Children Of The Deterrent (Halfhero Book 1)

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  We walked in the door as if we owned the place. For once, I had abandoned my hunched posture, instead striding forwards like a boxer on his way to the ring for the fight of his life. I was terrified, but there was no way I would let anyone see it.

  Beside me, Abos hurried to keep up. Having expected to be dwarfed by a seven-foot tall man, I was secretly enjoying the fact that I was now about six inches taller than The Deterrent.

  The guard behind the desk looked up from the sports pages, then made a strange noise before going for the alarm. I expected that and put on a burst of pace, ending with a double-handed push on his chest. His chair had wheels, and he rolled backwards at speed for a few yards before hitting a cupboard. He was still accelerating as the back of his head made contact with a wooden panel, and he slumped.

  I kicked open the gate I had wheeled George through just two days earlier. We had almost reached the lift when the shutters came down around us, the alarm sounded, and twenty soldiers came our way. Ignoring them, I kicked open the door to the stairs. Well, that was what it would look like when the video footage was reviewed. In reality, there was no way even I could break through a steel door that size. Abos did the real damage, using the same trick he'd once pulled on the Challenger tank, lifting the buckled door off its hinges the moment my foot connected with it.

  As soon as we were in the stairwell, I replaced the door, off-centre, wedging it into the space to block it. With Abos's help again, of course.

  We jogged down to Station's second subterranean level. The hybrid level.

  We burst through the security door. Being back there was enough to make my last meal curdle in my stomach. We turned and followed a thin white line on the wall.

  As we jogged, I heard a series of sharp, electric fizzing sounds as if someone were pressing a buzzer. I turned to Abos.

  "Cameras," she said. "I'm shorting them."

  I looked up at the next tiny camera as we approached it. Another fizz, and the blue light winked out.

  We passed a door marked Coms. Abos stopped.

  "After you," she said.

  I kicked it in and stepped through. Two men leaped to their feet, one staring at us in shock. The other followed his training, drew his weapon, shouted a warning, then—as we ignored him and kept walking shot me twice in the chest. The ricochet from one shot caught the second soldier in the upper arm, and he yelped. The first guy, choosing pragmatism over potential pain, threw his weapon away and put his hands up.

  "Get your friend to a doctor," I said. They headed towards the door, and I called after them. "Not here. Get out of Station. How many more people are down here?"

  He hesitated. I was punching holes in the video control console as I spoke to him, reducing it to an ugly tangle of metal, shredded cabling and crushed circuit boards.

  "Anyone left here after the next twenty minutes or so will die. I'm giving you the chance to save them."

  He displayed a touch of bravado.

  "What, you two are taking on the whole of Station?"

  Abos turned towards the wrecked console. The cameras were all out of commission now.

  The console lifted from the floor, rose a few feet, then smashed back down, destroying anything that might have survived my pummelling.

  I turned back to the soldiers.

  "Yep," I said. The injured man looked up at his comrade.

  "Can we go now?" I answered with a slow nod.

  They left. We followed, but turned away from the exits and headed for the hybrid lab.

  The first surprise was that the hybrids weren't locked away behind five inches of solid steel and an airlock. There was just a double door.

  The second surprise was that the room, which was the size of an aircraft hangar, was full of beds. There must have been over a hundred of them, all occupied, with tubes snaking out of wheeled drips next to each one. As we walked into the room, we saw the misshapen heads, the heavily muscled bodies. Hybrids.

  At the far end of the cavernous space, on a raised platform, was the man who had once asked me to serve my country.

  Hopkins.

  Abos and I walked through the chamber towards the Colonel. For the first time, I wondered if that was really his rank. Outside of Station, he would surely have been promoted. Perhaps he didn't care. He was top dog in his underground fiefdom.

  "I must confess, I was surprised when I saw who had triggered the alarm," he said.

  I hadn't laid eyes on Hopkins in fourteen years. I realised he was an old man now. The cane he now kept by his side was not decorative; he leaned heavily on it when he stepped up to the rail at the edge of the platform.

