Contagion

^{CHAPTER FOUR} FOURTEEN, THIRTEEN

Hurrying through the streets towards Trafalgar Square once more, Jack felt the weight of responsibility press down on him. He’d seen the way Jenna had been glancing at him, and he knew what she would have to ask again soon: Why can’t you warn everyone? And he was trying. He truly was. Now that he knew the mystery of that huge red star he was more at peace cruising his internal universe of potential. But that didn’t mean he was no longer afraid of it. Perhaps he even feared it more.

He moved from here to there, acknowledging powers he had already tapped, searching for those that might help him now. He discovered amazing things—the ability to implant false memories; cold breath that could freeze; a touch that could turn any solid into a liquid, and then a gas, without heat—but there was nothing to communicate en masse to everyone left in London. The more he looked, the more hopeless it seemed.

Jack wished everything was the way it had been before coming to London.

He thought of Camp Truth, their place in the woods where he, Lucy-Anne, Sparky, Jenna, and sometimes his sister Emily used to gather, collecting scraps of information about London left to them by similarly minded individuals. They’d sit there for long hours, talk, make plans, and then go home to the respective houses to dream away another night. Sparky would work on the old Ford Capri that reminded him so much of his brother, his parents ghosts of what they had once been. Jenna would try to talk to her father, but he was cold now, changed by whatever had been done to him. Lucy-Anne went from home to home, never settling because dreams of her parents and brother would not let her. And Jack would return home to look after his sister Emily. There was help for orphaned families, but there could not be homes for all of them. Doomsday had made too many. So Jack and Emily lived in the home they had shared with their parents, and it was only since leaving that Jack realised that it had really been Emily looking after him.

He could wish for those simpler times, but he did not really want them. Not now he had found his mother and she had escaped London.

And not with what he had now. A curse, perhaps. But some of the things he could do…

“I can’t,” he said, answering no one in particular. But they all seemed to know what he meant. “I’m looking. But there are limits. It’s still confusing.”

“Maybe we need to be a bit more creative,” Sparky said.

“What do you mean?” Rhali asked.

“Dunno. Lateral thinking.”

“So let’s think laterally while we walk,” Jenna said.

Fifteen minutes later they heard motors and ducked into a pub doorway. Jenna tried the handle—locked—and Jack grasped it, eyelids drooping as he delved inside, and he heard the lock’s tumblers rolling and clicking. He pulled the handle and the door fell open. They tumbled inside. Sparky shut the door gently, then peered through a dusty window as the engines drew closer.

“You picked the lock with your fingers,” Rhali said. “That’s pretty amazing.”

Jack smiled, blew on his nails, polished them on his jacket.

“Four Land Rovers,” Sparky said from the window. They all ducked down and fell motionless. “Choppers. Couple of them are sitting on the Rovers’ roofs. Got rifles. They look…odd.”

“Odd how?” Jack asked. The vehicles passed by without slowing, and Sparky waited until the engines were fading before answering.

“Like they haven’t washed in a while. Dishevelled. You know?”

“Smelly, like you,” Jenna said.

“Yeah,” Sparky replied. He looked troubled.

“Desperate,” Rhali said. Jack realised that she was hunkered down beneath a table, shivering, and he sat beside her. Her eyes were wide and fearful.

“They’ve gone,” he said softly.

“They’re hunting,” she said. “Looking for revenge. You told us what Reaper and the others did to the Choppers at Camp H. Killed them all.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. He’d watched the Superior they’d rescued from the cages freezing the Choppers, seen them fall and break apart like fragile statues. No mercy. No humanity.

“So they’re looking for us,” Jenna said.

“Looking for anyone,” Rhali said. She closed her eyes and frowned. “And there are plenty of people around. Lots of movement, through back alleys and beneath the city.”

“Movement where?” Sparky asked, still watching from the window.

“Towards where we’re going,” she said.

Jack stood and went to Sparky. “Clear?”

“Think so. What do you think?”

