“Not here!” Rosemary said. “We have to take her away, I know someone who might help, but not here!”
Jack leaned across Jenna to see why Sparky had puked, and her wound was pouting, something that could only have been her intestine protruding through the rip in her flesh. He closed his eyes and swallowed his bile, looking up at Emily. Wide-eyed, blinking slowly, pale, he suddenly saw himself in her, courage and love mirrored.
“Help me,” he said, and his nine-year-old sister came to him without question, helping him pull Jenna's shirt tight across her stomach. Jack undid and unthreaded his belt, then tied it around Jenna. He had no idea whether he was doing the right thing. Rosemary, the healer, was looking the other way, and he hated her right then.
“Who can help?” Jack asked. He wanted to shout, but he could hear voices coming from somewhere far away, or echoing from close by.
“We need to get away,” Rosemary said. A helicopter buzzed overhead, streaking across the hotel. Another one was coming in from the distance, and Rosemary was actually pacing back and forth. “Now!” she said. “We have to leave now! They'll be bringing reinforcements, and we'll never get away in one piece if that happens.”
“One piece?” Sparky said, spittle hanging from his chin.
Rosemary looked down at Jenna. “She can still be helped,” she said. “Trust me. If that wasn't the case, I'd be telling you to leave her where she is.”
Between them, Jack and Sparky lifted the wounded girl. Mercifully she passed out, screaming herself into unconsciousness as Rosemary led the way along a narrow alley stinking of rot and filth, across a narrow street, and through a park where people had once sat to have lunch but which now was home to a band of noisy, angry monkeys.
The deeper they went into the Toxic City, the more Jack doubted they would ever find their way out again.
…although it's clear that this is a disaster the likes of which has never been seen before. London is effectively isolated, with no traffic entering or leaving. Reports of the death toll vary wildly, from a few hundred admitted by the British government, to several hundred thousand suggested by independent sources. A promised statement by the British prime minister has yet to materialize, and the questions have to be asked: What of the terrorists? Is the prime minister even still alive? And if he is, why has he not yet spoken to his people? In this time of global communication, it seems incredible that so little is being shared.
—CNN: Tragedy in London, 3:35 a.m. EST, July 29, 2019
Lucy-Anne had forgotten her own name. But she knew the name of her brother.
“Andrew,” she muttered as he ran north. The word worked like a talisman, parting the air before her and thickening it behind, drawing her ever-forward towards its owner. “Andrew,” she said, and London heard the name. Thousands of fat pigeons watched her go by, and a parade of cats paused in the middle of a wide, vehicle-strewn road to sit and observe this strange sight.
The sounds behind her had ceased. Everything behind her had ended, because that was a place far in the past. Even her nightmare of dead parents…a memory, fading like a photograph left out in the sun.
Forward was the only place that existed now.
Your brother is alive north of here, she heard. She could not remember the voice or who owned it, but the words were her fuel. She would need food and water soon—her throat was parched, her sight blurry—but while there was still daylight in the sky, she could not waste any time.
She passed a place where a battle had taken place. Several trucks had been parked in a rough square, and their bodywork was pocked with hundreds of bullet holes. A couple of the trucks had burned, and their pale grey skeletons had rusted. Birds sat on the twisted metal, and something large moved ponderously in the cab of one of the unburned vehicles. She had no reason to stop and see what it was, because it was not her brother.