London Eye: 1 (Toxic City) (4 page)

…and the British Government has restricted all movement into and out of London. All airports in the UK have been closed, with over five hundred flights diverted to French, German, and Spanish airports, and more than two hundred turned back to their countries of origin. At this time, the agent used in the attack has not been identified, and it is not known whether it is chemical or biological in origin. Pictures still being transmitted from inside London show soldiers in NBC suits barricading roads, and bodies piled by roadsides. There is no official word on casualties, although an unnamed source inside the Ministry of Defence describes the death toll as “catastrophic.” The British prime minister is expected to make a statement shortly.

Homeland Security Threat Level is maintained at Severe/Red, and the American public is asked to be on their guard.

—CNN, 12:20 p.m. EST, July 28, 2019

M
um's still alive.

The words were fresh in Jack's mind as they left Camp Truth and headed through the woods. Rosemary and Lucy-Anne went as a grandmother and her granddaughter going to visit friends. Sparky and Jenna were pretending to be boyfriend and girlfriend, a prospect which delighted Sparky and seemed to annoy Jenna immensely. And Jack and his sister Emily were on a family outing. If anyone asked where their parents were, Jack would only have to say “dead” for the
understanding to hit home, and he hoped someone
did
ask, because
his mother was still alive!

Emily fluttered around in excitement, filming everything in sight. Jack wanted to tell her to save the batteries, but he knew she had several spares and a solar recharger, and he liked seeing her so absorbed in something. He could always tell the difference between her being simply distracted, or completely involved in something that took her away from their sad reality. Now, she was just a little girl chasing butterflies.

When they emerged from the woods and walked along the main road, traffic was light, and nobody seemed to pay them any attention. A police car zipped by, pale face at the window. Closer to the bus stop, Jack held his breath as a Capital Keeper wagon roared past. It had once been an army truck, but the camouflage paint had gone, replaced by the now-familiar deep Royal Blue.

“I wonder where they've been,” Emily said. She was so bright. Most kids her age would have asked where they were going.

Their bus was on time, and they sat halfway along the top deck. The sun beat through the windows and made Jack sweat, but he enjoyed the heat. He looked out and watched the world go by.

He saw a field full of cows, and a car that had been stopped by the police, its occupants made to sit beside the road with their wrists bound while the officers ripped the car apart. He saw a lake where people rode jet skis, and three houses set back from the main road that had been burnt out, their blackened windows looking like sad, cried-out eyes. And amongst the faces staring from cars and lorries passing them by, he saw blank sadness that spoke volumes.

Normality, for these times after Doomsday.

“Mum's still alive,” he whispered in Emily's ear, and she grinned.

The journey took a little over an hour, and they were both glad to get off the bus. They weren't used to travelling so far.

They followed the directions Rosemary had given them, watching out for the shop names, and when they passed the Beckham Bistro, they left the pavement and headed down the narrow, rubbish-strewn alley between buildings. At the end of the alley they crossed an area of undeveloped ground. Glass crunched underfoot, and a wild dog barked at them and stalked slowly away. There were lots of wild dogs now—as well as cats, parrots, and snakes—their owners killed in London, and though there were frequent culls, numbers seemed to be increasing. Before Doomsday Jack could remember his father being fascinated with cryptozoology, the study of exotic animals living wild in Britain: wolves, bears, black panthers, cougars, and alligators, all were rumoured to be thriving. He wondered what his dad would make of this.

They crossed the area of rough ground, passed between two blocks of flats that had seen better days, then exited onto the towpath beside a canal.

As they passed beneath a metal road bridge spanning the canal, something changed. It took Jack a moment to spot exactly what it was: everything had grown silent. No more buzzing flies, no rustles in the overgrowth alongside the towpath, no barking from beyond the hedges and walls. It was spooky as hell, and he didn't like it one bit.

“Jack—” Emily began, her voice shadowed with worry.

Someone jumped down from the bridge's underside and pressed something against his back. “Do what I say, or I blow your kidneys all over your shoes.”

Jack glanced at Emily, and her face broke into a smile.

“I really wish I'd had my camera ready for that one,” she said.

“One of these days, Sparky…” Jack said, turning around.

“Yeah?” Sparky was still pointing his finger-and-thumb gun. “You and which army?”

“I thought we were meeting under a viaduct?”