Jack shrugged. They were all watching him, but it was Jenna who answered.

“Breezer’s calling them to him,” she said.

“Perhaps. Planning an escape, maybe.”

“So he’s doing what you can’t,” Sparky said to Jack. “Communicating with everyone.”

“Perhaps,” Jenna said. “But he doesn’t know how long’s left, like we do. We’ve got to get to him, tell him we should try Miller first. If Breezer just tries an escape, they might all be massacred at the Exclusion Zone.”

Jack glanced at his watch. “Come on. Less than fourteen hours.”

“That’s if what Nomad said was true,” Jenna said. “She spooks the hell out of me.”

“And me,” Jack said. “But I don’t think she had a reason to lie.”

They left the pub and moved along the street, listening for more engines. Choppers were abroad, intent on murder. Just another day in the toxic city.

It took another hour to reach Trafalgar Square, and from there they moved east until they were close to Heron Tower where Breezer had once made his base. They had to hide twice more from roving Choppers, the second time almost getting caught when a large foot patrol approached along a narrow side street. It was only Rhali’s gift that warned them, and they ducked into a Tube entrance with seconds to spare. It was the first time they’d seen a Chopper patrol without vehicles of any kind. There were at least twenty of them, all heavily armed, and it marked another change to their methods.

These soldiers also looked more rag-tag than usual. Jack wondered whether they’d been given their marching orders ahead of the bomb, and had decided to exact revenge on as many Irregulars as they could before leaving London. If so, it was a good sign, because it confirmed that zero hour was still some time away.

Of course, he wouldn’t have put it past Miller to not even tell many of his soldiers that the countdown had been triggered.

They hid along the street from the tall office building, listening for danger. Rhali was alert; Jack waited for something to happen.

“Looks deserted,” Jenna said.

“That’s the way Breezer wants it,” Sparky said.

“Yeah, but…Rhali said there were loads of survivors coming this way. I thought we’d see some sign of that.” Jenna turned to Rhali, who was leaning against Jack. He propped her up. She was growing tired very quickly, her months of abuse at the hands of the Choppers all too apparent.

“The upper floors,” Rhali said, nodding. “There are scores of them. And…below us. In the tunnels and the Tube lines. I think there’s a way into the basement of the building.”

“Right,” Jack said. “Well. Front door, anyone?”

“We’re becoming regular visitors to the place,” Jenna said.

“Yeah,” Sparky agreed. “They should give us season tickets.” His eyes opened wide. “Hope they’ve got some of those great burgers on the go!”

“The dog burgers?” Jenna asked. “Ewww.”

“Dog, cat, rat, don’t care what they were. Tasted divine.”

As they approached the building, a voice called from shadows. “Howdy, Jack. How’s it hanging?” The girl walked from the building’s lobby, leaned against the door and put one hand on her hip. She grinned.

“Fleeter,” Jack said, surprised.

“Come on in. The kettle’s on.”

There were so many questions to ask Breezer—about his plans, how he was calling the Irregulars here, why Fleeter was with him, whether he and Reaper were still in contact. But instead Jack opened their conversation with the bombshell.

“We know how long it is until Big Bindy blows.”

Breezer seemed shocked to see them. He blinked as if he had dust in his eye, frowned, turned and walked back through the doors, leaving Jack and the others out on the staircase. They’d come up a dozen floors and were breathing hard. Sparky was almost carrying Rhali.

“Still a grumpy bastard,” Sparky said.

“Shall we jump off the roof again?” Jenna quipped.

Jack shoved the closing door and marched through. The open plan office area beyond was bustling with two dozen people, and the smell of cooking food wafted through the air. Dividing screens were still ranked a few feet in from the windows, and the people kept to the central area, careful not to cast shadows that might be seen from outside.

“Breezer!” Jack shouted. Heads turned, and a couple of people told him to Shhhh! Jack laughed. “It’s not a bloody library!” he said. “He hasn’t called you all here to sit down quietly to read. You’re all going to die!”

