Chapter 18: Vignette does a job...
"Oh God oh God oh God..."
Vignette babbled incoherently to herself with each hesitant step into the darkness. There was no room left in her mind to scold her for not bringing another human being into this mission with her, only fear and an urge to run in any direction. But she had to be quiet, making sure each step was on dry concrete, unless she wanted something or someone hearing her.
"Gab dear...if I die..."
She snapped her trembling rifle to her left after hearing a quiet crack, but realized it was just a rat. It 'squeak squeaked' away, splashing into the pockets of ankle deep sewage water as it went.
Vignette stopped dead in her tracks, aware of ravenous human-like voices echoing across the tunnels. She aimed her sights behind her where she came from, hoping to high hell that she didn't have to pull the trigger. She had already felt tremendous guilt after shooting the last person she encountered, knowing that he was most likely starving to death, and simply wanted to eat. She could've thrown him some of her rations, but shot out of fear.
She was not aware that there were people 'living' in these tunnels, sustaining themselves on rats, fungi and human flesh. If she had known she would've brought along friends much braver than she was, or just wouldn't have gone in the first place.
"Soph...," she muttered nervously. "I'm gonna give you a beating if I get out of this. Lying piece of..."
Around ten hours earlier, Vignette met up with Sophie, her old friend / boss. She was apparently working on a solution to the whole 'lack of food' problem in Japan, by modifying certain seeds to not only be able to grow, but flourish when planted in radioactive soils. But to do so, she needed some parts for a machine which Vignette happily agreed to fetch for her, under the assumption that it was for the greater good.
It probably was, but what was the greater good if she would end up dying in these sewers?
Water could be heard splashing up from a living creature in the distance. It was all too dark, but Vignette could just make out the silhouette of a person running towards her glowing red reticle. She fired off a warning shot, Vignette's face illuminated by the muzzle flash for a millisecond.
"B-B-BACK OFF!," she yelled, her voice reverberating across the tunnels. "I WILL SHOOT YOU!"
The man stopped and slowly raised his hands so that his fanned out fingers were visible as a silhouette.
"Don't shoot!," he called with a raspy voice. The man sounded weak and tired. "I didn't know you were here!"
"Turn around and leave!," Vignette ordered once more.
"Please...I'm don't want to hurt you! I just want to talk!"
"...what do you want?!"
"D-Do you have any food? Please...we're starving..."
Vignette walked a bit closer so that she could better hear what the man was saying, still keeping her reticle pinned to his chest.
"If I give you food, will you leave me alone?"
"Y-Yes. Of course."
With one hand, she reached into her back pocket. In the time it took for her left hand to retrieve the granola bar, Vignette suddenly saw his hands disappearing with a brief silhouette of a handgun.
She held down the trigger and punched five holes right through his body. The smoke cleared and the ten ejected bullet casings found their place in the water while Vignette still kept her reticle on the downed man, a lesson learnt when an Ares soldier pretended to play dead and nearly shot her head clean off. Ever so cautiously, she began to move forward inch by inch, watching for any signs of movement.
None. It seemed as if he was dead. She kicked away his handgun and sighed in both relief and sadness.
"I shouldn't be feeling sorry for him. He was going to shoot me. I...warned him."
She pulled out a lighter from a pocket on his tattered coat and shined the light up and down his corpse. She didn't keep any of his belongings: half a packet of cigarettes, some spare 9mm bullets, a cracked phone and a wallet with a picture of a young girl, but instead rested them on top of his torso.
She shook her head, but continued to venture deeper into the endless abyss that was the sewer tunnels, now a bit comforted that she had a small source of light. The warm, orange glow creating shadows and patterns on her army rifle reminded her of when she would watch the sunrises with Gabriel during deployments, during simpler times. If only Gabriel was next to her right now, she wouldn't be jumping in her boots at every noise she heard.
Eventually, after going through door after door and clearing away countless cobwebs, the sewers would turn into maintenance tunnels, its walls lined with old, criss-crossing pipes, and electrical boxes scattered here and there. If Sophie was indeed telling the truth about this place, by following these maintenance tunnels, they would lead straight into an old warehouse where the part was located.
