Contagion

^{CHAPTER SEVENTEEN} ZERO

“Shit,” Sparky said. “Maybe they are going to machine-gun us after all.”

They were halfway across the Exclusion Zone, and facing them was a wall of lights. They could see the movement even from here, hear the engines. Several helicopters buzzed overhead, but they couldn’t tell whether they were military.

But they had already seen groups of people ahead of them disappearing into the bustle at the edge of the zone, and there was no gunfire. They had little choice. Lucy-Anne knew that Jack could not dream the bomb back forever.

“Time?” she asked through her damaged mouth.

Sparky glanced at his watch and kept staring for a while, as if trying to make sense of something. “It’s almost midnight,” he said.

“He’ll do it,” Jenna said. “For as long as he can, he’ll do it.”

Lucy-Anne had an arm around each of their shoulders, three friends so close. If only their fourth was not missing. She felt as though she’d left a limb behind, and several times crossing the bombed and burned Exclusion Zone she experienced a mad compulsion to rush back into London to be with Jack. She knew where he was. She might even get there in time.

“Almost there,” Sparky said. “But don’t these people know what’s happening?”

“Maybe it won’t reach this far,” Jenna said.

“Yeah, but it’s still close.”

“Lots have left already,” Breezer said. “I’m hoping this is the last of them. Others might have gone in different directions, but everyone my people were able to contact were told to come this way. There are some who refused to leave London. And probably many more we don’t know about, deep down in the tunnels, hidden away.”

“And those things from the north,” Sparky said.

“Yes. And them. I’ve seen some…but not many. It could be many of them don’t want to leave London.”

“We can hope,” Jenna said. “The thought of them out in the countryside…”

“I suspect they’ll be as scared as we are,” Breezer said, betraying his own fear at leaving the toxic city that had been home for two years.

“Let’s go,” Lucy-Anne said, wincing at the pain. It was her way of saying, Shut up and let’s get the hell out of here.

As they approached the outer edge of the zone, the buzz of frantic activity was obvious. There was surprisingly little military, and those who were there seemed as panicked as everyone else. People rushed to and fro, calling names, searching for loved ones among the slow trickle of people emerging from the darkness of the Exclusion Zone. Cars and other vehicles were moving in only one direction—away. And those few still remaining sat with engines running, ready to leave as soon as possible.

These were the people of Britain come to rescue survivors they had been told were all dead. Until very recently this area would have been occupied only by Choppers, but now most of them were gone—obeying or against orders, Lucy-Anne did not know—fleeing the bomb that mad bastard Miller had triggered. Instead of waiting here until the last minute, helping the survivors get out, holding back the hundreds or thousands of people who had flooded towards London when the truth had emerged…they had turned tail and fled. Lucy-Anne had not thought she could ever hate the Choppers any more, but she did right then.

And though she loved these people who had come to help, she was also afraid that another tragedy was imminent.

“Buddy hell…” she muttered, and then a faint washed over her. She felt Sparky and Jenna strengthen their grip, and then everything drew far away. Blackness pulled her down, and she welcomed it.

He is walking along the South Bank. London is all but silent; the only sounds are litter blown by the breeze, and pigeons cooing in the trees. The London Eye is a smashed ruin behind him, but though wrecked it still feels like a special place. A place of creation and birth. Now he is leaving it behind.

He walks along the pavement but barely touches it. I’m Nomad, he thinks, and the sudden burst of lucid dreaming is a shock. It chills and excites him, because he has never felt its like before. He looks across the river and imagines one of the buildings there lifting up, and with a grind of breaking masonry it does so, huge columns of stone splashing into the Thames. He blinks and everything is back to normal.

It is amazing, but this is no time to play. Jack knows he has a job to do.

A voice calls out from behind him. His urge is to continue on and ignore it, but that is Nomad’s dream, not his. So he turns around to see Lucy-Anne running along the riverside towards him. She looks petrified.

Any time now, Jack thinks.

Behind him, a flash. Lucy-Anne’s eyes go wide and her face drops.

Now…

Jack dreams everything back to normal. The flash recedes almost before it begins, barely even glittering from the river’s surface. The sky returns to its indifferent blue. Lucy-Anne no longer looks scared.

I did it! Jack thinks, and in the dream Lucy-Anne pauses close to him, looking around in confusion as if not knowing what to do.

“Don’t worry,” Jack says. He speaks with Nomad’s voice. “I’ll see you again.”

Jack snapped awake. Angelina was beside him, shaking him gently. She moved back as he sat up.

“It worked,” he said.

“For how long?”

He looked at the tank. It should have been blasted to atoms and beyond, but it remained whole because of him. “I don’t know,” he said.

“How will we ever know?”

Jack contemplated the moment of the explosion. He knew little about the workings of such a device, but he thought there was an initial charge that started the nuclear reaction. Would he hear that first blast? Would it reach his ears and travel to his brain, registering there before he was vaporised? Even with something as unimaginably destructive as this there had to be a moment between living and dead. An instant in time when consciousness ceased and his senses halted. He wondered whether at that instant, he would know what was happening.

Or would there be no knowledge? Would he be ended halfway through a thought or action, a movement or dream? Ceasing to be, like a raindrop touching an ocean.

He wasn’t sure which would be best.

Jack was tempted to force the tank open, touch the bomb, start to dismantle it, look inside to see if there was a timer he could find, one which perhaps had been put back hours or minutes by the dream he’d just had. I forced it to unexplode. But he was afraid in case all of his powers could not combat the most subtle of booby traps.

And he was afraid in case he’d only put the timer back by seconds.

Lucy-Anne knew that voice.

“I can’t go with you. You think they’ll let me through? You think they’ll let me live?”

