by Chris Ward
‘What do we do now?’ Raine said.
‘Benny said there were communities,’ David said. ‘There could be other walled cities too, but it might be best to stay away from them. Mika said Tim Cold thought that the other Tube Riders were in Cornwall. Remember, the boards have satellite maps. It should be easy to find our way.’
‘I can’t believe we made it out,’ Airie said. ‘This is better than I could have imagined.’
David smiled. ‘We made it. We’re—’ The word safe died on his lips as a spine-tickling howl broke the stillness of the night.
‘What the fucking hell was that?’ Raine said.
David glanced towards Airie, but he was glad her face was hidden in shadow. He wouldn’t have liked to see the same hopelessness in her eyes that he was sure was reflected in his own.
‘The Tracker-Killer,’ he whispered.
59
Battle
Dreggo stared out at the crowd as the sky began to darken. She could see it now, the pockets of fighting where frustrated citizens had begun to take out their anger on each other.
‘Is it not as I told you it would be?’ the Governor said with a hint of amusement in his voice. ‘They are like pack animals fighting over the bones of a corpse. They have no organisation, no unity. My soldiers have not fired a single shot. The problem takes care of itself.’
Nearest to them, hopeful people who had shown up to see what change was in the air had begun to wander away, their shoulders slumped with disillusionment. The stage had stood empty all afternoon as people bayed for the Governor, but in his absence infighting had blown up into violent riots, and now the crowd was dispersing itself as a handful of hidden snipers looked on.
A knock came on the door. The Governor called for the person to enter, and a meek secretary stepped in and held up a radio.
‘My Lord, it’s the Commander in Chief of the Department of Civil Affairs, Farrell Soars,’ she said, not looking up from the floor at her feet. ‘He says it’s urgent.’
The Governor nodded. He took the radio out of the woman’s shaking hand and bade her to leave. As the door closed, he pushed the radio against his ear.
‘Yes?’
Dreggo watched as the Governor’s frown deepened. His jaw tightened, then his lips began to curl back. In one sudden motion he threw the radio across the room.
‘Our last chance has gone,’ he said. ‘My little cleanup operation has failed. The DCA squad who rounded up the Tube Riders you failed to catch has disappeared, taking the Tube Riders with them.’
‘Disappeared?’
‘They never appeared at the handover point. Other squads are hunting for them now. There have been rumours of a disturbance by the Watford gate, but small riots have broken out right across London, and the DCA were too short of manpower to investigate. I fear the Tube Riders have escaped us once again.’
‘Peetur,’ Dreggo said.
‘What of him?’
‘He is a Tracker-Killer. He will follow them until either he or they are dead.’
‘Do you have communications with him?’
Dreggo hesitated. She started to speak when the Governor’s voice appeared in her mind. It isn’t wise to lie to me. ‘He wasn’t ready for active service,’ she said. ‘His communications systems weren’t operational. He was deployed to guard Airie Walker. It wasn’t expected that she would escape.’
The Governor was still for a moment, and Dreggo could sense his displeasure. Then he nodded. ‘It is no consequence. Dead or alive, they will not return. I fear, however, that for the time being we will have to exert greater powers of control over the people of this city, in order to ensure that such a situation doesn’t happen again.’
He turned away from her and walked to the window. Beyond the glass, street lights had begun to blink on, illuminating patches of the empty plaza, the crowds now all but gone.
There was nowhere to run and they all knew it. Using one flashlight to illuminate their path through the forest, Raine and Airie were up ahead as David came to a stop. With his heart heavy in his mouth, he hooked the clawboard’s straps around his wrists and turned back towards the rustle of undergrowth that signaled the rapid approach of the Tracker-Killer.
‘David!’
‘Go!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll hold it off as long as I can.’
‘No! You don’t have a chance!’
‘We can’t run forever. I make my stand here. Try to find water, something to cover your scent, just in case it makes it past me.’
He was forcing heroism into his voice, trying to give them the strength to keep moving, but Raine was right. He had no chance. The Tracker-Killer would rip him to pieces. All he could do was slow it enough for Raine, Airie, and Jake to get away.
He closed his eyes, concentrating on the sound as it grew closer. He tried to imagine he was preparing for a ride, and that the Tracker-Killer was no more than a train rising up back in the tunnel, an unstoppable tube of steel that would obliterate anything in its way.
‘I tamed them,’ he whispered. ‘I can tame this monster too.’
The Tracker-Killer broke from the trees faster than he expected. He opened his eyes and activated the flashlight a second before it slammed into him, knocking him to the ground as it rolled over and came bounding up. He twisted and turned the light, dazzling it. It was squat and thick, built like a bull, with huge, muscular arms. Its clawed hands and feet were bloody, ripped open perhaps by the rough climb up and over the perimeter wall.
Snarling, it crouched like a dog and leapt forward. David fired the grapnel into its face, the metal hooks burying into its cheek. At the last moment he twisted sideways, rolling behind a tree and pressing the retract function. Blood and oil sprayed him as the Tracker-Killer howled.
