Mutant City (14 page)

When Rush looked at Brick again, he saw his friend’s attention was no longer on the vast, glinting metropolis. Instead he was staring at a settlement at the foot of the mountain. It was surrounded by water on all sides, a lemon-shaped islet linked to the mainland at its south and north by what appeared to be large rafts.

‘Logtown,’ Forkhand announced, flashing those blackened teeth again. ‘A man called Kohl runs the place. You’ll be meeting him soon enough.’

Brick nudged the boy at his side, gesturing with his chin.

Not far from the largest building on the small island, trees were being hauled out of the water. Long chains were wrapped around their trunks, and animals, four or five of them linked together in a leather and rope harness, were dragging them towards a large building with a spinning waterwheel on the side.

‘What are they?’ Rush asked their captor.

‘The critters? They’re boarnogs. Some half-pig, half-dog things the loggers breed. Strong they are. Mean too.’

‘They’re what you want to fight Dotty against, aren’t they?’

The mountain man gave the boy a ghastly grin. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

Tia

Tia watched in frustration. The marmoset had stopped for a third time – sitting on top of the steel cable, gripping it with her feet, her prehensile tail wrapped around beneath it just in case. The animal was still only about two-thirds of the way up the twisted metal rope that stretched from the ground to the mast above the massive wall that, even at this distance, loomed over the ramshackle shanty town.

‘Don’t stop again, Buffy,’ Tia said under her breath. She knew from her cameraman – who’d seen and filmed the monkey climb the cable on that first occasion – that it had taken the marmoset about seven minutes to reach the mast. Buffy had already taken at least four times that long. The animal seemed nervous about something, but Tia had no idea what.

Tia looked about her, hoping again that Buffy’s presence had not been noticed. Despite being on the edge of the sprawling slum, there were still people about, and any commotion about a monkey on the wire would almost certainly bring the situation to the tower guards’ attention. At the same time, Tia also had to take care not to behave suspiciously in case the cameras mounted on the ramparts should decide to swing round to find out what she was up to. Anybody seen loitering for any length of time this close to the no-man’s-land that separated the edge of the slums and the wall would inevitably call attention to themselves, and since the mutant rallies had started, the guards seemed more trigger-happy than ever.

She glanced at her watch.

Eleanor would already be at the guard station. She’d planned a surprise visit, hoping that her presence would fluster the watch commander and his troops enough for the monkey to slip inside the city unnoticed, but with Buffy taking so much time to make her way back on this occasion, Tia hoped Eleanor could keep up the charade without the guards beginning to suspect the reason for her presence.

The camera nearest to her began to swing round in her direction, and she ducked into the shadows of the nearest ramshackle hovel, telling herself it was nothing more than a routine sweep. Through the thin walls she could hear a woman inside shouting at her children, telling them not to fight with each other while she was getting their dinner ready. The dwelling – it could hardly be called a building – was typical of the vast majority of places the people here lived in. Inside there would only be the one room, and it would be used for eating, sleeping, playing and everything else. In parts of the shanty town these homes were packed so closely together, jammed up against each other with no space between them, that it was impossible to see where one hovel ended and another began. There would almost certainly be no toilet inside, and if there was it would not be plumbed in any way. A bucket often had to be used by all, emptied regularly to keep the flies at bay. If they were fortunate, there might be a communal latrine somewhere nearby that could be shared by as many as twenty or thirty families. If that was fully occupied when the shack’s inhabitants needed to go, they would have to use the stench-filled gutters that ran through the streets. No wonder disease and infection were rife in the slums.

Tia’s head whipped around when she heard the unmistakable high-pitched trills of a marmoset’s distress calls. Looking up at the wire, she could see Buffy was still on top of it, her little head oscillating wildly back and forth as she appeared to scan the skies above.

‘What’s the matter now, Buffy?’ Tia whispered. Then she saw it. The hawk turned lazily in the air, banking on the thermals as it took in the tiny figure below it.

