Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City)

by Tim Lebbon

  And yet…

  He looked down at the roofs and streets passing below, and the parks and squares, abandoned vehicles, gardens, storage units, and factories, and then the River Thames…and all the while he felt watched.

  But these were not Nomad's eyes.

  “Let's put it down!” Jack shouted.

  “Er…” Sparky said. “Right. Yeah. Down.”

  Jenna kept her eyes squeezed shut and maintained the same position, and Jack thought it best to leave her until they had landed.

  He scanned ahead and below them, trying to spot a safe landing site, trying also not to think about their combined weight this thing was not meant to carry and the impact they might suffer on striking the ground.

  As if responding to his doubts the hang glider dropped suddenly, Jack's stomach turning, Sparky shouting, and from his right Jack heard Jenna's low, pained groan.

  Sparky fought with the controls, tongue sticking from the corner of his mouth as he concentrated on steering them away from the face of a department store, then edging them to the left again as a tall aerial loomed atop an office building. The aerial slapped the aircraft a foot from Jack's leg, smashing a strut into fibreglass shards. They lurched, then started banking to the left.

  “Going down on the road,” Sparky shouted.

  “Watch out for the bus!”

  Sparky did not reply, too busy concentrating. Jack held on tight. He had brief visions of the wheels disintegrating, the aircraft coming apart, and the three of them rolling and scraping across the tarmac, slamming against vehicles or buildings, their broken, dead bodies eventually rotting where they came to rest. He did not believe they were destined for such a pointless ending, and yet he was only too aware of the vagaries of fate.

  The wheels struck the ground and they bounced, twisting to the left, striking again, and during the second bounce Sparky twisted them to the right, ensuring that the next impact took them past a bus slewed across the road. The front wheel struck the kerb, but by then their speed had drastically lessened.

  Jack let himself roll ahead of the hang glider. As he came to rest on the pavement he took a moment's pause, looking up at the clear blue sky and enjoying the brief silence.

  “Thank you for flying Sparky Airways,” Sparky said. “Please ensure you have all your belongings. Apologies for the bumpy landing. I can confirm that the pilot shit himself.”

  Jack sat up and grinned at his friend. Sparky smiled back, then shrugged as if it was nothing.

  “All in a day's work, eh?” Jack asked.

  Jenna was slowly releasing the strut and unwinding the strap from around her arm. She wiped absently at where it had chaffed her skin raw, smearing blood, then stood on the solid ground. Her knees bent a little, and when she reached out for balance Sparky grabbed her hand. She nodded, stood upright, and looked around, as if only just waking from a deep sleep.

  “Jenna?” Sparky asked.

  “Sparky,” she said, her voice a croak. “If you ever do that again, I'll slit your throat in your sleep.” Then she let go of his hand, turned around, and vomited on the pavement.

  Jack frowned and stood. And even though his girlfriend was puking, Sparky saw Jack's expression, and recognised that something was wrong.

  “What?” Sparky asked.

  “Ever feel like you're being watched?” Jack asked. He scanned their surroundings—the bus slewed across the street, other cars parked along the road on flat tyres, the silent façades of buildings on both sides. Shopfronts were smashed, burnt out, or the windows were dusty and dirty, hiding anyone or anything that might be watching from inside. A pavement café was a mass of overturned timber tables and rusted chairs. Along the street, an Underground entrance was a burnt-out mess, as if a great fire had belched from beneath London. The taint of fire was still on the air. A breeze rustled litter along the street. Dark circles of chewing gum speckled the pavement around him. He saw and sensed all these things, yet the overriding sensation was of being observed.

  And it was not Nomad. Her memory in his mind was already a familiar feeling. This was something else. Something other.

  “All the time,” Jenna said. She seemed a little better, and was allowing Sparky to hold her upright, one arm around her waist.

  “No,” Jack said. “By someone particular.”

  “This one of your powers?” Sparky asked.

  Jack shook his head, though he was unsure. “Sixth sense.”

