London Eye

Jenna answered the front door, looking excited and scared.

“Come on!” she said. “Sparky's already here.”

“How did he get here so quickly?” Lucy-Anne asked.

“I went to his place on my bike. Don't worry, I didn't use the phone.” Jenna turned and disappeared back into her house.

“I bet she bloody did,” Lucy-Anne said as she stepped over the threshold. “Bet she called him.”

Jack shook his head and followed his girlfriend inside. They were all careful, but sometimes she was ready to take caution too far. They always went under the assumption that the authorities listened to all telephone communication, but if any eavesdropper heard a girl calling a boy and saying, Come over, I have a nice surprise, it was doubtful they'd press the panic buttons.

He immediately noticed the strange atmosphere inside the house. There was nothing definable, nothing he could put his finger on, but the place had an air of…change.

A shadow filled the doorway to the kitchen, and the thunderous voice that followed was familiar to them both. “Hey, you bastards, finished playing with each other long enough to join us?”

“Hey, Sparky,” Jack said, smiling. They'd become friends through circumstance, brought together because of their beliefs and suspicions, but Sparky was a boy Jack would have got on with anyway, even if Doomsday hasn't happened and London was still there. Sure, he had a wildness about him. Sometimes he acted as if he had a fault-line running along his spine. One day he'd blow. Sparky's brother had blown long before Doomsday, taking to drugs, stealing cars, and running with a gang in the suburbs of London. But Jack was confident that Sparky would keep it together. If he ever did quake, it would be on the shoulders of someone that deserved it.

“Sparky,” Lucy-Anne said, “I never play.” Her false-seriousness made them all laugh, but something about Sparky's mirth sounded different.

“What is it?” Jack asked.

His friend stepped into the hallway. He was sweating, short blond hair pasted to his forehead. His eyes were wide and wild, and Jack thought he'd never seen the boy this worked up. “Something you've got to see for yourselves.”

Jenna appeared behind him in the kitchen doorway, short and slight, and wearing her beautiful long dark hair in its usual twisted mess on the back of her head. “You guys coming, or what?”

“Where are your parents?” Lucy-Anne asked.

“They went out. Come on!” Jenna turned and went back into the big kitchen-diner at the rear of the house. Sparky pressed himself against the wall and gestured for them to follow, bowing slightly.

As Jack walked past his big friend they swapped glances, and Sparky's eyes were alight.

There was an old woman sitting in a chair at Jenna's kitchen table. A pot of tea, several used cups, and crumbed plates cluttered the table's surface. The woman looked up and smiled. There was nothing particularly outlandish about the way she was dressed. She had grey, unkempt hair, heavy boots which looked as though they'd suit Lucy-Anne better, old clothes that had seen better days. But a vivid red scar above one eye gave her a wild look. And her smile hid a deep sadness.

“Hello,” the woman said. “My name's Rosemary, and I'm from London.”

Jack shook his head and backed against the wall. No one comes out of London, he thought. They shoot the things that try. They burn them!

Rosemary's smile grew. “Don't believe everything you see in the media. But then, you're the last people I need to say that to.”

“Did you…read my mind?” Jack asked.

“No, not me,” Rosemary said, “although I know a young woman back in the city who can do just that.”

“Isn't it wonderful?” Jenna asked. She stared at Jack and Lucy-Anne, as if expecting her enthusiasm to wash over them as well.

“Bloody miracle, is what it is,” Sparky said.

“How did you get out?” Jack asked.

Rosemary took a glass from the kitchen table and sipped at the water it contained. She closed her eyes and sighed; the sweetest thing ever. “Tunnels. There's a whole network under London, and not all of them are guarded.”

Jack shook his head. It didn't make sense. “So why haven't more people come out before now?”

“The route's only just been found. There's a man called Philippe who can see the lie of the land. A three-dimensional map in his mind, that's how he explains it to me, and he discovered this way to escape the city. We're afraid that a larger escape would be spotted, so I came alone to meet Jenna's father.”

“Why?” Jack was still pressed against the wall, and he felt his friends’ eyes on him; Jenna angry, Sparky challenging, Lucy-Anne…he could not read her. She was a blank. He hoped it was caution.

“So many questions,” Rosemary said.

“What the bloody hell do you expect?”

“Jack,” Jenna said, stepping forward. She touched his shoulders and looked up at him. She was sweet, her caramel skin impossibly smooth, and in other circumstances he could have seen them being together. But she was usually so filled with sadness that she rarely let anyone close.

