London Eye: 1 (Toxic City) (8 page)

Lucy-Anne fell to her knees. Something about this place was so familiar, and yet her memory teased her still.
Just do it!
she thought, challenging her nightmares to strike her once again. But if they
did
have something to say about this place, they held back.

For the next couple of minutes they had to step over and around a mess of bones splayed across the path. Some of them bore teeth marks. Others had been chewed through to get to the good stuff inside.

Rosemary led them on, and as daylight fled and gave the Toxic City back to the night, they left that sad, surreal place and found themselves once more in familiar streets.

They gathered in a small square where once-tended plants had grown wild, and where birds chattered as they chose their roosts for the night.

“It's not far now,” Rosemary said. “There's a house two streets away that I sometimes use. There's food there, and bottled water, and enough rooms—”

“Listen!” Sparky held up his hand, eyes wide, head tilted to one side. The birds had also fallen silent, equally attuned to the sound of danger. “Engines.”

“Quickly!” Rosemary led them across the road and through a gate into the small park at the square's centre. “Hide, stay low, and whatever you do, make sure you're not seen.”

“Choppers?” Jenna asked.

“Almost certainly. Irregulars hardly ever use vehicles.”

Lucy-Anne hid with Jack and Emily behind a bank of undergrowth growing around an old oak tree. She looked for the others but they had all hidden themselves away so well that even she could no longer see them. She had the crazy idea that they had never been there at all.

“I'm afraid,” Emily said.

The motors were drawing closer. There were several of them, and above their grumble he heard the distinctive sound of something else: a helicopter.

“Me too.” Lucy-Anne smiled at the girl.

“But we're here,” Jack whispered into his sister's ear. “We're in London, and Mum and Dad will be here too.”

“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “Do you think they'll remember us?”

Jack tried to answer, but his voice broke. “Shh,” he said instead. He glanced at Lucy-Anne and she saw tears in his eyes. “Shh.”

The helicopter passed overhead. She saw it through the jagged branches of the oak tree, its tail light flashing red as it hovered briefly, then thundered away across the Barrens. It was too high for its downwash to be felt, but so loud that Lucy-Anne could not even hear her own breathing. She noticed that though Emily cringed into her brother, her right hand was held out from her side, the dark lens of the camera facing up.

As the helicopter drifted away, the square was illuminated by a flood of headlamps. Lucy-Anne tried to hunker down lower, gasping as the light fingered through bushes and between tree trunks to briefly dazzle her. The engine sound did not change. She heard heavy wheels grinding on the gritty road, and another set of headlamps swung through to follow the first. The two vehicles grumbled around the square, their engine noise intensely threatening. But behind them, a heavier sound. It rumbled and shook through the ground as well as through the air, and it made leaves in the square shake where the helicopter could not.

“What's that?” Emily asked.

“Don't know. Big truck.” Lucy-Anne peered through the bushes, trying to make out the shape and size of the two vehicles driving around the edge of the square. They seemed quite small, but before she could get a good look, they were gone, and the massive rumble that followed them took over.

It echoed from the buildings around the square, shook the ground, and the lights—red, yellow, and white—slashed through the undergrowth as if it was not there. It ended the shadows in that place, and its motor sounded angry and hungry.

The vehicle turned around the edge of the square, following the two smaller trucks that had preceded it. Through branches and past heavy limbs draped with leaves, Lucy-Anne could see its shape, and it was huge. It reminded her of an oil tanker, but its heavy grey sides looked daunting, the three conical towers on its back ugly and threatening with the stubby black guns that protruded from them.
The engine tone lowered for a moment and she thought it was going to slow.

“They
can't
have seen us!” Emily said, almost shouting to be heard.

Lucy-Anne delved into her pocket for the knife Sparky had let her keep, laughing out loud at how ineffective it felt.

Then the giant vehicle lumbered on, putting on a surprising spurt of speed as it skirted the square and disappeared after the 4×4s.

For a couple of minutes after the lights disappeared and the vehicles were out of sight, everyone remained where they were. Lucy-Anne listened to the engines fading away, echoes coming back at them and playing tricks with direction and distance. Then Rosemary crawled across to them, her eyes wide, fearful, and perhaps excited as well. “Choppers!” she said. “And that big monster was one of their mobile labs. I've watched Irregulars taken into there, never to be seen again.”

“We need to go to your house,” Jack said. Emily was still shivering in his arms. “It's been a long day, Rosemary, and we need rest. This is all too much.”

“Near miss, eh?” Sparky said, crawling across to them.

“Got it all on here, I think,” Emily said, holding up her camera and smiling weakly.

