Tube Riders, The (2 page)

The knife vanished and Switch stepped back. For a moment his good eye fixed Dan with a dark stare, then he turned and stalked back down the platform towards the breakfall mattresses.

‘Don’t worry about him, he’s just–’

‘Fuck off,’ Dan said, turning away from Marta. He wiped a hand down his face, smearing away the blood from the shallow cut. He shook his hand and drops fell onto the platform, mingling with the dust.

‘Dan!’ Paul shouted.

‘And you. You come near me again and I’ll fuck you up.’

They watched him walk up the platform towards the far stairs. He glanced back just once as he reached the foot of the stairs, and then was gone.

‘And then there were four,’ Marta muttered under her breath. ‘Good work, Switch.’ She turned around, but Switch was at the far end of the platform near the breakfall mats, bent down near the platform edge. For Switch, the dismount length – the distance from the end of the platform to where a rider landed – was everything. Now that Dan had gone, the others couldn’t care less.

‘Do you think he’ll come back?’ Simon asked.

Marta gave a frustrated laugh. For a moment she felt like crying, but she shrugged it off. ‘What do you think? No chance now.’ She shook her head and sighed. ‘He never really got into it, did he? He just didn’t
fit
.’

Paul looked away. It was hurting him the most. Another friendship ruined. They were hard to come by these days, and like cracked glass, so easily shattered.

‘Worth a try,’ Simon said, and patted Paul on the shoulder. ‘But there’s still us, right? There are still Tube Riders while there’s the four of us.’

‘That idiot. If it wasn’t for him … honestly, sometimes I think we’d be better off–’ Paul’s voice trailed off. He ran a hand through the scant remains of his hair and pushed his glasses further up his nose. His face was flushed. ‘Dan wanted to be part of a gang. I didn’t want to tell him about us at first, but he seemed … seemed willing. Now he’s pissed off, angry with us, and feels cast out. Where’s the first place he’s going to go?’

It wasn’t a question because they all knew the answer. Simon cocked his head. ‘We have to hope he doesn’t tell them about this station.’

‘I’m sorry, guys. I just wanted him to be one of us.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Marta said. ‘St. Cannerwells is off their turf. The Cross Jumpers rarely leave Charing Cross East.’

‘What about the rumours?’

Paul and Marta were quiet for a moment. The Cross Jumpers didn’t ply their trade in secret like the Tube Riders did. Word got around quickly, and that word was that the Cross Jumpers had a new leader.

‘Why would he want to start a turf war?’ Paul said. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

‘They don’t like us. They want us finished.’

‘What for? There are only five – shit, four – of us left. We’re hardly worth the effort.’

Marta gave them a grim smile. ‘It’s not about how many of us there are. It’s about our legend.’ She put her hands on her hips and gave them her best rock star pose, the thick dreads of her hair hanging against the sides of her face. ‘We’re the mighty Tube Riders, baby.’

They’d often talked about it, grinning with amusement. In squats, underground clubs and illegal bars all across London GUA, there were hushed mutterings about the ghosts that appeared at the windows of the Underground trains. There were a thousand rumours about what the newspapers had dubbed “Tube Riders”, a name the original gang had gladly adopted. They were only half-jokingly considered wraiths or demons disturbed by all the noise, or the ghosts of generations of kids who had committed suicide down in the dark tunnels by throwing themselves under the trains. Only a month ago, Marta had found an article in an illegal magazine that claimed the entire London Underground network was haunted, and that it should be shut down.

Simon grinned. ‘It is kind of cool.’

‘The Cross Jumpers don’t like it because no one gives a shit about them,’ Marta said. ‘They’re scared to ride like we do and everyone knows it. That’s why they want a turf war.’

Simon glanced back down the platform. ‘You know Switch will want to fight,’ he said. ‘Pitched battle and all that? Tally ho, charge of the bloody Light Brigade.’

Marta watched a trickle of sweat meander its way down Paul’s face. ‘Well, he’s on his own,’ Paul said. ‘How many knives can he hold at once?’

‘Come on, let’s get out of here,’ Simon said. ‘I don’t feel like riding anymore today.’