“Just along there,” the boy nodded. “Couple hundred yards. I decided to wander back here, make sure we weren't followed, or nothin’.”

“Everyone get here okay?”

“Fine.” Sparky grinned, rubbing his cheek. “Jenna gave me a right slap on the bus when I tried getting frisky, though.”

Jack examined his friend's red, slightly swollen cheek. He nodded. “Good.”

“Let's go!” Emily said. She ran along the towpath, scaring several ducks into the water.

“You've got to help me look after her, Sparky,” he said quietly.

“You know I will.” Sparky slapped the back of Jack's head, hard, and laughed. “But you know something? I think
she'll
be looking after
us.”
Behind the laughter he was deadly serious, and Jack reminded himself yet again how blessed he was with friends.

They descended from the towpath down a steep slope, and when they entered the damp shadow of the viaduct Jack felt a chill that had nothing to do with temperature. Rosemary, Jenna, and Lucy-Anne were waiting for them there. Lucy-Anne gave him a nervous smile, but he could see that she was excited, too.

“We're about to leave the world you know,” Rosemary said, and Jack's chill seemed to settle into his bones.

The brick arch of the viaduct leaked in several places, raining water down around them and turning the ground into a quagmire. Jack had often wondered what would happen if such a canal bridge were to collapse. Would the whole waterway drain away down here? Would everything in its path be washed away? The red brick was swathed in moss, and from the ruts in the ground it appeared that the leaks had been dripping for a long time.

“It's less than ten miles to the Exclusion Zone from here,” Jenna said. “We're walking the rest of the way?”

“Not used to exercise?” Rosemary asked, smiling.

“I
love
walking,” Jenna said. “It's just that…won't we be seen?”

“Only if people look in all the wrong places. Like I said, we're leaving your world, going somewhere different. Slipping between the lines. It's not a quick journey, but we'll follow paths that will take us all the way into London, undetected and safe.”

“And your friend Philippe showed you the way?” Lucy-Anne asked.

“Yes, Philippe. Though he's hardly a friend.” Rosemary smiled sadly. “London's not an easy place for friendships right now, I'm sad to say. I do have some, but…well, there's so much paranoia.”

“So how do you know you can trust him?” Sparky asked.

“I think I'm a good judge of character.” Rosemary looked around at the five of them, saving her smile for Emily. Then she pointed away from the viaduct and along an overgrown path that seemed to lead into darkness. “We're going there.”

Jack's friends glanced around for a beat, meeting each other's eyes as though waiting for a decision to be made. It was Emily who started after the old woman, glancing back at them all with eyebrow raised.

Sparky started singing. “We're
off
to see the
Wizard—
”

“If you sing any more,” Jenna said, “I will kill you in your sleep.”

“The
wonderful
Wizard of Oz.” Sparky even started skipping.

They followed Rosemary, placing themselves completely in her hands. It was the riskiest thing any of them had done since coming together after Doomsday, but Jack knew it was the
right
thing, as well. They had all been aware that one day, the time for action would arrive.

Very soon, Jack had the real sense that they were travelling just beyond the veil of reality before which most people lived their lives. Rosemary led them through places that seemed forgotten, cast aside or ignored, and sometimes they could hear, and even see the world
going on around them. It was like a route leading back from what the world had become towards what it might have been before, though he knew that at the end of this route lay something else entirely: London as it was now; the Toxic City.

The path from the viaduct led between the rear gardens of two rows of abandoned houses. Many of the structures seemed unsafe and close to collapse, and one or two had already taken the first tumble into ruin. One long spread of buildings on their right had been burnt out, roof joists blackened and exposed to the sky. Few windows remained. Gardens were overgrown, and here and there Jack caught sight of children's playthings clogged with bramble and grass, dulled primary colours showing through the green foliage. He wondered why so many houses had been abandoned at once.

The path stopped against a blank brick wall, a tall boundary construction that seemed to close off the garden space between the two terraces. Rosemary waited for them there, then started down a set of steps almost completely overgrown with brambles. She descended silently. At the bottom, surrounded by banks of undergrowth and overshadowed by the high wall, they huddled together before a boarded area at the base of the barrier.

“Old canal route,” Rosemary said. “It was drained and decommissioned when they built these houses, over a hundred years ago. It's dark in here. You might want to get your torches out.”

