Barricade

by Jon Wallace

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

Kenstibec was genetically engineered to build a new world, but the apocalypse forced a career change. These days he drives a taxi instead.

A fast-paced, droll and disturbing novel, Barricade is a savage road trip across the dystopian landscape of post-apocalypse Britain; narrated by the cold-blooded yet magnetic antihero, Kenstibec. Kenstibec is a member of the "Ficial" race, a breed of merciless super-humans. Their war on humanity has left Britain a wasteland, where Ficials hide in barricaded cities, besieged by tribes of human survivors.

Originally optimised for construction, Kenstibec earns his keep as a taxi driver, running any Ficial who will pay from one surrounded city to another. The trips are always eventful, but this will be his toughest yet. His fare is a narcissistic journalist who's touchy about her luggage. His human guide is constantly plotting to kill him. And that's just the start of his troubles.

On his journey he encounters 10-foot killer rats, a mutant king with a TV fixation, a drug-crazed army, and even the creator of the Ficial race. He also finds time to uncover a terrible plot to destroy his species for good—and humanity, too.

Release date: June 19, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

THE VILLAGE

Luckily, the Landy hadn’t taken any serious hits and the damaged parts were easily replaced. When I started it up again the noise was smooth and regular. Even Starvie was tranquillised by it. She settled into silence as we drove, resting both hands on her green cases, staring at her feet on the dashboard. It was good to have her quiet. I watched the headlights dance on the road and dead trees. I listened to the engine and the wind whistling through the bullet holes. There were whole stretches of wide, open road where I could pick up some speed, droop my hand out the window and let the air rush through my fingers.

Occasionally we hit an obstruction. A few miles outside Lockerbie we turned a long, slow corner at speed and nearly ran straight into something huge straddling the road. In the headlights I could see twisted metal and a door hanging by a hinge. I reversed, wary of booby traps, and stepped out the car, telling Starvie to wait where she was.

I picked my way up the road, shining the high-beam torch along the tarmac, looking for the telltale tracks of wires in the snow bank, but couldn’t see anything but wreckage. When I reached the obstruction I shone the torch up and saw what must once have been a helicopter, lying on its smashed undercarriage. The nose was crushed against the left bank, its tail snapped and on its side, running up the slope on the right. Two of three rotor blades were still intact. Five skeletal bodies hung from them, presumably the helicopter crew. One, the pilot, had a triangular road sign hung around his neck, bearing the legend ‘Built to last’ in spray paint. The whole grim installation was half corroded, the metal frozen in long stalactites that oozed to the ground, fusing the wreck to the tarmac.

‘What is it?’ yelled Starvie.

‘Just a bit of history,’ I called back. I didn’t want her seeing what it was. Who knew how she would react?

We couldn’t go around it. I went back to the car, pulled us back around the corner, and prepared the winch. Normally I would have tossed a few grenades at the blockage to be sure there were no sneaky Real devices waiting to go off, but this thing had been there for a while, and any circuitry would have corroded by now.

I wrapped the winch cable in as many fat knots as I could through the holes in the airframe. The metal was paper-thin, shards snapping off in my gloves. I thought I might just pull the top half away and be left with a jagged, tyre-shredding metal pool on the tarmac, but I managed to loosen most of it, and dragged a good portion clear. I tucked the chopper into a lay-by and went back to the original spot. A few sharp remnants stuck out of the road like thorns, but they were so brittle they could be snapped away by hand. I cleared a passage without too much bother.

While I was working, Starvie went to the helicopter wreck, and took the sign off the pilot’s head.

‘What’s this,’ I asked, ‘respect for the dead?’

She went over to the Landy, lifted the sign like an offering, then jammed it between the radiator and the cow bars. It made an almighty scraping noise.

‘Hey!’ I said. ‘Watch the paintwork!’

She took a step back, adjusted it so it was straight, and then got back in the car. I walked up to her window and looked at her. She was sitting with her arms folded, her boots up on the dash again. I shone the torch onto her feet.

‘Sorry,’ she said, and took them down.

‘I’m not sure I like the idea of taking souvenirs,’ I said, shining the light on the road sign.

‘It is not a souvenir,’ she said. ‘It is war paint, like the Reals wear. Sort of a badge. Don’t you think it looks good?’

