by Tim Lebbon
“Thank you,” Ruben said, his gratitude heartfelt.
“And I'm sorry for…” Rosemary said, but she trailed off.
“All the lies?” Sparky suggested.
Jack laughed. “We're used to them. Didn't you know it's now lies that run the world?”
As the sun settled red across the London rooftops, they heard the sound of a wolf's howl in the distance.
“Is that really what I think it is?” Sparky asked.
“I saw one once,” Rosemary said. She was sitting on the small sofa beside Ruben, eating tinned tomatoes from a large bowl. She'd fetched the food from a house further along the street, saying that keeping safe houses well stocked would take away the safety. “Hyde Park, about a year ago. That's a wild place now. The trees and bushes have gone mad, the grasses come up to your knees, and the first of the mass graves is there. Lots of it was dug up by wild dogs and other carrion things just after the authorities withdrew from London, so there are bones scattered everywhere. And I found somewhere where the bones had been arranged around a copse of trees like some sort of…symbol. I went closer to the bushes, and a wolf came out. It was beautiful. So powerful, so of nature, that I felt…insignificant. Here we are, humans being inhumane as we always have done, and the wolf survives.” She nodded, staring at the wall opposite and seeing into her past.
“Wolves placed the bones?” Sparky asked.
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not. I'm more inclined to think it was some sort of offering or worship of the pack.”
“By people?”
“By people. There are some…you haven't met or seen any yet, but Jack, when I take you down to your mother you'll see some of the people she looks after. Mad. Worse than mad…an unnatural insanity, because what happened to us is entirely man-made. And some people haven't been able to handle the talents they've developed.”
“And Mum heals them?”
“She looks after them. They can't be healed because there's nothing wrong with them. It's just that their bodies and minds can never accept the sudden change.”
Jenna stirred. Everyone froze. She smacked her lips, and frowned. “Did someone put a dead rat in my mouth while I was sleeping?”
“Hey, Jenna!” Sparky squealed, leaning down and kissing her hard on the lips.
“Oh, gross,” the girl said, but she smiled as she tried to push herself up on her elbows. Sparky helped, lifting her into a sitting position and placing a couple of cushions behind her back.
“Welcome to the land of the living!” Jack said without a trace of irony. “How do you feel?”
Jenna paled and her hands flew to her stomach. “I've been shot!”
“You're all better now,” Emily said.
“Better?”
Jack nodded at Rosemary and Ruben, both smiling as the girl came around.
“Rosemary,” she said. “Again. Thanks.”
“Ruben took the bullet out,” the woman said, nodding at the fat man beside her.
Sparky produced the bullet from his pocket. “Kept it for you. Maybe it'll make a nice pendant, or something.”
Jenna frowned at the bullet as he dropped it in her hand. She looked around, confused, and her gaze settled on Sparky. “You kissed me?”
“Er…sorry,” he said. “But if it makes you feel better, you're right. You tasted like dead rat.”
“Where's Lucy-Anne?” Their silence was no real answer, so she asked again.
“We don't know for sure,” Jack said. “She never came back.”
“Where are we now?”
Rosemary filled her in on their flight from the hotel, through the streets to this place. She left out the discussion they'd had, leaving that for Jack.
“We have to go and look for her,” Jenna said.
Jack shook his head. “It's too dangerous, and now it's getting dark—”
“She's our friend,” Jenna said, her voice weak but firm. “She's your girlfriend, Jack. We can't just abandon her because she ran away.”
“I've gone through all this,” Jack said, and the guilt came in yet again.
“She could be lying injured somewhere. Shot, like me.” She looked at Rosemary. “Do you know anyone that can find her?”
“Not now Gordon's dead,” she replied. “But that doesn't mean there isn't anyone else.”
“Then we all go and look, starting at—”
“It's impossible,” Rosemary said. “If she'd stayed in or around the hotel, the Choppers would have her by now. If she ran further, then we have no clue as which way she ran. And it's not as if we can walk through the streets calling her name.”
“So we just give up on her?”
Nobody answered for a while, until Emily went and sat beside Jenna. “I think she's gone to find her brother,” she said. “Alive somewhere, in the north. In fact, I'm sure of it.”
“How can you know?” Rosemary asked.
“Because that's what I'd have done.” Emily grinned at Jack, and he smiled at his little sister.
“Maybe,” Jenna said. “I hope so. It just feels so bad…so unfair. God, I need sleep.” She slid down until her head rested against Sparky's shoulder. He froze, delighted, and she grinned, pushing his shoulder around as if fluffing up a pillow before closing her eyes.
Jack smiled. He'd wanted to see these two getting it together for a while. Sparky would be a challenge for anyone, but perhaps being attacked by dogs, chased by government soldiers, blown up, and shot in the stomach was all Jenna had needed.
“We all need sleep,” Rosemary said. “It's been quite a day. There are two bedrooms upstairs. Ruben and I can sleep down here.”
