The Power of Five Oblivion (54 page)

“What about Scott? Can you tell me anything about him?”

“Scott has a part to play. Like all of you.”

“I really miss him.”

“I’m sure. But the two of you will find each other again. In time…”

I must have moved or something because suddenly Miss Ashwood called out to me. “Holly…?”

I wondered how she could possibly have known it was me and I felt guilty about being found eavesdropping on them and moved forward hurriedly. “I came to say goodbye,” I said.

“It’s very brave of you to make the journey into London, Holly,” Miss Ashwood said. “And I have to say that I am quite jealous. You are now a companion of one of the Gatekeepers. Who knows where that will take you? Look after Jamie. And yourself.”

The Traveller came over with his brother. “Time to go…” he said. He had a huge backpack strapped to his shoulders and I wondered how he could manage it with his wound.

The other four men joined us. Their names were Blake, Simon, Ryan and Amir and they were all in their mid-twenties. Sophie also came to say goodbye, holding the Traveller close to her and trying (I could tell) not to show how worried she was. I think she’d asked to come with us, but someone – Susan Ashwood perhaps – had told her she had to stay behind. And then we were off. There was another door that I hadn’t noticed, this one with a huge handle and an airtight lock, like something on a rocket or a plane. Will opened it for us and we stepped through. I heard it close behind us and that was it. We were on our own.

There were no lights here. We were carrying our own torches and straight away I saw the answer to at least one question that had been puzzling me. The Traveller had said we were ten miles from St Meredith’s, which had struck me as an awful long way to walk, but now I saw that my legs were going to be spared. There were two vehicles waiting for us; electric cars, still plugged into the wall, recharging. I sat in one with Jamie and the two brothers. The rest got into the other. Someone unplugged us and we were off, shooting down the tunnel at about twenty miles per hour, the engines whirring softly but making no other noise.

The tunnel was new. The floor was cement and the walls were tiled and I wondered if the Nexus had actually constructed it themselves. It must have cost them millions. Each of the cars had headlamps which lit the way ahead and, despite everything, I enjoyed the ride, watching the walls flash by, with the breeze – cool and musty – blowing in my hair. It had been years since I’d been in a car of any sort. The only thing with wheels that had worked in the village had been my wheelbarrow. I was sorry when, after about forty minutes, we came to a solid wall, slowed down and stopped.

“We go the rest of the way on foot,” the Traveller said.

We all climbed out. Ryan and Amir turned on their torches and I saw a small, jagged opening set in the wall. We climbed through and found ourselves in another tunnel, quite different from the one we had left. It was much older, for a start. The walls were blackened with soot and as the two men swung the beams across, I made out long lines of cable, stapled together, running into the distance.

“Take care,” Ryan said. He was softly spoken with an Irish accent, I think, and I didn’t need to be told to know that from this moment on we were always going to be close to danger. He lowered the torch to show a series of metal tracks bolted to the metal floor. “There’s no current but you can still trip over and hurt yourself. Try to stay close.”

We set off again. And with a sense of excitement I realized where we were. This was the Tube – the underground train system that had run through London. I tried to imagine commuters rushing along in the darkness from Oxford Street to Piccadilly Circus and Knightsbridge. These were just names to me. And yet here I was, following one of the tunnels; a maze of tunnels, in fact, that would eventually bring me to whichever part of the city we wanted. They’d had moving staircases too. Escalators. I remembered Miss Keyland telling me about them and that made me think of how she had died and reminded me that if I wasn’t careful, I’d end up dead too. This wasn’t a fun expedition to a forgotten city. London was dangerous.

We walked for about fifteen minutes before the tunnel suddenly opened out and I found myself in what must have once been a station. It was called Highgate. The torchlight picked out the name printed on a blue band, surrounded by a red circle. We were low down. There was a platform above us to one side and white tiles that curved over our head. On the other side, the walls were covered with advertisements. Holidays in Israel. The
Financial Times
newspaper. Some church group promising the secret of life. The paper was damp and tatty. And nobody was going on holiday any more, money was no use, and the church hadn’t saved anyone, so it was all a waste of time.

