by Steve Feasey
‘Don’t you listen to him!’ It was Kohl. ‘Those shots were lucky! You keep pulling that damn ferry back in or I’ll – GARGH!’ The third stone caught him in the throat, collapsing his windpipe and shutting off both his threats and any doubts about ‘lucky shots’. The pair took one look at each other, dropped the rope and ran off.
There were no more attempts to stop the ferry leaving.
Brick winched them to the far quay, where, once ashore, the big mutant used his colossal strength to heave a thick wooden jetty post out of the ground and throw it through the deck of the ferry. The two friends watched it slowly sink beneath the surface for a few moments before turning their backs on Logtown and the mountains beyond.
They stared across the landscape before them in the direction of the vast metropolis that was City Four.
A splash made them whirl about, only to see Dotty in the shallows, her teeth clamped on to the head of one of the eelsnakes. The creature curled and twisted its body in a vain attempt to escape the rogwan’s deadly jaws, but Dotty held on, bracing her short legs in the thick mud as she made her way backwards towards the shore. Once there, she dragged the thing to Brick and Rush and deposited it at their feet, letting out a deep hurgh. She nudged the catch with her nose, looking up at the two of them for a moment before shaking herself off and covering the pair with muddy water droplets.
‘You’re welcome, Dotty,’ Rush said with a smile, recognising the gesture for what it was.
They were all exhausted. Brick insisted on looking at the wound on Rush’s leg where he’d been caught by a boarnog’s tusk, so they agreed to make camp where they were. Nobody was coming over the river after them – they were sure of that. Rush was worried about the ARM’s imminent return to Logtown, but if they were to stand any chance of making it to C4 ahead of them, they would have to rest tonight.
They built a fire to cook the eelsnake, the meat of which was dense, with a slight earthy flavour. Despite this, the three of them ate the entire thing.
Bellies full, they eventually lay back on the ground and stared up at the stars.
Brick started humming, and Rush smiled. The sound no longer bothered him. In fact, he rather liked it.
‘Rush?’ Brick asked after a few minutes.
‘What?’
‘How’d you hit those men? With the stones?’
The teenager sighed and looked over at his friend. ‘Want to see a trick?’
Brick nodded. He sat up and Rush did likewise.
‘Hold up your index finger.’ His grin widened when he saw Brick frown, trying to work out which of his digits was required. ‘The one you point with. Or in your case, the one you pick your nose with!’
Brick pulled a face at him, but obliged by sticking the digit straight up towards the night sky. Rush dug a round pumice-coloured stone from the earth, wiping the mud from it on his trousers. ‘Keep still,’ he said, and placed the stone on the very tip of Brick’s upraised finger. It wavered for a couple of seconds and then became completely still, as if steadied by some invisible hand.
‘Wait just a moment.’ This time Rush picked up an old dry stick, which he placed on top of the stone, holding it there. He couldn’t help but smile at the look of bewilderment on the big man’s face. ‘It gets better,’ he said. With all the flourish of a stage magician, he took his hand away and sat back, his hands on the ground behind him. The stick remained, perfectly balanced on the uppermost tip of the stone, and then began to very slowly rotate about its centre point, gradually picking up speed. If Brick had looked up at that moment he’d have seen the intense look of concentration on his friend’s face and the tiny beads of sweat that were beginning to form on his lip and forehead, but the big guy’s eyes were glued to the little propeller set-up on the tip of his finger.
‘Ha!’ Brick said. ‘It’s magic!’
Rush clapped his hands and both the stone and the twig fell to the ground.
Brick looked at his friend in amazement. ‘How’d Rush do that?’ he asked. He picked the items up, staring at them as if they might come to life again.
‘That’s rich, coming from the man who healed me with nothing but his hands!’ Rush shrugged and lay on his back again. ‘Like you say, it’s magic or something. I don’t really know how I do it. It’s like when I launched the stones at those men; they weren’t going to miss, because I made them hit their targets.’