I went and had another look. I adjusted it so that it was exactly halfway between the headlamps, then got back in the car. We edged slowly through the mess on the road and reached the other side without a puncture.

Starvie was asleep in a minute. Her head occasionally banged on the side of the car as we traversed a bump, but on she slept. When we hit a straight section of road I reached over, took a cloth out the glove compartment, and wiped the boot marks off the dash. I looked at Starvie, wondering how she’d deal with having a Real guide in the car. She had an interesting way of handling things, neither fully Real nor fully Ficial. It surprised me that Control hadn’t found better use for her than reading news.

After an hour I saw another fire. It was burning up on a hill, just as big as the last one, just as strange in the night. I stopped and had a look at it through my binoculars, but it was too far away to make out any detail. I certainly couldn’t see any Reals dancing around it.

Starvie only stirred when the High Lights came out. They broke a little earlier there because of the winds that blew up from the south. There was even a little greenery – fields of thick, dank moss endured the ash and grime.

I stopped the car a mile east of the village. Starvie leapt out, taking one of her green cases with her. She popped it open and produced a camera, a big one, wrapped in plastic sheeting. She started taking shots of the cloud – the bright purple streaks where you could imagine the sun was hiding. Then she turned to the car and took pictures of the hazard sign close up, then wider images of the car sitting on the open plain. Then she pointed it at me. I slapped the lens away. She shrugged and turned the camera on the landscape again, clicking away as if being timed.

I gave her a minute to do her thing, then grabbed her arm and marched her to the ridge overlooking the settlement. She kept snapping away.

‘Why are you bothering with that?’ I asked her.

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘More souvenirs.’

I told Starvie to lay down next to me. She made an excited noise as she lowered herself on the moss. She ran her hands through the turf, her eyes wide. It was probably the first time she’d not lain on a rock-hard flak tower bunk.

I brought out my binoculars and assessed the activity below. Starvie rooted in her case and produced a different lens, as long as her forearm, which she fixed to the camera with a pleasing click. She looked over the village.

‘It’s small,’ she said.

‘That’s right. Only fifty or so Reals here. Probably fewer now. They don’t have medication, so when there’s an outbreak they drop like flies.’

I couldn’t see much movement. There were five large concrete buildings built in an uneven semi circle on a piece of scarred coast, set back from a black shingle beach and the pale, green sea. In the centre of the settlement was a poorly constructed concrete obelisk, and some smaller tarpaulin constructions were dotted around the perimeter. Nearest the coast was a ramshackle glass construction built among the remains of a metal gantry, possibly a radio direction array. Great sheets of plastic hung between them, sheltering the greenhouse’s metal frame from the weather. The settlement had no barricade or entrenchments, only a few dotted trenches scattered among the tents. A gravel road snaked out from the obelisk and led out of sight past the cliff edge.

I noticed a couple of figures in raincoats, their hoods up, sitting atop the furthest concrete building. They were clutching rifles. One of them stamped his feet in the ash and snow. Starvie took pictures of it all. Then she noticed something.

‘What are they?’

She reached out her arm. I followed the line with my binoculars. A group of four-legged things were stumbling awkwardly towards one of the concrete buildings. Two Reals walked with them, guiding them inside.

‘Livestock,’ I said.

‘Animals?’ she yelled. ‘They have animals?’

‘Be quiet,’ I said. ‘They’re diseased and good for nothing. The people around here are trying to breed some clean stock. It’s a waste of time. Every Real spends half its life dreaming about milk and meat.’

‘But how do they survive? Why don’t we have cows?’

‘This place is built on an old air defence centre with a generator. They have power and filtered air conditioning in a bunker. They keep the animals in there for as long as possible, but, like I say, it’s pointless. As soon as they bring them out they start to get sick.’

‘Why bring them out at all?’

‘To defecate in that greenhouse,’ I said. ‘The earth here can throw up a few fragile crops. Their idea is to cultivate fresh supplies and build themselves some coastal nirvana.’

‘We should have cows,’ she said.

‘Waste of time.’

Starvie lay down the camera and scratched at her head furiously, then at her sides and belly. I did some scratching myself.

‘I don’t get this,’ she said. ‘Fine, maybe their cows are a bit mangy, but this is still better than the interior. Why don’t all the Reals live here?’

