The Tube Riders

by Chris Ward

  Dreggo saw Clayton coming towards them. At his side were two handlers and behind him came a group of DCA agents. She felt an immediate warning signal go off in her head. Clayton usually came towards her tentatively or with a show of forced confidence. This time, though, he walked with genuine purpose. She put a hand on her hip and felt a knife hidden there. Maybe this time, if she was quick . . .

  ‘Secure it quickly, I want to take a look at it.’ Clayton pointed at Lyen, and the two handlers moved forward.

  ‘Back off!’ Dreggo shouted. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘Don’t worry, we won’t hurt him.’

  ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’

  ‘Stand away, Dreggo. I won’t warn you again.’

  She saw the remote in his hand and the certainty in his eyes. With a growl she stepped back as the handlers closed in and secured Lyen’s wrists. They pushed the Huntsman to his knees.

  ‘What do you want with him?’

  One of Clayton’s men handed him an envelope. ‘We just want to try a little experiment. A little recognition game.’ Clayton pulled a sheet of paper out of the envelope. ‘You sure he’s secure?’ he asked the handlers. They nodded.

  ‘I hope he rips your face off,’ Dreggo muttered.

  Clayton flashed a look at her, and uncertainty appeared for just a moment before the purpose returned. ‘Does this one have a name?’

  ‘Lyen,’ one of the handlers said.

  ‘How appropriate. Lyen. Lion.’ He looked right into the Huntsman’s eyes. ‘Tell me, Lion, do you recognise this girl?’

  He held up the sheet of paper. Dreggo couldn’t see, but Lyen’s eyes stared for a moment then went wide. They flicked back and forth across the paper, and his eyes narrowed in a frown, the wires over his head pulling tight. His lips curled back in a snarl and then he began to shake from side to side. The word that came from his mouth was mostly a growl, but Dreggo’s acute hearing picked it up.

  ‘Marta . . .’

  Lyen jumped to his feet, wrenching his hands apart, the shackles creaking as they barely held. The Huntsman snapped at Clayton but one of the handlers activated the leash remote and Lyen jerked as a shock tore through him. Another pulled a bag over Lyen’s head and sprayed him with something that stank of chemicals. The creature sunk to his knees, his breathing slowing.

  ‘Clayton, what are you doing to him?’

  He passed the picture to her. It was a faxed copy of a family photograph, mother, father, brother, sister. At first she didn’t recognise any of them. Then, as she looked closer, the girl became familiar.

  ‘That’s –’

  ‘Marta Banks, leader of the Tube Riders.’

  Dreggo looked closer at the other people. The photograph was old; the girl could only be fourteen or fifteen. The boy was older, maybe –

  ‘Oh my God.’

  Dreggo pointed at Lyen, trussed and bound, his face hidden. ‘Take off that fucking bag.’

  Before Clayton could protest, one of the handlers pulled the mask away from Lyen’s face. Dreggo looked down on the creature, slumped forward on its knees, its eyes staring into space. Human eyes . . .

  ‘Lyen. Lion. Leo. Right here, Dreggo, we have Leo Banks,’ Clayton said. ‘Lost brother of Marta, and if our intelligence reports are correct, formerly a Tube Rider.’

  Dreggo couldn’t take her eyes off him. Now that she looked closely, the eyes were the same, as was the face shape. Only the rest, the terrible rest, was different.

  Clayton snorted. ‘Not that easy to see the family resemblance these days, is it?’

  #

  The Governor looked around his ruined room. The array of ornaments and precious artwork lay smashed and scattered across the floor. Tables and chairs were upturned, some of them in pieces. The cabinets along the wall had fallen forward, revealing old, stained wallpaper beneath. A door into an inner chamber had come loose of its hinges, and even the huge bay window had a small hairline crack.

  The Governor breathed heavily, feeling the pull inside his body that the power had caused, feeling the urge to continue, to destroy more, to smash everything he could until the power grew so great that it destroyed him, too.

