The Dark Master of Dogs

by Chris Ward

  The man turning in circles knew nothing until Jun’s hands were around his neck. Far stronger than a regular human, Jun barely needed to squeeze before his hands were covered in blood and the DCA agent had gone limp.

  Jun turned to the third man. His claws flashed, shredding the man’s chest. A cry of pain came over the audible receivers. Kurou smiled, delighted at the savagery of the attack. He started to type a command for Jun to capture the man and bring him back to use as a new test subject, then something metallic gleamed out of the smoke.

  The visual image went dead. Kurou heard a few more seconds of audio, the sound of something heavy hitting the floor and a few more groans of pain, then they went dead, too.

  He sat up in his chair, frantically tapping buttons, trying to get Jun back online, but it was no good.

  Something bad had happened, the worst thing that could possibly happen to one of his Huntsmen, the only thing that could quickly kill one because of the fifty percent of its control systems being located there.

  It had been shot in the head.

  20

  Suzanne

  Three of the cars were old electric vehicles, their batteries flat, covered with a film of dust which suggested they hadn’t been used in a long time.

  The fourth was the car Moose had used to rescue them from the gallows. It had a battery charge of fifty percent according to the dash, and the key was still in the ignition. Neither Suzanne nor Patrick had ever driven before, but Patrick took charge simply because he’d read more books about cars than she had. After a few minutes of frustrating jerking and stopping, he managed to figure out the drive functions and the brake enough to get them going.

  ‘Thank God these electrics are quiet, otherwise they’d have heard us by now.’ Suzanne scowled, receiving an embarrassed grin from Patrick.

  ‘Looks easy, doesn’t it?’ he said. ‘You want to try?’

  ‘Just don’t hit anything.’

  Almost on cue, he over-corrected on a turn and a line of overgrown bushes scraped down one side of the car.

  ‘At least it’s not new.’

  Suzanne rolled her eyes. ‘Just figure out how to drive straight before we hit any major roads. You don’t get a driving permit unless you can actually drive.’

  The road through the trees was narrow, the hedgerows so overgrown as to leave barely enough space for the car to pass. The road surface, however, where it was visible through the weeds and gunky leaf litter, was tarmac. Most of the major roads were in the process of being pulled to align with some madcap government scheme of slowing people down to focus their energies on production now that Britain had annexed itself from Europe, but they hadn’t yet got to all the minor roads and lanes that still crisscrossed the countryside. Race had always told Patrick that if you needed to get somewhere and you knew the way through the labyrinth of back roads, you could still drive pretty much anywhere without seeing so much as a bucketful of gravel.

  ‘See if there’s a map anywhere in the side pockets,’ Patrick said. ‘I have absolutely no idea where we are or where to go, but we’re down to forty-five percent charge already and I’m pretty sure we’ll get noticed if we drop by a charging station.’

  She nodded and scrambled around under the seats and in the side pockets to see what was lying about. A GPS system on the dashboard didn’t work, and the front pocket was stuffed with oily rags. Moose had clearly taken little care of the car, and the floor of the back seat was littered with junk: old food wrappers, bits of newspapers, flyers for seeming incongruous places and events.

  Under everything Suzanne located a small map of Somerset, its edges frayed and browned.

  ‘All right, see if you can get us to some kind of hill or something so we can take a look around.’

  The lane was still winding upward, now moving through steeply sloping pastureland which looked mostly abandoned. They came to the first gateway they had seen that wasn’t completely overgrown and Patrick pulled the car to a stop.

  ‘Handbrake!’ Suzanne shouted as Patrick switched off the engine and opened the door to climb out.

  With a coy smile he jerked the lever up. ‘Getting there,’ he said.

  The gateway had a view of the Somerset Levels. They were clearly in the Mendips somewhere, and Suzanne compared her map to the towns visible on the flats below.

  ‘All right, got it,’ she said. ‘We’re on the east slope of the Mendips, so we need to get right back around to the other side. I guess since the road we’ve been following ended up as a dead end, we’ll have to keep going straight and try to bear north or south at some point, coming back around.’

