Contagion

^{CHAPTER FIVE} TWELVE

They talked for half an hour, eating at the same time. Sparky put away three burgers.

While others talked, Jack cruised his mindscape, probing here and there, tasting potentials unknown and powers already dealt, but he could find nothing that might help him locate Miller. If he’d had a drop of the man’s blood, or a shred of hair, or an item that had been of sentimental value to Miller, then maybe he could have used one of his fledgling talents to zero in on the man. But he had nothing but a memory of his brutality, evident in the sad form of Rhali. She sat with Jack and shared his warmth, and Jack felt something strong growing between them. Theirs had been a relationship of contact, not words. He found that fundamentally beautiful.

Without any means to find Miller, they could only go to look for him. Breezer would come, and he would bring Guy Morris, the man who could control a person’s actions with a whisper. Order every Chopper to drop their weapons, he would mutter in Miller’s ear. And he would.

“Camp H,” Fleeter told them after a while. She sounded confident. “Best place to look if you’ve no better leads.” It was all she contributed to the conversation. Jack went to ask her how she knew, but there was no need. She was Superior, and still enjoyed acting it.

They gave themselves until six p.m. to find Miller and attempt to ensure a safe exit from London. After that, with six hours left until detonation, they would have to rush the Exclusion Zone one way or another. Jack tried to shut out images of thousands of people crossing those bombed, flattened areas and being mown down by machine-gun fire.

He still found Fleeter fascinating. He had seen her killing in cold blood, and yet now she was here, and she seemed different. She looked exhausted, but there was something else about her as well. A brightness, as if she had discovered life again. She’d told Jack about how she’d guided his mother and Emily out of London, and how for a while she’d taken a walk out there, seeing normal people doing normal, everyday things, unaware of the dreadful events just twenty miles from where they lived. This, she’d said, was why she had returned to Breezer and his people. She wanted to help.

She claimed no allegiance with Reaper. But she was still a monster.

Jack would never forget the look in her eyes when she killed, and he could never fully trust her.

From the moment they stepped out into the fresh air once again, Jack knew that something had changed.

“Least we didn’t have to jump from the roof this time,” Sparky said.

“Pity,” Jenna said. “I enjoyed that so much.”

“You did, really. Secretly. Deep inside, you want me to carry you upstairs and throw you off.”

“You. Carry me up forty flights of stairs. I’d like to see you try.”

Sparky grinned and glanced at Jack. “He could.”

“I’m not Superman,” Jack said. But no one replied to that, and he wondered what everyone really thought of him. He still wasn’t sure what he thought of himself. He feared the potential he carried inside, and worried that they were untried, untested, and liable to backfire if he used them all too rashly. But perhaps it was merely a question of confidence. Maybe he needed to grow used to bearing such power.

Time would tell. And as he breathed in the strange London air and sensed the changes occurring, he knew that he would be testing more powers very soon.

“Something’s different,” he said.

“Spidey senses tingling,” Sparky said.

“What is it, Jack?” Rhali asked. She touched his arm, held his hand. She’d not eaten much—said she was not used to such food, and that in captivity they had sometimes forgotten to feed her for days. But she already seemed stronger.

“Can’t you feel it?” he asked them all. Sparky and Jenna walked together, Rhali was with him. Fleeter strolled slightly ahead of them, automatically taking the lead. Breezer and Guy Morris accompanied them, quiet and tense. They never liked travelling in the open like this.

“No,” Breezer said as if stating the obvious.

Jack was not aware that he was using any particular power. Between blinks he searched inside, but he’d touched no star, and there was no taste of Nomad on his tongue. Perhaps using what she had given him was becoming second nature. But that made him wonder just what he was turning into.

“Rhali,” he said. “You sensed it.”

“I still sense movement to the north,” she said. “And moving closer.”

“But whatever’s coming towards us is different,” he said. “Not…human.”

“Oh, dandy,” Jenna said.

Jack looked around at the high buildings, absorbed the silence. “The whole city’s holding its breath.”

“We need to move,” Breezer said, eyes wide. “And quickly.”

“What is it?” Jack asked.

“The north. That’s where the monsters went after Doomsday. Not many people go up there, and some who do don’t come back.”

“Monsters?” Jenna asked.

“Evolve caused physical changes in some people,” Breezer said. He nodded at Fleeter. “You know.”