Something moved and we all froze. A gun appeared in Blake’s hand so quickly that he could have been a magician, performing a trick. We looked around us, expecting to see someone appear on the platform. But it was only a rat, running along the tracks. It was a fat, bloated thing with matted fur and shiny eyes and, seeing it picked out in the flashlight, I couldn’t help wondering what it had found to eat. It was probably better not to know. We continued through the station and into the tunnel at the other end. Once again, total darkness closed in on us, swallowing us up.

We walked and walked. After the comfort and speed of the electric cars, our journey into London was an ordeal. There was nothing to look at, except for the glint of light showing the rails ahead and the lines of cables which snaked along, following us all the way. I could feel the backpack dragging down on my shoulders, and my last meal and that luxurious warm shower had already become a memory. We walked through three more stations: Archway, Tufnell Park, Kentish Town. I found myself wondering about the names, about what they represented. Had there been an arch at Archway? What was so Kentish about Kentish Town? And what would I find if I climbed the escalator and exited? There might be people still living in parts of London but somehow I doubted that they’d be pleased to see us.

There was a hideous sight waiting for us at Camden Town. A train had been parked on a rail parallel to the one we were following – a huge red thing that fitted into the tunnel like toothpaste in a tube. Suddenly I was aware of a dreadful smell and someone – Amir, I think – passed me a cloth to cover my face. “Try not to look,” he said.

Of course, that only made me more curious and as we walked past I peered through the curving windows, wondering what the reflected torchlight would reveal. I wished I hadn’t. The carriages were packed with dead bodies. They must have been standing shoulder to shoulder, with no room to move, when they died. It was impossible to say what had killed them. The bodies had partly rotted away. I glimpsed empty, staring eye sockets and teeth grinning where the cheeks had once been. The corpses were dressed in rags, the remains of dresses and suits … otherwise it would have been impossible to tell the men from the women. I think the most horrible thing was that so many of them were still on their feet, with what was left of their arms and hands connected to straps that ran along the ceiling. Death must have hit them like a whirlwind, blown down the tunnel. Some were sitting. Some were on the floor. But the rest of them had been caught there, jammed against each other, and that was where, for all eternity, they would remain.

I couldn’t wait to get past it and, trying to speed up, I bumped into Jamie. I couldn’t see very much of anything. There were still only two torches lighting our way. Anyway, in my hurry, I almost tripped both of us over.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“It’s OK,” he said. And then I felt him take my hand, just for a moment. It was quite unexpected. He and I had been through so much together but we hadn’t exactly been close. Not like him and his brother. “I’m glad you came,” he said.

“Are you?”

“Yes.” He fell silent for a moment. “I wouldn’t have got this far without you, Holly,” he went on. “Back in your village … I’m so sorry about what happened. But I’m glad you were on my side.”

That was the end of it. He didn’t say anything more. But it meant a lot to me and when I think about Jamie now, about the way things might have gone between us, that’s the moment that I always remember most.

We stopped for a rest at King’s Cross (which king and why was he cross?) and had something to eat and drink – dried fruit, nuts and water. We sat on the platform, on benches facing the rails.

“It’s not much further,” Will Fletcher told us. “Maybe only half an hour. Are you two all right?”

We both nodded.

“We’ll have to move quickly when we get to the surface. It’ll still be dark but that won’t stop them watching the streets. We’ll go straight to the house and get some sleep. Try not to touch anything if you can help it. The contamination isn’t as bad as it was but you still have to be careful.”

I wondered why he was whispering. In fact we’d been tiptoeing throughout the journey, even though we were far underground and, apart from the rats and dead people, on our own. But after King’s Cross the track sloped upwards and without any warning we emerged in the open air. I might not have even realized as there was no moon and the light, or lack of it, stayed more or less the same. But the air smelled different and I got a sense of buildings, rising up above us. There was another Tube train parked behind some girders, over on our left, but this time I was careful not to look.