  "Who's your friend, Daniel?"

  Abos removed her balaclava, and Hopkins stopped dead, staring in disbelief as we got closer.

  "Miss Lofthouse? Impossible. I saw your dead body."

  Abos removed the contact lenses. When he turned his golden eyes on Hopkins, the old soldier stared in disbelief. Then he said pretty much the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I wished George had been there to hear it.

  "But you're... a woman."

  Abos replied, playing up her Welsh accent, which confused Hopkins still further.

  "Well, you haven't got any brighter over the years, have you, boyo? Now, be a good lad and give yourself up. We're closing Station down."

  Hopkins stared at the being he had seen grow from a blob of slime into a superhero he had been able to manipulate. I wondered if he had realised he could have found The Deterrent years ago, if not for his catastrophic assumption that Abos was male.

  We were halfway along the rows of beds now. Hopkins took something out of his pocket and pointed it towards us, pressing something.

  "You're too late. We are building an army here that will make this country truly great again. And we couldn't have done it without you.

  "You realise what they are?" Hopkins waved an arm to take in the whole room. I saw what was in his palm. A power button. Like the one they had used to trigger me. On the 'missions' when they needed me to kill whoever they pointed me towards.

  In my peripheral vision, I caught a small movement in one of the beds. They were waking up.

  "They're monsters."

  "Maybe," said Hopkins. "Maybe you're right. You should know, Daniel. They're your children. Meet the family."

  There was more movement around us as hybrids sat up, pulling the needles out of their arms and swinging their legs round. That horrible, dull, rage-filled glare was in evidence as dozens of pairs of eyes swivelled our way.

  Hopkins' words echoed in my mind. I already guessed Station had used my blood and skin samples to help them manipulate genes and produce hybrids, but now I realised the whole truth. It was much simpler. And much more devastating.

  The women. The women who had come to my room, apparently unable to resist me. Dozens of secret visits to relieve their sexual tension. Always using a condom. Never staying afterwards. I was such a fool.

  Hopkins wasn't lying. These misshapen, tortured killers were my biological children.

  "We still can't work out how to make them live beyond twelve or thirteen," said Hopkins. "It's a shame, really. But their mental limitations make them easy to programme and the growth hormones we use mean they are perfect for situations where extreme violence is necessary."

  I felt despair and rage rise inside me. As the hybrids surrounded us, Abos put a hand on my arm.

  "There's no other way, Daniel. I'm sorry. But I won't let you do it." I felt myself lift into the air as she looked at me, then I was flying towards Hopkins, who watched my approach with disbelief. It was a strange feeling, the air rippling around my body like a heat haze as I rose and crossed the room, about twelve feet from the floor. I landed next to Hopkins and pushed him sprawling into a corner where he wheezed in pain. He looked like a frail old man. It would give me no satisfaction to kill him, despite part of me wanting to do just that.

  I turned back to the main room. I couldn't see Abos at all, just a seething, bloody mass of bodi
es, fists, and feet flying as they tried to reach their prey and tear it apart. The hybrids just kept coming, doing their best to drag others out of the way and get to the stranger in their midst.

  Hopkins dragged himself back towards the railing, trying to breathe normally. We both watched as the mass of bloodied bodies moved, a living ball of arms, legs, torsos, heads, writhing as it rose, slick with blood, into the air, like a child's balloon. If the child was in a modern take on Hieronymus Bosch's vision of hell.

  There was a noise, a muffled boom I felt in the pit of my stomach. The ball of hybrids exploded outwards, each individual body hurtling away from the centre. For a moment, the figure in the middle, the nucleus of their bloody atom, was visible: Abos, her clothes torn, her skin slick with her own blood and that of her attackers.

  Hopkins grunted in satisfaction when he saw that his protégés—my children—could hurt the superbeing who had defied him. He was watching with fascination, and his mask had, temporarily, dropped. His expression was not that of an officer doing his job, however distasteful it might be, it was the that of a man addicted to violence and death, who had allowed his humanity to wither. I wondered if he was still telling himself the lie that he was serving queen and country.

