Contagion (Toxic City Book Three)

by Tim Lebbon

  “Movies you can control yourself?” she asked.

  “Sometimes you're the director, yes,” he said. “But that never lasts.”

  “I don't understand.” She thought of Rook falling into that pit, her dreaming the events again in time to warn him, thinking she'd saved him from that fate. Then he'd fallen again, and the same terrible death had come to claim him.

  “I tried so many times when I was your age,” he said. “But changing things in your dreams only bleeds over into reality a little, and those bleeds are soon cleared up.”

  “What are we going to do?” she said, hopelessness washing over her. “What am I going to do?”

  “Survive,” Andrew said. “You're why I'm still here like this. It's difficult. And once you're safe, I can stop dreaming at last.”

  Survive…stop dreaming… Her brother was a ghost, and Lucy-Anne remembered walking across that strange landscape on London's outskirts, the place where countless bodies had been buried, and knowing that beneath her feet lay her mother and father. The certainty had been shocking, but she'd known it was true because she had already dreamt it. Her life now was starting to feel like one long dream. Her imagination had always taken her to strange places, and sometimes she'd found it teasing her when she could not recall whether a memory was a dream, or vice versa. Many times through her childhood she'd remembered going somewhere with her family that no one else recalled, or believed an event was a dream when her parents and Andrew had very clear memories of it. She'd never thought anything of it. It had felt natural. It was ironic that now she was starting to understand herself and how she dreamed, it felt more alien than ever.

  “I'm exhausted,” she said. “I can't run forever. I need to…I have to…” To dream, she thought. As she pulled away from Andrew and her surroundings, she could not be certain whether she was falling asleep, or waking up.

  People cry out. Flames roar. Someone is wailing as they stagger back and forth across the road, grasping at guts drooping from a terrible wound in their stomach. Their features and hair are burnt away, but Lucy-Anne recognises the clothes.

  Nomad is running across the street towards her. She jumps a blazing motorcycle, leaping further than is possible, and barely seems to touch the road as she lands and rushes on. She is the focus of movement in the street, the eye of the storm, and all flames lean away from her.

  Lucy-Anne holds up her hands and tries to speak, but her voice has been silenced. My dream, this is my dream, and I can change everything!

  But though she knows that she has been here before, she has no control over the scene. She cannot quench the flames, nor can she divert Nomad from her course. Perhaps they have been heading towards this meeting since Doomsday.

  Gunfire sounds in the distance, voices, screams, and nearby the pounding of heavy footsteps.

  Turn away, she thinks, but Nomad runs onwards. Step aside. But the strange woman is determined.

  Lucy-Anne opens her mouth, but cannot scream as Nomad runs into her and knocks her to the ground. She tries to punch, but her arm remains by her side, not obeying her dream.

  Nomad raises a fist and brings it smashing down on Lucy-Anne's throat.

  A burst of light—

  The Thames flows sluggishly before her, and to her left she can just see the curve of the London Eye above some buildings. She looks around in a panic for Nomad, knowing that when she sees her the blast will come. There is no stopping it. A sun will grow in London and consume everything, and however much Lucy-Anne wills her dream to change, can she really confront such power?

  Nomad killed me, she thinks, feeling the impact on her throat, pressing her hand there, and then she sees her friends. She bursts into tears because they are so solid, so there. They are approaching the river with several other people and they come with purpose. Jack looks older than before, and there's something about him that reminds her of Nomad.

  They are much further along the riverbank, and closer to her she sees a group of Choppers squatting down behind concrete benches and a fallen wall. They are watching. And aiming.

  We have to go, a voice says. She turns and Andrew is there, walking along the riverbank past a line of long tables covered with the swollen, rotting remains of books. Lucy-Anne, you don't have long.

  But…

  She looks at Jack and her friends again, and the other people, and the Choppers slowly standing, ready to fire.

  But not now!

