by Steve Feasey
Rush tensed as the panel slid open, but was relieved to see Josuf’s face. ‘You remembered,’ the man said with a sad smile.
‘Of course I remembered. Get in.’
He was perplexed when Josuf shook his head. ‘You have to go, Rush.’ He reached over the boy’s shoulder and pushed at another section of wall that fell away, clattering noisily down a set of stone steps that appeared to lead behind and beneath the farmhouse. A damp, earthy smell filled the small hiding space.
Rush stared at the opening before turning back. ‘How long has that been there?’ he asked.
‘Long enough. Listen. You have to take the tunnel and run. Don’t stop, Rush. Don’t stop until you’re past the orchard and into the woods on the other side. Make your way towards City Four and –’
‘That’s what the voice in my dream said.’ The vision of the woman speaking in a voice that was not her own returned.
‘What?’
‘I had that weird dream again – the one about the things trying to hit me. Only this time it was different.’ He frowned, remembering. ‘In my dream it’s a woman that comes to get me. She never usually speaks, but this time she did . . . in a man’s voice.’
‘What did the voice say?’
‘It told me to collect something from the Tranter Trading Post, then go to the mutant ghetto at City Four.’
Despite the danger they were clearly in, Josuf shook his head and allowed himself a brief smile. ‘Jax,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘Never mind that now, you have to go. Get to City Four. Find Silas . . . and Jax. You won’t remember them, but they will know you.’
‘What’s going on? What about you?’
‘I’m going to hold them back as long as I can.’
‘But –’
‘I knew men might come looking for you one day, Rush. It’s part of the risk I was willing to take when I promised to protect you, and I’ll be damned if I won’t do just that, now I’m called upon to do so!’ He stopped. Reaching out, he placed his hands on the boy’s shoulders, taking in the teenager’s face in the dim light. ‘You’ve been like a son to me, Rush. The son I always –’
There was a loud bang from somewhere in the house. Josuf shoved the boy towards the opening. ‘There’s a chain at the bottom of the steps. It hangs down from the roof – you can’t miss it. Reach up and pull it down hard. Then get to the end of the tunnel as fast as you can.’
‘TIME’S UP, MUTE!’ Josuf half turned at the sound of the soldier’s voice. ‘We’re coming in to get our blood!’
‘What’s going to happen, Josuf?’
‘I’m going to keep my promise.’
The two looked at each other for a moment longer. ‘I wish you had been my father,’ Rush said as tears slid down his cheeks.
‘Thank you, son. Thank you.’ The man who had been Rush’s guardian for the past thirteen years shoved him through the opening and closed the panel behind him.
The tunnel was a dark, rat-filled space. With one hand on the cold mud wall to his right, Rush half stumbled, half fell down the steps leading to the long escape route away from the farmhouse. He had no idea how Josuf could have made such a thing, or how long it must have taken him. He could hear the usual residents scurrying out of his way as he stepped off the bottom step. Remembering Josuf’s instructions, he groped around overhead, reaching up and blindly seeking out the chain in the blackness. When his fingers finally brushed the cold metal links, he grabbed hold and pulled down with all his might, jumping involuntarily as a heavy iron grille dropped down to block off the stairs behind him. He stared at the thing, knowing it not only cut off any chance for him to return via the stairs, but also the possibility of Josuf’s joining him in the tunnel. He had little choice but to do as he’d been told. He was about to start out into the dark tunnel, but froze when he heard the muffled sounds of shouting somewhere beyond the stone steps. He didn’t want to be down here on his own. It felt like cowardice to be running away like this when he should be up there, helping. But the only way back was to get to the end of the tunnel and turn round. Feeling for the wall again, Rush stumbled blindly ahead into the blackness.
After what could only have been a few minutes – it felt like much longer – Rush made out a small glimmer seeping down into the darkness from above. He looked up at the dim ring of light describing the edges of what must be a small, covered hole in the ground. His heart sank. There was no way he could get up to it without help. The thought of being stuck down here chilled him, until he realised that as tall as Josuf was, he would not have been able to reach it either. He took a step backwards to get a better look and nearly tripped over the wooden ladder on the floor behind him. Quickly grabbing the thing, he thrust the leading edge upward.
As the sole of his foot touched the third rung he heard the loud crack of what could only be a shot being fired.
His spine turned to ice and his stomach lurched. Then, full of rage and fear, Rush threw himself at the wooden lattice structure above. The earth on top of it had formed a seal around the edges, so he had to slam his shoulder into it to lift it up and out of the way.
He found himself at the edge of the orchard, where he stood getting his breath and his bearings. Spinning round, he looked back down the slope in the direction of the house he’d grown up in. There was a strange calm as the rest of the world slowly woke up. Then the second shot rang out.
Despite everything Josuf had said, Rush began to run back towards the house, slowing only a fraction as he saw the men coming out. When one of them spotted him, a shout went up and they headed for their vehicle.
