Tube Riders, The (8 page)

Marta rubbed her sore neck as she scrambled to her feet. Looking around, she saw three others had passed her and were closing in on Simon, Paul and Jess. Two more moved towards Switch, while the rest hung back. The blood had scared many, but Dreggo alone might prove strong enough to take them out. There was something wrong about the girl, something unnatural.

And then the train roared out of the tunnel, its engines booming like thunder.

‘Now!’ she screamed. ‘Ride, Tube Riders, ride! Go!’

Switch slashed at one of his new attackers and they backed off out of range. Marta glanced back and saw Paul swing his clawboard in an arc at the nearest of the three that circled them. It connected hard and the man went down, giving them room to move.

‘Come on, Jess!’ Simon shouted, pulling the girl by the hand. Paul, surprising Marta with courage she had never realised he had, rammed the end of his clawboard into the stomach of the next man and then swung it into the face of the third.

The train was halfway through the station now. They had just seconds left to catch it before it was gone and they were dead. Simon and Jess sprinted towards the platform edge. Jess, crying in terror, leapt and somehow managed to catch a hold, with Simon catching behind her. For just a second Marta marveled at how good the girl was. It had taken Marta weeks to pluck up the courage to make her first ride.

‘Dreggo, they’re getting away!’ someone shouted.

‘Kill them!’ Dreggo screamed without looking up, her voice hoarse and desperate. ‘Kill them all!’

‘Paul!’ Marta screamed. ‘Come on!’

Paul turned toward the train. His face was contorted with fear and he looked more scared of the train than the Cross Jumpers. For a moment Marta thought he would pull out, but then he broke into a lumbering run. He was going far too slow, years without riding ruining his fitness. He squeezed his eyes shut and grit his teeth, summoning the nerve he needed. He reached the platform edge and leapt for the train. For a moment Marta thought he would miss: he was too low, his leap not high enough. The image of Clive’s smashed body flashed through her mind, then Paul’s clawboard caught with one edge and she gasped with relief. Using a deft skill he probably forgot he had, Paul shifted on the train side, pushed up with one foot and leveled the board out. Then the train was taking him away.

Marta couldn’t help but smile. He still had it. Once he had been good – no champion, but respectable – and that skill obviously didn’t fade easily. Maybe it was just like riding a bike after all.

It was her turn. She sprinted and caught just as the front of the train entered the far tunnel. From the side of the train Marta looked back towards the platform as the wind whipped her hair around her face. Switch was still back there, on the platform, running for the train. Another second and he would miss it. At the last moment, Marta saw Dreggo look up from Maul’s dead body. She bared her teeth in anger and for a moment looked feral, lupine. She screamed something Marta couldn’t hear, and her arm whipped through the air.

Switch, incredibly, had a huge grin on his face as he sprinted for the train. He was a hundred feet ahead of Dreggo, but as his board caught, he arched his back, crying out, and his face contorted with pain.

Then the darkness of the tunnel engulfed them.

Chapter Eight

Discovery

Marta felt the train begin to slow. As the chilling, buffeting wind eased, she heard the faint sound of crying not far ahead of her.

Jess.

What an introduction to tube riding
, she thought. Despite the danger, the deaths, the main reason they did it was for fun. Now, one man lay dead back on the platform, several others were hurt, and they were on the run. She had dealt with struggle and violence all her life, but tube riding was supposed to have been their escape.

‘Marta!’ Paul’s voice came from not far ahead. Just a shadow in the strobe lighting from the emergency lights in the tunnel and the glow through the carriage windows, he was inching back along the carriage towards her, sliding his board carefully along the rail of the jerking, bumping carriage as the train thundered through the darkness.

Paul stopped just short of her. ‘We’re coming into a station,’ he shouted into her face, struggling to be heard over the echoing roar of the engine up ahead and the clattering of the wheels over the rails. ‘You want to dismount here?’

She shook her head. ‘Not yet. There’s another disused station two further stops down the line. Westfern Street. Remember?’

They had used to ride there but a stop light had been installed a short way into the far tunnel so the trains came through too slow. ‘We can get off there,’ Marta said. ‘We should be safe.’

‘Sounds good. I’ll tell Jess and Simon. They’re two carriages ahead of me.’

‘Paul, wait. How are
you
doing? First ride in a while, remember?’

The laugh Paul gave her verged on hysteria. ‘Piece of cake,’ he shouted, and she could tell he was barely holding it together in the nightmarish dark of the tunnel. ‘Not looking forward to getting off but it’s better than getting battered by a group of thugs.’

