20 Years Later Read online

  20 YEARSLATER

  E.J. NEWMAN

  E.J. Newman was born in a tiny coastal village in Cornwall,

  south west England, during one of the hottest summers on

  record. Four years later she started to write stories and

  never stopped until she penned a short story that secured her

  a place at Oxford University to read Experimental Psychology.

  She now lives in Somerset with her husband, her son, and her

  books, where all are loved dearly. She runs her own

  copywriting business and a free short story club at her blog

  Post-Apocalyptic Publishing at www.enewman.co.uk.

  “For my grandparents, both here

  and on the other side,

  but especially for my Nana,

  who always believed in me.”

  20 YEARS LATER

  E.J. NEWMAN

  ©2011 Emma Newman

  ISBN 978-0-9844981-2-3 (hardback)

  ISBN 978-0-9844981-1-6 (ebook)

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form. Request for such permission should be addressed to:

  Dystopia Press

  3615 Franklin Ave., No. 237

  Waco, Texas 76710

  www.dystopiapress.com

  [email protected]

  Publisher: Mark Roy Long

  Editor: Kayla Allen ([email protected])

  Cover design: SoroDesign (http://sorodesign.com/)

  Interior design: Stacie Buterbaugh ([email protected]) Author photo: Harry Duns (www.harryduns.com)

  Special thanks: Scout Flowers, Annabeth Parrish, Joy Cozby, and Steve Tiano

  First edition

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication

  (Provided by Quality Books, Inc.)

  Newman, Emma, 1976-

  20 years later / Emma Newman. -- 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  SUMMARY: Twenty years after a plague has wiped out

  most of humanity, four friends in London seek to

  discover the secret behind this catastrophe.

  Audience: Ages 12-18.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9844981-2-3 (hardback)

  ISBN-10: 0-9844981-2-5 (hardback)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9844981-1-6 (ebook)

  ISBN-10: 0-9844981-1-7 (ebook)

  1. Teenagers--England--London--Juvenile fiction.

  2. Plague--Juvenile fiction. 3. London (England)--Juvenile

  fiction. [1. Teenagers--Fiction. 2. Plague--Fiction.

  3. London (England)--Fiction.] I. Title. II. Title:

  Twenty years later.

  PZ7.N47976Twe 2011 [Fic]

  QBI10-600137

  PROLOGUE

  London wasn’t always a dusty, ghost-filled monument to the dead. It was once an intense city with toxic air and the constant din of millions of people talking, consuming, shoving past each other. Perhaps it’s impossible for you to imagine so many people alive in this place but, I assure you, it’s true. After all, where do you think all the bones littering the streets came from? Each one of the skulls you step over every day was once a person, alive as you are now, and that skull was filled with dreams and fears just like yours. Terror was probably the last thing all those poor souls felt. God knows it was for me.

  I can only guess that you’re in London, unless this book has had its own adventure too. For a moment more, indulge me, I like to try to imagine who you are. Of course, I can only make some educated guesses. It’s likely that you’re older rather than younger, as so few children read now. But perhaps you are young, and if so, you must have one of the survivors caring for you, someone kind enough to teach you how to read now that there are no schools. I hope so, it makes you one to treasure.

  Perhaps you’re trying to decide whether to burn this book now or read it first. Are you weighing up which is more important to you: a few more minutes of heat or the hours of another person’s voice reaching up to you from these pages?

  Wait! Let me speak to you, let me tell you this tale! Don’t you want to know about the Red Lady’s rise to power, or perhaps how she fell? Have you heard the name “Joshua” whispered in dark places and wondered what exactly he did? Or is it David the King who fascinates you? No, what am I thinking? It must be the Four you want to know about, the four who changed the world. Well, I was there, watching as it all happened, so if you burn this now, you’ll never know.

  I shall start after It happened, some twenty years later, when London was divided between the gangs: the Gardners, the Bloomsbury Boys, the Red Lady’s Hunters, to name but a few. Yes, I shall start in the place where it all began: Miri’s garden.

