The Girl in the City Read online

  The Girl in the City

  by Philip Harris

  Copyright © 2015 by Philip Harris

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author or publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living, or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Aspects of this story are inspired by the world of Pennsylvania, copyright (c) 2014 by Michael Bunker. Used with permission.

  ISBN 978-0-9938887-4-8

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design by Jason Gurley

  Interior illustrations by Ben J. Adams - Copyright © 2015 Philip Harris

  Formatting by Polgarus Studio

  Published by Philip Harris

  http://www.SolitaryMindset.com

  THE GIRL IN THE CITY

  LEAH GRABBED THE SALVAGE AND RAN. Metal and plastic clattered and rattled in the cloth bag hanging around her shoulders as she threw herself down the slope, slipping and sliding on the loose earth. The lights of the encampment behind her cast long shadows across the ground but made it just about possible to see where she was going. She heard the Wild Ones shouting as they ran towards the pile of discarded circuit boards, wires, and lumps of rusted iron she’d just raided. She felt the familiar rush of adrenaline, and a smile slid across her face. She let gravity do its job, pulling her faster and faster down the hill until she was afraid she’d topple forward.

  A dark shape reared up out of the gloom—a woman armed with a heavy wooden club. The woman swung the weapon at Leah’s head. Leah dived to the right. She landed awkwardly, the bag caught beneath her. Something hard dug into her ribs, a piece of metal or the big circuit board she’d found buried at the bottom of the salvage pile. She cried out, winced.

  The woman shouted, “Weasel’s over here, boys.”

  Leah pulled herself to her feet and took off running again. She risked a backwards glance. The woman was out of shape and weighed down by layers of heavy animal furs, and she was already falling back. There were others, though—two men, leaner and less encumbered. They were past the woman and gaining on Leah. She zigged and zagged, trying to confuse the men and slow them down, but they were too close. She needed to get out of their line of sight; she couldn’t let them follow her back to the City.

  Leah headed left, away from home and towards unfamiliar territory. There was a crack, and a puff of earth kicked up a few feet ahead of her.

  Leah yelped in surprise. She’d never been shot at before. For a moment, she considered throwing the bag away and giving up on the day’s bounty. But she couldn’t go home empty-handed.

  She ran towards another hill. The ground beneath her feet became harder. That made it easier to run, but she had to dodge stones and rocks. Twice she nearly tripped and fell.

  Another glance back showed her the men had slowed. One of them held a longrifle to his shoulder. Leah ducked as another gunshot rang out, and the bullet ricocheted off a nearby boulder. She pushed harder, desperate to reach the top of the hill, expecting any second to feel the punch of a bullet hitting her in the back. Another shot whined past her ear as she reached the crest. She flinched and threw herself forward.

  Immediately, she realized her mistake. The ground dropped sharply away from her, and she plunged over the edge. She hit the ground face first, filling her mouth with dirt, and flipped over twice. The bag slipped from around her neck, and she clutched at it, still eager not to lose the salvage. She landed on a partly buried rock and screamed as a wave of pain swept up her leg. The impact jarred the bag free, sending it sliding away from her. Leah clawed at the shifting earth, trying to at least slow herself down.

  Her shoulder clipped a tree. She lunged at it, desperate fingers wrapping around the brittle trunk. Bark broke away in her hands, but the tree held, and she stopped sliding.

  She lay there, breathing heavily, trying to get her heart back under control. Dirt and a few smaller rocks tumbled past her head. Her bag was above her, caught between a pair of rocks that would have quite happily shattered her spine had she hit them.

  The harsh voices of the men drifted to her from somewhere up above, but Leah couldn’t see them yet. This side of the hill was dark. The lights of the encampment were blocked by the mass of earth and rock, and the moonlight had been swallowed up by the thick cloud that had rolled in that afternoon. If she was lucky, the men might not be able to see her in the gloom. That was why she’d chosen to stray so far from home and try such a brazen raid in the first place.

  Opposite her sat a large rocky outcrop, its surface pitted and weatherworn. Pushing aside her fears, Leah scrabbled across the slope towards the rocks. The ground gave way beneath her, and she started slipping again. She dived forward and managed to claw her way onto more stable ground. As soon as her feet felt secure, she rolled behind the outcrop.

  “Can you see ’er?”

  Leah flinched. The man’s voice was guttural, dangerous. She’d heard stories of what happened to people who were careless enough to get caught by the Wild Ones. Stories of torture and murder. Of cannibalism.

  “No,” said a female voice, the woman with the club. Light flashed across the ground beside Leah, and she shrank back behind the rocks.

  “But I can see the little weasel’s bag. Throw me the end of your rope, and I’ll get it.”

  Cloth rustled.

  “Don’t let go of me, you doplich. These rocks are nasty sharp,” said the woman.

  Dirt cascaded down the hill beside Leah, chased by the odd rock and one or two broken branches.

  The woman grunted and called out, “Let out a bit more rope. I can’t quite reach.”

  Wood snapped, and more dirt rolled past Leah’s hiding place. “Okay, I’ve got it.”

