by Chris Ward
A little insurance policy.
He grabbed Tommy’s hand. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Get the fuck out of here and don’t look back. Suzanne is in Porlock. Get her and her sister Kelly on that boat. Promise me, Uncle Tommy. If I can make it, I will, but don’t wait. Please. Please!’
Tommy stared at Patrick a moment, then nodded. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said. Then, glancing up once at the Huntsman advancing down the corridor, he turned and ran.
Patrick watched the Huntsman approach. It didn’t even look at him as it walked past, instead going to the door and closing it, as though frustrated Tommy had let a draft come in.
With the Huntsman guarding the door, Patrick tried to climb to his feet. His legs still didn’t work, but his arms felt fine. He pulled himself to the wall and pushed up into a sitting position, wishing he had kept the rock.
A figure stepped out into the corridor. One hand reached up, adjusting a top hat. As emergency lighting caught Kurou’s face, Patrick saw the blood streaming from a cut below Kurou’s eye, staining his satin shirt.
‘Well, we meet again,’ Kurou said. ‘Dear Patrick, you certainly have a way with introductions.’ One hand flicked blood off his cheek. ‘I underestimated you. I didn’t think for a minute you were brave enough to come inside, but I do love bravery in a person. It’s quite the compelling attribute, is it not?’
‘Fuck yourself with a ten-foot stick,’ Patrick said.
‘Oh, what ungratefulness,’ Kurou said, theatrically rolling his one seeing eye. ‘After I saved you as well. And many could say I saved your brother, too.’
‘You turned him into a monster.’
Kurou shook his head. ‘Oh no, I made him something far better than he was before. Humanity is such a pathetic race, don’t you think? Just look at the grace of a hawk, the agility of a cat, the tracking skills of a dog … we have none of it. We build our machines to compensate. How silly we are.’
‘You’re human too, you prick.’
Kurou sighed. ‘Regrettably so.’ He lifted a finger. ‘Wait. Do you hear that?’
Patrick listened. ‘What?’
‘Silence. It appears the battle is over. Now, would you like tea?’
40
Urla
She hardly dared to pick up the phone. When she did, Justin’s voice on the other end trembled as he spoke.
‘The battle’s over,’ he said. ‘And I believe we won.’
‘What the fuck does that mean?’
‘Our units returned early this morning. We suffered heavy losses, but—’
‘How heavy?’
‘Six of sixty men—’
‘Dead?’
A deep breath. ‘Returned.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Doctor Crow had a hostage, Stanley Carmichael-Jones.’
‘So he didn’t leave the country after all?’
‘It seems not. However, Doctor Crow had wired him up with some kind of bomb. The initial blast killed a dozen men, and then those creatures attacked.’
Urla tried to think of something to say, but nothing meaningful would come. She stared at the wall until Justin spoke again.
‘Should we cancel the parade?’
Urla closed her eyes. Maxim Cale would likely be waking up right now, perhaps his aides preparing him for the official breakfast she had organised and was due to leave for within the next five minutes. If she cancelled the parade … she could kiss goodbye to any promotion. She would rot away here in this nothing town.
‘We can pull security from the regular police and the local military base,’ she said. ‘It’ll be better than nothing.’
Justin was quiet a long time. Urla sensed something important he wanted to say, but she was afraid to ask. In the end, he solved the problem for her.
‘Doctor Crow got away,’ he said.
Urla felt her knees go weak. ‘Tell me that’s not true.’
‘We found no trace of him.’
‘And those things?’
‘Tommy Crown said there were fourteen. Our men neutralised twelve.’
‘Well, that’s something. The other two?’
‘One was seen fleeing. Of the other we saw no sign. It’s possible Tommy Crown miscounted.’
‘Bring him here. I need to talk to him again.’
Another pause. Urla knew the answer before Justin spoke.
‘He escaped. One of the creatures broke him out. It is believed he fled with Doctor Crow.’
Urla slammed the phone down on the tabletop. When she lifted it again, she was surprised to find it still worked.
‘This is a fucking mess. Get everyone we have searching for Doctor Crow, Tommy Crown and that last … thing. We need them captured before the start of the parade.’
‘I’m afraid we don’t have many men left. I’ve already put in requests with the neighbouring departments for a loan of men.’
‘You did what?’
‘I reached out to the neighbouring DCA units to inform them that we were in need of cover.’
Urla wished she could reach down the phone line and strangle him. He must have known how such an act would humiliate her.
‘That’s an executive order. You do not have the authority to do that.’
‘In an emergency, I felt it necessary to use my initiative.’
Urla could feel Justin smiling. ‘I could have you arrested.’
‘By who?’
Urla slammed down the phone, and this time the casing broke off, and the connection went dead.
41
Kurou
Flawed.
So many things he needed to tweak to make his Huntsmen into perfect killing machines.
Checking their visual files, he had noticed a common trait among those he had created from captured members of the DCA.
Hesitation.
