Jack, the man I made. It’s his name, now, whatever he was called before.
Like I say, in the short time I knew him, before I made him and after, I never called Jack by his name nor he me. We couldn’t, not in this line of work. Whenever I spoke to Jack, I called him “Prisoner,” and answering, he called me “Sir.”
ON THE WAY TO THE FRONT
(illustrated by Liam Sharp)
THE TAIN
The light was hard. It seemed to flatten the walls of London, to push down onto the pavement with real weight. It was oppressive: it scoured colours of depth.
On the concrete river-walls of the south bank, a man was lying with his right hand over his face, squinting up through his fingers at the bleached sky. Watching the business of clouds. He had been there for some time, unmoving, supine on the wall top. It had rained for hours, intermittently, throughout the night. The city was still wet. The man was lying in rainwater. It had soaked through his clothes.
He listened, but heard nothing of interest.
Over time he turned his head, still shielding his eyes, until he was looking down at the walkway to his right, at the puddles. He watched them carefully, a little warily, as if they were animals.
Finally, he sat up and swung his legs down over the edge of the wall. The river was at his back now. He leaned forward until his head hung over the path and the dirty water that blotted it. He stared into the minute ripples.
The puddle was directly below his face, and it was blank, as he had known it would be.
He looked closer, until he could see faint patterns. A veil, the ghosts of colours and shapes moved across the thin skin of water: incomprehensible but not random, according to strange vagaries.
The man stood and walked away. Behind him the sunlight hit the Thames. It did not scatter: it did not refract on the moving river into little stabs of light. It did other things.
He walked in the centre of the paths and pavements, in clear view. His pace was quick but not panicked. A shotgun bounced on his shoulder. He swung it round and carried it to his chest, holding it as if it offered more comfort than defence.
The man crossed the river. He stopped below the arc of Grosvenor Bridge, and clambered up its girdered underside. Where it should have been a curve of shadows, the bridge was punctured, broken by thick rays of light. The man wrestled through the holes in its structure that recent events had left.
He emerged in a crater of railway lines. An explosion had spread broken bricks and sleepers in concentric circles, and the metal rails had burst and buckled into a frozen splash. The man was surrounded by them. He trudged past the bomb’s punctuation, to where they became train lines again.
Months ago, perhaps in the moment of that interruption, a train had stalled on the bridge. It remained. It looked quite unbroken: even its windows were whole. The driver’s door hung open.
The man gripped it but did not look inside, did not run his hand over the instruments. He hauled himself, with the door as a ladder, to the train’s flat roof. And then he stood up, gripping his gun, and looked.
His name was Sholl. He had been awake for three hours already that day, and still he had seen no one.
From the roof of the train, the city seemed empty.
To his south was the rubble that had been Battersea Power Station. Without it, the skyline was remarkable: a perpetual surprise. Sholl could see over the industrial park behind it—the buildings there much less damaged—to a tract of housing that looked almost as it had before the war. On the north shore, the Lister Hospital looked untouched, and the roofs of Pimlico were still sedate—but fires were burning, and trees of poisonous smoke grew over north London.
The river was clogged with wrecks. Besides the mouldering barges that had always been there jutted the bows of police boats, and the decks and barrels of sunken gunships. Inverted tugs like rusting islands.
The Thames flowed slowly around these impediments.
Light’s refusal to shimmer on its surface made the river matte as dried ink, overlaid on a cutout of London. Where the bridge’s supports met the water, they disappeared into light and darkness.
Once, in a city seemingly deserted, Sholl would have explored, in fear and loneliness. But he had grown disgusted with those feelings, and with the prurience that quickly mediated them. He walked north, along the top of the train. He would follow the tracks down past the walls of London, into Victoria Station.
From some miles off, from the direction of South Kensington, came a high mewing sound. Sholl gripped the shotgun. A multitude lifted from the distant streets, many thousands of indistinct bodies. They were not birds. The flock did not move in avian curves, but spastically, changing speed and direction more suddenly than birds could ever manage. The things trilled and chattered, moving erratically south.
Sholl eyed them. They were animals, scavengers. Doves, they had been named, with heavy-handed irony. They could hurt a person badly, or kill, but as Sholl had expected, they ignored him. The flock passed over his head in unnerving motion. They were unclear.
Each dove was a pair of crossed human hands, linked by thumbs. Cupped palms and fingers fluttering in preposterous motion. Sholl did not watch them. He was leaning out and staring into the Thames water below him, below the doves, the water in which nothing was reflected.
Of course the city was not empty, and at noon sounds of life and sporadic combat began.
Sholl was standing in the remains of Victoria Street, beside the immobilised bus in which he lived. It was a newer two-decker, its windows all grilled and caged, irregular bars welded across them. It had been inexpertly clad in plates of iron armour. Its number, 98, was still visible. Shreds of advertisement remained on its sides. Inside was food and fuel that he had stockpiled, his books, and the tat of survivalism.
There was small-arms fire coming from Brompton. He had heard that a small group of paratroopers had regrouped somewhere to the west of Sloane Square, and the noise seemed to verify that. He had no idea what they were fighting, nor how long they would last.
