The Tube Riders

by Chris Ward

  Ishael closed his eyes for a long moment. When he looked at her again there was only regret there. ‘A lot of people have died because of what this country has become. Here, we’ve been building an underground army. We planned to start a rebellion, but I think we all knew it would never be enough. We might sting the bastard, but he’d still swat us away.’ Ishael tapped his finger against a photograph fixed to the wall. It showed a strange-looking man taken over a distance. The man was facing the camera, his mouth slightly open in a look of anger, his eyes wide in shock. Marta saw they were dark red, like clotted blood.

  ‘Is that him? The Governor?’

  Marta knew very little about the Governor, only that he had been in power since before she was born. She had never seen a picture of him before, because he never appeared in public or on television. There were rumours about him, of course, but no one she knew had ever seen his face. He was like a dark lord in a tower, controlling Mega Britain through hundreds of lower ministers and officials while he hid away from public view. Most rumours said he was disfigured, scarred by fire, perhaps, or mutilated in an accident. The most common rumour she had heard was that his skin was abnormally pale, as though he lived underground, but there were other less believable ones. Some people thought he was nine feet tall.

  Ishael nodded. ‘The man who took this picture is dead. It’s the only picture I’ve ever seen of the Governor’s face. He was being transferred into a new government office, and the photo was taken at long range.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘We’re not sure. We think his skin colour is due to albinism, but there are rumours that there are other strange things about him. Albinos have no fear of light, yet he is almost never seen outside. A former government worker who defected to us once reported that the Governor’s quarters were kept at a higher humidity level compared to everywhere else in the building.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We guess it has something to do with his skin. Some other defect.’ Ishael frowned. ‘People say he’s the result of a scientific experiment gone wrong. Or, perhaps, spectacularly right.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The man had no proof, but he had heard rumours from the other staff that the Governor . . . he could do things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Move stuff around. Hurt people.’ He shrugged. ‘With his mind.’

  Marta felt a shiver go up her back. ‘Telekinesis?’

  ‘I didn’t like to use that word, but yeah, that’s what the informant said. He also said there were rumours that the Governor was from a different place entirely.’

  ‘He’s not human?’

  Ishael shrugged again. ‘There were rumours that the space program is an effort to contact someone or something. That it has nothing to do with Europe or America at all.’

  Marta cocked her head. ‘People in London believe the Tube Riders are the ghosts of train suicides come back from the dead. But they aren’t. It’s just us. Me, Paul, Switch, and Simon. And, as of yesterday, Jess and Owen. Hardly legends, are we? The Governor is probably just a normal man with a couple of allergies.’

  ‘Maybe. But looking at that photograph, do you really think so?’

  Marta felt cold inside as she studied the picture, the red eyes seeming to know she was watching. Ishael moved nearer to her and put a hand on her arm. Normally, if a man she’d known only a day tried to touch her, she’d have knocked his arm away, but with Ishael it just felt right. She leaned against him, feeling more like a child than she had for years.

  ‘We’re going to help you,’ he reassured her. ‘We’re going to find a way to get you over to France. And I’m sorry that we can’t do more for your friends, the ones out in the GFA.’

  Marta felt a sudden pang of regret. ‘Did we abandon them?’ she asked him. ‘Should we have gone after them? The others call me their leader, but I don’t know how, I can’t lead . . .’

  Ishael shook his head. ‘You’re doing fine. The others, this . . . Jess? You have to trust her. You have to trust that she’ll find her boyfriend and find you.’

  ‘He was hurt bad.’

  ‘Put yourself in his situation. Would he want you to come after him?’

  Marta thought for a moment. ‘Simon . . . no. He’d tell us to go on. He’d tell us to see this through.’

  ‘Then that’s what you must do. You have to trust them to make it, and if they don’t . . . you have to honour their memory by finishing this.’ He smiled in a way she thought was supposed to reassure her. ‘We’ll help them any way we can,’ he said. ‘I’ll post men to watch for them, and if they make it to Bristol, we’ll find them. And if they still have that memory card, then we’ll make sure they get it to you.’

