation and paranoia could account for, and then he ended up having to wing it. This was rapidly developing into one of those nights...
"Westies gotta stick together, right Grey' 'cause ain't nobody else gonna stick by us."
"Yeah, Brow'. That's right." Yeah, Westies stuck by each other. They also cheated each other, murdered each other, kept each other down like crabs clinging on when someone tried to climb out of the bucket. But there was no reason to point that out when he was literally being hauled to safety, and in better times he wouldn't want to strip that delusion from Browen's eyes. These tunnels were never intended for people to pass through them, but the Rhydin underworld was expansive and growing every day. Most people were smart enough to stay the hell away, but thieves always needed a shadow highway for their goods and services. The monsters and the hazards picked off one or two of the less wary, or less lucky, every month and the remainder counted themselves as smarter and more fortunate....at least until their number came up.
It was starting to look like the dice had made their final call when they got to the exit, and found the manhole stuck in place. Crosby had evidently been taking no chances on being followed. Grey wanted to swear, but the way Browen looked at him - still placid, still calm, trusting that his smarter, smaller friend had a way out - made him bite the words back. So he just smiled that crooked grin and said, "There's another way out further along - I checked. Hopefully the Chechens will think we all went out this one, and waste their time chasing Cros' down." And much joy may they have of the little weasel, he thought. They'd been hearing sounds of pursuit for a while now - the clang as the manhole they'd come down had been forced open, shouts and threats faintly echoing down the tunnels. They were still pretty far behind, but they were gaining. Browen hefted him up again, and they continued on.
The next manhole was sealed, too. Browen was beginning to look less placid, more panicky. Grey was beginning to think the world had it out for him tonight. "Okay," he said. "We're still okay, no worries. These tunnels - there's gotta be another manhole up the line, and worse to worst, they've gotta discharge out in the river or the harbor. We keep moving, we'll be fine."
"Alright, Grey, if you say so," Browen said. "I gotta rest, though. You ain't that heavy, but stooping like this, it hurts my back."
Grey snorted; he was skinny enough, but only someone Browen's size and strength would consider half carrying nearly ten stone to be 'not that heavy.' "Yeah, droog, take your time." He listened to the sounds of the tunnels for a moment, but couldn't pick up the muffled echoes of the Chechens behind them. Maybe they'd forced the hatch and gone after Crosby after all.
One could hope.
After a moment, Grey dug his mobile out of his pocket. Couple messages, nothing pressing. He thought for a second, and then typed a quick text to Roach. Miss yer busted face, khoroshen'ky. After a moment's consideration - was it too much' Not enough' - he hit send. Browen couldn't help but notice.
"Girlfriend?" he asked. Grey blinked, then shook his head.
"Nah, nah. Just a good time," he said.
"Booty call, then?" Tired as he was, Browen could still manage a respectable leer. Grey frowned.
"It's not like that, either."
"Yeah, I bet ya respected the hell out of her....in the morning." Browen laughed. Grey shook his head, willing to let it slide - for now. The man did just carry his busted arse several miles through a storm tunnel, and it could probably be excused that he had the manners of a troll. You couldn't help what you were born as, after all.
"Saw her before the job," he said instead. "Looked like something was bothering her." Which, considering he'd watched her set her own broken nose with little more than irritation and bad words, said a lot. "Maybe I should have blown this off, stuck around."
Browen tilted his ugly head to one side like a curious baby bird. "I thought you gave up that white knight bull after your roommates got killed?"
"...yeah. So did I." He managed a faint smile, more self mocking than anything. "How're ya feelin'" Ready to get moving?"
Browen shook his head. "Not quite yet....couple more minutes, ya" How's the ankle?"
"Hurts like a suka," Grey gritted his teeth and poked at it with his fingers. Definitely swollen, so if he took his boot off to get a better look he wasn't going to get it back on. Besides, this didn't look like the type of place you wanted to go exposing your tender bits to, not if you wanted to keep them attached to you. "I might be able to walk, though. A bit."
"How long we known each other, Grey?" Browen's voice sounded far away. Grey glanced up, to see the bigger man standing near the tunnel out. He smiled faintly.
"I dunno, Brow'. Couple years?" He shrugged, tucked his phone back into his pocket, and let his hand rest inconspicuously behind his waist. "'sup?"
"Yeah....you know, you always look the same" Looked just like that when I met you. Freakiest thing," Browen said. He was rambling. He glanced down the tunnel, first in the direction from which they had come, then towards presumed safety.
