Authors: David Wingrove
Forcing himself to ignore it, he hauled himself up out of the seat and through the gap. There was a lot more light here in the front. He could make out Sam’s figure, slumped over the
controls. Leaning across, Jake put his hand on the side of his neck. It was warm. And there
was
a pulse.
‘Sam… we’ve got to get out of here… the capsule’s filling up…’
Sam groaned.
The control board in front of Sam was faintly lit. There were thirty, maybe forty switches, none of them clearly marked. Which of them activated the seal?
Did he just keep flicking them until he got lucky?
‘Sam… we’ve got to get out of here…’
Sam stirred, his head lifted. ‘Wha’ the…?’
Jake reached up, touching Sam’s face, tracing his nose and forehead with his fingers. They were sticky with blood.
‘The seal, Sam… which switch opens the seal?’
Sam groaned again.
That was another thing. If he breached the seal, he was going to have to grab hold of Sam and somehow get him ashore, too, because Sam wasn’t going to make it on his own.
At least I know how
, he thought, his eyes moving from one switch to another, hoping he might recognize something.
He smiled wryly. So all of those old swimming safety lessons were about to pay off. Who’d a thunk it?
It made him think of Alison, and in turn of Kate. He had to get out. For her sake as much as for his own.
‘Sam… I’m going to press a few of these switches until I find the right one, then I’m going to get you out of here and back onto dry land. You got that?’
Sam’s groan seemed almost articulate this time. He gave the vaguest nod.
‘Okay. Good. But you couldn’t help me here, could you, buddy? Just press the right switch for me, eh?’
Sam moved his head, almost as if he were focusing, then his hand went out, his fingers covering a switch.
Nothing happened, but now Jake knew which switch he had to throw.
‘Okay,’ he said, talking to himself now. ‘Count to three and we’re out of here. One, two…’
The solid thunk as the seal came open and the sudden inrush of cold, stale-smelling water took Jake by surprise. For a moment he lost direction. In the sudden swirl he couldn’t make out
which was up and which down. And Sam… he had no idea where Sam was.
As the capsule opened like a massive flower blooming, it began to sink. As it sank it dragged him under.
Jake kicked hard, struggling to make his way back to the surface. The pain in his chest and ribs was ferocious, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was to survive. He pumped his legs
and arms, striving to break free of the water’s grip, then broke surface, gasping.
It hurt. He could hardly breathe it hurt so much.
For a moment he closed his eyes, treading water. He felt like he was going to black out, only he knew he mustn’t. If he lost consciousness now he was dead. Dead and no way back.
He counted ten then opened them again, looking about him.
Moonlight silvered the swollen surface of the river. There was no sign of the craft, no sign of Sam.
Jake slowly turned himself in the water, trying to work out where he was.
The hopper’s capsule must have drifted upstream quite some way. The City was way off in the distance, its bright-lit towers unmistakable.
Just then something bobbed up onto the surface, some twenty yards away.
‘Sam! Wait, buddy… I’m coming…’
Jake kicked out hard, swimming towards him, praying he hadn’t already drowned.
Jake left Sam on the tiny stretch of beach and went for help. He had tried to make contact but the implant beneath his ear had been damaged. When he touched it it was moist
and painful and the best he got from it was a faint hiss.
He didn’t know where he was – Fulham, maybe – nor how he was going to make contact, but there had to be a way. Hinton would come for them. They had to. They wouldn’t let
him down. He was worth too much to them.
There was a set of worn stone steps leading up onto the embankment. It wasn’t a cold night; even so he was soaked through and as he stood there, trying to make things out, he found he was
shivering.
Cold or shock? He didn’t know. Maybe it didn’t matter. All he knew was that he had to survive long enough for them to get a fix on him.
It was dark where he’d come out, like it was a park of some kind. An unlit, uninhabited space. Further back, however, beyond the immediate blackness, he could see the fires blazing,
sending their lambent glow up into the night; could hear the Security sirens wailing, the baying of looters and rioters.
Jake turned, looking back across the river.
