Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City) (3 page)

He tried to speak, but something had been taped over his mouth.

He heard voices. The stretcher was put down, and then someone spoke very close to his right ear.

“Don't be afraid, Jack.” It was barely a whisper, androgynous. “We're going up, and you and your friends will be safe. There will be fear. You'll be
scared
. But trust me, there's no danger.”

With a jolt they started carrying him again, and Jack prepared himself. When Rosemary had taken them down into the subterranean hospital to find his mother, a pair of twins had guarded the place, manifesting terrors in the minds of anyone who approached as a defence against the hospital being discovered. Jack had seen huge scorpions, Emily had seen moths, and Sparky for some reason had imagined giant, deadly chickens.

But the sense of fear that settled quickly over him now was terrible and all-consuming. He would have cried out, had his mouth not been bound. He writhed, then froze. His heart hammered. Everything he couldn't see was going to eat him, everything he couldn't feel or hear would crush him, consume him. The anticipation of this was more terrible than the act itself might be, and he moaned so hard against his gag that he thought his brain would erupt.

“It's safe, it's safe,” that calming voice whispered, but the darkness pressed into Jack, trying to drown and crush him down.

It's safe, it's safe
, he told himself. He sought something extra—a new sense, a burgeoning power—but he was simply Jack. Scared, lonely, worrying about his mother and sister held in the Choppers’ Camp H, fearful of his father, the dreadful Reaper. Scared little Jack. He started to cry, wishing his mother were there to hold and calm him as she had been for most, but not all of his years.

I've only just found her, I can't lose her again!

“We're there,” the voice said, and the hood was removed from Jack's head, his limbs unbound, and tape was ripped from across his mouth.

His vision swam from the tears, and he squinted his eyes against the glaring light.

“Oh, sorry.” The light levels lowered. A man was revealed before Jack, silhouetted against the strip lights in the ceiling. He was tall and thin with a wild head of hair haloing his face, but his expression was in shadow.

“Who are you?” Jack asked. He gathered his composure, grabbing onto the normality of what he saw after the terrors he'd been experiencing. “Why are you doing this to us?”

“Because I have to. And my name's Breezer.”

“Oh. Right. So what's your special power?”

The man chuckled and moved to the edge of the room, leaning against the wall. Across the room Sparky and Jenna sat up as they were released, and Jack locked gazes with them. Sparky looked angry, but Jack knew that they were safe. There was no threat here.

“No, that's really my name,” the man said. “Bill Breezer. I'm fifty-four. I'm a heating engineer. Or used to be.” He glanced at all of them, and Jack thought perhaps his smile was always there. He looked like someone who smiled a lot. Which meant that he was difficult to read.

“Where are we?” Sparky asked. The people who carried them had retreated from the large room, though Jack saw two of them just outside the open door. The room itself was sparse—bare plasterboard walls, a polished floor with holes where something had once been bolted down. A few paler patches on the walls where frames had once hung. It had the air of somewhere abandoned.

“If I felt comfortable telling you that, we wouldn't have knocked you out to bring you here.”

“Thanks for this anyway,” Jack said. “The Choppers almost caught us three times, at least. We can't run forever.”

“No,” Breezer said. “And Miller really wants you, it seems. Because…” His smile dropped slightly and he took on a faraway look, staring through Jack rather than at him. “Ahh. Wow. Nomad touched you.”

“So you read minds,” Jack said.

“I see histories. It doesn't amount to the same thing, but it can be more useful. You could have denied Nomad's touch, but I would have still known.”

“You see through lies,” Jenna said.

Breezer nodded. “You're all welcome here, of course. Even you, Jack.”

“
Even
me?”

“Your father's a monster.”

Jack bristled for a moment, but then remembered what his father had done in that suburban London street—the men and women he had killed, brutally, in cold blood. And he could hardly deny Breezer's assessment.

“He's no longer the father I knew,” Jack said.

Breezer did not answer. He looked at all three of them again. Then he inclined his head and said, “So, let's eat. I'll bet you're hungry?”

Sparky nodded.

“Ahh,” Breezer said. “A fan of a decent burger, Sparky?”

Sparky smiled.

“Good. Follow me. And while we're eating, we can talk about what might happen next.”

