by Steve Feasey
And as these rumours grew, the enthusiasm of individual members of the ARM to be assigned the role of catching these Mutes shrank.
Melk
From the darkened penthouse complex at the very top of the Bio-Gen tower, President Melk looked out over the metropolis that was City Four. Above, corpulent clouds, their fringes gilded with silver light, drifted lazily in front of the moon. The floor-to-ceiling wall of glass before him provided a stunning unbroken vista, and he had none of the apprehensions or feelings of vertigo he knew many felt when they stood this close to the transparent barrier. If he felt anything, it was the desire to lean forward, to reach out towards the city he and his ancestors had built and sweep it up into his arms.
Lights shone from the windows of most of the huge tower blocks again now – lights that, along with the heating, had been extinguished thanks to the terrorist attack the city had suffered. To make matters worse, the winter had been a harsh one for C4’s citizens. Reinstating these crucial services had been beset with delays, but he was pleased power had now been restored to well over seventy per cent of the city, with assurances that the rest would follow in the next few weeks. Of course this wasn’t good enough for his critics, who had the nerve to suggest he’d been dragging his heels over some of the work. There was truth in the accusation, but still …
He glanced down at a small table by his side, on top of which lay the report he’d been reading. His secret project. It was a work of such Machiavellian genius that even he’d baulked at putting it into action at first, but needs must when the devil drives. And the devil was driving Melk, driving him on to find a solution to the ultimate problem faced by his people.
A sigh escaped him, and he reached for the glass of water on the table.
There was still much to do to repair the damage done – not just to the infrastructure, but to the minds of its citizens – seven months ago by the mutant terrorist group. A group of five mutants with freakish powers, led by Melk’s own brother, Silas, who it turned out wasn’t quite as dead as the president had believed him to be. Melk had been forced to call on the aid of the other cities, and his handling of the rebuild and its progress were being closely monitored by both his political opponents and those who had re-elected him. There was, however, one guarantee he’d made to the citizens of the Six Cities that he’d not been able to honour. Despite his best efforts, he had still not managed to recapture the renegades responsible for the carnage wrought on C4. And that bothered him like nothing else.
He’d come close on a couple of occasions – sightings of the Mutes, particularly in the slums on the outskirts of the other cities – had almost led to their arrest by members of his elite Agency for the Regulation of Mutants. But each and every time, the ARM had been thwarted and the rebels had escaped. Recently, however, these ‘sightings’ had almost ceased. After that debacle in the Shattered Zone a few weeks ago, his hybrids – he still thought of them as ‘his’ – had disappeared. They were out there, making occasional forays to ambush transportation vehicles for food and other supplies, but the rats had gone deep underground.
He watched as a surveillance drone descended from the skies to investigate something. The skies were out of bounds to citizens and mutants alike. Only unmanned drones were allowed access to the heavens, a law that still rankled with him. He wondered what the device was investigating; it was probably just some Pure kids up to no good on the streets.
In the slums beyond the City, the mutant problem was growing. Rallies demanding mutant rights, equality, access to the privileges of the Pure. He had his rabble-rousing brother to thank for that too! Something needed to be done. And now Melk was ready to put in place the means by which to do it.
Melk swore to himself that when he did finally capture Silas and his band of freaks he would bestow upon him the most heinous punishments imaginable.
Below, a brightly lit advertisement for a soft drink of some kind momentarily caught his attention. Be Happy! the vivid neon hoarding suggested, but Melk found it difficult to comply. Despite all the good reports he’d received from his officials about life in the city returning to normal; despite Melk silencing the critics of his unprecedented fourth-term return to office; despite his latest, most secret project about to come to fruition, he was not happy.
Things, strange things, had started to occur. Things that, as a man of science, Melk should have been able to laugh away as ridiculous. Things like the shadowy figure that had appeared by his bedside the other evening. A figure that for all the world looked like –
Stop it!
He took another sip of his drink and forced himself to think of other things, like the most recent satisfaction polls that had come in this morning.
He swirled the glass in his hand, the ice cubes chinking softly against the sides. Glancing down, he caught sight of citizens moving along a clear-roofed walkway far below – filing along obediently in countercurrent streams. Like ants. And just like ants, the attack on their colony had changed them. Before the bombings, the mutants beyond the wall surrounding City Four had been viewed as little more than a pest by the city dwellers: an out-of-sight, out-of-mind nuisance not taken too seriously. Despite his own efforts to warn people, they’d refused to listen. His citizens had become soft. Spoiled and overindulged, they’d dismissed his protestations about ‘the enemy at the gate’ as rhetoric. Well, they were listening now. He had to hand it to his brother – Silas had managed to accomplish something he’d almost failed to. And all it had taken was a few strategically placed bombs. Melk smiled to himself. If he’d known that was all that was required, he might even have planted the damned explosives himself!
There was fear now. The good, Pure citizens of City Four were frightened of the mutants surrounding their safe, privileged world. It was time to act. Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Melk was determined to use the new state of affairs to his advantage and –
Father …
Melk whirled around, the cold drink splashing up out of the glass and on to his hand.
