Contagion (Toxic City Book Three)

by Tim Lebbon

  “Your hair needs dyeing again,” Sparky said.

  “I only did it a week ago.” They looked at each other, dumbfounded, as time struck them both. A week ago they'd still been living outside London, ignorant of much that was occurring inside the toxic city, full of rebellion and a need to understand. In her mind her family was still alive, and in Sparky's was the hope that he might see his brother again one day. All those hopes were now dashed, and so much had happened that they were both changed people. They'd never be the same again. Beyond London now seemed as distant and mysterious as the city had once been.

  “Fuck me,” Sparky whispered.

  “Yeah,” Lucy-Anne said. She nodded towards Jack.

  Jack was gesturing them over. He looked around at the piled containers, alert for trouble. Probably looking for that Fleeter girl, Lucy-Anne thought. She'd only known her for an hour or two, but already she didn't like her.

  “I've helped him,” Jack said. “After all he's done, I healed three broken ribs, eased the pain of his ruptured eye, reset his jaw. I stopped a bleed in his left lung, and dispersed a blood clot that was moving towards his heart.” He stood beside Miller and waited until they had gathered around. Only Rhali stayed away at the other side of the clearing. “And I've told him that this is what he'll be destroying. What I can do, and what so many others can do as well.”

  Miller was shifting in his chair, and at first Lucy-Anne thought he was crying. But then she heard the terrible sound of laughter.

  “But he doesn't care,” Breezer said.

  “Tell him to do what we want!” Sparky said. “That thing Guy Morris could do, you know. Whisper it in his ear! Can't you do that?”

  “I tried,” Jack said.

  Miller's laughter burst into loud, hearty guffaws. He groaned in pain as well, but the discomfort seemed to humour him even more. “Your father would thank you for healing some of what he's done to me,” he said. “More for him to torture next time!” His one good eye was rolling in its socket, leaking a pale pink, bloody fluid.

  “He's mad,” Lucy-Anne said.

  “I can belt it out of him,” Sparky said, stepping forward with his fist raised.

  “No,” Lucy-Anne said. “I mean he's really mad. Insane.”

  Jack nodded. “Maybe that's why I can't get through to him.”

  Miller looked back over his shoulder at Jack, then at Sparky standing in front of him, fist still raised. “Ohhh, don't hurt me!” he shrieked, cackling, wiping bloody tears from his cheeks.

  “Bloody hell,” Sparky said. His shoulders slumped.

  “So what now?” Lucy-Anne asked.

  “Now we all die,” Miller said. “Boom! Big Bindy!” He pointed at Lucy-Anne. “You die.” He jabbed a finger at Sparky. “Blondie dies.” And across at Rhali. “That brown bitch dies, too.”

  Jack turned to strike him, but he was too late. Lucy-Anne moved quickly, flowing forward and bringing her fist around. She'd always been ready with a punch, even before Doomsday and the strain it had put her under, but this was the first that ever felt truly righteous. She felt the solidity of his cheekbone beneath her knuckles, and heard the creak of his neck as the blow turned his head to the side. It stopped his vile utterances and his laughter, and the silence following the punch was almost peaceful.

  “Yeah,” Sparky breathed softly.

  “Come on,” Jack said. “Let's leave him to his bomb. We're getting out of here.”

  “Leave me?” Miller asked. His voice was fluid with blood. “You're not leaving me. You've saved me.” He lifted his right hand and flexed his mended fingers, turning his hand this way and that as if it were something precious. “Oh, thank you, Jack,” he said. For the first time, his voice sounded almost normal.

  As he reached down into his clothing Lucy-Anne was already moving, pulling Sparky down with her, shouting, “Get down!” Perhaps Jack could have flipped like Fleeter and prevented what happened next. That he didn't could have been down to surprise, or maybe it was something darker. Maybe he really didn't want to.

  With the hand Jack had fixed, Miller lifted a gun and pressed its barrel into his mouth. His final mad chuckle was swallowed by the gunshot, and by then Lucy-Anne had looked away. But she still heard the wet patter of Miller's tortured mind scattering across the ground.

