Monster Republic (5 page)

The journey took a dark and lonely hour, interrupted only by the passage of a car or the footsteps of pedestrians. People with some reason to be out, despite the lateness. People to be avoided.

Every time he heard an engine or sensed a set of headlights sweeping his way, Cameron dived over a garden hedge or ducked into a shadowed porch until they’d passed. Even though he had done nothing wrong, he felt like a criminal on the run.

Finally he turned the corner into his own street. He quickened his pace, opened the gate and walked up the path, just wanting to get inside his house, to stop running. He stopped at the front door and swore softly to himself.

His keys, along with his wallet, his phone and anything else he had been carrying at the time of the accident, were presumably stored
somewhere at the lab he had just escaped from.

For a moment Cameron stared at the doorbell. Just one gentle press would bring his mum and dad to the door. They would call the police, get something done about Dr Fry, and talk about finding him, Cameron, some help. Maybe over a nice, normal cup of tea.

But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had to break the news to his family in the right way. He didn’t know exactly what that was, but ringing the doorbell at three in the morning definitely wasn’t it.

Maybe he should get inside and wait for them to wake up? Cameron pondered the idea. If nothing else, it would put the moment off for a few more hours.

‘Yeah,’ he murmured to himself. ‘That’s it.’

There was still the question of how to get in, though.

Cameron took a deep breath and crept along the side of the house. As he rounded the corner, his heart jumped into his mouth. There
was somebody in the garden! Waiting, silhouetted against the night sky. At first he thought it must be a Bloodhound. Then he realized. It wasn’t a person at all, but a collection of clothes hanging from the washing line.

Odd. It wasn’t like his mum to leave washing out overnight. And the rubbish hadn’t been taken out either. Three full bin bags had been carelessly dropped by the back gate, rubbish spilling out of them.

No, not rubbish – clothes. In fact, weren’t those his favourite jeans?

Dropping to his knees, Cameron took a closer look. He was right – the jeans were his, as was the jumper and all the clothes underneath.

‘What are they doing out here?’ he whispered to himself. His mum was always taking old clothes to the charity shop. But she didn’t normally take his things without asking. Something wasn’t right.

Pulling on some clothes, Cameron bunched up a T-shirt in his fist and tiptoed up to the back door. There was a tinkle of glass on the
kitchen floor as he broke the window, but even to his super-sensitive ears, it didn’t sound too loud. Reaching in, he worked the latch and slipped through the door.

Technically, he was home.

The house was deathly quiet and Cameron stood there for a long minute, just getting over the feeling of being an intruder. The kitchen looked just like it always did, neat and tidy, so Cameron made his way into the hall. It too looked normal: the row of coats behind the front door; the antique chair that his dad had bought at an auction; the cards on the old table.

Cards? Cameron frowned. It wasn’t anyone’s birthday. So why were there so many cards? Dozens of them. He crossed over to the table and picked one up. It had a picture of white lilies on the front, and words in loopy, hard-to-read writing:

With deepest sorrow for your loss.

Someone had died. Cameron’s heart skipped a beat. Could it be his gran? She lived in Australia but she must have heard about his
accident by now. She was old, well into her eighties. What if the shock had been enough to kill her?

‘Please, not you,’ he muttered, opening the card. He recognized his gran’s handwriting at once. So it wasn’t her who had died. Then who?

Cameron scanned the brief note inside.

Cameron staggered, his mind whirling. He thumped heavily into the table, knocking a spray of cards to the floor like confetti. Words leaped up at him:
With sympathy … Thinking of you
…
Sad to hear of your bereavement
…

Realization hit him like a speeding train.

His family thought he was dead.

That was why his mum had packed up all

his clothes, and why she had forgotten to bring the washing inside. Somehow –
somehow
– they thought that he had been killed in the accident at the power plant. How was he going to explain …?

‘Who’s there?’

A girl’s voice. His sister’s voice.

Startled, Cameron turned to see her poised nervously on the stairs. She hadn’t changed – except for the dread in her eyes. It took him a second to recover his breath.

‘Hi, Shan. It’s me, Camer—’

‘Shannon! Get back to your room!’

