The Tube Riders

by Chris Ward

  Three groggy voices came back affirmative.

  ‘Is it going to blow up?’ Marta asked, crawling across the broken bus windows towards him, a small cut on her cheek and some pieces of twig in her hair.

  ‘No,’ Paul said. ‘Not unless there’s a spark from somewhere. It’s a common myth that vehicles blow up when they crash, and the bio-fuel buses use is less flammable than old petrol.’

  ‘Thanks for the fucking infomercial, but we had better get moving,’ Switch said. ‘We’ve lost our wheels, but they’ve still got theirs.’

  ‘Perhaps we should blow it up anyway,’ Owen said, leaning against the sideways turned seats. ‘Throw them off the trail.’

  ‘He’s got a point,’ Marta said. ‘How?’

  Owen pointed at Switch. ‘You’ve got something to light a fire with, haven’t you?’

  Switch grinned. ‘Of course I have.’

  ‘And the fuel’s still flammable?’

  ‘Yeah, less than petrol, but it’ll still ignite, I think.’

  ‘Good.’ Owen nodded. ‘Do it then.’

  Switch cut a piece of his rope to use as a fuse. The driver’s body yielded the keys to the petrol tank, but unfortunately the bus had rolled on that side. Instead, Paul and Switch had to break a hole in the bottom of the tank and feed the rope inside. Rust made it easier, but the three-quarters empty tank swallowed a lot of rope before they reached the fuel itself. The fuse wasn’t long enough to be safe, and Switch insisted the others got clear before he set it alight.

  He waited until they were twenty yards away, then he touched his lighter to the doused rope. ‘Here it comes!’ he shouted, watching a flame immediately strike up and rush towards the bus’s undercarriage. Switch turned and dashed in the other direction, leaping over a stand of bracken into a small natural hollow, just as the flame reached the bus and an explosion boomed. Switch looked up to see the underside of the bus broken open, a pool of flame around the vehicle. He nodded with satisfaction as the flames raked at the side of the bus.

  ‘Nice job, Switch!’ Marta shouted.

  ‘Thanks. Pocket fucking pyro, I am.’ He grinned and turned to follow the others.

  They were heading downhill, away from the bus, towards a stand of forest. They had no escape from the Huntsmen, of course, but the trees would give them cover against gunfire.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Owen said, running alongside Paul.

  ‘We run,’ Paul said. ‘And we keep running.’

  ‘Paul, that’s a crap plan if ever I’ve heard one.’

  Despite their fear, their exhaustion, and the bruises that littered their bodies, Marta and Switch both laughed.

  ‘Well, you get working on a new one, and while you’re at it, we’ll keep running from the Huntsmen,’ Marta said.

  ‘Easy,’ Owen said. ‘The river.’

  ‘What river?’

  He pointed to the right. ‘I saw it from the top deck of the bus before we crashed. At the very least we can get across it. Should make our trail more difficult for the Huntsmen to follow.’

  ‘Paul, your brother’s a genius,’ Marta said.

  ‘That’s the benefit of a proper education,’ Owen said. ‘And lots of video games.’

  ‘Well, you haven’t solved what we’re going to do once we cross that damn river,’ Switch said. ‘I can’t swim all that fucking fast. And if we’re walking I imagine even those DCA chumps will be able to find us.’

  ‘I thought I saw some sort of boat. Maybe we can steal it, but we’d better hurry.’ Without waiting for an answer he dashed ahead of the others, dancing between the trees like a deer running from fire. ‘Come on!’ they heard him shout back, before a sudden splash came from up ahead.

  They jogged after him through the trees, emerging from a thicket on to a sharp riverbank. Owen was standing waist deep in the water.

  ‘Dammit, didn’t see it coming . . .’ he muttered, looking down at his sopping clothes and then picking a piece of grime out of his hair.

  The others looked down. The riverbank didn’t so much slope away as drop vertically into the water, and a moment later they realised why.

  ‘It’s an old canal,’ Paul said. ‘I wonder what they used it for?’

  ‘God knows. But it’s here so we might as well make use of it. Where’s that boat, Owen?’

