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About the Author

Chris Bonnello is an author, speaker and special needs tutor based in Nottingham. Following a career in mainstream primary school teaching, since 2015 he has been an autism advocate through his website, Autistic Not Weird (https://autisticnotweird.com). He has won multiple awards for his work, and delivered speeches as far away as India and the Sydney Opera House. The Underdogs series, which began in 2019, is his first published venture as a novelist.

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To the memory of my adopted godparents, Ted and Mary Ward, who taught an autistic child to lead people.

And to my adopted godson Morgan, who I am eternally proud of.

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4

The Underdogs of Spitfire’s Rise as of May 16th, Year One

And the highest-ranking staff of New London Citadel:

Prologue

Oliver Roth never felt like words on a screen did him justice. He sat at his workstation, browsing the clone factory incident report, and wished it had been written with a little more flair – with him being recognised as more heroic. He had earned it.

He grabbed his last slice of pizza and ate it in two mouthfuls. Life in New London’s upper floors, with literally only three people in the country who outranked him, came with its fair share of luxuries. Among them was the opportunity for pizza on demand, even for breakfast. Yes, as a growing boy and a professional assassin, healthy eating was important. But only when his bosses were looking.

Besides, they’d forced a fourteen-year-old out of his bed at half six in the morning. So him eating pizza for breakfast was their fault, really.

Executive Summary Report: New London Clone Factory Destruction

Roth huffed. Nicholas Grant, dictator and master of Great Britain, had chosen such a stale and wooden title for such an exciting few days.

Updates in progress: May 16th, Year One On April 23rd, Shannon Grant fled New London with her associate, Lt Anthony Lambourne (deceased). They hid in a disused NHS health centre with a small group of Takeover Day escapees. There they were found and killed by Keith Tylor (deceased) within twenty-four hours, with the exception of Shannon. As commanded by Nicholas Grant, Shannon was transported by Tylor back towards New London. However, she was able to kill him and escape.

Wow Nick, could you have made this sound any more boring? This is your estranged daughter you’re writing about !

But Roth smiled. That was the great thing about being asked to proofread. He could make whatever edits he wanted.

She was able to stab Tylor more than fifty times and leave him dead in somebody’s back garden,

the edited sentence said. Roth had never liked Tylor anyway. Smiling, he read on.

Before their escape, Shannon and Lambourne produced a computer virus which would shut down and destroy New London's clone factory, which ultimately made its way into the hands of Terrorist Faction 001 (known among themselves as the ‘Underdogs’). It is assumed that Shannon remains sheltered with them in their countryside hideout (which they have named ‘Spitfire's Rise’).

O K , let ’ s make the next bits more interesting.

The insurgents Underdogs invaded New London on April 25th, with a team comprised of Ewan West, Kate Arrowsmith, Jack Hopper, Alex Ginelli and Charlie Coleman (deceased). Their intention was to neutralise annihilate the clone factory, although they were forced to evacuate chased by Oliver Roth into the Inner City prison. The exception being Alex Ginelli, who was separated from his group (see also: The Ginelli Project).

‘Oliver,’ came the gruff voice of Iain Marshall through his radio.

‘Nearly done, calm yourself.’

He knew his tone would annoy his boss. But Marshall was the kind of man who deserved to be annoyed whenever possible. Anyone who would willingly choose to be New London’s Head of Military Division was never going to be a barrel of laughs.

‘We’re waiting for you in the Experiment Chamber right now. You don’t want to miss the fireworks, do you?’

‘You perform the AME experiment without me and I’ll break your pretty little jaw. Now wait a second.’

Marshall huffed and fell silent. Roth continued his edits.

The insurgents Underdogs were able to utilise a weakness in the Inner City walls staff incompetence, and escaped the prison on the morning of April 28th. They were able to destroy the clone factory as planned (in addition to seizing intel on the AME project from an officers' sector), and escaped with Alex Ginelli. The exception being Charlie Coleman, who was apprehended and killed shot repeatedly in the chest by Oliver Roth, bringing his Underdog kill count to eight of the morons.

Roth smiled. It was an improvement at the very least. He read the final paragraph as he rose to his feet.

To date, the surviving Underdogs remain at Spitfire’s Rise. They are assumed to be planning their next move against the AME project. As a result of their raid, research regarding AME has been sped up dramatically.

Talking of AME, it was time for those fireworks. Roth jogged towards the door: Grant, Marshall and Pearce would wait for him even if he walked, but he couldn’t wait to see the experiment for himself.

*

With a swipe of his keycard and the flicker of a green LED, Oliver Roth was granted access to the Experiment Chamber. The teenage assassin found himself in the same room as Iain Marshall, New London’s Head of Military, and Nathaniel Pearce, its Chief of Scientific Research. Only Grant himself was missing.

‘Evening, Oliver,’ said Nathaniel Pearce with shallow sarcasm. It was barely seven in the morning, but Pearce took every opportunity to point out his colleagues’ faults, including lateness.

Roth smirked, and said nothing. Part of being fearsome meant knowing when not to step into arguments.

‘Is the subject ready?’ Roth asked, spotting the figure behind the glass.

