The Future of London: (L-2011, Mr Apocalypse, Ghosts of London)

by Mark Gillespie

  “Everything,” Barboza said. “The whole neighbourhood is off. They can’t risk any more little revelations slipping out. And they can’t risk letting us loose in London knowing what we know. You’re a very dangerous person Walker. And so am I.”

  Walker sighed. “What a fucking day,” he said.

  “Please,” Barboza asked. “Enough of this bullshit. We’ve stayed here too long as it is.”

  But Walker just shrugged his shoulders. “Fuck them. Them. Whoever them are. The people in the shadows who control everything – fuck them. Let them come and do what they want. If they enjoy watching me take a piss so much then I’ll give them a live performance.”

  Barboza grabbed his arm. Once again, it felt like a steel vice had clamped its jaws around him.

  “Stop it,” she said. ““There won’t be any negotiation with these people Walker. They’re not going to send middle-aged men dressed in well-tailored suits and ties. They’re not going to offer you a nice retirement package in the Costa del Sol for keeping your mouth shut. It’s the fucking army – they’re sending the troops here to kill us. We know too much. You understand?”

  With that, Barboza turned and hurried out of the room. Walker heard her in the kitchen, slamming doors open and shut and piling things onto the counter. He heard heavy footsteps on the linoleum floor. Then she went upstairs. More footsteps. A few minutes later she came downstairs, storming back into the living room. She was holding two rucksacks in each hand by the strap. Walker recognised his dad’s old sports bag. Archie Walker had once used it for squash games with his workmates in Edinburgh.

  “It’s as much as we can carry,” she said. “Food, water, toothbrush, change of clothes – enough to get us started. Anything else you want?”

  Walker looked at his father’s sports bag. In that moment, everything became clear – as clear as it had been since the first day of September 2011 when civilisation had forsaken London in a blur of violence. He saw the path ahead. It opened up like the Biblical Red Sea before his eyes. The future. He knew exactly what he had to do. This was it. He had a purpose beyond Stanmore Road.

  “Kill him,” he said.

  Barboza screwed up her face. “What?” she said.

  But they were interrupted by a noise outside. Faint at first, and yet growing louder at an alarming speed. Growling engines. It was the sound of heavy wheels rolling across the hot concrete of Stanmore Road.

  Barboza’s face turned chalk white. She ran towards the window, pulled the curtains back and looked out.

  “Oh fuck!” she yelled.

  She ducked down underneath the window. “They’re here! Oh shit, shit, shit. Jesus Christ, we’re screwed.”

  Walker walked slowly towards the window. He pulled back the curtains, making little effort to conceal himself from the view of those outside. An army helicopter was setting down in the middle of the street. He recognised the shape – it looked like a Black Hawk, rugged, long and low-set, with four blades spinning in a blur. Looking to the left, he saw a large AFV making its way along Stanmore Road, crawling as if it had all the time in the world. The vehicle pulled up in the middle of the street, rolling to a gradual stop.

  The hatch opened.

  “Get down.” Barboza hissed at him.

  Walker didn’t move. He continued to look outside as a squad of troops leapt out of the AFV, one after the other in quick succession. He watched as they took position at the outskirts of the garden, pointing their rifles towards the house. Towards him. At the same time, another AFV pulled up on the street, close behind the first.

  Walker ducked down beneath the window at last. As he did so, Barboza squeezed beside him. He heard her breathing, fast and erratic, like she was having some kind of fit.

  “Fucking hell!” Barboza said.

  Walker looked at her. He knew so little about the woman sitting next to him – the real woman and not the character she’d been playing since they met.

  “Do you have a family out there?” he said. “Husband, kids, parents…?”

  Barboza wiped a tear from her eye.

  “My parents,” she said. “I’ve got a mum and dad in Leeds. I’m never going to see them again, am I? They won’t know what’s happened to me. Oh God what have I done?”

