She grunted and flopped to the carpeted floor, dropping her gun and rolling immediately onto her back.
The tall soldier seemed to be fighting with his weapon, yanking it this way and that as if someone invisibly was holding the barrel. He pointed it at the woman writhing on the floor before him, shaking his head and moaning, "No, no..."
A shape appeared behind him at the corridor junction. Puppeteer.
"No!" the soldier shouted, and he shot his friend again.
Jack turned away, but he still saw her head whip back, and blood splash across the floor and up the corridor walls.
"Come on," Rosemary said. She nodded briefly to Puppeteer, then pushed the fire exit door open.
Jack hustled Emily through first, following her and turning around. As Rosemary let go of the door and its closer pulled it shut, he saw Puppeteer approaching the remaining Chopper, right hand held out and fingers playing the air.
The soldier screamed as his feet left the floor and his head was crushed, slowly, against the elaborately corniced ceiling.
"Jack," Emily said, "I should have got that on film."
"Kids," Rosemary said. "So resilient."
Jack barked one loud, harsh laugh, and then followed Rosemary down the stairs.
"Safety catch," he said.
Rosemary shook her head. "Dear, I honestly don"t know if I could ever shoot another human being."
"Even if they"re trying to shoot you?" Emily asked.
They reached the ground floor and continued down to the bas.e.m.e.nt level. There were no windows here, no viewing panels in the doors, and the stairwell was dark and functional. Jack took a small torch from his rucksack and lit their way.
"Something has to set us apart from them," the woman said. And though Jack was still angry with her, his respect for her doubled.
The hotel"s bas.e.m.e.nt corridor was illuminated by a few narrow, dirty windows at high level. They looked out past iron railings at the street before the hotel. Something was burning out there, and Jack thought it was one of the Choppers" trucks.
"What the h.e.l.l are those two Superiors doing?" he asked. "How can they take on an army?"
"I doubt there were just two," Rosemary said. "And they have such powers, Jack! I know of a fire starter, a woman who can confuse senses so that she"s almost invisible, and someone who can change the colour of things."
The sounds of fighting had ceased for now, but the air was heavy inside the hotel, as though people with death on their minds still stalked its corridors and searched its empty rooms.
"I hope Sparky and Jenna are okay," Emily said, voicing a fear which Jack had been harbouring since seeing them exit the stairwell. Jenna had been wounded, and he hoped that Sparky would be sensible; no heroics, and no revenge for his dead brother. Not yet.
"They"ll be fine," he said.
"And Lucy-Anne," Emily added, but Jack could think of no easy way to respond to that.
"We should leave," Rosemary said. She was gasping for breath, but looked like she would never give up. "If your friends made it down this far, they"ll be waiting for us behind the hotel."
The bas.e.m.e.nt was warren of store rooms, cupboards and corridors ending at closed doors. The air was grimy and grey. Emily pulled a penlight from her rucksack and it complimented Jack"s torch, giving them enough light to find their way to a set of doors to the outside.
"Wait," Jack whispered. He held out his hands for the gun.
"Jack..." Emily said.
"Dear..."
"I"d rather shoot them and be d.a.m.ned, than be dead and morally superior," he said.
Rosemary handed him the weapon. He"d never fired a gun, but he knew the basics. He checked that the safety was off and held it in both hands, finger resting across the trigger and guard. It made him feel safer. It made him think he could do something to protect Emily, if he really had to.
He remembered Gordon"s head flipping back as the bullets took his face apart.
He thought of the soldier he"d just seen shot, the blood and other stuff splashing from her shattered skull.
Slowly, he nudged the door. It was unlocked. It creaked open into the courtyard he"d seen from the hotel room. They could be hiding anywhere, he thought. Ready to take us to Miller, just me and Emily. The fact that the Chopper had said he wanted at least one of them alive did not make him feel the slightest bit safer.
He listened for Lucy-Anne; crying, shouting, screaming. She was not there.
They heard more shooting. It seemed to come from the front of the hotel, the shots echoing from abandoned buildings and giving them voice for the first time in years. There were shouts, yet more gunfire, and then a heavy whump as something exploded.
"Jack!" Sparky said. He appeared from behind one of the cars, and Jack almost did not recognise him. His denim jacket was darkened with blood, his hands red with it, and the look on his face was that of a child. I"m scared, it said. None of this is happening...none of this is real...take me home...
"Sparky! Where"s...?" But Sparky had already turned and looked down behind the car.
"Oh, s.h.i.t," Jack said. He ran across the courtyard, nursing the gun across his chest as he went.