‘Run for it, Buffy, run!’

Tia watched the little monkey start to scamper further up the cable, its tiny hands and feet a blur as it tried to get to the top as fast as possible. The hawk had dis­appeared, and Tia craned her neck, frantically searching the heavens for sight of it. Then, in a flash, she saw it. It came in low from the right at great speed, wings folding at the last minute, hooked talons outstretched. There was no way the marmoset could avoid the raptor, and Tia held her breath as she waited for her little pet to fall into the clutch of those deadly spurs. Just as the hawk was about to grab the monkey in a last fatal embrace, Buffy jumped high into the air, twisting acrobatically and lashing out at the aerial killer’s wings with small hands and feet as the predator passed beneath. The marmoset’s efforts might all have been in vain because Tia was certain her pet would plunge to its death, but at the last second Buffy managed to grab hold of the cable again with her tail, swinging about underneath like a circus performer, before pulling herself up. With a quick look left and right, the monkey scurried up the remainder of the wire and into the metal skeleton of the mast, where she was at least safe from further aerial attacks. Tia heard the cry of frustration from the unseen hawk before it flew off in search of easier prey.

Tia breathed a huge sigh of relief, only to realise that everything could still go horribly wrong. While the marmoset was on the mast, she was in most danger of being spotted by the guards in the observation post right next to it. Tia prayed that Eleanor was still inside, doing her best to keep them distracted, but Buffy needed to get moving again. Instead, the little animal was cowering among the struts and supports that made up the tall aerial, no doubt shaken to the core by her near-death experience at the claws of the raptor.

‘Go, Buffy. Get a move on!’ Tia urged under her breath.

Almost as if the monkey had heard and understood, the creature shook itself down, jumped on to the top of the roof and disappeared from sight.

Tia gave a little clap of delight and turned round, startled to find she was
being observed, not by a CCTV camera, but by one of the children from the shack behind her.

The youngster smeared his running nose on his cuff and stared up at her from eyes of the deepest blue Tia had ever seen (without surgical or genetic enhancement, anyway). Those eyes were beautiful; the rest of the face, covered as it was with coppery-red growths, was not. The child was a victim of Rot, a terrible disease that in the last few years had swept through the Mute communities based around each of the Six Cities, killing many thousands. Tia’s father suspected the disease might have been engineered by Melk’s people, but had, as yet, been unable to prove it.

‘What you up to?’ the boy asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘Yes, you were. You was watching that fing climb over the wall.’

‘What thing?’

‘The one what the bird nearly got.’

Tia didn’t say anything.

The child sniffed, his eyes tracing the cable up to the mast and the guard tower beside it.

‘How many of you live here?’ she asked, gesturing towards the shack.

‘Six.’

‘That’s a lot of mouths to feed.’

‘We was seven, but Uncle Gorp died last month.’

‘How would you like some food coupons?’

The child’s eyes regarded her suspiciously. He scratched at his face, then quickly took his hand away, as if it was something he’d been told not to do. ‘How many?’

‘Two?’ She saw the child’s interest dwindle a little. ‘They’re gold star tickets,’ she added.

Coupons that could be exchanged for food were hard to come by in the slums. A gold star ticket would be enough to feed a family for three or four days.

‘What’d I ’ave to do for ’em?’

‘Forget.’

The boy glanced up at the cable and back at Tia again. A mischievous look spread across his face. The kid was street-smart. ‘Forget what? I ain’t seen nuffink.’

‘The Agency for the Regulation of Mutants can be very persuasive. They might try to “help you to remember” after I’ve gone.’

The boy spat on the ground. ‘I hates the ARM! It’s cos of them Uncle Gorp’s dead. Mum says they beat him senseless when they found him selling stuff he shouldn’t ’ave been. Conkerband or sumfing.’

Tia dug in her pocket and pulled out the tokens.

