by Tim Lebbon
“After that?” Lucy-Anne asked.
“Down again. A dried-up stream that leads to an old sewage treatment works. A tunnel. Then under the Exclusion Zone, and we'll be in London.”
“We're that close?” Sparky said.
Rosemary nodded at the clematis-covered wall. “It looks like a clear day. Take a look.”
Sparky glanced at Jack, frowning, but Emily had been listening and she was there before all of them. She snuggled herself through the trailing clematis plant, pushing through with the camera, and then they all heard her intake of breath. Jack did not realise just how much she had been nattering commentary at the camera until she stopped.
“Emily?” he said.
“It's all gone.” Her voice was very small, and very vulnerable.
Sparky and Lucy-Anne pulled aside the hanging plants, and the four of them pushed their way through, standing beside Emily by one of the empty window openings.
They had all heard many stories of the Exclusion Zone, read plenty of eyewitness accounts of what it looked like, and over the past two years there had been at least a dozen drops of photographs of this place close to Camp Truth. But some things simply had to be seen.
Jack could barely believe that such talent for destruction could exist in humankind.
There were buildings around the church-houses, shops, and the blocky outline of an old school. They all seemed to be abandoned. Beyond them, to the east, was a place where similar buildings had once stood. Now, there was only ruin. No wall had been left standing, and the piles of rubble, some higher than Jack's head, disappeared into the distance. They reminded him of scenes he'd seen of the Sahara, only these dunes were of brick, slate, and stone, rather than sand. Many areas had been scoured by fire, scars on the grey landscape that had reduced the rubble to dull black boils. A few tree stumps were visible, but even these had been bulldozed down or destroyed in explosions.
Here was the Exclusion Zone, created by the Choppers to protect the rest of Britain from what had happened in London. Here was the terrible evidence of the government's scorched earth policy, an attempt to create an unbreachable cordon across which no one could go, and nothing could come. Here was destruction, and beyond, perhaps two miles distant, Jack could see a line of buildings standing in the hazy summer heat.
There was London. There was the Toxic City. And somewhere beyond the boundary of those buildings-maybe even in one of those he was looking at right now-his mother, and perhaps his father.
“We're so bloody close,” Sparky said.
“What have they done?” Lucy-Anne whispered, her voice broken, face wet with tears. Jack touched her, and she fell shivering into his embrace. He felt the wetness of her tears against his shoulder, and his own eyes blurred.
“There's no going back now,” Jenna said.
“This sight is something many of you may have imagined, but never seen,” Emily said, slowly panning the camera across the staggering ruins. “But viewers, beyond this image is a lie about to be uncovered. Prepare yourselves. Soon, you will witness the truth of the Toxic City.”
Chapter Seven
The End of Beauty
The culprits for these cowardly acts are still at large. All Londoners should remain at home and await further instructions. Do not attempt to flee the city. Do not attempt travel of any kind. Further attacks are expected. The prime minister will be giving a live statement on all TV and radio channels at 7:00 p.m.
— Government Statement, all-channel broadcast, 6:15 p.m. GMT, July 28, 2019
They lowered the clematis back across the window and ate the food they had brought. The church was still a beautiful place, but the air was marred by the knowledge of what lay beyond. Once they left here, Jack suspected they would be leaving that beauty behind.
The robin returned to watch them eat. Sparky threw a bread crust its way, but it hopped back and ignored the offered food. Jenna crumbled the crust from a jam tart and sprinkled it across the undergrowth. The bird watched her, head jerking this way and that as though expecting ambush at any minute.
Emily crawled forward with the crusts from her own sandwich. She broke them into many pieces, then held out her hand as far as she could stretch.
“Not a chance,” Lucy-Anne said, but she grew still as they watched the little bird. It hopped from the wisteria and came close, eyeing them all suspiciously, but was apparently unconcerned at Emily's presence.
Jack saw that she held the camera in her other hand, the lens trained on her hand offering the crumbs.
The bird hopped closer, hesitated, then jumped into Emily's palm.
Jack heard her intake of breath. He wished he could see her face.
Eventually the bird hopped away, and their small group was taken with a flutter of excitement. They finished their food and passed a water bottle around, all of them aware that every mouthful and swallow brought them closer to leaving this place.
“I never liked London,” Sparky said. “Shit-hole. Bloody place made my brother what he was.” He toyed with a long leafy plant stem, winding it around his finger. “What he is.”
Jack was surprised. Sparky rarely talked about Stephen, and certainly not to an audience. Sometimes, after a few ciders, the two of them would discuss him for a while, but it always ended up with Sparky getting angry, his voice turning hard and exuding violence. Jack had always thought that talking, really talking, was just what he needed.
“How?” Jenna asked, and Jack could have kissed her.
“Went there to join a band,” Sparky said. “Mum and Dad didn't want him to go, said he should stay on in school and go to university. More they said that, the more determined he became.” He laughed. “Band was called Deep Shit. Steve liked that, said that when they made it big he could always answer people asking what he did by saying, ‘I'm in Deep Shit.’ Well, he soon was.” He drifted off, concentrating far too hard on the plant stem. Jack noticed his friend's face flushing.