  “Can you see the girl?”

  The light returned, sweeping over the side of the hill and illuminating a row of jagged rocks at its base. They looked like the teeth of some giant creature. Leah imagined them chewing her up and shuddered.

  “No,” said the woman. “We’ve got the stuff back, and I’m hungry. She’s probably dead on those rocks, anyway. Pull me back up.”

  The avalanche of dirt and rocks began again, and Leah closed her eyes. She’d lost the night’s salvage, and the haul had been good. The Wild Ones would be pleasantly surprised when they opened her bag. But at least she was alive. And apart from a few bruises and scrapes, unharmed.

  The ground beside Leah lit up again, sending shadows dancing across the grass. Leah pulled back, pressing herself against the rock, but unless the Wild Ones came down the slope, she was safe.

  The woman said something Leah couldn’t make out, and the light disappeared. The chatter continued, fading away as her pursuers walked back towards their camp. Leah sat for as long as she dared. She kept her arms wrapped tight around her legs, shivering in the chill night air. When she could wait no longer, she began climbing back up the hill. It was slow going and treacherous. She kept having to stop to pick out her route, and by the time she got to the top, her arms and legs were aching, and she was sweating despite the cold.

  The horizon was beginning to lighten, but she could see the flickering fires of the encampment off in the distance and the lights of the City opposite. She ran parallel to the camp, searching the gloom for the tall tree that she used to orient herself in the world. It took her longer than she’d expected to find it. She was beginning to wonder if she’d gotten confused and had ended up turned around when the tree loomed up out of the dar
kness in front of her. She whispered a quiet thanks to whatever gods had kept watch over her and headed towards the City and the cave system that would take her home.

  The walk took almost half an hour, and the sun was climbing rapidly into the sky when Leah finally slid down the last hill to the narrow crack in the ground that led into the caves. From there, she’d be able to get to the tunnel system beneath the City. The drainage tunnels had been built to handle the overflow from the river that ran through the middle of the City. They were damp and foul smelling, and you had to ignore the creatures skulking around in the shadows, but it was the only way to get into or out of the City unobserved.

  Leah took one last look around to make sure the Wild Ones hadn’t followed her and then slipped through the crack and into the pitch-black caves. She unclipped the flashlight she carried on her belt and flicked it on. The beam cut through the darkness, casting eerie shadows across the uneven floor. She reached towards her belt for a drink and realized her canteen had fallen off at some point, probably during the unexpected descent down the hill. She sighed. What more could go wrong today?

  Suddenly very thirsty, Leah hurried through the caves. She was following a series of complex symbols she’d scratched in the rock—directions written in a language only she understood. Each junction was marked with a sequence of symbols that told her which direction the tunnel led, how many exits there were and their proximity to police patrols.

  In her haste, Leah missed a couple of turns and had to backtrack, but eventually she reached the shaft that led up from the caves to the drainage system. This was the hardest part of the journey and was probably the reason why no one else used the tunnels. The shaft was narrow, and the walls were slick with what Leah hoped was just water. But the bricks were uneven, and there were enough cracks and crevices that Leah could climb up to the remains of a ladder still attached to the wall at the top of the shaft.

  Checking behind her one last time, Leah began clambering up the wall. Her legs were tired after the chase, and soon they were shaking from the effort of holding her weight as she felt out the handholds in the wall. Something made a noise in the tunnel above her, the skittering of some subterranean creature. As Leah grabbed the ladder, a drop of something wet and cold landed on her neck. She shivered.

  The rusting ladder creaked as she pulled herself up the last couple of feet and into the tunnel. She stood as quickly as she could, then clapped her hands twice to try to scare off any nearby creatures.

  Leah paused, listening for sounds of pursuit. Once she was satisfied no one had followed her, she began picking her way through the muck and dirt towards the hidden room she liked to think of as her secret lair. As far as Leah knew, no one came down into the drainage system anymore, but they had once, and Leah had found the storage room the first time she’d come here. It had been sealed behind a brick wall, but time and poor workmanship had taken their toll, and the wall had cracked. With a bit of help from Leah, some of the bricks had fallen away, creating a narrow gap just wide enough for her to squeeze through.

  Whoever had sealed the room had left a stack of broken chairs and some wood leaning against the wall inside. Over the course of a couple of weeks, Leah had managed to assemble the various broken chairs into two moderately intact ones and found enough discarded bricks nearby to create a makeshift desk from the wood. After a weekend of industrious cleaning, she had a top-secret lair for her top-secret society, The Salvage Squad. So far, she was the only member.

  Leah slipped into her lair and sat down. She’d left a backup canteen on the table, and she took a drink from it. The water was a bit gritty, but it was better than nothing.

  A muffled thump came from somewhere overhead, and Leah ducked instinctively. She recognized it as an explosion. The City had been under attack by a terrorist group called TRACE for months now. They claimed they were fighting for the people of the City. All Leah knew was that they did a lot of damage and killed a lot of people.

