Dark Days

CHAPTER 2

The safe zone extended from King’s Cross to the Ice Wharf on the canal, and down to Clerkenwell Road. A tiny slice of what had once been the most alive city in all the world, at least as far as Jack was concerned. London had so many layers of magic and death and blood and sex all piled on top of one another, you could never plumb the depths. That city, the one kept safely out of civilian gaze, and the daylight London, made it a place he’d never wanted to leave.

Now he couldn’t leave, because from all reports the rest of England was just as fucked.

Just shy of the barrier, Jack slipped through the wire and down the boarded-up steps to the Angel tube station. He could take the tunnels to Blackfriars and from there one of the ferry gangs would take him across the Thames.

He thought about the last meeting he’d had with Ian Mosswood, a Fae creature who was one of the few not to abandon London for their own realm, the Courts. Mosswood, usually a chap who could pose for billboards, looked ragged, wrapped in a black coat, his salt-and-pepper hair mostly white. Fae didn’t last long in the Black or the daylight world unless they were ancient and strong, which Mosswood was.

When they’d met, Jack had had the unpleasant realization that the world was a lot more buggered than he’d let himself believe.

“You know you can’t possibly succeed, right?” Mosswood had asked, keeping a close eye out for both the scavenger gangs and the menagerie of flesh-ripping creatures that roamed outside the safe zones.

“Cheers, Ian,” Jack said. “Always like to hear that I’m doomed from the start.”

Mosswood handed him a scrap of vellum on which was both a liberal spatter of blood and an address.

“I’m dying,” Mosswood said. “Do you realize how absurd that is? I am eternal and yet I am dying.”

Jack glanced at the paper now, then shoved it back in his pocket. The address was south of the river, deep in Elemental territory, and he remembered the sinking sensation in his gut that he’d been careful not to let Mosswood see.

“We all have to go sometime, mate,” he’d told Mosswood.

“You’d do well to remember that,” the Green Man replied. “I won’t see you again, Jack. This world has only a little time before there’s nothing left but the ashes and the demons.”

“And the cockroaches,” Jack had said, with a levity he didn’t feel. His sense of humor had abandoned him on the day he’d left Whitechapel.

“Like I said,” Mosswood muttered, and then turned and limped away.

Jack shook off his memories and forced himself to focus. The tunnels to the river were populated with nasty monsters, of course. Jack had a light, his hexing abilities, and a liberal spray of iron-and-salt packed shotgun rounds for anything that made it past the first line. Pete had had her old service weapon, which he was glad of when things went pear shaped, but the shotgun was better if you weren’t a former crack-shot police inspector like his wife. Point and shoot, no skill required.

The things north of the river were mostly scavengers, wraiths and the like that would rather feed on the dead than the living. Then there were the mole people, as Pete had called them, the humans who’d taken to the underground when it all kicked off.

And the ghosts. Thick, packed, like commuters waiting for a train. Many of them had been, when they’d died, and most were so new they didn’t even realize they were dead.

Jack sighed, doing his best to avoid brushing against the silent, staring spirits that packed the tunnel. His head throbbed.

He had to get to the south side of the river before dark. He’d been chasing his daughter for months, ever since he had ripped Lily out of Pete’s arms.

Some of those months, the ones after Pete, had been wasted crawling inside any bottle he could find. He would have gone back to being a dirty smack addict if anyone in the greater London area had any drugs left.

Then he’d picked himself up, and set about getting Lily back. Jack had spent his life on the shadow side, so he learned how to sneak in and out of the safe zones, learned who dealt information and who just played at it, learned the names of all the big hard men who controlled South London now, and he decided that he’d either get Lily back or he’d be dead soon enough.

These days, either option was acceptable.

Of course Jack knew he was only keeping Lily alive to torment him. That Jack was being batted around like a cat toy. Jack had decided it didn’t matter. All of this had happened. He’d started life in shit; he’d clawed his way into a filthy, miserable existence as a psychic too strong to shut off his own visions, and when he’d finally found a bit of happiness, that was when it really hit the fan.

