Mind the Gap (10 page)

Hattie managed to stagger away.

Jazz pulled her shirt up to cover her nose and mouth and ventured farther into the tunnel, through the slowly rising fog of yellow gas. Cadge came after her and they picked up their pace.

“Nothing but bloody sewer rats, what you are!” they heard a man shout.

The gas thinned, almost a gauzy film over the shadows. The entrance to the United Kingdom’s lair stood open, the metal door hanging wide, and that ugly gas roiled up from the throat of the stairwell beyond.

Not far from the door, four men stood around Harry, who lay on the ground. They spat on him, shouted obscenities, and kicked his back and legs and ribs, even as he tried to protect his face and head with his arms, pulling himself into a fetal ball.

“Don’t belong down here, rats. Gotta flush you out,” one of the men said.

The four of them wore white filter masks over the lower parts of their faces. They’d thrown something down into Deep Level Shelter 7-K—tear gas or worse—to drive Harry and the kids out of there. Jazz didn’t know what had happened to the others, but she could only hope they’d gone out the emergency exit while Harry’d gone up the hatch to buy them time.

Harry let out a shout of agony as a heavy boot caught him in the back. He arched his body, letting a fusillade of profanity loose upon his attackers. But words would not drive them off. They only kicked him again, harder. They hadn’t yet noticed the two witnesses in the deeper shadows of the tunnel.

“What do we do?” Cadge whispered.

Images of her mother’s corpse flashed through Jazz’s mind. She saw the blood again, and the message scrawled on the bedroom floor. Her mother’s last thoughts had been of her survival. But if she’d reached home while the killers were in the midst of murder, she would never have chosen to run. Nor could she now.

She bolted toward them. One of the men heard her approach and looked up. Jazz stopped short, just near enough to taunt them with her presence.

“Oi! Leave off, fuckers!”

All four of them looked up, and for the first time she got a decent look at them. Three were dressed in boots and work clothes, sleeves rolled up as though they’d just come from the docks. The other wore black trousers and a thin black tie that hung over a white shirt. With the right cap and jacket, he’d have looked like a rich man’s chauffeur.

In the eyes of all four of those men, Jazz saw sudden recognition. One by one, they focused not on her and Cadge but on her alone, and they
knew
her.

The phantoms of the London Underground might not frighten her anymore, but the look in the eyes of those men sent ice shooting through her and dread skittering down the back of her neck. She caught her breath and stood staring back at them.

They stepped away from Harry. On the ground, the old thief coughed and spat up blood and bile. The men watched her with a terrible malice.

“Well, now,” said the man with the black tie. He reached up and pulled down his mask—most of the gas had dispersed—and Jazz uttered the smallest sound, a kind of whimper that she despised.

She recognized him. He had been one of the men the Uncles sometimes sent to watch over her and her mother, to pick up groceries or do a bit of repair on the pipes or the electric. And he had been standing outside her house, on guard, while her mother’s killers had been inside. Jazz didn’t know his name. In her mind, he was simply one of the BMW men.

He took a step toward her.

“Cadge, run!” she cried.

Jazz turned, caught her foot on a railroad tie, and stumbled. She risked one glance over her shoulder and saw the men running. One of them tripped and fell, but the others did not hesitate.

She ran. Her breath sounded too loud in her ears, and the walls of the tunnel seemed to be closing in. They gave chase, shouting to one another as though on a foxhunt. And Jazz knew what happened at the end of the hunt. The copper stink of her mother’s blood rushed back to her as though she had returned to that death room. Her breath came faster.

Cadge ran just ahead. The only noise he made was his footfalls. As they rounded the bend, legs pumping, dancing amid the remnants of train track, Cadge snatched up his duffel bag.

“Nowhere to run down here, kids!” one of the men called.

Jazz had been thinking almost exactly that a moment before, but now she realized how wrong he was. There were an infinite number of places to hide in the down-below. The men had beaten Harry and scared off the others, but the United Kingdom had scattered. They’d be hiding now, like the rats these men thought they were. Like Hattie. The girl had passed them only moments ago, but Jazz ran by the stairs she and Cadge had come down and the door was now closed firmly. In the shadows, it looked unused.

