by Steve Feasey
‘I didn’t, but Messrs Lacroix and Masters did. I took the liberty of delving into their heads while I was in the boot. They don’t know where Brick is being held, so we’ll have to find that out when we get upstairs.’
‘What if they come round before we get out of here?’ Tia asked as the lift rose.
‘They won’t,’ Jax said in a tone that left her in no doubt.
The elevator doors opened. Directly in front of them was an extremely tall counter that stretched the full width of the room. An overweight man sitting behind the desk glanced up and beckoned them forward. Behind him, in a large open-plan office, at least ten uniformed men and women went about their work.
‘Who have we got here?’ he asked, his attention only half on the newcomers.
‘Two Mutes that were hanging around the perimeter fence.’
‘I was referring to you. You new?’
‘Yes, sergeant,’ Tia said, spotting the insignia on the man’s shirt. ‘I was assigned to the ARM only this week.’ The agency had been fervently recruiting recently, and Tia hoped her story would sound plausible.
‘Are these Lacroix and Masters’ mutants?’ the man asked, looking at his screen.
‘That’s right.’
‘Then why aren’t they booking them in?’
‘They’re in the infirmary. Masters got hurt during the arrest.’
He glanced across at Jax and Rush. Thanks to the albino, the custody sergeant saw two bloodied individuals who’d clearly been roughed up during their apprehension. He raised an eyebrow. ‘I see Lacroix has been up to his usual tricks. Never one to miss a chance to beat up on a resident of Muteville, that one.’
The man gave Tia his full attention for the first time. ‘Now listen up, rookie. I don’t care who asks you – in the future, somebody asks you to book their prisoners in? You tell them to go to hell. Those two officers are taking advantage of you.’ He sighed and heaved himself out of his chair, nodding towards a door on Tia’s right. ‘Bring them through to the cells,’ he said.
Tia, Rush and Jax waited until the custody sergeant pressed a button to open the entrance from his side. Stepping through, they found themselves in a narrow corridor, the right-hand side of which was taken up by a row of metal and plaziglas doors. The custody sergeant beckoned for them to follow him as he waddled off towards the cells.
‘Busy?’ Tia asked.
‘Not really. Just a couple of freaks in.’
‘I heard you had a special guest. One of the Mutes that Melk has been looking for?’
‘The big guy? Yeah, he’s in Cell 4. But not for much longer.’
‘No? Why’s that?’
‘Melk wants him moved to the Bio-Gen labs. The transportation team is on its way over here now.’
Tia watched as the man approached one of the cell doors and pressed a button on the small pad on the wall beside it. When he pushed his palm – fingers splayed – against the pad, there was a loud clunk! as the locks slid open.
‘Put your guys in here. I’ll –’
The man slumped to the ground.
Holstering her shock-rod, Tia glanced up the corridor before turning to Rush and Jax. ‘Well, that went a lot more smoothly than I thought it would.’
Rush was already hurrying towards the cell numbered 4. Through the plaziglas viewing window he could see Brick sitting on a low bench, hunched over, his massive forearms resting on his thighs. At the far side of the cell was a large mirror and another door. Even from where he stood, it was clear to Rush that Brick was even more sick now than he had been at the safe house. With a bunched fist, Rush banged on the door to get the big guy’s attention.
Rush struggled to contain his emotions when his friend slowly raised his head; on Brick’s face was a bewildered look that turned to recognition, swiftly replaced by joy. Brick clapped his hands together and pointed back in Rush’s direction, shouting loudly until Rush, glancing behind him, gestured for him to be quiet.
Jax and Tia had dragged the custody sergeant over to the door so his hand could be pressed to the pad. As soon as the door was released, Rush pushed his way inside, hurrying over to Brick, where he was enveloped in the big guy’s arms.
‘I said I’d come for you,’ he said.
‘Good to see you again, Brick,’ Jax said from the entrance. ‘This is Tia; she’s helping us.’ He closed his eyes and small frown lines appeared on his forehead. ‘Silas is with Melk. Let’s get out of here.’
