Forgotten City

by Michael Ford

  “Dad said everyone had one of those,” said Kobi. “Or watches or glasses or even chips inside their bodies.” They looked at him blankly, and Kobi guessed that they had been told less about what life was like before Waste than he had. He passed out the candy bars.

  Fionn looked at his suspiciously.

  Kobi almost laughed. Candy was one of the main foods that didn’t perish, and over the years he’d eaten a lot. “Something tells me you’re going to like it,” he said.

  Fionn tore his open and took a tentative bite, but soon he was grinning from ear to ear.

  Kobi’s flashlight flickered. “Uh-oh,” he said.

  “Do you have any more batteries?” asked Asha.

  He shook his head. “Here, hold this.” He handed her the flashlight, stood up, and went back into one of the stores. The sweater would do. He tried not to panic—whenever the generator had packed up at the school, throwing them into blackness, his dad had said the dark was nothing to be afraid of. But down here it felt almost physical, a pure suffocating barrier. They might never find their way out again. He took a length of broken timber, wrapping the sweater tightly around one end, then doused it in lighter fluid to make a torch. When he lit it, the rich yellow glow of firelight spread through the eerie abandoned streets. At the same time, his heart rate began to slow.

  He felt a flush of pride as he imagined his dad congratulating him on his quick thinking. The flashlight gave out completely a couple of seconds later. Fionn and Asha looked relieved too. They ate another candy bar each.

  “Fionn says it’s peaceful here,” said Asha, her face bronze in the flame’s light.

  “He doesn’t seem to mind being up on the surface, either,” said Kobi.

  “Yeah . . . ,” said Asha, looking worriedly at Fionn. “I wouldn’t have guessed he would take to the outside so easily. Personally, I’m a fan of anywhere where there are fewer things trying to kill us.”

  Kobi nodded. He knew where the Waste was concerned that the situation could change in an instant. Survival was about being ready for those changes. “Never rest on your laurels,” Dad used to say. “There’s always work to be done.”

  “We need to make some spare torches,” he said. “I don’t know how long this will last.”

  Leaving Fionn with another candy bar, they went back to fetch more materials. Once they were out of earshot, sifting through the old clothes in the butcher’s shop, Kobi whispered to Asha.

  “What’s up with him anyway? Why can’t he talk?”

  Asha tossed aside a paperback book. “He could once. Something bad happened when he was younger. At Healhome.”

  Kobi remembered the feeling of anger, fear, and loneliness he’d felt emanating from Fionn during the vision of Healhome. He remembered what Niki had said about some kids not being as physically resistant as others. He peered out at Fionn, who was still quietly eating. Poor kid had probably seen more than one of his friends die. And if Asha was right about his condition, he was on borrowed time too. Kobi was starting to suspect that Fionn wanted to spend his last days free of Healhome: a place where kids slipped into death without ever having truly lived.

  They finished fashioning the torches, and Kobi told Asha he was going to look for exits leading to the surface. He made his way past Fionn. The younger boy was holding up his hands in the flickering light, making a wolf silhouette against the wall. “That’s great, Fionn,” said Kobi. That kid really can’t get enough of shadow puppets. Kobi carried on along the passageway. The torchlight gradually petered out the farther he went, and it was as he reached the limits of its illumination that he saw something in the roof ahead. The faintish green glow of natural light. He walked directly underneath and realized it was a skylight, crisscrossed with a metal frame. Greenery coated its upper side, but Kobi understood he must be looking at the overground city, and it was dawn.

  He was about to go back and tell the others when they came rushing up to him, firelight playing over their frightened features.

  “Kobi—something’s coming!” said Asha, gripping the dart rifle.

  13

  “MORE SNATCHERS?” SAID KOBI.

  Asha was breathing hard. “No. Something Waste-infected.” She threw a glance back the way they’d come. “It’s getting close.”

  Kobi heard a noise. A screeching, chittering sound, growing by the second. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from, but Asha’s attention seemed fixed in one direction. And as he stared too, fear eating at his heart, he saw in the torchlight the floor was coming alive with a mass of furred flesh. Rats. Some the size of small dogs, others perhaps a foot long. It was hard to make out their individual bodies as they clambered over one another in a seething torrent. Dozens of them. Asha fired a dart, but they kept coming.

