In the Shadow of London

by Chris Ward

  Three … two … one….

  The train rushed away into the tunnel. Raine opened her eyes, listening to a soft tap-tap coming from further up the platform. She frowned. It didn’t sound like dripping water, or the reverberation of a broken pipe—

  A shadow fell across the tracks below one of only five working emergency lights, the one nearest to the stairs leading up. It shifted, thinned, then thickened. Protrusions sectioned off into the shapes of a head and arms.

  Without even thinking, she half crawled, half slid towards the platform edge and dropped over the side. The footsteps seemed to follow her, and she held her board against her chest for protection. She hadn’t thought to bring any other kind of weapon, and she cursed herself for her foolishness.

  A flashlight illuminated faded advertisements stuck behind dirty plastic sheets on the inner wall of the tracks just above her head.

  ‘Looks like a good movie, that one,’ a cockney voice said, followed by a chuckle. ‘Reckon I can still get tickets?’

  A thump indicated someone else slapping the first man on the back. ‘I saw it once. Bag of turd.’

  ‘That so?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You see anything?’

  ‘There’s no one here, is there? Waste of time.’

  ‘At least we can check it off the list. Lindon said to make sure.’

  ‘What are we even looking for?’

  Cockney laughed. ‘Stiffs. Booze stash. I don’t know, do I? What do Tube Riders do when they’re not pissing off the government?’

  ‘What’s that over there?’

  The footsteps moved away. Raine risked a glance up over the edge of the platform. The two men were walking towards the breakfall mattresses by the far tunnel.

  ‘Pile of rubbish,’ Cockney’s voice drifted back. ‘Bunch of old bedding. Homeless people probably brought it down.’

  Raine let out a slow breath.

  ‘You hear that?’

  Raine started. At first she thought they had heard her, then she heard the familiar hum of an approaching train. She looked around. There was too little space between the tracks and the platform edge here. It would crush her.

  ‘Come on,’ Cockney said. ‘Let’s go see how they do it.’ Running footsteps followed, and to her horror she realised they were right above her. ‘Like this, wasn’t it?’

  The train was coming. The glow of its lights had begun to lighten the far depths of the tunnel. Raine looked around in a panic, spotting a small alcove across from her just wide enough for her to squeeze inside. As the train’s roar grew, she crouched down and skipped over the electrified rails, squeezing into the alcove just as the train came rushing into the station.

  It was so close the smell of engine oil made her gag. She clamped a hand over her mouth as the last carriages clattered by, the drag of the wind almost pulling her out of her hiding place. She looked up. The two men were standing on the platform directly across from her.

  She didn’t dare move. They both wore a motley assortment of ragged clothes. One had blond hair pushed into a mohawk, the other was bald and had a scar running down the side of his face. They were young, no more than twenty.

  One had his hands on his hips and was watching the departing train. The other seemed to be staring right at her.

  Long knives hung at their belts. They were hardened thugs; without a weapon she had no chance if they came for her.

  ‘Come on, Colm,’ the man with the mohawk said, and she realised this was the cockney. ‘We can say we found nothing. Fuck it. Someone else can check if they want.’

  The bald man switched on his flashlight and turned around. For a moment it flashed across Raine’s face, making her wince. She realised the lights of the train must have dazzled them enough to let the shadows hide her, but if they stayed much longer their eyes would adjust again. For now, though, if she made any move at all, it would reveal her.

  The bald guy, Colm, went over to the wall, his flashlight illuminating the place where she had stood earlier. ‘Lot of footprints over here,’ he said. ‘Looks a bit suspicious, don’t it? What if those mattresses were what they landed on, like Lindon said? Might be one of the fuckers using this place.’

  ‘Probably just tramps.’

  Colm looked up. ‘These pricks paying you, Ridley? Look, man, they’ve been down here. All we’ve got to do is tell Lindon to put a watch on this place. You know how much coin we’ll get?’ Colm took a step forward, one hand dropping to his knife. ‘If you’re turncoating on me, man, I’ll cut off strips of your face and feed them to me mama’s dogs.’

