by Chris Ward
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Carl dashed through the woods after Jess and Simon. He hoped Jess had followed his instructions, because it was easy to take a wrong turn among all the poorly-planted trees.
He closed his eyes, trying not to think about the slaughter he had just witnessed. He tried to forget the sight of the Huntsmen’s claws on the men’s throats, ripping and tearing, but the image was painted on his retinas so he opened his eyes and glanced behind him instead. Mercifully he hadn’t seen his own father die, because Roy Weston had fallen down behind one of the cars, but the Huntsman had been over there, claws flashing. There were no signs of pursuit, but he knew it was underway by now. Running hard, he knew he would catch Jess and Simon soon, and he could only hope that their passage wasn’t obvious enough that those terrible creatures could follow.
Huntsmen, Jess had said. Carl had heard of them, but out here in the GFAs they were a myth, a legend. The kind of thing mothers told their children would eat them if they didn’t go to sleep right away. They were monsters in the closet or under the bed, a child’s nightmare.
Yet here they were, in the flesh, with some sort of cyborg warrior woman as their leader. Quite what Jess and Simon had done to deserve such pursuers, he could hardly imagine.
He reached a small river and bounded over it in a single leap. The terrain started to rise again now, and Carl followed a rough path up through the undergrowth of what had once been natural forest. The ruined town began a few hundred feet ahead. He was nearly there.
Under one arm he carried something he’d found years ago in the ruined town, down in an old basement. It wasn’t dissimilar to the boards that Jess and Simon had, except it was longer and had little wheels on one side. When his parents were out, he sometimes took it out and rode it up and down the hallways of the house, but there was nowhere outside he could use it because all the roads had been torn up and replaced with gravel. Whoever had designed the GFAs hadn’t wanted people moving about too much.
The first ruined houses appeared to his left, and he veered in their direction to take him up through the old town. Why, he wondered, as he passed several old houses and the collapsed ruins of a corner shop, a rusty ice cream sign still outside, had the government felt it necessary to do this? To relocate so many people and then try to cover over any trace of them ever having been here?
He’d asked his grandmother about it, the only person prepared to say anything at all. She had told him that the government didn’t think the countryside needed so many people, that it was easier to get things done with more empty space about. They’d chosen those best for the task, and left them behind.
Those best for the task? Like his father? Roy Weston had certainly been good at raising cattle and crops, but as a father he hadn’t proved the best at anything. Carl swallowed a lump in his throat as he remembered that his father wouldn’t get a chance to make that right now. He could only hope that Dreggo and the Huntsmen had spared his mother and Jeanette. He wanted to go back and check, but that was suicide.
‘I can’t go back,’ he said aloud as he jogged up the half overgrown road that lead to the old station. ‘Whoever you are, Jess and Simon, I’m with you now.’
He saw them then, up ahead, leaning against the overgrown steps that led up to the station. Simon was doubled over, clutching his ankle and wincing in pain, while Jess was fiddling with a silver object. As he got closer he recognised it as a crossbow, the same kind that those beasts had carried. As he didn’t think she was one of them, he guessed that meant that at sometime before he met them, one of the Huntsmen had ended up dead. The thought gave him some hope.
‘Don’t stop, Carl,’ Jess said as he reached them. ‘Get across the train line and up into the woods. Simon can’t run anymore, so we make a stand here.’
Carl shook his head. ‘You have no chance against four of them.’
‘There’s no way we can get Simon on the train. They trail us by scent, so running’s no good. They’re not after you. You might still get away.’
Carl held up the board he carried. ‘Look at this. We can use it to push Simon along the platform when the train comes.’
Jess took it and turned it over in her hands. ‘A skateboard? Where did you find it?’
‘Skateboard.’ Carl tested the name. ‘I found it in one of the houses here. We don’t have them out in the GFAs.’
‘A tool of anarchy,’ Jess mused. ‘Who would have thought they’d ban skateboards?’
‘Train,’ Simon muttered.