Jack was acutely aware as he climbed the broken escalator at Blackfriars that if he’d just stayed in his tip and continued shooting up, none of this would ever have happened.

That was the sting of hindsight. Jack couldn’t imagine being happy, and then he was. He couldn’t imagine his happiness being ripped away from him, and it was, every last bit. And looking back, it was so fucking obvious that it hurt just as much as a boot to the gut. He wasn’t supposed to be happy and live his life and kick off as an old man with a bunch of grandkids. Jack had only ever existed to burn the world, whether he wanted to or not.

The demons and the old gods and everyone with sense who’d ever met him saw it. He was the only one who had thought things might turn out differently.

Breaking glass, screams, and bootfalls reached his ears as he exited the station, and Jack sighed again. Riots were practically an hourly occurance now, but he didn’t have time to waste on avoiding this one. The sun—what little could be seen through the constant haze of soot and smoke—was already perilously low.

A broken brick whizzed past his ear, and he saw a human gang—the Front Street Boys out of Twickenham, judging by their colors—converging and beating on a zombie. The thing already had one leg off and its face stove in, thrashing as it struggled to scream through its mouth sewn up with red thread.

The Stygian Brothers were turning out zombies with the regularity of a biscuit factory, some half-arsed gibberish about giving the dead of London a second chance. All they gave the rest of the city was a great big fucking pest problem, by Jack’s reckoning, but that was a Stygian for you. Corpse-botherers with no damn sense at all.

Jack avoided the festivities as best he could, heading for the docks where you could find a ferry south, if you were either not human or suicidal.

Before he’d gone far, though, he heard screaming of a different kind—human and panicked. Not that human screams were rare outside the safe zones, but this was bookended by the kind of cackling that Jack attributed to men who enjoyed inflicting pain on smaller, weaker things.

He rounded the corner into an alley that dead-ended at the water. Once, the area had been posh, like most of the wharfs. When he’d first landed in London, the Docklands had been a rotting mass of wharves and junkies and tips falling into the river. Over the years, the tips had been knocked down and the junkies shuffled off to places like Peckham, and the wharves supported posh shops, restaurants where the prices were longer than the menus, and gleaming towers of flats that Jack always figured cost a quid to even look at.

Now it was all burned or overrun with the gangs and the zombies. He could smell the river from here. It was like London had reverted to its dirty, blood-soaked roots. A river full of sewage, a sky full of smoke, and streets full of people so desperate they were worse than animals.

There were four of them surrounding the source of the screaming, a woman with a backpack which one of the hooligans was busy ripping into.

They didn’t sport colors, except for the rusty streaks across their bare torsos. Jack dropped his head to his chest. Fucking cannibals. What was it about people that made them decide the quickest way to deal with the end of the world as they knew it was to turn each other into entrées?

He should just walk away. There were four of them, and often enough cannibalism led directly to necromancers, all too happy to have a band of homicidal nutters who’d work for long pig. Bad enough the cannibals ran about feasting on human flesh; being juiced up on black magic was just unfair.

Still, Jack picked up a length of pipe lying in the street and marched forward. He hit the one rummaging through the pack first, laying him out on his face, and then banged the pipe off an overturned metal rubbish bin. “Oi!”

The cannibals turned as one. Their eyes were as empty as the next addict’s, and Jack sighed. They were definitely running on sorcery.

Jack set himself, gripping the pipe so he felt the threads bite into his palm. “Come on, then,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”

The leader was a skinny bloke with short hair, pasty and small. He might have been one of the posh twats occupying this stretch of the wharves before it all kicked off. Jack threw a leg-locker hex on him and watched him go down, one of his friends falling with him. Jack took the brunt of the third’s charge on his shoulder, the cannibal glancing off and going past. He responded with a hit to the kidneys with the pipe, and another to the back of the cannibal’s skull when he went down.

