Prequel

by T. K. Malone

  No, what she’d experienced was slick. Sticks had said it, it’d take organization to hold her, feed her, torture her—film her.

  “Either,” Sticks said, “there’s a whole army on your doorstep, or someone’s messing with your head.”

  “But why?”

  “That’s what you gotta find out. Shoot, is there anything you know about the place?”

  Teah let out a long breath. “It was at least four hundred yards square… No, no, hang on. I must have been held in the old Angel Bay Hotel. The soldiers that rescued me, they showed me…” Her head slumped down into her hands. “God, I don’t know—I just don’t know. I was at the top of the Bay View hotel and held in the Angel Bay Hotel, but how? My head was scrambled most of the time.”

  “With what?”

  “They kept injecting me. Someone…Roy, I think, called it ‘swirly, swirly’.”

  “Hallucinogen?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “So, you could have been anywhere?”

  “But I heard Roy, Sumner, the other man, they got shot…by your men. I felt their blood.”

  “Did you see them?”

  She wrung her hair and looked up at the forest, through the trees and over the valley. “They’re preparing for the end of the world,” she whispered, changing the subject while she grouped her thoughts.

  “Sure looks that way. Gotta get me an invite into there.”

  “Can I have another smoke?” She asked, desperate to try an sate her body with its mellowness.

  “Sure—careful though…”

  “I know, I’ll get hooked. Thing is, don’t much look like it’ll get a shot at killin’ me,” and suddenly remembered saying that before.

  Sticks lit it for her. “There ya go.”

  “Would you want to?” Teah asked him. “Want to survive the apocalypse?”

  Lighting his own, Sticks sat back against the trunk. “’Course. Way I look at it, life’s been fairly shit so far, and I ain’t had a bad time, so if it gets better, I might have a blast.”

  “Blast?”

  Sticks chuffed a laugh. “Blast. If it gets worse, it’ll just be slightly shittier, but I’ll bet not by much.” He blew out a great puff of smoke. “I’d like to stick around to find out.”

  “You reckon there will be?”

  He looked around at her, a grin plastered on his face like usual. “An apocalypse, nah, none of them have got the nuts. Oster Prime, well, he ain’t long elected, and with what the Russians are doing in Europe, hell, that’ll teach the world not to press the big button. Nah, I think we’ll be alright.”

  “Then why dig the hole,” Teah pointed out.

  “In case he has got the nuts—that’s why—never know what them politicians’ll do to save their hides. You never answered my question; did you see ‘em? Did you see this Roy fella die?”

  Teah knew the answer, she just didn’t want to say the words. She’d accepted, no, she’d rejoiced, the thought that Roy, Kin’ell and Sumner were dead, and the thought that they might not be was too much to bear. “I had a hood on,” she muttered.

  “That’s a bastard. Hood, hallucinogens—strikes me we only know you were rescued from the Angel Bay and that a couple of folks were killed. Strikes me, someone don’t want you to know what happened.” He shrugged. “You’re precious to him or her.”

  “Precious?” she said, incredulous. “Tortured, beaten and you say precious?”

  “They didn’t kill you,” Sticks pointed out. “Why?”

  Why? She thought. They’d got everything out of her—she was sure of that. And if they’d wanted her dead, like they’d said, why put her AI back? She took her last draw on the smoke. There was only one conclusion; they both knew that. They wanted her alive.

  “They aren’t finished with me yet.”

  Sticks patted her knee. “It seems not. And it puts you in an odd predicament.”

  “How?”

  Looking around the valley, Sticks pushed himself up. “I brought you up here so you could run—I wouldn’t have stopped you. Thought you might want a clean start—heck, I’da even told you how to get to Morton, or even the preppers camp, but you didn’t, and now I know why.”

