Contagion

She believes, too, Jack thought, but of course she did. Doomsday had made her something special—a healer—and she knew that he’d been touched by Nomad.

Jack, I did it! Emily said. I spread the word, and the photos, and everything is changing.

It is, his mother said. London’s story will change again very soon.

At first Jack thought they were talking about the bomb. But there was no way they could know, and as his consciousness dipped closer to his mother, he saw her confident smile.

They’re coming! Emily said. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. I did it just like you said, and—

—a jolt as Jack saw what she’d done, relayed either from her own memory, or perhaps painted by whatever talent had taken hold of him.

Emily with the camera she’d retrieved on her way back out of London, through the tunnels, Fleeter guiding her and her mother, a brief flash of violence as Fleeter—

Emily and his mother, alone now, hurrying across countryside with the weight of London behind them. Lights speckle the landscape; farms, hamlets, places where normal people are living almost-normal lives so close to the toxic city. His family are glad to be out, but sad that Jack is not with them. Go to Cornwall, he’d told them, but he can see from the set of Emily’s face that—

She has no intention of doing what he’d told her. Instead, they break into the school under cover of darkness, do their best to seal off a small office by covering the window with several layers of curtains, and fire up the computer. It’s a decent laptop with a good Internet connection. Emily connects the camera and downloads the pictures she’s taken, and the film clips, and then—

Their mother finds some food and drink, and sits back while Emily works. The love she exudes for her daughter is overwhelming. As is her sadness at the two years of her daughter’s life she missed. Jack sees his mother’s tears even though Emily does not, and that makes him wonder—

I’m ready, Emily says, sitting back and stretching her stiff limbs. Don’t hesitate, their mother says. I wasn’t. I was just enjoying the moment. I wish Jack could be here to see this. She presses return and—

She has learned so much. Jack never knew she’d been watching him so closely, and Jenna when she worked on their computer in their buried camp in the woods—Camp Truth they’d called it, and now everything Emily had learnt there would be put to the test, the real truth its burden. Emails are sent in small blocks to avoid spam filters, attachments encrypted, any text bland and inconspicuous. Twenty, sixty, a hundred, worming their way through wires and across the ether, and while within the first second a large percentage are intercepted, examined, catalogued, flagged for inspection, and locked away in secure servers across the southeast, a few get through and find their intended recipients. Then the true dispersal begins. Sleeping computers wake, dormant servers fire up, and automated email accounts start forwarding emails to millions of addresses across the country. Most are caught and deleted by provider spam programmes, many more are attacked by security code written to look for precisely these messages—images scanned, tones and colours and content analysed by algorithms so complex that they require terabytes of power. From every million emails sent, perhaps a hundred land in inboxes, and of these maybe thirty are opened. From there, it is out of the virtual hands of the web and into the consciousness of human beings.

While emails fly and die, further messages are sent to the computer in Camp Truth. They’d christened it Marty so they could talk about it in company, and Jenna had treated it like another friend. Alone, it beeps and buzzes as its fan whirrs up, and the screen comes to life to illuminate the place where so many of their hopes had been kept alive. Jack senses the scene, and whilst exciting, it is also sad. The people who had been there mere days ago have all changed now, and discovering the fates of their various family members means they will never be the same again.

Jenna’s programmes, worked on so diligently for months, start working. Images are dispersed to scores of websites, and to hundreds of people hiding online under a web of aliases and false provider information. Photographs and films taken within London soon pop up all across the Internet. Reaction is swift—the authorities’ preparedness for such an eventuality shocks Jack, even though he has seen evidence of it so many times before —and websites crash like a series of virtual dominoes. But the spread of information is now speedier than any attempt to suppress it. And while ten websites crash, one will always survive to pass on information.

A film of the Exclusion Zone, with Jack and Lucy-Anne staring around in shock…

Jack’s mother in the Underground station, and behind her the beds taken with dead and dying…

Choppers cruising the streets in their blue vehicles…

Nomad, mysterious, ethereal, with the sad, empty city behind her…

More images that betray the truth that has been kept from the world. Film clips that show the incredible things that have happened within London, and display that it is not a dead, toxic place as the world has been told.

Jack saw the truth spreading across Britain like blood finding its way through an organism’s arteries and veins.

And as he finally drew back towards his universe of potential, he used Rhali’s gift to sense the mass of people moving quickly towards London. Roads were heavy with vehicles. Their gravity was huge. And they were all coming to find people they had lost.

“Bloody hell, mate, I thought you were gone!” Sparky was kneeling next to him, Jenna and Lucy-Anne behind him.

“I was,” Jack said. “I reached out to Emily. Saw what she’s done. And…” He actually laughed out loud, and it felt so good. “And she’s a genius! She’s contacted Marty. She and my mum didn’t get the hell away like I told them to, but are holed up in a school maybe twenty miles outside the Exclusion Zone. She used everything on the camera.”

“And it was all stopped by the Choppers,” Jenna said. “Go on. Tell me that. And they’ll have triangulated on Camp Truth, too.”

“No,” Jack said, smiling. “A lot got through. The word’s out. We’ve done what we always wanted to do, and now there are people coming towards London. Loved ones, those who always half-believed like us, they’re all coming here to see what’s left.”

“And they’re being stopped?” Sparky said.

“I’m not sure,” Jack replied.

“Bloody hope they are.”

“All the more reason to follow Andrew straight away,” Lucy-Anne said. “What if they break through?”

“What do you mean?” Jenna asked.

“The truth got out there are just the wrong time,” Lucy-Anne said. “It’s what we’ve always wanted, but if so many people know, they won’t be able to stop them.”

“The Choppers will stop them coming close, just like they always stopped anyone leaving,” Fleeter said bitterly.

“Really?” Lucy-Anne asked. “How? With force?”

“No,” Jack said. “No, they can’t. Oh. Oh, shit. There’ll be press, reporters, web journalists. They’ll try to stop them, but they won’t be able to use force. And if there are enough people, they’ll just march on London. Everything’s been blown wide open.”

“And because of that, it’s not just London in danger now,” Rhali said.

“That bomb can’t explode!” Jenna said.

“Right,” Lucy-Anne agreed. “And so we follow Andrew.”

Fleeter flipped out, her disappearance causing a thud! that cracked one of the restaurant’s front windows.

For a moment Jack thought of following. But even seconds might count now, and he would no longer desert his friends.

“Come on,” he said. Without another word they left the restaurant and followed a ghost along London’s haunted streets.

Walking behind Andrew was like living a memory.