Chapter 2
Hello city
You made an enemy in me…
Barenaked Ladies, Hello City
Twelve months later: Marduk City.
Seifer spent most of his time in a tiny rented flat with the smell of grease and old dirt floating up from the diner below and water dripping through the ceiling. Better this way, the solitude, and no one heard him when he woke, sweatcold and crying or screaming from the odd dreams that came almost every sober night. He preferred it with no one else around to hear, to ask questions and ask well-meant but empty comfort.
Anyway if he drank beyond a certain point he didn't dream. Most of his time was lost inside a bottle or four of vodka, if he'd just got paid for a job, or the rotgut local moonshine that smelled like nail polish if he was running out of money. When he remembered between the jobs and the bottles of deep, blissful forgetfulness, he shoved a few gil in an envelope and stuffed it through the landlord"s door.
The jobs. When you came right down to it there were only so many things a trained mercenary on the run from the law with no identification, no money and nowhere else to go could do. And Seifer had too much pride for the most obvious. Luckily, in the underground labyrinth that was the fifth level of Marduk, there were always people with annoying little obstacles that they would pay to have removed.
He'd hoped that life would pass him by while everyone forgot and assumed he was dead or gone or lost or maybe just mythical, but things hadn't panned out quite like that.
And meanwhile his life crept on, endless merging cycles of sleeping and drinking and trying not to dream and eating (when he remembered) cheap fast food. Sometimes someone would phone him or a slip of paper would be passed to him in a bar or via various anonymous mail accounts and drop boxes around the city and he"d go out and kill someone or just really, really hurt them. When he came back he'd just drink some more and throw his bloody clothes in a trash bag into some Dumpster.
He'd thought it would go on until maybe he drank himself to death, something which had so far refused to happen, though not from want of trying. Or one night he'd go out as normal, only someone else would be waiting who'd be that much faster. And then twenty years and Hyne only knew how many mistakes would all end cleanly and quickly in surprise and pain and a quick explosion of blood.
Six months. It had all gone by so quickly.
And then one day it all changed.
On the morning in question Seifer had been walking down one of the main streets in Marduk City, fourth level. (no stopping if you value your life, money, virginity and any small valuables you happen to have on your person) on his way to check on one of his pickup points.
It really was a shithole. He"d read in a tourist booklet months ago that Marduk was a city that had been founded long ago in a more bucolic age on a small plot of land between two rivers. The city architects had dealt with the problem of expansion as more and more people moved in by building streets in tunnels straight down into the rock. They"d won several important architectural awards and solved the population problem, at least on paper, but the architects had failed to overlook one very important point, namely that nobody was too keen to inhabit underground housing with no natural light, terminal rising damp and piped air. So the houses got sold at rock bottom prices and they"d been home to the poor, the desperate, and incurably criminal ever since they"d been put up.
The city kept tunnelling down, and in time the lower levels of Marduk, from the relatively respectable second, down to the suicidal not-on-your-life seventh level where all the maintenance equipment, sewers and water pumps were kept, developed their own hierarchy. Rumour had it even the maintenance workers down there wore mail vests.
Seifer kicked aside an empty can. Luckily he hadn"t had to go down there much…..yet. Mostly his business took him above the fourth level, because people who had enough money to hire killers usually had enough cash to own a decent flat with fresh air and a view of something nice. Hyne, but he hated it in the lower levels. The piped air and water tasted of sulphur and other peoples' body odour. The light was provided by dim fluorescent bulbs that were supposed to last ten years without needing changing but instead rarely lasted ten minutes due to the frequent attentions of small boys with stones and residents using them for target practice.
It was funny how you never really appreciated things like fresh air until they were gone, he thpught, then shrugged. But the rent was cheap and the overcrowded slums offered the opportunity to hide in a crowd used to ignoring things that didn"t concern them.
He kept walking.
A woman with long brown hair and a tatty jacket that had been fashionable ten years ago in Balamb turned as he came up behind her. She gave him a startled double-take before she turned round and fled in the opposite direction like a frightened rabbit,
Weird. Maybe he'd had to beat up her husband or something.
He got half a mile down the road before he noticed an old man getting into one of the electric taxis at the side of the road staring at him over the door in a painfully obvious I'm–trying-to-pretend-I'm-not-looking-at-you-and-failing-miserably way. He was tempted to slam the door on the guy"s nose as he walked past but heroically managed to pass up the temptation. Besides, going up and saying something like "You"re looking at me in a funny way" would attract waay too much attention, of exactly the wrong kind. He settled for glaring at him and grinned as the man jumped into the cab and slammed the door as if an ifrit was on his tail.