Silas
‘You’ve got some gall, coming here like this,’ the president said, glaring across at his brother, who was standing with his back to the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up one wall of the penthouse. The two men were alone, Melk having sent his guards out of the room and locked the door.
‘What? No hugs? No tears of joy at our fraternal reunion?’
‘When they said you just walked in through the gates, I assumed you must have lost your mind. But you don’t sound like a jabbering lunatic.’
‘If I could have come carrying a white flag, I would have.’
The two men stared at each other.
‘Why?’ Melk asked eventually.
It was only a single word, but Silas knew exactly what his brother meant.
‘Because what you were doing was wrong. That place . . . “the Farm”? That was wrong. What you’re doing now is wrong.’
‘I want my property back.’
‘They’re not your property. They’re living human beings.’
‘Mutant hybrids! Not one thing or another. They’re aberrations. Freaks.’
‘If they are, it’s because you made them that way! Call them what you want. You can’t escape the fact that they have a right to life – a life that has meaning and purpose, and not just so you can experiment on them, clone them and discard them when they’re no longer of any use.’
‘Who said anything about cloning?’
‘Don’t insult my intelligence. We both know what you were planning.’ Silas stopped. A shouting match with his older sibling was not what he had come here for. ‘I heard you were ill. You don’t look it. I wonder why that might be.’
‘Maybe I have a fairy godmother and used up one of my wishes.’
‘If you let him go, all this can end peacefully.’
The president stared back at him in disbelief. ‘You really are something, you know that? Let me just see if I’ve got this right – you are threatening me?’
‘Do you have any idea what it’s like to live out there?’ Silas gestured over his shoulder towards the slums beyond the wall. ‘Poor health, poor hygiene, not enough food, freezing in the winter, roasting in the summer, no lights at night, no hot water in the morning.’ He looked across at his brother’s sneering face. ‘I could go on, but I see that I’m in danger of breaking your bleeding heart. The mutant people have had enough. At the rallies the talk is of uprisings and revolution. Your Agency for the Regulation of Mutants is doing nothing to help the situation – they’re mindless thugs. Nothing more than a big stick you’re using to stir up the beehive.’
‘You,’ Melk said, jabbing a finger back at his brother, ‘and the likes of you, are the reason there is such discontent out there. People like you, telling the Mutes that they have rights to the same things we city dwellers have.’
‘Where’s my nephew?’ Silas stared stonily back. ‘Except he isn’t really my nephew, is he? Oh, I guess you had his face altered a bit when he was very young so the similarity isn’t quite so striking, but even so, I’m amazed that nobody else seems to have worked it out. I caught one look at him on a news broadcast and I instantly knew what you’d done.’
‘I don’t know what you’re on about,’ the president said in a small voice.
‘You never could resist flouting the rules, could you? Neither state laws nor those of nature mean anything to you. What did you think? That a clone of you would somehow fulfil all the dreams you were unable to? That you could achieve some kind of immortality if you reproduced yourself and shoeho
rned that individual into the position you had to vacate? What memories did you give the poor thing? Does it think it’s really your son?’
‘Shut up.’
‘What do you think the people of the Six Cities would have to say about that, hmm? How do you think they’d react if they found out the man standing as the next president is nothing more than a clone of the former one – a pitiful puppet whose very memories have been implanted by the man pulling the strings!’
‘It’s stupid to limit a man – a man with the dreams and aspirations I had for my people – to no more than three terms! That isn’t long enough!’
‘What you’ve done is illegal and immoral. And despite all that’s bad about the vast majority of the people inside the city wall, it is something that even they will not stand for.’
Another long silence stretched out between the two men. ‘You always were too clever for your own good,’ Melk muttered, walking over to his desk and opening a drawer. He regarded the gun in his hand for a moment before turning it on his brother. ‘I have to say, it’s an interesting theory, brother. But even if it’s true, nobody will ever have the chance to hear it. You walked into this building as a dead man, and now you’re going to be carried out as one.’
