The man stood and walked away. Behind him the sunlight hit the Thames. It did not scatter: it did not refract on the moving river into little stabs of light. It did other things.
He walked in the centre of the paths and pavements, in clear view. His pace was quick but not panicked. A shotgun bounced on his shoulder. He swung it round and carried it to his chest, holding it as if it offered more comfort than defence.
The man crossed the river. He stopped below the arc of Grosvenor Bridge, and clambered up its girdered underside. Where it should have been a curve of shadows, the bridge was punctured, broken by thick rays of light. The man wrestled through the holes in its structure that recent events had left.
He emerged in a crater of railway lines. An explosion had spread broken bricks and sleepers in concentric circles, and the metal rails had burst and buckled into a frozen splash. The man was surrounded by them. He trudged past the bomb’s punctuation, to where they became train lines again.
Months ago, perhaps in the moment of that interruption, a train had stalled on the bridge. It remained. It looked quite unbroken: even its windows were whole. The driver’s door hung open.
The man gripped it but did not look inside, did not run his hand over the instruments. He hauled himself, with the door as a ladder, to the train’s flat roof. And then he stood up, gripping his gun, and looked.
His name was Sholl. He had been awake for three hours already that day, and still he had seen no one.
From the roof of the train, the city seemed empty.
To his south was the rubble that had been Battersea Power Station. Without it, the skyline was remarkable: a perpetual surprise. Sholl could see over the industrial park behind it—the buildings there much less damaged—to a tract of housing that looked almost as it had before the war. On the north shore, the Lister Hospital looked untouched, and the roofs of Pimlico were still sedate—but fires were burning, and trees of poisonous smoke grew over north London.
The river was clogged with wrecks. Besides the mouldering barges that had always been there jutted the bows of police boats, and the decks and barrels of sunken gunships. Inverted tugs like rusting islands.
The Thames flowed slowly around these impediments.
Light’s refusal to shimmer on its surface made the river matte as dried ink, overlaid on a cutout of London. Where the bridge’s supports met the water, they disappeared into light and darkness.
Once, in a city seemingly deserted, Sholl would have explored, in fear and loneliness. But he had grown disgusted with those feelings, and with the prurience that quickly mediated them. He walked north, along the top of the train. He would follow the tracks down past the walls of London, into Victoria Station.
From some miles off, from the direction of South Kensington, came a high mewing sound. Sholl gripped the shotgun. A multitude lifted from the distant streets, many thousands of indistinct bodies. They were not birds. The flock did not move in avian curves, but spastically, changing speed and direction more suddenly than birds could ever manage. The things trilled and chattered, moving erratically south.
Sholl eyed them. They were animals, scavengers. Doves, they had been named, with heavy-handed irony. They could hurt a person badly, or kill, but as Sholl had expected, they ignored him. The flock passed over his head in unnerving motion. They were unclear.
Each dove was a pair of crossed human hands, linked by thumbs. Cupped palms and fingers fluttering in preposterous motion. Sholl did not watch them. He was leaning out and staring into the Thames water below him, below the doves, the water in which nothing was reflected.
Of course the city was not empty, and at noon sounds of life and sporadic combat began.
Sholl was standing in the remains of Victoria Street, beside the immobilised bus in which he lived. It was a newer two-decker, its windows all grilled and caged, irregular bars welded across them. It had been inexpertly clad in plates of iron armour. Its number, 98, was still visible. Shreds of advertisement remained on its sides. Inside was food and fuel that he had stockpiled, his books, and the tat of survivalism.
There was small-arms fire coming from Brompton. He had heard that a small group of paratroopers had regrouped somewhere to the west of Sloane Square, and the noise seemed to verify that. He had no idea what they were fighting, nor how long they would last.
It had been some weeks since he had heard large artillery in the city. The resistance was breaking down.
Now he could be almost certain that any gunfire he heard came from his own side. In the first few weeks of the war, the enemy had used weapons that were the same, functionally identical to those of the defending armies. It would have been—definitionally, Sholl thought sourly—a well-matched war, precisely matched, except for two things.
The imagos arrived from nowhere, in the heart of the city. Like Trojans, Londoners had woken with invaders among them. Troops had gone onto the streets. Gunships had shelled the city from the inside, levelling Westminster and much of the riverside.
The second factor in the imagos’ favour was that they could break their habits. They started with the absolutely familiar weaponry, but soon discovered, or remembered, that they were not restricted to it, that there were other methods of warfare available to them. Their general had taught them how.
Standing in the broken streets north of Victoria, amid architecture brittled by war, tremulous and near collapse, Sholl began to see people. He glimpsed them at the windows of deserted shops: he saw them at the far ends of alleys.
The last Londoners. Millions were now gone. Dead, disappeared and fled. Of those who were left, some had become dangerous, like all terrified animals. Several times Sholl had almost been the victim of assaults, and as days passed there were more bands roaming and looting from the dying city. They would attack what fellow humans they met with a miserable kind of violence. But these fleeting figures were not those. Sholl shouted in greeting to a man he saw foraging for canned food in the glass and rubble ruins of a Europa food store. The man batted the air in Sholl’s direction, demanding silence, an exaggerated motion of fear. His face was invisible. Sholl shook his head.
Sholl stood in the centre of the street, where he should not have felt safe. It was not bravado but a judgment. The enemy would continue their campaign against the backstreets where the last fighters held out, but had little interest in harassing London’s fearful ratlike survivors. For which he might pass. Besides which, though Sholl did not yet fully trust it, he had another reason to think himself safe from the imagos.
Watching the cringing man running like a starveling from rubbish to rubbish, trying to get out of the light, Sholl made a decision.
He walked. His pack was heavy with books, tins and equipment he had taken from his bus, and he shucked it up in irritation, trying to make it comfortable. East along Victoria Street, past those houses still standing, charred cars and the spillage of war, past the uncertain monuments that the victorious invaders kept raising and forgetting. Up Buckingham Gate, bearing as directly north as Sholl could go.
There must have been thousands left in London, but fear had made most of them prey-creatures, who came out at night and moved in furtive bursts. Sholl thought very little of them or about them. There were a few others, more like him. He would see them very occasionally: men and women becalmed in the war’s aftermath, standing without fear on roofs or wandering as if beyond caring by the edges of parks or rivers or darkened shops. He had seen enough of them die to know that not everyone with a similar insouciance to his own was safe from the enemy’s attack.