Wastelands: A Broken World

CHAPTER 1: GALLERY OF BONES

'I don't like this, Evie,' Jace said, squatting down beside me, careful not to disturb the barricade of rubble in front of us. 'I don't like it one fucking bit. We haven't had one sniff of Lena's crew for days now and those bastards always have a habit of turning up like a bad bloody smell.'

I nodded, letting my gaze sweep once more over the deserted square. I'd scanned the ruins of Trafalgar so many times already, spying nothing but a solitary pigeon, pecking away at dust as if it hoped it might magically transform into food. Ivy always said that once London was wiped out and the people with it, the pigeons, rats and cockroaches would outlive us all and I was starting to believe she was right. It was hard to think about the city housing nothing but vermin and bones, but with every scouting mission encountering less survivors each time, I was losing hope that London was becoming anything but one huge, crumbling necropolis for a conquered species.

Lena's crew, once a massive thorn in our side that had a nasty habit of turning septic, would usually have been crawling all over the east side of Quadrant Two. When we'd first moved into the old Aldwych station – or fucking trespassed, as Lena had told us – their territory had covered Trafalgar, Piccadilly, up to Soho and stretching all the way over to the Strand, and we couldn't move two paces without running into them. In those early days, confrontations had always been swift and violent, until they realised we were too established and too well-organised to move us on or wipe us out altogether.

Since then, we'd lived an uneasy truce, taking over the whole of the Strand, the area immediately south down to the river and all the way over to Chancery Lane. Unfortunately, truce was the loosest of terms and any chance meetings were still often violent – the angry laceration on my shoulder and the ache in my collarbone evidence enough of that – which was why it was unsettling that we hadn't come across a single one of Lena's crew in five days now, despite our blatant trespass on their side of the Quadrant. It was never a welcome sight to see Lena, despite my grudging respect for the tough Norwegian police officer who had been stranded here when the War began and the Americans had dropped the bombs, but I found myself practically praying for her to turn up now, just so I knew they were still alive and we weren't all alone in the northern zone.

Of course, I was also praying that she'd turn up with that scrappy ferret bastard Rico by her side, so I could plunge my blade right up into his ribcage and twist the knife until I saw the life drain out of his beady, little eyes.

Instinctively, my hand went to the dressed wound on my shoulder, my palm covering the square of bandage taped there. The gauze was slightly damp to touch, and I knew without looking that I was bleeding again. I saw flashes of Rico's sweaty face as he bent over me, his booted foot pressed against the wound he had just made with a sweeping arc of his machete, slicing through the skin like butter. Snapshots of him dropping to his knees and pressing his thigh hard between my legs, his hand fumbling at my belt buckle as I bled out onto the debris-covered stage of the Shaftsbury Theatre. I shouldn't have been surprised really. I'd heard the rumours about Rico. About how he wasn't that bothered whether his victims were alive or dead when he fucked them. Necrophiliac Rick, as Jace called him, was having the time of his life in the New World with the abundance of fresh corpses it provided for him. Planning how slowly to sink my other blade into his tiny infected balls while he was still alive was one of the only things that had kept me going these past couple of weeks.