When he's not writing post-apocalyptic adventures, most of Brandon Hale's time is spent with his wife in the mountains of Virginia. Brandon loves to dabble in all forms of art, from drawing to sculpting, but writing will always be his first, best love. Most of his time is spent writing novels and keeping up his blog:
http://booksfromhale.com
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How Jessica met Simon: A Tube Riders Origins Story
Chris Ward
Jessica
It was a risk to go looking for the boy again, especially after the pitiful smudge of hazy sunlight had dropped behind the high rises to the west, leaving only the few working streetlights and the trash fires to illuminate London’s streets. Camden Market, once a buzzing hive of subculture, wasn’t the place her father said it had been forty years ago, before the Governor took power. It was as dangerous at night as anywhere else, but there had been something in the boy’s look, those bright eyes, that was tugging on her like a fishhook embedded in her heart. The boy had cast his line and now was reeling her back in.
With a defiant sigh, Jessica put down the book and stood up. She switched off her reading lamp and went to the window, drawing back her curtains to reveal the quiet Richmond street outside.
The streetlight at the front of their house had gone out again. Jessica frowned. The loss of power was never a good sign, but it did mean it would be easier to get out without her parents noticing.
She took her jacket from the hook behind her door and slipped down the stairs. In the living room, her father was snoring on the sofa, his head resting on his shoulder. Her mother was watching the TV with the sound turned down low, a blanket over her knees. Jessica slipped back into the shadows, pressed the temporary deactivation button for their security system and slipped out.
The street was dark, the night thankfully quiet. She zipped up her jacket and pulled the hood over her face, even though it was neither raining nor especially cold. In a pocket in the inner lining something heavy jostled – the knife she never left home without. Her parents might consider it bad form for the daughter of a respectable family to carry a street urchin’s weapon, but if they knew they would understand.
They lived in London Greater Urban Area too.
A hollow whump sounded from a few hundred metres away and a glow appeared above the line of houses to her right. Jessica sighed, pulled the hood lower over her face, and hurried for the tube.
There was some kind of commotion going on by the entrance, but she ignored it, easing her way through the crowd and down into the station. She had just passed
through the turnstiles when a gunshot rang out from above. Several security guards appeared from nowhere and hauled huge sliding riot doors across, blocking off the exits behind her.
‘Get on the next, lass,’ the nearest guard said. ‘All further trains tonight will be diverted until that mob clears out.’
She wanted to ask what was going on, but one glance at the three security guards halted her tongue. Between the escalator down to the platform and the riot doors were just her, a pretty posh girl, and three disillusioned men. She had nothing to gain and everything to lose. She nodded and hurried down to the platform.
No one got off the next eastbound train as it pulled in, the notification of the station’s temporary closure obviously having been announced. She climbed up into the sticky warmth blasting from a broken air conditioner, took a seat in the corner and folded her arms over her chest.
The train rumbled off into the tunnel. Gazing out at the blurred advertising hoardings rushing past, Jessica wondered whether she would even be able to find the boy again.
‘Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you … but do you have the time?’
His words had been so mundane, so throwback, so antiquated. Jessica had stared into the piercing blue of his eyes, the words bouncing around in her head like fragments of a long forgotten song.
And she had felt something she had only ever read about before, something which terrified and excited her at the same time.
Simon
He slammed a fist against the wall as tears welled in his eyes. The door to his flat hung loose on one hinge, swaying back and forth. A huge puncture in the centre showed where the Department of Civil Affairs had broken it open.
He listened for a few moments but only silence came from inside. He crept in through the open doorway and looked around. Their things were strewn everywhere. Everything that could be smashed had been, and all their cupboards and drawers had been upended, their contents strewn across the floor like flotsam on a beach after a powerful storm.
Only one thing seemed to be missing.
His father.
‘I told you, I told you…’
They won’t find out, his father had said, over and over, crouched in front of the computer and its illegal internet connection. How could they? Stop worrying, Simon.
They had. The computer was in pieces and his father taken by the government’s henchmen, dragged away into whatever hellhole of interrogation now awaited him.
Simon turned at the sound of footsteps beating out a heavy rhythm on the stairs below. Simon looked up, frowned, and hurried inside, grabbing what he could, stuffing a few clothes and some personal items into a hold-all. He made it back out on to the landing as the first of the looters – maybe alerted to the arrest by the DCA cars in the street – appeared on the landing below.