The Fall of Deadworld Omnibus
Page 25
“And your jay-friends would? If they are there, they’re operating out of a decimated zone with no crops to harvest and no supplies to salvage. Plus you’ve got no date on when that message was broadcast—it could’ve been cycling since the Fall, for all you know. It’s too risky, Hawkins.”
The Judge had an expression that she pulled when she was not going to be dissuaded—her scar tissue hardened further before the girl’s eyes, the facial equivalent of shutters being pulled down—and Misha saw it then, resolve deepening across her features in the space of a couple of seconds. She knew there was going to be no reasoning with the older woman, and it was either accompany her or go their separate ways.
Hawkins signed.
“What was it you said? Trust no one?”
The Judge shrugged.
Of course Misha had gone with her—what the hell else was she going to do? But her unease had deepened as they’d cut through field after field of devastated farmland, the earth grey and sterile. The few buildings they encountered looked as if a succession of tornadoes had torn across the land: roofs were caved in, windows smashed. Even the doors to the storm cellars had been wrenched open or holes punched in them like a great fist had repeatedly pounded on the wood. It reminded the girl of the basement sanctuary she and a number of her fellow survivors had lived in for a spell before it too became compromised. Huge rusted pieces of machinery were toppled over, tractors lying on their sides with their massive tyres in the air like fallen beasts that hadn’t been able to right themselves—dinosaurs in tar pits, Misha had thought. There was very little sign of human life apart from a handful of skeletons lying amidst the rubble, and one picked-clean bag of bones hanging disconcertingly from the branches of a tree, picked up and deposited there by the sheer force of the whirlwind that had powered through. It was a disaster area, but no one was coming to its aid.
She’d considered numerous times when to suggest to the Judge that this was a bust, that they were needlessly putting themselves in danger pursuing a dead signal (or, to Misha’s mind, a fantasy), but she knew Hawkins was seeing all this. She wasn’t blind to the terrain they were heading into, yet she kept to her course, constantly tuning and retuning the radio for a stronger or updated broadcast. When she suddenly hit a wall of static that rhythmically fluctuated, she became so excited she slew the bike to the side of the road the better to concentrate.
Misha had wished she could’ve shared the Judge’s enthusiasm as she looked around at the dark and silent thoroughfare they’d stopped on, eerily desolate and far from anything resembling shelter. She felt exposed and vulnerable. She had to admit, there was something emanating from the radio that sounded different to the usual monotone, but it wasn’t enough to assuage her fears.
“What is that?” Hawkins had croaked, craning an ear to the speaker. “Is that… voices?”
“Can’t hear anything that resembles words,” the girl replied. “Just a drone, from what I can tell.”
“Well, where’s it coming from?”
“It’s near, very near…” the Judge whispered. “It’s in this vicinity.”
She gunned the engine and they proceeded at a slower pace, trundling forward while she kept her head cocked to the comms-unit, alive to any changes. It did seem to be getting louder with every few dozen feet they travelled, and finally in the distance they could discern two sets of red lights gleaming in the dusk. As they got closer, they saw it was the back end of an articulated lorry slanted at forty-five degrees, while the cab had planted itself in the ditch that ran alongside the tarmac, and wedged beneath the truck’s undercarriage were the compacted remains of a station wagon that had virtually had its roof sliced off by the impact. Judging by the tyre marks on the highway, both vehicles must’ve been going at some speed at the point of collision and dragged each other off to one side. Hawkins pulled up alongside and dismounted, but made a point to leave the engine running.
“Just going to take a look,” she muttered before accentuating with her hands:
“Is this the source of the transmission?” Misha whispered.
The teenager slouched back on the Lawrider’s pillion and cast an eye at the vehicle. The truck was Justice Department-affiliated—one of the many contractors supplying farm produce. That might explain the Judicial code Hawkins had originally heard, since the driver would be instructed in their use. But there was nothing here that was going to help them. The presumably vegetative contents of the trailer were rotting to high heaven, and it was highly doubtful anyone aboard was still alive—
Misha suddenly realised that the Judge was returning to the bike at speed, the torch-beam bobbing before her. She sat up, concerned, aware that the drone-like rasp of the broadcast was playing again… before it struck her that the sound was coming from beyond the Lawrider’s receiver and was actually a background hum that filled the air. Confused, she opened her mouth to fire a question at Hawkins just as she swung her leg back over the bike and twisted the throttle, but the older woman was in no mood to answer her.
“Bad idea,” was all she said as the tyres screeched and they shot off, past the crashed vehicles, and barrelled down the empty stretch of highway. The drone was still there, and getting incrementally louder.
Hawkins took one hand off the handlebars momentarily and hitched up the neck of her uniform, covering what little of her face was visible below the helmet. “Wrap something around your mouth,” she called over the roar of the engine, casting an eye over her shoulder at Misha.
“What is it?” the girl shouted back, then twisted around and saw for herself as a black cloud swirled from where the lorry had been lying and began to sweep after them. “Aw, crap.” She fumbled in her jacket pocket and pulled out a scarf, which she quickly looped around her mouth and nose. The swarm was already outpacing them, and the first of the insects were ricocheting off the bike or pattering against her back.
