“She's our friend,” Jenna said, her voice weak but firm. “She's your girlfriend, Jack. We can't just abandon her because she ran away.”
“I've gone through all this,” Jack said, and the guilt came in yet again.
“She could be lying injured somewhere. Shot, like me.” She looked at Rosemary. “Do you know anyone that can find her?”
“Not now Gordon's dead,” she replied. “But that doesn't mean there isn't anyone else.”
“Then we all go and look, starting at-”
“It's impossible,” Rosemary said. “If she'd stayed in or around the hotel, the Choppers would have her by now. If she ran further, then we have no clue as which way she ran. And it's not as if we can walk through the streets calling her name.”
“So we just give up on her?”
Nobody answered for a while, until Emily went and sat beside Jenna. “I think she's gone to find her brother,” she said. “Alive somewhere, in the north. In fact, I'm sure of it.”
“How can you know?” Rosemary asked.
“Because that's what I'd have done.” Emily grinned at Jack, and he smiled at his little sister.
“Maybe,” Jenna said. “I hope so. It just feels so bad…so unfair. God, I need sleep.” She slid down until her head rested against Sparky's shoulder. He froze, delighted, and she grinned, pushing his shoulder around as if fluffing up a pillow before closing her eyes.
Jack smiled. He'd wanted to see these two getting it together for a while. Sparky would be a challenge for anyone, but perhaps being attacked by dogs, chased by government soldiers, blown up, and shot in the stomach was all Jenna had needed.
“We all need sleep,” Rosemary said. “It's been quite a day. There are two bedrooms upstairs. Ruben and I can sleep down here.”
The mention of beds and sleep got them all yawning. Jack and Emily went up first. They used bottled water and toothpaste from Emily's backpack to clean their teeth, then they chose the twin room and closed the door. Emily fell asleep almost before her head hit her pillow, and Jack sat up for a while, staring at his little sister. Tomorrow we're going to see Mum, he thought. He was excited and afraid in equal measures.
He lay down, but was not surprised when he could not sleep. A rush of memories came back to him, good times with his parents that he had long forgotten, and he wallowed in them, smiling at some and crying softly at others. He'd never really known nostalgia as a powerful emotion, but he did now. Before today he'd laboured under the belief that things could, by some miracle, go back to normal. Find his mother and father, escape the Toxic City, go home, live together again as they had been more than two years before. But now he acknowledged the firm reality that his family had changed forever. Nostalgia, as he experienced it there in a stranger's bed, could not allow for things ever being the same again.
He heard the stairs creaking and Sparky and Jenna talking in subdued tones. They went into the double bedroom next door, and for a while he heard their voices, Sparky's low and deep, hers soft and sad. There were tears as well, and then talking again, and after a period of silence he heard the first gentle moans of pleasure. Sleep came to Jack at last, giving privacy to his friends.
Chapter Thirteen
……… static ……….
Whatever had broken in Lucy-Anne's mind was trying to fix itself. She could feel it like an itch, a tickle so deep inside her that it could never be reached, and she shook her head now and then to try and dislodge it.
Her run slowed to a fast walk, and that was when she started to see people. The first was a face in a window, pale and sickly, and when she did a double-take the face was gone. There was no expression to read there at all, and she purposely got lost in a network of streets and alleys in case the person decided to follow.
North, ever northward, and between every blink she saw the faces of her parents from her nightmare.
I'm never going to sleep again, she thought. Though she was in this terrible place, it was the blank plane between sleeping and waking that horrified her now. There had been the dogs, though her memory of them had grown indistinct, and other memories were even vaguer, so distilled through whatever had snapped in her mind that she could not tell whether they were real events or dreams. Perhaps the distinction no longer mattered.
Lucy-Anne knew that something had snapped inside. Hers was a conscious madness, a waking breakdown, and when she dwelled on it her head hurt as though physically injured. North was all that mattered, because somewhere in that direction would be Andrew.
Someone walked into the street ahead of her. The figure paused, turned her way, froze.
Lucy-Anne ran between buildings, stumbling over a pile of refuse, ducking through gardens, rushing past a Tube station with a pile of skeletons wedged in its entrance gates. She hit a main road and quickly turned left, welcoming the shadows cast by the large buildings to her right. There she slowed, listening in case she had been followed but never willing to stop her forward momentum.
The first black shape passed behind her with the sound of a whisper in the night.
She spun around, skidding to a halt in the middle of the wide residential street. Her hands came up, but there was nothing there. She fumbled the knife from her pocket and held it out before her, but it felt pitiful against the world. There were tall four-storey buildings on one side. Behind her was an overgrown park at the centre of what must be a large square, and staggered along the road were cars. Many of them were still parked in an ordered row along the pavement. There were Porsches, BMWs, Mercedes, Bentleys, and the buildings stared at her with rich, dead eyes.
Something else fluttered behind her, and when she crouched and turned she saw a black shadow disappearing into the park. She frowned. Leaves rustled ten feet above the ground, and more shadows moved through the trees.
“Birds,” she whispered. And as if conjured by her voice, they made themselves known.
They burst from the undergrowth in the park, lifted from rooftops and erupted from several broken windows in the building facades, darkening the air and swooping towards her without making a single sound.
The scream came from Lucy-Anne as she ran, because she had seen these rooks before.
She sprinted straight into one of the expensive cars, flipped across its bonnet and smacked her head against cool metal. As her vision faded, she heard a long, high whistle, and instead of retreating it seemed to grow louder as consciousness left her.
She is alone, in a ruined landscape of forgotten buildings and hopelessness, but she is at peace with her own company. She is walking through the streets without fear or trepidation. Sometimes she whistles, sometimes she sings, but she is just as comfortable with only the sound of her footsteps on dusty pavements. She would claim contentment-there are things undone, and fate hangs on a knife-edge somewhere away from where she is now-but for the moment, she is as happy as she can be.
And then she becomes aware of the others. They are crowding around her, though unseen. They stalk her across rooftops and in tunnels beneath the ground, crashing through from one terraced building to the next, and they only have eyes and ears for her.
She starts to hurry, hoping to outrun them. But that will be impossible. Not because they are fast and she is slow, or because they know this place far better than her. But because she is making these pursuers with every breath, every thought, and every time she sleeps they multiply many times over.
She breaks the silence and screams, because she knows that eventually they will catch her. And kill her.