After Days - Chapter 3: Part 1

“That look you gave Mamma back there, what don’t I know?” Asked Laza as he sprinted down wide, dead streets, throwing himself over abandoned cars as he couldn’t afford the time to simply avoid them.

The urge filled Leon’s tongue to list all the many things that his brother did not know, but now was not the time to score points, all he could focus on was finding the boy and getting him away from Route 13. That damned place. How could Laza not know why it was a cause for concern? Leon wasn’t sure if it was because he was detached from the important things or just plain stupid.

Leon opened his mouth to answer, but as the pair turned a corner they were caught by a mighty headwind, knocking the words from his lips as he was forced to push harder. Brilliant, running into a strong wind on an empty stomach, what a waste of good energy. It took a lot to frighten Leon, but the thought of turning up at Route 13, exhausted, worried him right to his bones, and still left enough worry to flood his imagination.

“It’s Russell, isn’t it?” The stocky man presumed, throwing his voice across the tearing wind. Surprise pulled over Leon’s face, damn, maybe he was neither stupid nor detached, just slow. Luckily the stinging gusts forced Laza to squint his eyes, or else he may have shoved his brother into a wall for his mask of mockery. For Laza, the fact that Leon did not correct him was confirmation. “He died down there. You think the same thing is gonna happen to you?” He was sure to exclude himself from the suggestion of death.

“What makes you think Russell died there?” Leon returned quickly, relishing in his brother’s false assumptions. “Last we saw of him he was leaving to look for a new hideout. Last Ueda saw of him, well…” he paused, raising a dour eyebrow as he winked in the wind. “…she reckons he was the kind of man who didn’t need a hideout.”

Laza stared at him blankly with an arm shielding his face. He didn’t catch the underlying message, and Leon knew it, but his task was to find Elliott and get him home, not to educate his dense headed backup.

Regardless of how badly Laza wanted the facts in black and white, they didn’t speak another word to one another, their lungs too busy gasping for air as they pushed themselves harder. Route 7. Route 8. Route 9. As they passed each of the large street signs, which had the original name scraped off and its new one carved in, they both began to fret about the wellbeing of their tiny sibling. Elliott may have been a child of war, but he was still a child, one which Ueda had oddly tried to shelter from the terror of their reality. It was the same for both of the twins. Why did she treat them so differently? They were just like the other young ones who had joined the group, found alone and in need of a home. By the time Leon was Victoria’s age, he had already been expected, and forced, to kill on more than one occasion. It was simple, Elliott and Vicky were infants, Laza and Leon were weapons.

Finally they reached a narrow alley on Route 10, a shortcut to the mouth of Route 13. They struggled through the deep mounds of rubbish and waste, but they kept a good pace. For a moment Laza thought he had seen a nice juice rat, and he had, but it was already dead and tainted, its body melting like waxy soup into the cracks of the street.

He’s wasn’t sure how, but Leon had managed to pass by him and was at the exit of the alleyway, slumped against one of the lining brick walls with his head resting heavily in his hands, panting heavily through open lips.

“Get up! We can’t afford to rest.” Laza demanded as he stomped to a halt at his brother’s outstretched feet. A hazing weight descended behind his emerald green eyes, proving to himself that maybe they had no option but to rest. His head began to spin from exhaustion as he let himself drop, scraping the back of his tough jacket against snagging bricks. He too panted heavily, trying to gulp in as much air as he could, but his lungs just weren’t big enough to satisfy. Sweat trickled into his sight, leaving him glaring across the alley with only one open eye as he blinked the salt away.

“I don’t need a rest.” Leon puffed as he tilted back, lowering his clammy hands to his lap.

‘Liar.’ Laza thought to himself. Surely if he couldn’t move, Leon didn’t stand a hope of doing so himself.

“She was right.” He riddled as he looked across to his squinting ally, and yet again, Laza didn’t get it. Explaining was too much effort and would mean a pause in the repetitive steam of gasps, there was no way he was going to make any sense with bursts of a couple of words between breaths, and he didn’t even want to try. Despite that he knew he didn’t really have to talk. With a sharp sway of his head he gestured towards a rusty, cylindrical manhole cover, disturbed from its proper position in the road. Surely Laza would be able to piece it together, and from the look on his face when he looked out into the street, at the steaming hole in the cobbles, he did.

The dank opening in the road, the entrance to Route 13, was not the only thing that suddenly made sense to him. Leon hadn’t been lying, he really didn’t need to rest. It was clear to see from the clouded red border of his eyes and fidgeting of his finger that he was afraid. Not of the terrors that may lie in wait beneath their feet, but because of what he might truly find down there. This was all Russell’s fault. For a time he had been a role model to Leon, like a father even, and for a boy who was so young but so aware to lose someone that dear, and never know why, was nothing short of heart breaking. Though Laza did consider his brother to be somewhat weak, he felt sympathy as he imagined how he must have been feeling.