  Patrick looked at her. ‘You want to go back? I mean, wouldn’t it be safer to keep on running?’

  ‘And go where? Drive until we run out of power, then continue on foot, surviving on the food we don’t have? We’re in no way equipped to do anything.’ She looked down at her hands, wondering if now was the right time to tell Patrick what she had been building up to. It would come as a bit of a shock, but she had never needed to bring it up until now.

  ‘And … I’m worried about my sister.’

  Patrick turned to stare at her. ‘Your what? I thought you were an only child.’

  ‘She lives with my mother in Glastonbury. My mother remarried. I told you that, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yeah, you might have mentioned it, but you didn’t say you had a sister.’

  ‘Half-sister. Kelly. She’s nine. Or at least she would be now. I haven’t seen her in a couple of years.’

  ‘Suzanne, what the fuck? I thought we told each other everything.’

  ‘Patrick, we’ve only been together a year. Sure, it feels like a lot longer, but I bet there’s a ton of stuff you’ve never told me.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Suzanne’s eyes blazed. ‘Well, you neglected to tell me your older brother was a dirty pervert until I caught him spying on me.’

  ‘I didn’t know—’

  ‘Yeah, right. You grew up together.’

  ‘But come on, you have a little sister?’

  Suzanne shrugged. ‘We’re not close. When I was a kid, Mum left Dad for a younger guy and Dad was pretty mad, so he cut off all contact. I only got back in touch with her myself when I was sixteen. Turned out she’d been living just up the road in Glastonbury the whole time, had married this guy and they’d had a daughter. I’ve only seen her a couple of times, but we got on all right.’

  ‘And you want to go check on her?’

  Suzanne nodded. ‘The DCA will have already been to yours and mine. They might have staked out both houses, so going there will leave us fucked. But it took me ages to find my mother. I had to pay some guy to track her down.’

  ‘When you were sixteen? Pay with what?’

  Suzanne aimed a slap at him. ‘I didn’t suck his dick, if that’s what you’re thinking. I stole money out of my father’s wallet. Yeah, I’m not proud of it, but whatever.’

  Patrick sighed. ‘All right, so you reckon it’ll take the DCA a while to track her down.’

  ‘I hope. And the guy, the new husband, he works in the transportation industry. He might be able to blag us some tickets on a train into London or up north somewhere.’

  Patrick smiled. ‘So keep on running like I suggested?’

  ‘What the fuck else do you expect?’

  Patrick nodded. ‘Well, it’s better than no plan. Let’s do it.’

  They got back in the car and continued on, Patrick driving slowly with the hedgerows brushing the car on either side, Suzanne navigating along a series of narrow country lanes to keep him off the main roads where they might encounter the DCA. Soon they came down out of the Mendips and on to the Somerset Levels, driving along exposed roads cutting through farmland.

  ‘What if they have helicopters?’ Patrick said.

  ‘They don’t,’ Suzanne answered. ‘My dad told me the oil’s nearly gone. All the stuff he was supposed to build had to be electric, battery rechargeable. He said they’re building t
hese massive wind farms in Scotland to power the entire country.’

  ‘They should just rejoin Europe.’

  Suzanne shrugged. ‘I think the government’s scared of another war.’

  The car bumped out of the lane they were traversing and onto the hard-pressed gravel that had once been a major road. Patrick immediately slowed their speed as stones cracked against the car’s mudguards.

  ‘I guess the fun part of the drive is over.’

  ‘Go left here. Perhaps we should stash the car somewhere.’

  They trundled slowly along the gravel road. The outskirts of Glastonbury appeared in the distance, a few houses growing into a larger town.

  ‘It’s over there,’ Suzanne said. ‘Across those fields.’

  Patrick tapped the dash. ‘We’re at five percent anyway.’

  He turned the car through an open field gateway and parked it in behind a hedge. The grass was overgrown, the gate no more than rotten pieces of wood.