It had been some weeks since he had heard large artillery in the city. The resistance was breaking down.
Now he could be almost certain that any gunfire he heard came from his own side. In the first few weeks of the war, the enemy had used weapons that were the same, functionally identical to those of the defending armies. It would have been—definitionally, Sholl thought sourly—a well-matched war, precisely matched, except for two things.
The imagos arrived from nowhere, in the heart of the city. Like Trojans, Londoners had woken with invaders among them. Troops had gone onto the streets. Gunships had shelled the city from the inside, levelling Westminster and much of the riverside.
The second factor in the imagos’ favour was that they could break their habits. They started with the absolutely familiar weaponry, but soon discovered, or remembered, that they were not restricted to it, that there were other methods of warfare available to them. Their general had taught them how.
Standing in the broken streets north of Victoria, amid architecture brittled by war, tremulous and near collapse, Sholl began to see people. He glimpsed them at the windows of deserted shops: he saw them at the far ends of alleys.
The last Londoners. Millions were now gone. Dead, disappeared and fled. Of those who were left, some had become dangerous, like all terrified animals. Several times Sholl had almost been the victim of assaults, and as days passed there were more bands roaming and looting from the dying city. They would attack what fellow humans they met with a miserable kind of violence. But these fleeting figures were not those. Sholl shouted in greeting to a man he saw foraging for canned food in the glass and rubble ruins of a Europa food store. The man batted the air in Sholl’s direction, demanding silence, an exaggerated motion of fear. His face was invisible. Sholl shook his head.
Sholl stood in the centre of the street, where he should not have felt safe. It was not bravado but a judgment. The enemy would continue their campaign against the
backstreets where the last fighters held out, but had little interest in harassing London’s fearful ratlike survivors. For which he might pass. Besides which, though Sholl did not yet fully trust it, he had another reason to think himself safe from the imagos.
Watching the cringing man running like a starveling from rubbish to rubbish, trying to get out of the light, Sholl made a decision.
He walked. His pack was heavy with books, tins and equipment he had taken from his bus, and he shucked it up in irritation, trying to make it comfortable. East along Victoria Street, past those houses still standing, charred cars and the spillage of war, past the uncertain monuments that the victorious invaders kept raising and forgetting. Up Buckingham Gate, bearing as directly north as Sholl could go.
There must have been thousands left in London, but fear had made most of them prey-creatures, who came out at night and moved in furtive bursts. Sholl thought very little of them or about them. There were a few others, more like him. He would see them very occasionally: men and women becalmed in the war’s aftermath, standing without fear on roofs or wandering as if beyond caring by the edges of parks or rivers or darkened shops. He had seen enough of them die to know that not everyone with a similar insouciance to his own was safe from the enemy’s attack.
And there were soldiers. Command had broken down almost instantly with the onset of fighting, but a few units survived, and persisted. In these late days they could be almost as dangerous as the invaders. In some places they had combined forces: in others they fought amongst themselves. They exchanged fire over control of some half-looted Sainsbury’s, or an Esso petrol station. They might burst into view suddenly in a dust-bleached jeep pinned with guns, bursting out of the shell of a car park in their battered khakis, performing sweeps of an area they were trying to “secure.”
They would level their guns at anyone human they saw, and shout at them to get down. Their intentions remained decent, Sholl suspected, or at least not malign: they were still trying with an imbecilic tenacity to defend London. He had even seen them in small triumphs. They rattled bullets into flocks of ravenous doves, spattering the pavement with the little hand-creatures and sometimes even saving the doves’
intended prey. Even more powerful enemies fell to the soldiers, sometimes. They had brought down some of the flyers in the first weeks of fighting, had several times seemed to kill (it could be difficult to tell) what must have been imago commanders. But the logic of defeat—and they were defeated—had fragmented them.
The soldiers made themselves live in a future where they had won. They experienced each second as a memory, preemptively. The rat-people, in contrast, the Londoners become vermin, lived only in a present that terrified them. Sholl did not know where in history he lived, he and the few others like him. He felt uncoupled from time.
In some parts of London, the soldiers seemed to feel the pressure pulling them toward warlordism, and they fought it with inappropriate bonhomie. They would lean out of their fortified warehouses or basements, and yell cheerfully at any of the terrified and starving citizens they saw, inviting them in. In earlier but still recent days, Sholl had spent time with a unit camped out in Russell Square, in what had once been a dormitory for overseas students. The soldiers had made it into barracks, pasting their schedules and rotas on its noticeboards, on top of handbills for skiing trips and Italian lessons. They leaned out from upper floors and shouted at the few terrified locals, wolf-whistling the women.
They had tried repeatedly to contact some central command, some bunker or committee, but their superiors were gone or silent. Including Sholl, there had been four civilians with them, whom the troops had mocked with good humour, and tried to train. The commanding officer was a young Liverpudlian who had spent most of the day grinning at his troops, but whom Sholl, walking at night, had heard in the small hours trying to raise Liverpool on his radio, weeping into the static. “Fucked if I know, mate,” he had said on the day Sholl left, as if Sholl had asked him a question.