"Jenna?" Emily called. Jack heard her following him, and he hoped that she had put her camera away, because some moments were meant to be private.
Jenna was on the ground behind the car. It was an old Mazda 6, Jack saw, with one of those fish badges on the back that signified the owner was a Christian. Wonder if it did them any good? he thought, because Jenna was a believer too, he knew. And there she was, dying in a pool of her own blood.
She"d been shot in the stomach. Her hands were pressed there now, as if trying to penetrate to remove the foreign object. She could not lie still; her legs were raised and tensed, her shoulders lifting and falling alternately, and even though her eyes were open, Jack was not sure she could see him. She was in an awful amount of pain, biting her lower lip until it bled to prevent herself from crying out.
"Jenna." He knelt beside her and leaned over, trying to catch her eye. She saw him, and he knew that she saw. But she was doing something far more difficult than trying to communicate. Every breath she had, every shred of strength, was spent trying to keep herself alive.
"What happened?" Jack asked Sparky when his friend knelt next to him.
"We"d made it down to the ground floor. Stupidly thought we should run across the foyer." Every word was a gasp. "Someone was waiting behind the desk. Started shooting. She...fell. I dragged her into a doorway, down some steps, then I heard more shooting from up above. Screams. Whoever shot at us didn"t follow us down. That"s it. Been trying to stop the bleeding, but..." He shook his head. "You seen Lucy-Anne?"
"No," Jack said. "Rosemary!"
"Is the bullet still in there?" She stood behind them. Emily was beside her, trying not to look at the blood but unable to look anywhere else.
"Don"t know," Sparky said.
"Why?" Jack asked.
"If it is, I can"t do anything. Can"t-"
"Don"t tell me you can"t!" Jack stood, cringing at his raised voice but unable to help himself. "After everything, don"t tell me that!"
"If it"s still in there and I heal the wound, it"ll do no good. I can"t take bullets out of people, Jack. But-"
"Can"t you make her better?" Emily asked.
"If the bullet"s gone through, then yes, dear, I can. If not, and I heal it inside, she"ll probably develop an infection and die."
"Sparky," Jack said. "Help me." He searched around on the ground, shifting old leaves aside and picking up a fallen branch from one of the neighbouring garden"s trees. He snapped a short section from it, eight inches long.
"What are you doing?" Sparky said.
"Seeing if the bullet came out the other side." He pressed the stick to Jenna"s lips, and her mouth opened, teeth biting into the wood. She knew what he was doing.
"Not here," Rosemary said. "It"s too dangerous!"
"Have your b.l.o.o.d.y gun back." Jack lobbed the weapon at her and she caught it, uttering a startled cry. She turned to look up at the tall face of the hotel behind them.
"On three," Jack said. "One...two...three." He pushed Jenna up by the arm, Sparky pulled one of her legs, and as she turned onto her side she screamed into the wood, biting down hard enough to crack it and send splinters and shreds of bark spitting out.
Jack looked. Her jacket and shirt were soaked with blood all the way around. He lifted them up, exposing her bare back, and used her shirt to wipe across her skin. The blood smeared and smudged, but he found no exit wound there, and no sign that anything had broken the skin.
He hated doing this to his friend. He could see Emily"s expression as she watched, and he hated what all this was doing to her, as well. It had gone so wrong so quickly that he could not imagine things ever being right again.
The wood snapped in Jenna"s mouth and she screamed, unable to hold it in any longer.
Sparky was in front of her. He looked down at her stomach, turned away, and vomited.
"Not here!" Rosemary said. "We have to take her away, I know someone who might help, but not here!"
Jack leaned across Jenna to see why Sparky had puked, and her wound was pouting, something that could only have been her intestine protruding through the rip in her flesh. He closed his eyes and swallowed his bile, looking up at Emily. Wide-eyed, blinking slowly, pale, he suddenly saw himself in her, courage and love mirrored.
"Help me," he said, and his nine-year-old sister came to him without question, helping him pull Jenna"s shirt tight across her stomach. Jack undid and unthreaded his belt, then tied it around Jenna. He had no idea whether he was doing the right thing. Rosemary, the healer, was looking the other way, and he hated her right then.
"Who can help?" Jack asked. He wanted to shout, but he could hear voices coming from somewhere far away, or echoing from close by.
"We need to get away," Rosemary said. A helicopter buzzed overhead, streaking across the hotel. Another one was coming in from the distance, and Rosemary was actually pacing back and forth. "Now!" she said. "We have to leave now! They"ll be bringing reinforcements, and we"ll never get away in one piece if that happens."
"One piece?" Sparky said, spittle hanging from his chin.
