Contagion (Toxic City) (15 page)

Gunfire, bullets, the rattle of lead hitting metal and the eruption of an explosion somewhere close by. Jack punched and kicked again but the strange woman was already gone.

A hand closed around his arm and hauled him upright. He blinked at the searing pain in his eye, closed it, and with his one good eye he saw Shade standing before him. He was more there than Jack had ever seen him, and he looked exhausted.

Behind him, Reaper. But this was a Reaper Jack had never seen before. Panting, sweating, eyes wide in desperation, his clothing awry and left arm held awkwardly across his body, desperation had almost taken him back to looking like Jack's father.

“You better still have him, boy,” Reaper said.

At the far end of the street three Chopper motorcycles skidded around a corner. Above them the helicopter came in again, and its heavy machine gun started tearing the street apart.

Nomad's eyes opened and she cried out at the dream she was still having.

Lucy-Anne and blood and then there is no more air because…

She stood, cautious still of the bomb and its traps. Summoning every scrap of what she had, everything that had set her apart since Doomsday and still did now, she became less human than she ever had before.

And in the blink of an eye, she went to change the future.

Lucy-Anne stood in the smashed window and looked out at the street, and she had seen some of this before. It wasn't quite right…but even as she watched, events steered themselves towards what she knew was to come.

Reaper fell back as bullets ripped along the street. Jack was shoved across the car bonnet and fell onto the pavement, and the dark man who'd been holding him dropped behind the car. The vehicle jerked on its suspension as bullets stitched across the roof and windows exploded outwards.

“Jack!” Jenna called. She stood beside Lucy-Anne, eager to help but knowing that to do so would be suicide.

Can it get any worse?
Lucy-Anne thought. She looked down beside
her at Hayden cowering beneath the window sill. He was holding a blood-soaked handkerchief to Fleeter's face, and the girl's limbs were jerking and slapping the floor.

“Sparky!” Jenna shouted. She darted out into the street just as the helicopter passed overhead in a roar and a cloud of dust. It was so low that Lucy-Anne could see the pilot's eyes as he looked down, and she wondered what he saw. People? Or monsters?

There were both down here.

Sparky was lying across the other side of the street. He was on his back, one hand held up, one knee raised. His blond hair was now dark with blood. The thing attacking him had fled at the gunfire. Probably more sensible than they were.

Jenna was running towards him as the Chopper motorcycles powered along the street.

“Jenna, run!” Lucy-Anne shouted.

Reaper stood and turned towards the motorcycles.
Now he'll shout them to smithereens
, Lucy-Anne thought, but he held his chest as he roared, and the result was not as dramatic as she expected.

The lead motorcycle swerved, struck a parked van and flipped, spilling its rider and rolling past Reaper and the prone Sparky. It missed Jenna by inches and smashed against another vehicle, spinning on its side on the street and then bursting into flames. Spilled fuel flowed, carrying the fire wide.

The rider stood on shaky legs, one hand pressed to her side, the other tugging a pistol from a holster on her belt. As she lifted the weapon the air around her hazed and she seemed to crumple, skin glistening with frost. She coughed, and ice formed in the air before her. A tall Asian woman appeared from the shadows behind her and knocked her aside. She knelt beside the fallen Chopper, pressed her mouth across the struggling woman's mouth, and Lucy-Anne turned away.

The other two Choppers braked, turned, and powered back along the street.

Kill them!
she thought, but Reaper was slowly bending over as if winded. Had he caught a bullet? She didn't know.

The helicopter opened up again and Shade screamed. He appeared from a shadow Lucy-Anne had not been aware of and stumbled across the street, both hands pressed to his guts, blinded by pain. Agony gave him form.

“Shade!” Reaper shouted, but the shadow man seemed not to hear. He staggered directly into the flaming pool of fuel, and his scream turned into a shriek.

Lucy-Anne dashed across to Jack. He was bleeding and holding one hand to his wounded eye. “Do something!” she shouted at Reaper, looking up at the helicopter cruising slowly towards them back along the street. Fire leapt from its machine guns. Bullets ricocheted.