"Brow'- just go, man." Grey held up his left hand to forestall the protest. "Seriously, there's no reason for both of us to go down for this. Just do me a favor, and give Crosby a good kick in the nuts for dumping us into the shen like this, okay' Right in the huevos. Stupid ublyodok deserves at least that much, blyad."
Browen shrugged apologetically. "Yeah, okay. It's just, you know-" He shrugged again, then lifted a hand and walked away. Grey shook his head.
"Shoulda left me an hour ago. Blyad." He rubbed his eyes and tried to rest his weight on his hurt side again. It still wasn't having any of it. He was gonna have to pull himself along, leaning on the tunnel wall, if he couldn't find enough debris to improvise a crutch...
It was then he heard the voices, speaking Chechen. Closer than he would have thought, far closer than he liked. He dropped immediately, and dragged himself into the little alcove he'd noticed earlier. There wasn't much to it, just a narrow and low notch in the wall, but just maybe - in the dark, with some rubble dragged in after him....He had just managed to finish tucking himself all the way in and doing just that when their lights stabbed his eyes, grown accustomed to the dim gloom. Half a dozen of them. High powered flashlights, mounted on nasty looking rifles. They weren't messing around.
"We haven't caught up to those bastards yet?" One of them snarled in gutteral, barely understandable English. "What the hell is wrong with that frakking toy of yours" Find them!"
"We're on the right trail," a slight man with glasses said in a bored tone. Native English speaker, maybe from back on Earth. He didn't have a Rhydin accent, but Grey couldn't quite place it, either. "One went up that first ladder. The other one went this way."
"What about the third prick?"
The slender man shrugged and gestured with his device - something like an ectoreader and a tricorder had met in a bar one evening and had a drunken tryst. "Just the two of them. Third guy must have taken another way out of the warehouse."
"Maybe it's broken," a third man said. Grey couldn't see the operator's eyes roll from behind his glasses, but he could hear it in the man's voice.
"It's not broken. I told you, I'm getting life signs on the last guy just fine, and I could see where the other one went up the ladder. It's working exactly according to spec. Let's get a move on, or he's gonna make it to the end of the line before we catch him."
"Like hell," the apparent leader muttered, gesturing for one of his men to precede him into the tunnel. After a moment, they were gone down the passage, moving quickly. Grey exhaled, not entirely sure how they'd missed picking him up. This hardly seemed like the time to worry about it, though.
"Sorry, Brow'," he murmured as he dug himself out of his hidey hole. How long had they known each other" Hadn't Browen been one of Sadie's little lost doves? So, that meant it had been....his head hurt as he tried to think about it, and he shrugged. Couldn't have been that long, then. Guy could fend for himself. He was gonna have to, because there was no way Grey was in any shape to come charging to anyone's rescue.
His phone dinged at him. Digging it out and checking his messages he saw he had a delivery error; no signal. With a sigh, he clicked delete. Stupid, sentimental... he thought at himself morosely, and put the phone away. There was a piece of wood just long enough to work as a crutch in the rubble he'd used to conceal himself - a part of an old shipping pallet, or a piece of someone's fence - and he started working his way back down the tunnel, slowly. After all, the Chechens had followed them in from somewhere, and that meant there was a way out...
He heard the pop before he felt the pain and knew immediately that he'd screwed the pooch. He went over in a heap and Browen nearly landed on him, somehow avoiding the same fate. "Quit playin' around, we've gotta go!
It hurt enough that trying to stand seemed like a manifestly bad idea, but he did it anyway. It was everything he'd expected. Crosby slid down the ladder and hesitated at the bottom. "...the hell happened to him?"
"Landed wrong," Grey said shakily. "Think it's sprained." There was a layer of debris and litter at least six inches deep at the bottom of the shaft, the usual crap that washed through the streets and collected in storm drains around the city. Crosby gave him a blank, flat look and then shrugged. He hopped off the ladder and vanished into the dark tunnel running underneath the streets.
"You've gotta get up, Grey," Browen was starting to look anxious, not much of a difference from his usual expression of benign, placid confusion. He was hired for his muscles, not his brains or his skill. That was supposed to be Grey's specialty. Grey tried to stand again, teeth gritted, and only Browen's sudden helping hand kept him from faceplanting.