  There was silence for a few moments. The gunshot echoed away, and somewhere in the distance a flock of birds took startled flight, complaining at the sky.

  “Right,” Sparky said shakily. “So Miller's probably not going to help us.”

  Lucy-Anne couldn't hold back a giggle, but it quickly faded. They stood and headed away, all of them doing their best not to look back. Warm wet death was something they had all seen too much of.

  Of them all, it was Rhali who walked with the most composure. For the first time since they'd rescued her, she seemed at peace.

  They crossed what had once been Camp Hope and passed into the cool shadows between piled containers. When they emerged from the container park and started back towards the river, Lucy-Anne looked around for Andrew. But he was nowhere in sight. She felt a momentary panic, a sense of utter loneliness. Then a hand rested on her shoulder. Rhali.

  “Bloody excellent punch,” the girl said, grinning from ear to ear.

  “Classic!” Sparky said. “I taught her everything she knows!”

  “She taught you, more like,” Jenna said.

  “I was always scared of her,” Jack said. “It's the purple hair, I think.”

  Lucy-Anne gave Jack the finger. “Eat me.”

  Her old boyfriend raised one eyebrow, and Sparky started making some rude gestures behind his back.

  Lucy-Anne laughed a little. And she also cried gentle, thankful tears, because she was back with her friends, and they were as close to family as she had left anywhere in the world.

  Keen to get away from Camp H and the horrors it still contained, they decided to cruise upriver again towards where they had embarked. There was the silent understanding that they had talking to do and decisions to make, but for now putting distance between them and the camp was the priority.

  Fleeter had not reappeared. Jack said she was probably following them, and that made Lucy-Anne uncomfortable. But at the same time she was returning to herself, feeling stronger, and grasping a new purpose—to help her friends survive.

  “Are you sure they won't just let us out?” Lucy-Anne asked Jack. They were sitting in the open at the boat's bow, watching the serene Thames ahead of them awaiting the boat's disturbing wash. The others were under cover back towards the cabin. Jack looked sad and lost.

  “They've kept everyone in London for this long,” Jack said. “I've heard plenty of stories about escapees being murdered. Bodies put on display, sometimes, to dissuade others from trying to break out. Why would they change their minds now? Their problem of London is about to be solved once and for all, so they'll do more than ever to keep anyone from getting out.”

  “But they'll be retreating,” Lucy-Anne said. “Pulling back, if they know what's about to happen.”

  “Not until the last minute, I doubt. They'll have trucks, helicopters.” He shook his head.

  “It's not hopeless,” she said, sensing the despair in him. He only looked at her. “Really!” she insisted. “We've got nine, ten hours yet. We'll find a way.”

  “I don't see how,” he said. Lucy-Anne reached out and held his hand, and a rush of memories of her and Jack assaulted her. Most of them were good. He was above all her friend.

  “We stop the bomb or get out,” she said. “Anything else is not an option.” She was proud of herself. Saying that whilst remembering her dreams—the blast, the flames, the heat-flash blanching everything that London had become into a white-hot mess—took some effort.

  Jack smiled, then sat back against the bench. “We thought we'd lost you,” he said. “So what happened?”

  “Rook found me,” she said. She leaned back next to Jack, and with the sun on her face and the gentle movement
s of the boat, she felt almost relaxed. London could almost have been its old self again.

  “A Superior,” Jack said.

  “No, not at all. Rook was all on his own. He went with Reaper because it suited his purpose.”

  “Which was?”

  “Revenge. He was in a dark place. Such a…sensitive boy. He and his brother survived Doomsday and lived together for a while, but then the Choppers took his brother, and the birds showed him what happened. They slaughtered him. Took his brain.”

  “They've experimented on so many,” Jack said.

  “But he saw something in me. We connected, I guess. And maybe fell for each other, just a little.” It seemed strange talking like this with Jack, because until recently they had been a couple. But she sensed no hostility from him, and no surprise. Their relationship had been strong from the moment they'd met, marred only by the weight of expectation between them—that they should be together. They were much better together as friends. Anything else just got in the way.

