by Steve Feasey
This book is dedicated to my daughter, Hope.
Keep your chin up, kiddo.
Contents
Prologue
Melk
Tia
Dead City
Ambush
Melk
Silas
Melk
Registration
Juneau
Steeleye
Rush and Tia
Anya
Tia
Steeleye
Anya
Steeleye
Silas
Steeleye
Flea
Jax, Rush and Tia
Tia and Rush
Anya
Melk
Jax
Rush
Steeleye
Melk
Tia
Rush
Tia
Rush
Tia
Rush, Brick and Jax
Epilogue
About the author
Prologue
Rush stood perfectly still, eyes narrowed as he squinted out on to the shadowy landscape. The measly light from a crescent moon did little to illuminate the murk, but without it Rush would not have spotted the glint – a brief flicker – in the distance a few moments ago.
Since that time he hadn’t moved. Like a statue he stood atop the elevated platform that must have once been used to hoist straw or some other feed up into the roof space of the dilapidated barn at his back, and he focused all his attention on the area out there where he thought the glint had come from. A cold wind blew in from his right, tousling his long hair and whipping it across his face.
Maybe it had been a trick of the light? There had been no repetition; the night was as dark and ordinary as it had been before. If not a trick of the light, maybe the moonlight glinting off an animal’s eye. Could something like that be spotted this far away? He doubted it. No, the reflection seemed to come from something not of the natural world: a shiny surface, something man-made, possibly metal.
Behind him, through the rotting timber walls of the abandoned outhouse that had been left to decay like the rest of the farm, he could hear the sleepers. One particular noise, a deep bass rumble, much louder than the sound of the other sleepers, could only be Brick, the mutant man-child they had managed to rescue from City Four. The incursion, however, had made Rush and his mutant friends public enemy number one. It had also had the effect of uniting City Four’s Pure inhabitants behind President Melk, who was only too eager to order that Rush’s small band of mutant teens should be hunted like animals by the Agency for the Regulation of Mutants. Because even in the mutant world outside the Pure cities, Rush and his friends were different. Their gifts made them powerful – and dangerous.
There was a moan from inside the barn, followed by mumbled gibberish that presumably made sense to whoever was experiencing the dream or nightmare. Rush’s own dreams had been vivid and unnerving of late, no doubt thanks to the continual state of stress he found himself in. That and the hunger.
He continued to stare out into the darkness.
Rush wanted to wake his friends – just in case there was anything out there – but he knew how tired they all were. They’d been out hunting most of the day, although they had little to show for it. After cooking and eating whatever they’d managed to catch, the group had gone to bed with their bellies far from full.
The old telescope was on the deck at his feet. He opened his hand, and the device sprang up from the wooden floor and slapped into his palm, as if pulled there by some invisible string. He lifted it to his eye and scanned the shadows again. Nothing. Not even a hint of movement. He sighed. Phantoms in the darkness.
Relaxing a little, he lowered the spyglass and slowly sank back down into his seated position on the floor. Retrieving the blanket that had dropped to the wooden deck, he pulled it around his shoulders, suddenly all too aware of the cold now the adrenalin charge he’d experienced was dissipating. He considered everything he’d been through since that fateful night when the ARM had turned up at his own farm all those months ago – the things he’d experienced and the things he’d discovered. Rush had always thought he was just another grubby mutant. But in fact he was the result of a secret scientific experiment to create mutant hybrids with extraordinary powers, and there were others like him. Eventually they found each other: Rush, Anya, Brick, Flea and Jax. Like a strange, broken family, they’d fought a battle and survived – hiding from the ARM, learning to use their powers, waiting for the moment when they could fight back. How could all that have happened in the space of a few months? It hardly seemed possible. One minute he was living on a remote homestead in the middle of nowhere with his guardian, the next he was a member of a renegade band being pursued across the lands of Scorched Earth – rebels with large bounties on their heads. Dammit, if all that wasn’t enough to make you think you were seeing things in the dark, he didn’t know what was.
He settled back against the cold timber wall, the coarse material of the blanket making his neck itch a little. Taking in the stars on the far horizon, he allowed himself to wonder how long it was until dawn and gradually felt himself relax a little.
Then he saw it again.
This time there was no doubt in his mind. Out there in the dark, something was moving around, and it was moving slowly, as if it was aware he’d almost spotted it. Whatever it was, it was man-made. It’s a gun, he thought. He didn’t know why he knew that, but he did.
He wanted to jump to his feet and shout out to wake his friends. His heart was thumping wildly again, but he forced himself to move calmly, convinced that whatever was out there was watching him every bit as closely as he’d been looking out for it. He rose, made a big show of stretching and yawning and went inside.
Although long abandoned, the place still had a faint whiff of animals and straw. On the floor, curled up in blankets, were the vague, indistinct shapes of his slumbering friends, and he hurried over to the closest of these amorphous mounds. Dropping to his knees, he shook the thing awake.