The mention of beds and sleep got them all yawning. Jack and Emily went up first. They used bottled water and toothpaste from Emily's backpack to clean their teeth, then they chose the twin room and closed the door. Emily fell asleep almost before her head hit her pillow, and Jack sat up for a while, staring at his little sister. Tomorrow we're going to see Mum, he thought. He was excited and afraid in equal measures.
He lay down, but was not surprised when he could not sleep. A rush of memories came back to him, good times with his parents that he had long forgotten, and he wallowed in them, smiling at some and crying softly at others. He'd never really known nostalgia as a powerful emotion, but he did now. Before today he'd laboured under the belief that things could, by some miracle, go back to normal. Find his mother and father, escape the Toxic City, go home, live together again as they had been more than two years before. But now he acknowledged the firm reality that his family had changed forever. Nostalgia, as he experienced it there in a stranger's bed, could not allow for things ever being the same again.
He heard the stairs creaking and Sparky and Jenna talking in subdued tones. They went into the double bedroom next door, and for a while he heard their voices, Sparky's low and deep, hers soft and sad. There were tears as well, and then talking again, and after a period of silence he heard the first gentle moans of pleasure. Sleep came to Jack at last, giving privacy to his friends.
.………static……….
—Reception on every UK radio and TV channel,
6:00–9:00 a.m. GMT, July 29, 2019
Whatever had broken in Lucy-Anne's mind was trying to fix itself. She could feel it like an itch, a tickle so deep inside her that it could never be reached, and she shook her head now and then to try and dislodge it.
Her run slowed to a fast walk, and that was when she started to see people. The first was a face in a window, pale and sickly, and when she did a double-take the face was gone. There was no expression to read there at all, and she purposely got lost in a network of streets and alleys in case the person decided to follow.
North, ever northward, and between every blink she saw the faces of her parents from her nightmare.
I'm never going to sleep again, she thought. Though she was in this terrible place, it was the blank plane between sleeping and waking that horrified her now. There had been the dogs, though her memory of th
em had grown indistinct, and other memories were even vaguer, so distilled through whatever had snapped in her mind that she could not tell whether they were real events or dreams. Perhaps the distinction no longer mattered.
Lucy-Anne knew that something had snapped inside. Hers was a conscious madness, a waking breakdown, and when she dwelled on it her head hurt as though physically injured. North was all that mattered, because somewhere in that direction would be Andrew.
Someone walked into the street ahead of her. The figure paused, turned her way, froze.
Lucy-Anne ran between buildings, stumbling over a pile of refuse, ducking through gardens, rushing past a Tube station with a pile of skeletons wedged in its entrance gates. She hit a main road and quickly turned left, welcoming the shadows cast by the large buildings to her right. There she slowed, listening in case she had been followed but never willing to stop her forward momentum.
The first black shape passed behind her with the sound of a whisper in the night.
She spun around, skidding to a halt in the middle of the wide residential street. Her hands came up, but there was nothing there. She fumbled the knife from her pocket and held it out before her, but it felt pitiful against the world. There were tall four-storey buildings on one side. Behind her was an overgrown park at the centre of what must be a large square, and staggered along the road were cars. Many of them were still parked in an ordered row along the pavement. There were Porsches, BMWs, Mercedes, Bentleys, and the buildings stared at her with rich, dead eyes.
Something else fluttered behind her, and when she crouched and turned she saw a black shadow disappearing into the park. She frowned. Leaves rustled ten feet above the ground, and more shadows moved through the trees.
“Birds,” she whispered. And as if conjured by her voice, they made themselves known.
They burst from the undergrowth in the park, lifted from rooftops and erupted from several broken windows in the building facades, darkening the air and swooping towards her without making a single sound.
The scream came from Lucy-Anne as she ran, because she had seen these rooks before.
She sprinted straight into one of the expensive cars, flipped across its bonnet and smacked her head against cool metal. As her vision faded, she heard a long, high whistle, and instead of retreating it seemed to grow louder as consciousness left her.
She is alone, in a ruined landscape of forgotten buildings and hopelessness, but she is at peace with her own company. She is walking through the streets without fear or trepidation. Sometimes she whistles, sometimes she sings, but she is just as comfortable with only the sound of her footsteps on dusty pavements. She would claim contentment—there are things undone, and fate hangs on a knife-edge somewhere away from where she is now—but for the moment, she is as happy as she can be.
And then she becomes aware of the others. They are crowding around her, though unseen. They stalk her across rooftops and in tunnels beneath the ground, crashing through from one terraced building to the next, and they only have eyes and ears for her.
She starts to hurry, hoping to outrun them. But that will be impossible. Not because they are fast and she is slow, or because they know this place far better than her. But because she is making these pursuers with every breath, every thought, and every time she sleeps they multiply many times over.
She breaks the silence and screams, because she knows that eventually they will catch her. And kill her.
She came to, opening her eyes a crack and immediately becoming disorientated at the movement. The sky had turned black, and it was swimming in circles above her.
The rooks screeched, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, and she rolled over and covered her ears to shut out the sudden, terrifying sound. She screamed, but though she felt the cry vibrating in her throat, she could hear nothing.
