Contagion

shut out images of thousands of people crossing those bombed, flattened areas and being mown down by machine-gun fire.

He still found Fleeter fascinating. He had seen her killing in cold blood, and yet now she was here, and she seemed different. She looked exhausted, but there was something else about her as well. A brightness, as if she had discovered life again. She’d told Jack about how she’d guided his mother and Emily out of London, and how for a while she’d taken a walk out there, seeing normal people doing normal, everyday things, unaware of the dreadful events just twenty miles from where they lived. This, she’d said, was why she had returned to Breezer and his people. She wanted to help.

She claimed no allegiance with Reaper. But she was still a monster.

Jack would never forget the look in her eyes when she killed, and he could never fully trust her.

From the moment they stepped out into the fresh air once again, Jack knew that something had changed.

“Least we didn’t have to jump from the roof this time,” Sparky said.

“Pity,” Jenna said. “I enjoyed that so much.”

“You did, really. Secretly. Deep inside, you want me to carry you upstairs and throw you off.”

“You. Carry me up forty flights of stairs. I’d like to see you try.”

Sparky grinned and glanced at Jack. “He could.”

“I’m not Superman,” Jack said. But no one replied to that, and he wondered what everyone really thought of him. He still wasn’t sure what he thought of himself. He feared the potential he carried inside, and worried that they were untried, untested, and liable to backfire if he used them all too rashly. But perhaps it was merely a question of confidence. Maybe he needed to grow used to bearing such power.

Time would tell. And as he breathed in the strange London air and sensed the changes occurring, he knew that he would be testing more powers very soon.

“Something’s different,” he said.

“Spidey senses tingling,” Sparky said.

“What is it, Jack?” Rhali asked. She touched his arm, held his hand. She’d not eaten much—said she was not used to such food, and that in captivity they had sometimes forgotten to feed her for days. But she already seemed stronger.

“Can’t you feel it?” he asked them all. Sparky and Jenna walked together, Rhali was with him. Fleeter strolled slightly ahead of them, automatically taking the lead. Breezer and Guy Morris accompanied them, quiet and tense. They never liked travelling in the open like this.

“No,” Breezer said as if stating the obvious.

Jack was not aware that he was using any particular power. Between blinks he searched inside, but he’d touched no star, and there was no taste of Nomad on his tongue. Perhaps using what she had given him was becoming second nature. But that made him wonder just what he was turning into.

“Rhali,” he said. “You sensed it.”

“I still sense movement to the north,” she said. “And moving closer.”

“But whatever’s coming towards us is different,” he said. “Not…human.”

“Oh, dandy,” Jenna said.

Jack looked around at the high buildings, absorbed the silence. “The whole city’s holding its breath.”

“We need to move,” Breezer said, eyes wide. “And quickly.”

“What is it?” Jack asked.

“The north. That’s where the monsters went after Doomsday. Not many people go up there, and some who do don’t come back.”

“Monsters?” Jenna asked.

“Evolve caused physical changes in some people,” Breezer said. He nodded at Fleeter. “You know.”

“I only know the stories,” she said. “Wolf men. Bird people. Flesh eaters.”

“Oh, super,” Sparky said.

“And now they’re moving into the city,” Rhali said.

“Oh, even more super.”

Rhali breathed deeply, clasping Jack’s hand tighter for support. “There’s a small group a mile away,” she said. “Moving…too quickly.”

“Right,” Jack said. “The river. A boat. Let’s go. Fleeter?”

Did she looked a little afraid? He wasn’t sure. Such a look might have been another version of her smug smile, or a trick of the light. But just before she flipped out with a smack! and went to check their route, she locked eyes with Jack, and he saw something dark staring back.

They headed for the river. Jack wondered why no one had mentioned the north before, and the people and things who lived there. But he supposed there had been no need. London was a vastly changed place, and it could be that the north had become as remote as the outside world. When he had a chance, he would ask Fleeter about it.

They moved as silently and quickly as possible. He saw things that days ago would have traumatised him for life, but which now were merely another part of the landscape. Two withered, dried shapes hung side by side from nooses suspended from second storey windows. A pram sat in the middle of the road, a mess of blankets and clothing inside, mother dead on the road with her skeletal fingers curled around one wheel. A bus had driven into a DVD store, and the silhouettes of its dead passengers were just visible through the dusty windows.

“No one buried them all,” Rhali said. Jack was surprised, and then he remembered that the Choppers had caught her soon after Doomsday. She’d been shut away since then.

“There was no one left to do it,” he said. “London is their mausoleum.”

A clap! and Fleeter reappeared beside the bus. She projected her usual aloof smile, but swayed where she stood, reaching out to the bus for balance. She closed her eyes for a moment, breathing deeply.

“We’re clear from here to the river,” she said. “No Choppers. But what’s coming from that way isn’t safe.” She nodded back the way they’d come.

Both Sparky and Jenna looked at Jack expectantly. He in turn looked at Breezer and raised his eyebrows.

“You know what Guy can do,” Breezer said. Jack nodded. He’d seen the small, thin man in Camp H telling the Choppers to drop their weapons. “Whether his powers of suggestion will work on whatever’s coming down from the north…” He shrugged. Beside him Guy remained silent, offering nothing.

“Guess it’s all on you, then,” Jenna said to Jack.

“I don’t want to kill anyone else,” he said.

“You might not have—” Fleeter began, but Jack cut her off.

“I’m not like you! Come on!”

They moved less cautiously than they would have normally, trusting Fleeter’s observations, and soon they were closing on the river. Breezer said he and the Irregulars kept two boats moored there, engines services and fuel tanks full, just in case they were ever needed. But they hadn’t started the motors in over a year. Too noisy, too risky.

Close to the river was an open square, landscaped and with several large stone sculptures on marble plinths. The sort of place office workers might have come to for lunch, and tourists might have chosen to have their pictures taken with the river and London skyline in the background. An ice cream van sat in one corner on flattened tyres, a line of bodies sprawled on the ground before its open window. It illustrated again the speed with which disaster had befallen London. In the distance, on the other side of the river, Jack could just make out the upper third of the London Eye, its graceful arc marred by the damage from the helicopter crash that had started everything.

“They’re coming,” Rhali said, and moments later four shapes burst from a side street across the road from the square.

“What the hell are they?” Sparky said. No one answered. Everyone drew close together and squatted down, sheltering behind a sculpture but knowing that it would not protect them for long.

Jack probed inward and prepared himself, balancing two talents, ready to use either. His heart hammered