by Chris Ward
It stood open, light bathing the landing outside. The sound of the television drifted out, but over the top of it Raine heard Jake crying. It was the most beautiful sound in the world, because it meant Jake was still here, he was still alive.
She stepped through the entrance and gasped. Greg’s body lay on the kitchen floor. His shirt was soaked with blood, his throat ripped open. His dead eyes stared up at the ceiling, and even in death he appeared to be frowning, as if whatever had decided to end his life had interrupted his favorite TV show.
Jake’s crying came from the bedroom, and Raine could only pray thanks that whatever had killed her cousin had left her baby alive. She stepped past the body and pushed open the bedroom door.
A robed figure crouched over the crib, furry, clawed hands encircling Jake, still wrapped in his blanket. Raine backed away, reaching behind her for a knife out of the rack by the kitchen sink.
Her heart was hammering so much the sound seemed to fill the room as she went back to the doorway. Whatever this thing was, it could end her baby’s life with one swift twist of its hands.
‘Get … away … from … him.’
The creature turned, and Raine gasped. She had never seen a Huntsman nor met anyone who had, but there was no mistaking what it was. Human eyes hung above a dog’s snout, the jowls pulled back to reveal glistening, sharpened teeth.
Its eyes narrowed. The claws lifted Jake up out of the crib and held him tight against the Huntsman’s body. Raine glimpsed tattered clothing and an assortment of weapons, then her baby was enveloped by the cloak.
‘He’s mine!’ she screamed, her terror giving way to rage. She flung herself at the Huntsman, her knife flashing through the air.
It moved quicker than she could have believed. One hand swung up, knocking her arm aside and the knife out of her grip. Claws slashed at her stomach, then she was crashing into the crib and tumbling over. She landed hard on the floor, but was already pushing herself back to her feet, looking around for another weapon.
The Huntsman stood in the doorway, watching her from beneath the hood. She heard Jake cry out, then another shadow stepped into the room.
The woman.
Her eyes met the Huntsman’s and widened in surprise. Jake squealed. The Huntsman growled, dropping into a crouch, one arm still holding on to Jake.
‘Sorel … kill now the thing.’
The Huntsman flung itself forward, slamming into the woman as her hands came up. A powerful claw slashed through the woman’s hood and tore flesh and wires away from her neck and chest. She tried to fight it off, but the Huntsman was too strong. It slammed her against the wall, then barrelled through the door and out into the night.
Raine scrambled past the woman into the kitchen. She looked around desperately for some kind of weapon, but apart from knives there was nothing. She looked from old frying pans to pots without handles and even a plastic drying rack for clothing. Nothing could help her.
She stopped, her eyes falling on the object leaning against the wall by the door.
Her clawboard.
The Huntsmen tracked by scent. Either it had followed David’s trail here or it had tracked hers from one of the Underground stations. Her old association with tube riding had caused this, but of everything she owned the clawboard was perhaps the one thing that could help her.
She picked it up as the sound of movement came from behind her. Fingers slipped through the support straps and she spun, slamming the hard wooden edge of the clawboard into the woman’s face as she stumbled forward.
There was a crack that sounded more like breaking plastic than bone, and the woman staggered. Raine twisted the board around and brought the hooks up into the woman’s chest, digging them through flesh riddled with wires, twisting it so hard she was pulled off her feet. The woman crashed to the ground. Raine kicked her hard in the face then turned and raced for the door.
The street outside was empty and silent, the Huntsman long gone. Raine looked around her for signs of its passage: something dropped, blood, even scuff marks on the road, but there was nothing.
‘Jake!’ she screamed, over and over until her voice cracked and lights came on across the street, but no baby’s cry answered.
The Huntsman was gone, and it had taken her son with it.
