by Chris Ward
Anger blazed in the teenager’s eyes. He took a step forward, but Raine lifted her knife. ‘Leave. Now.’
They began to back up the platform, muttering to each other. At the bottom of the exit escalator, the angry one gave her the finger and screamed out a few obscenities that the echoes of the old station made indecipherable. Raine stood and watched them go, feeling only pity.
If David was out there spreading the word that the Tube Riders were back in London, he wasn’t just endangering himself but everyone who chose to follow his stupid whims. She knew him better than most people, and he didn’t have the first clue how to be a revolutionary. For a while she had loved him, and sometimes she felt like she still did, but what had seduced her was his imagination.
Above everything, David was a dreamer, and while he had charmed her with tales of a better life beyond London GUA, at heart that’s all they were: stories, idle pillow talk fantasies to banish the harsh realities of their world for another day.
‘Oh, David,’ she whispered, the faint echo of her voice drifting back from the walls that held so many memories. ‘What have you done?’
16
Reprisal
If Mika didn’t look too close she could almost believe the two women were human. Despite their shackled hands, she wasn’t prepared to get close enough to see the microchips in their eyes, the shifting metal under their skin. Cloaked to hide the absence of hair on the back of their heads where wires laced over their skin, they looked like two women from an ancient religious sisterhood brought out into the world for the first time. Their eyes stared straight ahead, their head movements slow and concise, as if rather than taking in the world as a whole they were moving from one gridded sector to another.
In a sense, she guessed, they were. The computer tablet on her lap displayed a likeness of what they saw, a world in infra-red, punctuated by heat blotches and shifting green lines that represented scent trails.
The van pulled up beside a stand of trees. Mika got out and found herself looking down a slope into a bowl of a park, concrete paths crisscrossing overgrown playing fields with a concrete pond and a trashed playing area in the centre. It surprised her to see a handful of people down there, some standing around talking, a couple actually walking dogs—Mika hadn’t seen a dog in years—and a father and son apparently throwing a ball to one another. She shook her head and gave a wry smile. It was as though someone had forgotten to tell them that the world had moved on.
A growl from behind her brought her back to reality. Two handlers were leading Sorel out of the back of another van. She recognised one as Jed, and wished she had the authority to have him imprisoned for his cruelty, or at least removed from his position. He held the shock control out in his hand like a weapon, while a kinder handler, who she remembered was called Barney, had a hold of Sorel’s leash.
The other two were also getting out of the first van, their cowls covering their faces, their handlers standing back from them like two zookeepers waiting to see what would happen. Their shackles had been removed, and Mika couldn’t help feeling a sense of trepidation, despite the shutdown controls fitted into their bodies. Sorel was a second generation Huntsman, savage and deadly, second only to the more powerful tracker-killers. The other two were known as Level Threes, what Mika secretly referred to as Dreggo-class, still deadly but less powerful and more easily controlled. After Dreggo’s escape their intelligence had been downgraded with surgical procedures on their human brains, so that now they were only fifty percent autonomous, carefully programmed to stop them going off the grid like Dreggo had.
‘You’re late.’
Mika looked up at the sound of the familiar voice and gave an inward sigh at the sight of Dreggo herself standing just in front of an unmarked brick building on the edge of the park. A towering figure in a cloak stood beside her, and Mika took a moment to recognise the Huntsman Heyna, whom Dreggo had assumed as her official bodyguard. Heyna was unshackled and unguarded, by all accounts with his shock controls now removed. He was the strongest of all operational Huntsmen, and Mika shivered at how easily he could slaughter them all. Answering only to Dreggo now, his only control was due to a learned sense of loyalty to the woman he considered his queen.
Mika swallowed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘We’re ready to begin.’
‘Good. Get them inside. And don’t think this has been forgotten. I asked for three Huntsmen, not one. You disobeyed a direct order.’
Mika could barely keep the tremble out of her voice. She sensed the handlers looking anywhere but at Dreggo and herself, aware of Dreggo’s reputation for brutality.
