London Eye

Jack felt the heat of the setting sun before he saw it. Soon it would be dusk, but the afternoon warmth felt very good as they climbed up from the Underground and stood at the crossroads of two London streets.

At first glance it could have been a quiet Sunday morning. Cars were parked along the roadside, if a little haphazardly in places, and a few shops had their front doors propped open. Pigeons cooed quietly on window sills. Litter whispered along the street, blown by a gentle breeze. But there was no life here, no breath, no heartbeat. This was obviously a dead place, and with that realisation came the facility to see evidence of that demise.

One of the propped-open doors rested against a skeleton in a dark blue uniform. Several shops’ windows were smashed. Along the street, almost hidden behind an incongruous growth of brambles and rose bushes, a burnt-out pub poked charred rafters at the sky.

“It looks…” Lucy-Anne began. Jack could see her eyes flitting across the scene, going from windows to doors, cars to side-streets. Is she looking already? he thought, but he did not have to ask. Although he knew the size of London, he felt closer to his mother and father than he had in a long time.

“We have to be careful,” Rosemary said, urging them back into the shadow of the Tube station entrance. “Choppers patrol the streets around this time of day. They don't like the dark, but they roam the dusk, when Irregulars are looking for somewhere to spend the night.”

“You don't have somewhere permanent to live?” Jenna asked.

“Some do,” Rosemary said. “But not many. Far too dangerous.”

She looked terrified, and Jack could not detect a shred of pleasure in her at being back in London. Rather than coming home, Rosemary seemed to have brought herself back to danger.

“So where do we spend the night?” Sparky asked. “I've had enough of tunnels and rats.”

“There's somewhere I know,” Rosemary replied. “North, across the Barrens.”

“Barrens?” Jack asked.

“The grave I told you about,” the woman said. “You'll see. Not far from here. You'll see.” She looked around the group, nodded, and then stepped out onto the pavement.

They followed her in line, Emily holding the camera before her and sweeping it slowly around. The station stood on one corner of a crossroads, and Rosemary led them around the side of the building, past peeling posters advertising movies and stage shows two years and many lifetimes old.

“Will we see lots of people?” Emily asked.

“Not around here,” Rosemary said. “Not this close.”

“Close to the Barrens?” Jack asked. But Rosemary only glanced back at him with haunted eyes.

Around the next corner they turned left into a residential street. There were three cars and a bus involved in a pile-up at the junction, one car having been forced from the road and through the front wall of a house. The blackened scars of an old fire blistered one flank of the bus, but it was impossible to tell whether this was a result of the accident, or something that had happened afterwards.

Jack caught his breath and glanced at Emily. I never really considered, he thought. All the bodies we might see, all the dead. But Sparky was already running for the bus, raising his hand and whistling in a grim parody of a late commuter.

Lucy-Anne chuckled.

The boy forced his way through the half-open door and looked around, only his silhouette visible against the dust-streaked windows. He jumped off again quickly. “No one home!” he shouted. “But someone's been shopping in Harrods.”

“Anything worth having?” Jenna asked.

Sparky stood before them, blinking, the ruin of the vehicles behind him. “It's not my stuff to look at,” he said.

“I know someone who went to Harrods soon after Doomsday,” Rosemary said. “He came out with a diamond necklace and a hand-sized horse carved from soap. Three days later he threw the necklace away and started washing.”

She was serious, but for some reason Lucy-Anne found what she said unbearably amusing. She started giggled, then laughing, bending over with hands on her knees and roaring at the pavement.

“Quiet!” Rosemary said, but if Lucy-Anne heard, she did not care. The laughter continued, and Jack could not find it in himself to try and stop her. She'd been acting differently ever since the dog attack, and it felt good to see her like this. He tried to shove the fact that she might be losing it to one side.

“Lucy-Anne!” Rosemary said, angry at first, but quickly growing calmer. The woman touched the girl's back, smoothing softly as the laughter changed quickly into tears. “We need to be quiet. Really, we do. London is a dangerous place now, dear. There's more than just people that will do us harm.”

Lucy-Anne stood and moved away from Rosemary, wiping her eyes, looking around at the group then away again. She's still messed up, Jack realised. That was no release for her at all. She needs…something.

Rosemary looked at the sky to the west, where oranges and reds bled across rooftops. “We should go,” she said. “I don't like crossing the Barrens in the dark.”

“Why?” Jenna asked.

“They're haunted.”

Jack had never believed in ghosts, but her words struck a chill in his heart. Emily clasped his hand and he squeezed back.