  “Why I didn’t run?” She highly doubted Sticks knew the answer to that. She didn’t run because… and then it dawned on her. It wasn’t the baby. How could it be? And if they knew she was pregnant, surely pumping her full of drugs, beating, torturing her were an even more heinous crime. What mother would bring a child up in that city, that environ? Her eyes darted around. Could she live out here? What about Zac? If what Sticks was hypothesizing was true, then so might Zac be, he might be trying to find her. Teah stood. “So tell me, tell me why I don’t run.”

  “Because you’re a stiff, and you gonna want justice—you gonna want to know what’s up. You wanna run into the hills, to leave, but you’re scared, scared of everything you’ve ever heard about life outside the city. Me? If I thought I could I’d push you all the way to Aldertown, I would. Get out of that city, it’s toxic.”

  “Yeah well,” she said, and followed him as he started walking back to the encampment.

  “Yeah well,” Sticks replied. “If you ever do decide, don’t go straight up Morton Valley—too narrow—you’ll get caught at Morton Deep. Don’t go to Sendro either—too many crawling to and from the Pen. Na, go further down, find the old road, takes you past this camp, then cross the valley up a bit, over the ridge and head up.” He turned and smiled. “That’s the way I’d go t’get to the preppers.”

  She shook her head, not quite sure how to feel about the young soldier. Everything was black and white to him—easy, easy though his life had been far from it.

  “Why don’t you come with me?”

  Sticks laughed at that.

  “And who’d look after Commander Croft?” and nearly choked on his words as they emerged from the trees. Croft was waiting for them. He beckoned them to fall in with him as he marched to his tent.

  Sitting on the edge of his desk, he looked Teah up and down.

  “Who is this woman?” he asked, and passed a print to her.

  Teah stared down at the picture; it was May. She was splayed out on some grass, a bullet hole in her head.

  “She was found in The Free World Park. There was a drone right by her. The stiffs that found her ID’d you fleeing the scene.”

  “But how could they? I was here.”

  Croft looked like he was struggling with his words. “This happened two days ago. It seems the people we shot as we rescued you were carnies claiming the bounty that Charm put on your head. You been lying to us, Teah?” but Teah didn’t answer, her head exploding with confusion.

  “Ain’t like that, Commander,” Sticks said.

  “Like what?”

  “She’s been messed up, tortured, I can see it, you can see it. There’s something going on.”

  Croft took the print back. “I spoke to the men who rescued you. They said the call came from a woman, came over the emergency channel.”

  Teah felt as though the ground had opened up beneath her. She felt like she was being swallowed, drawn into web, trapped by its silken bonds.

  “No,” she whispered. “It’s not true.” She looked Croft in the eye. “None of it is true.”

  Chapter Eight

  The car skidded away from the camp, a black saloon, tinted windows, two Free World flags on either side of its hood, fluttering in the wind. They’d put her in the back, her arms cuffed in front of her. The two men that had escorted her from Croft’s tent were the stereotypical agents, black suits, black shades, bulging muscles, bulging temples, and neither was afraid to flash his gun. The orders that Croft received were quite emphatic too. “Hand her over, and do it without question.” Though Sticks had protested, Croft a little, their words didn’t even elicit a response from the men. Now they sandwiched her in the backseat, another agent driving.

  Her confusion was complete, her despair not far behind it. What had she done
to deserve any of this? Questions queued up in her throat waiting to be asked, but her sideways glances at both agents tempered their eagerness. She knew she’d get nothing out of either men. Whatever her fate, it was not in their hands.

  The valley diminished, leveling as it approached the freeway that ran the length of the coast. There was no traffic to hinder their way; she assumed that cars, trucks and bikes were rare out here—fuel precious now. They soon left the valley behind, the freeway behind, and were on the road to The Black City.

  Had they now accused her of murder? Of murdering the very woman that had facilitated her torture, had they really accused her of that? And how would she plead her innocence, when it sounded so far-fetched, so contrived, not even a scar to vouch for her story.

