Tales of Crow- The Complete series Box Set

by Chris Ward

  A game of lives was such a beautiful thing.

  Kurou left his two newest arrivals to recover, heading back into his other laboratory to check on the rest of his Huntsmen. Two of those built from runaways had expired, but the third was operational.

  ‘Awake.’

  The Huntsman sat up.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Alive….’

  ‘That’s good enough. I have a job for you. A little test run, so to speak.’

  ‘As you command….’

  He had fitted each Huntsman with a computerised tracking and visual system. He flicked a switch just behind the Huntsman’s eye to make sure it was operational, feeling a momentary flush of terror as the Huntsman, its jaws no more than a couple of inches from his face, gave a low growl.

  How it felt to be a victim with such a horror bearing down on you … he couldn’t imagine.

  ‘Go,’ he said, stepping back. ‘Head for the town and listen for your instructions. I will relay them to you. Do not expose yourself unless given orders or it is necessary for your survival. In any situation you feel threatened, do not hesitate.’ He stepped back, took an object from a table nearby. ‘Here is your weapon.’

  For a time, Kurou had lorded over a stunning castle in Romania. Before inevitably needing to move on, he had so enjoyed looking through the armoury at the old medieval weaponry. So crude, yet, in a savage time, so effective.

  And of everything, nothing was more elegant than a bow. Requiring power and accuracy, it could execute the cleanest of kills in a fraction of a second.

  The bow he passed the Huntsman was barely the length of his arm and had a far shorter range than a medieval longbow, but it was made of modern materials, and aimed using the Huntsman’s computer system, it carried a deadly level of accuracy.

  ‘Go forth and create havoc,’ Kurou said, patting the Huntsman on the shoulder. ‘I, your creator, shall be watching.’

  The Huntsman turned and ran from the room.

  Kurou headed back to his main office. He pulled up the Huntsman’s systems on a computer screen, establishing both visuals and sound as well as a two-way audible control and a systems-override button in case the Huntsman got out of hand. Then he settled back with a glass of fine wine from Carmichael-Jones’s private stock to enjoy the show.

  Kurou had named the Huntsman Jun after an old, now sadly deceased, adversary. He sipped wine while a dark trail blurred on the screen in front of him, displayed in more detail by an infrared version in a corner box, which was the version Jun was seeing to allow him to navigate in the dark. To Kurou’s dismay, Jun slipped and fell twice before emerging at a main road, although both times he climbed back to his feet, seemingly unharmed.

  Moving along the gravel that replaced where the road had been proved far easier. Jun ran at full speed, an estimated twenty percent faster than his human body might have managed, the metal inserts giving him a power boost, and a small device behind his lungs injecting additional oxygen when Jun’s human lungs began to struggle with the requirement. Still, as he paused at a junction, considering, as his programming told him, to assess each new route for signs of danger, his breathing came in ragged gasps over the audio receiver.

  Kurou frowned, worried the Huntsman would run himself out. Divan could easily outrun Jun, his metal inserts of a lighter grade and his oxygen component larger, but the differences concerned Kurou as he pulled up a spreadsheet in a side bar and compared the two Huntsmen.

  Lower your speed ten percent, he typed into a manual command box, afraid that the Huntsman would have nothing left by the time the fun started.

  Moving a little slower, Jun headed into the outskirts of the town, choosing smaller roads now, pausing frequently to look for people breaking the draconian curfew laws by being outside, watching out for DCA patrols. Every so often, Kurou added a small manual adjustment, sometimes reminding Jun to look up, to check behind him, to consider each alley and side street. The Huntsmen were fifty percent automated, but the other fifty percent—the bad fifty percent, as Kurou called it—was the specimen’s original personality. A brave man would continue to be brave, a coward to shrink away. Having not known his test subjects in their former lives, a test run was as much an education for Kurou as it was for the Huntsmen themselves.

  Across the street from a small temporary building tacked on to the end of a row of houses, the Huntsman came to a stop, crouching down and shrinking back into the shadows well away from the streetlights.