The boy quickly snatched them from her fingers, as if he thought she might change her mind. He stared down at them.

‘They’re real,’ she said.

‘Was it yours?’ he asked without looking up.

‘What?’

‘The fing I never saw.’

‘The monkey? Yes.’

‘Was it important for it to get back inside?’

‘Yes, it was.’

‘Ain’t you scared?’

‘Of what?’

‘Me touching you. I’ve got Rot.’

‘No, I’m not scared.’ Every Citizen had been given a jab to inoculate them against the disease. It cost next to nothing, but had not been offered to those outside the walls.

The boy sniffed again. ‘I’m glad it got away from the bird.’ With that, he disappeared back inside the shack.

Tia watched him go. ‘Me too, kid,’ she said. ‘Me too.’

Rush

The route down the mountain was much easier than the ascent. A path of sorts wound its way through the forest, and the group made good time as they followed it. Animals lived in the overhead canopy, their calls ringing out in warning as the intruders entered their leafy world, but try as he might, Rush only caught a fleeting glimpse of one of the tree-dwelling creatures. It was a huge hairy thing with a rodent face, and it was gone almost as soon as it appeared.

They exited the tree line close to the river, their captors pushing them forward at the end of the poles until they were standing at a small dock.

Making its way towards them from the islet was a ferry, a dilapidated old thing that looked as if it might sink at any moment. In the centre of the deck the figure of an old man was cranking on a large winch, turning the handle at the top of it round and round so the device gobbled up the wet links of a half-submerged chain stretched from one shore to the next. The winch filled the air with a loud
cling!-cling!-cling!
noise that was almost painful on the ears. As Rush watched, something broke the surface next to the ferry; a long scaly head with black eyes appeared, rolling over for a moment and revealing a mouth filled with teeth. The head disappeared beneath the murky surface again, followed by a snake-like body that must have been as long as Brick was tall. The boat bumped up against the edge of the dock, the vessel’s operator straightening up and turning to face them.

The man was older than Rush expected. Like the mountain men, he was wiry and thin, his face all angles and sharp points. He wore a long coat, leather of some kind, that hung down past his knees, with muddy boots of the same colour and material. His long grey hair was shoulder length. There was something in his mouth that he chewed on one moment, shoved into the hollow of his cheek the next. He reminded Rush of a scarecrow figure he and Josuf had made to ward birds away from a plot of land where they tried to grow vegetables.

Even in dock the ferry listed alarmingly in the water, and the scarecrow caught Rush looking at it sceptically. The old man sucked his brown teeth, nodding his head, and continued his chewing.

‘She in’t too pretty, is she? But she gets herself back and forth over this river when I ask her to, and that’s all ’at counts. Yup.’ He nodded to himself as he said this last word, then he spat a long thick stream of something brown and vile into the water, wiping the rest of the juice off his chin with his sleeve.

‘Usual fee?’ Forkhand asked.

‘You got business –’ it sounded like ‘bezznezz’, the way the ferryman said it – ‘in Logtown?’

‘Yep. We got trade to do with Kohl.’

‘Then it’s the usual fee – payable upon leaving.’

As the mountain men and the captives climbed on board, the scarecrow ferryman pushed a lever on top of the winch and started turning it again so the vessel began to pull away from the dock.

Forkhand turned to Rush and Brick. ‘When we get to Logtown, I intend to sell you both to a man called Kohl. He’s like the mayor of the place and he owns the mill. He’ll put you to work. Now I guess you might get it into your heads to try and run away, but I’m telling you right now, that would be foolish.’ He raised his voice so the old man on the winch could hear him. ‘The only way on and off the islet is via the two ferries, isn’t that right, old man?’

‘You could try to swim it,’ the ferryman answered without looking up, ‘but I wouldn’t recommend it. If the tide didn’t carry you away and drown you, the eelsnakes in the water would get you. I seen ’em strip a harg to the bones in less time ’an it takes me to say my own name.’