‘Wh-who’s there?’ he said.
His eyes went to the spot where his son, Zander, had been standing when he was killed on the night of the attacks. There had been blood on the carpet then, a black pool that slowly spread outwards from beneath the prostrate body. He shook his head. The carpet had been replaced, but a part of Melk fancied he could still see that inky stain.
He swallowed, the noise sounding unnaturally loud in the silent room.
‘Hello?’ He didn’t like the tremor in his own voice. It sounded … weak.
It must have been somebody outside his office. Some member of his staff who had decided to work late, that’s all. His aide! Of course, that’s whom he’d heard. He’d asked the man to stay behind a little later this evening. It had been nothing more than that.
It didn’t sound like someone outside the office though, did it? And what about the other night, when you woke up?
Shut up.
It was the look on Zander’s face that he couldn’t get out of his mind. There was none of the slack emptiness the dead were supposed to exhibit once the ‘essence’ housed in their body had departed. Instead, in death, his son’s expression had been one of outrage and surprise.
Telling himself to stop being irrational, Melk absently wiped the spilt liquid against his trouser leg. Without knowing he was doing it, his gaze returned to the carpet and the ugly blackish stain that wasn’t really there.
Except it is there, Father. I will always be there.
This wasn’t the first time he’d heard the boy’s voice. Walking to a meeting the other day – in broad daylight – he could have sworn he heard Zander shout out to him. Then, like now, when he turned around to look, there was nobody.
Pull yourself together, he told himself. It’s the stress you’re under, that’s all. The pressure on a man in his situation was enough to make anyone a little jittery. There’s nothing there.
The carpet hadn’t been the only thing he’d had torn up
. The entire room had been refurbished – everything thrown out and replaced – with the exception of the battered metal plaque on the wall, the one with the number four. It was a relic, a historical artefact from ARK #4 – the vast underground facility that had sheltered his ancestors when humanity had tried to wipe itself out. Melk found it strangely comforting somehow to know it was all still down there, buried beneath the earth. They all were. Each of the Six Cities had been built atop the subterranean Arks when their creators had emerged from beneath the ground like new life rising from dormant seeds.
That had been a new beginning. Now he was on the verge of another.
He took a deep breath, forcing himself to close his eyes and be calm. He was acting irrationally. This nonsense was beneath someone like him. He was, when you stripped away his political achievements, a scientist, and there was no place in science for ghosts or phantom voices from the grave. Claptrap like that was the stuff of the weak-willed or the Mutes outside the walls.
When he opened his eyes again, the carpet was one uniform shade.
You see? Stress, nothing else. A small sound – not quite a laugh – escaped him.
On unsteady legs, Melk walked over to the desk from which he would deliver his ultimatum in two days, skirting the place where Zander had fallen. The speech would be broadcast not just inside the walls but outside too – on a huge vis-display that was being lowered into place at this very moment. It was a speech that would leave those on both sides of the divide in no doubt that their neighbourly relations were about to change forever.
Placing the drink down on the plaziglass surface, he pressed the fleshy part of his palm beneath the thumb, activating the comms unit implanted just beneath the skin. He lifted the hand, forefinger resting against his ear, a purplish light illuminating the side of his face. His assistant, who worked in an office next to Melk’s suite, answered immediately.
‘Bring me another drink,’ Melk said, noting the slight catch in his voice.
‘Is … is everything all right, Mr President?’
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘It’s just that I thought I heard you speaking to somebody.’
Had he been talking out loud? He wasn’t aware he’d done so.
‘No, er, that was just me going through my speech. You know, getting the juices going.’
‘Of course. I’ll bring you that drink straight away, sir.’
Tia
Tia was being jostled to within an inch of her life in the back of Tink’s wagon, the rigours of the long journey creating a host of aches and pains in her young body. A heavy tarpaulin stretched across a metal frame created a half-tunnel of canvas over the rear of the wagon that hid her and the mutant trader’s merchandise from anyone who might take an interest in the vehicle. The only other passenger, Silas, was somehow managing to sleep.
She pulled the canvas back to get some air. Despite repeated warnings from Tink, Tia couldn’t help but occasionally pop her head out the front to take in the stark and often inhospitable landscapes they’d crossed over the last few days. The world outside the cities, where until recently she’d spent her entire life, was so very different she might as well be on another planet. There was a wildness to it she loved; the people, the flora and fauna, the land itself, everything felt more … alive.
Looking out on a windswept tundra, she found herself thinking about the group she had thrown her lot in with now. They owed their continued existence to her slumbering travel companion, Silas, who’d rescued them from his brother when most of them were little more than babes in arms. Like the terrain she was travelling through, they were wild in a way she found exciting. They had to be: despite the incredible powers they’d been created with – each of them cooked up in a top-secret laboratory by the evil Melk – their lives had been harsh and unforgiving, and just about as different from her own childhood as could be imagined. She’d been sheltered from the real world. Even as a journalist and daughter of a rebel, she’d been kidding herself when she told people she understood what it was like to live outside the protection of the city walls. Well, she wasn’t kidding herself now, was she? Out here, away from her own people, the plight of the mutants was much worse than even she’d imagined.