  Kurou watched through Jun’s vision as the DCA agents worked in the local outpost across the street. By all accounts, there were half a dozen across Wells, and more were appearing all the time. One on each street corner was a policy of the current Conservative prime minister, and when Cale got in it was only likely to intensify. Lightweight, metal and glass buildings, they were checkpoints only, and their resident agents would bail at the first sign of trouble. Here, on the eastern part of town, they were a long way from most of the unrest.

  Kurou zoomed Jun’s view in through the outpost’s windows. Two agents were looking at computers; the third sat with his feet up on a desk, reading a newspaper.

  You have your orders, Kurou typed. Good luck.

  Jun began to move forward, low to the ground, and Kurou knew he was moving on all fours, extra inserts used to lengthen his arms addressing the balance between back and front and giving him a more doglike gait. He was across the road so quickly Kurou wondered if he ought to give up on the two-legged models altogether.

  None of the DCA agents were paying attention to what was going on outside. Jun pulled a tiny canister out of his shirt, jerked the door open a couple of inches and tossed it inside.

  The outpost filled with smoke. The DCA agent with his feet up fell off his chair, while the other two scrambled for their weapons. Kurou could also see nothing, but Jun’s vision in the corner box changed to heat sensor, and three warm shapes appeared, frantically moving about. One was turning in circles as though unsure what to do, another was crawling across the floor, and the third was scrambling at his clothes, perhaps looking for a mobile phone or a gun.

  Jun pulled the bow out of his jacket, notched an arrow, and shot the crawling man at pointblank range. From the heat sensor image it appeared to pierce the back of his left shoulder and reemerge through his chest. He slumped to the ground, twitching.

  The man turning in circles knew nothing until Jun’s hands were around his neck. Far stronger than a regular human, Jun barely needed to squeeze before his hands were covered in blood and the DCA agent had gone limp.

  Jun turned to the third man. His claws flashed, shredding the man’s chest. A cry of pain came over the audible receivers. Kurou smiled, delighted at the savagery of the attack. He started to type a command for Jun to capture the man and bring him back to use as a new test subject, then something metallic gleamed out of the smoke.

  The visual image went dead. Kurou heard a few more seconds of audio, the sound of something heavy hitting the floor and a few more groans of pain, then they went dead, too.

  He sat up in his chair, frantically tapping buttons, trying to get Jun back online, but it was no good.

  Something bad had happened, the worst thing that could possibly happen to one of his Huntsmen, the only thing that could quickly kill one because of the fifty percent of its control systems being located there.

  It had been shot in the head.

  20

  Suzanne

  Three of the cars were old electric vehicles, their batteries flat, covered with a film of dust which suggested they hadn’t been used in a long time.

  The fourth was the car Moose had used to rescue them from the gallows. It had a battery charge of fifty percent according to the dash, and the key was still in the ignition. Neither Suzanne nor Patrick had ever driven before, but Patrick took charge simply because he’d read more books about cars than she had. After a few minutes of frustrating jerking and stopping, he managed to figure out the drive functions and the
brake enough to get them going.

  ‘Thank God these electrics are quiet, otherwise they’d have heard us by now.’ Suzanne scowled, receiving an embarrassed grin from Patrick.

  ‘Looks easy, doesn’t it?’ he said. ‘You want to try?’

  ‘Just don’t hit anything.’

  Almost on cue, he over-corrected on a turn and a line of overgrown bushes scraped down one side of the car.

  ‘At least it’s not new.’

  Suzanne rolled her eyes. ‘Just figure out how to drive straight before we hit any major roads. You don’t get a driving permit unless you can actually drive.’

  The road through the trees was narrow, the hedgerows so overgrown as to leave barely enough space for the car to pass. The road surface, however, where it was visible through the weeds and gunky leaf litter, was tarmac. Most of the major roads were in the process of being pulled to align with some madcap government scheme of slowing people down to focus their energies on production now that Britain had separated itself from Europe, but they hadn’t yet got to all the minor roads and lanes that still crisscrossed the countryside. Race had always told Patrick that if you needed to get somewhere and you knew the way through the labyrinth of back roads, you could still drive pretty much anywhere without seeing so much as a bucketful of gravel.

