by Tim Lebbon
“This is Ruben,” Rosemary said. He lifted one hand in acknowledgement, never taking his eyes from Jenna's stomach.
“Can you help her?” Sparky asked.
“Yes. You'll need to give me some room, though.”
“Do you need anything?” Emily asked. “Water, something to wash your hands?”
“No,” he said. He rolled up his sleeves and entwined his fingers, and Jack saw for the first time how large and fat his hands were, with fingers like swollen sausages. After cracking his knuckles he glanced at Rosemary, then the others.
“Keep away,” Rosemary said. “You can watch, but don't interrupt him while he's operating. It's dangerous.”
“Operating?” Sparky stood from the sofa, relinquishing his hold on Jenna's hand with some reluctance. “He doesn't have any knives, or anything.”
Ruben smiled, held up his hands and waggled his fingers. Then he went to work.
Jack could not help watching, fascinated as well as disgusted. Emily stood beside him filming the whole thing, and once again he marvelled at her toughness.
Ruben's obesity and fat fingers belied his grace and deftness of touch. He felt around the wound first, using a soft yellow cloth from his pocket to wipe away the blood so that he could see the hole more clearly. His fingers trailed across the skin, barely touching, and Jack saw Jenna's stomach twitch as though tickled. Then he pressed slightly harder, flexing the skin and pushing down around the wound. Rosemary had not told any of them exactly what Ruben's gift was, and Jack was unsure of what to expect.
Ruben pushed his fingers into Jenna's stomach.
Jack gasped and stepped forward, but Rosemary reached out and grabbed his arm, shaking her head. She mouthed the word No, and held on until Jack nodded and stepped away again.
Initially it looked as though Ruben's fingers were pressed into the wound, following the route of the bullet through Jenna's guts and towards her spine. But then Jack realised that the big man's fingers had punctured the skin around the wound, though no fresh blood flowed, and Jenna seemed to be in no more discomfort than before. The bullet hole pouted and seeped a fresh flow of blood and clear fluid, and the purplish curve of her intestine once again showed at the rip.
Ruben was concentrating so hard that sweat speckled his balding head, soaked the back of his shirt and dripped from his nose and chin. When it mixed with Jenna's blood he seemed unconcerned, and Jack started to worry about infection, the germs on his hands, and—
He's stuck his bloody hands into her gut!
He glanced across at Sparky and saw that the boy was astounded.
Ruben lifted himself up slightly, hunching over Jenna before pushing deeper. Both of his hands were in her stomach now, her light skin stretched tight against Ruben's darker skin, and Jack could barely see the join. The man's hands worked inside her, tendons flexed on his wrists, and the muscles in his forearms performed their own complex, delicate dance as he probed deeper, and wider.
Jenna groaned, still unconscious, and tried to press her hands back against her wound.
“Hold her hands, please,” Ruben said. Sparky and Emily went to the sofa and did as he asked, stroking Jenna's skin and unable to look away. Emily still bore the camera in her other hand, training it on Ruben, the wound, Jenna's face, and then turning slightly to record Jack's reaction as well.
“There it is,” the man said, his voice barely a whisper. “Now then…” He leaned closer, more sweat dripping from his face, and Jack saw that his eyes were closed. He was operating by touch alone.
Jenna groaned and said something, too distorted by pain for Jack to make sense of.
“It's okay, girl,” Ruben said softly. “Almost done, almost out, and then the lady Rosemary will do her work.”
“Have you got it yet?” Sparky said, and Rosemary threw a stern look his way.
Ruben surprised them all with sudden movement, tugging his hands from Jenna's stomach, flinging them up above his head and speckling the ceiling with rosettes of blood. Something bounced from the wall and fell behind the sofa. The fat man tried to stand but he seemed weak, and instead he slipped from the sofa and sat on the floor, breathing heavily. “It's out,” he said.
Jack rushed to Jenna, kneeling beside Sparky and Emily and looking at her wounded stomach. The tear from the bullet was still obvious and horrific, but there were no other wounds to show where Ruben's hands had entered.
