by Tim Lebbon
“Precisely,” Reaper said. “What these bastards never learn is that we are better than them, and we will win.”
Jack's heart thumped, blood pulsing in his ears. He knew that this could turn bad very quickly.
“We won't have long,” Sparky said.
“Then let's not waste any more time,” Reaper said. He walked closer to one group of Choppers, and two who had discarded their helmets looked at him with unashamed terror.
“No more murdering,” Jack said. “We can use them.”
“And use them we will,” Reaper said. “So. Which one do we interrogate first?”
Each time she blinked, Nomad saw the girl's face. Young, pretty, yet aged with tensions and experiences that were etched into her eyes like memories on view. Her purple hair might have been a bruise. The explosion and the girl were one and the same.
I'm drawing close to her again, Nomad thought. She's come to the north where the worst of my mistakes live out their lives. The north. I haven't been here for…
After Doomsday, when Nomad found herself wandering the ruined city and becoming something else—drowning in new abilities, and then drowning her past with them—she had gone to dwell in the north. It had felt sufficiently different from the rest of London to perhaps allow her some peace. But that peace had failed to manifest, because the north had shown her the worst of what she had done. The monsters had run, crawled, flown, and scampered there, hiding amongst the mazelike streets and parks, and she had wandered amongst them, never touching nor wishing to be touched.
And so Nomad had moved south and found the reality, though that was no less troubling. She had returned north occasionally since then, because her destinations were never purely geographic, and sometimes there was a randomness to her wanderings that made it inevitable. But she had never been comfortable there.
She seeks her brother, but if he is here, she will not want to find him. It was strange thinking of the girl in such terms. Nomad was going to kill her—she was certain of that, convinced, and ready for it—and yet the girl was very real in her mind, with aims and ambitions, fears and worries. Strange. She did not think of people like that anymore. Everyone was a ghost to Nomad because she dwelled somewhere so different.
Everyone but the boy, Jack. Her boy. In him she had planted the seed of her future and hope for redemption. And she would do everything she could to protect him.
“What?” Lucy-Anne asked as she ran. “Rook, what?”
“Hampstead Heath,” Rook said. “I never thought it would be so…” But she didn't hear what else he said because they were both running, pounding the pavement, and Rook's birds fluttered around their heads, their own evident excitement echoing his.
Lucy-Anne had never been to Hampstead Heath before. She was expecting a park, like any one of London's other large green areas. What she could not prepare herself for was the sheer scale of the place. One moment they were running along a residential street, aiming for a wide junction with shops on the other side of the road. The next moment, they turned a corner and wilderness confronted them. A landscape of greenery, much of it strange. A swathe of wild hillsides, a forest, a jungle of trees and creepers. The shock was immense, and she was almost winded by it. Then when she breathed in again she could taste the Heath, and it was both alluring and terrifying.
“They called it the Lungs of London,” Rook said as they jogged. “So big, it's like a different place. Countryside in the middle of the city. Sucks in a lot of London's pollution, pumps out oxygen. It did, at least. Who knows what it pumps out now?”
Lucy-Anne heard but could not respond. At the end of the street two roads led off, the main one on the left providing what was once a definitive demarcation point between green and grey. Now, that line had been blurred. The Heath was spreading, bleeding greenery from its previously defined borders. The buildings there sprouted grasses, wore climbing plants across their façades, and several seemed to have trees growing through their slated roofs.
Nothing grows that quickly, Lucy-Anne thought. But every sense told her that the Heath no longer obeyed any natural rules she knew. While Evolve had acted upon the human population of London, perhaps here it had also touched the vegetation.
“How the hell are we going to find him in there?” she asked. Rook looked at her, eyes wide with excitement and fear. He could offer her no answer, no comfort. He only took her hand and pulled her along the street.
“The only way is to start looking,” he said. “I've sent my rooks ahead. They've been scouting the land while you rested.”
“And what have they found?”
“Wilderness. Strangeness. Danger.” He smiled at her. “All the usual.”
“And nothing to put me off,” she said.
“Of course.”
They walked on, and Lucy-Anne felt a sudden rush of affection for Rook, and gratitude that he would take it upon himself to do this for her. He was a wild boy himself, and strange, and she knew very well how dangerous he could be. But he was also showing himself to be very human.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Haven't found him yet.” A bird drifted down to Rook's shoulder, and the dark-haired boy tilted his head. When he did that, Lucy-Anne thought he took on the mannerisms and the look of a rook himself.
“Okay,” he said. “We can follow the road onto the Heath. It rises up out of London, and it's pretty overgrown in places. But it looks safe for now.”
Lucy-Anne nodded and, hand in hand, they left the London she had once known.
They entered another world.
Walking into Regent's Park had been strange, with its haunting shadows and strange inhabitants. But Lucy-Anne had always maintained the sense of London around her. The city exerted a gravity that had influenced her every step of the way, present in her memories for each step through the park. Here, she felt different. As soon as they moved out of the built-up area and started across the Heath, she was somewhere else. London and everything that had happened was behind her, and ahead lay a future and a place she could not even guess at.
