by Chris Ward
Before Jess could reply or the others could say anything else, Marta left them. With her clawboard held in one hand she walked out in plain view of the approaching Cross Jumpers. Switch hurried to catch up, while the others followed more nervously.
‘What do you want?’ Marta shouted.
A girl, probably younger than her, stepped forward out of the group. Marta raised an eyebrow. A girl? They had just assumed this Dreggo was a guy. The girl’s angular features were attractive if a little thin. Her eyes, though, were hard and unforgiving. Marta grimaced. The new leader of the Cross Jumpers didn’t look about to negotiate.
‘Well, well, the elusive Tube Riders. It’s good to meet you at last.’
Marta nodded. Her heart was pounding, but she had to stand up for the others. Switch would start a suicidal battle they had no hope of winning, while Paul and Simon would probably run and be cut down. Perhaps she could offer a one on one with the girl . . . perhaps make a deal . . . her mind raced with ideas but none of them stood out and she knew she would have to trust her intuition, something she often hated to do.
‘What do you want? You have no business here.’
‘I’m afraid we do,’ the girl said. ‘As of now, the Tube Riders are disbanded. I have an ultimatum for you. Throw your . . . catching boards . . . on to the tracks and walk away. Do it and no harm will come to you.’
Marta felt anger welling up inside her. Her brother had begun this, and his memory lived in every ride she took. She wasn’t about to get forced away from something she loved by some bitch. She held the clawboard tight in both hands. Her board, unlike some of the others, had twin hooks, which she filed daily. They were sharp enough to tear the bitch’s face clean off.
‘No,’ she shouted. ‘You wanna fight, come on. You and me. Leave the others out of this.’
A man who looked like he spent half his life in a gym stepped forward. He hefted a sledgehammer in his hands like it was a plastic straw. ‘Want us to do them now, Dreggo?’
The girl raised a hand. ‘Wait, Maul.’ She smiled. ‘We’ll give them a moment, I think.’
Dreggo looked back at Marta and spread her hands. ‘It’s very simple. Give up this silly game, and you can live.’
Marta glanced back towards the others. Paul, Simon and Jess still hung back behind her. Switch took a few steps towards Marta’s right flank as Maul inched forward. Marta pretended not to notice.
‘Why is it so important to you?’ she asked.
Dreggo tried to smile disarmingly but it was forced, fake. ‘It’s not. There just isn’t room for two of us.’ She waved a hand behind her. ‘Not now our numbers have grown so large. We want other places to practice.’
‘You stay in your stations, we stay here. That way no one gets hurt.’ She hoped it wasn’t obvious she was stalling for time. Behind her she heard the low rumble of a train back in the tunnel. A few more seconds . . .
‘So I’ll take that as a no, then?’ Dreggo’s smile had vanished.
‘You and me,’ Marta said, trying to sound a whole lot braver than she felt. ‘Come on! What are you, chickenshit?’
Dreggo’s eyes blazed. ‘I’d cut you open, you Tube Rider slut, but this is about more than the two of us.’
‘I don’t think it is,’ Marta shouted. ‘I think it’s about you wanting something you have no right to because what you have sucks more cocks than you do.’
Dreggo tensed, then gave a little shake of the head as if to say you’re making a big mistake. She lifted an arm and waved the other Cross Jumpers forward. Marta noticed that while the few nearest them looked frenzied, wild, caught up in their own bloodlust, a greater number hung back, reluctant. Just from their body language she could tell they had no taste for the coming violence. Perhaps if they could break through the Cross Jumpers’ front line they could get away . . . but the odds were still overwhelmingly against them.
Marta glanced behind her. The train noise was still growing, but it was still too far back, probably just exiting the previous station. They had no choice: they would have to fight.
‘Hold them off until the train comes,’ she muttered to the others. ‘Ride the first chance you get.’
She let go of the clawboard with one hand long enough to reach under her shirt, looking for her own weapon, a small can of pepper spray. Her father had given it to her some years ago, before he died. Last summer, after a group of punks had jumped her not far from here, a friend had made some modifications to it. She wasn’t sure exactly what was in it now, but he’d assured her the burn would be a lot more permanent than simple pepper water.
