by Steve Feasey
He stopped and scanned the land ahead of him, looking out for the telltale spots on the ground. As he did so, he reached up with his human hand and felt the area where the bullet had impacted with his metallic skull. The dent was larger than he’d first thought, and it was without a doubt the reason for the malfunctions of his ‘augmented self’. Who knew what damage had been done to the high-tech equipment, not to mention his real brain. Ever since the attack he’d had a raging headache that refused to shift, and for some reason the pain inside his skull made him think of Svenson, and how she’d react when she saw the damage; no doubt she’d have him under the saw or knife as soon as he walked in the door. If there was anything of him left to walk through the door. He might have been imagining it, but he had the distinct impression that the areas where his human body parts interfaced with the bionic augmentations were more tender than they’d been when he’d been taking his medication. He certainly wasn’t imagining the red and puffy, sore-to-touch skin at the ‘interface zones’. Maybe my transplants are being rejected? he thought, and the idea made him laugh out loud. The sound had a harsh braying quality and didn’t sound to his ears like the laugh of a completely sane person. Too much heat, he thought, and guffawed again.
Thank goodness the sun was setting. Although he was both dehydrated and hungry, his mood was lighter than it had been for some time now. No longer having the whingeing and whining ARM unit with him was part of it, but it was also because he was close. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he did. Soon he’d be at the place where those freak kids were hiding out, and then he would settle the outstanding business that existed between them.
The HUD dropped out again, and with it the filter he’d been using to track the stolen vehicle, returning his view of the world to that of a one-eyed human. Swearing aloud, the cyborg banged at the side of his head with his bionic hand, the impact making a dull clanging noise and doing nothing to diminish his headache. This hit-and-hope trick had worked last time: the heads-up display had returned, along with a stream of data about faulty systems and diagnostic faults, all of which Steeleye Mange had ignored or deleted. This time there was nothing.
‘Dammit!’
He raised the fist again, ready to give his skull an almighty whack, when he stopped. He’d been so reliant on following the data provided by his cyborg equipment, he’d almost forgotten to take in his surroundings. He’d finally made the crest of the hill he’d been climbing, and below him, spread out at the bottom of a shallow valley, was a desolate city. That there was anything left of it at all after the Last War was a wonder, and Steeleye reasoned that the geographical layout of the land all about it – hemmed in as it was by the hills – was the reason. He didn’t need infrared or heat vision to tell him this was the renegade children’s encampment. He knew. It was perfect. If he’d been on the run in the same way they were, he wouldn’t have hesitated to go to ground here. Grinning, he looked down at his own feet. Sure enough, there, next to them in the dirt, was the smudged impression of a tyre track, and he was sure that if he’d had his HUD working there would be a small speck of the telltale residue somewhere in the dirt around it.
His shadow stretched out off to his left, and he turned his head to glance at the swiftly setting sun. A small slither of intense orange peeked back at him over the horizon. It would be gone in a few minutes, and that suited Steeleye just fine. Looking for a way down into the basin below, he spotted the walkway at the far end of the ruined flyover. Humming to himself, he strode towards it, ignoring the clunking noises his leg was making. Maybe today wasn’t going to be too bad after all.
The dead city was eerie, made all the more so by the silver moonlight it was bathed in now. It was too quiet, and the silence gave him the impression that the mummified dead who occasionally stared out at him from the shattered earth might at any moment rise up and attack him, the unwelcome interloper. Steeleye liked the place. It had a menace to it that he could relate to.
‘HELLO!’ he shouted. ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’
He paused to take another look around.
Where? Where would be the best place to hide a six- or seven-strong group of individuals among all this wreckage and –
He spotted it. He must have looked over it already, but now he was looking at it from another direction he could see how the opening in the ground wasn’t just a cave-in as he’d first assumed. It was too regular in shape, and the area around it too ordered, as if much of the rubble had been cleared recently. But the real giveaway was the pair of trousers he could now see spread out on top of the mangled concrete outcrop not far away, no doubt put there to dry.
The mutant cyborg picked his way over to the concealed entrance, staring down into the rectangular opening and the stairs that led down into a perfect blackness. He’d heard of such places. It was rumoured that huge subterranean transporters had operated between the six underground cities, or Arks, that the Pures had hidden in throughout the Last War and the years that followed it. If that was indeed true, it made sense that the pre-war inhabitants of Scorched Earth might have had something similar. He wondered what it must have been like back then, living in a world where humankind was all one. No Pures or Mutes, just one homogenised species called people. He decided he didn’t like the idea. Division causes fear and mistrust, and those were two things Steeleye knew how to use to his benefit.
There was a faint whiff of something on the air coming up out of that place. Fuel? He banged the side of his head again, hoping to jolt his visual feedback systems back to life, but nothing happened. Night vision might have been nice right now.
Screw it, he thought. Having come all this way, he was damned if he was going to creep around like some goddamn sneak thief. He’d take these little upstarts on, mutant to mutant.
‘Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in!’ he shouted down into the shadows. ‘Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll tear your underground hidey-hole apart!’
