Tim Lebbon - Contagion

He sought the personality she had once been.

Jack excavated. Unearthed the truth she had kept buried for so long. Freeing who she really was. He touched the star and let it burst, and its light flooded Nomad’s subconscious. When he pulled out and drew back from her, readying for another attack, preparing to defend himself if what he’d tried went wrong, it was not only Nomad slumping to the ground before him.

Angelina Walker was a part of her once again.

She looked up at Jack with haunted eyes.

“You’re staying with me,” he said, and before she could react he stole her breath until she fainted away.

Jack used everything he had to venture closer to the tank. He mapped the trip wires and lasers in his mind, forming a three-dimensional understanding of where they were, and then sought out the other traps. He moulded a space of motionless air around motion detectors, levelled the temperature around body heat detectors. Paused by the inner doors, wondering what he might have missed and probing inside the tank with all of his human senses, and many senses that were far from human.

The bomb was in there, hot and heavy. The tank was welded shut.

“Angelina,” he said. The woman was leaning against the wall beside him, eyelids fluttering, leg twitching. “Is there anything else?” He brought her up out of her faint.

She was scared, shivering, useless. She would be no threat to him as she was now, but neither could she help. This was all on him.

“We’re going closer,” he said. “I have to be as close as I can. Come with me.”

Everything was still, and quiet, and as far removed from London as he had been in days. He stared at the terrible display of war machines, portraying both beauty in form, and ugliness in their intended purpose. Each one told a story now lost to the dark mists of long-finished wars. And yet each story still resonated, because Jack felt the influence of the people who had manned these machines. He had a duty to them as well as to everyone left alive in London. He had a duty to the world.

“What did you do?” he asked Angelina, not expecting an answer. But she gave one anyway.

“Only my best,” she said.

“You can help me put everything right,” Jack said. “I’ll sleep, but I need waking every few minutes. You can do that. You have to.”

Angelina nodded, and he saw no deception in her. He would have to trust her.

They moved closer until they were only a few feet from the tank, and then they stopped. They sat down slowly, Jack checking all the time for lasers he hadn’t seen, pressure pads or trip wires hidden in shadows. But he knew that they were safe, for now. With the powers he had, he knew.

He could sense the bomb inside, a terrible weight. And he knew the time was close.

“Lucy-Anne dreamt of Nomad and the bomb,” Jack said. “I have to do the same.” He closed his eyes and started breathing deeply, falling into his universe and then passing through an unknown place into Nomad’s stranger, cooler mind.

And he dreamt of Lucy-Anne.

“Shit,” Sparky said. “Maybe they are going to machine-gun us after all.”

They were halfway across the Exclusion Zone, and facing them was a wall of lights. They could see the movement even from here, hear the engines. Several helicopters buzzed overhead, but they couldn’t tell whether they were military.

But they had already seen groups of people ahead of them disappearing into the bustle at the edge of the zone, and there was no gunfire. They had little choice. Lucy-Anne knew that Jack could not dream the bomb back forever.

“Time?” she asked through her damaged mouth.

Sparky glanced at his watch and kept staring for a while, as if trying to make sense of something. “It’s almost midnight,” he said.

“He’ll do it,” Jenna said. “For as long as he can, he’ll do it.”

Lucy-Anne had an arm around each of their shoulders, three friends so close. If only their fourth was not missing. She felt as though she’d left a limb behind, and several times crossing the bombed and burned Exclusion Zone she experienced a mad compulsion to rush back into London to be with Jack. She knew where he was. She might even get there in time.

“Almost there,” Sparky said. “But don’t these people know what’s happening?”

“Maybe it won’t reach this far,” Jenna said.

“Yeah, but it’s still close.”

“Lots have left already,” Breezer said. “I’m hoping this is the last of them. Others might have gone in different directions, but everyone my people were able to contact were told to come this way. There are some who refused to leave London. And probably many more we don’t know about, deep down in the tunnels, hidden away.”

“And those things from the north,” Sparky said.

“Yes. And them. I’ve seen some…but not many. It could be many of them don’t want to leave London.”

“We can hope,” Jenna said. “The thought of them out in the countryside…”

“I suspect they’ll be as scared as we are,” Breezer said, betraying his own fear at leaving the toxic city that had been home for two years.

“Let’s go,” Lucy-Anne said, wincing at the pain. It was her way of saying, Shut up and let’s get the hell out of here .

As they approached the outer edge of the zone, the buzz of frantic activity was obvious. There was surprisingly little military, and those who were there seemed as panicked as everyone else. People rushed to and fro, calling names, searching for loved ones among the slow trickle of people emerging from the darkness of the Exclusion Zone. Cars and other vehicles were moving in only one direction—away. And those few still remaining sat with engines running, ready to leave as soon as possible.

These were the people of Britain come to rescue survivors they had been told were all dead. Until very recently this area would have been occupied only by Choppers, but now most of them were gone—obeying or against orders, Lucy-Anne did not know—fleeing the bomb that mad bastard Miller had triggered. Instead of waiting here until the last minute, helping the survivors get out, holding back the hundreds or thousands of people who had flooded towards London when the truth had emerged…they had turned tail and fled. Lucy-Anne had not thought she could ever hate the Choppers any more, but she did right then.

And though she loved these people who had come to help, she was also afraid that another tragedy was imminent.

“Buddy hell…” she muttered, and then a faint washed over her. She felt Sparky and Jenna strengthen their grip, and then everything drew far away. Blackness pulled her down, and she welcomed it.

He is walking along the South Bank. London is all but silent; the only sounds are litter blown by the breeze, and pigeons cooing in the trees. The London Eye is a smashed ruin behind him, but though wrecked it still feels like a special place. A place of creation and birth. Now he is leaving it behind.

He walks along the pavement but barely touches it. I’m Nomad , he thinks, and the sudden burst of lucid dreaming is a shock. It chills and excites him, because he has never felt its like before. He looks across the river and imagines one of the buildings there lifting up, and with a grind of breaking masonry it does so, huge columns of stone splashing into the Thames. He blinks and everything is back to normal.

It is amazing, but this is no time to play. Jack knows he has a job to do.

A voice calls out from behind him. His urge is to continue on and ignore it, but that is Nomad’s dream, not his. So he turns around to see Lucy-Anne running along the riverside towards him. She looks petrified.

Any time now , Jack thinks.