  “I saved him,” she said. She sensed Jack's confusion.

  “I thought he was gone?”

  “He is, now. But I thought I'd saved him. I've got something too.”

  “The dreaming? Nomad touched you?”

  “I've met her, Jack. Seen her in my dreams, and met her for real, and sometimes both are the same. But the thing I've got is all my own. Something I've always had, when I think back to when I was younger, but always a more subtle thing than it is now. More gentle. Nomad told me I was what she's been looking for forever. And Rook too, he told me his brother had something of his gift even before Doomsday.”

  “So what does that mean? And what can you do?”

  “I think it might mean that everyone left alive had something beforehand that Evolve caught onto. And I can dream. At first I thought I was seeing the future, or forms it might take. I dreamed of meeting Rook and his birds attacking me, and they did, briefly, after he died. I dreamed of Nomad and the bomb. I dreamed of meeting you by the river and the Choppers waiting there, but I didn't know how that one turned out, and didn't have a chance to change it.”

  “Change?”

  “I think I can…I thought I could change events in my dreams. Lucid dreaming, guiding things. Rook died and I dreamed him alive again, and for a while he was.” She looked at the scratches on the back of her hand, put there by Rook's nails as he fell into the hole. “But then fate caught up with him, exactly as I'd seen it before. I might have stretched things a little, but I don't think I really changed anything.”

  “That's amazing,” Jack said. “I had nothing before. Don't think so, anyway. But Nomad's touch has given me…” He trailed off, looking into a distance no one else could see.

  “What?” Lucy-Anne asked.

  “So much,” he said. “So much that I really don't know what I might become.”

  “So we're special,” Lucy-Anne said. She couldn't keep the bitterness from her voice, because being special hadn't done much for her thus far. “My talent's not caused by Doomsday, and it's grown just by being here. And you've been touched by a freak.”

  “We're all special,” Jack said, looking along the boat at his friends. Rhali smiled. Sparky gave them the finger. “Differentiating between who has a gift and who doesn't—who's normal, or Irregular, or Superior—loses sight of everyone's uniqueness. We do that, and we might as well sink the boat and drown right now.”

  Lucy-Anne thought of Rook and how conflicted his gift had made him. She'd seen him cold-bloodedly killing Choppers out of a burning need for revenge. She had also seen his more vulnerable, needy side, and the part of him that was still a child. And she realised that the Rook she'd fallen for had been the human boy, nothing more or less.

  “We're all special,” she said, nodding.

  “And we always were.”

  “So we stop the bomb or get out.” She smiled at Jack, her special friend. “Sinking the boat is not an option.”

  “Right.” He smiled back. For a moment too brief to measure but too precious to ignore, all was well with the world.

  “On the bridge,” Sparky said. “I'd recognise that spooky bastard anywhere.”

  Jack turned and looked ahead of them, certain he was about to see his father again and unsure what he thought about that. He felt sick and excited. Outwardly he'd disowned him—Reaper was a murderer and exuded little hope of redemption. Inside, Jack still remembered the kind man he used to love so much.

  But it was not Reaper standing in the centre of Tower Bridge looking down at the approaching boat.

  “Puppeteer,” Lucy-Anne said. She more than anyone had cause to remember him; he'd almost killed her back in that hotel, just before the Choppers arrived and everything went to hell.

  “Thought we'd seen the last of them,” Jenna said.

  “What shall I do?” Breezer sounded scared, and Jack could not blame him. Any time the Superiors intruded in their lives, it meant that either they wanted something, or that things were about to get much worse. Perhaps both.

  “Carry on,” Jack said. “Let's see what happens.” He looked around the boat, trying to make out whether Fleeter was with them or not. He thought she'd gone, but it was possible that she'd come along for the ride, sitting quietly flipped out. Twenty minutes on the river for them would have felt like twelve hours for her, but she was inscrutable. He had no idea what her aims were.

  “I'm going to see if Fleeter's with us,” he said. Sparky and Jenna nodded.

  “What do you—?” Lucy-Anne began.

  “Blink and I'll be back,” he said. He leaned closer to her. “Trust me.”