‘Goddamn it, haven’t we run far enough?’ David shouted. ‘Let us go!’
Something slammed into his shoulder, knocking him backwards. The gnarly trunk of a tree struck his back, winding him. As he gasped for air, he saw a crossbow bolt protruding from his torn shirt.
The pain was agonizing. David rolled sideways, keeping the tree to his back as the creature rushed him. Claws scrapped the skin off his arms but he avoided a killing blow. His strength quickly fading, he staggered forward a few steps, then fell to his knees and brought the clawboard up in front of him. It sagged on one side, where his injured shoulder didn’t have the strength to hold it up.
The Tracker-Killer snarled as it approached, its eyes now adjusted to the light. Blood streamed from an ugly gash in its cheek, but otherwise it looked unharmed. It circled him cautiously, like an animal waiting to see if its prey was done fighting.
‘You have human eyes,’ David gasped. ‘Once they looked on beautiful things, didn’t they? You saw the world as it should be, not as it is. I’m sorry for what they did to you, but if it’s you or me—’
The Tracker-Killer rushed him. David waited waited … waited … then swung the board up, the hard end pointing straight at the creature’s face. Claws rushed past the board and found soft flesh to rip and tear, but the metal of the board smashed the creature’s nose, then slammed into its eyes, taking pieces of bone and metal with it. Blinded, the creature began to thrash out wildly, and trapped beneath it, David had nowhere to escape. He closed his eyes, waiting for it to be over.
‘Get off him!’
Airie’s scream brought him enough strength to open his eyes, and he saw them both there, their boards swinging like clubs, battering the creature, breaking it up piece by monstrous piece, until finally it rolled off him, and with a last, drawn out gasp, it expired and lay still.
He somehow found the strength to push himself up against the trunk of a tree, but he knew he didn’t have long. He didn’t need to see the blood pumping from gashes on his thighs, feel the hot burn of the crossbow bolt in his shoulder, or the way one arm felt detached from his body, as if it wasn’t really there at all. He really felt the need to sleep, but every time his head dropped he concentrated all his efforts to kee
p his eyes open for a few seconds more.
Airie was crying, and he so wanted to hold her, to tell her everything would be all right. She kept trying to touch him, but Raine told her to mind his injuries, taking the words off the tip of his tongue. He tried to smile his thanks to her, but wasn’t sure if words came or not over the roar of blood rushing in his ears. He knew he was alive, but for how long he couldn’t tell.
‘You saved us,’ Airie gasped, tears streaming down her face. The glow from the clawboard flashlight that was illuminating their faces was slowly fading, the batteries winding down to mirror his own increasing need to sleep. He wanted to talk to them, but found words like a jumble in front of his face. He smiled at them, trying to pick them out of the air and put them into a line.
Raine’s fingers closed over his hand. Jake still hung from a harness around her neck, the baby looking remarkably well considering the battle he had just lived through. He even had a cute grin on his face as he stared at David.
‘I want you to touch him,’ Raine said. ‘I want you to touch him, knowing who he is. I wanted to tell you … there just wasn’t a good time.’
He smiled, managing to grasp a couple of the floating words and make them leave through his lips. ‘Tell … me?’
‘One day I’ll tell him his daddy was a hero. I’ll make sure he knows you, David. He’ll know who you were.’
‘My … boy?’
The revelation kept sleep away for a few seconds more. David smiled again, concentrating on the feel of Jake’s warm, soft back under fingers that no longer felt like his own. ‘Tell him … tell him … one day he’ll be big and strong … tell him his Daddy would be … so … so … proud.’
Tears were streaming down Raine’s face. ‘I never stopped loving you, David. Not really. Despite what I said. Despite everything.’
Airie was crying too. David wanted to hold them all, but his hand had gone limp. He watched it slump to the grass like a dead, useless thing.
‘Whatever happens … never … ever give up,’ he felt himself say. ‘Always fight. Always … hold on … and if you find the others … tell them … tell them to rise for us.’
It was time to sleep. He held their gaze a moment longer as the light faded, wanting to remember them forever. Then he let the unbearable weariness have its way with him, and closed his eyes.
60
Scatterings
He heard the sound of her enter the room, but for a long time she stood and waited as he stared out at the grey highrises of London from his armchair by the window. He hoped she would leave, but when she didn’t he finally turned to face her.
In the shadows that never seemed to disperse she looked little different, although the metal part of her face seemed slightly more crooked than before. She smiled and came over to him, kneeling beside his chair, pushing the hood back from her head with a flourish like the reanimated corpse of some long-dead actress.
‘I told the Governor that the Tank had nothing to do with the attack that freed the Tube Riders.’
‘It didn’t.’
‘Can you prove it?’
‘Can you prove it did?’
Dreggo shook her head. ‘I wanted to see you, Lindon. I … missed you.’
She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. He could tell from the timbre of her breathing that she wasn’t lying, that from a casual meeting of interests she had grown a real bond, that he had come to mean a lot to her.
He was almost sad as he lifted the knife to her neck and held it there against the single pulsing vein of her scarred jugular.
