Dark Days

CHAPTER 5

The army evacuated Whitechapel at dawn, convoys of trucks miles long rolling down Whitechapel Road, spreading through Tower Hamlets ahead of the fires and the looters.

The corpses weren’t all human, or even mostly. Scavengers from across the river had made it to the Docklands in the night, and Jack had been listening to the screams of people too stupid or unlucky to make it inside before the legions of Hell fell upon them.

They were mostly scavengers, carrion feeders or elementals that crawled inside human hosts and left the street littered with corpses.

The trucks didn’t care. They crunched over flesh and skulls, the long dead and the ones that were still warm.

By the time Jack held the door open for Pete and Lily and Margaret, it was chaos all around. Trucks were on fire, the army had taken cover anywhere they could, and the streets were filled with mobs of panicked civilians and looters all struggling to run from the demons.

Pete tried to turn with the baby and go back inside, but a flaming bottle shattered against the building, and flames sprouted so close Jack could feel the heat singe his eyebrows.

Magaret screamed, and he grabbed her hand while Pete shielded Lily, and they ran down the alley where they’d kept Pete’s Mini Cooper. The car had been looted weeks ago, was just a spray-painted corpse now, no glass, no tires, and no engine.

Gunfire chattered from the road. The army hadn’t figured out yet that bullets didn’t do much good against things that weren’t human. Jack hoped, at least, that they’d put a dent in the looters.

“Where are we going to go?” Pete panted. “If we can’t evacuate, we’re fucked.”

“If we go back that way, we’re fucked,” Jack said. Margaret’s grip on his hand was so tight that he could feel his fingers going numb. “Maybe we can try to get to a tube station. At least we’ll be off the streets.”

“They shut down the stations weeks ago,” Pete said. She looked up at him, pulling Lily tight against her. “Jack, what are we going to do?”

Jack didn’t get to tell her he had no fucking idea. A cluster of looters appeared at the far end of the alley, and the leader let out a sharp whistle, pointing at Jack and Pete.

“Oh, shit,” he muttered. He could see it now—they’d be beaten, anything useful would be taken, and then if they were lucky it would end there. If they weren’t, they’d be taken or killed, or left alive but too weak to fight off the demons that hid in every dark spot in the city.

It was Pete who acted while Jack was still frozen. She shoved Lily into Margaret’s arms. “Run,” she told Margaret. “Get to a truck, and go with the evacuation. We’ll find you.”

“But Pete…” Margaret’s eyes filled up with panicked tears.

“Don’t argue!” Pete snapped. “We will find you, but you need to take Lily and you need to run.”

Margaret turned and fled, Lily wailing. Jack looked at Pete, panic forming a bubble in his chest and making his heart thrum. “We should have stayed together,” he said.

Pete turned back toward the looters, who were taking their time. They knew Jack and Pete had nowhere to go. It was either the gang, or the demons out on the main road. Magaret could find her way to the army, as long as they bought her some time.

“I’m sorry,” Pete said.

Jack felt the panic burst abruptly, replaced with something that felt like a blade to the gut. “We’re not going to meet them, are we?”

“Maybe,” Pete said. “But the important thing is we give them time to get away.”

She didn’t look upset or afraid, but then, Pete never did. She was strong. If it weren’t for him, Jack thought, she probably would have survived even this without a scratch.

He threw a leg-locker hex on the first looter, but there were more and more of them, and he and Pete got pushed, slowly, back toward the body of the Mini. Jack was about to say fuck it and hex up a fire that would incinerate every last looter when one sprang forward and grabbed Pete, pulling her forward into the forest of grasping hands and cold, frenzied faces.

Pete screamed and kicked at the looter, but before Jack could do anything, a shot rang out, snapping off the walls of the narrow alley. The first was followed by another volley as three soldiers with machine guns advanced, mowing down the looters until none of them moved.

Jack caught Pete as she swayed, and he didn’t understand for a moment why she was falling. The looters hadn’t had blades, just tire irons and cricket bats, things left over from when they’d been rational people, before the advent of the demons and the dead had driven them over the edge.

Then he saw the two blossoms of red on her shirt, and he started screaming. Pete fell, and she didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t do anything. Her eyes stayed open, but she didn’t look at him, and there wasn’t enough breath left in her lungs to say anything.

He’d never imagined this. That it would be quick, unexpected, that one moment Pete would be in his arms and the next she’d be gone, just another body out of the hundreds he’d seen in the preceding weeks. He’d never imagined that Pete would die before him.

Jack wanted to stay with her, right there on the bloody pavement, but the soldiers grabbed him and forced him onto a truck. He fought them. They’d killed her, and now he was alone. Finally, one of them hit Jack on the skull with the butt of a rifle, and he tumbled into the merciful void of nothing.