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.
About the Author
TIM LEBBON is a
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.
THE TOXIC CITY TRILOGY
Copyright
Published 2013 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books
Cover illustration © Steve Stone
Jacket design by Nicole Sommer-Lecht
Inquiries should be addressed to
Pyr
59 John Glenn Drive
Amherst, New York 14228–2119
VOICE: 716–691–0133
FAX: 716–691–0137
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Lebbon, Tim.
Contagion / By Tim Lebbon.
pages cm. — (Toxic City ; Book Three)
ISBN 978-1-61614-821-8 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-61614-822-5 (ebook)
1. Terrorism—Fiction. 2. London (England)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3612.E245C66 2013
813’.6—dc23
2013024869
Printed in the United States of America