“It's just something I never expected.”

“It's something we've always hoped for!” Jenna whispered.

“So what can you do?” he asked over his friend's shoulder.

“I'm a healer,” Rosemary said.

“Huh!”

Jenna squeezed his arms, but he would not catch her eye. She could have been sent here by the Capital Keepers, he wanted to say. And the more he thought about that, the more likely it seemed. If that were the truth they were already doomed, and they'd be whisked away, and even if they were allowed back home they'd be changed like Jenna's father. Ghosts of their former selves.

“Need an open mind, mate,” Sparky said.

Jack shook his head. “It just can't be.”

Jenna sighed, and rested her head on his shoulder to whisper into his ear. The closeness surprised him. “Always the doubter,” she said.

And then she stabbed him.

Lucy-Anne went for Jenna. The girl turned with the knife held out. Lucy-Anne feinted right, then moved left, swinging her forearm before her to divert Jenna's arm. But the knife fell and struck the tiled floor with a splash of blood, and Jenna retreated against the closed back door.

Lucy-Anne snatched up the blade and was on the other girl in a second. She pressed her against the door with an arm across her throat, and then they locked stares; two friends who had been through so much, and Lucy-Anne remembered a dozen times when they had eased each other's tears.

“What the hell…?” she asked, and Jenna shook her head.

“Lucy-Anne, trust me.”

Lucy-Anne looked down at where Jack had slumped to the floor. He was pale, but for the startlingly bright blood pulsing between his fingers from his leg. Artery, she thought, oh shit, she got his artery. She glanced across at where a phone was fixed to the wall.

Rosemary rose from the table, sighing as her joints clicked with audible pops. “Don't worry,” she said, her voice endlessly calm.

“Don't worry?” Lucy-Anne shouted. She pulled Jenna from the door and pushed her across the kitchen towards the old woman, facing them all with the bloodied knife held before her. “Don't worry?” She looked at Sparky, expecting support from him but seeing only a strange, subdued excitement in his eyes. He was not looking at her, or the knife she held, or even at their friend bleeding to death on the floor. He was looking at Rosemary.

Jack groaned. He was staring down at his leg, watching as pressure pumped the blood past his pressing hands.

Rosemary stood by Jack's feet and looked at Lucy-Anne. “Girl, I'll give you a reason to believe,” she said, and then she knelt beside the wounded boy. Jack tried to wave her away, but his coordination was failing.

“Let her,” Jenna said.

Lucy-Anne watched. Her own heart was beating in time with Jack's pulsing blood, and she held the knife so tight that her fingers hurt. I won't let go, she thought. Not until I'm sure. But she was holding the knife on her best friends in the world, and something about that made her feel sick.

Rosemary lifted Jack's hands away from his wound, and used a small pair of scissors to cut open his sodden jeans. Then she replaced his hands with her own. She gave him a quick, sad smile, and then her eyes closed. Her face went blank-empty-as though she had gone elsewhere.

And then her hands slipped inside Jack's leg.

When Jack came to, Jenna was on her hands and knees mopping up the blood, but she could not take her eyes off the old woman. Rosemary sat at the kitchen table again, drinking water and sighing as though it were nectar.

“Do you actually fix it, or is it, like…?” Lucy-Anne trailed off. She was sitting opposite the old woman. She had a knife in her left hand, resting on her leg, and as she shifted it fell to the floor. She did not seem to notice.

“Hey…” Sparky lifted the short sleeve of his tee shirt exposing the tattoo of his brother's name that he'd done himself. He'd been drunk at the time, and the ‘S’ of Stephen looked more like an ‘F.’ “Can you fix this?”

Rosemary smiled and shook her head.

“How about this?” Sparky pointed at his face.

Rosemary frowned. “What's wrong with it?”

“Ugly,” Jack said, and it seemed to take all his energy. Here he was, subject of a miracle, and everyone's attention was elsewhere. But when he looked at his leg at last-and saw the smooth spread of skin that minutes earlier had been pouting open-he realised that he was wrong. He was not the miracle at all.

“So do you now believe, non-believer?” Jenna roared, her voice mock-deep. Jack stood cautiously, leaning against the wall. He put weight on his leg. It felt as though the wound had never been there at all.

“You stabbed me.”

“Well…” She shrugged, raising her eyebrows.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “I believe.”

“So can we all talk now?” Jenna asked. She sat at the table and motioned the others to join her.

