Tube Riders, The (15 page)

Marta stood up. ‘She
wanted
to go, don’t forget that. She told you she wanted to do it, so stop blaming yourself.’ She looked around, hands clenched into fists. ‘This isn’t our fault, we didn’t want any of this to happen. Jess’s parents are dead because this country is screwed up. We’re the
victims
, not the criminals, and we owe it to Jess’s parents, and, and ... to this whole damn country to get that evidence into the hands of people who can do something about it.’ She flapped her hands, her face flushed.

Switch stood up beside her. ‘Well, it wasn’t quite Che fucking Guevara but it wasn’t bad.’

Marta took a deep breath, readying herself to continue. ‘Let’s get this straight,’ she said. ‘We have some very, very dangerous people after us. We run, or we die. It’s that simple. Now, Simon, get up there and get her moving. We have no idea how many of those things are after us. Maybe one, maybe more. If we split up we can spread the trail, confuse them. Move quickly and don’t stay anywhere too long. Keep away from enclosed places and don’t travel unarmed.’

‘What good is a knife or a club against something that does that?’ Paul said, nodding towards the bodies.

‘It’s better than no knife or no club.’

Simon climbed to his feet. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll do what I can.’

Marta glanced at a clock on the wall. ‘It’s nearly six o’clock,’ she said. ‘We leave at midnight. Simon, you have to convince her. You have to. Otherwise she’s going to end up like them.’ She didn’t need to point.

They went to the front door and peered out on to the street. Street-lighting made a broken line back the way they’d come, while above them the sky was dark purple, wisps of orange and red hanging above the rooftops that stretched away towards the spires and office towers of central London. Marta thought it looked pretty, but she couldn’t shake a sinking feeling in her chest that night had never been so bleak, had never before contained so many demons.

Chapter Eighteen

Danger

Numb
.

Like dead hands gripping every inch of her body and squeezing until her skin turned blue and cold. Hands manipulating her, molding her, kneading her flesh into one single amorphous ball, devoid of all sensation and feeling. And from it her eyes looked out, staring but not seeing the walls, the prints and the posters that hung there, the photographs of friends, of her family. The shelf in the corner, the books. Stephen King, Charles Dickens, Zadie Smith, Kurt Vonnegut; tatty paperbacks bought at staff discount price from the store she worked at, as many as she could afford, most read more than once, many three or four times. She loved books, stories and adventures. Her own life, in the relatively calm neighbourhood of Fulham, where things still went wrong, where houses still got burned and cars still got wrecked, but less frequently than across the rest of London GUA, wasn’t so much an adventure as a struggle; worry and concern overriding any sense of excitement she might get walking the dangerous streets. Then, only this afternoon, she’d been given an opportunity to take a real adventure, to be part of an urban myth, do something
special
that nearly no one had ever done before.

Except it hadn’t ended up that way. Her life had been turned on its head in the space of a few hours. And now, numb, unfeeling, she wondered what would happen next. What
should
happen next.

Numb.

She wanted to stay curled up in a ball, her own body a barricade to shut out the world. She wanted nothing more to do with it, wanted only for it to leave her alone.

He had come again. Simon was sitting on the edge of her bed, one hand on her knee, gently rubbing it. ‘You have to pack some things,’ he was saying. ‘We have to go. They’re going to come back sooner or later.’

Jessica didn’t care. She didn’t care what happened next. She just wanted everything to end, all the hurt and the pain and the sorrow, all of it to be extinguished, stamped out like the embers of an old camp fire.

‘You have to be strong,’ she heard Simon saying, his voice soothing. A voice she loved, but a voice that she wanted to hate now. She wanted to blame him, and she’d told him so, but Jessica was sensible, educated, and despite her grief she knew this wasn’t his doing. He was as much a victim of unfortunate circumstance as she was. Just, with her parents dead, it felt right to blame someone close. It felt necessary.

