KILLER T

by Robert Muchamore

  Judah looked anxious as Charlie ripped the plastic off a two-and-a-half-inch needle.

  ‘It’s a lot bigger than the ones used for vaccine updates,’ Charlie warned, pushing the needle into a vial. ‘And its intra-muscular, so I’m not going to pretend it isn’t painful.’

  Judah had started rolling up his T-shirt, but Charlie shook her head.

  ‘Push your tracksuit bottoms down to your knees, and pull your underwear up so I can see your thigh.’

  Judah pushed his chair back and Charlie went down on one knee beside him. Kids were getting modded younger and younger, and Charlie felt a little guilty looking at Judah’s hairless boy leg and Batman boxers.

  But if I don’t take their money, someone else will and they probably won’t do half as good a job …

  Charlie pushed the long needle into thigh muscle as Judah gripped the sides of his chair and teared up with pain.

  59 GREEN FINGERS

  In some developing countries, Killer-T had disrupted food production and transport so badly that famine had killed more people than the virus itself. The US had prepared for a more serious epidemic after the SNor outbreak, and while people got tired of sweet, claggy space food, no American went hungry.

  The shortages made people want to become self-sufficient in food, and the government had helped, providing online education programs, free polythene greenhouse kits and genetically modified seeds designed to grow in a variety of climates and produce high yields.

  Working in the polytunnels could be hard, especially since it was August and the outdoor temperature was in triple digits, but Harry felt a sense of accomplishment as he brought two large bags filled with potatoes, parsnips, tomatoes and beans into the kitchen. His jeans were grubbier than when he’d put them on that morning, and his polo shirt soaked in sweat.

  The polytunnels were sealed, but nothing completely kept out synthetic nasties. Harry washed his haul in a solution of dilute chlorine and insecticide, then spread them out to dry on the countertop.

  ‘How’s school?’ he asked Ed, who’d barely moved since breakfast.

  ‘I got an eighty-two on my History module,’ Ed said proudly. ‘Now I’m playing Gretchen at chess.’

  ‘Who’s winning?’ Harry asked as he wiped mud out of the sink.

  ‘I’ve never beaten her,’ Ed admitted. ‘She’s twelve; it’s embarrassing.’

  Ed had been much happier since they’d moved out of the city, but Harry and Charlie worried that he only had friends in the virtual world.

  ‘Rosie and Vern invited us over for elevenses,’ Harry said. ‘Do you want to come?’

  Ed shook his head. ‘I’ve got a one-to-one tutorial with Miss at eleven twenty. And she said you haven’t paid this month’s tuition.’

  ‘Charlie handles the money,’ Harry said. He noticed that he’d dropped a small potato and picked it up to dry with the others. ‘You know what Vern’s like when he gets talking, but I won’t stay over there too long. I’ve got a bunch of updates to make on Vegas Local this afternoon. If you get hungry, there’s some of the strawberry-and-apple pie Charlie made yesterday in the refrigerator.’

  ‘I’ll have space food,’ Ed said.

  ‘Of course you will,’ Harry said, smirking. He grabbed a clean polo shirt out of a basket of unfolded laundry and pulled it over his muscular chest as he crossed the two hundred feet of dirt to Vern and Rosie’s place. Then he realised he’d forgotten the tomatoes he’d promised and doubled back.

  ‘Hey, Rosie!’ Harry said happily, taking off his boots before stepping through the insect screen over her back door.

  It was one of those time-warp homes where people do a place up when they first move in, then leave everything to decay. The kitchen made Harry feel like he was on a sitcom set, with its yellowed Kenwood mixer and old-skool TV with a bulbous beige case and a plastic antenna on top. Rosie always watched a game show or nature channel, with the volume uncomfortably loud because she was going deaf.

  ‘Afraid I’m grubby,’ Harry said, settling at the table with his tomatoes as a quiz show buzzer ripped from the TV.

  ‘I raised three boys,’ Rosie said, bringing a clanking jug of iced tea to the dining table. ‘A bit of stink won’t shock me.’

  She fetched a plate of cheese and homemade-pickle sandwiches, then showed Harry new pictures of her seven- and nine-year-old granddaughters on her tablet.

  ‘The younger one looks a lot like you,’ Harry said, noticing dirt packed under his nails as he bit a sandwich.