“There won't be another patrol for a while,” Rosemary said.

“I need to find my family,” Lucy-Anne whispered. Her heart was thrumming, and something had started ticking deep inside her, a timer slowly running out of sand. She was counting down to something, and she had no idea what.

“Not yet,” Jack said.

“Lucy-Anne, we need—” Jenna began.

“My
family!”
she said, louder this time. “We've come all this way, been through those bloody tunnels…those
dogs!
And I'm not just going to go to fucking sleep!”

“Quiet!” Rosemary said.

“Stop telling me to be quiet, old woman!”

“Lucy-Anne.” Jack stepped forward and held her arms, trying to pull her close. She resisted, pulling back, staring over Jack's shoulder at something more distant.

“Where did they live?” Rosemary said. Her voice was calmer now, cooler.

Lucy-Anne glanced at her, but said nothing.

“Answer her,” Jack said. “She knows the city.”

“She led us to those dogs.”

“Tooting, wasn't it?” Jenna asked. “Didn't they live near the big police station in Tooting?”

Rosemary sighed and lowered her head.

“What?” Lucy-Anne demanded. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Tooting isn't there anymore,” Rosemary said softly. “We just walked across it, and now it's called the Barrens.”

Lucy-Anne gasped, and her defences fell from her in a heartbeat. She crumpled in Jack's arms, slumping down as though her knees had given out. She wished he could hold her tight enough to stop everything, just for a while.

“It doesn't mean they're dead,” he whispered in her ear.

No, they're not dead
, she thought. And something deep inside seemed to grin.

She pulled away from Jack and stood on her own. She smoothed down her clothes, ran her fingers through her hair, and wiped an errant tear from her cheek. Then she glanced at Rosemary. “Sorry.” The word was quiet, but they all heard it in the silence.

Rosemary nodded and gave a brief smile. “We should go. If we hurry, we can be there before it's fully dark.”

They followed the woman out of the square and along a narrow street, as they had been following her all that long day. She had led
them out of the world they knew and into one they used to know, but which was now a mysterious, dangerous place. She had healed their wounds after the dogs attacked them, and told them about the strange places beneath London, both old and new. She had walked them across the largest grave the world had ever seen, and pointed out monuments to individual people that seemed, in Lucy-Anne's eyes at least, to be more immediate than the thought of a million dead.

She trusted the old woman, and she didn't. She liked her, and she feared her. And as Rosemary unlocked the front door to an innocuous, terraced house in a street that had once sung with life, Lucy-Anne wondered whether history was too powerful for any of them to change.

There will be a statement from the prime minister on all TV and radio channels at 10:00 p.m.

—Government Statement, all-channel broadcast,
8:15 p.m. GMT, July 28, 2019

I
t was a normal house, its owners dead or gone since Doomsday. Rosemary had tacked several layers of thick sheets and blankets over every window and door so that she could light candles without being seen. There were a few lighter patches on the papered walls where pictures had once hung, empty book cases, and piled in a small room at the rear of the house were a pram, bouncy chair, and several bags of baby toys and clothes. She told them that she had tried to depersonalise the house—not to make it her own, but to make it anonymous.

Before Doomsday, she had been a nurse. She did not like stealing someone else's home.

Jack thought they would all have trouble falling asleep. After eating food cold from tins, Rosemary showed them to separate rooms. Lucy-Anne, Jenna, and Sparky took one, while Jack and Emily had another, bickering briefly about who should have the top bunk.

“It's dangerous,” Jack said, and Emily laughed and climbed the ladder.

But when the time for sleep came, Jack closed his eyes and suffered none of the anxieties he feared. He had worried that being here at last, in the Toxic City, would keep them all awake. But he soon
heard Sparky mumbling in his sleep and Emily's gentle breathing above him, and before dropping off himself he realised that the dangers of this place extended far beyond the ruins of the Exclusion Zone. London was perilous, but a world where such lies could be told, and such wonders hidden away, was deadly through and through.

For the past two years, none of them had ever been safe.

Breakfast was more cold food from tin cans, but baked beans had never tasted so good. Jack wondered how the Irregulars stayed healthy without anything fresh: no vegetables, fruit, or meat. But he kept having to remind himself that they were not normal people.
She's moved on
, he thought, watching Rosemary opening several large plastic bottles of water.
She's evolved, all of a sudden.
Her hands moved smoothly, confidently, the patterns they made almost poetic. What must it be like to have such power? He could barely imagine.

“I'm taking you to a man called Gordon,” she said. “He's a friend, but not as…accepting of his new gift as I am.”

“What's his gift?” Jack asked.

