Contagion (Toxic City, #3)(3)
Awake now, welcoming the pain from her bruised scalp and scratched hand, Lucy-Anne looked north towards the shadowy landscape of Hampstead Heath.
I'm told that there is a bomb, Nomad had told her and Rook. A nuclear bomb. She'd looked directly at Lucy-Anne as she spoke, because both of them had known that anyway. They had seen it in their dreams. The people of the north—the ones you see as monsters—they know also. They have sensed it. And they're not as monstrous as they seem. Lucy-Anne had been unable to talk, taken as she was with the memory of those terrible dreams—conflagration, destruction, the cloud that London would become. But Rook had asked her more. I don't know where or when, had been Nomad's response, and Rook had grown angry, even though he feared her. With one more glance at Lucy-Anne, the mysterious woman had left.
“All of this, gone,” Lucy-Anne whispered. She expected no reply from the city, but in the distance a long, lonely cry rose up, part animal, part human. She had no wish to know what might make such a sound.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, shrugging off dreams and memories and those crippling visions that seemed to pin her to unreality. This was real. She was here, alone, with a message to tell, and with friends to find again. She'd abandoned Jack, Jenna and Sparky, and Jack's sweet sister Emily, when she had first discovered the truth about her dead parents. Plenty had changed since then—in her, and around her—but she found some shred of comfort in the realisation that some things never change.
Friendship, for instance.
She had been running south for her friends when she'd tripped and banged her head. Now, she took a few moments to root through the house she had sheltered in, searching for useful things. She found a leather jacket that had seen better days, two tins of food in the kitchen that might still be edible, and a carving knife that she slipped into her belt.
Out in the street she turned south and started to jog, and doing something positive made her feel safer.
Behind her, a shape parted from shadows and followed.
In the cool night, Nomad sat in the shattered thirteenth floor window of an office block, looking out across a city that should never be dark. Starlight silvered the buildings and roads, the tree canopies of parks, and the uneven contours of car parks filled with vehicles that would never move again. Night neutralised colour, and hers was a grey London tonight. Out there she could still sense her boy Jack, struggling with the changes she had planted within him whilst attempting to save his family. She could sense Lucy-Anne, that girl who had been special even before Doomsday. And she wanted to protect them both.
That was why she was here. High, quiet, apart from the violence that sometimes ruled the streets down below, she breathed in the scents of her city. The pain still nestled in her chest, and she knew what that meant. Many across London suffered the same sickness. But pain was fleeting and temporary. Even though she bled from her nose when she reached outward, and her head throbbed blindingly when she listened, she could not let it matter.
Beyond the pain she heard time itself.
It grumbled in the settling of a thousand old brick foundations, and many more newer beds of concrete. It whispered in the imperceptible flow of old glass, gravity urging it slowly, so slowly down. It sang in the straining growth of countless trees, shrubs, flowers and grasses, and murmured stiffly in other plants’ demise. Time's flow swept the city forward and drove the clogged Thames, corroding, worrying at bridge supports and the concrete banks built up to stop the flooding that would inevitably occur one day. Every breath was a moment further away from time's beginning, and every footfall was one step closer to the end. She flowed with it for a while, enjoying being in tune with not only nature itself, but the inscrutable time that moved it ever-onward. The pains became dulled with time's promise that pain would always end. Then she focussed, listening and sensing for those ways in which humanity made itself aware.
In the distance, the tick-tick of a wrist watch on someone still living. Further afield, the heavier clicks of a wall clock passing each second. She heard and disregarded countless sounds, senses, feelings, passing them by in her search for the one that mattered. When she found it, its nature and purpose were obvious.
It counted backwards.
To the south, in a locked place so well shielded from outside that the air inside must smell of almost two years ago, the city's destruction sat in an object barely the size of a suitcase.
Seventeen hours, thirteen minutes, twenty-eight seconds…
The pains kicked in again, possessing her bones and blood and seeming to melt away her whole body as if caught in a terrible blast. She shivered, and groaned.
“Oh, no,” Nomad muttered. More words stolen by the breeze. They added to the utterances of desperation and hopelessness made since Doomsday and still echoing from old brick and stone, and Nomad rested onto her back as she gratefully withdrew into herself again.
Seventeen hours…
Jack could not sleep. Dawn smeared London's jagged horizon, its palette slowly illuminating the crossroads in front of the furniture store. He lay on a double bed deep in the shop, hands behind his head, watching through the dusty shop front as the West Kensington street scene was revealed. Several cars had burned, and sometime since Doomsday they had been shoved onto a pavement across the road, leaving a swathe of melted, blackened tarmac.
Every time he blinked, he wondered at the names of the three men or women he had just killed.