“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.