“I’ve got deliveries in New York,” Rakesh said. “But I’m thinking about being there. Don’t.” He jerked aside before the woman could hit him once more.
Salome laughed. “You’ll be there. Knowledge is power,” she added, then moved back to her own campsite.
Frannie was hoping to get an explanation, but instead Rakesh said, “It’s been a long day. Let’s get some rest.”
She couldn’t hide her surprise. “Don’t you want me to read?”
He put a finger to his lips, looked around at his fellow mailmen, then whispered. “Knowledge may be power, but you’re not something I’m ready to share.”
Frannie decided to take that as a compliment, and broke out her sleeping roll. She also took it as a good sign when he settled beside her and they ended up sleeping together spoon fashion.
“How are we getting to New York?” Frannie asked once they were safely out of the secret Chunnel that let out at the bottom of a tall white chalk cliff. They moved quickly to a narrow path that led up from the seashore. Smugglers had been using this coast for hundreds of years.
“Flying,” Rakesh answered when they reached the top of the cliff.
Rolling green, empty countryside spread out before them.
“Thank goodness you have access to a plane. I feared we’d be snorkeling across the Atlantic.”
“There are still a few flights from Gatwick. If you have the right contacts. And the price,” he added.
She frowned. “How much is this going to cost me?”
“More data.”
She tapped her forehead. “I’ve got some Laura Ingalls Wilder in here I’d be happy to share with the pilot.”
He touched the same spot her finger had. “Save the story for me. I’ll take care of your ticket.”
“When do we leave?” she asked. She had a time constraint to consider.
“We have to deliver Mrs Bledsoe’s letter first.”
Frannie had figured that was coming. She wondered if he noticed he’d said we. Oh, yeah, he had.
“Bad neighborhood?” she asked.
“Worse than most.”
“Where you go I go,” she said. A true statement wasn’t a promise of help if his delivery turned dicey.
But of course she’d have to help, because she needed him to get to her assignment. And she’d hate to see anything happen to his handsome ass.
“The mailing address is Paddington Station.”
Frannie took a shocked step back. Rakesh caught her before she could take a fatal fall backwards. He kept his arm firmly around her waist as they talked.
“Paddington’s a quarantine zone,” she said.
“I already know that. I’m immune,” he added. “I’m betting you are too.”
“Yes. But that’s not the point. Brit security strictly enforces the zone around the area. Maybe you can sneak in, but getting out isn’t so easy. And the conditions inside . . .”
“Gangs, gunfights, the usual stuff. Only a bit more concentrated.”
“Zombies,” Frannie added.
That was the common, if incorrect, name for those few who survived the engineered biological weapon that terrorists had set loose in London. Not that the scarred, brain-damaged ones who lived through the original sickness survived more than a year or so after the so-called recovery. They were crazy mean while they lived. Frannie knew she couldn’t catch anything from them, but the thought of being scratched and bitten by a stinking husk of human did not appeal in the least. And they were bound to be attacked if they went into Paddington Park, as the place had come to be called.
“Hardly anybody inside the cordon is sick anymore. Most people packed in there are healthy, but they won’t be let out. Mrs Bledsoe wants her daughter to know that the kids she got out before the quarantine are safer than their mom will ever be.”
Frannie cringed. “You’re trying to make me feel sorry for people,” she complained.
“Is it working?”
She relaxed against him. “Yes.” She sighed. “Let’s get this delivery over with.”
Rakesh hugged her before he let her go. “You’re not so bad, for one of the Elect.”
“I’m considered a rebel at home,” she told him. Which was sort of true. Rebel without a cause, or a clue, she guessed.
They traveled to London on bicycles retrieved from a hidden smuggler’s cache, much of the way along a forgotten Roman track. And then along another ruined railway line that once led directly into Paddington Station. They had to abandon this route within a few miles of their destination, leave the bikes in another cache and move cautiously toward the security cordon on foot.
As things went in this time, London was a fairly civilized place. At least the gangs that ran the various areas of the city mostly kept to an agreement that kept them from killing the people they exploited. The government spent its time either chasing the gangs or leaving them alone, depending on the current policy on bribes and corruption. The one thing the official security forces were good at was enforcing the quarantine. It kept the streets safe for the official gangs to go about their business, and the threat of ending up exiled to Paddington Park was a great incentive to keep the populace docile and tax-paying.
Of course Frannie and Rakesh sneaked toward the quarantined area at night through a city under curfew. But it wasn’t like sneaking was that hard for either of them. Frannie just wished that Rakesh didn’t have an affinity for traveling in the sewers. It got them dirtier than they already were, and it kept them safe a while longer, but it still didn’t get them all the way to their destination.
They emerged on the edge of Hyde Park and ducked into the entrance of the abandoned Lancaster Gate tube station. They paused long enough to clean off as much as they could in a lavatory that had a trickling water faucet.
“I don’t suppose you have an invisibility cloak?” he asked when they headed back out into the dark street.
“They’d still smell us coming.”
“Okay. I guess we’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way. Cover me,” he said, and walked boldly up to the nearest checkpoint gate.
Frannie stayed in the shadows with her gun out. She felt terribly exposed, even if her implants made sure she at least couldn’t be picked up by infrared security cameras. She waited and watched in her hiding spot—
While a bribe passed from Rakesh’s hand to a guard’s.
Hey! That wasn’t fair.
She was furious when Rakesh waved her forward. “Why didn’t you just ask her to deliver the letter?”
Frannie asked after they were clear of the checkpoint.
He was affronted. “My job is to deliver the mail, and I do exactly that.”
She was unwillingly impressed, and mollified, by Rakesh’s professional integrity. Or possibly it was willful, stubborn insanity. She still kind of liked it.
“Now that we’re in, how do we get out?”
“We’ll think of something.”
She’d suspected he’d say that. He took her by the hand as they walked into the abyss. She made sure her Glock was in the other.
There was no curfew inside the crowded tangle of streets cordoned off with the ruined train station at its center. Most of the multistoried, close-set buildings around the station had been small hotels and pubs in the days when there were tourists in the world. Now it was an overcrowded tenement neighborhood that reminded Frannie of Whitechapel in the days of Jack the Ripper. Only not quite as safe.
There weren’t many moving on the dark street. Greedy-eyed people were gathered on steps and seated on curbs, looking up as they passed, gazes following. Some were sharks, most of them were scavengers who could easily form into packs. Walking in a place like this was an art form that took total spacial awareness and cold confidence. Rakesh was as adept at the do-not-fuck-with-me dance as she was. They made good partners.