  ‘There.’ He pointed. The others saw it, caught up under a tangle of trees on the canal’s far bank, about fifty feet away. ‘I didn’t say it would definitely float, now, did I?’

  To Marta it looked like an old barge, not dissimilar to ones she’d seen rotting along the sides of the Thames. Its hull was a rusty mottled brown, and hanging vegetation draped over the low cabin that stuck up at one end, clogging up its deck with ancient fallen leaves.

  ‘Let’s get across, see if we can set it adrift,’ Paul said, climbing down into the water. ‘Wow, it’s cold!’

  Together, they waded across the canal. It was no more than waist deep at its widest point, the flow of water steady but not dangerous as it tugged at their legs.

  Switch got up on the boat first, and pushed his way through the foliage towards where the boat nestled against the bank.

  ‘It’s tied up!’ he called back. ‘I’ll cut it free. Paul, Owen, help me push it away from the bank. Marta, go look inside. See if there’s some kind of engine that still works.’

  She nodded and pushed her way through the low branches towards the door down inside. She felt a brief pang of fear; there was no telling what horrors she might find inside this ancient, abandoned boat. She braced herself for decomposing corpses. She felt quite familiar with dead bodies now, but they had all been fresh.

  Behind her, she heard Switch and Owen whooping with delight as the boat lurched under her feet and swung lethargically out towards the centre of the canal. Over them, she heard Paul demanding quiet. Turning back to the job in hand, she found the handle of the little door to be rather smooth, maybe sheltered from the weather. The door wasn’t locked either, and opened without a sound.

  It took Martha a moment or two for her eyes to adjust to the dim light inside. When they did, however, they widened in surprise.

  The small cabin was well tended and ordered, like a miniature kitchen-dining room. There was a booth table at the back, complete with a vase holding dried flowers. In the middle was a small stove and beneath it a fridge, humming with power supplied by a generator somewhere. Near the front, set into an alcove in the barge’s hull, was a small bed.

  And on the bed, a man of about forty was lying on his side, watching her. He looked like a detective from a film noir; in plain but clean clothes, with his face clean shaven and his hair combed neatly over to the side. He had a thin, pencil moustache that curled at the ends. He raised one eyebrow and cocked his head as Marta gasped.

  ‘Erm . . . I don’t believe I’ve made your acquaintance, young lady, but it appears that you and your friends have just hijacked my boat.’

  Chapter Forty-One

  Rescue

  At times, Carl felt he was supporting a dead weight as they headed down into the dark railway tunnel. Jess would walk a few steps then suddenly slump against his shoulder, making him pause to prop her up again, get her moving. She didn’t speak much, but she didn’t cry either, and Carl could only guess at what was going through her head. He considered the darkness of the tunnel a relief sometimes, because it hid the painful vacancy in her eyes. He had learned through her earlier hysteria that the Huntsmen had murdered her parents just two days before, and now with Simon dead Jess had no one left to live for. She had talked about turning her knife on herself, so now Carl held all the weapons just to be safe. It was just talk, though, he knew. Death might free her from the pain, but he knew that somewhere behind those empty eyes, Jess wanted to live, if only to seek revenge.

  He kept her moving. Don’t stay still too long, don’t give the demons time to come back. Or the Huntsmen, if they’re even different.

  The driver, upon Carl’s sudden appearance, ha
d stopped the train. As honest a man as Carl had ever met, he had helped Carl carry Simon’s body back into the trees, accepting Carl’s muted explanations, asking no more questions than necessary. By the time the grave was dug and Simon’s body had been laid to rest, Jess had climbed down from the train. Carl had found her wandering in circles, her eyes blank.

  At Carl’s request, the driver had taken the train on, leaving them behind.

  For a while Jess had lain down on the ground, her body shaking with fever and shock. Carl had kept her warm and tried to comfort her.