  Hopkins was the real monster, not the poor twisted bastards who could never be anything other than pain-filled, rage-fuelled killers.

  I looked back at Abos. Below her, snarling hybrids tried to reach up as she hovered above like a bloody angel sent to deliver them. She spread her arms and, accompanied by the scrape of metal on concrete, a hundred or more beds flew up from the floor, drips still hanging from them. The hybrids were still braying for her blood.

  "Daniel." Her voice rang across the hall, clearly audible above the howls of the hybrids. I looked at her. Those golden eyes, so odd, so alien, seemed to look right into the heart of me. I heard the sorrow in her voice. And I heard the decision.

  "Look away. Please."

  The beds had converged around her, hanging directly above the hybrids.

  Abos lowered those golden eyes, and I turned away from the railing, hauling Hopkins with me.

  I didn't watch what followed, but I heard it; metal hitting flesh and muscle, bones snapping, snarls turning to screams or howls of pain. A brief respite then the same sound again, this time wetter, fewer howls, some awful, unforgettable weeping. Then a third, final, crushing blow followed by the silence of death.

  A pair of feet walked into my field of vision as I knelt there, doubled over. I had one hand on Hopkins' collar, forcing him to look away. Abos waited for me to move. She didn't speak. Sensible shoes. Black, sensible shoes covered in blood.

  A siren sounded before I could speak. It was a siren I had heard once a week during my years at Station as part of a regular drill. A siren that would sound familiar to anyone who had lived through the Blitz in London or—like me—had spent hours listening to Two Tribes, by Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

  In this context, the siren didn't mean bombers were approaching, or that nuclear war had broken out.

  It meant that the protocols around a critical breach of Station security had been initiated, and all personnel had three minutes to evacuate. Everyone in Station knew their chances of living beyond the next three minutes had just dropped. If you heard the siren while at ground level, you'd get out. If you were anywhere else in the entire complex, you were dead.

  In about two minutes and fifty seconds, a series of linked electric charges would be automatically detonated, and the office block above Station would fall, burying its secrets it in a concrete and brick tomb.

  I looked up at Abos, then down at Hopkins.

  "I'm an old man," he said. "I have done my duty. Now it will fall to others to carry the torch."

  What a pile of crap. Especially as Station was about to be buried forever. Hopkins settled himself against the wall and waited for the ceiling to fall in.

  I wondered how he would react if I ripped his moustache off.

  "Let's go," I said to Abos.

  Hopkins pulled something out of his jacket. It was another power button. Before I could stop him, he pushed it.

  At first, I looked around, half-expecting a superhybrid to emerge from a secret room. All the platform games I ever played in my bedroom or in arcades featured a boss level, a tougher enemy that offers a real challenge to the dedicated gamer. I waited, moving my feet into a fighting stance.

  Then I felt it begin, and the horror of what Hopkins had done became clear.

  My arm still carried the drug release system Station had surgically placed there when I joined them. Hopkins had just triggered me.

  I turned on him. He was still smiling. I could feel a cold sensation travelling down my arm. I remembered it from the missions I had run, but there was something different this time. Something about the world felt suddenly, and utterly, wrong.

  "What is it?" Abos put a hand on my shoulder. I looked at the hand. It was changing, becoming more like a claw - reptilian, covered in scales, blood crusted on long, vicious talons.

  Hopkins spoke.

  "I was beginning to think we'd never get close enough to to trigger you again, Daniel. Your escape caught us all napping. Still, spilt milk and all that."

  "You need to get out," I hissed at Abos, trying not to look at the talons. "Now."

  "This is the really good stuff," said Hopkins. "A triumph of psycho-pharmacy. I've only seen results on hybrids, but your performance should be remarkable."

  "We need to get out, Daniel. I won't leave without you."

