Redlaw - 01

REDLAW

JAMES LOVEGROVE

Solaris Books

First published 2011 by Solaris, an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

www.solarisbooks.com

ISBN (.mobi): 978-1-84997-296-3

ISBN (.epub): 978-1-84997-295-6

Copyright © James Lovegrove 2011

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.

London at night.

The city’s veins throb with light, with life. Traffic pulses to and fro, white one way, red the other. Signs glare. Windows flare. The massed glow from neon and incandescent bulbs burnishes the sky.

But there are dark areas down there in the urban sprawl, like cancer growths on an X-ray. Places where no lights shine. Black spots.

See them?

There in Harringay. In Southall. In Deptford and Stoke Newing-ton, Hounslow and Beckenham, Kilburn and Peckham Rye.

They stand out, black amongst the brilliance. The opposite of beacons. Not beckoning—repelling.

Shall we descend towards one of them? Why not? That one there to the east, say, in Mile End.

Well, what are you waiting for? An invitation? You don’t have to have one. Still, if it’ll make you happy...

Come on. Come on down with me. Enter London from above. Enter freely and of your own will.

The traffic growl grows as we get lower. The vehicles of the night—what music they make.

Few drivers, however, choose to go where we are going, and so we sink into a kind of bubble of hush as we near our destination. London’s twenty-four-hour grumble is muted, and here amid the bleak concrete geometry of a high-rise housing estate we hear only the softest of sounds. A scurry. A snarl. A whisper that could be a voice, or the rustle of a scrap of newspaper blown across cracked tarmac.

All that moves is the wind, clawing over waste ground and round the gigantic tombstone tower blocks. The rest is stillness.

You can feel it, though, can’t you? The sense—the certainty—of being watched. Eyes, staring at you from broken windows, from behind that gutted car, from within that patch of head-high knotweed. Deep red eyes.

The estate looks unlived-in, abandoned, deserted.

Yet there are residents.

Everywhere.

Watching.

So let’s depart, if it unnerves you. We don’t have to stay. Let’s rise and travel, away from the dark, towards the light.

But not far. Not too far.

Because there’s activity, just outside the decrepit but still tenanted housing estate. A street or so beyond its boundaries, beyond the tall, wire mesh fence with its thorny crown of barbed wire...

...someone is running.

A boy.

In terror.

Running for his life.

CHAPTER ONE

Nikola, as he ran, wished many things.

He wished he was faster. He wished he had wings. Above all he wished he had never strayed beyond the fence. They had warned him against it. Everyone had. Countless times. The fence, they had told him, is there for a reason. Not to keep us in. To keep
them
out. So do not go over it. Stay this side. It is dangerous out there for our kind.

Nikola had listened. But he hadn’t
listened
. He’d seen little of London since arriving on the ferry from mainland Europe. In fact, once he’d been discovered stowed away in the back of the articulated goods lorry, all he’d seen was a detention centre, the inside of a van, then the housing estate. He was sixteen, and he did not care for being confined.

So tonight he had scaled the fence. All but vaulted over it, in fact. It was not that high, four metres or thereabouts. The barbed wire had scraped his hands but drawn no blood. An easy escape. Everyone was right: the fence was a deterrent to the rest of the world, not to those inside it.

Tentatively, curiously, Nikola had begun to explore.

In the immediate vicinity of the estate there was nothing much. Dead shops, hollow houses, pavements latticed with weeds. Nobody wanted to live here, so close to a Sunless Residential Area. Local Londoners had decanted themselves elsewhere.

Nikola startled a stray cat, which yowled and spat at him like a demented thing before scurrying away. A short while later he had to hide as a SHADE patrol car rolled by, sweeping its searchlight. Emerging from the basement stairwell down which he’d ducked, he carried on his voyage of discovery warily. He hugged the street shadows, of which there were plenty, as he moved out towards where the city was alive and humming.

He only wanted to take a look, that was all. Just to see what it was like, this English capital, this fabled metropolis that was now, by default, his home. He was certainly not on the prowl, hunting for victims. He could smell them from afar, and the smell was unbelievably exotic and intoxicating, but he had no intention of taking one of them for himself. He knew how insanely unwise that would be, how it could have dire repercussions for his whole community. A little curiosity, though, a little sightseeing—that was allowed, wasn’t it?