  Andrew has reached her. He looks more real now than he did back in the reality of London. Perhaps this is how she will best see him from now on—in dreams.

  They talked for half an hour, eating at the same time. Sparky put away three burgers.

  While others talked, Jack cruised his mindscape, probing here and there, tasting potentials unknown and powers already dealt, but he could find nothing that might help him locate Miller. If he'd had a drop of the man's blood, or a shred of hair, or an item that had been of sentimental value to Miller, then maybe he could have used one of his fledgling talents to zero in on the man. But he had nothing but a memory of his brutality, evident in the sad form of Rhali. She sat with Jack and shared his warmth, and Jack felt something strong growing between them. Theirs had been a relationship of contact, not words. He found that fundamentally beautiful.

  Without any means to find Miller, they could only go to look for him. Breezer would come, and he would bring Guy Morris, the man who could control a person's actions with a whisper. Order every Chopper to drop their weapons, he would mutter in Miller's ear. And he would.

  “Camp H,” Fleeter told them after a while. She sounded confident. “Best place to look if you've no better leads.” It was all she contributed to the conversation. Jack went to ask her how she knew, but there was no need. She was Superior, and still enjoyed acting it.

  They gave themselves until six p.m. to find Miller and attempt to ensure a safe exit from London. After that, with six hours left until detonation, they would have to rush the Exclusion Zone one way or another. Jack tried to shut out images of thousands of people crossing those bombed, flattened areas and being mown down by machine-gun fire.

  He still found Fleeter fascinating. He had seen her killing in cold blood, and yet now she was here, and she seemed different. She looked exhausted, but there was something else about her as well. A brightness, as if she had discovered life again. She'd told Jack about how she'd guided his mother and Emily out of London, and how for a while she'd taken a walk out there, seeing normal people doing normal, everyday things, unaware of the dreadful events just twenty miles from where they lived. This, she'd said, was why she had returned to Breezer and his people. She wanted to help.

  She claimed no allegiance with Reaper. But she was still a monster.

  Jack would never forget the look in her eyes when she killed, and he could never fully trust her.

  From the moment they stepped out into the fresh air once again, Jack knew that something had changed.

  “Least we didn't have to jump from the roof this time,” Sparky said.

  “Pity,” Jenna said. “I enjoyed that so much.”

  “You did, really. Secretly. Deep inside, you want me to carry you upstairs and throw you off.”

  “You. Carry me up forty flights of stairs. I'd like to see you try.”

  Sparky grinned and glanced at Jack. “He could.”

  “I'm not Superman,” Jack said. But no one replied to that, and he wondered what everyone really thought of him. He still wasn't sure what he thought of himself. He feared the potential he carried inside, and worried that they were untried, untested, and liable to backfire if he used them all too rashly. But perhaps it was merely a question of confidence. Maybe he needed to grow used to bearing such power.

  Time would tell. And as he breathed in the strange London air and sensed the changes occurring, he knew that he would be testing more powers very soon.

  “Something's different,” he said.

  “Spidey senses tingling,” Sparky said.


  “What is it, Jack?” Rhali asked. She touched his arm, held his hand. She'd not eaten much—said she was not used to such food, and that in captivity they had sometimes forgotten to feed her for days. But she already seemed stronger.

  “Can't you feel it?” he asked them all. Sparky and Jenna walked together, Rhali was with him. Fleeter strolled slightly ahead of them, automatically taking the lead. Breezer and Guy Morris accompanied them, quiet and tense. They never liked travelling in the open like this.

  “No,” Breezer said as if stating the obvious.

  Jack was not aware that he was using any particular power. Between blinks he searched inside, but he'd touched no star, and there was no taste of Nomad on his tongue. Perhaps using what she had given him was becoming second nature. But that made him wonder just what he was turning into.

  “Rhali,” he said. “You sensed it.”

  “I still sense movement to the north,” she said. “And moving closer.”

  “But whatever's coming towards us is different,” he said. “Not…human.”