‘He doesn’t look it,’ replied Pearce, taking a sip of coffee from a mug which read ‘smart-arse and proud of it’ in big bold letters. ‘Not that it matters.’

Roth took a closer look at the clone inside the chamber. He may have been a manufactured collection of factory-grown flesh and organs, but the emotions on his face seemed very real. He showed signs of nervousness and suspicion, clueless as to why he was armed to the teeth with an assault rifle, holstered handguns, grenades and a belt full of hunting knives. Especially since the Experiment Chamber around him was almost empty, hosting little more than a pair of stone pillars that stretched to the ceiling, positioned a metre apart in the centre of the room.

Roth glanced to his left. Iain Marshall was predictably impatient, his hands in his pockets and his top lip beginning to quiver. Nathaniel Pearce wore his usual creepy smile, perhaps a little too entertained by his own work.

‘Are we nearly there yet?’ Roth asked.

‘AME is four months ahead of schedule,’ Pearce replied. ‘You can wait another minute.’

Don’t say that like you’re proud, Roth thought. If it weren’t for Ewan West stealing our plans from that officers’ sector, Nick wouldn’t have made you speed up the research. McCormick and his special needs kids have had three weeks to plan their next move.

Special needs kids. It may have been true, but Roth used the phrase to insult his enemies rather than underestimate them. Thanks to their efforts in April, New London’s glorious clone factory had become a burned-out ash pit which hadn’t grown a soldier in three weeks. Those ‘special needs kids’ were the reason why the ageing clone population was in steep decline, only propped up by imported soldiers from other Citadels.

The phone rang at the side of the desk, and Marshall picked up the handset. Without seeking permission, Roth pushed the speakerphone button to allow himself and Pearce into the discussion too.

‘Experiment Chamber,’ Marshall said.

‘Iain,’ came a lively voice through the speakerphone.

It was the voice of Nicholas Grant.

‘Morning, sir.’

‘Looks to me like you’re ready. Commence the experiment, gentlemen.’

‘You’re not coming down?’

‘Floor F’s too low for me. The view on my screen is perfect.’

Roth leaned over the desk.

‘Hey Nick,’ he said, ‘I bet you wish Shannon were here for this!’

‘My daughter made her decisions,’ Grant answered. ‘Now she can live with them.’

Roth looked to his left. Pearce’s face wore an entertained grin, and one corner of his lips perked at Grant’s last sentence. Roth could not interpret what that particular grin meant, and Pearce did not elaborate.

Roth had not spoken to Shannon much during their time together in the Citadel. As far as he remembered, the girl had spent most of her days locked away in some far corner of Floor A like a fairy-tale princess. Whether this was through her own choice or through her father’s overprotection, Roth had never known; he just knew that Shannon Grant had been a private neurotic failure of a person, and she was probably still her private neurotic failing self in Spitfire’s Rise too.

‘Now, if you please,’ Grant finished. Roth brought his attention back to the Experiment Chamber and the clone who stood inside, and he remembered how excited he was to witness the proceedings about to take place.

Pearce nodded and pushed a button. The CCTV cameras around them began to record.

‘Eight minutes past seven,’ announced Pearce, ‘May sixteenth, Year One. Final phase of practical experimentation underway. Atmospheric Metallurgic Excitation, research trial twenty-six. Commencing.’

Marshall retrieved the radio from his belt, and spoke to the clone behind the glass.

‘Soldier,’ he began, ‘move to the other end of the room. At jogging speed, passing between the pillars.’

Roth watched in amusement as the clone gave a frightened stare towards the shielded humans, perhaps trying to ask his superiors why. When none of them gave any reaction, the clone turned his head forward again.

He knows his only option is obedience. Poor guy.

The clone ran for about ten metres, weighed down by his excessive array of weaponry, before passing between the two stone pillars.

He didn’t live long enough to notice what happened next.

The slow-motion replay would later show the air rippling around him, as if he had run through a vertical surface of water. The previously blank space between the pillars turned crimson and wavy when touched. The clone’s head, the first part of him through, was unaffected by the waves. But his fate was sealed as his metal equipment followed.

The space between the stone pillars burst into action. Tiny lightning shards attacked the metal in the clone’s grasp: his assault rifle and handguns, his grenades, the belt buckle and hunting knives, and the fronts of his steel-capped boots.

But at that moment, Oliver Roth could only watch at regular viewing speed. To him the dozens of explosions seemed instantaneous, as every metallic item around the clone’s body was detonated by the red barrier. The shrapnel from the firearms and blades ripped through his limbs, sending his extremities across the room and his artificial blood splattering across the chamber floor. His right hand slapped the bullet-resistant glass in front of Iain Marshall, causing hysterical laughter from Roth. As the clone’s torn remains fell to the ground, nothing more than visceral chunks of carved meat, the rippling red curtain faded back into invisibility as if nothing had happened.

Bloody hell, thought Roth, grudgingly impressed. As much as he despised Nathaniel Pearce, the Chief Scientist had surpassed himself this time. Atmospheric Metallurgic Excitation had once been a crackpot idea from the depths of Nicholas Grant’s imagination, but somehow Nathaniel Pearce had brought it into the realm of reality: an invisible wall of energised air that destroyed anything forged from metal.

