11. Morlocks
Morlocks
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
FR-T
Expanding a warren is slow work. You gotta go slow because you can’t use machines; can’t even dig too fast by hand or they’ll hear ya. The metal bury ground mics everywhere, seeding the ground with the damn things. Maybe one in fifty doesn’t break on landing or end up facing the sky, but it’s enough. You gotta go slow, gotta stay deep or those ears hear you and they come for you and you learn that the tunnels are a mixed blessing. They keep you hid as long as you’re hid, but once they know…
Sometimes you end up caught, with metal at either end of a burrow, and then there’s not much you can do but hope and prey that you’re the one they miss; that falling bodies and falling rock mask your heatbeat and your body heat without smothering you.
Happened to me; I got injured and everyone else got dead. Reckon the shock dropped my vitals far enough the Terminators didn’t get a trace under the bodies and the rubble.
Knew they wouldn’t go far. They’d hole up, wait for the patrols to come back; wait for command to send a rescue or a recon to look for survivors. That meant I couldn’t run, couldn’t move far enough to reach food. Fortunately, I suppose, I was buried under what a rat would call food.
Oh, no; I didn’t eat my former comrades, although I’ve known those who did and I don’t judge them for it in those circumstances. I, however, stuck to rat. For more than a week I lived on rat, before I felt safe to slough off my shelter of decaying human flesh - oh, there’s a metaphor in that if you’re a poet - scavenge what was left in stores and carve my way, painstakingly slowly, out of that charnel pit.
In the end, I was lucky; again. I found an old storm drain, clean and open and connected to a web of electrical tunnels which ran under half of old Chicago. That was deep; that was quiet. We still use most of it and some of us… Some of us never come out.
Some guys who get caught in a hole like I did go stir crazy; blow up their warren or get cooked trying to run for the hills. Others do what I did. We get smart, we get careful; we go deeper. I found those sewers because I dug down.
We’re a breed apart. We live our lives underneath, never seeing the sun, even through the pall of dust. We live in the tunnels, work in the tunnels, expanding the warrens, digging into the metal factories, finding new places for habitation and industry. We sleep and hunt and eat in the tunnels; fight and fuck in the tunnels and raise our children in the darkness under the earth.
Our skin is so ground in with mud that we become the colour of the tunnels themselves; we learn to see in the dark and then to hear and feel when we can not see. In the tunnels we become the equals of the machines, and then their superiors.
And yes, we eat our dead, reclaiming their life for the tribe.
And yes, sometimes we eat one of the others when they fall down here, or when we find a metal kill in the upper tunnels.
And yes, sometimes we find a Grey and then we do hunt and kill and feast upon forbidden flesh.
The others say that they worry for us, but we know the truth; we know that they fear us. It matters not; we owe them no ill-will. We are content to wait; wait until man and metal eradicate each other and the world is left to us.
Because if there is one thing that being buried alive under a mound of corpses for nine days teaches you, it’s patience.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
FR-T
Expanding a warren is slow work. You gotta go slow because you can’t use machines; can’t even dig too fast by hand or they’ll hear ya. The metal bury ground mics everywhere, seeding the ground with the damn things. Maybe one in fifty doesn’t break on landing or end up facing the sky, but it’s enough. You gotta go slow, gotta stay deep or those ears hear you and they come for you and you learn that the tunnels are a mixed blessing. They keep you hid as long as you’re hid, but once they know…
Sometimes you end up caught, with metal at either end of a burrow, and then there’s not much you can do but hope and prey that you’re the one they miss; that falling bodies and falling rock mask your heatbeat and your body heat without smothering you.
Happened to me; I got injured and everyone else got dead. Reckon the shock dropped my vitals far enough the Terminators didn’t get a trace under the bodies and the rubble.
Knew they wouldn’t go far. They’d hole up, wait for the patrols to come back; wait for command to send a rescue or a recon to look for survivors. That meant I couldn’t run, couldn’t move far enough to reach food. Fortunately, I suppose, I was buried under what a rat would call food.
Oh, no; I didn’t eat my former comrades, although I’ve known those who did and I don’t judge them for it in those circumstances. I, however, stuck to rat. For more than a week I lived on rat, before I felt safe to slough off my shelter of decaying human flesh - oh, there’s a metaphor in that if you’re a poet - scavenge what was left in stores and carve my way, painstakingly slowly, out of that charnel pit.
In the end, I was lucky; again. I found an old storm drain, clean and open and connected to a web of electrical tunnels which ran under half of old Chicago. That was deep; that was quiet. We still use most of it and some of us… Some of us never come out.
Some guys who get caught in a hole like I did go stir crazy; blow up their warren or get cooked trying to run for the hills. Others do what I did. We get smart, we get careful; we go deeper. I found those sewers because I dug down.
We’re a breed apart. We live our lives underneath, never seeing the sun, even through the pall of dust. We live in the tunnels, work in the tunnels, expanding the warrens, digging into the metal factories, finding new places for habitation and industry. We sleep and hunt and eat in the tunnels; fight and fuck in the tunnels and raise our children in the darkness under the earth.
Our skin is so ground in with mud that we become the colour of the tunnels themselves; we learn to see in the dark and then to hear and feel when we can not see. In the tunnels we become the equals of the machines, and then their superiors.
And yes, we eat our dead, reclaiming their life for the tribe.
And yes, sometimes we eat one of the others when they fall down here, or when we find a metal kill in the upper tunnels.
And yes, sometimes we find a Grey and then we do hunt and kill and feast upon forbidden flesh.
The others say that they worry for us, but we know the truth; we know that they fear us. It matters not; we owe them no ill-will. We are content to wait; wait until man and metal eradicate each other and the world is left to us.
Because if there is one thing that being buried alive under a mound of corpses for nine days teaches you, it’s patience.