Edward Grant - Rebellion

The flashlight beam wandered along the floor of the tunnel, then shone into Logan’s face.

“Who’s that?” the man yelled.

The pistol bucked in Logan’s hand as he fired twice.

He flinched as the gun boomed in the narrow tunnel, and left his ears ringing again. The flashlight fell to the dirt floor, and the man struggled with the rifle, trying to swing it around to point down the tunnel, toward Logan.

Logan fired twice more.

The man fell backwards, then vanished into the ground. The flashlight rolled across the floor, and came to a stop against the wall.

Logan crawled forward, pistol held ready to fire. The beam of the flashlight was shining across the tunnel now, and the light illuminated a dark opening in the floor. The man must have come up through there from a level below this one.

A metre from the hole, Logan grabbed a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, and tossed it forward. It fell through the hole, and he pushed himself down hard onto the dirt.

The grenade explosion thumped below him, loud enough to hear over the ringing from the gunshots. The planks in the walls rattled. The roof shifted, and dirt dripped onto his back from the gaps between the planks.

Logan lifted his face and pulled the goggles back over his eyes, then crawled forward to the hole, and looked down. The remains of the insurgent lay at the bottom of a hole about three metres deep, his flesh torn apart into a bloody mess by the grenade explosion. Hand and footholds had been cut into the planks on the walls.

Logan’s breath wheezed, and his heart pounded. The sounds of the world began to return as his ears slowly recovered from the explosion. He lowered his head into the hole, and listened carefully. Someone was mumbling down there. He couldn’t hear the words, but he could hear someone talking. Probably more than one person.

He could crawl back along the tunnel, say he hadn’t found anything. Maybe Volkov would believe him. Or maybe not. Because he probably wouldn’t believe Logan whatever he said.

No, he had to go down there and see who was hiding on the lower level.

He lay beside the hole for a few seconds, waiting for any sound that might indicate someone crawling along the tunnel below him to investigate the noise, and breathing deeply to try to fill his blood with oxygen.

Then he twisted around until he could slide his legs down into the shaft. He pressed the toes of his boots against the wall until he found a foothold, then descended one step at a time, stopping half-way to listen for anyone approaching. All he heard was the mumbling, louder now but still unintelligible.

He continued down, hanging by his arms as his feet passed the bottom of the shaft and dangled below him into the lower tunnel. The body squished beneath his boots as they touched down on the ground. He coughed at the smell of burned flesh, then crouched on top of the remains and pulled himself into the tunnel that led toward the voices.

A face appeared out of the darkness.

Logan swung his pistol ready to fire, then stopped. Someone lay in an alcove at the side of the tunnel, covered from neck to feet by something thick and dark. They weren’t moving, and he recognized the face as he slowly crawled closer.

The dead boy’s body, wrapped in a tarp. It didn’t smell so bad, down in the cold air of the tunnels, but Logan crawled past as fast as he could.

Maybe they figured it was safer to bury him somewhere in the tunnels than up on the surface, where someone might see the grave. Either way, the girl had definitely been down there, after all.

And one of the voices he heard up ahead whose mumbling echos reflected from the wooden walls sounded high-pitched, and female. The other two were deeper, more masculine.

As he crawled on, he tried not to think of how much dirt was above him, and how thin a layer of planks was supporting it. Or how hard it would be to turn around in the tunnel and crawl back out if there were too many insurgents down there for him to handle.

They shouldn’t be expecting anyone to be crawling through their tunnels. Any sane commander would have done what Volkov suggested, and just pulled out of the village to blast the place with heavy weapons. Logan didn’t plan to die just so Poulin could look good to her aristo friends. But every moment he spent down in the tunnels not clearing them out was another moment the insurgents could be using them to move around and shoot at his comrades up above.

He crawled faster.

After a moment, he reached another cross-tunnel. He looked both ways and listened, then crawled across it. The voices were still coming from ahead of him, and some of the words were intelligible now.

A light glowed dimly a few metres ahead of him in. Logan raised the goggles as he crawled toward it, and blinked as his eyes tried to adjust to the faint glow after the bright image in the goggles. The voices grew louder as he approached. He could hear the words clearly now.

“How could you do it? Kill your own people?” the girl said.

“We didn’t order it,” a male voice said.

“We need to get out of here,” a deeper male voice said. “Those shots were in the tunnels, not the village.”

“Who did it?” the girl said. “How many other villages have they slaughtered?”

“It’s the damn Montagnards,” the first man said. “And I have more important things to deal with right now.”

“What’s more important than mass murder? How will the people support us after that?”

Time to earn some brownie points with Poulin. Logan grabbed a grenade from his left side, pulled the pin, and tossed it into the room. Then lowered his head and closed his eyes.

The girl yelled as the flashbang went off. The flash was bright enough for Logan to see the glow even through his closed eyelids, and the bang made his ears ring again. He took a deep breath, then pushed his head and arms out of the tunnel, into the room.

It was about three metres square and two metres high, with thick planks for walls. A lamp hung from the ceiling, shining its light around the room. The girl crouched low on the far side, behind the narrow table that filled the centre of the room below the lamp, and held her hands over her ears. Her lantern lay on the floor beside her.

One man held his hands over his eyes as he leaned back against the wall. The other glanced at Logan, then fumbled for the rifle that leaned against the wall beside him. Logan swung the pistol up, and put two rounds in the man’s head and neck, above their body armour. The man collapsed to the ground.

“Drop your weapons and surrender,” Logan yelled, but even he could barely hear the words over the ringing in his ears from the flashbang in the confined space.

Something moved in the shadows of the tunnel mouth on the far side of the room. Logan didn’t hear the rifle firing from that tunnel, but he could hardly miss the dirt and wood splinters spurting into the air as the rounds hit the ground and walls near him. He ducked back into his tunnel.

More shots followed, tearing chunks from the wooden walls beside him. Then something small and round smacked into the dirt, and rolled across it to thunk against the wall.

A grenade.

Logan reached for it. Rifle and pistol rounds smacked into the wood nearby. He ducked back for a split second, then grabbed the grenade, and tossed it back. He barely heard the explosion over the ringing in his ears, but he could hardly miss the flash from the end of tunnel.

The room went black. Logan pulled the goggles down, and peered around the corner of the tunnel, into the room.

The table had collapsed at one end. The lamp lay smashed on the floor, and the lantern had been crushed beneath the fallen table.

Planks hung loose from the walls where the explosion had torn them free, and more dangled from the ceiling. A body lay beside the table, and the head and arms of another dangled out of the tunnel entrance on the far side of the room. The shooter’s rifle lay on the floor beside them.