Contagion (Toxic City) (18 page)

They hitched a ride with a family in a camper van. There was a man, a woman, and a young boy. They'd come to find their daughter, but there had been no sign of her.

“Did you see Annabelle?” the desperate mother asked. “Seventeen, blonde hair, denim jacket? We've thought she was dead all this time, ever since Doomsday, but now we hear about all this…all these lies…and we came to find her. Do you know her? Did you see her?”

Everyone shook their heads, and Lucy-Anne was glad for her wounds, because she could not say what she was thinking.
She's probably dead, buried in a mass grave somewhere. Or if she did survive Doomsday, she might have developed an amazing power. In which case she's likely dying from the illness Evolve also gave everyone. Or she might be a murdering Superior. Or maybe the Choppers dissected her to see what made her tick. So no, we haven't seen your daughter. Concentrate on your son
.

The family were very kind to them, giving them food and drink they'd brought along in their camper van, and they volunteered to take them to a hospital. The hospitals were already overflowing with people who'd come out of London, they said, and they had a long way to go before they gave up on their little girl.

In this family's outlook, Lucy-Anne found hope. They seemed so accepting of the people who'd emerged from London after so long. They spoke of a huge charity push that was being organised, led by a core of movie stars, musicians and actors, and which aimed to raise a hundred million pounds in the first year for rehabilitation and treatment of London's survivors.

They spoke of the government, and how the Prime Minister had already stepped down. Foreign reaction, and how other countries were being accused of complicity. The mood of the general populace now that the truth was out. The people had been deceived and fooled by those in charge, and never had the gulf between ruled and rulers been so wide and deep. “There'll be chaos for a while,” the man said. “The likes of which Britain hasn't seen before. But there's a real pulling together of people at the moment. It's the people who were lied to. It's us who are going to make things change.”

They spoke a lot more, but Lucy-Anne drifted in and out of consciousness.

And she dreamed.

She runs along the South Bank and sees Nomad before her. Calls her name. Nomad turns, and smiles, and then it is not Nomad at all, but Jack smiling back at her. She can see the pain in his eyes, both the good and the bad one, because his injuries are apparent in the dream. As is his tiredness, and his strain. His smile is pure and unforced, but Lucy-Anne can tell that it is taking every ounce of physical and mental strength for him to hold the dream together, in peace.

She smiles back, her expression conveying so much. She tells him that they are safe and he can let go now. He can let go.

And then there is light.

Lucy-Anne jerked awake, breathing hard, gasping for breath. “Bad dream!” she said. “I had such a bad—”

But then she realised that she could see everyone's faces, even though it was the dead of night. And they were all looking back the way they'd come.

A false dawn rose over London as the city became truly toxic.

“We're safe,” Lucy-Anne says. “Jack, you can let go now.”

He smiles. Relaxes.

Light and heat sear across London, and as Jack starts seeing paint singeing and flaking on the ruin of the London Eye, he closes his own eyes.

He plunges into his huge universe of potential, a place filled with endless possibilities of human evolution plumbed far too early. He floats for a while, content. The red star of contagion no longer pulses for release.

As the points of light begin to grow, the red shifts to white.

And each star explodes, continuing to expand until they banish the darkness and join forever in one incredibly bright, cleansing light.

TIM LEBBON is a
New York Times
–bestselling writer from South Wales. He's had almost thirty novels published to date, as well as dozens of novellas and hundreds of short stories. His most recent releases include
Star Wars: Into the Void (Dawn of the Jedi)
from Del Rey,
Coldbrook
from Arrow/Hammer, the Toxic City trilogy from Pyr in the United States, and
Nothing as it Seems
from PS Publishing, as well as The Secret Journeys of Jack London series (coauthored with Christopher Golden). He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and has been a finalist for International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Awards.

ABC Network is currently developing the Toxic City trilogy as a TV series, and 20th Century Fox acquired film rights to The Secret Journeys of Jack London series, for which Tim and Chris Golden wrote the first-draft screenplay. He is working on new novels and screenplays.

Find out more about Tim at his website,
www.timlebbon.net
.