Tim Lebbon - London Eye

“This is narrow,” she said, facing the group of friends. “But not very long. And on the other side, there's the abandoned Tube station.”

“Are we under London yet?” Jenna asked.

“Almost,” Rosemary said. She looked up at the roof and the others shone their torches there, as though they could see all the way through. “Very close now. This is part of what they did to the Exclusion Zone, part of the damage.” She shook her head, and just before she turned away, Jack thought he saw tears.

She was right, the crawlspace was very narrow. But they pulled their way through, lured by the promise of an easy walk and the end of the beginning of their quest.

Jack and the others had seen a few grainy images of London's Tube network since Doomsday, smuggled out with other pictures on memory cards tied to pigeons’ legs or dogs’ collars. They usually showed stations they were familiar with, only a little run down; litter on the platform, dust thick on the tiles, the spaces illuminated by heavy torches or small fires. But the place they found when they emerged from the crack in the earth was very different.

“Where the hell are we?” Sparky asked.

Jenna laughed. “I think it must be Christmas!”

The meagre light from their torches reflected from dozens of mirrors arrayed along the platform and down on the line, glitter balls hanging from the ceiling and smashed glass swept in drifts against the platform wall to their left, flooding the station with light. Swathes of bunting zig-zagged back and forth just above head height for the full length of the platform. In many places, tiles had fallen or been smashed from the wall, but the blank gaps left behind had been painted with luminous green, yellow, or blue paint. Halfway along the platform, there was even a crazy tree made from heavy wire, pinned with hundreds of small passport-sized photographs. Jack went to the tree and saw that each photo was of a different person. Some smiled, some frowned, some stuck out their tongues.

But among this colour and the enthusiastic splash of light, there was no sign of recent human habitation. Plenty of rats, true. And Jack saw footprints-a dog's? A wolf's? — which he was sure were trodden in dried blood.

“This station's been out of use for almost twenty years,” Rosemary said. “Really was the end of the line! So those who lived underground-and there's always been a lot of them-adopted it as their own. Decorated it, slept here, used it as a retreat from above. The stairs are blocked off, and I suppose there must have been other ways up and down, but they've long gone.”

“Where are they now?” Jack asked. “If they were…you know…moved from society anyway, how come they're not still here?”

“Doomsday touched everyone,” Rosemary said, “and Evolve seeped everywhere. There are places in London that are graves. Huge graves. You'll see one soon, but…there's no way I can really prepare you for it.” She looked around the group, and her expression truly startled Jack for the first time. She was an old woman, with the eyes of someone who had known far too much sadness, but she looked at them as though she were sorry for them all.

“It's sad,” Lucy-Anne said.

“’Course it is,” Sparky said. “Life's sad, and shit.”

“No, no,” Jack's girlfriend said. “This place. Even those who wanted nothing to do with the outside world were affected. Don't you see?”

“I see,” Jack said, and he meant it. Lucy-Anne looked at him, and he felt included in her thoughts for the first time since they'd left Camp Truth.

“Well, I want to leave,” said Emily. She had filmed the station, but the red light on her camera was no longer blinking. “Feels weird down here. Haunted.”

None of them disputed her choice of words.

They walked along the old underground line, constantly aware of the flicker of movement just beyond the influence of their artificial light; rats, moving away, but not too fast. Jack guessed they'd had a fine feeding season a couple of years before, and maybe these descendants of those fattened things remembered the taste of human meat.

When they reached the next station it was grim and drab, and half of a train carriage protruded from the tunnel at its far end. The station name had been torn from the wall and smashed from the tiles, as though identity had no place in this new world.

“From here, we go up,” Rosemary said.

“About bloody time,” Sparky said.

None of them stopped walking, because they were all ready to see sunlight once more. But the mood between them was tense…and excited.

Here was the Toxic City.

Here was London.

Jack felt the heat of the setting sun before he saw it. Soon it would be dusk, but the afternoon warmth felt very good as they climbed up from the Underground and stood at the crossroads of two London streets.

At first glance it could have been a quiet Sunday morning. Cars were parked along the roadside, if a little haphazardly in places, and a few shops had their front doors propped open. Pigeons cooed quietly on window sills. Litter whispered along the street, blown by a gentle breeze. But there was no life here, no breath, no heartbeat. This was obviously a dead place, and with that realisation came the facility to see evidence of that demise.

One of the propped-open doors rested against a skeleton in a dark blue uniform. Several shops’ windows were smashed. Along the street, almost hidden behind an incongruous growth of brambles and rose bushes, a burnt-out pub poked charred rafters at the sky.

“It looks…” Lucy-Anne began. Jack could see her eyes flitting across the scene, going from windows to doors, cars to side-streets. Is she looking already? he thought, but he did not have to ask. Although he knew the size of London, he felt closer to his mother and father than he had in a long time.

“We have to be careful,” Rosemary said, urging them back into the shadow of the Tube station entrance. “Choppers patrol the streets around this time of day. They don't like the dark, but they roam the dusk, when Irregulars are looking for somewhere to spend the night.”

“You don't have somewhere permanent to live?” Jenna asked.

“Some do,” Rosemary said. “But not many. Far too dangerous.”

She looked terrified, and Jack could not detect a shred of pleasure in her at being back in London. Rather than coming home, Rosemary seemed to have brought herself back to danger.

“So where do we spend the night?” Sparky asked. “I've had enough of tunnels and rats.”

“There's somewhere I know,” Rosemary replied. “North, across the Barrens.”

“Barrens?” Jack asked.

“The grave I told you about,” the woman said. “You'll see. Not far from here. You'll see.” She looked around the group, nodded, and then stepped out onto the pavement.

They followed her in line, Emily holding the camera before her and sweeping it slowly around. The station stood on one corner of a crossroads, and Rosemary led them around the side of the building, past peeling posters advertising movies and stage shows two years and many lifetimes old.

“Will we see lots of people?” Emily asked.

“Not around here,” Rosemary said. “Not this close.”

“Close to the Barrens?” Jack asked. But Rosemary only glanced back at him with haunted eyes.

Around the next corner they turned left into a residential street. There were three cars and a bus involved in a pile-up at the junction, one car having been forced from the road and through the front wall of a house. The blackened scars of an old fire blistered one flank of the bus, but it was impossible to tell whether this was a result of the accident, or something that had happened afterwards.