“Try,” Rook said at last. “The battery will be flat. The tyres will be down. Water in the engine. Something.”
Lucy-Anne grabbed the key and felt the fob, running her fingers over the cold metal. “Mazda,” she said. “Mum and Dad always swore by them.” She made sure the car was out of gear and turned the key. The engine coughed, hacked a few times, and then caught. She pressed on the gas and revved. The car vibrated with restrained power.
“Wow,” Rook said.
“Yeah,” Lucy-Anne said. “Well. Where to, sir?” Laughing softly, she turned on the headlights. The street before them was flooded with weak light and she gasped with shock.
Three shapes squatted on the broken road, flinching away from the light. They were humanoid, but their bodies were thin and stringy, bare skin pale and diseased, and open sores wept across their abdomens and legs. They had what looked like stumpy wings, useless and malformed. Their faces were bulbous, each feature exaggerated. They looked like gargoyles.
“Oh my…” Lucy-Anne muttered. The gargoyle-people fled, scampering from the haze of weak headlamps and finding shadows once more
“Unnatural,” Rook said. He seemed deeply troubled, his face creased in an intense frown in the pale dashboard light. “Not right. That's not right.”
“Can't argue with you there,” Lucy-Anne said, and she slipped the car into first gear. It moved sluggishly, heavily, and she admitted to herself that Rook had been right on one count; at least one tyre was flat. But she moved eventually into third gear and drove slowly along the road, and the gargoyle-people did not trouble them again. Perhaps they had climbed and now hung overhead, watching. Maybe they squatted on rooftops and watched the car moving northward, pushing a pool of weak light before it. Lucy-Anne's world became the splash of light ahead of them, and the inside of the car, and the place somewhere beyond both where her brother was still alive.
Not like that, she thought. Not with wings and a face like that! Not with withered arms so he can snake along the ground. Not with scales or fur, not changed at all, but just…Andrew. She wished she could fall asleep and dream him well. But since the vision of the nuclear explosion and Nomad's casual presence, she had been afraid to sleep at all.
“I need something to eat,” she said. “A drink. Water. Something.”
“Soon,” Rook said.
“How do you know?”
“I don't. Never been this far north. But we'll get something soon.”
“What, bird seed?” Her voice grew louder and tinged with panic, so she gripped the wheel harder and concentrated, breathing long and deep. Losing it again would do no one any good. “What happened to them?” she asked at last.
“Don't know. Extreme reaction to Doomsday.”
“Extreme?” Loud again, panicked. She slammed the wheel with one hand and they veered to the left, clipping the side of a parked van.
“I've only heard the rumours,” he said. “Never wanted to see for myself.”
“Why?”
“Didn't want to see what I might have become.”
They fell silent. Lucy-Anne concentrated on her driving, pleased when the glare of headlights grew stronger as the battery was charged again. It was amazing that the car had started so quickly after two years, and she wanted to tell someone about that—Jack, Sparky, Jenna. But that opportunity might not come again.
She weaved the car along the streets, passing between parked or crashed vehicles when she could, working to shove a path through when she could not. She quickly learned that low gear and low revs was best for pushing an obstacle out of the way, but several times they had to backtrack to find an alternative route. Sometimes this took them into narrow side streets or even the back lanes between house gardens, and perhaps it was a trick of the light, but she saw many shadows darting away.