  “Fuck this,” she mumbled, as the car slowed and stopped at the city’s checkpoint. They were waved through and into the toxic belt of land; the city’s perimeter. She looked at it as they passed, its uneven hillocks of buried waste making it resemble dunes, little clefts in between, cluttered with discarded engines, pipes, cars. It was a memorial to a time only recently passed, a time before The Grid had become close to self-sufficient. She knew why Charm kept it that way, why he didn’t clear it up. It hemmed folk in, giving the drones a killing field, stopping most carnies smuggling—making that a near exclusive club. Was Charm now moving to eradicate his opposition? Was she just caught in the cross fire?

  They reached its end; Teah expected the car to carry on, to take her through the shit-bit as Sticks had named it. Instead, they turned onto a muddy trail separating the two desperate pieces of land, and Teah knew exactly where they were going.

  The pipe rose out of the ground like a giant worm screaming at the sky. Its blackness matched the mood of the gray clouds, the dark of the day. The car drew to a halt twenty feet away from it, but the agents didn’t move, didn’t speak. A chill ran through her. This was the exact spot where she’d rescued Connor, where he’d died.

  She recalled the day vividly, and yet at the same time it was a blank. It was like it had never happened, but she knew it must have. Foggy memories mixed with clear snippets, all of the call to rescue a lost boy, of approaching, running toward the pipe, but then nothing. The next thing she recalled was waking up in the hospital. Then a small leap forward in time, and she visited the boy, found out his name was Connor, met his brother Zac. Her memories where like a film played in her mind, one where numerous frames had been redacted.

  The agent on one side opened his door and got out. “Miss?” he said, by way of invitation, and held the door open for her. Stepping out, she looked up at the billowing, gray clouds and shivered with the growing breeze. Looking past the agent, into the throat of the vast pipe, she saw a man, his back facing her, his gloved hands locked.

  “Josiah Charm,” she muttered to herself.

  Teah had met him once and once only. She’d met him at the hospital, sitting at Connor’s side. He’d said something peculiar to her—she was sure of that. She remembered him turning, looking up at her as she’d shuffled to Connor’s bedside in her hospital gown. He’d smiled and mouthed the words, the strange words, but try as she might, she couldn’t remember a single one of them, just that they were odd, somehow out of place. Now, she stood near the very tube where it all happened, rooted to the spot and staring at his back. The agent got back into the car and it skidded away, a cloud of dust billowing around her.

  Charm never moved, never even acknowledged her presence. For a while she just stood there looking at him, wondering what the leader of The Black City wanted with her. He was an average man, remarkable really, she thought, given the power he wielded. Young, for his station, perhaps early forties, his mousy hair showing a taint of gray, against his rich, black overcoat. He was ordinary in every way apart from the extraordinary presence that radiated from him; pure power.

  “Why did you kill her?” he asked.

  At first, Teah didn’t answer—the question not what she’d expected. Somehow, she’d assumed that Charm would spill the truth, tell her of the plan and maybe commend her on her part in bringing it to fruition.

  “I didn’t.”

  He turned then, framed against the endless black of the pipe. “Oh but you did,” he said, and smiled. “You see, she failed because of you.”

  “You shot her?”

  His grin, when it came, sent a shiver through her. She nearly collapsed where she stood, her legs suddenly losing all their strength. He inclined his head slightly, as though a little confused. “Me? Good God no. Why would I have killed her?”

  “But she worked for you.”

  Charm took a couple of steps closer to her. “And what on earth makes you think that?”

  “She was no carnie.”

  “No,” he said, and stepped closer still. “No carnie.”

  “Then if she wasn’t working for you, and…” Teah tried to think. “Who?” she finally said, drawing a blank.

  Charm raised his eyebrows in apparent surprise. “Really? You’re giving up that easily? After all that you have learned? If not me, then who? Com’on Teah, the question should not be beyond you. Who else would have the gall to kill her and lay her out for all to see? Who would have the stones to mess with my park?”

  Teah could only think of one man. “Cornelius Clay.”