Dad’s voice rang out down the stairs, making Cameron jump. Then his father was rushing after it, pushing past Shannon and ushering her back up behind him.

‘Keith? What’s going on?’ Cameron could see his mum at the top of the stairs. ‘Oh, my God! What is
that
?’ She burst into tears, clasping a hand over her mouth.

‘Stay where you are! I’ll handle this!’

‘Dad,’ Cameron tried to say, but his voice was no more than a squeak. The look in his dad’s eyes was every bit as frightening as the reflection he had seen in the lab window.

‘Get out! Get out of our house this second!’ Dad was shaking and, Cameron realized, so was he. ‘My wife is calling the police right now!’

Nodding, Cameron’s mum disappeared quickly from view.

Cameron called after her. ‘Mum!’

‘What’s your problem? You’re in the wrong house! You come near my family, I’ll give you a bloody good hiding!’

Cameron moved forward. ‘No, listen, it’s me—’

He had barely taken a step before his dad rushed down at him. ‘That’s it!’ he yelled. ‘Get out!’

‘Dad!’ cried Shannon, her voice trembling. ‘Be careful!’

And now his dad had hold of Cameron,
trying to force him away from the stairs. Cameron could still hear his mum crying, even as she spoke to someone on the phone. Crying himself, hurting inside, Cameron struggled to fend off his dad.

He tried to hold back, but this just seemed to provoke his dad into getting rougher and rougher. He shoved Cameron against the wall, turning over the hall table, scattering keys and mail, and raised a clenched fist. Cameron threw up an arm to parry the blow, then he shoved his father away – just trying to push him off and put some space between them. Space so he could talk, so he could explain.

But he had forgotten how strong he was now. Flying backwards, his dad lost his footing and Cameron heard a hefty thump as his head hit the stairs. Dad let out a pained groan and slumped to the floor, dazed.

Horrified, Cameron stared for a moment. Then he saw his sister staring back at him. Her eyes were filled with disgust and fear, and all the hateful emotions that cut deepest.

Head and heart reeling, Cameron turned
and ran for the door, doing his best to shut out the sound of his sister’s screams and his Dad shouting, ‘Yeah! You’d better run, whoever you are! Freak!’

Smashing through the front door as if it were paper, Cameron staggered out into the fresh night air. As he darted down the path, he was aware of lights coming on in nearby houses and neighbours emerging from their doors, drawn by the sounds of the fight.

Familiar faces. Surely someone would recognize him?

‘Mrs Chatto,’ Cameron shouted. ‘It’s me!’ But their next-door neighbour only screamed as he lurched towards her, and rushed back inside her home.

Panic-stricken, he vaulted the gate and froze, looking left and right. Where should he go?

With a sick feeling, he realized it didn’t matter. Left was as good as right. Rora had spoken the truth. He
didn’t
have a home. He
was
a monster. And he
did
have to run – from
the lab, from his family, from whatever he had become.

But
where
?

Quicker than he could make up his mind, at one end of the street a white van roared into view. It had no siren, but it cast flickering blue light everywhere, bringing more people to their door ways or out onto their front paths.

From the porch of the house opposite, Mrs Wyndham, who had been Cameron’s babysitter for five years, called out, pointing: ‘Police! There! There it is! Get it!’

The van pulled to a stop some metres away. The passenger door was thrown open and a man leaped out. But it wasn’t the police. It was the all-too-familiar figure of Dr Lazarus Fry. His gaze fixed immediately on Cameron.

Dr Fry smiled, calmly and evenly. ‘It’s all right,’ he said in a slow, firm voice, as if he was talking to a frightened animal. ‘Everything will be all right.’

He glanced briefly around at the growing
crowd of muttering onlookers. Then he smiled at Cameron again, almost paternally. ‘You’re lost, you’re frightened and I understand that. But if you just come with me, we’ll get you all the help you need.’

The blare of a horn echoed from the opposite end of the street. Dr Fry’s smile faded as Cameron turned to see a small figure racing up on a motor scooter.

Rora.

She braked some distance away, but kept the motor running. ‘Cameron!’ she yelled. ‘You can’t trust him! You belong with us! Come with me!’

