The London Pride

by Charlie Fletcher

  ‘A violin?’ he said, choking. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I am better zan serious, my friend,’ said Wolfie, winking at him. ‘I told you: I am prodigy.’

  Wolfie may have been a prodigy, and Tragedy may have believed he was a secret weapon, but Will noticed they both moved very slowly and silently as they eased out of the back door of the basement and crept down the alley.

  The downpour was heavier now, and the glowing blue people on the street beyond the mouth of the alley seemed to acquire a haze around them as the driving raindrops refracted their light as they hammered past. It was the kind of rain that hits the ground so hard that it bounces back up your trouser legs and soaks your ankles. Within a few steps Will was drenched. He put his hoodie up and kept his right hand on Filax’s back as they went along.

  When Filax stopped, he stopped. A large silhouette of a lion slunk past on the street, backlit by the blue glow of the pedestrians.

  Tragedy and Wolfie seemed to melt into the wall, and Will lowered into a crouch behind a parked scooter.

  By the time the lion had moved on, Will’s hoodie was so wet and heavy that it deadened his hearing and flapped on either side of his face like a pair of blinkers, severely narrowing his field of vision, so he pushed it back and resigned himself to getting thoroughly soaked. Creeping around with blinkers on seemed a suicidal thing to do in the circumstances. He needed all his wits about him.

  It took them five minutes to creep to the end of the alley.

  What they saw there was dispiriting – four lions in view, and Selene, broken, lying across her plinth on the face of the hotel above the door, arms hanging lifelessly as a gold bug fluttered on her face. All her stars lay in a pile across the front doorway below, like discarded confetti. Will felt the familiar pang of guilt. Maybe she had succumbed to the bugs’ attack because he had distracted her for that crucial moment. They turned back and took a further five minutes creeping back to where they’d begun.

  ‘We’re a bit bottled in,’ admitted Tragedy. ‘If bleedin’ Ariel would come back she could fly us out of here. Dunno what she’s up to.’

  In the near distance they heard a lion roar with a ground-trembling blast of hunter’s frenzy.

  17

  Going Underground – part 2

  Ariel and Jo were, for an instant, paralysed with fear in the ticket hall of the Underground station. In two leaps the roaring lion filled the entrance, blotting out the view of the street like a snarling thundercloud.

  To give Ariel her due, she caught up pretty fast. What had begun with Jo dragging her ended up with her grabbing Jo and flying backwards, deeper into the ticket hall.

  What saved them was that the frozen people were as immovable to the lion as they were to anything else. They acted like speed bumps and traffic bollards, making the great beast slow right down and pick his way through them, his head ducked in below the canopied entrance as he pushed his way in after Jo and Ariel.

  Ariel flew them over the ticket barriers and hovered, suddenly indecisive.

  ‘Go down!’ said Jo. ‘Follow the escalators.’

  Two escalators angled downwards right in front of them.

  Ariel still hovered. Jo could see her looking for another option.

  ‘What are you waiting for!’ she said. ‘Move!’

  ‘Looking for another exit!’ said Ariel, sounding flustered.

  The lion was working its way over the obstacle course of frozen people. Once it got over the ticket barrier it would have a clear enough space to jump at them. It was nearly there.

  ‘Come ON!’ said Jo. ‘GO!’

  Ariel was biting her lip, eyes going left and right.

  ‘Why aren’t we moving?’ said Jo.

  ‘I’ve never been underground,’ said Ariel.

  ‘Ever been eaten by a lion?’ said Jo.

  Ariel still wavered. Jo tried to wrench herself free of her grasp.

  ‘Well, I’m going,’ she gasped. ‘I’m real, right? Not like you. I don’t get a reset at midnight if this goes wrong. Let me go!’