  “Oh, dandy,” Jenna said.

  Jack looked around at the high buildings, absorbed the silence. “The whole city's holding its breath.”

  “We need to move,” Breezer said, eyes wide. “And quickly.”

  “What is it?” Jack asked.

  “The north. That's where the monsters went after Doomsday. Not many people go up there, and some who do don't come back.”

  “Monsters?” Jenna asked.

  “Evolve caused physical changes in some people,” Breezer said. He nodded at Fleeter. “You know.”

  “I only know the stories,” she said. “Wolf men. Bird people. Flesh eaters.”

  “Oh, super,” Sparky said.

  “And now they're moving into the city,” Rhali said.

  “Oh, even more super.”

  Rhali breathed deeply, clasping Jack's hand tighter for support. “There's a small group a mile away,” she said. “Moving…too quickly.”

  “Right,” Jack said. “The river. A boat. Let's go. Fleeter?”

  Did she looked a little afraid? He wasn't sure. Such a look might have been another version of her smug smile, or a trick of the light. But just before she flipped out with a smack! and went to check their route, she locked eyes with Jack, and he saw something dark staring back.

  They headed for the river. Jack wondered why no one had mentioned the north before, and the people and things who lived there. But he supposed there had been no need. London was a vastly changed place, and it could be that the north had become as remote as the outside world. When he had a chance, he would ask Fleeter about it.

  They moved as silently and quickly as possible. He saw things that days ago would have traumatised him for life, but which now were merely another part of the landscape. Two withered, dried shapes hung side by side from nooses suspended from second storey windows. A pram sat in the middle of the road, a mess of blankets and clothing inside, mother dead on the road with her skeletal fingers curled around one wheel. A bus had driven into a DVD store, and the silhouettes of its dead passengers were just visible through the dusty windows.

  “No one buried them all,” Rhali said. Jack was surprised, and then he remembered that the Choppers had caught her soon after Doomsday. She'd been shut away since then.

  “There was no one left to do it,” he said. “London is their mausoleum.”

  A clap! and Fleeter reappeared beside the bus. She projected her usual aloof smile, but swayed where she stood, reaching out to the bus for balance. She closed her eyes for a moment, breathing deeply.

  “We're clear from here to the river,” she said. “No Choppers. But what's coming from that way isn't safe.” She nodded back the way they'd come.

  Both Sparky and Jenna looked at Jack expectantly. He in turn looked at Breezer and raised his eyebrows.

  “You know what Guy can do,” Breezer said. Jack nodded. He'd seen the small, thin man in Camp H telling the Choppers to drop their weapons. “Whether his powers of suggestion will work on whatever's coming down from the north…” He shrugged. Beside him Guy remained silent, offering nothing.

  “Guess it's all on you, then,” Jenna said to Jack.

  “I don't want to kill anyone else,” he said.

  “You might not have—” Fleeter began, but Jack cut her off.

  “I'm not like you! Come on!”

  They moved less cautiously than they would have normally, trusting Fleeter's observations, and soon they were closing on the river. Breezer said he and the Irregulars kept two boats moored there, engines services and fuel tanks full, just in case they were ever needed. But they hadn't started the motors in over a year. Too noisy, too risky.

  Close to the river was an open square, landscaped and with several large stone sculptures on marble plinths. The sort of place office workers might have come to for lunch, and tourists might have chosen to have their pictures taken with the river and London skyline in the background. An ice cream van sat in one corner on flattened tyres, a line of bodies sprawled on the ground before its open window. It illustrated again the speed with which disaster had befallen London. In the distance, on the other side of the river, Jack could just make out the upper third of the London Eye, its graceful arc marred by the damage from the helicopter crash that had started everything.

  “They're coming,” Rhali said, and moments later four shapes burst from a side street across the road from the square.

  “What the hell are they?” Sparky said. No one answered. Everyone drew close together and squatted down, sheltering behind a sculpture but knowing that it would not protect them for long.