“We have to go down there.” Leon said calmly, the silence finally giving him chance to control his breathing. It was as much an attempt to convince himself as it was to prompt action. “Elliott’s there and it’s ‘cause of me. I should have found food. I shouldn’t have let him out of m-”

His snivelling was stopped as a broad open hand clattered against his cheek, immediately turning it a raw red as his head bounced against his own shoulder. He looked up, muzzled with shock, to his older brother, standing over him and rubbing his own stinging palm. Leon was more than use to the sensation of Laza’s blows, but never had he been slapped by him and never had he seen such an understanding look on his face. To his own surprise, Leon returned the assault with a kind smile of thanks as he nodded. He had needed that.

Again, with no exchange of words, the rescuers began their climb down into the maze of tunnels and waterways which sketched along the whole of the city’s underground. They continued carefully, softly, struggling to find their way as the darkness strained their eyes. Tunnel after tunnel they searched, like blind men in a round room, they had no idea where to start, or even where they were. Occasionally one of them would stray from the edge of the waterline and sink to their knees in stagnate sewage.

Surely Elliott couldn’t be down here. He wouldn’t be. Elliott hated the dark, and the damp, and the small spaces that were all the sewers had to offer. So why would he have come down here. Leon couldn’t fathom it, no matter how hard he tried. His best guess was that Elliott had tried to be smart, thinking that since he hated Route 13, everyone else would too, and he would stand a better chance of either crossing the city or finding a meal. The gut-wrenching truth was, the things down here stood a better chance of eating well tonight than the family did.

“This isn’t working, we’ve been walking for ages now and I haven’t seen a single sign of him.” Laza complained, his voice quiet but stern like a hiss. He shuffled his thumb impatiently across the body of his battered pipe, getting more edgy by the minute.

“That’s what worries me.” Leon riddled yet again.

Laza was hungry and frustrated, he couldn’t restrain himself. He stopped and turned with a tense back and balled fists, blocking his brother’s path. “Are you even taking this seriously? The kid is lost down in 13, we haven’t seen him, and that worries you? Why the hell would it not?” It was obvious that he wanted to curse.

“Open your eyes dammit.” Leon snapped as his pinned Laza against the trickling wall. “What have we seen since we came down here? Nothing. Not even a god damned mouse. Now, given that this is the worst place we could be right now, I’d say that’s pretty damn odd. For all we know, he could already be in pieces.”

Laza’s face twisted in agreement, it was odd. “So how do we do this? Hmm? Are you going to use Kel’Dar, or am I?” He was sharp and chilled, hurt intended.

Leon backed off, covering up his slight stumble into deeper water. “Excuse me?”

“I heard you and Mamma talking before, and if you meant what you said, you seem to be in a hurry to die for no good reason. At least doing it this way would add some meaning to it.” He turned his back and continued his search.

“Meaning?!” His voice ricocheted through the tunnel as he boomed after his mad brother. “So what if I used Kel’Dar, what would I be wasting? We live day in and day out, suffering and searching for that next thing to keep us alive, so that we can suffer the next day, and the next. We keep chasing our own tail and it gets us nowhere. We claim that we’re fighting against Celestia but the truth is that we just sit and hope that we can kill a Whisper or two, before they kill us.”

“That is life!” Laza yelled from the start of another twist in the path, sick of his brothers whining. “We grew up in war, were forged in war.” He marched back the way he had come. “Fighting and survival is all there is.”

“They sound like the words of a man who’s never known anything but killing. No love, no hope.”

“And when have you ever know love or hope?!”

“When I had her!” Leon cried up into his brother’s face, wrenching at the scruff of his jacket. His rage boiled as his heart splintered, not knowing whether to hold his stare or turn away.

It was then that fear stabbed at Laza, deep in his gut. That look. Just that look in Leon’s desperate eyes made him believe that his crumbling brother may actually use Kel’Dar there and then, for no greater cause than to rip him apart.

Leon had fought himself many times to try and leave his sorrow where it belonged, but through his dreams, his nightmares, his long nights alone, he could never forget her beautiful face as she drained of life. He had to be strong, he could not let this define him. After a long, deep breath, his looked to his brother with a face of solemn promise. He could feel himself choking before he even began to speak. “If I used Kel’Dar, I would break this world apart, over and over, if it meant getting even an ounce of that hope back.” He held his gaze to be sure that Laza took his words as an oath.

“Whoa, that sounds cool.” Elliott gawked as he immerged from an adjoining tunnel, startling the older boys, so much so that Leon reached for his knife. Elliott saw it, and normally he would have taken a frightened step back, but he was brave, he had to be, he couldn’t afford to prove Leon right.

“Christ, Elliott.” Laza chuckled, oddly giving him the same greeting as Leon had the last time he snuck up. “Mamma sent us to get you. She was worried sick, we all were.”