Seifer turned into the main street leading to the elevator system. It was wrong. Something was wrong here, and he didn't know what it was. And all his instincts, honed by years of SeeD training and only slightly dulled by one year of bitterness and alcohol abuse, were screaming that he better find out, and quick.
His growing suspicions were only confirmed by a woman several metres down the street. She looked him hard in the eye and then backtracked rapidly, pushing her child in front of her until they both disappeared into one of the neon-lit doorway of the many cheap restaurants that lined the street.
The first time could've been an accident; mistaken identity; whatever. Second time; a coincidence, maybe. Third time…something was happening, and he didn't intend to be here when the shit hit the fan.
And, unless he was mistaken, someone had been following him since the last crossroads.
Seifer pretended to study the rent notices and brightly coloured whorehouse calling cards in the window of the newsagents without looking round and the faint footsteps behind slowed and stopped. He pulled the cap he was wearing slightly further over his face and yanked down the brightly patterned bandanna he'd tied beneath it to cover his scar. No point in asking for trouble. And he might as well take the opportunity to find out what the fuck was going on.
Spinning and checking his wrist like he was late for some appointment, Seifer set off at a fast walking pace down one of the side alleys. He'd pawned his watch some weeks before, but the guy following him didn"t know that. The sound of the following footsteps, growing louder away from the bustle of the main route, paused and then turned after him.
He took a right, then left and left again, just to make sure he really was being tailed. The man followed. He wore cheap soft-soled trainers, from the sound of it. A big guy, but Seifer thought he could probably take him if he was quiet. He pretended to check the time again and a careful flick of the wrist made the small knife he always wore concealed in his coat sleeve drop down into his palm.
Seifer sped up and then turned another sharp left. He heard the man behind walk slightly faster to keep him in sight. At the next corner he stopped as if to unlock the door of a closed derelict shop, rattling a handle, and then crept as silently as he could with steel-capped boots onto the rusting metal fire escape just above the ripped and peeling shop awning, crouching down. He watched the man following pause, then cross the empty street to poke his head into the shadowy shop interior before he vaulted the railing and crashed through the canopy. Seifer's weight hit the man in a tangle of damp rotting canvas and he saw his shocked face for a moment before he hauled him up through a fistful of fabric and slammed him against the wall. Something metallic skittered across the concrete. He heard a sharp crack as the guy's skull hit the brickwork and pulled back a little. He didn't want to kill him, after all. At least, not yet.
A pale cloud of brick dust floated in the air, making the man he held cough. With his arm levered across the man"s throat, Seifer flipped the knife out of his palm and pushed it hard behind one ear against the carotid artery that pulsed in his prey's throat.
"Just what the fuck do you think you"re doing?"
The man in his grip pointed frantically to his face, which was turning a nasty shade of purple. Seifer cautiously lifted his arm but kept the knife pressed to his neck
"I…..have money. Drugs…."
"Keep it. I"m not interested. Now why were you following me?"
The man twisted and began to gasp out hurried excuses and explanations ….he only wanted to find somebody to ask the way, he thought Seifer was someone else, he just…
Seifer pressed the sharp blade of the knife harder against the man"s bull neck. "Yes? Do you think I'm stupid?"
The man grunted in reply. He flicked his arm up and chopped Seifer on the wrist with the side of his hand. The knife spun from Seifer's hand and clattered on the concrete. He snarled and flicked the second knife out from his left sleeve, forcing the man's head back and kneeing him in the balls as well for good measure.
"That was bloody stupid. If I hadn"t been pissing my life away in this dump for the last twelve months you"d be dead right now. Luckily I've decided to be nice. Just answer my questions and maybe you won"t end up in pieces. Small ones."
The man decided that cowardice was the better part of valour. "Help! Heelp!"
"Shut UP." Seifer slammed the guy harder against the wall until the rest of the canopy threatened to collapse "Like anyone"s going to bother in this shithole. They'll just shut their windows and pretend they can"t hear anything. I know. I've seen it. Hell, I"ve done it. Now are you going to tell me what in Hyne's name is going on here or shall I just cut your throat right now?"
He heard the cautious opening of a door behind him and then the hasty slam of door and shutters as someone saw what was happening and decide he didn't want to have any of it, thank you very much, whatever was going on.