  ‘Her father just got redeployed to become a flight-deck technician on the USS Gerald Ford,’ Rosie said proudly. ‘I helped design the electromagnetic catapults on that boat.’

  ‘Really?’ Harry said, surprised.

  Harry saw Vern and Rosie as a couple of sweet seventy-somethings who pottered around on their farm, but they’d both been scientists at the Groom Lake research base a hundred miles north of Vegas – more commonly known as Area 51.

  ‘I’ve soldered up another lithium battery pack if you want it,’ Rosie said, holding her lower back and making a soft moan as she sat down.

  ‘That would be fabulous,’ Harry said. ‘Plenty of cold nights at this altitude and I like to keep the polytunnels above sixty degrees. We’ll have to find something to swap.’

  ‘We’re neighbours,’ Rosie said warmly. ‘I’m not keeping score.’

  ‘Charlie said you were going to show her how to make them.’

  ‘It’s not hard,’ Rosie said. ‘Millions of cars with old battery packs get scrapped. The batteries are too weak to put in another car, but they still make low-drain backup batteries for solar-power systems. The scrapyards have to pay to dispose of the batteries, so they let me grab as many as I want.’

  ‘We got lucky having you and Vern as neighbours,’ Harry said brightly. ‘I could barely change a light bulb when we first moved out of the city. You’ve taught us everything.’

  ‘You help us too,’ Rosie pointed out. ‘Charlie takes our parcels and runs all our errands in town. You helped Vern lift the new air-conditioner on to our roof. And the people who owned that house before you were a nightmare. Growing weed and partying all hours …’

  This jarred with Harry, because Vern and Rosie didn’t know about the modding lab.

  ‘Think I hear Vern,’ Harry said as the garage door rattled.

  Vern usually took a few moments to take off his boots, but he came straight through to the kitchen looking flustered.

  ‘There’s two pickups racing up the hill,’ he said breathlessly.

  Harry grabbed his phone to check the CCTV cameras they’d set up together.

  ‘Already checked. The cameras are out,’ Vern said as he picked up an old wall-mounted telephone with a long curly cord. ‘Landline’s cut too.’

  Harry thought fast. There’s no phone signal out here in the mountains. The CCTV works on our shared WiFi network and Vern’s landline phone is a different system. So two different systems have stopped working, and it isn’t a power failure because the air-conditioning is humming …

  ‘Internet seems to be down too,’ Harry said, looking at his phone.

  ‘It’s gotta be zombies in them pickups,’ Rosie said, looking frightened.

  ‘Cutting phone lines seems too organised for zombies,’ Harry said.

  ‘Now that the cops reverse zombies when they’re caught, they’re selecting mods that leave them with better survival skills,’ Vern said. ‘We watched a PBS documentary about it a few weeks back.’

  ‘It’s called a three-fourteen-B mod,’ Rosie said as she checked her tablet to confirm there was no outgoing connection.

  ‘Better gear up,’ Vern said, leading a charge into the garage and unlocking a hefty gun cabinet.

  As Vern, Rosie and Harry pulled on body armour and grabbed automatic rifles, Ed yelled from out front.

  ‘There’s two cars coming, Harry!’ he called, as he came up the porch steps and into Vern and Rosie’s kitchen. ‘And my internet stopped working.’<
br />
  Harry didn’t want to spook Ed, but it was hard not to, dressed in a flak vest and holding an assault rifle.

  ‘Is it zombies?’ Ed asked.

  ‘They’ll be at the gate in under a minute,’ Rosie said as she expertly loaded a clip into her assault rifle. ‘I’ll head upstairs and cover you boys.’

  ‘Ed, I need you to be calm and sensible, OK?’ Harry said.

  Ed was trembling and Harry feared one of his panic attacks, or, worse, a full-on fit.

  ‘Run back to the house, go down into the shelter and don’t come out until one of us tells you to,’ Harry said.

  Ed was terrified of being left alone after the Care4Kids abandonment. He started rocking from side to side as Vern came out of the garage, fixing an ammo belt, then passing another to Harry.

  ‘Can you come down to the gate with me?’ Vern asked Harry. ‘You look scarier than I do.’

  ‘Sure,’ Harry said, still wondering how to deal with Ed.