“I only know the stories,” she said. “Wolf men. Bird people. Flesh eaters.”

“Oh, super,” Sparky said.

“And now they’re moving into the city,” Rhali said.

“Oh, even more super.”

Rhali breathed deeply, clasping Jack’s hand tighter for support. “There’s a small group a mile away,” she said. “Moving…too quickly.”

“Right,” Jack said. “The river. A boat. Let’s go. Fleeter?”

Did she looked a little afraid? He wasn’t sure. Such a look might have been another version of her smug smile, or a trick of the light. But just before she flipped out with a smack! and went to check their route, she locked eyes with Jack, and he saw something dark staring back.

They headed for the river. Jack wondered why no one had mentioned the north before, and the people and things who lived there. But he supposed there had been no need. London was a vastly changed place, and it could be that the north had become as remote as the outside world. When he had a chance, he would ask Fleeter about it.

They moved as silently and quickly as possible. He saw things that days ago would have traumatised him for life, but which now were merely another part of the landscape. Two withered, dried shapes hung side by side from nooses suspended from second storey windows. A pram sat in the middle of the road, a mess of blankets and clothing inside, mother dead on the road with her skeletal fingers curled around one wheel. A bus had driven into a DVD store, and the silhouettes of its dead passengers were just visible through the dusty windows.

“No one buried them all,” Rhali said. Jack was surprised, and then he remembered that the Choppers had caught her soon after Doomsday. She’d been shut away since then.

“There was no one left to do it,” he said. “London is their mausoleum.”

A clap! and Fleeter reappeared beside the bus. She projected her usual aloof smile, but swayed where she stood, reaching out to the bus for balance. She closed her eyes for a moment, breathing deeply.

“We’re clear from here to the river,” she said. “No Choppers. But what’s coming from that way isn’t safe.” She nodded back the way they’d come.

Both Sparky and Jenna looked at Jack expectantly. He in turn looked at Breezer and raised his eyebrows.

“You know what Guy can do,” Breezer said. Jack nodded. He’d seen the small, thin man in Camp H telling the Choppers to drop their weapons. “Whether his powers of suggestion will work on whatever’s coming down from the north…” He shrugged. Beside him Guy remained silent, offering nothing.

“Guess it’s all on you, then,” Jenna said to Jack.

“I don’t want to kill anyone else,” he said.

“You might not have—” Fleeter began, but Jack cut her off.

“I’m not like you! Come on!”

They moved less cautiously than they would have normally, trusting Fleeter’s observations, and soon they were closing on the river. Breezer said he and the Irregulars kept two boats moored there, engines services and fuel tanks full, just in case they were ever needed. But they hadn’t started the motors in over a year. Too noisy, too risky.

Close to the river was an open square, landscaped and with several large stone sculptures on marble plinths. The sort of place office workers might have come to for lunch, and tourists might have chosen to have their pictures taken with the river and London skyline in the background. An ice cream van sat in one corner on flattened tyres, a line of bodies sprawled on the ground before its open window. It illustrated again the speed with which disaster had befallen London. In the distance, on the other side of the river, Jack could just make out the upper third of the London Eye, its graceful arc marred by the damage from the helicopter crash that had started everything.

“They’re coming,” Rhali said, and moments later four shapes burst from a side street across the road from the square.

“What the hell are they?” Sparky said. No one answered. Everyone drew close together and squatted down, sheltering behind a sculpture but knowing that it would not protect them for long.

Jack probed inward and prepared himself, balancing two talents, ready to use either. His heart hammered and he felt sick. Even though these things no longer looked quite like people, the thought of killing them was horrible.

A woman wore flowing clothes, but they did nothing to camouflage her lengthened limbs, or her scaled skin. Her eyes shone with a purple membrane, and her teeth were long and crowded into her mouth. She hissed as she ran by, tongue tasting them on the air. A man followed, bounding on hands and feet. He was naked, body elongated. Long spines protruded from his back, and on either side grew rudimentary wings. Blood dripped down his side, and when he roared it sounded full of pain. He followed the woman, away from them and towards the river. But the other two arrivals slowed as they crossed the square. The two women hooted to each other as they both turned to stare at the huddled group.

“Don’t think much of yours, mate,” Sparky whispered, and Jack almost guffawed with nervous laughter. But he had to be in control. Everyone here was depending on him.

