Contagion (Toxic City Book Three)

by Tim Lebbon

  He cast his senses up and out and felt the movement of groups of people close to where they were, projected onto his perception as warm glows on a sea of ice. Those nearby were clear, while further away they became smaller and more remote. But it was the closer movements that interested him.

  Jack took hold of what he felt and travelled once again. He quickly focussed on one mass movement. There were perhaps eight of them, travelling in a loose group along the path of the river towards a bridge. He homed in on one, attaching himself to its heat and light and life.

  He found the star he sought and plunged towards it. As he did so, it became the mind of another.

  Jack had planned questions, sought answers, but both became abstract. This was like nothing he knew or understood, and for what felt like forever he tumbled and swirled in this alien place, trying to grab and hold onto something, anything, that made sense. It was only when he accepted that there was little sense to be made that his fall became more controlled.

  This was such an alien mind that he might as well have tried conversing with a tree, or a river. But there were still images here that he could perceive, and with some concentration, understand.

  He knew what it sought.

  “Jack? Jack!”

  Slap!

  Reality rushed in, a sickening sensation that was nothing like the gentle flow of waking up. Everything hit home, and when he quickly sat up sickness flooded his mouth. He leant sideways and spat it out, breathing shallowly, willing himself not to puke up everything else.

  “Gross,” Sparky said.

  “You slap me hard enough?” Jack asked.

  “Hey, gotta take the opportunities given to me. You're lucky I don't carry a hammer.”

  “Thanks, mate.”

  “Yeah. Well.” Sparky's voice barely hid his concern, and Jack looked up, making an effort to smile. It was difficult.

  “What did you see?” Rhali asked. She was sitting on a bench, looking weak and drained. He wondered whether he had taken anything from her.

  “They…” Jack paused, knowing that they were all listening, but unable for a moment to continue. “They'll still human, deep inside, though barely. Still have their loves and lives, hopes and fears. And yet…so different. Changed so much. And it hurts them.”

  “Good!” Lucy-Anne said. Her blank expression did not change, though her voice was filled with venom.

  “They can't help what they've become,” Jack said. “And they're doing their best. To survive. To find the bomb, and stop it.”

  “They know where it is?” Sparky asked.

  Jack nodded. “South of here, across the river. I saw their destination, and I think I recognised it. Visited it with school a few years back. Imperial War Museum.”

  “So they're all going there to stop it,” Jenna said.

  “To try.” Jack nodded and stood up, looking across the silent, dying city. “They barely have a concept of outside. London is their only home now, and they're doing their best to save it.”

  “Can they?” Jenna asked. “I mean, those women we saw didn't seem, I dunno…intelligent.”

  “I saw gargoyle people,” Lucy-Anne said. “Trying to fly. They had claws. And a woman like a dog, pissing against a tree. A man like a monkey. And the worm.” She looked up, but her expression did not change. “There was the worm that ate Rook.”

  “So he is gone,” Jack said softly.

  “I dreamed him well again, but it still took him in the end. I dream the future. Change it. And it only changes back again.” She frowned and ran her hand through her short hair. “I think that's what happens, at least.”

  “Did they kill your brother too?” Sparky asked gently. His own brother was dead in London, and Lucy-Anne would know that. Such loss was something else that had forged their friendship.

  “Oh no, Andrew's still…he's still around.” She glanced around the boat as if expecting him to appear. “He said he dreamed himself alive, so when he did die, he didn't quite go.”

  “He's a ghost?” Jenna asked.

  “I guess.” Lucy-Anne fingered a chain around her neck, looking out across the river.

  Jack had seen so much that he had little trouble believing in ghosts. But right now, wherever or whatever Andrew was did not matter.

  “Knowing where it is doesn't help us much,” he said. He looked at Fleeter sitting at the bow of the boat. She had been taking all this in without comment, smiling her annoying smile. “You're sure Miller's still at Camp H?”

  “No,” she said. “It was just an idea.”

