Tube Riders, The (20 page)

‘We’re going to die unless we’re on that train!’ Paul shouted.

Marta looked at Switch. He had his nail gun in one hand, but his face was pale, hopeless. Even he knew they had no chance against so many.

‘Remember what I told you,’ Paul said to Owen. ‘Don’t let me down, brother.’

Owen, endlessly cheerful, nodded. ‘I’m a Tube Rider now,’ he said, hefting the clawboard Paul had given him.

‘Please don’t get hurt,’ Paul said.

‘Run, jump, hook,’ Owen recalled.

‘You got it, now go! I love you, kid.’

Owen grimaced. ‘Man, shut
up
. Christ.’

The train rushed in. Marta heard Jess screaming at Simon to ‘Run, one last time, just
run!
’’, and then she was running after Paul and Owen herself. In these moments, she reflected, it was everyone for him or herself; if someone fell they were on their own. No one could go back.

Two of the Huntsmen had crossed in front of the train. As Marta caught, she saw them stumble as they tried to turn too quickly. In front of her, Paul and Owen were safely caught, Owen whooping his delight as his board hooked on to the metal rail. Just behind her, Switch caught the rail, and she leaned forward to see beyond him to where Simon, his face contorted with pain, had just jumped. His board caught the edge then slipped safely inside the rail. He howled in pain as the train jerked his injured shoulder, his eyes squeezing shut, veins protruding from the backs of his hands as he struggled to hold on. Jess, at the back, caught the rail then quickly freed one hand and pulled the crossbow from her belt. As the nearest Huntsman leapt forward, its claws reaching, she aimed and fired. The bolt hit the Huntsman in the shoulder, enough to knock it back into the one coming behind. They tumbled to the ground as the train roared into the tunnel.

‘Hang on!’ she screamed as the cold wind and the dark enveloped them. She could only hope the others had enough strength left to listen.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Aftermath

Vincent could think of no other plan than to play dead as the Huntsmen, freed on his command, rushed into the station. The Tube Riders were out of sight behind the moving train, and a moment later it was gone, taking them with it. Two Huntsmen were on his side of the tracks, two on the other. Vincent thought for a moment he was the next victim, but then, howling like a pack of rabid wolves, the Huntsmen leapt down on to the tracks and bounded away into the tunnel.

As silence descended, Vincent climbed to his feet. Three nails had hit him in the thigh. One had fallen loose while the other two were imbedded deep and wouldn’t move. Every time he touched them bolts of pain lanced up his side.

Still, moving slowly, he could walk. He found himself marveling at the resourcefulness of the Tube Riders; the skinny, odd-looking one in particular. He hoped to put a bullet in that one personally.

A few feet away lay the body of the girl who had captured the blind Huntsman. Vincent hobbled over and looked down.

It had mauled her bad enough that she would never need to worry about boyfriends again, he thought darkly, but underneath the blood he could see the slow rise and fall of her chest. A small moan when he nudged her with his foot confirmed that she still lived.

I’m the one who got away
. He knew what she meant, of course. There was no way a normal human could have survived such a mauling. And if what she claimed was true, Vincent thought, maybe she could be of some use to them.

#

Leland Clayton was pissed. Climbing from the car outside the abandoned station, it was all he could do not to draw his gun and flick off the safety. Vincent had gone above his authority, ordering the Huntsmen called off in an attempt to ambush the Tube Riders. Clayton, whose idea it had been to stake out the station in case one or more might return, had expected to view their bodies only after the Huntsmen had finished. Just minutes ago, though, Vincent had called him and muttered some lame excuse that an “altered” plan had failed, and that the Tube Riders had escaped, but not to worry because the Huntsmen were once again on their trail.

Vincent, vying for commendation from the Governor, had gone behind Clayton’s back again. Maybe, Clayton reflected, this was one time too many.

Inside the station, he found Vincent leaning against the wall, a couple of aides tending to a wound in the younger agent’s leg.

‘Okay, so what the fuck just happened here?’ Clayton’s fingers had gone to the gun again, and he purposefully pulled his hand away and stuck it in his trouser pocket.

Vincent yelped in pain as one of the aides dabbed his leg with antiseptic. ‘I’m sorry, Clayton. It was my fault–’

‘You’re damn right it was. We’re under orders from the Governor
himself
to take those kids out.
He
ordered the Huntsmen, and
you
ordered them off. I know you want my job, Vincent, you damn fool, but surely you value your fucking
life?
’

Vincent looked at the ground. ‘I’m sorry, I thought they might be more useful alive.’

‘Which is why you had them pinned down by two gunmen, both of whom are now dead?’

‘They were just to help … negotiations. I was fully expecting the fugitives to give themselves up.’