  “I’m sorry,” Walker said. It was all he could think to say.

  They sat with their backs against the living room wall. They could hear the sound of the helicopter’s engine outside. It was so loud that that Walker thought they’d landed the damn thing on the roof of his house. Any second now, he thought. An entire battalion of troopers would come crashing through the ceiling, trained assassins clinging to ropes with one hand, assault rifles outstretched in the other.

  Bang. The end.

  Walker heard the sound of voices on the street – fluid orders and commands being given in muted tones. This was an organised assassination. These were soldiers with years of instilled discipline behind them. What was the point in fighting back?

  He heard footsteps creeping up the path.

  Walker and Barboza sat quietly beneath the window. Nobody spoke. There was nothing else to say, nothing else to do but wait for it – to breathe in the last of that god-awful summer heat, to say their silent farewell to the world.

  From somewhere in the garden, hushed voices and the crackle of a radio.

  Walker closed his eyes. He wondered if he would see his parents soon.

  Chapter 25

  He could hear the soldiers breathing.

  “On my count,” a gruff voice said behind the front door. “On three.”

  Walker heard the crunch of footsteps wading through the long grass in the garden at the back of the house.

  “They’ve gone around the back,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Barboza whispered. Her eyes were closed. But she did something that surprised him – she reached over and took his hand in hers.

  Walker squeezed her hand gently. It was warm and damp. He had long since made peace with the fact that he was probably going to die alone in his bed in London. At least there was enough time left for one last surprise in his life.

  But nothing happened. Walker was convinced that the soldiers were stalling on purpose, prolonging the agony just for kicks. Perhaps they had been ordered not only to execute, but also to torture them, to punish them for their misdemeanours against entertainment. What sort of feathers had Barboza ruffled?

  He heard random spurts of clipped speaking. The constant crackle of walkie-talkies. The soldiers were still poised at the door but why hadn’t they come in yet? This had to be the longest countdown in the history of the armed forces.

  “Fuck sake,” Walker whispered.

  “What’s going on?” Barboza asked. Her eyes were still closed. “Why are they just standing out there?”

  “MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!”

  Walker and Barboza nearly jumped out of their skins.

  Here it comes.

  There would be an almighty crash. Voices shouting. The door would come flying off the hinges and heavy footsteps would storm across the hallway. They would come charging through the living room door that Walker had half-destroyed, there would be a hail of bullets and that would be it. It would be the end. Nothingness. With any luck, it would be quick and painless.

  But it didn’t happen. Walker turned his ear towards the street. He pushed his head closer to the window so that he could hear what was going on. There was still a lot of noise going on out there, but it sounded like…

  He didn’t dare to hope but he was almost sure of it.

  The footsteps were moving away from the door.

  “MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!”

  Walker heard the tone of the commanding officer’s voice. It was a combination of someone doing their duty, trying to sound authoritative, but also trying to contain a flood of personal emotion that threatened to spill over.

  Something had happened.

  Thoughts raced back and forth in Walker’s mind like a pinball flying around the table
at ninety miles per hour. He clenched both fists, gritted his teeth and waited to see what would happen next. Was he going to die, or what?

  He turned to Barboza. She had opened her eyes and was looking at Walker, furrowing her brow as if to say – what the hell? Walker shrugged. He pushed himself up a little further, so that he could turn around and sneak a look through the windscreen. But he needn’t have been so subtle – the military seemed to have lost all interest in the occupants of the house in Stanmore Road. He saw a flock of soldiers running back to the AFVs. The measured discipline of just moments ago was shot to hell. They were bumping into one another like overexcited schoolchildren who’d just heard the bell to signal the start of the summer holidays, as they clambered back into the AFVs. At the same time, the helicopter blades were turning and the Black Hawk looked to be on the brink of taking off again.

  “They’re going,” Walker said. “They’re leaving.”

  Barboza looked outside, making sure to keep her head low.

