The Tube Riders

by Chris Ward

  Crouched in the doorway, he said, ‘If I hadn’t taken her there . . . if I hadn’t made her come . . .’

  Paul said, ‘What about the camera?’

  Simon opened his hand. On his palm was a tiny memory card. ‘She threw it at me. Told me . . . fuck, I don’t know.’ He looked down, shaking his head.

  Marta stood up. ‘She wanted to go, don’t forget that. She told you she wanted to do it, so stop blaming yourself!’ She looked around, hands clenched into fists. ‘This isn’t our fault, we didn’t want any of this to happen. Jess’s parents are dead because this country is screwed up. We’re the victims, not the criminals, and we owe it to Jess’s parents, and, and . . . to this whole damn country to get that evidence into the hands of people who can do something about it.’ She flapped her hands, her face flushed.

  Switch stood up beside her. ‘Well, it wasn’t quite Che fucking Guevara but it wasn’t bad.’

  Marta took a deep breath, readying herself to continue. ‘Let’s get this straight,’ she said. ‘We have some very, very dangerous people after us. We run, or we die. It’s that simple. Now, Simon, get up there and get her moving. We have no idea how many of those things are after us. Maybe one, maybe more. If we split up we can spread the trail, keep them confused. Move quickly and don’t stay anywhere too long. Keep away from enclosed places and don’t travel unarmed.’

  ‘What good is a knife or a club against something that does that?’ Paul said, nodding towards the bodies.

  ‘It’s better than no knife or no club.’

  Simon climbed to his feet. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  Marta glanced at a clock on the wall. ‘It’s nearly six o’clock,’ she said. ‘We leave at midnight. Simon, you have to convince her. You have to. Otherwise she’s going to end up like them.’ She didn’t need to point.

  They went to the front door and peered out on to the street. Street-lighting made a broken line back the way they’d come, while above them the sky was dark purple, wisps of orange and red hanging above the rooftops that stretched away towards the spires and office towers of central London. Marta thought it looked pretty, but she couldn’t shake a hollow feeling in her chest that night had never been so bleak, had never contained so many demons before.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Danger

  Numb.

  Like dead hands gripping every inch of her body and squeezing until her skin turned blue and cold. Hands manipulating her, molding her, kneading her flesh into one single amorphous ball, devoid of all sensation and feeling. And from it her eyes looked out, staring but not seeing the walls, the prints and the posters that hung there, the photographs of friends, of her family. The shelf in the corner, the books. Stephen King, Charles Dickens, Zadie Smith, Kurt Vonnegut; paperbacks bought at staff discount price from the store she worked at, as many as she could afford, most read more than once, many three or four times. She loved books, Jessica did, stories and adventures. Her own life, in the relatively calm neighbourhood of Fulham, where things still went wrong, where houses still got burned and cars still got wrecked, but less frequently than across the rest of London GUA, wasn’t so much an adventure as a struggle; worry and concern overriding any sense of excitement she might get walking the dangerous streets. Then, only this afternoon, she’d been given an opportunity to take a real adventure, to be part of an urban myth, do something special that nearly no one had ever done before.

  Except it hadn’t ended up that way. Her life had been threatened, she had witnessed an assassination, and then discovered her parents’ gruesome murder all in the space of a few hours. And now, numb, unfeeling, she wondered what would happen next. What should happen next.

  Numb.

  She wanted to stay curled up in a ball, her own body a barricade to shut out the world. She wanted nothing more to do with it; wanted only for it to go away and leave her alone.

  He had come again. Simon was sitting on the edge of her bed, one hand on her knee, gently rubbing it. ‘You have to pack some things,’ he was saying. ‘We have to go. They’re going to come back sooner or later.’

  Jessica didn’t care. She didn’t care what happened next. She just wanted everything to end, all the hurt and the pain and the sorrow, all of it to be extinguished, stamped out like the embers of an old camp fire.

  ‘You have to be strong,’ she heard Simon saying, his voice soft and soothing. A voice she loved, so loved, but a voice that she wanted to hate now. She wanted to blame him, and she’d told him so, but Jessica was sensible, educated, and despite her grief she knew this wasn’t his doing. She had wanted the adventure he offered, and he was as much a victim of unfortunate circumstance as she was. Just, with her parents dead, it felt right to blame someone close. Whatever had killed them wasn’t around to accept the gift of her hatred.

  ‘Come on Jess, please,’ he murmured, talking slowly to her, leaning close. Still she didn’t look at him, her gaze holding steady on the wall in front of her. The images of her dead parents flashed up in her mind, torn up and bloody, her parents who’d never done anything but love her and try to do the right thing, try to maintain normality in the face of growing chaos. They didn’t deserve to die, but who did? Deserving anything didn’t make it more likely to happen. She was no more deserving of life than they were of death, but here she was, still breathing, still trying to debate what she should do if and when she chose to unlock her arms, release her legs and ease her feet to the floor. What to do when she decided something should be done.

  Simon was trying to hold her hand. At last she turned to him, looking up into his face, grey with worry, eyes moist with sorrow.