“Truck driver’s CB radio was still broadcasting to an open channel,” Hawkins yelled. “He was long dead, of course. The static we were picking up, it was the locusts… feeding.”
Anger had risen in Misha’s gullet and she’d cut loose, unable to stop herself, and got a mouthful of chitinous winged bullets as a consequence.
It was already dark; now, as the pulsating swarm descended, it was like driving through a sandstorm: visibility was practically zero. She clung to Hawkins and hoped the Judge could maintain their course despite it being virtually impossible to see anything more than a few feet ahead. Claustrophobia gnawed at her, and her heart thudded madly. It felt like the locusts were sucking out all the oxygen, as the densely packed bodies crowded around her head; it was hard enough breathing through the scarf, but now she was gulping down panicky snatches of air as if she was drowning.
Her body was alive with a million crawling things, and it was all she could do not to scream and release her grip on Hawkins and swat away at the countless creatures that were invading every available inch. She knew the Judge was feeling it too—she sensed the older woman tremble and stiffen, and beneath her she could feel the Lawrider pick up speed as Hawkins’ instinct to flee at all costs got the better of her. They were tearing along now, to all intents and purposes blind to what was in front of them, and the incessant buzzing meant they’d been lowered into a pit of white noise. All senses had been blunted—nothing but animalistic fear was guiding them. Misha, in some rational part of her brain,
knew that they had to slow down, that they were travelling at high velocity into the unknown, but she just wanted them to break free of the swarm, to burst out of its clutches.
Hawkins didn’t see the car wreck until they were mere moments away from hitting it; she had time to emit a strangled cry of shock as the bike’s headlights illuminated it abandoned in the middle of the road. The computer flashed up a collision warning, but they were going at such a speed as to make avoiding it impossible. The Judge valiantly attempted to wrench the Lawrider’s steering to one side, squeezing hard on the brakes, but they still clipped the vehicle’s left wing. There was a tremendous screech of tearing metal, and the next thing Misha knew they were being flipped into the air, weightless for a fraction of a second, before hitting the tarmac with a bone-jarring thump, skidding and rolling for a hundred more yards.
It took her a full half-minute to gather her bearings, ears ringing, head throbbing. She looked back down the road and saw the eviscerated remains of the bike spread across the thoroughfare, portions of it sprinkled liberally from one side to the other. The wreck they’d hit had been shunted off the highway entirely, its front end having done a full three-sixty so the skeletal driver was now grinning in her direction. Must’ve got a flat, Misha thought absently. Didn’t make it, and was eaten where he sat at the wheel. Or he starved to death, unable to leave the confines of the car, which became his tomb.
Get up, girl, a rather more strident voice cut through her dazed musings. Get up before you’re stripped, flensed, and digested where you lie.
She staggered to her feet and turned her attention to the other direction, where the seemingly unconscious form of Hawkins was sprawled several feet away. Cursing, Misha limped over towards her, acutely aware both of the sharp ache in her left leg that suggested something was torn, sprained or badly bruised, and also of the persistent buzzing now starting to filter through her regained senses. Hard flying bodies were pattering against her, and she yelped, panic coming to the fore. She reached the Judge and rolled her on to her back, the older woman still breathing but refusing to stir, no matter how loud the teen screamed in her face or shook her by the shoulders. Locusts crawled over her helmeted visage, and were getting in Misha’s too, despite her best efforts to effectively swaddle it with her scarf. The swarm was descending.
“Oh, God, oh, God,” she breathed, looking around frantically. There was no way she could carry the Judge, or even drag her; in any case where was she going to go? There was no immediate shelter to head towards, nowhere they could flee to in time. Then a shimmer on the tarmac caught her eye, which took a second for her to identify: gasoline from the Lawrider’s ruptured tanks. It had leaked across the road. She reached into Hawkins’ boot holster and pulled the Lawgiver free, remembering what the Judge had told her about the palm-encoded security system—nobody but Hawkins would be able to fire it without it self-detonating—and forced it into the woman’s gauntleted right hand, curling her finger into the trigger guard before aiming as best she could at the fuel spray and the bike’s wreckage. She squeezed and a bullet ignited the gas, a spark travelling along the line of liquid back to the Lawrider and the whole thing went up, an orange fireball blossoming into the dark sky.
The insects swirled around the sudden explosion, clouds of them incinerated by the wall of heat. The inferno provided an instant relief, the swarm dispelled. Blackened bodies hit the ground like carbonised hail, powdering into sooty smears. Misha couldn’t help but let out a victorious laugh as she watched the locusts shrivel up around her. She holstered the gun, and then got an arm under Hawkins’, lifting her to her feet, eliciting a groan from the Judge.
“C’mon, you tough old bird,” the girl muttered. “I need you to help me out, here. Fire’s not going to keep them at bay for long. We gotta get under cover.”
She took a few steps but near collapsed, Hawkins’ weight pushing her to her knees as the pain in her leg made her gasp. She sobbed, got to her feet and grabbed the Judge’s uniform with two hands and pulled, desperate now. “C’mon!” It was useless. She let go and sat, head bowed, resigned.