  Part of him shared her pain, now his own father was almost certainly dead too, while part of him resented her for taking away his time to grieve. In a few short minutes he’d gone from being the kid with the murdered father to the shoulder that supported Jess’s grief. The world, so bright and easy just a few hours ago now seemed so dark and unjust. Carl had frowned up at the blue sky, willing it to cloud over; willing it to give him some sign that the way things happened was preordained, that life wasn’t just controlled by the stupidity of chance.

  The clear blue had beamed back at him unflinching until he turned away.

  He had needed to drag her to get her moving. He’d thought to let her say goodbye to Simon before they buried him in the forest, but for the first time Jess had shown a reaction, angrily pushing him away.

  ‘Let him rot!’ she had screamed, getting up and marching off down the tracks. Carl knew her words weren’t a reflection of her true feelings, but a result of the frailty and loneliness she felt. She had lost him, found him again and saved him. And then, when everything should have been getting better, he had been taken away.

  Carl had followed her until she started to slow down, watched her as her legs began to shake, and then caught her as she started to fall. Supporting each other they had walked along the tracks, their shoulders slumped under the combined weight of their collective grief.

  Carl knew he had to find her friends. That was the only way to help her, but by now they should be inside Bristol GUA. There was only one unguarded way in that he knew of, and that was the same way the trains went in: through the tunnels. To Carl’s relief, the train had left them only a couple of miles from the Bristol GUA perimeter wall, which began to rise above the trees as they got closer; not as tall as London’s but still foreboding enough. Beyond it, plumes of smoke rose into the air from dozens of industrial holdings, one or two large enough to be visible above the wall. The clunking sounds of machinery grew louder as they approached.

  Jess had said nothing as Carl led them down into the railway tunnel, the darkness closing in about them, clammy like cold sweat.

  Now, having been walking through the tunnel for about thirty minutes, they could see nothing but the faint glow of occasional emergency strip-lighting in either direction. Carl figured the tunnel would eventually come out somewhere, but he hoped it was sooner rather than later because he knew that back down the line, the rest of those creatures were following.

  Then, up ahead, he saw lights.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to Jess, nestled into his shoulder. ‘We’re almost through.’

  The girl said nothing.

  Soon after, they emerged into an old underground station. Carl didn’t know much about trains or city stations, but it didn’t look like somewhere passengers would get on or off. There were no seats on the platform edge, no sign that there had once been shops, timetables, or trash cans. This platform was for the loading and unloading of freight, he assumed.

  He found some steps at one end of the platform, and helped Jess up on to it. It was a relief to be off the tracks, because he knew another train would be due soon. No others had passed while they’d been walking, which meant the possibility of another one roaring down the tunnel increased with each passing second.

  They went up some more stairs, away from the platform. Emergency lighting bathed the passageway in a dull orange glow, enough for them to see the dust on the floor, the few footprints where it had been disturbed. None looked too recent, which also came as a relief to Carl.

  The passage thinned, and the tiles beneath their feet changed from a sandy colour to a darker grey. There was little dust here, suggesting the tunnel was still in use. It headed off in two directions. Carl chose left.

  The passage angled slightly uphill, reaching a sharp corner at the top of the rise. Just as they reached it, Jess moaned and leaned against him, causing Carl to stumble forward around the corner. He was looking at Jess, and he only knew he’d bumped into someone when the other man pushed him away.

  ‘Hey, you!’

  Carl looked up, fear filling his heart. A man wearing the black uniform of the Department of Civil Affairs stood right in front of him. He looked like he had been in a fight: bruises shadowed his face and one eye was swollen shut. Behind him were two more agents, supporting the limp weight of another man. This one looked far worse. Long hair crusted with dried blood hung down around a bloodied and badly beaten face.

  Carl stepped back. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, for lack of anything else to say.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ the DCA agent said, and reached into his pocket for something.

  ‘We got lost?’ Carl ventured. ‘It’s pretty dark down here.’ He looked down at Jess to tell her to run, but the girl’s eyes were open, focused, and narrowed with hatred. ‘You!’ she screamed, and before Carl knew what was happening she had snatched a knife from his belt and launched herself forward.

