London Eye

“So where do we spend the night?” Sparky asked. “I've had enough of tunnels and rats.”

“There's somewhere I know,” Rosemary replied. “North, across the Barrens.”

“Barrens?” Jack asked.

“The grave I told you about,” the woman said. “You'll see. Not far from here. You'll see.” She looked around the group, nodded, and then stepped out onto the pavement.

They followed her in line, Emily holding the camera before her and sweeping it slowly around. The station stood on one corner of a crossroads, and Rosemary led them around the side of the building, past peeling posters advertising movies and stage shows two years and many lifetimes old.

“Will we see lots of people?” Emily asked.

“Not around here,” Rosemary said. “Not this close.”

“Close to the Barrens?” Jack asked. But Rosemary only glanced back at him with haunted eyes.

Around the next corner they turned left into a residential street. There were three cars and a bus involved in a pile-up at the junction, one car having been forced from the road and through the front wall of a house. The blackened scars of an old fire blistered one flank of the bus, but it was impossible to tell whether this was a result of the accident, or something that had happened afterwards.

Jack caught his breath and glanced at Emily. I never really considered, he thought. All the bodies we might see, all the dead. But Sparky was already running for the bus, raising his hand and whistling in a grim parody of a late commuter.

Lucy-Anne chuckled.

The boy forced his way through the half-open door and looked around, only his silhouette visible against the dust-streaked windows. He jumped off again quickly. “No one home!” he shouted. “But someone's been shopping in Harrods.”

“Anything worth having?” Jenna asked.

Sparky stood before them, blinking, the ruin of the vehicles behind him. “It's not my stuff to look at,” he said.

“I know someone who went to Harrods soon after Doomsday,” Rosemary said. “He came out with a diamond necklace and a hand-sized horse carved from soap. Three days later he threw the necklace away and started washing.”

She was serious, but for some reason Lucy-Anne found what she said unbearably amusing. She started giggled, then laughing, bending over with hands on her knees and roaring at the pavement.

“Quiet!” Rosemary said, but if Lucy-Anne heard, she did not care. The laughter continued, and Jack could not find it in himself to try and stop her. She'd been acting differently ever since the dog attack, and it felt good to see her like this. He tried to shove the fact that she might be losing it to one side.

“Lucy-Anne!” Rosemary said, angry at first, but quickly growing calmer. The woman touched the girl's back, smoothing softly as the laughter changed quickly into tears. “We need to be quiet. Really, we do. London is a dangerous place now, dear. There's more than just people that will do us harm.”

Lucy-Anne stood and moved away from Rosemary, wiping her eyes, looking around at the group then away again. She's still messed up, Jack realised. That was no release for her at all. She needs…something.

Rosemary looked at the sky to the west, where oranges and reds bled across rooftops. “We should go,” she said. “I don't like crossing the Barrens in the dark.”

“Why?” Jenna asked.

“They're haunted.”

Jack had never believed in ghosts, but her words struck a chill in his heart. Emily clasped his hand and he squeezed back.

They followed Rosemary along the street, past the crashed cars and bus and towards the junction at the far end. It felt strange walking past so many silent houses, and Jack thought this was what Rosemary meant by being haunted. She'd said that the Barrens was a grave, but wasn't the whole of London now one big tomb? He thought of what the houses to his left and right contained, how many of the inhabitants had probably died at home and still sat or lay there now, staring at the sunset-streaked windows with skullish eyes. It was chilling, and the silence made it doubly so. Any place so used to noise and bluster became haunted when it was silent and still. He remembered when his father had remained behind at work one evening to finish a report, and the strange look in his eyes when he came home. When Jack had asked what was wrong, he'd simply said, I'm used to the building being full.

“These places feel full of the dead,” Jack whispered, his voice carrying in the silence.

“Not all of them,” Rosemary said. “There were efforts to clean up. The government right at the beginning, and then us. We couldn't just let the city rot.”

“Then where…?” As Jack spoke they rounded the corner at the end of the street, and his question was answered.

Lucy-Anne had never seen a place that looked so wrong. It reminded her of the Exclusion Zone, but the space before them had not only been flattened, but apparently excavated and turned as well, as if to expose fresh ground to the new world. No old buildings remained standing, though there were structures out there, ambiguous and strange in the fading light. It was maybe a mile across in both directions. Shrubs and sapling trees grew in abundance, lush and somehow grotesque. She could not work that out. Leaves shone with health, flowers were full and fat, yet she could not shake the idea that they were wrong.

“It's a mass grave,” Jack said.

“Yes,” Rosemary replied. “The Barrens. The area was destroyed in a huge blaze two days after Doomsday. It didn't take much for them to finish the job.”

“A grave?” Emily said. She was still filming. “How can that be a grave?”

“No one knows how many are buried here,” Rosemary said. “Twenty thousand? A hundred thousand? A million?”

“Those plants…” Lucy-Anne began, wondering whether talking about them would reveal why they looked so disturbing. I've seen them before, she thought, and a memory promised itself to her…but not yet.

“They look almost meaty,” Sparky said, and yes, that was it, and when Lucy-Anne closed her eyes and breathed in deeply she could almost smell the rawness of them.

“Fertile ground,” Jack said. Lucy-Anne knew what he meant, and it was dreadful.

“We have to cross that?” Jenna asked.

Rosemary nodded. “I've done it many times before. But never in the dark.”

“Because it's haunted?” Emily's voice was small and lost.

“There's no such things as ghosts,” Jack said, squeezing his sister's shoulder.

“You don't need ghosts for a place to feel haunted,” Rosemary said. “Please, come on. The light's fading.”

They went, and as they passed from the neat, paved areas of a dead London street and onto the heaved ground of the Barrens, Lucy-Anne wondered if everyone was thinking thoughts similar to hers: My family could be beneath my feet right now.

When she closed her eyes, she saw their death-masks grinning up at her from mass graves. She ground her teeth together to shove away the image. A nightmare? She thought not. Just her imagination going overdrive, and she determined to walk on.

The ground was uneven. Smooth here, ridged and cracked there, sunken elsewhere, it promised broken bones for the unwary. Lucy-Anne looked all around, searching for the glint of bones, or the messy trail of hair still attached to shrunken scalps. But whoever had done the burying had been thorough.

“We're walking on them,” Jenna said, something like fascination in her voice. Nobody replied.

They passed the first spread of lush plants, and Lucy-Anne could not identify them. The shrubs’ flowers looked like roses, but from the stems below the flowers hung catkins, and the thorns were long and thin like hawthorn. Lower down, a bright red heather hugged the ground, spread through the cracks and crevasses like something spilled. She thought of asking whether anyone recognised the species, but decided against it. She was afraid that they were new. Now that Sparky had used the term meaty, Lucy-Anne could