  Telling him not to panic would have the opposite effect. But Ed could be distracted if you gave him a task.

  ‘This is important,’ Harry told Ed. ‘Run back to our house, then go around very quickly. Take your laptop and any other expensive things that you can carry. Then take them into the shelter and guard them. You’re a guard, OK? Your job is really important.’

  Ed nodded excitedly.

  ‘I know you’ll do a good job,’ Harry said.

  Ed rushed out of the door, and Vern smiled and handed Harry an ammo belt.

  ‘You’ve got a knack with that boy,’ Vern complimented as Rosie ran to the top of the house. ‘Give a man responsibility to stop the panic. Learned the same trick on survival training in the air force.’

  Ed had reached the other house when Harry and Vern stepped out into midday heat.

  ‘I grabbed a few of your girlfriend’s homemade grenades,’ Vern said, handing a pair to Harry. ‘I made wire clips so they can hook on your belt.’

  60 TERATOMA TUMORS

  Harry felt like a cowboy, striding the desert in his flak vest and assault rifle. He thought about the contrast with the skinny English kid who’d landed in Las Vegas eight years earlier and, like always, wondered if his mum would approve of what he was about to do.

  The two dust plumes from the pickups were close. The properties weren’t fenced in, but the ground leading up from the highway was steep and bouldered. Even a powerful 4×4 would have to use the dirt road, and Vern had built a hefty steel gate between two boulders a hundred and fifty yards from the houses.

  ‘If they cut the phone and the CCTV, they must have staked us out,’ Harry said, checking that his gun was loaded as he followed Vern towards the gate.

  ‘Possibly,’ Vern said. ‘But a wireless signal blocker isn’t hard to make, and there’s a telephone cabinet down by the highway. Just crowbar the door and cut the wires with a pocket knife …’

  The giant rocks made natural cover, and the lead pickup’s squealing brakes suggested the driver wasn’t expecting the heavy gate. Harry stepped up into a foothold and peeked over the top of the boulder. The two pickups were modern, but wore a coat of desert grit. The lead unit was driven by a huge man, hunched over the wheel with a hairy forehead and vast woolly arms.

  ‘Some kind of superhero,’ Harry warned, using the popular nickname for anyone who’d been modded for extreme strength, using the experimental mods developed by the Chinese army. ‘I think there’s another superhero in the second pickup. The ones on the pickup beds are younger. Mostly girls.’

  ‘Armed?’ Vern asked.

  ‘I can see knives and pistols for the girls. The superhero’s got a machine gun.’

  ‘Body count?’ Vern asked.

  ‘The first superhero’s getting out,’ Harry said. ‘There’s two guys in each cab. Four or five kids riding on the back of each one.’

  Vern stepped out from behind the rock, his assault rifle aimed at the superhero who’d just got out of the main vehicle.

  ‘You’re on a private road and the police were alerted by radio as soon as the phone was cut,’ Vern lied. ‘I strongly advise you to turn back.’

  Vern gave a signal for Harry to step out behind him. As he did so, sweaty zombie girls jumped down from the pickups, while a mean-looking Asian teen pointed an assault rifle. Harry looked left and right warily as the superhero spat in the dirt, then confidently chimed the muzzle of his MP7 machine gun against the barred gate.

  The superhero was seven and a half feet tall and his T-shirt size must have included a dozen Xs. While modders like Charlie would only do therapies that used variants of human DNA, superhero mods included genes from powerful primates.

  The results of non-human mods were unpredictable. Along with cancerous growths and sudden heart failure, the most common side-effect of mixing ape and human DNA were stem cells that produced the wrong type of tissue in the wrong location. So hard tissues like teeth and nails would grow in random spots through your body, or internal organs would get blocked by clumps of hair.

  The superhero at the gate showed a particularly gruesome example of stem-cell confusion, with infected balls of milky-white eye tissue clumped on his hairy arms.

  ‘If you pay us two hundred thousand, we’ll go away,’ the superhero said. ‘Fifty thousand a month buys you protection.’

  ‘Got my own protection,’ Vern scoffed, raising his gun. ‘I’m an old man. Inflation wiped out my pension. We live off what we grow.’