“He can trace bloodlines,” she said. “One drip of blood, and he can sense it all across the city.”

“You mean he can smell our families?” Sparky asked.

“It's much more than smell, dear,” Rosemary said, smiling. She held up her hands. “Just as this is a lot more than touch.”

“You're superheroes. Like Batman.” Emily chewed on stale breadsticks, and her seriousness made them laugh. All except Rosemary. Jack noticed that she looked pained rather than amused, and he wondered just how accepting she really was.

“Yeah!” Jenna said. “Shouldn't you call yourself ‘Healer,’ or something? And your friend Gordon, he should be ‘Sniffer’!”

“I prefer the name my parents gave me,” Rosemary said.

“Still…” Jenna said, glancing around and catching Jack's eye. He saw the twinkle of amusement there, looked away quickly, and Lucy-Anne was staring right at him. He smiled but her expression did not change. Even when he leaned sideways in his chair, her eyes did not waver. Yet again, she was seeing something very far away.

“So where does Sniffer live?” Sparky asked.

“Gordon is one of the few I know who stays in the same place. It's a hotel, the London Court, and he has the top floor.”

“All of it?”

“All of it. Why not? Apparently, Paul McCartney stayed there a few years ago, hired the whole top floor of the hotel for his entourage. Gordon quite likes that idea, so he's done it as well. Except he hasn't had to pay.”

“And he feels safe staying in the same place?” Jack asked. “Safe from the Choppers?”

“Of course,” Rosemary smiled. “He can smell trouble a mile away.”

“Hah!” Sparky laughed. “Sniffer!”

“Please don't call him that to his face,” Rosemary said, suddenly serious. “He knows what he can do, but…he doesn't like doing it.”

“Why not?” Emily asked. “That seems daft. If you can do something special, you should.”

“Well, dear, he finds it quite frightening.”

Emily looked at Jack and blinked, and he could almost hear the cogs turning in her mind.
How awful to have something that scares you so much.

“But he'll help?” he asked.

“Oh, I'm sure. He wants things to change as much as any of us.”

They gathered some food and drink together and shared it around their rucksacks, then waited in the hallway behind the front door while Rosemary checked that the coast was clear. She'd told
them that they would be staying to the side streets, alleys, and residential roads, as Chopper patrols concentrated more on the old shopping districts.

“It's quiet,” she said, clicking the door shut again. “I'll go first, you follow in a close line.”

“How far?” Jenna asked.

“A mile,” Rosemary said. “Maybe less.”

“What will we be seeing out there?” Lucy-Anne's voice was low and tense, as if she was waiting for something to happen. Jack had tried several times that morning to approach her, talk to her, but she had shrugged him off. He wondered whether they were even together anymore, and guessed not. Perhaps they never really had been.

His concern seemed so childish. And that made his sadness feel all the more indulgent.

“I know the route,” the Irregular said. “Hopefully, nothing.”

Hopefully.
Jack squeezed his sister's hand and she beamed at him, full of the fresh new day. Kids. He wished he hadn't had to grow up so damn fast.

They walked the streets of London, past silent homes containing dark secrets, across roads that were already cracked with the soft green force of shoots tired of biding their time, passing shadows hunkered down in alleys and gardens like memories waiting to strike back at those who had made them bad, and for the first time Jack really understood the tragedy of what had happened. It struck him hard, and looking around at his friends he could believe that they were experiencing the same thoughts. Before today, back in Camp Truth, there had been mourning for their missing families and anger at the cover-up perpetuated by the government and military. That's where all their thoughts and emotions had gone, all their
mental energy spent mourning and hating, grieving and conspiring—personal things, all tied to them.

None of them had ever really spared a thought for London.

This once-great city was now a ruin. True, buildings still stood straight and square, but the life was gone from here. Each darkened window in a house's façade promised only sadness contained within. The streets showed their age, now, without people and vehicles to pin them to the present. London was London no more, but a fading echo of what it had once been. A dead city.

Feeling sad, sensing London's history growing wilder, older, and further beyond redemption with every missed heartbeat, Jack walked with the others and let the sights and sounds wash over him.

They saw a family of foxes sitting and playing beside a road. The adults looked their way, but they remained on the street, when two years before they would have scampered away to wherever the city foxes hid during daylight. The cubs yapped and rolled, snapping at waving fern fronds growing along the gutter. Emily turned her camera their way, and as if aware of what she was doing, the wild animals fled, and the street felt as though they had never been there at all.

“Lots more foxes,” Rosemary said. “And rabbits, badgers, weasels, squirrels, and rats.”

“Food for the dogs, at least,” Lucy-Anne said.