Queasy, swaying, she stood and skirted around the parked car, heading for the gated front gardens. If she could only get into a house away from these things, then maybe…
The memory of this nightmare hit her and she turned, searching for the shadow she had seen. There was no one there. The rooks were descending closer, though, almost filling the sky as they shifted this way and that, waving and pulsing like a shoal of fish.
She crashed through a gate, ignoring the sting of nettles blooming out across the path as she ran to a front door. It was locked. She bashed on it and shouted, still unable to hear her own voice. But of course; everyone here was dead.
Almost everyone! she thought. Andrew isn't dead. He's alive, somewhere to the north of here he's alive, and I'm going to—
Something stroked across her cheek and she thrashed her arms, touching nothing. It was an intimate touch, almost a caress, and through the screeching of rooks and the alien flapping of their wings, Lucy-Anne heard a soft, melodious whistle.
She ran back down the path and through the gate, and now the rooks were buzzing her. She waved her arms and squinted her eyes almost shut; she touched nothing, and no claws went for her face. The smell of the birds was shocking, like a bundle of wet laundry left rolled up for far too long.
Across the pavement, and she ran into the same car again. Its rusted bumper scratched at her leg through her jeans. She staggered away and went to her knees. With tears welling in her eyes she screamed again, determined to show anger and rage rather than weakness.
More birds closed in, their claws raking through her hair and becoming entangled, wings flapping against her face, and she saw the orange flash of beaks dangerously close to her eyes.
This is my nightmare! And with that thought came a vague memory of what would come next. Lucy-Anne stood and closed her hand around a bird's ragged legs. And now I throw it, she thought, throwing the creature, and now the shadow.
The whistling changed pitch, and a ripple passed through the rooks. Their screeching died out as if they were concentrating on something else now, not just her. As the birds parted slightly before her, she tried to look past their chaotic wings, moving forward through them, keen to see whoever stood beyond.
The shape appeared. As the birds rose away from the square at last, roosting again on rooftops and in tree canopies, she saw the boy standing thirty yards along the street. He was short and slight, dressed in scruffy black clothing. His hair was a wild dark mop, and his stance was one of casual superiority. His smile too, when it came, communicated a level of confident control.
“They like you,” the boy called. “Which means I do as well. They're very choosy, my birds.”
“Your birds?” Lucy-Anne said.
The boy whistled one more time, a short sharp note, and the rooks fell completely silent.
“My birds.” He walked towards Lucy-Anne, and she felt herself unable to move. Not his whistling, she thought, that's not what's rooted me here. It's me. It's my nightmare of the birds, and…
…and now she wanted to see what came next.
“I dreamed about your birds,” she said.
The boy shrugged as he walked.
“You don't seem surprised.”
“Why should I?”
She tried to think of a reason, but none came. “I'm looking for my brother,” she said instead, and the boy's face grew more stern.
“You'll die,” he whispered. “In the streets, in the ruins, you'll die. If the Choppers don't get you, there are other things that will. North of here…wild places.”
“And you expect me to—”
“I can help you,” the boy said.
“What? Help me look for Andrew?”
He nodded. He paused several feet from Lucy-Anne, looking her up and down with a frankness she found unsettling. There was something birdlike about the way his dark eyes shifted, his hands clawed at the air, and his hair almost looked barbed.
“Why would you do that?” she asked.
“My name's Rook,” the boy said, “and I've met you in my dreams.”
The six terrorists who attacked London yesterday have been killed in a shoot-out with a milit
ary unit in the West End. Communications into and out of London are down. The biological agent used by the terrorists has not yet been identified, but the whole of the London basin is affected, and travel to and from the city is strictly prohibited. Please help the emergency services and the military to contain this disaster by following these simple guidelines: Anyone trying to enter or approach London will be arrested. Any aircraft attempting to overfly London will be shot down. There follows a list of numbers for concerned relatives…
—UK All-Channel Bulletin,
9:00 a.m. GMT onwards, July 29, 2019
At seventeen, Jack should have taken Sparky aside at the first opportunity to ask him how it was, was she hot, and to give him all the details. But that would have been in normal times, and these times were far from normal. There was a quietness to Sparky the next morning, and while Jenna helped Ruben and Rosemary prepare the best breakfast they could from old tinned foods, Jack sat beside his friend on the sofa.
“Okay, mate?”
“Yeah.”
“Hope today's a bit better than yesterday.”
“Well…” Sparky began, then he smiled. “Yesterday was mixed.”
“What's up?”
Sparky sighed. He scratched at his arm where his brother's name was tattooed, then leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “We've got no control over any of this, you know? We follow Rosemary from one mess to the next. We lose Lucy-Anne, and can't do anything to try and help or find her, and how bloody frustrating is that?”
“We all feel the same. But Rosemary's right, there's no way of even guessing where she is.” He drummed his fingers on his knee, tapped his foot. He'd dreamed about Lucy-Anne, but today he could not remember his dreams.
“And last night, Jack. My first time. Incredible. And…I should be telling Steve about it, you know? I should tell him, and he should laugh and be pleased, and it should be a secret from Mum and Dad because that's just the way it is with brothers…” He trailed off, blinking slowly.