‘What is it?’ Jax was instantly on the alert. Despite the dark, he could clearly make out the worried look on the younger Mute’s face. The albino, fully clothed beneath his blankets – all in black as always – threw the covers to one side and got to his feet. He was much taller than Rush, and in the darkness of the barn his ghostly white flesh seemed even starker than usual.
‘Something’s outside.’ Even as Rush said it he began to feel the return of the same doubts he’d nursed while on lookout. What had he really seen, after all? ‘It might be nothing – just a vehicle passing by on a routine patrol somewhere way off in the distance – but I’m pretty sure there’s something moving about out there.’
‘When did you first see it?’
‘A few minutes ago. I thought I might have imagined it, but I’ve just seen it again, and it’s definitely not a trick of the light.’ He paused, then nodded, mainly to himself. ‘Somebody is out there.’
‘Show me,’ Jax said.
‘Shall we wake the others?’ Rush hissed.
Jax took a moment to look about him. ‘Not yet.’
Captain Rourke held the night-vis set up to his eyes, zooming in to fill the display with the green-and-black image of the two Mutes on the wooden platform.
It still wasn’t completely clear to him if his squad’s presence had been discovered, but he didn’t like the way the younger one had gone inside and then come back out with this other, taller freak.
Rourke’s squad had been tipped off as to the whereabouts of the mutant terrorists thanks to a random spotting from a surveillance drone that had flown off course and ended up lost somewhere over this wilderness. The drone’s operator had, for some reason known only to himself, decided to check th
e footage stored on the device, and he’d seen the images of the Mutes at the derelict farmhouse. Knowing there was an order that any sightings of small groups of Mutes should be reported, he’d taken his findings to his commander and, after reviewing the footage, the powers-that-be proclaimed that this was almost certainly the group responsible for the bombings in City Four. After that it was simply a matter of identifying which ARM unit was nearest and deploying them at top speed. Rourke’s squad was that unit, and the captain was delighted to be the one tasked with meting out some ARM justice to these terrorist scumbags. It had been a tough journey. Even with their all-terrain vehicles, they had had to travel all day and night to get across the broken lands known simply as the Shattered Zone.
Now here they were. Although exhausted and sore from being bounced around in the back of a troop carrier for all that time, he could sense the excitement and anticipation in his men. Under cover of darkness they’d started to move into position, everything going well until something spooked the kid sitting watch up there on the platform. Now there were two Mutes up there on the high ledge, scanning the landscape for whatever it was that had caught the boy’s attention. The captain zoomed in closer, frowning. Actually only the shorter one was looking out; the tall white freak at his side was standing perfectly still, his eyes closed as if he was meditating or something.
Rourke felt a strange sensation inside his head, a moment of slight vertigo that made the world around him shift and his stomach roll uncomfortably. He had the weirdest feeling – as if somebody was looking out through his eyes. It passed as quickly as it had started, and he shook his head, wondering if it was his body telling him to take on board some food or fluids. Reaching for the water canteen at his hip, he became aware of movement beside him as somebody skilfully belly-crawled through the brush, followed by the familiar voice of his second-in-command, a promising young soldier called Henderson.
‘What’s happening, sir?’
‘Not quite sure. The kid went inside and came out with this other freak. They’ve been standing like that for a while now.’
‘Our options?’
Rourke had been weighing these up for the last few minutes. For his liking, he and his men were still a little too far away from the ruined old farmhouse to go for an all-out assault. With no way of knowing what means of transportation the Mutes might or might not have, he ran the risk of losing all of them if he went down that route. Even so, he knew the longer they were forced to hide here in the dirt, the brighter it would soon get, and the advantage of a night attack would be lost to him.
‘Where are Sax and Franco?’
Rourke had ordered the two men to break away from the rest of them and head off to the left, instructing them to use some low hills on that side as cover and make their way round towards the back of the outhouse. If he’d had them in place, he could have launched his attack and relied on the pair to trap any escaping Mutes. But the two men, like the rest of them, had been forced to take what meagre cover they could find when the young lookout got twitchy.
‘Dammit, we might just have to go in. Take the fight to the Mutes and hope we can engage with them before they have a chance to get away. Go and tell the men to –’
Something flew overhead. It was only a whisper of a sound, but it was picked up by the highly trained military man nonetheless. Rourke craned his head around just in time to catch a glimpse of a large dark shape against the night sky. This was followed by the sound of leathery wings flapping once, as if whatever it was had suddenly braked against the air and come to a halt up there.
‘Sir?’
There was a dull thump to the rear of his squad, that to Rourke’s mind could only be something hitting the ground. Twisting around again and lifting the night-vis back into position, he trained the device back on the platform. The two Mutes were gone.
‘Quick, Henderson! Get on the comms and tell everyone we’re under attack!’
The actual ‘fight’, if it could be described as such, was thankfully short. Anya had morphed into a hideous-looking winged serpent, coiling her lower half around Brick and Rush, ignoring the latter’s complaints that she was crushing him, and carrying them both out of the back of the barn and into the night. At the same time, Flea had set off in the direction of the two men who were working their way up the flanks. Despite her being the smallest of the group, nobody thought for a second Flea would be in any sort of danger from the two soldiers – it’s hard to fight with someone who moves so quickly you can’t even see them. Jax stayed behind and monitored the others’ movements.
