Reaper's Legacy

^{CHAPTER SEVEN} BLACKBERRIES

“She was there. She was there!”

“I didn’t see anyone,” Rook said.

“There, in that open doorway, watching me!” Lucy-Anne pointed at the building she had only ducked into before realising it was empty and lifeless. She had not been afraid to continue inside, but she had been certain that to do so would be pointless. The woman was already gone.

“Nomad,” Lucy-Anne said. “That’s who she is. The wanderer. The ghost of London.”

“Nomad’s a myth,” Rook said.

“And what do you think you are to everyone outside?”

Rook looked troubled. He glanced between Lucy-Anne and the empty building, and she could see that he believed what he said—he’d seen no one there, and to him, Nomad was a myth.

“We should get going,” he said. “Dusk soon. Good time to get into the north.”

“There’s a boundary?” Lucy-Anne asked.

“Only in your head.” Rook set off and Lucy-Anne followed, but she paused to glance back several times at the open doorway. The place had once been a hotel, and she wondered how many rooms with closed doors still housed the rotten remains of the dead. Amongst them had walked Nomad, seeking a place from which she could observe Lucy-Anne.

She’s there in my dreams, and now I’m seeing her for real.

Rook took them through the back end of London—hidden places, alleys and areas that only people who knew they were there would be able to find. Some of them wound behind rows of houses, paths overgrown with rose bushes gone wild and clematis given free rein now that there was no-one there to trim it. Other narrow, cobbled roads seemed to be left over from a much older London emerged from hiding, and if it weren’t for the dusty vehicles sitting on flattened tyres, Lucy-Anne might have believed they had gone back in time.

In some places there were bodies. Shrivelled, dried remnants, or gnawed bones scattered by carrion creatures. Lucy-Anne was surprised how quickly the shock faded.

Dusk settled quickly across these hidden places. Shadows seemed to stretch out from where they had been resting during the day, washing across the ground, climbing walls, enveloping everything and striving to hide things from view. Lucy-Anne felt safe with Rook, and she could still see and sometimes hear his birds following them above, or flitting from roof to roof around them. But that did not prevent her from being unsettled as night approached.

Going north made the darkness deeper.

As Rook led the way, Lucy-Anne noticed something of a change come over him. At first she thought perhaps it was the failing light that seemed to bleed some of his confidence. But he moved slower, more cautiously, until he stopped at the end of an alleyway leading out onto a wide shopping street. He stood facing away from her with his arm held out, and a rook shadowed down and landed on his upturned wrist.

The bird was silent, head jerking left and right and looking everywhere but at Rook.

“What is it?” Lucy-Anne asked.

“I’m afraid,” Rook said. As he spoke the bird gave a caw-caw! and flapped its wings, but remained perched on his arm. Perhaps it was afraid as well.

The admission shocked Lucy-Anne. After she’d seen Rook in action with Reaper she’d viewed him in the same way. Despite his protestations, she saw him as a Superior, a person who considered themselves as more than human, and better.

“Afraid?” she asked.

“I can be, you know,” he said.

“I know, but…”

“Can’t you sense it?” he asked, turning around to face her. The bird watched her, dark eyes inscrutable.

She tried to feel what he was feeling, sniffing the air, listening for anything out of the ordinary, and then closing her eyes. But she felt only what she had ever since entering London—dislocation, and an idea that she could never belong here at all.

“It’s wild!” Rook said. He was speaking quietly, glancing about as he did so. Afraid of being watched. “I’ve only ever been this far north once before, and I turned back and ran. Got lost south of the river, and it felt like going home. Back to my mother’s womb. Safe.”

“What’s so terrible about it?”

“London changed, but this part changed more than anywhere. It’s a different place now. Those left behind here don’t even pretend to be what they were before.”

“And everyone else does?” she asked doubtfully.

“Even Reaper admits to being human.”

She glanced past him into the deserted street, lit only by the faint glow of dusk and the rising moon. “Then what about people here?”

“Like I said. Wild. Just…” He reached out and touched her, and it was like a feather across her cheek. “Just be warned.”

“But you’ll protect me,” she said. “You know how.”

“I know how to try.”

“I have no choice,” Lucy-Anne said. “My brother’s out there somewhere. That’s all I am now. Searching for him defines me.”

Rook nodded once, then glanced away. “Follow me,” he said. “We’ll cut across the street, then through some gardens. Then there’s a wide road, and we’re in Regent’s Park.”

“And why are we going there?”

“It’ll probably be quicker passing through the park than along streets.”

“And safer?”

“Didn’t say that.”

The enormity of their task, always at the back of Lucy-Anne’s mind, came to the fore then. Andrew was a needle in a haystack, a pebble on a beach. And now that they were heading into the wilder north of London, the haystack and beach were more dangerous than ever.

There were six corpses propped against the wall at the edge of the park. Each had a small fire lit in its lap, their arms had been interlocked in a grotesque mockery of dancing, and their heads and shoulders were encased in silvery-grey webbing. They were naked apart from their shoes. That’s what Lucy-Anne noticed first, before the rest of the horror. That they all wore shoes.

