Mutant City (6 page)

I’m not big on goodbyes, so I hope you’ll forgive me for taking off like this. I have left you and your travelling companion a few ‘necessities’ to help you on your way. When I’m finished doing what I have to, I’ll swing on by to City Four and look you up.

Your friend,

Old Tink

Travelling companion? Bleary-eyed, Rush crawled out of the tent and saw the rogwan sitting outside waiting for him.

He smiled at the creature, receiving a
hurgh
and a black tongue to the face
in response.

‘Well, if we’re going to travel together, I guess I need to give you a name.’ He looked at the rogwan, trying to work out what kind of name you gave a beast that looked like that.

‘Dotty,’ he said, frowning. He had no idea why that particular name had occurred to him. ‘How do you like that for a name?’

The rogwan blinked and waggled her rear end on the ground.

‘OK. Dotty it is then.’

He stood and stretched, looking out over the lands simply known as the Wastes. If everything Tink had told him was true, he’d do well to cross it in one piece. But at least now he wouldn’t have to do so alone.

Tia

‘It’s not possible, Tia.’

‘Why?’ The girl looked across at her father and thought how tired he looked; the strain of the election he was fighting against Zander Melk and the ongoing war of words with the Principia over mutant rights was beginning to etch itself on his once handsome face.

‘You know why. Melk and the Principia have ordered a curfew prohibiting any Citizen from being beyond city walls after nine o’clock.’

‘At exactly the time the ARM has been charged with terrorising the inhabitants of Muteville.’ She inwardly winced at her own use of the name given to the mutant ghetto out there, but it seemed to have stuck in recent times. ‘The curfew isn’t in place to
protect
our
people, it’s to stop them discovering what’s happening right under their own noses.’

‘Do you think the people of City Four are really that obtuse?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that many of our fine Citizens are already all too aware of what’s happening out there, but as long as they don’t have to see it –’

‘All the more reason for me to report from beyond the wall. To
show
them what’s going on so it can be stopped before it’s too late.’

‘You assume they want it to stop.’

‘Then it’s our duty to make them want that, Dad. You know that as well as I do.’

Her father shook his head. ‘It’s simply too risky. I can’t afford to give you a cameraman and a soundman, only for you all to end up in jail.’

The teenager looked at her father, annoyed at his refusal. She, more than anyone, knew that Towsin Cowper, owner of a large and powerful media empire, could afford to do pretty much anything he chose to. And one of the things he chose to do was stand up to the powers that be and report on the mutant plight, even if doing so had cost him. Friends and associates had turned their backs on him, preferring, like so many others, to close their ears and eyes to what was happening outside the cities’ walls. Ignoring these people and their warnings, Cowper had gone ahead anyway, using his wealth and influence to highlight the mutants’ predicament and to campaign on their behalf. Most of what he said and did fell on deaf ears, but he didn’t care. Wrong was wrong, and what was happening out there was definitely wrong. He’d been pleased to discover his philanthropy had rubbed off on his daughter. Tia had become a reporter, and she too had already made a number of news pieces on the subject. But now she was asking for something else entirely and, as her father, he couldn’t allow her to put herself in the type of danger she was describing.

‘You’re forbidding me to go?’

‘It’s not that. As I’ve just explained, I can’t afford to give you –’

‘I don’t need a crew,’ she said with a look he knew all too well. It was the grim look of determination her mother had often displayed when she’d been alive. The girl reminded him of Regan in so many ways. Like her mother, she was beautiful in an elegant, effortless way that needed none of the modifications so popular in a city where people changed their eye colour, body shape and facial appearance at a whim. ‘I can do it all on a small handheld cam. I’ll be able to set it up on a tripod for my broadcast pieces, and use it to film the ARM crews as they go through the ghettos. I’ve met some people out there – good people who will keep me safe.’

Cowper sighed. His daughter and he clearly had very different ideas of the meaning of ‘safe’. ‘You’re forgetting the most important thing, Tia: your chip.’

At birth, every citizen had a small chip implanted into their thigh bone. Without it, each door you passed through identified you as not having one, and therefore as a non-Citizen. It was a way of keeping out those who didn’t belong inside the walls. It was also a convenient way for the Principia and security forces to keep tabs on those who did.

‘I had it removed.’

Cowper stared at his daughter in disbelief, momentarily lost for words. The penalty for having your CivisChip removed was death – that was
if
you could find anyone crazy enough to perform the operation, which also carried the same sentence.

When he spoke again his voice was small, the words faltering. ‘You did what?’

‘The money I earned from the last three broadcasts? I used it to have my chip taken out.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In Buffy.’

Her father stared at the small marmoset monkey sitting on his daughter’s shoulder. The animal cocked its head and returned the look. There were bio-labs in the city that specialised in growing clone replications of animals that had become extinct following the Last War. Tia had brought the little creature home about six months ago, and the two of them had hardly been apart since then.

The comms unit on his desk beeped as the image of the smiling face of a business associate appeared. Cowper waved a hand across the screen, blocking the call.

Although outwardly he appeared perfectly calm, his heartbeat was racing as he tried to figure out various ways he could get this mess sorted and keep his daughter safely out of the clutches of the City Security Police.

‘It has to be transplanted into another living creature,’ Tia explained. ‘The guy who performed the surgery suggested putting it in Buffy. He said he’d had success with transplanting the device into monkeys before.’

‘And what will happen to the marmoset once you get to Muteville?’

‘I’ll let her go. In fact, it was Buffy who gave me the idea during the last broadcast. She escaped while we were out in the ghetto. I thought she’d been killed – you know how short of food they are out there – but when we returned she was sitting in my bedroom waiting for me.’