“What sort of band was it?” Jenna asked.
“Punk. Real punk, not the pop sort that was popular a few years back. Music with bollocks. But the singer, Charlie, was a waster. He wasn't really there for the music, not like Steve. He thought they'd make it big, make loads of money, do what they want. Thing is, he spent it before they made it. Booze and drugs, and girls attracted by the glamour of it all.” Sparky shook his head, as though amazed for the first time at what had happened to his brother.
“It's strange what some people see as glamorous,” Rosemary said. Sparky glanced up, and for a moment Jack thought he was going to shout her down. But then he nodded.
“Yeah. Steve never did, not really. But being aware of how crap all that stuff was…it didn't help him. Mum and Dad blame him completely, but I blame them. Never let him do anything he wanted. Kept him at home, trying to protect him they said, because they had this thing about how big and nasty the world was. They knew it was, ‘cos they saw it all on telly, read it in the papers. Huh.”
They waited quietly, letting Sparky take his time. Even Emily was silent, leaning against Jack as if for protection from where this story was going.
“So he rebelled,” Sparky continued. “What a bloody cliche, eh? He took the drugs to get back at Mum and Dad. Least, that's what I think. They just blamed him, disowned him, never took his calls. And he stayed there in London when the band fell apart before it had really begun, and…” He started crying.
“I think we all know the story from there,” Rosemary said after a while, and Jack winced and closed his eyes, because now surely Sparky's fury would fly.
But sometimes grief can overcome fury, and smother it. “That's just it,” Sparky said, his voice sad and lost. “None of us knows, not really. We know what happened to London. But something like that…it's not one story, it's a million. That's why I want to find him. Need to find him. To hear his side of the story.” He lowered his head again and wiped at his eyes, unashamed in his sadness.
After a minute or two Jenna stood and went to him. Sh
e sat by his side, not touching him, silent, but Jack could see that her simply being there meant the world.
Jack and Emily went first. The churchyard was even more overgrown than the ruined building itself, and it was impossible to hurry without risking a fall. There were still gravestones showing their humped grey shoulders above the undergrowth, and hidden beneath would be tomb slabs and other promises of broken bones. But the lushness also provided good cover, and they crawled their way towards the church's boundary.
Over the road, into the ditch, right, and then left. It sounded so easy. But Rosemary's directions could not convey distance, nor the fact that there were great swathes of vicious stinging nettles all across the churchyard.
They moved slowly, carefully, doing their best to avoid the nettles and always listening for noises that may warn of danger. In the distance Jack could hear motors, so faint that there was no way of telling whether or not they were approaching. Closer, there was only the singing of birds, and the soft, secret whispers of plants moving in a warm summer breeze.
When they reached the edge of the churchyard, they followed the boundary wall until they found a grilled gate. The hinges looked rusted, but there was no lock or chain, and Rosemary had told him that she'd come this way.
“Ready?” Jack asked.
Emily nodded, rubbing at a rash of stings across one forearm. “Need some dock leaves.”
Jack smiled. “Mum always told us that, didn't she?” Emily tried to smile back.
Jack leaned against the gate and looked back along the road. Nothing. Then he turned and looked toward the Exclusion Zone. He could see where the road finished in a pile of rubble, the tarmac crushed and cracked by whatever heavy vehicle had been used to demolish so many buildings. Again, nothing. They seemed to be completely alone.
The Exclusion Zone spooked him. So many people had lived there, and now they were gone, along with all trace of their existence. A place that had once been so full of life was now barren and sterile. The breeze lifted drifts of dust-clouds across the broken landscape, and he could imagine they were something else.
“I'll go first,” Jack whispered. “If you hear or see anything wrong, go straight back to the church.”
“And leave you?” Emily's eyes went wide, the mere thought of being parted from her brother patently terrifying.
Jack touched her shoulder and squeezed. “Don't worry,” he said. He could think of nothing else to say. “I'll go first.” This was so dangerous that if he was seen, there would be no easy way out for any of them.
Cameras? he thought. Microphones, satellite surveillance, dogs? They wouldn't leave the Exclusion Zone unwatched or unprotected, surely? But Rosemary had come this way, and that was all he could hold on to.
He gave Emily a quick kiss on the cheek, pulled the gate open and ran. His feet kicked up dust from the road, grinding in the grit on its surface. It was only two lanes wide, but it seemed to take forever to reach the other side and fall into the ditch.
The ditch was filled with nettles as well. Jack gasped as they touched him across one arm and beneath his chin, raising sore welts that would take hours to fade away. He squatted, turned, and looked back at the church. Nobody shouted, nobody came, no vehicles sprang to life. He could almost believe that he had made it.
Cautiously, he lifted his head above the edge of the ditch and looked across at the gate. Emily was there, staring right back at him. He gave a thumbs-up and she smiled, returning the gesture. Then she slipped through the gate and followed his route across the road.
“Careful!” he whispered as she dropped in beside him. “More nettles!”
“I'm okay.” She had her camera out again, Jack noticed, and she poked it over the ditch to get a shot of the church.
“Come on, the others will follow soon. We need to get back under cover.”