Marta looked down the platform. ‘Switch! We’re going!’

The other man looked up and then jogged over.

‘I reckon that was seventeen feet,’ he said as he reached them, grinning inanely. His bad eye twitched at them as though he was trying to suggest something. ‘I hit that third mat out, near the front edge. That’s about the seventeen feet mark, isn’t it?’

‘Not bad,’ Marta said, feigning interest. ‘That beats my best.’

‘And mine,’ Simon said.

‘Ah, we all know you’re a pussy.’ Switch tried to wink with his other eye, but it just made him look epileptic. He patted Paul on the shoulder. ‘Only Paul has better, eh. And that’s why you don’t ride anymore, isn’t it? Don’t need to now you’ve proved your point, eh?’

‘Okay, leave it out,’ Paul said, looking down at the platform.

‘Come on man, don’t cry! That ride was awesome! A Tube Rider legend!’

‘Switch,
can
it,’ Simon said, and although Switch gave Paul a lopsided grin he shut up and began picking grime off the hooks of his clawboard instead.

Marta remembered the day Paul had made twelve feet. His clawboard had got jammed in the rail, maybe by a small piece of gravel caught in the railing or an accumulation of packed dirt. He’d managed to free his hands just in time, but he’d landed bad and been left with three broken ribs and a fractured collarbone. That wasn’t the worst, though. Marta could still remember his screams when he realised the board was stuck. If there were ghosts down here, that had been the sound of one of them possessing his body. That spine-splitting shriek had been no sound a man should make. It made her shiver even now, two years later.

They headed back towards the stairs, their clawboards slung over their shoulders. The escalator had stopped working years ago, and now its metal teeth were rusted and gummed up with litter and dirt. They climbed up into darkness, emerging on to the old ticket corridor. A couple more emergency lights helped them past the old turnstiles, some boarded-up newsstands and an old donut store. Another staircase at the end led them up to the surface. Their feet rustled through piles of leaves blown in by the wind, while all around them the smell of unwashed bodies and the decomposing remains of takeout food hung in the air. They weren’t the only people to use the station; at night it was common for tramps to bunk down behind the metal barrier of the entranceway. They rarely went far inside, though. Mega Britain’s illegal magazines had seen to it that only the desperate or the very brave went into abandoned London Underground stations.

Marta went out first and waited for the others. It was a cold October day, the sky a leaking grey bucket that spat rain on her leather tunic and ripped jeans. St. Cannerwells backed on to a bleak park, a rusty iron fence separating them from a slope of untended grass, a cracked, root-rippled concrete path and a small pond filled with litter. Supermarket trolleys protruded from the brown water like half-submerged wrecks; paper-cup boats floated amongst the icebergs of old cardboard boxes while around them trees clacked their bare branches together in mocking applause.

‘See you tomorrow?’ Marta asked.

‘I’m working but I’ll come over when I’m done,’ Simon said.

‘I have some stuff to do but yeah, I’ll try,’ Paul said.

‘Switch?’

The little man was tapping the palm of his left hand with the index finger of his right, muttering under his breath.

‘I’ll take that as a yes.’

As the others said their goodbyes and left, Marta stood for a moment, looking out across the park towards the huge elevated highway overpass that rose above the city to the south. Half finished, it arched up out of the terraces and housing blocks to the east, rising steadily to a height of five hundred feet. There, at the point where it should have begun its gradual decent to the west, it just ended, sawn off, amputated.

Years ago, she remembered her father standing here with her, telling her about the future. Things had been better then. She’d still been going to school, still believed the world was good, still had dreams about getting a good job like a lawyer or an architect, and hadn’t started to do the deplorable things that made her wake up shivering, just to get food or the items she needed to survive.

He had taken her hand and given it a little squeeze. She still remembered the warmth of his skin, the strength and assurance in those fingers. He had pointed up at the overpass, in those days busy with scaffolding, cranes and ant-like construction workers, and told her how one day they would take their car and drive right up over it and out of the city. The government was going to open up London Greater Urban Area again, he said. Let the city people out, and the people from the Greater Forest Areas back in. The smoggy, grey skies of London GUA would clear, the sirens would stop wailing all night, and people would be able to take the chains and the deadlocks off their doors. She remembered how happy she’d felt with her father’s arms around her, holding her close, protecting her.

