Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City)

by Tim Lebbon

  “I did dream of you,” she whispered.

  “And that's why I want to help you,” Rook said. “Because you're like David. Pure. Don't you see? You weren't even here when it happened, and still you're so special. Not like me. Changed into this by Doomsday and all the shit that's come after.” He turned suddenly and walked away. Overhead, rooks followed them, flitting from roof to roof, all of them totally silent.

  Lucy-Anne ran after him. She could not shake from her mind's eye the image from her dream—that strange woman on the banks of the Thames, and the nuclear explosion that had seemed to pass her by.

  “They're just dreams! They can't all come true.”

  “I came true,” Rook said over his shoulder. He continued walking away, and Lucy-Anne could only follow.

  Jack stared along the barren wilderness of the Mall towards Buckingham Palace and wondered what had become of the Queen. Had she died at her first inhalation of Evolve, just like so many of her subjects? Or was she now someone with incredible, almost supernatural powers, a human being rapidly evolving into something greater—a fire starter, a healer, someone capable of impossible things?

  As far as Jack was aware, no one had seen the Queen since Doomsday. Perhaps on his quest he would meet her, and her majesty would be revealed.

  “Stop arsing about!” Sparky hissed. He was Jack's best friend, heavily built with spiked blond hair, and a lighthearted manner that hid darker depths. “Jenna's gonna be waiting.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. He closed his eyes briefly, and for a while he was his old self. He was glad. He felt so much closer to his friends like this.

  All through the previous night, following his confrontation with his father and their escape from the scene of so much death and destruction, Jack had been sensing a change happening inside. The Nomad's touch was working through him at its own strange pace. He was infected, but he had an idea that his own burgeoning powers were something different from his father's, or Rosemary's…or perhaps anyone else in London right now.

  He had hidden himself, Sparky, and Jenna away from view in a basement while a Chopper looked right at them, and made the soldier not see. And he didn't know for sure how he had done so. Invisible! Jenna had gasped, but Sparky had been more wary, eyeing his friend as he considered what had happened.

  Jack was still not sure whether he had influenced their presence, or the Chopper's ability to see them.

  Sparky grabbed his arm. “We need to get across Trafalgar Square sharpish! Don't like it here, it's too open. Anyone could be watching.”

  “We'll be okay,” Jack said.

  Sparky frowned at him.

  “No special powers,” Jack said. “Just a feeling. Come on, let's find Jenna.”

  They ran up from the end of the Mall towards the square, crossing streets once crammed nose to tail with vehicles. Now it was jammed with a motionless traffic jam that might never move again. Many cars had their doors closed and windows obscured by a pale green growth inside, and Jack had no wish to see what might be hidden.

  The square was home to thousands of pigeons, and the birds took flight in sweeping waves as Jack and Sparky ran across. That was a good sign as far as Jack was concerned; it meant that no one else was around to startle the birds aloft. Unless they're like that boy Lucy-Anne's gone off with, he thought. Sadness stabbed at the loss of his old girlfriend.

  They skirted around one of the huge plinths bearing a proud, gigantic lion, and Jack looked up past it at Admiral Nelson on top of his column. Nelson's view of London must be a sad one.

  “There,” Sparky said, pointing. Jack followed his friend, trying not to see the mass of clothing and other things that filled one of the fountains. People had used to come here on New Year's Eve to drink and celebrate and dance one year into the next, filled with hope for what the future might bring.

  They met Jenna in front of the National Gallery, crouched down behind a pile of split black plastic bags spilling mouldy clothes. Sparky and Jenna touched hands briefly—they had progressed from good friends to lovers only recently, and their vitality was evident—and she looked at Jack with wide eyes.

  “I've made contact,” she said. “They're bringing him to a meeting point now, and he'll check us over. But…”

  “But what?” Jack prompted.

  “They say he's dying.”

  “Well, if he can't help us we're lost,” Sparky said. He glanced back at Jack, as if expecting him to dispute his statement.