“Lucy-Anne, got to get back…got to…” Jack said. He reached for her, staggered forwards, and she held out her hands for him.

From her right, the roar of motorcycles again. The rattle of small-arms fire.

Ahead of her, Jenna was kneeling by Sparky.

Along the street, Shade was screaming, stumbling, aflame, trying to reel in his spilling guts.

Now
, she thought.
Now is when Nomad—

Something smacked her in the face, knocked her head sideways.

As she tried to breathe and gargled only blood, she saw what she knew must come.

“No!” Jack shouted. “No, Lucy-Anne, no!” He couldn't quite understand what he had seen, how her face could have changed shape so quickly. She was still Lucy-Anne, but no longer the girl he had known.
The cool, logical part of him knew that she had been shot. But the pure emotional part of him that drove to the fore in this time of confusion and bullets, burning and blood, could not readily accept the truth.

She stumbled to the left, one hand coming up towards her face but never quite touching. Her pale skin was raw now, and her spiky hair was dulled by the colour contrast of her blood. Her eyes started to roll up in her head.

The rush of fury was terrifying. Jack's heart thudded in his chest, the heaviest impact, and his skin came alight, tempering his thoughts and sharpening his senses until he could see like a hawk, hear like a hound. What happened next was pure instinct, and yet he felt totally in control. For the first time ever, Jack and his new abilities worked completely in harmony. They flowed together, and were one.

As easy as breathing, he turned and pushed a heat wave along the street that peeled paint, melted glass, and ignited gas in fuel tanks. The two motorcycles erupted, enveloping their riders in flames, swerving and striking parked vehicles. Several cars and vans also exploded, and glass and twisted car body parts flew in a deadly flock across the road. One rider screamed, but not for long.

The helicopter pilot pulled up and tipped the aircraft away from the chaotic street. But not soon enough. Jack's shout caught it and brought it down, and it struck a roof and thrashed onto its side.

He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. His tumultuous universe settled. He turned away from the crashing helicopter and the burning chaos along the street, and went to hold his friend.

But someone was there before him.

In a blink, everything changed. There was a
clap!
that reverberated through buildings and ground, and Jack's first thought was,
Everything has been renewed
. From the moment before the sound to the moment after, the potential of the future seemed to have shifted
hugely, and he felt a moment of consuming elation that he had not experienced since before Doomsday. He could not explain it. And he did not try. So much was beyond explanation.

As Lucy-Anne slumped towards the ground, Nomad ran along the street. She leapt a burning motorcycle and ran at Lucy-Anne, grasped her as she fell, pushed her onto her back, and then she raised a hand above her head, middle and forefingers pointing.

What is she
—? Jack thought, and then Nomad brought her fist down and punched a hole in Lucy-Anne's throat.

“What?” Jack whispered. His voice was a calm breath amongst the burning and crashing and the breaking of things.

Lucy-Anne arched her back and shuddered. Nomad raised her hand again, splashing blood across the road, blood also dripping from her hand. Lucy-Anne's blood.

Yet again, Jack's instinct took over.

And here she comes, Nomad, another movement in the chaotic street and yet the focus of everything. Flames lean away from her. She is the centre. She runs and jumps a burning motorcycle and her feet barely seems to touch the ground, and then she knocks Lucy-Anne down.

Lucy-Anne draws in a breath to scream, but blood floods into her lungs.

She tries to punch at Nomad, but her limbs do not obey her commands.

Pain rings in, but it is the ice-cool pain of trauma and shock. Her chest is heavy. She cannot breathe past whatever has happened to her face.

And then Nomad punches straightened fingers down at her throat, and Lucy-Anne feels the hot, painful rush of air into her lungs once more.

He saw Lucy-Anne shudder as a breath flooded in, and somewhere inside, somehow, he sensed the relief bleeding through her shock and
pain. Other, more destructive powers reined in, and his skin tingled from his ears to the tips of his toes.

