The UnTied Kingdom - The UnTied Kingdom Part 50
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The UnTied Kingdom Part 50

It smelled different, and there was some kind of heat and breeze in the air, and that strange rumble ...

Then hands appeared on the edge of the ditch behind Eve, and he shouted, 'Behind you!' as Sholt appeared, bloody and grimy but most definitely not dead, grinning that horrible grin of his. Harker raised his gun, but Eve was in the way, he couldn't get a clear shot. 'Eve, get down!'

In the distance, a horn sounded. The rumbling grew louder. Bombs, Eve had said. Charges. The tunnel was falling down around them.

Then something something big, and hideously loud, and incredibly fast, and lit up, glowing, something like a gigantic snake, shot past behind Eve, slamming into Sholt and ripping him apart as it screeched on the metal rails. Eve, still on the ground, stared in horror.

'It's the Northern Line,' she croaked, watching the thing fly past. 'It's the bloody Northern Line!'

Another explosion shook the tunnel. Wet mud splattered Harker and Charlie.

'We need to get out,' he said, 'before the whole thing collapses. Banks, are you okay?'

Banks didn't answer. He was kneeling by Tallulah, who was still and pale.

'She's not breathing,' he said.

Harker's eyes met Charlie's. 'Is there a pulse?'

A few awful seconds passed, then Banks shook his head and started to cry.

Harker got to his feet. 'Eve,' he said, starting towards her, but as he approached the hole between his world and Eve's, something went boom right near his ear.

When he opened his eyes, Eve and the platform were gone, and the tunnel was collapsing around them.

The train had stopped just ahead. Its light spilled out over the disused platform, illuminating with a dim glow the dirty rails that were now splattered with blood and bits of torn flesh.

The train had stopped because it had hit Sholt, she realised dimly, but she didn't care about that, because something had exploded and she couldn't see into Harker's tunnel any more. The hole in the curved Tube wall had filled in with dirt, bits of wood, stone and concrete.

Heart pounding, unable to get to her feet, Eve crawled over, her leg throbbing and her eyes burning, and scrabbled at what had once been a platform entrance, and was now solid with mud.

'No,' she said, digging with her good hand, and then her bad one, too. 'No.'

'Is someone there?' came a voice, and she shouted, 'Yes, and you've got to help me!'

Footsteps sounded, electric torchlight blinded her, and then there was a man in a hi-vis jacket beside her.

'Jesus,' he said, 'I'll get you an ambulance.'

'I'm fine,' Eve said. 'But we have to get through here. The tunnel collapsed and there are people there.' Harker was there. He was right there.

'There's no tunnel,' he said, and she stared at him as if he was mad, then looked back at the cascade of earth. She clawed at it, grabbed chunks of earth and rock and threw them away, gasping for breath and blinking away burning tears, because he was there, they were all there, just out of reach, right there The man in the hi-vis spoke into his radio, then put his hand on Eve's shoulder and pulled her back. She stumbled, fought him, then fell to her knees and stared at the wall of earth.

I will see you again.

'There's nuffink back there,' said the man in the hi-vis. 'No tunnel. This platform ain't been used for years.' He peered at the blocked archway. 'Reckon there was a landslide or summink.'

Looking back at the train and the rails, he sucked his breath through his teeth. 'Was there someone wiv you, love?'

'Is he dead?' she asked numbly.

'Fink so. Sorry.'

'I'm not.'

He frowned at her, and she said distantly, 'He was not a nice man.'

'Oi,' said the man, peering at her. 'Ain't you Eve Carpenter? You went missing, dincha?'

There was no tunnel. No portal into another world.

No injured Charlie, no dead Tallulah. No Harker.

'What the hell are you doing down here?' said the man, and Eve whispered, 'I don't know.'

Chapter Twenty-Eight.

'Thirty-three days,' said the journalist. 'Thirty-four, by the time they got you to a hospital. You must have been somewhere.'

'I've said it before,' Eve said calmly, looking down at the plectrum she'd spent a month trying to grasp. She strummed a few chords. There was a tune there, but no words.

There's nothing you can say that won't sound like goodbye.

'You "went away"?'

'Yep.' Eve looked at the other woman, challenging her to ask about rehab or slyly question her sanity. She'd heard it all anyway.

The journalist lost her nerve and looked down at her notepad. They generally did these days. Eve had discovered inner calm: it came with having nothing to lose.

'Now, your comeback single, Missing You, has been doing really well, and you're working on an album, is that right?'

'That's right.'

'Does it have a title yet?'

Outside, a taxi beeped its horn. A light buzzed overhead. Somewhere, someone was playing a radio.

'Yep. It's called Rumours of My Death.'

'Clever,' said the journalist, and Eve thought, Not really.

'Will it be similar to Missing You?'