“Er, Jack,” Jenna said from behind him. Jack raised a hand without looking back. He wasn’t sure where the sudden anger had come from, but it felt good to let it flow. Breezer was not the appropriate target—Miller and Reaper were far more suited for that. But right now, he was all there was.

“Jack, don’t,” Rhali whispered behind him.

“Breezer!” Jack shouted again. The man paused by the dried skeleton of a huge, dead potted plant and turned around. He looked haunted.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Breezer said. “Clinton died this morning. Remember Clinton?” Jack did. The black man sat in a shopping trolley, snatching truths from the air like flies, affected by the same sickness that was taking root in many of London’s survivors. Even Nomad had displayed signs, though she’d denied it.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jack said. He breathed deeply, trying to make sense of his outburst. Fear contributed, he was sure, and fury at what had happened here, what London had become. Anger, too, at the monster his father had turned into. “We’ll get out of London, and out there we’ll find a cure.”

“It does matter,” Breezer said. “He was my friend. Every death matters. And at a time like this…when so many have died…every death matters even more.”

Jack felt himself filling up. Tears burned behind his eyes. He nodded, said nothing.

“We’ve brought as many here as we can,” Breezer continued. “Passed the word however we could. Word of mouth, pre-arranged signs. We’ve even got a woman who can talk with pigeons, use them as messengers. But…two groups have already been caught by the Choppers. Three people hanged from Blackfriar’s bridge. Two more machine-gunned in Waterloo. I’m doing the best…” He gasped, swallowed deeply. “The best I can. And we’re going to make a run for it.”

“Not yet,” Jack said. “Anyone crossing the Exclusion Zone will be slaughtered. Is that the end you want for all these people?” Jack looked around at everyone watching the conversation and wondered what they could all do. It was a room of wonders, but he felt only sadness. He could see several who were obviously in the final throes of the sickness. “Is that what you all want?”

No one answered.

“So how long do we have?” Breezer asked.

“Midnight.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“Would it matter?” Jack asked.

“Can’t you stop it? Nomad’s touched you, so can’t you disarm it, or take it somewhere else? Or…I don’t know…break it?”

“I don’t think so,” Jack said. He walked closer to Breezer, lowering his voice in the hope that no one else would hear. His friends most of all. “I’m a mess, Breezer. I have so much inside me, but I’m scared at what I’ll do. So no, even if I knew where it was, I don’t think I could take that risk. I need time to learn.”

“Don’t have time,” Breezer said.

“No. But we’ve got a plan. A way to get out, perhaps safely. Are you ready to hear it?”

Breezer seemed to shrink into himself a little, slumping down with the unbearable weight on his shoulders. Perhaps he had burdened himself, but that didn’t matter. His tired nod did.

“Anything,” he said. “God help us all.”

“Not Him,” Jack said. “Miller. We need to find him, and you should come with us.”

“Let’s talk,” Breezer said. He looked past Jack and nodded, and at first Jack thought he was greeting Sparky and Jenna again. But when Jack turned around he saw Fleeter standing back by the stairwell doors. She was smiling her usual faint, superior smile.

“Okay,” Jack said. “First things first, though. You need to tell me about that.”

Nomad lied to me, Lucy-Anne thought. He’s not dead at all! But her excitement was tempered, and everything here felt like a dream. She was dislocated from her surroundings. Moments before, the creatures had been facing her with bared teeth and curved claws, things that had once been human ready to eat human flesh. Her fear was rich and deep, her senses alert. Now Andrew was before her and everything had changed. Her surroundings had faded into the background. She concentrated on her brother and what he had become.

Not dead at all, but surely no longer alive.