  Jack felt anger rising, but he drove it down. He needed calmness now more than ever.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Breezer said. “We'll know soon enough, one way or another.”

  The bodies were still there. The ruin of Camp H seemed untouched since the brief, terrible battle of the day before, and the scene had a familiarity that made Jack's skin crawl. The metal containers in which Miller and the Choppers had made their base—a prison and vivisection centre for the Irregulars and Superiors they managed to capture—were crushed by the forces unleashed upon them. Several dead soldiers lay alongside one container, and scattered across the clearing in the container park were fifteen or twenty more corpses. It was difficult to tell exactly how many—Jack had seen them frozen by the Superior he'd helped rescue, then shattered into pieces by his father's deadly whisper. Those pieces had now thawed. Carrion birds were feeding on them, and he could see the red streaks across the concrete where some had been dragged away during the night.

  Miller sat in his wheelchair beside the ruined prison container. He was alone, and at first glance Jack couldn't tell whether he was alive. But he reached out with his mind and touched upon the chaos of Miller's thoughts, and as they emerged from between containers, the madman's eyes were upon them. He'd gathered dead soldiers’ jackets across his lap, around his shoulders and over his head. He was huddled down in his chair. Jack could only see a small pale spread of skin, and the glimmer of one eye. He might have been the Emperor from Star Wars, but if so he ruled a doomed empire.

  “Stay on your toes,” Jack said. “Rhali?”

  “I think we're alone now,” she said.

  “Could be a song there, somewhere,” Sparky quipped.

  Jack led the way. Breezer came with him, and behind them were Sparky, Jenna and Rhali.

  Fleeter had flipped out as soon as they'd moored and left the boat, saying that she was going to scout the way ahead. Jack hadn't even bothered trying to call her back. She had her own agenda.

  “That's far enough!” Miller called. There was something wrong with his voice; a growl, rough-edged.

  Jack laughed. “What, Miller? Have you got us covered?”

  “Monsters,” Miller muttered. His words echoed from the container piles around Camp H.

  “Yeah, right,” Rhali said. “We're the monsters.” Her voice was quiet. But there was fear and fury there, and Jack had never heard her so alive.

  “I said that's far enough!”

  Jack and his companions stopped.

  “Why?” Jack asked.

  “I don't want to be seen,” Miller said.

  “What did he do to you this time?”

  “Your father, you mean?”

  “Reaper,” Jack said. “He's no longer my father.”

  “Oh, he is, boy. And you've got it in you too. I can see it in your eyes, the way you stand. You're dripping with power, and when you use it, you'll become a monster as well.”

  Jack tried to blink away the memory of those three Choppers he'd killed. He was afraid Miller might see it.

  “Why aren't you dead?” Rhali spat.

  “I am!” Miller laughed. It was a horrible, high giggle, made more dreadful because his body and wrapped clothing barely moved at all.

  “We don't have time to piss around, here,” Jack said quietly. He started walking forward again, trying not to see the human parts scattered around his feet, and trying not to remember the terrible things he had seen in
side those containers. In the larger collection of containers, the research rooms where the unfortunates had been dissected and stored. And in the smaller unit, the prison where they'd kept those due for experimentation. Monstrous. Almost unthinkable. And the man responsible for all of it was this wretched thing before him.

  Jack's anger rose again. He'd already held a gun to this bastard's head and refrained from pulling the trigger. But he had greater weapons than guns.

  Far greater.

  “Stay back!” Miller said. A hand emerged from the clothing, palm out. Two fingers were missing, their stumps ragged and wet.

  Jack stopped. “I can help you.” The idea of fixing some of Miller's wounds was reprehensible. Yet even thinking that way gave Jack a sense of inner peace. I'm better than him, he thought. But there was nothing superior about that idea. It was a fact, and even entertaining the idea that he could help Miller was proof of that.

  “Help?” Miller said, and then he laughed again. He slumped in his chair as he did so, as if each time he exhaled he shrank a little more.