Silas
‘What was that?’ Silas said, looking up from the sock he was darning with a needle and thread. He thought he’d heard a crash, like something falling down outside, followed by what might have been a human grunt. He looked over at Brick, but the big mutant clearly hadn’t heard anything and sat, oblivious even to Silas’s question, humming tunelessly to himself. If the mutant colossus had asked how long it would be until Rush would be back once, he must have asked a hundred times.
Slowly getting to his feet, Silas took a few steps towards the entrance and then stood perfectly still, listening. Nothing.
They’re fine, he told himself, knowing his edginess had everything to do with his anxiety for the four children currently not with him: the three he’d sent off to C4, and Anya, who’d not been heard from since she’d transformed and gone off on her own. Flea had volunteered to go out and scout the surrounding land, looking for her, but each time she returned, exhausted from her extensive searches, she did so alone.
Silas was about to turn and return to his work when he froze. There it was again, louder. This time it was unmistakably the sound of a man’s voice carrying down the stairs from above.
Brick too had heard it now. The big guy quickly scrambled to his feet and stared across the room in the direction of the gate-like shutter separating the stairs from the area where they’d set up home. Silas gestured to Brick to stay silent when he was struck by the expression on the other’s face. It was almost as if he recognised …
Silas gave a small gasp as it dawned on him why Brick was staring agog like that. He also knew the voice. He should do – he’d locked horns with Steeleye Mange before, back in Muteville. If Mange was up there, his arrival could only spell trouble.
‘Brick!’ he hissed, jabbing a finger in the direction of a small pile of blankets in one corner. ‘Wake Flea.’ As the big guy did as he was directed, Silas moved towards the stairs to check the security gate was locked.
Having woken up almost the instant the giant mutant’s hand had touched her
shoulder, Flea suddenly appeared at her guardian’s side. Her transition from deep asleep to fully awake was as quick as everything else about her. He beckoned Brick over too.
‘What?’ Flea said, the word dragged out a little so it sounded odd: wh-a-a-t? Her powers made it hard for her to work at the speed of the others. Her perception of the world and the people in it was that they were super-slow-moving, and even though she’d gone a long way to being able to control this aspect of her special ability, learning to slow herself down so she could function more normally, she still struggled to form words and make herself understood.
‘We have to go down into the tunnels,’ he said. Brick groaned with dread. ‘I’m not going to lie to you, Brick, it’s very dark down there, but Flea and I will be with you. We can’t stay here.’ He turned to Flea. ‘Do you remember the man who captured you on your way to the C4 slums? The man who made you steal for him? The same man that captured Brick here?’
‘Bad man,’ Brick said to Flea. He pointed to his face. ‘Silver ball for eye.’
She nodded.
‘That’s who is up there. I don’t know how he found us, but he has. So you see, we don’t have any choice. We have to go. Now.’
* * *
They paused at the top of what had once been an escalator. Dark didn’t even begin to describe the sucking blackness below them. The strange ridged metal steps disappeared after only a few metres. Beyond that, nothing. When they’d first arrived and set up camp, Silas had made some torches: metal rods around the top of which he’d wrapped fuel-soaked rags. But even though he and Flea now each held one, they knew they mustn’t light them until they were well out of sight and in the underground tunnels themselves. Brick wasn’t allowed to turn on his own little dynamo-powered torch either, but he held the plastic contraption jammed up against his face, tears rolling down his cheeks as he forced himself to step out, down into the darkness.
They were almost two-thirds of the way down when the voice from above boomed for them to halt.
Steeleye
Luck was on the cyborg’s side. Or maybe it was something more than luck. Maybe it was destiny that was aiding and abetting him. Why else had he turned his head a split second before the ARM sniper had squeezed the trigger, avoiding certain and instant death? Why else had he been led here by a trail of chemical droplets that only he could see? And why else, when his leg momentarily failed on the second step down to the underground hideout, sending him tumbling down the rest of the stairway and causing him to smash his head on the concrete floor at the bottom, had his HUD suddenly blinked back to life? Destiny. He was being tried. Fate was playing games with him, testing his ability to keep going and overcome the obstacles it threw up in his way. And if that was the case, it could only mean one thing: he was being groomed for greatness. He’d always known as much – that he was destined to be so much more than the gangland boss of Dump Two. No, he was far better than that, and when he took these hybrid kids back to Melk and won his citizenship, he’d show the Pures what it was to be powerful. How long might it take for an individual like him to rise to the level of power that someone like Melk enjoyed? Not too long, he thought.
Steeleye picked himself up off the floor. Although working again, the heads-up display wasn’t completely functional. It winked off and on again three times before finally settling as a fuzzy, blinking version of what it had once been.
A security gate separated the bottom of the stairs from the rest of the underground space. The thing was made of metal and, when pulled across into the thick concrete walls as it was now, looked as if it would be difficult to shift. A quick shoulder-charge confirmed this to be the case. Gripping the gate and placing one foot against the wall next to it, Steeleye leaned back and heaved, enjoying the screech as the metal began to buckle and give way under the immense force. When he’d created enough of a gap to squeeze through, he paused to assess how best to proceed. The head-mounted light appeared to be operational, but if anyone was waiting to ambush him on the other side of this gate, it wouldn’t do to give them such an obvious and easy target. Not until he knew what he was dealing with. There were other ways to spot rats in the sewers. He switched to thermal instead and carried on.