  ‘There’s a chance no one will find it for a while,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  They hiked across the field, emerging over an old stile onto another road heading into the town. Suzanne took the lead, taking the residential streets she thought she remembered, but getting lost a couple of times, doubling back, before finally coming to the end of a cul-de-sac and nodding.

  ‘There. Number five, on the left.’

  The street was a quiet line of neat, modern houses. A communal lawnmower funded by the street committee kept all the gardens tidy, and the residents were far friendlier than those on her own street, keeping an eye out for each other. It was mid-afternoon, though, so everyone would be work.

  Suzanne stopped. ‘Don’s car’s in the driveway.’

  ‘Who’s Don?’

  ‘My mother’s new husband. He has a car permit, but he should be at work.’

  ‘Perhaps he walked. Hey, why don’t we steal it?’

  Suzanne rolled her eyes. ‘Yeah, that wouldn’t get us noticed, would it? Look, he’s a fat bastard. He never walks anywhere.’

  She took a couple of steps forward, but Patrick put a hand on her arm. ‘Maybe you should wait here while I take a look.’

  Suzanne gave him a sarcastic smile. ‘I appreciate the thought, but I don’t need a hero. Come on.’

  ‘What if there are DCA hiding out, waiting for us?’

  ‘We’ll be careful.’

  She knew it was foolhardy to approach the house, but she didn’t care. She needed to know one way or other what had happened to her mother and sister. The house looked silent, untouched, but there was no way Don, a stout defender of the government, would have stayed home without reason.

  The front door was ajar. Suzanne climbed over the garden’s front wall and sneaked across the lawn to the house.

  The windows of the other houses stared at her in silent accusation. With a grimace, she put her shoulder to the door and pushed it open.

  It got stuck halfway on something lying behind.

  A body.

  Suzanne nudged aside a polished boot leading to a pressed pair of suit trousers and a shiny belt. A gun holster was unclipped, the gun missing. A baton on the body’s right hip lay in a pool of drying blood.

  ‘He’s DCA,’ Patrick said from behind her, making Suzanne jump. ‘Looks like he got stabbed.’

  ‘Jesus, don’t do that!’ Suzanne hissed. ‘You scared the shit out of me.’

  ‘I suppose that was the guy left to wait for us. Where’s your mother’s family?’

  Suzanne looked around. Bloody footprints led up the hall and into the kitchen. Careful not to leave any prints of her own, Suzanne followed.

  ‘Mum? Don? Kelly?’ she called softly, repeating their names over and over. ‘Is anyone here?’

  Despite her father’s wealth, her mother’s house was far more opulent than the house Suzanne had grown up in. Her father had never believed in excessive spending, and one of the wedges driven between them had been her mother’s wish for a better environment for her and her daughter. Here, Suzanne saw all the kinds of ornate bookshelves, tables, and cupboards that her father would have turned his nose up at, preferring old hand-me-downs or the cheapest items a furniture store had to offer.

  The kitchen alone was bigger than the entire lower floor of Suzanne’s house. A worktop island stood in the middle, all sharp corners and shiny chrome—

  Marked by one bloody handprint.

  Suzanne stood frozen as a figure rose periscope-like from the other side and pointed a gun at her face.

  ‘I’ll kill you if you move.’

  The shock might have only lasted a couple of seconds, but it felt like hours. Suzanne’s mouth worked silently, unable to find the breath to form words. Behind her, Patrick gave a solitary gasp.

  The arm holding the gun lost a little of its tension. A girl’s face appeared above the seemingly huge barrel, eyes filled with tears, blood streaking her face. She gave a little sob, then lowered the gun, its barrel cracking hard on the worktop.

  ‘Suzanne, is that you?’

  Suzanne swallowed before she could speak. ‘Yes, Kelly, it’s me.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I came looking for you and Mum. What happened?’

  Kelly said nothing for a long time. Then, finally letting go of the gun, she ran around the kitchen island and wrapped her arms around Suzanne’s waist, sobbing as she buried her face into Suzanne’s jacket.