  “I can't help him,” Rhali said. Jack wasn't aware that she'd advanced with him, but he would not tell her to wait. She'd been through too much for that. There was no violence in her, but she still had rage to expend somewhere, somehow.

  When they drew close to Miller, and he threw back the jackets and hoods covering him, everything seemed to change.

  There was barely a human left. Reaper must have worked on Miller for some time after Jack and his friends and family had left, and perhaps some of his Superiors had taken a turn as well. The woman who could freeze flesh with a breath. The knife man. Perhaps someone who could pin life to something that should be dead.

  He wore a white surgical mask across his face, but it could not hide the mutilation. His ears had been torn off. One eye was missing, and both eyelids had been sliced away, leaving his remaining eye wide and white and frantic, and flowing with moisture. His nose was broken and caked with dried blood, and beneath the mask his jaw seemed to protrude too far to the left. It moved constantly, as if he were chewing cud.

  “Oh, my God,” Rhali whispered.

  Miller chuckled. “Like what you see?” He moved more clothing aside.

  Reaper had taken more from each of his legs, removing the left all the way up to the groin. His left arm was twisted and broken, thumb and three fingers removed so that only the middle finger remained. Perhaps Reaper had thought it an amusing gesture, though Jack doubted he had any humour left in him at all. Miller's shoulders were bruised and lacerated. There was nothing visible that was untouched, and no telling what horrors the bloodied, fouled clothing still hid. He stank. It was pitiful and sickening, but Jack looked deep for any shred of sympathy.

  “No,” Rhali said. “No, I don't like it. But you deserve it. Every cut and stab and gouge you've made on another innocent has been visited upon you. I could never hurt you, Miller, much as I want to. I kept my humanity, even through everything you did to me. The starvation, the deprivation. The humiliation. So I could never avenge myself on you. But I see you now…” She went close to him, too close for Jack's comfort, but Miller merely winced back into his chair. “And I hope it hurts.” Then Rhali turned her back on Miller forever and glanced sadly at Jack as she walked away.

  “Okay,” Jack said. He nodded at the ruined shell of the vivisection suite. “I think in there would be an appropriate place to talk.”

  “You're going to torture me?” Miller drawled, totally unconcerned.

  “No,” Jack said. “No, probably not.”

  There were still bodies inside. They might have died when Jack and Fleeter first pushed them over—when flipped, gentle movements would translate as incredibly fast, violent actions in the real world. But he thought it likely the Superiors had returned to finish the job. Jack averted his eyes, but the stench of rot was cloying.

  He wheeled Miller into the vivisection room. The metal table was stained with dried blood, and more blood was puddled where buckets had been kicked away from the drainage points. Walls were deformed, the ceiling crushed down, tools of torture scattered across the floor. Jack thought perhaps Miller had spent some time on this table at Reaper's hand.

  Breezer came with him and stood with arms folded across his chest. He could not hide his disgust at the man in the wheelchair, and it was not only at his appearance. Jack had not asked Breezer how many Irregulars he'd known who had been taken by the Choppers, but it was a fair bet that parts of some of them resided in sample jars in the next room.

  “So all this torture and pain and death, and what did you find out?” Breezer asked. “Was it worth it? Has any of this been worth anything?”

  “I'm too tired to talk about it,” Miller said. “We're so close to the end that none of it matters anymore. Big Bindy will blow in…” He turned his mutilated left arm, pretended to look at a watch that was not there, giggled. “Hours. Or minutes. Or…” He tilted his head, his exposed eye watering constantly.

  “In about ten hours,” Jack said. “And the bomb's in the Imperial War Museum.”

  Miller's one good eye swivelled and settled on Jack. Then he shrugged. “It doesn't matter.”

  “You're probably right. But what does matter is helping anyone left alive in London. You can do that.”

  “Me? You see what's left of me, boy? I'm barely human anymore.”

  “You haven't been human for a long time,” Breezer said.

  “I'm a scientist, and—”

  “You're a murderer!” Breezer stepped forward, and Jack was surprised to see Miller jerk back in his chair. Filled with bravado, still he was in pain, and scared. Good. That might make what came next much easier.

