Sins of the Father (25 page)

You broke your promise
, Daniel said.
Cross your heart, that's what you told me! Cross your heart, you'd make them die!

Re-tracing the path he had taken in entering the building, Leonard finally squeezed free of the vents and arrived in the underblock maintenance tunnels. The tunnels were wider than the vents, allowing him to walk upright so long as he crouched his body and kept his head bowed. Wary in case the Judges were close behind him, Leonard ran through the tunnels and headed down toward the sewers.

Cross your heart, you said
, Daniel's voice was angry and insistent.
You broke your promise...

No
, Leonard finally answered the boy.
I promised I'd kill the bad men, Daniel. But they weren't bad men. They were a woman and her kids
.

Liar! Liar! Liar! Liar!
The boy shrieked in childish petulance.
You're a liar! Leonard is a big fat li--

A woman and her kids
, Leonard said.
They looked at me like I was a monster
.

No!
The boy refused to listen to reason.
No! They were men! Three men! I saw them with their wrinkled faces and ugly beards! I recognised them! They were one of the men who hurt me!

"One" of the men? Despite the threat of the Judges, Leonard abruptly stopped running, his mind pulling up short at something Daniel had said. Daniel, there were three of them. How could three people be 'one' of the men who hurt you?

Thinking for a moment, Leonard experienced another sudden burst of insight. The sensation of it almost made him dizzy.

Daniel
, he said as he turned towards the boy.
Tell me exactly what you saw
.

"He was a monster," the woman said. A Med-Judge had given her a sedative to calm her nerves, but she seemed on the brink of hysteria. "He was huge. And that face... Oh drokk... that face..."

"You said he put his hands around your throat?" Anderson spoke gently as she tried to coax more from the woman. She reminded herself of the information she had been given by a street Judge as she and Lang had arrived at the scene. The street Judge has said the woman's name was Miriam Joyce. "And then, suddenly, he let you go? Is that right, Miriam?"

"He started to argue with himself," the woman said. Her hand checked gingerly at the bruises on her throat as she relived the experience. "He began talking to himself in two different voices. I know it sounds crazy, but he used two voices like he had two people inside him. One of them was deep; it sounded like it was his real voice. The other was higher pitched. It sounded like the voice of a child... Oh Grud, it was the child part of him that kept telling him to kill me..."

Losing her composure, she dissolved into tears as the floodgates of delayed emotion suddenly burst open. Uncomfortable at the thought of inflicting more suffering on a woman who was already traumatised, Anderson began to back away. Abruptly, though, the woman reached out and grabbed her hand, her eyes staring up at Anderson through the tears as though she had some vital message she wanted to pass on before she forgot it.

"I saw him," Miriam Joyce said. "The child, I mean. I saw the monster and then, when he put his hands around my throat, his face changed. Suddenly, he looked like a child. It's impossible, I know. But you have to believe me... I'm not crazy..."

"No, you're not crazy, Miriam," Anderson soothed her. As the woman's tears began to flow more freely, she hugged her. "It's all right," she told her. "We believe you."

"It's all wrong," Leonard said afterwards, his voice barely more than a whisper as he entered the sewers while Daniel clung to his shoulders. "You have to accept it, Daniel. Those people weren't who you thought they were. They weren't the bad men. We killed the wrong people."

In the end it had been so simple. Instead of telling Leonard what he had seen in the apartment, Daniel had shown him. Laying his palm across Leonard's forehead, Daniel had sent pictures directly into his mind. Leonard had seen every aspect of the incident inside the apartment from Daniel's viewpoint, observing the scene through the boy's eyes from beginning to end. In place of the woman by the sink, Daniel had seen a leering old man. In place of her children he had seen two more old men, their features identical to the first. Initially, Leonard could not understand it. How could he and Daniel have been in the same place at the same time and seen totally different things?

Then, abruptly, an idea had occurred to him.

"Show me the others," Leonard had said. "Show me the men we killed. The box man, the headset man and Jimmy Nayles: show me what they looked like."

