by Tim Lebbon
“These places feel full of the dead,” Jack whispered, his voice carrying in the silence.
“Not all of them,” Rosemary said. “There were efforts to clean up. The government right at the beginning, and then us. We couldn't just let the city rot.”
“Then where…?” As Jack spoke they rounded the corner at the end of the street, and his question was answered.
Lucy-Anne had never seen a place that looked so wrong. It reminded her of the Exclusion Zone, but the space before them had not only been flattened, but apparently excavated and turned as well, as if to expose fresh ground to the new world. No old buildings remained standing, though there were structures out there, ambiguous and strange in the fading light. It was maybe a mile across in both directions. Shrubs and sapling trees grew in abundance, lush and somehow grotesque. She could not work that out. Leaves shone with health, flowers were full and fat, yet she could not shake the idea that they were wrong.
“It's a mass grave,” Jack said.
“Yes,” Rosemary replied. “The Barrens. The area was destroyed in a huge blaze two days after Doomsday. It didn't take much for them to finish the job.”
“A grave?” Emily said. She was still filming. “How can that be a grave?”
“No one knows how many are buried here,” Rosemary said. “Twenty thousand? A hundred thousand? A million?”
“Those plants…” Lucy-Anne began, wondering whether talking about them would reveal why they looked so disturbing. I've seen them before, she thought, and a memory promised itself to her…but not yet.
“They look almost meaty,” Sparky said, and yes, that was it, and when Lucy-Anne closed her eyes and breathed in deeply she could almost smell the rawness of them.
“Fertile ground,” Jack said. Lucy-Anne knew what he meant, and it was dreadful.
“We have to cross that?” Jenna asked.
Rosemary nodded. “I've done it many times before. But never in the dark.”
“Because it's haunted?” Emily's voice was small and lost.
“There's no such things as ghosts,” Jack said, squeezing his sister's shoulder.
“You don't need ghosts for a place to feel haunted,” Rosemary said. “Please, come on. The light's fading.”
They went, and as they passed from the neat, paved areas of a dead London street and onto the heaved ground of the Barrens, Lucy-Anne wondered if everyone was thinking thoughts similar to hers: My family could be beneath my feet right now.
When she closed her eyes, she saw their death-masks grinning up at her from mass graves. She ground her teeth together to shove away the image. A nightmare? She thought not. Just her imagination going overdrive, and she determined to walk on.
The ground was uneven. Smooth here, ridged and cracked there, sunken elsewhere, it promised broken bones for the unwary. Lucy-Anne looked all around, searching for the glint of bones, or the messy trail of hair still attached to shrunken scalps. But whoever had done the burying had been thorough.
“We're walking on them,” Jenna said, something like fascination in her voice. Nobody replied.
They passed the first spread of lush plants, and Lucy-Anne could not identify them. The shrubs’ flowers looked like roses, but from the stems below the flowers hung catkins, and the thorns were long and thin like hawthorn. Lower down, a bright red heather hugged the ground, spread through the cracks and crevasses like something spilled. She thought of asking whether anyone recognised the species, but decided against it. She was afraid that they were new. Now that Sparky had used the term meaty, Lucy-Anne could not shake that impression from her mind when she breathed in. And the flowers themselves were heavy, damp, brightly coloured. Fertile ground, Jack had said, and Lucy-Anne tried in vain to not visualise what lay beneath.
“A marker,” Rosemary said as they approached a low structure. “There are lots of them. Sometimes you'll even find fresh flowers here.” The structure was surprisingly well-made, constructed from red London bricks and painted around its circular base with a thick black coating. Its round top was slightly sloped to allow water to run off, but embedded in the surface was a glass-enclosed picture, still sharp and clear even though moisture had penetrated through a crack in one corner. The man stared up at them as they passed, smiling happy thoughts from a vanished time.
