Cameras? he thought. Microphones, satellite surveillance, dogs? They wouldn't leave the Exclusion Zone unwatched or unprotected, surely? But Rosemary had come this way, and that was all he could hold on to.
He gave Emily a quick kiss on the cheek, pulled the gate open and ran. His feet kicked up dust from the road, grinding in the grit on its surface. It was only two lanes wide, but it seemed to take forever to reach the other side and fall into the ditch.
The ditch was filled with nettles as well. Jack gasped as they touched him across one arm and beneath his chin, raising sore welts that would take hours to fade away. He squatted, turned, and looked back at the church. Nobody shouted, nobody came, no vehicles sprang to life. He could almost believe that he had made it.
Cautiously, he lifted his head above the edge of the ditch and looked across at the gate. Emily was there, staring right back at him. He gave a thumbs-up and she smiled, returning the gesture. Then she slipped through the gate and followed his route across the road.
“Careful!” he whispered as she dropped in beside him. “More nettles!”
“I'm okay.” She had her camera out again, Jack noticed, and she poked it over the ditch to get a shot of the church.
“Come on, the others will follow soon. We need to get back under cover.”
“I like feeling the sun.”
“Me too,” Jack said. But after only three or four hours underground, up here he felt so exposed.
They moved slowly along the ditch bottom, doing their best to dodge the worst of the nettles, stomping on those they could not bypass. When a telegraph pole cast its shadow across the ditch Jack looked up, expecting to see a camera fixed to its side and swivelling to follow their progress. But all it held were two limp cables, long since cut.
The ditch branched left and they went that way, following Rosemary's directions. A shopping trolley blocked their path, and Jack felt a weird rush of nostalgia for something so innocuous. Years ago, before Doomsday, some kids had probably swiped this trolley and used it for a bit of fun: rides along the road; jumping hastily erected timber ramps. Then they'd dumped it, and it had been here ever since, rusting into the landscape as the world changed around it. He wondered where those kids were now, and whether they still had fun.
He climbed around the trolley and helped Emily, then they went on until the ditch ended with a narrow culvert, much too small for them to enter. Jack paused, frowning, and looked back the way they had come.
“We came the right way,” he said. “I'm sure.”
“Here,” Emily said. “Is this what she meant?” She was looking over the top of the culvert, filming across ground level at whatever lay beyond. Jack stood beside her.
The large area before them held several ground-tanks, all of them covered with heavy metal covers. Pipes and frames hung over them, many bent and twisted by some unknown force, and rust stained much of the metal.
“Sewage treatment plant,” Jack said.
“Oh, great. That's going to smell just lovely.” Emily panned the camera around and lowered it, dropping back down to sit in the ditch.
“It's dry down here,” Jack said, joining her. “And I doubt this has been treating anything for a couple of years.”
Emily looked up sharply, lifting a finger to her lips.
Jack looked back along the ditch, and moments later he saw the shapes coming towards them. Sparky first, bent over so that he could not be seen above ground level. Jenna followed him, and behind her came Rosemary and Lucy-Anne, Jack's girlfriend keeping close to the older woman.
“I don't think there's anyone around,” Sparky said when he reached them. “If we were seen, they'd have come for us by now.”
Jack could not help recalling some of the stories from the drops close to Camp Truth-kidnappings, disappearances, executions. And he could see in Jenna's haunted eyes that she was thinking the same. Her father had been taken, and returned, but now he was a different man. A lesser man. Capture would mean the end for all of them, whether that end was death or something else.
“You need to lead us from here,” he said to Rosemary.
“It's not far,” she said, gasping for breath. “We'll be out of the sun again in a minute.”
“And next time we see it we'll be in the Toxic City,” Lucy-Anne said. Her eyes were hard, and when she glanced at Jack he sensed a shocking distance already growing between them.
“We still like to call it London,” Rosemary said. “It hasn't been toxic for a long time.”
Lucy-Anne nodded, still looking at Jack. What? he wanted to say. What is it? But he had never really understood her.
Sparky stood, looked around for a long time, then nodded. Rosemary climbed from the ditch and hurried across an area of long grass until she stood on concrete paving between metal tank covers. The others followed.
Beside the closest tank cover, there was a small hatch in the ground. The cover was metal as well, but light. Rosemary took a hooked metal manhole key from her pocket, curved it into a recessed ring in the cover and swung it upward. As she started down the small concrete staircase revealed beneath, she glanced up at the others. Her face softened, and for the first time Jack wondered whether she was a mother, and if so, where her husband and children were right now. He felt terrible for not asking, but now it seemed too late.
“It's not far now,” Rosemary said.
“Back down into the dark again,” Lucy-Anne said. There was something in her voice Jack had never heard before. He thought maybe it was fear.
“Yes, dear, but not for long. We're almost there.”
“If there's anything else you need to warn us about-” Jack began.
“The dogs are dead,” Rosemary said. “You killed them, together. I can't pretend the city isn't dangerous, but then you all know that, don't you?”
Emily separated from the small group and trained her camera on them. “The final descent before we rise into the Toxic City,” she said. “And then we'll go to find who we came for.” Even keeping the camera before her eye could not hide the tear that streaked her cheek.
“I'm not afraid,” Lucy-Anne said. But as she followed Rosemary down, every jerky, determined movement she made was testament to her lie.
Lucy-Anne was afraid of her nightmares.
The dogs from her dream had come and bitten her, and after everyone had set off from the ruined church, and it was only her and Rosemary left, she'd asked the old woman how close she had been to death. Its teeth nipped your spine, Rosemary had said, but I touched it and made it better.
How close? Lucy-Anne had demanded.
Very, Rosemary had said, before rushing across the road into the ditch.
Now, descending back into the darkness once again, Lucy-Anne waited for other nightmares to make themselves known. She refused to believe it had been coincidence, because after what she'd been through that would be too cruel.
But if not coincidence…what?
Have I had nightmares about falling? she wondered, and her feet reached the foot of the ladder. Rats carrying plague? But there were no vermin that she could see down here. My friends, killing me? She looked around at the others, and she suddenly wanted to fold up and cry out at the betrayal her imagination was capable of.
“Nearly there, everyone!” she said, amazing even herself with her upbeat voice. “We've been waiting for so long, and now we're almost there!”
Smiles were exchanged, and they went on their way.
To begin with, their path was simple. After descending the concrete steps they found themselves in a long tunnel that ran the length of the sewage treatment works, with shorter tunnels projecting off at right angles. The smell was subtle and subdued-much to Emily's obvious relief-and just before they reached the end, Rosemary opened a metal hatch in the wall. They took it in turns, squeezing through, shining their torches on the opening and into the tunnel revealed beyond. This one had a low ceiling that meant they all had to crouch down, and cockroaches scuttled away from their torch light.