  ‘See if there’s a map anywhere in the side pockets,’ Patrick said. ‘I have absolutely no idea where we are or where to go, but we’re down to forty-five percent charge already and I’m pretty sure we’ll get noticed if we drop by a charging station.’

  She nodded and scrambled around under the seats and in the side pockets to see what was lying about. A GPS system on the dashboard didn’t work, and the front pocket was stuffed with oily rags. Moose had clearly taken little care of the car, and the floor of the back seat was littered with junk: old food wrappers, bits of newspapers, flyers for seemingly incongruous places and events.

  Under everything Suzanne located a small map of Somerset, its edges frayed and browned.

  ‘All right, see if you can get us to some kind of hill or something so we can take a look around.’

  The lane was still winding upward, now moving through steeply sloping pastureland which looked mostly abandoned. They came to the first gateway they had seen that wasn’t completely overgrown and Patrick pulled the car to a stop.

  ‘Handbrake!’ Suzanne shouted as Patrick switched off the engine and opened the door to climb out.

  With a coy smile he jerked the lever up. ‘Getting there,’ he said.

  The gateway had a view of the Somerset Levels. They were clearly in the Mendips somewhere, and Suzanne compared her map to the towns visible on the flats below.

  ‘All right, got it,’ she said. ‘We’re on the east slope of the Mendips, so we need to get right back around to the other side. I suppose since the road we’ve been following was a dead end, we’ll have to keep going straight and try to bear north or south at some point, coming back around.’

  Patrick looked at her. ‘I thought you didn’t want to go back. I thought you wanted to keep running.’

  Suzanne looked down at her hands, wondering if now was the right time to tell Patrick what she had been building up to. It would come as a bit of a shock, but she had never needed to bring it up until now.

  ‘And … I’m worried about my sister.’

  Patrick turned to stare at her. ‘Your what? I thought you were an only child.’

  ‘She lives with my mother in Glastonbury. My mother remarried. I told you that, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yeah, you might have mentioned it, but you didn’t say you had a sister.’

  ‘Half-sister. Kelly. She’s nine. Or at least she would be now. I haven’t seen her in a couple of years.’

  ‘Suzanne, what the fuck? I thought we told each other everything.’

  ‘Patrick, we’ve only been together a year. Sure, it feels like a lot longer, but I bet there’s a ton of stuff you’ve never told me.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Suzanne’s eyes blazed. ‘Well, you neglected to tell me your older brother was a dirty pervert until I caught him spying on me.’

  ‘I didn’t know—’

  ‘Yeah, right. You grew up together.’

  ‘But come on, you have a little sister?’

  Suzanne shrugged. ‘We’re not close. When I was a kid, Mum left Dad for a younger guy and Dad was pretty mad, so he cut off all contact. I only got back in touch with her myself when I was sixteen. Turned out she’d been living just up the road in Glastonbury the whole time, had married this guy and they’d had a daughter. I’ve only seen her a couple of times, but we got on all right.’

  ‘And you want to go check on her?’

  Suzanne nodded. ‘The DCA will have already been to yours and mine. They might have staked out both houses, so going there will leave us fucked. But it took me ages to find my mother. I had to pay some guy to track her down.’

  ‘When you were sixteen? Pay with what?’

  Suzanne aimed a slap at him. ‘I didn’t suck his dick, if that’s what you’re thinking. I stole money out of my father’s wallet. Yeah, I’m not proud of it, but whatever.’

  Patrick sighed. ‘All right, so you reckon it’ll take the DCA a while to track her down.’

  ‘I hope. And the guy, the new husband, he works in the transportation industry. He might be able to blag us some tickets on a train into London or up north somewhere.’

  Patrick smiled. ‘So keep on running like I suggested?’

  ‘What the fuck else do you expect?’

  Patrick nodded. ‘Well, it’s better than no plan. Let’s do it.’

  They got back in the car and continued on, Patrick driving slowly with the hedgerows brushing the car on either side, Suzanne navigating along a series of narrow country lanes to keep him off the main roads where they might encounter the DCA. Soon they came down out of the Mendips and on to the Somerset Levels, driving along exposed roads cutting through farmland.