Silas’s gaze didn’t waiver. ‘It doesn’t have to end like this. All you have to do is give Brick back to me, and this can end. For now, at least. You can take that as your final warning.’
‘The fact that I’m the one holding the gun doesn’t seem to have registered with you. You’re in no position to issue warnings.’
‘I take it you won’t let him go then?’ Silas let out a weary sigh. Behind his back he pressed the button on the small torch device he held in his palm. A red light blinked on and off repeatedly. ‘You disappoint me.’
Melk raised the gun, aiming at his brother. ‘Save it for somebody who gives a damn.’
The first explosion was a low, rumbling boom from somewhere deep beneath the earth. Despite this, the building Melk and Silas were standing in shook, as if trembling with fright.
‘What was that?’ Melk asked.
‘That was either the underground tunnels that lead to the dumps or . . .’
There were two more resonant explosions, one after another. These too were clearly underground, but seemed a little nearer. ‘No, I think that was the tunnels. The first would have been the pumping systems for the water and sewage.’
Melk lowered his weapon a fraction, staring disbelievingly at the man across from him.
Silas gave him a brief, sad smile. ‘Do you remember how I asked you just now if you had any idea what it was like to live out there beyond the wall?’ He tipped his head back, regarding the other man. ‘Well, you and the people of C4 are about to find out.’
The next three explosions were all above ground. They went off within seconds of each other. The last one was by far the biggest, and both men flinched at the monstrous noise and power unleashed.
The lights in every building in City Four went out all at the same time.
‘Ah, those must have been the electrical substations,’ Silas commented as the meagre emergency backup lighting winked on overhead.
There was a violent banging on the door to the office, the guards pounding and shouting the name of the president.
Melk watched as his brother, silhouetted against the glass wall, lifted a finger, as if waiting for something. There was a pause and then one last, smaller explosion could be heard. Silas lowered the raised digit.
‘I wanted to bring down the Bio-Gen building, but I didn’t have enough explosives. That last one was the communication centre. I had to be very careful with that one because I knew people might still be working there, even at this time of night, and I didn’t want to risk the loss of lives. Every one of those explosions was carefully placed so as to destroy infrastructure but not people. Two of your “creations” – Anya and Flea – put them in place, but if anybody was unfortunate enough to be hurt, the blame is all mine, not theirs.’
‘What have you done?’
‘I tried to warn you. I told you what you were doing was wrong.’ Silas turned and pushed a small device, no bigger than his thumb, on to the glass. ‘I’d stand well back and cover your eyes if I were you,’ he said over his shoulder as he hurried to one side and crouched down behind a column, turning to look back at his brother one last time. ‘Now.’
Melk staggered back and managed to get his arm up in front of his face as the glass wall exploded outwards, raining deadly daggers down the side of the building on to the ground below. The cold night air blew in through the ragged hole, quickly lowering the temperature of the dark interior. The banging on the door was louder than ever, as if something very heavy was being used to break it in. In addition to this, a new voice had joined the other men – this one calling out to his father. The noise hardly registered with Melk. He was transfixed by the sight of his brother hurrying over to the destroyed window. Silas stood on the edge, squinting against the wind, which blew and buffeted him. He looked up for a moment, nodded once and jumped, his arms held straight out, perpendicular to his sides.
Melk cried out in shock as two massive tentacles snatched Silas in mid-air and grasped him by the armpits.
The huge foul-looking creature hissed for a moment as it dropped alarmingly with the extra weight, but it quickly recovered, beating its leathery wings frantically and carrying the man off into the darkness.
The door finally gave way under the assault of the hydraulic ram. Zander and two guards half stumbled into the room, staring wildly about them. When the president turned to look at them he had a bewildered expression on his face. The uncharacteristic look quickly passed. Melk lifted the gun and shot the two soldiers dead.
When he turned the gun on his son, the look on the younger man’s face was priceless.