  “Run!” said Kobi.

  Bumping into one another, stumbling over uneven ground, they turned and fled, but they’d gone just a few paces when Asha pulled them back. “More,” she said.

  And she was right. Another stream of rodents were closing from the other direction. Surrounded. Kobi’s skin crawled as he saw the full horror of the swarm. The Waste hadn’t only made these creatures bigger, it had malformed them too. Some were bald or covered in glistening sores. Others had two heads or hobbled lopsidedly on stunted legs. Others had overgrown teeth growing through their faces like miniature tusks.

  “Fionn, do something!” said Asha.

  The boy closed his eyes and thrust out both hands on either side like he was trying to hold back two invisible walls. Kobi felt a prickle through his body, like he could pick up the strange signals Fionn was sending out. And the rats did slow, as if momentarily stunned. But the effect was short-lived, and they scurried on in frantic waves.

  “Over here!” said Kobi, then took out the remains of the lighter fluid. He poured it in two lines on either side of them, fifteen feet apart, then held the torch to the ground. Flames licked across the floor, but only a few inches high. He drew his machete, and Asha took the ax. Fionn snatched the Taser.

  Now we know what took the survivors’ remains. . . .

  The rats reached the boundaries of the fire and paused, tumbling over one another. But almost at once, one of the leaders landed in the fire with a terrible squeal, rolling around in panic. The fire was extinguished in seconds.

  The remainder of the rats streamed over their dying kin. A scrawny, jagged-clawed thing threw itself at Kobi, who hacked it aside midair. He kicked another, before a smaller one latched on to his jeans and began to claw its way up. A shriek came from behind Kobi as one rolled past with the Taser prongs jutting from his neck. Kobi grabbed the rat from his waist and hurled it as hard as he could at a wall. It hit with a dull splat. Asha was spinning, trying to use the stock of the rifle to bash rats aside, but there were two fighting up her back, unreachable. Kobi sent them tumbling with a prod of the torch.

  The creatures flooded around Kobi’s ankles, and he felt the sharp sting of claws and teeth. He kicked and stamped as best he could, but for every rodent he killed or tossed clear, more swarmed after it. Asha tried to climb, using the ledge of a wall, but the rats simply piled over one another and jumped to reach her, and she fell back down into the melee. She swiped the ax, over and over in wide arcs, driving them back. Kobi ignored the ones on his own body, wading through with the torch at ground level, kicking and stamping. Some caught alight and charged blindly, setting fire to more. The bitter smell of burnt rodent flesh was all around.

  Then, inside his head, he heard the jolt of a barked command. “Look above you!”

  Kobi looked up and saw a two-headed rat with a wizened hind leg scurrying directly above, along a roof beam. It dropped toward him, and Kobi gave an upward swipe. The machete blade cut the creature in two and covered him in gobbets of blood and gore.

  “Fionn!” roared Asha. Kobi saw the boy had fallen to one knee and dropped the Taser. A rat had sunk its teeth into his forearm, and though he shook it violently, the thing wasn’t letting go. More were crawling
up his legs and lower body. He shot a desperate look to Kobi. Kobi’s scalp tingled in a burst of pins and needles. Though Fionn didn’t say a word, the young boy’s voice echoed inside Kobi’s head, like in a tunnel. “Help me!”

  In the same moment, a powerful, strange kind of fear gripped Kobi’s stomach. He realized, somehow, that it was not his own. He was feeling Fionn’s terror.

  He dropped the torch and tried to stagger across to help the young boy. Asha was coming from the other side. Dead and dying rats squelched and squirmed underfoot, and Kobi tripped, collapsing headlong into the morass. He felt rats covering him almost at once. He tried to stand, and through his panic, he saw Asha reach Fionn’s side and begin to rip off the marauding rodents. At the same time, she herself was swamped.

  We can’t win! thought Kobi. They’re going to eat us alive.

  A loud crash made him twist around. The skylight showered in shards of glass and something massive tumbled into the tunnel from above. What now?

