In the Shadow of London

by Chris Ward

  ‘It would probably be easier.’

  He patted her on the back to get her climbing again, feeling a sudden frustration with his masculine weakness. He could have just set her loose on the street, or insisted to Taku that she stay there. He had other bolt-holes too, ones that were infinitely easier to access. He kept telling himself he was getting her out of harm’s way until any fallout over her rescue had blown over, but part of him felt like he was setting her up like a secret lover.

  When he reached the ledge, the gloom in the shaft now so deep that he could barely see his own hands in front of him, the loose panel had been pushed inwards. Airie had already gone inside.

  David glanced down. It was only fifty feet to the bottom of the shaft but it looked like forever. He watched for a few seconds, making sure no one was hiding in the shadows, watching their progress, then he pushed open the panel and climbed inside.

  The panel covered the end of an under-floor ventilation shaft. The collapse of the rear staircase had made access to the third floor impossible. The first and second floors were accessible by climbing the exterior walls, but an overhanging balcony that surrounded the third floor made it near impossible to get any further. Brave looters climbing the shaft had accessed the floors above, but there was no way into the third floor without shifting a heap of rubble.

  Looking up at the building from outside, then inspecting it from the inside, it had taken David several days to figure out a way in. When he had finally found the ventilation shaft he had expected others would have done also, but the apartments on the third floor were untouched. Barely able to believe his luck, he had fitted the panel to appear like part of the wall, and over several months he had slowly built up a store of goods to use in an emergency.

  When he climbed up through the hole in the corridor floor just outside the largest of the three apartments, the one he had commandeered for himself, he found Airie standing in the doorway, holding up two packets of dried pasta.

  ‘Where the hell did you get these? You could feed half of London on what you got in here.’

  He smiled. ‘Welcome to my private larder. I keep it well stocked.’

  Airie went back inside. David followed her in, noticing with wry amusement that she had already begun to rifle through the kitchen cupboards packed with dried and canned goods. The truth was that most of what David had stockpiled was dependant on how much water he had available, and the rest was nearing or past its use-by date. He could only carry a small bag of goods up the shaft at any one time, and as he rarely ate here, much of his store was collecting dust.

  ‘Curry sauce! Wow!’

  ‘You don’t want to know much I paid for that. Part of my soul didn’t survive that shopping trip.’

  Airie turned towards him, hands on hips. ‘So, where’s this running water you were telling me about? The kitchen taps don’t work. Did you lie to me just to get me into your little man-cave?’

  ‘This way,’ he said.

  He let Airie into an ornate bathroom. A sheen of dust hung along the window ledges and the edges of the tiled floor, but when David turned on the shower a brown trickle of water came pouring out.

  ‘There’s a rainwater tank on the roof,’ he explained. ‘It’s good enough to wash with, but I boil it before I drink it or use it for cooking.’

  ‘It’s dirty!’

  ‘Wait a minute.’

  The brown began to filter out, and after a few seconds the water was running clear. Airie stuck out a hand, then pulled it back. ‘It’s cold!’

  ‘I can’t do anything about that,’ I’m afraid. ‘But I do have this.’ He held out a plastic bottle.

  ‘Shampoo!’

  ‘And these.’ He opened a cupboard and pulled out a crisp white towel. ‘I’m not here much, and there were loads. Whoever lived here kept it well-stocked.’

  Airie was staring at the towel as if she’d never seen one before. From the grime on her body David could tell that even a cold shower was luxury.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ he said. ‘Are you hungry? I’ll boil something up.’

  Airie pouted at him again, and looked him up and down. He thought she might say something suggestive; he had a rebuke on the tip of his tongue, but all she said was, ‘Thanks.’

  ‘See you in a bit. Those drawers over there contain women’s clothing. I couldn’t tell you if any of it’s worth wearing or not.’

  He left her to get cleaned up, and went back to the kitchen where he set about making some pasta on an old camping stove he had lugged up some months before. Airie’s yelps at the cold water came faintly from the bathroom.

  The pasta was just about ready by the time she went quiet. David added some carbonara sauce that wasn’t quite out of date and spooned it on to two plates. He had just put them down on a table he had pulled close to the bay window that looked out towards London’s skyline when the door opened and Airie came in.

  David gaped. She had found a black lace nightdress somewhere. It hung to just above her knees, and he couldn’t help but admire the pale skin of her legs. She had tied up her hair and her skin glowed with youth and vitality.

  She smiled. ‘I feel quite the princess.’

  ‘You look it too.’

  Airie looked about to reply with some equally flirtatious comment, but her eyes had moved past him to fix on something in the distance. At first he thought it was the food, but then he realised her gaze had gone beyond the table to the window. With one hand tentatively touching the bruised side of her face, she walked past David and pulled the drapes wide.

  ‘Fucking hell. You can see it.’

  ‘Airie, keep the drapes shut please. If someone down on the streets sees us they’ll know you can get into this apartment.’

  She ignored him. David stood up and went to stand behind her. He was about to pull the drapes closed when he realised what held her gaze.

  ‘Doesn’t it give you the creeps, knowing he could be in there, looking out at you?’