  Marta closed her eyes. The image of Simon, his face screwed up in pain, and Jess’s desperate shout as she leapt off the train into the dark rushed back to her. She opened her eyes again, the memory too painful. ‘How can it end?’ she whispered in a quiet voice. ‘How can we end all this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He forced a grin. ‘Everything pans out in the end,’ he said. ‘One way or another, it’ll work out.’

  ‘But which way? The right or the wrong?’

  Ishael said nothing. Marta knew there was only so far he could reassure her without it sounding false. They’d grown up in the same country. They both knew the way things were.

  Ishael pulled away from her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Where?’ Don’t leave me.

  ‘I have to go the station and oversee our defenses. I can’t ask my men to do what I won’t do myself. If you can wake your friends one of my men will come and drill you on how we’re getting you out of the city. We have a plan in place.’

  Marta bit her lip. Her heart started to thud as she realised this man was putting his life and that of others on the line for theirs. When the Huntsmen came through the station there was no guarantee anything could stop them. And Ishael would be standing in the front line. Don’t beg him to stay, her mind screamed at her. You barely know this man. Don’t show such weakness.

  Something in his eyes made her feel he could read her mind. He reached up and ran a finger down the side of her face, his touch as gentle as a breeze.

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ he said. ‘It’ll work out.’

  Marta’s lip trembled. She didn’t trust herself to say anything. Ishael flashed a smile at her, turned, and was gone.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Friends, Enemies

  ‘Thank you very much, but I really should get going.’ Jess started to stand up, but the old woman shook her head.

  ‘Good Heavens, girl, after what you’ve been through, you ought to have a shower at least.’

  Jess considered it. ‘Well, I guess. If that’s all right?’

  ‘Sure it is.’

  The old woman led Jess up the stairs at the back of the living room and showed her into a pretty bathroom, all frilly drapes and flowery patterned towels and mats.

  After the old woman had left, Jess stripped off and climbed into the bath tub. She switched on the shower and squeezed her eyes shut as the hot water doused over her, wishing she could cleanse more than just her body. The horrors of the last day were still so fresh in her mind that she couldn’t imagine ever being without them, like a weight slung around her neck that she had to carry everywhere.

  She hadn’t meant to talk to the old woman, but sitting across from that kindly face she’d been unable to help herself. The woman reminded her of her own grandmother, dead some ten years now, with soft, caring eyes, and an easy smile.

  She hadn’t told the woman everything, but she’d still said too much, maybe. She was looking for her boyfriend, she had said, fallen from the train, but carried away before Jess could get to him. They had been heading for Bristol, looking to start a new life away from the troubles in London, but some men had started a scuffle in their carriage, and Simon had been pushed through an emergency door. How much the woman knew
about the trains, she hadn’t said, but she had nodded carefully while Jess spoke.

  After ten minutes Jess switched off the shower and climbed out of the tub. She dried herself and dressed in spare clothes she had brought from London. Her other clothes were so ripped and soiled that she stuffed them into a waste basket, hoping the old woman wouldn’t mind.

  She was feeling a lot better as she picked up the rucksack containing her weapons, the clawboards, and the last of her leftover food, and went back down to the living room.

  She was humming to herself as she pushed through the door into the living room, and found a large, bulky middle-aged man standing next to the old woman.

  ‘Ah, Jessica dear. I hope you feel better now.’

  Jess took a step back. The man, too, looked alarmed.

  ‘This is my son, Roy, the one I was telling you about. Roy Weston.’

  The man stared at Jessica with barely disguised hatred. ‘You –’

  ‘Roy was telling me they found a boy. It sounds like your Simon –’

  ‘Mother!’

  Jessica took a step forward, one hand going to her forehead as though she might faint at any moment. They had Simon!

  ‘He’s alive? Where is he?’

  Roy Weston didn’t answer. His eyes moved to her rucksack. Jess watched as he stepped across in front of the old woman, and glanced behind him, looking for something hard to hold on to. He settled on a large quartz bowl and lifted it in front of him.