  Ridley raised a hand, shaking his head. ‘No, Colm, I’m just freaked, that’s all. If you say they was here, then they was here. We’d better tell Lindon.’

  ‘You’ve got it. Come on, let’s get out of here.’

  They headed for the exit. Raine breathed a long sigh of relief, then leaned back and closed her eyes as another train came rushing through the station. When she opened her eyes again, the men were gone.

  Raine climbed back up on to the platform, keeping to the shadows between emergency lights as she followed the men up the stairway and along the concourse towards the exit. After they had gone up the steps and out through the hole broken in the brick wall across the entrance, she waited for a while just inside the exit until the sky had begun to darken, giving them time to give up and leave in case they had decided to stake the place out.

  She cursed herself for coming here, but knew she would have to come back. David had promised to wait every Tuesday. She had purposely come on a Thursday to avoid seeing him, but now she had to warn him before he walked into a trap.

  Whether she had believed him before or not, it didn’t matter now. She had her own evidence.

  They were hunted.

  10

  Recruit

  Airie opened her eyes to find sunlight streaming through tears in the curtains David had drawn. She climbed out of a bed that was almost absurdly comfortable and peered between the curtains at the world outside.

  A rare break in the clouds had allowed the morning sun to show its face, but plumes rising from distant factories over towards the Docklands were working hard to fill the gaps. In the far distance, the blunt point of Parliament Tower seemed to be watching her, so she heeded David’s warning about staying out of sight and went back to the bed for a while.

  David had gone out somewhere, but she could still feel his body under her hands. She had made a move on him but he had pushed her away, muttering a litany of vague excuses that had just made her mad. What was wrong with her? No one had ever turned her down before. Whether through some sense of chivalry or revulsion, it didn’t matter. He had this look in his eyes, especially when his hair hung across his face, but part of her had just wanted him to cleanse her body of the touch of other men. He probably thought she was a kid, and she knew that perhaps she should be, but her brother had been selling her to his friends since their parents had died in a bus accident two years ago. The first few times she had tried to refuse, but he had used his bony little fists on her, and with nowhere to go she had gone numb to it after a while. Like most things, it was easy with practice.

  One of the men who had been going to rape her in the abandoned station was dead, but her brother and the other man had escaped. David had told her to stay here, and knowing they were out there made it easy to follow his instructions. Her brother was a coward, but he had once beaten her unconscious for trying to escape, and she had no doubt that he would do it again. She could close her eyes to the pain of his fists, but waking up to find stains on the insides of her thighs had broken what was left of her heart.

  Looking out of the window at the distant peak of Parliament Tower was depressing, so Airie began to poke around the apartment to see what David had stored. He had done a good job of stockpiling food supplies, with dozens of packets of dried pasta, cups of instant noodles, dried mashed potato mix. There were some cans, but many were out of date already. He had also filled dozens o
f plastic bottles with water—presumably purified—in case the rooftop tank’s supply ran out.

  There was a lot of camping gear too, tents and gas stoves, several packets of emergency blankets, flares, waterproof jackets, even a couple of sub-zero sleeping bags, still in their factory wrapping. It seemed he was quite the hoarder.

  None of it was of much interest, so she wandered out of the apartment and down the corridor to the two others on the same floor. She could see where the stairs had collapsed, sealing off access to this floor except by the way they had come in, and it was comforting to see no footprints in the dust that had settled around the piled rubble. David told her that he had searched the apartments and taken anything of value but had selected the one with the view for his secret hideout. The others were unused.

  Neither door was locked. The first apartment was neat but plain. Much of the furniture and everything personal had gone, as if the owners had moved out some years ago. Airie poked through the drawers and cupboards, finding a few items of clothing that fit her, that, judging by the ugly colours and patterns had belonged to a short older woman. She checked the taps in the kitchen and bathroom but they yielded only a few drops of rust-coloured slime.