  ‘I love you,’ she said, not smiling. ‘I loved my parents too, but something got to them. I won’t let it get to you too.’

  Simon smiled; for a moment he looked like a drug addict who had just taken a hit, overcome with a sudden euphoria. Tears streamed down his cheeks. ‘Oh fucking hell, Jess. I love you so much.’ Then, ‘No one wanted this to happen. It’s no one’s fault but theirs. The fucking, screwed up, bullshit government.’ Suddenly remembering where her father worked, he opened his mouth to apologize, but Jess spoke first. ‘We’ll get them,’ she said. ‘Somehow, someday . . . we’ll get them.’

  Something had changed inside. A curtain had been drawn over her past, over what innocence she had enjoyed in the years leading up to today. A new mark had been set, a new starting point, and it was one altogether darker. She felt different, felt her heart beating stronger, her hands clenching harder, the focus in her mind sharper than ever before. The girl who had gone down those steps at St. Cannerwells earlier this afternoon had vanished forever.

  A siren rose in the distance. ‘We have to go, Jess,’ Simon told her. ‘We have to go now and give ourselves a chance or stay here and die.’

  She didn’t look at him, but she climbed up from the bed and brushed the hair out of her eyes. She walked past him, down the stairs and pushed through into the living room while Simon trailed helplessly behind her.

  The sight of her parents’ bodies made her sway, her eyes going momentarily blurred and she thought she might faint. A sob rose up in her throat so quickly she bent double and began to cough, thinking it might choke her. They weren’t perfect, her parents, but they had always treated her well, had always loved her. And here they lay, mutilated, torn apart by some rampaging monster.

  Simon tried to put a reassuring hand on her back but she pushed him away. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said, though part of her wanted him to. It was just too soon, too early. For now she needed to be alone with her grief.

  She couldn’t leave them, but she had no choice. The wailing siren was closer now. She had no idea if it was coming here or if there was some other disaster elsewhere it was driving to attend to, but the end result was the same. Simon was right, they had to leave, or their bodies would join her parents’ on the canvas of blood and gore that her living room had become, and that wouldn’t solve anything.

  It hurt
her to turn away, it hurt more than anything. But she did, glancing at Simon who stood behind her, his mouth hung open, one hand in his jeans pocket which she knew was gripping the tiny camera memory chip that had started all this. It pained her to look at him because part of her blamed him for her parents’ deaths, but was it his fault after all? Or was it hers? She had been the one who brought the camera, the one who had recorded something they weren’t meant to see.

  In that moment her mind was made up.

  She rushed through into the quaint little kitchen her mother kept as neat as a showroom, went to the cooker and turned on the gas hobs. She didn’t know if it would work or not, but it was worth a try. Behind her, Simon said, ‘You have gas?’ but Jess ignored him. In a cupboard by the back door her father had an eighteen-litre container of kerosene – another government perk – that he used to fuel a stove heater they had on the upstairs landing. She hauled it towards Simon.

  ‘Douse them,’ she said. ‘Spread it everywhere you can.’

  ‘Are you sure –’

  ‘Do it!’ she snapped. ‘I’m not having the government taking them away to experiment on. They were my parents!’

  He did, his skinny frame lugging the container beside him, seemingly having more difficulty with it than she had. Once, his apparent weakness would have made her smile, but now she just stared after him with a hollow feeling in her heart. She wondered if she could ever find it in herself to smile again.

  She rooted around in a kitchen drawer for a box of matches, grabbing as she did so a handful of small notes and change her mother kept for housekeeping money. At the back of the drawer she found a matchbox, still half-full, with a picture of a long forgotten Beefeater on the front. Hate for the government boiled in her, and it was all she could do to suppress a scream. She stuffed the matches in her pocket and went to find Simon.

  In the living room, he had taken down two curtains and draped one over each body. For a moment she felt a surge of love for him at this sign of sensitivity, then the siren wailed much closer this time and she shook it off. Simon had splashed kerosene all over the floor, the walls and the covered bodies of her parents. When it came to arson, he looked like an old pro.

  ‘Okay, let’s go,’ she said. On her way out she grabbed a sofa cushion. She stopped at the door and handed it to Simon while she pulled the matches from her pocket. ‘Get ready to run,’ she said, striking a match and holding it to the cushion until the frilly cover began first to smoke and then to flame. She waited until the fire had taken hold then grabbed it back off Simon and tossed it through the door of the living room.

  ‘Run!’

  They dashed out of the house as a whump of igniting kerosene followed them. It would be a few minutes before the gas exploded and she wanted to be well away before then. ‘When we get a chance, Simon,’ she shouted as they ran, ‘we hunt them.’

  #

  Paul tried not to run as he headed back through Fulham. The streets were alive with the activity of changeover: stores by day barring their doors and pulling down their shutters, while on the pavements and in the market places street vendors took their place, selling everything from skewered snack food to bootlegged DVDs and homebrewed beer and spirits. Many of them worked an under-the-counter service as well, dealing in narcotics, medical drugs, knives and other weapons. By the end of the night, Paul knew, some of these vendors would be dead, others rich, some moved on and others newly respected. Versions of warfare existed everywhere, and trade was no longer fair.