But something had happened. She didn’t know everything – no one did – but things had changed. The government hadn’t done any of those things. The construction stopped, the skies remained grey, and life got even worse. Riots waited around every street corner. People disappeared without warning amid tearful rumours that the Huntsmen were set to return.

Marta sighed, biting her lip. Her parents and her brother were gone. Marta was just twenty-one, but St. Cannerwells Park was the closest she would ever get to seeing the countryside, and the euphoria of tube riding was the closest she would ever get to happiness.

She gripped the fence with both hands and gritted her teeth, trying not to cry. She was tough. She had seen and done things that no one her age should have to experience. She had adjusted to Mega Britain’s harshness, was accustomed to looking after herself, but, just sometimes, life became too much to bear.

As the rain began to get heavier, tears pressed from her eyes and rolled lethargically down her cheeks.

Chapter Two

Jessica

‘Get out of my fucking seat!’

Simon lifted his head from the window, but the shout wasn’t aimed at him. Further up the bus, a burly man with a tattoo across his face was picking a fight with a man wearing a baseball cap. Simon watched with only a passing interest as Baseball Cap nodded cordially and stood up, moving back into the aisle. Tattoo Face growled something as he went to sit down, but as soon as he looked away Baseball Cap put two big hands on his back and shoved him hard against the window.

Tattoo Face’s head slammed against the thick glass with a resounding crack. Baseball Cap shoved him again and this time the window shattered, showering the street below with little diamonds of safety glass. The bus swerved in towards the curb, and Tattoo Face lost his balance and fell out into the street, landing on the bonnet of a car trying to cut up on the bus’s inside.

Gripped by a rage drawn from the cloud of misery that seemed to hang over Mega Britain, Baseball Cap jumped out of the window after him, screaming obscenities. The two men grappled on the car bonnet with Tattoo Face taking some heavy blows until he pulled a long knife from inside his coat and rammed it into Baseball Cap’s side. Baseball Cap cried out in pain and fell backwards, blood clouding out around the wound, turning his blue shirt a dirty brown. Tattoo Face saw his chance and shoved Baseball Cap off the car just as the bus began to move again. The driver, hollering something incomprehensible over the top of the screaming people, tried to steer the bus back into traffic, only for it to roll over Baseball Cap’s body, the wheels crushing his chest with the sickening crunch of bones.

The bus ground to another stop. The driver jumped up and climbed out, shouting at someone out on the street, arms gesturing frantically. Tattoo Face had fled, no one in the growing crowd making an effort to stop him. Sirens were already wailing in the distance, but what disturbed Simon most was how little people cared. There were a few gapers on the pavement, but there was as much laughter as there were looks of horror. A couple of people further up the bus had got up to watch, but behind him two middle-aged women were continuing a conversation as though nothing had happened.

This country’s screwed up,
he thought
. No wonder some of us like to hide underground. It’s safer and you don’t have to deal with the people
.

He stood up, crossed the aisle, and jumped out of the open back door. With the growing number of abandoned cars left along the streets it only took a little trouble to cause a jam, and now the bus was boxed in. Simon had hoped to make it a couple more stops into central Fulham, but he was close enough to walk from here. He headed across the street, away from the commotion, and slipped down an alley. He emerged on to a residential street running parallel to the main road which was so quiet in comparison that it spooked him. He looked around for people, but saw none. It was as though he’d stepped through a portal into a ghost town.

Then a muffled explosion sounded, pulling him back to reality. The bus had gone up. He increased his pace, aware that within minutes there would be a full riot happening. It was always the same. Then, in twenty minutes or so, the police or the Department of Civil Affairs would show up and start killing people.

Hate, anger, and resentment fueled people now. Food was in short supply, and the last oil was almost gone. The streets were becoming clogged by abandoned petrol-powered cars and the few who owned electric vehicles could barely afford the spiraling costs of the recharging stations. At night there were often electrical blackouts; those times were the most dangerous of all as looters took to the streets in large gangs.

