Tube Riders, The (29 page)

Chapter Thirty-Two

Fresh Scent

Dreggo sat at one end of the freight truck as the train rumbled along, watching the Huntsmen at the other end with suspicion, even though most of them appeared to be sleeping. Their heads were lowered, buried in their cloaks, and their knees were pulled up to their chins. All twenty of them sat pressed tightly together like a flock of birds at roost.

Emotions rose from them like steam, and she found it almost painful to sit and watch them as their combined hatred and sadness pressed at the wooden walls of the truck. She recognised one or two from her first days in the facility, remembering the human eyes behind the canine mouths and beneath the jumble of wires and electrodes. They looked more alien than human now, but once they had been men, innocents dragged off the streets into the hellish science labs and torture pits of the research facility.

Innocents just like her.

The freight truck bumped and Dreggo looked up at the door, wondering how much further they had to go. They had been traveling for about an hour, rumbling across the sleepers, the train bumping and jerking, depriving them of any chance of real sleep. She guessed they were somewhere out in Reading GFA, maybe halfway to Bristol. Belatedly, a call had come in from Bristol’s branch of the DCA, informing Clayton of a disturbance this morning at the train station there. A group of kids had caused chaos, crashing a train and destroying a large volume of cargo in the process. Clayton had been furious that the call had taken so long to come in, but at least the Department of Civil Affairs had known the Tube Riders had gone where expected. Their predictability made them easier to track down, and Dreggo expected this mission to be over shortly. After which, of course, she had a little mission of her own to complete.

She looked at the Huntsmen again. Like flicking through files, she knew about all of them from the information Karmski’s minions had uploaded into the computerized part of her mind. She knew which ones had been in active service, which ones contained blemished records, which ones were most likely to be uncontrollable once set loose. The scientists hoped that the data on each creature would help her control them, but it just scared her even more. From her own feelings she knew how much each Huntsman was hurting, and knew that madness and bloodthirsty insanity were just a simple order away.

One of the creatures stirred, its head lifting with a grunt, snout jerking towards the door. It shifted forward onto hands and knees, moving doglike towards the edge of the freight truck. As it reached the door, it lifted one hand and scratched at the wood.

Dreggo dropped into a crouch. She searched the data for information and found that this Huntsman, Craul, had tested highly in scent recognition tests. It had picked up something the others had missed.

‘Craul, what is it?’

The Huntsman swung its head towards her. Drool hung from its jaws, and the skin moved back from the teeth in a snarl. ‘Tube Riders.’

Dreggo raised an eyebrow. Could the disturbance in Bristol have been something else? Witnesses had spotted four people, but she knew the Tube Riders numbered six including the little kid. More likely was that they had split up.

Or perhaps one of them lay dead by the train tracks. It would take just minutes to stop the train and check.

Craul was growling and pulling at the door, locked from the outside. Dreggo knew the Huntsmen could break through if they really needed to, but it was worth Clayton thinking the DCA had control.

She tugged the radio from her belt, tapped in a number.

Clayton’s voice fizzled on the other end. ‘What?’

‘We’ve got something,’ she said. ‘Stop the train. We need to check.’

A minute later the train began to slow, finally bumping to a stop. Dreggo waited while doors opened further down and the voices of men carried down towards them. She could hear a lot of them out there; no doubt they weren’t taking any chances with a car full of Huntsmen.

Then keys rattled in the padlock. ‘Stay back from the doors,’ someone shouted.

‘We’re back,’ she shouted back. She wanted to wait by the door and order the Huntsmen to attack them now, but the DCA agents would be heavily armed. Their time would come; she had sworn it to herself.

The door swung open. At least ten DCA agents stood there, weapons leveled at the Huntsmen. Dreggo felt sure the creatures could still overwhelm them if she gave the order. Many of them would be happy to die.

The Huntsman, Craul, snarled and took a couple of steps forward. ‘Tube Riders,’ he growled again.