“It's becoming a wilder place to live.” The woman smiled at Emily's camera and then nodded along a narrow alley between two houses. “That way. There's a body down here, but you won't see much of it.”

The skeleton was almost completely subsumed by nettles and ferns, the stalks and leaves sprouting up between ribs and through eye sockets. Jack wanted to walk straight by, but Emily paused and moved some of the plants aside with her foot. She started a quiet commentary into her camera's microphone.

“Who was this sad person, dead in an alley, killed by the lies told to everyone? They had long hair that might have been blonde, like mine. A leather jacket. A badge on the jacket, saying how much they liked the Dropkick Murphys, and a T-shirt, but it's too faded to see what was written on it. Did they fall here and die quickly, or crawl from a long way away? Were they coming from somewhere, or trying to get somewhere else?” She trained the camera along the body, then stepped away and let the ferns spring back up. “Another grim statistic of the Toxic City.”

“Come on, Emily,” Jack said. She looked at him, scared.

“This could have been us, if we'd come with Mum and Dad. This could have been
anyone.
We might have been friends.”

“Come on.”

Within twenty minutes of leaving the house, Jack craved the sight of another human being. Rosemary led them along sidestreets, through alleys, and, at one point, over several garden walls and through the small enclosed places that had once been so private and contained. He felt like an intruder, passing across family spaces once used as play areas for children, or barbeque areas for their parents. He saw children's garden toys hidden amongst the long grass and shrubs gone wild, and in one garden he noticed that the French doors leading into the house were open a few inches. He tried to see inside, but a slick green moss covered the inner surface of the glass, turning everything into shadow. He did not feel watched.

“Where are the other Irregulars?” he asked Rosemary as they paused beside an overturned lorry. It had been carrying boxes and boxes of books, the last bestseller now swollen into unreadable humps all across the road.

“We've been seen,” Rosemary said. “There was one in a house just back there, watching from an upstairs window.”

“Did you know them?”

“Don't think so. They'd have probably said hello if I did.”

“So is everyone alone, now?” he asked. “Is this how it always is?”

“Oh, no, Jack,” she said, apparently surprised at how he felt. “I do have
some
friends. There are people I see regularly, people I mix with. Many of us live on our own most of the time, of course, because it's far safer that way. But we have…not really a community, but an existence. There's plenty of hide and seek, but the Choppers don't bother us constantly. We just have to keep watch for them. And there are Irregulars with gifts that can do that for us.”

“So when do we meet Gordon?” he asked, feeling his friends’ eyes upon him as well as the lens of Emily's camera. “It's not just Lucy-Anne who wants to know about her family.”

“It's not far now. We have to cross a couple of main streets, but we'll be fine.”

“No dogs?” Lucy-Anne asked. “Wolves, lions, bears?”

“I've never heard of a bear being seen south of the river,” Rosemary said, and Jack was not sure whether she was joking.

They crossed the main roads carefully, running in pairs, and very little changed. Jack saw a dozen cats sitting together in front of one smashed-up shop, licking their paws, lazing in the sun and watching the humans rush across the street. It was an unsettling sight, because he'd never seen more than two cats sitting together before. It was as if the loss of their erstwhile owners had given them free reign to exist and adapt as they wished.

After the main roads, Rosemary led them along a lane beside a tall, grand looking building. Several cars had been burnt out here, and they had to climb over the scorched metallic ruins because there was no room between the walls. Jenna slipped on the last car and gasped as raw metal sliced her ankle.

“I'll see to that in a minute,” Rosemary said, and Jack stared at her with amazement once again.

Past the cars, the woman opened a heavy grille gate, which had a chain and padlock placed around it as though locked. When the others filed through after her she replaced the chain, hanging the padlock so that it did not quite click shut.

Jenna groaned, leaning on Sparky for support. Blood dripped from her boot.

“At least he'll have smelled us by now,” Rosemary said, kneeling beside the wounded girl.

“Make him sound like a bloody vampire,” Lucy-Anne said.

“There's no such things as vampires,” Rosemary muttered, and that made them all laugh softly. She looked up, surprised at first, and then smiling along with them. “Fair enough,” she said. “Maybe there are, and I just haven't met them yet. London's full of secrets.”

She rested Jenna's foot against her leg and touched the cut, growing still and silent as her fingers did their work.

A door opened behind them. Something long and dark emerged, aiming their way, and behind it was the most terrified face Jack had ever seen.

“It's me!” Rosemary said, jumping up and holding up both hands, the right one still bloody. “Gordon, it's me.”

The man behind the gun blinked and looked at all of them, one by one. “They're from outside!” he said.