  Ariel stared at her as if she’d been slapped. Then the lion roared, and she rolled in the air and shot like a bullet straight down the barrel of the escalator tunnel. It was a long way down, and she flew well until they were about halfway. Then she gasped, her body shuddering and sputtering, and Jo felt the power go out of her as they tumbled and hit the divider running down between the up and the down escalators. It was lucky that Ariel hit first, because she was made of metal. The barrier was smooth, shiny steel, which made it an excellent slide, but there were bumps and protuberances on it that were there especially to stop daredevils using it as one. If Jo had been underneath she would have been pretty badly banged up, given the speed at which they hit. As it was, metal slid almost frictionless on metal, which was good from the point of getting away from the lion, but bad from the point at which they ran out of escalator and went sprawling on the hard stone floor of the concourse beyond.

  Jo tucked and rolled, and came to a painful stop against a nun’s legs. Ariel landed upside down against the end wall, smacking home next to a busker with an accordion, sending his capful of coins spattering across the floor.

  ‘Ouch,’ she said.

  Jo scrambled to her feet and limped across to her.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, casting her eye back up the escalator.

  Because of the angle, she couldn’t see all the way to the top, but she could hear some pretty heavy and ominous scraping.

  She pulled Ariel to her feet. ‘We’ve got to go,’ she said.

  Ariel looked at her.

  ‘What?’ said Jo.

  ‘I can’t fly,’ said Ariel, her eyes dull with shock.

  ‘You can’t fly?’ said Jo.

  Ariel shook her head.

  ‘It’s gone.’ Her eyes brimmed with tears. Her lip actually quivered.

  The noise from the escalator turned from scrabbling to slithering, then the unmistakable screech of heavy metal sliding against metal.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ sobbed Ariel. ‘I don’t know …’

  Jo slapped her. ‘Run!’ she said. ‘You run!’

  And she grabbed her and forced Ariel forwards. The sobbing turned to gasping as the two of them powered along the tunnel towards the platform, dodging in and out of the unmoving commuters, as behind them the huge bronze lion slid downhill like an incoming express train.

  They heard it crash to a halt at the bottom but didn’t look back as they ran.

  They hit the split between the northbound and southbound platforms. There was a train in one, and the other was empty.

  ‘We’ve got to get back into the air,’ said Ariel.

  ‘Only way back up is the way we came. Past the lion,’ panted Jo. ‘Keep moving!’

  She didn’t want to go into the tunnels. She really didn’t. There was a live electric rail in there that would fry them if they touched it, and that was just the first of a hundred or so reasons. However, they might have to. But then, if they could go into a tunnel, the lion could too, so maybe that should be the first reason, because at least right now the lion was a bit hampered by having to negotiate all the frozen people it couldn’t push over. In the tunnel it would have a clear run at them.

  Jo was doing all this thinking as she ran, trying to make up a plan on the move. Her eyes scanned the signs on the platform. Maybe there was a fire exit. Or a door to a narrow passage the staff used. But there weren’t any useful signs, or if there were, they were moving too fast for her to make them out between the blur of garish posters plastered to the walls, posters advertising museums and holidays and books and movies, lots of movies. If this was a movie, she thought bitterly, there’d be a crawl space or something, a convenient access hatch and a behind-the-scenes piece of ducting they could hide in, but this wasn’t a movie, and there was nothing convenient about what it was. Which was terrifying, all the more so because the lion scrambled out onto the platform behind them and roared. Jo made the mistake of l
ooking back and meeting its glare over the heads of the static crowd clogging the platform.

  It blinked lazily at her and then confirmed all her worst fears by simply avoiding the barrier of people and slipping off the platform down onto the rails, which gave it a clear run at them. It filled the space, its head and mane almost as big as a train as it powered towards them.

  Ariel’s gaze met hers, and the resigned, dead look in her eyes shocked Jo. She didn’t waste breath trying to shout her back to life. She just grabbed her and shoved her back through one of the arches that connected the two platforms.

  They stumbled through and found themselves facing the train. The doors were wide open.

  Jo pulled Ariel onto the train. It was one of the new ones that had no dividers between the carriages, so that once inside you were on one long tube, as if you had entered the belly of a snake.

  They ran towards the end of the snake. If it had been full of people they would have been really safe. The lion could not have squeezed its way after them.

