by Chris Ward
‘I hope I get to see it,’ Airie said. ‘You didn’t see him, David. The Governor. I saw him. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be allowed to exist.’
‘One day he won’t.’
‘I hope so. When I felt him looking inside my head I felt like he had lived forever.’
David fell silent. He didn’t like to think about the blood red eyes he had seen in the picture. He could only imagine where they had been and what cruelty they had dealt out.
Dreggo howled as she slammed back against the wall of the Governor’s makeshift office in the tall former bank that overlooked Parliament Tower Plaza. She slumped to the floor and rolled over onto her front, trying to get back to her knees in order that she could plead for mercy. Beyond the door, she felt Heyna reaching out for her, and she silently begged the Huntsman to stay calm. Even against the might of the Governor his claws ached to defend her.
‘I will have every one of them destroyed unless you get them under your control,’ the Governor said, turning away towards the window, where tinted shades protected him from the afternoon light. ‘You control them, not the Department of Civil Affairs. It is with you that I placed the trust of their command.’
‘I did what you asked,’ Dreggo hissed. ‘I shut down the revolt from within the Tank. The Underground Movement for Freedom no longer exists within London’s perimeter walls.’
‘Yet you couldn’t prevent the escape of a single girl.’
‘We were ambushed. The research facility runs at less than half strength—’
A force she couldn’t see jerked her up to her feet. It pulled her forward, her feet and hands pressed against her sides, only releasing her when she was within arm’s length of the Governor.
He gave a long, slow sigh. A huge pale hand reached out to caress the scarred side of her face, wiping away blood and oil.
‘You did well,’ he said. ‘I am sorry for the way I treat you. You are a flawed creature, like I am myself. The girl is of no consequence. Whatever the people might think, she is not Marta Banks.’
‘Peetur, the Tracker-Killer, is still following them.’
‘It is of no consequence. Luckily for you, I have other dogs. Farrell Soars has, for once, proved his worth.’
Dreggo didn’t want to ask what the Governor meant. Under her breath she muttered, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘They matter little now,’ the Governor said. ‘Their back is already broken. This pathetic uprising is over.’
From the corner of her good eye Dreggo could see the crowds massing in the plaza outside the window. Packed in front of an empty stage, the drone of their chanting could be heard even through bulletproof glass.
‘What do we do about them?’
The Governor smiled. ‘We let London take care of them.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Watch with me. It will take time, but eventually you will see why in the absence of a figurehead to guide them, my control is absolute.’
The Governor fell silent. Dreggo let her breathing slow, trying to ignore the feeling of broken bones in her back. As it had done so many times before, her body would knit itself back together, but the pain of healing was often greater than the pain of the damage. She forced any negative thoughts out of her mind. With the Governor so close he might already be listening, so she focused her attention on the crowd, waiting to see what would happen.
‘They’re not coming,’ Raine said, patting Jake’s back as the baby slept softly against her chest. ‘You said they would be here by four. It’s nearly five.’
Benny wiped sweat off his brow and peered out of the window of the abandoned house watching the Underground station across the street. ‘Ten more minutes. They’ll be here.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a radio. ‘I need to go speak to my contact. You stay here.’
He stumped off out of the room and down the stairs. Raine stared at the station, willing David to appear as commuters came and went as if today were a normal day. Had it not been for the towering perimeter wall blocking the sky to the north, she might have not felt so uneasy. As it was, they were hunted from all sides, and the net was closing.
‘There! Benny! They’ve made it!’
Two figures came stumbling out of the train station. The taller one was supporting the other, who was limping. She patted the top of Jake’s head in his baby sling as she turned to find Benny.
The big man was standing by the doorless entrance, nodding as he spoke into his radio. He frowned as he turned towards her, then looked to where she was pointing and gave a short nod.
