Tube Riders, The (21 page)

‘The nearest hospital’s fifty miles, Rhodes,’ Weston said, dismissing it as though it were a stupid idea. ‘Over these goddamn roads that’s a three-hour bloody journey in the car. At least.’

His father was right, but Carl thought that the real reason was so his father could keep an eye on the man. After all, no one came out of the cities, and if he had been thrown from the train as was how it looked, he surely wasn’t a very savory character. Other people might want him as far away as possible, but Weston, who had made his fortune in his youth as a cruiserweight boxer, had an unusual fascination with the folly and misfortune of others. And if it turned out the man was a fugitive, Weston would be certain to want his reward.

‘Don’t worry,’ Weston said. ‘I’ll see to it that Jeanette gives the boy the correct doses as and when necessary.’

Rhodes held up the metal bolt and grunted. ‘Where the hell did he get that, I wonder? Where did you say you found him?’

‘In the woods,’ Weston said. He made no mention of the train tracks. ‘I don’t know him, so maybe he’s not from round here.’

‘I should say so,’ Rhodes grunted. ‘From a neighbouring farm, perhaps? You positive you don’t want the police involved, Weston? Boy could be a fugitive.’

‘Newspapers have nothing,’ Carl’s father replied. ‘We’d know if someone was on the run. Most likely a bunch of boys were playing bow and arrow.’

Rhodes shook his head, a wry grin on his grizzled old face. He put the metal bolt, cleaned of blood now, down on a bedside table. ‘Where those boys got a goddamn crossbow from is anyone’s guess.’

After Dr. Rhodes had left, Weston took Carl down into the kitchen. ‘What have I told you?’ he said, pushing Carl’s shoulder. ‘Keep away from the damn train lines! You have no idea who that kid could be! He could be, I don’t know, a bloody spy?’

‘Who from? Who would spy on us?’

Too late to take back his insolence, his father cracked him around the side of the head with the inside of his clenched fist, making Carl’s ears ring and his vision momentarily blur. ‘Don’t talk back to me, boy,’ he growled, and Carl shrunk away. A couple more years of filling out and he might be capable of fighting back, but his father was still too lean and the memories of a strict childhood were still too close.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered, looking at the floor.

‘I don’t want you playing near the tracks again, do you understand me?’ Carl’s father poked a finger into Carl’s chest as though to ram home the point.

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Good.’

Weston stalked off. Carl was left to wonder about the man upstairs. Who was he? Had he fallen from the train, or had he been pushed? Carl had watched the trains many times, from outside the fence, from the branches of nearby trees, from the platform of the old station itself. They didn’t have windows, of that he was sure. They were cargo trains; they didn’t carry passengers. And the man upstairs certainly wasn’t dressed in anything that could be considered a worker’s uniform. So who was he? Where had he come from?

Carl could guess some of the answers at least. He’d come from inside London GUA. But London was closed up, people didn’t go in without a permit and people certainly never came out, not dressed like the man was and covered in blood. He was running from something, but from what Carl couldn’t even guess. All he knew was that the metal thing that Rhodes had taken from the man’s side had come from the weapon of someone who had got very, very close to their target.

Despite everything, Carl found himself smiling. The intrusion of the man into his life was a spark of excitement in a world of boredom barely sustained by his imagination and his adventures amongst the ruins in the forest. The man was a stranger, and a mysterious one at that. Carl could only guess at the stories the man had to tell, but he sure as hell planned to find out as many of them as he could.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Newborn

What remained of Dreggo lay upon the cold metal operating table in the middle of the science laboratory. A group of technicians and doctors fussed around her, working hard to repair the damage, both physiological and mechanical. As Leland Clayton entered, his nostrils filled with the scents of formaldehyde, ferrous steel and blood, while the low hum of generators, the clack of needles, and the buzz of drills hung in the air around him.

A poor night’s sleep had followed several hours of cleaning up the mess he had found in St. Cannerwells. Adam Vincent had been treated at a government hospital, and the families of the dead men had been notified. Not for the first time, Clayton cursed the decay that had set in over the land; getting the simplest of tasks done often proved a major headache. The Department of Civil Affairs, while brutal and unflinching in the face of duty, was a failing organization, fallen into stagnation after too many years of personnel and budget reductions. Even the men were suffering; below the higher levels of the organization the training was inefficient, and many of his men were less than useful in a firefight. Vincent was a prime example of how worthless, backstabbing idiots could now rise up into the higher echelons of the department when fifteen years ago they would not have been allowed in. The future was bleak too; new recruit numbers were falling, with many of the agents he needed to put trust in little more than thugs dressed up in silks.