  Most of the troops had by now climbed back into the AFVs. But Walker noticed that it wasn’t quite the end yet. Three men in uniform were standing in the middle of the road, their heads bowed in deep discussion. One of them – the overanxious commanding officer who had ordered the soldiers back to the AFVs – was barking orders at the two younger troopers.

  Walker caught a little of the conversation over the sound of the helicopter and the AFVs.

  “No choice…we have to intercept…you two…finish the job…we need the numbers at the superwalls…you know what has to be done...finish…finish the job.”

  “What are they saying?” Barboza asked.

  Finish the job.

  Walker turned away from the window and dropped back down onto the floor. He scratched absently at his forehead, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. What the hell was going on out there? Were they going or what? But no matter what way he looked at the problem, it all came down to the same conclusion. And that conclusion came in the form of two soldiers being left behind.

  Finish the job.

  “We’re still in deep shit,” he said. “Something’s happened. They’re pulling out but I think they’re leaving two of them behind to finish it. They’re not quite letting us off the hook. Sorry.”

  Barboza winced. “Then we’re still dead?” she said, dropping down beside him.

  Walker glanced at her. He could tell by the look in her eyes that Barboza was unwilling to relinquish the hope that she’d just recovered upon seeing the soldiers withdraw. And neither was he – he was no longer willing to lie on his back, expose his belly and let them do what they wanted.

  “C’mon,” he said to her. “Follow me.”

  “What?”

  But Walker didn’t answer. He was already down on his hands and knees, crawling towards the kitchen. Barboza didn’t ask any more questions. He heard her dropping down on all fours, following close behind.

  As they crawled across the hallway floor, they heard the rumble of the AFVs pulling away from Stanmore Road. The helicopter’s mechanical hum was faint as it receded into the sky.

  All that mattered now was staying alive. The odds were still against their survival but Walker felt like he’d just been handed a return ticket from the valley of death. A voice deep down told him that he was meant to survive this and travel beyond the limits of Stanmore Road. Something bigger was out there waiting for him.

  They crawled into the kitchen. Walker looked through the stained glass panels on the back door but couldn’t see anyone out there. Whoever had been traipsing through the back garden earlier had gone with the rest of them. With the coast clear, Walker leapt to his feet and grabbed the kitchen knife that Barboza had put back on the counter. The tip of the knife was still smeared with tiger blood.

  At the same time, Walker reached over and pulled another two knives out of the rack – a bread knife and a carving knife. He handed the carving knife to Barboza and she took it without hesitation.

  Footsteps.

  Walker froze. They were coming from somewhere out back.

  He hurried over to the kitchen window. The window was halfway open, just as he’d left it for Alba to come and go after he was gone. He listened for a second, wondering if he would hear the brief crack of a rifle shot. Would he have time to hear it before his brains were splattered all over the kitchen? But that’s not what he heard. Footsteps. He heard the scraping of feet against a wooden fence, followed by a soft thud. Someone was close, but not in his garden. Not yet.

  “They’ve split up,” Walker said. “I think one of them has gone down to the end of the block. He’s making his way through the other gardens, jumping fences. Has to be. He’s coming here.”

  There was no easy path to Walker’s back garden from the front. To reach it from the outside, the soldier would have had to walk down to the end of the row of terraced houses that Walker’s house was adjoined to. Then, at the end of the row, he’d have to go around the back of the nearest house and cut through a number of other gardens, leaping six feet tall fences until he arrived at the rear of Walker’s house. It was one of the advantages of living in the middle of a row of terraced houses. Previously, before 2011, it had been a limitation that the garden could only be accessed from the back door of the house and not from the outside, but not today. Today it bought Walker and Barboza a little time.

  “We have to make a run for it,” Barboza said, beating Walker to the punch.

  Walker hesitated.

  “Well?” Barboza said.