Raine couldn’t stop herself from running out into the street and waving her arms over her head. David looked up and gave a tired wave back. As the two stumbling figures reached her, Raine stared. They were barely recognisable, both battered and bloodied. David was wearing a dirty guard uniform, and Airie’s clothes were little more than rags.
Benny waved his radio back over his shoulder. ‘Glad to see you made it. My contact is coming. Hold on.’
As Raine hugged David to her, she noticed a man leaning back against the wall outside of the train station. He was also talking into a radio, and while he was looking from left to right in an attempt to appear innocuous, his gaze kept falling on them and pausing for longer than was safe.
‘We’ve been seen,’ Raine said. ‘Quick, Benny.’
‘It’s all good. Follow me.’
Benny led them around the back of the building into a car park. A battered truck was idling with a man sitting in the driver’s seat.
‘Get in the back,’ Benny said, pulling the doors open.
David climbed up, helping Raine and Airie up behind him. Benny sealed the doors and then climbed into the front. The back of the truck smelled damp and old. Raine ran a hand over Jake’s back and stared at David sitting opposite her in the dark.
‘I hope this works out.’
‘Yeah, me too.’
The truck began to move. The windscreen seemed intentionally dirty so the streets appeared through a grey, smeared haze. Jake cooed a little in Raine’s arms. Airie was silent and still. David kept leaning forward to get a better view.
‘Where are they taking us?’
‘I don’t know. We have to trust Benny. He’ll get us out.’
The truck turned left on to a side street that wound through abandoned buildings up towards the foot of the perimeter wall. Raine, despite living in its shadow for several years, had never been this close. There was something imposing about the walls that made people stay away. In some areas the ground had been cleared, while in others dozens of perfectly serviceable buildings stood dusty and unused, untouched even by vandals, as if they contained the ghosts of London’s long lost freedom.
The truck stopped.
‘Time for a change of transportation,’ Benny said. ‘You wait there.’
‘Something’s wrong,’ Airie whispered. She started to get up, but Benny shook his head.
‘No, best if you stay there.’ With a long, resigned sigh, he pulled a gun from under his shirt and pointed it between the seats towards them. ‘Sorry about this, it’s not personal. It’s just that looking after your interests didn’t fit with mine.’
Raine couldn’t see David’s eyes in the gloom, but she was glad. His voice alone told her how he felt. ‘I trusted you!’
‘Didn’t I tell you, boy? Trust no one. We don’t give out trust like flowers here in London. Haven’t you learned that by now? For what it’s worth, I believed in you until they found me.’ He shrugged. ‘Someone grassed. One of my contacts, maybe. The DCA showed up at my boat, and unfortunately it was your neck or mine.’
Before David could reply, the doors swung open. A group of Department of Civil Affairs agents leveled guns into the back of the truck.
‘Get out,’ said the nearest, a man wearing the uniform of a rank lieutenant. ‘Slowly. We have orders to take you alive, but if you make any sudden moves we’ll take our chances with you dead.’
A DCA truck was idlin
g across the street, a sliding side door open. With thick bars over the windows and a wire cage on the inside, it offered no escape.
‘Disarm them, Captain,’ the DCA lieutenant said. ‘If they struggle, kill the kid first.’
Raine clutched Jake to her as a DCA agent pulled her out of the back and pushed her after the others towards the DCA truck. As she passed Benny, standing off to the side, she turned to spit in his direction, just as another DCA agent lifted his gun and pointed.
‘And you, fatso. Get in there too.’
Benny rounded on him. ‘What? I kept my side of the bargain! You said I’d go free!’
A gun barrel jabbed him in the stomach. ‘Once a turncoat, always a turncoat. There’ll be an extra spike over the west gates for you, I’m sure.’
The DCA took away their weapons and herded them into the truck, where they were restrained with cuffs over their wrists. Raine sat beside David, with Airie on his other side. Benny and his driver sat opposite. Three DCA men got into the front, with two men in the back, taking seats facing the prisoners, guns on their knees. The other DCA agents climbed into two cars parked further along the street.
