Tube Riders, The (52 page)

‘She never intended to come back,’ Marta sobbed. ‘She went out there to her death.’

Paul turned away, his heart heavy. There was nothing left he could do now except keep the train moving forward.

The tunnel began to rise more steeply.

‘Come on, just a little more…’

In the mirror, Paul could see the water splashing the back of the train.

Ahead of them, the rails disappeared beneath what looked like two huge doors.

‘Hang on!’ Paul shouted.

He closed his eyes as the train struck the doors and burst out into the cool light of dawn. Behind them he heard a huge
whoosh
as the water erupted out of the tunnel entrance. It rose high in the air and then battered down around them like a lake falling from the sky. Water showered the train’s windscreen hard enough to crack it.

‘We have to jump!’ Paul shouted, feeling the sudden lurch of the train as the certainty of rails beneath it disappeared. They’d run out of track. Not everything was finished on this side, either.

Paul swung one of the doors open as the train meandered towards a stand of trees. He looked back to see his brother, Carl, and Switch leap off the side of the train. Beside him, Marta was still sobbing. He grabbed her and hauled her to the door.

‘Marta,’ he gasped. ‘In case we don’t survive this, I just wanted to say…’

‘What?’

He shook his head. ‘I have no fucking idea. But whatever it was, it was going to be profound.’

She gave him a teary smile.

He took her hand.

They jumped.

Paul hit the ground and rolled, feeling the crunch of bones in his body. As water rained down on him he looked up and saw the train cab veer sideways into a stand of trees. It hit something and rose up into the air, for one second standing on its end. Then it crashed back down, broke apart, and exploded.

A wall of fire rose up into the air. Paul lay on his back and felt the heat even through the water that was still pouring down on him. As he closed his eyes he wondered why the water hadn’t stopped yet.

A few minutes later, when he opened his eyes, he realised it was raining. Beside him, Marta was sitting up, watching the plumes of smoke rise from the wrecked train cab into the grey morning sky. He looked behind him, and saw Owen and Carl helping Switch to his feet. The little man was wincing with pain, one arm hanging limp.

Beyond them, Paul saw the remains of what had once been a building, a pair of train tracks stretching a short way out from the rubble to end in a grassy field where two freshly ploughed lines of earth now led up to the burning ruin of the locomotive.

Paul stood up. Something in his shoulder felt wrong, and he had a burning sensation in his chest. But, he was alive. He reached down with his good arm and pulled Marta up. The girl looked in better shape as she smiled up at him, her hair slicked against her face.

Wordlessly, they started walking back towards the ruined building, beyond which a pool of sea water now lapped calmly. As they reached the others, Owen, Carl and Switch stood up. Owen took Paul’s other hand, making his brother wince a little, while Carl supported Switch with an arm over the little man’s shoulder.

No one said anything.

They climbed up the slope, past the ruined building, past the pool of water and up to the brow of the hill. Rain battered down relentlessly, soaking them all to the skin. Behind them, the flames from the burning train still roared.

They stood in a line at the top of the hill, and looked down a gentle slope towards the sea. There, stretching back several hundred feet from the beach, they saw a gorge cut out of the rock, now filled with sea water that lapped gently against its bare rock sides. To a stranger, it might look like a canal, recently begun, cutting inland through the rising hillside, until the builders had just given up and gone home as the hill became too steep.

The tunnel to Mega Britain, closed off forever.

‘I hope she’s at peace now,’ Marta said.

The others looked at her.

‘Jess or Dreggo?’ Switch asked.

Marta cocked her head. With her free hand she wiped her wet hair out of her eyes. ‘Both, I guess.’

They were silent for a long while. Waves, building in the rising Atlantic storm, broke against the corners of the rock channel, sucking the water back, before surging forward to create curtains of splash rising up from the steep edges of the gorge. Out across the English Channel, dark clouds rolled and toiled, battering the water with driving sheets of rain.

‘God, the sea smells good,’ Switch said.

There were mumbles of agreement.

‘You know, we have to go back,’ Marta said. ‘Sometime.’ She sniffed. ‘We left a lot behind.’

Carl said, ‘Things will change when we go back. Things will be put right.’

