The giant rocks made natural cover, and the lead pickup’s squealing brakes suggested the driver wasn’t expecting the heavy gate. Harry stepped up into a foothold and peeked over the top of the boulder. The two pickups were modern, but wore a coat of desert grit. The lead unit was driven by a huge man, hunched over the wheel with a hairy forehead and vast woolly arms.

‘Some kind of superhero,’ Harry warned, using the popular nickname for anyone who’d been modded for extreme strength, using the experimental mods developed by the Chinese army. ‘I think there’s another superhero in the second pickup. The ones on the pickup beds are younger. Mostly girls.’

‘Armed?’ Vern asked.

‘I can see knives and pistols for the girls. The superhero’s got a machine gun.’

‘Body count?’ Vern asked.

‘The first superhero’s getting out,’ Harry said. ‘There’s two guys in each cab. Four or five kids riding on the back of each one.’

Vern stepped out from behind the rock, his assault rifle aimed at the superhero who’d just got out of the main vehicle.

‘You’re on a private road and the police were alerted by radio as soon as the phone was cut,’ Vern lied. ‘I strongly advise you to turn back.’

Vern gave a signal for Harry to step out behind him. As he did so, sweaty zombie girls jumped down from the pickups, while a mean-looking Asian teen pointed an assault rifle. Harry looked left and right warily as the superhero spat in the dirt, then confidently chimed the muzzle of his MP7 machine gun against the barred gate.

The superhero was seven and a half feet tall and his T-shirt size must have included a dozen Xs. While modders like Charlie would only do therapies that used variants of human DNA, superhero mods included genes from powerful primates.

The results of non-human mods were unpredictable. Along with cancerous growths and sudden heart failure, the most common side-effect of mixing ape and human DNA were stem cells that produced the wrong type of tissue in the wrong location. So hard tissues like teeth and nails would grow in random spots through your body, or internal organs would get blocked by clumps of hair.

The superhero at the gate showed a particularly gruesome example of stem-cell confusion, with infected balls of milky-white eye tissue clumped on his hairy arms.

‘If you pay us two hundred thousand, we’ll go away,’ the superhero said. ‘Fifty thousand a month buys you protection.’

‘Got my own protection,’ Vern scoffed, raising his gun. ‘I’m an old man. Inflation wiped out my pension. We live off what we grow.’

‘I’ll have your computers, phones and watches,’ the superhero growled as Harry eyed the zombie girls moving further away from the pickups, some disappearing behind rocks. ‘There won’t be trouble unless you make trouble.’