London Eye: 1 (Toxic City)(28)

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?”