Paul glanced at him. Carl’s eyes, like Marta’s, were elsewhere. His mother, maybe still alive, prayed for his return. One day, he promised himself, he’d see them reunited.

Owen was peering back over his shoulder. ‘I don’t know about you lot, but while I’m enjoying the view, the sentimentality and getting wet and everything, I’m pretty sure there’s a town back there, and I’m not too keen to die of hypothermia when I could be sitting in a café watching TV and eating a baguette. Who’s with me?’

No one laughed. But as he looked around, Paul saw the others were smiling too.

Epilogue

Beach

As the rain began to die down, the two children slipped out of the old air raid shelter and began to pick their way back across the beach towards home. They had one hand each on a bucket which was full of tiny conch shells. Mother had promised to help them make a mural for their bedroom if they could collect enough. Mother hadn’t planned on the rain though, the temperamental Atlantic drift bringing in storms quicker than the gulls that invariably flew ahead of them.

The beach arced around to the left towards a headland where Father sometimes took them fishing in summer. Off the rocks there they’d caught baskets of cod and whiting which Mother would grill over the barbeque in the evening. Sometimes, they’d even caught a spider crab or two.

They were both obviously thinking of better weather and nicer days, because they almost tripped over the body lying in the sand not far from the water line. They were too surprised to scream, but they did drop the bucket, scattering conch shells across the wet sand.

‘What is it?’ the first child said in the dialect of French favoured in Northern Brittany.

‘It looks like a girl,’ the second replied.

‘What’s she doing here?’

‘It looks like she’s sleeping.’

They approached slowly. The girl was lying on her front, her hair spread out around her on the sand. Her clothes were ripped and torn.

The first child knelt down by the girl’s face. ‘Hello?’

‘What’s wrong with her?’ the second child asked.

‘What do you mean?’

The first child pointed.

The second child saw now. Something shiny seemed to be covering part of her face. ‘I don’t know. I think we’d better get Mother.’

‘Look. She’s awake.’

The two children watched as very slowly a hand reached out and scraped a line in the sand, the fingers leaving five trails which quickly pooled with water.

The two children scampered away across the beach, shouting for their mother.

Here Ends

The

Tube Riders

(The Tube Riders Trilogy #1)

by

Chris Ward

Are you ready?

The Tube Riders: Exile (The Tube Riders Trilogy #2)

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Enjoy the first chapter of The Tube Riders: Exile…

The Tube Riders: Exile

Chapter One

Halo

The crushing force of the wave forced his mouth and eyes open. His vision blurred as salt water pressed down into his lungs, dry and abrasive. Dragged back under, he tumbled over and over, caught in a death roll as sharp rocks lacerated his clothing and split open his skin.

For a brief moment there was air, and he howled like a dying man as water burst out of his throat in a gushing, suffocating rush. Then the next monstrous wave crashed over his head, forcing him back down into its freezing depths.

He thought of his family, of his mother’s arms. He remembered how she had kissed him in the days before, told him how much he was loved.

The water battered him again, and he saw himself being torn away from his family by strangers in white coats with rough leather gloves and hard, durable boots, taken down into a black mine of hell that would turn him into a monster with a dark, cancerous hatred in his heart.

#

The Governor jerked awake. His car, accompanied by a three-car Department of Civil Affairs convoy, bumped along a potholed lane that arced its way through sparse, untended woodland. Through the trees up ahead appeared glimpses of a grey perimeter wall topped by barbed wire and gun emplacements, patrolled by soldiers with guns slung over their shoulders.

He wiped sweat from his brow and took a deep breath, relishing the air in his lungs, remembering the suffocating press of the sea water.

Too many memories. Too much pain.

He had been lucky. Whether or not the Tube Riders had come out on the other side of the tunnel that began at Lizard Point in Cornwall he didn’t yet know, but aboard the train they’d had a better chance than him, and he had managed to survive. He had clawed his way up out of that seething, churning mass of destruction and clung like a barnacle to the wet, cold rock while the waves caused by the collapsing tunnel had battered the cliffs below.