  He let it go, regretting its onset but regretting more his inability to control it. Fearsome though it was, his power was unpredictable, largely unknown. He did not know how great it could be, but it had been easy enough for him to seize power, to keep him in control of Mega Britain for more than forty years. It had enabled him to establish a state that barely remembered the past, and to control his subjects through a mixture of fear and misleading promises. And he wouldn’t need it much longer; his spacecraft were almost ready. Just a few more years . . .

  And now everything was threatened by a group of street kids. Power or not, he couldn’t defeat an entire army. His own military was weakened by the transferring of material resources to the space program, and the Huntsmen, together with Dr. Karmski’s other prototypes, while strong, were too few. His hopes had rested on keeping the European Confederation at bay with a series of charades, but if those kids managed to get across the Channel . . .

  He pulled the internal phone off the wreckage of his desk and pressed the button for reception.

  ‘Get my car,’ he said, in chocolate-smooth tones. ‘I’m going to Cornwall.’

  He put the phone back down. He knew from Clayton’s reports that the Tube Riders were heading that way. To what end he didn’t know, but it was time to find out.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Train

  Jess was quiet now as they headed down through the tunnels. Occasionally Carl glanced back at her, watching the way she absently stroked the dirty walls, her eyes following the trails in the grime left by her fingers. As they walked, Carl explained what had happened to his father and Simon to the man called Ishael, who turned out to be the leader of Bristol’s Underground Movement for Freedom, an organization even Carl had heard of out in the GFA.

  ‘I can only tell you how sorry I am for your loss and for hers,’ Ishael said. His voice was muffled; the swelling around his jaw made speech difficult. ‘Too many have died already, but I think this is just the start.’ He in turn had recounted his knowledge of recent events; the arrival of the Tube Riders in Bristol, the attempt of his men to halt the charge of the Huntsmen and their overwhelming defeat, his capture and subsequent torture at the hands of the DCA agents.

  ‘I don’t know where they were taking me,’ Ishael said, a haunted look in his eyes. ‘But I expected to die.’ Carl saw that the fingernails were missing on Ishael’s middle, ring and little fingers of his right hand, and how Ishael grimaced with every step he took, as if someone had beaten his feet. A day ago he wouldn’t have thought such things possible, but he was beginning to see the world in a whole different light.

  Carl had found a radio on the body of one of the dead men and now Ishael held it up. ‘If there was a signal down here I could contact my men,’ Ishael said. ‘I know the frequency, but these walls . . . they’re just too thick and we’re too far below ground.’

  Carl didn’t know where they were going, but both Ishael and Jess were slowing them down. Jess was unresponsive, but to Ishael he said, ‘Can you please try to move a bit faster? The Huntsmen could be on us at any moment.’

  The other man gave a pained half-grin, and Carl knew that once, not so long ago, he had been handsome. ‘I’ll do my best.’

  Carl had also pulled three guns off the bodies of the DCA men. He had one, while Ishael had the others. Jess had made no response when he’d tried to give her one, looking right through him as though she were somewhere else entirely. Now, Carl held his own in front of him as he moved, even though he’d never fired a real gun before. He imagined it had a far stronger kickback than an air rifle.

  They reached another fork in the tunnel. ‘Head left,’ Ishael said behind him. ‘Right goes back to the surface. We have to get out of the city, try to meet up with the others. The best way to do that is to steal a train.’<
br />
  ‘You’re joking, right?’

  Ishael shook his head. ‘The government has no heavy artillery. Mega Britain’s army is mostly limited to foot soldiers and the Huntsmen. We don’t know what missiles or other weapons they might be hiding, but there is practically no known air force or heavy ground artillery. So, what can possibly stop a train?’

  #

  A short distance further on they found a flight of stairs that led up to a loading bay. There they found a stationary train, its trucks standing empty. There were no guards in sight and they were able to approach the cab unnoticed. Ishael, terrifying with his bruised and bleeding face and clearly at home with guns, hauled open the door and with a wave of his stolen weapon instructed the surprised driver (Carl was happy to see it was a different driver to the kind man who had helped him to bury Simon) to start the engine and pull out of the station while Jess and Carl climbed into the cab. As the train groaned into life guards came running, but too late. The train, hijacked by a blond-haired, bright-eyed kid, a man with a battered face, and a red-eyed, mute girl was away.