“What’s this?” she whispered. Rook squatted beside her in the shelter of a bus stop, two of his birds on the ground beside him. A third bird drifted in through the dark and settled on his shoulder, and he tilted his head.

“Don’t know,” he said, answering her at last. “There’ll be plenty we can’t explain. But the coast is clear.” He went to stand, and Lucy-Anne grabbed his arm.

“Clear?” she asked. She did not want to see the bodies, yet that was the only thing she could look at. She wondered if they were Choppers. “Clear?”

“So my birds tell me,” Rook said. “And I trust them. Come on.”

They crossed diagonally across the street, moving away from the bodies with the fires in their laps and towards the hulking shadow of an open park gate. If they were a warning, Lucy-Anne’s every atom told her to take heed. But her mind drove her on towards Andrew.

The smell of burning flesh accompanied them into the park, and she wondered how often this warning was replaced. And as she and Rook passed through the wide gates and onto the first of the curving footpaths, she froze in shock.

Empty, dead London was an unnatural place. Once home to endless bustle, with streets awash with life and millions of separate stories every day, and squares echoing to birdsong and the lilts of a hundred languages, the new silence of the toxic city was alien and unnatural. Before she left for good, Lucy-Anne had once remained behind in school on a dare, hiding until the caretakers locked her in, emerging into darkness, prowling the corridors and classrooms with every intention of performing small acts of rebellion and graffiti. But she had found the place so disconcerting—silence where once was life; breathlessness where echoes should live—that she’d smashed a window to escape.

London felt like that now.

But the park was worse.

They didn’t have to go too far in before they heard the calls and hoots, the whistles and moans. It sounded like Lucy-Anne imagined a jungle would sound at night, except…different. There was an intelligence to some of these calls that sent a shiver down her spine. Strange smells assailed her nostrils, and when she tried breathing through her mouth she tasted something acidic and damp on the air. In the weak moonlight, shadows danced beneath trees seemingly in defiance of the motionless canopies. Wide swathes of lawn had grown into seas of long grasses. Things moved in there.

The sheer wilderness of the place was overwhelming, and Lucy-Anne kept close to Rook.

“Can’t we go around?” she whispered.

“You saw what awaited us out there,” he said. “We’re in the north now. The streets around here…” He shrugged but said no more.

“You’ve sent your rooks to see?” she asked. Rook did not reply. He seemed unsettled, tense, so she did not force the issue. Her one desire became to make it through the park and out the other side.

The path they followed soon vanished beneath a spread of tough grass, and Rook grabbed her hand and pulled her towards a wall of darkness beneath a copse of trees. Lucy-Anne did not want to go that way—she felt like a child afraid of the dark—but Rook’s birds swooped in and away again, one landing on his shoulder as soon as another took off. She could only assume that they were imparting information and telling him whether it was safe. Her life was in his hands.

She had not willingly been totally dependent on another person for a very long time.

As they approached the trees Lucy-Anne saw the first shadow moving down amongst the boles. It darted from tree to tree through the shadows, seemingly merging with one trunk before skitting across to the next.

Calls and cries came from across the park, but the copse before them had fallen silent.

Rook paused, head on one side and a rook cawing on his shoulder. “You’ll see strange things,” he said, then he walked on.

Lucy-Anne took a deep breath and followed. Something caressed her ear and she waved at it, expecting to find a drooping branch. But she touched nothing, and when she glanced up she saw a shadow lifting and dipping above her as it flapped its strong, silent wings. Other rooks hovered farther away. Protecting her.

The shape slinked out from behind the first of the trees, scampering through the grass and then standing upright on two legs to glare at them. It was a man, but his arms and legs were deformed and bent like a dog’s. At first she thought he was black, but then she spotted the pale patches of skin across his stomach and abdomen, and realised that he was mostly covered in a heavy, dark pelt. His face protruded, nose wide, wet nostrils opening and closing as he took in their scents.

He shouted at them, and it was a bark. It sounded pained.

“Don’t panic,” Rook said.

“Oh my God,” Lucy-Anne said, appealing to a deity she had forgotten since her childhood. “Oh my God, what is that, what is that?”

“A man turning into a dog,” Rook said.

Lucy-Anne laughed out loud at his stark answer. But he was right.

The man shouted again, a heavy, deep bark that could not have issued from a human’s throat. He fell to all fours again and scampered away, kicking through the long grass, skitting back and forth, and a rudimentary tail swished the air behind him. Soon he was lost to the darkness, and moonlight could touch him no more.

Lucy-Anne was glad. She wished the moon and stars would shut themselves away for the rest of the night.

Amongst the trees, the darkness was even deeper. Rook moved quickly, and every now and then one of his birds would flit down out of the darkness and land on his shoulder. They were scouting the way forward, but Lucy-Anne knew that they might not see everything. There could be anything hiding in the dark.

A man turning into a dog! she thought. She had never seen or imagined anything like it, and it was a whole new aspect to what had happened to London. She’d heard of and met people whom Doomsday had changed, giving them talents or abilities that had been pure science fiction until two years ago. But the changes had all been on the inside. Here, things were different.