“How far does it go?” Jenna asked, amazed.

“This goes out to the edge of town. From there, we go underground almost all the way into the Exclusion Zone.”

“Underground how?” Jack asked. While everyone else was taking torches from their rucksacks, he stared at the timber boarding, one rotten corner of it recently detached.

“You'd be surprised,” Rosemary said. “There are plenty of places beneath the surface of things.” She grabbed the corner of a plywood
sheet and tugged, popping it from a couple of loose nails and resting it back against the board beside it. “People have been building in this country for thousands of years. Much of what's underground is unmapped, uncharted, and forgotten. Philippe has the talent to find it, which is something new. I suspect he knows of places that haven't been seen, or trodden by human feet, for many centuries. Canals, underground rivers, storage basements, tunnels, subterranean hiding places, cave networks, roads built over and blocked off.”

“Looks spooky,” Lucy-Anne said, but Jack could hear the excitement in her voice at the prospect.

“Oh, it's bound to be haunted,” Emily said. She had picked the camera from her rucksack, not her torch.

They all stood there for a moment longer, and Jack looked up at the narrow spread of blue sky above them. The sun was behind the brick wall, and he could barely feel the summer heat down here. But he was ready. Darkness, shadows, and secret ways beckoned, but beyond that, the revelations he had been craving for two years.

And his mother. The picture was in his pocket, her stern, beautiful face waiting for him whenever he needed a look. He and Emily had mentioned their father only in whispers, afraid of what their mother's expression might mean.

“I'll go in last,” Emily said. “I
really
need to get this.” She stood back with her camera, and Rosemary led them away from daylight and into the night.

…and the advice is to remain indoors and await further instructions. Government sources state that there is, as yet, no credible claim for responsibility. What is clear is that there has been a massive breakdown of communication into and out of London, with mobile phone networks down, satellite systems malfunctioning, and land lines dead. We understand that the prime minister will be delivering a statement at 6:00 p.m. But as of now, far from becoming clearer, the situation seems to be descending…(broadcast ends here)

—BBC TV Newsflash, 5:35 p.m. GMT, July 28, 2019

T
o begin with, Jack was disappointed. They walked along the dried canal bed, their torch lights flashing here and there like reflections from long forgotten water, and on the old towpaths he made out at least a dozen box structures obviously used as temporary shelters by tramps. Smashed booze bottles littered the ground, bags of refuse lay split open by rats or other carrion creatures, and he saw many broken items from the world above. He had believed that they were leaving the world he knew, but it appeared they had merely entered its underside.

But then Jenna called out from where she had stalked ahead with Rosemary, and the excitement kicked back in: “Oh, this is not a nice way to go.”

They caught up with her and all trained their torches in the same
place. There was a skeleton propped against the side of the dry canal. It still wore the faded remnants of clothing, but the bones had been picked clean, and in places there were what looked like teeth marks. One leg was gone below the knee, and both arms were missing.

“Gross!” Emily said. Jack thought briefly of leading her away, but he would not patronise her like that. They were all seeing this together.

“Some bones over there,” Sparky said, pointing with his torch. Jack saw a few loose bones scattered across the ground, splintered and chewed. “Let's just hope he or she was dead before the dogs got to them.”

Lucy-Anne walked on quickly, turning her torch from the body and marching ahead into the tunnel. She paused after twenty yards, and Jack could see her shoulders rising and falling as she panted.

“Lucy-Anne?” he asked.

“I'm fine!” But she did not turn around, and when she heard their footsteps she went on alone.

Beyond the skeleton—as though death could be a barrier, or a border—they found very few signs of human interference. Their bobbing torch beams picked out stalactites hanging from the arched ceiling, and in several places water dripped in unavoidable waterfalls. Emily giggled as she ran through and got soaked, but Jack could not help wondering at the water's origin. He hoped for a ruptured water main, not a foul drain.

It was cold, down in this place never touched by sunlight or heat. There was a very slight breeze coming from ahead, and without that Jack guessed the tunnel would have stank. Every few seconds someone's torch beam would illuminate the edge of the dried canal, reminding him of where they were and how strange this was. But though it was dark, and unsettling, and the air went from musty to fresh in a breath, there was a palpable sense of excitement. Jack felt
enthused, and he could sense the others experiencing their own versions of the same anticipation. Their fast breathing echoed, torch lights bobbed erratically, and a loaded silence had fallen over them. The air felt as if it was about to break.