  But, along with all the other bad cards Jo had received in the last twenty-four hours, fate had dealt them an empty train. It might be a new day, but her unlucky streak was definitely unbroken.

  They felt the train lurch beneath their feet; they spun and looked back.

  The lion had forced its great head inside the carriage behind them, and was now carefully tunnelling in, belly low to the ground as it crawled forwards, filling the space as it came. It was an awkward progress, but it did move it inexorably forwards.

  Jo turned. They had run out of train. She looked back at the crawling lion and realised with a lift in her heart that it was now so constricted that they could escape it by getting out of the train through the side door, because by the time it had squeezed after them they would be long gone.

  She turned to the side, expecting to see the next doorway, and saw the door. Closed. And beyond it no platform to escape to, just the black wall of the tunnel.

  ‘Great,’ she spat. ‘Of course …’

  ‘What?’ said Ariel.

  ‘It’s a short platform. You can’t get out of the front coach.’

  She looked round again. There wasn’t enough time to get back up the carriage to an open platform door, because the lion would get there first. They might as well save time and just run straight down his throat.

  ‘We’re trapped,’ said Ariel. Her voice sounded dull and as dry as rust.

  18

  Going sideways, fast

  The roar of the hunting lion had chilled Will’s bones. He didn’t know for sure that it had been on Jo’s trail, but it wasn’t a bad bet. He’d just have to trust she had got to a place of safety, because the alternative was too horrible a thought to consider without freezing like a rabbit caught in headlights. In fact, if Will stayed still and thought too hard about things he would find it harder and harder to move when he needed to. So the answer was to keep on moving. He pointed to a half-open window across the alley.

  ‘We don’t need to use the streets,’ he said. ‘We go sideways. We use the buildings as cover.’

  And before Wolfie or Tragedy could say anything, he checked that no lion was peering down the alley before he crossed it and boosted himself into the window.

  He landed on a desktop between a computer screen and a man frozen in the act of working a keyboard.

  ‘Sorry,’ he muttered on reflex, and slid over the man’s paperwork and down onto the ground.

  Tragedy and Wolfie followed him.

  They worked their way through the building until they got to the other side, where they looked through another fire-exit door across the next alley. There was a service door standing wide open in the wall of the adjacent building as a man wheeled in a cask of beer on a dolly.

  By hopping alleys and winding their way through the interiors of six different buildings they got themselves a block and a half away from the besieged hotel.

  Then they had to cross a main road, and once they had checked it out and decided it was safe, they found themselves in the open again.

  ‘Zis is fun,’ grinned Wolfie.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Will. ‘This is Oxford Street.’

  He looked both ways down the wide and crowded thoroughfare. It was teeming and huge and hard to check out properly and full of places from which predators’ eyes could even now be hungrily scanning for them. The thought of it made his mouth dry.

  ‘It’s massive,’ he said. ‘Anything could be watching us and we wouldn’t see it until it was too late.’

  ‘Do we need to cross it then?’ said Tragedy. ‘I mean, we could carry on with the house-hopping on this side. Seems to work and Wolfie’s right – it’s sorta fun seeing inside all these houses …’

  ‘This is not FUN!’ Will said. A little too loudly. All three of them knew this instantly and went very still, listening and looking. Nothing seemed to have heard them.

  The idea of having something as silly as ‘fun’ while his mother was alone and unmoving and vulnerable in the cold street, where any of the malicious statues or dragons could just amble up and hurt her, or while his sister was lost who-knew-where made Will’s blood pound with anger. He tried to control it. There wasn’t time to explain to them.

  ‘Sorry,’ Will whispered between gritted teeth. ‘But seriously. This isn’t fun. This is life or death. Jo and I swore we wouldn’t get split up. But now we have. And we said if that happened, we’d rendezvous at Coram’s Fields …’

  ‘By your mum,’ said Tragedy, remembering.

  Coram’s Fields was where he had met them, just after the whole world had gone so gut-wrenchingly pear-shaped and jammed to a shuddering stop.

