Contagion (Toxic City, #3)(10)

Loud impacts sounded from the high metal roof. The noise filled the previously quiet unit. Lucy-Anne cried out in shock, then pressed down the handle and swung the door, darted into the open, and ran. She crossed a car park and dodged around several cars, then heard thuds behind her as things dropped from the roof.

She stopped and spun around, backing up against a truck sat on flattened tyres. This is where I make a stand, she thought, and she was filled with a dreadful sense of foreboding. She had not dreamed this at all. As she saw what faced her, she wished she could have fallen instantly asleep to un-dream it.

She was going to die here, and her bones would be scattered across the moss-covered concrete.

There were three of them stalking closer to her, cautious but confident, and she could sense their hunger. Each breath ended with a gentle growl.

“So what are you supposed to be?” she asked. Her voice wavered, and none of them gave any indication that they had heard.

They were smaller than adult humans, but she had no sense that they were children. Vaguely ape-like, their arms and legs had grown long and thin, yet still wiry and strong. Their naked bodies were covered with a fine brown felt-like fur, and their heads had elongated, mouths protruding and ears flattened against their triangular skulls. The teeth were long and vicious. Their eyes were startlingly human, yet they held little sign of any intelligence she could understand. One of them had a tattoo on its upper arm.

She was certain that they wanted to eat.

“Come on then,” she said, waving the knife before her. But she felt no real bravado. She would fight when they came, but she could not kid herself. She might wound one or two of them, but they'd take her down within seconds.

She only hoped it was over quickly.

I'm so sorry, Jack, she thought. Sparky, Jenna. I'm so sorry. I only hope you get out anyway, but I can't pretend that I'm sad at what's going to happen to London. She blinked and saw Nomad once more, silhouetted against the nuclear blast that would sweep away all that had gone wrong, and every twisted thing that London had birthed.

When she opened her eyes again, someone else was there.

Lucy-Anne frowned, squinted, trying to make sense of who and what she saw. It was a shadow on the light where no shadow was cast, and when it moved it was like a blind spot in her vision. It flowed from the doorway of the sports shoe unit, and then the ape-things were screeching as it moved amongst them. They darted away, one of them passing so close to her that it collided with the truck's hood, tripped over the bumper and sprawled on the ground, scrabbling for purchase before sprinting away on all fours. One took a huge leap up onto the building's roof and disappeared from view. The others ran across car parks and roads, vanishing between units. In moments they were gone, and Lucy-Anne was alone with whatever, or whomever, had saved her.

Someone new, she thought, but she instantly knew that was wrong. This was someone she already knew. She dropped the knife, barely noticing the sound as it struck the ground.

“Rook!” she whispered as the shadow formed before her. A shape where no shape should be, his features manifested from the light, coalescing into the form he used to take. Almost solid, but not quite. Nearly there, but still absent in some fundamental way.

And not Rook.

“My sweet sister,” Andrew said.





Hurrying through the streets towards Trafalgar Square once more, Jack felt the weight of responsibility press down on him. He'd seen the way Jenna had been glancing at him, and he knew what she would have to ask again soon: Why can't you warn everyone? And he was trying. He truly was. Now that he knew the mystery of that huge red star he was more at peace cruising his internal universe of potential. But that didn't mean he was no longer afraid of it. Perhaps he even feared it more.

He moved from here to there, acknowledging powers he had already tapped, searching for those that might help him now. He discovered amazing things—the ability to implant false memories; cold breath that could freeze; a touch that could turn any solid into a liquid, and then a gas, without heat—but there was nothing to communicate en masse to everyone left in London. The more he looked, the more hopeless it seemed.

Jack wished everything was the way it had been before coming to London.

He thought of Camp Truth, their place in the woods where he, Lucy-Anne, Sparky, Jenna, and sometimes his sister Emily used to gather, collecting scraps of information about London left to them by similarly minded individuals. They'd sit there for long hours, talk, make plans, and then go home to the respective houses to dream away another night. Sparky would work on the old Ford Capri that reminded him so much of his brother, his parents ghosts of what they had once been. Jenna would try to talk to her father, but he was cold now, changed by whatever had been done to him. Lucy-Anne went from home to home, never settling because dreams of her parents and brother would not let her. And Jack would return home to look after his sister Emily. There was help for orphaned families, but there could not be homes for all of them. Doomsday had made too many. So Jack and Emily lived in the home they had shared with their parents, and it was only since leaving that Jack realised that it had really been Emily looking after him.

He could wish for those simpler times, but he did not really want them. Not now he had found his mother and she had escaped London.

And not with what he had now. A curse, perhaps. But some of the things he could do…

“I can't,” he said, answering no one in particular. But they all seemed to know what he meant. “I'm looking. But there are limits. It's still confusing.”