  “Prickly-neck feeling,” Jenna said.

  “Yeah,” Sparky said. “Tingly balls.”

  “We should be moving,” Jack said. “We covered, what, a mile?”

  “I reckon two,” Sparky said.

  “So we put more distance between us before we take a rest,” Jack said.

  “And you know how to find your father?” Jenna asked.

  “I'll figure it out,” Jack said.

  He saw the look passing between Sparky and Jenna, and turned away. He was already feeling more distant from his friends, and not because of their growing closeness. He was becoming more and more different.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let's run.” Jack led the way. They passed the bus and a wrecked van hidden behind it, and Jack caught a glimpse of a dead face following him from the driver's window. He gasped with shock, then saw the hollow gaze of a skull. It had been picked clean by carrion creatures and it leaned against the window frame, grinning as they ran by.

  Perhaps the bus was full with passengers who would never arrive at their destination. He had no wish to see.

  He heard his friends’ footsteps behind him. As he ran he tried to analyse the sense he had of being watched, and why it felt so strong. This was not a new power, he was certain. Perhaps it was merely a self-perpetuating idea that became more definite the more he thought of it.

  As they approached a confluence of three roads he was looking up at the buildings, some windows smashed and some dusty and closed, searching for the face of their watcher. Doing so meant that he didn't see the Choppers.

  “Jack!” Sparky shouted.

  There were three blue-painted vehicles powering along a road towards them, each of them large enough to hold six Choppers. The front vehicle, a Jeep, bore a heavy angled plough, and it shoved an abandoned BMW convertible aside with barely a pause.

  They were a hundred yards away when brakes screamed, and the windscreen of the Jeep shattered into a glittering, blood-red haze.

  Lucy-Anne's fascination with Rook was growing by the minute. And though she was seeing some terrible things, she could not deny that she was also enjoying her adventure. That's mad, she thought. This isn't an adventure, it's a disaster. But she was happy to deny her inner voice.

  “What's your story?” she asked him as they left the Transport Museum.

  “Mine?” Rook looked at her in surprise.

  “I'm putting my trust in you,” Lucy-Anne said. “You're taking me into the north of London.”

  “I haven't said I would yet,” he said, but the ensuing silence between them spoke volumes. She already knew that he was interested in her. Now she wanted to know why.

  “This way,” he said, nodding along the street. “Let's keep moving and I'll tell you as much as I…” He started walking, and Lucy-Anne followed. Rooks drifted above them, like shadows of a shattered night. Much as I want to? she thought. Or as much as I remember?

  “I was living in Collier's Wood with my mother. Dad left a few years ago. Met a stripper in Soho, fell in love, took her to live in Cornwall.” He grinned without humour. “Sordid, eh?”

  Lucy-Anne did not reply. She was finding it strange enough imagining Rook with a mother, living in a house. Something normal for this extraordinary boy.

  “When Doomsday hit, me and David were on the way home from school. We'd stopped at a pizza place and were eating with some friends. Heard about an explosion at the Eye, didn't think much of it. Bit of a shock, but we were just kids, you know? There've been bombs before. So we were just eating and messing around, and t
hen we left and started for home. There was me and David, and…” He frowned, shrugged. “A few friends. Can't remember their names anymore.

  “It wasn't ’til we passed Collier's Wood tube station that we saw something weird. Loads of people rushing from the tube. They all looked scared, panicked. Most of them were on their phones, not looking where they were going or communicating with anyone around them. A fat guy was hit by a car. No one stopped, no one seemed to care. So we took off towards our street, our friends tagged along—they lived past the end of our street, usually came into our place for a play on the Wii or something after school. At the end of the street, they just…dropped. Hit the pavement. One second they were walking with us, the next they fell.”

  He was silent for a while, and Lucy-Anne tried to imagine this strange, deadly boy playing computer games and walking home from school with friends. They were such mundane activities that she could not make the connection. But Rook's expression made it for her; she had never seen him looking so human.

