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

by Mark Gillespie

  That’s when Walker had slipped in between the two of them.

  The only thing that mattered was finding the boy and bringing him back to Station. And doing it before the Ghosts arrived in Bedlam. But as the sun slowly dipped behind the high-rise buildings, they knew their odds of doing so were getting slimmer. They might find the boy, but would they get back to Station safely? Or they might get back safely, but would they find the boy?

  The whole thing was a giant shot in the dark.

  At Carol’s lead, they increased the pace. Anxious footsteps pounded off the concrete, accompanied by the sound of their shallow breathing. Walker occasionally heard the whirring and clicking from the streetlights above. But he told himself to forget it. There was nothing he could do about that – the people on the outside were watching, so be it.

  “How long will it take us to get there?” he asked Carol.

  “Ten minutes if we get a move on,” she said.

  Considering that he’d been living alone for the past nine years, Walker wasn’t one for unnecessary conversations. He enjoyed silence. But even the most banal small talk was better than the lingering tension he felt simmering between these two women.

  “Have you lived in Station long?” he asked Carol.

  The older woman sighed. At first, Walker thought she wasn’t interested in talking and if so, he would suck it up and let it go without another word.

  “Yeah,” she said after a moment. “I’ve been there since the beginning, pretty much.”

  “Since Piccadilly?”

  “Almost to the day,” she said. “My original escape plan didn’t quite work out. But it could have been a lot worse if Michael King, Fat Joseph, and some of the others hadn’t found me and took me in.”

  “Escape plan?” Walker said. “You tried to get out of London?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “Didn’t everyone? Damn right I tried. Anybody who didn’t try needs their head read.”

  “What happened?” Walker asked. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “I don’t mind,” Carol said, keeping her eyes on the road. “As long as we don’t slow down that is. We’d been watching it on the telly at home – Piccadilly and the aftermath and all that crazy shit. But when it got real bad – scary bad – that’s when we decided to get out of the city for a while. We’d lay low and then come back when everything had calmed down. So a group of us – my family and some people on our street – drove north in one of them people carriers. There was no plan, not really. We were just trying to get as far away from London as possible. It was me, my husband Tom, Sarah – my eleven-year-old daughter, and a few good neighbours who we’d rounded up.”

  “Where were you coming from?” Walker asked.

  “Stoke Newington,” she said. “About five miles from Piccadilly Circus. We travelled north and with the car we had, we could have been clear of London in about forty-five minutes. Well that’s depending on traffic ’cos everyone was doing the same thing. That’s what it looked like anyway.”

  “So you knew? About the M25?”

  “We heard the rumours,” Carol said. “You couldn’t help but hear ’em. There was somebody running down our street – literally just sprinting down the middle of the road like he was in the hundred metres final of the Olympics. God he was screaming so loud. He was yelling about barriers being built around the city to keep the trouble in. It sounded crazy but I believed him. So yeah, we drove up. Figured north was probably the safest route to take.”

  “Were the barriers already up?” Walker asked. “By the time you got there?”

  “Don’t know,” Carol said. “We never made it. Our car got attacked just outside Tottenham.”

  Walker scratched at a small growth of stubble on his chin. Elsewhere, his face was a little sunburned and as his fingers strayed outside the realm of the itch, he felt a hot, tingling sensation that was mildly painful.

  “You got attacked?” he said.

  Carol nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “A big group of kids – well teenagers I suppose. They came for us. Swinging baseball bats, cricket bats – all sorts of bats. They ambushed us on the road – on the A10 travelling north. God there must have been about thirty or forty of them at least. They just ran onto the road like they didn’t care about anything. Tom was driving and you know what? If he’d have kept going, if he’d just driven through ’em, ploughed through the little bastards, then we might have made it. My life would be a lot different today. But Tom wasn’t that sort of man. He wasn’t ready to accept the idea that civilisation had collapsed in the great city of London.”

  Walker felt like he’d invaded her privacy enough. But curiosity got the better of him and he couldn’t resist asking further questions. Fortunately Carol didn’t seem to mind continuing with her story.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “We fought them as best we could,” Carol said. “And that was the second mistake we made after not ploughing through the bloody lot of them. We fought because we needed our car and we assumed that’s what they wanted. But if we’d just gotten out of the car and let them have it – held our hands up – they probably would have left us alone. I don’t know. I think they just wanted to smash it up, to burn it, or drive it down to Piccadilly, into the eye of the shit-storm.”

  “Aye,” Walker said. “They didn’t take kindly to you trying to fight back then?”

  “Tom and the other men thought they could scare them off,” Carol said. “Well, those kids – they weren’t backing down to anyone. Not anymore. They weren’t afraid to use their weapons either, bloody little savages. So there I was, sat in the car, holding my daughter tight, and watching them beat my husband to a bloody pulp. All the children in the car watched their fathers die. Yeah well, there’s only so much you can take, right? I got out the car and ran at them. Screaming, telling them to stop. He was the love of my life. You know? I couldn’t just let him go like that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Walker said.