It was just as bad over there. He could make out more than a dozen different fires, could hear the sirens, the distant roar of the mob.
Jake shivered. It was a bad night to be lost.
The trouble was, he didn’t know how things worked out here, outside the enclaves. Was there a communications network? Was there some way he could get Hinton on the line to come and rescue
them? Or was he going to have to drag Sam with him to a gate and get them to let him in?
That last seemed likely. This didn’t look like a place that had a sophisticated, hi-tech communications web. This had the look of somewhere that had been left to rot.
For a full two minutes he stood there, unable to decide. The truth was, he didn’t know what to do. For the first time in his life he had no answers. All he knew was that he couldn’t
leave Sam, even if it made things difficult.
Okay… Think… How can you make this easier?
Some kind of cart, that would be a start. Or a litter. Something he could put Sam in, so that he didn’t have to carry him. Only where the fuck was he going to find something like that?
He didn’t know. All he knew was that he felt like a castaway on an island full of savages. And with that thought came another, darker, bleaker than the first.
He was going to die here. Ignominiously. Unheroically. Victim of some savage little know-nothing.
It made him feel sick. Made him feel like his whole life had been wasted.
‘Jake… Jake…’
Jake went to the rail and looked down. It was Sam, calling him. He couldn’t make him out very well, but he knew it was him.
‘Wait there,’ he shouted back as he ran down. ‘I’m coming.’
Sam was sitting up, holding his shoulder. Jake knelt.
‘You okay?’
Sam nodded. ‘Thanks… you know…’
Jake waved it aside. ‘D’you think you can walk? I mean, you can lean on me…’
He helped him up. Sam swayed a moment, as if he were going to fall down again, then steadied himself.
‘I’m fine, I…’
‘We’ll find a gate,’ Jake said. ‘We’ll work our way east and…’
The thought struck him. Sam would have an implant. Even if his was damaged, Sam’s would still work.
‘Sam… your implant… can you…?’
Sam shook his head. ‘Nothing but a hiss. Like everything’s dead.’
That made Jake think. What if the communications system was down? What if the Chinese had hit that too? Because he knew now it was the Chinese. They were behind all of this. It was probably one
of their agents who had shot him out of the sky.
Which meant he had been specifically targeted. They had somehow known when he’d come out of there – known what craft he was on and had a man there waiting to pull the trigger and
send the missile flying up out of the darkness at him.
It was a souring thought. It made him think of the steward at Bellini’s. The guy he’d thought had been watching him. Well, maybe they had been watching him all along; knowing he was
Hinton’s star turn; knowing that if they got to him they weakened Hinton and, through Hinton, the West.
Because if what had happened was what he thought had happened, China had just declared war on the rest of the world. Not overtly, but covertly, by dismantling its systems, by destroying its
electronic infrastructure.
Or was that going too far?
Getting Sam up the steps took a long, exhausting time. Sam was hurt. Badly hurt. At the top they had to rest, to let him get his strength back. It didn’t augur well. The fastest Sam could
do was a kind of geriatric limp.
Jake wasn’t sure they were going to make it. If this was Fulham, then they had a good long walk – a mile, a mile and a half through hostile streets – before they’d get to
the enclave. And even then, there was no guarantee the gate would be open. Not on a night like this.
He wondered where Kate was. Whether she was at home now, worrying. Whether Hinton would have told her that his craft had gone missing.
That disturbed him, more than anything, because it felt like Hinton had given up on him. That, having lost him, they hadn’t bothered to send anyone out to see if he’d survived the
crash. It felt wrong, somehow. It felt—
‘Jake…’
Jake looked to Sam. He was hunched forward, his head down.
‘What?’
‘You’d better leave me here. Go get help.’
‘But Sam…’
Every word seemed to cost Sam dear, but he was insistent now. ‘No, Jake. I’m just being practical. You try and walk me through those streets you die. And I’ll die too. Whereas
you leave me here we both have a chance. Just put me somewhere where no bastard can see me. Then you go and get help. Bring someone back, yeah?’
