Mutant City (3 page)

Ears still ringing, the teenager lay on his back for a moment trying to comprehend what he’d just witnessed. The sky above him was thick with life, as if every bird in the world had taken flight, all cawing and screeching to each other at the same time.

Gingerly getting back to his feet, Rush stared down the hill at the mangled wreckage of the ARM vehicle and the even more mangled figures within it. Where Josuf had stood only moments before was nothing but a dark red-and-black smudge.

Rush dropped down on to his hands and knees and vomited into the grass.

When the mutant boy finally turned his back on the horrific tableau outside the farmhouse and made his way through the orchard, he was in a dazed and confused state, still not quite able to believe what he’d witnessed. Because of him, the man he’d come to think of as his father was dead, killed by the ARM while trying to protect him.

For a while after the incident, Rush had sat on the grass, holding his mud-and-tear-streaked face in his hands as he tried to figure out what to do. How could this have happened? What had the men, supposedly on a routine check, really wanted? Part of him wanted to stay at the place Josuf and he had called home. But Josuf had told him to go. Not to do so would mean his guardian had died in vain. It was this realisation that finally forced Rush to pull himself together and set off away from the only home he’d ever known.

City Four, the capital, the biggest of the Six Cities, was far away to the north. Rush knew it was the heart of government, of corruption. And mutants were not allowed within its wall. So why was Rush, a mutant, supposed to go there? He refused to allow himself to dwell on the enormity of the task ahead of him. Josuf had taught him to hunt and forage for food, and he was perfectly capable of concealing himself and making his own shelter when he needed to bed down for the night, but even so, the thought of making such a long trip on his own was daunting. Without really knowing where he was going, the mutant boy set off to find Silas and the mysterious Jax, who was able to speak to people in their dreams.

Melk

The sound of Principal Zander Melk’s footsteps seemed unnaturally loud to him as he hurried along the corridor towards his father’s hospital room. The urgent summons by the president had taken him by surprise, his father’s carers conveying the older man’s desire to speak to his son as ‘a matter of urgency’.

He paused at the door, peering in through the small viewing window to take in the sallow-skinned figure atop the sheets, connected via an array of tubes and wires to a multitude of machines about the bed. It was unusual to see anyone so ill inside the cities’ walls, but the thing eating away at his father from the inside was something the old man had created himself, one of his experiments intended to wreak havoc on the mutants. It was a derivation of the Rot disease that now afflicted so many Mutes, but this strain appeared to have no cure. It was difficult to escape the irony: a disease designed to harm Mutes had itself mutated and infected its maker via a tiny tear in his hazchem suit; the old man well and truly hoist with his own petard. The only saving grace for those caring for him was that, unlike its deadly cousin, his father’s version of Rot was not contagious.

‘Father?’ Zander said as he stepped inside.

Just moving his head to look in the direction of his son’s voice seemed to take a huge effort. For Zander Melk it was impossible to reconcile the wizened figure before him with that of the powerful oligarch who had done so much for the Principia and the Six Cities that had been built in the aftermath of the Last War.

Propped up on pillows, the incumbent president nodded at his son. Until recently he’d managed to keep his illness a secret; blood transfusions and a whole host of medications made it just about possible for him to maintain appearances. But his opponents, particularly that Cowper man, had begun to suspect things weren’t right. And rumours spread quickly in a place like City Four. Like sharks sniffing blood, they’d begun to circle in the political waters, waiting for the right moment to attack. So he’d pulled the rug from under them, called an emergency election in which he intended to use his power and influence to install his son to power. If he was honest, he had grave doubts about Zander’s ability to carry off the role. He lacked the . . . mettle to make the harsh decisions Melk knew were needed to put a stop to this mutant rights nonsense. Still, if everything went as planned, the situation would be temporary at best.

Melk Senior reached up and removed the transparent mask from his face, the hiss of pumped oxygen escaping as he did so. ‘Close the door,’ he said, then fluttered his fingers in the direction of the chair beside his bed.

‘How do you feel?’ Zander asked as he sat down.

‘I’m dying. How do you think I feel?’

‘The doctors say that there’s still –’

‘The doctors can’t cure this.
I
couldn’t cure this, and I created the damn thing! I was too clever for my own good, and look where it’s got me.’ He took a gulp of oxygen and lowered the mask again. ‘I wanted to speak to you before it’s too late. There’s something you need to know.’

‘What’s that?’ Zander inwardly groaned. No doubt his father was about to give him another lecture on what he was doing wrong and how he should be running things. The last time they’d spoken the old man had told him he was too liberal, pouring scorn on his campaign, and saying he needed to continue with the current hard-line policies when it came to the ‘mutant problem’.

The old man looked across at his son, an all too familiar sneer forming on one side of his mouth as he did so. ‘Don’t worry, Junior, I didn’t ask you here to use my last breath to tell you how much I love you.’

‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’

The frail creature in the bed tried to laugh, but what came out instead was an ugly, wet coughing sound that spoke of lungs filled with more than just air. ‘See? That’s the man I made and brought up. You need to work on that attitude some more. That hardness is in the Melk genes. That’s why we got to be where we are.’

Zander waited. Maybe it would have been better to trust his initial instinct and ignore the invitation to come here. The pair had never shared much love between them.

‘I need to tell you about the Farm.’

‘The what?’

‘It was a place I set up about twenty years ago. A research institute, if you like.’