  His burst of laughter told her that answer was wrong. “Do I waste all my budget on training you lot? Cornelius Clay is out of the game, really, The Drone Slayer stalking The Free World Park again? Tut-tut, you must do better than that. And don’t say Zac Clay, or Billy Flynn, or any of those so-called Black City Riders, they lack the finesse.” Charm leaned in close. “And one would hope, given your relationship, that Clay would treat you better than that.”

  He reached out, now close to her, and let his finger brush against her cheek.

  “You don’t remember, do you?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “You will in time.”

  “Do I have any?”

  “Any?”

  “Time.”

  Charm pulled his collar up, tucking his chin in, and then thrust his hands deep into his coat pockets. “Of course you have time, you are my queen. That is why they want you dead.”

  “Queen?” she repeated.

  “That concerns you more than who?”

  Teah put her hands in her own pockets, surprised when they curled around what felt like a pack of smokes. She pulled them out. “Sticks,” she whispered, and smiled.

  “What?” Charm asked.

  “You can’t break sticks,” Teah said, and lit one of his smokes. “Oster Prime, the answer to your question is Oster Prime. He is the only one who could set up an organization within The Black City.”

  Charm took his hands out of his pockets and clapped. He reached forward. “Please?”

  She gave him the smokes. “Not bad,” he said, but she didn’t know whether he was referring to the smokes or her answer. “Let’s assume you’re right. What possible interest could a man like Oster Prime have in you? How has his beady eyes fallen from afar and landed on a stiff from The Black City, ask yourself that.”

  “I don’t know,” was all Teah could say.

  For the briefest of moments, she thought she saw Charm’s expression soften, then he let out a dribble of smoke that curled up obscuring his face. When it cleared, he was stone-faced again.

  “You should never have rescued the boy,” he said. “The damage could have been repaired. It leaves me with a conundrum, and that is what to do with you. Understand this, Teah, you are both incredibly precious to me, and at the same time, incredibly dangerous. Queen, you may be, but I’ll tell you this; I have let my queen fall before and still won the game.” He tapped his fingers on his lips. “What say we give chance a say? What say you to that?”

  “You talk in riddles, Josiah Charm,” she replied.

  He let loose a small laugh. “Riddles are all I have.” He reached inside his jacket and drew out a gun. “You can never go bac
k to my city, never. Your mind is polluted with your recent trials. You’d be constantly looking over your shoulder, wondering when the next May will lure you into a trap. Are you wondering about that? Do you still think you were just a random target picked up in just another ambush? Oster Prime wanted to find out what was inside your mind, and I believe he failed—that was why May was killed. He did, however, make a huge mistake and exposed his meddling to me.”

  Charm threw his cigarette butt down and stepped it out, then looking up at the sky. “They tell me it’s going to rain for a week. That should douse the fires.”

  “Fires?”

  He looked at her, square in the eyes. “I’ve located the complex you were in—Prime’s secret HQ, I suppose you’d call it. Quite clever, really. Did you know there used to be a rail terminus right where we stand… Well, a few hundred yards out. When the cities were connected to the towns, other cities, the coastal lines, I’d imagine it was a busy terminus—so many tunnels. It seems he set up there—even tapped into the electricity. Clever, as I’ve said, but soon to be… let’s just say it won’t endure much past today.”

  “So you have me picked up for a murder you believe I had nothing to do with?”

  He threw her pack of smokes back to her. “Ah, but you had everything to do with it. I’ve come to an arrangement with Zac Clay. Connor will be taken under my wing, away from the chance that Prime may discover him.”

  “What’s…” Teah made to ask, but wondered whether she truly wanted to know. She stared at his gun. “You going to use that?”

  “Only if I have to.”

  “What do you want?”

  Charm took a couple of steps back. “What I want is for that boy never to have gone into that tunnel. What I want is for you to have never rescued him. But we don’t always get what we want, do we? Now, now I must make the best of the situation I find myself in. I want you to start running, Teah, running like you’ve never run before, and if you live, my choice was right, and if you die, my problem is solved.”