  David shrugged. ‘I don’t worry about it. I like to remember it’s there, though. I don’t want to forget.’

  Airie shivered. She leaned back against David and he wrapped his hands protectively around her waist.

  In the far distance, rising up out of the London Docklands like a thick, blunt pencil, Parliament Tower stood like a grey sentinel against a background of hazy cloud.

  8

  Match

  Mika rubbed her eyes. Outside her office window the sky was beginning to lighten, shards of smoky light breaking through the gloom. She looked at the stack of paper cups beside her computer and tried to count how many bitter vending machine coffees she had drunk over the last few hours. Twice she counted to six before her vision blurred and she had to start over again.

  ‘Five more minutes,’ she muttered, tapping the mouse to remove the screen saver, an endlessly scrolling propaganda message detailing the importance of the London GUA perimeter walls. A block of scent code appeared and she gulped back the last quarter of cold coffee in her stack of cups before hunching back over the keyboard to continue the seemingly endless process of picking out which line of code had got the Huntsman riled.

  Not for the first time she cursed the handlers for being little more than overpaid thugs. Mega Britain’s stock was threadbare in all departments, and the last of the skilled handlers had perished six months ago during a mission to the Southwest Exclusion Zone. The men hired to handle the new batch of Huntsmen were bullies who shared only a love for cruelty. Mika would happily see every one of them put behind the bars of their charges’ cages, but she knew better than to cause trouble.

  Dr Karmski, her direct superior, had also failed to return from the same mission. Mika had accepted her promotion to Head of Scientific Research with polite grace, and now continued to do her work as inoffensively as possible, asking no questions, never searching too hard for the answers to others.

  Dealing with the Huntsmen was an unenviable job, but they had once been men. It was important to remem
ber that.

  She continued to scroll through the feed of computer code. Sorel’s memory had been copied onto a hard drive and transcribed into readable text. Making sense of it was a tedious grind she would normally pass to a lower ranking laboratory assistant, but she wanted no mistakes made with this one. The nature of the beast’s misfiring brain made it a thankless task. It was impossible to match scent strains exactly because their constantly corroding nature meant no code was ever the same. All Mika could do was scroll back through the long seconds of the Huntsman’s recent missions and search for scent trails that carried vague resemblances.

  When every single thing, living or dead, had a trail, the mass of data was extraordinary.

  A line of numbers that looked vaguely familiar flickered up the screen. Mika sat up. She opened up her bookmarked files and ran a search of lines of five digits that matched, repeating the process several more times for different sets of digits in the same sequence.

  ‘Huh.’ She nodded. Got it.

  Two months before, when Tube Rider euphoria had been at its highest, Sorel had been sent to sweep through sections of the London Underground, searching for possible rebels hiding down in the tunnels. He had found and killed several people, but all had later been identified as homeless drifters, in most cases addicts or wanderers suffering from mental illness. None had posed any threat to the government.

  At the site of the recent mob riot in Goldhawk Road, Sorel had picked up a scent he claimed belonged to a Tube Rider. Mika had sent him out to follow the scent, but it had died a few streets away, where the owner of the scent had likely picked up a bus. With no way to be sure what route the bus had taken, searching for where the scent picked up was a hugely inefficient use of the few Huntsmen that were left.

  What Mika needed was a source scent, a repeated one, an indication that the Tube Rider’s home might be close by. Then a sweep of the streets could begin to flush the Tube Rider out.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned….’

  The location of the matching scent was Melling Road Junction Underground station, an abandoned station on the Hammersmith and City Line.

  Despite her fatigue, Mika picked up the phone on her desk, dialing a number she knew by heart.

  A secretary answered. ‘I need your boss to contact me,’ she said. ‘I have some information. It’s urgent.’

  She put the phone down and immediately started to yawn. Not too urgent, she thought, to delay a long overdue rest. She glanced behind her, eyeing the easy chair in the corner of her office with something like excitement.

  At first she thought the sound was the phone ringing. Then she realised it was someone knocking on the door. Mika climbed stiffly up, throwing a glare at the bright morning outside, and went to unlock her office door.

  Farrell Soars stood there, the mean-faced, stocky Commander-in-Chief of the Department of Civil Affairs. She didn’t like Soars much; she had got on much better with his predecessor, Leland Clayton, another who had been sucked into the black hole of the mission to capture the fugitive Tube Riders.

  ‘You were sleeping.’

  ‘I was up all night working on this.’

  Soars frowned, as if sleep was an alien concept. ‘What did you find?’

  ‘The Huntsman Sorel was right. One of the human scents he picked up is a ninety-four percent match with another scent found in Melling Road Junction Underground station, a known hang-out of the Tube Riders. Allowing for natural decay and contamination of the scent, the indication is that it is the same. A person who had associated with the Tube Riders was on the scene of the mob riot in Goldhawk Road.’

  Soars shrugged. ‘The mobs arise by their own founding,’ he said. ‘Groups of drunks in gambling dens, disgruntled factory workers getting off work early. We have been assured by the leaders of the Tank that none of these mobs are organised by their people.’