Rosemary looked down at Jenna. "She can still be helped," she said. "Trust me. If that wasn"t the case, I"d be telling you to leave her where she is."
Between them, Jack and Sparky lifted the wounded girl. Mercifully she pa.s.sed out, screaming herself into unconsciousness as Rosemary led the way along a narrow alley stinking of rot and filth, across a narrow street, and through a park where people had once sat to have lunch but which now was home to a band of noisy, angry monkeys.
The deeper they went into the Toxic City, the more Jack doubted they would ever find their way out again.
...although it"s clear that this is a disaster the likes of which has never been seen before. London is effectively isolated, with no traffic entering or leaving. Reports of the death toll vary wildly, from a few hundred admitted by the British government, to several hundred thousand suggested by independent sources. A promised statement by the British prime minister has yet to materialize, and the questions have to be asked: What of the terrorists? Is the prime minister even still alive? And if he is, why has he not yet spoken to his people? In this time of global communication, it seems incredible that so little is being shared.
-CNN: Tragedy in London, 3:35 a.m. EST, July 29, 2019 L ucy-Anne had forgotten her own name. But she knew the name of her brother.
"Andrew," she muttered as he ran north. The word worked like a talisman, parting the air before her and thickening it behind, drawing her ever-forward towards its owner. "Andrew," she said, and London heard the name. Thousands of fat pigeons watched her go by, and a parade of cats paused in the middle of a wide, vehicle-strewn road to sit and observe this strange sight.
The sounds behind her had ceased. Everything behind her had ended, because that was a place far in the past. Even her nightmare of dead parents...a memory, fading like a photograph left out in the sun.
Forward was the only place that existed now.
Your brother is alive north of here, she heard. She could not remember the voice or who owned it, but the words were her fuel. She would need food and water soon-her throat was parched, her sight blurry-but while there was still daylight in the sky, she could not waste any time.
She pa.s.sed a place where a battle had taken place. Several trucks had been parked in a rough square, and their bodywork was pocked with hundreds of bullet holes. A couple of the trucks had burned, and their pale grey skeletons had rusted. Birds sat on the twisted metal, and something large moved ponderously in the cab of one of the unburned vehicles. She had no reason to stop and see what it was, because it was not her brother.
"Andrew," she gasped, and the word drew her on.
With every step, she lost more of herself. And every step made her past seem like a darker, older place.
They followed Rosemary, carrying the wounded girl between them. Jenna was in and out of consciousness, groaning, moaning from the pain. Jack wanted to check on her wound, but he feared that if they stopped they would never get going again. The strength had been knocked from them. Sparky looked beaten and pale, tired and shocked. Jack thought he seemed smaller than before, as though confirmation of his loss and what they had been through had lessened him somehow.
"Sparky," he kept saying, just to hear his friend"s name and hoping to see the familiar confident, cheeky smile in response. But Sparky"s reply was always slow, and weaker by the minute.
Emily walked beside Rosemary. She seemed to be handling things better than any of them.
They dodged from street to alley, square to park, and with every step they took the sounds of conflict receded. At one point they pa.s.sed an area that seemed to have been flattened by bombing, and Jack asked Rosemary whether what had just happened was a regular occurrence.
"London suffers," is all she offered in response. "We"re almost there." She went ahead, carrying the gun awkwardly and approaching the front door of an innocuous house in an unremarkable street. She lifted a plant pot containing the skeletal remains of a rose bush, picked up a key and opened the door.
"Is this where he lives?" Jack asked.
"I need to go and fetch him, and I"ll be faster on my own." She glanced at Jenna. "And you two can"t carry her much further. She"s losing a lot of blood."
They went inside. The living room had a wide window looking out onto the wild back garden, and they laid Jenna on the sofa. She stirred, groaned, and then relaxed again. Her face was pale and sweat soaked her hair into thick, dark strands.
"Pain killers in the kitchen cupboard," Rosemary said. "Don"t unlock the front door to anyone but me. If there"s a knock, or any sign of the Choppers, get out the back door and run as fast as you can. Key"s in the lock. There"s a gate at the bottom of the garden, and-"
"We can"t run anywhere with her," Sparky said.
"No, you can"t." Rosemary looked grim, and Sparky stepped forward, about to vent his fury. Jack was pleased to see the old Sparky back again.
"We"re not going anywhere," Jack said. "Just find this person you say can help."
"His name"s Ruben," Rosemary said. "And I"ll be back with him soon." She left the room and strode for the front door, gun slung over one shoulder like a novelty handbag. Jack followed her and grabbed her arm.
"The Superiors," he said. "My mother. My father. You need to tell me now."
"There"s no time."