by Tim Lebbon
Smiles were exchanged, and they went on their way.
To begin with, their path was simple. After descending the concrete steps they found themselves in a long tunnel that ran the length of the sewage treatment works, with shorter tunnels projecting off at right angles. The smell was subtle and subdued-much to Emily's obvious relief-and just before they reached the end, Rosemary opened a metal hatch in the wall. They took it in turns, squeezing through, shining their torches on the opening and into the tunnel revealed beyond. This one had a low ceiling that meant they all had to crouch down, and cockroaches scuttled away from their torch light.
This tunnel ended with a blank wall, but an opening had been smashed through, revealing an uneven, sloping route that led deeper. They followed Rosemary, emerging into a large, brick-lined chamber that seemed much older that the treatment plant built just beside it. It was the converging point of four large sewage pipes. This place did stink, even though none of the pipes seemed to be carrying very much. One of them trickled a small, steady flow of dirty water into the chamber, but the other three appeared dry.
“Oh, that's pleasant,” Sparky said. “Reminds me of Lucy-Anne's armpits.”
Lucy-Anne did not reply. Sparky looked at her and she raised an eyebrow, and that was enough to make him smile.
“Rats everywhere,” Jenna said. They did not seem to bother her, but Emily remained close to Jack, even while she trained her torch around the walls and filmed what it revealed.
“You'll see a lot more,” Rosemary. “But there's always a balance. Lots of wild cats in London now, and they keep the rat population down.”
She headed off, confidently aiming for one of the large sewage pipes.
“We walk through there?” Lucy-Anne asked. She hated this; she had never been afraid before. She could not prevent herself from shaking, and she'd seen the way Jack had been looking at her: concerned and confused.
“Not for long.”
The pipe swept this way and that, branching left and right, but Rosemary did not hesitate at all. She took one branch that narrowed considerably, but they were happier to bend almost double, accepting the burning pain in their knees and back, rather than crawl. There was dried stuff here, sewage and dead rats and other things they could not so easily identify.
And at last Lucy-Anne found something to cling onto and calm her, and that was the memory of her family. Their smiles and voices drove away the threat of forgotten nightmares. Whatever happened in the near future, she was determined of one thing: she would discover the truth.
That's what drove them all, she was sure. Not the sense of injustice, and the knowledge that the government had lied to them day in, day out, since Doomsday. It was family that made them able to do this. Jack's and Emily's parents, and Sparky's brother. Even Jenna, who had lost no one on Doomsday, was coming here to avenge what they had done to her father since then.
She felt a momentary flush of hope and determination, and pride in her friends. If they weren't half-crawling through a pipe coated with dried shit and dead rats, she'd have hugged them all.
She could imagine Sparky's reaction to that.
Lucy-Anne giggled. She tried to stop, but couldn't. Her torch light shook as she laughed, and they all paused because they thought something was wrong.
“No!” she said, shaking her head even though none of them could see much down here. “No, it's okay, its…” Her laughter turned manic.
“Gas down here sometimes,” Rosemary said, her voice low with concern.
“Nobody strike a match,” Sparky said, and that only made Lucy-Anne laugh louder.
The sewers ended in another large chamber, and in this one they found a dead body.
It was a woman, sitting back against the wall, long hair tangled across her face and down one side of her head. She wore jeans and a heavy ski jacket, and rats had eaten her eyes.
That's what Jack noticed first, and what he could not help looking at again and again. He jerked his torch back at her face, knowing he should not, knowing that he should be turning the other way and leading Emily across the chamber and into whichever sewer they had to walk along next…and rats had eaten her eyes!
“Oh,” Lucy-Anne said, backing away against the wall of the chamber. But she kept her eyes open.
“Rosemary-” Jack began, but she cut in.
“Not when I came through!” she said. “She wasn't here when I came through.”
“You know her?” Jenna asked.
Rosemary went closer, stepping carefully across the lower part of the chamber, dodging still-wet pools of raw sewage.
“Jack…” Emily said. She lowered the camera. “I don't think I want to film this.”
Jenna was with them then, holding Emily's hand and turning around so that they both faced away from the body.
“No,” Rosemary said. She had lifted the woman's hair from her face and stepped aside, allowing torchlight to fall there. “I don't know her.”
“Then what the hell is she doing down here?” Sparky said. “You said you're the only one who knew this route, you said that Philippe bloke told you the way, and-”
“Lots of Irregulars come down below London,” Rosemary said. She turned her back on the body, hiding it from view. “To escape, to hide. There are some that can't handle what's happened to them, and…” She shrugged.
“She killed herself?” Jack asked.
“Maybe.” Rosemary returned to them, leaving the dead woman behind. “Or maybe she was dying anyway, and she wanted to do it alone.”
“We're still under the Exclusion Zone, right?” Jenna asked.
Rosemary thought about that for a while, then nodded. “Just. But soon, we enter an old Tube station that has been abandoned for years, walk along the line, and then we're there.”
“So there'll be others?” Jack asked. “More people below ground?”
“There are plenty. But I doubt we'll see them. As I said, most of them come down here to be alone.”