  But Jack couldn't. Miller and the Choppers were searching for them now—Miller knew that Jack had been touched by the mysterious Nomad, and his greatest desire now to was get hold of Jack and examine him. Dissect him, perhaps. See what was going on inside.

  And what was? Jack wasn't sure.

  “Guys, I'm feeling pretty lost anyway,” Jack said. “You both know something's happening with me, but I don't really know what. Different things…and not all the time. I can't…” He looked around, waved across the square. “I can't topple Nelson's Column with my mind, or see around corners. Or change this pile of clothes into stone. Or…” He shrugged, voice breaking, throat filling. He spoke quieter. “Maybe I'll be able to do all those things tomorrow. But today, the only thing stopping me going mad with this is you two. My mates.”

  Jenna smiled at him, eyes glittering.

  “Pussy,” Sparky said.

  Jack laughed softly. “Yeah. So come on. Let's see if this old guy can help.”

  From the moment he saw the old man, Jack knew that he was dying from something unknown. It was the same malady killing the Irregulars in the underground hospital where he'd found his mother. An incredible man—Jack hoped he could still use his gift—he was suffering from the mysterious illness affecting more and more of London's survivors.

  He was mad, first of all. Sitting in an old shopping trolley in the shattered entrance to a once-posh store, scrunched up like a skinny rag doll, the man seemed to be snatching at unseen flies bothering him. He stared, motionless, and then a hand would lash out, fist closing on nothing.

  “What's he doing?” Sparky asked.

  “Don't know,” Jenna said. “Same when I found him. I thought he was eating flies, but I don't think there's anything there.”

  “Just cos you don't see nothing, don't mean there's nothing there.” The man glared at them, his wide white eyes startling, dreadlocks gathered across his shoulders, chest, and drawn up knees like a hundred twisting snakes. Although sitting in the trolley, he seemed animated with constant movement.

  Deeper in the ruined store, Jack could see the shadows of other people observing them. The glint of light on metal—a gun? Something about that comforted him. These weird powers were troubling, and beside them a gun was almost mundane.

  They'd been told that this man would be able to tell whether they were being followed or spied upon, and whether the Choppers could trace them. Jack had found the tracking chip in the photo of his mother, but perhaps there was something more.

  “So can you do it?” he asked.

  “Kids,” the man said. His age was ambiguous; he could have been forty or sixty. “Just not polite anymore.”

  “Can you do it, please?” Sparky said.

  The man's hand snapped out, arm surprisingly long, and he clenched his hand close to Sparky's face. Drew it in close to his nose, eyes rolling slightly, trolley wheels squeaking with movement. His dreadlocks shimmered and squirmed, and his shoulders shook. He inhaled and closed his eyes.

  “You're all right,” he said.

  “Good,” Jack said. “Thanks. So now—”

  “Didn't say you,” the man said. “You, you got more about you.” He wasn't quite staring at Jack. All around him, but not quite at him. “Doubts, and hidden things. Weird.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “Tell me about it.”

  The man turned suddenly and reached for Jenna, stretching out from the trolley and almost tipping it over. She flinched back, but his fist closed and plucked several dark hairs from her head. He dre
w them quickly to his face and breathed in. Wheels squeaked.

  “Shit,” Sparky said, glancing at Jack. “We could've just run.”

  “We've been running all night,” Jack said.

  “You're fine,” the man said to Jenna. He turned back to Jack, letting Jenna's plucked hair go to float down around him. “Now, back to you. To you. You.”

  “What do you need?” Jack asked.

  The man was frowning. His eyes grew wider, and he started keening, crunching up in pain.

  Someone emerged from the shadowy shop. The short woman glanced at Jack and his friends, and Jack saw a look in her eyes that he recognised from his mother. She had been made some sort of a healer by the effects of Doomsday, but she was someone who had always cared.

  “He's very sick,” the woman said. “You should leave him now.”

  “I can't,” Jack said. “He hasn't checked me yet. I need to know if I'm being watched.”

