Seven Days to Topside

"Pretend you're already dead." – Known as "Rule 1" for surviving underground, scrawled by an anonymous Sanitation Technician on the wall of substation 7, City of Happy Lucky, 2199

The air was rank and stifling, what little there was to breathe. I hardly noticed it anymore but today it bothered me. When it rained topside it brought down all the fresh filth from the city. I used to miss rain. Now I cursed it as I silently led my squad through the darkness. The city issued facemasks but no self-respecting sanitation technician wore them; you couldn't hear right with them on and down here it was important to hear what was coming.

"How many more days, boss?" Jazin asked, scratching under his ENV-suit. He was lanky and his face was brown as the algae growing along the machine-rounded walls of the standard six-meter alumino-plastic sewer pipe we trudged in.

"Seven. Seven days," I told him for the tenth time.

He just laughed. Ali chuckled behind us.

Seven more days on this last miserable tour and then retirement topside, back to the world of the living again. I was too tired to complain and too numb to care. There was a formal expression for san-techs like me so close to retirement. In the field manuals they refer us as "short-timers" and there's all kinds of warning signs squad members are supposed to look out for: Lack of will, poor decisions, indifference to the mission. But I preferred the nickname lower ranking squad members used when they thought their superiors were out of earshot. Zombies. That one word seemed to describe the lack of sensation I felt after living on the edge for so long.

Just like management to pick one last job like this for a zombie short-timer and his burnt-out crew. But I'd always done right by my squad. Only the mission was more important. We all swore the damn oath to keep these tunnels clean.

"Ahead." Ali said.

The tunnel opened up into a pumping chamber. I could feel the slow roar of the pumps before I heard them. These stations were common drop-off points for re-supply and other pickups. Not too deep for union topsiders. They could bring a load of supplies down and be back to the surface before dinnertime. I hadn't seen the surface in four years.

I squinted as I entered the chamber. It was lit with fluorescents like most substations this close to the top. I removed my infrared goggles, blinking away the red shadows burned onto my retina. Vats of waste being reconditioned by bacteria gave everything a dark green glow.

In the chamber sat three men geared up in brand new ENV-suits, all wearing facemasks. Newbies. They rested on four 25-liter drums. One stood up and approached me. He was tall, over two meters. Not a good trait for a pipe scraper. Something about him, the way he glanced behind me, the way he shifted his weight from boot to boot told me he was impatient. Another bad trait down here.

"You Squad X-Five Niner?" he asked, his voice muffled through his mask. San-tech squad letters denoted depth experience, numbers were identifiers. The further down the alphabet the squad letter, the deeper into the sewer system the squad had been. In my career I had never met a Y or Z squad, or even knew if any existed.

I nodded. "Welcome to the underworld. Where we taking this?"

"We're to assist you on a bait drop to Zone Theta Blue," he said.

Behind me, Jazin spat into a churning vat of green slime.

Theta Blue. The Pit. Over the last hundred years the city had built on itself over and over again, layer upon layer. Picture a trash pile that people just kept dumping on, until there was nowhere left to for the trash to go. The Pit was at the bottom of that trash pile. The only things down there were the Rat King's legions and Pus worshipers, eternally fighting it out in the sludge like devils and demons warring over Hell. San-techs avoided that plumbing unless we traveled together in large numbers, and then, only with white-phos throwers to burn the top sections out.