‘Father –’
‘I’m not your father. You’re just another version of me – a weak, feeble, disappointing translation, but a version of me nonetheless.’
‘What?’
‘You’re a clone, a copy, a . . . facsimile. Nothing more. I had high hopes for you, but I have to say, you’ve been a disappointment. You’ve served your purpose, Junior, and now it’s time to let the real Melk take over again.’ He pulled the trigger.
Rush
‘Stop,’ said Jax, halting in front of the door that led back into the foyer of the custody suite. His hand hovered over the round button as he turned and looked back at the others, the expression on his face unreadable.
‘What are we waiting for?’ Rush asked.
The building shook as the first bomb went off. There was a moment of silence and then the scrape of chair legs against the floor as the ARM officers hurried over to the windows, all talking and shouting at once.
‘That,’ Jax said, and pressed the door release.
Rush gently grabbed Tia by the elbow as she went to call the elevator. He shook his head. ‘We’re taking the stairs, remember? If we’re in that thing, we’ll get stuck when the power goes out.’
They might have escaped undetected had one of the men in the office not turned around and spotted them at the very moment they passed through the doorway leading to the fire escape. They didn’t wait to hear the shouted warnings for them to stop.
There was another low booming noise.
‘Hurry,’ Tia urged. A loud, blaring klaxon sounded, the pitch and volume of it painful enough to make the four of them hunch their shoulders and wince.
They took the stairs as quickly as they could, helping and encouraging each other on the way down. At least one of them was always by Brick’s side, supporting the giant as best they could. When, somewhere overhead, loud voices ordered them to halt or be fired at, they ignored the warnings, but the threat was enough to spur them onward with even greater urgency. They reached the bottom of the stairwell and the exit to the underground parking facility just as the main lights went out and insipid emergency auxiliary lighting took their place. Annoyingly, t
he klaxon was still blaring out from big speakers all around.
Three men were waiting for them, standing at the far end of the car park with small masks over their mouths and noses. There were no shouted warnings, no orders to put up their hands. The man in the centre simply stepped forward, aimed a strange-looking gun at the mutants and fired.
‘Rush!’ Jax shouted out.
The small canister with greenish-grey smoke spewing from it was almost on top of them when Rush lifted his hand. The gas grenade stopped, hanging in the air, shaking as if still trying to push its way past the invisible force that had halted it. Then it suddenly went into reverse, hurtling back with even greater speed towards the men who’d fired it, hitting the ground at their feet and discharging its contents into the air around them. Rush flicked the fingers of his hand downwards, swiping at the air like a cat pawing an invisible fly, and the men’s masks flew from their faces. They began to choke and cough, grasping at their throats, tears pouring from their eyes. All three of them collapsed to the ground.
Jax shouted out again as the door behind him flew open. Rush spun around and caught a glimpse of men on the other side before he slammed it shut again with his mind. It was clear to the others that Rush was having to expend enormous effort to keep the door barred as the men battered against it from the other side, and he physically flinched and winced as they bodily threw themselves against it.
‘Hurry up,’ he said through gritted teeth.
Tia was already approaching the vehicle they’d arrived in, when Jax stopped her. ‘Not that one,’ he said. She turned to look at the albino and inwardly shuddered at the wicked grin on his face. He indicated another vehicle: an armoured personnel carrier with a large gun turret on top. ‘That one.’
As soon as everyone was safely inside the vehicle, Rush finally relaxed his control on the door. The look on the men’s faces as they poured through and saw the smiling albino pointing the powerful cannon in their direction was incomparable. With a cry of dismay they turned on their heels and scrambled back in the direction they’d come, just as Jax fired round after round of explosive bullets into the concrete walls. He had no intention of hitting the men, but the sound of the gunfire in the enclosed, underground space was deafening. Large hunks of masonry shattered, filling the air with a thick, impenetrable dust, and when he had finished his barrage there was an eerie silence, broken only by the odd lump of concrete tearing loose and crashing down.