The front car of the DCA convoy ahead of him pulled up at the gate checkpoint. A uniformed guard emerged and leaned down to the car window. An arm appeared, impatiently flashing an ID card. The guard nodded and marched back into the gatehouse, and a moment later the gate swung open.

From the front, the building could have been any other manor house left over from the purge of Britain’s nobility, which the Governor had ordered shortly after assuming power. Unlike many great leaders of the past, while the inhabitants had been slaughtered in their garages and basements like unwanted dogs, he had been selective with his destruction of the buildings themselves, instructing the demolition of only those he had considered likely to act as a standard for the disaffected. In a reordered context, such buildings had proved useful. The gothic pillars and tall, ornate windows gave Talhale House an air of classical beauty, but behind the tinted glass were bricks and steel, a series of alarm-triggered storm doors and enough guards to take out a small army. The gun emplacements and the dozens of mines scattered throughout the forest were precautionary; realistically no one could get in or out without authorisation.

Once home to a noble line of upper class British gentry, Talhale House was now a prison, housing some of Mega Britains most dangerous criminals.

‘How have the years been, my old friend?’ the Governor mused, as Wohfel, one of his three Personal Guard, held the car door open for him, and another of them, Stark, shielded him from the sun with a large parasol. The third, Adilin, was somewhere among the closest trees, following on foot, keeping watch, staying invisible.

He tried to hide his limp as he moved. He had once told the traitor Leland Clayton that generosity could inspire people to follow you, but he had found that only through coercion and intimidation could you ensure absolute loyalty. Clayton’s own bullet still kept wrapping on his shoulder, while the battle with the Redman had drained his strength, and the final confrontation in the tunnel off Lizard Point had left his body battered and bruised. Under his trousers he wore a brace on his leg. Smote against the cliff face by water surging from the collapsed tunnel, the femur bone in his left leg had broken in three places, and while it would heal in time, he was physically the weakest he had ever been.

The less people who knew it the better.

The door opened and a man in a dark blue suit came down the steps to meet them. When he saw the Governor, his eyes gave a double take and a look of horror danced across his face. Suppressing a gasp, he sank to one knee, his head bowed.

‘My Lord Governor, I am Ronald Welch, Director General of Talhale House Maximum Security Unit. It is an honour–’

‘Get up,’ the Governor snapped. ‘I don’t have time for this. Did you wake him?’

Welch looked up. ‘Yes … sir. Halo is awake.’

‘Good. I need to see him immediately.’

‘Um, sir, he’s not in the best of condition–’

‘I wouldn’t expect him to be after forty years in this hellhole. Would you be?’

‘Um, no, sir. I–’

The Governor waved him aside and started up the steps with his guards flanking him. Welch shouted to his men to open the doors. The Governor felt a sense of satisfaction at the fear with which they still seemed to behold him.
My influence still holds true, for now.

He glanced back as they went inside. Several DCA agents had left their vehicles and were standing around by the gates in a gesture of security. The Governor still had a bitter taste in his mouth after what had happened with the DCA in Cornwall, and while the order to turn their guns on the Huntsmen had been given by Leland Clayton, his trust in the DCA as an organization was lost. Clayton’s replacement as Commander in Chief, Farrell Soars, was a solid man and respected by the lower ranks, but the Governor had to ensure no such situation happened again.

‘Wait here,’ the Governor told the Personal Guard. ‘I need to see this man alone. Do not allow anyone else into the building until I return.’

Stark and Wohfel both nodded, their eyes hidden behind their visors, and took up positions just inside the door. The Governor glanced outside once more at the DCA agents, then followed after Welch.

An elevator took them down a couple of floors below ground. The Governor emerged into a cramped, low corridor where he was forced to follow Welch in single file. They made a couple more turns and then descended another flight of stairs. Double storm doors made a barrier through to the Maximum Security wing, and the Governor waited patiently while Welch let them through one using a coded keypad, locked it again and then opened the other. The Governor wondered for a moment what might happen if Welch suddenly decided to go turncoat, sacrificing his life to keep the Governor trapped down here. The man would die, of course, but did the Governor have the strength to break out of a place like this?

He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts.
Don’t let the paranoia overcome you. I am still strong, and they still fear me.