‘Like the labs at Bio-Gen?’ Zander asked, referring to the vast genetic-modification empire his grandfather and father had built up, first here, in City Four, but subsequently in all six megalopolises. It was the reason City Four had risen to become the most powerful of the cities, quickly becoming the capital, where the ruling body, the Principia, was based. The other cities were each given over to specialist industries: manufacturing of electronic goods and vehicles; food and livestock (especially genetically modified crops and animals); arms and defence; mining and power production. But the empire was run from C4, the city the Melks had always lived in, the city they practic­ally owned.

‘No, not quite like them.’

Zander didn’t like the way his father said that. ‘Why haven’t I ever heard it mentioned before?’

‘Because officially it never existed. It was a facility where I tried to uncover secrets, secrets that nobody else wanted to look into.’ He gave a vague wave of his hand. ‘The Farm was established so I might look into mutant anomalies.’

‘Anomalies?’

‘Aberrations. Mutations so extreme that they defy scientific explanation.’ He paused to wet his dry, cracked lips.

Zander was beginning to wonder if the old man’s ramblings might be simply a result of the pain-controlling medication he was on. He glanced back towards the door, weighing up whether he should call one of the nursing staff.

The old man continued. ‘I’d heard rumours about mutants from the most extreme environments who had psychic powers and other weird abilities.’

‘They’re just old wives’ tales. Something that mothers tell their children to get them to sleep at night – “Behave or the mutant bogeymen will get you”.’

The old man held up a finger. He reached out and retrieved the mask, holding it to his face and sucking in more oxygen before continuing. ‘I thought so too at first. But as scientists we owe it to ourselves to investigate such things, so I set about trying to find a mutant who showed signs of having a special gift. And I found one.’ He let out a harsh bark of a laugh which was quickly followed by another round of coughing. ‘Boy, did I find one.’ After a slight shake of his head he continued. ‘My men set out into the Blacklands, where the ravages of the Last War have created a landscape so inhospitable that for a while it was thought nothing could live there. But things
do
live there: horrible and grotesque things that you would hardly think of as human. One of these was brought back from that place. How they got it back with the things they experienced while it was in their custody is a miracle, but they managed somehow, although the cost was high in terms of the lives and minds lost. The freak was taken to the Farm to be picked apart, like a wristwatch, so I could see if I might be able to work out what made it tick. It didn’t survive, but I succeeded in isolating the mutated genes of interest.’

‘What did you hope to achieve?’

His father stared at him for a few moments. ‘What do we do at Bio-Gen, son? Hmm?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘What do we offer to the citizens of the Six Cities?’ He paused, waiting for an answer that didn’t come. ‘Hope, that’s what. We offer them flawless, disease-free, intelligent, athletic human beings that are ordered up like food from a restaurant menu. You want a baby with green eyes and jet-black hair? No problem. You want him or her to be tall and strong so that they might fulfil
your
dreams of playing in the InterCity Games? Sure, why not? You want a child with musical abilities, with dextrous fingers and wide hands to easily span those octaves? A concert pianist? Hey, whatever you want, you’re paying! We can do all that.’ There was the maniacal glint in his eye that his son knew so well. ‘But what if we could offer more? What if we could make them
more than human
?’

‘We are forbidden from mixing our DNA with that of the mutants.’

‘It was all the same DNA, before they became freaks!’

‘But it’s
not
any more
.
We made certain of that. We refined and reprogrammed our own genome to remove the defects and disease. We did that precisely so we might offer the hope you just described.’

‘Ha!’ Another bout of hacking coughs followed the old man’s exclamation, this one longer than the last. ‘You make it sound as if we were on a mission to save humanity! We did it for money. We did it
because we could
!’

‘Tainting our DNA with mutant genes? That’s the most illegal thing you could possibly do.’ Zander’s mind was a blur as he tried to take all this in. ‘Is that what you were doing at this Farm?’

‘We tried to create perfection: a superhuman being, if you like. We used artificial wombs and implanted single-cell fetuses with the DNA material I’d collected.’

‘Where did you get the fetuses?’ Zander couldn’t stop himself asking questions to which he really did not want to hear the answers; his father had already admitted to some of the most serious crimes imaginable. If anyone found out about this, the Melk name would be destroyed and his whole presidential campaign would be over. When the old man shrugged, he could hardly contain his anger.

‘
Where?
’

‘I took them out of stock.’

Rush

It was the third day of his journey and the sun was beginning to make its way towards the horizon. It’d be dark again soon. Tired and dirty, and more than a little hungry, Rush was walking along the side of an old dirt track, his feet dragging in the dust. He paused to look up at a bird sitting on a bough of a tree – a strange creature with a long proboscis where its beak might have been – when he heard the noise of a wagon approaching from behind. Scurrying into the nearest bush, he peered out from the dense foliage to see the large, harg-drawn vehicle come round the bend. He kept perfectly still, knowing he could not be seen, but his heart sped up when the vehicle came to a halt beside him.

There was a moment or two of silence, eventually broken by a man’s voice. ‘What you doing hiding in that bush, boy? You planning on jumping out and attacking me, like one of those bandits from the Wastes?’

There was little point hiding any longer, although how the man could possibly have known he was there was a mystery. Rush stood up and looked at the driver of the wagon for the first time.

‘Tink!’

‘I thought it might be you,’ the wagon driver said, a sad look on his face. ‘At least, I hoped it would be you.’

The man reached down, offering the youngster a hand so he could climb up on the jockey-box alongside him. Side by side, they sat in silence for a while, just looking ahead.

‘I came by your place – what was left of it – yesterday. I was going to pay you and Josuf a visit, maybe trade some merchandise for a few barrels of that fine cider he makes.’ The old man sighed and shook his head. ‘How much did you see?’

‘Everything. Those men . . .’ He couldn’t say the words.