To her right, Maul closed on Switch. Switch’s good eye shone; he was ready to go down fighting. He looked almost excited. The others were hanging back. Simon would fight to protect Jess but Marta had never seen Paul lift a hand in anger and wondered if he would now. Perhaps he would just run.
If she could just take out Dreggo, maybe she could end all this –
Dreggo leapt at Marta with impossible, unnatural speed. Marta was stunned. One hand was still caught inside her shirt. Pushed to the floor, she swung the clawboard up with her other hand, trying to knock Dreggo off her. The wooden edge connected hard with the side of the girl’s face and one hook scratched a line of red along Dreggo’s cheek, but Dreggo shrugged off the blow as though it was nothing. Strong hands closed around Marta’s neck. As Marta tried to roll her off, she saw Switch dart at Maul. Maul swung the sledgehammer, but Switch was too fast, ducking like a flyweight boxer and flashing the knife across the big man’s throat. Maul wobbled for a second, and then clutched at his neck as blood sprayed across the platform.
Switch was already moving away as Maul crashed to the ground like a falling tree. Blood pooled around him. Switch tossed the knife from hand to hand as others closed in. ‘Come on!’ he screamed. ‘Come on you Cross Jumper fucks! Let’s have some!’
Marta tried to kick Dreggo’s legs, but Dreggo was no longer looking at her. Her face had turned towards Maul, filled with a look of sudden, unexpected horror. She pushed away from Marta as though their fight was already done. ‘Maul!’ she screamed, crawling towards the other man through a puddle of his blood.
Marta rubbed her sore neck as she scrambled to her feet. Looking around, she saw three others had passed her and were closing in on Simon, Paul and Jess. Two more moved towards Switch, while the rest hung back. She knew the blood had scared many, but Dreggo alone might prove enough to take them out. There was something wrong about the girl, something unnatural, and Marta knew that if they stood and fought they wouldn’t stand a chance.
And then the train roared out of the tunnel, its sound like a crack of thunder.
‘Now!’ she screamed, ‘Ride, Tube Riders, ride! Go!’
Switch slashed his knife at one of his new attackers and they backed off out of range. Marta glanced back and saw Paul swing his clawboard in an arc at the nearest of the three that circled them. It connected hard and the man went down, giving them room to move.
‘Come on, Jess!’ Simon shouted, pulling the girl by the hand. Paul, surprising Marta with courage she had never realised he had, rammed the end of his clawboard into the stomach of the next man and then swung it into the face of the third.
The train was halfway through the station now. They had just seconds left to catch it before it was gone and they were dead. Marta saw Simon and Jess sprinting towards the platform edge, saw Jess, crying, screaming in terror, leap and catch a hold, with Simon catching behind her. For just a second she marveled at how good the girl was. It had taken Marta weeks to pluck up the courage to make her first ride.
‘Dreggo, they’re getting away!’ someone shouted.
‘Kill them!’ Dreggo screamed without looking up, her voice hoarse and desperate. ‘Kill them all!’
‘Paul!’ Marta screamed. ‘Come on!’
Paul turned toward the train. His face was contorted with fear and he looked more scared of the train than the Cross Jumpers. For a moment she thought he would pull out,
but then she saw him break into a lumbering run. He was going far too slow, years without riding ruining his fitness. She saw him squeeze his eyes shut and grit his teeth, summoning the nerve he needed. He reached the platform edge and leapt for the train. For a moment Marta thought he would miss: he was too low, his leap not high enough. The image of Clive’s smashed body flashed through her mind, then Paul’s clawboard caught with one edge. She gasped with relief. Using a deft skill he probably forgot he had, Paul shifted on the train side, pushed up with one foot and leveled the board out. Then the train was taking him away.
Marta couldn’t help but smile. He still had it. Once he had been good – no champion, but respectable – and that skill obviously didn’t fade easily. Maybe it was just like riding a bike after all.