There was a heavy torch by the dead woman's left hand, and to her right an empty whiskey bottle lay on its side, a plastic bowl upended beside that. Last meal and drink.
“I wonder what she could do,” Rosemary mused.
“That's someone's mother,” Jenna said, angry. “Someone's sister.”
“We should go,” Jack said. “I don't want to stay down here anymore. Rosemary, I just want to get there and see the sun again. How far?”
“An hour.”
“An hour.” Lucy-Anne was staring at the woman, torch playing unwaveringly on her mutilated face.
“Lucy-Anne,” Jack said. “Come on.” He stepped before her, blocking her view and wanting so much to reach out and hold her. But the distance was still there, and he didn't think he had arms long enough.
The sewer ended in a place of chaos. The pipe had ruptured and smashed, and the solid ground around it had apparently been washed away by some vast underground flood. The void left behind looked precarious and in danger of collapse at any moment. Roots hung dead and shrivelled from the ceiling, and the fractured ends of underground pipes and ducting protruded like broken bones. Rosemary led them across, stepping around and over rocks and cracks in the ground, towards a small crawlspace at the other side.
“This is narrow,” she said, facing the group of friends. “But not very long. And on the other side, there's the abandoned Tube station.”
“Are we under London yet?” Jenna asked.
“Almost,” Rosemary said. She looked up at the roof and the others shone their torches there, as though they could see all the way through. “Very close now. This is part of what they did to the Exclusion Zone, part of the damage.” She shook her head, and just before she turned away, Jack thought he saw tears.
She was right, the crawlspace was very narrow. But they pulled their way through, lured by the promise of an easy walk and the end of the beginning of their quest.
Jack and the others had seen a few grainy images of London's Tube network since Doomsda
y, smuggled out with other pictures on memory cards tied to pigeons’ legs or dogs’ collars. They usually showed stations they were familiar with, only a little run down; litter on the platform, dust thick on the tiles, the spaces illuminated by heavy torches or small fires. But the place they found when they emerged from the crack in the earth was very different.
“Where the hell are we?” Sparky asked.
Jenna laughed. “I think it must be Christmas!”
The meagre light from their torches reflected from dozens of mirrors arrayed along the platform and down on the line, glitter balls hanging from the ceiling and smashed glass swept in drifts against the platform wall to their left, flooding the station with light. Swathes of bunting zig-zagged back and forth just above head height for the full length of the platform. In many places, tiles had fallen or been smashed from the wall, but the blank gaps left behind had been painted with luminous green, yellow, or blue paint. Halfway along the platform, there was even a crazy tree made from heavy wire, pinned with hundreds of small passport-sized photographs. Jack went to the tree and saw that each photo was of a different person. Some smiled, some frowned, some stuck out their tongues.
But among this colour and the enthusiastic splash of light, there was no sign of recent human habitation. Plenty of rats, true. And Jack saw footprints-a dog's? A wolf's? — which he was sure were trodden in dried blood.
“This station's been out of use for almost twenty years,” Rosemary said. “Really was the end of the line! So those who lived underground-and there's always been a lot of them-adopted it as their own. Decorated it, slept here, used it as a retreat from above. The stairs are blocked off, and I suppose there must have been other ways up and down, but they've long gone.”
“Where are they now?” Jack asked. “If they were…you know…moved from society anyway, how come they're not still here?”
“Doomsday touched everyone,” Rosemary said, “and Evolve seeped everywhere. There are places in London that are graves. Huge graves. You'll see one soon, but…there's no way I can really prepare you for it.” She looked around the group, and her expression truly startled Jack for the first time. She was an old woman, with the eyes of someone who had known far too much sadness, but she looked at them as though she were sorry for them all.
“It's sad,” Lucy-Anne said.
“’Course it is,” Sparky said. “Life's sad, and shit.”
“No, no,” Jack's girlfriend said. “This place. Even those who wanted nothing to do with the outside world were affected. Don't you see?”
“I see,” Jack said, and he meant it. Lucy-Anne looked at him, and he felt included in her thoughts for the first time since they'd left Camp Truth.
“Well, I want to leave,” said Emily. She had filmed the station, but the red light on her camera was no longer blinking. “Feels weird down here. Haunted.”
None of them disputed her choice of words.
They walked along the old underground line, constantly aware of the flicker of movement just beyond the influence of their artificial light; rats, moving away, but not too fast. Jack guessed they'd had a fine feeding season a couple of years before, and maybe these descendants of those fattened things remembered the taste of human meat.
When they reached the next station it was grim and drab, and half of a train carriage protruded from the tunnel at its far end. The station name had been torn from the wall and smashed from the tiles, as though identity had no place in this new world.
“From here, we go up,” Rosemary said.
“About bloody time,” Sparky said.
None of them stopped walking, because they were all ready to see sunlight once more. But the mood between them was tense…and excited.
Here was the Toxic City.
Here was London.
Chapter Eight
Fertile Ground
There will be a statement from the prime minister on all TV and radio channels at 8:00 p.m.
— Government Statement, all-channel broadcast, 7:08 p.m. GMT, July 28, 2019
Jack felt the heat of the setting sun before he saw it. Soon it would be dusk, but the afternoon warmth felt very good as they climbed up from the Underground and stood at the crossroads of two London streets.
