Page 18 of From the Noblest Motives
Wait. Why can I feel that? Why do I feel the earth at all?
Carefully, he reached for the top of his head. His hand came away sticky and dark. Even though it was too dim to see clearly, the iron scent of blood was sharp and unmistakable. His metal plate was gone, knocked partially off in the first explosion and entirely off in the second. He hoped too much of his scalp hadn't gone with it.
All right. Talent-blocker plate gone. Below the compound far enough to be beyond the effect of the mu-metal walls and floor. Fire blazing above him likely to get worse, which meant breathing was going to get dicey in short order. It said a lot about the prison's priorities that talent suppression had taken precedence over fire suppression.Although now that I'm thinking about it, someone might have disabled those systems.
Lying there thinking instead of reacting, a lot of things occurred to him at once. He rose up on his elbows for another look at his dead companion, whose plate had been removed rather more carefully than Shudder's accidental and messily painful plate-ectomy.
This man wanted to kill me. This manplannedto kill me. No, that's not even quite right. This man was specifically chosen by someone to kill me, and a not-prisoner provided the means—plate-ectomy—and method—guy was probably a sparker who was told where explody stuff would be. Someone really, really wanted me to die in here.
"Well. I'm not in an obliging mood today. Come on rocks. Help me out here."
He urged the rocks off his lower body, and pain exploded in his left leg when things shifted that shouldn't. That didn't look good. A hint of white bone showed through his pants leg where the material had ripped. Tibia? Fibia? Tibula? Not that it mattered. Broken was broken, and he wasn't walking out. Why wasn't anything ever easy?
Fine. He wouldn't actually have been walking out anyway. Time for some earth moving, though he'd have to be careful about it. If he went too far, he'd most likely run into swamp and drown before he could tunnel to the surface. Not far enough, and that would be incredibly stupid, tunneling back into the prison of murderous conspiracies.
He grayed out twice in the process of ripping off one of his sleeves and tying it around the broken leg. The best he could do was to try to keep debris out of the open wound.Hooray. I'll escape prison murder and die of sepsis.
One thing at a time. Escape first. Die later. First, he needed a direction. Shudder had the sense that the kitchen and dining area were centrally located, and while he hadn't considered it as more than a spatial feeling before, now he realized it only made sense. With everything so rigidly scheduled so prisoners didn't encounter each other in the halls, it would be much more efficient and easier to control if the prisoners all had roughly the same distance to walk.
Though there might be more than one dining/kitchen complex. There could be several blocks of cells set up this way, and if that were the case, how far away was he from the outer perimeter fence? Was there a perimeter fence?Gah. No idea, since they didn't un-bag my head walking in. Stop. Making yourself crazy. Just pick.
Shudder huffed at his own waffling and stared at the undamaged wall beside him. Those pipes were big. Big pipes in a house were usually… what? Wastewater, right? So they'd be heading away. Out. But there could be an internal wastewater plant.Oh dear gods, stop it. Follow the stupid pipes.
He turned to the awkwardly positioned corpse. "Terribly sorry, Mr. Enemy. We were never even properly introduced, and now I'm going to have to abandon you here. I have the feeling you won't mind too much."
He coaxed the earth beneath the rubble into rising to meet him. Earth surfing would have to do, since he couldn't stand and didn't think he could crawl without passing out. He'd just never surfed on his back before. Carefully, he used his earth moving to push rubble aside, verifying that yes, he'd fallen far enough that he could tunnel through the foundation—ordinary concrete—and into the dirt underneath. Tunneling was tricky, and Shudder had to put everything else out of his mind. One moment of lost concentration when he forgot to hold the earth up above him while he tunneled forward, and he'd end up buried alive. Now that would be an ironic ending, wouldn't it?
The good thing was he didn't need to dig a proper tunnel. He could shove the earth past his body on either side as he dug and only worry about keeping the actual tunnel around his body intact. No need to worry if it collapsed after he moved through. He wasn't ever going to use it again.
Concentrate, stupid. Worst focus in the universe.
How long it took, he would never have any idea. Not as if he could ask his AI minder from inside the tunnel. Several times he had to stop and rest. Everything hurt too much. But the ever-increasing need for fresh air shoved him onward each time. Eventually, the heavy pressure of mu metal above him vanished, and he assumed he'd made it outside the walls. A few more feet, a few more feet…
When he started to grow lightheaded, he knew he'd run out of time. Hypoxia would kill him as surely as a cave-in. Shudder turned his efforts to tunneling up as quickly as he could manage, letting the earth cradle him and carry him to the surface.
His fingers broke through first, encountering damp soil and plants. He enlarged the hole enough to get his head and shoulders out for a look and drew in a shaky breath of lovely humid air. It was heavy with vegetative rot and moldering wood and was the sweetest thing he'd ever smelled. There was a chain link fence eight feet from him, and on the other side of that fence loomed an enormous, featureless building with no doors or windows on the portion he could see.
He was out. Entirely out.First try. Ha. He would've done a fist pump if he wasn't so tired. Not that he could stop here. Sirens blared from the compound, and at some point, the prison staff would recover bodies, do a head count, and come up one short.
Despite his weariness, Shudder snickered. "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."
The sun had apparently just set, since there were dimming purple bands still hanging around in the sky. That had to be west. Probably. So he should go…
Not west. A healthy Shudder would've headed that way, back home, back to the Redoubt and his kids. West eventually ran into poisoned lands that he wasn't going to survive in his current condition, even if he got that far. Not north. Too much civilization, too much government that way. San Judas Tadeo was in the western wilds of Georgia. Right. He'd head farther into the wilds and aim for the ruins of one of the old coastal towns. See if he could regroup there. Maybe even find some help among the half-feral people who tended to live in those places.
He had the earth lift him the rest of the way out of the tunnel and gritted his teeth to turn on his uninjured side.Fuck. Ow. So much not good things. At least he could see where he was going this way. As night closed in, Shudder earth surfed south, doing his best not to think too far ahead.
5
CYRIL
Free Shudder!
Repeal the Horace Act!
Variant Rights Are Human Rights!
Every broadcast came back to the same story, the same shots of angry protesters surrounding government buildings. Damien leaned toward the image to read the signs, though there was little variation. The variaphobe factions had tried to hoist Shudder up as the face of variant evil. While they hadn't failed spectacularly, they had still failed to win over the majority they'd apparently expected. At least, that's what the news polls indicated.