‘The Level Threes are perfectly suitable for a mission of this kind, where stealth is necessary.’
Dreggo glared at Mika out of her one human eye. ‘This will be on you if the mission is a failure. The Governor does not accept failure, and neither do I.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Get them inside.’
Under Mika’s supervision, the handlers led Sorel and the two Level Threes down into the station. Dreggo followed them inside, with Heyna standing guard by the entrance.
Mika had done her homework on the abandoned St. Cannerwells London Underground station. In service as part of the Piccadilly Line until 2052, it was a single level line, with two lines of track split by a central platform. There had once been four entrances, with two central concourses and six escalators, one at each end of the two side platforms and the one central one, but all but one entrance had been bulldozed or bricked up, and access to the tracks for maintenance purposes was by one broken escalator.
It had become known as the main hangout for the Tube Riders, the gang who had captured video footage of a DCA assassination and eventually broadcast it across the European Confederation. By all accounts Europe was preparing for war, but Mika suspected that was government propaganda. Mega Britain’s problems, as she saw it, weren’t with Europe, but with its own people. In the aftermath of the broadcast, the trail had gone cold, and the Tube Riders were assumed to still be in Europe. Their name had became a rallying cry for mobs all across London, and the Governor and Dreggo both felt they were the root of all the upheaval. In truth, London had been a hellhole as long as Mika could remember, and no amount of public executions would quell the growing dissatisfaction bubbling under the surface.
The handlers led Sorel and the Level Threes down to the tracks. Mika walked close behind them, keen to stay as far as possible from Dreggo, who was wandering among the shuttered shops and old ticket gates as if she had once lost something here and was still hoping to find it.
The two Level Threes waited patiently for instructions while Sorel was led up and down the platform, his nose close to the ground like a dog, searching for new scents. Mika had connected her computer tablet to Sorel’s data receivers, and as he moved back and forth lines of data flowed down the screen. Scent trails were important, but Sorel was also looking for DNA residue, anything from hair and skin fibres to forgotten clothing. A scent trail could lead them directly to a suspect, but DNA could be matched to government identification records, and put names and faces to the scents. Then the Department of Civil Affairs could come into play.
‘Are you done?’ Dreggo said. ‘How long is this going to take?’
‘We’ve detected several fresh scent trails,’ Mika said. ‘We’re just looking for DNA evidence.’
‘Good. Release them.’
‘We can’t be sure until we analyse the data that these scents belong to people associated with the Tube Riders,’ Mika said. ‘We need to align them with old scents and look for similarities—’
‘Release them. I won’t ask you again.’
Mika stared at the outline of Dreggo’s face in the dim glow of the emergency lights. A red dot shone in the centre of her robotic eye, and her metallic face mask glinted silver. The human side of her face, however, was a mass of shadows, unreadable.
‘Sorel has identified nine distinctive scents—’
Dreggo reac
hed her quicker than Mika could have imagined and she found herself pinned back against the station wall by a wiry hand around her neck. She gasped but no breath would come. Kicking back against the wall in panic, she stared at Dreggo, her eyes wide with terror.
‘Assign them their targets or you die, here, tonight.’
Mika stumbled as Dreggo released her, falling forward to hit the tiles with her hands. The computer tablet had fallen to her left, so she snatched it up, ignoring the crack in its rear casing. With a couple of clicks she assigned the recent scent trails to the three Huntsmen.
Mika looked up. ‘It’s done.’
Dreggo looked about to say something, but three sets of clicks as the Huntsmen’s bonds fell away distracted her. Sorel immediately dropped into a crouch, hissing at Jed, who stepped back out of range, holding the shock control up like a shield. The Huntsman took a step forward, then seemed to glance towards Dreggo, who nodded.
With a snarl, Sorel turned and bounded off along the tracks, disappearing into the tunnel.