As Clayton grimaced at the smell and took in the sight of the girl’s ruined body, he couldn’t help pulling the phone from his pocket and glancing quickly at the display. He was waiting for a call from Bristol GUA regarding the arrival of the Tube Riders. He had fully expected them to jump the train at the earliest opportunity and try to hide among London’s slums, and had wasted valuable hours having his men check stations further down the line. The Huntsmen, though, had come back with the information that the Tube Riders had ridden right out of the city, hanging from the train as it exited under the perimeter wall from one of the sewer-like tunnels. Where they were now was anyone’s guess, and while he would have liked to have followed them immediately he dared not go above the Governor. They had a meeting later today, but the Governor was holed up in meetings all morning regarding the staged assassination of the EC ambassador by so-called terrorists. Clayton couldn’t help but think that a noose was tightening around Mega Britain’s diseased neck.

At the head of the operating table stood Dr. Karmski, rubbing his chin with one gloved hand while he watched his team work. Clayton noticed an unnatural level of concern on the face of the usually sadistic doctor. He looked like a father overseeing an operation on his own child.

Clayton looked down at Dreggo’s body. Half her face had been torn away and there were deep lacerations all down the front of her torso, but he could still see she had once been a woman. Not a normal one, though; metal inserts were evident in her arms and legs, as well as what looked like some kind of plastic body-frame, now scored with deep claw marks. Clayton wondered whether, had it been absent, there would be much of her left.

‘So,’ he began, trying to sound authoritative. ‘Where exactly did it come from?’

‘
Her
, Mr. Clayton. Not “it”, if you please.’

Clayton scowled. ‘
Her
, whatever. It’s a Huntsman, I presume?’

Karmski smiled. When he spoke, his voice was almost wistful, as though he were speaking to no one but himself. ‘She was the first of a
new breed
.’

Clayton opened his mouth to reply, but Karmski continued, ‘She’s been gone over a year. At the expense of her tracking skills we left her more human. With it she kept her beauty.’

‘Okay, Karmski, enough of your crackpot perversity. Can you fix her or not, and if so, what good is she to us?’

Karmski smiled. ‘Fixing her is easy. We can make her stronger, we can make her better. Mr. Vincent claimed she knew those others, the ones you hunt. As requested we are readying more Huntsmen for release, but these others … some of them are … flawed. Barely controllable. Yet, she … my Dreggo, she is one of them and also one of us. She can lead them.’

Clayton rubbed the bridge of his nose, considering. ‘We have recalled the Huntsmen. I will talk to the Governor later today. It is my expectation that tomorrow we will move out as a unit. Can she be ready by then?’

Karmski laughed. ‘Mr. Clayton, you amuse me. You’ve seen what we are down here, you’ve seen the wonders we create.
Of course
she can be ready by tomorrow.’

Clayton rolled his eyes at the word ‘wonders’. He’d been to Stonehenge and Dover, he’d seen wonders both natural and manmade. In comparison, the creations of this modern day Dr. Frankenstein were
monstrosities
. He said, ‘How can it be possible for a body to heal so fast?’

‘We replace what is broken, Mr. Clayton. Skin, bones, nothing is beyond our skills. And the tissues themselves, we simply order them to regenerate.’

Clayton seriously doubted the boldness of Karmski’s statement, and as he glanced at Dreggo he felt a momentary pang of sadness for the girl, losing the last shreds of her humanity before his eyes. But he nodded, his face grim. ‘Good. Report to me when she’s walking about again.’ He turned and walked out.

Just as he closed the door, he glanced back across the room, at the racks of expensive computer machinery and medical equipment, and shook his head. ‘While everything around us rots,’ he muttered wryly.

#

Back inside the laboratory, Karmski watched as the technicians fixed in place a black metal plate to hide the ruined part of Dreggo’s face. The Huntsman had left just one eye and her nose undamaged. Half of her mouth was gone, replaced by synthetic skin tissue, its vulnerability now protected by the partial mask. Much of her former human beauty was gone, but there was still enough of the old Dreggo left to excite him.

Karmski still remembered the day they’d brought her in, a fifteen-year-old runaway, drugged and bound. Later, strapped to an examination table, still numb with drugs, he’d used her for the first time in the solitude of his private lab. He remembered the soft, suppleness of her skin, the warmth of her body, her taste, her smell. He shivered at the memory.

As his scientists had experimented on her and found new ways to enhance her strength and abilities, Karmski’s love for her had grown. The girl once known as Deborah Jones, nicknamed Dreggo, was never left alone out of her shackles. With an endless supply of tranquilizers and memory-erasing drugs to hand, Karmski’s love for her had manifested itself often. The day she had slipped her bonds while being transported up to the research labs and escaped, killing three scientists and more than ten guards in the process, was the proudest and also the darkest of his life.

‘After all this time, you’ve come back to me,’ Karmski murmured, while all around him the scientists, technicians and doctors worked without pause.

#

Out in the corridor, Clayton pulled his cell phone from his pocket and answered a call from Vincent.

‘Vincent? What news do you have?’

‘The Huntsmen have returned and been secured as you ordered,’ the younger man’s voice came through. ‘It’s as we thought. The kids have definitely gone. There are no fresh scent trails inside the perimeter walls. They’re outside. We’re ready to move anytime. Your orders?’