This is it, Jack thought. This is when it all changes. I've been touched already, but if we sit and listen to this woman, we'll get drawn in. Rosemary smiled at him, inviting him to join them at the table, and in that moment he saw something of his mother in her. She was much older than his mum-maybe seventy-five-and weary, worn by time and circumstance. But she exuded a deep-set goodness from every pore.

“Does it hurt to heal?” Jack asked. That question suddenly seemed very important.

“No,” she said. “It feels as natural as breathing.”

Jack nodded, went to the table and sat down next to Lucy-Anne. She grabbed his hand and squeezed too hard, her nervousness and excitement obvious. Sometimes he sensed such violence in her that it scared him.

“So why have you come for my father?” Jenna asked.

“Things are falling apart,” Rosemary said. She sighed, and looked around the table. “How much do you all know?”

“We know it wasn't terrorists,” Jack said. “An army scientist crashed a helicopter into the London Eye and released a virus they called Evolve.”

“Angelina Walker,” Jenna said. “No one knows why she did it.”

Jack nodded. “We know that not everyone in London was infected and killed.”

“And that the survivors are hunted,” Jenna added.

“And they're special,” Lucy-Anne said. “They're called Irregulars, like you.”

“Not all like me,” Rosemary said. “I can heal. Others can do different things, a whole host of amazing things. And we're all sought-after by the Choppers.”

“Choppers?”

“That's what we call the ones that hunt us. You call them Capital Keepers. But whether they're scientists or military, it doesn't really matter. When they catch an Irregular they do…terrible things. So we call them Choppers.”

“What terrible things?” Lucy-Anne asked, squeezing Jack's hand even harder.

Rosemary closed her eyes. “We need help. We need to get out of there, and the only way that will happen without slaughter is if the general public-all of them-know the truth of what's happening. We need exposure.” She looked at Jenna. “That's why I came to find your father. To ask him to come in with me, gather evidence, and then present it to the world. So…will he be here soon?”

“It's us you're talking to here!” Lucy-Anne said. She stood sharply, sending her chair scraping across the floor. “And don't you bloody dare look down on us just because we're just kids. We've all grown up a lot since Doomsday, because we've had to.” She pointed at Jack. “Mother and father.” At Sparky. “Brother.” And herself. “Mother, father, brother.”

Rosemary's expression did not change at this roll-call of the missing and dead. “The last thing I'd call you is kids,” she said.

Lucy-Anne nodded, seemingly satisfied. When she sat down she held Jack's hand again, but this time it was a gentle touch.

“My dad's out with Mum,” Jenna said. “They go walking a lot. Sometimes they take me, but usually I just want to stay at home. We didn't lose anyone. But Dad…”

“He fought,” Rosemary said.

“Yeah.” Jenna nodded, staring past them all. “Looked for the truth. First they called him an activist, and threatened him with the law. When he ignored their threats, they took him.”

“He was in contact with several people in London,” Rosemary said. “People who could enhance their brainwaves to such an extent that they almost acted as radio transmitters and receivers.”

“‘Could’?” Sparky asked.

“When the Choppers discovered the communication, they took all three. Beheaded two of them in the street, so the word goes, and the other just disappeared. Camp H.”

“’H’ for what?” Lucy-Anne asked.

“Hope,” Rosemary said with a wry smile.

“That was the same time they took Dad?”

“Yes. But we don't think they bring outsiders to Camp H.”

“He never told us where he went,” Jenna said, “or who took him, or what they did to him. When he left, he was so full of fight and anger. Every time I kissed him goodnight, there was a real power about him. He had purpose. He came back two weeks later and…” She opened her hand like a quickly blooming flower. “Pff. Gone. Sometimes I can't believe he's still my dad.” The volume of her voice had grown, but the tears came as well, and Jenna shook with anger and grief.

“Then I suppose he can't help me anymore,” Rosemary said sadly.

“Is it true they implant something?” Sparky said. “When they take people and send them back. Something to kill them if they start investigating again?”

Rosemary shrugged slowly. “How can I know that? This is your world out here. I live in London, but that's a whole new world now.”

“You've heard of it though, right?” Jack asked.

“Rumours.”

“And you still came to ask him for help?”

Rosemary stared at him then, and Jack was certain she was trying to convey some message that she did not wish to voice. He stood, let go of Lucy-Anne's hand and walked to the kitchen sink. Outside, the sunset was burning across the ridges of neighbouring houses. Jenna's parents would be back soon.

“I need to know,” Jack said quietly.

“Me too,” Sparky said.