  ‘Yes,’ said Will. ‘And that’s north of here. Round the back of the museum and on a bit. And this road runs east–west. So we have to cross it.’

  Filax showed the way. He crawled across, slow and low to the ground, as if stalking a rabbit. He passed two taxis and slipped round the back of a topless tourist bus, and got to the other side. Slinking between the pedestrians, he bounded into a narrow street. He disappeared from view for a long minute, but then he returned, stood in the entrance to the alley and wagged his tail.

  ‘’E’s saying it’s all clear,’ said Tragedy. ‘’E’s a corker of a dog, isn’t ’e?’

  ‘He is,’ said Will, dropping to all fours. He was already so wet that crawling across the puddled pavement and the rain-slick street were going to make no difference to his general level of comfort.

  The three of them beetled across the tarmac, keeping as low to the ground as possible. They had just got to the back of the tourist bus when Filax barked and they all froze in their tracks.

  The bark was loud, challenging and definitely an urgent warning.

  19

  Emergency exit

  Jo and Ariel were backed up against the driver’s door at the front of the Underground train, dead-ended with nowhere to run. Ariel was tugging at the door as if unable to believe that it wouldn’t open. Jo was staring at the head of the lion that filled the carriage as it belly-crawled towards them. It was like being inside a syringe, watching the plunger coming to squash you.

  She looked at the window beside her and saw the dirty black tunnel wall beyond it. And she saw the little glass window above.

  The one marked ‘EMERGENCY ONLY’.

  She leapt forwards and elbowed the glass. Ariel spun at the sharp crack and threw her a despairing look.

  ‘What?’

  Jo snatched the torch out of the emergency box and pointed at the window.

  ‘Window. Break it.’

  Ariel hesitated. Losing her powers had drained her so that her normal sparkiness was almost extinguished and replaced with a leaden dullness.

  ‘It’s glass, you’re metal. BREAK IT!’ snapped Jo. That lion was getting much too close.

  Ariel seemed to wake up a bit. She crossed to the window and punched it. Nothing happened.

  ‘Ow!’ she said.

  Jo realised s
omething had broken inside Ariel – not inside her hand, but inside her head. She’d lost her usual sassy vigour, the cockiness that had made her so annoying, but which had also made her energetic. This reduced Ariel was nothing like the heroic Ariel who had stepped in front of the dragon’s blast to save Will. This was a loser Ariel. And right now Jo needed the other one badly, or they weren’t going to get out of this.

  There was only one way to get her back, and that was to insult her.

  ‘I thought you were great,’ Jo sneered. ‘I thought you were something.’

  She was hoping there was still enough unbroken Ariel within her to catch fire at the dismissive scorn in Jo’s voice.

  ‘I thought you were something,’ she repeated. ‘Not a blubbering nothing.’

  Ariel’s head came up a fraction. ‘I am something,’ she said, but her voice was still sluggish.

  ‘You’re not,’ spat Jo. ‘Look at you. Whining and giving up.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Ariel.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ said Jo, eyeing the approaching lion. ‘You’re nothing.’

  Ariel glared at her. Was that something kindling in her eyes?

  ‘You’re worse than nothing,’ said Jo, choosing the next words as if they were the final arrow in her quiver, hoping it was the one that would hit the mark, because if it didn’t, any second now the lion would have squirmed so close to them that it would be able to swat them with a paw. ‘You’re just ordinary.’

  The word thunked home. Ariel’s eyes ignited.

  ‘ORDINARY?’

  She lashed out at the emergency window.

  It smithereened into tiny chunks of safety glass, and then she hit it again and the bits dropped away, letting in the faint breeze from the tunnels and the grimy and faintly sulphurous smell that came with it.

  ‘You think that is ordin—’ she began.

  Jo just grabbed her, scrambled over the seat and dropped down the outside of the train.

  When you’re running on adrenalin, time and memory go funny. It’s like the fight-or-flight mode needs all the juice in you, so it doesn’t bother remembering what you’re doing, because that would be a waste of energy, energy needed to power your legs and heart and get you as far away from the danger in as short a time as possible.