Tim Lebbon - London Eye

“Chopper chopper!” Sparky shouted, giggling nervously.

“We can't be caught!” Jack said again. “This isn't fair!” He thought of his mother and sister crawling out of London through the dangerous darkness, his father somewhere to the north, and Lucy-Anne wandering the street alone as she searched the ruin of one of the world's largest cities for her lost brother. And such a weight of responsibility pressed down on him that for a moment he could not move, crushed there on that burnt car's bonnet and staring into the skeletal eyes of someone sorely missed.

“Come on,” Sparky said, tapping his leg.

“Jack!” Jenna shouted.

Another helicopter appeared above the end of the street, lowering itself slowly between house rows, rotors so close that they whipped dust from the buildings’ facades.

“There!” Jenna shouted, pointing at an open door across the street. “We can go through and try to find-”

“Look!” Sparky shouted. He pointed, but there was no need. The darkening of the sky was obvious.

The helicopter pilot was concentrating so hard on not crashing into the houses that he can't have noticed the flock of rooks gathering above him. There were hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, swirling and waving in complex patterns that were as beautiful as they were disturbing.

“Over there!” Jenna said. Along the street, halfway between where they stood and where the pilot was readying to land, someone emerged from a house. Rooks roosted on his shoulders and head, and though it could not be heard, Jack saw that he was whistling.

The helicopter was ten feet above the ground when the rooks dived into its spinning rotors.

“Down!” Sparky shouted. He pulled Jenna down beside him, Jack fell beside the burnt out cars…but they all had to watch.

Thousands of birds exploded in puffs of black and sprays of blood. The houses beside the aircraft were coated in clumps of wet feather and meat, and the combined calls of dying birds was louder that the protesting engine. Some dived into the main rotors, other curved down and flew into the rear rotor blade, their suicides instant and without hesitation.

The helicopter's front windshield was quickly obscured by a mess of diced rooks, and it tipped down and to the left.

Sparky shouted something else, but the noise was too great, the chaos too confusing to hear. The aircraft tilted and hit the ground hard, and the still-spinning rotors smashed across the front of a house. Shards of shattered brick zinged along the street like shrapnel from an explosion, ricocheting from the ruined cars, smashing windows, and whistling overhead. Jack felt something hit his leg, and the impact point quickly turned wet and numb.

The motor squealed, crunched, and then exploded with a pained grinding of metal. A section of brickwork fell from the front of the house directly into the blades, and one of them snapped away, spinning skyward and disappearing over the terraced rooftops. An avalanche of roof slates slid down onto crashed helicopter.

The remaining rotors stopped spinning, broken and dipped, and the aircraft settled at a slant against the house's wall.

Jack could not move. He looked from the ruin of the helicopter, to the boy with rooks on his shoulder, then back to the aircraft. There was movement there, though it could have been the shuffle of dying birds twitching wings or tail feathers. More slates slipped from the roof. An upstairs window fell forward and smashed across a broken rotor blade. The house was still shifting, and the rest of it could come down at any moment.

There were still hundreds of rooks circling above, and the mysterious boy watched them.

A side door on the helicopter creaked open. Two soldiers fell out, stumbling away from the wreck and quickly bringing their weapons to bear.

Behind the boy standing in the house's doorway, Jack saw a shadow move. As it emerged into the light, he could see her face.

“Lucy-Anne!” Sparky shouted. She withdrew at the sound of her name, but they had all seen her. Jenna glanced back at Jack, shocked and afraid, just as Sparky stood and started running diagonally across the road.

One of the soldiers raised his gun and fired.

Jack blinked against the shot, and in the space of that brief darkness he dreaded what he would see when he looked again.

Sparky was still running, hunched down now, and Lucy-Anne had appeared once more, eyes wide with shock, waving him towards her and shouting for him to Run! Run!

He won't miss a second time , Jack thought, looking along the street at the soldier. The Chopper was changing his stance, settling into a proper shooting posture this time, and behind him the other soldier was taking aim as well.

“Run, Sparky!” Jenna shouted, and the second soldier looked their way.

The circling rooks dived, silent and fast. They moved like a single slice of night, and somewhere in their cries as they powered into the two soldiers, Jack was sure he heard gunshots. The men disappeared, replaced by a vicious cloud of pecking, clawing birds.

More people tumbled from the helicopter. Two soldiers fired into the birds, oblivious to whether they were hitting their companions, and the third man retreated behind the wreck, talking into something in his hand. Jack recognised him: grey hair, short…Miller.

As Sparky reached the house and Lucy-Anne greeted him with a confused smile, two doors on that side of the street but closer to the helicopter crashed open. The several people that emerged must have been rushing through the gardens and houses to get here, and Jack guessed they were sorry they had missed all the action. They certainly looked like fighters. One was short and dressed in black, and Jack had difficulty focussing on him…almost like a shadow where the sun still shone. Another carried a variety of guns and knives, her eyes milky white and blind. They darted across the street and approached the downed helicopter, working well together, their movements fluid and rehearsed.

Jenna had run after Sparky, and as Jack climbed across the last of the burnt cars, he looked that way, too…

…and saw his father emerging from an open doorway close to the helicopter.

“Dad,” he croaked, his voice hoarse.

His father looked so different. Still tall and trim, but his face carried so much more than his forty-five years now, and his mouth was cruel, laughter lines turned into creases of worry and stress.

“Dad!” Jack shouted at last.

Reaper turned and looked directly at him. For that moment, they were the only two people in the street. Nothing else mattered. Here was his father, missing for two years and considered a lost cause by his wife. Jack tried to welcome a rush of memories similar to when he and Emily had found his mother, but the memories he found were more elusive, and less joyful. They were tinged by the present, and the blank mask that this man had become.

Not even a smile.

“Dad, it's me, Jack!”

Reaper took one step towards his son, then stopped. He turned and said something to the blind Superior now standing by his side, and Jack was terrified that the order had been given to kill him. But the Superior merely walked towards the downed helicopter. Miller was at the ruined aircraft, screaming into the thing in his hand. Two soldiers flanked him, guns at the ready, and rooks were settling all across the wreckage. More circled above, and yet more pecked at red things scattered across the street. Dead birds, dead people; meat was meat.

The second helicopter returned.

“Over here!” Sparky called. He and Jenna were with Lucy-Anne now, and they retreated into the house's shadow.

Jack wanted to run. But even when the helicopter's machine guns opened up, tearing chunks of masonry from the terrace's facade, smashing holes in roofs, shattering those few whole windows that remained, all he could do was look at his father.