Contagion (Toxic City) (10 page)

Amazing, but none of this was of use to him.

The great red star of contagion throbbed and glowed right across his universe, pregnant with possibility.

He searched for anything that might help, skimming from one star to the next, understanding the amazing gifts they might grant him but knowing that none of them would be of use. In his desperation he moved faster, and soon his mind was aflood with new talents he had yet to use. Some of them he did not truly understand, because they were more obtuse. Beyond the normal bounds of human behaviour.
Maybe I could talk with the monsters
, he thought, but even that would not be of use. Not for what he needed.

Talk could not consume nuclear fire. A mind sensitive to thoughts or heat, movement or deviousness, could not cast aside the sun-hot flash that would soon bloom across London. Angry and scared, Jack opened his eyes and burst from his inner world. He found that he'd been panting hard and sweating, and Lucy-Anne was kneeling beside him looking concerned. He took the bottle of water she offered and drank deep, seeing stars.

“It's hopeless, isn't it?” she asked.

Jack did not answer. He looked at Fleeter, waiting to catch her eye. When she looked at him at last, he spoke.

“You and me,” he said. “We're the only hope.”

Fleeter shook her head. “I don't think so.”

“Yes!” he said. “We flip, go to the bomb. Move it somehow. Carry
it, drag it, whatever. Get it on a boat, sail out into the North Sea. We've got time. Eight hours here is eight days for us, or more.”

She shook her head slowly, mouthing,
No
.

“Fleeter…” he said, and he wondered what her real name might be.

“You've never been flipped for more than a few seconds real-time,” she said. “I have. I know what it feels like, what it does. It feels like
forever
. After the first few minutes you find it hard to function. Your body shuts down. A distance grows, and it's harder and harder to move or get back. It's a transitory thing, Jack. Like jumping around while everyone blinks. It's a trick, and I don't think we can trick time, or nature, or whatever it is that much.”

“Don't think, or don't know?”

“Damn it, Jack, I know you're desperate, but don't blame me that it won't work!” Fleeter seemed serious, her usual smile absent. “Besides, you know what happens when we move things when we're flipped. Everything's speeded up in this world. We move the bomb, nudge it, drop the bloody thing, and who knows what'll happen?”

“So it's a long shot,” Jack said.

“The longest.”

“It probably won't work.”

“No. It won't work.”

Jack nodded and took another drink of water. “If you won't help me, I'll do it myself.” He climbed to his feet and ran his fingers through his sweat-damped hair.

“Jack, no,” Lucy-Anne said. “I'll not lose you as well.”

“Then dream me safe,” he said, smiling. He hugged Lucy-Anne, and as she hugged him back, she stiffened.

“What?” Jack asked.

“Andrew,” she said. “He's here.”

“Jack!” Jenna called from the restaurant outside. “Everyone! Someone's here.”

Lucy-Anne pulled away and rushed through the swing doors, and Rhali stirred at the raised voices.

“What's happening?” she asked.

“I think a ghost's come to visit,” Jack said. Fleeter went first, then he helped Rhali to her feet and supported her through into the restaurant.

Just inside the front doorway stood someone who was barely there.

“Lucy-Anne,” the ghost breathed, his voice barely a whisper. “I can stop the bomb. But I need your friends’ help.”

“How did you find me again?” Lucy-Anne asked.

“How could I not?” The remnant of Andrew stood close to the restaurant window as if avoiding shadows. Sunlight barely touched him. She could see that he was trying to be his old self for her—the cheeky smile, the way he pretended to lean against the wall—but everything was subsumed beneath his ethereal sadness.

“What will happen to you?”

“I've already gone,” Andrew said. “You have to accept that, and understand it. I'm only here as an echo.”

“But you
are
real. If you weren't, how could you be helping us? How could you have helped this man you've hidden away?”

Andrew shrugged, and for a moment he really was his old self, so much so that Lucy-Anne laughed. “Weird times,” he said.

“Yeah. Tell me about it.”

The others were bustling. Andrew's appearance was a shock, but now they were filled with a new sense of urgency and purpose. Jack's frustration at not being able to help had been palpable, and his insistence that he would do alone what Fleeter said was impossible together had been a sign of his desperation. Now, there was another way.

Lucy-Anne only hoped the man was still where Andrew had left him.

“Come with us?” Lucy-Anne asked.

“I'll be watching you,” he said.

“My guardian angel.”

“I wish.” Andrew lifted a weightless hand and moved it close to her face, but not close enough to touch. She guessed he did that for her; to not feel his presence might be too much. But she could see from his eyes that he also did it for himself.

Andrew could no longer feel, and much about his sister must remain a memory.