She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there—three minutes? ten?—when she heard the sound of engines. Looking up, she saw multiple bright white headlamps getting bigger as they headed in her direction. Without thinking, she reached out and clasped Hawkins’ hand, gripping it tight, and waited for the newcomers’ arrival.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
COLM HAD ALWAYS figured that the best way for him and his boy to survive was to go it alone. He’d seen the long refugee trains flooding out of the cities, desperately attempting to escape the genocide, and made a conscious decision not to join their ranks, choosing instead for the pair of them to forge their own path. His son had thought differently at the time, and pleaded with his father to seek safety in numbers, but Colm was adamant that it was a bad idea. Big groups always factionalised and grew tense, he’d said, and inevitably things would fall apart. Then there were leadership squabbles and accusations of dishonesty or greed; contagions swept through camps as they shared cooking utensils or washing facilities; and there was always a difference of opinion on the easiest and quickest route to a destination no one could agree on. No, Colm knew all too well just what happens when you put a number of people—starving, scared people, fleeing for their lives—in a pressure-cooker environment such as that. Human beings naturally found comfort in their peers at times of stress, and mistakenly believed that by clinging to one another they made it harder for the enemy to pick them off. On the contrary—in Colm’s experience, it just made it more convenient for the Judges to find you.
He had some history with waging war on Justice Department—and as a consequence picking the most practical way to pass beneath their radar—since his juve days. He’d been a pro-democracy agitator for as long as he could hold a spray-can, and ran with different cells as he grew older, each more militant than the last. What started as anti-authoritarian troublemaking in his early teens with a gang of his schoolmates that never extended much beyond scrawling tags and obscenities on government property, Colm found himself graduating to protest and sabotage as he fell in with the direct-action crowd—Jensen, Gabriel, Struckers and the young Loxley—picking up a few scars from brutally applied Judges’ batons when the marches got dispersed. He even did a two-month stretch for disorderly conduct. The jaybirds never deterred him, though, merely strengthened his resolve: the fascist system needed tearing down, there was no question of that.
It was inevitably a girl that drew him deeper into the democracy circle, and eventually to their paramilitary wing. He and Lara killed their first Judge together, and more than likely conceived the boy the same night, and their union felt like a new dawn, that something pure and genuine could arise out of the violent resistance. They were together for seven more years, drifting between the pro-dem outfits, never allying themselves with one for too long, for they knew that Justice Department was watching, and underground groups that got too big or established became complacent and sloppy, and were then infiltrated and raided. Every so often they saw their colleagues executed by televised firing squad. Colm and Lara were wanted felons, and they had their son to protect, so they kept acquaintances and ties to a minimum, the better to walk away at a moment’s notice. During this time, they murdered a further dozen badges, becoming expert in the art of assassination—they even got their own serial-killer media handle, the ‘Snuffkins,’ on account of the cutesy icon Lara had devised, which they’d draw at the scene in the victim’s blood. Her thinking was that it completely devalued the seriousness of the act, made the deaths a joke at the expense of the Grand Hall, which would only enrage Chief Drabbon even more (on that score, by all accounts, it worked spectacularly well). They would have gone on and dispatched twice that number if their luck hadn’t finally run out, and their latest target got off a rogue ricocheting Lawgiver round as he died that went straight through Lara’s right eye. She hit the sked, half her skull missing.
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sp; Grief-stricken, a panicking Colm doubled down on their reclusiveness and took the boy as far off the grid as he could, reasoning there were few they could trust. In any case, Lara’s face was splashed all over the news and the trashzines—one half of the Snuffkins, snuffed out—and any fellow dems would deny ever being affiliated with him, or knowing who he was, once the jays started following the trail. He shielded his son from it as well he could, impressed on him that Father knew best (Mom had landed a job overseas, he told him), and was looking into how they could smuggle themselves abroad (where they could ‘meet up with her’), when the weird shit started going down. Some kind of coup at the top was what he heard, though the reports of half-dead Judges indiscriminately slaughtering the citizens made him shiver as he imagined the corpses of his and Lara’s kills coming back to claim revenge. Whatever the truth behind what was going on, he and his kid had to get out of there.
So it was just the two of them, eschewing company and making their own way in this new world order. Some radical part of him acknowledged that this development showed that his and Lara’s past bloody political action had been justified—that the Judges were only ever one step away from this kind of mass cull of the populace, and if anything the Snuffkins should’ve taken even more down when they had the chance—but mostly he was tired of the carnage. This was no future for anyone.
They were traipsing through thick woodland, and the boy was complaining he was hungry, which he did often. Their supplies were dwindling, and they’d have to hunt again, if they could find edible wildlife, but they still had some strips of dried rabbit meat in his backpack, which would do in the interim. He told his son to hold up, and he slung the rucksack off his shoulders, head buzzing all of a sudden and his throat scratchy—tiredness, he thought, and dehydration. He was about to reach in when what he saw inside made him exclaim aloud in disgust and sling the pack away from him into the foliage.