‘Where are we being taken?’ Raine said, as the truck began to move. ‘Benny? You must know. You sold us out after all.’
Benny shook his head. ‘There’s a garrison barracks near the Watford gate. Could be there—’
The truck came to a stop. The two guards in the back peered out of the front. A bus lay on its side across the road up ahead. A group of men were standing around it, one or two looking into the undercarriage. One of them, a man wearing a bus driver’s uniform, turned and waved his arms over his head as if asking for help.
‘What the fuck is this?’ the DCA agent driving the truck said. ‘We’ll have to go around—’
The windscreen lit up with cracks. His body jerked and blood sprayed across the passenger window. The bang of gunfire came again and the other two in the front were dead just as quickly, their bodies jerking as bullets found their marks. The guards in the back turned towards the prisoners, but David and Airie rushed them, slamming them against the cage wall, knocking their guns free. As an explosion sounded outside, the truck’s back doors swung open and a group of casually-dressed but heavily-armed men pulled the DCA agents out onto the street and shot them where they lay.
‘Get out,’ the nearest said. ‘There’s not much time.’
Raine followed the others out as another man snapped their bonds with a pair of wire cutters. One of the following cars had been blown onto its side. All around them the men were shooting DCA agents, then dragging their bodies into a pile in the centre of the road. In seconds, the firefight was over.
‘Who are you people?’ David said. ‘What is this about?’
Boots crunched through broken glass on the road behind them. ‘I guess you could consider this an apology,’ came a voice David recognised.
58
Outside
David stared at Lindon. The muscular man shrugged. ‘We’re even now, Tube Rider. This ends here. But if you or your associates ever come around the Tank again, you’ll see no mercy.’
‘We had a chance,’ David said. ‘We missed it.’
Lindon shook his head. ‘No. There was no chance. People are dying now by Parliament Tower, but you don’t have to. Go. Eyes are turned away. Use those grapple hook things of yours to get over the perimeter wall. My men will give you twenty minutes of cover. After that you’re on your own. Go now. I won’t offer again.’
David turned to Raine and Airie. They both nodded. ‘What about him?’ He pointed to Benny. Benny’s driver had been shot in the crossfire, his body now among those being set alight in the middle of the street, but Benny was cowering on his knees, his hands clenched in front of his face.
Lindon pulled a gun from his belt and held it out. ‘He’s yours. Finish him.’
David took the gun and walked over to Benny. He leaned down and pushed it against Benny’s temple. ‘I trusted you, Benny.’
Benny shrugged and shook his head, his jowls flopping around his chin. ‘No, boy. You trusted London. That was your mistake.’
David closed his eyes and tightened his finger on the trigger.
‘No.’ He stood up and handed the gun back to Lindon. ‘Let him go.’
Lindon shook his head. ‘Perhaps one day you’ll understand, Tube Rider. If you ever want to beat them, you have to play their game. Your honour is admirable, but pointless.’
He lifted the gun and shot Benny in the temple. As the big man’s body slumped to the ground, Lindon turned back to David. ‘Your twenty minutes started five minutes ago.’
David looked around at Raine and Airie. Jake wriggled in Raine’s arms. David hefted the clawboard the Tank men had returned to him over his shoulder. ‘Come on,’ he said.
Lindon watched them go as they headed into the streets that wound up to the base of the perimeter wall. Part of him was pleased to see the back of them, and part of him felt a sense of regret, that a chance had been missed. If they were really the ones who would free London, they would be back. If not, at least his people would be safe.
‘Burn everything,’ he said, turning back to his men. ‘I want no trace of them left, or that we were ever here.’
Benny had done them one service. The perimeter wall around the Watford gate was lower than in most other parts of London. At around fifty metres high it was still imposing, but up close it was slightly sloped due to the nature of its construction.
‘I’ve never seen one this close,’ Airie said. ‘I had no idea.’