And another, just for good measure.

The woman screamed something, and Jack turned to see the leader up and bearing down on him. He wondered, as the man closed his teeth on the sleeve of Jack’s leather, why she hadn’t done a rabbit as soon as he’d shown up. Might explain why she’d gotten caught by cannibals in the first place—she was too fucking stupid to live.

Jack let himself fall. The bloke wasn’t big enough to pin him, and Jack rolled them and pressed the pipe across the bloke’s throat. He kept pressing until the bastard twitched and went still.

He realized he’d forgotten about the leader’s friend when he felt a waft of air across the back of his neck as the cannibal wrapped his hands around it.

Then there was a report, a sting in his ears as the shot echoed back and forth from the narrow alley walls, and the woman straightened up from her pack holding a handgun, an old-fashioned revolver that gits in movies called a .38 Special.

The cannibal dropped, the exit wound in his chest the size of Jack’s balled fist.

“Fuck,” he said, sitting down hard. The woman picked up a piece of gauze from her pack and approached him, wiping what turned out to be cannibal blood off his face.

“You know,” she said. “You have a shotgun strapped to your back. Why go to all this trouble?”

Jack blinked at the nurse from King’s Cross. Her face was scratched and dirty, and the collar of her scrubs hung in rags, but she looked a lot more together than he felt. “What the fuck are you doing out here?” she asked, tossing the gauze away, sticking the gun in her waist, and gathering up the wreckage of her pack.

“I could ask you the very same question,” he said.

“Not everyone who needs help made it to the safety line,” she said. “And now the army won’t let them in if they make it, so I’m out here.”

She hauled Jack to his feet with surprising ease for a woman who’d almost been turned into carpaccio. He let her. He wasn’t young any longer, and a dust-up like that belonged to the Jack Winter who strode through the streets in steel toes and black leather, daring someone to give him an excuse to shed blood. His own or the other bloke’s, it hadn’t mattered.

“How about you?” she said. “You one of those mages? The ones who claim they aren’t doing sorcery even though everyone knows they fucking are?”

Jack shook his head. If she’d seen the leg-locker hex, he’d deny it. People in the safe zones hated mages. They hated magic, period. Believed in it, saw it with their own eyes, and hated it. That bit hadn’t changed—give the human race something it didn’t understand and it got right down to the business of burning it out of existence.

“Just heading across,” he said.

The nurse’s light brows drew together. “That’s demon territory.”

Jack nodded. “I know,” he said. “And to answer your other question, luv, I didn’t ventilate those cannibals because I didn’t want to also ventilate you.”

She snorted. “Glad you’re concerned with my safety, because you sure as hell don’t care about your own, going over there.” She pointed at the columns of smoke rising from across the Thames. “You go over there, you’re dead.”

Jack sighed. “Look, what’s your name?” He didn’t want some gun-toting Florence Nightingale to stop him from crossing in the mistaken belief that his life was worth saving. He had to shift her before she decided they were friends, or worse, that she needed to help him.

That was how people ended up getting hurt. There’d already been enough of that.

“Ida,” she said. “Ida Higgins.”

“Christ, what did you ever do to your parents?” Jack said.

Ida Higgins shrugged. “My grandmother’s name. What’s yours?”

“Jack,” he said. “Jack Caldecott.” Ida hated mages, and he was one of the big names on the list. He figured if Pete were here, she wouldn’t mind him using her maiden name to save his arse.

“You want to tell me why you’re bent on feeding yourself inch by inch to demons, Jack?” Ida said.

While he’d been wasting time saving Ida, the horizon had started to bleed red. The smoky sunset was already in full, apocalyptic swing. It would be almost night by the time he made it across.

Fuck it, Jack decided. It wasn’t like he was planning to come back anyway. “Because my daughter is over there,” he said. “If I go after her, I may die. If I don’t, she will for sure.”