  Lucy-Anne grinned. It was her cheeky, mischievous grin that he'd fallen for, and he felt a moment of nostalgia for the time they'd spent as an item.

  Then he closed his eyes and grasped the talent, and before anyone spoke again he flipped.

  The impact of changing his pace with the world thumped him in the gut and chest. He opened his eyes and looked around, and for a moment he knew he could take a breath. The world took on that surreal, deadened sheen he'd already become used to, and everything was still…almost. There was movement all around, but because it was barely noticeable it felt like a fluid, dizzying sensation. He could not see anything moving. But everything was.

  Fleeter was nowhere to be seen.

  His friends on the boat were stuck where he'd left them. Breezer drove, eyes dead ahead. And Lucy-Anne looked at him with wide, fluid eyes. If he could wait here motionless for long enough, he'd see her eyes growing wider and her mouth falling open as she realised that he'd gone. But even here, out of phase with the world, the clock was ticking.

  He quickly scanned the bridge ahead of them and the shores on either side, looking for any other signs of Superiors being present. He couldn't believe that Puppeteer's presence was an accident, nor that he was here on his own. The tall man stood at the decorative railing, hands on the handrail, leaning slightly out and looking down at their boat. There was no one else on the bridge, but he saw a silhouette on one of the bridge's wide stone feet that might have been another person. He leaned left and right, trying to get a better view, but they were hidden in shadow.

  If Fleeter was close by, she'd likely see that he'd flipped. And then she would either hide or come to him. He called her name. His voice was flat and dead against the motionless air, and it probably didn't carry very far.

  Jack glanced at Puppeteer one more time, and his pose suggested that he was about to raise his hands. He seemed coiled. Jack frowned. Something was going to happen, and he had to be ready as soon as he flipped back.

  He could not put off the future forever.

  Lucy-Anne was still staring at him, and her gasp of shock came upon his return.

  “Where…”

  “I sped up, that's all. Or slowed everything else down.” He frowned. “Not really sure how it works exactly.”

  “Let's save that for later,” Jenna said. “Look.” She pointed up at the bridge, where Puppeteer had r
aised his hands into claws.

  “Okay then,” Jack said. He stood at the bow of the boat. “Breezer!” he called back over his shoulder. “Aim for the central span.”

  “What're you going to do?” Lucy-Anne asked.

  Jack breathed deeply and heard Sparky say, “Magic!” Then he felt the air close all around him as if holding him in a fist, and his right foot left the boat's deck.

  Rhali called out in alarm. Jenna and Sparky grabbed a leg each. Jack relaxed his mind, and then reached out with Puppeteer's own power.

  He actually felt the tall man's clothing and skin against his palms. He lifted, his strength incredible, and as he brought Puppeteer out over the bridge's edge he felt himself drop to the deck again. The Superior had lost his hold.

  “Yeah!” Sparky said.

  Jack let go. Puppeteer fell and splashed into the Thames fifty feet ahead of them.

  Jack relaxed, biting his lip to see away the brief dizziness that accompanied his use of a powerful talent. Is that the first sign of the sickness? he wondered. But he could not concern himself with that. In the scheme of things it was insignificant.

  Puppeteer was splashing in the river's embrace, and Sparky heaved a lifebelt overboard. “Don't pollute the river!” he shouted.

  “Jack! On the bridge!” Jenna pointed, and Jack already knew what he was going to see. More Superiors. Shade was there, barely visible between blinks, and the sleek form of Scryer rushing along the pavement. Of Reaper there was no sign.

  “What do you want?” Jack shouted at Puppeteer. The man was clasping the lifebelt now, drifting past them in the grip of the river's flow. He stared back at Jack but gave no sign of having heard.

  Jack reached out and clasped him, lifted him from the river, higher, higher, and even though he felt Puppeteer pushing back with his power, Jack was much stronger. When he was almost as high as the bridge again Jack let go and he fell, crying out slightly before striking the Thames once more. He disappeared beneath the surface then quickly popped up again, gasping, splashing around as he sought the dropped lifebelt. But he had drifted behind their boat now, and every second put more distance between them.