Tim Lebbon - Reaper's Legacy

“Can they get in?”

“I don’t know.” He sounded calm, but he was looking around like a startled bird.

The urge to turn around was huge. She could smell the mustiness of old decay, a stench that had become familiar since she’d entered London with her friends, and she knew that someone dead shared the car with them. Or we’re sharing their car , she thought. Sorry. Sorry to sit in your car.

Then she saw the key in the ignition, and her thoughts of the dead person vanished.

“I can drive this,” she said.

“What? No! Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Hey, there’s plenty you don’t know about me. I’ve nicked a car or two. Can drive. Even if the key wasn’t there, I could probably start the thing given time.”

“No,” Rook said, and he grabbed her shoulder. It was a surprising gesture, but one she welcomed. “I mean, no one drives cars apart from the Choppers. Too dangerous. Too easy to see or hear.”

“You really think there are Choppers here to see or hear?” she asked.

He was watching her in the darkness. She could just make out the faint glint of his eyes, and his shadows sitting beside her was solid reality. Everything else was ambiguous.

Claws raked across the car roof again, and something big flitted in front of the windscreen.

“Whatever, I’m not going out there,” Lucy-Anne said. A dozen of his birds had entered the car with them, and glancing in the rearview mirror she could see several silhouetted against the rear window. She also caught sight of a larger shape and glanced away again.

“Try,” Rook said at last. “The battery will be flat. The tyres will be down. Water in the engine. Something.”

Lucy-Anne grabbed the key and felt the fob, running her fingers over the cold metal. “Mazda,” she said. “Mum and Dad always swore by them.” She made sure the car was out of gear and turned the key. The engine coughed, hacked a few times, and then caught. She pressed on the gas and revved. The car vibrated with restrained power.

“Wow,” Rook said.

“Yeah,” Lucy-Anne said. “Well. Where to, sir?” Laughing softly, she turned on the headlights. The street before them was flooded with weak light and she gasped with shock.

Three shapes squatted on the broken road, flinching away from the light. They were humanoid, but their bodies were thin and stringy, bare skin pale and diseased, and open sores wept across their abdomens and legs. They had what looked like stumpy wings, useless and malformed. Their faces were bulbous, each feature exaggerated. They looked like gargoyles.

“Oh my…” Lucy-Anne muttered. The gargoyle-people fled, scampering from the haze of weak headlamps and finding shadows once more

“Unnatural,” Rook said. He seemed deeply troubled, his face creased in an intense frown in the pale dashboard light. “Not right. That’s not right.”

“Can’t argue with you there,” Lucy-Anne said, and she slipped the car into first gear. It moved sluggishly, heavily, and she admitted to herself that Rook had been right on one count; at least one tyre was flat. But she moved eventually into third gear and drove slowly along the road, and the gargoyle-people did not trouble them again. Perhaps they had climbed and now hung overhead, watching. Maybe they squatted on rooftops and watched the car moving northward, pushing a pool of weak light before it. Lucy-Anne’s world became the splash of light ahead of them, and the inside of the car, and the place somewhere beyond both where her brother was still alive.

Not like that , she thought. Not with wings and a face like that! Not with withered arms so he can snake along the ground. Not with scales or fur, not changed at all, but just…Andrew. She wished she could fall asleep and dream him well. But since the vision of the nuclear explosion and Nomad’s casual presence, she had been afraid to sleep at all.

“I need something to eat,” she said. “A drink. Water. Something.”

“Soon,” Rook said.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. Never been this far north. But we’ll get something soon.”

“What, bird seed?” Her voice grew louder and tinged with panic, so she gripped the wheel harder and concentrated, breathing long and deep. Losing it again would do no one any good. “What happened to them?” she asked at last.

“Don’t know. Extreme reaction to Doomsday.”

“Extreme?” Loud again, panicked. She slammed the wheel with one hand and they veered to the left, clipping the side of a parked van.

“I’ve only heard the rumours,” he said. “Never wanted to see for myself.”

“Why?”

“Didn’t want to see what I might have become.”

They fell silent. Lucy-Anne concentrated on her driving, pleased when the glare of headlights grew stronger as the battery was charged again. It was amazing that the car had started so quickly after two years, and she wanted to tell someone about that—Jack, Sparky, Jenna. But that opportunity might not come again.

She weaved the car along the streets, passing between parked or crashed vehicles when she could, working to shove a path through when she could not. She quickly learned that low gear and low revs was best for pushing an obstacle out of the way, but several times they had to backtrack to find an alternative route. Sometimes this took them into narrow side streets or even the back lanes between house gardens, and perhaps it was a trick of the light, but she saw many shadows darting away.

We’re being watched all the time , she thought. It was a chilling idea. But it didn’t matter. Andrew was somewhere ahead of her, always ahead. Soon, she hoped, she would find him. And then this part of her journey would be over.

What came next would depend on who or what Andrew had become.

“I never thought I’d see you scared,” Lucy-Anne said. Dawn was breaking across the rooftops to the east, and Hampstead Heath was close. Their journey had been slow but uninterrupted, a mummified corpse sat in the seat behind her, and a dozen rooks perched around the car, swaying in time with its movement and occasionally calling out for no apparent reason. It was a surreal journey, and she needed it broken.

“What, you think I’m some sort of super human?”

“Don’t you?”

Rook smiled. It was the first time she’d seen him smiling since dusk the previous evening, and it looked good on him.

“I feel…” He sighed, and a rook hopped down from his shoulder onto his knee. It pecked at a fly buzzing the window, its beak striking the glass with a musical tink !

“Feel what?”

“Different. I feel different.”

“You are different.”

“And abandoned. Do you have any idea what it’s like? Can you even think about how it felt after Doomsday, when London was filled with dead people and I was left…alone. We survived for a time, me and my brother. We thought there’d be rescue attempts. But then they took him, and I was alone, and I knew that was it. So yeah, I’m different. I’ve moved on. London’s the whole world now, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes get scared. Doesn’t everyone?”

“Everyone human, yeah. Dunno about the Superiors.” She glanced sidelong at him when she said this, but she already knew what he thought about them. He was as much Superior as he was Irregular. Rook was one of the few who was completely his own person. His only allegiance was to his birds.

And now perhaps to her as well.

“Slow down,” he said. “Need to find out where we are.”

She slowed the car at a road junction but left it running, and Rook opened his window. The rooks in the car with them took flight immediately, flitting through the window and spiralling up above the car. Lucy-Anne leaned over the steering wheel and looked up, but they were quickly lost to dawn’s glare.