Reaper's Legacy

“Andrew is all I have left,” she whispered.

“No he isn’t.” Rook shook his head, reaching out to touch her hand. Was that affection? Ownership? She didn’t know, and she flinched away. He’d said he could help her, but that didn’t mean she owed him anything. Not yet.

Rook laughed softly. “Come on. East of here, there are four of them. I’ll show you what I can do.”

“Four of what?” He started down the steps at a jog, without answering. “Rook? Show me what?” Still he didn’t answer.

At risk of losing him to the deserted, dead streets of London, Lucy-Anne followed.

There were four, as Rook had said. But one did not belong.

“What are they doing to him?”

Rook reached out quickly and pressed his hand across Lucy-Anne’s mouth, then came in close so he could whisper in her ear.

“Not a word.”

They were in the third floor of a once-exclusive apartment complex, looking out through net curtain at the wide street below. The trees and bushes down there, untrimmed and unchecked since Doomsday, had gone wild. Expensive cars sat on flat tyres along the centre of the street. And parked on the opposite side of the road, a dark blue Land Rover. She could just make out the driver sitting inside keeping the engine running, and outside stood two heavily-armed Choppers, and the man.

Rook’s retinue of birds remained out of view. Lucy-Anne saw a few pigeons and, high overhead, a family of buzzards circled.

She watched Rook watching them, and wondered what he was here to do. Was he a spy for Reaper, gathering as much information as he could about the Choppers and what they were doing? Or was this something else?

Shouting. She returned her attention to the street, just as one of the Choppers shoved the man forward. He was crying and shivering. He looked very thin. Lucy-Anne wanted to reach out to help him, but knew she could not.

Rook had slipped his hand beneath the net curtain and flipped a catch, and Lucy-Anne held her breath as he eased the window open.

“Get on with it!” she heard the Chopper shout. “It’s your last chance, you stupid bastard. You know what you’ve got to do, so do it!”

The other Chopper said something Lucy-Anne didn’t catch, but the loud one shouted him down.

“You saw what he did to me in the back of the Rover. Just look! Bit me!” He held out his gloved hand, displaying nothing. He nursed his rifle in his other hand, barrel never wavering far from the snivelling man.

The man faced away from the Choppers, and that’s how Lucy-Anne knew he was not feigning the tears. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen anyone looking so wretched.

“Go on! Do it! Do it!”

The man squeezed his eyes closed and seemed to gather himself, and for a moment silence descended across the street. Lucy-Anne held her breath in anticipation of what she was about to see. What can he do? she thought. But nothing happened, and the man slumped down to his knees and started crying again.

“Right, well, another waste of bloody time,” the Chopper said. “Got the camera ready?” His colleague chuckled and nodded as the soldier raised his rifle, sighting on the back of the man’s head.

Rook glanced sidelong at Lucy-Anne, eyes glittering, as if testing her.

She screamed, “Leave him alone!”

Rook chuckled, then grabbed her arm and pulled her back from the window.

Machine-gun fire raked the building’s facade, shattering windows, bullets ricocheting, the sound unbelievable where it was channeled back and forth between the high buildings. Lucy-Anne curled into a ball and watched bullets stitching the plaster ceiling above her.

Rook was crawling towards the back of the room, and as he knelt up he whistled, a high-pitched sound which seemed so unnatural coming from a human mouth. He seemed suddenly more alive than she had seen him before, and for a moment as he raised his arms she thought he might take flight, mimicking the birds he seemed so close to, and over which he exerted such control.

The gunfire halted.

“The man!” Lucy-Anne said, but Rook was only grinning. He whistled again, attracting another burst of gunfire. They were shooting blind. The Choppers had no idea who was watching them, or from where.

The light from outside suddenly faded, and even beneath the staccato gunfire she could hear the descent of birds.

Rook laughed out loud, revelling in what he was doing. “Come and see!” he said, grabbing Lucy-Anne’s hand and pulling her to the window on her knees. Broken glass cut their legs, but neither of them took any notice. The scene outside was so amazing that it eased away the pain.

Rooks filled the street, shadowing her view of anything beyond the window, fragmenting it so that she only caught brief, fleeting glimpses of what was happening—the Choppers shooting, their hands waving, the guns dropped, arms flapping, bodies falling beneath the onslaught of birds. The Land Rover started reversing along the street, engine protesting, and then it impacted a BMW that had not moved in two years. Its windows starred, then broke. Its insides turned black, and then red.

“What about him?” she said, leaning left and right as she tried to spot the man the Choppers had brought here for whatever reason. “Where is he? Rook?” She glanced at Rook, then back down to the street.

“He needs to keep still,” Rook said. He was concentrating. “Sometimes the birds…” He shrugged, unconcerned.

“You’re as bad as Reaper,” she said.

“I’m nothing like Reaper,” Rook said. “I’m on my own. Come on. There’ll be more arriving soon.”

“But…” The noise outside was already decreasing, and the air seemed to be thinning and growing lighter as the rooks spiralled up and out of view over the rooftops. Left behind, evidence of the terrible deaths they had brought down with them, at the behest of the young man in whose hands she had placed herself. The two Choppers were tattered remnants of humanity. The Land Rover’s engine had died, windscreen splashed red from the inside. And as she watched, the terrified Irregular slowly raised his head and looked around, struggled to his feet, and hobbled away down the street.

We should help him, she thought. He was trailing blood. Perhaps a Chopper had got a lucky shot off before the birds descended. But even as she had the thought, she realised that he would slow them down. He would be an encumbrance, and Rook was right—more Choppers would soon arrive.

“We’ve really gotta go,” Rook said.

Lucy-Anne looked back at the slaughtered Choppers. One of them was scratching slowly at the rough road surface, but his eyes stared sightless into the gutter. Last breaths. “I’m staying here.”

“Fair enough.” He left the room, and the sudden stillness and silence were startling. Lucy-Anne held her breath.

It was thirty seconds before Rook reappeared, his smile tensed with frustration.

“I’ll come if you tell me why you’ve got so much hate,” she said. “You smile, but…”

“Yeah,” Rook said, looking down at his feet. It was the first time he’d allowed her to see him sad. She supposed it was a start.

They were walking along a narrow pathway between high-walled gardens, pushing through rose and clematis bushes that had run rampant in the two years since Doomsday. It surprised Lucy-Anne just how much things had grown in such a short time, almost as if nature had been waiting for humanity to lose its grip and was revelling in newfound freedom.

Rook had not spoken for half an hour. The silence suited her, but it also made her memories of the deaths she had witnessed more vivid. There was such coldness in the boy that she could almost feel it emanating from him in waves. He made the hairs on her arms stand on end.

Each time she blinked she saw the dying Chopper scratching at the road, and wondered what last thought had been going through his or her mind.

Lucy-Anne maintained the silence, hoping that he would start telling her about himself without prompting.