They followed Rosemary along the street, past the crashed cars and bus and towards the junction at the far end. It felt strange walking past so many silent houses, and Jack thought this was what Rosemary meant by being haunted. She'd said that the Barrens was a grave, but wasn't the whole of London now one big tomb? He thought of what the houses to his left and right contained, how many of the inhabitants had probably died at home and still sat or lay there now, staring at the sunset-streaked windows with skullish eyes. It was chilling, and the silence made it doubly so. Any place so used to noise and bluster became haunted when it was silent and still. He remembered when his father had remained behind at work one evening to finish a report, and the strange look in his eyes when he came home. When Jack had asked what was wrong, he'd simply said, I'm used to the building being full.

“These places feel full of the dead,” Jack whispered, his voice carrying in the silence.

“Not all of them,” Rosemary said. “There were efforts to clean up. The government right at the beginning, and then us. We couldn't just let the city rot.”

“Then where…?” As Jack spoke they rounded the corner at the end of the street, and his question was answered.

Lucy-Anne had never seen a place that looked so wrong. It reminded her of the Exclusion Zone, but the space before them had not only been flattened, but apparently excavated and turned as well, as if to expose fresh ground to the new world. No old buildings remained standing, though there were structures out there, ambiguous and strange in the fading light. It was maybe a mile across in both directions. Shrubs and sapling trees grew in abundance, lush and somehow grotesque. She could not work that out. Leaves shone with health, flowers were full and fat, yet she could not shake the idea that they were wrong.

“It's a mass grave,” Jack said.

“Yes,” Rosemary replied. “The Barrens. The area was destroyed in a huge blaze two days after Doomsday. It didn't take much for them to finish the job.”

“A grave?” Emily said. She was still filming. “How can that be a grave?”

“No one knows how many are buried here,” Rosemary said. “Twenty thousand? A hundred thousand? A million?”

“Those plants…” Lucy-Anne began, wondering whether talking about them would reveal why they looked so disturbing. I've seen them before, she thought, and a memory promised itself to her…but not yet.

“They look almost meaty,” Sparky said, and yes, that was it, and when Lucy-Anne closed her eyes and breathed in deeply she could almost smell the rawness of them.

“Fertile ground,” Jack said. Lucy-Anne knew what he meant, and it was dreadful.

“We have to cross that?” Jenna asked.

Rosemary nodded. “I've done it many times before. But never in the dark.”

“Because it's haunted?” Emily's voice was small and lost.

“There's no such things as ghosts,” Jack said, squeezing his sister's shoulder.

“You don't need ghosts for a place to feel haunted,” Rosemary said. “Please, come on. The light's fading.”

They went, and as they passed from the neat, paved areas of a dead London street and onto the heaved ground of the Barrens, Lucy-Anne wondered if everyone was thinking thoughts similar to hers: My family could be beneath my feet right now.

When she closed her eyes, she saw their death-masks grinning up at her from mass graves. She ground her teeth together to shove away the image. A nightmare? She thought not. Just her imagination going overdrive, and she determined to walk on.

The ground was uneven. Smooth here, ridged and cracked there, sunken elsewhere, it promised broken bones for the unwary. Lucy-Anne looked all around, searching for the glint of bones, or the messy trail of hair still attached to shrunken scalps. But whoever had done the burying had been thorough.

“We're walking on them,” Jenna said, something like fascination in her voice. Nobody replied.

They passed the first spread of lush plants, and Lucy-Anne could not identify them. The shrubs’ flowers looked like roses, but from the stems below the flowers hung catkins, and the thorns were long and thin like hawthorn. Lower down, a bright red heather hugged the ground, spread through the cracks and crevasses like something spilled. She thought of asking whether anyone recognised the species, but decided against it. She was afraid that they were new. Now that Sparky had used the term meaty, Lucy-Anne could not shake that impression from her mind when she breathed in. And the flowers themselves were heavy, damp, brightly coloured. Fertile ground, Jack had said, and Lucy-Anne tried in vain to not visualise what lay beneath.

“A marker,” Rosemary said as they approached a low structure. “There are lots of them. Sometimes you'll even find fresh flowers here.” The structure was surprisingly well-made, constructed from red London bricks and painted around its circular base with a thick black coating. Its round top was slightly sloped to allow water to run off, but embedded in the surface was a glass-enclosed picture, still sharp and clear even though moisture had penetrated through a crack in one corner. The man stared up at them as they passed, smiling happy thoughts from a vanished time.