He inched away from her along the carriage. As the train decelerated into the station, she looked through the windows at the passengers inside. This carriage only held a handful of kids and a group of old women, hunched over, their hands wrapped tightly around their bags. Marta remembered being young and her father telling her about the old days, before the government changed, before Britain became Mega Britain, before the perimeter walls and the class segregation, as he called it. She remembered him telling her that despite the riots, the violence, the banning of the internet, mobile phones, and unregulated television, that some things never changed. Some things you could just rely on.

He said the London Underground was one. You could ride the tubes, and it could be any time of the last one hundred and fifty years. Looking into that carriage now at the kids and the old women, it was like looking back through a time portal into London’s past. She started to smile, but tears welled up in her eyes.

Her father had been hit by a car while crossing the road. It wasn’t the car’s fault, he told her on his hospital deathbed, just minutes before internal bleeding claimed him. He’d had things on his mind, and had been looking the wrong way as he jogged out across the street. An old-style death for a man who had always believed Mega Britain could be saved.

Her mother died a year after, killed by a terrorist bomb placed in a litter bin outside the foreign consulate. She’d been there trying to get a visa for Marta to study in America, a thinly veiled plan to get her daughter out of the country before things got really bad. She had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The police said that the device had been poorly made and hadn’t exploded properly, but Rachel Banks had been right outside and was the only casualty.

A letter arrived just a day after the funeral declining the application. That was two years ago. Since then, applications themselves had been outlawed.

Unlike her father’s, her mother’s death had been an old-fashioned one for an entirely new reason. Despite the bombings, the protests, the uprisings, Mega Britain rolled on.

Paul inched back towards her again as the train came to a complete stop, and the doors opened on the other side. People stood up and got off as others got on.

‘Simon said he’s cool,’ Paul said. ‘Jess is in a bad way, though. In shock. Simon’s worried she’s going to fall off. Not helping that it’s so damn cold.’

Marta grimaced. ‘Tell him to keep a hold of her. There’s been enough death today already.’

Paul looked at her and shook his head. ‘I can’t believe Switch killed that man. He seemed to enjoy it, like he went blood-crazy.’

‘It was them or us. It might still be us, if we don’t keep our heads down.’ The train doors closed, and it began to move again. ‘That girl Dreggo seemed to care for him a lot. It looks like we’re on her hit list now.’

Paul sighed. ‘Switch didn’t need to kill him. He’s quick enough with that knife he could have just slashed him up a bit. My brother, Owen, he’s just twelve, but I’m worried he’ll end up like that. You know, not caring.’

‘What Switch does is out of our control,’ Marta said, feeling unexpectedly defensive. ‘Remember, he was protecting us. I noticed you were pretty quick with that clawboard.’

Paul leaned closer as the train picked up speed momentarily before beginning to slow again. ‘Simon wasn’t going to leave Jess’s side. They were going to get cut off from the train. It was the only way to give them both a chance.’ He smiled. ‘It’s a good job we had Dan’s clawboard for Jess. Otherwise we might have been stuck.’

‘Well, we made it, but I think Switch is hurt. He’s hanging on back there but I think she got him with a throwing knife.’

‘Something was odd about her,’ Paul said. ‘Did you notice how young she was?’

Marta gave a nervous laugh. ‘You didn’t feel her hands around your neck. They were like iron. I’d be dead now if Switch hadn’t got her attention by killing that guy.’

Paul sighed, and it sounded as though he was holding back tears. ‘It sucks so bad that it has to be this way. An eye for an eye, always.’

‘Dreggo hasn’t got hers yet, remember. We’re going to have to lay low after this.’

The train rolled into another station. They were on the right side of the train, and again the doors opened on the left. Marta knew that getting off at Westfern Street was their only chance, because the station after was a connecting station, where the train changed lines. The doors opened on the right side there, and they would be discovered.

Paul inched a little closer. ‘Look at them in there,’ he said, speaking right into her ear. ‘Some of them look right through us. Why don’t they notice us?’

‘They do,’ Marta said. ‘But what they see is a ghost. They see a person outside the window peering in, mixed with the reflections from the people inside, the flicker of the lights, the emergency signs, and the advertising on the wall behind us ... so many things. Most of the time we don’t know what it’s like to see one of us from in there. I remember once coming home from school and passing through the abandoned station at Field Park and for a few seconds seeing someone hanging from the train. It scared the living shit out of me, and worse, the figure looked like my brother. It was after I told him about it that night that he told me about tube riding. It
was
my brother.’

‘I guess that’s why most of the people who acknowledge us are drunk, high or mad. They’re more willing to trust what their eyes show them.’

‘Exactly.’

The doors closed again and the train pulled away, the engines roaring as it gained speed. ‘Okay, next one,’ Marta said. She shouted the instruction back to Switch. The little man had used the stops to move forward to the carriage behind them, but he looked groggy and weak as he gave a slight nod of his head.

‘I hope he’s not hurt too bad,’ Paul said. ‘Asshole though he is, I’m fond of that bastard.’