“You’re slow and old, you ugly shits!” Cadge called to their pursuers. “I hope you all have heart attacks and die down here.”

“Christ, Cadge,” Jazz rasped, running, chest burning with the effort. She’d already been exhausted when they’d walked into this chaos. What was Cadge doing?

When he glanced at her and she saw his expression in the gloom, she understood. He wasn’t taunting the men out of amusement, but to make sure they knew he and Jazz hadn’t gone through that door. If one of them opened it and found Hattie there, she was dead.

Well done, Cadge.

He started to slow, the extra burden of the duffel weighing on him. Jazz glanced back and saw they’d lengthened the distance between themselves and the thugs. She couldn’t even see them now around the bend in the tunnel—could only hear the clomping of their boots. But if Cadge slowed…

“Drop the bag,” she whispered.

He shot her a look of terror. “But the torch—”

Jazz tore the duffel from his hands and let it fall to the floor of the tunnel, hoping one of the bastards would trip on it. Cadge wanted the torch in case they had to hide somewhere that the light from above didn’t filter in and where there were no electrical lights still siphoning power from the upside world. But they couldn’t afford to lose a step.

Better to live in the dark than die in the light.

Her face burned with exertion and hatred, not only for these men but for herself. The BMW man proved it, and she’d seen that recognition in all of their eyes. They were here for her. Jazz had brought blood and perhaps even death to Harry and his United Kingdom. Her heart tightened into a fist in her chest. She couldn’t let them catch her. The pain they would inflict on her would be terrible, but far worse would be the knowledge that her mother had spent so many years preparing her to survive and that she had failed at the task.

She had to live for Mum.

“Here,” Cadge said.

The only light came from vent shafts twenty yards in either direction, but her eyes had become used to the dark in the past couple of months and she saw immediately what Cadge pointed to. A small narrow platform was set into the left side of the tunnel. Against the far wall were thick pipes that thrust deeper into the Underground and ran up to the ceiling of the tunnel. They branched off there, some following the tunnel both ways and some going straight up through the ceiling toward the surface. Others, however, turned and vanished into a crawl space atop the platform wall, no doubt once having carried water or power into other tunnels and stations from here. Many of the pipes had large wheel valves, but it was the ladder that mattered.

She gave Cadge a push and they ran for it together.

As they climbed onto the platform, the men rounded the bend in the tunnel.

“Where d’you think you’re going?” one of them called, and then laughed.

As the laugh died out, Jazz heard another sound. Cadge had reached the ladder ahead of her, but he turned and stared back down the tunnel—not at the men but beyond them, as though he could see the source of the distant shriek that came whistling up the tunnel, building in volume.

“Fuck me blind,” Cadge whispered.

The BMW man reached the platform first and leaped up onto it. He lunged at Jazz. She turned and squared off, letting him come, and then swung her leg to kick him in the balls. He was ready for the attack, as she’d figured he would be. It had been a feint.

She drove her fingers into his eyes.

He screamed, reached for his face, and Cadge slammed a shoulder into him, knocking him off the platform. The others tried to catch him, but the BMW man slipped through their hands and hit the ground.

“Jesus, my eye!” he cried. “It’s bleeding. Bitch popped my eye!”

The words were a shout of fury and pain; otherwise, Jazz would never have been able to hear them—not over the shrieking wind that came hurtling along the tunnel. The howling noise grew louder. To her ears it sounded like a train derailing and the terrified screams of the passengers, all merged into an infernal chorus.

The Hour of Screams.

A hundred rats ran along the tunnel, all in the same directions, ignoring the humans and seeking darkness once again.

“Jazz, a song!” Cadge shouted, his lips right beside her ear.

Her hair whipped past her face. The wind buffeted her, and now she saw that it had spectral texture. She nodded and huddled with him at the base of the ladder. Jazz clapped her hands against her ears to block out as much of the noise as she could. The banshee wail of the Hour of Screams grew louder, grating on her mind, stripping away her thoughts.