Despite how he had altered them, when faced with their former comrades, they had shown a reluctance to complete their duty, and against desperate men seeing only the monsters they had become, that had proven a fatal flaw. Five to one they had slaughtered their attackers, but Kurou had dreams that twenty, fifty to one be achievable.
They needed to be faster, stronger, more agile, and they needed better weapons. Their claws and teeth weren’t enough. They needed stronger armour, better tissue regeneration speeds, more high-tech analytical procedures to ensure they knew when a battle could be won.
A work in progress, nothing more.
His fingers tapped away on the tablet screen, a blur as he wrote his notes.
Flawed, they might be, but he was a scientist, and a scientist’s work was forever trial and error. He had trialed, and he had erred, but he was still alive, and there would be further successes to be found.
Patrick lay on the floor of the old pinball hall, unconscious, his limbs secured to the ground with packaging tape. Among the wreckage of the place, Kurou had happened upon an old music player Race must have dropped on their first meeting, and now the sounds of Plastic Black Butterfly, a band Kurou had encountered what felt like a million years ago, rattled out of a small speaker. As he worked on Patrick, he listened to an old acquaintance, Ken Okomoto, shredding through riff after riff, and he felt like he finally understood how someone could feel about mastering the guitar. It wasn’t so different to how he performed his experiments: you were forever searching for an ultimate fluidity, a poetic grace.
He wondered, absently, if Ken Okomoto were still alive, and if so, what he was doing now. If he still lived, he would be an old man, perhaps sitting in a rocking chair, remembering the days he spent in the company of a man named Crow.
It was a hits album. As the songs came and went, Kurou heard the voices of first the original singer, O-Remo Takahashi, a man long dead, and then Jun Matsumoto, who had taken over vocals following Takahashi’s death. Kurou’s mood darkened with each song featuring Jun, and he scratched at the socket of the eye Jun had taken from him, itched the scar tissue on his skin Jun, in his sacrifice, had caused. So many years ago, yet Jun had
left a lasting mark, and in many ways was still with Kurou, a shadow at his shoulder.
In the end, Kurou couldn’t take any more. He threw both the speakers and the music player out through the open door.
No matter.
He was about finished anyway.
In the doorway, he found the Huntsman he had left on guard slumped on its knees, head bowed. He nudged it with his foot, and it fell sideways into the grass, its eyes glassy and dead.
He had sensed the creature had been injured during the battle. When he examined its chest he found three bullet wounds. Its tissue had begun to regenerate, but one bullet had nearly severed an artificial nerve column he had inserted. Having used the creature to carry Patrick here, it seemed he had worn the Huntsman out.
He frowned. No matter. Just another example of his need to progress.
The time was coming to move on.
There was just one last job to be done.
Still frowning, he dragged the creature’s corpse back into the abandoned pinball hall and hid it out of view. Perhaps one day he would come back to reclaim the technology he was leaving behind, or perhaps it would just rot away, out of sight, out of mind.
A poor but convenient end.
As the three of them fled, he had seen the surviving DCA hauling the dead Huntsmen into a pile and setting fire to it.
It warmed his heart a little that the idiots were depriving themselves of his complicated technology.
As he headed back to Patrick, he caught a brief glimpse of himself in a tarnished surface. Once, he had lived a life away from any reflections, the very sight of his own face the greatest enemy of all. In the decades since, he had grown less vain, more resigned, almost comfortable with the monstrosity staring back at him.
Once, he had simply been hideous. He had been hideous yet valued, his knowledge and skills sought after by governments and rich men the world over. Now, he was hideous, scarred, old, and forgotten.
Karma, perhaps? Or the sign of a world moving on, turning to face new monstrosities such as Maxim Cale?
‘Dear friend,’ Kurou said as he stared at himself, unsure whether he were speaking to his own reflection or the distant specter of Maxim Cale, ‘I would very much like to see you eye to eye one last time. A penny for your thoughts? A crow’s eye for a hawk’s eye, sire?’
Behind him, Patrick groaned. The boy was waking up.
With the Huntsman dead, it would be a long walk about to the town. But, Kurou reflected, it would be something of a victory march.
And for that he should feel happy.
42
Maxim Cale
His senses—in particular the one that mattered—had dulled over the years, softened by easy living and repetition, his budding political career taking him far from the years of need and longing, into a world of boredom, endless conversations, and polite comfort. After years of slowly moving up the ranks like an icebreaker cutting through an Arctic ice sheet, he was now in position to finally break free and take total control.
Britain, the hard work of its isolation already done by a succession of paranoid leaders coupled with the fear of an ongoing war in Europe he had in many ways been responsible for, was now a blandly safe place, malleable like putty, ready to be moulded to meet his demands.
And yet … in this nondescript Somerset town, he sensed danger. The presence of a mind he hadn’t felt in twenty years, since an encounter which had left him fighting for his life as a strange, birdlike creature strolled away into the snow. It hadn’t been his first encounter with the man named Kurou, of course, but it had been his last.
Until now.