His attackers came out of nowhere. There was no warning. They were quick, and they were wrapped head to toe in thick clothing which masked their scent. This, more than anything, told Nikola that they were specialists. They’d been lying in ambush, hoping for precisely this opportunity, waiting for someone like him to happen along. Someone rash. Someone reckless.

There were four of them, all in motorcycle helmets with leather neck guards. Two were on rollerblades, leading the attack, hurtling unexpectedly around a corner, keeping low as they kick-thrusted themselves towards Nikola, arms pumping. He started to move, but they were on him in no time. A blow from a chainmail-gloved fist caught him on the side of the head and sent him reeling.

Nikola staggered to his feet, only to see the two rollerbladers arc around each other in the middle of the street and veer at him again. As he turned to run, he came face to face with the other two members of the gang. They stood with their legs apart, braced, each carrying an ash-wood stake.

Nikola felt fear then like he had never felt before. The stakes’ sharpened points were bright white in the darkness. The visors on the helmets of the men wielding them were implacably black and blank.

He sprang sideways. It was all he could do. He collided with a set of railings, which he hurdled clumsily. Within seconds he was scaling the face of a three-storey terraced house. He heard shouts behind him, below him. He scuttled up the brickwork as fast as he could, finding finger purchase in the narrowest of crevices. Height. If he gained height, surely he would be safe. These men could not follow him up onto the rooftops, could they?

But they could. While the two rollerbladers raced off in opposite directions, heading for the ends of the terrace to cut off Nikola’s escape that way, the other two men lodged their stakes in their belts and went in pursuit of him on foot, propelling themselves up the front of the house much as he had, if not quite so straightforwardly. Drainpipe, window ledge, door lintel, anything that projected outwards, however slightly, was of use to them. They were free runners. Vertical, horizontal, diagonal, it made no difference—it was just a surface to be negotiated, just a series of handholds and toeholds they could employ to get to where they were going.

Nikola reached the roof, moments ahead of his pursuers. He darted along the vertex, doing his best to keep his balance on the rounded tiles. The two men thundered after him. Nikola swung round a chimney stack. A second afterwards, so did they. Only a couple of houses lay between him and the end of the street. One of the rollerbladers was waiting for him there, at the corner. Nikola jinked right and slithered down the angle of the roof towards the houses’ backyards and the alley that furrowed in between. He leapt off the gutter, landing lightly on a wall below. Then he was in the alley, skirting overturned dustbins and upended shopping trolleys. The pair of free runners weren’t far behind.

The rollerblader intercepted him at the alley’s mouth. Nikola, however, sprinting with all his might, barged straight into the man, his shoulder low. The rollerblader was shunted backwards, went scooting across the street, and whacked into a lamppost, letting out a loud grunt of pain. He recovered and joined the two runners in chasing after Nikola; soon all three of them were at Nikola’s heels. Nikola pounded on, praying that he was going the right way. The tower blocks of the Residential Area loomed ahead, but the street he was on seemed to be curving away from them. He had no idea whether to take a right or a left at the next junction. If he could get to the Residential Area he would surely be okay. The men would not dare follow him over the fence. But he felt that he was in a maze, and any wrong turn he made would be the end of him. He was strong, stronger than any of the four men, but they outnumbered him, and they had weapons.

Then Nikola slammed face first into the ground. He didn’t know how it had happened. Had he tripped? He tried to get up but couldn’t. His legs were stuck fast together. Ropes entwined his ankles, attached to weighted steel spheres. A bolas. Frantically Nikola began to unpick the ropes, but the three attackers now had him surrounded. The other rollerblader appeared, skidding to a halt. Nikola looked up at them all, baring his teeth and hissing in rage. He swiped at the nearest of them, raking talons across the man’s leg, but his trousers were made of Kevlar or something. Some fabric that talons couldn’t penetrate.

Knees pinned Nikola’s wrists roughly to the road. He struggled with all his might, but the men bore down, holding him in place. A stake was brandished. Nikola writhed and spat. All he could think of, even as he lay there helpless and apparently doomed, was tearing open the throats of his four attackers and feasting on the delicious warmth within. His thirst, spurred by anger, was a feral thing. He despised them all. They were nothing but cattle. Prey. Given the chance, he would drain every last drop of life from them.