Elliott’s face dropped with childish insult. “I can look after myself, anyway, you wouldn’t bring us food so someone had to.”

Both the boys were rocked to the core and each had their own reply to scorn him, but they bit their tongues, still grateful that he wasn’t hurt. “We still need to take you home, I promised Ueda I’d get you back in one piece, and since you’ve done a good job of keeping yourself out of trouble, let’s call it a day.”

Suddenly the boy’s face beamed with delight at his brother’s compliment, finally feeling a sense of acceptance, regardless of how minor it may have been. Laza scrubbed the lad’s hair as he walked passed, heading towards a distant pillar of light – what could be excused as light – beaming down from another uncovered manhole. “Let’s get goin’ kid.”

He still didn’t like the idea that he was a kid, but he was a brave kid so he let it slide.

The usual and constant dripping ring of the tunnels was shattered by a piercing squawk. It sounded like the kind of gasp you’d imagine a person to make if they rose from the dead. It rendered the boys paralysed in terror as they simply guessed which direction the echoing cry had come from.

Elliott was the first to break the silence, not with his courage but naivety. “You know what that was?” There was a clear raise in his already unbroken pitch.

“A tainted rat?” Laza answered unsurely. Leon turned to him with a bitter stare, of course it wasn’t a rat, not even a tainted one. The closest thing Leon could compare it to, was the sound a Whisper had made once when he had been trying to drown it. Laza just shrugged it off. “Whatever, I’m going home.” He would have seemed tough and mysterious if he hadn’t wrapped an arm around to Elliott’s back, hurrying him along towards the light.

Leon’s curiosity turned his legs to stone and he saw no use in fighting it, so he made the most of it. He squinted around the black array of winding passages, each acting as a means of ambush, and he was stood at their junction. As he became further and further isolated, he couldn’t shake the burning itch on his back that he was being watched, measured. He turned again and again, but the itch stayed, always on his back. The enemy could see its prey and Leon had no clue what he was up against, that made it very dangerous indeed. All he did know was that the mystery was making his stomach twist.

Trickling, dripping, footsteps, chatter. These were the only things that he could hear in the abyss, though he could do without Elliott’s excited boasting further down the tunnel. Leon turned to shush the couple as the light arched over Elliott’s tiny frame and Laza’s short, upright hair, though he could not see their legs.

The bottom half of the pair was hidden by the darkness. Surely the water couldn’t be so much deeper, their arms were swinging too naturally. Then the shadow rose, concealing Laza entirely, then Elliott, then Laza again. He strained his eyes to try and make sense of it, only to notice that it was not the shadow that consumed them, but something just as dark, slithering from a side tunnel and towards them. “Laza, get out!”

Even from a distance Leon could see the defiant frown covering the side of his face as he shuffled his youngest brother up the creaking ladders, and he still didn’t seem to hurry. ‘Hurry you son of a bitch.’ Leon dashed towards the wriggling mass, his footsteps bursting through the water as he ran, the jingle of the spray bouncing off the walls. The golden blade began to sing as he drew it from its sheath at his back, seizing the shadow’s attention. It wisped its head back as its long body curled like a snake. A bullet ripped through Leon’s tight chest, or at least it felt that way. He lost his focus and in doing so he also lost his footing to the slippery surface below, skidding to his back as his legs tangled. His speed carried him right into the snake’s midst, close enough to slit it open, but Leon could not lift his dagger, he couldn’t get to his feet and no matter how hard he tried he could not look away.

The creature curled above him, looking down at him with glowing green eyes, plain and void of any emotion or thought. With as much absence, its mouth hung open with shining, flat teeth and a dull but noticeable glow creeping at the back of its throat. Cracks in the black, oily face were as bright as the campfire at the hideout, but cast deceiving, flickering shadows all around. Despite all of the signs that this thing was tainted, Leon knew what he was looking at and he knew the image would be forever scorched into his memory. The brow, the nose, the round eyes, the lips, the chin, it was all Russell.

Leon managed to summon the strength to rip his gaze away from Russell’s wide eyes and notice that even though the serpent-like body had stopped its rhythmic swaying, it still moved. In fact, it crawled, writhed, twitched and squeaked with blotches of struggling, blackened animals. Rats and foxes and god knows what else tugged like they were stuck in a tar pit, and for the most part, it looked like they were.

All of a sudden the tunnels were alight blazing gunfire as it ripped through the back of Russell’s head, bursting his huge face all over Leon’s quivering body. He wanted to throw up or even better, die. The man he was so close to calling ‘father’ had been down here all these years, twisted, consuming anything it could to expand its formidable form.

The limp carcass collapsed towards Leon as he barely managed to roll to safety. He crawled with sewer water up to his chin until he was inside a branch of the maze where the gunfire, or more importantly the men behind the guns, could not reach him.