The women’s skin was so pale it was almost translucent, bodies incredibly thin, breasts reduced to nothing. There was something fluid about them, both in the way they moved and how they looked—as if their skins contained molten innards, rather than flesh and blood. They hooted again, and countless tiny tentacles extruded from their forearms and palms, waving as if caught in a breeze.

“Do you think—?” Jenna began, and then both women roared and came at her. Their inhuman voices cried hunger.

Jack stood and pointed at them, keeping his arms and shoulders relaxed, and as he exhaled both women were lifted from the ground. He held them there using the talent he’d first seen in Puppeteer, and he felt the potential thrumming through his arms—he could throw, squeeze, crush them. They thrashed and squirmed, and one grasped hold of the sculpture. Her tentacles flexed and curled around the concrete, pulling hard, but Jack only felt the slightest tension. His power was not muscular.

“What now?” Rhali asked.

“Ice cream van,” Jack said. “Doors.”

Sparky, Jenna and Breezer rushed to the van and tugged open the driver’s door. Jenna winced back at whatever was inside, but Sparky turned and gestured to Jack.

Jack started walking, still pointing, and the two strange women drifted through the air before him.

“Stand back,” he said, and he guided them in through the door.

Breezer slammed it shut.

“Stay in the van,” Guy said, and Jack felt an intimate, sickening sensation inside his head. If I was in the van, I’d stay inside, he thought. He knew at that moment that he could bear that talent as well, given time. Its star was open to him.

But as well as their bodies, these women’s minds were sufficiently altered from human to apparently make them immune to the man’s words. They kicked and banged at the door as Sparky shoved it closed. Thin tentacles squirmed through the lock and around the door’s edge, and Jack had only moments to reach out with his mind and snap the locks closed. He did the same for the other door, and also the wide hatch that led from the cabin back into the ice cream van’s rear area. He didn’t think it would hold the women for long. He caught a brief glimpse of one of their inhuman faces at the window, and he thought perhaps they wanted to feed.

It did not bear thinking about, and they all ran as one from that place of sculptures and danger, sprinting across the wide paved walkway and towards the Thames.

“Which way?” Jenna asked Breezer. He pointed left. There was an iron fence lining the river, but five hundred feet away Jack could see a break in the fence and a walkway leading across to several pontoons. Two of them sat unevenly in the water, the large boat moored to one resting on a slant on the river’s bed. But another pontoon floated upright, and he thought he could see the two boats Breezer had mentioned.

From behind them they heard glass smashing. The trapped things would be out in moments. Jack was not afraid of being caught by them, because he would not let that happen.

He was afraid of killing them.

“Jack!” someone shouted. He looked around, wondering who they’d left behind, but they were all there. As he caught Sparky’s eyes, his friend’s mouth fell open in shock.

“Jack!” the voice called again, and then he recognised it. Lucy-Anne.

She was along the path from them, running and waving frantically. There was someone with her…or was there?

“Lucy-Anne!” he shouted. He forgot the danger they were in, the people he had killed, the weight of danger crushing them from all angles. For that brief instant all was delight, and he wanted to greet his dear friend with a hug. He waved at her to come with them, and heard Jenna’s and Sparky’s delighted laughter.

And then Lucy-Anne shouted again. “Get down!”

Between them, several Choppers stood from behind a fallen wall and three heavy benches. Without warning, the shooting began.

Lucy-Anne shouted one more time, and then a Chopper turned and started shooting at her and she fell and rolled, pressing herself flat against a kerb, the gutter barely deep enough to protect her. Bullets impacted the sidewalk about her and plucked at her clothing, her hair, and kissed the back of one leg with icy pain that quickly turned lava-hot. Oh no oh no! she thought, again and again, because she had not dreamed the end of this. Whatever fate had in store for her and her friends today had yet to be played out.

“Andrew!” she yelled, but his wraith was no longer with her. “Jack!” she called instead.

More gunfire, shouting, and behind the impacts she heard running feet. She glanced up and around, terrified that at any moment a bullet would find her head. At least she wouldn’t know. She could not comprehend the instant change from alive to dead an impact on her brain would cause, but right then it did not frighten her. What scared her was not being here anymore to tell her friends about the bomb. They were all she had left, and with every atom of her body she did not want to let them down.

Someone screamed, androgynous in their agony.