  The second apartment was altogether different. A spacious living room was lined with shelves bulging with family photographs and mementoes. A group shot of middle-aged parents with two teenage boys and a younger girl was followed by a ballet trophy for someone named Leslie Bates, and engraved 2062. Airie quickly did the math: fourteen years ago. A picture of the two boys much younger, with a baby propped up between them was followed by one of the father and the oldest boy wearing cricket whites and each holding up a bat.

  She wandered into the bedrooms set off the hallway. A room clearly belonging to two boys had twin beds against opposite walls, with a pair of desks beneath a window. An open math textbook lay on one, beside it a notebook which revealed half-finished sums when Airie blew away a thin layer of dust. A pen lay next to it, the ink long dried.

  What had happened to them? One of the cupboards stood open, coat-hangers hanging awry, a sweater fallen down, a couple of shirts coughed out onto the floor. One drawer stood open. A mixture of boxer shorts and socks filled one side but the other was empty, as if someone had scooped out half and left the rest.

  ‘They left in a hurry,’ someone said, and Airie gasped and spun around, her heart thundering. David stood in the doorway, his hair hung over the bruised side of his face.

  ‘Jesus fuck, you could have let me know you were there.’

  He smiled. ‘Sorry, I wondered where you’d gone.’

  Airie took a few moments to let her heartbeat slow down again. ‘Where did they go?’

  David shrugged. ‘I don’t know. When I came here I couldn’t bear to touch anything. I took the food but left everything else as it was. Almost every abandoned building in London got looted down to a shell, but this place was never found. It’s like a historical monument.’

  ‘It gives me the creeps.’

  ‘Wait until you see the daughter’s room,’ David said.

  ‘Why?’

  He went out, Airie trailing after. At the end of the corridor he opened the door and showed her inside. He pulled open the curtains to reveal a quaint bedroom, all lace and frills and girls’ toys. A pair of dolls sat at the end of the neatly made bed. A desk beneath the window was empty beside a layer of dust.

  ‘The boys room and the parents’ room, they packed stuff,’ David said. ‘Here, nothing.’

  Airie gave a slow nod. ‘They didn’t take her.’

  David’s hand closed over her own. He pulled her close and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘I tried to figure it out. I looked for diaries, maybe some kind of letter, perhaps they had a phone even. Nothing. I couldn’t work it out. The parents and the boys, they left in a hurry. The latest date I found on a pile of letters was August 2064. Twelve years ago. I’ve wondered ever since what happened to that little girl.’

  ‘Perhaps they sent her early? Sent her out into the Greater Forest Areas, then they got spooked and left quickly?’

  David shrugged. ‘Could be anything. I don’t know. That’s London for you. Come on, let’s get out of here. I’m hungry.’

  He led her out, closing the door on the flat and its memories with an air of respect. Back in his own hideout, he set some water to boil while Airie went to the window and peered out.

  ‘Where did you go?’ she asked. ‘I was bored.’

  He pointed at the bookshelf in the corner that was stacked with dusty paperbacks. ‘Read,’ he said.

  ‘I like pictures.’

  ‘Draw some. There are some pencils in the kitchen drawers.’

  Airie couldn’t help but smile. ‘I’ll think about it. What are you going to do with me?’

  David smiled. ‘To be honest, I have no idea. I think it’s best you stay here until we figure something out. Where did you live?’

  ‘Here and there. We squatted wherever my brother could find someone who would let us in or who’d take me as payment. We were staying in Bethnal last, a place on Stanford Road.’

  David nodded. ‘I know it.’

  ‘You gonna beat my brother’s ass?’

  ‘It’s tempting.’

  ‘Be careful. He’s a cowardly little bastard but he has mates out of the Tank.’

  ‘I have worse things to worry about than that place.’