Lucy-Anne stood and ran her hands through her purple hair. “Yeah.”

Jack turned back and looked at Rosemary; an old woman, worn and tired, scarred and grubby, but filled with an astonishing power that the government had gone to brutal measures to conceal.

“We'll come,” he said.

Rosemary nodded slowly and smiled. “The second you were all here together, I knew that would happen.”

“Another power?” Jenna asked. “You're an empath?”

“No, dear,” the old woman laughed. “I'm human.”

They split up, agreeing to meet at Camp Truth at dawn the following morning. Jenna and Sparky were taking Rosemary there to sleep. They said it was probably the safest place of all, but the old woman seemed too tired to be afraid.

She scared Lucy-Anne. There was something…different about her. There was that incredible thing she had done with Jack's leg, yes, but she seemed so very out of place here in the village. She sat at Jenna's table and drank tea, ate toast, talked to them and fended their questions, but to Lucy-Anne it seemed as if she were from another world.

In a way, she supposed that was true.

Jack had been keen to get home to his sister Emily, so Lucy-Anne had walked home alone. She'd stopped in the corner shop and bought a bottle of cheap red wine, joking with the boy behind the counter who flirted with her every time she went in. He was her age but seemed so much younger, and she thought it was because he'd lost no one to Doomsday. He seemed happy and content, and blissfully unaware of what had gone on in his world because so little of it had touched him. Sometimes she thought of inviting him home to see if some of his carefree attitude would rub off on her. But she knew that she'd end up showing him pictures, and talking about those she had lost, so she'd left him with a smile and a sway of her hips.

Sitting in the living room of the big, empty house left to her when her family had vanished in the Toxic City, Lucy-Anne allowed the tears to come. Usually they were driven by grief and sadness, but today there was something else: the terror that soon, all her fears would be realised.

She had never, ever let herself accept the fact that they were dead.

She swigged from the bottle. It was half gone already, and she knew she should pour the rest down the sink. Last thing she wanted tomorrow was a hangover. But she was enjoying the fuzziness in her head, and it seemed to relax her muscles, enabling her to sink into the sofa and lose herself in the music blasting from her stereo.

“Sorry, Mum and Dad!” she called up to their bedroom. Led Zeppelin was particularly loud this evening, and she knew they didn't like it very much.

She never went into their room, and kept the door locked.

“Andrew, you always did like good music!”

Her brother's bedroom door was locked as well, but she had not felt able to remove his favourite CDs from where he'd left them scattered around the music system in the living room. Now they were her favourites, too.

She drank a little more, and spoke to her family, because this was the only place and time she would ever allow herself to do so: at home, alone, when no one could see her true desperation.

Tomorrow, everything was going to change.

It looks like a huge, open wasteland, but she can see its ghosts.

There used to be buildings here, and parks, and shops and pubs where people had mixed and chatted, laughing and scowling their way through life. It has all gone now, and their absence seems to make the sky far too large.

Instead there is a vast plain of broken rubble, exotic-looking plants and flattened, blurred areas that look so strange. She sees movement far away across the plain, and she squints into the merciless sun, shading her eyes to see whether it's people…or something else.

She walks towards the movement because it seems the best place to go. It's hot and harsh here, with a warm breeze blowing from the left and carrying a melange of scents: the dust of ages; dry, old rot; and something spicy and forbidden which she cannot identify.

As she nears the thing she saw moving, she finally makes out what it is. The pack of wolves is rooting at something buried deep in the ground. It's one of those strange blurred areas that she had seen, and she can now identify that effect as well: in this rugged plain of a dead city, this spread of land is as smooth as a bowling green.

The wolves growl, but she walks closer. She thought she had a knife in her pocket, still stained with the blood of a friend, but she frowns when she finds her pocket empty. Maybe she dropped it? She feels like a fool, because there are so many dangers out here.

She should be scared of the wolves, but she is not here for them. So she shouts and they flee, casting incongruous growls back as they disappear among the rubble.

The sky darkens as she walks out onto the flattened area. The breeze dies down, but she can smell rot well enough. And even though the sun has hidden its face behind a cloud, the glare of unearthed bones is obvious.

She kicks through the bones, hauling skeletons aside, rifling through half-rotten clothing, shouting out for her mother, father, and brother. She's desperate not to find them, but she cannot tear herself away.

And then there are her parents, dead but not rotten, buried deep down where the wolves had not reached, and there are worms in their eyes and beetles in their mouths, and even as she looks to the sky and screams she can see them still.

She will know them like this forever.