CHAPTER 68

2001, New Wellington

New Wellington’s streets were clogged with vehicles, motorized and horse drawn, refugees all attempting to head south to avoid the coming fight. Word was already spreading. Right now, along the port city’s main street, it was a motionless logjam, a deafening turmoil of raised angry voices, snorting unsettled horses and rattling combustion engines.

The pavements either side were filled with pedestrians laden with possessions on their shoulders and backs. Liam and the others found themselves standing beneath the porch of a hardware store, watching the tide of foot traffic traipsing past them.

‘It’s like everyone’s leaving!’ uttered Liam.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Sal. ‘Did McManus tell you?’ She spat his name out like bad-tasting phlegm.

‘There’s something going on in New York,’ said Liam. ‘He said something about a new offensive.’

‘More war, is it?’ grumbled Lincoln. ‘Has this corrupted world not had enough of it already?’

‘But if the fighting’s going to happen up in New York, why is everyone here running away? This is far enough from the fight, isn’t it?’

‘Not far enough,’ answered a gruff voice behind them.

They turned to see an old man in the store behind them. He’d opened his door without their hearing. ‘You not heard the rumours, then?’

‘Rumours?’ Liam shrugged. ‘Aye … it is the British are attacking.’

The old man wafted his hand like that was old news. ‘That much everyone knows about, lad … No, there’s talk this time they gonna be fightin’ with experimentals once again.’ He nodded at the people streaming past them. ‘News was in the morning papers. Some dock workers down at them landing bays caught sight of a bunch of new-type tube-breeds.’

Liam looked at Sal and the others, unsure whether the old man was referring to the hunter-seekers, or the huffaloes.

‘Stupid fools! They don’t give half a cent what-for about the things they unleash on us over here! Crazy-minded monsters bred to kill? It’s only America, right?’ He shook his head angrily. ‘Bad enough we got tube-breeds all over the country in every farm, every factory … but crazy ones been bred and trained just to kill? It’s no wonder it’s got everyone a-jitter now. They scared there’s gonna be another Preston’s Peak!’

He nodded out at the congested street. ‘Twenty-four hours from now, this place gonna be a ghost town. An’ I guess I’ll have to board my shop up from looters an’ mebbe head south myself until they made sure they gathered up all their monsters and got ’em back in cages again. God knows … I don’t want to be the only fool in town if they gonna lose control of ’em all over again.’

‘Right,’ said Liam, nodding.

‘Anyways …’ The old man frowned. ‘You an’ your friends comin’ in to buy some stuff?’

‘Ah no, we were just … sort of getting out of the way of the –’

‘Well, this ain’t a darned hotel!’ He glanced at Bob’s hulking form, hunched over to fit his bristly head beneath the awning above his porch. ‘You’re blockin’ me up from proper customers! You better scoot off me boards, that or buy somethin’!’

Liam sighed. ‘All right … all right, we’re going.’

He led the way down three steps, on to the pavement and into the bustling crowd, against the flow. All manner of people – rich and poor, billycock hats to flat caps, lace bonnets to threadbare shawls – a tide of anxious city people, all grumbling curses and muttering rebukes as Liam waded against the trudging tide.

An hour later they were standing on the side of a road heading north-east out of New Wellington still choked with vehicles and carts heading southwards, making painfully slow progress, but moving at least.

‘Seems like everyone north of here is leaving,’ said Liam.

He wondered why so many civilians would have bothered living so close to the front line anyway. After all, according to McManus the war was an ongoing struggle, a constant ebbing and flowing of the front line, which stretched westwards across New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, with minor skirmishes here and there every summer that shifted the line half a mile one way, then the other.

But it was a stalemate war, wasn’t it? A war with which people had grown used to living. Grown used to it rumbling on quietly in the background like a thunderstorm passing by.

People manage … that’s what they do.

Except, of course, not now. Not with rumours of a big push going around. Not with rumours of killer eugenics being deployed not too far away from them.

‘It’s silly,’ said Sal. ‘The eugenics weren’t dangerous … not the ones that took us, anyway. Were they?’ She looked up at Lincoln.

‘Pitiful beings,’ he said. ‘If truth be told, they were quite sad creatures.’

Liam couldn’t help wondering what to make of the eugenics. Looking at the flood of people going past, he could understand their fear. Back in that farmhouse, the attack had seemed ferocious, quite terrifying at the time. And yet now he realized those creatures had just been a band of runaway workers. Frightened for themselves. Just doing their best to scavenge and survive.

But, if they’d been a frightening sight, he couldn’t begin to imagine what military eugenic creatures must be like. Mind you, he’d already met some, right? The hunter-seekers. They hadn’t seemed so bad.

He shuddered with the thought of something.

There must be other types we’ve not yet seen.

‘We should get going. The road looks like it’s clearing up a bit. We should make better time now we’re out of town. How far is New York from here, Bob?’

‘Information: a hundred and eleven miles.’

‘Ahh, well, that’s all right.’ Liam smiled. ‘That’s not so far to go, then. Shall we?’