Tim Lebbon - Contagion

Behind him, a flash. Lucy-Anne’s eyes go wide and her face drops.

Now …

Jack dreams everything back to normal. The flash recedes almost before it begins, barely even glittering from the river’s surface. The sky returns to its indifferent blue. Lucy-Anne no longer looks scared.

I did it! Jack thinks, and in the dream Lucy-Anne pauses close to him, looking around in confusion as if not knowing what to do.

“Don’t worry,” Jack says. He speaks with Nomad’s voice. “I’ll see you again.”

Jack snapped awake. Angelina was beside him, shaking him gently. She moved back as he sat up.

“It worked,” he said.

“For how long?”

He looked at the tank. It should have been blasted to atoms and beyond, but it remained whole because of him. “I don’t know,” he said.

“How will we ever know?”

Jack contemplated the moment of the explosion. He knew little about the workings of such a device, but he thought there was an initial charge that started the nuclear reaction. Would he hear that first blast? Would it reach his ears and travel to his brain, registering there before he was vaporised? Even with something as unimaginably destructive as this there had to be a moment between living and dead. An instant in time when consciousness ceased and his senses halted. He wondered whether at that instant, he would know what was happening.

Or would there be no knowledge? Would he be ended halfway through a thought or action, a movement or dream? Ceasing to be, like a raindrop touching an ocean.

He wasn’t sure which would be best.

Jack was tempted to force the tank open, touch the bomb, start to dismantle it, look inside to see if there was a timer he could find, one which perhaps had been put back hours or minutes by the dream he’d just had. I forced it to unexplode . But he was afraid in case all of his powers could not combat the most subtle of booby traps.

And he was afraid in case he’d only put the timer back by seconds.

Lucy-Anne knew that voice.

“I can’t go with you. You think they’ll let me through? You think they’ll let me live?”

“So what are you going to do?” Sparky asked.

“Haru and I will fade away.”

“What about Emily and—” Jenna said.

“I haven’t been her father for a long time.”

“Thank you.” That was another voice, and it took a while for Lucy-Anne to place it. She struggled to open her eyes, and when she did it was difficult to focus in the darkness.

“You’re welcome,” Reaper said. “Now…” He did not finish; perhaps because he had no idea what to say.

Lucy-Anne saw him then, Reaper, silhouetted against the floodlights set along the edge of the Exclusion Zone. She couldn’t make him out in detail—couldn’t see his expression, his eyes—but when he walked away and disappeared into shadows, she thought perhaps his shoulders were curved, weighted down with everything he had done.

Or maybe he was just trying not to be seen.

“Where did he find you?” Sparky asked.

“Hiding in a basement,” Rhali said. “He was calling for me. After I ran I was terrified, I got confused, so I headed west. Heard the shooting and explosions behind me and ran until I was exhausted. And I thought Reaper was going to kill me.”

“Rhali,” Lucy-Anne said.

Rhali knelt beside her and touched her leg, appraising her wounds without wincing away.

“But he came to save me. For Jack, he said. He saved me because I meant something to Jack. So…Jack?” Rhali asked.

Lucy-Anne shook her head.

“Is he…?”

“Dreaming us safe,” Jenna said. “Come on. We’ll tell you on the way out.”

They were outside London once again. Beyond the Toxic City. And everyone was on the move.

Vehicles screamed off into the night—cars, vans, buses, motorbikes, four wheel drives. Heavy lights illuminated the landscape for hundreds of feet in every direction. A score of coaches trundled along a road, two abreast, all of them jammed with passengers. Many more people walked.

They saw a wall of faces. On hoardings surrounding a church—its refurbishment abandoned two years ago—people had started pinning photographs and messages to lost loved ones. Someone had painted ragged letters across the top of the hoarding in an attempt to form some sort of alphabetical order, and many people frantically searched the images or sat at the wall’s foot, waiting for a miracle.

“One minute,” Rhali said. “Just one!” She ran to the M section of the wall and started looking. Searching for her own face, or a message from someone she loved. No hope , Lucy-Anne thought. She felt emptied by all that had happened, and any dregs of hope she retained were kept for Jack, and Jack alone. She had none to spare.

But then Rhali froze, reached up, stood on tiptoes. Everything seemed to pause as they saw her touch her own smiling face—happier from years before, fuller—and then pull off a square of paper attached to it.

She returned to them, stunned. “My cousin,” she said. “My cousin Jay has been here. Looking for me. And he left…” She held out the paper, unable to say any more. Lucy-Anne saw some phone numbers, and a big Jay followed by an even larger X as a kiss.

“Whoa,” Sparky said.

“Let’s go,” Rhali said, smiling. “He’ll be waiting for me to call.”

There were a few groups of people hugging deliriously, seemingly ignorant of the panicked retreat from what was about to happen in the city. Those lucky few who had met those loved ones come to find them. Lucy-Anne wondered what powers these people had, and what those they loved would think of them. How they would integrate back into normal, real life hardly bore thinking about. What would Jay think of Rhali now?

But that was not Lucy-Anne’s problem. She had her own to contend with. These terrible injuries. Her dreams.

“What’ll we tell Emily?” she asked as they walked.

“We’ll tell her how brave her brother is,” Jenna said. “How proud of her he is. Look at what she’s done! She’s revealed the truth to the world. If it wasn’t for her, all these people might well have been shot down as they tried to leave.”

“And we’ll tell her her daddy’s dead,” Sparky said.

Lucy-Anne was shocked for a moment, remembering Reaper slinking away into the shadows after bringing Rhali back to them. But after everything he’d done—and she had only seen and heard about a fraction of it—that was nowhere near redemption.

No one objected to Sparky’s suggestion.

“Where do you think we’ll find them?” Jenna asked.

“Knowing Emily, it wouldn’t surprise me if they found us,” Sparky said.

Lucy-Anne looked back across the bombed Exclusion Zone towards the distant, dark London. There were no lights over there, and the starlight gave only a surface silvery sheen to what she could see of the city.

She knew that however strong Jack’s dreaming, the darkness could not last all night.

He sees Lucy-Anne again. It is a beautiful moment, even though he knows it is only him benefiting from the sighting. This is Nomad’s dream he is redreaming, and retelling, after all.

He has a second to dwell on her beauty. Not only on the outside, because her rebellious, perky attractiveness has always been obvious to him. But on the inside as well. She has lost so much, but even so she did not allow the madness to carry her away. It stole her for a time. But she triumphed.

And then the flash behind him. London is bleached, as if the explosion’s power is already erasing the city before its heat and shock blasts can do the real work. The skin on the back of his neck stretches.

Lucy-Anne’s eyes go wide and her face drops. And then he sees her eyeballs melt as—