The Tube Riders

by Chris Ward

  The girl lay by the edge, sheltered by the raised metal side of the Land Rover, one hand under her head, one hand over her stomach.

  Her eyes were closed, but Carl was sure she wasn’t sleeping.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Past Lives

  Dreggo had been dozing when the Tube Riders ambushed the convoy, otherwise she would have known that the Huntsman by the canal wasn’t real. Whether she would have told Clayton was another matter, but the two Huntsmen sent to follow the canal had taken a detour into a field of sheep about ten miles outside Exeter. There was nothing she could do to recall them; she could only wait until they were ready, and hope they didn’t find any human settlements nearby to raid when they were done.

  Clayton, thankfully, appeared too preoccupied with the Governor’s imminent appearance to have noticed. A lot of things had slipped by him since Adam Vincent had been killed, and Dreggo could see the worry in his face as he directed his men in burying the bodies of the agents hit by stray machinegun fire and patching up the damage to the trucks.

  ‘Dreggo!’ he shouted, even though she was barely an arm’s length away.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We have three dead and four more injured. How the hell did this happen?’

  He was talking mostly to himself so she didn’t answer. Instead, she said, ‘I’ll send two Huntsmen to follow the trail. Get a map and find out the best way to cut them off. The radio transmissions said they were heading down into Cornwall.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Clayton looked flustered as he rubbed his head. His eyes were shadows in the dull glare of the convoy’s one remaining headlight, but she could see the stress painted in dark lines across his face. ‘Fuck, how could this happen?’

  ‘To Falmouth,’ Dreggo said. She’d been awake while a DCA radio operator had intercepted one of the conversations between the men back in Bristol and the Tube Riders on the boat. They’d probably known their open frequency would be easy to intercept, so they’d not given away many details. Falmouth, she thought, could have been a slip brought on by pressure, or a dud to deliberately throw them off, but it was the only lead they had, and in any case the Huntsmen would lead them to the truth.

  Despite Clayton’s obvious panic at yet another near miss, Dreggo was quite enjoying the chase. The Tube Riders had proven wily, slippery prey, and it would make the eventual catch even sweeter. They were still running, of course, but heading into the open wilderness of Cornwall was probably a mistake. They were running out of land, and Dreggo knew there were no active ports in Cornwall. If it was an airstrip they had their sights on, it would be easy to spot and dispose of with the rarity of flight these days. No, the chase was coming to an end, but it had certainly been an interesting one.

  Cornwall. From what Clayton had told her it was mostly empty. The bottom half was sealed off by a fence, what lay inside unknown to anyone outside the higher levels of the government. The northern part, from the River Camel up, was still used for grazing cattle and milk production. From the River Camel down, though, Clayton had just shrugged. Empty, he said. Everyone moved to work elsewhere.

  She was certainly getting to see the country. The more she saw, however, the more she hated it. She hated the dumb violence of the cities, the blissful ignorance of the GFA people. She hated the way the government had torn up the roads, pulled down the signs. People knew only what they needed to know, Clayton had told her, but everything stank of delusional, misguided leadership that was slowly tying the country into a knot. If you didn’t clean or oil or check a car it would continue to run for a while, at first as good as always, before its performance began to wane. Eventually, it would just stop dead. She could see that happening to Mega Britain, and a large part of her was looking forward to it.

  ‘He’ll be angry,’ Clayton said, brushing one hand through his thinning hair. ‘We had them cornered, and they outsmarted us. They got away again.’

  ‘They were lucky,’ Dreggo said. ‘That’s all. One mistake and they might all be dead now.’

  ‘But they’re not.’

  ‘Which is why we need to get moving.’

  Clayton nodded. ‘Okay. We roll out in five.’ He gestured at one of his agents. ‘You got me that map yet? We need to know how they’re going into Cornwall. What’s the quickest way? Which roads are still there, which aren’t. Be quick about it.’

  Dreggo watched him as he pulled another hand through his hair. As the truck with the working headlight began to swing round, she caught a glimpse of his eyes.

  They looked as bloodshot as the Huntsmen’s.

  He’s suffering, she thought. Finally, after everything, he’s starting to hurt too.

  #

  In the back of the frozen goods truck, sitting in the dark a little apart from the others, Lyen’s mind toiled. He had smelled her; she was near.

  ‘Marta.’

  The photograph had sprung a leak in the sealed tank of his memory. Switched off from his past, he was starting to remember small sequences, images, voices. The girl in the picture was Marta, but who was Marta? He knew her. How did he know her?

  What had he been before this?

  Lyen listened to the shouts and the gunfire outside. The sounds of violence, of war, and his tongue lolled from his jaws, the need to maim, to kill, rising up inside him.

  The other Huntsmen shifted. Cowls fell back, some stood, others scratched at the walls of their prison. Lyen pulled the crossbow from his belt and fingered the mechanisms. How he knew to use it he no longer remembered, but the weapon was as much a part of him as his own hands. He had killed many men with it, and he hoped to kill many more. The blood in his veins wouldn’t run warm without the blood of others on his hands.