‘And instead you got taken out with what? A nail gun? You, a DCA agent, gets taken out by a kid with a fucking
power tool?
’ Clayton was too angry to laugh. ‘You’re a fucking disgrace, Vincent. I’d demote you to sorting mail if it wouldn’t embarrass me to explain why.’

‘I was surprised. And that thing over there, she took out my men.’

Clayton looked over his shoulder. ‘The dead girl? One: who the fuck is she, and two: please explain to me, Vincent, how did she manage to kill two agents?’

Vincent raised a hand. His look had taken on a familiar smugness that Clayton always wanted to punch off his face. ‘Firstly, she’s not dead. And she took out my men by setting a Huntsman on them. A Huntsman she somehow managed to capture. Tell
me
, how the fuck did she do that?’

Clayton rolled his eyes. ‘It gets better. Who is she?’

Vincent smiled. ‘She’s the one that got away.’

‘God help you Vincent, if you smile at me again you’re going under the next fucking train–’

‘She’s half Huntsman.’

‘What?’

‘Go look at her. She’s been modified.’ For a moment Vincent grimaced and clutched at his leg. ‘And for some reason she was chasing them too,’ he continued through gritted teeth. ‘I thought she might be of some use.’

Clayton narrowed his eyes. His anger still boiled but he was remembering something Dr. Karmski had said about an escapee. That, though, he would deal with in time. ‘So, Vincent, you’re telling me you managed to lose everyone we’re after in order to bring me someone who “might be of some use”? Jesus Christ. Get yourself to the hospital and get out of my fucking sight.’

Clayton walked away from Vincent towards the bloody body on the ground. Vincent was right; wires protruding from her forehead and the glimmer of metal beneath the skin where she’d been mauled told him she’d been modified all right. Clayton felt a funny tickle go down his neck. He knew the government’s so-called “researchers” took kids off the streets for this. She might have been a perfectly normal girl, walking home from a café, cinema, whatever, when a bag was pulled over her head and the next thing she knew she was strapped to a chair in a room full of scientific equipment. Now she’d ended up like this, almost more metal than human. And he considered her one of the lucky ones. He didn’t know everything about what happened in those evil underground laboratories, but he knew that a vast number of mistakes were made before the “lucky” few ended up as Huntsmen.

He felt like putting a foot on her neck and saving her from more pain, but his curiosity got the better of him. And like Vincent had said, maybe she would be of some use.

‘Hey!’ he shouted back to one of his agents. ‘Get a couple of men over here with a stretcher. We need help for this one. Make sure you secure her arms though. She might be dangerous.’

As the man ran off, Clayton walked to the edge of the track and stared down the tunnel in the direction Vincent said the Tube Riders had gone. The Huntsmen were out there somewhere, running hard, nearly inexhaustible. His professional mind hoped they ran the quarry down by morning, saving him a lot of trouble and hard work. The part of him that had once had morals, though, wished the Tube Riders luck.

Part Two

Bristol

Chapter Twenty-Three

Lost Boy

Monday was looking like another quiet day for Carl Weston. The new school term was still a week away and with a little sly help from their housekeeper, Jeanette, his homework was all done and sitting in a folder back at the house. He’d been careful this time to have her write the answers on a piece of paper for him to copy up, rather than directly onto the work itself. A teacher had caught him out last time and he could still remember the sting of the cane. The back of his father’s hand had hurt a lot more, though.

Down in the woods, among the ruins of the old town, he’d set up a shooting range where he regularly practiced with his air rifle and catapult. Most of the houses were gone now, the roads torn up, but in some places the skeleton walls of old terraces and shops still rose up over his head.

Transplanted trees and undergrowth obscured most of the buildings. Many of the trees tilted at ridiculous angles because, his father said, when the government began a project to reseed the countryside some years before he was born, many of the newly transplanted trees were not supported properly and had since suffered from the effects of subsidence and wind battering. The natural trees were easy to spot because they rose straight, but as a young child Carl had loved playing among the exposed root systems of many of the capsized trees, prevented from total collapse by the helpful remains of an old shop or house. Brambles, bracken and ivy smothered everything now, but Carl regularly cleared away the entrances to some of the better root-caves to maintain a series of dens where he could while away his days in blissful idleness.

Now, with the morning sun casting long shadows all around him, he crept through the silent ruins with his catapult held ready. As he approached a sycamore tree growing at a forty-five degree angle, he crouched low. With a sudden cry of attack he leaned forward and executed a karate roll, coming up into a squat and loosing the rock ammunition. It clanged off a rusted old construction sign Carl had jammed into a crack in a half collapsed wall.

‘Got ya!’ Carl shouted, holding the catapult aloft. The old sign, a half-corroded silhouette of a construction worker holding a hand up in a “stop” pose, didn’t reply.