  You may not have heard of her, but one of the most important people you need to know about is Miri. In the year I begin this account, she was in her forties. I’d like you to try to picture her, hair long and dark with some silvered strands. Some of the lines around the edges of her large brown eyes were no doubt left by the horrors she experienced when It happened, but most of them were carved by smiles.

  Miri’s garden, at the centre of Queen Square, Blooms-bury, was one of the most beautiful places in London. Not dangerous and wild like the big public parks with their beasts and thorns, and not overgrown like the small house gardens are now. Well kept and orderly, Miri’s garden kept her and many others alive.

  Her home was part of an old school with arched windows where the housemaster once resided. The other choices were old offices (too impersonal) or one of the hospitals that surrounded the square, but nothing on this earth would make Miri step into a hospital for a second time since It happened, let alone live in one.

  The old schoolmaster’s house was where her son, Zane, was born and raised. Ah! I can imagine your eyes widen and hear you say: “Yes, I’ve heard of him!” Well, yes, of course, everyone alive has but, at this point, very few knew of Zane. He learnt about the healing arts at her side, which is why I start with her. Without Miri, there would have been no Zane as you know of him.

  Zane was always a sensitive child, with his mother’s dark, soulful eyes and the thick brown hair of her youth, uncut since the day he was born. At the time I have in mind, he was almost fifteen and his hair reached his lower back. He was becoming a handsome young man, so yes, everything you might have heard about him in that regard is certainly true.

  At that age he knew very little of life outside the garden, but despite everything his mother did to protect Zane, his innocence was still taken from him. Not by one dramatic event, but gently, like each day steals one’s youth. The first little piece was stolen the night the Giant came.

  Chapter 1

  THE GIANT

  On the night Zane first saw the giant, the summer moon was almost full. A figure approached Miri’s house slowly and fearfully, keeping well within the shadows and ducking behind anything nearby whenever the clouds parted. The visitor crept up to the house and paused, looking carefully at both ground floor windows several times before finally making a choice. Standing on tiptoe, he cast one more fearful look around the shadowed square before tapping insistently on the glass.

  After a few moments, Zane opened the window as quietly as he could, held up a lit candle and peered down with sleepy eyes.

  The trespasser bounced on his tiptoes. “Hullo!” he whispered.

  Zane smiled at the Bloomsbury Boy standing in front of him. “Hi Dev, what’s wrong? It must be the middle of the night.” The candlelight shone off Dev’s teeth revealing the large gap between the front two. Even though it was only illuminated by one candle, Dev’s shock of unruly hair was clearly bright ginger.

  “Come with me,” he whispered. Dev was shaking, as if scared as well as excited. The Bloomsbury Boys’ territory was only five minutes to
the west from Miri’s garden, in Russell Square, but Dev rarely came over at night.

  “But it’s dark!” Zane said, looking past Dev. The garden in the square, so familiar in the daylight, looked forbidding. His mother never let him go out alone once the sun had set, and that had never bothered him at all. The routine was always the same; packing up tools half an hour before sunset, then filling three buckets of water from the pump in the garden. Once everything was safely inside, she had taught Zane to go to every door and window in the house, locking and checking each one, before lighting candles in the kitchen and living room. It was then Zane’s responsibility to ensure that all of the curtains were closed perfectly, lest the candlelight shone out of a gap into the darkness. He had never asked why, it was just the way things were. Unlocking the window to talk to Dev had been bad enough, the thought of climbing out and into the moonlit garden was just … absurd.

  “But you got to come with me! I seen sommat … sommat weird …”

  Dev’s apparent agitation stopped Zane from sending him away. “What do you mean by ‘weird’?”

  “A light … in one of the windows, high up. I saw it. Was like it was movin’ too.”

  Zane was fully awake in an instant. “A fire!”