  Picking up speed, they roared out of Bristol Temple Meads station and away through the city, past old, crumbling city centre housing estates and large industrial buildings billowing smoke up into the air in great grey-white plumes. The side of the Avon Gorge rose in a wave up to their left, while the city swept away to their right, the apartment blocks and office high-rises poking up into the sky, with only the absence of any reflecting sunlight revealing their missing windows, their abandonment. Carl heard Ishael sigh, and when he looked at the other man Ishael muttered something about how it still looked the same as ever. Carl had never seen a city before so couldn’t comment.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ the driver spat, showing more anger than fear.

  ‘As far away as possible. Cornwall.’

  ‘The line ends in Exeter but that doesn’t matter. They’re gonna catch you, you know.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  Carl listened to the exchange with nervous interest. He didn’t think the driver would try anything with them all there, and he hoped not. For one thing he wasn’t sure how to fire the gun in his pocket that his hand was currently resting on. For another, while shooting a half-human, half-robot monster like a Huntsman was fine and dandy, shooting an actual human who had done nothing wrong was not. He wasn’t convinced that Ishael knew quite what he was doing, but the longer they were in the train the further they got from the Huntsmen, and that was fine by him.

  ‘You have a problem,’ the driver said, pointing at a flashing light on the dashboard.

  ‘What?’

  ‘See that? It means they’ve switched the rails at the next junction. We’re going to move over on to the other line about a mile further on.’

  ‘The other line? Where does it go?’

  ‘Same as this one.’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘The other line is for incoming. Anything coming along that track is going to hit us unless we stop and go backwards.’ The man grinned, revealing gaps between blackened teeth. ‘Huh. They must really hate you.’

  ‘Is there any way we can override it?’

  ‘No.’

  What can stop a moving train? Carl remembered Ishael’s question now, and thought he knew the answer: another train.

  Ishael’s eyes hardened and he jabbed the gun into the man’s neck. ‘Tell me. Believe me, I am desperate enough to kill you.’

  ‘Okay, okay, but it’s pretty useless. There’s a manual lever half a mile from the junction. We hit that, the junction switches back.’

  ‘Can we slow down, get out and do it?’

  ‘We could, but there’s another train behind us.’ The man gestured towards a side mirror outside the train’s window. ‘We slow and that hits us. Good God, what have you people done?’

  Ishael punched the dashboard with his free hand, immediately wincing. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

  Carl reached into his bag. ‘I can do it,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  Carl held up his catapult. ‘I’m pretty good. I didn’t have much to do outside of school, you know. I used to shoot at signs all the time. Sometimes birds and animals, although I used to feel a little guilty whenever I hit one.’

  Ishael tried to laugh. ‘You’re joking, right? You miss, we die.’

  ‘Do we have a choice?’ Carl replied. ‘We have nothing to lose.’ He glanced at Jess. The girl’s empty stare followed the tracks as the train rushed forward, swallowing them up. She veered between frightening intensity and hollow emptiness as she battled with what haunted her. He wondered then if she would either notice or care if they smashed headlong into an oncoming train.

  ‘Do you have a rock or something?’ Carl asked.

  Ishael looked around, but it was the driver who handed him something heavy from his pocket. It was a small hip flask. ‘I couldn’t give a fuck about you people but I don’t particularly want to die either,’ the driver said.

  ‘It’ll have to do,’ Carl said. He wound down the window of the train and leaned out. A strong wind buffeted him in the face, making it nearly impossible to hold the catapult steady, its unlikely ammunition resting in the cradle.

  ‘That’s it up ahead,’ the driver said, pointing. At first Carl couldn’t see what he meant, and then he spotted it: a lever about three feet long, sticking out of a metal box with a flashing red light on the side. It was just like in the cartoons he had watched as a little kid, but damn, was it thin, and it was coming so fast he barely had time to aim.

