Hmmm… I like this chapter. We get to know our boy Hunt a little better, and we find out exactly how the CSM likes to tote its agents around. :P Gotta give them points for originality.
14 – The Ski Lift
The church stood at the edge of town and looked about the same as 'most any decent-sized church built in the last fifty years—big, but not overly fancy, made of brown brick and decorated only with a large white cross bolted to the wall. There were flowerbeds along the sides of the building, but you could tell that it had been a while since anyone bothered tending them. The aged, almost welcoming look of the place was a stark contrast from the lines and grids that filled most of the rest of town, but it was a building that you could easily overlook and that had no real relevance to anyone's everyday lives anymore, now that church gatherings were illegal.
That, Grandma explained, made it a perfect CSM hideout.
Even though the building was no longer used for services, the old pastor and his family used it as a house—more room for all the kids than there is in the apartments, they would say if asked. And they did have a lot of kids, I noticed; twelve, some of them their biological children and others orphans rescued from the street. They do it because they love children, Grandma told me, but also because it makes a good cover story: with so many people coming and going, with kids running here and there and the odd desperate soul wandering to the church for solace, no one thought a thing when people came and went from the building at all hours of the day. Besides, who would suspect an orphan-loving pastor's family of being gatekeepers to one of the CSM's most important underground tunnels?
"Welcome," the pastor greeted us warmly when he opened the door. "Glad you made it here safely."
"I pulled the old lady trick on them again," Grandma declared, grinning proudly. "By now I'm sure they think I'm the grumpiest old woman in the entire sector."
"I'm sure," he replied with a smile.
"Is Hunt here?" I asked, looking around but only seeing a gaggle of children.
"He is," the pastor confirmed, "he's waiting for you in the basement. Come this way." He ushered me down the hallway towards an open door that led to a set of stairs. My grandmother stayed at the front door.
"Tell everyone I say goodbye!" I called to her, before following the pastor down the stairs. She waved at me, and then I was gone, descending into the dimly lit basement below.
Hunt was sitting on a chair in the corner when we came downstairs. He looked as tense and serious as ever. "You're here," he said, standing up. "I already put the papers in your backpack." He motioned to a pair of packs lying against the wall.
"You remember your instructions?" The pastor asked Hunt. He nodded. "Good. Hunt, you know the way to the tunnel. Godspeed, you two." Then he went back upstairs and shut the door behind him, leaving us alone.
"Here, help me over here," Hunt motioned, walking towards the far brick wall, "I unlocked it already; it opens when you push hard enough." He directed me to a section of the wall and we started pushing, and sure enough, little by little, part of the wall gave way. It appeared to be a rotating piece, a section of interlocking bricks that weren't properly cemented and could be swiveled like a roundabout door.
Once it was opened wide enough for us to slip through we stepped onto the dark platform on the other side, which turned out to be a lift. It was operated by a series of chains and pulleys, and Hunt navigated it down the dark shaft into the tunnel below. As we went down, I looked up and saw the opening in the brick wall close itself.
"What's it like down there?" I asked, peering over the edge of the platform.
"The first few miles of the tunnel is an abandoned sewer line," Hunt explained, "It hasn't been used for decades. The rest of the tunnel was dug out by CSM operatives."
We finally arrived at the bottom of the shaft, and after Hunt had re-positioned the lift platform (so that the next person who tried to use it wouldn't take an unfortunate fall down the shaft) we began walking down the tunnel at a brisk pace. At first I was worried we'd actually be walking to the West—which would have been enough of a challenge for me, let alone for a human tagalong—but Hunt assured me that there was transportation up ahead. When I asked him what, he just smiled and told me to be patient. I rolled my eyes. Boys sometimes.
When we finally got to our transportation, though, I was a bit surprised. I had been expecting a mine car, or some weird, complicated system of zip lines that looked like it belonged in a James Bond movie. What I wasn't expecting though, was…
"A ski lift?" I asked, examining at the setup skeptically.
Hunt was at the tiny control booth a few meters away from the lift, his back turned to me while he was flipping switches to get the power going. "Hey," he called, with what might have been an amused grin on his face, "Don't bash the lift until you've tried it. This thing happens to stretch several hundred miles. It's a legend in the CSM."
"Several hundred miles!" I exclaimed. I think I might go crazy if I had to ride on one of these things that long. I mean, it didn't even go up; it just ran straight down the tunnel. "How did they even build a passage that long, or get the parts for the lift?"
"An estimated thirty percent of the UNAE's population has resistance ties," Hunt quoted proudly. "Some of those thirty percent happen to be construction workers, explosives experts, and parts suppliers." I'd been around Hunt long enough to know that CSM was his point of pride, and he was enjoying this opportunity to gloat about the resistance's accomplishments all too much.
Once the ski lift up and running, Hunt and I boarded (if that's even the right word) one of the ski lift chairs, and we were off. We were off very slowly, but we were off. "Well this is exciting," I said sarcastically as the lift puttered along. At this rate, we'd arrive at our stop by the end of the month.