  Jack probed inward and prepared himself, balancing two talents, ready to use either. His heart hammered and he felt sick. Even though these things no longer looked quite like people, the thought of killing them was horrible.

  A woman wore flowing clothes, but they did nothing to camouflage her lengthened limbs, or her scaled skin. Her eyes shone with a purple membrane, and her teeth were long and crowded into her mouth. She hissed as she ran by, tongue tasting them on the air. A man followed, bounding on hands and feet. He was naked, body elongated. Long spines protruded from his back, and on either side grew rudimentary wings. Blood dripped down his side, and when he roared it sounded full of pain. He followed the woman, away from them and towards the river. But the other two arrivals slowed as they crossed the square. The two women hooted to each other as they both turned to stare at the huddled group.

  “Don't think much of yours, mate,” Sparky whispered, and Jack almost guffawed with nervous laughter. But he had to be in control. Everyone here was depending on him.

  The women's skin was so pale it was almost translucent, bodies incredibly thin, breasts reduced to nothing. There was something fluid about them, both in the way they moved and how they looked—as if their skins contained molten innards, rather than flesh and blood. They hooted again, and countless tiny tentacles extruded from their forearms and palms, waving as if caught in a breeze.

  “Do you think—?” Jenna began, and then both women roared and came at her. Their inhuman voices cried hunger.

  Jack stood and pointed at them, keeping his arms and shoulders relaxed, and as he exhaled both women were lifted from the ground. He held them there using the talent he'd first seen in Puppeteer, and he felt the potential thrumming through his arms—he could throw, squeeze, crush them. They thrashed and squirmed, and one grasped hold of the sculpture. Her tentacles flexed and curled around the concrete, pulling hard, but Jack only felt the slightest tension. His power was not muscular.

  “What now?” Rhali asked.

  “Ice cream van,” Jack said. “Doors.”

  Sparky, Jenna and Breezer rushed to the van and tugged open the driver's door. Jenna winced back at whatever was inside, but Sparky turned and gestured to Jack.

  Jack started walking, still pointing, and the two strange women drifted through the air before him.

  “Stand back,” he said, a
nd he guided them in through the door.

  Breezer slammed it shut.

  “Stay in the van,” Guy said, and Jack felt an intimate, sickening sensation inside his head. If I was in the van, I'd stay inside, he thought. He knew at that moment that he could bear that talent as well, given time. Its star was open to him.

  But as well as their bodies, these women's minds were sufficiently altered from human to apparently make them immune to the man's words. They kicked and banged at the door as Sparky shoved it closed. Thin tentacles squirmed through the lock and around the door's edge, and Jack had only moments to reach out with his mind and snap the locks closed. He did the same for the other door, and also the wide hatch that led from the cabin back into the ice cream van's rear area. He didn't think it would hold the women for long. He caught a brief glimpse of one of their inhuman faces at the window, and he thought perhaps they wanted to feed.

  It did not bear thinking about, and they all ran as one from that place of sculptures and danger, sprinting across the wide paved walkway and towards the Thames.

  “Which way?” Jenna asked Breezer. He pointed left. There was an iron fence lining the river, but five hundred feet away Jack could see a break in the fence and a walkway leading across to several pontoons. Two of them sat unevenly in the water, the large boat moored to one resting on a slant on the river's bed. But another pontoon floated upright, and he thought he could see the two boats Breezer had mentioned.

  From behind them they heard glass smashing. The trapped things would be out in moments. Jack was not afraid of being caught by them, because he would not let that happen.

  He was afraid of killing them.

  “Jack!” someone shouted. He looked around, wondering who they'd left behind, but they were all there. As he caught Sparky's eyes, his friend's mouth fell open in shock.

  “Jack!” the voice called again, and then he recognised it. Lucy-Anne.

  She was along the path from them, running and waving frantically. There was someone with her…or was there?