It was her turn. Marta sprinted and caught just as the front of the train pushed into the far tunnel. From the side of the train Marta looked back towards the platform as the wind whipped her hair around her face. Switch was still back there, on the platform, running for the train. Another second and he would miss it. At the last moment, Marta saw Dreggo look up from Maul’s dead body. She bared her teeth in anger and for a moment she looked feral, lupine. She screamed something Marta couldn’t hear, and her arm whipped through the air.
Switch, incredibly, had a huge grin on his face as he sprinted for the train. He was a hundred feet ahead of Dreggo, but as his board caught, he suddenly arched his back, crying out, and his face contorted with pain.
Then the darkness of the tunnel engulfed them.
Chapter Eight
Discovery
Marta felt the train begin to slow. As the chilling, buffeting wind eased, she heard the faint sound of crying not far ahead of her.
Jess.
What an introduction to tube riding, she thought. Despite the danger, the deaths, the main reason they did it was for fun. Now, one man lay dead back on the platform, several others were hurt, and they were on the run. She had dealt with struggle and violence all her life, but tube riding was supposed to have been their escape.
‘Marta!’ Paul’s voice came from not far ahead. Just a shadow in the intermittent light through the train windows, she saw him inching back along the carriage towards her, sliding his board along the rail. Jess and Simon were on the carriage in front of them, Switch a couple of carriages behind.
Paul stopped just short of her. ‘We’re coming into a station,’ he said. ‘You want to dismount here?’
She shook her head. ‘Not yet. There’s another disused station two further stops down the line. Westfern Street. Remember?’
He did. They used to ride there but a stop light had been installed a short way into the far tunnel so the trains came through too slow. ‘We can get off there,’ Marta said. ‘We should be safe.’
‘Sounds good. I’ll tell Jess and Simon.’
‘Wait. How are you doing? First ride in a while, remember?’
The laugh Paul gave her verged on hysteria. ‘Piece of cake,’ he said, and she could tell he was barely holding it together. ‘Not looking forward to getting off but it’s better than getting beaten up by a bunch of thugs.’
He inched away from her along the carriage. As the train decelerated into the station she looked through the windows at the passengers inside. This carriage wasn’t busy, just a handful of kids and one or two older people in there, hunched over, their hands wrapped tightly around their bags. Marta remembered being young and her father telling her about the old days, before the government changed, before Britain became Mega Britain, before the perimeter walls and the class segregation, as he called it. She remembered him telling her that despite the riots, the violence, the banning of the internet, mobile phones, and unregulated television, that some things never changed. Some things you could just rely on.
He said the London Underground was one. You could ride the tubes, and it could be any time of the last one hundred and fifty years. Looking into that carriage now at the kids and the old women, it was like looking back through a time portal into London’s past. She started to smile, but tears welled up in her eyes.
Her father had been hit by a car while crossing the road. It wasn’t the car’s fault, he told her on his hospital deathbed just minutes before internal bleeding claimed him. He’d had things on his mind, and had been looking the wrong way as he jogged out across the street. An old-style death for a man who always believed Mega Britain could be saved.
Her mother died a year after, killed by a terrorist bomb placed in a litter bin outside the foreign consulate. She’d been there trying to get a visa for Marta to study in America, a thinly veiled plan to get her daughter out of the country before things got really bad. She had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The police said that the device had been poorly made and hadn’t exploded properly, but Rachel Banks had been right outside and was the only casualty.
A letter arrived just a day after the funeral declining the application. That had been two years ago. Since then, applications themselves had been outlawed.
Unlike her father’s, her mother’s death had been an old-fashioned one for an entirely new reason. Despite the bombings, the protests, the uprisings, Mega Britain rolled on.
Paul inched back towards her again as the train came to a complete stop and the doors opened on the other side. People stood up and got off as others got on.
‘Simon said he’s cool,’ Paul said. ‘Jess is in a bad way, though. In shock. Simon’s worried she’s going to fall off. Not helping that it’s so damn cold.’