‘Craul, back!’ Dreggo ordered, and to her surprise the creature responded, slinking back into the shadows where the others waited.

The men moved back to let her get down. ‘Lower your weapons,’ she said. ‘The Huntsmen work on my orders. Unless I say, you’re safe.
Unless I say
.’ She glared at them, undermining the threat. On the heat sensors installed into her robotic eye, the faces of several men flushed red with fear.

Leland Clayton stood at the back, behind his line of defense, she noted. ‘How was first class?’ she called, pushing through the armed men towards him.

‘What do you have?’ he said, ignoring her sarcasm. She noticed he had one hand in his jacket’s pocket, where no doubt his finger hovered over the button of the device that would stun her if she attacked him.

One of my Huntsmen picked up a scent,’ she said. ‘I think the Tube Riders might have split up. Otherwise, we’re looking for a body.’

Adam Vincent moved up alongside Clayton. His nose was bruised and blackened and one eye was swollen closed. He was limping from the nail gun wound and she smiled at his obvious discomfort.

‘What happened to you?’ Dreggo quipped. ‘You fell asleep and the train rolled over you?’

Vincent glared at her. ‘I cut myself shaving.’

‘You shave with a sledgehammer?’

‘Shut it, bitch.’ Vincent turned to Clayton who, she noticed, had a little smirk in the corner of his mouth. ‘One of them was hurt,’ he said. ‘One of the boys. The Huntsman shot him with a crossbow.’

‘Let’s do a sweep of the line,’ Clayton said. ‘See if we can find his body. The Huntsman smelled it when?’

‘A couple of miles back.’

Clayton nodded. ‘Can you pick up the scent yourself?’

Dreggo smiled. Clayton didn’t want the Huntsmen released if he could avoid it. ‘Not as well as they can,’ she said.

Clayton looked grim. ‘Okay, take two, have one track on either side of the line.’ He lifted a finger to point at her. ‘Keep them reined in though. I’ll have guns trained on them at all times.’

She gave him a mock salute. ‘Yes,
sir
.’

She took Craul and another Huntsman who had tested well, Jacul, and set one either side of the train line. Together they moved along the track, Craul and Jacul bent close to the ground, Dreggo walking along the tracks between them. Behind her four of Clayton’s agents followed, their guns trained on the Huntsmen. Clayton himself walked at the back. Vincent had back by the train to conduct his men in a sweep of the nearby forest. The other Huntsmen had been locked back up in the freight truck.
Like cattle
, she thought bitterly.
Don’t give up, my new friends. Your time will come
.

They had been walking for maybe twenty minutes when Craul let out a howl and darted towards the fence that kept people off the railway line.

‘Stop!’ one of the agents shouted.

Dreggo heard the click of a gun. ‘Craul!’ she shouted. ‘Wait!’ But the Huntsman had ducked down by a hole in the fence and pushed through.

‘I’ll shoot!’ the agent shouted behind her, as the Huntsman emerged on the other side of the fence and dashed off into the forest.

‘Craul!’

The agent fired. The
tak-tak-tak
of automatic rifle fire blasted through the trees, sending birds flocking into the air. Dreggo flinched back from the sound, shutting her eyes for a moment. Finally, as the agent stopped firing, she smelt cobalt in the air, her enhanced sense of smell picking it up as thick as treacle. She looked through the forest towards Craul.

The Huntsman was lying face down about thirty feet away, not moving. Dreggo felt a sudden pang of regret; after all, Craul had simply been following his initial order to find the Tube Riders.

Dreggo searched her files. Craul had once been a man called David Wilson, abducted from outside his home in Green Park in October 2064. He was survived by a wife and two young children, who, if luck was with them, would be still alive and well, the children now close to finishing high school.

Dreggo hung her head. A bolt of guilt ripped through her, thicker than the Huntsman’s crossbow quarrels in a pouch attached to her belt. It was government policy to send a certificate of death to any fallen Huntsman’s family. She knew what it would say: David had died in service of his country; his death had been honourable.