It was cold now. The sun had begun to dip towards the horizon, taking with it what little warmth it had contributed to the day. Tink, wrapped from head to toe in unidentifiable animal furs so only his face was exposed to the elements, stared ahead stoically. In his mouth, jutting out beneath his bushy white moustache, was his pipe. The thing had long since gone out, but he kept it clamped between his teeth, as if the fiery embers that had no doubt warmed him for a while were still burning.
‘You should come inside,’ Silas said to her. She hadn’t registered his waking.
Tia turned to look at him before nodding and withdrawing back under the canvas.
The trio’s trip had served two purposes. First, they’d been to City One, the southernmost of the Six Cities, to listen to a mutant rally Silas had helped to arrange. He’d spent years campaigning for Mute rights, and even though he now had every ARM agent on Scorched Earth looking for him, he still insisted on attending many of these events. She admired him for that. He reminded her of her own father, a man whose determination and pig-headedness had undoubtedly rubbed off on her. Like Silas, Tia had quit the safety of City Four to be with the group of young rebels, documenting the events leading up to, and those that followed, the discovery of the mutant children with special powers. It was work she believed to be important – a documentary that would ultimately expose President Melk and his Principia as liars and hypocrites – even if there was a good chance it would never be seen by anyone inside the Wall. Because she doubted she’d ever get inside any of the cities again. Tia had had her CivisChip – a device all Pures had embedded in their thigh bone at birth – removed. In doing so, she’d also ended her ability to get past the formidable security in place at each and every entry point to each and every city, as well as most of the buildings inside them.
After the rally – a subdued affair thanks to the heavy ARM presence – the three set off on what was the more important leg of their journey and continued south, heading in the direction of a region so devastated in the Last War that it had been forsaken by almost everyone on Scorched Earth. Tink had convinced them that there was somewhere close to the Blacklands that might provide Silas and his group of extraordinary mutants with a place they could make their own, where they might remain safely hidden from their pursuers – for a while at least.
Despite being lost in her thoughts, Tia noted the shift in the rhythm of the monotonous noise of the harg’s hard hoofs hitting the ground as it pulled the wagon along. Tink’s voice, expressing urgency without betraying any fear, called back to them.
‘Er, you two might want to get inside that secret cubbyhole like we practised,’ he said. ‘And quickly. We’ve got company coming up the road behind us.’
Ignoring Silas’s hissed warnings, Tia peeked through a gap to get a glimpse at whatever it was Tink was talking about. Her heart sank when she saw an ARM troop carrier speeding up the road in their direction. Sliding away a number of boxes to reveal a hatch in the floor of the truck bed, she watched as Silas prised his fingers into the gap and swung the flap up, allowing access to the concealed hold beneath. It was a terribly tight squeeze, but Silas and Tia could both get in there. And as long as the ARM didn’t look too hard, they could stay hidden until any search was over.
Holding the hinged section up, Silas let Tia in first, and was about to follow her when Tink gave a little laugh. ‘Well, what d’ya know. Silas, Tia, you can forget crawling into that tiny little box. Looks like our Agency for the Regulation of Mutants has itself been deregulated a little.’
The pair looked quizzically at each other before getting up and pushing back the canvas to see what he was talking about. There, climbing out of the troop carrier and waving their hands at them, were Rush, Jax, Flea, Anya and Brick. Bring
ing up the rear, snuffling and hurghing with indignation at having been cooped up, was the rogwan, Dotty.
They pulled the vehicles well off the main road, into a hollow that would provide them shelter from the wind as well as any prying eyes that happened along the route. Around a large fire they discussed everything that had happened during the twelve days they’d been apart.
‘So did you find it?’ Rush said, addressing Silas and Tia. It must have been a trick of the light, but Tia fancied he looked more mature than when she’d set off. His jaw seemed squarer, his shoulders a little broader.
‘It wasn’t quite where Tink thought it was, but, yes, we found it,’ the older man responded.
‘And it’s really uninhabited? An entire city?’
Tia answered this time. There was something about the way she pulled the blanket tight around her shoulders as she remembered where she’d just returned from that left Rush feeling slightly uneasy. ‘Well, I think you’d be hard pressed to call it a city, once you’ve seen it.’
‘Still … it’s hard to imagine a place like that remaining abandoned for so long.’
‘I guess the only good thing about planning on living with the dead is that nobody else wants to.’
‘It is a lot further south than Tink remembered,’ Silas continued. ‘It’s on the edge of the Blacklands. “Remote” doesn’t even begin to describe it. That could work for, but also against, us. It’ll be hard to find food there that won’t make us all sick or even kill us, and I’m not sure how we’d go about supplying ourselves for the winter.’ Silas had been opposed to finding a base somewhere so remote, stating that it would take him away from his mutants’ rights work and the rallies he was still so keen to keep going. However, he’d insisted they put it to the vote, and when he’d been outnumbered he’d grudgingly accepted the majority decision.