  Several of the Huntsmen had moved to the door and were pawing at the thick steel, whining like hungry dogs. Lyen stayed where he was, though, his eyes closed, trying to remember how he had known the girl in the picture – the girl they were chasing – was called Marta.

  #

  The Governor’s car, with its enhanced suspension, gave a surprisingly comfortable ride across the countryside, and he looked out of the tinted windows with interest at the towns and villages that they passed while evening fell. Behind them, the small container truck that made up the second half of his own convoy was having less luck, bumping heavily through the potholed remains of the roads, graveled over only on more common routes. It didn’t matter; there was nothing important inside, not to him at any rate.

  As always, when faced with the results of his policies, the Governor felt pangs of uncertainty. Had his GFA policies worked as they should? Was production up or down? Had pulling up the roads really helped focus people’s attention on their work?

  Until dark shut off the outside to everything but his own reflection, it heartened him to see the bales in the fields, the huge parked up trailers laden with grain ready for transportation into the GUAs. He had seen farm workers laughing and joking as they went about their work. At least in the GFAs people looked happy.

  Happiness, though, for the Governor, was of no importance other than to maintain productivity. He didn’t care about their state of mind as long as the country still produced, still rolled on, with the end result being the finances for and the tools to build his spacecraft. As long as the country kept producing the spacecraft, and his spacecraft got gradually closer to breaking through orbit, the Governor himself, while not happy exactly, was content. That was enough.

  Through the front window, the lights of the car illuminated a large rusted sign fallen on its side. Taunton, 18 miles, it said. The Governor made a mental note to have someone come out and remove it. Relics of a past age such as this frustrated him. He had chosen to regress the countryside, and it had worked. People worked, people produced food. No one complained if they got their beer and their fetes and their community centres. They delivered their produce to an allocated place, then received money for it, and went back home. Relics such as this sign served just to remind people of what had gone before,
and that served no purpose.

  His mind leaving the sign, the Governor set his thoughts on the task in hand. These kids, these so-called Tube Riders, were running across the country with their proof of the Ambassador’s assassination, slipping between the fingers of Clayton’s Department of Civil Affairs and the claws of the Huntsmen alike. What did he make of them?

  On the one hand he admired them for their resilience, and thanked them for exposing some of the flaws of his system. How easy it was to get out of the cities through the railway tunnels! He had never considered it. And the Huntsmen, his pride, his success, born from the same pits of genetic hell as he had been, had been shown up as flawed, unstable. Clayton had warned him, of course, but Clayton was a fool. Mega Britain, the Governor’s creation, ran so smoothly that Clayton had never had more to do than interrogate a few political prisoners. Faced with a real crisis the man was a fraud. It was a shame that Clayton’s second was dead; Vincent had shown an ingenuity the older man lacked, but there were others in the lower ranks of the DCA who would welcome the chance to replace Leland Clayton as soon as this mission was over.

  The Governor flicked down the sun shade above him and studied himself for a moment in the small mirror on its underside. His skin, milky-white, was in contrast to the dark sunglasses he wore, despite it being almost dark outside. The texture of his skin was coarse and when he reached up to pinch it, it was thick, Negro skin. But he was perfectly albino, just one of his many abnormalities but probably the most useless. An inverse effect was that it made him intolerable to direct sunlight. Vampiric, some might suggest, but it wouldn’t kill him, not in short bursts at least. Merely irritate, at worst burn. It was more the fear of it that kept him out of sight these days, and the memories of the cruel experiments that had seen him exposed to measure its effects. He still had the scars.

  All in all, he looked in good health. His face perhaps suggested a man in his late thirties or early forties, but in reality Maxim Cale was a hundred-and-thirty-three years old. Extended life was just one of the many gifts bestowed on a shy, quiet little boy abducted from an innocuous North African village at the end of the Second World War and locked away in the dark hell of a Soviet science laboratory for more than twenty years.

  Night by night the screams had filled the dank, chilly corridors, only muffled by rows of locked doors. Stern men in white coats marched back and forth, clipboards in their hands, sharp instruments in their pockets. In those dark days genetic engineering was an unknown science, but in those underground labs experiments were performed decades before the rest of the world would learn of its existence, top secret scientific experiments on children taken from all over the globe. That young boy from North Africa was just one of dozens made to scream all through the night, children who saw their faces and bodies change with each passing day. As he grew into a man the technology became more and more advanced, the changes to his body more apparent, until one day, they gave him too much. They gave him the power to break out, to kill the scientists and the doctors who had been so cruel to him, and to escape from that icy hellhole just a couple of miles south of the Arctic Circle.

  Half a century later, his mind now as dark and as murderous as those who had abused him, he went back to that place to find the details of what had happened to him and the others. He understood the worth of the experiments now, but also the complexity of the technology possessed by the Soviets in the 1940s and ‘50s. He understood that it should have been beyond them to know those things, to have those instruments, to have the technology. The question he asked was where had it come from? With bloodlust clouding his inquisitiveness, he had gone back to find the answers.

  But the place was gone. Destroyed, bombed from the inside, all the records and artifacts and information vanished. The people too, both the scientists and the other people like him, all gone.

  Where?