Marta smiled. ‘Me too.’

She leaned out from the train, looking ahead down the track. In the distance she saw a bright red light, still just a pinprick like an animal’s eye far off in the dark. It was the stop light just past the next station. The train should start to slow down, enough that Jess would be able to dismount without hurting herself. She worried about Switch, though. How hurt was he?

Marta heard the squeal of the train’s ancient brakes as it slowed, wrinkling her nose as the stench of smoke and oil drifted up from the wheels below her. A moment later they were surrounded by emergency lighting as the train staggered into the station.

Ahead of them, Simon and Jess jumped off. Simon rolled well, while Jess landed with a grunt but seemed to be okay. As the platform appeared below them, first Paul jumped, and then Marta gritted her teeth and jumped after him. She ducked her head and held her arms in as she’d learned, but she still cried out in pain as she landed on the cold, hard platform. It had been years since she’d dismounted short of the breakfall mats, and the pain was refreshingly sharp.

She climbed to her feet as the train rolled past her. It was slowing almost to a full stop, and as the last carriage reached them Switch jumped down, landing on his feet, twisting and falling to the ground. The train rolled away into the tunnel and came to a stop a few hundred feet inside.

‘Are you all right?’ Marta said, helping him to his feet. Her hand came away sticky, and she smelt the copper scent of blood.

‘That bitch stuck me,’ he moaned. ‘How’d she do that from that distance?’

‘You need a doctor,’ Paul said.

‘Fuck it. I’ve had worse. Let’s just get out of here and then worry about it.’

Simon and Jess walked over. Jess’s face shone wet with tears, but otherwise she looked all right. Simon had one hand on her arm as if worried she might faint.

‘The way out’s up there,’ Marta said, pointing towards some stairs behind them. Let’s get out of here and reassess ourselves in the light.’

‘Is the station open?’ Paul said.

‘This end used to be. I don’t know if it’s been closed up since, though.’

They started up the stairs, Marta in the lead with Jess at her shoulder, Simon and Paul helping Switch along behind them. At the top of the stairs the corridor turned to the right, opening out into a wider lobby where Marta remembered the ticket gates were. Beyond that were two more staircases before the station exited on the corner of Hatton Road. There might be a locked gate, but if it was old and rusty they might be able to force it.

The station had been abandoned longer than St. Cannerwells, for at least twenty years. Marta wasn’t expecting to hear voices, nor see lights from the lobby area. Dazed, still in shock from the Cross Jumpers’ attack, they walked right out into plain view of a group of men standing in a huddle just beyond the old ticket gates.

It took a moment for Marta to recognise the black suits the men wore. When she did, noticing at the same time another man in their midst, on his knees with his hands tied behind his back, his face battered and bloody, she lifted a hand to stifle a scream.

The Department of Civil Affairs.

One of the men lifted what looked like a baton and smashed the kneeling man across the face. The battered man gave a watery grunt and fell sideways, but another man caught him and held him upright. The battered man started talking quickly, his voice high-pitched and faltering. He was crying for his life in a language Marta didn’t recognise. The tears though, tears of utter terror, were something she understood. An image of her mother flashed into her mind, her mother with tears streaming down her bloodied cheeks as she lay in the hospital bed an hour after the terrorist attack. ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to leave you,’ Rachel had wept. Half an hour later, she had done both.

One of the DCA agents looked up. He turned to the others and said something sharp, looked back at them and pointed. Three men pulled guns. Two aimed them at the Tube Riders, but the third held it up to the battered man’s temple and pulled the trigger.

The gun went off, impossibly loud in the empty Underground station. Behind Marta, Jess screamed, and she heard Simon retching.

For a second everything seemed to stop. Marta glanced at Jess as the girl said, ‘I know that man, oh God,
I
know that man
…’ As she trailed off her hand fell to something tied around her stomach.

Marta’s heart seemed to twist in her chest.

The camera
.

‘Hey!’ shouted the man holding the gun. ‘Stop!’

‘Run!’ Marta screamed.

One of the other men fired. The shot rang out, and a puff of dust and broken tiles exploded out of the wall just inches wide of where Paul stood. Then they were running as though it were Huntsmen and not just men who pursued them, their ears still ringing from the gunshots.

Switch, with a determined grimace on his face, went first down the steps, three at a time. Paul was close behind, while Simon hung back a little, dragging Jess, who looked close to passing out. Marta, at the back, glanced behind her and saw the men closing.

‘Come back here!’ someone shouted. ‘Come back or you’re all dead!’

Down on the platform, they heard the rumble of the next train as it approached.

‘Ride this one?’ Switch shouted.

‘No,’ Marta replied. ‘It stops in the tunnel. They’ll catch us.’