Ruben was looking at his hands, gently dabbing the smears of blood that speckled them like liver spots. There was nowhere near as much as there should have been.
“Where's the bullet?” Sparky asked. He crawled around the end of the sofa and looked behind it, stretching his arm into the gap between sofa and wall. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, standing with the prize in his hand. The bullet was half the size of his thumb, squashed and distorted by the impact on Jenna's flesh.
“Move aside, please,” Rosemary said. She nudged past Jack, waited while Ruben crawled across the floor, and knelt beside Jenna.
The girl screamed, hands pressing down onto her wound once more.
Rosemary put her hands on Jenna's stomach, grew very still, and her face went blank.
“That was incredible!” Sparky said. He'd hardly left Jenna's side since Rosemary had healed the wound, and now he sat at one end of the sofa with the girl's head in his lap. She seemed to be asleep now rather than unconscious, and she had already stopped moaning from the pain. “She was dying in front of us, and now…” He shook his head.
“It's just what we can do,” Rosemary said, but she was smiling.
“It's a miracle! No bloody wonder the Choppers are hunting you all.”
“Yes, well, I'd rather not be hunted,” Ruben said.
“They told us you were all monsters,” Emily whispered. “They showed pictures on the telly and the Internet. Pictures of…monsters.”
Ruben smiled and motioned for Emily to go to him. She sat beside him on the other, smaller sofa in the room.
“Do I look like a monster to you?” he asked.
“Of course not. You look like my friend Olivia's dad.”
Jack laughed, and Ruben honoured him with a smile as well.
“And is Olivia's father a monster?”
“No,” Emily said. “Though he's a bit gruff sometimes. And he smells of smoke.” She frowned. “I've always known they were lying, because Jack made sure I did. But they still tell everyone else that anyone left alive in London is a mutant. Dangerous.”
“Some are,” Ruben said, smiling ruefully. “Some are.”
“They met some Superiors back at the hotel,” Rosemary said.
“But they helped us,” Jack protested. “If it weren't for them…” He thought of Lucy-Anne, and the guilt cut in again, harsh and sharp. Is there someone that can heal me of this? he wondered, and he thought there probably was. But some things needed to be suffered.
“And if the Choppers hadn't turned up,” Rosemary said, “there's no saying what Puppeteer and Scryer would have done to us.”
“Maybe Lucy-Anne is with them!” Emily said. “Maybe they rescued her, and—”
“If they had, they'd have let her go again,” Ruben said. “Even we're looked down upon by them, but you…”
“We're normal,” Emily said.
“My girl,” Ruben said, “I'll tell you something, and whether or not your brother or friends agree, you listen to me because I know: there's no such thing as normal.”
“So maybe she went north to look for her brother?” she said.
“She's dead,” Sparky said. “She was mad, grief-stricken, no way she'd have come to her senses quick enough to hide or get out. No way.”
“We can't know that for sure,” Jack muttered, but a voice inside was whispering we can, we know, we're sure. He turned to Rosemary. “How safe are we here?”
“As safe as anywhere,” Rosemary said. “We use a house a couple of times, then abandon it. I hid here for a week a few months ago when the Choppers did a sweep through t
his part of town.”
Ruben grunted. “They took Horace, Pat, and Bethany, that time.”
“So, yes, it's safe,” Rosemary said, sighing sadly. “I think we should stay here tonight, give Jenna a chance to get her strength back.”
“But you've cured her,” Emily said. “Why can't we just go and find Lucy-Anne, then look for my mum and dad.”
Rosemary and Ruben swapped glances, and Jack saw their loaded look.
“What?” he asked.
“I've cured her, but she's tired from what she's been through,” Ruben said. “She needs a rest.”
“Not that,” Jack said. “There's something else, isn't there?”
“Your parents,” Ruben said. “Rosemary told me who you are, though I wasn't aware she'd gone out to get you.”