Nomad looked at him and almost smiled. Jack wondered what would have happened had he unleashed any of those powers. She looked weak and was bleeding from her nose and the corners of her eyes, yet she was still strange, almost alien, and removed from what was happening.

“Jack,” a voice said. Jack frowned, but could not take his eyes off Nomad and Lucy-Anne.
Maybe she's dead anyway
, he thought, but he saw his friend moving as she struggled against the pain coursing in. She'd been shot in the face.

“Jack!”

Jack turned, and Reaper was behind him. “Not out of danger yet,” the man who had been his father said. “And I…” He touched his throat, as if to signal what was wrong. Behind him stood Haru, blinking rapidly, seeming exhausted. For the first time Reaper looked weak, uncertain, as if something had been stripped away and he had been lessened. Was he scared? Jack wasn't sure about that. But he did see something in his father's eyes that gave him a moment of satisfaction in this terrible time—respect.

“Sparky?” Jack called. The boy was sitting against a shop front across the street now, Jenna beside him. He raised a hand and waved.
Bloody but alive
, Jack thought, and that was as good as he could hope for right now.

Fires crackled, glass broke, metal buckled. The street was a symphony of destruction. The helicopter was settling into the sagging roof of a jeweller's, lying on its side with rotors snapped off, fuel gushing down the shop's facade. Two Choppers had climbed from the wreck and were trying to crawl across the rooftop to an adjoining property.

Jack's heart sank, so quickly and deeply that sour sickness rose in his throat.
I've done it again
. He could see a burning corpse tangled
with the wreckage of a motorcycle, and the stench was terrible. He looked at the climbing, scrambling Choppers and wondered who they were. There must have been more in the helicopter, dead or dying.

“I've done it again,” he said aloud.

“She's…” Hayden said. He was climbing from the restaurant window, pale and shaking. “She's…”

“Fleeter?” Jack asked. Hayden nodded.

There was no sign of the evolved humans, creatures, monsters. Survival was their sharpest instinct.

It was becoming Jack's as well. Now that everything had gone bad, and people were dying, and he was killing again, survival was all that mattered. And Hayden was key to that.

“Come here,” Jack said. “Quickly. Carefully.” He reached out one hand.

Hayden started towards him, looking down at Lucy-Anne and Nomad, then at the ruins and wrecks of machines and people across the street. Shade burned and sizzled, no longer casting shadows. Now he was just another dead man.

“He's our hope,” Jack said, nodding towards Hayden. He did not even glance back at Reaper to see if the man was listening. Jack knew it, and that was all that mattered. Everything rested in this man's hands.

“Jack,” Reaper said, panicked, “quickly, I can't, I can't do it, but you have to look
now
!”

Lucy-Anne felt apart from herself. The unbearable pain was borne by someone else. She might have been dying. Nomad knelt beside her and she looked different somehow, less than what she used to be. She was bleeding.

I came here for you
, Nomad said in her mind, but Lucy-Anne could not be sure whether the woman had really said it, or if she'd imagined those words.

Lucy-Anne tilted her head to the side and tried to scream at the agony, but she could make no sound. Her body was no longer hers; pain was its master now.

There
, she thought, returning Hayden's gaze as he stared down at her in frank fascination.
There's our only hope. And I've never dreamed this far
.

And Hayden's shocked expression vanished in a haze of blood and bone as he danced to gunfire's tune.

“No!” Jack shouted.

Instinct—

He crouched and turned, reaching out and lifting the two surviving Choppers from the rooftop. Even as he was suspended in mid-air one of them swung his rifle, and Jack super-heated the weapon, melting it and the man's hand to a slick mess. The man screamed.

Jack heaved them over the rooftop and they disappeared beyond, falling and dying out of sight.

Jack dashed past Lucy-Anne and Nomad and knelt beside Hayden, reaching out ready to clasp and heal, hands heavy with powers he had only just begun to understand. But there was no healing these wounds. No powers on earth could gather these scattered brains, bring them together, make sense of them again. Their chance at stopping the bomb—their hope for the future—lay dead in a bloody mess across the road's surface.