  ‘Roy, what are you doing?’

  ‘Be quiet, mother! Girl, I don’t know who you are, but I want you out of here right now, or heaven help me . . .’

  Jess followed his gaze. The crossbow she had stolen from the Huntsman was half exposed at the top of her rucksack.

  ‘The boy was seriously hurt, mother,’ Roy said. ‘Someone had tried to kill him, and my guess is it was this little bitch here.’

  ‘Roy!’

  ‘No, I didn’t – it’s not mine!’

  ‘You get a two minute start, girl, and then I’m coming after you with a shotgun.’

  Jess knew he didn’t actually have a gun, otherwise it would be trained on her now, but she didn’t wait for a second warning. Grabbing her bag, she turned and bolted back through the door into the hall, looking for another way out. Behind her she heard the old woman shouting over her son’s angry demands for a telephone.

  He’s going to get a gang after me, Jess thought. Whatever serves for law enforcement out here in the damn woods is now officially alerted to my presence.

  She went through into a small kitchen, past a little terrier dog that watched her with confusion from its basket. A door led out into a quaint garden which Jess sprinted across, vaulting over a wall at the end into an adjacent field. A few moments later she heard shouting from the garden behind her, but she was already climbing over another hedge into the next field along.

  As she ran alongside the hedgerow towards a distant gate, her mind was a confusion of bitterness and sadness. The old woman had shown her genuine kindness, only for her buffoon son to charge in and accuse Jess of trying to kill Simon. Yet, the two people were of the same blood, mother and son. How could one be so kind, the other not?

  Still, Weston’s entrance had solved one problem for her: she now knew where to find Simon. Before her shower, the old woman had talked with pride about how her son was the biggest landowner in the village. All Jess had to do to find the biggest landowner was to find the biggest house, and that was easy.

  From where she stood, the field dipped away into a valley, and there, at the top of the far rise, overlooking the whole village, stood a large manor house, glinting white in the sun.

  And somewhere inside it, if she could get there before Roy Weston and his lynch mob, she was sure she would find Simon.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Ambush

  Dreggo and the three Huntsmen were crouched behind a low wall in the lee of a hedgerow that bordered the back lawn of the manor house. Dreggo was still, concentrating, but the Huntsmen fidgeted, their lips curled back, their eyes darting around them. They were hungry, she knew, but there was no time to eat now. They had found the Tube Riders.

  Well, one of them at least. Following the trail had been easy. The men who had taken the injured Tube Rider had battered their way back through the forest, leaving a path of broken vegetation that she could have followed in the dark, even if the scent trail had gone. They obviously weren’t expecting pursuit.

  They had circled the house earlier, and found no scent leading away. The boy was still inside, hopefully laid up with his injuries. And if he was, Dreggo doubted he would be guarded.

  Easy pickings.

  But that was just one. They’d found another trail leading away from the same spot, fresh but less clear because whoever had left it was alone and moving fast. Dreggo had recognised the fragrant scent of a woman, and knew that the Tube Rider’s girlfriend had come after him. The girl lacked Dreggo’s Huntsman-like tracking ability, though, for after a few hundred feet she had veered away from the path left by the men, and her trail had become erratic, doubling back on itself, even swinging round to cross over the same path again.

  She had got lost, Dreggo knew. They had followed the trail until it finally emerged from the woods in the corner of a field. At this point, Dreggo had turned the Huntsmen back around and together they had backtracked to the other trail and followed it to the house. The girl would come, Dreggo knew. She was after the boy, too, and the best way to trap her was to use the boy as bait.

  Behind her the Huntsmen stirred. A whine escaped from Jacul’s lips, while Meud and Lyen bobbed their heads like hyenas, tongues lolling.

  ‘Be quiet,’ she muttered.

  ‘Eat . . .’

  Dreggo grimaced, as she always did when she heard one of them speak. Their canine muzzles and tongues weren’t designed for speech, but they still had the necks and therefore the larynxes of humans. What came out was a low, cheese-grater voice that sounded like a metal file scrapping away human skin, and each time they spoke it reminded her of how close she’d come to ending up as one of them.

