Contagion

“What did you do?” he asked Angelina, not expecting an answer. But she gave one anyway.

“Only my best,” she said.

“You can help me put everything right,” Jack said. “I’ll sleep, but I need waking every few minutes. You can do that. You have to.”

Angelina nodded, and he saw no deception in her. He would have to trust her.

They moved closer until they were only a few feet from the tank, and then they stopped. They sat down slowly, Jack checking all the time for lasers he hadn’t seen, pressure pads or trip wires hidden in shadows. But he knew that they were safe, for now. With the powers he had, he knew.

He could sense the bomb inside, a terrible weight. And he knew the time was close.

“Lucy-Anne dreamt of Nomad and the bomb,” Jack said. “I have to do the same.” He closed his eyes and started breathing deeply, falling into his universe and then passing through an unknown place into Nomad’s stranger, cooler mind.

And he dreamt of Lucy-Anne.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ZERO

“Shit,” Sparky said. “Maybe they are going to machine-gun us after all.”

They were halfway across the Exclusion Zone, and facing them was a wall of lights. They could see the movement even from here, hear the engines. Several helicopters buzzed overhead, but they couldn’t tell whether they were military.

But they had already seen groups of people ahead of them disappearing into the bustle at the edge of the zone, and there was no gunfire. They had little choice. Lucy-Anne knew that Jack could not dream the bomb back forever.

“Time?” she asked through her damaged mouth.

Sparky glanced at his watch and kept staring for a while, as if trying to make sense of something. “It’s almost midnight,” he said.

“He’ll do it,” Jenna said. “For as long as he can, he’ll do it.”

Lucy-Anne had an arm around each of their shoulders, three friends so close. If only their fourth was not missing. She felt as though she’d left a limb behind, and several times crossing the bombed and burned Exclusion Zone she experienced a mad compulsion to rush back into London to be with Jack. She knew where he was. She might even get there in time.

“Almost there,” Sparky said. “But don’t these people know what’s happening?”

“Maybe it won’t reach this far,” Jenna said.

“Yeah, but it’s still close.”

“Lots have left already,” Breezer said. “I’m hoping this is the last of them. Others might have gone in different directions, but everyone my people were able to contact were told to come this way. There are some who refused to leave London. And probably many more we don’t know about, deep down in the tunnels, hidden away.”

“And those things from the north,” Sparky said.

“Yes. And them. I’ve seen some…but not many. It could be many of them don’t want to leave London.”

“We can hope,” Jenna said. “The thought of them out in the countryside…”

“I suspect they’ll be as scared as we are,” Breezer said, betraying his own fear at leaving the toxic city that had been home for two years.

“Let’s go,” Lucy-Anne said, wincing at the pain. It was her way of saying, Shut up and let’s get the hell out of here.

As they approached the outer edge of the zone, the buzz of frantic activity was obvious. There was surprisingly little military, and those who were there seemed as panicked as everyone else. People rushed to and fro, calling names, searching for loved ones among the slow trickle of people emerging from the darkness of the Exclusion Zone. Cars and other vehicles were moving in only one direction—away. And those few still remaining sat with engines running, ready to leave as soon as possible.

These were the people of Britain come to rescue survivors they had been told were all dead. Until very recently this area would have been occupied only by Choppers, but now most of them were gone—obeying or against orders, Lucy-Anne did not know—fleeing the bomb that mad bastard Miller had triggered. Instead of waiting here until the last minute, helping the survivors get out, holding back the hundreds or thousands of people who had flooded towards London when the truth had emerged…they had turned tail and fled. Lucy-Anne had not thought she could ever hate the Choppers any more, but she did right then.

And though she loved these people who had come to help, she was also afraid that another tragedy was imminent.

“Buddy hell…” she muttered, and then a faint washed over her. She felt Sparky and Jenna strengthen their grip, and then everything drew far away. Blackness pulled her down, and she welcomed it.

He is walking along the South Bank. London is all but silent; the only sounds are litter blown by the breeze, and pigeons cooing in the trees. The London Eye is a smashed ruin behind him, but though wrecked it still feels like a special place. A place of creation and birth. Now he is leaving it behind.

He walks along the pavement but barely touches it. I’m Nomad, he thinks, and the sudden burst of lucid dreaming is a shock. It chills and excites him, because he has never felt its like before. He looks across the river and imagines one of the buildings there lifting up, and with a grind of breaking masonry it does so, huge columns of stone splashing into the Thames. He blinks and everything is back to normal.

It is amazing, but this is no time to play. Jack knows he has a job to do.

A voice calls out from behind him. His urge is to continue on and ignore it, but that is Nomad’s dream, not his. So he turns around to see Lucy-Anne running along the riverside towards him. She looks petrified.

Any time now, Jack thinks.

Behind him, a flash. Lucy-Anne’s eyes go wide and her face drops.

Now…

Jack dreams everything back to normal. The flash recedes almost before it begins, barely even glittering from the river’s surface. The sky returns to its indifferent blue. Lucy-Anne no longer looks scared.

I did it! Jack thinks, and in the dream Lucy-Anne pauses close to him, looking around in confusion as if not knowing what to do.

“Don’t worry,” Jack says. He speaks with Nomad’s voice. “I’ll see you again.”

Jack snapped awake. Angelina was beside him, shaking him gently. She moved back as he sat up.

“It worked,” he said.

“For how long?”

He looked at the tank. It should have been blasted to atoms and beyond, but it remained whole because of him. “I don’t know,” he said.

“How will we ever know?”

Jack contemplated the moment of the explosion. He knew little about the workings of such a device, but he thought there was an initial charge that started the nuclear reaction. Would he hear that first blast? Would it reach his ears and travel to his brain, registering there before he was vaporised? Even with something as unimaginably destructive as this there had to be a moment between living and dead. An instant in time when consciousness ceased and his senses halted. He wondered whether at that instant, he would know what was happening.

Or would there be no knowledge? Would he be ended halfway through a thought or action, a movement or dream? Ceasing to be, like a raindrop touching an ocean.

He wasn’t sure which would be best.

Jack was tempted to force the tank open, touch the bomb, start to dismantle it, look inside to see if there was a timer he could find, one which perhaps had been put back hours or minutes by the dream he’d just had. I forced it to unexplode. But he was afraid in case all of his powers could not combat the most subtle of booby traps.