They emerged into a brightly lit corridor. At the end of the corridor stood a floor-to-ceiling window offering a view out over London. The window was not far away, and Jack suffered a moment of dizziness when he realised how high they were. In the distance he could see the green chaos of a large overgrown park, and closer by stood the unmistakable silhouette of Nelson's column.

“I was sure you'd taken us underground!” Jenna said.

“We're in Heron Tower,” Breezer said. “The Choppers treat us like rats, and that's their greatest mistake. Here, we can hide in plain sight. And just in case we're compromised, there are various escape routes below and above.”

“Above?” Jack asked.

Sparky stepped towards the window.

“Don't!” Breezer said. “We try to stay away. Don't want to risk casting shadows.”

“Right,” Sparky said. He looked for a moment longer, then turned around. “You mentioned burgers?”

Jack's query unanswered, Breezer walked back along the corridor, and Jack and his friends followed.

They entered a large former office area. The desks were now pushed against one wall, and dividing screens had been ranked a few feet from the panoramic windows. Plants in large square pots had long ago withered and died, brittle sculptures to a forgotten past. The windows themselves were dusty, filtering sunlight and blurring the views beyond.

There were still some touches that saddened Jack, office workers’ attempts to personalise their space—kids’ drawings stuck to some of the regular concrete columns, photographs of drunken office outings, and on one desk a collection of old, stained mugs. Whatever purpose this office had served seemed pointless now.

There were several Irregulars in the large open-plan area. Most of them sat in swivel chairs reading or staring from the windows, and two were hunkered over an enclosed metal gas barbecue. Heavenly smells were issuing from there, and Jack's mouth started to water.

“Right then,” Sparky said, and he walked on ahead of them.

Jenna surprised Jack by taking his hand. “We'll be all right,” she said. “All of us.”

“I wish you could see the future,” Jack said, smiling at his friend. She smiled back and kissed him on the cheek.

They gathered around the barbecue, and Jack was surprised to see no flames, and smell no gas. There was not even a gas bottle in sight. Then he saw that one of the Irregulars had her hand pressed to the metal container's underside, and she was frowning in concentration.

“Medium rare, please,” Sparky said, grinning at Jack and Jenna. Jack laughed out loud, and it was a release of tension that felt so good he did it again. Jenna laughed too. Breezer smiled uncertainly.

The barbecue was opened and food served onto scratched china plates. The several Irregulars melted away then, leaving Breezer alone with them. They ate in silence for a few minutes, and Jack could not help smiling. Such a surreal scene. London bathed in summer sun beyond the windows, so distant that it might have been back to normal. And they were eating human-heated burgers in an office block.

“Delicious!” Sparky said through a full mouth. Grease dribbled down his chin and caught in his fuzzy stubble. “Best beefburger I've tasted in ages.”

“Thank you,” Breezer said. “We do what we can.” He took a delicate bite of his own meal and chewed for a few moments. “It's not beef.”

All movement froze. Jack looked from Sparky, to Jenna, to Breezer. Then Sparky shrugged and took another huge bite, making appreciative noises with each munch.

“What are you doing here?” Jack said. “You seem to be in charge, and—”

Breezer's high laugh surprised them all. “I'm not in charge!” he said. “Jack. You make us sound like Superiors.”

“Well…” Jack nodded after the people who had left the large room.

“We're surviving,” Breezer said. “Doing our very best, that's all. There's not much trust about these days, so when a few people find others they
can
trust, they tend to stay together.” He looked at his food, no longer seeming hungry. “It's not quite family. But as close as we have.”

“You have family outside London?” Jenna asked.

“Wife,” Breezer said. “My two sons. I lost some more distant relatives
on Doomsday, but not my close family. They're out there somewhere. Think I'm dead.”

“And haven't you ever wanted to try to get out to them?” Jenna asked.

“Of course! In the beginning escape was all any survivor wanted. But the government quickly threw a cordon around London, and the Choppers blasted whole districts to rubble so that—”

“Yeah, we saw that,” Jack said.

“Right. Well, there was so much confusion. The huge numbers of dead started to decompose, stinking the city up. There was disease, and carrion creatures—dogs, cats, rats.
Lots
of rats. Everyone was grieving for someone, everyone was confused and scared. No one knew what the hell had happened, and why the authorities weren't trying to help. There were a lot of suicides. And on top of all that, we started to feel…different.”