The two Level Threes took a little longer to move, standing still for several seconds until Mika began to think they were broken. Then together they turned and walked not towards the tunnel but the exit, following scent trails made by people on foot.
As the three Huntsmen disappeared, Dreggo strode over towards Jed, who stood facing the direction Sorel had gone.
‘Look at me.’
As Jed turned, a knife appeared in Dreggo’s hand. Before Jed could move, it had sliced through his throat. He staggered as blood poured out, so Dreggo lifted a foot and kicked him towards the platform edge.
Mika heard the grunt as Jed landed on the rails. She climbed to her knees as Dreggo turned around, eyes searching those of the other handlers.
‘They speak to me,’ she said, ‘but not with words you can hear. Wrong them, you wrong me.’ She turned back towards Mika. ‘For what it’s worth, they like you.’
Mika responded with a dumb nod.
‘Report back to me when their prey are found,’ Dreggo said. ‘Dead or alive, it doesn’t matter, but I want the bodies.’
Then she was gone, striding back up the platform. Mika stared after her, too afraid to speak even after Dreggo had turned up the stairs to the concourse and disappeared.
17
Fakers
‘Man, did you see her?’ Lewis clapped Tee on the shoulder. ‘She was hot like I’ve never seen. And the way she jumped off that train … man, I had a rock in my pants. Thought I was gonna jizz all over the platform for a minute there.’
Tee shoved him away. ‘Shut up, you fucking clown. She smashed up my board. I don’t care how hot she was.’
‘Come on, don’t tell me you wouldn’t have nailed her.’
‘Fuck her—’
‘Exactly.’
‘No. She can fuck off. And so can the Tube Riders. What a dumbass idea that was. We should never have gone down there.’
‘But that guy was right, wasn’t he? There really are Tube Riders. We just saw one.’
Tee sighed. All he wanted to do was go home and lock himself in his bedroom. He had an unshakeable feeling that he had stuck his hand into a pot of something he should have left well alone.
‘You wanna go head down Nettleware Park? There’s always a bunch of people there once the tubes shut down. This girl I met last week said she’d be down there. She was angling for it. I reckon I can slide one in tonight.’
‘I’m good. Gonna head home.’
‘Why? You fucking dweeb. We can tell those pricks about that chick we saw, that we were hanging out down there being Tube Riders.’
‘I’m tired.’
‘Pussy.’
Tee just sighed. He glanced behind him into the dark streets down which they had come. As a streetlight suddenly flickered he saw the shapes of two running men.
‘Um, Lewis, I think there are some guys following us.’
‘What are you talking about?’
They were walking along an old residential street that had once been pretty opulent. Each house stood on its own plot of land, surrounded by a square of overgrown garden. Tee spotted the man crouched in the weeds two doors down before Lewis did.
‘Run,’ he hissed, as the man stepped out on to the road in front of them. There was nowhere to go except straight into the garden to their left. Tee hurdled the bramble-clogged railings as behind him came a dull thud and then a cry of pain. He didn’t look back, even though he could barely see where he was going. Beneath the waist-high brambles and grass the garden was strewn with rubbish that made sure footing impossible. He frog-walked through it, terrified of twisting his ankle on a hidden rock. Behind him, someone shouted for him to stop, but he didn’t turn back. He reached the wall of the house, hurried through a patch of sparser weeds where the rain didn’t reach, then picked his way through an overgrown back garden.
At the back of the house was a stone wall latticed with brambles and spiny hawthorn bushes. He clambered through it, ignoring the thorns that caught on his clothing and ripped at his skin.
Dropping down on the other side, he found himself on the edge of a school playing field. The stone-walled hedgerow ran along the back of the houses towards a stand of trees a few hundred feet to his left, while right led towards a tall school fence bordering a road. Across the field, straight ahead, was a cluster of school buildings.
Tee had always been a fast runner. It was practically a prerequisite when you hung out with guys like Lewis, who had a knack for finding trouble. Behind him, he heard someone coming through the garden towards the back wall. A single street light on the edge of the school illuminated the buildings, but most of the field was dark. Out there they would struggle to see him. If they had guns they would have used them by now, and in a straight sprint he backed himself against anyone.
