Chapter
One
Clawboard
The
mob was trying to derail the train.
Up
on the elevated Hammersmith and City railway line, a short distance from the
ruins of Shepherd’s Bush Market and just back from where Goldhawk Road passed
underneath the tracks, a ragtag group of men was hauling what looked like a
thick silver rope up over the rails and passing it down to another group
waiting on the street below.
A
crane hook the length of a man’s chest was attached to one end. A short
distance from the second group, an old double-decker bus lay on its side
amongst the debris in the middle of the street, its windows smashed in.
‘Pull
harder!’ shouted a bare-chested man from up on the tracks. Tattoos covered his
back and his hair was dyed blood-red. ‘Get it looped through the frame!’
With
a collective roar, the men in the street hauled on the wire rope. It stretched
a few feet closer to the bus. Shards of broken safety glass crunched under
their feet.
Across
the street from the railway line, occupying the first and second floors of an
old redbrick building which had a boarded-up supermarket metro on its ground
level, was a local bureau of the Department of Civil Affairs. Concerned faces watched
from behind windows protected from thrown stones by bent and twisted sheets of
wire mesh. Another group of men crowded around the entrance, keeping the
government’s enforcers trapped inside.
‘Haul!
Come on, haul it!’
The
men hauled, shouting and cursing. From somewhere further up the line came the faint
blare of a train’s horn.
Crouched
in the shadows of an alleyway between two nearby buildings, David Silverwood
watched the mob with a mixture of apprehension and excitement. It was the
biggest mob he had yet seen, and the skeleton crew of DCA agents inside the bureau
building had not even tried to engage them.
With
another collective roar of exertion, the men succeeded in pulling the wire rope
as far as the bus. Two men hefted the crane hook in their arms and began trying
to loop the wire around the rear window frame.
Sirens
wailed in the distance. David crept back into the shadows of the alleyway to
the lowered ladder of a fire escape and climbed quickly up to the third floor
roof. From here he had a much better view of the railway line and Goldhawk Road
heading away northeast towards Shepherds Bush Common.
The
sirens were coming closer. A few streets away, two white vans threaded through
the piles of debris, red roof lights flashing. David frowned. Just two? There
was no way they could disperse a mob this size, but there were rumours that the
DCA was spread as thin as it had ever been.
The
large clock on the wall of an old post office across the street read three
forty-four. Six minutes until the next train, by David’s reckoning. A couple of
miles up the track towards central London, where the rails went underground for
the first time, was the abandoned London Underground station of Melling Road
Junction. In the days he had hung out there the trains had always come through
every fifteen minutes, starting at five past the hour.
The
vans came to a stop where an overturned car blocked the street. One of them
made a hasty U-turn. David wondered if they would give up and go back, but then
the back doors flew open and something stooped and cloaked leapt out onto the
street.
No.
It
couldn’t be. Not here.
Another
followed, taller than the first, something silver glinting in its hands.
So,
the rumours were true.
Two
men in DCA uniforms climbed out of the back of the van. One made a sweeping
motion with his hands and the two stooped figures dropped into a crouch then bounded
forward, up and over the piles of debris and lumps of fallen masonry that
clogged the road, closing the distance to where the mob had gathered with
unnatural speed.
David
had never seen one, but he had heard the stories. In the last few weeks, the
rumours had been everywhere.
He
ran to the far edge of the roof, cupped his hands over his mouth and screamed, ‘Run!
Huntsmen!’
A
ripple of shock passed through the mob. The group in the street dropped the
wire rope and scattered. The man with the powerful voice still screamed his
commands, but only a hardy few were still listening as the rest climbed down
from the elevated railway line, running after the others. As his last comrades
deserted him, he walked to the bridge above Goldhawk Road and lifted his fists
above his head.
‘Come
on, you bastards!’ he screamed, beating one hand against his chest, brandishing
a knife in the other.
Something
whistled through the air and a silver bolt struck the man in the shoulder. A second
took him in the stomach, and he tumbled off the elevated railway line to the
street below. Moments later the first of the Huntsmen reached him, dragging him
back into the shadows beneath the bridge. David lost sight of them both, but
the sound of ripping, tearing claws, and the screams of a dying man came
piecing out of the evening air.