“How do they know exactly where he was buried?” Jenna asked. “It must have been…”
“They used army wagons mostly,” Rosemary said. “Sometimes removal lorries. Brought them here by the hundreds. I never saw it myself, but I've heard accounts, and it doesn't take much to imagine. So you're right, dear. No one can know for sure where any particular body is buried. I think those that come here treat it like one grave.”
One grave, Lucy-Anne thought, and a flash of memory stabbed at her again. Again, she drove it away.
“Dead London,” Sparky said. “Bloody freaking me out, I know that for sure.”
“There are some rough paths to follow. We'll be across in a few minutes.” Rosemary looked nervously back the way they had come, where the sun was just disappearing below a line of rooftops.
Her nervousness unsettled Lucy-Anne even more. She can't really mean it's haunted? She looked around at the grotesque, strange surroundings, and the silence that enclosed them felt like a held breath. What sounds the Barrens would utter once darkness fell, she had no wish to discover.
They passed more memorials of all shapes, sizes, and designs. One was constructed in cast concrete, eight feet tall and six wide, and three names were carved lovingly into its surface. Another was a brick-built square thirty feet across, the ground within flattened and planted as a perfect lawn, a small wooden cross at its centre. Whoever had built it obviously maintained it, as the grass was trimmed and the cuttings strewn beyond the wall. There were countless wooden markers; many crosses, and others simply stakes driven into the ground. Pictures were pinned to some of them, the majority faded and leached of colour by the sun, but some obviously replaced frequently. Others had names carved into them. As well as the brick or stone markers, there were other elaborate sculptures of twisted and shaped metal that would not have looked out of place in an art gallery.
They could be here, Lucy-Anne thought. Every step she took was painful, and the silence from the rest of the group testified to their upset as well. Among them all, Jack and Emily were the lucky ones. They had family, and everyone else walked alone.
“Oh,” Rosemary said. She paused, glanced back and then continued walking. Perhaps the sun was sinking too quickly for her to think about changing their course.
Someone or something had excavated a hole thirty feet from the rough path they were following. Soil and broken masonry had been dug through to reach the softer parts beneath, and in the dusky light the spread of bones looked pink. There were skulls in there, and leathery skin, and hair twisted across stretched features.
Lucy-Anne fell to her knees. Something about this place was so familiar, and yet her memory teased her still. Just do it! she thought, challenging her nightmares to strike her once again. But if they did have something to say about this place, they held back.
For the next couple of minutes they had to step over and around a mess of bones splayed across the path. Some of them bore teeth marks. Others had been chewed through to get to the good stuff inside.
Rosemary led them on, and as daylight fled and gave the Toxic City back to the night, they left that sad, surreal place and found themselves once more in familiar streets.
They gathered in a small square where once-tended plants had grown wild, and where birds chattered as they chose their roosts for the night.
“It's not far now,” Rosemary said. “There's a house two streets away that I sometimes use. There's food there, and bottled water, and enough rooms—”
“Listen!” Sparky held up his hand, eyes wide, head tilted to one side. The birds had also fallen silent, equally attuned to the sound of danger. “Engines.”
“Quickly!” Rosemary led them acro
ss the road and through a gate into the small park at the square's centre. “Hide, stay low, and whatever you do, make sure you're not seen.”
“Choppers?” Jenna asked.
“Almost certainly. Irregulars hardly ever use vehicles.”
Lucy-Anne hid with Jack and Emily behind a bank of undergrowth growing around an old oak tree. She looked for the others but they had all hidden themselves away so well that even she could no longer see them. She had the crazy idea that they had never been there at all.
“I'm afraid,” Emily said.
The motors were drawing closer. There were several of them, and above their grumble he heard the distinctive sound of something else: a helicopter.
“Me too.” Lucy-Anne smiled at the girl.
“But we're here,” Jack whispered into his sister's ear. “We're in London, and Mum and Dad will be here too.”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “Do you think they'll remember us?”