He kicked off, racing across the field, not looking back. One brief shout came from behind him, but he couldn’t even tell if it was aimed at him or not. The untended grass swished around his feet as the shadows closed in. He kept his eyes on the outlines of the distant school buildings, and even though he stumbled a few times, he reached the closest without incident, dropping down below the dark windows, turning in a crouch to look back across the playing fields towards the row of houses.
The garden he had escaped through was on the end of the row, but so distant he could barely make out the shape of the house. He waited for a few minutes, hardly daring to breathe as he listened for someone running across the grass towards him, but there was nothing.
They had got Lewis. He considered going back to see what had happened to his sometime friend, but decided against it. They weren’t close after all; they just hung out from time to time. Probably their attackers were after money, in which case it wouldn’t take them long to realise Lewis didn’t have any. Yeah, so he might get a bit of a pasting, but it wouldn’t be the first time. He would be all right. They would probably share a joke about it in a couple of weeks.
He waited a little longer, then headed for home. He shared a flat with his dad a couple of stops up the line, but it wasn’t worth getting the tube from here. Quicker just to walk.
Back out on the street he found his trepidation easing with more streetlights around. It was getting close to midnight, and there weren’t many people out, just a few tramps squatting together in doorways, lost in muted conversations that Tee made no attempt to overhear. He stuffed his hands into his pockets against the chilly breeze, missing the clawboard that he had briefly carried with a sense of pride, even if he had truthfully known that the girl was right, that it would never be able to hold him to the side of a moving Underground train. He had always wanted an identity, and for a few days he had felt like he had found it, as he and Lewis strutted around pronouncing themselves as Tube Riders. After all, wasn’t that what that guy David had said, that being a Tube Rider was all in the mind? It was an attitude, not a thing.
And Tee sure had attitude.
When he got to his dad’s place
he groaned as he saw the light was on in the second floor window. It meant his worthless, good-for-nothing father was home, probably with company. His dad had this fat girlfriend called Brenda who was barely older than Tee, and they liked to bang real loud.
He tried to be quiet as he went inside, closing the door softly behind him. His dad didn’t like to be disturbed when he was with Brenda, but the house was eerily silent. They might already be asleep, or they might have gone out somewhere but left the lights on to deter burglars.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as he saw the lock on his father’s bedroom had been broken. Something bad had happened, he knew, but it was like a train wreck; if something bad had happened to his father, he had to look. Part of him was almost excited.
Finding Lewis sitting on a wooden stool beside his father’s bed was the last thing he had expected, but as his friend looked up, peering out of swollen eyes, Tee knew his chance to get away was gone. As footsteps came up behind him, he looked around the room, saw his father’s bloody body lying on the bed, a knife still poking theatrically out of his gut, then dropped his own hands to his sides in resignation.
‘Sorry, man,’ Lewis was saying, ‘they kind of beat your place out of me.’ He tried to smile, but the jagged remains of his teeth made him look wild, skeletal. ‘And you know what it was that guy said our Tube Rider motto is, don’t you?’
As hands fell on his shoulders, Tee could no longer remember, but from the way Lewis gave him a maniacal, defeated smile, he knew he was about to be reminded.
‘Live together, die together,’ Lewis chuckled. ‘Ain’t that just the truth?’
18
Rally
Airie was sitting on the sofa, painting her nails out of an old makeup pouch she had found in one of the other apartments. Her hair was tied up over her head; her eyes were lined with silver glitter. The clothes she had sewn together herself out of pieces of others, a patchwork of colours over a brown-grey undershirt, made her look like a cross between a hobo and a circus performer. A short skirt barely covered legs that were becoming stronger and more fleshed out with each passing day. Long black leather boots with silver buckles shined to a sparkling finish gave her an element of sex appeal that David was finding hard to ignore.