'Some of it.' Eve glanced at the bandages covering her newest skin grafts. 'I've got some great collaborations lined up with some producers I really admire ...'

The words came automatically, the way they had for Harker when Don't think about Harker. He said he'd see her again, and he always kept his word, but since Transport for London had eventually excavated the landslide and found nothing but more mud, the chances of Harker walking through her door seemed somewhere between slim and anorexic.

'And with Missing You, you hinted that it was written about someone in particular. Would you like to elaborate?'

The Tower was different now. She'd visited the other day. And London Bridge was an ugly concrete thing, low and squat and easy to miss. Her old flat still stood in Mitcham, although some other poor sod had been moved in almost as soon as Eve went missing.

Everywhere she went she looked for Harker, but found no traces of him or his world. Nowhere in London held a memory of him; but everywhere, she remembered.

Eve looked at the woman calmly. 'No.'

Again, the journalist tried to outstare her, and failed. Flustered, she looked at her notes again. 'Right, er ... yes, well, what about living in a hostel when you were released from hospital?'

'I didn't have anywhere else to go. And no money.' Eve shrugged. 'I've lived in worse.'

'It was rumoured that you were going to sue the TV company who let you fly the paraglider without sufficient tuition. Why did you decide not to?'

'They'd probably have to fire people in order to pay the settlement, and they'd most likely be people who really needed the money. And I sure as hell didn't want to force anyone else to be as poor as I was.'

The journalist looked around Eve's comfortable, bland hotel suite and tried a smile. 'But now money's not a problem?'

'No,' said Eve, who had found herself at the centre of a bidding war for her album. 'It's not.'

'And your tax problems?'

'It's amazing how fast they go away when you can afford a lawyer who mentions nervous breakdowns,' Eve said. Maybe that had been playing dirty, but she'd offered a cash payment and they'd backed off pretty sharpish.

Now Eve had a lawyer on retainer, and three accountants each desperate to find fault with each other.

'Now, when you left Grrl Power, you cited artistic differences,' said the journalist.

'I hated the songs,' Eve said.

'Did you try writing your own material then?'

'Yes, but,' Eve shrugged, 'I guess I had nothing to write about.'

'So what made you try it this time?'

The songs had poured out of her since she had returned. Good songs. Songs about love and loss and anger and grief and life. I didn't need songs. I needed something to sing about.

Eve stared out of the window at Park Lane, which was jammed with traffic. She'd walked to St James's the other day, but found nothing to keep her there.

'Well, as the man said, when you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose.'

'Right,' said the journalist, making a note. 'Which man?'

In another cell, someone was sobbing, which Harker considered to be pretty pathetic. He was, as far as he knew, the only man there condemned to die, and he wasn't crying about it.

He'd thought about it, but he hadn't really seen the point.

He'd been asked if he wanted a special last meal, but since he'd never eaten well in his life, he didn't see why he should start now. A priest had been sent to give comfort, but the only comfort Harker wanted had disappeared through a hole in the world.

In the morning they'd come and stick a bag over his head, lead him out into a private courtyard, and use him for target practice. Harker tried to be depressed about it, and found he couldn't work up the enthusiasm.

The only thing he was annoyed about was that he'd run out of cigarettes, but then a packet landed by his feet and he looked up to see Saskia standing on the other side of the bars, her hand still raised.

'Brought you something,' she said.

He picked them up. 'You always said these'd kill me.'

'Well, it looks like I was wrong.' She seemed to have something on her mind, frowning down at him. But then no one was smiling much these days.

Harker lit up a cigarette and sucked deeply. Better. Much better.

'Harker ... why did you go down to those tunnels?'

'You know why.'

'I want to hear you say it, to me.'

This was unnecessarily cruel. 'I wanted to save Eve.'

She nodded. 'And did you?'

He frowned. 'What do you mean? Do you see her around anywhere?'

'No, but ... Harker, you said she'd gone back where she came from. But you never said where that was.'

'Another world,' he said, wondering, like Eve, if he'd gone mad.

'And the ... doorway was in those tunnels?'

'Yeah.' Until Sholt's French bombs had destroyed it. Though why he'd wanted to destroy what he and his fellow Coalitionists had gone to so much trouble to dig out, Harker didn't pretend to understand. Perhaps, in the end, Sholt's hatred of Harker had sent him slightly mad.

'Wheeler's having them brought down tomorrow,' Saskia said. 'Bombing what's left until it collapses. Can't have Coalitionists running around under London.'

'Nope.' First cigarette already exhausted, he lit a second. Saskia watched him a little while, then said, 'I saw Charlie the other day.'

'Yeah? How's she doing?'

'Not too badly. She's on the waiting list for a prosthetic.'

'It'll drive her mad sitting in a wheelchair,' Harker said.

'It is. She's constantly bickering with your Captain Haran Daz, is it?'

'He's there, is he?'