The
second Huntsman had gone in pursuit of the dispersing mob. It caught up with
two men, claws slashing, downing them in one stroke. Then it dropped to one
knee, lifted an arm, and something silver struck a third running man in the
back, knocking him forward on to the bonnet of a burnt out car.
The
clock above the old post office ticked over to three fifty.
The
train came roaring down the line out of the three-storey townhouses on either
side of the tracks. Its wheels struck the wire rope and for an instant it
seemed to slow as the wire went taut, dragging the bus a couple of feet along
the tarmac. Then the wire rope broke free and the train powered across the
bridge, roaring straight through the now-abandoned Goldhawk station and
hammering on towards the Hammersmith terminus, disappearing between the residential
buildings on either side of the line.
As
the train’s engine roar faded away, David scanned the streets for the Huntsmen,
but they were nowhere to be seen. The last members of the mob had long dispersed,
and the streets were nearly deserted. A couple of DCA agents had taken a few
tentative steps outside their bureau building, but while the two DCA vans were
still parked further up Goldhawk Road, of their occupants there was no sign.
It
was time to leave. David headed for the fire escape, but at the last moment a
tickle of caution made him pause.
He
squatted, lowering himself flat to the roof. Then he eased forward until one
eye could peer down through the rungs of the metal stairs at the street below.
Breath
caught in his throat. One of the Huntsmen was down there, sniffing at the
ground like some kind of hound, its hood fallen back to reveal the top of a
sparsely haired scalp crisscrossed with silver wires.
‘Hey!
Come on, let’s go!’
A
uniformed man strode into view. The Huntsman snorted and looked up, growling at
the newcomer.
‘Time
to go, you ugly bastard.’ A hissing filled the air and the Huntsman jerked and squealed,
a sound that made David’s hair stand on end. Then, with one last glance up at
the fire escape, it slinked after its handler.
It clocked me, he
thought, remembering the way its human eyes had paused on his. It knew I was here.
The
handler led the Huntsman back to the vans. The other had already returned,
standing tall with its head bowed like a friar at prayer, only the silver
crossbow held in curved claws giving it away as something monstrous. David didn’t
wait to see what happened next. Finding his nerves again, he hurried down the
fire escape and away into the streets, crossing under the railway line and
heading in a gradual arc towards the east, back in the direction of central
London.
A
few streets away he came across a city bus picking its way through the debris. He
climbed aboard, taking a worn, colourless seat among a clutch of glum,
disillusioned faces.
He
peered out at the trash-strewn streets, wondering what had just happened, and
what it meant for his safety.
Twenty
minutes later, he flipped the driver a coin and got off. He cut through a
crowded market and across a sloping, overgrown park to a cluster of tall
tenement buildings.
In
the apartment he had called home for the last two years, he ignored his
flatmate, Taku, who was slumped on a ratty sofa in their sparse living room, watching
old movies on a battered TV that had a crack cutting diagonally across the
screen from left to right. He unlocked the room he called his own and then locked
it again from the inside, adding an extra padlock as a secondary precaution.
There,
he sat down on the bed and tried to let himself relax.
The
Huntsman had smelled him. Had it not been for the intervention of the handler,
he might be dead. No one could kill a Huntsman, everyone knew that. They were
as close to invincible as a creature could get. According to word on the
streets, even the government could barely control them. That was why they had
been locked away for so long until the kids calling themselves Tube Riders had
been bold enough to escape.
Everyone
he knew thought it was rubbish, this whole story about the supposed Tube
Riders. What were they anyway, just some urban myth about kids who hung from
the side of London Underground trains late at night, peering in through the windows?
They were ghosts, apparitions, some said, the trapped souls of train suicides.
They couldn’t possibly exist, and they couldn’t possibly have gone on the run
from the government, causing an army of DCA agents to follow on their trail,
and bringing the Huntsmen back on to the streets.
No,
most people thought it was bullshit.
David
reached under his bed for an old cardboard box pushed right back against the
wall. He pulled it out and tossed aside an assortment of tatty books, dusty
ornaments, and other junk to reveal a smooth piece of willow at the bottom.
About fifty centimetres long, it had two rubber straps on one side and two
metal hooks on the other.
He
gave a grim smile as he lifted up the clawboard and blew away the dust. Unlike
most people, David knew the rumours about the Tube Riders weren’t just idle
street talk. He knew they were true.
Once,
he had rode with them.
And
if the government was hunting Tube Riders, he might be in a lot of trouble....
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