  “I'll only ask once,” Jack said. “We need you to provide a safe route out of London. We know if we just storm the Exclusion Zone it'll be a massacre. We'll be cut down, bombed, slaughtered. But you can call them off. You can tell the Choppers to stand down and let us out.”

  “I could,” Miller said. “And then all this would be released to the outside world.”

  “The only thing released would be human beings with remarkable abilities,” Jack said. “All this murder and chaos and hatred…that's your doing.”

  Miller chuckled again. It shook his body, and his pain was obvious. “I don't care anymore,” he said. “I want to die. Look at me! Look what he did to me! My only wish now is for your bastard father to die with me.”

  “You might want to die,” Breezer said, “but what about—”

  “You're all monsters,” Miller said. “The Evolve was my creation, so you're all my children. And I condemn you to death.”

  “That's…” Breezer shook his head, then looked at Jack.

  Jack nodded.

  Breezer turned Miller's chair and wedged it against the metal examination table, locking its brakes, holding Miller's one good arm down against the side of the chair. The mutilated man laughed, but Jack could not tell whether he was afraid or purely mad. His remaining, lidless eye was wide open, either way.

  “Like father, like son,” Miller said.

  “No,” Jack said. “Not at all.”

  He stepped forward and pressed his hands to Miller's face.

  The same ruins, the same day, the same tumbled wreckage of the London Eye. Lucy-Anne has seen the Eye since her last dream, so this time it is different—less damaged, only scarred high up with the impact site, with charred and broken pods further down where the helicopter tumbled and exploded. The aircraft's blackened remains straddle a safety barrier next to the burnt-out ticket office. Lucy-Anne cannot understand how Angelina Walker survived that wreck to emerge as Nomad. Perhaps she also dreamed herself to life.

  As she thinks of her, Nomad appears. She climbs from the helicopter's ruin and jumps down to the ground, landing with barely a touch. She starts to walk away from Lucy-Anne, and it is the dream of destruction once again. In the distance the light will soon bloom, a bright flash that for an instant will look like creation, but will bring dest
ruction.

  But Lucy-Anne wonders, Isn't all creation a violent event? The Big Bang, life from no-life, and London's evolution?

  But there is a difference. The bomb about to erupt is meant purely for destruction, and in its place it will leave a sterile, dead place.

  Lucy-Anne follows Nomad, frantically trying to shout for her, but she has no voice. Any time now, any time now…

  And then Nomad turns back to face her and lifts her hand, points, two fingers aiming at Lucy-Anne like a gun. “You and me,” she says. “You and me together.” She starts running at Lucy-Anne and the surroundings change in the blink of an eye.

  A street, burning, shooting, screaming, bodies, flames and smoke, and Nomad leaps a burning motorbike and drives Lucy-Anne to the ground, straddles her, and drives her pointed fingers down into her throat, silencing the words that were building there—a cry for mercy, a scream of anger, and a question:

  You and me?

  Lucy-Anne snapped awake and sat up. Sparky held her so she didn't tip to the ground, and Jenna glanced back and smiled. She must only have been asleep for moments, because everything was the same—the ruins of containers and several vehicles, the grotesque scattering of bodies and body parts, and the people she'd come with standing and sitting, waiting for Jack and the man called Breezer to emerge again.

  The sun was high and hot. London was warm, but the usual humid, acidic stink of the city was absent now. She could smell only rot and death, and when she blinked she saw Nomad's expressionless face as the woman killed her.

  Breezer appeared at the warped door opening in the larger container, stepping out grim-faced. Jack pushed Miller's wheelchair out behind him and let it roll down the ramp on its own. Miller slowed to a halt and looked up at the sky. He looked different. More whole.

  “Jack doesn't look too happy,” Jenna said.

  “Sparky,” Lucy-Anne said, holding out her hand. “Help me up, mate. Leg's gone to sleep.” He reached for her and held her upright, and she knew that he knew that her leg was fine. She just wanted the contact.