He moved towards her slowly, and she remembered the expression he wore. Four years ago she’d come home from school and Andrew had been waiting for her in the living room, watching TV but obviously distracted. Their parents were at work. Andrew was seventeen then, and he was always home just before Lucy-Anne, ready to get her a snack and make sure she’d had a good day in school, tell her to do her homework, and generally look after her for a couple of hours before their mother arrived home. But from the moment she’d walked through the door that day she’d known that she was in control. Andrew had looked nervous, contrite, and as he’d walked towards her he’d seemed to lessen in stature. Lucy-Anne, I was playing a game on your iPod and I dropped it in the kitchen, and you know how hard the floor tiles are. I’m sorry. I’ll buy you another. Troubled though their relationship was—he was the Good Boy, the hard worker, the apple in her mother’s eye—she could not find it in herself to be angry at him.

He looked the same now as he approached across the cracked concrete car park.

If this is my dream I can change it, she thought, and she glanced towards the industrial unit to her left, willing it to turn to marzipan and icing. But the aluminium sheeting remained, dented and spattered with mould. The windows did not turn into chocolate squares, the drainpipes were not liquorice. If this is my dream…She closed her eyes and opened them again, but everything was the same.

“You’re not here,” she said.

“I am,” Andrew said. “Enough, at least. But I’m only really an echo. I dreamed myself alive.”

“I dream too!” she said.

“You always did. And your dreams drove you to distraction.”

Lucy-Anne stepped forward and reached for her brother, but he drifted back as she came closer. His feet barely seemed to move.

“What are you? A ghost? What happened?”

“Ghost is as good a word as any,” he said. “And I’ll tell you. But you should walk south, and quickly. Those things aren’t the only ones moving out of the north today.”

“Because of the bomb?”

“Word is spreading,” Andrew said.

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“Only for you, sister. I’m already dead.”

Lucy-Anne closed her eyes and breathed deeply, fighting off a faint. Only useless women in old movies faint at something like this! she berated herself. She bit the inside of her lip, pinched the back of her hand, and for a fleeting instant thought that when she looked again he would be gone. That terrified her. So much so that she found herself frozen, unable to move, unwilling to open her eyes in case—

“Lucy-Anne,” he said, and she felt something almost stroke her cheek.

Her eyes snapped open and he was there before her, one arm outstretched and his hand moving away. He’d touched her face, just like he used to when she was a little girl and he wanted to show affection. He’d very rarely kissed her. A fingertip to her cheek was his greeting, a gentle touch that said more than any words.

“Oh, Andrew,” she said. The tears came at last because she knew he was gone. He echoed to her now, but there was no future for them.

“Quickly,” he said, moving backwards, pointing south. “I’ll tell you while you walk.”

He made her feel safe. She wasn’t sure why. He’d seen off the ape-like people, true, but he was hardly there at all. Perhaps it was simply the fact that she no longer felt alone.

“I ran,” Andrew said. “After I found Mum and Dad dead in the hotel room I left and ran, as fast as I could, directionless. The streets were filled with bodies back then, so soon after it had happened. And sometimes other people. But most were so scared, so shocked, so alone, that they hid. So I just ran, and I was already dying. Whatever killed everyone else seemed to be acting much slower on me. I didn’t know why. I felt myself fading. My strength was filtering away. I fell, and I dreamed myself alive again.”

“So you dream, too,” Lucy-Anne said, but she should not have been surprised.

“I dreamed of a folly on the hill, and knew what was happening. So I ran on until I found it, and then let everything take its course.”

Lucy-Anne reached into her jacket and shirt and brought out the chain and signet ring given to her by Nomad. Andrew’s chain, his ring.

“I showed Nomad where to find me,” he said.

“You…”

“I laid down and died,” he said. “Leaning against a wall, still dreaming about not dying, because even as I felt myself closing down…my heart stopping, my senses fading…I was always thinking of you. My poor little sis left all on her own.”

“You made yourself a ghost.”

“Whatever I am is because of my dreams.”

“So, all this time?”

“I’ve been waiting. But don’t be sad for me. It’s different for me now.”

They left the industrial area behind and moved into residential streets again, countless houses now home only to dried bodies and memories. Lucy-Anne walked with another memory. And even though she knew, the wrench of loss was going to hurt all over again.

“I dream,” she said. “And I’m always scared.”