Carl stood up and leaned against the thick tree trunk. He listened for a moment, cocking his head, looking up into the foliage. Not far away came the sound of a bird’s call, followed by the flutter of wings. He was used to the birds, of course, but there was something else, a low rumbling, somewhere distant. He looked up at the sky, though he hadn’t seen a plane in ten years or more. Then he remembered.

‘Train!’

With a big grin on his face, Carl dashed off through the trees, quick feet skillful over the treacherous ground from an entire childhood of playing in the forest. The train line was several hundred yards away, slightly upslope, cut along the side of a hill. Twisting sharply back and forth he raced through the trees, following a trail he’d cut along what had once been a main road but now looked like something out of a fairy story, chunks of concrete and the occasional flash of white line hidden by huge drapes of hanging brambles caught up in tree branches, creating a natural tunnel.

Scrambling over the remains of a bungalow, he reached the fence that cordoned off the tracks just moments before the huge train lumbered through. His fingers gripped the fence and he gasped with excitement. He was just in time to count the trucks as they rolled past. Fifteen, sixteen … he counted nineteen in total. Just two short of his record, but it had been a long one nonetheless. No wonder it was moving so slowly. All of the trucks were brown freight carriers. The cab had windows but he’d been too late to get a look inside at the driver. One of the older house servants had told him that the trains had once carried passengers from one town to another. Carl would have found it difficult to believe – after all, everyone knew the cities had been closed up to keep the unsavory types locked away – had he not discovered an old station among the ruins, not far from here. It was confirmation enough that the trains had once stopped, and nowadays, while playing in the forest, he dreamed of a time when the world had been different, when life hadn’t all been farming, ginger ale at summer fetes, and algebra.

As the train rolled on into the trees, Carl turned and walked a little way along the fence. It was lower here where the slope was steeper. It was to keep people off the tracks, that much was obvious, but here, with only his family’s house within a couple of miles, Carl thought it a little unnecessary. The trains were infrequent, just a handful each day and less at night, rumbling on towards Bristol GUA and back again towards London.

He had borrowed a pair of his father’s wire clippers and cut a hole once. He had pushed his bicycle through and ridden along the tracks, all ten miles back to the perimeter wall. Movement over the gravel and sleepers had been sluggish but the weather had been fine and the ride enjoyable, until the hulking grey perimeter wall had risen up in front of him like the end of the world. Above it the sunshine had been sucked away; grey clouds rolled and toiled, trying, he had thought, to get out.

Beneath it all, a dark tunnel had sloped down into the beast itself, breathing out cold, damp air that had made Carl shiver and put his discarded sweater back on. And there, from deep down in the dark, twin eyes had appeared, catching Carl in their stare. Rushing towards him with a roar like a rising storm, Carl had been able to leap out of the way only at the last second before the train rushed like a dragon out of the tunnel.

Looking back from the side of the track where he had fallen, he had seen the mangled remains of his bicycle lying in the train’s wake. Unfixable, he had left it on the opposite tracks for the next metallic beast to drag down into the earth.

His parents hadn’t fallen for the story that his bike had been stolen. Crime was rare, and even a small thing such as that was treated seriously. His father had taken the belt to him in a bid to discover the truth, and Carl had almost given in and told him, his father quitting the assault perhaps two welts short of a confession. Still, rather than risk embarrassment in the local community his parents had glossed over it. Scapegoating one of the lower house servants or farm hands would have been possible, but they would still have struggled to find a motive. After all, most roads were gravel these days and the bike had hardly been new.

So now Carl just walked everywhere.

Glancing up, he saw the sky was beginning to lighten, the sun to come up. He loved the mornings best, often hunting in the forest before school, but Mother would go mad if he was late for breakfast. He put the catapult into a belt bag and turned to head off. Just as he did, he heard a low moan coming from further along the tracks.

He paused, hand reaching for the catapult, afraid it might be some boys from school come to ambush him, administer a beating. It had happened once before, so he never traveled unarmed now. Although the catapult, like his air rifle, was little more than a way of distracting them long enough to give him a decent head start, he felt safer carrying it. He shuffled forwards, trying to see.

The moaning came again. Carl felt sure it was a person this time, and whoever it was sounded hurt. It could be a trap but doubted the boys from school would bother, especially at this time of the day. Most people just left him alone.

‘Hello? Is anyone there?’ Carl moved forward a few more steps. There he saw, lying on the other side of the fence, leaning against it as though he’d been thrown there, a man.

Carl sensed the man was badly hurt and hurried forward, leaning down. ‘Are you all right?’ he said through the fence. He couldn’t see the man’s face very well but he didn’t look that old after all, maybe in his early twenties, maybe the same age as some of the farm hands. Carl was sixteen but often felt younger; over twenty still made the injured person a man.

‘Jeh … Jes …
Jess,
’ he moaned. There was blood on his shirt around his shoulder, a large patch that stained the light blue fabric dark. Carl might have mistaken it for sweat except that it had dried hard, and had that distinctive smell he knew well from helping his father prepare meat for market.