‘You made a stone do something?’
‘Yeah. It sounds weird, I know, but . . . it’s like I’m able to connect with an object. I can feel the tiniest particles that make something what it is – the atoms or maybe something even more fundamental than that – and affect the way it interacts with other things around it. It’s difficult to explain.’
The big man slowly nodded his head. ‘Like the hurt. I can see it and take it out. Sometimes.’ He started to hum again.
‘Have you always been able to do that, Brick?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Me too. Although Josuf, the man who looked after me, said I shouldn’t.’ He paused, remembering his guardian. ‘I wonder how many more of us there are? How many other mutants have special gifts like you and me? When I was growing up, I imagined it had to have something to do with all the radiation and chemicals left over after the Last War – that they screwed up my DNA and gave me weird powers. If that’s true, there could be thousands of us out there.’
‘Five,’ Brick said, pausing mid-hum.
‘What?’
‘Five. There are five of us. The bad man, the really bad man, made us. He made others, but they died. You were all babies. ’Cept Jax. “Waaah, waaah, waaah” – that’s how you went. “Waaah, waaah, waaah.”’
‘Wh . . . ? What do you mean?’
But Brick was no longer listening; he was too engrossed in trying to balance the stick on the pebble, humming tunelessly to himself.
Anya
At the girl’s signal, Tink pulled on the reins, bringing the harg and the wagon it pulled to a halt. He looked across at the teenager sitting beside him.
‘They’re just around this next bend,’ Anya said. ‘I saw three of them, but I can’t be sure there weren’t any more hiding out of sight.’
‘And they’d already captured some travellers?’
‘Uh-huh. One of the captives looked younger than me.’
Tink frowned, still not sure what their best option was now they’d arrived at this point. To his mind they were extremely limited.
‘We have two choices,’ he eventually said. ‘Either we trust in this old harg of mine to somehow find it in him to go round this bend at top speed, hoping it’s fast enough to get us past these men before they have a chance to attack us, or we get sneaky and play the ambushers at their own game.’
Anya considered this. ‘If we try to rush through, what happens to the people they’ve already captured?’
‘We’d be leaving them to their own fate.’
The teenager shook her head. ‘I’m not sure I’m happy doing that.’
‘Neither am I, but I thought it best to let you know what the alternatives are.’
‘So we get sneaky?’
‘It looks that way.’
The sound of the harg’s hoofs echoed back off the trees that lined the track on either side. It was a good place for an ambush, Tink thought to himself, looking out from beneath the brim of his hat. In fact, it was almost too good. He was wearing a long woollen poncho so only his head could be seen. Even the reins disappeared beneath the thick folds of cloth. He did his best to look weary, slumping forward on the jockey-box as if he might topple off at any moment.
Tink pulled the animal to a halt when he saw a man armed with a crossbow step out into the middle of the track. He didn’t need to look to his left or right to know the other members of the gang were taking up positions, so the wagon would be boxed in from all sides. The group had clearly done this many times before.
‘Whoa there!’ the man shouted, pointing the weapon at the wagon driver. One side of the amb
usher’s face was withered, like melted candle wax.
Tink stared at the man, but sat unmoving.
‘Where you going, old-timer?’ the man asked.
‘Muteville. I’m a trader, and I have some business there.’
‘That so?’ He nodded to himself, taking this in. ‘What you trading?’
‘Oh, you know, this and that.’
‘What you got?’
‘Nothing you’d be interested in,’ Tink answered.
‘Maybe I should be the judge of that,’ the man said. Without taking his eyes off Tink, the man with the melted face called out to one of the other men, ‘Bern! Have a look and see what our mysterious friend here has in the back of his wagon.’
‘You planning on robbing me?’ Tink asked, aware of a man slightly behind him and to his left, emerging from cover and approaching the rear of his cart.