“Do you really want her to hear this?” Rosemary said, nodding at Emily.
Jack went to say something, but Emily beat him to it. “I'm older than I look.” She stood, left the sofa, and sat beside Jack on the floor.
“Okay then,” the healer said. “But you're not going to like it.”
“Tell me something new,” Jack said.
Sparky laughed softly. “The world's gone to shit.”
Rosemary started talking.
She told them all about Reaper. Emily glared at Jack.
“She only mentioned it just before she went,” he said. “I'd have told you.”
Her glare softened. “He's alive. Anything else doesn't really matter right now.”
“I'm afraid it does matter,” Ruben said. “Reaper is like those Superiors you met at the hotel, only much worse. He barely acknowledges that we exist, and as for outsiders…I've no idea how he'll react. He might just kill you, I suppose.”
“But he's our father,” Jack said.
Rosemary shook her head slowly. “Jack, Emily, his time as your father ended two years ago. The virus Evolve altered his mind, just as it altered the minds of everyone else in London it didn't kill. But with him and the Superiors, it changed so much more. He's a different man now. He'll know you, perhaps, but that might not mean anything. Although we hope…” She trailed off and looked across at Jenna, lying peacefully asleep with her head resting on Sparky's thigh.
“You never came looking for her dad, did you?” Jack asked. “You obviously knew about what he'd done, and what he'd had done to him. But you came looking for me and Emily.”
“Yes,” Rosemary said. “Because of Reaper, and because of what you might be able to make him do.”
“But you're telling me I can't make him do anything! He'll barely know us, that's the impression you're giving. What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“He's my daddy,” Emily said, and Jack could see that the raised voices were upsetting her. But this was something that he could not leave alone: another lie, another deception, and now he needed to know the truth. Lucy-Anne was gone, Jenna had almost been killed, and the time for being blind was over.
“We're desperate,” Ruben said, and the fat man looked suddenly vulnerable and hopeless. “The Choppers pick us off the streets one by one, take us away, and cut us up to…to look for what makes us what we are. We're just lab rats to them, not humans. Sometimes they capture a Superior, but usually it's us Irregulars.”
“Because the Superiors put up more of a fight?” Jack asked.
“Yes, because they're able to,” Rosemary said. “Many of us have powers that are benevolent by their very nature. Mine, Ruben's. But the Superiors…well, you've seen what some of them can do. And there are more.”
“So have you tried to hook up with them?” Sparky asked. It seemed so obvious to him. “Join forces to take on the Choppers? From what I've seen round here so far, you lot just hide out in little groups or alone, sneak around at night like bloody rats trying not to get trapped. Get active, not passive.”
“We tried fighting back on our own, first of all,” Ruben said. “Six months after Doomsday, all of us still trying to come to terms with what had happened to London, what had happened, and was still happening to us—”
“Still happening?” Jack cut in.
“Our talents are getting stronger all the time,” Rosemary said. “And that's scaring them. Their efforts to capture us are speeding up, and sometimes becoming more desperate.”
“So there we were,” Ruben continued, “cut off from the outside world, many of us separated from families outside or…bereaved.” He looked away, remembering someone Jack could never know.
“I'm sorry.”
Ruben shrugged. “There's been so much loss that, in a way, personal grief is even more tragic. Anyway…we tried. A group of us got together, and when the Choppers next sent in their armoured column we attacked them. Fire bombs, a few guns we'd found lying around, homemade explosives. And Peter. Remember Peter?”
Rosemary smiled, and Jack could tell that more sadness was yet to come.
“Peter was a young boy, a couple of years younger than you, who could direct bursts of energy from his mind. It cooked electrical circuits, blew computer chips. He called it his Mind Blower. He helped us, trying to take out the armoured vehicles’ navigational computers and communications. And it worked. But only until they shot him.”
“The attack went on,” Rosemary said, “and when they left we thought we'd driven them away.”