“So what are you going to do?” Sparky asked.

“Haru and I will fade away.”

“What about Emily and—” Jenna said.

“I haven’t been her father for a long time.”

“Thank you.” That was another voice, and it took a while for Lucy-Anne to place it. She struggled to open her eyes, and when she did it was difficult to focus in the darkness.

“You’re welcome,” Reaper said. “Now…” He did not finish; perhaps because he had no idea what to say.

Lucy-Anne saw him then, Reaper, silhouetted against the floodlights set along the edge of the Exclusion Zone. She couldn’t make him out in detail—couldn’t see his expression, his eyes—but when he walked away and disappeared into shadows, she thought perhaps his shoulders were curved, weighted down with everything he had done.

Or maybe he was just trying not to be seen.

“Where did he find you?” Sparky asked.

“Hiding in a basement,” Rhali said. “He was calling for me. After I ran I was terrified, I got confused, so I headed west. Heard the shooting and explosions behind me and ran until I was exhausted. And I thought Reaper was going to kill me.”

“Rhali,” Lucy-Anne said.

Rhali knelt beside her and touched her leg, appraising her wounds without wincing away.

“But he came to save me. For Jack, he said. He saved me because I meant something to Jack. So…Jack?” Rhali asked.

Lucy-Anne shook her head.

“Is he…?”

“Dreaming us safe,” Jenna said. “Come on. We’ll tell you on the way out.”

They were outside London once again. Beyond the Toxic City. And everyone was on the move.

Vehicles screamed off into the night—cars, vans, buses, motorbikes, four wheel drives. Heavy lights illuminated the landscape for hundreds of feet in every direction. A score of coaches trundled along a road, two abreast, all of them jammed with passengers. Many more people walked.

They saw a wall of faces. On hoardings surrounding a church—its refurbishment abandoned two years ago—people had started pinning photographs and messages to lost loved ones. Someone had painted ragged letters across the top of the hoarding in an attempt to form some sort of alphabetical order, and many people frantically searched the images or sat at the wall’s foot, waiting for a miracle.

“One minute,” Rhali said. “Just one!” She ran to the M section of the wall and started looking. Searching for her own face, or a message from someone she loved. No hope, Lucy-Anne thought. She felt emptied by all that had happened, and any dregs of hope she retained were kept for Jack, and Jack alone. She had none to spare.

But then Rhali froze, reached up, stood on tiptoes. Everything seemed to pause as they saw her touch her own smiling face—happier from years before, fuller—and then pull off a square of paper attached to it.

She returned to them, stunned. “My cousin,” she said. “My cousin Jay has been here. Looking for me. And he left…” She held out the paper, unable to say any more. Lucy-Anne saw some phone numbers, and a big Jay followed by an even larger X as a kiss.

“Whoa,” Sparky said.

“Let’s go,” Rhali said, smiling. “He’ll be waiting for me to call.”

There were a few groups of people hugging deliriously, seemingly ignorant of the panicked retreat from what was about to happen in the city. Those lucky few who had met those loved ones come to find them. Lucy-Anne wondered what powers these people had, and what those they loved would think of them. How they would integrate back into normal, real life hardly bore thinking about. What would Jay think of Rhali now?

But that was not Lucy-Anne’s problem. She had her own to contend with. These terrible injuries. Her dreams.

“What’ll we tell Emily?” she asked as they walked.

“We’ll tell her how brave her brother is,” Jenna said. “How proud of her he is. Look at what she’s done! She’s revealed the truth to the world. If it wasn’t for her, all these people might well have been shot down as they tried to leave.”

“And we’ll tell her her daddy’s dead,” Sparky said.

Lucy-Anne was shocked for a moment, remembering Reaper slinking away into the shadows after bringing Rhali back to them. But after everything he’d done—and she had only seen and heard about a fraction of it—that was nowhere near redemption.

No one objected to Sparky’s suggestion.

“Where do you think we’ll find them?” Jenna asked.

“Knowing Emily, it wouldn’t surprise me if they found us,” Sparky said.

Lucy-Anne looked back across the bombed Exclusion Zone towards the distant, dark London. There were no lights over there, and the starlight gave only a surface silvery sheen to what she could see of the city.

She knew that however strong Jack’s dreaming, the darkness could not last all night.

He sees Lucy-Anne again. It is a beautiful moment, even though he knows it is only him benefiting from the sighting. This is Nomad’s dream he is redreaming, and retelling, after all.

He has a second to dwell on her beauty. Not only on the outside, because her rebellious, perky attractiveness has always been obvious to him. But on the inside as well. She has lost so much, but even so she did not allow the madness to carry her away. It stole her for a time. But she triumphed.

And then the flash behind him. London is bleached, as if the explosion’s power is already erasing the city before its heat and shock blasts can do the real work. The skin on the back of his neck stretches.

Lucy-Anne’s eyes go wide and her face drops. And then he sees her eyeballs melt as—

He dreams it all back to normal. He dreams it…back…to normal.

London displays its true colours again, and the pigeons in the trees coo plaintively.

Across the Thames, a building is burning.

Lucy-Anne raises her hands to her face, and as the scream forms in her throat—

Jack woke up. Shook his head. Pushed away Angelina’s hands as they flapped at his face, holding one cheek and slapping the other.

“Not long,” he said. “I can’t do it for long. Maybe Lucy-Anne could have. I’m sure she could. But I…”

The tank’s bodywork seemed to vibrate, filled with barely restrained energy.

“Maybe next time,” Jack said.

“It’s not fair,” Angelina said. She was crying.

Jack could find nothing to say to her, so he leaned back and closed his eyes, thinking of his friends.