"Like I said, just what the fuck is going on?"
The man lifted his arm slightly and a piece of paper fluttered to the floor. Seifer snatched it out of the air with his left hand, bringing the knife farther in to cover the guy's throat.
This picture was almost identical to the paper he"d seen a year ago. Except this one was in colour, cheaply printed and bore the obvious marks of being in the man"s pocket for some time. WANTED: SEED CADET SEIFER ALMASY, IN CONNECTION WITH WAR CRIMES DURING THE SECOND SORCERESS' WAR…..
"There was a sixty thousand gil reward. They're all over the place. It"s not just these –there's other ones. In black and white. But they"re not offering a reward" He coughed. "I..needed…the money."
"Did it say who put them up?"
The man shrugged, or as best he could with Seifer"s knife across his throat. "I don"t know! But it is you, isn't it. I was right! I saw you on the vidscreens with your bitch sorceress!"
"Shut. Up," grated Seifer. Didn"t this guy know how to the hell to behave when someone else was holding all the cards?, he thought. He flicked the point of the knife upwards, sawing neatly through the base of the man"s ear.
"Aaagh!"
"Who WERE they?" Seifer was getting worried. They weren't in the best of areas and with the noise this guy was making someone was bound to be along in a minute. All it needed was for a few other guys to have seen one of those fucking posters and he"d be in some deep shit.
"I"m dead anyway."
"How right you are."
"They said they were SeeDs!"
Seifer raised an eyebrow "You"re fucking lying."
"I saw them on the vidscreens too! Black uniforms, right? With real gold on them. And there was this guy on the screen…Dark, y' know…. pimp coat, looked like a girl? He was the one who wasn't offering a reward! Spouted some kind of shit about the public duty!"
Squall. Fuck. Lucky the bastard was too tight to offer real money. "So who were the other guys?" He had one hell of a suspicion .This was not good. He pressed the knife upwards harder, slicing away a bit more of the remaining flesh and cartilage. "What about the other ones? The ones who gave you this?"
"Aaagh! They're Galbadians! Said they wanted you alive! Said they'd pay for it! Said they've got all the gates sealed off! Said you'll never get out in one piece!"
A number of unpleasant possibilities were clamouring for attention in Seifer"s head as to what exactly the Galbadians wanted him alive for. Or what Balamb Garden wanted him for after all this time. None of them were good. A city was a great place to hide unless some asshole did something like this and then you had a million staring eyes that never slept. Sixty thousand gil was as much money as the average Trabian saw in a lifetime.
The man smiled as much as a conspiratorial smile as he could manage. "Want some papers? Guaranteed to get you through the checkpoints"
"Which checkpoints? You"d be going through with me. In front."
The man flicked a glance at the knife. His smiled faded and he said nothing.
There was the noise of voices and feet from one of the surrounding alleys and the guy grunted and brought his knees up to try and kick Seifer in the balls. Seifer twisted to try and see who was behind them. The man he held cannoned into him, his left hand reaching for something hidden inside his jacket as Seifer's head snapped round. He reflexively brought the knife across in a long sweep that sliced through the soft flesh of the man"s throat and sent a spray of blood arcing into the dusty gloom inside the shelter of the canopy and steps. The guy's breath exhaled in a wet hiss. The voices got closer.
Cursing, Seifer grabbed the heavy falling body by the waist and dragged them both into the close shadow of the awning, holding his breath and hoping whoever was coming was blind or deaf or both. The voices got closer and then receded, drunk and arguing loudly.
Thank Hyne. Not even the right street. Stupid.
He let the body flop into the dust and pulled the curtain of torn fabric over the steps to enclose the front of the store in a gloomy stinking tent. The police'd be even more suspicious if they found a dead guy who hadn't been robbed. No doubt someone on the streets would cheerfully have relieved him of the chore, but Seifer hadn"t stayed alive in Marduk for a year by taking chances. He rifled the body and found that the man hadn"t been carrying much. Just a gun in his pocket he hadn"t had time to draw when Seifer jumped him, scattered with some bullets on the concrete. An ID wallet identified him as David Matthews, Trabian, twenty four, single, a card-carrying member of Twentieth Century Flicks Video Store, Woo Hung Lee's Emporium of Marital Aids and Exotica, and an organ donor. Nice to know some kid somewhere was going to get a nice new pair of kidneys. The wallet bore the insignia of one of Marduk's less prominent street gangs.