  “He's weak and needs rest,” the woman said. She sounded so weary and sad.

  “Is it the same as the others?” Jack asked.

  The woman looked at him in surprise. “You're outsiders. You've seen others suffering from this?”

  “My mother worked in a hospital under Stockwell tube station,” he said.

  The woman sighed, nodded. “The same. It affects the mind, and the body, and withers them both. So sad. Such a loss.”

  “Especially with the powers they all have,” Jenna said.

  “No,” the woman said. “It's such a loss because they're people, and I can't do a thing to help.”

  “You're watched,” the man said. His voice was incredibly low, almost vibrating through the ground. Even the carer stepped back. “You're known. You're…observed…by…her.”

  By Nomad, Jack thought, but he did not speak her name.

  “Take him away,” Jack said. But the man had stopped shaking and was looking at Jack now, one long, thin arm raised, fingers clawed as if to tear something out of the air.

  “She's waiting to see,” he rumbled. Pigeons took flight at his voice, and Jack felt the words resounding in his chest, his belly. “See if the…seed…took…” He sighed and slumped down, muttering something as his hair closed across his face as if to hide him from view.

  “What was that all about?” Jenna asked. She came close to Jack, Sparky standing behind her.

  “Maybe he meant Nomad,” Jack whispered.

  “Right,” Sparky said. “Great. So now what do we—”

  A whistle, a whisper, a piercing pain in Jack's neck. As his vision quickly clouded he saw more shapes emerging from the shop and coming towards him. His friends fell. And he fell too, watched all the way by a presence inside that was so very far from human.

  And so he sleeps. The gravity of his future draws him onward, and it frightens him. But that's fine. It should frighten him, for a time. But soon it will entrance him as well.

  Nomad moved from one street to the next, casting her senses about now that Jack was asleep. If danger rose she would go to him, but not unless it was extreme, and not unless he could do nothing to counter it himself. He had to learn, and she was afraid of steering him the wrong way.

  Afraid of encouraging in him the same madness that had taken her.

  But I was different. I am the first vector, and I was there at the beginning. Evolve was so much stronger then, so much a concentrated mass of change. Confused, like an infant unsure of its abilities and potentials. Now, I am sure. I've been practising.

  From where she rested, she saw.

  In Peckham, a man smashed his way into a locked house and rifled through a dead family's photograph album. He cried, even though he did not know them. Nomad felt his sadness and cried with him, and the man's head snapped around as he heard the sound of a weeping woman.

  In Soho, three women used their combined powers to stalk a deer. There were only seventeen wild deer left in London—Nomad knew every one of them, and could place them all given the time and peace to concentrate. But she could not deny these women the fresh meat they craved. They were all pregnant, and their children would be important. Nomad knew that, and she tried to tell the embryos so. The women paused and gasped as their children kicked against the unfairness of things, and the mothers all felt a brief, intense moment of wretchedness.

  The deer escaped.

  She tasted blood on the air, and traced it back to a pub in the East End. An empty bottle of whiskey, a smoking cigarette, the taste of hopelessness on the air and the tang of sharpened steel, a knife on the floor, a man bleeding his last. Another precious one gone, and Nomad's fresh tears matched his own.

  Deep underground, a group of people were trying to make a home.

  Seven miles to the north, a spirit haunted a deserted tower, and wondered why it was there.

  Nomad moved on, passing through the toxic city she had brought into being. Every now and then she paused to lean against a wall. Inside her, something else was growing. This sickness was the only thing she could not touch or smell, see or know.

  It was a mystery to her, and Nomad was no longer used to mysteries.

  Jack thought perhaps they had blinded him. There were Choppers in the shop! But that did not make sense. The people in the shop had been Irregulars, their rendezvous had been arranged, and now he was bound and sightless, yet moving.

  They were carrying him on some sort of stretcher. He struggled against his binds, but his hands and legs were tied tight. He blinked and felt no pain, yet he still couldn't see.

  His memories swam, perception awash.