  The creature landed, shaking more debris from its fur, then raised its head in a growl. Kobi took a heartbeat to understand what he was seeing. The wolf! From the school!

  It made no sense—it must have followed them for miles.

  The gray-furred predator set into the rats at once, crushing them beneath its paws and snatching them up with its teeth—two, three at a time. With vicious shakes of its head, it broke bones and tore at flesh. Kobi managed to stand, and attacked with his machete again, slashing until his arm ached. It felt like he’d been fighting for hours, but it must have been only a minute or so before hundreds of dead rats were gathered at their feet and against the blood-spattered walls. The remainder turned and fled as quickly as they had swept in, and their chattering died away into the darkness.

  It took a second or two before Kobi could even think, then he saw Asha was cradling Fionn in her lap. She looked up through tear-filled eyes. “He’s really badly hurt, Kobi.”

  Kobi struggled over, trying to ignore the pain across his body. The wolf shambled over too and lowered its enormous head to nuzzle at Fionn. Despite their grave situation, Kobi couldn’t help but wonder how the wolf had found them, and why it had come to their aid. It must have followed Fionn, and it realized he was in trouble.

  The boy was breathing shallowly, and his eyes were half-open, the whites a worrying shade of yellow. A sheen of sweat covered his forehead. His hands and forearms were badly bitten, and there were patches of blood across his torso too. But it didn’t look like any arteries had been severed. He just looked desperately weak, like he could lose consciousness any minute.

  “The rats have contaminated him with more Waste,” said Asha.

  He hasn’t got long, thought Kobi, with sudden awful clarity. He needs cleansers. Kobi hadn’t been able to grab any before they left the school. We need to get him to the lab, fast.

  “Don’t worry, Fi,” he said. “We’ll get you out of here.”

  His eyes met Asha’s. “How?” she mouthed.

  Kobi looked around in desperation, then pointed at the hole in the roof, where the wolf had burst through into the derelict street. The smoke from the fizzling torch was spilling out into the dawn of the city.

  “The lab can’t be far, but we have to get up into the city to see where we are.”

  Kobi stood and went to the skylight. The street was about twelve feet up. Kobi’s first attempt to make the jump fell well short. The wolf cocked its head, then padded over.

  “It wants to help,” said Asha.

  Kobi swallowed. “Are you sure?”

  The wolf pushed him out of the way, then lowered itself to the ground.

  “Go ahead, get on,” said Asha.

  Kobi shot her a wary glance. Easy for you to say.

  Taking a deep breath, he sank his hands into the thick fur and hoisted himself over the wolf’s back. It lurched to its feet sharply, almost throwing him off. But Kobi was closer to the ceiling and managed to loop his hands over the lip, pulling himself up to street level. Gusting sea air and a gray dawn greeted him. The skylight opened onto one of the streets a block back from the bay, under a tree-coated flyover beside the old docks. The harbor wall had been overwhelmed in places, undermined by the onslaught of virulent plant life. What remained leading to the water was a huge swamp of seaweed. The Great Wheel loomed a couple of blocks north. Dad said it had once been an amusement park ride, but now it listed to one side, coated with vines and the occasional tangle of a bird’s nest in its old cars.

  Below, Asha was tying a rope around Fionn’s armpits. She pulled it tight, then tossed the other end up. Kobi caught it. Bracing his feet on either side of the skylight, he gritted his teeth and then hoisted Fionn up. The injured boy groaned softly.

  Asha came next, leaving the wolf below. As she clambered into the open, she gazed around in astonishment at the windswept harbor, then began to unfasten the rope from Fionn.

  “Do you think the wolf can make it?” asked Kobi. He wasn’t sure he even wanted it to. There was enough to think about already.

  The wolf growled, bunched its hind legs, and sprang upward. Its plate-size front paws gripped the sidewalk, and for a moment its lower body scrabbled before it heaved itself up beside them. “Nice jump!” said Asha, stroking its manelike ruff. The wolf licked her hand with its thick slab of a tongue. Kobi couldn’t even imagine what his dad would have said.