Seifer flicked the wallet into one of the many pockets of his dirty and now bloodstained coat. Never knew when another ID might be useful. The photograph on the wallet didn't look much like Seifer, but then it didn't look much like the dead man either.
He lashed out at the door of the empty shop which splintered like balsa wood. It was the work of a moment to drag the cooling corpse inside through the shattered planks and settling dust. There was a chipped filthy enamel sink just inside the door and a twist of the cold tap gave a flood of viscous green goo that was almost but not entirely unlike water. It tasted richly of chemical waste products as he sluiced it over his streaked face and coat. The blood stuck to the faded leather jacket like glue and eventually he just gave up and exchanged his coat for the dead man"s. He'd chuck it later.
Finally Seifer dragged the lax body through the dust to a tiny room at the back of the shop that by the look of it had been used for storage. There hadn't been much blood after the first explosion and the trail left behind in the dust was easily obliterated by ten minutes fast sweeping and a damp rag torn from his shirt.
Hopefully no one would even stop to notice until the corpse started to smell. He considered the idea of burning the evidence, but decided against it. Fire was a real hazard in the tiny overcrowded slums, and he had no desire to add mass murder to his not inconsiderable list of crimes.
Time to get out of here.
He dragged the remains of the front door dragged shut with a creak of fading hinges, fighting the splinters torn from it when he'd broken the lock to get in.
As he walked away he thought of the quickest way back to the flat. He took care to pocket the fallen gun and pull the awning down further over the front of the shop. Not much to worry about, assuming the guy over the road decided not to grow some bollocks and call the enforcers.
A few minutes later Seifer raced up the stairs to his rented room, taking two at a time and throwing open the door which made a large chunk of plaster fall off the ceiling and narrowly miss his head. He slammed it quickly and leant on it, breathing fast. He dragged his hands slowly down his face, sliding to the floor.
"Shit."
He looked around.
Even Seifer admitted the place was a dump. The nature of his jobs advised caution and made him move around a lot, but in two months the only homely touches it had acquired were a pile of empty vodka bottles in one corner and a ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts in the other. A few girly mag posters decorated the walls and a secondhand mattress and sleeping bag sprawled across the floor. A leaning chipboard wardrobe propped up the wall, festooned with more posters and filled with a change of clothes or two and a rucksack. The only window looked out onto a brick wall and had bars on, either to discourage all but the most terminally enthusiastic of robbers or (Seifer's pet theory) to prevent people jumping out of them and making a mess on the pavement outside the shop. Sometimes when he got really drunk, he"d forget that they didn't open. The room never seemed to have enough air in it, and what was there smelt of old blood and burning plastic and the death of a thousand dreams.
He rummaged through the wardrobe and started stuffing things in his rucksack; three or four changes of clothes, the sleeping bag and the only map he had (a streetmap of Marduk and the surrounding area with the local bars marked in lurid pink circles.) Lighter and cigarettes. A couple of rounds of ammunition. His gun and knives. A last full vodka bottle.
Damn. Twelve months here, one lousy year of his life, and this was all he had?
None of it was going to be much good on the run. And where to run to? Assuming he could ever make it out of the city, there were really two options, south or north. Now this, he thought, was what they didn"t teach you in the SeeD manual. 'How to escape from an unknown number of enemies with no legal papers, no friends, no maps, and no assistance.' If it'd said those kind of things, he thought, instead of all those boring rules, he might have read it.
Maybe he could go back to Garden and come up with some excuse. "Sure, yeah, I had amnesia. I've been wandering for years all over Galbadia, helping small orphan children and cats stuck up trees and fighting for righteous causes."
Instead of holing up in a slum and killing people for money.
He snorted. Mmm. Going back to Garden was out. He could just turn himself in, but to be honest he wasn't sure they"d be any more pleased to see him than the Galbadians would be. Seifer had been through all this before anyway. Better to at least try and make some kind of living for himself than going begging back to Garden. If he even got that far without someone recognising him and deciding to raise a lynch mob. Hyne, people had been executed for worse things than trying to take over Garden and kill all the SeeDs. Plus, his memories of the wars before time compression were vague, at the least.
And he really didn"t fancy his chances of going up to Cid and saying "Yeah….I wasn't really sure of what I did during the war…do you think I might have screwed your wife?"
