When he lifted his eyes to the rider, normal reactions shut down with shock. Pure instinct from his years of fenland combat seized control, lurching him sideways down a gap between a couple of stalls. He heard the bike pass behind him. It did not stop.
The fright echoed around inside him for long minutes while he found a backwater area to recover—a remote corner of the market where rotting food got left to be picked over by scrawny women and their urchins. Master-Sergeant Ratty lived in Camden industrial asylum. He rode a big motorbike. It was not actually stunning news. Ratty did after all have a proper Camden accent. A crazy after-shock of relief swept over Lawrence and he started laughing. Imagine the look on Ratty’s face had he recognised Big Stak! That would have been a sight almost worth dying for... Then again, this was not such a funny business. He simply had to get out of Camden and hope he did not run into more Value System shareholders whilst roaming Brent Cross—if he could get there.
His explorations proved there was no way out of Camden by public drain. Every road away from the marketplace came to a turnpike toll or else petered out into wild bushland on the hillside to the north—Lawrence now realised this hill led up onto the famed Hampstead Heath and its notorious horse-breeding gangsters. However, the railway line to the west did offer a way out. This was the same line down which the glory train had come the previous day. Lawrence observed working men wandering in and out from its route, apparently without any hindrance. He had no other choice, so he joined them.
Before he had covered many paces, he realised why this was not a popular route. It ran at the bottom of a concrete ravine where light barely reached. The only clear route was along the railway line, which was kept clear of major obstacles by the trains. The rest of the way was impassable due to banks of weeds, pools of mud, fallen trees and great stinking screes of rubbish built up from decades of abattoir waste, dead cats, tarry drooling chemical tailings, rusty ironmongery and even some half-eaten human corpses, all disposed of by the upper world. The established path curved well clear of these screes to avoid the eternal feeding frenzies of rats and cats and seagulls and even the odd vulture. Lawrence gripped his slingshot loaded in his pocket, ready to whip it out and swipe any man or beast that confronted him. In fact, the human traffic proved to be docile, the opposing streams keeping to their own rail, avoiding eye contact. Lawrence guessed these were craftsmen of various types, as most carried bags of tools and wore denim dungarees.
The line curved and disappeared into the black depths of a tunnel, from which the roar of falling water called. The stream of people flowed to the right just prior to that ominous black mouth, ascending a zig-zagging path up the broken wall of the ravine. It emerged onto a wild, unkempt area where trees grew out of ruins of Public Era vintage, amongst which ran a path worn through a foot of top soil to old Public Era black tarmac. Lawrence had no difficulty flowing the flow as it wound through the trees and shells of what had once been mighty structures with walls of reinforced concrete a yard thick. He supposed these had originally been tall buildings demolished to comply with Naclaski. He felt safe here, amongst these rough-and-ready artisans. No Value System shareholders would come this way.
The path ran through a hole in a wall and out onto what was clearly a public drain, albeit heavily overgrown with nettles and brambles. That was good news: no glory trucks, no armoured cars, no ultramarine wagons ever came this way. What encouraged Lawrence was that the drain ran away from the morning sun—that meant north west, the direction of Brent Cross. It also climbed, another hopeful sign that he was getting away from the low, central area of the London basin. There were no trees here. They must have been harvested long ago. Along one side of the drain ran an unremitting brick wall topped with broken glass and outward-curving spikes. This was probably the frontier of a gangster’s petty domain, most likely the horse-breeders of Hampstead Heath. The other side gave into a wilderness of thick bushes and swamps.
A middle-aged man had collapsed across the path near the top of the hill. Everyone just stepped over him and kept going, so Lawrence did the same. The poor bastard looked dead anyway—he probably took a heart attack after the long climb. A little way after that, the path crested the hill to provide a viewpoint, where a number of men had stopped to get their breath, have a cigarette and admire the scene. It was worth a few minutes’ pause. The full northern flank of the Grande Enceinte stretched across the landscape. It looked rather like a thin, red-toothed belt, due to the regularity of the Naclaski forts. The specifications of the Grande Enceinte were the boast of the decent society that sheltered behind it in the Central Enclave. A circumference of nineteen miles containing a safe zone of seventeen square miles, approximately axe-shaped with the cutting head to the east, twenty Naclaski forts, two billion bricks, all gleaned by the hands of Night and Fog gangs from Public Era ruins and re-fashioned into a safety feature as high as a mature oak tree. The battlements looked over a bare area of rubble and wasteland called the Strip. It was from here that materials had been gleaned to construct the Grande Enceinte—that was why Lawrence now had such