‘He’s in here, sir,’ Welch said, indicating a solid steel door, its former shine now grimy and stained, flecked with rust.

‘Is he chained?’

Welch actually smiled. ‘Of course, sir. He’s always chained.’

The Governor nodded. ‘Good. Open the door.’

He stood back while Welch operated a series of locks and then dragged the heavy door open, grunting and straining under the load.

The Governor peered inside. A dark form was slumped on a wooden pallet in the corner. It took a moment to identify the amorphous shape as a man curled up in a foetal position. The stench of weeks-old sweat and feces collided with the dry dusty scent of grain sacking, and the Governor wrinkled his nose in disgust.

‘Get up,’ Welch barked.

The sacking shifted a little. A grimy foot poked out from the folds and rubbed against the edge of the wooden pallet. Then chains clinked as the foot withdrew into the folds.

‘Hello, Halo,’ the Governor said. ‘It’s been a long time. Are you ready for some fresh air?’

There was a barely perceptible shift in the brown, formless clothing covering the figure. As the Governor’s eyes began to adjust to the gloom, he made out the long white hair and beard that covered the figure’s head and face. He felt like he was looking at some hellish version of Jesus who now lay in a grey purgatory, somewhere between crucifixion and rebirth.

‘Get up, old friend. Let me take a look at you. You served me well once, and I have use of you again.’

A rasping, crackling sound rose from under the figure’s clothes. At first the Governor was unsure what it was, then he realised it was laughter.

‘Ha, ha … ha. My … my,’ intoned a gravelly, parched voice. It sounded like the man hadn’t spoken in a long, long time. ‘Is that a familiar face … I spy?’

‘Halo–’

With a rattle of chains, the figure leapt up from the pallet, hands curved into claws as they stretched forward. A single dirty fingernail scraped a layer of skin from the Governor’s cheek before he jerked back out of range. Behind the beard and beneath the hair the man was unrecognizable from the one the Governor had known so many years ago, barring one thing – the black, dead eyes. Now they were as wide as sinkholes, as empty as a dead soul, and they bored into the Governor’s own with undisguised hatred.

‘Cale, you bastard, I’ll tear out your throat!’

‘Now, now,’ the Governor said, feeling the door pressing into his back. He tried to keep the unease out of his voice, but he had seen how the chain fixtures in the wall had loosened, seen how the shackles around the man’s wrists had bent. The Huntsmen were powerful, but none of them could bend steel. It was beyond even him.

‘It’s good to see you’re alive, Halo,’ the Governor said. ‘I will send a team to bring you up. I imagine it’s been a while since you last saw natural light.’

Halo had slumped to his knees. He reached down and began scratching against the stone floor. ‘Little piggy, little piggy … I’m so hungry so.’

The Governor stepped out of the cell. ‘Lock the door,’ he said to Welch, who was waiting outside in the corridor, a forced smile failing to hide his fear. As Welch replaced the locks, the Governor asked, ‘When did he last eat?’

‘Six days ago, sir,’ Welch told him. ‘He lives mostly on water with vitamin supplements. If we feed him more often he gets too strong and breaks his chains. Then we have to starve him until he’s weak enough to be sedated. Sometimes it takes weeks.’

‘Good, good. Bring some men and instruct my team on how best to restrain him. I want him brought up to the surface and cleaned up. I have need of him.’

‘Sir, are you sure? He’s dangerous.’

The Governor gave a cold laugh. ‘You say that word as if describing a rabid bear or a starved tiger. You have no idea how dangerous that man can be. But … he can be controlled.’

As the elevator carried him back up to the surface, however, his mind was plagued with doubts. There were too many people around him whom he could no longer trust. Once, Halo had been closer to him than anyone, a surrogate son, and he knew the man had the skills he needed. But after forty years underground, what was he releasing? A man … or something else?

Still, the situation had reached a critical level. His empire was on the verge of collapse. He needed to know if the Tube Riders lived, and whether the secret they carried had survived. Halo might be his last chance to avoid all-out war, both from without and within. He closed his eyes, searching for peace, but found none.

It was a risk, he knew. But it was one he had to take.

###

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