London Eye: 1 (Toxic City)(67)

“It became like another world,” she said. “I convinced myself that London was a different place entirely, a different reality, not just the ruin of a city so close to home. I missed you both terribly, but thinking that way made it somehow easier.”

“It's not so wrong,” Jack said. “We've only been here for two days, but it is somewhere else.”

Their mother told them about the hospital, and how difficult it was gathering medicines, bedding, towels, and food without being caught by the Choppers, the problems of sanitation, wild animals, rats…

Emily asked why they needed medicines when there were healers. Their mother replied that most healers’ powers were very specific, and that illnesses and injuries in the Toxic City were much more diverse.

They were talking around so many important subjects, and the more they talked, the more Jack began to fear they would never discuss what was important.

“Rosemary says you're a healer like her,” he said. And here it was. The subject of their mother's change, that in turn would lead on to what had happened to their father.

“Not like her,” she said. “Not exactly. None of them…none of us…are exactly alike.”

“What was it like, Mum? When it happened?”

She shook her head slowly, her face grim. She looked between Jack and Emily and into the past, seeing scenes which Jack guessed she had tried her best to bury. But her daughter had asked, and the good mother would answer.

“It was like living a nightmare. First the rumours of explosions and a terrorist attack, and then…Your father and I were just coming out of the Natural History Museum. There wasn't panic, but police cars were tearing along the roads in every direction, sirens everywhere, and people…” She shook her head, smiling. “People were standing with their phone cameras, ready to catch something amazing. A few were watching the news on their phones, and as we stood on the pavement we could almost see the ripples of panic spreading out from these people. That was the first time we heard talk of a biological attack, and your father and I started to worry.

“The first people I saw die were coming out of a restaurant on a street corner. Maybe the breeze blew whatever was in the air along the street, and it hit them just as they emerged. They fell, hard and quick. I knew they hadn't just fainted. You could almost see the life going from them.”

“They died that quickly?”

“Everyone did. The breeze carried the change through the streets, and one breath was enough. They fell in waves, and the sound was…horrible. Heads striking pavements. Mothers dropping their dead babies, falling dead themselves. Cars crashed. There were explosions, fires. There was screaming.”

“But you and Dad?”

“We ran. We thought we were running away from it, but then they started dying all around us. And then we fell.” She was crying now, but these tears were far different from those she had already shed. They glimmered on a sad face, not a happy one, and they did not seem quite so bright. “We lay together on the pavement, side by side, looking into each other's faces. I saw his eyes go red as the veins in them gave out, and I felt a stab of pain in my own head, and I thought, That's it. The last thing I thought about was…was you. I think I spoke to you both, as I lay there. I closed my eyes, waiting…And when I opened them again it was night, and your father was gone.”

Jack had a million more questions, but he could see that his mother was finding this difficult.

“I never saw him again.” She shook her head, smiled at Jack, and hugged her daughter for the hundredth time.

“And when you woke up, you were changed?” he asked. Meeting Rosemary and the others, seeing what they could do, had been incredible. But sitting here now and realising that his mother was one of them shocked him to the core.

“Not that I noticed right away. It took a while for whatever happened to us all to really come to the fore. That day I spent wandering the streets, trying to find help, trying to find somewhere not clogged with bodies. I called for Graham, kept calling. My phone didn't work, so I tried some of those I found dropped in the street. They were all dead, too. The electricity was already off. It's never been back on since. Later that day, the sounds of shooting began. I hid in a hotel, and I was there for several days. There was bombing, most of it far away, some quite near. I saw planes flying high overhead. I don't know what they were targeting, and for a while I was afraid they were going to just bomb the whole city.