‘Too busy attacking us,’ I said. ‘Like I said, they don’t all follow the same path. This lot aren’t as devoted to destroying us, and they’re not as desperate for fuel. Plus, of course, there are the ticks.’

Starvie looked at me for a second, then at her arms. They were swarming with minute black insects, about the size of a pin head. I was covered in them too.

‘Oh my,’ she said, wiping some of the bugs from her eyes and spitting. ‘Grim.’

‘They don’t bite,’ I said, ‘they feed on the moss. But they do like to check you out. The Reals make some kind of nutritious paste out of them, I believe.’

She got up into a crouching position, shook her head and bounced on her haunches. I had the impression she wanted to scream and run about the place but was holding it in for my benefit.

‘So tell me,’ she said, ‘what’s the plan? I suppose we drive into the village and you snatch someone?’

‘Hardly,’ I replied.

‘So we go in and make a deal?’

‘Not that either.’

‘Why not?’ she said. ‘I thought you said they’d take payment.’

‘Some of them will. But as I keep telling you, they’re not like us. They don’t have Control there issuing behavioural protocol, and even if they did, they wouldn’t all follow the lead. You need to pick the right one and approach him away from the others. He’d lose face if he agreed to help us in front of his people.’

She shook her head and spat out a few ticks.

‘I don’t see why you don’t just go in there and cull the lot.’

I turned over and looked at her.

‘You want pictures of it, don’t you?’

‘No. Well, why not?’

‘Because my way it’s easy. If any of them got away from us they’d raise the alarm and we’d have the whole world out looking for us. I’m not going to spend the next three hours playing murder in the dark so you can try out your new lens.’

‘It would be that hard to cull this lot?’

‘It is not as easy as it looks, believe me. No, we’ll wait for a man pulling a cart to leave the perimeter. A trader. If he follows the road out of sight, we’ll get in the car and head back down the road – cut him off a few miles down. Then we’ll talk to him and see if he wants to deal.’

‘They pull a cart? How far?’

‘You’d be surprised,’ I said. ‘If he wants to make a profit he’ll head all the way to Liverpool.’

That got her attention. She turned and stared at me.

‘Liverpool is a barricade,’ she said. ‘It’s ours. He can’t trade there.’

‘It’s not ours any more,’ I said. ‘I was there a month ago and I was very nearly discontinued.’

‘Then why have I been reading reports on the cull there every day?’

‘Why do you think?’

She punched a fist into the earth.

‘This is the limit!’ she said. ‘The absolute limit. So I’ve not been reporting, I’ve been peddling bullshit?’

‘Well . . . that’s regional news for you, isn’t it?’

‘Bastards!’ she said. ‘Cheating bastards! If I see that Perma again I’ll . . . I’ll . . .’ She trailed off and slapped at her face and neck. Suddenly the ticks were bothering her. She gathered herself and closed her eyes, keeping her feelings from bursting out.

‘If they don’t let me do this job properly they might as well include me in the cull. That’s all I’m saying.’

I decided to let her stew. It was curious to me that she hadn’t figured it out for herself. How could she not see the nature of what she was doing?

‘These bugs are getting in my camera,’ she said, brushing the lens with her palm. She got to her feet and went back to the cab.

I contented myself with scanning the village, looking for other signs of life. I wondered if I’d made a miscalculation. While every village had its trader, disease could rapidly wipe out a good part of the population. It was possible that we’d be sitting here for days waiting for someone who was dead.

Starvie reappeared at my side, smoking a cigarette.

‘Enjoy that, do you?’ I asked her.

‘Helps me pass the time.’ She pointed down to the village. ‘Besides, only that lot worry about cancer. It’s a Ficial privilege to smoke these, when you think about it.’

She blew a few smoke rings and grinned. I shook my head.

‘Just don’t even think about having one in the cab.’

 

 

 

My boss is shouting and cursing and beating the steering wheel with his fists. We can hear him easily in the hold. I am with five others, sitting on coarse hemp sacking. There are no windows back here. The only ventilation comes from three inch-wide slits in the roof. The door is sealed tight because the boss still thinks we will run away given the chance.

We are five hours late for work, stuck in traffic, a real bad jam. Fury swells the boss. He swears and he screams and he shouts.