Before leaving they’d taken the time to turn off the generators that had powered the lights, but the stink of them still filled the underground space. The things they’d recently touched glowed in his new view of the world. If indeed this was a place Old Earthers had come to journey underground, there must be a series of tunnels that their vehicles had travelled through, and he was betting this was the escape route the rebel children would take now. He didn’t have to go far to find the top of the stairway leading deep down, further into the ground. Almost at the bottom, the thermal imaging picked up the three fugitives slowly descending. Three human-shaped harlequins, different colours glowing where their bodies gave off most heat, carefully making their way through the blackness.
He could have taken them in the dark. That would have been the easiest thing in the world, just fire down on them from his elevated position and snuff their miserable lives out. But he wanted the albino, and if the white-skinned freak was one of this trio, simply eliminating him so quickly in this manner wouldn’t do. Oh no. Besides, what was the point in having all this high-tech gear if he wasn’t able to have a little fun?
He liked the way they cowered and grabbed at each other when he shouted down at them to stop. One of them stepped back a little too quickly and would have fallen down the rest of the steep staircase had the others not grabbed them. Now they all clung to each other in the blackness, staring this way and that for any clue as to where he might be.
‘Look at you,’ Steeleye taunted them. ‘Three blind mice. Maybe we should shed a little light on this scene before I come after you with the carving knife, eh?’
He activated the light on his HUD, turning it up to maximum brightness so he could get his first real look at the trio. He knew them all. The big guy – Brick? – was the one he’d captured and taken back to C4 for Melk not so long ago; the smallest of the three, was a petite redheaded girl he’d forced to become a pickpocket for him. But it was the third member of the group that he was most pleased to see. The older guy had accompanied the white-skinned freak on the first occasion they’d met and had directed the albino to crawl around inside Steeleye’s head, making him hallucinate and see terrible things. He was their leader. He’d openly threatened Mange in front of his own men, and when he’d left, taking the redhead and her guardian with him, he’d turned back and grinned. Well, he wasn’t grinning now.
Silas. That was his name. The man turned to the other two and shouted for them to run, shoving them down the stairs away from him as he did so. Then, wielding what looked like a metal pole with a bunch of rags tied to one end, he came charging up the stairs, heading straight for Steeleye.
Maybe it was Steeleye’s astonishment at the gall of the man, maybe it was an electronic malfunction, but what happened next was a terrible error on the cyborg’s part. He should have simply used his shoulder-mounted PEG to shoot the man. His HUD had already locked on to the target, the crosshairs tracking Silas’s surprisingly swift progress up the stairs. All that was needed was for Steeleye to blast him back down before turning his attention on the others. Instead, he got his command sequences mixed up and called up the miniature rocket launcher he’d used against the ARM agents. The crosshairs disappeared, replaced by a small red triangle. Steeleye ignored the additional red warning signals that flashed in front of his eyes, dismissing them as just another bunch of dumb system errors.
It was only as the tiny anti-personnel rockets hissed upwards out of the launcher that he realised what he’d done and what the warnings had been trying to tell him. Silas was almost on top of him, but Steeleye paid him little heed; he was frantically trying to access the abort command for the rockets. Only as the steel pole swung down towards him did he take evasive action, lifting his metal arm to ward off the blow just as the rockets sm
ashed into the ceiling overhead. The explosion in the confined space was deafening, and Steeleye was vaguely aware of the redhead girl emitting a loud scream before disappearing in a blur of motion.
The ceiling came crashing down, great chunks of concrete hammering into flesh and bone and metal, burying everything beneath it.
Flea
She’d been so close! As soon as she saw the rocket fired by the cyborg, she knew she had fractions of a second to react. But even fractions of a second could be a very long time to somebody as fast as Flea. As she set off she watched the pencil-sized rockets’ propulsion systems firing, and she instantly recognised what was going to happen. The rockets, two of them, moved quickly even in her super-slow-motion version of the world, but she thought she could reach Silas in time. She had to. Between Silas and the bottom of the staircase, where Brick and Flea were, there must have been forty or fifty stairs in all, and she was only three or four steps away when the rockets struck the ceiling and exploded. Flea glanced up to see the flames spreading out from the point of impact like a deadly flower slowly opening its petals. She stretched forward and grabbed a handful of Silas’s shirt from behind, peering past him and registering the look of horror on Steeleye’s face as the full implications of what he’d done dawned on him. Her plan had been to simply yank Silas back towards her, even though doing so meant there was a good chance the two of them would fall down the full length of the escalator, but his momentum as he swung the pole at the cyborg carried him forward instead, sending them both off balance.
She’d misjudged how long she had.
She dodged the first few chunks of stone as they rained down around her, but one caught her a painful blow on the leg. She twisted about but was struck again, this time by an even larger hunk of stone that connected flush between her shoulder blades, forcing her to her knees. From that point, she knew there was no getting up. Writhing in agony, she watched in horror as a slab of concrete almost as big as she was plummeted down on to her.