  ‘Slow the train as much as you can!’ Ishael shouted at the driver.

  ‘You’ve got to hold my shoulders,’ Carl said. ‘I can’t keep it steady.’

  Ishael glanced at the driver, then at Jess. He put his gun in Jess’s palm, folded her fingers over it and turned her hand so the gun pointed at the driver. Jess didn’t react. ‘She will shoot you,’ Ishael told the man. ‘If you make a move, she will shoot you.’

  Ishael moved behind Carl and braced himself against the back of the cab. Carl smelt dried blood on Ishael’s fingers as the other man put his hands on Carl’s shoulders. Carl lifted the catapult, lining up the shot. He’d done this a thousand times in the forest, jumping and rolling, diving out of trees, over walls, aiming at rabbits, foxes, deer. He’d hit more often than not, but even when he missed he’d always get another shot, sooner or later. There would be no other shot this time.

  He could hear Ishael’s raw breathing in his ear as he tensed the catapult, the cradle held in his fingers, the metal hip flask pointed slightly up.

  Ready, aim . . .

  He let his fingers open and the little flask shot through the air, momentarily outrunning the train. Then, to Carl’s amazement, it clanged against the lever and was gone, falling into the overgrown grass verge. In a moment the lever was behind him too as the train rushed past, and Carl tried to look back to see if it had shifted or not, but it was already too far behind to tell.

  ‘You got it!’ Ishael shouted, just as a deafening gunshot rang through the cab. The driver cried out in pain. Carl looked around and saw the man fall against the control panel and then slide to the floor, blood oozing from a head wound.

  Carl stared at the dead man then looked up at Jess, her steady gaze on the body between them. He gripped the window edge and tried to force his breathing to slow. His heart was thundering faster than the wheels of the train over the sleepers below them.

  ‘What happened?’ Ishael asked Jess. ‘Jess? What did he do?’

  The girl didn’t look at him. Her fingers opened and the gun dropped to the floor.

  Ishael turned to Carl. He looked grim. ‘Between you and me we have to figure out how to drive this thing,’ he said.

  ‘There’s the junction,’ Carl said, pointing through the front window. Half a mile ahead a second line branched off from the first. In the distance, they could see another train moving towards them, at this distance as thin and silent as a snake.

/>   ‘I see it,’ Ishael said.

  ‘Are you sure it worked? I didn’t see the lever move.’

  They stared at the junction as they approached. It was impossible to tell which way the train would go, and Carl’s eyes flicked from the rails to the other train and back. He felt Ishael’s bloody fingers digging into his arm.

  Ten seconds away, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, threetwoone –

  They screamed as the train jigged left, jerking them into the path of the oncoming train. Carl covered his face with his hands, resigned to the coming impact. Beside him, Ishael was shouting out for him to open the door, but his mind failed to recognise the command as the other train thundered towards them. He wanted to shut his eyes, but he couldn’t, just couldn’t take them off the oncoming train –

  – which suddenly jigged to their right, ducking away from them like a cobra vying for an opening in its prey’s defenses, and then it was past them, roaring alongside their train and gone, disappearing in the mirrors behind them as it headed in towards Bristol. Another scream faded away on Carl’s lips. He looked down to see that Ishael’s blunt fingers had left bruises on his forearm.

  ‘What just happened there?’ Ishael asked, his voice shaking. Carl saw that he had bitten into his already swollen lip. Fresh blood dribbled down his chin.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He lied,’ a quiet voice said.

  They turned to see Jess looking up at them, her face still devoid of emotion.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That wasn’t a junction override,’ she said. ‘He just wanted you near the door, to give him a chance to push you out. He controlled the junction from the dashboard.’ She pointed at a small computer display. Carl saw red lines on it and flashing symbols which must signify their train and oncoming rail junctions, but it was all gibberish to him. He didn’t even know how to drive a car.

  ‘I saw him press it,’ Jess said. ‘He knew that the other driver would want to avoid the crash and would open up an earlier junction, which is what he did.’