“Drop your—” a voice shouted, and gunfire erupted from a different direction. More of them! she thought. She risked a glance above the shallow kerb.

A Chopper was running towards her, barely thirty feet away, rifle held across his chest. As he saw her he paused and shouldered his rifle, and then he was smashed forwards in a haze of blood, pavement beneath him fracturing, a roar accompanying his death. Blood spattered the ground close to Lucy-Anne and she rolled back, stood, not knowing which way to turn.

Beyond the dead Chopper were three others, all of them dead and leaking across the ground. And beyond them, Jack and his friends were dragging a shape across the pavement, huddled low and heading for the cover of a boat ride ticket kiosk. Lucy-Anne couldn’t see who had been hit. She started running.

More gunfire burst from a building to her right, flashing from two second floor windows. The kiosk blurred, and splinters and shards of wood flicked at the air. They wouldn’t last a second behind there. Barely aware of what she was doing—not knowing what she could do—Lucy-Anne changed direction and ran for the building. It was a grand old structure, perhaps an up-market office block, and the storeys were tall. So the two Choppers fell at least fifteen feet when they were thrown from the windows.

Lucy-Anne winced at the crunch of breaking bones, but the silence that followed was a blessing.

A shape appeared in one window—a stocky woman in a short skirt, holding onto the window frame and looking down at what she had done. There was another, taller shape behind her, but Lucy-Anne could not make it out. Not quite. But she had seen that silhouette before, and she thought perhaps it was Reaper.

One of the Choppers was still alive, crawling away from the building in a vain attempt to escape. Lucy-Anne ignored them. They were a person in pain, but so was she. And they might have just killed one of her friends.

She ran. Focussed on the kiosk, ignoring the dead Choppers she passed and their spreading blood and broken weapons, she started sobbing uncontrollably as she saw Jack stand and look her way. And he smiled and opened his arms as she drew close, pulling her into a warm, loving, living embrace that made her, for the first time since Rook, glad to be alive.

There was nothing Jack could do. Guy Morris had been killed by a bullet in the throat as he’d tried yelling at the Choppers to drop their weapons. Two inches to the left or right and perhaps Jack could have healed the wound and saved him. But his spine had been smashed and he’d quickly bled out.

He embraced Lucy-Anne, so pleased to see her, to feel her warmth. Sparky and Jenna came and hugged them both, and for a brief, beautiful moment Jack wasn’t sure who was crying and who was not. When Fleeter reappeared with a clap and they parted, he realised that some of the tears were his.

Not relinquishing contact with Lucy-Anne, he turned to Fleeter. She still smiled, but looked more exhausted than ever.

“So where is he?” Jack asked.

“Gone.”

“He’s watching over us.”

Fleeter shrugged. “He cares. About what you’re doing.”

“Yeah. Right.” Jack was both furious and relieved. He’d been gathering his own strength, about to unleash his own shout again, when his father had killed the Choppers. More blood spilled to stain the London streets, and Jack’s memory, forever. But at least this time it had not been at his hand.

“So where is he now?” Sparky asked.

Fleeter glanced at Sparky, then back at Jack and Lucy-Anne. “Looks like you found your girlfriend.”

Jack could have punched her. He saw the mischief in her eyes as she looked over Jack’s shoulder at Rhali standing behind him, and he couldn’t believe she was doing this now, with the smell of death rich in the air. It was as if murder enlivened her.

“We really need to go!” Breezer said. He trotted along the riverbank path, skirting around the dead Choppers. From back the way they’d come, Jack heard more smashing glass, and a high, loud hooting sound that made his balls tingle with fear.

They ran. Lucy-Anne and Jenna went together, talking, their laughter perhaps a little too high and mad. Jack grasped Rhali’s hand and squeezed, and when she squeezed back he felt a rush of gratitude. He hoped she felt the warmth developing between the two of them—if not, he would make sure he told her what he felt at the first opportune moment. But she also recognised the strength of friendship and history between him and Lucy-Anne. He hadn’t even scratched the surface of how incarceration had affected her, but it seemed her mind was still sharp.

Still running, Jack leaned across to kiss her cheek, and she surprised him at the last moment by turning to him. Their lips met, and for a blissful instant nothing else mattered.

“Well, now,” Rhali said as they mounted the ramp leading down to the pontoon.

“Yeah,” Jack said. They had to let go hands and walk in single file, but he thought their touch would last forever.