Jack tried to answer, but his voice broke. “Shh,” he said instead. He glanced at Lucy-Anne and she saw tears in his eyes. “Shh.”
The helicopter passed overhead. She saw it through the jagged branches of the oak tree, its tail light flashing red as it hovered briefly, then thundered away across the Barrens. It was too high for its downwash to be felt, but so loud that Lucy-Anne could not even hear her own breathing. She noticed that though Emily cringed into her brother, her right hand was held out from her side, the dark lens of the camera facing up.
As the helicopter drifted away, the square was illuminated by a flood of headlamps. Lucy-Anne tried to hunker down lower, gasping as the light fingered through bushes and between tree trunks to briefly dazzle her. The engine sound did not change. She heard heavy wheels grinding on the gritty road, and another set of headlamps swung through to follow the first. The two vehicles grumbled around the square, their engine noise intensely threatening. But behind them, a heavier sound. It rumbled and shook through the ground as well as through the air, and it made leaves in the square shake where the helicopter could not.
“What's that?” Emily asked.
“Don't know. Big truck.” Lucy-Anne peered through the bushes, trying to make out the shape and size of the two vehicles driving around the edge of the square. They seemed quite small, but before she could get a good look, they were gone, and the massive rumble that followed them took over.
It echoed from the buildings around the square, shook the ground, and the lights—red, yellow, and white—slashed through the undergrowth as if it was not there. It ended the shadows in that place, and its motor sounded angry and hungry.
The vehicle turned around the edge of the square, following the two smaller trucks that had preceded it. Through branches and past heavy limbs draped with leaves, Lucy-Anne could see its shape, and it was huge. It reminded her of an oil tanker, but its heavy grey sides looked daunting, the three conical towers on its back ugly and threatening with the stubby black guns that protruded from them. The engine tone lowered for a moment and she thought it was going to slow.
“They can't have seen us!” Emily said, almost shouting to be heard.
Lucy-Anne delved into her pocket for the knife Sparky had let her keep, laughing out loud at how ineffective it felt.
Then the giant vehicle lumbered on, putting on a surprising spurt of speed as it skirted the square and disappeared after the 4×4s.
For a couple of minutes after the lights disappeared and the vehicles were out of sight, everyone remained where they were. Lucy-Anne listened to the engines fading away, echoes coming back at them and playing tricks with direction and distance. Then Rosemary crawled across to them, her eyes wide, fearful, and perhaps excited as well. “Choppers!” she said. “And that big monster was one of their mobile labs. I've watched Irregulars taken into there, never to be seen again.”
“We need to go to your house,” Jack said. Emily was still shivering in his arms. “It's been a long day, Rosemary, and we need rest. This is all too much.”
“Near miss, eh?” Sparky said, crawling across to them.
“Got it all on here, I think,” Emily said, holding up her camera and smiling weakly.
“There won't be another patrol for a while,” Rosemary said.
“I need to find my family,” Lucy-Anne whispered. Her heart was thrumming, and something had started ticking deep inside her, a timer slowly running out of sand. She was counting down to something, and she had no idea what.
“Not yet,” Jack said.
“Lucy-Anne, we need—” Jenna began.
“My family!” she said, louder this time. “We've come all this way, been through those bloody tunnels…those dogs! And I'm not just going to go to fucking sleep!”
“Quiet!” Rosemary said.
“Stop telling me to be quiet, old woman!”
“Lucy-Anne.” Jack stepped forward and held her arms, trying to pull her close. She resisted, pulling back, staring over Jack's shoulder at something more distant.
“Where did they live?” Rosemary said. Her voice was calmer now, cooler.
Lucy-Anne glanced at her, but said nothing.
“Answer her,” Jack said. “She knows the city.”
“She led us to those dogs.”
“Tooting, wasn't it?” Jenna asked. “Didn't they live near the big police station in Tooting?”
Rosemary sighed and lowered her head.
“What?” Lucy-Anne demanded. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Tooting isn't there anymore,” Rosemary said softly. “We just walked across it, and now it's called the Barrens.”