‘Come on Jess, please,’ he murmured, talking slowly to her, leaning close. Still she didn’t look at him, her gaze holding steady on the wall in front of her. The images of her dead parents flashed up in her mind, torn up and bloody, her parents who’d never done anything but love her and try to do the right thing, try to maintain normality in the face of growing chaos. They didn’t deserve to die, but who did? Deserving anything didn’t make it more likely to happen. She was no more deserving of life than they were of death, but here she was, still breathing, still trying to debate what she should do if and when she chose to unlock her arms, release her legs and ease her feet to the floor. What to do when she decided something should be done.

Simon was trying to hold her hand. At last she turned to him, looking up into his face, grey with worry, eyes moist with sorrow.

‘I love you,’ she said, not smiling. ‘I loved my parents too, but something got to them. I won’t let it get to you too.’

Simon smiled; for a moment he looked like a drug addict who had just taken a hit, overcome with a sudden euphoria. Tears streamed down his cheeks. ‘Oh fucking hell, Jess. I love you so much.’ Then, ‘No one wanted this to happen. It’s no one’s fault but theirs. The fucking, screwed up, bullshit
government
.’ Suddenly remembering where her father worked, he opened his mouth to apologize, but Jess spoke first. ‘We’ll get them,’ she said. ‘Somehow, someday … we’ll get them.’

Something had changed inside. A curtain had been drawn over her past, over what innocence she had enjoyed in the years leading up to today. A new mark had been set, a new starting point, and it was one altogether darker. She felt different, felt her heart beating stronger, her hands clenching harder, the focus in her mind sharper than ever before. The girl who had gone down those steps at St. Cannerwells earlier this afternoon had vanished forever.

A siren rose in the distance. ‘We have to go, Jess,’ Simon told her. ‘We have to go now and give ourselves a chance or stay here and die.’

She didn’t look at him, but she climbed up from the bed and brushed the hair out of her eyes. She walked past him, down the stairs and pushed through into the living room while Simon trailed helplessly behind her.

The sight of her parents’ bodies made her sway, her vision momentarily blurring, and she thought she might faint. A sob rose up in her throat so quickly she bent double and began to cough, thinking it might choke her.

Simon tried to put a reassuring hand on her back but she pushed him away. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said, though part of her wanted him to. It was just too soon, too early. For now she needed to be alone with her grief.

She couldn’t leave them, but she had no choice. The wailing siren was closer now. She had no idea if it was coming here or if there was some other disaster elsewhere it was driving to attend to, but the end result was the same. Simon was right. They had to leave, or their bodies would join her parents’ on the canvas of blood and gore that her living room had become, and that wouldn’t solve anything.

It hurt to turn away, it hurt more than anything. But she did, glancing at Simon who stood behind her, his mouth hung open, one hand shifting in his jeans pocket, fingers moving over the tiny camera memory chip that had started all this.

In that moment her mind was made up.

She rushed through into the quaint little kitchen her mother kept as neat as a showroom, went to the cooker and turned on the gas hobs. She didn’t know if it would work or not, but it was worth a try. Behind her, Simon said, ‘You have
gas?
’, but Jess ignored him. In a cupboard by the back door her father had an eighteen-litre container of paraffin – another government perk – that he used to fuel a stove heater they had on the upstairs landing. She hauled it towards Simon.

‘Douse them,’ she said. ‘Spread it everywhere you can.’

‘Are you sure–’

‘Do it!’ she snapped. ‘I’m not having the government taking them away to experiment on. They were my parents!’

She rooted around in a kitchen drawer for a box of matches while Simon took the paraffin into the living room, grabbing as she did so a handful of small notes and change her mother kept for housekeeping money. At the back of the drawer she found a matchbox, still half-full, with a picture of a Beefeater on the front. Hate for the government boiled in her, and it was all she could do to suppress a scream. She stuffed the matches in her pocket and went to find Simon.

He had taken down two curtains and draped one over each body. For a moment she felt a surge of love for him at this sign of sensitivity, then the siren wailed much closer this time, and she shook it off. Simon had splashed paraffin all over the floor, the walls and the covered bodies of her parents.