“The powers,” Jenna said.

“It drove a lot of people close to madness. Some still are, and you'd do best to avoid those. But a lot of people tried to escape, yes. Overground, underground, covertly, aggressively. A few even tried air balloons. They were all caught and executed. Sometimes the Choppers left their bodies on display. Once, fifteen corpses rotted on lamp posts in Oxford Street. That was Christmas of the first year.” Breezer trailed off as he remembered terrible things.

“But you could burst out, couldn't you?” Sparky asked. “Combine, use powers to find a weak spot, an escape route like Rosemary did. Get out and spread the word about the deception.”

“They'd know,” Breezer said.

“But we came in through tunnels,” Jack said. “Five of us and Rosemary snuck in.”

“Six of you?” Breezer said, nodding. “Yeah, it's possible they knew that, too.”

“But how?” Jenna asked.

Breezer glanced from one to the other of them, as if waiting for something.

“‘Cos they've got one working for him,” Sparky said. The blond boy was staring at the open barbecue and the spare burgers steaming there, but he no longer looked hungry. He looked furious.

“No,” Jack said, shaking his head. “No! With everything they've done? All the people they've captured and
chopped up
?”

“It's not for sure,” Breezer said. “A rumour that has only just surfaced. But it's said there was a child in the beginning who could feel the
weight
of people moving around London. Don't ask me how. How can I tell your truth from your lies? But if she was in Kensington, she could tell if a group of people were walking across Piccadilly Circus. She called it following the city's pulse, so it's said. And three months after Doomsday, the Choppers took her.”

“But they didn't kill her,” Sparky said.

“Why doesn't she find you lot?” Jenna asked.

“We live here together, but are careful only to gather in threes or fours. And it's said she only tracks moving people, not those just…”

“Just living somewhere,” Jack finished for him.

“Bloody hell,” Sparky said.

“Yeah.” Jack was nodding slowly.

“So if you form an army…” Jenna began, but she did not need to finish.

“And now even that option is being taken away,” Jack said, and he stared Breezer in the eye. “Because you're all dying.”

Breezer nodded, turning grim. “You saw Milton down in the street. Until a few weeks ago he was as strong as you or me, and now…well, he's mad, and fading fast. None of us knows what the illness is, where and when it will manifest. No healer can touch it. It's a mystery.”

“Do the Superiors suffer from it as well?”

“I don't know,” Breezer said. “There are so few of them, and they have little contact with us. Sometimes I think they view us as low as the Choppers.”

“But you have an idea of what it is,” Jenna said, a statement more than a question. Jack smiled secretly. She'd always been good at steering conversations.

“I've been studying it,” Breezer admitted. “Questioning as many Irregulars as I can.”

“Seeing through lies,” Jenna said.

“Finding the truth.”

“Which is?” Jack asked.

“Well, you know the basics. Evolve killed most of those it touched, and those who survived quickly developed a range of powers and abilities. Almost all of them were psychological. Some…almost supernatural. That's Evolve's first mystery. What I do think is that whether a person now calls themselves Irregular or Superior depends upon how dramatic the power they're developed. Superiors tend to have destructive, or more physically powerful abilities. Less human, some might say. The far more numerous Irregulars are healers, truth-seers, way finders. Other things, too.”

“I'd figured that one out myself,” Jack said, thinking of what his father had become—Reaper, a man who killed with his voice—and those accompanying him. “The woman who brought us into London wanted the Irregulars and the Superiors to unite. Force their way out, and expose themselves to the world.”

“I know Rosemary well,” Breezer said, nodding slowly.

“You don't agree with her?” Jenna asked.

“On the contrary, I was one of those who suggested the possibility in the first place. And I knew who she was creeping out of London to find. I'm convinced the only way anyone will leave
London alive is if the Superiors join with the rest of us. It was a long, long shot, thinking that bringing Reaper's children in would change the way he is. Persuade him to cooperate. But now…” Breezer looked at Jack with hungry eyes, and Jack glanced away to Jenna and Sparky. They were tensed, more alert. Worried. They all sensed a change in the conversation.