Part II
London-Gone
23
Recall
Dreggo resisted the urge to scream as the robotic surgical arm continued to work on repairing the scar tissue on her leg. Although the numbing agent left her without feeling from the waist down, she insisted on sitting up on the gurney to watch as the machine did its work. Every so often a doctor would come through the door and adjust its settings or check its progress. Few looked at her unless they needed to ask a direct question. Although she had only been working for the Governor a handful of months, her reputation already proceeded her.
Then there was the Huntsman standing by the door.
Heyna, seven feet tall, powerful and savage, yet as elegant as a Huntsman could be, would die for her. She could feel it in his thoughts as he communicated directly into her mind. Their spoken conversations were brief, his vocal chords damaged by the engineering that had created him, but in their minds they shared their thoughts and fears like virtual lovers.
Like everyone growing up in the shadow of London, she had feared and hated the near-mythical Huntsmen like bogeymen who lived in closets and hid under the bed. And then one had saved her, carrying her broken, dying body back from France, and she had understand that they were only a product of a far greater cruelty.
The robot came to a stop, its arm pausing. A bleep sounded, and a few seconds later the door opened and a doctor came in. He gave her one brief glance, then moved the machine a few inches to the left, adjusted its settings on a control screen, then went out again. The machine started up again, slowly repairing the damage to her skin, so that her own regenerative biotechnology could restore it correctly rather than as scar tissue.
The Governor told her she was perfect, but the Governor also thought Mega Britain was the greatest nation on Earth.
The Governor was a liar, but he had kept her alive when the very world itself wanted her dead. He treated her with uncharacteristic kindness and gave her limitless power to wield in his pursuit of order in London GUA.
She still didn’t understand why.
Elsewhere in the country, things ran smoothly. The Greater Forest Areas were pacified, and small uprisings in the Manchester-Liverpool and Sheffield-Leeds GUAs had been quelled with relative ease.
London was the problem. The heart of the country, blackened and foul, threatened to destroy Mega Britain from the inside out.
Dreggo had heard the whispers. Enough people had illegal Internet connections to know what had happened in the European Confederation, that the Governor’s lies had been exposed, and that a girl from this very city had been responsible, a girl by the name of Marta Banks, leader of a gang known only as the Tube Riders.
The wraiths of the underground.
Beneath the streets, the trains rushed through the city’s veins like circulating blood, and the greatest symbol of them all was threatening to unite the people against their leader. Dreggo had pleaded the Governor to shut the system down, but without the London Underground the city would grind to a halt.
The Tube Riders were gone, fled, vanished, he claimed. It didn’t matter if the trains still ran.
He didn’t understand.
Dreggo lifted the file near her left hand and pulled out the photographs for what had to be the fiftieth time. They were stills from Heyna’s visuals, of the moments when the rally had turned against her, when her attempt to execute two Tube Rider conspirators had failed.
The man, with his handsome face and hair flowing to his shoulders, had tried to give himself up. Picking up his scent later, Heyna had confirmed he was the one they were looking for, the priority scent.
Then out of nowhere a girl had firebombed the stage, not only allowing
the two captives to be dragged into the crowd but allowing the priority scent to escape.
She had called herself Marta Banks.
Dreggo scoffed at the picture of the girl, dressed up like some cartoon warrior. She was barely in secondary school. No one could ever mistake her for the leader of the Tube Riders, if they knew Marta.
Unfortunately, no one did.
Now the whispers on the streets were that Marta Banks had returned, and would lead a revolt against the Governor.
‘Little Marta,’ Dreggo whispered, tapping a scarred finger against the photograph. ‘What can we do with you?’
‘You’ve screwed up again,’ came the voice of Farrell Soars from the other end of the line. ‘Who authorised this?’
Mika sighed. ‘You know who.’
‘Dreggo?’
‘Yes.’
There was a long pause. Mika imagined Farrell Soars cursing Dreggo silently, holding his anger inside. Even to a lowly scientist like Mika it was unwise to openly criticize the Governor’s decisions.