That they had probably stopped mourning him ten years ago was no matter. That certain details would be omitted, about the cruel experiments that turned him into a monstrous killing machine, or that he would have eaten his own children without a moment’s hesitation, didn’t matter either.

Whatever he had become, all Dreggo could see now was a man lying dead in the grass, shot in the back while trying to follow orders. She tried to feel nothing, tried not to care, but somewhere inside her the part that was still human burned with rage and shame.

‘What the hell happened here?’ Clayton, who had dropped back, shouted, running up towards them. ‘Keep the noise down, we’re not in the city anymore! People take note of gunfire out here!’

‘The fucker tried to run away,’ the agent said, looking at his weapon with suspicion, as though it had fired itself.

Dreggo glowered. ‘He was following the scent. Now one of my best trackers is dead.’

Clayton stopped a few feet away. He looked towards the fallen Huntsman and huffed. Dreggo watched him. Just behind his shoulder, Jacul waited by the edge of the tracks. A digital transmitter inserted into his brain meant she could speak to him with her mind; he could be on Clayton in a second. Another agent had his gun trained on Jacul, but at least Clayton would be dead before he had a chance to fire. Dreggo hesitated a moment, fighting the urge, but in the end she glanced back towards Craul’s fallen body, and couldn’t bring herself to sign Jacul’s death warrant too.

Clayton said: ‘You communicate with those things. They break loose out here and we have hell to pay. Remember that.’

‘It was okay to have them roaming wild in the city.’

Clayton shrugged. ‘There are lower standards there.’ Dreggo glared at him. His broad generalization took in almost everyone she had ever known. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘one less of those monsters is one less to worry about.’

Something inside Dreggo snapped. She leapt at Clayton, barely aware that while in her vicinity he had slipped his hand back into his pocket.

She knocked him to the ground, one arm sweeping for his face, metallic fingernail inserts raking at his eyes.

Pain bloomed in her and everything seemed to vibrate, as though someone had stuffed her into a washing machine set on high power. She tried to scream but her breath caught in her throat; all her muscles felt bunched so tightly they might burst like blisters all over her skin.

Then it stopped. Dreggo opened her eyes, wiped away a sheen of sweat and tried to breathe as her heart raced. Clayton climbed to his feet. His free hand touched the scratch on his cheek that was a sign of just how close she had come. His other hand held the little box of pain Karmski had given him.

‘Try that again…’

Dreggo bared her teeth. ‘Always,
always
… look over your shoulder, Clayton. One day…’

Clayton tried to match her stare but failed. He knew how close she had come. ‘Just get on with finding those kids.’ With his finger hovering over the button, his voice shook as he said, ‘Or I’ll have you put down like the dog you are.’

‘You’d be doing me a favour.’

Clayton brushed himself down. ‘Get another one out of the freight truck and get me those damn Tube Riders.’ Without waiting for a reply he strode off in the direction of the train.

Dreggo glared at the other DCA agents in turn until they looked away. Then, commanding Jacul to follow, she went to investigate what Craul had found.

There was a hole in the fence, a disturbance in the undergrowth nearby. Dreggo bent close and found the fence had recently been cut open, perhaps no more than a day ago. Jacul growled as he smelled what she did: Tube Rider scent, mixed with blood.

So, the injured one had fallen after all. The question was, was he dead or not? Someone had found him and come back with wire cutters. She found several sets of footprints, three unfamiliar scents.

Jacul, a few feet away, growled.

‘What is it?’

He pointed, saying nothing.

Dreggo nodded. She understood as she picked up the scent for herself.

The wet grass showed it had rained recently, and as a result the scents of the boy and the three who had carried him were a little dull, but a fifth scent was sharper, more recent. And Dreggo recognised it instantly as that of the boy’s girlfriend, the one she had tried to follow.