Red Eye - 02
PRAISE FOR JAMES LOVEGROVE
“John Redlaw is an inspired creation, a dauntless-hero-without-a-past saved from cliché by his faith and humanity, who carries the reader with him through the fast-paced, occasionally stomach-churning narrative.”
The Guardian
on
Redlaw
“Lovegrove has a terse, clear prose that carries the reader along... All in all, a stonking good read and a refreshing change to the paranormal romance that seems to dominate the bloodsucking genre. Buy it, read it, enjoy it.”
The British Fantasy Society on
Redlaw
“The action doesn’t let up for a second, but it’s clear that Lovegrove has his hands firmly on the reins of the plot... It’s a lot of fun to read and gives you pause for thought at the same time. I really hope this is the start of the series and not a one off.”
Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review
on
Redlaw
“Pick up James Lovegrove’s latest novel and you can rest assured that you are in the safe hands of a master craftsman.”
SFX Magazine
on
The Age of Ra
“One of the most interesting and adventurous British writers... Lovegrove has become to the 21st Century what JG Ballard was to the 20th.”
The Bookseller
on
Days
“Typically clever and gripping... Written in clear, terse prose, this is hard-edged, fast-paced reading. Pure gold for boys who have read everything by Anthony Horowitz… or have not been able to tackle him yet.”
The Times
on
Kill Swap
JAMES LOVEGROVE
REDLAW
RED EYE
Solaris Books
ALSO BY JAMES LOVEGROVE
Novels
The Hope • Days • The Foreigners
Untied Kingdom • Worldstorm
Provender • Gleed • Redlaw
Co-writing with Peter Crowther
Escardy Gap
T
HE
P
ANTHEON
S
ERIES
The Age Of Ra • The Age Of Zeus • The Age Of Odin
Age Of Aztec • Age of Anansi (e-book)
Novellas
How The Other Half Lives
Gig
Collections of Short Fiction
Imagined Slights
Diversifications
For Younger Readers
The Web: Computopia • Warsuit 1.0
The Black Phone
For Reluctant Readers
Wings • The House of Lazarus
Ant God • Cold Keep • Dead Brigade
Kill Swap • Free Runner
T
HE
5 L
ORDS
O
F
P
AIN
S
ERIES
The Lord Of The Mountain • The Lord Of The Void
The Lord Of Tears • The Lord Of The Typhoon • The Lord Of Fire
Writing as Jay Amory
T
HE
C
LOUDED
W
ORLD
S
ERIES
The Fledging Of Az Gabrielson • Pirates Of The Relentless Desert
Darkening For A Fall • Empire Of Chaos
First published 2011 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-84997-450-9
ISBN (MOBI): 978-1-84997-451-6
Copyright © James Lovegrove 2012
Cover Art by Clint Langley
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. 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 copyright owners.
Designed & formatted by Rebellion Publishing
N
EW
Y
ORK IN
winter.
The city is white, white, whiter than white. Snow has fallen freshly today, and more is forecast to fall later tonight. The city is featherbedded in thick drifts of the stuff. Manhattan, all twenty-two square miles of it, is no longer its usual muscular, hard-edged self. The skyscrapers and wharves instead look soft and strangely fragile. This urban island has become like some massive, impossibly intricate snowflake, lying quiet beneath a grim grey sky.
Down in the canyon streets, the valley avenues, traffic moves, but sluggishly. Yellow cabs make up most of it, crawling in long lines between the heaps of banked-up slush at the roadside. People are out and about but not in great numbers, and although in a hurry, because New Yorkers are always in a hurry, they walk with care. The ground is icy. Even boots with the ruggedest soles are no proof against slipping.
It’s January, Christmas nothing more than a bauble memory, New Year a forgotten hangover. The whole of the eastern seaboard of the United States is in the grip of the freezing weather, and no one is finding it at all festive. The band of snow extends as far inland as Chicago and as far south as Florida, where frostbitten oranges are dying on the bough and retirees who thought they’d escaped the cold forever have begun to succumb to hypothermia and pneumonia.
Here in New York, the Hudson is locked solid, a single rumpled floe. You could probably cross it on foot, if you were crazy enough to try. Icicles twice as long as a man is tall hang from the Statue of Liberty’s torch and crown. The wind that shoots in off the river lives up to the bird of prey it’s nicknamed after, the hawk. If it catches you, it sinks talons into you which seem to carve clean through your flesh to the bone.
So let’s try and find some warmth, shall we? I know of a place. You might not like it, but at least there’s no snow there and the wind can’t penetrate.
It’s underground. Deep down. Come with me.
We glide below the city into the subway. We go from the lighted areas, platforms where evening commuters grumble and stamp, into the tunnels. We travel through the transit system, following labyrinthine twists and turns of track, shunning the roar and clatter of trains, heading for darker, deeper, silent parts.
Now—yes—we’re where few dare venture, where maybe even angels fear to tread. We’ve come to a region of the subway that’s found only on old outdated maps. Its existence is a matter of debate even to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority itself. The assumption is that this and all the other disused sections have been walled up, fenced off, made safe and inviolable. They were taken off the grid long ago, and no one has really thought about them since.
In recent years, people have inhabited these manmade caverns. The homeless. The destitute. Human moles. They’ve built little shanty villages, furnished them with scavenged scraps, and made themselves as comfortable as they could. They’ve established their own neighbourhoods, their own rules and laws, and gone about their business more or less free from interference from above.