“Things change,” Andrew said. “Dreams are weird things, the ones we have even more so. I came to learn that they’re like movies that never run the same way twice.”

“Movies you can control yourself?” she asked.

“Sometimes you’re the director, yes,” he said. “But that never lasts.”

“I don’t understand.” She thought of Rook falling into that pit, her dreaming the events again in time to warn him, thinking she’d saved him from that fate. Then he’d fallen again, and the same terrible death had come to claim him.

“I tried so many times when I was your age,” he said. “But changing things in your dreams only bleeds over into reality a little, and those bleeds are soon cleared up.”

“What are we going to do?” she said, hopelessness washing over her. “What am I going to do?”

“Survive,” Andrew said. “You’re why I’m still here like this. It’s difficult. And once you’re safe, I can stop dreaming at last.”

Survive…stop dreaming… Her brother was a ghost, and Lucy-Anne remembered walking across that strange landscape on London’s outskirts, the place where countless bodies had been buried, and knowing that beneath her feet lay her mother and father. The certainty had been shocking, but she’d known it was true because she had already dreamt it. Her life now was starting to feel like one long dream. Her imagination had always taken her to strange places, and sometimes she’d found it teasing her when she could not recall whether a memory was a dream, or vice versa. Many times through her childhood she’d remembered going somewhere with her family that no one else recalled, or believed an event was a dream when her parents and Andrew had very clear memories of it. She’d never thought anything of it. It had felt natural. It was ironic that now she was starting to understand herself and how she dreamed, it felt more alien than ever.

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I can’t run forever. I need to…I have to…” To dream, she thought. As she pulled away from Andrew and her surroundings, she could not be certain whether she was falling asleep, or waking up.

People cry out. Flames roar. Someone is wailing as they stagger back and forth across the road, grasping at guts drooping from a terrible wound in their stomach. Their features and hair are burnt away, but Lucy-Anne recognises the clothes.

Nomad is running across the street towards her. She jumps a blazing motorcycle, leaping further than is possible, and barely seems to touch the road as she lands and rushes on. She is the focus of movement in the street, the eye of the storm, and all flames lean away from her.

Lucy-Anne holds up her hands and tries to speak, but her voice has been silenced. My dream, this is my dream, and I can change everything!

But though she knows that she has been here before, she has no control over the scene. She cannot quench the flames, nor can she divert Nomad from her course. Perhaps they have been heading towards this meeting since Doomsday.

Gunfire sounds in the distance, voices, screams, and nearby the pounding of heavy footsteps.

Turn away, she thinks, but Nomad runs onwards. Step aside. But the strange woman is determined.

Lucy-Anne opens her mouth, but cannot scream as Nomad runs into her and knocks her to the ground. She tries to punch, but her arm remains by her side, not obeying her dream.

Nomad raises a fist and brings it smashing down on Lucy-Anne’s throat.

A burst of light—

The Thames flows sluggishly before her, and to her left she can just see the curve of the London Eye above some buildings. She looks around in a panic for Nomad, knowing that when she sees her the blast will come. There is no stopping it. A sun will grow in London and consume everything, and however much Lucy-Anne wills her dream to change, can she really confront such power?

Nomad killed me, she thinks, feeling the impact on her throat, pressing her hand there, and then she sees her friends. She bursts into tears because they are so solid, so there. They are approaching the river with several other people and they come with purpose. Jack looks older than before, and there’s something about him that reminds her of Nomad.

They are much further along the riverbank, and closer to her she sees a group of Choppers squatting down behind concrete benches and a fallen wall. They are watching. And aiming.

We have to go, a voice says. She turns and Andrew is there, walking along the riverbank past a line of long tables covered with the swollen, rotting remains of books. Lucy-Anne, you don’t have long.

But…

She looks at Jack and her friends again, and the other people, and the Choppers slowly standing, ready to fire.

But not now!

Andrew has reached her. He looks more real now than he did back in the reality of London. Perhaps this is how she will best see him from now on—in dreams.