‘I heard there are no roads outside the city,’ David said. ‘They tore them all up to build these walls.’
Chunks of protruding masonry, metal wires, steel lintels, and even lengths of wood, all draped with a layer of concrete, rose high above them. Twilight was falling, the cloud cover turning dark with the threat of rain.
‘Let’s move,’ David said. ‘No flashlights. There might be guards up there.’
David went first, using the grapnel to get most of the way up, then climbing hand over hand the remainder of the way. He ducked down into a hollow between two lumps of concrete just below the top of the wall, where concrete had been flattened into a rough walkway. Further along were crude watchtowers, some made from corrugated iron, with machine gun emplacements and the occasional stuttering floodlight.
Raine came next, using the grapnel retractor to abseil her way up, carefully moving from rock to rock with Jake secured in his harness against her chest. When she reached David’s hollow, David took Jake for a while to let Raine rest. Below them, Airie came climbing up, hand over hand, the board strung over her back. Raine climbed down to meet her, and brought her huffing and gasping up to the hiding place.
A couple of hundred metres to the east, a searchlight was swinging back and forth, its cone of light flickering over the tightly twisting streets in the shadow of the wall.
‘Come on,’ David said. ‘Over the other side.’ Both girls looked at each other, then back at him. ‘What is it?’
Airie looked terrified. ‘What if there’s nothing there? What if it’s as they said, that London’s all that there is?’
‘Are we really going to be safer outside these walls, David?’
‘We’ve come this far. I guess if you really want, you can go back, but do you want to? Don’t you want to know what’s out there?’ He passed Jake back to Raine and lifted his clawboard. ‘I’m going to take a look. You can wait here if you want.’
Neither girl wanted to wait. Together, keeping low, they crept across the open walkway and climbed quickly down into a hollow on the other side. The wall was slightly steeper on the outward side, as if designed to keep out armies of marauders.
The sun had fallen below the line of the wall. Soon full dark would be upon them. A slab of granite blocked their view of the world outside London. They were a couple of feet from discovering the truth with their own eyes, yet they sat in a tight circle, watching each o
ther as if all three of them were afraid that their greatest fears would prove true.
‘We’ve only got a few minutes of light left,’ David said. ‘On the count of three….’
He got as far as two before Airie stood up, followed by Raine. David opened his eyes to the view a moment after Airie gasped and Raine let out a teary sniff.
‘Oh my…..’
Far to the west, the clouds had cleared to reveal purple and crimson fans of light as the sun dipped below a horizon of rolling hills, fields, and trees. What looked like roads lifted and fell, but there wasn’t a house to be seen.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Airie whispered.
‘And it’s ours if we get moving,’ David said. ‘Come on.’
Descending the wall took just a few minutes. Raine, holding Jake against her, went first, then Airie, and finally David, after a last look behind him to make sure there were no guards watching them from the walkway. At the foot of the wall he found Airie rolling over in the grass that rose up to her knees as if she had never seen it before. Raine was sitting with Jake on her lap, giving him some food out of a plastic container. Far to the west, a single languid searchlight was sweeping back and forth across an open field of grass, slowly moving in their direction. At its furthest point away from the wall, it illuminated a line of trees.
‘There,’ David said. ‘That’s safety.’
Both Airie and Raine were exhausted, but just being outside of the perimeter walls had given David a new burst of energy. He could barely keep the smile off his face as he led them in a gentle trot across the field, easily avoiding the searchlight. Less than a minute later they were safely under the boughs of the nearest trees, out of sight of the perimeter wall.
The gloom beneath the leafy canopy left them in shadow, but David didn’t dare turn on the flashlights just yet. ‘Let’s move as far as we can from the wall while there’s still a bit of sunlight,’ he said. ‘Stay quiet and keep an eye out for lights in case there are any patrols. The further we can get the better. When it gets too dark to see, we’ll use the boards to try to find some shelter for the night.’