However, she began to stray from the widest pathway which led to her destination, as she noticed old clothes and toys scattered around her feet, and she couldn't help but walk into the other rooms out of sheer curiosity. She switched to her Glock-18 and held it firmly to her chest, as she was taught during CQB (close quarters battle) training, so that no-one could grab the gun from a corner. The more she explored, the more she realized that this was where that man probably lived. A dawning wave of guilt came over her, thinking that he wanted to come home here, and pulled out his gun as an act of self-defence.
She turned the corner, entering a boiler room with homemade toys scattered on the ground, and chalk drawings strewn on any available flat surface. In the corner of a dirty mattress was a little boy, pointing a Colt 1911 at her.
*CLICK!
The noise was deafening, and Vignette would've shot at the noise instantly, but soon realized that it was a little kid. She holstered her pistol and knelt down to the little boy, gently taking the silver gun from his tiny hands.
"Hi there," she cooed in a gentle voice. He looked at her with a mix of fear and anger, shuffling against the corner of the wall as tightly as he could.
"I-I'm not here to hurt you. See? Oh! Are...are you hungry?"
She fished the granola bar from her back pocket and opened it in front of the kid, who salivated at the bar. She broke it in half, taking a bit of hers while giving the other to the child.
"Here. It's okay."
As he basically shoved the nutrient block down his throat, Vignette stood up and looked around at his room. There was another mattress in the corner, and she hoped that it didn't belong to the man she just killed. She opened a drawer and there was an old, tattered journal which she picked up, but she felt a tug on her leg.
"You can't read that," the kid explained. "He said that only I can read it."
"Oh...sorry."
She put the journal back into the drawer and sat down on the mattress opposite from the kid.
"Who are you?," he asked with his arms crossed. "Why are you here?"
"My name's Vignette. Vig-nette. I'm...looking for something."
"Give me my gun back!," he yelled suddenly. He ran towards Vignette and swiped the gun from her hands.
"What's your name kiddo?," she asked.
"Go away. Before I shoot you."
*CLICK!
"It wasn't your fault. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't your fault."
Vignette sighed as she placed the handgun magazine next to her. "Look...um...where's your parents? Why aren't they here?"
"Not telling!," he stubbornly huffed, turning his back to Vignette. "Stranger!"
"Is your...dad taking care of you?"
"Go! Away!"
He acted very similar to Gabriel in all her stubborn glory, although when she did it Vignette knew she was just playing around.
"Why don't we make a trade? I give you something you want, and you give me something I want. How's that sound hm?"
"No! N. O."
The sound of his stomach growling with comedic timing didn't make him sound too threatening.
"How about...a cheesecake?," Vignette offered. "D'you like sweets?"
His stomach growled even louder. "N-N-No! I...don't even know what that is."
"Have you tasted anything sweet kiddo? Cookies? Candies?"
He nodded slightly.
"Well...imagine that sweetness, but times a hundred. And it melts in your mouth because of how fluffy it is."
Obviously she was being flippant; the small bite-sized cheesecake she gets in her MRE's nowadays tastes like slightly sweet crackers, and would just crumble when exposed to any kind of moisture such as saliva.
"...for what?," he muttered, seemingly coming around to the deal.
"I just want to know...who sleeps in this bed and what that person looks like. You know, face scars or anything like that. Harmless information, right?"
He opened his mouth to spill the information, but stubbornly closed it and looked away, causing a small groan of annoyance from Vignette.
"Show me this 'cheese-thing' first! Then we have a deal!"
"You're a reeeeal pain, you know that?"
Vignette unlocked her phone and showed him a candid picture of Gabriel opening her mouth to eat the 'cheesecake'. He slightly opened his mouth at the image, and Vignette could've sworn she saw some kind of sparkle in his eyes. Vignette let him take the phone from her hands, even allowing him to look through her pictures.
"I don't have any lewds on there, do I? Err...pfft. I guess it's not like he'll get it anyway."
He stopped on a group selfie of Vignette, Gabriel and the residents of their apartment celebrating the blonde's birthday.
"Oi," she said with fake seriousness. "No looking through my other pictures. So, you've seen the cheesecake. We have a deal or not?"