“How do they know exactly where he was buried?” Jenna asked. “It must have been…”

“They used army wagons mostly,” Rosemary said. “Sometimes removal lorries. Brought them here by the hundreds. I never saw it myself, but I've heard accounts, and it doesn't take much to imagine. So you're right, dear. No one can know for sure where any particular body is buried. I think those that come here treat it like one grave.”

One grave, Lucy-Anne thought, and a flash of memory stabbed at her again. Again, she drove it away.

“Dead London,” Sparky said. “Bloody freaking me out, I know that for sure.”

“There are some rough paths to follow. We'll be across in a few minutes.” Rosemary looked nervously back the way they had come, where the sun was just disappearing below a line of rooftops.

Her nervousness unsettled Lucy-Anne even more. She can't really mean it's haunted? She looked around at the grotesque, strange surroundings, and the silence that enclosed them felt like a held breath. What sounds the Barrens would utter once darkness fell, she had no wish to discover.

They passed more memorials of all shapes, sizes, and designs. One was constructed in cast concrete, eight feet tall and six wide, and three names were carved lovingly into its surface. Another was a brick-built square thirty feet across, the ground within flattened and planted as a perfect lawn, a small wooden cross at its centre. Whoever had built it obviously maintained it, as the grass was trimmed and the cuttings strewn beyond the wall. There were countless wooden markers; many crosses, and others simply stakes driven into the ground. Pictures were pinned to some of them, the majority faded and leached of colour by the sun, but some obviously replaced frequently. Others had names carved into them. As well as the brick or stone markers, there were other elaborate sculptures of twisted and shaped metal that would not have looked out of place in an art gallery.

They could be here, Lucy-Anne thought. Every step she took was painful, and the silence from the rest of the group testified to their upset as well. Among them all, Jack and Emily were the lucky ones. They had family, and everyone else walked alone.

“Oh,” Rosemary said. She paused, glanced back and then continued walking. Perhaps the sun was sinking too quickly for her to think about changing their course.

Someone or something had excavated a hole thirty feet from the rough path they were following. Soil and broken masonry had been dug through to reach the softer parts beneath, and in the dusky light the spread of bones looked pink. There were skulls in there, and leathery skin, and hair twisted across stretched features.

Lucy-Anne fell to her knees. Something about this place was so familiar, and yet her memory teased her still. Just do it! she thought, challenging her nightmares to strike her once again. But if they did have something to say about this place, they held back.

For the next couple of minutes they had to step over and around a mess of bones splayed across the path. Some of them bore teeth marks. Others had been chewed through to get to the good stuff inside.

Rosemary led them on, and as daylight fled and gave the Toxic City back to the night, they left that sad, surreal place and found themselves once more in familiar streets.

They gathered in a small square where once-tended plants had grown wild, and where birds chattered as they chose their roosts for the night.

“It's not far now,” Rosemary said. “There's a house two streets away that I sometimes use. There's food there, and bottled water, and enough rooms-”

“Listen!” Sparky held up his hand, eyes wide, head tilted to one side. The birds had also fallen silent, equally attuned to the sound of danger. “Engines.”

“Quickly!” Rosemary led them across the road and through a gate into the small park at the square's centre. “Hide, stay low, and whatever you do, make sure you're not seen.”

“Choppers?” Jenna asked.

“Almost certainly. Irregulars hardly ever use vehicles.”

Lucy-Anne hid with Jack and Emily behind a bank of undergrowth growing around an old oak tree. She looked for the others but they had all hidden themselves away so well that even she could no longer see them. She had the crazy idea that they had never been there at all.

“I'm afraid,” Emily said.

The motors were drawing closer. There were several of them, and above their grumble he heard the distinctive sound of something else: a helicopter.

“Me too.” Lucy-Anne smiled at the girl.

“But we're here,” Jack whispered into his sister's ear. “We're in London, and Mum and Dad will be here too.”

“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “Do you think they'll remember us?”

Jack tried to answer, but his voice broke. “Shh,” he said instead. He glanced at Lucy-Anne and she saw tears in his eyes. “Shh.”

The helicopter passed overhead. She saw it through the jagged branches of the oak tree, its tail light flashing red as it hovered briefly, then thundered away across the Barrens. It was too high for its downwash to be felt, but so loud that Lucy-Anne could not even hear her own breathing. She noticed that though Emily cringed into her brother, her right hand was held out from her side, the dark lens of the camera facing up.

As the helicopter drifted away, the square was illuminated by a flood of headlamps. Lucy-Anne tried to hunker down lower, gasping as the light fingered through bushes and between tree trunks to briefly dazzle her. The engine sound did not change. She heard heavy wheels grinding on the gritty road, and another set of headlamps swung through to follow the first. The two vehicles grumbled around the square, their engine noise intensely threatening. But behind them, a heavier sound. It rumbled and shook through the ground as well as through the air, and it made leaves in the square shake where the helicopter could not.