Jack became fascinated with the ceiling, aiming his torch up there for long periods between brief glances at the uneven ground before him. In places it looked like a cave, with uneven rocky protrusions, stalactites made of some unidentifiable, creamy material, and dark cracks into which even his torch could not delve. Elsewhere he could see the rough concrete that sealed the canal beneath the ground. Perhaps it was an intentional covering-over, or maybe it had been hidden away bit by bit, buildings constructed to span and then smother the old waterway.

“Jack!” Sparky called. Jack paused and looked at where his friend was shining his torch. Just before Jack's feet was a hole in the canal's old bed, several feet wide and at least six deep. Its bottom was a mucky mess, the small pools of stagnant water reflecting only a sick, slick light back up at them. It stank. He'd almost walked into it.

“That would have been a good start,” Jack muttered.

“You'd have smelled worse than usual, that's for sure.” Sparky passed him by with a grin and stepped neatly around the hole.

Jack took more care after that. There was plenty to wonder at, but there was also his own safety to consider, and that had to come first. For two years he had been petrified about leaving Emily on her own. He'd had nightmares about drowning, feeling the darkness of deep water sucking him down, and all the while Emily was alone on a vast pebble beach far away, hands reaching in an impossible attempt to save him, her brother, until the last time he was pulled under, when he saw the shadows gathering at the beach's extremes…watching…waiting to make sure Jack was not about to surface again, before slicking across the beach towards his abandoned sister.

“You okay, Ems?” It was the name he'd used when she was very young, and she usually did not like hearing it. Their parents had used it all the time.

His sister glanced back and smiled, and he saw that she was more than okay. She was
enjoying
this. That bolstered his mood and drove away the memories of bad dreams, shadows fading on unknown pebbly beaches.

Lucy-Anne and Rosemary maintained the lead. Jack's girlfriend walked apart from the older woman, but Jack knew her well. She was trying to hide her fascination in case Rosemary saw it as a weakness. Lucy-Anne hated being beholden to anyone, and now they were all in the hands of this woman whom none of them knew.

They walked for half an hour. There was little chit-chat, but plenty of nervous energy. Jack wondered about Rosemary's friend Philippe, and how he saw routes and byways hidden to everyone else. What must that be like? How did he manage understanding such secrets? Jack found the world of the Irregulars both intriguing and disturbing, and whenever he tried to put himself in their place, he became afraid. His life had changed enough since Doomsday. He could only imagine what London's few, amazing survivors must have gone through.

The buried canal ended abruptly. Rosemary and Lucy-Anne came to a halt, standing side by side and shining their torches at a blank concrete wall. There was graffiti carved into the concrete, incongruous in such surroundings and more disquieting because of that. ‘We've come heer to hyde.’ The mis-spellings made the pronouncements even more otherworldly.

“Who wrote that?” Jenna asked.

“It looks very old,” Rosemary said. “To be honest, it's the first time I've seen it. I came from the other way, remember?”

“So where
is
the other way?” Lucy-Anne asked, her question bearing a challenge. Jack thought she was getting nervous.

“Can't you see?” Rosemary said, a hint of humour in her voice that Jack didn't like. She was supposed to be leading them, not testing them. But then, she
was
from out of London. Perhaps being in a position of power was something she was not used to.

Jack and the others shone their torches around, looking for where their path might continue. The combined lights lit up the whole end of the tunnel, revealing little but wall, ground, concrete ceiling, and the old, crumbling tow paths on either side.

“No,” Sparky said. “I don't see.” He spun around and played his torch behind them, his action instantly making Jack nervous.
Trap?
he thought.

“Down there,” Emily said. “Look! It looks like a wave of mud, but it's fresh.” She aimed her torch at the base of the graffitied wall, revealing a drift of canal-bed mud resting against the concrete. It looked unremarkable to Jack; just another hump in the old canal's uneven floor.

“Good eyes,” Rosemary said.

“SuperGirl,” Emily said matter-of-factly, and everyone laughed.

Their spirits raised, the others stood back while Sparky and Emily scooped away handfuls of loose dirt, slowly revealing a dark opening at the base of the wall. It was small—barely large enough to crawl through—but Rosemary assured them it was the way to go.