Lucy-Anne gasped, and her defences fell from her in a heartbeat. She crumpled in Jack's arms, slumping down as though her knees had given out. She wished he could hold her tight enough to stop everything, just for a while.
“It doesn't mean they're dead,” he whispered in her ear.
No, they're not dead, she thought. And something deep inside seemed to grin.
She pulled away from Jack and stood on her own. She smoothed down her clothes, ran her fingers through her hair, and wiped an errant tear from her cheek. Then she glanced at Rosemary. “Sorry.” The word was quiet, but they all heard it in the silence.
Rosemary nodded and gave a brief smile. “We should go. If we hurry, we can be there before it's fully dark.”
They followed the woman out of the square and along a narrow street, as they had been following her all that long day. She had led them out of the world they knew and into one they used to know, but which was now a mysterious, dangerous place. She had healed their wounds after the dogs attacked them, and told them about the strange places beneath London, both old and new. She had walked them across the largest grave the world had ever seen, and pointed out monuments to individual people that seemed, in Lucy-Anne's eyes at least, to be more immediate than the thought of a million dead.
She trusted the old woman, and she didn't. She liked her, and she feared her. And as Rosemary unlocked the front door to an innocuous, terraced house in a street that had once sung with life, Lucy-Anne wondered whether history was too powerful for any of them to change.
There will be a statement from the prime minister on all TV and radio channels at 10:00 p.m.
—Government Statement, all-channel broadcast,
8:15 p.m. GMT, July 28, 2019
It was a normal house, its owners dead or gone since Doomsday. Rosemary had tacked several layers of thick sheets and blankets over every window and door so that she could light candles without being seen. There were a few lighter patches on the papered walls where pictures had once hung, empty book cases, and piled in a small room at the rear of the house were a pram, bouncy chair, and several bags of baby toys and clothes. She told them that she had tried to depersonalise the house—not to make it her own, but to make it anonymous.
Before Doomsday, she had been a nurse. She did not like stealing someone else's home.
Jack thought they would all have trouble falling asleep. After eating f
ood cold from tins, Rosemary showed them to separate rooms. Lucy-Anne, Jenna, and Sparky took one, while Jack and Emily had another, bickering briefly about who should have the top bunk.
“It's dangerous,” Jack said, and Emily laughed and climbed the ladder.
But when the time for sleep came, Jack closed his eyes and suffered none of the anxieties he feared. He had worried that being here at last, in the Toxic City, would keep them all awake. But he soon heard Sparky mumbling in his sleep and Emily's gentle breathing above him, and before dropping off himself he realised that the dangers of this place extended far beyond the ruins of the Exclusion Zone. London was perilous, but a world where such lies could be told, and such wonders hidden away, was deadly through and through.
For the past two years, none of them had ever been safe.
Breakfast was more cold food from tin cans, but baked beans had never tasted so good. Jack wondered how the Irregulars stayed healthy without anything fresh: no vegetables, fruit, or meat. But he kept having to remind himself that they were not normal people. She's moved on, he thought, watching Rosemary opening several large plastic bottles of water. She's evolved, all of a sudden. Her hands moved smoothly, confidently, the patterns they made almost poetic. What must it be like to have such power? He could barely imagine.
“I'm taking you to a man called Gordon,” she said. “He's a friend, but not as…accepting of his new gift as I am.”
“What's his gift?” Jack asked.
“He can trace bloodlines,” she said. “One drip of blood, and he can sense it all across the city.”
“You mean he can smell our families?” Sparky asked.
“It's much more than smell, dear,” Rosemary said, smiling. She held up her hands. “Just as this is a lot more than touch.”
“You're superheroes. Like Batman.” Emily chewed on stale breadsticks, and her seriousness made them laugh. All except Rosemary. Jack noticed that she looked pained rather than amused, and he wondered just how accepting she really was.