In the Shadow of London

by Chris Ward

  ‘I didn’t touch you.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  David climbed out of bed, his head reeling. He reached a hand up through his hair and felt a large welt on the side of his head, the hair around it matted with blood. The room was trashed, chairs and tables overturned, ornaments knocked off shelves, cupboards pulled open and their contents spilled all over the floor.

  He reached down to pick up a packet of pasta lying at his feet that had split open, and his vision spun.

  ‘Leave it.’

  ‘I have to clean up.’

  ‘We’re getting out of here.’ Airie pointed at a rucksack by the door. ‘I’ve already packed for you.’

  David squeezed his eyes shut then opened them again. ‘What happened to me?’

  Airie put a hand on his arm and turned him around. She was dressed in the same urban warrior gear he remembered from the day before, her belt and a waistcoat packed with enough knives to arm an entire militia.

  ‘When you showed up in that station and bailed me out with those guys and my brother, I thought you were God. There was nothing I wouldn’t have done for you after that. Then yesterday you see those boys up on that stage and you turn coward, tried to give yourself up. You remember that?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then you came back here and found a bottle of whisky. Suddenly it was all woe is me, fuck everything, I’ve screwed up.’

  Snippets of destruction were starting to return. ‘I got drunk and hit my head?’

  Airie shook her head. ‘I put you out with the bottle.’ For a moment a tiny smile creased her lips. ‘I let you drink it first. I didn’t want to kill you.’

  ‘To stop me trashing the place? I’m sorry.’

  Her eyes turned hard again. ‘I don’t care about this shithole. You can do what you like. I asked you to come to bed with me. You refused.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Bastard.’ She kicked the bag of pasta out of the way and aimed a weak punch at his stomach. ‘Start manning up. You’ve started this whether you like it or not.’

  He nodded. ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘Those boys that got dragged up on that stage, you said you’d met them. Said you’d told them to show up at Melling Road Junction and learn to ride. Somewhere in there they got nabbed by the government. If someone could find them, they’ll find us too, and anyone else you’ve tried to convince to become a Tube Rider. We have to find those people before they all end up with ropes around their necks.’

  ‘Taku. My old place is closest.’

  ‘Then we’ll go there first.’

  An hour later they reached David’s street. It was deserted. The heap of abandoned cars that had been bulldozed into a barricade at one end dissuaded anyone to use it as a through road, so the only people who used it now either lived in the apartment buildings or came here to collect rent.

  ‘The door’s been lodged open,’ David said, pointing from where he crouched behind an abandoned car. Airie squatted beside him, a knife in one hand. Her anger had worn off over the journey, but a frostiness remained. ‘It’s usually shut.’

  ‘Does he have a phone?’

  David almost laughed. ‘Of course not. He rarely even leaves the apartment during the day. We have to go in. If we wait for him to come out we could be here for hours.’

  Airie nodded. ‘I’ll keep watch from downstairs.’

  ‘Okay. Let’s go.’

  They ran for the building along a flagstone pavement choked with weeds. When they reached the entrance, Airie dropped into a crouch just outside the door, her back pressed against the wall, knives in both hands.

  David headed inside. A strange humming sound was coming from up the stairs. The elevator had never worked, so he pulled the clawboard out of his rucksack and held it out in front of him, the hooks pointed downwards. The stairwell was dim, only a few of the lights still powered by the failing solar panels on the roof. The humming was coming from just above him—

  ‘David….’

  ‘Ah, man, no—’

  David bumped back against the wall as he looked up at his friend, hanging from a rope harness from the second floor light-fitting that had begun to tear free from the ceiling. His face was pale where it wasn’t stained with blood. Both feet were twisted at unnatural angles, and there was a black puddle on the concrete landing below him.

  ‘Hang on, I’ll cut you down.’

  ‘Run, David … that fucking whore … she’ll be back.’

  ‘Who did this?’

  ‘Some … bitch.’