  I'm special now, he thought, and he searched for some way to probe outward, see what was happening and try to stop it. He found nothing. For now he was just a normal boy who felt like he was going to puke.

  Deep inside had been that presence, and he searched cautiously for it again. It was gone. It had left behind the scent and the sense of Nomad, and at that thought Jack realised that a hood covered his head, and he was not blind at all.

  He tried to speak, but something had been taped over his mouth.

  He heard voices. The stretcher was put down, and then someone spoke very close to his right ear.

  “Don't be afraid, Jack.” It was barely a whisper, androgynous. “We're going up, and you and your friends will be safe. There will be fear. You'll be scared. But trust me, there's no danger.”

  With a jolt they started carrying him again, and Jack prepared himself. When Rosemary had taken them down into the subterranean hospital to find his mother, a pair of twins had guarded the place, manifesting terrors in the minds of anyone who approached as a defence against the hospital being discovered. Jack had seen huge scorpions, Emily had seen moths, and Sparky for some reason had imagined giant, deadly chickens.

  But the sense of fear that settled quickly over him now was terrible and all-consuming. He would have cried out, had his mouth not been bound. He writhed, then froze. His heart hammered. Everything he couldn't see was going to eat him, everything he couldn't feel or hear would crush him, consume him. The anticipation of this was more terrible than the act itself might be, and he moaned so hard against his gag that he thought his brain would erupt.

  “It's safe, it's safe,” that calming voice whispered, but the darkness pressed into Jack, trying to drown and crush him down.

  It's safe, it's safe, he told himself. He sought something extra—a new sense, a burgeoning power—but he was simply Jack. Scared, lonely, worrying about his mother and sister held in the Choppers’ Camp H, fearful of his father, the dreadful Reaper. Scared little Jack. He started to cry, wishing his mother were there to hold and calm him as she had been for most, but not all of his years.

  I've only just found her, I can't lose her again!

  “We're there,” the voice said, and the hood was removed from Jack's head, his limbs unbound, and tape was ripped from across his mouth.

  His vision swam from the tears, and he squinted his eyes against the glaring light.

  “Oh, sorry.” The light
levels lowered. A man was revealed before Jack, silhouetted against the strip lights in the ceiling. He was tall and thin with a wild head of hair haloing his face, but his expression was in shadow.

  “Who are you?” Jack asked. He gathered his composure, grabbing onto the normality of what he saw after the terrors he'd been experiencing. “Why are you doing this to us?”

  “Because I have to. And my name's Breezer.”

  “Oh. Right. So what's your special power?”

  The man chuckled and moved to the edge of the room, leaning against the wall. Across the room Sparky and Jenna sat up as they were released, and Jack locked gazes with them. Sparky looked angry, but Jack knew that they were safe. There was no threat here.

  “No, that's really my name,” the man said. “Bill Breezer. I'm fifty-four. I'm a heating engineer. Or used to be.” He glanced at all of them, and Jack thought perhaps his smile was always there. He looked like someone who smiled a lot. Which meant that he was difficult to read.

  “Where are we?” Sparky asked. The people who carried them had retreated from the large room, though Jack saw two of them just outside the open door. The room itself was sparse—bare plasterboard walls, a polished floor with holes where something had once been bolted down. A few paler patches on the walls where frames had once hung. It had the air of somewhere abandoned.

  “If I felt comfortable telling you that, we wouldn't have knocked you out to bring you here.”

  “Thanks for this anyway,” Jack said. “The Choppers almost caught us three times, at least. We can't run forever.”

  “No,” Breezer said. “And Miller really wants you, it seems. Because…” His smile dropped slightly and he took on a faraway look, staring through Jack rather than at him. “Ahh. Wow. Nomad touched you.”

  “So you read minds,” Jack said.

  “I see histories. It doesn't amount to the same thing, but it can be more useful. You could have denied Nomad's touch, but I would have still known.”

  “You see through lies,” Jenna said.

  Breezer nodded. “You're all welcome here, of course. Even you, Jack.”

  “Even me?”