Forty years ago he could have extended his mind like lines of rope, entering and influencing anyone he chose. While he was still strong, he had nothing of the glories of his past, and he was at risk every moment he was out in the general public. Once his control was established he would hide himself away, but until then he had to do the lackey work, gaining trust, influencing voters with his words, swaying public opinion.
It was almost done. The coming election was all but a formality.
Did he really need this little sojourn to the countryside?
His instinct—and it was rarely wrong—told him to flee back to London and hide away behind the growing perimeter walls.
There was danger here, danger in the form of an old, battle-hardened adversary.
He found it hard to concentrate as Urla Wynne spoke. The woman was explaining her work, her policies, what her policing force had done to suppress the public in this remote backwater. She was trying to hide something—a mistake, perhaps—and Maxim didn’t need to read her mind to know that. In an otherwise chilly restaurant she had beads of sweat on her forehead, and her hands were never still. The man sitting beside her—her assistant—seemed to be taking delight in her discomfort, and Maxim wondered which would put a knife in the other’s back first.
With the breakfast over, he was taken on what felt like a hastily arranged local tour, out to some nearby landmarks, and then to some local building and engineering projects. He watched from the shade, staying in his car where possible, not getting too close to the public, instead feeling for their minds, trying to project warmth and comfort, hoping to sway their vote.
And as always, everything felt false and forced, but by now he was well-versed in the motions of the political monster. Do as necessary and you shall receive.
The parade was due to begin at one. Maxim Cale and entourage had the best seats in Wells from a stand erected outside the town hall, in the central square where all the parade floats would gather after making a circuit of the town. Initially they all did a loop of the town square and the great cathedral before embarking on a two-mile circuit. From his vantage point on an enclosed area with a covered awning above him, he listened as Urla Wynne described every float as it came past.
A few were electric vehicles with wooden stages built on top. Others were carts pushed by hand. A couple of horses were even involved, their riders sometimes part of the display. Farm themes, village life themes, water themes, a few historical displays, he watched them all and listened to their descriptions with an understanding smile hiding his boredom, already wishing this day would be over soon, that the irritating music would stop, that the costumes and the jolly smiles of the townsfolk and the local children would stop insulting him with their inanity.
But beneath it all was the fear that something was going to happen.
Something terrible.
43
Patrick
Everything felt different when he awoke. At first he thought the irritating carnival music with its tinkling bells and groaning accordions was all in his mind, then his eyesight focused and he noticed the line of floats stretching ahead of him, moving in a slow line, arcing gently around a curve in the road.
He looked down. He was wearing a garish, flowing dress. Beneath him was a hard wooden seat, and beneath that a motorised cart humming as it bumped along the road in pursuit of the carnival float in front.
The entire cart was decked out in flowers, ornamental dais, and quaint trellises hung with flickering fairy lights. A wooden sign not fixed properly, so it flexed in the breeze, announced “CARNIVAL QUEEN”.
‘Let me off of this fucking thing—’
He started to get up, but a sudden jolt of electricity spat through his lower back, making him sit back down with a bump. He opened his mouth to speak again, but the tingle returned, some kind of booby trap which would activate if he tried to escape. His memory came rushing back in a flood, and he remembered Kurou, the Huntsmen, Tommy, the numbness in his legs.
It had all brought him here.
‘Welcome back, sire.’
What Patrick had thought was a bright red toadstool near his right knee began to twist around, and he realised it was the hat of a man crouched by his feet. Kurou, his face decked out in jester’s makeup, his clothes a similar mismatch of colour, frills and ribbon, looked up at him, a grin on his hideous, painted face.
‘Your wakefulness is convenient, sire. Just in time for the grand finale.’
‘What have you done to me?’ Patrick hissed, feeling the threatening tingle of electricity.
‘I simply adapted a situation,’ he said. ‘Shortly, we will be reaching our final destination. There, the town’s special guest will crown you as carnival queen.’
‘You have got to be fucking kidding me.’
‘A jester never lies,’ Kurou said. ‘Merely dances to a varying tune.’
‘You crazy bastard. Let me go.’
‘You are free. You can get up and walk around at any time … if you so choose.’ However, I will only disable my little retainer when it is time for you to be crowned.’
‘And if I do it, what then?’
‘You will be free forever. I will be a happy jester, and long live the king!’
Patrick slumped back into his chair. The world had gone mad, and he was at the centre, held tight by the maddest man of all. As the float rumbled on, watched by cheering people lining the streets, Patrick gently tested his movement, shifting one way, then the other. Each time, he felt a slowly intensifying tingle. When he lifted one leg fully off the seat, the electrical current became so strong he lost all feeling in the limb and it slumped back to the chair.
Unable to move, he began to explore his body beneath the humiliating folds of the dress. Everything felt tight and hard, as though whatever corset he had been sewn into was made of solid steel. Braces covered his legs and upper arms, and his chest felt tight. Feeling under the material, he felt wires, switches, hard plastic pads.
A bomb.
He sat back in the chair, his resolve gone. He was wired up, unable to escape. The deal he had made with Kurou to let him go after Suzanne was almost done.