Of the Shadows Own Accord (The Green and Pleasant Land, Volume 3) Read online

  Chapter 3, Leave it all behind

  The three of us lay on the pavement, sucking in long, hungry gasps of acrid, smoke filled air. I look down the steps leading to Camden Town underground station. I expected to see the rats flowing up out of the pit. I expect them to come for me, to gnaw at me as they had done hundreds of others. But they do not. We have outrun them, for now.

  Along the way many of those who fled Canary Wharf with us had been overtaken by the horde of long tailed monsters. As we'd run through other tube stations we saw thousands of other Londoners, we tried to warn them, but, we didn't stop, we couldn't. Sometimes they followed us, but we lost them all.

  We'd turned this way and that in the dark maze of the London Underground until finally emerging in the northern part of the city. Night had fallen, real night, not the fake night that the smoky warfare brings.

  “We need to hide” said Raj crawling over to me and helping me stand with him. Lucy climbed to her feet and the three of us staggered down a nearby alley and tried to get our bearings.

  Whole streets are on fire, the sound of battle is constant, the ack ack ack of the machine gun permeates every thought. I do not know if we are winning but it sure doesn't feel like it. Raj manages to jimmy open a window. They pull me through it. Back in the darkness. Though this is a gloom that at least my eyes can adjust to. The orange glow of burning London eventually permeates the blackness.

  We are in a small storeroom. Probably at the back of a shop of some kind. Its deserted, and fortunately for us still stocked. After a dinner of crisps and fizzy drinks I sink to the floor, such sugary delights might strive to keep me awake, but I have teetered on the edge of the deepest sleeps for too many hours, and my weariness will no longer be denied...

  Sunlight, curious sunlight bouncing around inside an empty crisp packet, exploring the places where the darkness hid from it not so long ago, but that silvery cavern is just made for the light, which bounces happily between every fold and crinkle.

  I sit up with a start. I know its silly of me to think it, but the world does seem ever so less threatening in the daylight. I look over at my companions, my protectors. They are still sleeping. I would put them both in their early thirties. Raj has a mound of unruly, curly black hair, and a friendly face, despite the daily growing count of worry lines. It is the kind of face that is made for smiling.

  Lucy has light brown hair with a coppery edge to it. A few freckles lurk about her nose, she is pretty, at least that is what I can make out beneath the dust and soot from yesterdays escapades. They are both dressed casually, jeans and polo shirts, trainers and converse. They are dressed for casual strolling, very few people in our society seemed to have had the appropriate wardrobe for that 'end of the world' look.

  Raj opens his eyes. There it is, that smile. Before words, before thought, he just beams at me and winks a brown eyed wink.

  “Morning Annabel” he whispers.

  “Good morning Raj” I whisper back.

  “Morning luv” says Lucy rubbing the sleep from her eyes as they both sit up. Raj moves to the window and looks up and down the alley sniffing at the smoky air. Lucy prepares breakfast, I am being very generous with that term. She opens some crisp packets and gathers some bottled water.

  “Have we got a plan?” says I. They look at each other. Raj rubs a hand through his stubble. “Is there anywhere you want to go Annabel, any family nearby that we can take you to?” he asks. I get a vague sense from his question that this is what they would like to do, I am a weak link in a small chain. Sadly I must disappoint them. I shake my head.

  “There isn't anyone, we are...we were a small family. I think my Dad had a brother in Yorkshire, but they fell out a long time ago.” They exchange another look. I wish I could be party to their secret language, comprised of facial expressions and a knowledge of what the other one is thinking just from experience.

  “Then I guess we'll take you with us then luv, if that's okay with you?” says Lucy. I nod.

  “To where?”.

  “Out of this city, before it claims us” says Raj ominously. We cram our pockets with snacks. Raj creates an impromptu rucksack out of his jumper which is loaded up with bottles of water. We make our way to the window, and back out into the big wide world...

  The cadaver falls to the ground as Raj staves the back of its head in with a brick. The goth chick that it was about to savage shouts her thanks as she gets up and runs. Lucy is behind us despatching another of the grey hands with a heavy metal pipe. It would seem that the chaos has not subscribed to the idea of things calming down in the day.

  We made it barely a few hundred metres from the shop when we ran into street battles between Camden residents and the undead predators who are trying to recruit them. I came here once with mum. She said it would help to broaden my horizons a bit to come to places like this. She used to tell me that dad would never bring me somewhere like this, that is not to say that the museums and art galleries which he took me to did not help to evolve my young mind. Mum just thought that balance was a good thing, that there are lots of different types of people out there, but despite those differences, the things we want are still essentially the same, and the only way to find that out was to meet them.

  Back then Camden market had been a bustling maze of colours and smells and visual intrigues. Not now though. Gone were the tattoos, and the flashing lights and the music. Now there was just burning and death, all London was transforming into the same things. Ash and dust were becoming uniform, they were eroding the cultural diversity of this once great city.