  Hopkins spoke again. He said a meaningless word which I don't remember. It sounded like a random assemblage of consonants and vowels. But I felt something change. I heard a noise I knew was internal, a rushing surge like a hurricane building up power. The recorded announcement sounded like it was miles away: "Two minutes, thirty seconds."

  "The Deterrent is your enemy," said Hopkins, in a voice that seemed to write commands directly into my brain's software. "Abos has killed your children. She wants to kill you. You must kill her first."

  43

  Fights—physical, brutal, hand-to-hand fights—-are ugly. They are an upsetting reminder of the animal still lurking behind our civilised veneer. The vast majority of fights are unplanned, beginning when emotions have escalated, and control has been lost. Some are entered into by mutual agreement, from an after-school playground brawl to a heavyweight title bout. Still others begin with no such agreement, when one participant launches her or himself at the second party, who is forced to mount a defence or succumb.

  The fight between Abos and me was of the last variety. Looking back, it must have represented an incredible challenge for her. Physically, I am incredibly strong, and my body can withstand a great deal of damage. I inherited both qualities from my opponent: my parent. She is equally tough, equally strong, but she has additional powers; of flight, greater speed, and the mental manipulation of physical objects.

  In relation to the battle that followed, although it lasted only a fraction over two minutes, the word 'epic' would not be an exaggeration. And Abos had to fight as if she had one hand tied behind her back. She didn't want to hurt me.

  I, on the other hand, was under the influence of powerful hallucinogenics, adrenaline, and God knows what else. And I did want to hurt her. Very much.

  I wanted to kill her.

  I can only describe what happened from my point of view, as warped and fantastical as it seems now.

  It started when I turned and looked at Abos. I didn't see Cressida Lofthouse, or a golden-eyed superbeing. What I saw was no longer a he or a she, but an it: a genderless demon, stripped of its human likeness. What I believed I was seeing at that moment was Abos finally revealed in its true form.

  It was naked. Its body was like an anatomy picture in a medical encyclopaedia, shiny muscles clearly visible, ligaments and tendons flexing, stretching and contracting, near-black blood flowing through thick, wiry veins. The face was the worst. It was hairless, missha
pen like the hybrids, the forehead prominent and swollen. Yellow eyes the colour of sickness fixed on mine, a forked tongue emerging from dark, cracked lips to flick towards me.

  I hesitated for a moment, reeling in shock. Abos had vanished, replaced by this hideous monster. A tiny part of my mind protested that what I was seeing couldn't be real, but it was swiftly drowned out by the tide of insane rage sweeping through my psyche.

  The fact that the demon, despite being given ample time, didn't attack me, in no way slowed me down once I'd recovered from the initial shock.

  I punched with both fists, stepping forwards and putting all my weight behind the blows. The demon took the impact on its chest and was knocked off its feet, ripping the railing away from the platform as it fell, landing on a dead hybrid.

  Before it could get up, I leaped after it, legs coiling under my body as I jumped, ready to kick out and crush the creature as I landed on it.

  I roared my frustration as the demon rolled to the side to avoid me. It retreated fast - faster than I believed possible, running across the corpses of its victims, heading for the exit. I started to sprint, then slowed when I looked ahead to the entrance. A steel security door had slid into place. Rooms could be sealed in the event of an emergency. This must have been Hopkins' work. And he'd done me a favour.

  We were trapped. Together.

  I jogged, trying to avoid the bodies around me. I didn't see hybrids any more. I saw children. Children butchered by the demon up ahead. I screamed in rage and felt power filling my body, white-hot, incandescent, a pure blinding rush of energy that had to be satisfied before it consumed me.

  I ran. The demon had its back to me. I raised my hands above my head, visualising my fists coming down on that skull, cracking the bone, driving through and crushing the foul brain within.

  A second before I reached it, the creature broke through the steel door. It was standing a few yards away, but I saw the surface of the metal buckle and give, the sound of it as it tore away from the entrance momentarily louder than my scream.