Again, Daniel had complied. Again, Leonard had seen that each of the men he had killed had looked completely different to Daniel's eyes. Their faces were not the same. Their heights and builds, even their ages, had been different. In each case there was a family resemblance between the men he had killed and the men Daniel had seen, but they were not the same men; Leonard was sure of it.

"We did a bad thing, Daniel," Leonard said as he waded through the muck of the sewers. "We have innocent blood on our hands. We killed the wrong people."

Clinging restlessly to his shoulders, Daniel maintained a sulky silence.

A family resemblance. The thought churned uneasily inside Leonard's head. He felt on the verge of another insight. It was strange: normally it took Leonard weeks to come up with a single idea, never mind three in one day. At times it was as though he had been slowly growing smarter ever since he had met Daniel. As though his close connection to the boy - the same connection that allowed Daniel to whisper and send pictures directly into his head - had caused some of the boy's intelligence to rub off on him. Whatever the cause, Leonard felt a new insight forming within him. The non-existent people Daniel had seen had all resembled the real people who Leonard had killed. Suddenly, the insight came to him with the force of a bullet.

"Daniel?" he said gently. "You said the bad men hurt you? When did it happen?"

"A few days ago," the little boy said. Still angry at Leonard, his voice was grumpy.

"And when did we kill Jimmy Nayles?" Leonard asked him. It was as though the question appeared in his mind of its own volition.

"A few days ago," Daniel said, shifting uneasily on Leonard's shoulders as though he found the question boring.

"And when did we first meet?" Leonard asked.

"A few days ago," Daniel said.

The insight was right. Suddenly, Leonard had begun to understand everything.

"Daniel?" Leonard said. "The bad men who hurt you? I think that might have happened a long time ago. A real long time. I think the bad men are all gone now.

"I think we've been killing their children."

"One man, two voices," Lang said to Anderson later, once the Med-Judges had taken Miriam Joyce away for medical treatment. "You heard what she said. Two voices arguing with each other, like a split personality. Sounds like a text book case of MPD."

Despite the fact the witness statement had given support to the theory she had advanced earlier, there was nothing of triumph in Lang's expression. Like Anderson, she seemed dog-tired: two sleep machine sessions in the last twenty-four hours had proved a poor substitute for the real sleep they both desperately needed.

"It could be," Anderson said. She had just received a report from the street Judges and Teks assigned to track the perp's path through the building. They had come up empty: even with the short lead-time between his escape from the apartment and the arrival of the first Judges on the scene, the perp had managed to vanish like a ghost. "But it doesn't explain the rest of Miriam Joyce's testimony. The way his face changed to the face of a child. I know eyewitness testimony is unreliable, but it ties in with the results of the psi-scans from the previous victims. Maybe we should call in to Control and-"

"Control to Anderson!" the radio blared on her belt.

"Speak of the devil," Anderson muttered. She grimaced as she pressed the transmit button on the radio mic, half-expecting news of another murder.

"Anderson here, Control. What have you got?"

"An update on the public response to the photo-scan of your perp that was released to the media. Since the image went on air, Justice Department had received one thousand five hundred and seventy-nine calls from individuals claiming that they know the perp. Mostly the usual sponts, weirdos, and crackpots. However, the Watch Commander at Sector House 46 reports that a suspect arrested in one of the Operation Lazarus raids has come forward with what seems like solid info on your perp's name and address."

EIGHTEEN

LEONARD UNLEASHED

Leonard had been back at the hostel for less than half an hour by the time the killers came for him.

Seeking a place to gather his thoughts in the wake of recent revelations, he had returned to City Bottom with Daniel in tow. The boy's mood had not improved. All the way back to the third floor room where Leonard lived, Daniel had argued with him relentlessly, wheedling and pleading in his attempts to persuade him to kill another of the so-called bad men. Leonard had been adamant, though: now he was convinced that Daniel wanted him to kill innocent people, he refused to be bound by his promise. Admittedly, he had not necessarily thought everything through. Inwardly, Leonard was aware that without Daniel's help he would never be able to find his mother. But though he still wanted Daniel to help him, he was no longer willing to pay the price if it meant more innocent people would die.