Carl and Jess both looked up. He was right; back somewhere in the woods came the low rumble of an approaching train.
‘Quick!’ Carl said. ‘Up on to the platform.’
Jess turned to him. ‘Carl, we can never thank you enough for this. After we’ve gone, please just run as far from here as you can. They won’t follow you because we’re too important to them, but just in case, make sure you get away. We’re forever indebted to you.’
He smiled. He didn’t have the heart to tell them what the Huntsmen had done to all the men back at the house. He sensed that enough deaths already hung around their shoulders.
‘It was a pleasure to meet you,’ he said. ‘I just hope that wherever you’re going, you manage to get there.’
Jess grabbed his arm and pulled him close, kissing him on the cheek. ‘Be safe, Carl.’
‘And you.’
‘Huntsmen!’
Simon’s single chilling word broke up their leave-taking. He was too weak to point but they could see anyway. No more than a few hundred feet away, two Huntsmen bounded through the trees towards them. One of them held up a crossbow, and a moment later they heard the fizzy ping as it’s quarrel loosed. Too late to move, they were lucky as it slammed into a wooden board not ten feet from where they sat.
‘Up, quick!’
Together, Carl and Jess hauled Simon up the steps to the platform. Carl felt Simon’s legs sag, and knew that however Jess had managed to get him to run, it had taken the last of his strength.
‘Come on Simon, I won’t lose you again!’ Jess screamed, practically dragging Simon along. Behind them, they heard the building roar of the next train, and above that, the wail of the pursuing Huntsmen.
Up on the platform, Jess wrapped the straps of his clawboard around Simon’s wrists, and then took hold of her own. Carl noticed how she avoided looking at him; her concern for his safety was there, but so was the knowledge that they were leaving him behind.
‘Stand on this, Simon,’ he said, filling the awkward silence. ‘I’ll push you. Can you jump?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Just one more time, Simon,’ Jess screamed into his face. ‘Just one more time!’
Carl supported Simon on the skateboard. Behind them, the Huntsmen had closed to less than two hundred feet. Carl wasn’t sure they’d make it.
‘Leave me the crossbow,’ he said to Jess. ‘I might be able to hold them off.’
Jess stared at him for a moment, their eyes locking. He saw the hardness in her face dissolve for just a second, realised she knew just how much he was prepared to give up to help them.
She held out the weapon. ‘Carl –’
‘Save it. Get him moving!’
Together, they started to push Simon along on the skateboard, gradually picking up speed. Behind them, the train reached the edge of the station, moving quickly but thankfully not at express speeds. The old go-slow in station laws still existed, even when the stations themselves did not.
The train rose up on them like a giant metal snake, a screaming roar and the puffing of its oily breath filling the air around them.
‘Faster – now, jump, Simon!’
Simon cried out and put all his strength into one last leap, pushing up off his good ankle. He lifted the clawboard, gritting his teeth as the stitches in his shoulder broke and blood began to soak through his shirt. For a second Carl didn’t think he’d make it, then the metal claw clunked down on the water drainage rail and he was jerked away from them,
the train already passing them. Jess looked back at Carl.
‘Go, Jess. It’s a long one, you still have time.’
She stared at him again. Her eyes flickered between his and the crossbow in his hands, already wound and fitted with a quarrel. ‘Carl, I hope we have the chance to meet again,’ she said, her eyes glistening. Then in one motion she turned and sprinted down the platform. Carl watched her angle in towards the train, then leap up and catch on the rail, as graceful as a leaping deer.
He turned away. The train was still lumbering past. He had just seconds before the first of the Huntsmen was on him. He remembered three from the slaughter at his house, but there were only two now, and one, maybe injured, lagged behind. He thought perhaps he had a chance if he could disable the nearest one, but then he saw her, back in the woods: the half-metal leader who’d ordered the slaughter of his father and his father’s friends. She wasn’t even running, just walking calmly towards him. He only had time to loose one bolt, but he wished it could be for her. Another time, he promised himself.