‘I’ll speak to Dreggo myself,’ he said at last. ‘The Department of Civil Affairs should handle this. The building was gutted, and the DNA of a body found in the stairwell matches one of your terrorism suspects. Do you know how thinly stretched our fire services are? Do you think you could tell your dogs to make a little less mess when they go out hunting? Jesus fucking Christ, we’ll have Baker Street all over again if this doesn’t stop.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Fuck your apologies. Do you have those suspect profiles yet?’
Mika paused. ‘I’m still working on it,’ she said.
‘Well hurry up. Jesus, what do they pay you for?’
He hung up. Mika stared at the phone receiver, her heart pounding. There was only so long she could put off both the DCA and Dreggo. Sooner or later they would find out about her sister’s profile.
She stared again at the prints of Mariel’s visuals. The other Level Three had gone to check on Kyaru’s work and run into trouble. Her charred body had been picked up and brought back to the research facility, but it would be weeks before she was operational again, if ever.
The last clear shot showed a young girl standing at the landing above Mariel, a bottle in her hand, poised to throw. Nearly thirteen years younger than Mika and with hair that was now dyed blonde, she was still unmistakable, the likeness between them uncanny.
Airie.
My sister.
No other bodies had been found in the building that matched the DNA of the priority scents, so her sister had escaped. It would only be a matter of time though before Sorel or Kyaru caught up with her.
Rick had already downgraded the orders from kill or capture to capture and contain. He claimed he had disguised the order so that it wouldn’t be easily noticed, but ordering a halt to the pursuit was something only Mika could do.
On the screen, the cursor continued to blink at her, like an eye wiping away a tear.
* * *
All operating units to return to the facility immediately. Current orders are terminated. Return to the facility and await further instructions.
* * *
It might come down to a split between her sister’s life and her own. Disobeying Farrell Soars would get her sectioned, possibly removed from her post, but disobeying Dreggo might get her killed.
She lifted a hand, her finger hovering over the send button. Gritting her teeth and squeezing her eyes shut, she pressed down. The message was replaced by a box that read ORDERS UPDATED.
Mika leaned back in her chair, taking a long slow breath to try to calm her pounding heart.
An update box appeared on the screen: ONE ORDER UPDATED. ONE ORDER SEND FAILURE.
Mika’s eyes widened. She sat up and brought up the details of the fail on the screen.
LEVEL TWO HUNTSMAN “SOREL” NOT RESPONDING.
She opened up Sorel’s details, trying to find what was wrong. Certain information was stored only in internal memory chips in the Huntsmen themselves, but other information was relayed back to the research facility’s computers. After the mistakes of Cornwall and then France, all surviving Huntsmen had been installed with a live feed camera in one eye as well as location tracking chips.
Mika called up Sorel’s visual feed and watched over the last few minutes before it went dead.
She stared as the events unfolded on a screen in front of her.
‘You stole a baby,’ she whispered. ‘Why on Earth did you do that?’
24
Visitor
‘So you think showing up once a month with a bag of goddamn flour makes you a good grandson, do you?’
Lindon put the bags down in Frank’s hallway. ‘If you’d rather I take this stuff with me, I can.’
The old man gave Lindon a gap-toothed grin. ‘Oh, I didn’t say I wasn’t grateful. I just might be more grateful if your lazy ass showed up once in a while and cleaned my windows.’
‘You have metal shutters.’
‘So? Got neighbours to impress, haven’t I?’
As always, Lindon could barely separate his grandfather’s jokes from when he was being serious. The house on one side was burnt out. On the other a handful of squatters spent their time catching rats down in the street.
‘I managed to get you some milk this week. And there’s bread. Spacewell made it.’
‘What did he put in it?’
Lindon shrugged. ‘Bread stuff.’
Frank growled and flapped a hand at Lindon to follow. ‘Okay, whatever. If I have any questions I’ll ask. Let me check you out. I figured I’m never going to stop you but I guess I can patch you up.’