Simon’s father had set up an illegal internet connection, so Simon knew what other countries were saying about Mega Britain. None of it was good. His father, a wannabe revolutionary who in reality did little more than sit around their flat bitching about the state of society, had fallen victim to his own attempts at understanding.

Simon had been riding when the DCA came a month ago. Treason was the usual charge, punishable by life imprisonment or death. And, like so many people taken away by the government’s thugs, there had been no word of his father since. For all Simon knew, his father had been blasted into space aboard one of the government’s doomed hulks. Whatever, it seemed unlikely Simon would ever see him again.

The DCA had seized his father’s apartment and possessions. To go back there was to walk into a bugged, wired hornet’s nest. He had lost what little stuff he had, some of which could be used to trace him. Now, he feared that the DCA would come for him too, but there was nothing he could do except keep his head down.

And there were other things to live for.

He was almost there now. He turned down another residential street and headed uphill, past terraced houses which defied the failing world with their tidiness. Some areas weren’t so bad. Groups of heavily-armed residents kept order in a feudal way, working in shifts to protect the streets from the kind of riffraff that looted shops during the blackouts. You couldn’t see them, of course; they waited in alleys, behind curtains, inside the dirty windows of abandoned cars. But they were there.

At the top of the hill he turned right on to a road called Denton Avenue. At number fourteen he stopped outside the little red gate and looked up at the windows.

He looked at his watch, an old Lorus that he’d been wearing the day the DCA showed up to take his father. Three fifteen. He’d said three, but she knew what the traffic – or lack of it – was like.

He looked up at the house again, the top window on the left, wondering whether he should shout. Then the curtain flickered, jerked back. Simon felt his heart jump in his chest. A face appeared. It was difficult to make out the features at this distance, but Simon knew them well: the thin, delicate cheekbones, the tight bob of hair curling in around the jaw line, the small lips and the bright blue, defiant eyes.

‘Jessica,’ he murmured, as always relieved to see she was safe.

The curtain dropped back.

He waited. Thirty seconds later the door opened and the same face peered out. ‘Okay, I’ve deactivated it,’ the girl called. ‘You can come through now.’

Simon reached out for the gate, still tentative after the first time he’d visited. The red should have been a warning, but he had been thinking about other things. He remembered the paralysis and the intense pain as the electricity had surged through his body, leaving him a writhing, frothy-mouthed wreck on the ground. Jess’s father worked for the government and had access to security technology most people didn’t. Everyone their family considered a friend knew to call ahead or use the buzzer beside the gate. All other people were regarded as potential enemies, and as such the electrified gate was a suitable deterrent. As he reached the door she pulled it wide and stepped out, almost falling forward into his arms.

‘I missed you,’ she said. ‘More each day.’

‘I’ve missed you too.’ Simon pulled her close and breathed in the sweet smell of her hair. He closed his eyes, feeling her heart beat against his chest. There were few reasons to live in London GUA but he had found one.

Jess was eighteen and worked in a used bookstore near the market where Simon sold pirated movies and antiquated music CDs on a stall owned by an old friend of his father. Simon felt a hundred years older than his twenty. The weight of his fear for her safety kept him awake at night. If he could, he would keep her by his side, but neither her parents nor Jess herself would allow it. As she constantly reminded him, having grown up in the same city, she was streetwise too. And with a father who worked for the government, she had to be even more careful.

‘Did you ride today?’ she asked.

He hesitated. He knew Jess didn’t like him to ride the trains, but she understood.

‘Just once,’ he said. ‘The others had stuff to do.’ He didn’t mention Dan’s close call.

She drew away, and looked up at him. For a moment he thought she was going to scold him again.
It’s the trains or me, Simon. You can’t have both. It’s your choice
. When she did speak, her request surprised him. ‘I want to come,’ she said. ‘I want to try it too.’

‘I’ve told you I don’t want that. It’s too dangerous.’

‘So why do you do it then?’

‘I – I–’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. It’s … my
thing
, I guess. My identity. It’s all I have left.’

She put her hands on his cheeks and pulled his face towards her. ‘Not anymore,’ she said, and kissed him. ‘Not anymore.’