Then Josuf was at the door, holding a heavy-looking metallic tube in his right hand. The front of his jumper, the jumper he’d been pulling on as he came into Rush’s room, was a bloody, wet mess. Josuf staggered towards the vehicle as its engine started up, and raised the arm holding the tube above his head. Rush gasped as he watched the personnel carrier move off, heading at speed straight for his guardian, who did nothing to get out of its way. As the vehicle ploughed into Josuf there was an almighty explosion, the force of which knocked Rush backwards off his feet, the air above him transformed into a rolling wave of heat.
Ears still ringing, the teenager lay on his back for a moment trying to comprehend what he’d just witnessed. The sky above him was thick with life, as if every bird in the world had taken flight, all cawing and screeching to each other at the same time.
Gingerly getting back to his feet, Rush stared down the hill at the mangled wreckage of the ARM vehicle and the even more mangled figures within it. Where Josuf had stood only moments before was nothing but a dark red-and-black smudge.
Rush dropped down on to his hands and knees and vomited into the grass.
When the mutant boy finally turned his back on the horrific tableau outside the farmhouse and made his way through the orchard, he was in a dazed and confused state, still not quite able to believe what he’d witnessed. Because of him, the man he’d come to think of as his father was dead, killed by the ARM while trying to protect him.
For a while after the incident, Rush had sat on the grass, holding his mud-and-tear-streaked face in his hands as he tried to figure out what to do. How could this have happened? What had the men, supposedly on a routine check, really wanted? Part of him wanted to stay at the place Josuf and he had called home. But Josuf had told him to go. Not to do so would mean his guardian had died in vain. It was this realisation that finally forced Rush to pull himself together and set off away from the only home he’d ever known.
City Four, the capital, the biggest of the Six Cities, was far away to the north. Rush knew it was the heart of government, of corruption. And mutants were not allowed within its wall. So why was Rush, a mutant, supposed to go there? He refused to allow himself to dwell on the enormity of the task ahead of him. Josuf had taught him to hunt and forage for food, and he was perfectly capable of concealing himself and making his own shelter when he needed to bed down for the night, bu
t even so, the thought of making such a long trip on his own was daunting. Without really knowing where he was going, the mutant boy set off to find Silas and the mysterious Jax, who was able to speak to people in their dreams.
Melk
The sound of Principal Zander Melk’s footsteps seemed unnaturally loud to him as he hurried along the corridor towards his father’s hospital room. The urgent summons by the president had taken him by surprise, his father’s carers conveying the older man’s desire to speak to his son as ‘a matter of urgency’.
He paused at the door, peering in through the small viewing window to take in the sallow-skinned figure atop the sheets, connected via an array of tubes and wires to a multitude of machines about the bed. It was unusual to see anyone so ill inside the cities’ walls, but the thing eating away at his father from the inside was something the old man had created himself, one of his experiments intended to wreak havoc on the mutants. It was a derivation of the Rot disease that now afflicted so many Mutes, but this strain appeared to have no cure. It was difficult to escape the irony: a disease designed to harm Mutes had itself mutated and infected its maker via a tiny tear in his hazchem suit; the old man well and truly hoist with his own petard. The only saving grace for those caring for him was that, unlike its deadly cousin, his father’s version of Rot was not contagious.
‘Father?’ Zander said as he stepped inside.
Just moving his head to look in the direction of his son’s voice seemed to take a huge effort. For Zander Melk it was impossible to reconcile the wizened figure before him with that of the powerful oligarch who had done so much for the Principia and the Six Cities that had been built in the aftermath of the Last War.
Propped up on pillows, the incumbent president nodded at his son. Until recently he’d managed to keep his illness a secret; blood transfusions and a whole host of medications made it just about possible for him to maintain appearances. But his opponents, particularly that Cowper man, had begun to suspect things weren’t right. And rumours spread quickly in a place like City Four. Like sharks sniffing blood, they’d begun to circle in the political waters, waiting for the right moment to attack. So he’d pulled the rug from under them, called an emergency election in which he intended to use his power and influence to install his son to power. If he was honest, he had grave doubts about Zander’s ability to carry off the role. He lacked the . . . mettle to make the harsh decisions Melk knew were needed to put a stop to this mutant rights nonsense. Still, if everything went as planned, the situation would be temporary at best.
Melk Senior reached up and removed the transparent mask from his face, the hiss of pumped oxygen escaping as he did so. ‘Close the door,’ he said, then fluttered his fingers in the direction of the chair beside his bed.
‘How do you feel?’ Zander asked as he sat down.
‘I’m dying. How do you think I feel?’
‘The doctors say that there’s still –’
‘The doctors can’t cure this. I couldn’t cure this, and I created the damn thing! I was too clever for my own good, and look where it’s got me.’ He took a gulp of oxygen and lowered the mask again. ‘I wanted to speak to you before it’s too late. There’s something you need to know.’
‘What’s that?’ Zander inwardly groaned. No doubt his father was about to give him another lecture on what he was doing wrong and how he should be running things. The last time they’d spoken the old man had told him he was too liberal, pouring scorn on his campaign, and saying he needed to continue with the current hard-line policies when it came to the ‘mutant problem’.