There was always suicide, well, that WAS suicide, but he'd always wanted to go out fighting. Or failing that, on top of a huge mountain of money and taking a beautiful woman"s bra off with his teeth. When he was ninety-four. And that was a fucking joke. Most SeeDs didn't live past their thirties, but the ones who survived past that just got tougher, like oak.
So, either Garden, north to the mountains, south or jumping off something high. He almost laughed. No choice at all, really, just like so much else in his life.
Might as well choose, though.
He fished a bottle out from the mountain of empties taking up half the floor space.
Note, take bottles out to the recycler before fleeing. There must be enough to buy a ticket out of here. Or maybe he'd just leave them. He owed several weeks rent as it was but so far the landlord had been too scared to collect in person, resorting instead to irate and then pleading letters under the door whenever Seifer was out.
Seifer drained the bottle, which turned out to be some kind of godawful peachflavoured spirit, and flipped it on its side on the floor. He bent over and flicked it with his foot, watching it spin and feeling the last dregs of the spirit working their way into his stomach. It spun fast, circling with a sound reminiscent of the last plate on the floor after the china shelves just got knocked over.
The bottle spun slower as he watched, then came to a rest. The neck pointed north. The base pointed south. Shit, he thought. I forgot to decide which was which.
What the hell. He'd have a better chance north anyway. It was well past time to go. He'd already outstayed his welcome here. Lifting his pack from the floor, he slammed open the door and walked out onto the street, heading for the nearest stairway system down. The key made a faint clanging noise as he vindictively chucked it down a manhole. It was dark outside; the usual depressingly seedy panorama. Dripping water reflected from puddles on the floor and neon signs sparkled luridly in the artificial dimmed lights. No one gave him a second glance, which was just as well. No soldiers, either, though he did see what looked like another poster from a distance, tacked up in a store window with the phone sex line cards and lost pet ads. He flicked the collar of his coat up just in case, anyway, and pulled the hat and bandanna down.
He made it to the nearest stairwell without incidence. Usually the quickest way was via the lifts spotted around the level, but you needed a permit, which Seifer hadn't got, and which cost money, and there was no chance he'd be able to slip on without one now. Just in case he dragged the dead man's wallet out and rifled through it. Hopefully it"d be a while before a girlfriend or a associate or fuck, even family, bothered to miss him or someone happened to check the old shop and find(and report) his body, but you never knew.
The stairwell gaped wide open in front. It wasn't even an escalator, just a wide, battered flight of chipped heavy plastic stairs with high railings and flickering failing bulbs lighting landings between the flights. It'd take a good walk to get to the top, but that wasn't where Seifer was heading. There were a few people around as he cautiously approached the hole; just a couple of tired workers from the lower levels coming up after a long shift and a small gang of teenage boys with identical flamboyant haircuts, leather jackets striped with gang logos and sweat, who knew trouble when they saw it and kept well away.
So either the Galbadians or Garden didn't know the area or they hadn't gotten anyone down here yet. Maybe they were too busy fighting it out on the upper levels.
Or I'm about to make one of the biggest mistakes of my life.
Again.
But he passed thought the entrance and down the first flight without incidence, boots ringing hard echoes on the floor despite how softly he tried to walk. Nobody shouted or shot or called him back. Seifer wasn" quite sure whether to be happy (they might not catch me, I'm going to get out ) or disappointed( just how hard are these guys trying anyway) or wary (maybe they're saving it all up for later or it's a trap...) or just apathetic(I really don't care any more) Had to be a good thing, anyway, for now.. Maybe they were expecting him to do something really stupid, charging into the gates in a motorcycle or taking someone hostage to bargain for leniency… or just hanging on, saving money and resources, hoping maybe some bounty hunter or the police would bring him in…
Seifer almost smiled. The police down here were about as efficient as a dead computer store employee-or he'd never have got away with his assassinations as long as he had. Come to think about it, it was just as well he'd be leaving-sooner or later he might have pissed someone of who cared enough to bring in their own firepower. Some people said that every cloud has a silver lining. In Seifer's twenty-year experience, the silver lining was mostly just more rain.
As he descended, the levels got more downtrodden. Jets of smoke from faulty air-conditioning units steamed from the walls. Wall lights had been ripped from their sockets for salvage, sale or fun. Once or twice he heard rustlings in the shadows and sensed faint movement, but he was big enough and looked don't-fuck-with-me-enough that no one came near him. In fact he saw nothing at on the way down at all except a couple of whores who slurred a greeting; chewing gum. Their pupils were dilated with the newest designer drug. Seifer could smell the heavy sweet-sour odour of their perfume as he walked by without looking or speaking, always alert. From behind him he heard a shouted swearword and then silence. One of them, he thought, h looked vaguely like Rinoa.