Hunt just shook his head and rolled his eyes at me. "Just lower the safety restraint," he told me. I did, then I saw the little control switch attached to the middle of the restraint bar. "Make sure your backpack's secure," he warned with a devilish smile, flicking the switch and sending me reeling.
How on earth they got a ski lift to go from zero to fifty in like five seconds is beyond me.
Once I had adjusted to the speed the ski lift was going at (and Hunt had stopped smirking), I tried starting a conversation. "So," I asked casually, "you do this kind of thing often?"
"Sometimes," he replied, "when someone needs an escort or a computer part needs to be delivered."
"It beats working at McDonalds, huh," I told him, smiling a little. He stared at be blankly as if he didn't know what I was talking about. "Oh," I realized foolishly, "I guess you wouldn't be too familiar with the world of fast food around here."
"Fast food lost popularity after the Barrier went up," Hunt explained, "and most companies not owned by one of the members of the Supremacy were shut down anyways, so even in the West there's not as many stores and restaurants to choose from."
"You ever been to the West?" I asked.
Hunt's face hardened and he shook his head. "No," he replied curtly.
Then he asked me, "So… Lex Hardly. Is Lex short for anything?"
"Alexandria," I told him, "like the ancient city."
"Got a middle name?"
"My birth mum never gave me a middle name," I told him, "but when we moved to England and my parents got all my paperwork in order, they listed my middle name as Ride. Paying homage to Max, I suppose." Then I turned the tables and asked, "So what about you? What's your full name?"
Scrunching his nose as if recalling an unpleasant memory, he replied, "I don't like my full name. Not even Nina knows it."
"What!" I whined, "I just told you my full name, and you're not going to tell me yours?"
"Nope."
"That's unfair!"
Hunt's mouth curled up into a slight smile. "That's life."
"You're mean," I pouted, before returning to my normal, blank condition. "Fine. If you won't tell me that, will you at least tell me how you ended up living with the Griffiths?"
"Only if you tell me which of your accents is your real one. I've heard you talk English and American."
I shrugged. "I honestly don't know. Both? I like to use the American one more, but I switch between them sometimes when I'm not paying attention. Now," I urged, "Tell me how you ended up on the farm."
"Okay, then." Hunt began, "When I was a kid I had a falling out with my parents, you could say. At age twelve I ran away from home. I caught rides on the backs of transporters, and whenever they arrived at a sector border I'd either find a way to hide on top of the transporter or I'd abandon the ride and run like crazy. Once I was riding on the back of a transporter and lost my grip, and I fell into the ditch and broke my arm. The ditch was right by one of the Griffiths' fields, so Iggy found me and took me back to the house.
"Ella and Val took care of me, and Nina kept me company, so I liked it there. And when I told them the… nature of my disagreement with my parents, and how I had managed to travel across numerous sectors almost undetected, she and Iggy thought I'd be a good recruit to the CSM. So now I make deliveries, escort new recruits to their training positions, and in my spare time I hijack transporters with Nina." He smiled slightly at his last comment.
Finally I ventured to ask, "So, you and Nina are close?"
Hunt nodded. "She's like a sister to me," he explained, "but I'm not interested in her that way, if that's what you're asking. Not interested in girls at all, actually."
I raised my eyebrows at him. "You mean you're—"
Hunt realized how odd his last comment had sounded. "No! That's not what I meant!" he blushed slightly when he cut me off, and clarified, "I was just saying that there's more important things than girls to worry about. The CSM has my heart, so to speak."
"Ah," I remarked dramatically, "the dedicated agent who swears love and loyalty to nothing but the cause, just like in the movies."
"Something like that."
I smirked. "You do realize, though, that in pretty much all those movies the dedicated agent always ends up falling for his scantily-clad accomplice, or a sexy assassin, or a damsel in distress…"
"Well this isn't a movie," Hunt reminded me, "and there are no scantily-clad accomplices, sexy assassins, or damsels in distress riding on this ski lift. If you don't mind, could we not discuss this anymore?"
I shrugged indifferently, and we stopped talking for a long time. Still, I felt a little proud that I had gotten Mr. Serious to have an almost-casual conversation; getting him to chat with me had been nearly impossible up to that point. There was a slight quirk in the fact that we discussed private details instead of normal topics, like favorite books or the weather. Still, progress was progress. There is more to Hunt than meets the eye, I decided, and being the nosy kind of person I am, I want to find out what it is.
The next thing I said to Hunt a few minutes later wasn't nearly as personal as our discussion before, but it was every bit important. "What are we supposed to do for bathroom arrangements on this thing?" I asked him, shifting uncomfortably in my seat.
Hunt smiled a little, and then pointed to a sign attached to one of the ski lift supports. "Look for yourself." He flipped the switch and brought the ski lift to a slow so that I could get a good look at the sign. It read: BATHROOM IN 50 YDS. PREPARE TO JUMP. Charming.