Tunnels 06 - Terminal

Jürgen demanded.
    From the words she’d been able to recognise, the bushman had been asking what was wrong with him.
    In the Styx tongue.
    And as Elliott, because of her father, was fluent in the Styx language, she was able to answer the bushman in it. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll find out what’s wrong,’ she said to him, the eerie sound of her words filling the room as if someone was tearing old parchment.
    ‘ Mein Gott ,’ Werner said.
    ‘ Mein Gott , indeed,’ Will said under his breath.
    Elliott switched back to English for Will and the two astounded New Germanians. ‘I can understand some of what he’s saying. He wants to know what’s wrong with him.’
    Despite the fact he was so weak, on hearing Elliott speak in the Styx tongue the bushman’s eyes had flicked wide open. He heaved himself up from his cot and, before anyone could stop him, had thrown himself at her feet. With his face pressed to the floor, he continued to repeat the same words.
    ‘They have returned,’ he was saying over and over again.
    Will was dumbfounded. ‘All the time, the bushmen were talking in Styx. But at such a high pitch, no one knew it.’
    He looked from the grovelling man on the floor to Elliott, and back to the man again. ‘If he can speak Styx, then maybe he’s part Styx like you? And maybe your blood … your Styx blood in the vaccine caused this … changed him. But how? And why?’

 
     
     
    Chapter Three

    A s the sun began its final descent, long shadows were beginning to crawl over London, where street after street was yet again without power. People were barricading themselves in their houses and preparing themselves for another night of fear, hunger and cold. But they didn’t know whether they were defending themselves against the lawless gangs who were running amok without the police or army to stop them, or something far more sinister, if the rumours doing the rounds were to be believed.
    In some neighbourhoods the residents had organised themselves into local militia, using vehicles to close off roads, and wielding brooms, garden implements and even saucepans to see off anyone who tried to enter their areas without good reason.
    But in west London there was one bastion of apparent normality. The Westfield shopping centre, Britain’s largest mall, was somehow still connected to an active grid, and the light flooding through its windows proved to be irresistible to those too terrified to remain at home.
    No one had thought to turn the sound system off andpiped music was playing in the background as, at regular intervals, a forced, DJ-smooth voice gave a pre-recorded message about forthcoming but long-out-of-date promotions. The shops themselves were definitely off limits with their security grilles firmly across them. Some still had goods in the window, but others had been vacated and the stock removed until, it was hoped, conditions returned to normal.
    All along the walkways in the shopping centre, people in sleeping bags or swaddled in blankets were settling down for the night. It was reminiscent of scenes from the Second World War when the underground platforms had been used as air-raid shelters. There may have been electricity to keep the lights burning, but the heating was another matter, and it was bitterly cold inside the building. A succession of small fires had been lit and were being stoked with empty packaging or whatever else could be found to keep them going, as empty-eyed faces stared into their meagre flames.
    Bound up in their own misery, none of them took much notice as a woman passed by. Tall and elegant, she threaded her way between the untidy clumps of people, her high heels clicking on the polished floor. If they had paid her any attention, they would have observed that she wore an expensive fur coat with the collar turned up, and that two men with hoods obscuring their faces were like twin shadows as they followed silently behind.
    A child, no more than six years old, made straight towards her and planted himself insolently in her path.
    ‘Oi, rich lady, got anything to eat?’ the boy demanded.
    The woman, Hermione, stared down at him with undisguised disgust. ‘What?’ she said.
    ‘I said, got anything to eat?’ the boy repeated, this timejabbing a dirty finger impatiently at his mouth as if he was talking to someone too stupid to understand him.
    Her dark-rimmed eyes blazed with anger, the muscles in her razor-lean face tightening so that she looked more like a