And then we came to Farringdon and everything changed. There were people on the platform, alive, shuffling about, muttering to each other. Suddenly everyone had their guns out and we were moving forward in a pack, looking in every direction at once. The people didn’t seem to want to hurt us. In fact they were more scared of us than we were of them. But it was still strange to stumble upon them and all sorts of questions went through my mind. Where had they come from? How long had they been here? How could they have possibly survived?

Blake or Ryan swung a torch and I saw some of them, picked out in the beam. There was a woman and a man. They were both bald and almost completely naked. She was badly deformed. One half of her face simply wasn’t there and the other half seemed to be frozen in an expression of pure terror, the eye on that side bulging like a ping-pong ball. The man, wearing filthy boxer shorts, was enormously fat with sagging breasts and a stomach that hung almost to his knees. I think they were both probably mad because as the light hovered over them, they cowered away, making strange animal noises. There was a group of children further along the platform. They were only about seven or eight years old so they must have been born here, after London was destroyed. They were clutching each other, pressing together like monkeys in a cage. I wondered what sort of life they’d had. They had never been to school. They probably had no parents. They might not even know how to speak.

“Survivors,” Ryan whispered. “Don’t worry. They won’t come near us.”

Even so, we hurried forward. It had been good to be out in the open air for a few minutes. But it was better to be back in the tunnel.

I never completely understood what had happened in London. It had been destroyed by a dirty bomb but what exactly did that mean? Was it nuclear or biochemical or both? And how much of the city was left untouched? I don’t know how the people I saw had managed to support themselves. What had the man been eating to make himself so fat? Like the rat that I’d seen at Highgate, it was probably best not to ask. All I can say is that everything felt poisoned: the walls, the ground, the very air. I felt that I was walking through a gigantic cemetery and that somehow it was almost an insult to be there and to be alive. There will come a time, I suppose, when historians and scientists will try to make sense of the ninth of May and what happened to Britain on that terrible day. I can only describe what I saw.

We finally left the Tube system at Moorgate Station and, sure enough, there was an escalator just as Miss Keyland had described – a long, silver staircase with strange teeth at each end. It wasn’t working, of course, and we had to climb up. We passed through an archway, then took a second staircase up to the entrance hall, where a row of barriers stood waiting, all of them open. Amir and Ryan guided us through with their torches and I glimpsed ticket machines, glass booths, and a kiosk selling newspapers and magazines, which were still neatly arranged in rows. If I had looked at their covers, I know I would have seen the date, ninth of May, printed on each one. The exit was closed with a metal grid but Blake had a key and I realized that we were close to the safe house that Miss Ashwood had mentioned and that the Nexus must use this route quite often.

I was exhausted by now. My legs were aching and I longed to be in bed. The streets that we followed seemed to be filled with rubble. There were cars everywhere – not just parked at the sides but stuck in a traffic jam that would never move again. I saw a bus. A red London bus. I got the impression of shops and restaurants but they were little more than shadows – and empty and broken ones at that. The breeze had dropped and nothing was moving. I think it was the stillness rather than the darkness that made the biggest impression of all.

And finally we reached the house. It loomed up in front of us, tall and narrow with a solid-looking door with the number 13 and boarded-up windows. Once again, Blake had the key and he let us into a hall with a door on one side and a staircase leading up. He didn’t turn on the lights, if the lights even worked. In fact Amir and Ryan had kept their hands cupped over their torches as we hurried through the London streets. They’d found their way here through memory and instinct as much as anything else.

“We’ll get some sleep,” Will said. He turned to Jamie. “You and Holly will share a room. I’ll be with Graham next door. The others will be downstairs. Once it’s light, you’ll be able to get your bearings. When you wake up, try not to leave the room. And – I probably don’t need to say this – the toilets don’t flush. There’s a chemical toilet in the basement. Do either of you need to use it?”