London Eye Part 6

The ditch branched left and they went that way, following Rosemary's directions. A shopping trolley blocked their path, and Jack felt a weird rush of nostalgia for something so innocuous. Years ago, before Doomsday, some kids had probably swiped this trolley and used it for a bit of fun: rides along the road; jumping hastily erected timber ramps. Then they'd dumped it, and it had been here ever since, rusting into the landscape as the world changed around it. He wondered where those kids were now, and whether they still had fun.

He climbed around the trolley and helped Emily, then they went on until the ditch ended with a narrow culvert, much too small for them to enter. Jack paused, frowning, and looked back the way they had come.

"We came the right way," he said. "I'm sure."

"Here," Emily said. "Is this what she meant?" She was looking over the top of the culvert, filming across ground level at whatever lay beyond. Jack stood beside her.

The large area before them held several ground-tanks, all of them covered with heavy metal covers. Pipes and frames hung over them, many bent and twisted by some unknown force, and rust stained much of the metal.

"Sewage treatment plant," Jack said.

"Oh, great. That's going to smell just lovely." Emily panned the camera around and lowered it, dropping back down to sit in the ditch.

"It's dry down here," Jack said, joining her. "And I doubt this has been treating anything for a couple of years."

Emily looked up sharply, lifting a finger to her lips.

Jack looked back along the ditch, and moments later he saw the shapes coming towards them. Sparky first, bent over so that he could not be seen above ground level. Jenna followed him, and behind her came Rosemary and Lucy-Anne, Jack's girlfriend keeping close to the older woman.

"I don't think there's anyone around," Sparky said when he reached them. "If we were seen, they'd have come for us by now."

Jack could not help recalling some of the stories from the drops close to Camp Truth-kidnappings, disappearances, executions. And he could see in Jenna's haunted eyes that she was thinking the same. Her father had been taken, and returned, but now he was a different man. A lesser man. Capture would mean the end for all of them, whether that end was death or something else.

"You need to lead us from here," he said to Rosemary.

"It's not far," she said, gasping for breath. "We'll be out of the sun again in a minute."

"And next time we see it we'll be in the Toxic City," Lucy-Anne said. Her eyes were hard, and when she glanced at Jack he sensed a shocking distance already growing between them.

"We still like to call it London," Rosemary said. "It hasn't been toxic for a long time."

Lucy-Anne nodded, still looking at Jack. What? he wanted to say. What is it? But he had never really understood her.

Sparky stood, looked around for a long time, then nodded. Rosemary climbed from the ditch and hurried across an area of long gra.s.s until she stood on concrete paving between metal tank covers. The others followed.

Beside the closest tank cover, there was a small hatch in the ground. The cover was metal as well, but light. Rosemary took a hooked metal manhole key from her pocket, curved it into a recessed ring in the cover and swung it upward. As she started down the small concrete staircase revealed beneath, she glanced up at the others. Her face softened, and for the first time Jack wondered whether she was a mother, and if so, where her husband and children were right now. He felt terrible for not asking, but now it seemed too late.

"It's not far now," Rosemary said.

"Back down into the dark again," Lucy-Anne said. There was something in her voice Jack had never heard before. He thought maybe it was fear.

"Yes, dear, but not for long. We're almost there."

"If there's anything else you need to warn us about-" Jack began.

"The dogs are dead," Rosemary said. "You killed them, together. I can't pretend the city isn't dangerous, but then you all know that, don't you?"

Emily separated from the small group and trained her camera on them. "The final descent before we rise into the Toxic City," she said. "And then we'll go to find who we came for." Even keeping the camera before her eye could not hide the tear that streaked her cheek.

"I'm not afraid," Lucy-Anne said. But as she followed Rosemary down, every jerky, determined movement she made was testament to her lie.

Lucy-Anne was afraid of her nightmares.

The dogs from her dream had come and bitten her, and after everyone had set off from the ruined church, and it was only her and Rosemary left, she'd asked the old woman how close she had been to death. Its teeth nipped your spine, Rosemary had said, but I touched it and made it better.

How close? Lucy-Anne had demanded.

Very, Rosemary had said, before rushing across the road into the ditch.

Now, descending back into the darkness once again, Lucy-Anne waited for other nightmares to make themselves known. She refused to believe it had been coincidence, because after what she'd been through that would be too cruel.

But if not coincidence...what?

Have I had nightmares about falling? she wondered, and her feet reached the foot of the ladder. Rats carrying plague? But there were no vermin that she could see down here. My friends, killing me? She looked around at the others, and she suddenly wanted to fold up and cry out at the betrayal her imagination was capable of.

"Nearly there, everyone!" she said, amazing even herself with her upbeat voice. "We've been waiting for so long, and now we're almost there!"

Smiles were exchanged, and they went on their way.

