The Power of Five Oblivion

when I think about Jamie now, about the way things might have gone between us, that’s the moment that I always remember most.
    We stopped for a rest at King’s Cross (which king and why was he cross?) and had something to eat and drink – dried fruit, nuts and water. We sat on the platform, on benches facing the rails.
    “It’s not much further,” Will Fletcher told us. “Maybe only half an hour. Are you two all right?”
    We both nodded.
    “We’ll have to move quickly when we get to the surface. It’ll still be dark but that won’t stop them watching the streets. We’ll go straight to the house and get some sleep. Try not to touch anything if you can help it. The contamination isn’t as bad as it was but you still have to be careful.”
    I wondered why he was whispering. In fact we’d been tiptoeing throughout the journey, even though we were far underground and, apart from the rats and dead people, on our own. But after King’s Cross the track sloped upwards and without any warning we emerged in the open air. I might not have even realized as there was no moon and the light, or lack of it, stayed more or less the same. But the air smelled different and I got a sense of buildings, rising up above us. There was another Tube train parked behind some girders, over on our left, but this time I was careful not to look.
    And then we came to Farringdon and everything changed. There were people on the platform, alive, shuffling about, muttering to each other. Suddenly everyone had their guns out and we were moving forward in a pack, looking in every direction at once. The people didn’t seem to want to hurt us. In fact they were more scared of us than we were of them. But it was still strange to stumble upon them and all sorts of questions went through my mind. Where had they come from? How long had they been here? How could they have possibly survived?
    Blake or Ryan swung a torch and I saw some of them, picked out in the beam. There was a woman and a man. They were both bald and almost completely naked. She was badly deformed. One half of her face simply wasn’t there and the other half seemed to be frozen in an expression of pure terror, the eye on that side bulging like a ping-pong ball. The man, wearing filthy boxer shorts, was enormously fat with sagging breasts and a stomach that hung almost to his knees. I think they were both probably mad because as the light hovered over them, they cowered away, making strange animal noises. There was a group of children further along the platform. They were only about seven or eight years old so they must have been born here, after London was destroyed. They were clutching each other, pressing together like monkeys in a cage. I wondered what sort of life they’d had. They had never been to school. They probably had no parents. They might not even know how to speak.
    “Survivors,” Ryan whispered. “Don’t worry. They won’t come near us.”
    Even so, we hurried forward. It had been good to be out in the open air for a few minutes. But it was better to be back in the tunnel.
    I never completely understood what had happened in London. It had been destroyed by a dirty bomb but what exactly did that mean? Was it nuclear or biochemical or both? And how much of the city was left untouched? I don’t know how the people I saw had managed to support themselves. What had the man been eating to make himself so fat? Like the rat that I’d seen at Highgate, it was probably best not to ask. All I can say is that everything felt poisoned: the walls, the ground, the very air. I felt that I was walking through a gigantic cemetery and that somehow it was almost an insult to be there and to be alive. There will come a time, I suppose, when historians and scientists will try to make sense of the ninth of May and what happened to Britain on that terrible day. I can only describe what I saw.
    We finally left the Tube system at Moorgate Station and, sure enough, there was an escalator just as Miss Keyland had described – a long, silver staircase with strange teeth at each end. It wasn’t working, of course, and we had to climb up. We passed through an archway, then took a second staircase up to the entrance hall, where a row of barriers stood waiting, all of them open. Amir and Ryan guided us through with their torches and I glimpsed ticket machines, glass booths, and a kiosk selling newspapers and magazines, which were still neatly arranged in rows. If I had looked at