Control has ordered all Tower crews to commute by helicopter, but the boss won’t hear of it because of the expense. He is being squeezed by the bigger contractors for work rights on floors 590–615. He needs to save every penny. He needs the money to take the right people to lunch. If he takes the right people to lunch he might get the work on the floors. Then he’ll have enough money to be squeezed a little longer, for the rights to floors 670–790. The decision on rights will be delayed again. There will be more lunches. The right people need to make the right money.

So we go by road. Even though the roads don’t work. Even though every day they are clogged with go-slows and relocation columns and commuters and army trucks. We go by road and are always late. We go by road and the boss has us do twenty hours work in five. We go by road and the boss blames Control, and, by extension, us. He opens up the hatch between the cabin and hold, just to yell at us. He turns around in his seat, cigar clenched between his teeth, and spits short words. Smoke billows through the hatch, nearly obscuring his burning red face, his bloodshot eyes.

‘Yeah, sure, you things are worth the money. Save the world? Save the world? What a joke. What a fucking joke. You can’t even make the roads work. Why do we bother? We were better off without you. Better off without your Control.’

Rain beats hard on the hold. We have heard on the boss’s radio that today’s jam is caused by a flash flood. Half the motorway is submerged. Somewhere up ahead they are fishing bodies and wrecks from the water.

Maybe the boss is afraid. He could be afraid that the flood waters are going to reach us. He could be afraid that he will lose the contract. He could be afraid of becoming insolvent and being scooped up into a relocation programme. He could be afraid of the stories of what happens to the people in the columns. Maybe it is all of these things.

Maybe that’s why he picks on individual members of our team today. Normally he contents himself with insulting our entire race, but right now that is not enough. He has to get what he would call ‘personal’. Of course, we are not persons, but that doesn’t bother him. Reason has no part to play.

‘And you, forty-seven . . . are you listening to me, forty-seven? Are you listening? You lose a leg two days after your warranty runs out. Two days! They design you to break. I swear they design you to break as soon as that fucking warranty runs out.’

We sit there and listen to him because there is nothing else to do. We don’t bother to tell him that his anger won’t make the traffic flow or the waters recede or the floors get built.

The boss curses us because those who are to blame aren’t here to listen. It is like he thinks if he just yells loud enough they will hear, even out here on the motorway, stuck fast in the rain and traffic.

We sit in silence and look at each other, and that just makes the boss angrier.

 

 

 

ENCOUNTER

Four more hours. Grey snow tumbled everywhere, collecting two inches deep on my back and legs. Even the ticks fled underground. The wind blew in hard, withering the village and shore.

Snow was bad. It made it less likely that the trader, if he was down there, would set out on his journey. Since the cows had been led into the greenhouse there had been no movement. Only the guards had shown signs of life, occasionally getting up to stretch, stamp their feet or throw up into a bucket. Starvie gave up taking pictures. There were only so many shots she needed of Reals evacuating their insides.

‘Do they ever stop that?’

‘It’s not a good sign,’ I said. ‘They’ve obviously have an epidemic here. If there was a trader he might be dead. Plus, with this weather . . . I think we might be in for a long wait. Maybe we picked a bad spot.’

‘Terrific,’ said Starvie.

I started to think about moving. There was no telling how long the snow might fall.

Then, suddenly, something stirred. A shape crept out of a bunker and waded through the slush to the greenhouse. He was bent over, dragging his right leg behind him. At first I thought he was too lame to be a trader, but after a few minutes he reappeared with another Real, pulling a rusted trailer loaded with sacks, tins and various other junk. They made their way up the road to the guard house, waved one of those Real acknowledgements to the men on the roof, and slowly trundled out of the village.

We ran back to the cab and jumped in.

I released the handbrake and we started to roll back down the hill. I didn’t want the engine noise alerting anybody. Reals were easily startled and might bolt back to their bunker if they heard an exhaust. I only started the Landy when we rolled to a stop, then followed our tracks for a couple of miles, before cutting east across the fields to intercept the trader.

‘Wear these,’ I said, handing Starvie the night visions. ‘Guide me where I’m going and keep an eye out for the traders.’

As soon as she had them on I cut the lights and slowed right down to Real walking pace. After a minute or two Starvie tapped me on the shoulder.

