The mention of beds and sleep got them all yawning. Jack and Emily went up first. They used bottled water and toothpaste from Emily's backpack to clean their teeth, then they chose the twin room and closed the door. Emily fell asleep almost before her head hit her pillow, and Jack sat up for a while, staring at his little sister. Tomorrow we're going to see Mum, he thought. He was excited and afraid in equal measures.
He lay down, but was not surprised when he could not sleep. A rush of memories came back to him, good times with his parents that he had long forgotten, and he wallowed in them, smiling at some and crying softly at others. He'd never really known nostalgia as a powerful emotion, but he did now. Before today he'd laboured under the belief that things could, by some miracle, go back to normal. Find his mother and father, escape the Toxic City, go home, live together again as they had been more than two years before. But now he acknowledged the firm reality that his family had changed forever. Nostalgia, as he experienced it there in a stranger's bed, could not allow for things ever being the same again.
He heard the stairs creaking and Sparky and Jenna talking in subdued tones. They went into the double bedroom next door, and for a while he heard their voices, Sparky's low and deep, hers soft and sad. There were tears as well, and then talking again, and after a period of silence he heard the first gentle moans of pleasure. Sleep came to Jack at last, giving privacy to his friends.
.………static……….
—Reception on every UK radio and TV channel,
6:00–9:00 a.m. GMT, July 29, 2019
Whatever had broken in Lucy-Anne's mind was trying to fix itself. She could feel it like an itch, a tickle so deep inside her that it could never be reached, and she shook her head now and then to try and dislodge it.
Her run slowed to a fast walk, and that was when she started to see people. The first was a face in a window, pale and sickly, and when she did a double-take the face was gone. There was no expression to read there at all, and she purposely got lost in a network of streets and alleys in case the person decided to follow.
North, ever northward, and between every blink she saw the faces of her parents from her nightmare.
I'm never going to sleep again, she thought. Though she was in this terrible place, it was the blank plane between sleeping and waking that horrified her now. There had been the dogs, though her memory of them had grown indistinct, and other memories were even vaguer, so distilled through whatever had snapped in her mind that she could not tell whether they were real events or dreams. Perhaps the distinction no longer mattered.
Lucy-Anne knew that something had snapped inside. Hers was a conscious madness, a waking breakdown, and when she dwelled on it her head hurt as though physically injured. North was all that mattered, because somewhere in that direction would be Andrew.
Someone walked into the street ahead of her. The figure paused, turned her way, froze.
Lucy-Anne ran between buildings, stumbling over a pile of refuse, ducking through gardens, rushing past a Tube station with a pile of skeletons wedged in its entrance gates. She hit a main road and quickly turned left, welcoming the shadows cast by the large buildings to her right. There she slowed, listening in case she had been followed but never willing to stop her forward momentum.
The first black shape passed behind her with the sound of a whisper in the night.
She spun around, skidding to a halt in the middle of the wide residential street. Her hands came up, but there was nothing there. She fumbled the knife from her pocket and held it out before her, but it felt pitiful against the world. There were tall four-storey buildings on one side. Behind her was an overgrown park at the centre of what must be a large square, and staggered along the road were cars. Many of them were still parked in an ordered row along the pavement. There were Porsches, BMWs, Mercedes, Bentleys, and the buildings stared at her with rich, dead eyes.
Something else fluttered behind her, and when she crouched and turned she saw a black shadow disappearing into the park. She frowned. Leaves rustled ten feet above the ground, and more shadows moved through the trees.