To begin with, their path was simple. After descending the concrete steps they found themselves in a long tunnel that ran the length of the sewage treatment works, with shorter tunnels projecting off at right angles. The smell was subtle and subdued-much to Emily's obvious relief-and just before they reached the end, Rosemary opened a metal hatch in the wall. They took it in turns, squeezing through, shining their torches on the opening and into the tunnel revealed beyond. This one had a low ceiling that meant they all had to crouch down, and c.o.c.kroaches scuttled away from their torch light.

This tunnel ended with a blank wall, but an opening had been smashed through, revealing an uneven, sloping route that led deeper. They followed Rosemary, emerging into a large, brick-lined chamber that seemed much older that the treatment plant built just beside it. It was the converging point of four large sewage pipes. This place did stink, even though none of the pipes seemed to be carrying very much. One of them trickled a small, steady flow of dirty water into the chamber, but the other three appeared dry.

"Oh, that's pleasant," Sparky said. "Reminds me of Lucy-Anne's armpits."

Lucy-Anne did not reply. Sparky looked at her and she raised an eyebrow, and that was enough to make him smile.

"Rats everywhere," Jenna said. They did not seem to bother her, but Emily remained close to Jack, even while she trained her torch around the walls and filmed what it revealed.

"You'll see a lot more," Rosemary. "But there's always a balance. Lots of wild cats in London now, and they keep the rat population down."

She headed off, confidently aiming for one of the large sewage pipes.

"We walk through there?" Lucy-Anne asked. She hated this; she had never been afraid before. She could not prevent herself from shaking, and she'd seen the way Jack had been looking at her: concerned and confused.

"Not for long."

The pipe swept this way and that, branching left and right, but Rosemary did not hesitate at all. She took one branch that narrowed considerably, but they were happier to bend almost double, accepting the burning pain in their knees and back, rather than crawl. There was dried stuff here, sewage and dead rats and other things they could not so easily identify.

And at last Lucy-Anne found something to cling onto and calm her, and that was the memory of her family. Their smiles and voices drove away the threat of forgotten nightmares. Whatever happened in the near future, she was determined of one thing: she would discover the truth.

That's what drove them all, she was sure. Not the sense of injustice, and the knowledge that the government had lied to them day in, day out, since Doomsday. It was family that made them able to do this. Jack's and Emily's parents, and Sparky's brother. Even Jenna, who had lost no one on Doomsday, was coming here to avenge what they had done to her father since then.

She felt a momentary flush of hope and determination, and pride in her friends. If they weren't half-crawling through a pipe coated with dried s.h.i.t and dead rats, she'd have hugged them all.

She could imagine Sparky's reaction to that.

Lucy-Anne giggled. She tried to stop, but couldn't. Her torch light shook as she laughed, and they all paused because they thought something was wrong.

"No!" she said, shaking her head even though none of them could see much down here. "No, it's okay, its..." Her laughter turned manic.

"Gas down here sometimes," Rosemary said, her voice low with concern.

"n.o.body strike a match," Sparky said, and that only made Lucy-Anne laugh louder.

The sewers ended in another large chamber, and in this one they found a dead body.

It was a woman, sitting back against the wall, long hair tangled across her face and down one side of her head. She wore jeans and a heavy ski jacket, and rats had eaten her eyes.

That's what Jack noticed first, and what he could not help looking at again and again. He jerked his torch back at her face, knowing he should not, knowing that he should be turning the other way and leading Emily across the chamber and into whichever sewer they had to walk along next...and rats had eaten her eyes!

"Oh," Lucy-Anne said, backing away against the wall of the chamber. But she kept her eyes open.

"Rosemary-" Jack began, but she cut in.

"Not when I came through!" she said. "She wasn't here when I came through."

"You know her?" Jenna asked.

Rosemary went closer, stepping carefully across the lower part of the chamber, dodging still-wet pools of raw sewage.

"Jack..." Emily said. She lowered the camera. "I don't think I want to film this."

Jenna was with them then, holding Emily's hand and turning around so that they both faced away from the body.

"No," Rosemary said. She had lifted the woman's hair from her face and stepped aside, allowing torchlight to fall there. "I don't know her."

"Then what the h.e.l.l is she doing down here?" Sparky said. "You said you're the only one who knew this route, you said that Philippe bloke told you the way, and-"

"Lots of Irregulars come down below London," Rosemary said. She turned her back on the body, hiding it from view. "To escape, to hide. There are some that can't handle what's happened to them, and..." She shrugged.

"She killed herself?" Jack asked.

"Maybe." Rosemary returned to them, leaving the dead woman behind. "Or maybe she was dying anyway, and she wanted to do it alone."

"We're still under the Exclusion Zone, right?" Jenna asked.

Rosemary thought about that for a while, then nodded. "Just. But soon, we enter an old Tube station that has been abandoned for years, walk along the line, and then we're there."