“If I can do it at my age,” she said, “all of us can.”

“So you hid it on your way through?” Jack asked. “Buried it?”

“Yes. Ruined my nails.” The old woman smiled, but in torchlight it looked grotesque.

“Why?”

Rosemary frowned, and Jenna and Lucy-Anne aimed their torches at her face. Jack held back a laugh; it was like an interrogation in some crappy movie.

Cringing against the light, Rosemary turned away. “It's a
secret,” she said. “This way, this route, no one knows about it. No one but Philippe and me, and now you.”

The torches lowered, giving light to Sparky and Emily once more.

“Everything's
a secret,” Rosemary continued. “We're going towards a place where secrets are currency, and survival means stealth. I never liked London before Doomsday, to tell the truth, but these days, I like it much less. It's as if in moving on, we've also regressed. Trust is a thing of the past.”

“Tell me about it,” Lucy-Anne said, and Rosemary looked at Jack's girlfriend, her eyes sad and heavy with the terrible things they had seen.

“We trust you,” Jack said, surprising himself. Lucy-Anne glanced at him, eyebrows raised. “We do. We trust you. You lead us in, and we'll help however we can.”

Rosemary smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “All of you. But sometimes…” She drifted off and stared at the concrete wall.

“Sometimes what?” Sparky said, panting. He stood, face grimy and hands filthy from the dirt.

Rosemary sighed. “Sometimes, I think we've passed the point of no return.”

Rosemary went first. Sparky offered, but she insisted, waving away objections and borrowing Sparky's torch. Maybe Jack's statement of trust had given her strength, or perhaps it made her want to prove herself more.

Lucy-Anne felt a begrudging admiration for the old woman. But trust? Not yet.

“Only a few feet,” Rosemary said. They watched her crawl into the narrow crack at the base of the wall, pulling with her elbows and pushing with her booted feet, and the light she carried threw back curious shadows, as though there was something down there with her.

“I'm through,” Rosemary called. Her voice was muffled, and came from miles away.

Sparky went next. In his enthusiasm he banged his head on the concrete, cursing and touching his scalp to check for blood. Lucy-Anne giggled, but only briefly, because no one accompanied her.

Fair enough
, she thought.
Yeah, we all know how serious this is. Rosemary can stop the bleeding, but we're out of the world we know, now. We're facing danger and challenging it to bite back.

Jenna went after Sparky, then Emily, pushing the camera bag before her.

“You okay?” Jack asked. They were alone here now, with only the muffled sound of their friends chatting with Rosemary. Lucy-Anne could not quite tell in what way their voices had changed.

“I'm fine. Just…you know.”

“Bit scary, yeah?”

“I guess.”

They stared at each other, knowing that perhaps now there should be a kiss or a hug, or at least something more than this.

“You next,” she said, to break the silence more than anything. Jack smiled and nodded, reaching out towards her and barely managing to touch her hand with his.

She watched him crawl into the hole and, alone at last, she closed her eyes and gave way to a sob that had been building in her throat.

She could remember a dream she'd had weeks ago, when dogs were attacking her in the dark, biting her, eating her, even as she tried to fight them off. The body they'd seen…that had been like a trigger, throwing the dream back at her. She knew it was stupid. She knew they'd say she was a fool. But for a while back there, she'd been terrified.

At least now they were moving on.

She turned around slowly and shone the torch back the way they had come. Its beam did not reach very far.
Such old, thick darkness
, she thought, not sure where the idea came from. She suddenly felt like an invader down here.

The gap was much narrower than she'd expected, so much so that she could not even raise her head without bashing it as Sparky had done. So she stared at the gravelly ground beneath her, pushing with her feet and crawling through on her elbows. It was only as light fell upon her that she realised she was through.

Sparky helped her to stand, playfully brushing dust and dirt from her clothes. “Welcome to the Mines of Moria!” he said, in the gruffest voice he could manage.

Lucy-Anne looked around. “Bloody hell!”

“I think it's an old church basement,” Rosemary said.

The room was twenty steps across and thirty long, supported at regular intervals by thick stone columns. There seemed to be nothing stored down here, and it had the feel of being long-abandoned; dust had drifted against the base of walls, and in one corner an impressive array of spider webs formed grubby curtains. They shone their torches around, searching but not finding a way up into whatever building had once stood, or still stood above them.