Reaper's Legacy

some gardens. Then there’s a wide road, and we’re in Regent’s Park.”

“And why are we going there?”

“It’ll probably be quicker passing through the park than along streets.”

“And safer?”

“Didn’t say that.”

The enormity of their task, always at the back of Lucy-Anne’s mind, came to the fore then. Andrew was a needle in a haystack, a pebble on a beach. And now that they were heading into the wilder north of London, the haystack and beach were more dangerous than ever.

There were six corpses propped against the wall at the edge of the park. Each had a small fire lit in its lap, their arms had been interlocked in a grotesque mockery of dancing, and their heads and shoulders were encased in silvery-grey webbing. They were naked apart from their shoes. That’s what Lucy-Anne noticed first, before the rest of the horror. That they all wore shoes.

“What’s this?” she whispered. Rook squatted beside her in the shelter of a bus stop, two of his birds on the ground beside him. A third bird drifted in through the dark and settled on his shoulder, and he tilted his head.

“Don’t know,” he said, answering her at last. “There’ll be plenty we can’t explain. But the coast is clear.” He went to stand, and Lucy-Anne grabbed his arm.

“Clear?” she asked. She did not want to see the bodies, yet that was the only thing she could look at. She wondered if they were Choppers. “Clear?”

“So my birds tell me,” Rook said. “And I trust them. Come on.”

They crossed diagonally across the street, moving away from the bodies with the fires in their laps and towards the hulking shadow of an open park gate. If they were a warning, Lucy-Anne’s every atom told her to take heed. But her mind drove her on towards Andrew.

The smell of burning flesh accompanied them into the park, and she wondered how often this warning was replaced. And as she and Rook passed through the wide gates and onto the first of the curving footpaths, she froze in shock.

Empty, dead London was an unnatural place. Once home to endless bustle, with streets awash with life and millions of separate stories every day, and squares echoing to birdsong and the lilts of a hundred languages, the new silence of the toxic city was alien and unnatural. Before she left for good, Lucy-Anne had once remained behind in school on a dare, hiding until the caretakers locked her in, emerging into darkness, prowling the corridors and classrooms with every intention of performing small acts of rebellion and graffiti. But she had found the place so disconcerting—silence where once was life; breathlessness where echoes should live—that she’d smashed a window to escape.

London felt like that now.

But the park was worse.

They didn’t have to go too far in before they heard the calls and hoots, the whistles and moans. It sounded like Lucy-Anne imagined a jungle would sound at night, except…different. There was an intelligence to some of these calls that sent a shiver down her spine. Strange smells assailed her nostrils, and when she tried breathing through her mouth she tasted something acidic and damp on the air. In the weak moonlight, shadows danced beneath trees seemingly in defiance of the motionless canopies. Wide swathes of lawn had grown into seas of long grasses. Things moved in there.

The sheer wilderness of the place was overwhelming, and Lucy-Anne kept close to Rook.

“Can’t we go around?” she whispered.

“You saw what awaited us out there,” he said. “We’re in the north now. The streets around here…” He shrugged but said no more.

“You’ve sent your rooks to see?” she asked. Rook did not reply. He seemed unsettled, tense, so she did not force the issue. Her one desire became to make it through the park and out the other side.

The path they followed soon vanished beneath a spread of tough grass, and Rook grabbed her hand and pulled her towards a wall of darkness beneath a copse of trees. Lucy-Anne did not want to go that way—she felt like a child afraid of the dark—but Rook’s birds swooped in and away again, one landing on his shoulder as soon as another took off. She could only assume that they were imparting information and telling him whether it was safe. Her life was in his hands.

She had not willingly been totally dependent on another person for a very long time.

As they approached the trees Lucy-Anne saw the first shadow moving down amongst the boles. It darted from tree to tree through the shadows, seemingly merging with one trunk before skitting across to the next.

Calls and cries came from across the park, but the copse before them had fallen silent.

Rook paused, head on one side and a rook cawing on his shoulder. “You’ll see strange things,” he said, then he walked on.

Lucy-Anne took a deep breath and followed. Something caressed her ear and she waved at it, expecting to find a drooping branch. But she touched nothing, and when she glanced up she saw a shadow lifting and dipping above her as it flapped its strong, silent wings. Other rooks hovered farther away. Protecting her.

The shape slinked out from behind the first of the trees, scampering through the grass and then standing upright on two legs to glare at them. It was a man, but his arms and legs were deformed and bent like a dog’s. At first she thought he was black, but then she spotted the pale patches of skin across his stomach and abdomen, and realised that he was mostly covered in a heavy, dark pelt. His face protruded, nose wide, wet nostrils opening and closing as he took in their scents.

He shouted at them, and it was a bark. It sounded pained.

“Don’t panic,” Rook said.

“Oh my God,” Lucy-Anne said, appealing to a deity she had forgotten since her childhood. “Oh my God, what is that, what is that?”

“A man turning into a dog,” Rook said.

Lucy-Anne laughed out loud at his stark answer. But he was right.

The man shouted again, a heavy, deep bark that could not have issued from a human’s throat. He fell to all fours again and scampered away, kicking through the long grass, skitting back and forth, and a rudimentary tail swished the air behind him. Soon he was lost to the darkness, and moonlight could touch him no more.

Lucy-Anne was glad. She wished the moon and stars would shut themselves away for the rest of the night.

Amongst the trees, the darkness was even deeper. Rook moved quickly, and every now and then one of his birds would flit down out of the darkness and land on his shoulder. They were scouting the way forward, but Lucy-Anne knew that they might not see everything. There could be anything hiding in the dark.

A man turning into a dog! she thought. She had never seen or imagined anything like it, and it was a whole new aspect to what had happened to London. She’d heard of and met people whom Doomsday had changed, giving them talents or abilities that had been pure science fiction until two years ago. But the changes had all been on the inside. Here, things were different.

“Rook, what is this?” she whispered. He kept walking. “Rook?”

He paused and turned around. “We need to move quickly,” he said. And that was all. Any explanation would have to wait until later, because he set off again at a fast pace. Sometimes, Lucy-Anne had to run to keep up.

They passed through the wooded area, and just as they emerged close to a lake several shadows rose from the ground before them. Rook skidded to a halt, startled, and Lucy-Anne bumped into him. She maintained the contact.

Rooks flapped and cawed somewhere out of sight.

The shapes were people, naked, caked in mud, hair set in extravagant designs. Their limbs seemed too short, too thin. When they moved, Lucy-Anne saw why.

They had reared up from their stomachs, and the first woman slumped down to the ground and curled away through the undergrowth. She shifted from side to side as she went, withered, sore-covered arms dragging along on either side and legs fused along their insides to form a long, thin tail.

As Lucy-Anne gasped, the woman hissed. The two other snake people eased back down onto their stomachs and followed the woman, and soon they were lost from view.

“They were…” Lucy-Anne said.

“Lucky we surprised them,” Rook said. “Let’s hurry before they come back.”