‘She got back inside? Without you?’

Tia looked across at the monkey. ‘You’re a very clever girl, aren’t you?’

Cowper couldn’t work out how this might have happened. The security gates were rigorously manned and monitored, with automatic scanning devices to stop anything getting in or out unnoticed. The animal should at least have been captured. In fact, he was surprised it hadn’t been killed.

‘How?’

‘Marv – the camera operator I was with – saw her. She climbed up one of the long steel cables that support the mast above the west wall. All the way up, clinging on underneath like that, hand over hand. He said it took her about seven minutes to get to the top. If she’s done it once, she can do it again. My chip will be back here, but I’ll be out there. They’ll never know.’

‘They’ll know. There won’t be a log of you coming in through the gate. That’ll set alarm bells ringing.’

His daughter gave him a long look. ‘I thought you might know someone who could help with that.’

Cowper was about to say something when another thought struck him. ‘How will
you
get back in? Afterwards, I mean. I doubt very much that you’ve managed to train your simian friend to go back in the other direction at your beck and call. So how were you planning to return?’

Tia shook her head, avoiding meeting his eye. ‘I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought that far ahead. The most important thing to me right now is that I get myself embedded with the Mute population and start to put together the story of what’s really happening out there. I’ll shoot for a few weeks, edit it all together and then find a way back inside so that you can show it.’

His daughter’s choice of words struck him. ‘Embedded? War reporters are described as being “embedded”, Tia.’

‘You don’t think war’s been declared on the mutants, Daddy?’

That stopped him. He looked across at her. When had his little girl grown up into the beautiful, intelligent young woman he saw before him now? He was reminded of Regan again. The two were even more alike than he’d thought.

‘When I said I wanted to be a reporter, you said you’d do everything you could to help me. Reporters report on injustices, Daddy. That’s what they do. If that means they have to bend the rules and perhaps put themselves in danger sometimes, then that’s the price they have to pay.’

‘I can’t talk you out of this, can I?’

She shook her head.

He sighed and waved the screen of the comms unit back to life.

‘Who are you calling?’ Tia asked, concerned.

‘A friend. Somebody who can tell us straight if this monkey-brained idea of yours could actually work.’

Brick

Rush sat on his haunches, perfectly still, behind a large mangled wreck of concrete that might have once been a building of some kind before this world was almost annihilated all those years ago. What was left of the structure was now covered in foul-smelling chokeweed, but the mutant boy hardly noticed the stench as he held the spyglass up to his face, taking in the terrible scene in the distance. Dotty made a
hurghing
sound beside him, and he blindly reached out with one hand, placing it upon the stocky little creature’s back, urging her to be quiet. She trembled beneath his touch, but not from fear; in the week or so they’d been in the Wastes, Rush had come to realise the rogwan was almost fearless. No, Dotty was merely responding to the horror and revulsion the boy felt at what he was witnessing through Tink’s telescope.

The mutant marauders had almost finished the sacking of what had once been a trading outpost of perhaps thirty or forty people. From the description Tink had given him, he knew it had to be the Tranter Trading Post he’d been sent to find in his dream; it was also clear that he’d arrived too late. Whatever he had been supposed to discover here would be gone now; the place’s former inhabitants were all either killed or captured, the buildings ransacked and razed to the ground. Of the former inhabitants, the dead were the lucky ones. Those still alive had been forced into three large cages that sat atop wagons drawn by massive horned creatures. These gargantuan beasts chewed the cud as they stood harnessed, seemingly oblivious to the death and destruction their masters had meted out all about them.

Although too far away to make them out, Rush could imagine the despair on the faces of the unfortunate captives. Close up, they’d witnessed the terrible brutality that Rush had thankfully only caught glimpses of, sickening scenes that had left him feeling hollowed out and wretched. The attackers were one of the new breed of cannibal gangs that roamed these lands, and Rush knew it was pure luck he too had not become one of their victims.

Last night, cresting a low hill, he’d spotted the small settlement off in the distance. He stopped, observing the place and weighing up his options. He’d already been travelling for a long time, sticking to his plan of moving under the cover of darkness, and the stretch between him and the little colony looked bleak and barren, with little or no concealment. Nevertheless, he was getting desperate for food and water, having long since eaten all the dried meat Tink had left him. Despite Dotty bringing him back the odd morsel from some of her hunts, Rush was dreadfully hungry and getting weaker by the day. It was a toss-up whether to cross the desolate landscape separating him from the trading post in the dark, or wait until the morning, and his decision had undoubtedly saved his and the rogwan’s lives. He’d made his camp in the shelter of the ruins he was now in, eschewing a fire and huddling down with his blanket around him. He’d eventually fallen asleep, not coming to again until just before sunset, when the attack came.

They had taken their time, the mutant marauders. They easily outnumbered the traders, whom they killed at will, often toying with their prey, prolonging their agony and suffering. Eventually, bored, they set about dispatching the people of the settlement in horrifying ways, laughing and shouting as they went about the murderous business. Now, with the sun long past its zenith and making its way towards the horizon, they looked as if they were preparing to move out.

Dotty growled softly, and this time Rush took the small brass telescope from his eye and looked down at her, glad for an excuse to drag his focus away from the stomach-turning events that were finally coming to an end in the distance. The rogwan stared back at him, her squat, compact body rigid. Her dark tongue flicked out and her lips peeled back to reveal the razor-sharp black teeth that lined her gums. He’d learned that there was another set behind the first; these curved backwards slightly to hold on to prey larger than herself, and she stretched her mouth wide enough for them to be seen too. Shuffling around on her short legs, she bumped her head against his leg before turning to look in the direction of the outpost.