Clayton scowled. He hadn’t yet cooled on Vincent, still blaming him for the Tube Riders’ escape. After sending him to the hospital to have his leg fixed up, Clayton had demanded he return to supervise the search operations and oversee the return of the Huntsmen, a duty which had ensured Vincent got no sleep last night. Still, hearing the weariness in Vincent’s voice was scant reward for the wrath of the Governor Clayton might yet have to face.

‘We need the Governor’s permission to send the Huntsmen out into the GFAs,’ Clayton said. ‘I have a meeting with him later.’

‘If we send them now, they can run down the Tube Riders by early afternoon.’

You’ve changed your fucking tune
, Clayton wanted to say. Instead, he just said, ‘No. We wait for authorization. If I have to set those monsters loose in the countryside I’m not being responsible for whatever damage they might do.’

Clayton heard a slow intake of breath that could have been tiredness, could have been insolence. Then Vincent said, ‘Whatever you say.’

The train that the Tube Riders had taken was on a direct trunk line to Bristol. The DCA branch there had been notified, and enhanced station security requested. He had demanded armed guards, cover on every exit. In reality, though, he doubted he’d get it. Bristol had almost as many problems as London and the Governor’s announcement yesterday evening had caused pockets of rioting in cities all across the country. The police were over-stretched, and the DCA were trying to plug the gaps. He just hoped that the Tube Riders wouldn’t slip away before the net was in place.

He knew they wouldn’t be stupid twice. They’d taught themselves how to get on and off a moving train, a skill he genuinely admired, and he suspected they’d look for a safe place to jump, either out in the countryside or inside the perimeter wall of the industrial mess that was Bristol GUA. His hunch was that they’d head for the city, feeling safer in what they knew than the relative unknown of Reading Greater Forest Area.

Whatever they did, their free days were short. The DCA needed to organise itself to continue pursuit outside London GUA, but within a day, maybe two, there would be twenty Huntsmen on their trail. Huntsmen could follow a trail weeks old, and, if everything went according to plan, and Dr. Karmski knew what he was talking about, there would be another, better, stronger, Huntsman leading them, one who knew the Tube Riders well enough to anticipate their movements and to bring them in.

Clayton shut off his phone and headed for the exit. He felt a cold sweat bead on his forehead and in his armpits. He wanted to blame the clammy air of the lower levels of the facility, but he knew that was just an excuse. The truth was that the easy part of the day was over. The hard part – facing the Governor with the news that the fugitive Tube Riders, carrying information that, in the right hands could bring war to Mega Britain, had managed to escape not only the Department of Civil Affairs but the Huntsmen as well, and were now somewhere outside the city – was about to begin.

#

While the first sunlight of morning was still struggling to break through the grey smog that shrouded London, inside the facility the light came from the same clinical shadow-killing strip-lighting as ever. Inside a holding cell that doubled as a recuperation room, Dreggo lay sleeping, her one remaining eye closed, her chest rising and falling beneath a mound of bandages that left little clue as to the extent of her torso’s damage.

The last technicians had left. Several hours of surgery had repaired most of the damage to her circuitry and closed up the flesh wounds. The latter would take time to heal; although the gene-manipulation she had undergone during her initial development caused her tissues to regenerate at accelerated rates, Dr. Karmski’s men couldn’t work miracles and she would still be vulnerable for a few days.

The damage she had suffered could never be completely repaired. Her skin tissue could be replaced, but her human sight could not. In its place, the technicians had installed a computerized motion sensor and infra-red night vision “eye”, but she would only see clearly and in full colour from her right.

Karmski walked around the table. One hand reached up and touched the skin of her leg underneath the sheet that covered her. He glanced back towards the door. He’d locked it, but was nervous nevertheless. Dreggo had been gone over a year and he’d not had a chance to be alone with her since the DCA van had brought her in.

He sucked in a sharp breath as his hand slid further up the inside of her thigh. He glanced up at her face and saw her eyelids flutter, but otherwise she was still. He’d given her an extra dose of sleeping pills, just to make sure. With the right friends, the street could make you tolerant towards even the strongest medication.

Confident no one could see him and that she wouldn’t wake, Karmski let his other hand move inside his own trousers. His excitement was building, and he didn’t know how much longer he could hold himself back. He pulled his hand free and began to unbuckle his belt.

His other hand had found her sticky wetness now. He slid his finger inside, delighted to see the way her body shuddered. Awake, she’d kill him in an instant, but in her drugged sleep she felt the same pleasure as any other woman touched by a man as it manifested in her dreams.

‘My beautiful Dreggo,’ he moaned as he climbed up on to her, his trousers slipping down around his knees. Almost unable to control himself, he eased her legs open and pushed the covering sheet up over her body.

Losing himself in the pleasure of his greatest creation as he eased himself into her, Dr. Karmski felt like he’d come home.