  ‘A woman?’

  Taku coughed. Blood sprayed across the wall and the floor. ‘Go….’

  ‘We’ll cut you down soon, then we’ll get out of here together. Airie! Airie, get up here!’

  The sound of running feet came from below and then Airie’s face appeared. ‘Oh my god.’

  ‘Get one of your knives and cut him down. I’ll hold him. Wait here.’

  David ran up the stairs and down the corridor, trying every door he came to. On his third try he found an abandoned apartment still furnished with a handful of old tables and chairs. He grabbed a wooden chair and headed back to the landing.

  Airie had climbed up on to the banister rail and was leaning out to see if she could reach the light-fitting. David positioned the chair underneath Taku and stood on top of it. He wrapped his arms around Taku’s thighs and told Airie to cut the rope, even as Taku began to scream.

  Taku sagged in David’s arms, and it was all David could do to hold him until Airie jumped down to help support his weight. Together they lay Taku down on the landing, and David searched through the rucksack for something to wipe away the blood.

  ‘David, he’s fucked,’ Airie said. ‘Look at these cuts. It’s like someone didn’t want him to die right away.’

  ‘Just be quiet.’ He held out a t-shirt from his bag. ‘Go outside, see if you can find some water. Quickly.’

  Airie got up and scampered down the steps, the knives around her waist jangling.

  ‘David … she’s right.’

  ‘Shut up, man. You’ll be fine.’

  A hand snaked up, the strength surprising as it closed over David’s shirt, pulling him down. ‘She didn’t want me to die until you came—’

  ‘David!’ The cry came from down the stairs. Airie appeared, taking the steps three at a time, half turned back the way she had come. ‘Huntsman!’

  The word was like a kick to the gut as a shadow appeared on the wall, then a robed figure moved into view. Airie was already above him, near the next landing as the Huntsman rose up from where it crouched on all fours and a woman’s face looked up at them, the eyes grey and blank.

  ‘Leave me,’ Taku gasped.

  ‘No—’

  Something crashed against the concrete at the Huntsman’s feet, and a small explosion knocked David on to his side. Flames spread out across the stairs, catching the Huntsman’s robe alight.

  ‘Come on!’ Airie screamed, another glass bottle poised to throw.

  The Huntsman was wailing, thrashing back and forth, trying to pull off the robe before her body caught alight. Already flames were licking at her legs.

  ‘I can’t leave him!’

  Taku gave a weak smile. ‘Give me a knife, bro.’

  With one shaking hand, David pulled a knife from his belt and pushed it into Taku’s hand. The fingers though, refused to close.

  ‘What…?’

  ‘No, give me a knife.’

  The Huntsman had begun to crawl up the stairs, the woman’s face a snarl framed by fire. David snatched the knife and turned, only for Taku to gasp as another knife slammed into his chest just above his heart. With a howl of anger and resentment, David grabbed the protruding handle with both hands and leaned on it with all his weight, twisting the blade deep into Taku’s chest. As his friend coughed and lay still, David climbed over his body and scrambled up to where Airie waited on the landing above, one hand still paused in the air as if reliving the moment she
had thrown the knife.

  ‘What did you do?’ he gasped.

  The girl gave him a grim look that was partway between defiance and regret. ‘What I had to. Come on.’

  Below them, the robe had burned off the Huntsman’s body and the creature was hauling itself up the stairs by its hands. Fire bit and tore at its body, the woman’s face an unrecognizable visage of burned skin with two gleaming robotic eyes. Fire had spread to the ancient stained wallpaper, and was licking across the ceiling. Unchecked, it would gut the building within an hour.

  ‘There another way down?’

  David nodded. ‘A fire escape. Follow me.’

  He sprinted down the corridor. At the end a fire door stood already open, long ago broken off its hinges. David glanced back and pushed Airie ahead of him out on to the metal steps. Behind them, further down the corridor, the female Huntsman still burned as she staggered after them like a glowing, flickering devil.