“Rook, what is this?” she whispered. He kept walking. “Rook?”

He paused and turned around. “We need to move quickly,” he said. And that was all. Any explanation would have to wait until later, because he set off again at a fast pace. Sometimes, Lucy-Anne had to run to keep up.

They passed through the wooded area, and just as they emerged close to a lake several shadows rose from the ground before them. Rook skidded to a halt, startled, and Lucy-Anne bumped into him. She maintained the contact.

Rooks flapped and cawed somewhere out of sight.

The shapes were people, naked, caked in mud, hair set in extravagant designs. Their limbs seemed too short, too thin. When they moved, Lucy-Anne saw why.

They had reared up from their stomachs, and the first woman slumped down to the ground and curled away through the undergrowth. She shifted from side to side as she went, withered, sore-covered arms dragging along on either side and legs fused along their insides to form a long, thin tail.

As Lucy-Anne gasped, the woman hissed. The two other snake people eased back down onto their stomachs and followed the woman, and soon they were lost from view.

“They were…” Lucy-Anne said.

“Lucky we surprised them,” Rook said. “Let’s hurry before they come back.”

“Are they poisonous? Constrictors? Do they…how much like real snakes are they?”

“You want to stay and find out?” He ran and she followed him, skirting around the lake’s edge but not getting too close. Things were splashing in there. From the dark came wretched cries. It must hurt them, she thought. Such a huge change, so quickly. It must hurt! Though scared of them, she also felt pity.

Rook ran over a small footbridge that passed over a stream leading into the lake, and without pause headed across a wide area of long-grassed lawn spotted with occasional clumps of trees and wooden seating shelters. Moonlight silvered the land, setting fire to treetops. To their left and right shadows ran to keep pace with them, but Lucy-Anne could only assume that Rook knew about them. A rook landed on her left shoulder, its surprising lightness startling her, and a thought came unbidden: They’re graceful and beautiful. She understood some of Rook’s attachment to these creatures then, and for the first time she felt a pang of jealousy at his incredible abilities. Perhaps because he was closer to them than he ever could be to her.

They approached another small wooded area. She wondered why Rook was leading them into the trees instead of around them, and then she saw the shadowy humps across the grassland to their right. They moved slowly, sluggishly, but they seemed to be much larger than normal people. She was so glad that darkness mostly hid them from view.

“What the hell?” she asked, but he did not answer. He was focussed, committed to getting them across the park safely, past the mutations and the dangers, and she had to wonder why. He was not the heartless boy she had assumed when they had met. If anything he was confused and conflicted, hiding behind his grief over his dead mother and brother, sheltering emotions with his unusual abilities and the deadly opportunities they afforded him. Perhaps being with her was the first chance he’d had to properly express himself in two years.

They entered the wooded area, and as she opened her mouth to call him to a stop, to hold him and thank him, a shocking sense settled over Lucy-Anne that she had been to this place before.

With my parents, my brother, on one of those days we came to London? Surely I wouldn’t recognise it still, especially in the dark and with how much things have changed? Maybe I saw pictures? Maybe it’s a famous view of Regent’s Park that’s used for—

And then she smelled blackberries.

It was her dream. And soon would come the park bench smothered by shrubs, and then the monkey-man swinging down from the trees at her, and then the ground would open up to swallow Rook, and she would look down into the hole to see—

“Rook!” she shouted, and he skidded to a halt before her. The sense of déjà vu was still all-encompassing, and she tried to break it. If she could move on from the conviction that this had all happened before, maybe she could change things. Not every dream comes true, she thought. Rook and me in the house, making love…that hasn’t happened, yet. And she stepped forward and reached for Rook, grasping his jacket and pulling him close, ignoring his startled expression and pressing her lips to his. He was unresponsive and cold, and he shoved her away.

“No,” she said, “no, don’t. Just…thank you. For doing this. But…” She looked around. There was no bench, and no man swinging down at her from the trees. She sighed, and it shook her whole body.

“What?” Rook asked. He took her hands in his and waited until she looked up at him. “What is it?”

“Blackberries,” she said. “I smell them.”

“Not in season.”

She took in a breath and smelled damp soil, rain, and the warm tang of evergreens.

“No,” she said. “You’re right. Not blackberries at all.”

Frowning, he grasped her right hand tight and tugged her on. The first few steps were painful because she expected the ground to open at any minute and for them to tumble into the pit. But when that did not happen, and they emerged close to the northern edge of the park, she started running more freely. She experienced a moment of utter delight and well-being, and when they reached the boundary wall she grabbed Rook again and kissed him properly. This time he relaxed slightly into her embrace, but his eyes remained open and alert.

A rook landed on his shoulder and stared at her quizzically.

Lucy-Anne laughed. There was a hint of hysteria to the sound, and Rook looked as befuddled as his bird.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s fine.”

“Well, we’re through the park, at least,” he said. “Come on. Long way to go.”

In the streets, that feeling of well-being left her as quickly as it had come. When the first piercing shriek rang out, and was taken up by many others, Lucy-Anne wondered whether they had actually avoided anything at all.