  ‘Like what? Huntsmen?’ Airie gave a wicked laugh, as though the idea was preposterous. When David didn’t smile, her laughter abruptly cut off. ‘You’re joking, right? There’s no such thing as Huntsmen.’

  ‘No, and no, I’m not joking. And yeah, there are Huntsmen out there.’

  Airie felt white heat fill her cheeks. She spun in a circle as if looking for a secret passage out of the apartment. Huntsmen. She had heard the stories. Part human, part dog, part machine; if the government set one on your trail it would track you to the end of the Earth and then rip out your soul. They were unstoppable, relentless tracking machines, built for one thing only: to kill as quickly and efficiently as possible.

  ‘Calm down, we’re safe here.’

  ‘How can we be safe? How can we ever be safe again? Fuck you, David, why’d you have to interfere? My brother, he was a bastard, but even going to those places with his mates, it was better … better than dying, better than getting chased by a Huntsman….’

  ‘I don’t know that they’re tracking me, only that I ran into one at a mob riot. It seemed to notice me.’

  ‘Why?’

  David glanced towards his bag on the table. Airie followed his gaze, frowning. A wooden board was sticking out. It looked like a basic piece of two by four, but with metal hooks on one side, metal handles and rubber straps on the other.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a clawboard.’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘Hanging off the side of tube trains.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For fun.’

  ‘Sounds dangerous.’

  David shrugged. ‘It is.’

  ‘Then why do you do it?’

  ‘I don’t, not really. Not anymore. I quit.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’

  ‘Only cos you don’t answer them.’ She frowned, remembering something David’s friend had said. ‘You’re really a Tube Rider, ain’t you? I thought your friend was joking, but he wasn’t. That’s what you were doing in that old station, wasn’t it? Hanging off the side of the Underground trains.’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘You know people are talking about you? What you did, that was fucking cool.’

  ‘That was some friends of mine. Nothing to do with me.’

  The room seemed to blur as Airie let her mind drift back to the many long nights she had lain awake listening to her brother and his mates talking about London and the government. They were all doomed. Eventually the government would tire of all the riots and the mo
b violence and would do what was necessary to restore order. Some said it would be the regular military, others said war robots. Some of his drunker friends said the Huntsmen.

  Then something had happened. A gang had escaped. A number of people had been killed—many said by Huntsmen, but Airie didn’t believe it—but despite everything all the talk on the street was of this group who had defied the government.

  Some said they called themselves Tube Riders, after the ghostly people claimed to have been seen peering in through the windows of late-night Underground trains, but whatever reason they had chosen their name, and whether it was real or not, they had done something no one else had dared to do.

  Stick a figure up at the government.

  ‘Things used to be different, didn’t they?’ she said. ‘There used to be no perimeter walls or any of that crap. Do you know what’s outside of London?’

  David shrugged. ‘Fields, I guess. That’s why they’re called the Greater Forest Areas.’

  ‘Like Hyde Park?’

  ‘With less trash.’

  Airie nodded slowly. The Tube Riders were everything she dreamed of being—strong, tough, rebellious, not giving a shit, kicking sand in their enemies’ faces.

  She looked up at David, who had gone over to the table and pulled the wooden board out of his bag. He turned it over in his hands, then ran a finger over the hooks screwed to its outer service.

  ‘Can you make me one?’ Airie said quietly. ‘I want to be a Tube Rider too.’

  11

  Plans

  Rusty Pete had his feet up on a stool and was swigging from a scratched plastic bottle when Lindon walked into the old office with two men in tow.

  Pete kicked the stool away and sat up, glaring at Lindon. ‘Hey, you don’t knock, you don’t breathe tomorrow—’

  ‘These men claim they were attacked by Tube Riders.’

  Pete held Lindon’s gaze a moment longer, until Lindon knew that a score had been made that would one day need to be settled. Then he turned to the two men. The bigger of the two was familiar to Lindon. Saul Grey ran several gambling dens across central London, and Lindon had seen him in the crowd at his fights.