Cameron was torn, his mind awash with confusion. Could he trust Rora? Yes, she’d broken him out of the lab, but he knew nothing about her.

On the other hand, there was Dr Fry. Perhaps the only man in the world who truly knew what Cameron was. Perhaps it would be best to go back to the lab. Back to where his new self had been ‘born’.

But … Cameron couldn’t shake off the
memory of the clinical way in which Fry had assessed him when he had woken up in the lab – or the cold, refrigerated room in which he had been stored like a slab of meat.

‘Get it then! Take it away!’

From every direction, voices were jeering. The mood of the crowd was turning ugly. A bottle smashed at his feet, and above all the shouts Cameron heard the wail of approaching sirens. Finally the real police were on their way.

‘Come along now,’ said Fry, beckoning with an outstretched hand.

‘Cameron! Come on!’ yelled Rora. ‘We have to go!’

The sirens were getting closer, fast. A stone whizzed past Cameron’s ear.

He made his choice.

Ducking under a growing hail of missiles from the crowd, he sprinted over to the scooter and leaped onto the back. On either side, angry people shook their fists, but Cameron, holding on tight as Rora turned in a tight circle and accelerated away, didn’t notice. He was
staring over his shoulder, hoping for one last glimpse of home.

Instead, all he got was a view of Lazarus Fry, staring silently after him.

Rora drove them a few miles down lanes and back streets and into a small park. Cameron recognized it at once. He used to come here skateboarding because the hump-backed bridge was one of the few places in town that was good for stunts.

Stunts that paled into insignificance next to the speed at which Rora was steering the scooter through the winding paths. Still, even if they did end up wrapped around a tree, Cameron supposed he stood a far better chance of survival now than he would have done before Dr Fry had gone to work on him. He smiled bitterly. Watching superhero
movies, he’d often thought how cool it might be to possess some of their powers. Now he did, but if he’d known that the price was to be rebuilt as a hideous mutant, he would have passed on the whole deal.

Rora brought the scooter skidding to a halt near a bench in a remote corner of the park.

‘We should be OK here for a bit.’

Cameron climbed off and took a deep breath of night air, hoping it might cool his temper. It didn’t.

‘OK,’ he said, rounding on Rora. ‘So you’ve rescued me again. Now maybe you can tell me what’s going on.’

‘All right.’

Cameron looked up, surprised at her sudden willingness.

‘Go on, then. I’m listening. My bionic ears could probably hear you from the other side of the park.’

Rora gave a sharp bark of laughter. She hopped up onto the bench and sat down on the back of it, feet planted on the seat.

‘Right. This is going to sound incredible to
you, but you have to promise to hear me out.’

Cameron nodded slowly.

‘OK, then,’ began Rora. ‘Dr Fry is working on something called the Divinity Project. The lab is his production line.’

‘Production line for what?’

Rora took a deep breath. ‘An army. The Divinity Project is a top secret government operation to design and build the next generation of soldiers.’

Cameron wasn’t buying it. ‘Well, if it’s so top secret, how come
you
know about it?’

Rora’s dark eyes fixed on Cameron.

‘I was there.’

Cameron swallowed. ‘At the lab?’

‘How do you think I knew my way around?’

‘What happened?’

Rora chewed a fingernail nervously. ‘I was homeless when Dr Fry “saved” me.’

‘Why were you homeless?’

‘That doesn’t matter to you. Didn’t matter to my family. The important thing is, Dr Fry saved me – but only for himself. For his twisted experiments, anyway.’

‘Experiments?’ Cameron almost laughed – Rora made Fry sound like some mad professor. Then he remembered the fear and confusion of waking up on the trolley, and the laugh died in his throat.

He looked Rora up and down, but couldn’t see any obvious mechanical additions.

‘Well, they did a better job on the cosmetics with you than they did with me.’

‘We’re not the same,’ replied Rora. ‘I was an early project. You’re a different product altogether.’

‘So when were you there?’

‘A couple of years ago.’ Rora sounded impatient to get on with her story. ‘The point is, the Fry Foundation picked me up off the streets. I thought I was headed for some care home or something. Instead, I ended up in a lab with a bunch of other street kids. He’d collected them from all over, apparently. As subjects.’