  But the decision was taken out of their hands. At that moment, the front door began to rattle violently. From where he was standing, Walker could see the metal door handle moving up and down in a fast, jerky motion. Amidst everything else, Walker took a moment to appreciate how OCD he’d been about always locking the front door and teaching Barboza to do the same. Seems it had paid off at last.

  But it wouldn’t keep the soldier out for long. The door was under constant attack and a series of hard thuds followed. It sounded like three rapid-fire cannon shots in succession.

  He was kicking the door down.

  “Go!” Walker hissed.

  They ran towards the back door, Barboza in the lead and Walker behind her. Barboza pulled the door open and they rushed out, the heat pouncing on them as they ran into the back garden.

  Walker felt immediately exposed in the daylight. Vulnerable.

  Behind them, the front door crashed open. Walker heard it land on the hallway floor like a crack of thunder. That was it – his sanctuary had been violated forever. He could hear the soldier running through the house. Just seconds away. Walker turned around and shut the back door behind him, pulling the lever up and locking it from the outside. It would buy them a few seconds, but every second counted.

  Through the stained glass panel, he saw the blurry shape of the soldier rushing towards them.

  “Go!” he said to Barboza.

  They ran towards the wooden fence on their right hand side. Barboza scaled the six-foot barrier easily and Walker was right there behind her. They dropped down into the garden of the house next door and at the same time, heard somebody wrestling with the handle of the back door. Moments later, there was a volley of rapid gunfire followed by the sound of shattering glass.

  Walker looked straight ahead, pondering the escape route in front of them. There were no more houses beyond this last one, no more gardens to take cover in – only the open space of Stanmore Road for them to run towards.

  The obvious thing would be to keep going – to run and take their chances. But Walker knew that there wasn’t enough time to get away from the two soldiers if they did that. It was too far and their pursuers were too close behind. Were they to keep running, the bullets would tear them to pieces sooner or later.

  That left only one option left. They had to stand and fight. But that was suicide and yet it was their only real chance to live.

  Walker looked up and down the garden that they had landed in. He was sear
ching for something, anything that might give them a glimmer of hope and a fighting chance against the men who were hunting them down. This garden was the same as most of the other gardens in the neighbourhood – a short stretch of overgrown grass and little else besides a small garden shed tucked in at the bottom.

  Walker ran over to the shed, signalling for Barboza to stay put by the fence. He doubled over as he ran, keeping his head down. When he reached the steel door, he pulled the sliding bolt lock open and went inside.

  It was hot inside the shed. Unbearably so. But at least there weren’t any corpses or piles of bones lying on the floor. It was small, little more than a six by four at most. There were a variety of garden tools lying abandoned on the floor – a rake, hoe, a decrepit lawnmower that sat in several pieces, and a yard brush. There was also a small axe with a curved wooden handle lying amidst a pile of rotten wood that might once have been firewood. It was a no-brainer. Walker looked at the axe, grabbed it and then and ran back to the fence.

  The soldiers had almost caught up with one another in Walker’s garden. They were communicating and both voices sounded close, like they were within touching distance of each other. Walker was starting to regret not making a run for it. That would have been the smart option and now that the soldiers were upon them, assault rifles versus a knife and axe, the stupidity of his decision to make a stand was obvious.

  Walker hurried back to the fence and saw Barboza clutching at the handle of the carving knife. There was a look of determination on her face that was worthy of the character she had come to play. He gave her a nod and they sat side by side, with their backs jammed up against the wooden fence.

  Walker heard the soldier step through the shattered door and out into the garden. The sound of crunching glass was excruciating under the man’s feet.

  The footsteps came closer.

  “Oh fuck,” Barboza whispered.

  Walker focused on the man’s movement. At the same time, he pushed Barboza’s head down, encouraging her to keep as low as she possibly could. Then Walker squatted silently against the wall, listening to the soldier’s footsteps as he closed in on the fence. He concentrated intensely, trying to pick out exactly what section of the wooden structure that the soldier was moving towards.