He shivered.
It was so quiet. Creepy, it was so quiet.
The stairwell around him began to look like something from a bad science fiction movie, the kind with people running up the stairs instead of climbing out the door and forgetting to call the pest control. If only they worked. He could have just crawled out in the ventilation ducts and no one would have ever known.
A faded and peeling stencilled sign on the next landing said "6." Just one more to go, then. Level six was the upper maintenance level, with only a few human workers. Doors dotted the landings at intervals, all heavily locked with biohazard signs in eight different languages. No Entry. Fire Exit Only. Seifer walked down a couple more levels, looking carefully at the doors, until he came to one with "Maintenance Personnel Only!" stencilled on it. It didn't look like it had been opened for years unless you looked carefully.
The door was masked by the graffitied logos of five different gangs. Down in the corner was a tiny scratched cross just by the doorjamb, masked by grease and slime. Seifer grinned silently in the darkness and flicked his knife from a sleeve. He rubbed the knife on the inside of his coat to remove the greasy patina of boot polish and oil he kept smeared upon the blade to stop his knives shining at inappropriate moments. He'd learned early on in his short and undistinguished career as an assassin that you didn"t wear jewellery or polish your shoes or do anything that might shine or squeak or clink to give away your whereabouts until the job had been done. It was a skill that most street people learned early in their lives. Those that didn't, no-one ever found. Well, not all at once.
Silently he tilted the knife under the door, sliding it slowly along the step to cover the whole room inside. No movement was reflected in the dull blade. The room was an indistinguishable haze of blues, blacks, smudges of metal and smears of boot polish.
Good, Seifer thought. He rose and levered the knife in the slot of the security card holder.
Nothing.
He swore, and pressed again. The door creaked open with a sound reminiscent of gothic castles. Seifer held his breath. Seeing no one, he slipped through and eased the door quietly shut, alert in the darkness.
Was that a faint movement in the gloom ahead of him? Blue light shimmered on steel.
Shit.
There was a soft enquiring beep from the shadows, and Seifer relaxed slightly, eyes squinting. He pulled his gun from his coat and stepped out, pulling the cap more firmly over his face to mask his eyes. As the maintenance robot emerged from the shadows Seifer took careful aim and shot it.
Sparks showered from the robot's control panel. Its beeping noises sped up and then slowed to an awful monotone drone before the robot"s head exploded. Sparks and shards of burning metal zipped among the walls. Seifer ducked and threw an arm over his head to protect his eyes. Something whined past his head, nearly taking out an ear, and then everything was silent again except for the distant rumble of machinery.
He hunkered down against the wall to wait, carefully taking stock of his surroundings. He was sitting on a mesh walkway, one of many lining the walls of an immense underground chamber; a weird mix of ancient –looking brickwork and modern industrial fittings. There were many levels above, stocked with machinery and the deceptive human-like figures of maintenance robots going about their business.
Which was, not to put it too kindly, other people's business. The place stank.
He'd known about this route for a while, ever since one of his infrequent explorations of the city, looking for new places to leave messages, hide out and escape detection. After a quick look around, he'd left, crossing the spot off as a dead end, way too smelly and no use. But it might turn out to be just the right thing for leaving the city undetected.
Seifer wondered if exit routes had always been in the back of his mind after all. The disembodied and mangled head of the robot stared mournfully at him until he booted it into the nearest pit of sewage, where it sank with an accusing burp.
All this time, he thought, just trying to forget. After all, it wasn't really necessary to remember-why bother, when there was always so many people to do it for you, and in such varied detail? Since entering the city Seifer had heard the story of the Sorceress' Wars from a dozen shadowy corners in dusty crowded bars. The gallant SeeDs, saving the world from the hungry clutches of the evil and beautiful sorceress and her traitor sidekick. He"d never stayed to hear the end of any of them.
It could have been worse, he thought. I could have been the comic relief. Infamy wasn't as good as fame, but sometimes it was better than obscurity.
There was a sound in the shadows, indistinct against the backdrop of mechanical clanks and hisses. He listened carefully and heard muffled human footsteps, too irregular to be a robot's. And no robot ever whistled that badly. He pressed back against the brickwork, trying to become invisible. When you were six feet tall that hardly ever worked, but it didn't have to work forlong. The smoke gouting from the dismantled robot would obscure his outline in the gloom.
