Christopher Nuttall - Their Darkest Hour

Chris snorted as he started leading the way down the walkway. “You want to bet that some mutant turtles have been breeding down here,” he said, flashing the beam of light over the still water. “People used to put crocodiles down here with the rest of the shit they threw out.”

“Thank you, sir,” the Marine said. “I won’t ever be able to wipe that image from my mind.”

The walk seemed to stretch out into hours. It was strange to think that the aliens were just above them, watching for any signs of trouble. Chris knew that smaller parties of insurgents were meant to be launching a series of attacks to keep the aliens busy, but there was no way to know just how they were faring down in the tunnels. The torch flickered once as they reached a crossroads, reminding him of all the horror stories he’d read of monsters lurking deep underground. Aliens from Alien , sewer monsters from The X-Files … as a kid, he’d loved watching horror movies. And even as an adult, the memory still sent a chill running down his spine.

They reached the end of the tunnel and stopped dead. There was supposed to be a way around the blockage, into the parts of the sewers that were still working. Chris puzzled over the chart, before realising that they had walked past a smaller tunnel that connected to the main stream. The roof seemed to be closing in on them as they passed through a hidden door and out into the main body of the sewers. From what he recalled, most of the sewage was pumped out of the city, cleansed and then… actually, he couldn’t remember what happened then. They weren’t allowed to simply pump it into the Thames any longer, if he recalled correctly.

“Jesus,” one of the men commented. “What a fucking pong.”

Chris nodded, trying hard to breathe through his nose. In the distance, he could hear the sound of pumps pushing the sewerage through the tunnels. The environment was a breeding ground for rats, according to the briefing — he saw one running along a pipe before vanishing into the darkness. They seemed to have almost no fear of humanity, running up and almost touching their boots before jumping back to avoid kicks from the soldiers. Chris remembered that rats had carried diseases in pre-modern times and shuddered. The aliens had broken down a great many health and safety systems. There were probably places in Britain where scurvy and other long-forgotten diseases had returned to torment the human race.

He saw a light in the distance and reached for his pistol, before realising that it was the welcoming committee. Two of the soldiers who had been in London ever since the invasion were waiting for them, including someone he hadn’t seen since the Battle of London, when he’d been swept out of the city by the river. He called his name and ran forward, heedless of the danger of slipping and falling into the shit. It had been far too long since they’d seen one another.

“Bongo,” he said, as they hugged. “I thought you were dead!”

“I thought you were dead, you old pirate,” Bongo said. He’d come from Jamaica to join the British Army and had been streamlined into the Household Division. “What the fuck blew you out of London?”

“The aliens,” Chris said, as Bongo pointed to the ladder leading upwards to the safe house. He couldn’t imagine which civil servant had been so paranoid as to designate a handful of houses as emergency evacuation points, but he had to admit that the paranoia had made it a great deal easier to slip into London. “What have you been doing with yourself, then?”

Bongo filled him in once they reached the top and clambered out into the safe house. Chris had seen a couple like it while he’d been on close-protection details, places where MI5 could debrief defectors or notable public figures could hide from the media. It looked perfectly normal from the outside, but most of the building would be wired for sound and the tapes stored at a different location. He hoped they’d taken out the bugs once they’d started to use it as a base.

“Oh, we’re not based here,” Bongo said, when he asked. “There’s too much chance that someone will come across a reference to the place in the files — too many damn bureaucrats went over to the aliens. We just use it because it has access to the sewers.”

He made a show of glancing at his watch. “We’ll have to wait here until the sun goes down,” he added, “so we may as well have a brew. I hope you bought some teabags from outside…?”

“And a few army-issue packed lunches,” Chris said, with a grin.

“Bastard,” Bongo said, without heat. “Anyway… what have you been doing with yourself since Westminster?”

It was an hour before Bongo decided that the night had fallen far enough to allow them to slip out onto the streets. The aliens and their collaborators had put a stop to London’s once-celebrated nightlife by enforcing a curfew, but they didn’t really have the manpower to keep it firmly in place outside Central London. Bongo and the rest of the resistance could still move about with impunity as long as they didn’t go too close to the aliens, who had night-vision gear and a willingness to open fire without confirming that the contact was actually hostile. Most humans knew to give them a wide berth.

Chris had grown up in London and had loved the city, even though he’d left school with few qualifications and little hope of a worthwhile job outside the army. Looking at the city now tore at his heart. Buildings had been destroyed, or reduced to blackened shells of what they’d once been; the once-endless traffic had been driven off the road, leaving London’s population forced to walk from place to place on foot. Burned-out cars were everywhere, a reminder that the aliens sometimes used them for target practice; others had bullet holes through their windscreens or superstructure. He saw a handful of dead bodies as they slipped onwards and wondered just how many had died in the weeks since the aliens had landed. London had had a huge population once, but now… now there was no way to know how many were left. He only saw a couple of living humans as they walked through the gloom.

Bongo had said that many of the gangs had wiped each other out. They’d been dependent upon selling drugs to customers, drugs that were no longer available because the aliens had sealed off London and destroyed world shipping. The gangs had been reduced to fighting over the last few bags of cocaine or heroin, while their customers had been forced to go cold turkey, weaning themselves off the drugs the hard way. Chris had nothing, but contempt for those who became enslaved to the needle or snorting powder, yet many of the addicts would have suffered greatly for lack of their crutch. One more crime to blame on the Leathernecks, he told himself, as they reached what had once been a large housing estate. The locals probably knew that the resistance had a base there, but hadn’t breathed a word to the police. They’d probably felt that having the resistance there was good for them. The resistance certainly didn’t waste time taking protection money or all the other tricks the gangs used to pull.

“Come on,” Bongo hissed. Inside, the massive block of flats smelled faintly of urine. “I’m sorry about the stench, but we can’t risk standing out from the crowd.”

Chris nodded as the doors closed behind them. “Welcome to one of our staging bases,” Bongo said. He nodded towards a team of four people who had been waiting for them. “Abdul — SAS dude, very brave or thoroughly crazy. Jake — local volunteer, smart-ass. Janet — our… ah, contact with some of the police. And Fatima — our doctor.”

“Welcome to London,” Abdul said, dryly. He might not have been wearing a proper uniform — none of them were — but he managed to look as if he was dressed for parade. “I think you’ll hate what we’ve done to the place.”