  As Leah sat there, the adrenaline finally began to wear off, and the full impact of what she’d just gone through hit her. Her legs started shaking. Fingers of dread, cold and hard, seized her gut and twisted. If she’d been too slow or she hadn’t caught that tree or the Wild Ones had found her hiding place… she’d be dead. And she’d lost the salvage and her canteen. She’d been greedy, and now she had nothing her father could trade. She’d let him down.

  All she did have left were a couple of old coins she’d found inside the remains of a ceramic pig. Leah pulled them out of her pockets and peered at them. They were silver, but they were small, which meant they weren’t worth very much. Metal currency had been replaced by unis a long time ago, and only the most nostalgic collector had any interest in them. Leah decided to put them in her safe for the time being.

  She’d found the safe half buried out in the rural zone, complete with one slightly rusted but serviceable key. It had taken her a couple of hours to drag it along the tunnels to the shaft and another to attach it to a rope and haul it up to the drainage tunnels, but she’d managed it in the end. The safe’s lock had a habit of sticking, so she didn’t use it much, but she felt more comfortable knowing the safe was there if she needed it. She knelt on the floor beside the safe and unlocked the door, placing the coins beside the plastic doll’s head and a few scraps of green paper she’d found slipped inside an old book a few months earlier. Old books were precious—that one had got them a couple of days’ rations—but the green paper was old money, and old money was worthless. Leah’s stomach growled. She locked the safe door, took another drink, and headed back out into the tunnels.

  Her flashlight dimmed a little, and she groaned. She needed more batteries, which meant more trading of salvage they didn’t have. She knew the route to the surface pretty well, so she kept the flashlight off as much as possible as she made her way back towards the center of the City, only using it when she needed to check where she was or to cross a patch of water. Too tired to worry about being followed anymore, Leah took the most direct route to the closest side street. It was in the merchant zone, and the city would still be quiet enough for her to leave the tunnels unseen but not so quiet that a teenage girl wandering around would draw undue attention.

  When she finally reached the metal ladder that would take her back to the surface, she turned off the flashlight for the last time. She let out a sigh, thankful she wouldn’t have to tell her father she’d drained the batteries running around the rural zone. At least not yet.

  Promising her exhausted limbs this was the last exercise of the night, Leah dragged herself up the ladder. Distracted, she pushed open the cover at the top and was halfway out before she saw the Transport Authority policeman. She recognized him immediately. His name was Ray. He was a thin, wiry man with a permanent scowl who’d love to catch her rooting around beneath the City.

  Leah ducked, dropping back down the ladder until only her head was peeking out. Ray hadn’t seen her. His attention was taken up by the woman with him. She was much older than him, her hair gray and thin, but for a moment, Leah thought they were a couple. Then she saw the look of fear on the woman’s face. Ray had one hand clasped around her arm, just above her elbow. In his other hand, he held a gray cloth bag. Leah could see a loaf of bread sticking out of the top. Ray shoved the woman forward, and she slipped on some paper scattered across the alley.

  She turned towards Ray. “I’m sorry.”

  Ray rolled his eyes. “You always are, Alice.”

  “I have the voucher—you know I do. It’s at home. I can get it.”

  “It’s too late for that.”

  “But my daughter—”

  “You know the rules. You get one chance, and you threw it away.”

  “Please,” said Alice, her faced twisted in desperation. “I’ll do anything.”

  Ray grimaced and pulled on Alice’s arm, making her yelp. “You make me sick.”

  Alice muttered something Leah couldn’t hear, and Ray shook his head and pulled on Alice’s a
rm again. Leah watched as Ray led the woman down the alley. She felt a flash of relief that he’d been distracted, but it was quickly replaced by guilt. The woman, Alice, had just been trying to get food. She didn’t deserve to be treated like a criminal.

  Leah waited a full five minutes to be sure they’d gone before scrambling out of the tunnel and heading home.

  The streets were dotted with people, early risers and late revelers, but she kept to the side streets, and no one took any notice of her. She saw one Transport policeman, but he was already quizzing an elderly man and ignored Leah. Still, Leah turned off the street as quickly as she could, cutting down a dank alley.

  She’d barely taken three steps when a young man appeared around the corner ahead of her. He was holding his thigh, red blood glistening against the pale flesh of his hand. Leah threw herself against the wall behind a rectangular metal container filled with rotting garbage. The smell caught in her throat, and she gagged. The man’s uneven footsteps echoed down the alley towards her. She pressed herself against the wall, hoping that it might somehow swallow her up.

  There was a grunt, and something clanged against the metal container. The man appeared. Leah could see the wound in his leg clearly now. It was deep, the flesh red and exposed beneath his hand. His pants were soaked in blood. He was clutching a rectangular leather bag in his other hand. The man looked back over his shoulder, his eyes filled with a mix of pain and terror.

  A gunshot rang out, loud in the confined space of the alley, and Leah squealed. The man fell forward, sprawling into the dirt. Red blossomed across his shoulder. His eyes met Leah’s and widened. Twisting sideways, he threw the leather bag towards her. It slid across the ground and landed near her feet. She stared at it, her mind a whirlwind of conflicting thoughts.