The thump the captain had heard was the sound of Brick as the giant mutant hit the ground. Anya was a little more careful with Rush, but not much; she swooped in lower, dropping him close to Rourke and using her terrific momentum to slam, head first, into the ARM officer. Issuing a weird ululating cry, she shot back into the air.
Only a short while after the encounter had started, the ARM squad surrendered and had their weapons, comms devices, uniforms and other paraphernalia taken from them.
‘What are we going to do with them?’ Rush asked, looking across at the men, who were now all restrained using their own cuffs.
‘Kill them,’ Anya shot back, staring defiantly at each of the others in turn. She still had a feral look in her eye, despite being back in human form now. ‘What? They have guns and knives and heaven knows what else. They were on the point of attacking us in our sleep. You think any of us would have been alive when the sun came up if they’d got to us first?’ The anger was clear to hear in her voice, but there was something else: fear.
‘That’s enough, Anya,’ Silas said, pulling up on the harg-drawn wagon. The man who’d saved the mutant children way back when they were babes in arms quickly scanned the scene, giving each of his young wards a nod of approval. Jax and Tia climbed down from the back of the vehicle. ‘We’ll have no more talk of that sort, thank you.’
‘You’re kidding me, right?’
‘No, I am not kidding you. We will not be stooping to the levels of our enemies, and that’s final.’
Anya looked on the verge of answering him back, but held her tongue. Instead she turned her back on them all, shrugging off Jax’s attempt to console her, and walked off into the shadows, muttering under her breath.
Silas approached Rourke and his men. ‘I have little doubt that my young friend’s assertion of our survival chances had you not been discovered is correct. But we will not respond in the way she suggests. We will, however, be requisitioning your vehicles. You’ll be left out here to make your own way back as best you can.’
‘But we’re miles from civilisation,’ Rourke complained. The captain had a harrowed look about him and was finding it difficult to look his own men in the eye. How could he have allowed himself to be caught out like that? And how the hell was he going to explain all this to his superiors?
‘Civilisation? Is that what you call it? What kind of civilised race sends armed men out to hunt down and kill children?’ said Jax, standing beside his guardian. ‘I’m sure you’ll be picked up by your own people soon enough. They sent you here to find us, so they have a pretty good idea of where you are.’ He paused, narrowing his eyes at the captain. ‘After all, they know where the surveillance drone was when it fortunately spotted us.’
Jax was right. The next day Rourke and his team found themselves on a transporter heading back to the nearest city. When they arrived at the ARM headquarters, they described how they hadn’t stood a chance, how there were dozens of Mutes out there, and not just the five they’d been told to expect – although all of the men agreed during the journey back how it was strange these ‘others’ had disappeared as soon as they’d surrendered, and how none of them had managed to hit any of them with their weapons, the rounds appearing to simply pass straight through them as if they were ghosts. One man told how he’d thrown a grenade at a teenager, staring in disbelief as the boy raised his hand and the thing had hung in the air halfway between the soldier and its
intended target. The kid’s hand had shot up, and at that the grenade had flown straight up into the night sky too, only to detonate harmlessly somewhere high overhead. The youngster had turned his attention back to the man, and the next thing the soldier knew, he was flying backwards through the air, the entire front of his body feeling as if it had been hit with a giant hammer. That wasn’t all. The men reported dark, hideous flying creatures that morphed into other even more terrible beasts when they landed, striking terror into them; some told how their night-vision equipment had been ripped from their faces by a girl that seemed to appear and disappear again before they had a chance to react. Strange visions had been implanted in their heads – things that weren’t there but for all the world had appeared to be. Perhaps the strangest tale had come from the one ARM agent who’d been seriously injured during the skirmish – the man’s leg badly broken when, on the run, his foot had gone into an animal’s burrow all the way up to the ankle, snapping the bone like a toothpick. He’d lain there wailing in pain, unable to free his injured leg from the hole. Then, when the contact between the two groups was over, a colossal Mute had approached the man, the giant holding out his hands in a placating gesture as he slowly came towards him saying the word ‘Brick’ over and over. Quaking with fear, the soldier flinched as the hulking figure went down on his hands and knees next to him, fully expecting the brute to deliver the final killing blow. Instead, the Mute reached out and gently placed one of his shovel-like hands on the man’s head. That was the last thing the man remembered before blacking out. When he opened his eyes a few seconds later, and removed his leg from the burrow, he was astonished to find it was healed, completely pain-free. He rotated his foot, blinking in disbelief. As he did so, he caught sight of the huge mutant walking off. He was limping badly.
The accounts of Rourke and his men were supposed to be classified, the captain and his squad ordered not to repeat what they’d reported. But even in an organisation as regimented as the ARM, these things have a way of getting out, and word quickly spread that the mutant children out there in the Wastes had strange powers – superpowers.