Carl tried again to talk to the man, but he appeared lost in delirium. Carl had no idea how long he’d been lying here, but if he was badly hurt there was a chance he could die.

‘I’ll be back soon,’ Carl said, then turned and sprinted off into the trees.

#

Back at the house he found his father in the upstairs study, reading a book while the television flickered with the sound down in the corner behind him. A bowl with the milky dregs of cereal in its bottom stood on a table nearby.

‘Father, can you come with me please? I found a man in the forest. He’s hurt.’

Roy Weston slammed the book shut and looked up. The grey shadow of stubble matched the colour of his cold eyes. He stared at Carl for a moment and then put the book aside in a slow, laboured movement. Carl knew it as the first sign of trouble, and stepped back out of range in case his father’s hands darted forward.

‘Please, I’m not playing games,’ he said, grasping for courage for the injured man’s sake. ‘He might die if we don’t get help for him soon.’

‘Heaven help you if you’re messing with me, boy,’ Weston growled, standing up, still a head taller than Carl, who had his mother’s lighter build and height. A thick chest looked ready to throw bombs, and Carl backed away across the room, fearing a storm. He had the door behind him, though, and would run if necessary. In the past, his father’s anger had often been diffused by time, though Carl had scars on his back as a reminder of the times it hadn’t.

‘I think he fell off the train. He’s inside the fence.’

‘Okay,’ his father said slowly. ‘We’ll go and see what you’ve found.’

Downstairs, his father called a hand from the stables and instructed the man to bring some wood to fashion a makeshift stretcher if required, and some wire clippers to get through the fence. With Carl leading, the three men headed back down into the forest.

‘Carl, if this is some prank of yours there’ll be trouble,’ his father growled, stumbling over a root as they made their way through the ruined village and the irregularly angled trees.

‘It’s not! He’s just up here, not much further at all.’

The man was still there, curled up by the fence. He wasn’t making any noise now, and Carl at first thought he had died. Leaning closer, though, he saw the low rise and fall of the man’s chest.

‘Bloody hell,’ his father exclaimed. ‘Where did he come from, then?’ Directing the stable hand, he said, ‘Okay, let’s get that fence open and get him up to the house.’

The stable hand cut through the fence and they carefully lifted the man’s body on to it. The hand then took the front of the stretcher, Carl and his father the back. It was nearly a mile back to the house and they had to stop to rest several times. When they finally got back they waited in the kitchen while Carl’s mother and Jeanette, clucking loudly, as Weston would have put it, prepared a room on the third floor.

Carl’s mother insisted on old sheets being put on the bed before they laid him down, despite Jeanette’s protests to the contrary. Carl believed his father would have agreed with the housekeeper, but despite his temper and liberal use of corporal punishment, in the house Carl’s mother ruled, and so the unconscious man was laid on the floor while the bedclothes were replaced. Meanwhile, Weston dispatched the stable hand downstairs to call for a doctor.

Jeanette, with no children of her own, quickly took charge of tending to the man’s wounds. With Carl’s father’s help she stripped him down and began to mop away the dried blood that stained his torso. Carl’s mother held a hand over her mouth at the sight of the wound itself.

‘Goodness, what is
that?
’ she exclaimed, and they all peered closer to make some sense of the object imbedded into the man’s right shoulder.

‘Some kind of knife?’ Carl ventured.

‘Looks more like a thick tent peg,’ said his father. Then, in a poor attempt to make a joke, he added, ‘He have a bloody camping accident or something?’ No one laughed.

Jeanette, who had spent most of her life in a kitchen, said: ‘It’s like a metal chopstick, but it’s too thick. I’d say it’s a bolt of some kind.’

‘Well, don’t touch it until the doctor comes,’ Carl’s father said, and went to the door. Leaning out, he shouted down to the stable hand to tell the doctor to bring his surgical equipment.

A while later, with the stable hand dispatched back to his duties in the yard and Carl’s mother gone to an engagement with friends, Carl, Roy Weston, and Jeanette stood and watched while the doctor, Rhodes, did his work.

‘Weston, on my advice, this lad should go to hospital for care,’ Dr. Rhodes, a gruff, bearded fellow in his late fifties, told Carl’s father. ‘He’s lucky, that’s for sure. The injury is bad, but not life-threatening unless it gets infected. He’s also sprained his ankle, but I’ve splinted it and he should be able to limp about in a few days.’ He turned and pointed to a drip bag suspended from a metal frame which the doctor had rigged up to the bed. A plastic tube disappeared into the man’s arm just below the elbow, the insert covered with a plaster. ‘Refill this with the solution I gave you every two hours. He’s been out there for ten or twelve hours, I’d think, got a touch of dehydration. And give him those tablets, two after each meal for two weeks. I still think he should go to hospital, though.’