  Asha stroked Fionn’s head. “How far to the lab?” she asked.

  Kobi took out the map from his back pocket. “About thirty blocks,” he said.

  The wolf lowered its head again, toward Fionn.

  “It wants to carry him,” said Asha. Kobi scooped up the boy and laid him carefully across the wolf’s broad back.

  They set off toward the waterfront, where the city’s looming towers opened onto the expanse of gray blue. Asha kept a hand on Fionn to keep him steady, and Kobi held his crossbow ready, just in case. When they reached the road that ran alongside the sea, they turned north.

  As they walked, Kobi kept his eyes peeled for any sign of movement. Occasionally he saw a Snatcher in the distance, but nothing came close. His head was throbbing dully.

  “You were pretty awesome in that fight,” said Asha.

  “You too,” said Kobi. “Remind me not to make you and your ax angry.”

  Asha chuckled.

  Kobi rubbed his temples.

  “You okay?” asked Asha.

  “Just tired, I guess,” said Kobi.

  Asha was silent for a while, and for some reason Kobi sensed she was uncomfortable.

  He heard other sounds—the shushing and slap of water on the dock, the whistle of wind.

  He looked out to the sea, where white crests frilled the choppy waves. A giant ferry, like a small island, rested up against the other side of the bay, but really, from here, there was no sign of the Waste or its effects. He could almost have been looking out from the city as it was, before the virus hit.

  “Kobi . . . ,” Asha said slowly. “Your headaches. You said they started just after your dad left, right?”

  He frowned at her. “Yeah.”

  “What changed when he left? Why do you think you started having them then?”

  He didn’t know what she meant. “Well, I was on my own. That was pretty different. Maybe stress?”

  “But did any of your routines change? To do with your health.” Her eyes were wide and focused as if she was seeing something obvious that he wasn’t.

  Kobi opened his mouth, confused, then closed it again as a sick feeling rose in his stomach. She couldn’t mean . . . “My vitamins. You think my vitamins stopped my picking up telepathic signals.” An icy stab rushed up through his chest. “They were vitamins! Why would my dad want to stop me from receiving anything telepathic? He didn’t even know Waste could do that to people!” His voice was raised. “No.” He shook his head. Asha just watched him.

  “Think about it, Kobi,” she said. “He didn’t want telepaths being able to track you. He didn’t want
us to find you.”

  “No!” Kobi shouted it this time. “You’re saying that Dad knew about you. About the Guardians. It’s just coincidence that my headaches started when he left. Or maybe it was a side effect he didn’t know about.”

  Asha curled down her bottom lip and nodded. “Yeah. Maybe. . . .”

  Kobi said nothing. They continued on in uncomfortable silence. “Well, we can ask him soon,” said Kobi, forging ahead, cheeks feeling hot. No, she’s wrong. My dad wouldn’t lie to me. He would have wanted us to find other survivors. Unless he knew the Guardians were dangerous. . . .

  As they crossed each block, past the old cafés and restaurants and apartment buildings, the Space Needle occasionally appeared, piercing the sky. Snatchers docked and swarmed, more than he’d ever seen before, but as tiny as flies from this distance. He thought CLAWS must have sent more in. What kind of resources did these people have? Who were they?

  Whoever they are, they won’t stop looking for us, he thought.

  He checked the map, looking for the quickest route, and spotted a set of narrow alleys a couple of blocks over called Pike Place Market. They could cut right through. He remembered his dad talking about it. Before the Waste came, it was a bustling place where you could buy fresh produce of all kinds. Fruit and vegetables just off the tree or out of the ground, not in a can ten years out of date. Kobi thought it sounded a bit weird, even though he’d read about such things and seen pictures. But his dad spoke about peeling an orange like it was the best thing in the universe. They turned inland.

  The sign for Pike Place, which read simply “Public Market Center,” had crashed down into the street, and they picked their way past its metal frame to the covered market itself. Old delivery trucks, spilling pallets and crates, had been left outside.

  The entrance was dark, with a few shafts of light where the roof had collapsed. The wolf sniffed as they approached.

  “You sense anything?” Kobi asked Asha.