  “A load of pigeons gathered on the rooftops took flight and flew in tight circles above us, like living tornadoes. David looked terrified. I knew it was him—I'd known for a while about what he could do, or some of it—but he'd always been afraid. I reached for him to…hold his hand, or something. But they were falling everywhere. Along the street from us two cars crashed head-on, and another flipped over onto its back and smashed down the front wall of a house. There was a really big explosion, and screaming, and then my vision started blurring. David grabbed my hand. I passed out.” Rook held up one hand as if to illustrate his brother's touch, but then Lucy-Anne realised that he had called a halt. A rook drifted down to land on his shoulder, he tilted his head, and the bird took off again.

  “It's okay,” he said. “Irregulars. Come on.” They walked on, past the entrance to an indoor market and a jeweller's with rings and necklaces still scattered on the pavement amongst broken glass. Lucy-Anne looked around but saw no one watching them. Whoever it was the birds had seen must have been hiding.

  “What happened when you woke up?”

  “Everyone was dead,” Rook said. “It was like…waking in another world. London was mostly quiet. Some shouts, screams, from a couple of people stumbling about. We never saw any, though. I suppose we were lucky. We had each other. So we went home. And our mother was dead. Sitting in her armchair, and the TV was still on, then. An advert for washing powder. Her cup of tea was still warm.

  “After that things are hazy. Time seems weird. We stayed together, I know that. Outside was terrifying and horrible. So silent, and when there were voices, they were screaming or mad. It might have been a couple of days or three weeks, living in our house almost as normal. David made food, washed up, and we dressed in clean clothes every day. And when the TV and radio were off, and the Internet couldn't connect anymore, and David's mobile had no signal and after we'd buried Mum in the back garden, under the thornless rose bush she'd planted by the back gate so that we didn't prick ourselves on it when we were little…after that, when we did start thinking about leaving, a man told us not to.”

  “A man?” Lucy-Anne prompted when he seemed to drift off.

  “A black man. He looked like he was a hundred years old. I think I'd seen him before, selling flowers at the local market on Saturday mornings. He came down our street at nine forty-three every morning. Same time, exactly. He called himself a crier, like an old town crier, you know? And he told us to stay where we were, because everything was terrible. Told us stories. We didn't believe them, of course.”

  “What sort of stories?”

  “I'm sure you can guess.” He stopped walking and looked at a swathe of graffiti across a shop's side wall. It was a strange mixture of symbols and images, as if written in an alien language.

  “So we stayed at home, and then I discovered that I could…” Rook waved one hand around his head, and seven rooks circled above them for a few moments before drifting apart once more. “It was amazing to me, and strange to David. His own powers were so much greater than they'd been before, and he couldn't handle it. The day the black man didn't come, David went out. He was picked up by the Choppers.”

  “Do you know what happened to him?” she asked. Rook glanced back at her, his eyes hard, and Lucy-Anne realised that she'd asked an intensely personal question. If he did know, and it was as awful as she feared, then she had no right asking him to relive it.

  “They killed him,” Rook said.

  “You…” She trailed off, unsure.

  “What?”

  “You're sure?” she asked quietly. “Only…maybe the Choppers were trying to help. In the beginning, at least.”

  Rook walked to the kerb and stopped, as if waiting for the motionless traffic to start moving again. “You think?”

  “Well, maybe. At first. I mean, I know what they do now. We've heard the stories, and everything. But I just don't want to believe they were doing that right at the start.”

  “Really?” He stared at her, then his expression softened a little. “I only wish you could see.”

  “See what?”

  “What my rooks show me. They saw. They followed him, because my powers were young, unformed, chaotic. It was David they were for back then, as well as all the other birds. But it was only the rooks that came back to me and shared what they saw. The Choppers grabbed him from a supermarket where he was trying to break in to get food. They bundled him into the back of a van, slit his throat, collected as much of his blood as they could. Then they cut off the top of his head and took out his brain.”