  Someone somewhere knew; had noted down what had happened, knew where the technology had gone. It took him another ten years of searching, interrogating, and killing, to find out. When at last he did, the answer was so mind-blowing he’d screamed in rage and pulled a whole building to the ground.

  Afraid of the technology falling into the hands of the Americans or worse, in the last days before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians had hidden it in the one place they thought no one else would ever be able to get at it.

  Space.

  Maxim Cale, Governor of Mega Britain, wanted that technology back. He wanted to understand, wanted to know his origins, where his power had come from and why. And then he wanted to make use of it.

  It had taken him another two decades to maneuver himself into a position of power, of control, from which to attempt to recover it.

  He was close to success, now, he knew. Just a few more years . . .

  The Governor glanced across at the driver. The man didn’t look back. Maybe he should use these kids as his first test subjects. They were clever; their genetics were strong. He could give them power almost as great as his own, and then use them like he did the Huntsmen, turn them into killing machines to brush aside his enemies. All of Europe could fall, and after it, the former USSR, which had so mistreated him. How he wanted to make them pay for their crimes.

  The Governor leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes, enjoying the soft reverie of world domination.

  Cornwall

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Respite

  Marta stood on the hilltop looking east, across Bodmin Moor in the direction of London, from where the sun would soon rise. Nothing moved out there, no people or cars, not even sheep or cattle. Reeder had told her they used to run wild, but had long ago been herded up by the people of the GFAs. Now, only rabbits lived up here, invisible among the grass that whipped back and forth like hair in the wind.

  From her vantage point Marta could see almost to the edge of the moor, some ten miles east. The open grassland rolled away, punctuated only by a few rocky outcrops and some gnarly trees bent like old men by the incessant wind. It was pretty in a desolate kind of way, with the shadows stretched long across the hillsides, turning the valleys into lakes of dark water. She squinted, looking again for a house, but saw none.

  She heard a sound and glanced back to see Jess coming up behind her. The other girl’s shoulders were slumped, her eyes on the ground. Marta was still stunned by the change in Jess since their first meeting just a couple of days ago. Gone was the pretty innocence, the bright, sunny look that had clearly caused Simon to fall for her. Gone, too, was the violent hatred that had replaced it. Now she just looked bleak, weary, her eyes struggling to focus on anything for long. Her cheeks were pale, and her mouth hung slightly open as though it took too much effort to close it.

  ‘So little time,’ Jess said, her voice barely audible over the wind. ‘So little time, and they’ve all gone.’

  Marta could say nothing to ease her pain. She continued to scan the moorland, half watching for pursuit, half waiting for the sun to show itself above the distant hills. She didn’t want to think about Simon; it hurt too much.

  ‘I thought I’d got him back . . . I thought I’d got him . . .’ Jess shook her head as she came to stand beside Marta.

  Marta put an arm around her shoulders. She expected Jess to push it away, but instead she leaned in towards Marta like a child might with its mother. ‘I might not have loved him in the same way that you did,’ Marta said, picking her words carefully. ‘But he was dear to me. He was dear to all of us.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I want this nightmare to end.’

  ‘No, no,’ Jess said in earnest, and at first Marta wondered what she meant. Then Jess shook her head again, the fervour briefly returning. ‘It can’t end. Ever. Too much has happened. We might win, or whatever, but my parents, Simon . . . this nightmare will never be over for me.’

  Marta looked down as Jess’s voice rose. She felt guilty that Jess had to be a part of this. It wasn’t her own fault; Simon had brought Jess to St. Cann
erwells, but Marta knew he would never have made her come. But now Simon was gone, killed by the Huntsman, who was left to shoulder the blame? Her brother had started tube riding, and in the last few days she had graduated, reluctantly or not, to their leader. The death of Jess’s parents and now Simon should rest on her shoulders, surely?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Marta said.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Jess replied, but Marta could feel the emotion behind the words, hear the unspoken second line: but I want it to be. I need someone to hate.

  Behind them, Reeder was cooking up some fish and potatoes for breakfast, the smell drifting upslope towards them. Marta welcomed it like an old friend, her stomach growling in anticipation.

  John Reeder, for all his eccentricities, was proving a valuable ally. His old Land Rover, adapted for the harsh terrain, and his experience of living on the fringes of GFA society, had been invaluable. Without their chance discovery of his boat, they might all be dead. Certainly Jess, Ishael and the boy, Carl, would be prisoners, maybe all of them. They’d managed to outwit the Huntsmen and the Department of Civil Affairs again, but she wondered just how long they could stay half a step ahead.

  It had been Owen’s idea to disguise themselves as a Huntsman in order to trick their pursuers, an idea so simple only a child could think of it. Despite the risk, they had gambled that Huntsmen had been loosed on their trail, and that the DCA would be fooled into thinking one had kept with them long enough to appear at the right moment to trap them. Using guns that William had given Switch, again without their knowledge (‘If you get caught, what you don’t know you can’t tell,’ had been his familiar response), it was a case of shoot before being shot while dragging the others to safety. Paul had insisted they just aim for the lights, use the confusion and the surprise to get away, but despite his agreement, Marta knew Switch had aimed straight for the truck windows. Switch didn’t have the same qualms about killing people that Paul did.