There were squads camped out in grand houses in Kensington. They seemed cowed by their surroundings. They could not relate to the cool private gardens or the streets’ tall white facades. Even where the war touched the architecture, where it was scorched or bullet-pocked, or where the attacks of the enemy had changed its material into something new, the areas seemed sedate, and the soldiers uncertain rather than pugnacious.
In Bermondsey the remnants of some regiment were bivouacked in Southwark Park. Sholl had been impressed with that. The invaders, as well as the doves and other scavengers that had spilt out into London with them, concentrated their attacks on streets and backstreets. For the most part, Sholl had observed, they avoided parkland. But despite this, and the seemingly obvious advantage that might have offered them, most of London’s soldiers ignored the green spaces. Sholl wondered if the training in “urban warfare” had trapped them, if they could not relate to their task if they did not have side streets and deserted buildings in which to retreat.
He had approached the Bermondsey encampment, therefore, hoping to find something other than these neurotic everyday routines. He did, but it was no more useful to him. Machine guns had shredded the bushes beside him as he approached. He had lain where he had thrown himself, half-hidden by a tree that he knew would provide no defence from another such onslaught. “Fuck off, ” had come an amplified voice. Some figure in camouflage, just visible beyond the bombed land that surrounded the camp, standing on a crippled tank with a megaphone to his lips. “Fuck off out of our park you fucker.”
Sholl had retreated. The mud craters that surrounded the soldiers, he had realised, were not evidence of some hard-won battle against the enemy: they were as far as terrified Londoners had reached, trying to join the panicked, paranoid troops, and where they had been destroyed.
It had taken him a month to find the right people. He had travelled by day in his bus, when it had still moved, and then on foot, ignoring the dangers. Sometimes he heard fighting, between Londoners and the enemy, or human bands, and sometimes it was close, but usually a street or two away, around a corner, out of sight.
Sholl kept an A–Z map of London on him always, and amended it as he learnt about the city’s changing shape. He blocked out those areas he would not go: the imago strongholds; where the gangs were; the savage new communities where even human intruders were accused of being vampires, and burned or beheaded. In the rest of the city, Sholl made notes. Itemising what he found, he tried to track down, to anticipate, where certain other things might be. He was not searching randomly: he had a plan.
Where a building was gone or ruined, he crosshatched it out in black. Where it was made into something new, or where a new thing had appeared, he stuck numbered red crosses: he added a legend in tiny script on the inside front cover, naming what he saw.
#7, he had written, for the structure that now dwarfed the Brixton Prison. Jebb Ave. filled with something like cuckoo-spit. Funnel-tower still rising—threads snagging chimneys. Something inside moving.
In white dabs of Liquid Paper, Sholl marked and numbered the camps of London’s soldiers.
He watched them from the top deck of his bus, or from surrounding buildings, through binoculars. He made notes about them, too.
#4:ª 30 men, one tank, one big gun. Morale v. bad.
On four occasions, from as far away as possible, Sholl had watched the soldiers fighting. Once their enemy had been another human unit, and the exchange of fire had ended with a handful of dead on each side and desultory shouted curses. Watching these desperate men and women wrestling with their shaking weapons and churning each other into meat-froth had broken Sholl’s reserve and shocked him, and made him tremble.
The other three times, the battles had been the result of some bizarre incursion of the enemy. Once, the humans had managed to retreat. Twice, they had been wiped out. And those times, though the carnage was no less bloody or loud than when humans killed humans, Sholl had watched it with detachment. Even when the inva
ders had spun away through space just past him, so that he felt them, ignoring him, shimmering and cleaning themselves of blood.
It had taken Sholl a month. Days watching the soldiers doing their recces through the brick ruins of London, even here and there rescuing people—men and women half-eaten by doves, distractedly maimed by invaders. In the evenings Sholl would lock the doors of his bus and by torch read the books he had looted.
(His library was mixed. He was surprised to discover a renewed appetite for fiction. Mostly, though, he read and obsessively reread books on physics, which he worked through trying to understand what had happened to light, and puerile military guides called SAS Survival and Extreme Combat. He had a collection of Soldier of Fortune magazines, which he still regarded with contempt, even as he read them.
The science he found terribly hard, but he had worked through doggedly, and had been surprised to find himself understanding. He took in the science and the survivalism stolidly, as medicine.) It had taken Sholl a month, picking his way through the dwindling safe routes of the city, avoiding imagos and the gangs, watching soldiers, to find a group with the shades of self-consciousness, of purpose but uncertainty, that he was looking for. A group close enough to the enemy.
Like the Bermondsey soldiers, the troop that Sholl approached were quartered in parkland. They were much more secure, though, in the thickets in the south of Hampstead Heath. Sholl came up the trails of Parliament Hill, with London behind him. It was not very far before three sentries rose from scrubby bushes and halted him.
The frightened young men roughed him a little and rummaged in his rucksack, and when they had decided (according to what science Sholl had no idea) that he was not vampire, one of them ran and returned with their commanding officer. Sholl had watched the troop several times, from the rooftops of Gospel Oak, and he recognised the man by his grey hair and his bearing.
Looking for Jake and Other Stories Page 18