  The other man still had one hand in his pocket when Jess reached him. He didn’t have time to scream as her knife raked his throat, spraying blood across the walls and their clothing. A strange gurgle escaping his lips, he backed into the other men, causing them to let go of their prisoner.

  Carl reached for a knife of his own as Jess slashed at the nearest of the other agents, opening a wound on his face. As the shocked man reached up to feel for the damage, Jess rammed the knife into his stomach. The agent grunted and fell backwards, trying to pull the knife free.

  ‘You little bitch!’ the third man shouted, but as he lunged for Jess the battered man swung a fist up between his legs. The agent doubled over in pain and Jess pounded him on the back of his neck. He grunted and tried to punch her, but she kicked him in the groin and he fell to the ground, coughing.

  Jess walked among the fallen agents, looking for a pulse. The leader was dead, as was the second man, but the third man was lying curled up and clutching his groin, otherwise unhurt. Jess sighed, pulled the knife out of the second man’s stomach and slit the third agent’s throat with no more hesitation than if she were a mother tidying a child’s room.

  Carl felt a sick feeling in his stomach as he watched the clinical way Jess finished off the DCA men. Much as he hated to admit it, her actions reminded him a little of Dreggo: cold, merciless.

  Jess wiped the knife clean on the shirt of one of the dead men and slipped it into her belt rather than returning it to Carl. Looking around, he saw the beaten man sitting against the wall, watching them.

  ‘Thank you for saving me,’ he said. ‘My name is Ishael. Who are you?’

  Jess actually smiled, but it was wild, almost macabre. ‘We’re the Tube Riders,’ she said.

  The man’s eyes went as wide as the bruises and swellings would allow. ‘Jess and Simon?’ he asked. ‘I know your friends! I’ve heard so much about you.’

  Jess looked at Carl, then back at the man. The strength drained out of her face, and she stumbled back against the wall, putting her hands out to stop herself falling. Carl heard a high-pitched moan, like a distant door creaking. Then, slowly at first and then faster like a sudden flood, Jessica began to cry.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Cruise

  ‘They built it way back. Heaven knows why, but it goes all the way down as far as Exeter. We’ll be there before nightfall, I should imagine.’

  The Tube Riders watched the man who called himself John Reeder as he sat cross-legged on the bed, smoking a pipe. The aroma of tea leaves fil
led the air, and Marta for one wished he’d put the stuff in a pot and offer it around. The canal water dripping through a strainer on the top of the boat didn’t look so appetizing.

  ‘Thank you for not throwing us overboard,’ Owen said.

  Reeder cocked his head and grinned. A clump of hair detached itself from his neatly gelled scalp and he hastened to realign it. ‘It’s not often I get visitors. Even the government leaves me alone, and how many people can say that? I haven’t moved the Old Rose in a few months, but there’s still enough power in the tank to get you to Exeter.’ He tugged on one curl of his moustache and shrugged. ‘Not that I have a lot of choice really, is it? It’s far too far for you to walk. Where are you headed from there?’

  Marta said, ‘We’re not sure,’ at the same time that Switch said, ‘Falmouth.’

  The others looked at him. ‘What?’ Paul said.

  Switch grinned. His twitchy eye flickered like a bird trapped against a window. ‘I didn’t really have time to tell you about the plan. I figured I would when things had calmed down a bit.’

  Marta flicked a thumb over her shoulder. ‘We’re taking a canal cruise. Is it quiet enough for you now?’

  ‘I guess, yeah.’

  Paul started to stand, then remembered the low ceiling and sat back down. Owen, sitting on the floor in front of the fridge, was the only one who seemed comfortable.

  ‘Do you want me to leave the room?’ Reeder said with a wry smile. ‘Remembering of course, that it is, er, my room?’

  ‘Isn’t it called a cabin?’ Owen said.

  Reeder grinned at him. ‘I also charge for conversation.’

  Marta watched the man as he talked. From the moment she’d burst into the cabin and found him lying on the bed she’d found him captivating to look at, but not in a sexual, attractive sense. He was just so odd, so out of place that it was like looking at a time traveler, someone pulled forward a hundred years in time just to help them.