He heard swearing as a human engineer turned the corner and saw the steam. He was a small man, tired and unshaven; wearing blue coveralls and an ill fitting worker's bullet proof vest.
"Someone there?" he called.
Seifer froze, hoping the man wouldn't be keen enough to come and man had good reason to be nervous, with some of the gangs that came round here. Hyne, he thought, doesn't this guy read any horror novels? Stomping along dark smoky corridors saying stupid things like that was a sure way to get yourself eaten by whatever monster had crawled into the ventilation ducts this week.
He saw the glint of light as the man reached into his toolbox and produced a heavy spanner. He stood tensely for a moment while Seifer, half-hidden behind a pillar, waited for him to lose concentration.
After a few seconds he saw the man's attention fade. His gaze slipped from the silent shadows. Seifer imagined that he was mentally criticising himself for being so stupid. The spanner lowered.
Seifer tensed, and lunged. He pushed into the man and ducked as the spanner swept past his head. He swore as it came back round and connected with his forearm and then his hands closed on greasy navy lapels. His grip was tenous, but it was strong enough to hold the maintenance worker still for a second as Seifer punched him in the nose and, as he slumped to the ground, on his chin.
The worker crashed to the ground and lay stilll. Blood oozed slowly from a scalp wound as Seifer ripped his gloves off, shook some feeling into his skinned knuckles and knelt beside the body. He pressed dirty fingers to the pulse in the man's neck. It was regular. The man's face was peaceful. Seifer thanked Hyne he wasn't dead. He was already in enough trouble as it was.
He yanked the clip on ID tag off the man's uniform, turning the plastic wafer over in his hand. It was a cheap identity card with a laser swipe strip along one edge.
Seifer dragged the unmoving body to the door with some difficulty. He kicked it open and pushed the man through. With luck he'd wake up in a few hours with nothing the worse except for a bad headache and maybe all his money and boots gone-because this was Marduk after all, and he could go back up the stairs and find those whores.
One security gate later and five minutes diligent searching along the lower levels produced a manhole, smoking slightly in the metallic tasting artificial air. Seifer knelt down and swiped the card along its base. The swipecard was just another security measure, designed to ensure no rebel elements used the sewers to plant bombs or pollute water supplies. He wondered if anybody would notice if they did.
The manhole opened into a narrow tunnel that must have been at least twelve feet tall. Water dripped and echoed and flowed down the crumbling rotten brickwork-a relic of an earlier age. As Seifer's vision adjusted to the dark he saw a narrow river flowing along the bottom of the tunnel. He pulled a flashlight out of his rucksack, took a trash sack out and wrapped the whole bag in it, tying it on his back and wrapping the torch round his neck. He was pretty sure all his clothes would have to be trashed anyway, except his boots and gloves just because he hadn't got any others. It was a pity, but there was no way he was risking wandering around all this junk in bare feet. Way to get septicaemia, he thought. It was going to be hard enough to travel through the woods anyway without having a foot the size of a small pig.
He took a deep breath and swung down onto the crumbling metal rings, dragging the manhole over his head and sliding it back into position. His arm ached like hell where the spanner had caught it. As the manhole clicked back into place he felt a moment's panic and then lost his breakfast as the foul smelling air rolled up in heavy waves.
Whose bright idea had this been? he thought.
Oh. That's right. Mine.
Working as much by feel as by the light of the swinging flashlight hanging round his neck, he made his way down the rusting metal ladder as his boots slipped and fought against the slippery brickwork. Hyne, if he fell… Well, he just wasn't going to think about that. Drowning in sewage had never been on his things to do list anyway.
Seifer finally landed with a soft slurp in the unnameable stuff at the base of the tunnel. The liquid reached up to his waist. For want of a better word he decided to call it "water".
He slipped and stumbled along, following the flow of the water, movements echoing in the dark. Pipes ran along and out from the wall every so often, spouting sewage and liquid at random intervals. This he found out after he walked under one at the exact moment it decided to dump its load and got doused with a thin dark fluid that smelt like chemical residues and petrol. It could have been worse, though, and after that he gave any of the pipes a wide berth. He tried not to think what was going to happen if he found a grille blocking the flow of the pipes. The manholes couldn't be opened from below, another security measure. It was a spectacularly morbid thought, but he thought it anyway. Perhaps even death by liquid sewage was preferable to death by Galbadian, and it might even be quicker.