The previous night’s fight had been rough. Lindon, his mind elsewhere, had got caught flush by an opponent he should have beaten. The guy had piled in, refusing to break even when Lindon hit the ground. It took three men to pull him off.
‘Sit down. Jesus, look at you.’
‘I think my nose is broken.’
With bent, arthritic fingers that contained surprising strength, Frank twisted Lindon’s nose until it clicked back into place.
‘Ow!’
‘There. Let me fix up these cuts. You make a lot of money off this one?’
‘Enough. I put some in the bag.’
Frank sighed. ‘Boy, you know what I’ve told you a thousand times, don’t you? Don’t waste that shit on me. I should have died years ago, and a bag of bones like this don’t need much food. Keep that coin and buy your way out of here. Take that girl of yours, that kid Sammy, and even that weird motherfucker if you want. Do what you have to do, just get the hell out before the Governor decides he’s done with the place. He will, trust me. Those spaceships that go up … when one of them stays up, that’s it for us.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s looking for something, isn’t he? Launching satellites, my ass. He’s after something that’s up there floating around. And when he gets it, he won’t need London no more.’
‘You know I can’t leave.’
Frank dabbed a swab into a gash on the side of Lindon’s face where his opponent had slammed him against the cage bars. ‘Why the hell not?’
‘There’s nothing out there for me.’
‘Don’t be stupid, you damn ape. There’s nothing out there to worry about, not like they say. It’s just miles of green shit and smaller screwed up cities. I’m old, Lindon. I remember when they built these damn perimeter walls. They tore up all the roads, ripped down all the houses out in the country and heaped it all up around London as if scared the damn trees wanted to take over. It’s freedom out there. Freedom and safety.’
‘Even if I wanted to go, Cah wouldn’t.’
Frank sighed. ‘That girl of yours still struggling?’
Lindon nodded. ‘Yeah. I can’t help her.’
Frank patted the side of Lindon’s face. ‘Damn it, boy, I can see through you like a crystal fucking window. There’s so much you could do, but you’re content to just let all the shit wash ove
r you.’
Lindon felt a bloom of anger. ‘How the hell do you know what I’m dealing with?’
Frank lifted a hand. ‘Okay, okay, sorry an old man asked. You just go back to the Tank and plan some more bank robberies.’
‘There aren’t any banks.’
Frank laughed, and after a few seconds Lindon joined in. It felt good to laugh. It was the first time in a while.
Lindon sat in silence while Frank finished patching him up, sewing up his cuts, applying ointment to his bruises and then giving him an injection of antibiotics and painkillers.
‘Okay, finished,’ Frank said at last. ‘Take care of yourself out there, boy. I guess I’ll see you again next time you get your ass kicked.’
As Frank accompanied him to the door, Lindon said, ‘I’ll try to visit more often.’
Frank patted him on the shoulder. ‘Remember what I said. Get the hell out of this place.’
‘My duty is to the Tank.’
‘Ah, the Tank. The prettiest little community in London. Think about what you could do if you led those people, Lindon. The only reason the Governor isn’t kicked off his perch is because the people have no unity.’
‘I’ll be back again soon,’ Lindon said, heading down the steps before Frank could reply. Behind him came the sound of a curse and a slamming door.
Lindon tried not to let his grandfather’s words cut him as he headed back towards the Underground. He had heard it all before a thousand times over. Frank was old enough to no longer care who heard his blasphemy, but Lindon preferred to believe what the rumours said, that the Governor’s spies were everywhere, that even whispered dissent could bring the DCA to your door. The Tank and the Department of Civil Affairs had a grudging understanding, the Tank offering up criminals that acted outside of the code or targeted government property in exchange for being left alone. In truth, the Tank probably had the strength to defeat the DCA in a pitched battle, especially with the military spread thin across the country, but there was the unknown quantity of the Huntsmen to consider. The Tank people were Lindon’s people. For better or worse, it was his duty to protect them.