“What's that?” Emily asked.

“Don't know. Big truck.” Lucy-Anne peered through the bushes, trying to make out the shape and size of the two vehicles driving around the edge of the square. They seemed quite small, but before she could get a good look, they were gone, and the massive rumble that followed them took over.

It echoed from the buildings around the square, shook the ground, and the lights-red, yellow, and white-slashed through the undergrowth as if it was not there. It ended the shadows in that place, and its motor sounded angry and hungry.

The vehicle turned around the edge of the square, following the two smaller trucks that had preceded it. Through branches and past heavy limbs draped with leaves, Lucy-Anne could see its shape, and it was huge. It reminded her of an oil tanker, but its heavy grey sides looked daunting, the three conical towers on its back ugly and threatening with the stubby black guns that protruded from them. The engine tone lowered for a moment and she thought it was going to slow.

“They can't have seen us!” Emily said, almost shouting to be heard.

Lucy-Anne delved into her pocket for the knife Sparky had let her keep, laughing out loud at how ineffective it felt.

Then the giant vehicle lumbered on, putting on a surprising spurt of speed as it skirted the square and disappeared after the 4?4s.

For a couple of minutes after the lights disappeared and the vehicles were out of sight, everyone remained where they were. Lucy-Anne listened to the engines fading away, echoes coming back at them and playing tricks with direction and distance. Then Rosemary crawled across to them, her eyes wide, fearful, and perhaps excited as well. “Choppers!” she said. “And that big monster was one of their mobile labs. I've watched Irregulars taken into there, never to be seen again.”

“We need to go to your house,” Jack said. Emily was still shivering in his arms. “It's been a long day, Rosemary, and we need rest. This is all too much.”

“Near miss, eh?” Sparky said, crawling across to them.

“Got it all on here, I think,” Emily said, holding up her camera and smiling weakly.

“There won't be another patrol for a while,” Rosemary said.

“I need to find my family,” Lucy-Anne whispered. Her heart was thrumming, and something had started ticking deep inside her, a timer slowly running out of sand. She was counting down to something, and she had no idea what.

“Not yet,” Jack said.

“Lucy-Anne, we need-” Jenna began.

“My family!” she said, louder this time. “We've come all this way, been through those bloody tunnels…those dogs! And I'm not just going to go to fucking sleep!”

“Quiet!” Rosemary said.

“Stop telling me to be quiet, old woman!”

“Lucy-Anne.” Jack stepped forward and held her arms, trying to pull her close. She resisted, pulling back, staring over Jack's shoulder at something more distant.

“Where did they live?” Rosemary said. Her voice was calmer now, cooler.

Lucy-Anne glanced at her, but said nothing.

“Answer her,” Jack said. “She knows the city.”

“She led us to those dogs.”

“Tooting, wasn't it?” Jenna asked. “Didn't they live near the big police station in Tooting?”

Rosemary sighed and lowered her head.

“What?” Lucy-Anne demanded. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Tooting isn't there anymore,” Rosemary said softly. “We just walked across it, and now it's called the Barrens.”

Lucy-Anne gasped, and her defences fell from her in a heartbeat. She crumpled in Jack's arms, slumping down as though her knees had given out. She wished he could hold her tight enough to stop everything, just for a while.

“It doesn't mean they're dead,” he whispered in her ear.

No, they're not dead, she thought. And something deep inside seemed to grin.

She pulled away from Jack and stood on her own. She smoothed down her clothes, ran her fingers through her hair, and wiped an errant tear from her cheek. Then she glanced at Rosemary. “Sorry.” The word was quiet, but they all heard it in the silence.

Rosemary nodded and gave a brief smile. “We should go. If we hurry, we can be there before it's fully dark.”

They followed the woman out of the square and along a narrow street, as they had been following her all that long day. She had led them out of the world they knew and into one they used to know, but which was now a mysterious, dangerous place. She had healed their wounds after the dogs attacked them, and told them about the strange places beneath London, both old and new. She had walked them across the largest grave the world had ever seen, and pointed out monuments to individual people that seemed, in Lucy-Anne's eyes at least, to be more immediate than the thought of a million dead.

She trusted the old woman, and she didn't. She liked her, and she feared her. And as Rosemary unlocked the front door to an innocuous, terraced house in a street that had once sung with life, Lucy-Anne wondered whether history was too powerful for any of them to change.