  21

  Patrick

  ‘I can tell the two of you are sisters,’ Patrick said, trying to summon some amusement into his voice but finding none. Then, when Kelly looked up from where she sat in Suzanne’s arms and gave him a smile, he added, ‘I don’t think I’ve met two braver girls in my life.’

  ‘Try to tell me what happened,’ Suzanne said, stroking the hair out of Kelly’s face, while nodding at Patrick to fetch a wet cloth from the sink. ‘Take it slowly. Don’t worry, you’re safe now.’

  ‘They took Mum and Dad,’ Kelly said. ‘And they left that man behind.’

  ‘Who did? The Department of Civil Affairs?’

  ‘Yes. Five or six. When Mum saw the van pull up, she told me to wait in my room and stay quiet.’

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at school?’

  ‘They showed up while we were eating breakfast. Dad always drops me on the way.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘I’m not sure. They were downstairs, talking to Mum and Dad. I heard some raised voices, Mum shouting that she didn’t know anything. A few loud thumps and I heard Dad cry out, so I think they were hitting him. Then the next thing I know the van’s leaving. I looked out of the window but I couldn’t see who was inside, so I went downstairs.’

  ‘And you saw the man left behind?’

  Kelly wiped her eyes. ‘Not at first. I went into the living room and it was a bit messed up, a couple of chairs overturned, the TV pushed off its stand. I thought they’d gone, but he was in the kitchen, eating our leftover breakfast.’

  ‘He was probably left behind to wait for us,’ Patrick said, but Suzanne frowned at him to stay quiet.

  ‘What happened next?’ Suzanne said to Kelly. ‘After you saw the man?’

  He looked shocked at first, then he got up and chased me. He was laughing and I think he meant to … I don’t know. The kitchen and the living room have that joining door and both connect to the hall, so I ran away from him. I knew if I went upstairs he’d corner me, so I went in through the living room and looped around. The second time I ran through the kitchen, I grabbed the knife Mum had been using to slice the bread.’

  ‘Couldn’t you get outside?’

  ‘I tried, but he caught me. He started tearing my T-shirt off, but he didn’t know I had the knife.’

  ‘And you stabbed him?’

  Kelly’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Will I go to prison, Suzanne? He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘He was a very bad man,’ Suzanne said. ‘You’re not allowed to attack little girls,
so you were just defending yourself. You did the right thing.’

  Kelly started to cry. Suzanne pulled her close, whispering to her, so Patrick left them to have a little time together and went to look around the house.

  It was elegant and spacious, the very opposite of his own. More books than he’d ever seen in his life lined long shelves, and all manner of electrical items that required a permit lay sitting around. His first temptation was to find a bag and fill it. The price they could get on the street for some of these items might buy them safety.

  He was sitting on the sofa, holding a circular metal object and wondering what function it had, when Suzanne came in.

  ‘I’ve sent her upstairs to take a shower,’ she said. ‘I explained to her that the men were probably looking for us.’

  ‘How did she take it?’

  ‘She was angry at first, but once I explained how we were imprisoned for doing nothing wrong, she came around a bit.’

  ‘What do we do now? Sooner or later the DCA will come back.’

  ‘We have to take her with us.’

  Patrick shook his head. ‘No way. It’ll be hard enough to escape together. We can’t hope to get far with a nine-year-old kid.’

  ‘She’s my sister. I’m not leaving her.’

  ‘Come on, Suzanne, be reasonable.’

  ‘Says you trying to find your ignorant pig of a brother. Yet you want me to leave my sister behind?’

  Patrick sighed. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just scared. What are we going to do? We have no money, the car’s battery is probably flat by now, and—’

  The sound of an engine made him look up. Suzanne was staring out of the window. Patrick turned to look and saw a black van pull up, its petrol combustion exhaust belching plumes of smoke.

  ‘Go!’ Patrick shouted. ‘That’s them. We have to go!’

  He pushed Suzanne toward the door, but instead of heading into the kitchen where he had seen a backdoor leading out on to a lawn, she jogged up the stairs and started banging on a door at the top.

  ‘Kelly! Get out of there! The DCA are here. We have to go!’