She was right. He should quit tube riding and look after her. He’d met her just six months ago, but in these fractured times that could be half a lifetime. He couldn’t imagine giving her up, and he hated every moment they were apart, but the Tube Riders – Marta, Paul, even crazy Switch – they were his family. He couldn’t give them up either. Until he had met Jess, riding the trains was the only thing in his life that had mattered. He had found companions there, people like himself.

‘Let’s go inside,’ she said. ‘Off the street.’

Her family was out – as always – when he visited. Jess’s father was a government official – a position he neither talked about nor entertained questions about – and her mother worked for the MBBC, the Mega Britain Banking Corporation, the country’s only bank.

‘Did you find out anything about my father?’

Jess closed the door before she answered. ‘No, I’m sorry. I tried to ask Dad, but it’s difficult to do it without him becoming suspicious. He asks so many questions, without answering any. I tried to make it look like I was interested in the newspaper story about it, but he just spouted some propaganda about heretics earning their rewards.’ She shrugged. ‘To be honest, he probably doesn’t know.’

‘You know I had nothing to do with it, don’t you?’ Simon said, taking off his shoes. ‘I wasn’t involved with anything my father did, any of those leaflets he used to print out. I just looked at his internet a couple of times. That’s all.’

She cupped his face with her hands again. ‘I know, Simon. But I wouldn’t care anyway. Sometimes I think these so-called heretics…’

‘I want to take you away, Jess,’ Simon said, kissing her. ‘If we could only get out of Mega Britain, get over to France … it’s different there, you know. They have a government who gives a shit, there aren’t any of those fucking perimeter walls … God damn this place.’

They climbed the stairs up to her bedroom. ‘There’s hope,’ she said. ‘There’s an ambassador over from Europe, Dad told me. He came today for talks between the European Confederation and Mega Britain. Dad said the Confederation wants to open up trade again. End the blockade.’

‘Do you think they will?’

Jess sat down on her bed. ‘I don’t know. They might have to. The country is bankrupt, Dad says, but the government doesn’t listen. People are starving, there’s hardly any oil, there are riots everywhere…’

Simon put a finger on her lips. ‘Okay, stop now.’ He leaned forward and kissed her again.

Jess sighed and pulled him backwards onto the bed. Simon closed his eyes and let her take the troubles of the world away.

#

Later, dressed again and lying next to her on the bed, Simon said, ‘I’m going down again on Sunday. Around lunchtime, after I finish my morning shift.’ He stroked her face. ‘You can come if you like. I mean, if you haven’t got work and you’re not busy.’

‘Really? You want me to ride?’

Simon shrugged and gave her a non-committal smile. ‘I don’t know about that. Maybe just watch at first? New people have to practice on the freight trains, because they’re much slower. You can almost walk alongside. The commuter trains slow down when they go through each station, but they’re still pretty fast.’

Simon had talked about tube riding before, but Jess seemed endlessly fascinated. Until Simon had revealed his secret to her a couple of months after they had met, she had believed the ghost stories too.

‘Sounds difficult,’ she said, eyes lit up with interest.

‘Not so much.’ He grinned. ‘Not when you know what you’re doing.’

‘And you use this?’ She lifted his clawboard up off the floor and turned it over in her hands. It was a piece of sanded hardwood about two feet long. On one side, bolted to the wood with a series of little screws, was a long piece of curved metal, scratched and dented from use. On the other side were two thick leather straps, again fixed to the wood. The board itself was sprayed black. It looked like there had once been a design on it, but time had worn it away.

‘What the hell is this thing?’ she said wistfully, only half to him.

‘It’s called a clawboard,’ he said. ‘We made them ourselves, although some of them get handed on by people who … quit.’

‘Quit?’

‘Um, yeah. Some people get scared, you know? Other people just don’t want to do it anymore.’ He didn’t mention the deaths. There was no need to scare her.

‘And you made it?’

‘Yeah, this one, I did. The metal hook thing used to be part of the fender of a car. Some of the other guys have two or three smaller ones instead. The leather is horse leather, which is stronger.’

‘Where did you get it?’ I haven’t seen a horse since I was a kid.’