She was serious, but for some reason Lucy-Anne found what she said unbearably amusing. She started giggled, then laughing, bending over with hands on her knees and roaring at the pavement.
“Quiet!” Rosemary said, but if Lucy-Anne heard, she did not care. The laughter continued, and Jack could not find it in himself to try and stop her. She'd been acting differently ever since the dog attack, and it felt good to see her like this. He tried to shove the fact that she might be losing it to one side.
“Lucy-Anne!” Rosemary said, angry at first, but quickly growing calmer. The woman touched the girl's back, smoothing softly as the laughter changed quickly into tears. “We need to be quiet. Really, we do. London is a dangerous place now, dear. There's more than just people that will do us harm.”
Lucy-Anne stood and moved away from Rosemary, wiping her eyes, looking around at the group then away again. She's still messed up, Jack realised. That was no release for her at all. She needs…something.
Rosemary looked at the sky to the west, where oranges and reds bled across rooftops. “We should go,” she said. “I don't like crossing the Barrens in the dark.”
“Why?” Jenna asked.
“They're haunted.”
Jack had never believed in ghosts, but her words struck a chill in his heart. Emily clasped his hand and he squeezed back.
They followed Rosemary along the street, past the crashed cars and bus and towards the junction at the far end. It felt strange walking past so many silent houses, and Jack thought this was what Rosemary meant by being haunted. She'd said that the Barrens was a grave, but wasn't the whole of London now one big tomb? He thought of what the houses to his left and right contained, how many of the inhabitants had probably died at home and still sat or lay there now, staring at the sunset-streaked windows with skullish eyes. It was chilling, and the silence made it doubly so. Any place so used to noise and bluster became haunted when it was silent and still. He remembered when his father had remained behind at work one evening to finish a report, and the strange look in his eyes when he came home. When Jack had asked what was wrong, he'd simply said, I'm used to the building being full.
“These places feel full of the dead,” Jack whispered, his voice carrying in the silence.
“Not all of them,” Rosemary said. “There were efforts to clean up. The government right at the beginning, and then us. We couldn't just let the city rot.”
“Then where…?” As Jack spoke they rounded the corner at the end of the street, and his question was answered.
Lucy-Anne had never seen a place that looked so wrong. It reminded her of the Exclusion Zone, but the space before them had not only been flattened, but apparently excavated and turned as well, as if to expose fresh ground to the new world. No old buildings remained standing, though there were structures out there, ambiguous and strange in the fading light. It was maybe a mile across in both directions. Shrubs and sapling trees grew in abundance, lush and somehow grotesque. She could not work that out. Leaves shone with health, flowers were full and fat, yet she could not shake the idea that they were wrong.
“It's a mass grave,” Jack said.
“Yes,” Rosemary replied. “The Barrens. The area was destroyed in a huge blaze two days after Doomsday. It didn't take much for them to finish the job.”
“A grave?” Emily said. She was still filming. “How can that be a grave?”
“No one knows how many are buried here,” Rosemary said. “Twenty thousand? A hundred thousand? A million?”
“Those plants…” Lucy-Anne began, wondering whether talking about them would reveal why they looked so disturbing. I've seen them before, she thought, and a memory promised itself to her…but not yet.
“They look almost meaty,” Sparky said, and yes, that was it, and when Lucy-Anne closed her eyes and breathed in deeply she could almost smell the rawness of them.
“Fertile ground,” Jack said. Lucy-Anne knew what he meant, and it was dreadful.
“We have to cross that?” Jenna asked.
Rosemary nodded. “I've done it many times before. But never in the dark.”
“Because it's haunted?” Emily's voice was small and lost.
“There's no such things as ghosts,” Jack said, squeezing his sister's shoulder.
“You don't need ghosts for a place to feel haunted,” Rosemary said. “Please, come on. The light's fading.”
They went, and as they passed from the neat, paved areas of a dead London street and onto the heaved ground of the Barrens, Lucy-Anne wondered if everyone was thinking thoughts similar to hers: My family could be beneath my feet right now.
When she closed her eyes, she saw their death-masks grinning up at her from mass graves. She ground her teeth together to shove away the image. A nightmare? She thought not. Just her imagination going overdrive, and she determined to walk on.
The ground was uneven. Smooth here, ridged and cracked there, sunken elsewhere, it promised broken bones for the unwary. Lucy-Anne looked all around, searching for the glint of bones, or the messy trail of hair still attached to shrunken scalps. But whoever had done the burying had been thorough.
“We're walking on them,” Jenna said, something like fascination in her voice. Nobody replied.
They passed the first spread of lush plants, and Lucy-Anne could not identify them. The shrubs’ flowers looked like roses, but from the stems below the flowers hung catkins, and the thorns were long and thin like hawthorn. Lower down, a bright red heather hugged the ground, spread through the cracks and crevasses like something spilled. She thought of asking whether anyone recognised the species, but decided against it. She was afraid that they were new. Now that Sparky had used the term meaty, Lucy-Anne could not shake that impression from her mind when she breathed in. And the flowers themselves were heavy, damp, brightly coloured. Fertile ground, Jack had said, and Lucy-Anne tried in vain to not visualise what lay beneath.
“A marker,” Rosemary said as they approached a low structure. “There are lots of them. Sometimes you'll even find fresh flowers here.” The structure was surprisingly well-made, constructed from red London bricks and painted around its circular base with a thick black coating. Its round top was slightly sloped to allow water to run off, but embedded in the surface was a glass-enclosed picture, still sharp and clear even though moisture had penetrated through a crack in one corner. The man stared up at them as they passed, smiling happy thoughts from a vanished time.
“How do they know exactly where he was buried?” Jenna asked. “It must have been…”
“They used army wagons mostly,” Rosemary said. “Sometimes removal lorries. Brought them here by the hundreds. I never saw it myself, but I've heard accounts, and it doesn't take much to imagine. So you're right, dear. No one can know for sure where any particular body is buried. I think those that come here treat it like one grave.”
One grave, Lucy-Anne thought, and a flash of memory stabbed at her again. Again, she drove it away.
“Dead London,” Sparky said. “Bloody freaking me out, I know that for sure.”
“There are some rough paths to follow. We'll be across in a few minutes.” Rosemary looked nervously back the way they had come, where the sun was just disappearing below a line of rooftops.
Her nervousness unsettled Lucy-Anne even more. She can't really mean it's haunted? She looked around at the grotesque, strange surroundings, and the silence that enclosed them felt like a held breath. What sounds the Barrens would utter once darkness fell, she had no wish to discover.
They passed more memorials of all shapes, sizes, and designs. One was constructed in cast concrete, eight feet tall and six wide, and three names were carved lovingly into its surface. Another was a brick-built square thirty feet across, the ground within flattened and planted as a perfect lawn, a small wooden cross at its centre. Whoever had built it obviously maintained it, as the grass was trimmed and the cuttings strewn beyond the wall. There were countless wooden markers; many crosses, and others simply stakes driven into the ground. Pictures were pinned to some of them, the majority faded and leached of colour by the sun, but some obviously replaced frequently. Others had names carved into them. As well as the brick or stone markers, there were other elaborate sculptures of twisted and shaped metal that would not have looked out of place in an art gallery.