“Until the next morning,” Ruben whispered. “Gordon found him. You met Gordon. And I'm not sad that Gordon's gone now, because he never could really come to terms with what they'd done to Peter.”
Rosemary glanced at Emily.
“She's my sister,” Jack said. “She needs to know what we know.”
“Okay,” she said. “Gordon found Peter crucified on the front façade of Harrods. They'd used nail guns to pin him to the wall. Arms, legs, feet. Gordon was sure he must have still been alive when they did it, dying from his gunshot wound, because there was so much blood.”
“They took his brain,” Ruben said. “Cut off the top of his head and just…took it.”
“A warning?” Sparky asked.
Ruben snorted. “Yes, right. Just to tell us how little we mean to them as living things, but as carriers of all these new gifts…we're priceless.”
“So now most of us run, like you said, Sparky.” Rosemary nodded. “We run, and we hide, alone or in small groups. Trying to avoid the Choppers because we know what they do with those of us they capture.”
“You told me you wanted exposure,” Jack said. “That if we came in, saw everything, took some pictures and film, we could go back out and blow it all wide open.”
“There's no way they'd allow that,” Ruben said.
“But we have to try!”
Rosemary shook her head. “They can cover up what's happened here from the rest of the world. They can hide the existence of the new talents created on Doomsday—an evolved humanity, how incredible!—and the fact that those talents are growing every day. They can do all that, and keep the rest of the country ignorant of the truth, so do you really think a few pictures and bits of film will be believed?”
“Get them to the right places, sure,” Sparky said.
“Do you believe everything you see on TV?” Rosemary asked.
“’Course not. Load of bullshit.”
“That's my point.”
“But…” Jack shook his head, angered by the Irregulars’ lack of faith and belief in what was right, but unable to see a way through. “There's hope,” he said. “You have to hang onto that.”
“I lost it long ago,” Rosemary replied. “At least, until we found out about you. Because the only hope for the people left alive in London—several thousand of us, perhaps—and the powers we have, is for all of us to unite and fight our way out.”
Sparky laughed. “You're joking, right? Get together, you and all those Superior superhero wannabes, and start a war?”
“Not start a war,” the woman replied. “Finish one.”
“And can you give us any alternative?” Ruben asked.
“And you want me to go to my father, this Reaper you talk about, and persuade him to do this?” Jack asked.
“In a nutshell,” Rosemary said. “We tried, and he turned us down. You're our last hope.”
“But you don't believe he'll even care.”
“Not anymore.” She shook her head, wretched, tortured. “Our last hope is almost hopeless.”
Jack sat back against the wall and sighed. He looked at the ceiling and saw a fine network of webs, and in the corner sat a small, fat spider. It was waiting for unwary flies to become caught in its net. And if a dozen flies ganged up on it, the result would simply be a fatter spider.
“So how did you find out about Jack and Emily?” Sparky asked. “Someone with a people radar? Some bloke who can sniff paternal genes across hundreds of miles?”
“No,” Rosemary said, “their mother told me about them.”
“My mother,” Jack said, and he smiled. He thought of Sparky immediately and felt bad, but his friend was looking down at Jenna's face. Now that he knew his parents were still alive, the idea of exposing the lies of the Toxic City seemed even more pressing. Because if he had discovered they were alive only to lose them again—either to the Choppers, or if his father disowned them—Jack did not think he could mourn a second time.
“I need to see her first,” he said. “You can take me down to where she is?”
“Tomorrow,” Rosemary said, her face flushed. “So you'll do it? You'll go to Reaper?”
“I'll go to my father, yes. How will you find him?”
“He's not difficult to find.”
“Then why don't the Choppers come and take him?” Emily asked.
“They've tried,” Rosemary replied. “Often. None of them ever come back.”
My dad's a killer, Jack thought, but the idea was not as reprehensible as it should have been. Perhaps in his mind, he was already viewing his father as a radically changed man. It had been two years, and when they met they would be strangers. Maybe that was the best way for whatever future there was between them to begin.
