Tunnels 06 - Terminal

species had been spared by the virus, and a little further along the road Will spotted two fat crows playing tug of war over something beside a discarded hat. They didn’t bother to move until he was almost on them.
    ‘Get away!’ he shouted, aiming his foot at them. Beating their greasy black wings and giving ugly calls, they grudgingly took to the air.
    Will saw what the crows had been fighting over. On the tarmac was a human eyeball, so desiccated and discoloured it resembled a rotten plum.
    He couldn’t stop himself from staring at the eyeball as it stared accusingly back at him, its ragged optic nerve strung out behind it like a tail, as though it was some kind of new animal.
    ‘This is so wrong,’ Will whispered, suddenly overwhelmed by all the signs of death around him. People had clearly left their homes in their thousands to gather here in the centre of the city, where they’d succumbed to the virus. They must have been desperately hoping that their government was going to do something to save them from the disease that could cause death in as little as twenty-four hours.
    ‘Hey, dozy, what is it?’ Elliott shouted. Finding that Will hadn’t followed her into the large department store they’d been heading towards, she’d reappeared through the shattered glass of one of the doors.
    ‘ We did this,’ he managed to reply. ‘We’re to blame for all this.’
    ‘We never meant for it to come to this,’ Elliott said, as she surveyed the bodies.
    Of course Will knew that Elliott was right; Sweeney must have accidentally broken the test tube Drake had given him. It was never the intention to actually release the deadly virus. But it didn’t make Will feel any better about what he was seeing.
    Elliott shrugged. ‘They were doomed anyway. Most of them had been Darklit. Sooner or later, they’d have ended up as either hosts or food for the Phase.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Perhaps this is better, Will. Perhaps we did them a favour.’
    He began towards her, shaking his head slowly. ‘That’s difficult to believe.’
    As soon as they were inside the shop, Will stopped to take in the fountain – a large bronze dolphin in the centre of a circular pool set into the marble floor. Although the water had long since stopped spouting from the mouth of the dolphin, both it and the polished marble floors gave the impression of incredible affluence from a bygone age on the outer surface.
    ‘This was quite some shop,’ Will said.
    ‘Those people obviously thought so,’ Elliott agreed, as she left Will peering around at the cadavers on the floor, some with bags crammed full of items still clutched in their skeletal arms.
    ‘They must have known things were bad, but even so they were grabbing whatever they could,’ he said, as he poked one of the bags with the barrel of his Sten and expensive-looking lipsticks and face creams spilled from it. He laughed, though emptily. ‘They were even stealing make-up!’
    ‘Come over here. You’ve got to see this!’ Elliott shouted, her voice resounding through the huge main hall.
    ‘Wow,’ Will said. There was an imposing statue at the endof the hall, on either side of which a pair of staircases swept up to the other levels of the shop. The statue, which was a good fifty feet in height, was of a woman dressed in a toga and proudly displaying a cornucopia of fruit.
    But what stopped Will in his tracks was the enormous smoked glass dome that served as the roof of the hall. In wonder he craned his head back to take it all in. Without anyone around to keep it clean, wind-borne grit was already building up at the edges of the dome and encroaching on the glass, but the effect was still breathtaking.
    Will lowered his gaze from the dome, taking in the other floors on the way down, where he could just about make out all the different goods on display there.
    ‘This place is ginormous – like Harrods or something. Where do we start?’ he asked. He stepped over to a counter and wiped the layer of dust from its surface to peer at the range of meerschaum pipes arranged on crumpled velvet. Then he leant over the counter as he examined the showcases behind it. The glass doors had been wrenched off, and many brands of cigarettes he’d never heard of were inside. ‘ Lande Mokri Superb. Sulima ,’ he read, scanning along the row of old-fashioned packets. ‘ Joltams, Pyramide.’ Then he noticed a dead body slumped by the base of the showcase, dressed in a