He stood his ground. He had always been a dreamer, and he had a plan. But for it to work, he had to be quick. Once the train was gone he was finished, but what he hadn’t said to Jess was that he had no intention of being left behind. He’d have to trust his luck just a little more, was all.
He’d practiced for this. He’d ducked and rolled and dived, firing his catapult or his air gun at targets both stationary and moving; old signs and shop windows, rabbits, birds, foxes. He’d hit with a good level of accuracy, and his target now was a lot bigger.
The Huntsman closed on him, its own crossbow coming up. At the last second, Carl dropped and rolled sideways towards the platform edge. The Huntsman’s crossbow bolt fizzed through where he’d been standing and embedded itself in the wooden side of a freight truck. As Carl came up into a crouch just behind the Huntsman, he fired his own weapon into the back of its head.
The Huntsman roared and tried to turn around. As it did so, Carl picked the skateboard off the floor and swung it at the monster’s head. It hit the Huntsman clean in the face, and with another roar, it staggered backwards, right into the moving train.
Carl saw it lose its footing, saw it sucked into the gap between the train and the platform, saw it disappear into the dark shadows where the thundering wheels rolled.
The train was almost past him. Without thinking, he started to run alongside it, trying to time his spot. If he missed, he died, but if he stayed, he might die anyway. The woman and the other Huntsman had seen him kill one of their own; they would spare him no mercy.
There were just three carriages left. As the next space between two rushed towards him, he counted down from three and jumped.
Metal hit him in the stomach and then he felt something hard slam into his back as the train’s momentum rammed him against the front of the last truck. He cried out in pain and hung on for his life, wrapping his arm over a dirty, sticky tube that stuck out of one truck and fed into the next. His back and ribs screamed at him, but he was on the train, he was safe.
As the last of the platform edge disappeared, to be replaced by forest on either side, Carl let himself breathe, let himself close his eyes.
And there, for a few minutes at least, he let his face crumble up, let tears flow, and allowed himself to mourn.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Battlefield
Clayton watched with unease as the Huntsmen were unloaded inside Bristol Temple Meads train station, deserted now on his order. The handlers urged the beasts at the end of their leashes forward, occasionally dishing out a sharp stun, resulting in a growl of pain that echoed across the cavernous space above them.
Clayton wondered what a casual bystander might think of all this. Behind him, his men were unloading what looked like a train straight out of a nightmare. The Huntsmen moved slowly across the platform, cowled faces lowered, their rough breathing and the occasional growl the only sound.
The handler, Jakob, waved to him. ‘What?’ Clayton asked.
‘We’ve got a scent,’ the man told him. We’re a few hours behind but if we set the dogs off now we can run them down. These Tube Riders have to sleep at some point.’
Clayton nodded. ‘Get the Huntsmen over there. Make sure the new ones are familiar with the scent.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Jakob replied.
Clayton grimaced. The last thing he wanted was for the malfunctioning monsters to dash off after the wrong people. He’d seen a lot of bloodshed in the last twenty-four hours and was growing weary of it.
I want this finished, he thought. I want this over with.
He knew, though, that the only way to end it was to see those kids dead, and a part of him suffered at the thought of it. He’d done many bad things in his life, and he was about to do another. He knew, as no doubt the Governor did, that the Tube Riders had done nothing wrong. They were just another group of misfits trying to make something out of the mess Mega Britain had become. If there was anyone who ought to die . . .
Clayton squeezed his eyes shut, trying to keep out the thought. Treason was a strong word even in peace times, and to utter those thoughts out loud could see him dead. But there was something not right about everything, and part of Clayton wished he’d been born in a different time and place.
Instead he let himself think of Dreggo, the girl under his control whom the DCA were forcing to lead the Huntsmen. The bulge of the remote in his pocket pressed against his side, and he felt a sudden flush of regret for what he’d done to her. She’d attacked him, but his words had provoked her. What had he been thinking?
