When Earth is conquered by the sinister Greys and the alien who killed Evie's husband returns seeking her help, she must find a way to enact her revenge and fight the growing feelings for the creature who is an exact replica of the man she loved.
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A rat scurried down the handrail at Charing Cross, its whiskers twitching as it managed a far better job than we were of navigating what had once been the escalators and what was now a treacherous mountain of twisted metal, rubble and corpses. Unperturbed by our presence, it sped past us, out of reach of the flashlights on our rifles and into the inky blackness of the tunnels below.
It seemed fitting to me sometimes, that the human race had been forced into the tunnels under the city, living out a subterranean existence in the shadows alongside the rodents and bugs.
There was a part of me – the Evie who was born after Tom died – that couldn't help but feel we deserved this. The years before had been plagued with this sense of impending doom, almost as if we had been hurtling backwards, rewinding the progress of civilisation to something dark and feral. Of course, I wasn't really suggesting we'd deserved what the Greys had done to us, but it still felt like some kind of twisted retribution for a failure to keep turning the wheel.
The old Aldwych Station, where we had set up house – albeit temporarily - had been closed since 1994, long before the Final Wave, and at one point had been a popular museum for tourists and used as a location for filmmakers. Now, both entrances had been all but destroyed and there was no way to reach it from the eastern side where the tunnel had collapsed before it could reach Holborn, which meant our front door was a concealed entrance no bigger than a crawl-space all the way over at Charing Cross.
Getting in and out of Aldwych was an adventure all of its own and the reason why Jace had been pretty close to the truth as to why the stiches had split on my wounded shoulder. If the thirty-foot of crawl-space and the escalators weren't enough to contend with, there was almost a mile of track to walk in the pitch-black tunnels where it reeked of death and rotting things.
'Shit, man,' hissed Gav, keeping his voice low, as his foot slid on loose rubble. 'I swear, I can't believe I used to complain about these damn escalators always being out of action. I'd give anything now to walk all the way down one of these without almost killing myself.'
'To be fair, it's probably easier now than back then,' Abby replied, her flashlight illuminating the way ahead, 'far less tourists getting in your way.' She'd reached the bottom, the sweat peppering her brow and sticking the shirt to her back proving that, despite her joke, it was certainly no easier journey than it had been pre-invasion. 'The only problem now is that they're under your feet instead of in front of you.' She nudged at an exposed leg, the bone protruding just below the knee, pushing it back under a pile of bricks and a mould-spattered copy of the Financial Times.
'Cheers, Abs,' Gav said, using the handrail as support and jumping down from the bottom where the last few steps cut away into a mass of molten metal and jagged edges that wouldn't have been out of place in the Tate Modern. 'Always love being reminded of the new trend of interior design we've got going on in here. Nice one, thanks.'