Jack closed his eyes and searched, harder than he ever had before. But there was no trace of Hayden. He had been living and now he was dead, and there was no point in between from which Jack could gather any knowledge that might help.

It had all gone to shit.

The taint of pointless deaths forever staining his soul, he slumped down in the street, lost.

“They did something to us,” Reaper said. “At the edge of London. Crossing the Exclusion Zone. They fired several artillery shells. I thought they were just bad shots, but then I smelled something, felt strange. Tired. It must have been some sort of gas to knock us out, but Haru froze the worst of it into ice. I didn't know what they'd done until I tried to…to shout.” He was struggling to sound strong, as dismissive as he'd always been. But his fear was leaking through. Jack didn't think it was fear of death. He thought that Reaper was more scared of losing his destructive power for good and being normal again.

“They stole his shout,” Haru said. “They stole my cold.”

“Miller's last revenge?” Jenna suggested.

“He's dead?” Reaper asked.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “The Choppers know what's happening, so when you went to them it was a gift. Their last chance to trap you Superiors so they still have someone to experiment on when everything's blown wide. And they wouldn't want such murderers breaking out of London.”

“You'd call
me
a murderer, Jack?” Reaper asked, eyebrow raised.

But right then, Jack didn't care. So much had happened that he was finding it difficult to care about anything. He was withdrawn, distant from everyone and everything, prisoner of his own guilt and struggling to see light anywhere. The sun was down now, over London and in his mind. Darkness ruled.

Outside, something cried out in the night. He listened, but it was not human. Rhali was still lost.

“But you led them to us!” Jenna said. “Why the hell would you do that? Why would you think that was anything like a good idea?”

“We weren't sure they were following.”

“Bullshit!” Jenna shouted. Reaper flinched, face stern. But he did not respond. “What, were you scared? When you found you couldn't shout someone apart? And are you so-called Superiors just the thickest crusts of dog shit on the shittiest covered shit-shoe in the history of shit? Are you? Huh? You've wiped out pretty much everyone who can do something about the bomb, and now we've got the last one here, you lead the Choppers right to us!” She looked ready to rage some more, but her fury seemed to wane as quickly as it had risen. She pointed at Lucy-Anne. “And look what happens.” Her voice was suddenly lighter, sadder. “Just look.”

Lucy-Anne was sleeping in the corner of the large room. It had been a nightclub of some sort at one point, probably turned into a drinking club soon before Doomsday. There were no bodies in here, but plenty of canned drinks and bottled water, and crisps and nuts. The main attraction, though, was its lack of windows. They were shut off in here. Jack wondered whether, if he really thought about it, he could cut himself off from everything that had happened outside.

But he could still smell the blood and feel the desperation of his friends.

He was tired. Sparky's wounds had been simple to tend to. He'd be scarred, but Jack had stopped the bleeding and knitted flesh where his two worst lacerations lay open to the bone. But Lucy-Anne's wound was far different. The bullet had passed clean through her face, but in doing so it had done major damage. Her lower jaw was broken, teeth smashed, cheekbones cracked. Her broken teeth had been driven into
her throat, and if it hadn't been for Nomad opening an airway—a finger tracheotomy—Lucy-Anne would have suffocated.

As it was, Jack had eased her pain with a touch, but try as he might he'd not been able to reset the bones. Perhaps there were some who could. He had seen Rosemary's friend operate on Jenna to retrieve a bullet without opening her up. But right now, such damage was beyond his talents. She moaned, unconscious. Nomad slumped beside her, asleep herself. Nomad frightened Jack, because she gave off a heat and a stink that only he could sense. He thought she was dying, but she hadn't said a thing since they'd broken into the club. He'd moved close to her once to try to wake her up, but the heat and smell had driven him away.

The stench of death. And the heat, for all he knew, of hell.

“I was wrong,” Reaper said.

“What?” Jack said, aghast.