At first glance it could have been a quiet Sunday morning. Cars were parked along the roadside, if a little haphazardly in places, and a few shops had their front doors propped open. Pigeons cooed quietly on window sills. Litter whispered along the street, blown by a gentle breeze. But there was no life here, no breath, no heartbeat. This was obviously a dead place, and with that realisation came the facility to see evidence of that demise.
One of the propped-open doors rested against a skeleton in a dark blue uniform. Several shops’ windows were smashed. Along the street, almost hidden behind an incongruous growth of brambles and rose bushes, a burnt-out pub poked charred rafters at the sky.
“It looks…” Lucy-Anne began. Jack could see her eyes flitting across the scene, going from windows to doors, cars to side-streets. Is she looking already? he thought, but he did not have to ask. Although he knew the size of London, he felt closer to his mother and father than he had in a long time.
“We have to be careful,” Rosemary said, urging them back into the shadow of the Tube station entrance. “Choppers patrol the streets around this time of day. They don't like the dark, but they roam the dusk, when Irregulars are looking for somewhere to spend the night.”
“You don't have somewhere permanent to live?” Jenna asked.
“Some do,” Rosemary said. “But not many. Far too dangerous.”
She looked terrified, and Jack could not detect a shred of pleasure in her at being back in London. Rather than coming home, Rosemary seemed to have brought herself back to danger.
“So where do we spend the night?” Sparky asked. “I've had enough of tunnels and rats.”
“There's somewhere I know,” Rosemary replied. “North, across the Barrens.”
“Barrens?” Jack asked.
“The grave I told you about,” the woman said. “You'll see. Not far from here. You'll see.” She looked around the group, nodded, and then stepped out onto the pavement.
They followed her in line, Emily holding the camera before her and sweeping it slowly around. The station stood on one corner of a crossroads, and Rosemary led them around the side of the building, past peeling posters advertising movies and stage shows two years and many lifetimes old.
“Will we see lots of people?” Emily asked.
“Not around here,” Rosemary said. “Not this close.”
“Close to the Barrens?” Jack asked. But Rosemary only glanced back at him with haunted eyes.
Around the next corner they turned left into a residential street. There were three cars and a bus involved in a pile-up at the junction, one car having been forced from the road and through the front wall of a house. The blackened scars of an old fire blistered one flank of the bus, but it was impossible to tell whether this was a result of the accident, or something that had happened afterwards.
Jack caught his breath and glanced at Emily. I never really considered, he thought. All the bodies we might see, all the dead. But Sparky was already running for the bus, raising his hand and whistling in a grim parody of a late commuter.
Lucy-Anne chuckled.
The boy forced his way through the half-open door and looked around, only his silhouette visible against the dust-streaked windows. He jumped off again quickly. “No one home!” he shouted. “But someone's been shopping in Harrods.”
“Anything worth having?” Jenna asked.
Sparky stood before them, blinking, the ruin of the vehicles behind him. “It's not my stuff to look at,” he said.
“I know someone who went to Harrods soon after Doomsday,” Rosemary said. “He came out with a diamond necklace and a hand-sized horse carved from soap. Three days later he threw the necklace away and started washing.”
She was serious, but for some reason Lu
cy-Anne found what she said unbearably amusing. She started giggled, then laughing, bending over with hands on her knees and roaring at the pavement.
“Quiet!” Rosemary said, but if Lucy-Anne heard, she did not care. The laughter continued, and Jack could not find it in himself to try and stop her. She'd been acting differently ever since the dog attack, and it felt good to see her like this. He tried to shove the fact that she might be losing it to one side.
“Lucy-Anne!” Rosemary said, angry at first, but quickly growing calmer. The woman touched the girl's back, smoothing softly as the laughter changed quickly into tears. “We need to be quiet. Really, we do. London is a dangerous place now, dear. There's more than just people that will do us harm.”
Lucy-Anne stood and moved away from Rosemary, wiping her eyes, looking around at the group then away again. She's still messed up, Jack realised. That was no release for her at all. She needs…something.
Rosemary looked at the sky to the west, where oranges and reds bled across rooftops. “We should go,” she said. “I don't like crossing the Barrens in the dark.”
“Why?” Jenna asked.
“They're haunted.”
Jack had never believed in ghosts, but her words struck a chill in his heart. Emily clasped his hand and he squeezed back.
They followed Rosemary along the street, past the crashed cars and bus and towards the junction at the far end. It felt strange walking past so many silent houses, and Jack thought this was what Rosemary meant by being haunted. She'd said that the Barrens was a grave, but wasn't the whole of London now one big tomb? He thought of what the houses to his left and right contained, how many of the inhabitants had probably died at home and still sat or lay there now, staring at the sunset-streaked windows with skullish eyes. It was chilling, and the silence made it doubly so. Any place so used to noise and bluster became haunted when it was silent and still. He remembered when his father had remained behind at work one evening to finish a report, and the strange look in his eyes when he came home. When Jack had asked what was wrong, he'd simply said, I'm used to the building being full.