Magnus opened his eyes and saw Jeb already out of his seatbelt, his face potted with stabs of blood, as if he had been attacked by sharp-beaked crows. He touched his own face and felt heat and broken glass.
‘Come on.’ Jeb was almost on top of him, reaching towards the handle of the driver’s door.
‘Lock your side,’ Magnus said. ‘It might slow them down.’
He felt as if his brain had been shaken around his skull like a dice in a cup, but managed to open his own door and jump out into the blocked side of the alley. He staggered as he hit the ground and righted himself against the side of the van. Jeb followed quickly behind him. Magnus looked for the soldiers, but the army truck was out of sight somewhere between the back of the van and the wall of the alley. He had no idea how badly it, or the men inside, were damaged.
‘If this turns out to be a dead-end, then you’ve just given them a wall to shoot us against.’ Jeb shoved Magnus on the shoulder, reminding him of the need to keep moving and they started to jog towards whatever lay at the end of the alley.
Magnus said, ‘This is London, not New York. They won’t shoot us.’
‘I thought you came from Jockland, not another fucking planet.’ Tears of blood were running down Jeb’s face. His eyelashes glistered with shards of glass. He looked like a reluctant glam rocker, a bully boy drummer femmed up for the fans on his manager’s advice. ‘They announced on a loud fucking hailer that they were going to shoot us.’ Jeb spat on the ground. ‘Are you deaf as well as stupid?’
The alleyway was dark and lined with bins. It reminded Magnus of the lane behind Johnny Dongo’s hotel, where he had beaten up the rapist MP. He should never have got drunk, should never have been there. ‘Should never have been bloody born,’ he muttered under his breath. He could hear footsteps but was unsure if it was the sound of soldiers following them or merely the echo of his and Jeb’s feet against the cobbles. Jeb’s movements were sluggish and twice he stumbled. Magnus realised that his own progress was slow and weaving and knew that if they had to face the soldiers they would lose. They turned another dark corner and saw a blaze of sunlight. The alley led out into a main street lined with shops.
‘Thank fuck,’ Jeb said. ‘Come on.’
Almost all the shop windows that lined the road had been smashed. New clothes, some still on their hangers, lay scattered in heaps at the edge of the road, piled like storm-blasted seaweed at low tide. Trainers spilled from cardboard boxes inside a ransacked branch of Foot Locker and mobile phones were scattered like hand grenades outside EE Mobile. The bank sandwiched between the two plundered shops stood strangely intact, as if looters had decided they preferred solid merchandise to cash. Magnus picked up a smartphone. The plastic had been warmed by the sun. The phone’s screen was cracked, its virgin battery uncharged. It would be no use for calling home. He dropped it with the rest.
‘Do you know where we are?’
‘Not a scooby.’ Jeb’s voice was a whisper although the road, like the others they had driven along, was empty of people.
A plastic carrier bag, caught by the breeze, wrapped itself around Magnus’s leg. He peeled it free.
‘Where is everybody? This is like something out of Dr Who.’
Somewhere there was burning. The breeze was tainted with the odour of melting plastic and charred wood. The scent caught at the back of Magnus’s throat, nasty and acrylic, but there was an undertaste to it, a charred, summer barbecue smell that reminded him he was hungry. A Tesco Direct stood a few yards down the road. Someone had started to board up its windows, but they had given up halfway through and the plate glass on the exposed side had been replaced by fresh air and jagged shards.
‘I need to eat something.’
‘We need to get under cover.’
Jeb grabbed his elbow and kept moving, taking Magnus with him. Magnus shook himself free, but they crossed the road together, walking around cars that had been abandoned with no thought to parking fines or regulations. Magnus peered into a baby-blue Mini standing in the middle of the road, its doors wide open.
‘Someone left this car in a hurry,’ Magnus said. ‘The key’s still in the ignition.’
Jeb snapped, ‘Don’t start it.’
But Magnus had already leaned inside and turned the key. The engine growled into life. The sound was loud in the silent street and was almost immediately punctuated by the slap of boots pounding against pavement. There was movement in some of the abandoned shops as people who had hidden unmoving in the shadows fled. Jeb was already running for cover. The road was too jammed with cars for there to be any point in trying to drive anywhere and Magnus ran after him, leaving the car engine idling. He heard a crack of gunfire. He had been beater at enough grouse shoots to be sure that whoever was firing was not sending a warning shot over their heads.
‘Fucking idiot,’ Jeb panted and Magnus knew that it was not the gunman he was cursing.
A grille had been pulled half shut across the entrance to a subway station, as if someone had started to lock up and then given up the task as too much trouble. A man in a business suit lay just outside. He was thin and might once have been rich, but death had made these things irrelevant. Jeb leapt over his body and Magnus followed, catching the toe of his trainer against the man’s shoulder and landing flat on the tiled floor of the station. The fall saved him. Bullets rattled into the ticket hall, ricocheting against the walls and shattering the window of the information booth.
Jeb hurdled the ticket turnstile. Magnus crawled beneath the barrier nearest to him and followed the sound of Jeb’s footsteps along the tiled corridors to the platform below. There were bodies in the hallways, men and women who had lain down and not managed to rouse themselves again, but the soldiers might still be behind him and Magnus did not stop to check if any of the sleepers were alive. He saw the black line edging the walls, and a sign directing him onwards and knew that they were heading towards the Northern line. North, the rhythm of his feet said against the tunnel floor: north, north, north, north, north.
Fifteen
There were other people on the platform, but Jeb was the only one standing.
‘Can you believe it?’
Magnus did not need to ask what he was talking about. The reality of the sweats was stronger below ground than it had been in the looted streets. Up above there was still the chance that they had stumbled on the aftermath of one of London’s riots; down here the evidence lay in the bodies slumped where they had fallen, waiting for trains they would never board. They were bodies, Magnus told himself, to be pitied and mourned. The thing to fear was flesh and blood, the soldiers who might yet appear and take him back to prison at gunpoint. But his skin crawled with the certainty that the lady who had pulled the folds of her orange sari over her face before she died was about to draw the gauzy material back, blink her dead eyes and come towards him. Or that the youth, whose yellow headphones were still coiled around his neck, might straighten his spine and get to his feet. Or that any of the people, so clear and sharp-edged, so there, but no longer present, would twitch awake, turn their heads and look at him with the jealousy the dead must surely feel for the living. It felt wicked to want the so recently deceased to remain dead, but they were gone and every horror movie and zombie flick Magnus had ever seen was crowding in on him.
‘It’s unbelievable,’ Jeb said again, and Magnus saw that the dead stillness of the Underground was working on him too.
The electricity had failed and the platform was dimly lit by emergency lights. Along at the far end something moved, indistinct in the shadows. Magnus took a step backward; his foot touched the softness of another body and he almost toppled. He let out a gasp. The thing moved again, swift and undulating, and he realised that it was not one of the bodies restored to half-life, but the largest rat he had seen, sleek and busy, its whiskers twitching. The rat looked at him, and then it perked its nose in another direction, turning its ears, like radar towards some sound only it could hear. It scuttled down on to the tracks and ran into the waiting blackness of the tunnels beyond. A moment later Magnus heard the footsteps that had disturbed it. Jeb heard them too and held a finger to his lips. He nodded towards the tracks, where the rat had made its escape. Magnus shook his head. It was impossible. He had seen the Dongolite’s face as the train consumed him. Prison was preferable to the rush of noise and steel that had sucked the boy under. Jeb shrugged, exaggerating the gesture to make up for not speaking. He jumped down on to the tracks and jogged towards the north tunnel, his feet crunching against the gravel.