“I was—”

“I heard what you said!” He could barely even look at the man. Frightening, powerful, inhuman, to hear him utter such words disturbed Jack as much as anything else. It made him realise how much was changing, and how useless everything had become.

“So now what?” Sparky said. “I mean, thanks for sorting me out, mate. And for Lucy-Anne…for doing as much as you can for her. But now what? Rhali's gone. Your charming dad's gang are mostly dead or gone. Apart from Mrs. Frost there. And Hayden's had his brains blown out.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “I know all that.”

“So you've got a plan?” Sparky said. “Cos we're shit out of time.”

“No plan,” Jack said. “Other than, just…” He shrugged, because what he was going to suggest was no plan at all.

“What?” Sparky asked. “Tell us. You sound like you've given up, and you
can't
sound like that. I won't let you.”

“You saved us all back there,” Jenna said, and she cut straight to the core of what was torturing Jack. Not the bomb, or Hayden's death, or even Rhali's disappearance. It was the fact that he had killed again that made everything seem so pointless. He knew it was stupid, but he couldn't alter the way he thought. Even if everything worked out fine, he had killed to make it happen. A world where that was the price was perhaps not a world worth saving.

“Maybe,” Jack said. “Or perhaps I just made your pain go on a little longer.”

“What, you wish we'd all been killed?” Jenna asked.

“Screw that,” Sparky said. “And screw you. I'm going for the bomb even if you're not.”

“Me too,” Jenna said. She was sitting beside Sparky, grasping his hand tightly in hers as if she would never again let him go.

“I'm so scared of myself,” Jack said. He looked at Nomad but she was still slumped beside Lucy-Anne, as if echoing the girl's state. He'd started to hate the woman for what she'd turned him into. His gifts should have brought only good, but instead he'd become a killer.

Just like his father.

“Are you scared of me?” he asked Reaper.

“I'm scared
for
you,” Reaper replied. He looked like Jack's father, but that was because he was trying. Stripped of his power, he was using other means to advance whatever his cause might be.
Give him his powers again and he'll be as much a monster as ever
, Jack thought. He snorted and turned away.

Lucy-Anne was looking at him. He caught his breath and went to her, and when they saw she was awake the others gathered around as well. Sparky held Jack's arm and Jenna pressed close to him, and he had to fight back a sob. His friends were loyal, and close, and there was nothing he wouldn't do for them.

Nothing.

Giving up could never be an option.

Lucy-Anne was trying to speak, and Jack could see the pain it caused her. They'd dressed some of her wounds with napkins, and Jack had stopped the worst of the bleeding. But the structural damage to her face was appalling.

“Don't try to speak,” Jenna said, but Lucy-Anne grabbed at her friend's jacket and squeezed tight, clenching her fist against the pain.

“Gu…idee…”

“Got an idea?” Jenna asked.

Lucy-Anne nodded.

“I'll get you a pencil and paper,” Sparky said. “Hold on. Hold on!”

An idea
. Jack and Lucy-Anne looked at each other, and he wished he could pluck the idea from her mind. Wished it was that easy.

Sparky returned.

As Lucy-Anne began to write her idea down, Jack was still dwelling on that thought.

Pluck the idea from her mind…

The pain was part of her dream, and in the strange places she wandered, no one knew what she was trying to say. The London of her dreamscape had a bland, washed-out look—all colour was bleached, the sky was a monotone grey, and the parks and avenues were filled with the memories of trees. People walked the streets, but their expressions were neutral. Even when Lucy-Anne tried speaking to them, they only broke into slight frowns. Children walked with parents without being naughty, or inquisitive, or children at all. The River Thames did not flow.

The only splash of colour and life was the woman she was following along the South Bank.
Nomad!
she tried shouting, but the
woman did not seem to hear. Either that or Lucy-Anne's voice was not working, because she could not hear herself.

I was shot. I can see, but not smell or taste. I can feel and wish I couldn't. Some of this is true
.

So she ran after Nomad instead, sprinting through her dream of a London that never was, and each footfall jarred up through her body and reminded her of the pain.