  Lucy-Anne blinked at Rook, unable to break his gaze.

  “The birds left him, then. Dead, by the Choppers’ hands.”

  “And you've been avenging him ever since,” she whispered. It was dreadful—this poor kid, barely older than her, made into a vessel of vengeance. A killer.

  “In a way,” he said. “I accepted right away that he was gone, because I already knew that I was changing, and the rooks were no mystery to me. I was becoming more like he'd been, for whatever reason. But it's more as if I was trying to bring him back. And now, with you…”

  “With me?”

  “Someone else special,” Rook said, stepping forward and touching her face. “Touched before Doomsday. Pure.”

  “Oh, I'm not pure,” Lucy-Anne said, shivering at his touch.

  “I've been waiting for you ever since David died.”

  “And Reaper? The Superiors?”

  Rook smiled, a terrible expression. “What I do serves them, and they can sometimes help me.”

  “You feel nothing for those Choppers you killed?”

  “They're not people anymore,” he said. “They're from outside. Another world.”

  “So am I.”

  “Yes. But you belong here.” He turned away from her and started walking again, and just for a moment Lucy-Anne felt under intense scrutiny. She looked up and saw several rooks sitting on window sills, a few more circling gently above, and every single one of them was gazing down at her. Their eyes, black and lifeless. Then they took flight to follow Rook, like dregs of his own psyche blown apart by Doomsday. Perhaps everything he did was an attempt to hold himself together.

  Later that afternoon Rook suggested that they rest in a house for a while. He said that moving farther north during the day was dangerous, and that entering the wilder parts of London would be better achieved under cover of darkness.

  “Isn't that when whatever's there comes out?” Lucy-Anne asked.

  “What, like vampires?” Rook was mocking her, but she would not rise to his bait.

  “It's just that night always feels more dangerous. And don't birds sleep at night?”

  “Not mine,” he said. “They do what I ask of them, whenever I ask. They'll guide us in, and we'll be shadows. Darkness will hide us.”

  The house Rook broke into had probably once been worth a million pounds, but now its fine furnishings and tasteful decor held no value when it came to survival. Th
ey tramped dirty shoes across cream carpet, and he told her to wait in the living room while he checked the rest of the house.

  Several rooks had entered the house with them, and one perched on the back of an easy chair, watching Lucy-Anne. She hoped she was being protected, but suspected it was more likely that she was being guarded.

  Trying not to look at the bird—it was unnaturally motionless, eyes reflecting nothing—she glanced around at the room, attempting to connect with the family that had once owned this place. She skimmed over the furniture, the paintings, the ornaments and photographs, because they were more a part of the house than whoever had used to live here. The objects that did affect her were those that spoke of a human touch. On the bookshelf, an open book lay face-down, never to be finished. On the floor beneath a small table, a children's toy car gathered dust, its brash redness subdued by time. A sheaf of papers sat on the table. A coat was draped across the back of the sofa, and a wallet hung half-out of the inner pocket. Half-finished things that would never be taken up by their owners again. They made her sad.

  Rook reappeared in the doorway, and the watching bird fluttered past him and from the room with hardly a sound.

  “Family's upstairs,” he said, glancing around the room. “We'll stay down here. Two sofas. I'll check the kitchen, see if any canned food's still edible.”

  Lucy-Anne only nodded, and as he left again she leaned across so that she could see the staircase outside. She felt no temptation to go up.

  As she heard Rook rooting through the kitchen cupboards she sat back in the sofa and breathed in deeply. She'd had one night's disturbed sleep since leaving her friends, and exhaustion was creeping in. Sleep lured her down, yet Andrew urged her on.

  “I will find you,” she whispered, and the room seemed to be listening. But what would she find? In the north of London, where even people like Rook chose not to tread and there were bad people, hungry and cruel, would the Andrew she might find be one that she wanted?

  A flutter, and three rooks entered the room. They perched in high corners and became as motionless as shadows.