She sensed strangeness all around, but it was with a kind of detachment that she found comforting. The grass was long and sturdy, and it waved with the breeze, forming complex patterns that seemed to speak of something secret. The trees were heavy with shadow, and lush banks of shrubs could have hidden a thousand watchers. But her focus was narrowing now to include her aim and destination, and little else. Andrew smiled in her mind's eye and laughed in her memory. With the toxic city forgotten, it was his gravity that started to draw her in.
The wide path had once been immaculately maintained, with defined edges and its surface kept free of weeds. That had all changed now. They could still follow the route of the tarmac way, because the weeds and grasses that had grown through it were shorter and scrubbier than the surrounding heath. But nature had very definitely taken over here.
They were climbing slowly but surely towards a wide, gentle hilltop. Lucy-Anne glanced occasionally back the way they had come, and each look offered a more comprehensive view across London. As they approached the crest of the hill she could see Canary Wharf to the left, and to the right the dome of St. Paul's was just distinguishable above the spread of other buildings. Patches of green marked the parks that had grown wild. One tall office building close to the centre of London had been gutted by fire sometime in the past, and now it offered only a fractured skeleton to the sky. Half a dozen smoke trails rose from across the city, leaning to the east like plants erring towards the sun.
“It looks so different even from this far away,” she said.
“It's because you know how much it's changed,” Rook said. “And there's no sound of civilisation.”
Lucy-Anne listened and heard bird song, the howl of something larger, and movement in trees farther along the slope. No cars or sirens or screams of playing children.
A pack of dogs scampered across the slope down from them, and she shivered as she remembered their subterranean encounter wi
th dogs on the way in to London. I dreamed of them as well, she thought. She glanced at Rook.
“We need to stay away from the trees,” she said.
“Huh?”
“I dreamed of you in there, and then…”
He took her hand and kissed her quickly on the lips. “I have my eyes,” he said, glancing up. A dozen rooks circled high above them. “Besides, we can't avoid the trees here. You want to look, don't you?”
“Of course.”
“Then we have to find someone to help us.”
“You're serious?” She thought of the gargoyle people, the snake folk, and other mutations she had been imagining.
“If not, we might be looking forever,” he said. “The Heath is almost a thousand acres, and wilder now than ever before. You can feel that?”
Lucy-Anne nodded.
“There must be people among the monsters,” Rook said, glancing away from her. “There have to be.”
A rush of hopelessness flushed through her, threatening to corrode her determination. But she pressed her lips tight together and clenched her hands into fists.
“I don't care how long it takes,” she said. “Come on.” She walked uphill, towards a line of trees that marked the end of this open area of Hampstead Heath.
Rook followed, and it was Lucy-Anne who entered the forest first.
They walked for a few minutes, going deeper into the woods and higher up the hillside. Paths crissed and crossed, and she was aware of frequent movement away from them through the trees. They were surrounded by a bubble of stillness and silence. Lucy-Anne had no wish to see what dwelled beyond.
An urge came to start shouting Andrew's name. He could be close! she thought, and she walked tall to make herself seen. But she did not shout. She was too cautious for that.
Twenty minutes after entering the woodland, an intense feeling of déjà vu assailed her. She swayed, struggling against the compulsion to slump to the floor and let events wash over her. Not every dream comes true! she thought, and she searched among the trees for familiar scenes. There was nothing she recognised.
No bench, no man swinging in the trees, so—
She turned around and Rook was no longer with her.
Lucy-Anne felt her stomach sink, and her heart thumped painfully. Her vision blurred and then settled again, a newfound clarity making everything around her clear, sharp, and deadly.
“Rook!” she called. He won't answer, he's gone, he's fallen already into the pit just like my dream and—
“Over here,” he said. Lucy-Anne almost collapsed with relief. She took three steps and looked past a big tree, and there he was. He'd run along a shallow gully towards what looked like an old bandstand, and he was now climbing the gully's sides to walk back to her.
There was a bench on the left, halfway between them. Alongside the bench, a coil of green wire, the sort sometimes used in parks to define the edges of a path. On the air, a memory of blackberries.
“No,” she breathed. “Rook…” But she could not shout.
She tried to close her eyes so that she could not see the man swinging down from one of the trees, but Rook called her name—a shouted warning—and she looked. The man swung between her and Rook, naked and coated with dye, unnaturally long arms heavily muscled…directly from her dreams.
“Rook, stop!” she shouted, but he was running. And now the dog-woman, she thought, and there she was down the slope, urinating on a tree and sniffing at the ground. “Rook! Don't come any closer!”
“I don't think they mean any—” he began, and then the ground beneath him opened as he ran, swallowing him up as if he was never meant to be there at all. His rooks fluttered and flitted in confusion.
Lucy-Anne's vision began to fade, her world receded, and she bit her lip to try to see away the faint washing over her.
The ape man swung away, the dog-woman scampered into shadows. And from the pit she heard Rook's awful, blood-filled cry.
She staggered to the edge of the pit and looked down. There was Rook. At first she thought her vision was deceiving her, and that it was not a huge, wormlike thing chewing at his throat. A worm-thing with the remnants of humans limbs and long auburn hair.