"So there'll be others?" Jack asked. "More people below ground?"

"There are plenty. But I doubt we'll see them. As I said, most of them come down here to be alone."

There was a heavy torch by the dead woman's left hand, and to her right an empty whiskey bottle lay on its side, a plastic bowl upended beside that. Last meal and drink.

"I wonder what she could do," Rosemary mused.

"That's someone's mother," Jenna said, angry. "Someone's sister."

"We should go," Jack said. "I don't want to stay down here anymore. Rosemary, I just want to get there and see the sun again. How far?"

"An hour."

"An hour." Lucy-Anne was staring at the woman, torch playing unwaveringly on her mutilated face.

"Lucy-Anne," Jack said. "Come on." He stepped before her, blocking her view and wanting so much to reach out and hold her. But the distance was still there, and he didn't think he had arms long enough.

The sewer ended in a place of chaos. The pipe had ruptured and smashed, and the solid ground around it had apparently been washed away by some vast underground flood. The void left behind looked precarious and in danger of collapse at any moment. Roots hung dead and shrivelled from the ceiling, and the fractured ends of underground pipes and ducting protruded like broken bones. Rosemary led them across, stepping around and over rocks and cracks in the ground, towards a small crawls.p.a.ce at the other side.

"This is narrow," she said, facing the group of friends. "But not very long. And on the other side, there's the abandoned Tube station."

"Are we under London yet?" Jenna asked.

"Almost," Rosemary said. She looked up at the roof and the others shone their torches there, as though they could see all the way through. "Very close now. This is part of what they did to the Exclusion Zone, part of the damage." She shook her head, and just before she turned away, Jack thought he saw tears.

She was right, the crawls.p.a.ce was very narrow. But they pulled their way through, lured by the promise of an easy walk and the end of the beginning of their quest.

Jack and the others had seen a few grainy images of London's Tube network since Doomsday, smuggled out with other pictures on memory cards tied to pigeons' legs or dogs' collars. They usually showed stations they were familiar with, only a little run down; litter on the platform, dust thick on the tiles, the s.p.a.ces illuminated by heavy torches or small fires. But the place they found when they emerged from the crack in the earth was very different.

"Where the h.e.l.l are we?" Sparky asked.

Jenna laughed. "I think it must be Christmas!"

The meagre light from their torches reflected from dozens of mirrors arrayed along the platform and down on the line, glitter b.a.l.l.s hanging from the ceiling and smashed gla.s.s swept in drifts against the platform wall to their left, flooding the station with light. Swathes of bunting zig-zagged back and forth just above head height for the full length of the platform. In many places, tiles had fallen or been smashed from the wall, but the blank gaps left behind had been painted with luminous green, yellow, or blue paint. Halfway along the platform, there was even a crazy tree made from heavy wire, pinned with hundreds of small pa.s.sport-sized photographs. Jack went to the tree and saw that each photo was of a different person. Some smiled, some frowned, some stuck out their tongues.

But among this colour and the enthusiastic splash of light, there was no sign of recent human habitation. Plenty of rats, true. And Jack saw footprints-a dog's? A wolf's?-which he was sure were trodden in dried blood.

"This station's been out of use for almost twenty years," Rosemary said. "Really was the end of the line! So those who lived underground-and there's always been a lot of them-adopted it as their own. Decorated it, slept here, used it as a retreat from above. The stairs are blocked off, and I suppose there must have been other ways up and down, but they've long gone."

"Where are they now?" Jack asked. "If they were...you know...moved from society anyway, how come they're not still here?"

"Doomsday touched everyone," Rosemary said, "and Evolve seeped everywhere. There are places in London that are graves. Huge graves. You'll see one soon, but...there's no way I can really prepare you for it." She looked around the group, and her expression truly startled Jack for the first time. She was an old woman, with the eyes of someone who had known far too much sadness, but she looked at them as though she were sorry for them all.

"It's sad," Lucy-Anne said.

"'Course it is," Sparky said. "Life's sad, and s.h.i.t."

"No, no," Jack's girlfriend said. "This place. Even those who wanted nothing to do with the outside world were affected. Don't you see?"

"I see," Jack said, and he meant it. Lucy-Anne looked at him, and he felt included in her thoughts for the first time since they'd left Camp Truth.

"Well, I want to leave," said Emily. She had filmed the station, but the red light on her camera was no longer blinking. "Feels weird down here. Haunted."

None of them disputed her choice of words.

They walked along the old underground line, constantly aware of the flicker of movement just beyond the influence of their artificial light; rats, moving away, but not too fast. Jack guessed they'd had a fine feeding season a couple of years before, and maybe these descendants of those fattened things remembered the taste of human meat.

When they reached the next station it was grim and drab, and half of a train carriage protruded from the tunnel at its far end. The station name had been torn from the wall and smashed from the tiles, as though ident.i.ty had no place in this new world.