‘Robbing you? No. I like to think of it as a toll. This here is a toll road, and if you haven’t got the right fee, I’m afraid you’ll have to pay in some other way. Like with your freedom.’
Tink sat unmoving, waiting.
As the man pulled up the tarpaulin at the back of the wagon, there was a terrible scream. The creature waiting beneath the cover was hideous to behold, a great coiled dragon-like beast with bulging eyes and a huge mouth full of deadly teeth. It lunged out at the man, and the scream was abruptly cut off.
Tink threw back the poncho and rose to his feet, pulling out a weapon. It was an ancient device, a leftover from before the Last War, and unlike the guns used inside the cities that fired pulsed energy, this one still fired projectiles. Two barrels, side by side, swung up as he pulled the first trigger, doing his best not to be blown off his feet and end up in the back of the wagon by the recoil. The shotgun boomed, causing birds and other winged creatures of every description to take to the skies from the trees. The two remaining ambushers also managed to get off their own shots. One of the crossbow bolts flew through the air no more than a hand’s width in front of Tink’s nose; the other hit him above the eye. If Tink hadn’t turned his head in response to the first, the second shot would have killed him. Fortunately it was more of a glancing blow; the bolt cut through the flesh and had enough momentum to snap the old man’s head back so he spun around. He fell from the wagon, already unconscious before he hit the hard ground.
Out cold and bleeding, Tink couldn’t know that his shot had killed the man standing before him; neither did he see that the monster in the wagon behind him had already slid from the vehicle, snaking across the ground at great speed towards the third ambusher as he desperately scrabbled to reload. The man never got to fire another shot.
Later, Tink would have no recollection of being put in the back of the cart and covered over with the tarpaulin. Anya, despite the agony, had struggled back into her human form and, after freeing the other captives, who were tied up and face down in the men’s own wagon, had jumped in behind Tink’s harg, urged the animal into a gallop and set off for City Four, determined to get her friend and saviour the medical attention he needed.
Rush
Two days after they’d crossed the river and left Logtown behind them, Rush, Brick and Dotty finally reached the outskirts of Muteville. Despite spending most of the journey from there glancing over their own shoulders, there had been no sign of the ARM, and Rush was glad they’d destroyed the ferry so completely. Tired and hungry, they shuffled along, too exhausted even to speak. It wasn’t just fatigue from the journey that had rendered them voiceless; the nearer they’d got to the sprawling slums, the clearer it became how different were the two worlds separated by the colossal city wall. From a distance, the dark sprawling ghetto that had grown up in the shadow of the city had not seemed so bad, but now that they were within touching distance, their souls had become infected by the misery of the place.
As if unwilling to enter the slum straight away, they skirted around the fringes, moving inexorably closer to the vast wall that, even from a distance, loomed over everything.
Most of what Rush knew about the cities he’d gleaned from advertisements and reports he’d seen on a battered old comms screen at a neighbouring ranch. The screen was cracked and it was difficult to make anything out on the ancient device, but even so, it had been clear to him that life in the cities was something worth dreaming about. Whenever the InterCity Games were on, he and Josuf would make the long journey out to the nearest trading post and watch some of the events on a screen set up in a tent, paying two credits each for the privilege. This place was nothing like the images he had seen. The Mute settlement was dismal. If Rush needed any further proof of how disparate the two societies were, their experience when they approached the no-man’s-land immediately at the base of the wall provided it.
From the mutant side, the start of this no-go zone was a fence topped with razor wire with guard towers placed at regular intervals along it. Uniformed armed men occasionally paused on the parapets, and it was as Rush and Brick came close to the wire barrier that they drew the attention of one of these sentries. A device like a metallic insect the size of a man’s head immediately took off into the air from the tower, the high-pitched whining of its propellers adding to the impression of its being a living thing. It headed towards them, hovering in the air out of reach above them. Rush looked up, straight into the domed lens suspended beneath the thing’s ‘torso’.
‘You there!’ An electronic voice addressed them. ‘Step away from the fence.’