Noooo, she tried to scream, but it was not even a whisper. The last thing she saw as she hit the ground, rolled, and vision fled was the rooks, hundreds of them spiralling up into the sky and away. She heard their cries, and one more from Rook.
And then nothing.
They are somewhere overgrown, a place where nature has been given back to itself. Humankind has lost dominion here. There is a bench smothered with a rose bush, a path, and—
And this is my dream.
Rook is down the slope from her, moving quickly towards her with a look of excitement. He has seen something that he wants to share. But…
But this is my dream, I saw this happening, and soon there will be—
The naked man swings between them from the trees, and this time Lucy-Anne takes time to examine him and the rope he uses. He is smeared with a heavy dye, like coloured mud. Yet he still wears glasses, and she is sure his earrings are the red and yellow of Christmas. The rope is thin and blue, the kind used for tying down loads on the back of trucks. He ends his swing and clambers into a tall tree to her left.
I'm steering this, she thinks. Already this dream is not progressing like it ever has before.
She moves forward and looks for the man, but he has scrambled higher into the tree and is hidden from view.
She sees the dog-woman sniffing along at the foot of a tree farther away.
She'll piss, and then Rook will fall into the pit, I'll hear him scream and then look and that horrible worm-thing will be chewing at him, and he'll be dying.
“Rook, wait!” she shouts, and it is the first time she finds her voice.
Rook hesitates, then runs faster towards her.
Not long now. He'll fall.
“Stop running!” she screams. Rook's expression falters, and he skids to a stop twenty feet from her but not far enough away. He slips forward as the ground gives way.
“Grab something! Don't fall! Don't let yourself fall!”
Lucy-Anne is running forwards in her dream, in full control. She feels a gleeful rush of power, and even as Rook is scrabbling for his life she glances to the left. A tree explodes into colour, raining down a thousand fat red blooms that splash across the ground. She looks right and imagines a fully-laid dinner table, and there it is, meats and vegetables steaming all across the crisp white tablecloth.
She screeches in delight, and when she reaches Rook he is hauling himself from the edge of the pit. Something crawls around down there. Something hisses.
“I did it,” she says. Rook is silent, almost not there. “I did it.” But then she realises that this is a dream, and remembers what she has already seen in real life. She looks sadly at Rook, and he sees his own death reflected in his eyes. He starts to fade away.
There is a jump. Her surroundings change, and though there is no external jolt, inside she feels the shock of displacement. It is a blink between dreams, but Lucy-Anne now knows that she has some say in what she is seeing and experiencing, and that makes the change so much more shocking.
She and Rook are on a wide area of scrubland. London is in the distance so this is still the Heath, but a part of it she has never seen before. It is surreal. A huge table and chair stand before them, fifty times normal size, with long grasses growing around the legs and creeping plants trying to gain the tabletop.
What once were people move across a tree line farther up the hillside. They seem to be crawling on all fours, but she can't quite tell, because there is something so alien about their movements.
So what's this? Lucy-Anne thinks. She urges herself to wake—actually pinches herself in the dream, feeling the sharp sting of pain—but the dream still has more to show her.
Rook says something she can't quite hear. His voice is distant, and she experiences a moment of complete panic. Perhaps
he really is dead, and this dream is simply an unconscious wish.
Of course he's dead! I saw him fall, saw that thing eating at him, so he must be dead, and now—
Nomad appears. She steps from the top of the huge square table and drops to the ground, landing with knees slightly bent and yet seeming to cause and experience no impact. The grasses around her feet barely move.
“You,” Lucy-Anne says, fear cooling her blood.
“And you,” Nomad says. She looks at Lucy-Anne sadly and raises her hand, and Lucy-Anne senses the staggering amount of power held in Nomad's fist. Going to blast me scorch me burn me, she thinks, and between blinks she sees the nuclear explosion that has accompanied every other dream of this woman.
“I'm sorry,” Nomad says.
Lucy-Anne steps back. She's here to kill me! The scene freezes, filled with potential. “This is my dream,” she says aloud, but her voice sounds muffled and contained. “You can't kill me here.”
Movement begins again, and everything has changed. Rook is sitting in the long grass, and Nomad is squatting close by, frowning, shaking her head, and looking at Lucy-Anne as if she has seen a ghost.
“But no one knows me,” she says.
Lucy-Anne goes to speak, but there the dream ends. Her senses fade back to herself. She feels grass against her cheek, smells the freshly turned mud and foul sewage stench of the pit, and remembers the last time she had really seen Rook.
“Oh, Rook,” she said without opening her eyes, and she cried because the dream could not be real.
“It's okay,” Rook said. “You fainted. No wonder. That thing stinks.”
Lucy-Anne's eyes snapped open and Rook was there, kneeling by her side and resting one cool hand on her brow. He was shaking.
“Thanks,” he said. “One more step and I'd have gone right in.”
She lifted herself up on one elbow and looked past Rook towards the hole in the ground. The branches that had been laid over it to disguise it stuck up like broken ribs, and from deep in the dark pit she could hear a sickly, wet sound of movement.