  We link hands and run once more. The streets pass us by, I steal glances as we cross them, people flee, cadavers follow. Of the army sent to save us I see no sign except for the occasional abandoned vehicle with bodies slumped over it. We debate acquiring a vehicle ourselves but there seems little point, the roads are filled with cars, abandoned, in flames, or just stationary roadblocks that we would spend more time navigating than if we just stayed on our feet.

  We come to a crossroads and Raj looks up at the road signs.

  “Lets stick to the A10, I used to live just off of it and I know it works its way right out of the city.”

  “Sounds good to me” shouts Lucy above the sound of several helicopters which come screaming overhead. I look up at them, bulky metal machines. Their side doors are open and they fly so low that I can see men leaning out of the door with their hands on large, terrifying looking machine guns. One of them looks directly at me through his aviator sunglasses. He gives me a thumbs up as they pass by. I don't know what to make of that, should it bring me hope?

  Not long after they pass by we hear the guns open up. We don't want to hang around to find out whether or not they hit what they are shooting at. We join hands, we follow the signs for the A10 and mile by mile we flee the London burning.

  We walked all day. As darkness fell on the Great Cambridge road I looked back. The skyline was different now. Many of the cities iconic towers were gone. Those which were still standing gave off huge plumes of smoke, it made the city look like it must have during older days when hundreds of chimneys pumped their waste into the air.

  Jet planes and helicopters still hovered over the scarred metal heap that was London. I don't know why they still bother, the pyrrhic victory which is their only hope, will leave them kings of a mountain of fire and broken glass. There can be no hope, no salvation for the old world, it is gone, lost, sailed off down the river with the rest of the dead. The ferryman was doing a roaring trade, such a hefty handful of silver was his that it would likely sink him, along with all the souls he was collecting.

  We hunkered down in an old shed on some allotments. We'd crossed over from the London of towers and money, now we were in the London of houses and gardens. Mile after mile of suburbs was what had met our eye for most of the day. There were still some people around, the odd curtain twitched. But most had fled the city for the apparent safety of the countryside.

  There was no road
any more, the traffic was total. A long line of cars that stretched as far as the eye could see. Plenty of them were occupied. No engines ran, people sheltered in their vehicles. They peered with hostility at us as we passed. Britons were all alone now, solitary lions in a pride of blind men and suspicion.

  As Raj and Lucy settle down for an uncomfortable night on the shed floor I stare out of the dirty window, mesmerized by the sight of the city aflame. As the night rolls in I spy flashes in the sky. Balls of fire which fall to the ground. Here and there amidst the flames, I see things flying, not man made things any more. Things with wings that I try convince myself are not actually there despite the fact I'm looking at them. I think of the rats in the tunnel and shudder. More than the dead now occupy London, and all the might of mankind cannot hope to prevail.

  We walk all the next day. Gradually even the suburbs thin out. Here and there we pass shopping centres, leisure parks and industrial estates. I can see the places where the government had set up temporary clinics. I can see how the carnage emanated out from them in a wave. Rolls of bloody bandages, spent gun cartridges and seas of barbed wire are an indication of how it all went wrong, of the consequences of the deathwalker virus gaining the upper hand.

  Within the mounds of barbed wire things still struggle, made dead long ago, but they do not give up despite their predicament. They reach out to us, but they are trapped by the razor sharp coils that they fell into as the living.

  We keep going. Until the flaming towers are just tendrils of smoke, until the suburbs and the motorways end, until there is a sea of green either side and a long grey road in front of us.

  That night we shelter beneath the branches of an old oak tree. It had been a tiring day, a day of fighting cadavers, and running from cadavers. We sink down gratefully to the floor, ensconced in the false protection of the most ancient arboreal guardian. It is only then that we see it, a glow on the horizon.

  Not the setting of the sun, for it was the wrong direction entirely. Nor the city of London on fire, for this light was too broad and too bright to have been that. Our ears made us think we heard something, far off booming noises. There are flashes on the glowing horizon, like lightning strikes that danced this way and that. We watch, mesmerized, until even the dream like fantasy isn't enough to keep us from the real thing, the deep, dark sleep we suffer.

  We didn't know then. But what we saw was France, on fire. It would be aeons before anyone ever knew what happened that night, before the nationality of the submarines which had sat in the English Channel was revealed. Before the world knew the who and the why behind a devastating nuclear attack that vaporised millions, the living and the dead.

  It was about half way through the morning of the next day when we reached the destination that we didn't know we'd been heading for. Raj didn't say what made him choose it, I dare say that if I'd asked him then he would have blamed gut instinct. Whatever the drive behind it, he suddenly started up a slip road, we'd passed many more on the tarmac trail behind but this one took his fancy. So we reached the top of it, and away to the east we saw a town nestled with the valley, and the signs read Hertford, historic county town.