I'm going to get out of this, he thought. Minus my sense of smell, breakfast and possibly sanity if this goes on much longer.
After a while the pipe he was walking in joined a much larger tunnel where the water just came up to his knees. By the time he reached the exit Seifer had lost count of the times he'd thrown up into the nameless water. It was enough for his throat to burn with acid and his teeth to feel furry. He tried taking the bandanna off his head and wrapping it around his nose and mouth to block out the smell but after the third time of nearly being sick all over it he gave up and tossed it in the water.
Damn, he thought. Why is always carrots? He hadn't eaten carrots in the last year. Come to think of it, he hadn't eaten much in the last day or two.
There was nothing at the end of the tunnel. Nogrille, no robot security or hidden cameras (unless they were hidden really well) just a circle of light that slowly got bigger and stronger until Seifer could switch his torch off altogether. He blinked in the bright sunlight and hissed as his pupils constricted sharply.
Seifer looked around. He stood in the mouth of a huge pipe. The pipe jutted out several feet over a river, fastflowing and wide. There was no sound behind him except the rushing of the water. The outskirts of the city stretched to his left. It glowed in the half-light as the hundreds of countless law-abiding citizens who hadn"t spent their night crawling through a tunnel full of sewage and were now planning to flee from the authorities got on with their lives.
In Balamb, it would be wake-up call right now. He'd be sleeping in the room he shared with Fuu and Raijin. And the alarm would go off and one of them would stomp it and then eventually someone would crawl out of bed and they'd all race for the showers, and Seifer would get in first because he was the boss, ya know, and either Fuujin would win because she was a girl (and therefore fought dirty) or Raijin would win because he was bigger.
But he'd hated the stupid exams and the lessons on tactics at eight in the morning and Squall and Zell and their stupid gang and the rules that seemed to cover every aspect of their lives. You couldn't fight without taped gunblades or be late for classes or go into town without permission or talk back or use, Hyne forbid, your own initiative in missions. Seifer had never been very good at following those rules. Which was, maybe why he was here, crawling out of a tunnel full of shit, and they were there. Or here, depending on who exactly had been sent to tail him. Anyway, they weren't here right now, and that was the most important thing.
But in the back of his mind there was always something that said: this is too easy.
Seifer shrugged it off and put it down to the rare fact that something was going all right for once.
Casting around, he looked for a way down to the riverbank. There was none. The pipe jutted out several metres over the water, festooned with barbed wire at the sides and top. He experimentally kicked the base and was rewarded with a hollow clang. No way to get out through the bottom then. He was going to have to jump in the river.
Seifer shivered.
The water looked brown and cold. It was swollen with rainwater and nameless garbage from the city. He took a deep breath, checked his bag and dived. The dive was more of an unglamorous plop, weighted down with bag and flashlight still round his neck.
He took a deep breath before he went under, but the cold hit him like a wall and pushed the breath from his body. Halfway to the bottom and mostly drowning he realised his mistake and spent an interesting and frantic minute wrestling the flashlight off and ripping the bag from his back to free his arms, Little red and black spots danced in front of his eyes.
When Seifer came to the surface, sucking in lungfuls of air like fine Marduk whisky, the city was barely visible, and he was in the middle of a fastflowing river. His boots dragged at his feet and his clothes pulled him down. He thanked Hyne the river was at least quiet, he was having a job just to stay afloat and breathe.
It took ten minutes more of swimming, or rather trying to float in the right direction, before he finally touched bottom with the toes of his boots. His hands were freezing, clumsy and thick in the cold water and it was hard to move, but and a few seconds later he was lying in the brush at the edge of the trail, with the other flotsam thrown up by the tide, clothes soaking wet and laughing like crazy.
But the laughter had been six weeks ago. They'd been six bad weeks; weeks of learning and running and walking, putting one foot in front of the other mile after mile after mile, freezing in the night and fighting off monsters during the day and always being hunted. He'd seen helicopters a few times, heard the rasp of engines once, and seen five soldiers, the last one thirteen days ago. But they were still after him. He could feel it. Or maybe, he thought, it's all in my imagination. Won't be the first time. I'll be like one of those old guys you hear about, hiding in some remote location years after the war's ended. I'll get out of here in a year's time with a puzzled expression and a beard you could hide rats in.
If I last that long.