  ‘David, it’s broken!’

  He swung down the first couple of flights to where Airie was standing on the sheared-off remains of the fire escape, the lower two floors a mass of rusting, twisted metal on the ground below.

  ‘Ah shit, I forgot it collapsed.’

  ‘David, she’s coming!’

  Above them, the female Huntsman had staggered out onto the metal landing outside the door. Pieces of burning clothing slipped through the gaps in the metal frame and rained down around them.

  David looked around them, searching for another way down. Jumping onto a mass of twisted metal was suicide, and he didn’t fancy their chances of fighting past the Huntsman, burned or not.

  ‘There. It’s our only chance.’

  An electrical wire protruded from the wall five feet below them, hanging down to an electricity pole in the street. It would probably break under their weight, but as he saw it, they had little choice.

  He pointed at the wire, then wrapped his hands through his clawboard’s safety straps. ‘Climb on my back and hang on. Don’t let go. I’ve got to jump straight down. If you let go you’ll get skewered.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  Even as she said it, he realised Airie was laughing. Whether it was through hysteria or complete terror, he hoped he lived to ask. As the Huntsman rounded the last flight of metal stairs above them, he jumped off the edge of the fire escape, sinking like a rock with Airie’s weight on top of his own.

  For an instant he thought he had missed the wire, then his hooks caught. The line groaned and stretched, then bounced up a couple of feet and they slid down towards the street. They were still twenty feet off the ground but as they reached the wooden pole David put his weight on to his back hand to slow them. Then, as he struck the pole, he wrapped his arms around it, allowing Airie to climb down his body and then down the metal maintenance workers’ struts to the street.

  As he landed beside her, he turned back. The ruins of the Huntsman was climbing down the wall of the building like a spider, moving slowly but still quick enough that it would reach them in a couple of minutes.

  ‘We have to go,’ he said, and together they hurried away into the streets.

  ‘I’m sorry about your friend,’ Airie said as they ran.

  David grunted. ‘Me too.’

  ‘Where next? Are there others? Tube Riders, I mean?’

  David sighed and nodded again. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’s one. Her name’s Raine.’

  22

  Intruder

  Raine scowled, fighting the urge to ball her hands into fists. Donna was being a bitch. The jowly older woman, whose arms looked like they had vacuumed up all the fat left in London, shook her head.

  ‘You were three minutes late this afternoon, but that’s not just three minutes late, is it? It’s three minutes from when you enter the building. Then it’s three minutes to put your shit in your locker. Then it’s three minutes to tie up your hair, three minutes to put on your uniform. That’s why I’m docking you a quarter of an hour.’

  Raine didn’t bother to ask what happened to the missing three minutes. She shook her head. ‘You didn’t dock me for quarter of an hour, you docked me for half.’

  ‘Tax.’

  ‘Since when have you paid tax?’

  ‘Since you started showing up late. If you’d rather I paid you nothing, tossed your lazy ass out on the pavement and employed someone who actually wanted to work … then just say.’

  Raine stared at her. Had there been a chainsaw at hand she would have taken it to Donna’s ugly face, but as always when they had these arguments—far more frequently than Raine was ever late—Raine forced herself to think about Jake.

  Always think about Jake.

  She was convinced that if she could just ride the storm everything would be okay. The storm, which might last decades, would eventually blow over, as all storms did. All she had to do was hold out, and one day her son would have a life. It didn’t stop her boiling with rage, but it did help her control it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, going through the motions as she always did. ‘I’ll make sure I’m not late again.’

  Donna gave a wide, heavy grin that made it look like her mouth might slide off her face. She held out the handful of notes and the payslip written out in pencil, littered with crossings out and dark scores where numbers had been altered.

  ‘I’m glad we understand each other. See you tomorrow.’

  Raine waited until she was around the corner from the supermarket before she let herself scream and aim a kick at the nearest wall. It made her foot hurt, so she pulled the remains of a wooden advertising board out of the ground nearby and smashed it against a wall until it broke into pieces.