“I like feeling the sun.”
“Me too,” Jack said. But after only three or four hours underground, up here he felt so exposed.
They moved slowly along the ditch bottom, doing their best to dodge the worst of the nettles, stomping on those they could not bypass. When a telegraph pole cast its shadow across the ditch Jack looked up, expecting to see a camera fixed to its side and swivelling to follow their progress. But all it held were two limp cables, long since cut.
The ditch branched left and they went that way, following Rosemary's directions. A shopping trolley blocked their path, and Jack felt a weird rush of nostalgia for something so innocuous. Years ago, before Doomsday, some kids had probably swiped this trolley and used it for a bit of fun: rides along the road; jumping hastily erected timber ramps. Then they'd dumped it, and it had been here ever since, rusting into the landscape as the world changed around it. He wondered where those kids were now, and whether they still had fun.
He climbed around the trolley and helped Emily, then they went on until the ditch ended with a narrow culvert, much too small for them to enter. Jack paused, frowning, and looked back the way they had come.
“We came the right way,” he said. “I'm sure.”
“Here,” Emily said. “Is this what she meant?” She was looking over the top of the culvert, filming across ground level at whatever lay beyond. Jack stood beside her.
The large area before them held several ground-tanks, all of them covered with heavy metal covers. Pipes and frames hung over them, many bent and twisted by some unknown force, and rust stained much of the metal.
“Sewage treatment plant,” Jack said.
“Oh, great. That's going to smell just lovely.” Emily panned the camera around and lowered it, dropping back down to sit in the ditch.
“It's dry down here,” Jack said, joining her. “And I doubt this has been treating anything for a couple of years.”
Emily looked up sharply, lifting a finger to her lips.
Jack looked back along the ditch, and moments later he saw the shapes coming towards them. Sparky first, bent over so that he could not be seen above ground level. Jenna followed him, and behind her came Rosemary and Lucy-Anne, Jack's girlfriend keeping close to the older woman.
“I don't think there's anyone around,” Sparky said when he reached them. “If we were seen, they'd have come for us by now.”
Jack could not help recalling some of the stories from the drops close to Camp Truth-kidnappings, disappearances, executions. And he could see in Jenna's haunted eyes that she was thinking the same. Her father had been taken, and returned, but now he was a different man. A lesser man. Capture would mean the end for all of them, whether that end was death or something else.
“You need to lead us from here,” he said to Rosemary.
“It's not far,” she said, gasping for breath. “We'll be out of the sun again in a minute.”
“And next time we see it we'll be in the Toxic City,” Lucy-Anne said. Her eyes were hard, and when she glanced at Jack he sensed a shocking distance already growing between them.
“We still like to call it London,” Rosemary said. “It hasn't been toxic for a long time.”
Lucy-Anne nodded, still looking at Jack. What? he wanted to say. What is it? But he had never really understood her.
Sparky stood, looked around for a long time, then nodded. Rosemary climbed from the ditch and hurried across an area of long grass until she stood on concrete paving between metal tank covers. The others followed.
Beside the closest tank cover, there was a small hatch in the ground. The cover was metal as well, but light. Rosemary took a hooked metal manhole key from her pocket, curved it into a recessed ring in the cover and swung it upward. As she started down the small concrete staircase revealed beneath, she glanced up at the others. Her face softened, and for the first time Jack wondered whether she was a mother, and if so, where her husband and children were right now. He felt terrible for not asking, but now it seemed too late.
“It's not far now,” Rosemary said.
“Back down into the dark again,” Lucy-Anne said. There was something in her voice
Jack had never heard before. He thought maybe it was fear.
“Yes, dear, but not for long. We're almost there.”
“If there's anything else you need to warn us about-” Jack began.
“The dogs are dead,” Rosemary said. “You killed them, together. I can't pretend the city isn't dangerous, but then you all know that, don't you?”
Emily separated from the small group and trained her camera on them. “The final descent before we rise into the Toxic City,” she said. “And then we'll go to find who we came for.” Even keeping the camera before her eye could not hide the tear that streaked her cheek.
“I'm not afraid,” Lucy-Anne said. But as she followed Rosemary down, every jerky, determined movement she made was testament to her lie.
Lucy-Anne was afraid of her nightmares.
The dogs from her dream had come and bitten her, and after everyone had set off from the ruined church, and it was only her and Rosemary left, she'd asked the old woman how close she had been to death. Its teeth nipped your spine, Rosemary had said, but I touched it and made it better.
How close? Lucy-Anne had demanded.
Very, Rosemary had said, before rushing across the road into the ditch.
Now, descending back into the darkness once again, Lucy-Anne waited for other nightmares to make themselves known. She refused to believe it had been coincidence, because after what she'd been through that would be too cruel.
But if not coincidence…what?
Have I had nightmares about falling? she wondered, and her feet reached the foot of the ladder. Rats carrying plague? But there were no vermin that she could see down here. My friends, killing me? She looked around at the others, and she suddenly wanted to fold up and cry out at the betrayal her imagination was capable of.
“Nearly there, everyone!” she said, amazing even herself with her upbeat voice. “We've been waiting for so long, and now we're almost there!”