Caitlin Kittredge - Dark Days

And the ghosts. Thick, packed, like commuters waiting for a train. Many of them had been, when they’d died, and most were so new they didn’t even realize they were dead.

Jack sighed, doing his best to avoid brushing against the silent, staring spirits that packed the tunnel. His head throbbed.

He had to get to the south side of the river before dark. He’d been chasing his daughter for months, ever since he had ripped Lily out of Pete’s arms.

Some of those months, the ones after Pete, had been wasted crawling inside any bottle he could find. He would have gone back to being a dirty smack addict if anyone in the greater London area had any drugs left.

Then he’d picked himself up, and set about getting Lily back. Jack had spent his life on the shadow side, so he learned how to sneak in and out of the safe zones, learned who dealt information and who just played at it, learned the names of all the big hard men who controlled South London now, and he decided that he’d either get Lily back or he’d be dead soon enough.

These days, either option was acceptable.

Of course Jack knew he was only keeping Lily alive to torment him. That Jack was being batted around like a cat toy. Jack had decided it didn’t matter. All of this had happened. He’d started life in shit; he’d clawed his way into a filthy, miserable existence as a psychic too strong to shut off his own visions, and when he’d finally found a bit of happiness, that was when it really hit the fan.

Jack was acutely aware as he climbed the broken escalator at Blackfriars that if he’d just stayed in his tip and continued shooting up, none of this would ever have happened.

That was the sting of hindsight. Jack couldn’t imagine being happy, and then he was. He couldn’t imagine his happiness being ripped away from him, and it was, every last bit. And looking back, it was so fucking obvious that it hurt just as much as a boot to the gut. He wasn’t supposed to be happy and live his life and kick off as an old man with a bunch of grandkids. Jack had only ever existed to burn the world, whether he wanted to or not.

The demons and the old gods and everyone with sense who’d ever met him saw it. He was the only one who had thought things might turn out differently.

Breaking glass, screams, and bootfalls reached his ears as he exited the station, and Jack sighed again. Riots were practically an hourly occurance now, but he didn’t have time to waste on avoiding this one. The sun—what little could be seen through the constant haze of soot and smoke—was already perilously low.

A broken brick whizzed past his ear, and he saw a human gang—the Front Street Boys out of Twickenham, judging by their colors—converging and beating on a zombie. The thing already had one leg off and its face stove in, thrashing as it struggled to scream through its mouth sewn up with red thread.

The Stygian Brothers were turning out zombies with the regularity of a biscuit factory, some half-arsed gibberish about giving the dead of London a second chance. All they gave the rest of the city was a great big fucking pest problem, by Jack’s reckoning, but that was a Stygian for you. Corpse-botherers with no damn sense at all.

Jack avoided the festivities as best he could, heading for the docks where you could find a ferry south, if you were either not human or suicidal.

Before he’d gone far, though, he heard screaming of a different kind—human and panicked. Not that human screams were rare outside the safe zones, but this was bookended by the kind of cackling that Jack attributed to men who enjoyed inflicting pain on smaller, weaker things.

He rounded the corner into an alley that dead-ended at the water. Once, the area had been posh, like most of the wharfs. When he’d first landed in London, the Docklands had been a rotting mass of wharves and junkies and tips falling into the river. Over the years, the tips had been knocked down and the junkies shuffled off to places like Peckham, and the wharves supported posh shops, restaurants where the prices were longer than the menus, and gleaming towers of flats that Jack always figured cost a quid to even look at.

Now it was all burned or overrun with the gangs and the zombies. He could smell the river from here. It was like London had reverted to its dirty, blood-soaked roots. A river full of sewage, a sky full of smoke, and streets full of people so desperate they were worse than animals.

There were four of them surrounding the source of the screaming, a woman with a backpack which one of the hooligans was busy ripping into.

They didn’t sport colors, except for the rusty streaks across their bare torsos. Jack dropped his head to his chest. Fucking cannibals. What was it about people that made them decide the quickest way to deal with the end of the world as they knew it was to turn each other into entrées?

He should just walk away. There were four of them, and often enough cannibalism led directly to necromancers, all too happy to have a band of homicidal nutters who’d work for long pig. Bad enough the cannibals ran about feasting on human flesh; being juiced up on black magic was just unfair.

Still, Jack picked up a length of pipe lying in the street and marched forward. He hit the one rummaging through the pack first, laying him out on his face, and then banged the pipe off an overturned metal rubbish bin. “Oi!”

The cannibals turned as one. Their eyes were as empty as the next addict’s, and Jack sighed. They were definitely running on sorcery.

Jack set himself, gripping the pipe so he felt the threads bite into his palm. “Come on, then,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”

The leader was a skinny bloke with short hair, pasty and small. He might have been one of the posh twats occupying this stretch of the wharves before it all kicked off. Jack threw a leg-locker hex on him and watched him go down, one of his friends falling with him. Jack took the brunt of the third’s charge on his shoulder, the cannibal glancing off and going past. He responded with a hit to the kidneys with the pipe, and another to the back of the cannibal’s skull when he went down.

And another, just for good measure.

The woman screamed something, and Jack turned to see the leader up and bearing down on him. He wondered, as the man closed his teeth on the sleeve of Jack’s leather, why she hadn’t done a rabbit as soon as he’d shown up. Might explain why she’d gotten caught by cannibals in the first place—she was too fucking stupid to live.

Jack let himself fall. The bloke wasn’t big enough to pin him, and Jack rolled them and pressed the pipe across the bloke’s throat. He kept pressing until the bastard twitched and went still.

He realized he’d forgotten about the leader’s friend when he felt a waft of air across the back of his neck as the cannibal wrapped his hands around it.

Then there was a report, a sting in his ears as the shot echoed back and forth from the narrow alley walls, and the woman straightened up from her pack holding a handgun, an old-fashioned revolver that gits in movies called a .38 Special.

The cannibal dropped, the exit wound in his chest the size of Jack’s balled fist.

“Fuck,” he said, sitting down hard. The woman picked up a piece of gauze from her pack and approached him, wiping what turned out to be cannibal blood off his face.

“You know,” she said. “You have a shotgun strapped to your back. Why go to all this trouble?”

Jack blinked at the nurse from King’s Cross. Her face was scratched and dirty, and the collar of her scrubs hung in rags, but she looked a lot more together than he felt. “What the fuck are you doing out here?” she asked, tossing the gauze away, sticking the gun in her waist, and gathering up the wreckage of her pack.