  ‘I’ll have your computers, phones and watches,’ the superhero growled as Harry eyed the zombie girls moving further away from the pickups, some disappearing behind rocks. ‘There won’t be trouble unless you make trouble.’

  ‘If I pay now, you’ll be back for more,’ Vern said, ‘but the girls look dehydrated. I’d be happy to fetch some bottled water.’

  A zombie girl shouted cockily from the pick-up’s passenger seat. ‘There’s only two of ’em, Tony. Just kill ’em and get on with it.’

  The superhero made an animal grunt and shook his fist at the girl. ‘It’s two-inch-thick steel,’ he shouted, rattling the gate. ‘Shut your hole.’

  Suddenly a shot cracked. Harry flinched as the boulder splintered, less than three feet from the superhero’s head. As he looked back, another bullet whizzed overhead, obliterating the door mirror of the lead truck.

  ‘That’s two warning shots,’ Rosie yelled from her top-floor window. ‘You got thirty seconds to clear out, or the next one cleaves your skull.’

  The superhero shielded his eyes, looking into the glare to see where the shots had come from. He had greater numbers, but his vehicles were trapped behind a gate that hadn’t figured in his plans, and Rosie’s sniper position meant they’d take heavy casualties if they tried crossing the open ground between the boulders and the houses on foot.

  ‘Back on the trucks,’ the superhero growled to his crew. Then he fired a monstrous wodge of spit into the dirt between his boots and pointed at Harry.

  ‘This isn’t over,’ he warned.

  ‘We’ll be waiting,’ Harry said, shuddering as he looked the superhero in the eye.

  61 WHIPPED CREAM

  Charlie came out of the quarantine box inside her coffee shop, this time carrying a plastic bag full of little carbon dioxide cylinders.

  ‘Ta-da!’ she told Gwen cheerfully.

  The barista was nearing the end of a ten-hour shift and disappointed Charlie with a tired, ‘Where’d you get ’em?’

  ‘There’s a shuttered coffee shop over on Sands. I’ll be reopening it in a couple of months, but I remembered seeing a box of CO2 cartridges when I met with the construction manager who’s gonna fix it up.’

  ‘Another store,’ Gwen said, managing a slight smile. ‘You’ll be running Starbucks outta town before you know it.’

  Charlie ran up to the office and put a million dollars out of her $1.2 million modding fee in the safe. She split the rest, pocketing a hundred thousand for expenses back at the house, and the remainder into a cash register
tray containing the shop’s morning takings.

  After a phone consultation with a potential modding client over her encrypted phone, Charlie headed down to the shop. She was in a decent mood and her plan was to catch a city bus back to where she’d parked the Porsche, then drive home and help Harry make dinner.

  Her mood jarred when she noticed a black guy, sitting by the front window with an espresso. He was scruffy, with staring eyes, high cheekbones and plaited hair down his back. Gwen was serving a six-cup order at the drive-thru window, so Charlie had to wait before speaking to her.

  ‘The guy at table three,’ Charlie said warily. ‘Have you seen him in here before?’

  ‘Couple of times yesterday,’ Gwen said. ‘I know his eyes look zombieish, but he’s never caused problems.’

  ‘He looks familiar,’ Charlie said thoughtfully. ‘I’m half convinced I saw him at the Algarve earlier.’

  The cops would never use someone so distinctive to tail me, but it could be someone who knows I do modding, looking to shake me down, or rob me.

  But that face triggers something further back. Was he at Rock Spring High? Or in the visiting room at White Boulder?

  ‘I’ve gotta grab something upstairs, then I’m gonna head home,’ Charlie told Gwen. ‘Can you give me a call, and let me know if that guy follows me?’

  Gwen seemed alarmed. ‘If you think something’s wrong, I can call the security office. We pay enough money for them.’

  ‘No need,’ Charlie said firmly.

  The face kept gnawing at Charlie’s brain. Was he at OIL? Did he hit on me at a house party? Was he the guy who delivered fertiliser to the house?

  ‘Where do I know you from?’ Charlie asked herself irritably, seeing him on the CCTV in the office as she unlocked a desk drawer.

  She took out an automatic pistol and checked that the clip was loaded before wedging it into her handbag. Then she decided her smart seeing-a-patient shoes weren’t the best option if she had to run and switched to a pair of battered Converse under her desk.