The old man looked across at his son, an all too familiar sneer forming on one side of his mouth as he did so. ‘Don’t worry, Junior, I didn’t ask you here to use my last breath to tell you how much I love you.’
‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’
The frail creature in the bed tried to laugh, but what came out instead was an ugly, wet coughing sound that spoke of lungs filled with more than just air. ‘See? That’s the man I made and brought up. You need to work on that attitude some more. That hardness is in the Melk genes. That’s why we got to be where we are.’
Zander waited. Maybe it would have been better to trust his initial instinct and ignore the invitation to come here. The pair had never shared much love between them.
‘I need to tell you about the Farm.’
‘The what?’
‘It was a place I set up about twenty years ago. A research institute, if you like.’
‘Like the labs at Bio-Gen?’ Zander asked, referring to the vast genetic-modification empire his grandfather and father had built up, first here, in City Four, but subsequently in all six megalopolises. It was the reason City Four had risen to become the most powerful of the cities, quickly becoming the capital, where the ruling body, the Principia, was based. The other cities were each given over to specialist industries: manufacturing of electronic goods and vehicles; food and livestock (especially genetically modified crops and animals); arms and defence; mining and power production. But the empire was run from C4, the city the Melks had always lived in, the city they practically owned.
‘No, not quite like them.’
Zander didn’t like the way his father said that. ‘Why haven’t I ever heard it mentioned before?’
‘Because officially it never existed. It was a facility where I tried to uncover secrets, secrets that nobody else wanted to look into.’ He gave a vague wave of his hand. ‘The Farm was established so I might look into mutant anomalies.’
‘Anomalies?’
‘Aberrations. Mutations so extreme that they defy scientific explanation.’ He paused to wet his dry, cracked lips.
Zander was beginning to wonder if the old man’s ramblings might be simply a result of the pain-controlling medication he was on. He glanced back towards the door, weighing up whether he should call one of the nursing staff.
The old man continued. ‘I’d heard rumours about mutants from the most extreme environments who had psychic powers and other weird abilities.’
‘They’re just old wives’ tales. Something that mothers tell their children to get them to sleep at night – “Behave or the mutant bogeymen will get you”.’
The old man held up a finger. He reached out and retrieved the mask, holding it to his face and sucking in more oxygen before continuing. ‘I thought so too at first. But as scientists we owe it to ourselves to investigate such things, so I set about trying to find a mutant who showed signs of having a special gift. And I found one.’ He let out a harsh bark of a laugh which was quickly followed by another round of coughing. ‘Boy, did I find one.’ After a slight shake of his head he continued. ‘My men set out into the Blacklands, where the ravages of the Last War have created a landscape so inhospitable that for a while it was thought nothing could live there. But things do live there: horrible and grotesque things that you would hardly think of as human. One of these was brought back from that place. How they got it back with the things they experienced while it was in their custody is a miracle, but they managed somehow, although the cost was high in terms of the lives and minds lost. The freak was taken to the Farm to be picked apart, like a wristwatch, so I could see if I might be able to work out what made it tick. It didn’t survive, but I succeeded in isolating the mutated genes of interest.’
‘What did you hope to achieve?’
His father stared at him for a few moments. ‘What do we do at Bio-Gen, son? Hmm?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘What do we offer to the citizens of the Six Cities?’ He paused, waiting for an answer that didn’t come. ‘Hope, that’s what. We offer them flawless, disease-free, intelligent, athletic human beings that are ordered up like food from a restaurant menu. You want a baby with green eyes and jet-black hair? No problem. You want him or her to be tall and strong so that they might fulfil your dreams of playing in the InterCity Games? Sure, why not? You want a child with musical abilities, with dextrous fingers and wide h
ands to easily span those octaves? A concert pianist? Hey, whatever you want, you’re paying! We can do all that.’ There was the maniacal glint in his eye that his son knew so well. ‘But what if we could offer more? What if we could make them more than human?’
‘We are forbidden from mixing our DNA with that of the mutants.’
‘It was all the same DNA, before they became freaks!’
‘But it’s not any more. We made certain of that. We refined and reprogrammed our own genome to remove the defects and disease. We did that precisely so we might offer the hope you just described.’
‘Ha!’ Another bout of hacking coughs followed the old man’s exclamation, this one longer than the last. ‘You make it sound as if we were on a mission to save humanity! We did it for money. We did it because we could!’
‘Tainting our DNA with mutant genes? That’s the most illegal thing you could possibly do.’ Zander’s mind was a blur as he tried to take all this in. ‘Is that what you were doing at this Farm?’
‘We tried to create perfection: a superhuman being, if you like. We used artificial wombs and implanted single-cell fetuses with the DNA material I’d collected.’
‘Where did you get the fetuses?’ Zander couldn’t stop himself asking questions to which he really did not want to hear the answers; his father had already admitted to some of the most serious crimes imaginable. If anyone found out about this, the Melk name would be destroyed and his whole presidential campaign would be over. When the old man shrugged, he could hardly contain his anger.