Brick looked from the remote-controlled surveillance drone to the source of the noise: a small speaker mounted to a post nearby. He approached the stanchion, straining his neck to get a better look at the box and grille.
‘STEP AWAY, MUTE,’ the voice barked at him.
Rush cast his eyes in the direction of the tower nearest to them just as a guard swung something up to his shoulder. The youngster screwed his eyes shut as a bright red beam of light flashed across his vision for an instant. When he opened them again there was a red spot dancing on his chest.
‘Er, Brick . . .’
Brick grinned at him, oblivious to the danger. ‘That voice. The man’s up there –’ he pointed at the tower – ‘but we can hear him through the box thing here.’
‘We need to move, Brick. The man up there is getting angry.’
‘Say something else, soldier man!’ Brick called in the guard’s direction before turning to look eagerly at the speaker, hoping to hear the disembodied voice again.
‘Come on, big guy.’ Rush put his hand in the crook of Brick’s arm and gently pulled him away, aware that a second red dot had joined the first, this one firmly fixed on Brick’s head. The dots stayed with them as they moved off, only disappearing when they were well away from the fence and heading back in the direction they’d come from, towards the hovels of Muteville.
The buildings at the outermost edges of the vast, sprawling slum were little more than hastily thrown up lean-tos, many of which were still under construction as new arrivals added to the existing mass of mutants. The people who sat outside these poor excuses for a home looked wretched, and Rush found it difficult to meet their eyes. Moving deeper into the shantytown the pair discovered that the shacks lying beyond these were slightly better made; the walls firmed up and fixed with nails or ropes, the roofs more solid and gap-free. Those beyond these were better yet. Rush imagined that if he was able to fly over the squalid settlement he would see that the slums grew outwards from some central point; each new ring poorer and humbler than the one preceding it, until its residents could improve their dwellings.
The smell was terrible, although it didn’t seem to bother the children who laughed and chased each other among the filth and sewage running down open ditches at their feet. A mangy-looking dog raised the hackles on its neck as Rush and Brick approached, but the animal quickly put its tail between its legs and scampered away when it got a look at the rogwan trailing along behind them. The three of them moved deeper inside the slums, and it became clear what a d
aunting task lay ahead of them: the place was a maze filled to the rafters with people of every description. Every inch of space was taken up, the gaps between the buildings so narrow in places that they were only navigable side-on. Mutes sprawled out of the buildings, and everyone eyed the newcomers with distrust. Nobody seemed to know anything about a man called Silas, and most of the people Rush asked were openly hostile as he approached their living space, as if suspecting he might try to take it from them.
‘Go to City Four and find a man called Silas,’ Rush had been told. How? How were he and Brick ever going to find one man among this chaos? After everything they’d already been through, this was the last thing he’d expected, and he was soon filled with desperation and hopelessness.
After about an hour of walking along aimlessly, the way ahead opened up and they stepped out into a small square with houses facing inwards towards a small water pump in the centre. Although the space was small, it came as a relief to Rush, who’d begun to feel claustrophobic among the rat runs they’d been negotiating until now.
The three approached the pump. As Rush reached for the handle, a voice called out to him.
‘I wouldn’t touch that if I were you.’
He stopped and looked across at an old woman standing in a doorway.
‘Excuse me?’ he said, giving her a friendly smile.
‘That pump belongs to Green Ward. You’re not from this ward, so you’ve got no right to our water.’
‘We’re thirsty. We’ve been travelling for a long time, and –’
‘I don’t care who you are or where you’re from. That water is for the people of Green Ward, and you are not welcome to it. Move on. You can buy water at the market.’
Rush eyed the pump longingly. With a shake of his head he approached the woman.
‘If we’re not welcome to your water, maybe you can help us with something else. I’m looking for somebody.’
The woman said nothing, just gave him a look that suggested she was not impressed by having strangers wandering up and talking to her.