  Dreggo would have problems soon. She was overriding their orders by keeping them here; their natural instincts were to break into the house and kill the boy. Then, with the Tube Rider dead, their reward would be his flesh.

  She didn’t need their mind-link to sense their uneasiness. She had to keep them happy or she would lose control.

  ‘Come on,’ she hissed, and led them away from the house and through a cluster of farm outbuildings until they reached a barn. Dreggo heard the shuffling of cattle inside.

  ‘Just one,’ she ordered them. ‘And keep it quiet.’

  Meud’s eyes widened and his jowls pulled back over his teeth. He looked crazed, rabid. ‘Eat . . .’

  The other two had already moved towards the barn. ‘Listen to your transmitters,’ Dreggo told them. ‘Be ready when I call.’

  They nodded but she knew they weren’t paying attention. She hoped their hunger would outweigh their thirst for mindless slaughter.

  She headed back towards the house. Behind her she heard the thud of something heavy dropping dead to the ground, and knew the Huntsmen had made their choice. To their credit, it sounded as though they’d chosen an isolated target, for the rest of the cows continued their slow shuffling, their occasional moo. The Huntsmen knew stealth as well as any assassin; they just rarely chose to use it.

  She resumed her vigil at the same place as before. Dreggo knew that the girl would come from this way; she would be thinking like a fugitive, and would take what she believed to be the safer way in, around the back.

  Unsure how long she would have to wait, Dreggo let herself drift for a while, thinking back on her childhood, back when Mega Britain was young and the perimeter walls weren’t yet finished, when people could go out into the countryside and sit by rivers and under trees, eating sandwiches and drinking juice in the sun. She remembered the journey out of London into the tra
nquil fields and the rolling hills, but she also remembered the streams of people heading in the opposite direction, in towards the city, the suitcases and the weary faces, the armed guards lining the roads, the cranes rising up above the trees and the groan of heavy machinery.

  It had left conflicting impressions on her, and she realised that through it all she hated the countryside and the people who had been allowed to remain here, hated its illusion of safety. Her parents had never again taken her outside the perimeter walls, and her life had spiraled downhill until her eventual capture and abuse at the hands of Karmski and his government toads. Now, coming back here, she felt the urge to shatter the apparent tranquility that these people lived under. She had to live in Hell, so why shouldn’t they?

  She was still lost in reminiscence when a girl slipped out of the bushes not fifty feet from her and darted towards the back of the house.

  Dreggo ducked low against the top of the wall, pulling a branch across her face as the girl reached the back wall, turned and looked around her. Dreggo had no doubt that this was the Tube Rider; although the girl was wearing different clothes Dreggo could see the girl’s hanging board poking out of her rucksack, and in her hands she held a Huntsman’s crossbow.

  Dreggo smiled. She would enjoy turning the stolen weapon on the thief.

  The girl climbed a set of steps to a porch and peered in through a dirty window. Dreggo could only assume that around the back of such a large house were the servants’ quarters. After a moment the girl cracked open the door and slipped inside.

  Dreggo waited just a few seconds and then hurried across to the door. She too glanced inside and saw what looked like a kitchen pantry; shelves packed with cans and jars, hanging sides of meat, great sacks labeled as corn and flour. She gave a brief wistful smile at the storybook air of the house, and then slipped inside. Through an arch in the far wall wooden stairs led up.

  Dreggo had taken just a few steps when she heard the girl above her on a higher landing. The girl was doing her best to be quiet but Dreggo’s advanced hearing had no trouble picking up the creaks and shifts of her footfalls as she crept up along the wooden floor and up the next flight of stairs. Dreggo was tempted to kill her immediately because she knew the other Tube Rider was inside, but a sadistic part of her wanted them to die in each other’s presence. Let them think everything was going to be all right, and then take it away. Wasn’t that what life had done to her? Wasn’t that the way it always was?