Ruthless
STRONTIUM DOG
RUTHLESS
There was a bright blink of light above Johnny Alpha's head. Somewhere from the rocky cover behind Johnny, someone had fired a weapon at the remaining bandits. The initial muzzle flash reached the Gronk at the speed of light but the missile itself plodded far behind with the relative slowness of a recalcitrant donkey.
While its body twitched and jittered, the Gronk's shakey-cam eyes focused on the new arrival: a rocket-propelled grenade, lazily arcing over Johnny's head, its supersonic wake causing the desert air to shimmer. It spun as it flew, slow enough for the Gronk to read the serial number on its side, and the maker's designation - Day series, High-Explosive. Handle with Care. Made in Taiwan.
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For Tino Warinowski
Strontium Dog and Wulf created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra.
A 2000 AD Publication
www.abaddonbooks.com
www.2000adonline.com
1098 7 65 4321
Cover illustration by Dylan Teague.
Copyright © 2005 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.
All 2000 AD characters and logos © and TM Rebellion A/S."Strontium Dog" is a trademark in the United States and other jurisdictions."2000 AD" is a registered trademark in certain jurisdictions. All rights reserved. Used under licence.
ISBN(.epub): 978-1-84997-084-6
ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-125-6
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
STRONTIUM DOG
RUTHLESS
JONATHAN CLEMENTS
FRIENDLESS: 2162
There were always whispers in the playground. If you blagged at marbles, you were a cheating mutant. If you didn't save an easy goal, you were a mutie spakker. If you did your homework on time, you were a mutie swot. The teachers didn't like it when the kids spoke that way, and punishments could be severe.
All bad language was banned, but the kids did it anyway. Once, Big Batesy even called Miss Saunders a "ginger mutie snecker," and he was sent to see the headmaster. He came back after a caning, and the next day in PE, everyone told him the tiger stripes on his behind made him look like a mutant. He started a fight with the first kid to say it. And so it went on.
Every now and then, things got serious. Muties came up in geography, on the growing lists of places to avoid. They were mentioned in modern history of course, and the bigger kids said that the easiest way to get a good grade in sociology was to pick a topic that concerned muties, and then start wailing about what a rough deal they got.
But that's sociology exams for you. Out in the real world, school policy wasn't far removed from the playground. Forget the hand-wringing late-night discussion programmes; forget the yearly charity appeals on Purple Peter; and never mind about the lines and canings dealt out to anyone who so much as breathed a forbidden word like "mutie". Let's just say, for the sake of argument, you were able to look inside the teachers' heads, and read their minds. You wouldn't see a brave group of Salisbury's finest, busily educating the children of the rich and famous about the brave new world that awaited them. You'd see a cluster of petrified former Tories and Freeplumbers, who didn't publicly support the Patriot Party, but thought that whether you liked what he said or not, that Kreelman had a point.
There used to be a time when mutants were somebody else's problem. Sure, they were always on the news, but they were on the Continent. The walls around the old Radlands did a good job. The old people even liked it that way. They'd chuckle and say that the Volgans got what they deserved. That's what you get if you piss off the British. Stay off our patch, you little foreign sneckers. But what goes around, comes around. Somebody nuked London, but nobody was copping to it. Conspiracy theorists were convinced it was one of the American Mega-Cities - friendly fire and all that. But people didn't talk about it much any more. A generation on, and the after-effects were more than anyone could bear.
The New British News didn't help. It thrived on people's fears and on making people miserable. For all those couples that were scared to even try for a baby, it ran a special piece on how the cruellest form of mutation was infertility. Suddenly, childless couples weren't considered brave and patient, but were seen to be concealing the possibility that one of them was a mutant! That wasn't much help to public morale. And, of course, some people were bullied into getting pregnant, and then forced to deal with the consequences.
Lots of people wanted to emigrate. They amassed the visas and the shots they needed, or took back-breaking farmwork in Wales just to qualify for a homestead somewhere crappy like Procyon or Sirius. But for the older generation, Britain was their home. It was where they were born. You could shoot it full of holes and start decade-long fires, microwave the countryside and dynamite all the old cities, but it wasn't New Britain to them. It was still home, and they couldn't bear to see how fast it had changed. There was a faraway stare in the eyes of some of the adults, like they were praying this was all a terrible dream, and that any minute now they were going to wake up.