  People called out to him as he passed, offering sausages on sticks, plastic cups of soup, old toys and shabby secondhand clothing. He ignored them all, pushing away one or two of the more persistent.

  It terrified him to think that something was out there tracking him, something that would rip him up like it had done to Jess’s parents. What frightened him more was a Huntsman getting to Owen first, his twelve-year-old brother unaware of the danger he was in, the same as Jess’s parents had been unaware of the claws waiting to tear them apart.

  There was no way for them to know how many Huntsmen were on their trail. There could be just one, or dozens. His only hope was that because he lived further away than Jess, and he hadn’t come straight from home to St. Cannerwells this afternoon, having had a couple of errands to run, he had a longer trail to follow.

  Hope. Like love, so easy to destroy.

  He hurried into Fulham Broadway London Underground station, thinking it would be more difficult for the Huntsmen to track him if he moved by train. He bought a single journey ticket and made his way down to the platform, crowded with commuters as it approached six o’clock. The digital display told him it was seven minutes to the next train, though the destination section was cracked and difficult to read. He only had to go four stops, though, and he didn’t need to change.

  The seconds ticked past endlessly. He shifted from foot to foot, biting his lip hard enough to draw blood, wincing at the pain. Further up the platform, he heard a fight break out, the thud of thrown punches, the shouts and grunts of those involved, the restraining cries of the onlookers.

  A minute until the next northbound train. Paul pushed closer to the front of the platform, hugging his clawboard against his chest.

  Someone screamed, just as a familiar roar announced the train’s arrival. He glanced in the direction of the commotion but could see nothing through the crowd, and then the train had stopped and everyone was pushing forwards towards the opening doors. The new train was mostly empty and people piled in, Paul amongst them. Just as he got inside and turned around he heard more shouting, a louder disturbance than before. He heard a woman scream: ‘Oh, God! He’s dead! That thing killed him!’

  Paul swallowed. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. He stepped forward and shoved a couple of punks back out on to the platform to give the doors room to close.

  ‘You fucking cocksuck –’ one of the punks shouted, but the doors bumped shut, cutting off the man’s words. The train began to move along the platform towards where the commotion had been. Paul leaned forward to look out, and saw that a space had parted around a robed, cowled man who stood near the edge of the platform, towering over those around him. Paul hadn’t seen a monk in years and couldn’t believe that such a level of respect still existed.

  Then he saw the bloody corpse at the man’s feet, a security uniform soaked in blood. As the train passed, the cowled man’s head lifted and Paul saw a furry, wolf-like face with dark, human eyes that looked in through the window at the passengers inside. As his carriage passed by, its eyes locked on to his own. The train picked up speed and the creature slipped behind, but its eyes never left him.

  Paul’s legs shook as the train thundered into the tunnel and the outside became darkness. He looked for somewhere to sit down but all the seats were taken, so instead he just slumped to the floor, clutching the clawboard to his chest like a frightened child might clutch a rag doll. Like the others, he had seen plenty of bad things in his life, but always it had been focused on someone else.

  He had seen his own death in those eyes. Death, and worse.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Preparations

  While Switch and Paul both headed south, Marta went north instead, deciding to catch a bus rather than take the train. She jumped on the first one that came, wanting to be off the street.

  It took her on a long, circuitous route around the outer city centre towards Camden Town, which was near where she lived now. Instead of getting off, though, she rode for a couple more stops and then changed buses on to another route. Fifteen minutes later, at around seven o’clock, she alighted on a quiet street in a place called East Finchley. Here, she walked south up a thin residential street back from the high street, until she came to a small churchyard less than a mile from the massive St. Pancreas and Islington Cemetery.

  It was overgrown and untended now; the few remaining stone sentinels rising up out of the tall grass. Most of the granite and basalt stones were gone, pulled up by loot
ers, lugged away and sold. Some less-valuable slate stones remained, along with a few varnished wooden crosses, many of them leaning bent and broken like a mouthful of crooked teeth.

  Marta followed the remains of a gravel path around the side of the old church. Looking up at the building, she noticed another of the old stain glass windows had been destroyed in the months since she had last come here, leaving just one intact, near the back corner. Like the others, it had been boarded up from the inside and now just a few jagged shards of coloured glass remained sticking out of the wall.

  The church still functioned, she knew, with a resident minister and a regular congregation. Guns were their religion now, though, or at least how they maintained their order. She knew she was being watched, either from a tower or a spy-hole somewhere, maybe even with a rifle or a handgun trained on her, depending what weapons they had managed to acquire. It was the only way to keep their church intact, the riches inside safe. Night, though, brought its own problems, and they didn’t have the resources to watch everywhere at once.

  At the back of the church she followed the path through the stones to a section at the rear of the churchyard which was home to the freshest graves. There, near a low stone wall that backed onto a fenced-off alleyway, she came to a small rectangle of ground where the grass was lower than the surrounding area. At the top end was a flat, rounded rock that had long ago been borrowed from a riverbed. It had words on it, written in white paint, although the rain made them difficult to read.

  At the top it said:

  John Richard Banks.