Marta grimaced. ‘Tell him to keep a hold of her. There’s been enough death today already.’
Paul looked at her and shook his head. ‘I can’t believe Switch killed that man. He seemed to enjoy it, like he went blood-crazy.’
‘It was them or us. It might still be us, if we don’t keep our heads down.’ The train doors closed and it began to move again. ‘That girl Dreggo seemed to care for him a lot. It looks like we have a death wish hanging over our heads now.’
Paul sighed. ‘Switch didn’t need to kill him. He’s quick enough with that knife he could have just slashed him up a bit. My brother Owen, he’s just twelve, but I’m worried he’ll end up like that. You know, not caring.’
‘What Switch does is out of our control,’ Marta said, feeling unexpectedly defensive. ‘Remember, he was protecting us. I noticed you were pretty quick with that clawboard.’
Paul leaned closer as the train picked up speed momentarily before beginning to slow again. ‘Simon wasn’t going to leave Jess’s side. They were going to get cut off from the train. It was the only way to give them both a chance.’ He smiled. ‘It’s a good job we had Dan’s clawboard for Jess. Otherwise we might have been stuck.’
‘Well we made it, but I think Switch is hurt. I think that woman hit him with a throwing knife.’
‘Something was odd about her,’ Paul said. ‘Did you notice how young she was?’
Marta gave a nervous laugh. ‘You didn’t feel her hands around your neck. They were like iron. I’d be dead now if Switch hadn’t got her attention by killing that guy Maul.’
Paul sighed, and it sounded as though he was holding back tears. ‘It sucks so bad that it has to be this way. An eye for an eye, always.’
‘Dreggo hasn’t got hers yet, remember. We’re going to have to lay low after this.’
The train rolled into another station. They were on the right side of the train, and again the doors opened on the left. Marta knew that getting off at Westfern Street was their only chance, because the station after was a connecting station, where the train changed lines. The doors opened on the right side there, and they would be discovered.
Paul inched a little closer. ‘Look at them in there,’ he said. ‘Some of them look right through us. Why don’t they notice us?’
‘They do,’ Marta said. ‘But what they see is a ghost. They see a person outside the window peering in, mixed with the reflections from the people inside, the flicker of the lights, the eme
rgency signs and advertising on the wall behind us . . . so many things. Most of the time we don’t know what it’s like to see one of us from in there. I remember once coming home from school and passing through the abandoned station at Field Park and for a few seconds seeing someone hanging from the train. It scared the living shit out of me, and worse, the figure looked like my brother. It was after I told him about it that night that he told me about tube riding. It was my brother.’
‘I guess that’s why most of the people who acknowledge us are drunk, high or mad. They’re more willing to trust what their eyes show them.’
‘Exactly.’
The doors closed again and the train pulled away, the engines roaring as it gained speed. ‘Okay, next one,’ Marta said. She shouted the instruction back to Switch. The little man had used the stops to move forward to the carriage behind them, but he looked groggy and weak as he gave a slight nod of his head.
‘I hope he’s not hurt too bad,’ Paul said. ‘Asshole though he is, I’m fond of that spaz-eyed bastard.’
Marta smiled. ‘Me too.’
She leaned out from the train, looking ahead down the track. In the distance she saw a bright red light, still just a pin prick like an animal’s eye far off in the dark. That was the stop light just past the next station. The train should start to slow down, enough that Jess would be able to dismount without hurting herself. She worried about Switch, though. How hurt was he?
Marta heard the squeal of the train’s ancient brakes as it slowed, wrinkling her nose as the stench of smoke and oil drifted up from the wheels below her. A moment later they were surrounded by emergency lighting as the train staggered into the station.
Ahead of them, Simon and Jess jumped off. Simon rolled well, while Jess landed with a grunt but seemed to be okay. As they passed, first Paul jumped, and then Marta gritted her teeth and jumped after him. She ducked her head and held her arms in as she’d learned, but she still cried out in pain as she landed on the cold, hard platform. It had been years since she’d dismounted short of the breakfall mats, and the pain was refreshingly sharp.