But everybody had a relative who'd gone offworld. Everybody knew someone who died in the holocausts of London or Birmingham. And everybody knew somebody who had a mutant in the family.
Some of the older kids remembered the early fifties, when there was an experiment in "integration". A couple of big local families had kids who were obviously out sunbathing when the Bomb dropped or something. Obviously, there had been some arm-twisting and bribes going on. Rumour had it some school governor wanted his grandchildren to have the same chanc
es he'd had, even though one didn't have any legs and the other had a trumpet for a mouth.
The school was called into assembly, for a talking-to from Mr Williams. He ummed and arred for a while, and then started off on one of his war stories, or more accurately, it was a pre-war story. Something about the way that Brit-Cit used to be before it became the London crater. All about how great Britain was, and how we were all of one heart, and one mind, and one race. That was the good old days, of course, before the sustained background level of two hundred milliRads, and every major city got wiped out with a dirty bomb. And times were changing, and we had to play the hand we were given and, well, some people were holding the fourteen of clubs.
The governor's grandkids got by okay, actually, because not having any legs is kind of old school disabled, after all, and the trumpet-girl made a lot of friends in sixth-form. She left school early, though, and went into the entertainment business.
But new laws put a stop to any integration. No more muties allowed and Williams put a stop to his pep talks like they'd never happened. Muties lost the legal right to inherit from norms, and most stopped using their norm-names in protest. That played havoc with the records. They lost the right to work. They lost the right to demand anything from the norms, even pity. But in the schools, people still tried to sneak their mutie kids in.
Some of these kids were transfer students. There was a lot of population movement while the surviving twenty-five per cent of the pre-war population resettled, so people were never that surprised to see kids turning up and claiming to be from out of town. But people still talked - how sure were they that these new kids were genuine? Could it be possible that no-legs and trumpet-girl were the thin end of the wedge, and that the south-west was full of rich families who'd been hiding their damaged darlings for twelve years? Nobody dared say a word, but they thought it.
There was a climate of fear. The teachers hated hearing the world mutie in the playground because it caused even more paperwork than that time they found a training bra in Mr Brown's desk drawer. You can't ignore an accusation of potential genetic disadvantage - you have to investigate it. And that means trauma for the kid and distress for the parents, and sometimes the investigation caused so much stigma that the kid might as well have been a mutant anyway. Social services would also get involved and they really loved sticking it to a posh school like Bunker High.
There was that fat girl in 4B who killed herself because of the insinuations. The autopsy proved her to be one hundred per cent normal, but it's not like the news was any use by then. But as for Sandra Willis, the girl who accused her, it turned out she had a tail. Nothing major, but it was pretty obviously not normal. Her desk was cleared by the end of the day and she didn't come to school again. Some of the fifth years said they thought they saw her later working as a waitress in a muties only bar in Wilton, but that's hearsay. If they'd seen her for sure, then they would have been in the bar themselves, and that would have meant...
This is how it all begins.
There were plenty of crackpot schemes and snake oil salesmen prepared to exploit the petrified citizens of New Britain. There were cure-all vitamin tablets made of nothing but chalk, and copper bracelets that were supposed to extract cobalt from mildly damaged genes. The author of Curing Cancer with Feng Shui made a packet off other people's misery, but it meant that in any classroom at any given time, there were a number of perfectly normal children whose parents had dressed them like nutters.
Tinfoil Tony's mum was convinced that an aluminium hat would protect him from the worst background radiation, and insisted he wore it at all times. Paul wore an NBC protection suit to school every day, like everyone else in his family. His surname was Pratt anyway, so there was no need for another nickname. His Mum used to tell people that nobody in her family was going to get caught by another pre-emptive strike. It was like they were waiting for black rain, just so they could say I told you so.
And the new kid, John, he was dressed funny, too.