"S-Shut up! Anyway, it's not real! I want to see it here! In real life!," he demanded, his voice getting higher with each breath.
"I don't have it here right now. Because...I can't carry it around with me. It's delicious. I don't want people stealing it from me, you see."
"No. Deal."
"...in fact...there was a guy who tried to take it from me just a minute ago. This guy with long grey hair. B-But...we uh...I told him to go to my house to get it."
"Huh?! Where'd he go?!"
Vignette winced in pain. She was going to have to break the news to this poor kid.
"Look...I'm really sorry. Your dad is...gone. Come with me. I'll take care of you-"
"SHUT UP!," he yelled. "GET AWAY!"
"Hey, please I-"
"GO AWAY!"
Vignette turned and walked out of the boiler room, immediately hearing him break down in tears as soon as she left. She contemplated walking back in and putting him out of his misery right now, but couldn't bear to imagine it. She made a mental note to come back to this situation on her way back. The rest of the journey went by rather uneventfully, aside from said discovery of a little boy, as well as other remnants of desperate families living underground to escape the radiation. They all seemed to have either moved to a different location, or have been buried someplace nice, or so Vignette hoped.
Finally, after around an hour, she was at the warehouse where they shipped packages. Although the extremely tall shelves were toppled over, most likely from scavengers, they were still in alphabetical order, meaning that Vignette had an easy time looking for the correct stock of packages made by the manufacturers.
"Percon...Percon...here it is."
She noticed the wave of nostalgia she got when she opened the brown box with her knife, like she did when she got a brand new laptop shipped to her home back then. Pink packing peanuts fell on the floor as Vignette held up a circular glass disc with a metal rim and holes scattered in the middle of it. It looked like it was a part meant to be slot into some big machine, like an ink cartridge in a printer.
After taking two more discs as well as other parts, which included a circuitry kit, some servos, lenses used for microscopes and some batteries, she quickly scurried back into the tunnels, noticing that the sun was going down, and things that she didn't even want to imagine were moving outside. The place she was in, according to the online map, was about twenty kilometres (12 miles) away from Spirit Base, which was completely new territory for her, especially when the landscape was changed so much from the aftermath of war and a nuclear winter.
Vignette's feet were beginning to ache. Ever since the limit on how much food she was able to buy, she and Gabriel had noticed that everything took ten times longer to heal, a consequence from a lack of protein. The discomfort in her arms from a week ago when she was assigned to do heavy labour still lingered, like she had lifted weights just yesterday. She wondered if Sophie and her team of super geniuses could somehow make tofu after she got back.
Tired and lost in her own thoughts, she couldn't react quick enough when she felt the cold barrel of a rifle on the back of her neck.
"Vignette?"
She turned around after hearing the familiar voice.
"Gab? I can't see you."
The dark hallways of the maintenance tunnel was suddenly lit up by a bright flashlight, and Vignette looked down to see blonde hair.
"Oh thank God," she sighed in relief, hugging Gabriel tight. "W-What are you doing here Gab? I thought you had training?"
"You ever look at your watch dipshit? You had me fucking worried. You could've let me know!," she half-yelled.
"S-Sorry. I thought...this would be a simple fetch quest and- what? Fetch quest? I'm even beginning to sound like you, aren't I..."
Gabriel sighed. "Christ...what if that wasn't me...you...need to check your corners better."
"What's she doing here?"
Vignette looked to her right, at the indent in the wall where Gabriel ambushed her from, and saw the little boy peek his head out.
"Yeah," Gabriel mimicked. "What is she doing here?"
"Shut it. I was getting a few parts for Soph, that's all."
"You've got it now? Can we get the hell out of here now? This place gives me the creeps."
Vignette knelt down and made level eye contact with the kid, who hid behind Gabriel's leg.
"I'm sorry kid. About earlier," she said gently.
"Earlier?," Gabriel muttered.
"Whatever...are we going now?," he said through his nose, hopping on Gabriel's back.
"Let's."
AN: 12-03-2021 Hi everyone! Thanks for reading this far. Sorry about the lack of updates, I've been real busy with university stuff. I'll try and post at least once a week, expect one on Saturdays or Sundays.