Harry had said to pick a song but hadn’t elaborated much. Jazz knew it had to be something that she felt in her heart, that meant something to her, or she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on it. But as she tried to focus, tried to choose, the Hour of Screams grew so loud she could barely think, and nothing came to mind. Snatches of lyrics, but she couldn’t think how any of those songs went.

The stars,
she thought.
Something about the stars.

And then she had it, a song she could never forget, a melody that would never leave her.

Are the stars out tonight?

I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright.

I only have eyes for you, dear.

Jazz sang the words softly at first and then louder, defiantly. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut, but she felt Cadge at her side, huddled against her. Fear cradled her and she surrendered to it. Her sanctuary had been shattered. Her blood would soon stain the Underground, and the vanishing that had begun the day of her mother’s murder would be complete.

The Hour of Screams bore down upon them. Jazz shook, breath hitching in her chest. Things slipped past her that might have been gusts of wind but were not. They caressed her, and she knew these were not ghosts like the phantoms she had encountered before.

“I only have eyes for you,” she sang.

Beside her, Cadge shouted as though to drive the screams away and then began singing louder. She forced herself to open her eyes against the buffeting winds to make certain he was all right. Cadge had his own eyes screwed shut and hands clamped over his ears. His lips moved along with a song, but over her own singing and the howling of the Hour of Screams, Jazz couldn’t make out the words or the tune.

Motion on the tracks caught her eye. She looked and saw the men crumbling to their knees. Ethereal shapes whipped around them, darting in close and then drawing back, pulsing in the air. The men beat their arms uselessly against the wind. Their eyes were wide with terror, and their shrieks joined the symphony.

And then it passed. The wind began to diminish and so did the volume of the screams, until moments later it lingered as nothing more than a distant whistle, just as it had been the first time she’d heard it from so far away with Harry and Cadge.

The men did not rise immediately, nor did they curse or shout. One by one, they looked up, eyes still wide. One of them wore a grin that seemed slashed into his face. He started to laugh and the BMW man slapped him, which only made the thug laugh harder.

The BMW man’s gouged eye bled down his cheek. He glanced around with his one good eye and spotted her, then he bared his teeth and growled like an animal. His upper lip curled back to reveal crooked teeth.

One by one they rose, driven mad by the Hour of Screams.

“Rats,” one of the men muttered, staring at Cadge and licking his lips. “Drive ’em out.”

“Jazz,” Cadge whispered.

The men were moving slowly. The first one reached the platform and began to haul himself up.

“Jazz!” Cadge shouted. He grabbed her arm and whipped her around, shoved her toward the ladder. “Climb!”

Heart thundering in her ears, she grabbed hold of the rungs and scrambled upward. Cadge shouted after her, urging her faster. Jazz caught his face with the heel of her shoe, so quickly was he following.

“Go! Go!” he yelled.

At the top, hands sliding over dust and grime, she pulled herself into the crawl space between the thick pipes. It couldn’t have been more than two feet high but wide enough that she twisted sideways and rolled into the darkness. Turning around to face the way she’d come, she reached out to grab hold of Cadge’s hand as he topped the ladder.

He froze, clung tightly to the top rung, and she saw a terrible understanding in his eyes:
they had him.

Cadge knew he wouldn’t be getting away.

The BMW man roared in triumph as Cadge’s fingers were torn away from the rungs.

Jazz screamed for him. And for herself.

At the edge of the crawl space, she could see down onto the platform. The BMW man dropped onto his knees on Cadge’s chest and began to beat him. There was a cracking of bone and the wet slap of skin on skin, growing slippery with blood. The others pulled him off, desperate to have their turn. They had been sent down into the underneath to hurt or even to kill, but they were madmen now. They kicked Cadge in the side and the head.

In the dim gloom of the tunnel, she thought she could see the life go out of his eyes. But Jazz knew it before the men did, and so her own screams turned to numb horror and she edged backward through the crawl space, deeper and deeper. Eventually, it would lead to some other tunnel or passage, but she would be the only one to emerge.

The BMW man still growled like an animal, but soon the wet noises and the thumps of their blows ceased. One last smack echoed through the tunnel and into the crawl space, and then she heard them.