He flipped open the cylinder of his Coca-Cola Magnum .44. Two shots left. Goddammit. He would have to make them count. Concrete spat from the wall by his head as a fresh hail of bullets came his way.
Tactical Officer Jute snapped his revolver shut and thumbed the hammer. Whoever had sent him into this alone would have hell to pay. He waited for a break in the shooting, the tell-tale click and clatter of mag-releases and spent magazines falling to the floor. Good job these were amateurs who would keep shooting even when it wasn’t doing anything useful. When all you have is a hammer… Jute smiled.
He would show them a hammer.
He stepped back from the wall and raised the revolver. The trigger felt light as a bubble, like a moth could have set it off. He could see where they were, just not enough to shoot them.
“Hey!” he shouted. Score! One of them was dumb enough to stick his head out from behind the pillar that they were both hidden behind. His eyes widened, and then Jute put a slug through one of them, splattering the whitewashed walls with blood and brain. He ducked back behind the wall quickly as the other man sprayed a burst of gunfire his way.
“You son of a bitch god damn ass shit fuck dog copper!” he yelled. Jute tried not to think about the logistics of that sentence.
“Drop your damn gun!” he shouted. “I’ll take you in!”
“You’ll have to fucking kill me first!” said the man. Jute heard him turn and run. Fair enough, he thought. He hardly had to aim. The guy wasn’t even weaving. Straight shot through the heart, shock does for him before he hits the floor.
He kicked the body over, laying in a mingling pool of blood and piss, and pulled out his pocket cam. He snapped a picture of the prone form and the words flashed across the LED ticker at the top of the cam: SCOTT ORSCUS – TERMINATED. He glanced down and pulled his foot away. The pool was getting a little close for comfort.
He was about to turn back and snap the other brother – it might have been tricky since his head was in a bad state, but the AI algorithms hadn’t let Jute down yet – when he noticed something below Scott’s hand. He carefully kicked the hand away.
In his dying breaths, the idiot had scrawled a symbol in his own blood. A circle with a wavy line going through it. Like a yin-yang, without the dots. Jute snapped a picture of it and turned around.
His bootsteps echoed off the battle-scarred white walls.

“I’ve seen this symbol before,” said Ronia. “In the archives. Some cult from the Soda Wars. But they were supposed to have been wiped out.”
“The brothers Orscus weren’t big readers. I doubt they saw it in a history book,” Jute replied in a low tone, glancing from side to side as if the bodies in their refrigerated drawers might somehow pass the message on to their enemies.
“You think there’s a resurgence going on? Underground heirs to an old pre-war sect?”
“Could be.”
“Ooh, that sounds tough. You should probably report that to the city council, right?”
She was right. As much as Jute wanted, he couldn’t storm in on this guns blazing. Not without the approval of the higher-ups in the local gov. Nominally higher-ups. Those laws had been written a long time ago.

The government centre was a small one-story building in the semi-industrial district just north of the Zero Zone. They didn’t have central real estate any more – that had all been sold off, mostly to the Company, when tax evasion hit 98% in the ’50s. It was a little better these days – nearly half of the registered population of the city was paying, though it was more a case of registration falling than payment rising.
Admin costs were way down, though.
Jute went up to the reception desk and checked his gun. The head of the cults and spirituality committee was sitting in her office eating a sandwich. She looked up.
“Ah, you must be the man from CCES (kuh-kess). What’s this I’m hearing about a re-established Soda Cult?” She toyed with a bit of artificially-grown lettuce that had fallen out on her desk.
“It’s not much,” Jute said, cursing Ronia for not keeping it quiet. “But I thought I had better bring it to you.”
The head nodded. “You were right to. This symbol… if they really are back, in any form, they could represent big trouble for the social order in the city right now.”
She personally signed and granted the investigation permit that Jute had come for, and graciously accepted his offer of dinner after work.
And he hadn’t wanted to come here!

The hallmarks of the ancient order of the Pepsiites were myriad: the book in the massed, cramped shelves of the Enforcement Archive listed over 200 secret signs and code phrases as well as rituals, known holy sites, and taboos. They had certainly been busy bees, before the Company had finally won the Soda Wars and used their financial muscle to destroy all the competition once and for all.
Or at least drive it underground.
Underground. The Pepsiites had had tunnels under the city. The book claimed they had been filled in when the religion had been officially classified a dangerous cult.
Didn’t the Brothers Orscus live in the Subcity? Hadn’t they had complaints recently of strange noises, scratching in the walls down there?
Could they have found some forgotten tunnel?
Then the Pepsiites weren’t returned. Just adopted by a couple of thugs from the west side subway station. Jute breathed a sigh of relief.
Still, better to check it out. No backup on this one, it would be better if nobody heard about it if this turned out to be a bust.

He flashed his badge at the Subcity guard and stepped into the hot air of the underground, what had once been a railway but was now a hodge-podge jumble of dwellings, traders and services of all kinds. On both sides of the tracks, or the indent where the long-since-looted tracks had been, ramshackle structures made from whatever junk could be scrounged by the denizens.
The Orscus brothers had lived in a stripped-out train car that was a few hundred yards down the tunnel, half-buried into the concrete of the wall for extra space. He kicked the door a couple of times until it gave way, and then slid his revolver out of its holster. There was no such thing as too careful down here.
He brought the gun up as he sidestepped into the train car, angling it to cover the whole space in front of him. Cardboard ripped from cola crates covered the windows so almost no light entered the narrow dwelling. Jute pulled a flashlight from his belt and clicked it on, hooking it to the side of his light-reactive tactical glasses. The pencil-beam swept over the filthy interior, picking out a discarded can here, a caff-injector there.
There was a smell in the air of rot and old urine.
His boots crunched the glass of a vial that would once have held a shot. This was a den, a two-man caff-house.
This secret tunnel theory was seeming unlikely. Except Jute had a feeling he couldn’t place that something was in the air that wasn’t right. In the air.
Where was that breeze coming from? He held up his hand. His left. The side that should have been buried in rock rubble and the grey, dead soil that the city was built on. Not materials known for their permeability, in general. He turned to face the blank, blacked-out left side. Cardboard on these windows as well. Should have been suspicious from the start.
He tried the handle of the left side door. Didn’t work. He kicked that one out in one go, and his glasses darkened by a half-step in reaction to the sudden light.
It was only a candle, but in the darkness it shone like the sun. The tunnel quickly joined another, much larger. It went on for what felt like an age, and Jute now knew that he was far, far out of his depth. Now and then he passed another traveller. The first one of these made a small hand gesture that he recognised from the book. He nodded his head and offered the half-remembered countersign. This scene repeated itself as he made his way towards the light at the distant end of the tunnel.
It finally opened up still further. This was, he knew, the nerve centre.
“Ah,” said a man in a vivid red close-fit robe. “I see we have a visitor.” He was pale and tall and had large, watery eyes. He reminded Jute of a picture of a deep-sea fish he had seen in a book a long time ago.