  “No, not fire. I know what that looks like, an’ it weren’t that. It weren’t like nothin’ I ever seen before. Weird light … we got to check it out, might be sommat important, we got to keep you and Miri safe. An’ I don’t wanna wake Jay up, in case it’s sommat … stupid.” Dev hung his head, recalling the last time that had happened. “You’re clever. I thought you should come look-see too. Jay’d be dead chuffed if you did.”

  Zane considered this carefully. Within the Bloomsbury Boys, a strict hierarchy was in place. Jay, at the top, was the biggest, the one who had lived the longest and the one who had survived most fights with the Gardners. He could also be charming when he needed to be. Miri had once said he had Irish blood in him but Zane looked carefully the next time Jay was cut and his blood looked just like everyone else’s.

  The only ways that a boy could impress Jay were to either fight a Gardner up close and win, or get a Token, a physical trophy to prove a Boy’s ability to steal from the enemy in their own territory and get away afterwards. Tokens earned a Boy status within the gang: the more Tokens, the more respect and the better claim to food, the ultimate Token being the black tie of a dead Gardner.

  Dev, approaching fourteen (a guess, as none of the Boys knew when they were born and didn’t mark birthdays), didn’t have the dexterity or coordination to survive close combat with a Gardner and mercifully knew that fact. Unfortunately, he also didn’t have the luck or the wits to be able to obtain any other Token, and every day had to watch Boys much younger and smaller rise higher in Jay’s estimations. Jay was the axis upon which Dev’s world turned and Miri had patched Dev up several times after varied attempts to win his favour.

  Zane frowned. “If there is something weird there, it might be dangerous.” He took a deep breath. “I suppose it’s up to us to make sure this isn’t a threat, right?”

  Dev beamed at him. “Too right!”

  Zane and Dev stood outside of the hospital at the far corner of the square. His house couldn’t be seen from here, the line of sight intersected by the dark garden.

  Zane shook his head. “I’m not going in there.”

  Dev, a good six inches shorter, looked up at him with large hazel eyes. “Go on, honest-like it’ll be worth it, you ain’t seen nothin’ like what I saw, you wanna see it too. Your Mum won’t know; she’s asleep.”

  Zane tensed as pride tugged at a string in his stomach. “It isn’t my Mum I’m worried about,” he lied.

  In Zane’s life, the rule to Never Go Into Hospitals was as fundamental as Don’t Touch The Fire and Wash Your Hands Before You Clean The Wound. Miri had instilled him with not only a respect for nature, but also a pathological fear of the dark concrete buildings that lined the square. It hadn’t taken much; only a few cautionary warnings, a tearful reprimand when she had found him entering the lobby to look for fuel on a bitterly cold day, but the Never Go Into Hospitals rule was proving hard to break.

  “Then you must be scared,” Dev stuck out his chin as a clear challenge.

  Zane thrust his shaking hands into his pockets and stood straighter as Dev pulled his favourite woolly hat out of his pocket and jabbed his hair under it. The ginger fuzz defiantly poked out of several holes across the crown as Dev meticulously tucked in wayward strands away from his forehead and ears. Everything that Dev wore had holes, like all of the other Bloomsbury Boys. The skill of the well-dressed Boy was to make sure that each thin layer had its holes in different places. Lots of layers not only kept out the cold, but also made them look stouter than they were. It no longer worked on Zane as he and Miri had dressed too many wounds on their scrawny arms and legs to be fooled by such a simple trick.

  Dev took a deep breath, drew himself up to his full height as he faced the double doors and strode towards them.

  Zane’s clammy hands clenched deep in his pockets. The old glass of the doors was filthy and cracked, beyond them the hospital was as black as the inside of a poppy. He read the words on the faded blue sign hanging lopsidedly over the door. “National Hospital for Nee-ur-ology and Nee-ur-osurgery,” he sounded out softly as Miri had taught him.

  Dev, trying to seem braver than his clever and more handsome friend, reached out with shaking hands and pushed the doors open. He and Zane wrinkled their noses at the stale air that wafted out, carrying a fine dust on it that made Dev cough slightly.