Kids who wore glasses quickly got used to mutie taunts. They didn't like it, ever, but after a few years, it just washed over them. Nobody dared say that about John, though. Not on the first day, anyway. John's specs were jet black and covered his eyes completely. He'd never known a time when he didn't have to wear them during the day, and there were calluses on his cheekbones where a succession of smaller pairs had become too tight. Nobody met his eyes, because nobody was ever sure he was looking at them, and he kept to himself. It was the way he liked it.
There were plenty of reasons not to like him. He came from old money, for a start. The school was even named after his grandmother. Walk in to the entrance hall and you'd see her picture scowling down at you; Amy Bunker with her blue eyes and her mannish blonde crew cut. But some people hated John more for Amy's son and John's father, Nelson Bunker Kreelman, the politician.
People called his house "The Toad" or the "Black Spider." It was a bomb-proof geodesic close to the school, built on land that had been with the Bunkers for decades. The building was super-modern, like a multilayered black blancmange. People who'd been inside it said it was like a palace. The Kreelmans even had servants; normal human servants of course, not muties like some of the middle-class people had, squirrelled away in the attic.
John was a year older than most of the other kids in his class, except the ones who'd been kept back. He was twelve, and he'd never been to a school before. Typical rich bastard - he had private tutors, don't you know. He'd got to do kinds of stuff that the other Bunker High kids never even dreamed of, like clay pigeon shooting out on the plains, and even learning Greek! Who needs Greek? Sneck off, Alpha Beta boy.
When he turned up at Bunker, some of the teachers already knew him by name since they'd been going to his house after-hours for years. People said his family were running out of money, and now he had to slum it with the poor kids. Others said he was only going to Bunker so he could see how the other half lived before he took his rightful place with the elite. Nelson Kreelman was angling to become Baron Salisbury and the chances were high that by the time John Kreelman reached eighteen, he'd be a peer-in-waiting and called to the court of Clarkie. He wasn't going to have to work for much in life, that was clear. People hated him even more for that.
People knew who he was, and a lot of them suspected there was something wrong with him. It's not like his family had been abroad; his sister had been at the school for four years, so why was he only starting now? Ruth Kreelman was the most popular girl in the third year, and some of her circle had seen him from a distance when they were at a party or a sleepover. They'd never been able to get too close since their butler, Jarrett would always whisk him away again, like he was the family gimp.
Vicious tongues will wag. Everybody knew that Ruth Kreelman had a little brother who hardly ever left the house. Kids could be cruel.
Geography was the last class of his first day, but John Kreelman didn't rush off with the others. He waited until all the other kids had gone and then slowly began packing his stuff. One jog, one wrong move, one hockey stick sticking out of someone's bag and jabbing in the wrong direction, and he could lose his eyesight. Only the jet-black lenses protected his eyes from sunlight. They never came off, except when the inner and outer doors were locked in his room, and the inner and outer blinds were drawn. Then he could turn on the twenty-watt red light and slowly take the goggles off.
John kept his head down so people didn't see the glasses. When he tramped down the staircase in the central hall, he didn't even stop to look up at the portrait of Granny Bunker. She'd never liked him very much.
It wasn't far from Bunker High to the Kreelman residence, but John still had to observe special precautions. Only cross at the pelican crossings, wait until the man is green, then wait a little longer in case there's some colour blind mutie idiot on the road in a pick-up truck. No games after school, no sports, no hanging around with the other kids and kicking a ball around. If John went anywhere, he'd go to the library.
A book never hurt anyone, after all.
He'd been going more often lately, because he had a reason to read. His mother was very ill, and John liked to read to her. She said she wasn't, but she was always in bed by six, claiming she was tired. There were a lot of hospital check-ups, and she was relying more and more on Jarrett and the help.
John got to choose the books, too, and Diana Kreelman just lay back with her eyes half-closed, staring dreamily at John like he was the only other person in the world. It made John feel special, and he found himself reading to her every day. Classical myths, mainly; stirring stories from Homer and Hesiod. Achilles fighting Paris at Troy, the cunning of Odysseus. Even John's gruff father would almost crack a smile when he heard his son reading Plutarch's biographies to Diana - all those Roman generals with their schemes and strategies. What a leader John would have made one day, his father thought to himself before stomping from the room and shouting at the help.