  Carol nodded, drawing her lips tight together.

  “And that was mistake number three,” she said. “I should have tried to make a run for it with the kids. I didn’t think about driving away at the time because it meant leaving Tom behind. And gut instinct would never allow me to do that. Yet it was the most obvious solution. Instead I charged and fat lot of good it did. They hit me on the head with a baseball bat and there was a crunching noise in my head. I went down and I heard some of them cheering like they’d just scored a home run. Little pricks. But just before I blacked out, I heard her – I heard my daughter Sarah screaming. Everything went blurry; I saw the faint shape of her running over to my side and then lots of hands grabbing her and pulling her away from me. White hands. Black hands. They had my daughter. After that I blacked out.”

  “Jesus,” Walker said.

  “I don’t know if they meant to kill her or not,” Carol said. “But when I woke up, everybody was dead. I was the only one left alive – they must have thought I was already dead. I don’t think they were doing me any favours. But I was alive anyway. Does that make me lucky? I didn’t feel lucky. My family and friends were dead, and I was stuck in this shithole.”

  Walker felt a chill go through him. “Sorry,” he said. “You must have told that story more than a few times. Didn’t mean to put you through it again.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But to tell you the truth, it’s starting to feel like someone else’s story. Like it happened to someone else I knew once. Know what I mean?”

  Walker understood. He sure as hell wasn’t the same person anymore and if he’d been asked to recount the story of the teenage boy, Mack Walker, and what he did on the first day of September 2011, then maybe it would have felt like he was talking about someone else too. Maybe that’s how people coped with it.

  “So how did you end up at Station?” Walker asked.

  Carol shrugged. She was walking faster now, trying to keep up with Barboza who’d edged a little ahead of them.

  Walker hur
ried along with her, trying to keep his place in between of the two women.

  “They found me a few days later,” she said. “Michael King, Fat Joseph and some of the others who were the first Bedlamites. I was still on that same stretch of road, lying amongst all those corpses. I guess I was waiting to die. I was delirious, dehydrated and beaten up. They picked me up took me to Station – it wasn’t called Station then – and slowly brought me back to life. We went back later and buried the bodies. But after that, it took a long time to heal, mentally more than physically. I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t been easy to deal with sometimes. Nightmares, things like that. The tiniest little thing can set me off. But then a couple of years back, something happened that brought a bit of light back into my existence. A little boy came to us off the streets. And you know what? He needed a mother.”

  She was smiling. But then a dark cloud passed across her features, as if their grim purpose was recalled.

  “We’ll get him back,” Walker said.

  “We’d better,” she said. “I’m not going back until we do.”

  During this conversation, Carol had taken them on the quickest route from Liverpool Street to Old Street. After a short walk north on Bishopsgate, they’d travelled west onto Pindar Street. They’d continued in that direction, walking past Finsbury Square Garden, and eventually coming onto City Road, which would lead them north towards Old Street.

  Walker was beginning to tire of the scenery – the gruesome leftovers of a lifetime ago. There was an old Travelodge without a front door. They walked past an off-licence and an electrical store, standing side by side. Both shops looked like a bomb had tore through them many years ago. Rubble spilled out of the building and onto the street. Outside the off-licence, the burned out skeleton of a car was parked halfway up the pavement.

  They passed Bunhill Fields burial ground. Walker glanced to his left, peering over the steel fence that ran along the perimeter of the ancient graveyard. He saw the ancient headstones, peeking back at him over a sea of wildly overgrown grass. It was a city of the dead, much like the rest of London.

  At last, they came to Old Street.

  At first Walker, couldn’t see the underground station that they were looking for. The only thing he could see was a massive roundabout, an urban island that was surrounded by road and concrete buildings as far as the eye could see.

  “Where is it?” he asked Carol. “Where’s the station?”

  “There’s no street level building to Old Street,” she said. “You access it down the ramp or stairs.” She pointed to the other side of the roundabout. “Over there.”

  Carol didn’t hang about. She took off towards the station in a hurry and Walker and Barboza followed close behind. They crossed over the roundabout, hopping over a small concrete island that was located in the middle. A few moments later, they were standing at the top of a set of stairs that led down into Old Street Station.

  “Ready?” Carol said, looking at them both.

  Barboza nodded. “Yeah,” she said.

  “C’mon,” Walker said. He looked up towards the sky and felt his heart sinking. It was now a mixture of dark blue and grey up there. Whatever little light was left, it wasn’t going to last much longer.

  They walked down the stairs. Despite the eeriness of what they were walking into, Walker felt a sense of relief at getting off the streets. At the very least, he felt a little less exposed to the millions of eyes that inhabited the city. But despite this, it was going to be hard to see anything in Old Street Station. It was almost pitch black in there.

  Charlie was alone in there?

  But the darkness didn’t seem to bother Barboza and Carol. They were already rushing ahead of Walker, moving into the station. He wasn’t certain, but he got the sense they were trying to outdo one another – that whoever found Charlie first would be the winner of their ongoing feud.