  Inside the lobby fingers of moonlight began to tentatively pick their way across the floor. A thick layer of dust covered everything in sight with gentle undulations immediately recognisable from some of the alleyways between the garden and the Boys’ square. Bones.

  Zane swallowed hard, not noticing that both he and Dev were holding their breath. Their eyes darted around the space, taking in the strange looking doors, how so many things were broken. Internal windows and doors had been smashed and many were hanging off their hinges. Strange wheeled beds were further in, some blocking a corridor in their haphazard arrangement. There were many things neither of them had seen before: signs, symbols on the walls, fire extinguishers, faded and grubby posters from the time before It happened.

  A large, rotting staircase was at the farthest point ahead of them, but it was blocked by several pieces of furniture that had been used as some kind of makeshift barricade. Two pillars that were once white stretched up to the ceiling, now grey and streaked with dirt. To the right was a large reception desk, the wood intact, thanks to Miri keeping the Boys out of the hospitals too. Any other building and it would have been scavenged and burnt a long time ago. To the far right, Zane caught a glimpse of an attractive woman with short blonde hair looking out from a painting. He stared at her for a long moment, until Dev finally moved forward, taking a step inside.

  Zane followed close behind him, both still enraptured by the alien space but also the sheer sense of adventure. He jumped as the door began to swing closed behind them, and paused to brace it open with an old clipboard he found on the floor near his feet.

  “We need the light,” Zane whispered.

  Dev frowned. “We need to find another way up,” he whispered back, with a slight tremor in his voice. “Them stairs are no good.”

  Zane looked around for another way out of the lobby and saw a sign reading “Stairs to upper floors” with an arrow pointing to the right.

  “This way.”

  “How’d you know?”

  Zane pointed at the sign and began to move forward. His illiterate friend shrugged and fell in behind him, stepping where Zane stepped as Jay had taught him to do when exploring new places.

  They clambered over the bones and wreckage, taking care not to touch anything unless they absolutely needed to do so. The corridor to the right was extremely dark; the moonlight could only penetrate so far in, and at several points the
y could only progress by touch alone. It was only by chance that Zane leant against a door out of the corridor that swung open to reveal a stairwell, lit by moonlight streaming weakly through a skylight high above them. It was sufficient to sketch out the shape of the stairs stretching up above them and the door to the first floor.

  “It were four windows up, where I saw it, and on the other side,” Dev whispered. Zane nodded in response, gritting his teeth to stop them chattering. It meant that the light would be impossible to see from the garden or their house.

  As carefully and as quietly as possible, they both began to climb the steps. It was slow work, as the steps were also blanketed by the awful grey dust and many of them were littered with bones and skulls. They were careful not to send any crashing down the stairwell. Both boys were used to seeing remains bleached by the sun on the roads that hadn’t been cleared by Miri or the Bloomsbury Boys, but somehow the darkness and the knowledge that they really shouldn’t be inside this place conspired to make it scary to step over them here.

  Zane counted the doors as they went up and thankfully the dim blue-grey light got slightly stronger the further up they went. Finally, he stopped outside the door to the third floor. A small round window was set into it and he stood on his tiptoes to peer through. A long corridor with many doors leading off it on both sides could just be made out through the filthy glass. It was also very dark.

  He turned back to Dev. “Can’t see anything.”

  “It’ll be further along, the window was in the middle.”

  There was an awkward pause. “Shall we go and have a look?”

  Dev nodded. “Come this far …”

  He stepped in front of Zane and slowly pushed the door open. It creaked as if it hadn’t been opened for years and they both froze.

  Nothing happened.

  Dev let out the breath he hadn’t realised he was holding and stepped through. A large murky window at the far end of the corridor let in enough moonlight for them to progress. Their shoulders hunched with tension, they both began to creep down the silent corridor, their footsteps muffled by the thick carpet of dust. Thankfully, there seemed to be fewer bones up here.