They were at a stalemate. The argument between them raged back and forth, without being resolved. No matter how often Leonard tried to explain his insights to Daniel - that the bad men Daniel saw were not really there - the boy refused to listen. It was as though the idea that Leonard might be right was somehow too terrible for Daniel to contemplate.

Then, in the middle of their dispute, Leonard heard the sound of men in the distance moving towards the hostel and felt a nameless instinct warn him of danger.

It was difficult to tell without seeing them, but he estimated there were a dozen of them at least. It was not so much the fact there were so many men outside that spooked him. Even in City Bottom, large groups of people - other mutants, mostly - sometimes passed by the hostel, minding their own business. No, the unsettling part was that the men outside were trying to move too quietly. Raised in the ways of the Cursed Earth, it was a sound Leonard knew well. The sounds of hunters stalking their prey.

Motioning Daniel to be quiet, Leonard doused the lantern in his room and crept towards the window. Looking out cautiously, he counted fifteen men advancing stealthily under cloak of darkness on his side of the hostel. He smelt the scent of gun oil, watching as the men manoeuvred to cover all the exits. It was clear they were not Judges. They were all dressed head-to-toe in black, including black masks, and they were heavily armed.

Stealing a glance at the old rifle propped up in the corner of his room, Leonard cursed himself for his lack of foresight. He should have used some of his wages to get Freddie Binns to buy him some more ammo when he had had the chance. Now, it was too late. The rifle was empty and all but useless.

Downstairs, he heard the thud of explosions as the men outside threw grenades into the ground floor of the hostel. He heard mutants screaming in pain, followed by the muffled pop of silenced gunshots as the armed men advanced into the hostel to finish what their grenades had started. He heard more screams, and more gunfire, as the mutants he had lived and worked with were slaughtered on the floors below him. The sounds were moving closer, but Leonard was already hurrying from his room to meet them. He was unarmed.

If the rifle was useless, then he would just have to use his hands.

"The perp's name is Lenny," Judge Patton said, his voice raised to make himself heard over the roar of the H-Wagon's engines as he briefed the assembled members of his tac-team seated either side of him. "No surname - just Lenny. He's a mutant, wanted for three homicides that we know of. You'll find a picture of him, along with further details, on the briefing monitors beside your seats. Study them closely. And pay particular attention to the fact the perp is strong enough to bend plastisteel with his bare hands. If he decides to come quietly, that's fine. But we don't take any chances. Be prepared to use lethal force if need be."

Seated next to Lang at the end of one of the files of Judges, Anderson checked the magazine of her Lawgiver as she prepared herself for action. The H-Wagon and tac-team assistance had been summoned at short notice. The informant who had claimed to know the perp's name and location had turned out to be a career criminal by the name of Einar Jensen. Having been captured during one of the sweeps for Operation Lazarus, Jensen had attempted to make a deal for his freedom by offering up the killer of Jimmy Nayles based on the photo-scan released to the media. But the Judges of Mega-City One didn't do deals. Instead, Anderson and Lang had been summoned to perform a psychic interrogation. Courtesy of a telepathic probe of Jensen's mind they had learned Nayles's killer was a mutant named Lenny who lived in a ruined apartment building in City Bottom. Meanwhile, Jensen himself had been sent to the cubes with an additional five years added to his sentence for Withholding Information. Whatever private concerns she might have about the quality of justice in Mega-City One, Anderson was forced to admit it was certainly thorough.

"ETA to location: three minutes," the voice of the H-Wagon's pilot came over their radios. "I'm reading multiple gunflashes up ahead. At least two dozen hostiles. Looks like a major firefight has broken out at your target location."

"Call for backup," Patton said, gruffly. "Drop us three hundred metres from the target. Then, get airborne again and light up the hostiles."

"Understood," the pilot replied. "Taking her down now."

There was a sudden feeling of almost-weightlessness as the H-Wagon abruptly changed direction and started to descend. As it landed on City Bottom, the side doors slid open automatically, disgorging its cargo of Judges.