James Tarr - Dogsoldiers

“One turns into the other, give it enough time,” Sarah whispered. She was second in line. She’d spent some time in the pipes and knew what to expect, so was there to help the point man if necessary.

“Last man in,” Q heard George say some distance behind him, his voice rolling down the concrete.

The men of Theodore soon discovered that walking in the sewer pipe wasn’t nearly as easy as they’d thought it would be. The sludge at the bottom of the pipe wasn’t all mud, but it did suck at their boots with nearly every step. The sludge strip was so wide they couldn’t spread their legs apart far enough to avoid it entirely, not with the loads they were carrying. A few tried to walk to one side or another, but walking on an angled concrete surface soon had their ankles screaming.

After ten minutes everyone in the column was sweating and wondering just how much farther they had to go. The sewer pipe stretched out ahead of them into the dark, straight as a ruler. Mark was directly behind Jason, and in the strobing light of the low-beam flashlights he could see the young man trudging slowly through the muck, and hear his panting. And swearing.

“One foot in front of the other,” he called out softly. “One step at a time. One step, then the next, then the next. Don’t think about how far you have to go. Just worry about that next step.”

“For fuck’s sake, shut up,” someone behind them growled. Which for some reason made both Jason and Mark break out in giggles they had a hard time controlling.

Not quite ten minutes later they reached the end of the line. Or rather, the beginning of it, where several smaller pipes emptied out into the large one they’d just walked up. Water was trickling out of a few.

There was a huge hole in one wall that had been created with a shaped charge. Past the large crater was a narrower path dug upward through the earth. Twenty-five feet forward and up they shut off their flashlights and came out into the open air between two houses, just as they’d been told they would. They spread out in a defensive perimeter and waited until everyone was out of the sewer. It took some time. Between the moon reflecting off a few clouds and the stars above them, the night sky seemed incredibly bright compared to the lightless sewer pipe.

“Last man out,” George said quietly to Hannibal, panting under his load. The leader of Flintstone turned and gave a thumbs up to Ed, who was standing at the corner of the house. Ed checked the time on his watch, then doublechecked the columns on the paper in his hand, which he could barely see in the moonlight. They had an eighteen-minute window when no satellites would be above them. He waved a hand and the two squads slowly moved out, heading directly north.

They kept good spacing and moved around the last two houses on the street. Then they reached Puritan, a larger east-west surface street with two lanes in each direction. Two hundred feet to their east was Slash, the sunken freeway heading northwest/southeast. Theodore crossed to the north side of Puritan and the squads moved in two parallel columns down the street and over the bridge spanning the freeway.

Once over it the squads turned directly north again on the first side street. A very old commercial building built of red brick sat on the corner, then it was all houses to either side of them, compact two-story homes of red brick and white siding.

The men walked through the front yards, the grass swishing against their pantlegs. A dog barked, and faint talking carried on the soft breeze. They saw candle light in the window of one home, and heard laughing. Many of the homes seemed to have collapsed in upon themselves.

The two squads traversed one block, then a second, then a third, and found themselves at an alley. On the far side of the alley were the commercial buildings lining McNichols. The street was two lanes in each direction plus curbside parking.

Quentin, still in the lead, pointed questioningly and Sarah nodded. They led the squads through the alley eastbound for one block, then with four minutes to spare before the next satellite appeared in the sky above them, entered the back door of what, years ago, had been a small church wedged between a car wash and a tax service. Now all the modest commercial buildings in this area were long abandoned, half of them destroyed by fire.

In a city that had seen ten years of war, which was constantly shadowed by a haze of smoke from fires, the occasional muffled explosion was of no interest. Morris’ engineers had used charges to blow a hole twenty feet down past the foundation of the church, then, worried about sympathetic cave-ins, dug the rest of the way to the Six Mile Relief sewer line using shovels. They’d used a very small shaped charge to cut a circular hole in the reinforced concrete of the pipe, which they’d then widened with sledge hammers.

“This is a trunk line, a big one,” Morris had told them in the briefing, his finger tracing its route on the map. “It was first constructed in 1958. Where you’ll be inside it the pipe is between eleven and fourteen feet in diameter and twenty-two to forty-eight feet underground, depending, so you’ll never have to worry about banging your heads, or making noise. But I still wouldn’t be loud. Once you enter it here, inside this church, you’ll take it two and a half miles directly east.”

“There are giant sewer lines under the city, ‘interceptors’, big enough to drive an IMP through, but unfortunately none of them are where we need to go. When it comes to the trunk lines, the next size down, what my engineers did was figure out where they weren’t passable and devise workarounds. Most of the places they were blocked were impossible to dig out, but when the Army went after them they were lazy, or maybe in a hurry. They demolished this or that sewer line or junction, and then a quarter or half a mile down set additional charges and blew that site. Another half a mile or a mile further on they might have blown another junction, but probably not. They didn’t have the time or the inclination to collapse whole lengths of the sewer, they just blew spots here and there as blocks, and it worked for them. Until now. My men found that nearly half of the collapsed areas were really easy to get around with just a bit of digging and exploration. You might have to crawl up to the surface and walk fifty or a hundred feet, but then you can go right back down. The pipe heading directly north from here will be an easy traverse. On the other hand, numerous sections of the Six Mile Relief are blocked, either blown by the Army in the past or simply collapsed, so you’ll have to exit and walk above ground half a dozen times. Still, though, you’ll be underground for over two-thirds of that two and a half miles.”

Unlike the first sewer pipe they’d traversed, they found this one had running water in the bottom. The slow-moving fetid stream was less than a foot wide, however, and there was almost no mud in it, so instead of taking a break to rest their backs as planned, Hannibal and Ed agreed to push on.

Not quite a mile ahead the pipe was ruptured. A slope of mud and chunks of concrete stretched upward, but a trench had been dug through the debris. Ed moved to the base of the slope and peered up. He could see an oval of sky through the breach in the pipe, at the end of the chute dug and clawed by Morris’ engineers.

Ed stepped back and murmured to the first man, “Fifteen minute rest.” The word passed among them back down the pipe. Carefully the men set down their burdens and wormed their way out from under their heavy backpacks.

Ed met with Hannibal, George, and Sarah in the middle of the two squads, and they bent their heads together. “We’ve gone two and a half miles, total, since leaving?” he asked, peering at his folded map.