‘Okay, let’s go,’ she said. On her way out she grabbed a sofa cushion. She stopped at the door and handed it to Simon while she pulled the matches from her pocket. ‘Get ready to run,’ she said, striking a match and holding it to the cushion until the frilly cover began first to smoke and then to flame. She waited until the fire had taken hold then grabbed it back off Simon and tossed it through the door of the living room.

‘Run!’

They dashed out of the house as a
whump
of igniting paraffin followed them. It might be a few minutes before the gas exploded, and she wanted to be well away before then. ‘When we get a chance, Simon,’ she shouted as they ran, ‘we hunt
them
.’

#

Paul tried not to run as he headed back through Fulham. The streets were alive with the activity of changeover: stores by day barring their doors and pulling down their shutters, while on the pavements and in the market places street vendors took their place, selling everything from skewered snack food to bootlegged DVDs and homebrewed beer and spirits. Many of them worked an under-the-counter service as well, dealing in narcotics, medical drugs, knives and other weapons. By the end of the night, Paul knew, some of these vendors would be dead, others rich, some moved on, and others newly respected. Versions of warfare existed everywhere, and trade was no longer fair.

People called out to him as he passed, offering sausages on sticks, plastic cups of soup, old toys and shabby secondhand clothing. He ignored them all, pushing away one or two of the more persistent.

I have to get to Owen before they do.

There was no way for them to know how many Huntsmen were on their trail. There could be just one, or there could be dozens. His only hope was that because he lived further away than Jess, and he hadn’t come straight from home to St. Cannerwells this afternoon. Having had a couple of errands to run, he had a longer trail to follow.

Hope. Like love, so easy to destroy.

He hurried into Fulham Broadway London Underground station, thinking it would be more difficult for the Huntsmen to track him if he moved by train. He bought a single journey ticket and made his way down to the platform, crowded with commuters as it approached six o’clock. The digital display told him it was seven minutes to the next train, though the destination section was cracked and difficult to read. He only had to go four stops, though, and he didn’t need to change.

The seconds ticked past endlessly. He shifted from foot to foot, biting his lip hard enough to draw blood, wincing at the pain. Further up the platform, he heard a fight break out, the thud of thrown punches, the shouts and grunts of those involved, the restraining cries of the onlookers.

A minute until the next northbound train. Paul pushed closer to the front of the platform, hugging his clawboard against his chest.

Someone screamed, just as a familiar roar announced the train’s arrival. He glanced in the direction of the commotion but could see nothing through the crowd. Then the train had stopped and everyone was pushing forwards towards the opening doors. Just as Paul got inside and turned around, he heard more shouting, a louder disturbance than before. He heard a woman scream: ‘Oh, God! He’s dead! That thing killed him!’

Paul swallowed. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. He stepped forward and shoved a couple of punks back out on to the platform to give the doors room to close.

‘You fucking cocksuck –’ one of the punks shouted, but the doors bumped shut, cutting off the man’s words. The train began to move along the platform towards where the commotion had been. Paul leaned forward to look out, and saw that a space had parted around a robed, hooded man who stood near the edge of the platform, towering over those around him. Paul hadn’t seen a monk in years and couldn’t believe that such a level of respect still existed.

Then he saw the bloody corpse at the man’s feet, a security uniform soaked in blood. As the train passed, the cowled man’s head lifted and Paul saw a furry, wolf-like face with dark, human eyes that looked in through the window at the passengers inside. As his carriage passed by, its eyes locked on to his own. The train picked up speed and the creature slipped behind, but its eyes never left him.

Paul’s legs shook as the train thundered into the tunnel and the outside became darkness. He looked for somewhere to sit down but all the seats were taken, so instead he just slumped to the floor, clutching the clawboard to his chest like a frightened child might clutch a rag doll. Like the others, he had seen plenty of bad things in his life, but always it had been focused on someone else.

He had seen his own death in those eyes. Death, and worse.