"It's pretty frakked," he managed to speak instead of screaming, but it was a near thing. There was no way to tell in the gloom if it was bruised or broken, but his boot felt far too tight. "You'd better get, Brow'. If Crosby's scuttling like that, the Chechens must be ready to kick down the door, blyad." He hated working with flim-flam men. In Grey's perfect world, everyone got what they wanted and walked away happily - excepting maybe the government, with its talk of taxes, and licenses, and Schedule II narcotics. Con artists like Crosby, though, only gave a damn about themselves at the end of the day. Sociopaths, the lot of them, and usually he knew better....but like they said, you can't con an honest man. He'd let the obvious money potential blind him to the plan's equally obvious stupidity. If he was lucky, the Chechens would just break his other ankle and let him go with a warning.
There was a blast from above that shook the tunnel, followed by a lot of screaming. It wasn't pain that made him wince this time, although his ears hurt. Honestly, the way the night was going, he shoulda known better than to even think about luck...
"Can't leave a man behind," Browen grunted and pulled Grey's arm over his shoulder. "I got ya, buddy." It felt like his arm was going to get popped out of its socket, but he held his tongue. Still better than the Chechens, and the tunnels were low enough Browen was going to have issues as it was; nevermind trying a fireman's carry or a piggy-back ride.
"You're a peach, man. A true droog," he said instead. Browen shrugged, and the pressure on Grey's shoulder was enough to make him bite back a curse. The bigger man didn't notice, intent on following in Crosby's footsteps - long since faded in the distance - down the tunnel. Grey had made it a point to walk out their escape route before the meet; he made it a point to always have a backup plan in effect, and then a backup for the backup. Unfortunately, sometimes the rabbit hole went deeper than his preparation and paranoia could account for, and then he ended up having to wing it. This was rapidly developing into one of those nights...
"Westies gotta stick together, right Grey' 'cause ain't nobody else gonna stick by us."
"Yeah, Brow'. That's right." Yeah, Westies stuck by each other. They also cheated each other, murdered each other, kept each other down like crabs clinging on when someone tried to climb out of the bucket. But there was no reason to point that out when he was literally being hauled to safety, and in better times he wouldn't want to strip that delusion from Browen's eyes. These tunnels were never intended for people to pass through them, but the Rhydin underworld was expansive and growing every day. Most people were smart enough to stay the hell away, but thieves always needed a shadow highway for their goods and services. The monsters and the hazards picked off one or two of the less wary, or less lucky, every month and the remainder counted themselves as smarter and more fortunate....at least until their number came up.
It was starting to look like the dice had made their final call when they got to the exit, and found the manhole stuck in place. Crosby had evidently been taking no chances on being followed. Grey wanted to swear, but the way Browen looked at him - still placid, still calm, trusting that his smarter, smaller friend had a way out - made him bite the words back. So he just smiled that crooked grin and said, "There's another way out further along - I checked. Hopefully the Chechens will think we all went out this one, and waste their time chasing Cros' down." And much joy may they have of the little weasel, he thought. They'd been hearing sounds of pursuit for a while now - the clang as the manhole they'd come down had been forced open, shouts and threats faintly echoing down the tunnels. They were still pretty far behind, but they were gaining. Browen hefted him up again, and they continued on.
The next manhole was sealed, too. Browen was beginning to look less placid, more panicky. Grey was beginning to think the world had it out for him tonight. "Okay," he said. "We're still okay, no worries. These tunnels - there's gotta be another manhole up the line, and worse to worst, they've gotta discharge out in the river or the harbor. We keep moving, we'll be fine."
"Alright, Grey, if you say so," Browen said. "I gotta rest, though. You ain't that heavy, but stooping like this, it hurts my back."
Grey snorted; he was skinny enough, but only someone Browen's size and strength would consider half carrying nearly ten stone to be 'not that heavy.' "Yeah, droog, take your time." He listened to the sounds of the tunnels for a moment, but couldn't pick up the muffled echoes of the Chechens behind them. Maybe they'd forced the hatch and gone after Crosby after all.
One could hope.
After a moment, Grey dug his mobile out of his pocket. Couple messages, nothing pressing. He thought for a second, and then typed a quick text to Roach. Miss yer busted face, khoroshen'ky. After a moment's consideration - was it too much' Not enough' - he hit send. Browen couldn't help but notice.
"Girlfriend?" he asked. Grey blinked, then shook his head.
"Nah, nah. Just a good time," he said.
"Booty call, then?" Tired as he was, Browen could still manage a respectable leer. Grey frowned.
"It's not like that, either."
"Yeah, I bet ya respected the hell out of her....in the morning." Browen laughed. Grey shook his head, willing to let it slide - for now. The man did just carry his busted arse several miles through a storm tunnel, and it could probably be excused that he had the manners of a troll. You couldn't help what you were born as, after all.