‘It’s over, Dreggo. Our deal, our liaison, whatever. This place belongs to me. If you come here again I will kill you or die trying.’
Their eyes met. Dreggo almost managed to hide a small sigh. She said nothing for several seconds, then gave a short nod. ‘If it’s what you want. Remember, Lindon, I could give you everything.’
‘You could only give me more of the nothing I already have. I have made my decision. I won’t change it.’
Dreggo stared at him a moment longer, then stood up and left, closing the door quietly behind her. Lindon sighed, then reached down and picked up the metal tin by his feet.
With a click, the lid came off.
He stared down at the single lock of blond hair that he had placed on a piece of felt inside, wishing that things could have turned out different.
Raine and Airie buried David near a river, beneath a weeping willow tree the like of which neither had ever seen outside of a book. It was a quiet, peaceful place. Both wanted to say something, but when it came to it, neither wanted to share their thoughts with the other, so they stood in silence for a few moments, then took up their clawboards and headed on their way.
For several days they headed west together. They saw small villages at a distance, and talked often about entering one and trying to seek refuge. While using the grapnels on the clawboards to catch wild game and fish had proven remarkably easy, Raine wanted better care for Jake, while Airie wanted to avoid other people as long as possible.
In the end, it was easy to go their separate ways. Raine gave Airie her clawboard, which she added to the backpack with David’s and her own, then they had a brief hug and a goodbye before parting. Raine headed north, her eye on a couple of quiet villages they had passed, where she hoped she could find someone who might help her, while Airie chose to continue southwest in the hope that Mika and Spacewell had been right.
Neither mentioned David. There was nothing that needed to be said that they hadn’t said to themselves a thousand times already, and neither looked back.
Airie waited until Raine was out of sight before she pulled off her shirt to inspect the wound in her side. The Tracker-Killer’s claws had gone deep; blood had soaked the strip of toweling she had wrapped around her waist to keep it from oozing too much. Hiding the wound from Raine had been something she hadn’t at first planned, but as time went on and their tears over David’s death lessened, she wanted the other girl to feel positive about life again. Jake was a ray of sunshine, always laughing, always smiling. Raine had so much to live for. Airie felt certain that Raine would find someone who would take them in, look after them without asking too many questions, and in time she could become part of a community and start a new life.
Airie, on the other hand, had one last thing she needed to do.
The fence, with its scattering of metallic-gleaming bodies lying in the grass beyond, felt like the end of the world. Her strength was almost gone. The berries and wild vegetables she had managed to scavenge could no longer sustain her or keep the strange hallucinations brought on by the blood infection at bay. Using one clawboard to support her as she walked, she found a section of the fence that had frayed and dug her way under it, stopping to rest every few minutes and wipe away the blood from the wound that had broken open again.
Beyond the fence, she carried on walking southwest, occasionally seeing the glitter of an ocean she had never seen before in the distance. Nights fell and days returned, and she began to live in a half-world of strange visions of wild, half-human, half-machine creatures that stumbled past her in the dark. Howling shook the night, reminding her so much of the Tracker-Killer that she found herself crying into her hands, David’s face everywhere.
He was her only solace as the darkness began to descend each night. She told him over and over how much she loved him, how thankful she was that he gave her a life beyond the hell she had experienced with her brother, and that though he might be dead he would never really be dead, he would exist in her heart forever—
‘Get her on the stretcher. I think she’s alive.’
It took her a few seconds to force her eyes open. Two men were standing over her, dressed in what she could only describe as forest wear, caps made seemingly of leaves adorning their heads like a craft store attempt at camouflage.
‘I’m looking for the Tube Riders,’ she managed to gasp. ‘Are you them?’
‘Let’s get her back to the vill
age,’ one of them said. ‘We might be able to save her.’
She dozed through the journey as the men carried her through the forest. She listened to their idle talk but could never remember more than a couple of sentences behind, as if her memory was erasing itself as life played out.
When she came to again she found herself in a white-walled little room with a handful of people standing around her bed.
‘Man, what the hell are these things she’s brought?’ said one scrawny little man, and Airie saw him turning over a clawboard in his hands. Airie smiled, wondering if he would figure it out, or whether she would have to tell him.
‘We tried to fight them,’ she said, letting the moments of heroism obscure the sadness and death. We stood up and we tried to start a revolution. I came to find the Tube Riders. I came to find Marta Banks.’
‘Just try to sleep now,’ a man near her said as he wiped at her brow with a cloth, but Airie wasn’t listening. At the sound of the name, a girl standing by the door with her arms folded had turned to look at her. That she was clearly pregnant was only one thing that Airie noticed. The other was the brightness of her piercing blue eyes, shining out of a radiant, defiant face.
You’re her, aren’t you? You’re Marta Banks. Airie smiled, letting her head relax into the pillow, closing her eyes. It was an honour to play you, if only for a short time.
* * *
END
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the guys who helped me put this book together. You know who you are. Thanks to my family for your continued support, and most of all thanks to my readers. Without you, this book my never have existed.
C.W.
May 2016