  Mika remembered the incident report filed after the mob attack. ‘A voice was heard alerting the mob to the Huntsman’s presence. Perhaps this was organised by other Tube Rider associates we don’t yet know about. It’s common knowledge that their gang wasn’t associated with the Tank.’

  Farrell Soars stared at her, his gaze unwavering. ‘It would be useful if you could find a link,’ he said. ‘Perhaps someone who ran both with the Tube Riders and the scum in the Tank? All I need is an excuse to wipe them out.’

  The remorselessness in his eyes was terrifying. Everyone in London had heard of the Tank, but while it was run by gangs and career criminals, it had a reputation for helping out the needy. Fatherless families, runaways, orphaned children, all of them flocked there for safety. That Soars would consider a systematic annihilation of the people hiding out in the area once known as Westminster said more about him than it did about them.

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ she said.

  Soars continued to watch her. ‘My predecessor was naïve,’ he said at last. ‘He believed these Tube Riders to be a threat, but they’re not. By all accounts they’re either dead or no longer in the country. Are they still a threat to us?’

  Mika wasn’t sure if his question was real or rhetorical. She gave a shrug that could have meant anything.

  ‘The real danger is the Tank. Given enough time the Tube Riders will be forgotten. The Tank, though, will continue to grow in strength.’ He glanced down at her computer terminal. One lumpy hand caressed the desktop like a bloated, ugly spider. ‘Your orders to hunt down associates of the fugitive Tube Riders come from above me, so continue as you wish. Just know that I have few men I can spare for pointless mouse chases. I do not like having my time wasted.’

  The menace in his voice was enough to convey the threat that his words stopped just short of uttering.

  ‘I understand,’ she said.

  ‘Good. Contact me when you have further information that is of use to me.’

  Soars went out, closing the door behind him with a soft click that made Mika shiver. Leland Clayton had been a hard but forgiving man. Farrell Soars was a bear with a taste for blood.

  She picked up the phone and made another call. If she couldn’t count on help from the DCA she would have to conduct the search herself.

  ‘This is Doctor Mika Ando, Head of Scientific Research.’ she said when a voice came on the line. ‘I need a Huntsman to be readied for a mission.’

  9

  Hunted

  It was stupid, and it was irresponsible. There was no other way to look at it, but as Raine stood facing the dark tunnel entrance in the abandoned Melling Road Junction London Underground station, she felt that same pull she once had, like an old muscle flexing itself after many years of dormancy.

  The third train since she had arrived roared out of the tunnel and rushed along the platform, vanishing into the far tunnel with a howl of wind and engine noise. She watched it go, the old clawboard clutched in her arms.

  ‘Why did you have to show up, David?’ she muttered, for perhaps the tenth time. She had never expected to see him again, and that had suited her fine. Now, all the old feelings were starting to return, as well as the old resentment. David was easy on the eye, and she had never tried to resist his advances.

  Then Marta had happened.

  Juggling a dead end job while simultaneously bringing up Jake had made it easy to push David to the back of her mind. In quiet moments she sometimes thought of him, expecting that by now he would have assumed his spot by Marta’s side in Tube Riders royalty.

  She had heard the rumours about the escape, of course, but no one knew names. To most people the Tube Riders weren’t even real. If a group of them had escaped London and gone on the run from the government, she had expected David to be with them.

  ‘Why did you show up?’ she muttered again, just as another train came roaring out of the tunnel.

  She couldn’t ride. She had Jake to think about, and hanging off the sides of trains when she had a child to look after was more than just reckless. It was selfish.

  But each time a train came rushing out
of the tunnel, Raine felt a tingle in her feet, as if her body was compelling her to move.

  She turned her clawboard over in her hands. Made of light brown walnut wood that had once been part of an expensive chest of drawers, in her star-struck early days she had used a stencil to emblazon it with the letters TR in flamboyant swirling elegance. Only a few traces of the red she had used remained now, but she had never been able to bring herself to throw the board away. It had once been her symbol of family, yet like her real family, eventually it had failed her.

  She heard another train approaching. It was five p.m., rush hour for the small percentage of London’s inhabitants who still enjoyed a relatively normal lifestyle. They had never rode during rush hour for fear of being seen by too many people, but she had only come here to watch, to see if she still had feelings for what had—briefly—been a centerpiece of her life.

  She backed away towards the platform wall and squatted down in the shadows where she had often begun a ride. She turned her board over, the three metal coat hooks screwed to the wood pointed downwards. She ran a finger over them, feeling how the once-sharpen metal felt dusty and dulled against her skin.

  Turning the board over, she wrapped the rubber harness straps around her wrists and gripped the metal handles she had taken from old drawers. They felt strong, the screws tight.

  She closed her eyes as another train came rushing out of the tunnel.

  Smiling, she imagined how she would have pushed off and moved quickly into a sprint, angling towards the train, building up her speed until her lucky fourth carriage was alongside, then jumping up and forward, swinging the hooks down to catch the metal drainage rail, immediately parting her feet and landing lightly on the side of the train with the gentleness of a feather coming to rest. She would stare into the carriage for a few seconds, flash a smile at anyone staring back her in astonishment, then glance up towards the breakfall mats and prepare for her dismount.