Nomad turned, smiled, and Lucy-Anne imagined them meeting and embracing and the bomb not exploding.

She approached Nomad and held out her arms, and the woman raised her eyebrows in surprise. They embraced.
I think this is something I can do, for a while
, Lucy-Anne said.

When she opened her eyes she was talking to herself, and that grey London was deserted. But it was still there. No heat blast, no mushroom cloud, and a future that might just be malleable, for a time at least.

Maybe for long enough.

“You really think you can do that?” Sparky asked.

“It's all we have,” Jenna said quietly. She was looking at Lucy-Anne, smiling and nodding.

“But dream a nuclear explosion not happening?”

“What else would you do?” Jenna asked, not unkindly.

“Get the bomb onto a boat. Float it down the Thames. Into the North Sea, or something.”

“In…” Jenna glanced at her watch. “…less than two hours?”

Sparky frowned. He had no answer.

“It's the
only
idea,” Jack said. They all looked to him, Reaper included.

“Getting pretty bloody desperate here, mate,” Sparky said, shaking his head.

“Yeah, we are,” Jack said. “That's why Lucy-Anne's right.” He looked around at all of them, and he had tears in his eyes. Sparky, feisty and hard, but with a good heart. Jenna, resourceful and kind. And Lucy-Anne, who might well have lost more than all of them, and who now might be dying.

“Nomad,” Jack said, pushing hard into her mind to make sure she heard. She raised her head.

Lucy-Anne tensed, trying to lift herself up, and Jack thought that perhaps she already knew. But hopefully that would not matter.

Hopefully.

Jack closed his eyes and flipped, and when he opened them again his friends were all but frozen where they stood, sat or lay.

“Jack,” Nomad said. She had flipped as well, just as he'd hoped.

“I won't let anyone else die for me,” he said. He didn't say what else he was thinking; not yet.

“And I'll do anything I can to help you and Lucy-Anne.”

Jack moved across to Lucy-Anne, careful not to touch anyone else in case he hurt them. Haru exuded cold even now. And Reaper was in his way, raised a couple of inches from his seat. In that last moment before Jack had flipped out, Reaper had perhaps seen that he was scheming, and he had gone to stand and try to have some part in Jack's plans. But he would not.

Jack paused before his father and stared at him. Like this, his features again resembled those of the man he had once loved, and still did. The memory of his father was rich and strong, because Jack had strived to keep such memories close for those two long, lonely years between Doomsday and now. And he only wished he could find it in his heart to feel forgiveness and grant his father another chance. That should be how this all ended; with redemption and hope.

But he could not.

He resisted the temptation to nudge Reaper aside and knelt carefully by Lucy-Anne.

“I think I know,” Nomad said.

“And you'll not try to stop me?”

“Of course not. It means you and Lucy-Anne get out.” Her expression did not change, and there was no way he could read what she was really thinking. But even flipped out, he did not have time for a long discussion.

And I'll help too
, Andrew said. He emerged from shadows at the back of the club and drifted forward. Jack was surprised, but only for a moment. He'd been wondering where the ghost had gone, but had already guessed that he would not have abandoned his sister.

“She'll be all right,” Jack said. “You need to get her out of London, to a hospital, and they'll be able to fix her.”

“Probably,” Andrew said. “But shouldn't I be helping you?”

“Nomad and I will be fine,” Jack said. For a second he thought that Andrew could see the truth. But the ghost said nothing.

“I'll have to tell them,” Jack said. “When I flip back and get ready to leave.”

“We could just go,” Nomad said.

“No.” Jack shook his head but did not bother trying to explain. Nomad was showing how far from being human she had drifted. He didn't know how he would tell his friends what he was doing, but he supposed the words would come when they were needed.

Jack touched Lucy-Anne's forehead, so gently, and looked at her terrible wounds before closing his eyes.
They'll fix her
, he thought, but he could not be sure. Perhaps he was trying to feel better about not being able to fix her himself.