  They hurried past an old ticket sales window on their left. Walker was a few feet behind them, stepping tentatively onto the narrow concourse, which was much smaller and narrower than the one at Liverpool Street Station. That narrowness only made it feel more dangerous and claustrophobic, walking around the station in the dark. What else came creeping around in here after the sun went down? To his surprise, Walker found himself thinking back to a scene in An American Werewolf in London, where the American werewolf was chasing some English guy in a suit around the London underground.

  Of course, the lights had been on in the movie.

  But despite the lack of light, they hurried through the station as fast as they could, checking every nook and cranny. Their footsteps in the darkness made them sound like giants. The noise reverberated off the walls and ceilings and it felt like there was no way they could sneak through this place unheard, unnoticed.

  Walker searched through a few empty shops and abandoned units that ran alongside the concourse. He heard the others calling out from nearby.

  “Charlie!” Carol yelled. “Where are you?”

  “Charlie!” It was Barboza. “Are you here? Please talk to us.”

  Walker found nothing of interest in the old retail units. He tried the bathrooms too but all he found in there was the rancid smell of ancient piss and shit. It was enough to send him running back outside, vowing never to set foot in there again.

  After that, Walker hurried down the escalator that led towards the platforms. The platforms themselves were terrifying – everything was black and it was like something out of the climactic scene in a horror film. It had been creepy enough standing in the London underground when the lights were on. But in the dark, it was terrifying. It was like being dropped into a massive underground tunnel. Anyone or anything could have been in there with him.

  A sudden noise made Walker jump.

  He looked left and right. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw the shape of someone or something hurrying along the platform. Whoever it was, they were running away from Walker, heading towards the tunnel on the far side of the tracks.

  “Charlie!” Walker yelled. “Is that you? It’s Walker, and Carol’s here too. We’ve come to take you home.”

  No answer.

  “Fuck.”

  Heavy breathing. High-pitched and frantic. It was almost certainly a child down there and whoever it was, they were getting away.

  Walker ran along the narrow platform, spitting out his breath in short, sharp bursts. There was no time to worry about frightening Charlie – he had to grab the little shit and they had to get out of this godforsaken place. Where did the boy think he was going anyway? Into the tunnel? That’s exactly what it looked like he was doing. Up ahead, Walker saw the dark outline of Charlie stopping dead at the platform’s end, as if bracing himself to jump onto the train tracks.

  And then? Into the tunnel. Where anything could be waiting.

  “Charlie! Stop!” he yelled. “Please. Don’t jump onto the tracks.”

  “Charlie!”

  It was Barboza’s voice. She was behind them on the platform, running towards the tunnel.

  “Charlie!” Carol yelled from further back. “Is that you? Are you down here?”

  “He’s here,” Walker yelled back. “He’s trying to run.”

  The boy hesitated at the edge of the platform for too long – it was just long enough for Walker to catch up with him and grab a hold of him. As Walker reached an arm around the boy, he dragged him back onto the platform.

  “No!” Charlie screamed. “Let me go!”

  “Shut up kid,” Walker said, breathing heavily. “You really want to jump off the edge? You want to go into that dark tunnel by yourself?”

  Carol and Barboza caught up with them at the edge of the platform. Carol rushed over and grabbed Charlie by the arm, pulling him out of Walker’s grip. She knelt down and lifted the boy into a tight embrace, nearly squeezing him to death. The boy’s legs dangled helplessly, a few inches off the ground. Then she put him down again.

  Tears were streaming down Carol’s face.
But Charlie looked gutted, like he was horrified to see them.

  “Why did you run off like that Charlie?” she said. “How could you do that to me?”

  Charlie wriggled free of her vice-like grip. Carol stood up and took an uneasy step backwards, trying to disguise the expression of deep hurt in her eyes with a smile. But Walker saw it, even in the darkness.

  “Leave me alone,” Charlie said. “What if she’s here somewhere and you scared her off with all that noise? What if she’s waiting in the tunnels? What if she came looking for me and got hurt? I’m not going back without her.”

  Barboza stepped forward. She did so gently, so as not to spook the boy. Then she knelt down in front of him and smiled sadly.

  “Charlie,” she said. “I’m so sorry. This is my fault. I should never have said anything about your mum today. I just wanted to make you feel better – that’s all. But you must know yourself that she’s not coming back. Not today, not ever.”

  Charlie was blinking hard, like she’d just shone a beam of torchlight into his eyes. “But you said she was alive,” he said.

  The hurt in his voice was palpable.

  “I’m sorry Charlie,” Barboza said. “We don’t lie to the children, I know that now.”

  “We’ve got to go,” Walker said, looking around the black void that surrounded them. “If we wait any longer, there’ll be something worse than this waiting for us outside.”

  Carol pulled Charlie towards her. Then she lifted him up and this time he didn’t resist. Instead he buried his head in her chest and Walker heard the boy sobbing quietly.

  “Can you manage okay?” Walker asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s just get the bloody hell out of here. I want to go home.”