‘Sir,’ Pearce asked into the phone, ‘are you happy?’

Nicholas Grant’s discreet laughter answered the question for him. As Roth started to bounce on his toes with an excited smile, he looked to his side and found even Marshall smiling. Pearce rested his smart-arse mug at the side of the control panel and started to applaud himself.

‘Happy is one word for it, certainly,’ Grant said. ‘Nat, can you confirm that AME can be reproduced on a much larger scale?’

‘Everything we understand about the laws of physics tells me it is now possible,’ Pearce replied. ‘If it works for a square metre, it’ll work for a square mile. And if it works for a square mile—’

‘And are we still on target to achieve this within four days?’

Grant’s attachment to May 20th continues to make his decisions for him, Roth thought to himself.

‘Yes,’ finished Pearce. ‘It’ll be done within four days. Happy anniversary, sir.’

Chapter 1

The underground tunnel from Spitfire’s Rise was too small for Kate to stand up inside. Whenever she tried, the soil would scrape off the ceiling into her hair. It wasn’t the effect on her appearance that bothered her, but rather the sensory chaos of a mud massage against her head.

There were another twenty-ish metres before the trapdoor to the grassy hill. Raj was nearly there, barely patient enough to wait for his girlfriend.

‘Come on,’ he whispered in the darkness.

Kate took a deep breath. Normally she only broke the rules on Sundays, but today she and Raj had a special reason for sneaking outside. Raj reached the trapdoor, pushed it open, and natural light flooded into the tunnel. He barely gave himself a moment to acclimatise before hauling himself up onto the grass.

Kate dipped her head a little further and walked along the last wooden planks before the exit. Last year, McCormick’s idea of an underground tunnel had sounded great: an opportunity to enter and leave Spitfire’s Rise without using a visible entrance that might give away its location. But it had taken a long time to dig for a hundred metres, and the claustrophobia of those months had stayed with her.

‘Before we do this,’ Kate said as she approached the grass-covered trapdoor, ‘are you sure today is the 16th?’

‘Yep. And even if it’s not, let’s celebrate him anyway.’

May 16th. Her brother’s birthday. James Arrowsmith, autistic like Kate but in a completely different region of the spectrum, had turned nineteen just four days before Takeover Day. His profound disabilities were so complex, and his reliance on routine so strong, that nothing at all was allowed to change for his birthday. Wrapped presents and birthday songs would have been intimidating to him, but he had spent the day happy with how people had treated him.

He had eaten his dinner with a birthday candle. But he had done that every day for the previous eight years. On his eleventh birthday Mum and Dad had placed a battery-powered candle on his plate (not wanting to scare him with actual fire, of course), hoping he would tolerate it without becoming anxious. Even as a seven-year-old, Kate had wondered whether the candle had truly been for James’ sake or their parents’. But James had loved the flashing light, so much so that he had demanded it the next day. The day after, too. Before the family knew it, every single dinnertime, all year round, needed to feature a battery-powered flashing birthday candle on James’ dinner plate.

On his nineteenth birthday the candle was used accurately once again, just like how a broken clock was correct twice a day. And Kate remembered spending the day looking at James with beaming smiles. Even during her time at Oakenfold Special School, after her escape from mainstream, smiles had been hard to come by. So that day with her brother must have been wonderful.

Wow, the world had changed. James was now twenty years old, celebrating with whatever routine he had established in the depths of New London’s Inner City prison. He had been in there for almost a year, assuming he was still…

Maybe he really i s alive.

But maybe he’s not.

Maybe he found Mum and Dad .

But maybe he didn’t .

As was always the case, the worst part was not knowing. Even after almost a year apart, Kate’s co-dependency with her brother remained strong to the point of causing enormous anxiety. And with no facts to guide her, every possibility could float around her mind. Especially the worst ones.

Kate shook the thoughts out of her head, and climbed through the trapdoor. She gripped the overgrown grass and used it to pull herself up. The wind was soft, but cold. The sky had probably been clear all night, judging by the temperature.

‘Never stops being beautiful, does it?’ said Raj.

Kate looked up. Raj had already stopped searching for clone patrols: they were almost unheard of in the countryside now, twelve months after the end of the purges. Instead he sat himself at the top of the hill and admired the view, waiting for Kate to join him, and then closed his eyes to pray in silence.

Kate sat on the grass next to him, thinking about how curious it was that she and Raj Singh had ended up together: two Oakenfold Special School students who had never spoken back in the old days, largely because Raj was in a class specifically for dyslexic students who could barely read their own names. There were some great thinkers in that class, but none who would be able to complete a formal written exam. Raj himself had been a genius at anything that required visual-spatial thinking, and could come up with bright ideas that would never have crossed Kate’s mind, but his inability to record his brilliance on paper had left him in a class on the other side of the school to her. But here they were a year later, the autistic girl and the dyslexic boy, going out after however many years of not noticing each other’s existence.

She sat herself on the grass and found that Raj was right: the Hertfordshire countryside was a fine place to spend a war. Not all soldiers had picturesque villages and winding rivers outside their living quarters.

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