  ‘What if they have helicopters?’ Patrick said.

  ‘They don’t,’ Suzanne answered. ‘My dad told me the oil’s nearly gone. All the stuff he was supposed to build had to be electric, battery rechargeable. He said they’re building these massive wind farms in Scotland to power the entire country.’

  ‘They should just rejoin Europe.’

  Suzanne shrugged. ‘I think the government’s scared of another war.’

  The car bumped out of the lane they were traversing and onto the hard-pressed gravel that had once been a major road. Patrick immediately slowed their speed as stones cracked against the car’s mudguards.

  ‘I guess the fun part of the drive is over.’

  ‘Go left here. Perhaps we should stash the car somewhere.’

  They trundled slowly along the gravel road. The outskirts of Glastonbury appeared in the distance, a few houses growing into a larger town.

  ‘It’s over there,’ Suzanne said. ‘Across those fields.’

  Patrick tapped the dash. ‘We’re at five percent anyway.’

  He turned the car through an open field gateway and parked it in behind a hedge. The grass was overgrown, the gate no more than rotten pieces of wood.

  ‘There’s a chance no one will find it for a while,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  They hiked across the field, emerging over an old stile onto another road heading into the town. Suzanne took the lead, taking the residential streets she thought she remembered, but getting lost a couple of times, doubling back, before finally coming to the end of a cul-de-sac and nodding.

  ‘There. Number five, on the left.’

  The street was a quiet line of neat, modern houses. A communal lawnmower funded by the street committee kept all the gardens tidy, and the residents were far friendlier than those on her own street, keeping an eye out for each other. It was mid-afternoon, though, so everyone would be working.

  Suzanne stopped. ‘Don’s car’s in the driveway.’

  ‘Who’s Don?’

/>   ‘My mother’s new husband. He has a car permit, but he should be at work.’

  ‘Perhaps he walked. Hey, why don’t we steal it?’

  Suzanne rolled her eyes. ‘Yeah, that wouldn’t get us noticed, would it? Look, he’s a fat bastard. He never walks anywhere.’

  She took a couple of steps forward, but Patrick put a hand on her arm. ‘Maybe you should wait here while I take a look.’

  Suzanne gave him a sarcastic smile. ‘I appreciate the thought, but I don’t need a hero. Come on.’

  ‘What if there are DCA hiding out, waiting for us?’

  ‘We’ll be careful.’

  She knew it was foolhardy to approach the house, but she didn’t care. She needed to know one way or other what had happened to her mother and sister. The house looked silent, untouched, but there was no way Don, a stout defender of the government, would have stayed home without reason.

  The front door was ajar. Suzanne climbed over the garden’s front wall and sneaked across the lawn to the house.

  The windows of the other houses stared at her in silent accusation. With a grimace, she put her shoulder to the door and pushed it open.

  It got stuck halfway on something lying behind.

  A body.

  Suzanne nudged aside a polished boot leading to a pressed pair of suit trousers and a shiny belt. A gun holster was unclipped, the gun missing. A baton on the body’s right hip lay in a pool of drying blood.

  ‘He’s DCA,’ Patrick said from behind her, making Suzanne jump. ‘Looks like he got stabbed.’

  ‘Jesus, don’t do that!’ Suzanne hissed. ‘You scared the shit out of me.’

  ‘I suppose that was the guy left to wait for us. Where is everyone?’

  Suzanne looked around. Bloody footprints led up the hall and into the kitchen. Careful not to leave any prints of her own, Suzanne followed them.

  ‘Mum? Don? Kelly?’ she called softly, repeating their names over and over. ‘Is anyone here?’

  Despite her father’s wealth, her mother’s house was far more opulent than the house Suzanne had grown up in. Her father had never believed in excessive spending, and one of the wedges driven between them had been her mother’s wish for a better environment for her and her daughter. Here, Suzanne saw all the kinds of ornate bookshelves, tables, and cupboards that her father would have turned his nose up at, preferring old hand-me-downs or the cheapest items a furniture store had to offer.