There are lower standards there, he had told her, of the city. But those were the Governor’s words, not his. Clayton rubbed his eyes. Were the Governor’s threats turning him into a similar monster? Dreggo was no different to the Tube Riders, he knew. The wrong place at the wrong time. Yet something about her just made him hate her. Maybe it was that without the remote in his pocket, she would kill him in an instant, perhaps as he deserved.
‘Got to give them credit,’ someone said beside him, and Clayton jerked back to the present to see Vincent standing there, looking in the direction of the damaged train that had derailed just beyond the platform edge, its front end having collided with another stationary train. The debris was yet to be cleared.
‘What?’ Clayton said.
‘Got to give them credit,’ Vincent repeated. ‘They’re putting up a hell of a fight over this.’
Clayton smiled. ‘They’ve got spirit,’ he said.
‘Kind of a shame we’ve got to see it ripped out of them,’ Vincent said. ‘But I guess that’s just how it goes.’
Clayton looked at Vincent. The man’s face was a mess of bruises but that same cold stare was there. Clayton could read the younger man well. There was no conflict behind those eyes, simply a desire to see the job done as quickly and as efficiently as possible, ideally in a way that would benefit Vincent personally. Vincent had allowed the Tube Riders to escape once, and suffered for it. He wasn’t about to do it again.
‘Sir!’
Clayton turned, noticing as he did how Vincent turned also; that same desire for command still there, despite everything.
A DCA agent stood behind them. ‘They went down the stairs,’ the man said. ‘Into the parking garage. The trail’s clean down there because the area is disused. Want us to roll them out?’
Clayton considered. He estimated they were up to a day and a half behind the Tube Riders, but the perimeter wall was on high alert, while every train in or out of the city’s other main station was undergoing a thorough check. The chances were high indeed that they were still in the city, hiding out somewhere. Maybe they thought their trail would go cold, the scent would fade. Karmski had told Clayton that in the absence of rain or other contaminating factors, the Huntsmen could track a scent more than two weeks after it was first left. They were nothing short of a masterpiece of science, the doctor had said. Clayton wasn’t sure he would put it like that.
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He pushed his thoughts aside. ‘Okay, let’s do this,’ he told the agent, looking back over his shoulder towards the train. He frowned. ‘What’s going on with those?’
Several of the handlers had shackled a group of Huntsmen together using a chain with individual manacles.
‘They’re the reserve, I think,’ Vincent said.
‘The what?’
‘They’re using the first group to track. These others are the heavy artillery, so to speak.’
‘Jesus Christ. This whole operation is just waiting to fuck up.’
Already Clayton was regretting letting Dreggo go after the other Tube Riders. She had called him just once in the hour and a half since she left them, with nothing to report. He was fuming. What was she doing, having a goddamn picnic?
‘At least they’ve cleared out the station,’ Vincent said with a smirk. ‘If there were people around it would be like letting a group of rabid foxes loose in a chicken coop.’
Clayton rolled his eyes. ‘Just keep an eye on the ones to the left.’
He was sure Vincent was enjoying this. Adam Vincent enjoyed anything that made Clayton’s command look frail.
One of the handlers called to him. ‘All four went into the parking garage together. I’d guess they were running by that point.’
‘Well, in after them we go, then,’ Clayton muttered darkly, following the man down the steps. Behind them, three handlers were directing the chained Huntsmen down.
‘We should have stuck with five,’ Vincent said. ‘This is turning into one ugly fucking dog show.’
Clayton said nothing.
The door to the parking garage was ajar. Inside, the darkness was almost impenetrable, except for a small glow on the far side, several hundred feet distant.
‘Let’s get on it,’ Clayton said and stepped inside, his gun drawn as a precaution. He moved wide around the side wall as the handlers pushed the Huntsmen down the centre.
‘Looks like they just bolted straight across, sir –’
An explosion rocked the entrance just behind him, sending Clayton sprawling to the ground amid a shower of sparks and debris as the back of the parking garage roof collapsed.