“I'm so sorry,” she said. The tears came, quiet but forceful. Andrew watched, helpless, able only to soothe her with hushed words. He whispered of their parents and how proud they would be of Lucy-Anne for carrying on, and being strong. He sang a song they'd made up when they were both young, nonsense lyrics about a frog and a toad walking a long road. It made Lucy-Anne laugh, and cry some more. She felt far too young to suffer from painful nostalgia, but Doomsday had made everyone grow old. That was one of its unspoken effects—it had made everyone involved, and the country as a whole, age.

“Ready,” Sparky said. He stood behind Lucy-Anne and placed his hand on her shoulder, and she closed her eyes and pretended the contact was from Andrew. When she turned around and opened her eyes, Sparky was staring wide-eyed at Andrew, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. “Whoa,” he said.

“Yeah,” Lucy-Anne said. “And yes. Ready. All of us together.”

Sparky leaned in and gave her a wet kiss on the cheek, and as she pushed him away she was surprised at the sound of her own laughter.

They were preparing to leave the restaurant, possessed of a newfound urgency. Even Rhali seemed more lively and alert, and Jack had to shove his guilt over her to the back of his mind. He should be supporting her, listening to her story and helping her overcome
whatever had happened to her in the Choppers’ custody. Instead, he was rushing her back across London.

But individual needs were meaningless in the face of the catastrophe hanging over them. Millions had already died in London, and for Jack that made any more needless deaths all the more painful.

Lucy-Anne stood close to the front of the restaurant where the ghost of her brother cast no shadow. Sparky and Jenna gathered whatever drinks they could find, and knives for weapons.

Fleeter paced. Losing her constant smile suited her, because Jack no longer felt mocked. But he could still not trust her. That could only come with time they didn't have.

And then Emily crossed Jack's mind, so vibrant and there that for a moment he looked around for her. Then he smiled and closed his eyes, and knew that he could reach out to her so easily. Perhaps that would help. Knowing where she and his mother were, sensing their safety…maybe all that would help him through what was to come.

He grasped the talent and a dizzying surge made him sway. He heard and sensed hurried movement and held up one hand.

“Okay, I'm okay,” he said. “Give a minute. I just need a minute.”

Emily became his centre, and he allowed himself to drift towards her. He saw beyond London. There was no longer a sense of movement, but his perception shifted over the shattered city, past the devastated Exclusion Zone, and across the heads of the military still encircling what was left. Fields and roads passed beneath him, and small, deserted communities that had been abandoned after Doomsday. Scale changed as he dipped down, skimming over the landscape, then rooftops, and then settling at last in the playground of an old country primary school.

Emily was there, along with his mother. His sister grinned and squealed his name, jumping up and rushing around the playground
with her arms held up, trying to grab him. His mother smiled and looked up at the sky.
She believes, too
, Jack thought, but of course she did. Doomsday had made her something special—a healer—and she knew that he'd been touched by Nomad.

Jack, I did it!
Emily said.
I spread the word, and the photos, and everything is changing
.

It is
, his mother said.
London's story will change again very soon
.

At first Jack thought they were talking about the bomb. But there was no way they could know, and as his consciousness dipped closer to his mother, he saw her confident smile.

They're coming!
Emily said.
Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. I did it just like you said, and—

—a jolt as Jack saw what she'd done, relayed either from her own memory, or perhaps painted by whatever talent had taken hold of him.

Emily with the camera she'd retrieved on her way back out of London, through the tunnels, Fleeter guiding her and her mother, a brief flash of violence as Fleeter—

Emily and his mother, alone now, hurrying across countryside with the weight of London behind them. Lights speckle the landscape; farms, hamlets, places where normal people are living almost-normal lives so close to the toxic city. His family are glad to be out, but sad that Jack is not with them. Go to Cornwall, he'd told them, but he can see from the set of Emily's face that—

She has no intention of doing what he'd told her. Instead, they break into the school under cover of darkness, do their best to seal off a small office by covering the window with several layers of curtains, and fire up the computer. It's a decent laptop with a good Internet connection. Emily connects the camera and downloads the pictures she's taken, and the film clips, and then—

Their mother finds some food and drink, and sits back while Emily works. The love she exudes for her daughter is overwhelming. As is her sadness at the two years of her daughter's life she missed. Jack sees his mother's tears even though Emily does not, and that makes him wonder—

I'm ready
, Emily says, sitting back and stretching her stiff limbs.
Don't hesitate
, their mother says.
I wasn't. I was just enjoying the moment
.
I wish Jack could be here to see this
. She presses return and—

