Fanfiction for days

Normally, Gregory made Christophe take digging breaks every hour, but Christophe appreciated the less-frequent visits on a job this important. The store into which they were digging was a major money laundering facility for PrissyPants Productions, the most evil fucking corporation in existence in his opinion. Of course, his opinion was probably biased, since the damn thing was founded by Cartman and Jennifer Lopez. Fucking bitches. They’d slowly corrupted the world with a combination of cheap, highly fucking addictive pharmaceuticals and trashy music videos, and Cartman was rolling around in piles of fucking money like a worm.

  PPP only stayed in business because of the fucking drugs. After addicting half the population and increasing global productivity by twenty percent, Cartman was rich and influential enough to be untouchable.

  Kyle had founded their resistance movement, hellbent on taking Cartman down with corporate espionage, theft, and sabotage. Christophe wasn’t much good with the computer hacker-y portions, but fuck if he wasn’t their greatest asset when it came to stealing physical money (the virtual kind was fucking bullshit) and to blowing shit up, and generally pissing Cartman the fuck off. There was a running tally at QG of who Cartman threatened the most in his press releases. Kyle was at the top, naturally, but Christophe was quite proud of his and Gregory’s distant second place.

  The tally leaderboard was one of the few entertainments the resistance group allowed themselves. Cartman was taking over the world faster than they could take him down, and there was a palpable level of tension humming around the resistance fighters. It made Gregory turn to cigarettes, and made Wendy hide all of Stan’s alcohol, and turned Kyle towards his computers until Stan dragged him, hollow-eyed and silent, into the presence of other humans again. Christophe could feel it in himself, too, but the hours of daily digging helped keep him sane. Skirting through the streets at night after a day’s work with his shovel on his back was a habit he’d retained from before Cartman’s takeover, and it brought him comfort.

  He passed like a shadow between the buildings of New Denver, avoiding the too-wide eyes of curious people. Everyone else was absorbed in the menial tasks that occupied the after-dark: carrying towers of groceries into houses, repairing fizzing technology, walking thirty dogs at once, and they paid no attention to him. Some of the dogs growled at him, of course, but he snarled back at them under his breath and took detours to avoid the bigger groups of the fucking bitches.

  The people as a whole were too drug-focused on their tasks to notice him, but to ensure the security of their operation, he kept to the shadows of buildings and to the alleys littered with wretched people writhing from withdrawal symptoms. It was like fucking heroin, and could kill them if they were too addicted, which he knew far too well. Fucking bullshit. Once he was a kilometre or so away from his exit route, he rounded a corner and stalked down another identical alley. This one had a manhole cover in the middle of the street, though, filthy and covered in trash. It looked similar enough to the other round pieces of metal stuck in the streets, but with a closer look it became clear that the metal was different. Gregory had helped Christophe replace the wrought iron with a lightweight steel alloy to provide a quick escape route.

  The strung-out addicts did nothing more than roll their eyes in his direction at the first scrape of metal over concrete, but as always, they did nothing to bother him. When the grate was out of the way, he swung down into the empty old tunnel and stashed his bag of pills in a little hole he’d carved out. The place was barren, dark, and dank. Smog hung in the air, and Christophe coughed once, trying not to breathe the oppressive old smell of everything unwanted. It wasn’t far to the section he’d portioned out into a small tunnel, one that led to his expansive underground network.

  His tunnel system was an intentional maze. With the human race working at higher speeds, it was only a matter of time before they worked out how the little band of revolutionaries was moving about the city without notice, and Christophe had been determined to delay the rest of humanity finding the base as best he could.

  He never got lost, though. He could sense how the dirt moved, how the vibrations ran through the earth and echoed in the hollowed out paths. It was some sort of superpower or bullshit, he was convinced, and it only got more specific when he was soaring. God was a fucking asshole, giving him just enough of a superiority complex to not want to fucking off himself, especially when his talents made Gregory’s eyes gleam in satisfaction. He’d blow up the world and his own brain to see Gregory’s half smile.

  Four rights, a left, and another curve to the right, and he reached the wall of dirt with hand and foot-holds chiseled into it. He hauled himself up and out of the pit and into the basement of one of their safe buildings.

  His shovel and bag of supplies got dropped carelessly to the ground with a thump. There was a startled noise from a corner of the drab room from a figure bathed in the fake blue-green light of multiple computer terminals.

  “Mole,” Kyle said after he’d swiveled around in his computer chair. His eyes were sunken in his head and his hair was a dirty puff of red falling around his ears, except for the bare marks by his temples and the shaved patch at the base of his skull. He’d been pushing himself too hard again, naturally. “Oh, thank fuck. You finished with this bullshit yet? Gregory’s been driving us up the wall.”

  “None of your fucking business, putain,” Christophe grunted, and brushed past the redhead and up the stairs, lighting a cigarette as he went.

  “You know you’re not supposed to smoke in here, dumbass,” Kyle called after him, but Christophe ignored him. The nicotine helped.

  The main floor of their temporary headquarters had much better lighting than the basement, but even still, very little sunlight was allowed to filter in through the slats over the windows. Fluorescents hummed in the background, but the difference from the darkness of his tunnel and basement and the fake brightness offered by the lights made him curse and screw up his eyes in annoyance. His head throbbed.

  “Where the fuck is Gregory?” he demanded of the next person he passed. It was Stan, naturally.

  “I don’t know, dude, probably stalking around that room or ranting at Wendy or something!” Stan held up his hands defensively. Christophe flipped him off and stalked past him, heading towards the stairs.

  “I hope you get that project done soon so we can get some peace around here,” Stan called after him, but Christophe just flipped him off with the other hand and took the stairs two at a time.

  Up four flights, he turned right down a hallway that was just as brightly fluorescent as the first floor. The hallway had evenly spaced doors and patches of paint that were less faded next to each, the remnants of number plates. A faded, generic pattern scattered across the carpet, and the peeling wallpaper was striped in a pleasant, unobtrusive green.