“I'm glad you two got together,” Jack said. They had not talked much since leaving the Underground again, though the silence was never uncomfortable.
“Me too,” Sparky said grinning at Jenna.
“I don't know what came over me,” she said. “I thought I'd been shot in the gut, not the head.”
They all laughed softly, and watched an eagle drift majestically along the river's course and pass beneath the bridge.
“Wow,” Jack whispered. “Wonder where the hell that came from.”
“You know, Jack,” Jenna said, “Lucy-Anne will…we'll find her and…”
He shook his head. “Knowing she's alive is good.”
“You believe Nomad?”
“Don't you?”
“Without a doubt.” Jenna still seemed awkward, and Jack wasn't sure he wanted to verbalise his thoughts. But really, this was no time for any sort of self-deception.
“Me and Lucy-Anne…I think we were finished before we even started. Thrown together by our backgrounds and histories, not because we fancied each other.”
“Good friends,” Sparky said. “Maybe that's what you two are.”
“Yeah,” Jack nodded. “What you two did last night…Well, we haven't done that for ages.”
Jenna blushed and elbowed Sparky in the ribs.
“I said nothing!” he protested. But she was smiling, and Jack laughed.
“Let's get on,” he said.
“Rooks,” Sparky muttered. “Always spooked the crap out of me.”
“Scarier than chickens?” Jenna quipped.
“Okay, okay, another point to Jenna.”
They crossed the bridge and passed through Parliament Square, keeping their ears and eyes open.
Walking progressively northward, Jack wondered whether Lucy-Anne had already come this way. He thought of their time together and tried to come to terms with what it had all meant. They'd gone through the usual boyfriend and girlfriend moments; kissing and cuddling in front of a movie, drinking cider when Emily was in bed, progressing on to awkward fumblings and gasped moments of shared pleasure. But the physical side had always felt somehow false and forced, and it was the times when he talked Lucy-Anne through her fury, doubt, and despair that seemed most important to Jack now. Doomsday had left her with nothing and no-one, and more than anything, he had been there to help her through that. And it had been a natural process. He did not feel even a tiny bit used, and he was certain that Lucy-Anne had welcomed every moment of their unusual relationship. She was a beautiful girl, but his fondest memories of her were when she smiled an honest and happy smile, rather than when she lay half-naked on his sofa.
If only he'd realised that she'd been so close to snapping.
I'm so bloody grown-up, he thought without much humour. He looked at Sparky and Jenna, saw their shared smiles and the way they sought physical contact, and his envy was a very gentle thing.
Morning passed into afternoon, and in a side street they found a grocers that didn't smell too bad. The central aisle display of fresh fruit and vegetables was now home to shrivelled black things, like something excavated rather than grown. But there were shelves of tinned foods that had not been touched, and though the labels were faded after two years of dampness, they found some tinned fruit still fit to eat. It tasted sweet, and good.
“Shit,” Sparky said.
“What?” Jack was immediately alert, but his friend was still sitting down.
“The door.”
Jack looked, and at first he saw nothing. Then he made out the faint, curled gleam of a thin wire, nestled by the door jamb. They must have tripped it on the way in.
Sparky was already looking around the shop. “There,” he said.
“Old security camera.”
“Everything in this place is covered in dust apart from that camera's lens.”
“Reaper?” Jenna said.
Jack stood and browsed the shelves, trying to appear calm. “Doubt it,” he said. “He's leader of the bloody Superiors. Bet he's got people who can do a lot more than a trip-wire and a camera.”
“We should go,” Sparky said. “Quickly.” As they fled the shop, Jack saw Sparky giving the camera the finger.
They ran along the street, disturbing a pack of dogs that were worrying something newly-dead just inside a house's front door. Luckily most of the dogs ran into the house, not out at them, and Jack kicked out at the one mutt that came too close. Its jaws snapped on thin air, but it did not follow.
They tried to lose themselves, hoping that they would shake off any potential pursuers. But then they heard the sounds of motors in the distance, and they paused at a street corner, panting.
“We can't be caught!” Jack said.
“We have to hide.” Jenna was pointing at doors both open and closed.
“They might have the whole area wired.”
“Well, we can't just stand here arsing about!” Sparky said. “Come on!”
They ran along another street, climbing over a huge wreck where a lorry and several cars had crashed and burned. Jack was aware of a charred skull staring at him through one smashed windscreen, but then something flashed overhead that distracted his attention. A helicopter, its sudden appearance explosive in the street, engine sound dwindling rapidly as it headed away…and then started to turn.
“Chopper chopper!” Sparky shouted, giggling nervously.
“We can't be caught!” Jack said again. “This isn't fair!” He thought of his mother and sister crawling out of London through the dangerous darkness, his father somewhere to the north, and Lucy-Anne wandering the street alone as she searched the ruin of one of the world's largest cities for her lost brother. And such a weight of responsibility pressed down on him that for a moment he could not move, crushed there on that burnt car's bonnet and staring into the skeletal eyes of someone sorely missed.
“Come on,” Sparky said, tapping his leg.
“Jack!” Jenna shouted.
Another helicopter appeared above the end of the street, lowering itself slowly between house rows, rotors so close that they whipped dust from the buildings’ facades.
“There!” Jenna shouted, pointing at an open door across the street. “We can go through and try to find-”
“Look!” Sparky shouted. He pointed, but there was no need. The darkening of the sky was obvious.
The helicopter pilot was concentrating so hard on not crashing into the houses that he can't have noticed the flock of rooks gathering above him. There were hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, swirling and waving in complex patterns that were as beautiful as they were disturbing.
“Over there!” Jenna said. Along the street, halfway between where they stood and where the pilot was readying to land, someone emerged from a house. Rooks roosted on his shoulders and head, and though it could not be heard, Jack saw that he was whistling.
The helicopter was ten feet above the ground when the rooks dived into its spinning rotors.
“Down!” Sparky shouted. He pulled Jenna down beside him, Jack fell beside the burnt out cars…but they all had to watch.
Thousands of birds exploded in puffs of black and sprays of blood. The houses beside the aircraft were coated in clumps of wet feather and meat, and the combined calls of dying birds was louder that the protesting engine. Some dived into the main rotors, other curved down and flew into the rear rotor blade, their suicides instant and without hesitation.
The helicopter's front windshield was quickly obscured by a mess of diced rooks, and it tipped down and to the left.