  ‘Goddamn it.’

  She slumped to the ground, throwing her bag down beside her, and for a couple of minutes she let the tears come. The bitch had cheated her out of hundreds of pounds over the last couple of years, and there was nothing Raine could do except suck it up. One day, she promised, one day the bitch would get what was coming to her.

  Tottenham Hale Underground station was quiet at this time of the night. Raine always asked for regular day shifts, because she liked to be home before dark to take care of Jake, but one of the other girls hadn’t shown up since the weekend so Donna had dumped the afternoon-evening shift on her. Finishing at eleven p.m., she either had a thirty-minute wait for the second to last train of a reduced evening service, or a forty-minute walk back to Finsbury.

  For London, her area was relatively safe, but she was tired, so she opted for the tube. There was no one else on her platform at the station, so she walked right to the far end and sat down on a bench that creaked beneath her, crossing her legs and wrapping her arms around her waist to ward off the chill.

  It was impossible to say why, but London felt strange tonight. Out here near the perimeter walls, it was easy to forget the violence that was always happening somewhere in the city centre by concentrating on the oppressive stillness of a city fifty miles across that had barely any traffic. The heaps of abandoned cars were testament to how alive the city had once been, but after the gangs and the pyromaniacs had gone quiet for the night, London was beset with a calm that was almost soothing.

  Tonight, however, all Raine could feel was an itchy menace to the air. She had an overwhelming urge to give up her wait for the tube and run back to Finsbury as fast as she could, even though the rational part of her knew that provided the train wasn’t late, she had passed that mid-point where it was quicker to stay and wait. She hated the passiveness of inactivity, when London felt constantly on the verge of a fight.

  When the train came rolling into the station, she dived inside and took a seat in a carriage that was otherwise empty. Through the windows at the end she saw a handful of other commuters, their uniforms identifying them as shop or construction workers. There were no government workers out this way and the unemployed masses could hardly afford the modest train fares. The Underground, even in its decrepit state, was a luxury.

  A couple o
f other people got off at Finsbury with her, dropping their tickets obediently into the box by the unstaffed entrance, then disappearing, heads bowed, into the dimly lit streets. Raine, following a code for survival that she had inherited from her mother, turned left out of the station, walked slowly past the first few houses, then ducked into an alleyway and waited patiently, counting the seconds, for nearly five minutes.

  It was enough time, her mother had always reasoned, for someone trailing her to catch up and pass by, and the key to surviving in London was awareness. Her mother had forced the ritual into her daughter over years of repetition, but only when, a couple of years after her mother’s untimely death, someone had followed her out of the station—a man carrying a piece of chicken wire that had glinted in the rare moonlight—had she thanked her mother for her patience.

  She was just about to continue on her way when a figure in a cloak passed within three feet of her, walking quickly, head stooped. Raine clamped a hand over her mouth and held her breath as the figure—something in the shape of her legs making Raine think it was a woman—moved on down the street, the sound of her footfalls almost imperceptible as if she wore rubber-soled shoes.

  The woman was heading in the direction of her apartment.

  She glanced out of the alleyway once more, but the figure was now just a black shadow passing in and out of the circles of light spread around the few working streetlights. She was taking the most direct route, as if following a scent trail.

  I always go that way.

  In her mind she heard the soft cackle of Jake’s laughter. Her panic had already cost her too much time, but if she was fast—really fast—she had a chance to get there first.

  She turned and sprinted down the alleyway, zigzagging through backstreets she had always made it her business to know inside and out, taking a longer route towards her apartment but hoping her speed would make the difference. As she turned into her street she saw a light in her apartment window up ahead.

  There was no sign of the woman, but Raine had a couple of minutes lead at best. She reached the foot of her stairs and felt for the metal rail to guide her up. She was gasping for breath when she reached the door to her apartment.