‘I see the road,’ she said, ‘twenty metres ahead. No sign of the travellers.’

‘They should be behind us.’

I pulled the Landy up across the track and grabbed another set of goggles from the weapons rack. Then I pulled out one of the rifles and stepped out of the cab into the cold. I stomped through the snow and rested the rifle on the wet, warm bonnet.

I heard them before I saw them. Their cart made an awful squealing noise. Two shapes emerged along the path in night vision green and black, moving in awkward lurches. The guy with the limp led the way, the other trudging behind and to the left, pulling the cart by a rope tied over his chest.

I lined up the shot and took it. The guy pulling the cart spun on his heels, stood dumbly upright for a second, then collapsed. I was about to call out an ultimatum, but the leader didn’t care to hear it, diving out of sight and shooting back. The Landy took hits all over.

‘That’s rather accurate shooting he’s doing, isn’t it?’ yelled Starvie over the metal rain-drop sound.

‘It really is.’ I was impressed.

I took a few shots back in his direction and he went quiet, plotting his next move. I raised my head to scan the area but could still only see the cart. The shooter had a good position, a dip in the road I hadn’t noticed. He wasn’t about to put his hands up when he had that cover. I thought the only way open was to talk to him. He probably just needed reassuring.

‘Hey!’ I called out. ‘Can we talk?’

There was no answer, no sound but the tick-tick of the Landy engine cooling and the wind rushing over the plain.

‘He doesn’t seem chatty,’ said Starvie.

‘What would you suggest?’

‘Why don’t you rush him? You’re supposed to be a Power Nine, aren’t you? Doesn’t matter if he shoots you up a bit, does it? So get to it.’

‘He is a pretty good shot,’ I said. ‘If he gets me in the head it could take me a while to heal.’ Then a thought struck me. I looked at Starvie.

‘Maybe you should rush him.’

‘Me?’

‘Sure. When he shoots I can pick out his muzzle flash. If you get hit we don’t have to stop. You could sit in the passenger seat and mend while we drive.’

‘Look,’ she said. ‘This bit is your job. I’m the passenger, you’re the driver, get it? Figure something out or let’s just go. You know my position on bargaining with Reals anyway. We don’t need him.’

I thought about the fires I’d seen burning on the hills.

‘We can’t leave him out here,’ I said. ‘He’ll raise the alarm.’

‘You fear being hunted by the vomiting army?’

‘No. Yes. I don’t know. This is all going wrong.’

Starvie held out her hands.

‘Give me the gun,’ she said.

‘He is not visible.’

‘Give me the gun.’

I handed it over. She heaved it up on the car bonnet and took her shot. There was a pop and a trickling sound from down the road. She took another careful shot. Again, a pop and a trickle. She was shooting the Real’s supplies. She was accurate, for a reporter.

‘All right!’ she called out. ‘No more messing about! Either you come out now or I blast everything you’ve got on that trailer!’

No reply. I passed her another clip and she reloaded. She had that ‘tonight we bring you the latest, as it happens’ look.

‘Right!’ she shouted, ‘I’ve reloaded. Either you stand up and talk or you can say goodbye to the rest of your junk!’

Still nothing stirred in the night vision. I thought maybe the Real had crawled off, leaving us here shouting at nothing. I tried to reclaim the rifle but Starvie slapped my hand away.

‘Okay!’ she said. ‘Have it your way!’ She shot again. I didn’t hear any impact this time, but a voice cried out to our left.

‘OKAY! OKAY!’ it screamed. ‘HOLD YOUR FIRE! I’M COMING OUT! JUST DON’T SHOOT MY STUFF!’

The Real was a cunning one. He’d crawled through the mud at the side of the road and almost flanked us. Another few minutes and we might have been in serious trouble. His heavy figure stood up out of the snow and filth. Starvie swung the rifle in his direction, scraping a white line in the Landy’s paintwork as she did so. I grabbed the gun off her and shoved her behind me.

‘Right,’ I said, ‘drop the weapon.’

He wasn’t keen on that.

‘If you want to parley, I’m keeping the gun,’ he said. ‘Let’s just lower our guns and talk.’

‘Interesting notion,’ I said. ‘But if you hold onto that gun. . .