"Saw her before the job," he said instead. "Looked like something was bothering her." Which, considering he'd watched her set her own broken nose with little more than irritation and bad words, said a lot. "Maybe I should have blown this off, stuck around."
Browen tilted his ugly head to one side like a curious baby bird. "I thought you gave up that white knight bull after your roommates got killed?"
"...yeah. So did I." He managed a faint smile, more self mocking than anything. "How're ya feelin'" Ready to get moving?"
Browen shook his head. "Not quite yet....couple more minutes, ya" How's the ankle?"
"Hurts like a suka," Grey gritted his teeth and poked at it with his fingers. Definitely swollen, so if he took his boot off to get a better look he wasn't going to get it back on. Besides, this didn't look like the type of place you wanted to go exposing your tender bits to, not if you wanted to keep them attached to you. "I might be able to walk, though. A bit."
"How long we known each other, Grey?" Browen's voice sounded far away. Grey glanced up, to see the bigger man standing near the tunnel out. He smiled faintly.
"I dunno, Brow'. Couple years?" He shrugged, tucked his phone back into his pocket, and let his hand rest inconspicuously behind his waist. "'sup?"
"Yeah....you know, you always look the same" Looked just like that when I met you. Freakiest thing," Browen said. He was rambling. He glanced down the tunnel, first in the direction from which they had come, then towards presumed safety.
"Brow'- just go, man." Grey held up his left hand to forestall the protest. "Seriously, there's no reason for both of us to go down for this. Just do me a favor, and give Crosby a good kick in the nuts for dumping us into the shen like this, okay' Right in the huevos. Stupid ublyodok deserves at least that much, blyad."
Browen shrugged apologetically. "Yeah, okay. It's just, you know-" He shrugged again, then lifted a hand and walked away. Grey shook his head.
"Shoulda left me an hour ago. Blyad." He rubbed his eyes and tried to rest his weight on his hurt side again. It still wasn't having any of it. He was gonna have to pull himself along, leaning on the tunnel wall, if he couldn't find enough debris to improvise a crutch...
It was then he heard the voices, speaking Chechen. Closer than he would have thought, far closer than he liked. He dropped immediately, and dragged himself into the little alcove he'd noticed earlier. There wasn't much to it, just a narrow and low notch in the wall, but just maybe - in the dark, with some rubble dragged in after him....He had just managed to finish tucking himself all the way in and doing just that when their lights stabbed his eyes, grown accustomed to the dim gloom. Half a dozen of them. High powered flashlights, mounted on nasty looking rifles. They weren't messing around.
"We haven't caught up to those bastards yet?" One of them snarled in gutteral, barely understandable English. "What the hell is wrong with that frakking toy of yours" Find them!"
"We're on the right trail," a slight man with glasses said in a bored tone. Native English speaker, maybe from back on Earth. He didn't have a Rhydin accent, but Grey couldn't quite place it, either. "One went up that first ladder. The other one went this way."
"What about the third prick?"
The slender man shrugged and gestured with his device - something like an ectoreader and a tricorder had met in a bar one evening and had a drunken tryst. "Just the two of them. Third guy must have taken another way out of the warehouse."
"Maybe it's broken," a third man said. Grey couldn't see the operator's eyes roll from behind his glasses, but he could hear it in the man's voice.
"It's not broken. I told you, I'm getting life signs on the last guy just fine, and I could see where the other one went up the ladder. It's working exactly according to spec. Let's get a move on, or he's gonna make it to the end of the line before we catch him."
"Like hell," the apparent leader muttered, gesturing for one of his men to precede him into the tunnel. After a moment, they were gone down the passage, moving quickly. Grey exhaled, not entirely sure how they'd missed picking him up. This hardly seemed like the time to worry about it, though.
"Sorry, Brow'," he murmured as he dug himself out of his hidey hole. How long had they known each other" Hadn't Browen been one of Sadie's little lost doves? So, that meant it had been....his head hurt as he tried to think about it, and he shrugged. Couldn't have been that long, then. Guy could fend for himself. He was gonna have to, because there was no way Grey was in any shape to come charging to anyone's rescue.
His phone dinged at him. Digging it out and checking his messages he saw he had a delivery error; no signal. With a sigh, he clicked delete. Stupid, sentimental... he thought at himself morosely, and put the phone away. There was a piece of wood just long enough to work as a crutch in the rubble he'd used to conceal himself - a part of an old shipping pallet, or a piece of someone's fence - and he started working his way back down the tunnel, slowly. After all, the Chechens had followed them in from somewhere, and that meant there was a way out...