She has learned so much. Jack never knew she'd been watching him so closely, and Jenna when she worked on their computer in their buried camp in the woods—Camp Truth they'd called it, and now everything Emily had learnt there would be put to the test, the real truth its burden. Emails are sent in small blocks to avoid spam filters, attachments encrypted, any text bland and inconspicuous. Twenty, sixty, a hundred, worming their way through wires and across the ether, and while within the first second a large percentage are intercepted, examined, catalogued, flagged for inspection, and locked away in secure servers across the southeast, a few get through and find their intended recipients. Then the true dispersal begins. Sleeping computers wake, dormant servers fire up, and automated email accounts start forwarding emails to millions of addresses across the country. Most are caught and deleted by provider spam programmes, many more are attacked by security code written to look for precisely these messages—images scanned, tones and colours and content analysed by algorithms so complex that they require terabytes of power. From every million emails sent, perhaps a hundred land in inboxes, and of these maybe thirty are opened. From there, it is out of the virtual hands of the web and into the consciousness of human beings.

While emails fly and die, further messages are sent to the computer in Camp Truth. They'd christened it Marty so they could talk
about it in company, and Jenna had treated it like another friend. Alone, it beeps and buzzes as its fan whirrs up, and the screen comes to life to illuminate the place where so many of their hopes had been kept alive. Jack senses the scene, and whilst exciting, it is also sad. The people who had been there mere days ago have all changed now, and discovering the fates of their various family members means they will never be the same again.

Jenna's programmes, worked on so diligently for months, start working. Images are dispersed to scores of websites, and to hundreds of people hiding online under a web of aliases and false provider information. Photographs and films taken within London soon pop up all across the Internet. Reaction is swift—the authorities’ preparedness for such an eventuality shocks Jack, even though he has seen evidence of it so many times before—and websites crash like a series of virtual dominoes. But the spread of information is now speedier than any attempt to suppress it. And while ten websites crash, one will always survive to pass on information.

A film of the Exclusion Zone, with Jack and Lucy-Anne staring around in shock…

Jack's mother in the Underground station, and behind her the beds taken with dead and dying…

Choppers cruising the streets in their blue vehicles…

Nomad, mysterious, ethereal, with the sad, empty city behind her…

More images that betray the truth that has been kept from the world. Film clips that show the incredible things that have happened within London, and display that it is not a dead, toxic place as the world has been told.

Jack saw the truth spreading across Britain like blood finding its way through an organism's arteries and veins.

And as he finally drew back towards his universe of potential, he used Rhali's gift to sense the mass of people moving quickly towards London. Roads were heavy with vehicles. Their gravity was huge. And they were all coming to find people they had lost.

“Bloody hell, mate, I thought you were gone!” Sparky was kneeling next to him, Jenna and Lucy-Anne behind him.

“I was,” Jack said. “I reached out to Emily. Saw what she's done. And…” He actually laughed out loud, and it felt so good. “And she's a genius! She's contacted Marty. She and my mum didn't get the hell away like I told them to, but are holed up in a school maybe twenty miles outside the Exclusion Zone. She used everything on the camera.”

“And it was all stopped by the Choppers,” Jenna said. “Go on. Tell me that. And they'll have triangulated on Camp Truth, too.”

“No,” Jack said, smiling. “A lot got through. The word's out. We've done what we always wanted to do, and now there are people coming towards London. Loved ones, those who always half-believed like us, they're all coming here to see what's left.”

“And they're being stopped?” Sparky said.

“I'm not sure,” Jack replied.

“Bloody hope they are.”

“All the more reason to follow Andrew straight away,” Lucy-Anne said. “What if they break through?”

“What do you mean?” Jenna asked.

“The truth got out there are just the wrong time,” Lucy-Anne said. “It's what we've always wanted, but if so many people know, they won't be able to stop them.”

“The Choppers will stop them coming close, just like they always stopped anyone leaving,” Fleeter said bitterly.

“Really?” Lucy-Anne asked. “How? With force?”

“No,” Jack said. “No, they can't. Oh. Oh, shit. There'll be press, reporters, web journalists. They'll try to stop them, but they won't be able to use force. And if there are enough people, they'll just march on London. Everything's been blown wide open.”

“And because of that, it's not just London in danger now,” Rhali said.

“That bomb can't explode!” Jenna said.

“Right,” Lucy-Anne agreed. “And so we follow Andrew.”

Fleeter flipped out, her disappearance causing a
thud!
that cracked one of the restaurant's front windows.

For a moment Jack thought of following. But even seconds might count now, and he would no longer desert his friends.

“Come on,” he said. Without another word they left the restaurant and followed a ghost along London's haunted streets.

Walking behind Andrew was like living a memory.

Lucy-Anne and Andrew had never actually walked the streets of London together. She understood now that it was a proximity thing—people travelled from all over the world to visit London, but when you lived almost in its back garden, the need to visit receded. Her parents had been many times, and she and Andrew had visited separately, both with their respective schools and their parents. But they had never enjoyed these sights together.