‘Yeah…’ Jake smiled and gently touched Sam’s arm. ‘Okay. Let’s find a place to hide you…’
It took Jake the best part of an hour to get to the outer wall of the West Kensington Enclave. He’d had to stop and double back a dozen times, to avoid the mob. Once
he’d been chased, but they had quickly given up, looking for easier targets.
Keeping to the shadows, moving cautiously from hiding place to hiding place, he had made his way through roads littered with the rusting, burned-out hulks of ancient cars, the debris from fallen
houses, slate and broken bricks, soiled rags and human excreta, flattened beer cans and endless other rubbish. It would have been bad at the best of times but tonight it was like a vision of hell.
Not a street was untouched, not a single house intact. He had passed endless burning buildings, countless blackened shells from previous nights.
All of which was bad. Yet the worst was by the enclave wall itself, for there the houses had been bulldozed flat to make a space before the wall a hundred metres wide. There, on that flattened
pile of brickwork, they had built fires. There, as the guards on the walls looked on, shaven-headed men and women, half-naked with their faces painted savagely, kept up an unearthly heathen chant,
thrusting their home-made weapons in the air to the rhythm of a dozen makeshift drums.
Defiant and powerful they looked in that hell’s glow, Britain’s new outlaw class.
The unprotected…
Jake had never seen the like. On the news they never showed this side of things. It was always the mob fleeing Security. Never this.
The men were bad enough, yet it was the women to whom his eyes were drawn, for in them the transformation was most marked. Whatever signs of femininity they might once have possessed had long
since disappeared, devolved into a hard and brutish form.
Those whose heads were not shaved, in the fashion of their menfolk, wore long, matted hair. Streaks of dirt marked their faces, while what clothes they wore were rags and tatters, the cloth
frayed and stained. Many of them wore even less, their painted breasts exposed, held up, thrust out towards the soldiers who manned the enclave’s gates, as if in defiance of the Eden from
which they had been cast.
Looking at them all, Jake felt a certain pity. As fierce as they were, they had a worn and shabby look to them. A
beaten
look. They were like dogs. And mongrel dogs at that. Years of
ill-use had given them a furtive appearance, as if at any moment they would fall upon each other, tearing at one another’s flesh with tooth and claw. They only
seemed
like a tribe.
What they were was a pack.
Respectability had fallen from them, leaving them exposed. Where they lived now was a darker, nastier reality – a world in which each day was a struggle to exist, and god help the one who
showed any weakness.
As the wind changed, he could smell them, a sickening, fetid smell that made him want to retch.
Seeing them like this made him wonder how they lived. What they did when they were not taunting the enclave guards or making trouble. What they ate and how they organized their lives. But he
would never know. The media would never let him know. All they ever showed was this. This savage barbarism.
It was not their fault. But if not theirs, then whose? His?
Jake pushed the thought away. He was crouched now in the shadows at the end of one of the streets that opened out onto that great swathe of rubble, hidden behind an outcrop of brickwork. Looking
on and wondering how in god’s name he might get past such a mob, for there seemed to be hundreds of them dancing in the firelight, their ragged voices taunting the men on the wall.
From where he was he could see the gate, over to his left. It was a massive thing, like an ancient barbican, its upper levels heavily armoured.
If he could get there he was safe.
If
he could get there.
He looked to his right, wondering suddenly if there might not be another, smaller entrance somewhere. Down by the river, maybe, like they’d had on old castles. He couldn’t see
anything, but maybe he should try it.
Only what if he did that and was seen? What if they caught him?
Jake looked back. The mob was slowly working itself into a frenzy. To even think of trying to make his way through its ranks was absurd.
He would try the river. See if he couldn’t get the attention of one of the guards. There had to be a river gate. Had to.
For the next twenty minutes he crept from one pile of bricks to another, across that uneven wasteland, certain that at any moment he’d be seen. Only the attention of the locals was
elsewhere. They seemed to know what was happening in the Market, that all was not well ‘inside’, among the protected.
Finally he made the river. There was an old stone wall, which was crumbling in places, and a metal ladder down, but no sign in the enclave wall of any gate. The pale marble was tall and smooth.
Unbroken.