London Eye: 1 (Toxic City) by Tim Lebbon Read Free Book Online

expected, so much so that she could not even raise her head without bashing it as Sparky had done. So she stared at the gravelly ground beneath her, pushing with her feet and crawling through on her elbows. It was only as light fell upon her that she realised she was through.
    Sparky helped her to stand, playfully brushing dust and dirt from her clothes. “Welcome to the Mines of Moria!” he said, in the gruffest voice he could manage.
    Lucy-Anne looked around. “Bloody hell!”
    “I think it's an old church basement,” Rosemary said.
    The room was twenty steps across and thirty long, supported at regular intervals by thick stone columns. There seemed to be nothing stored down here, and it had the feel of being long-abandoned; dust had drifted against the base of walls, and in one corner an impressive array of spider webs formed grubby curtains. They shone their torches around, searching but not finding a way up into whatever building had once stood, or still stood above them.
    “Maybe over there,” Jenna said. She walked toward one corner, kicking through the layered dust at her feet. She looked up at the ceiling, then back at the group, nodding. “Must have been closed in ages ago.”
    Lucy-Anne saw the discoloured ceiling above where Jenna stood. The evidence of a blocked in staircase, perhaps, or the remains of where a hatch had once led down to this place.
    “Why'd you think it's a church?” Jack asked.
    “Over there,” Rosemary said. “In the end wall. That's the way we have to go. You'll see.”
    We'll see what? Lucy-Anne thought. She was about to ask when she heard the growl.
    Her heart stuttered, missing a beat and taking her breath away when it restarted. Her arms and chest went cold. A sound returned from her dream, as fresh and alive as if she were dreaming it again now: another growl, and a low, throaty bark.
    They were all frozen. The sudden stillness would have been comical, were it not for the other growls now answering the first.
    “Oh, no,” Rosemary groaned. And she sounded her age for the first time since Lucy-Anne had met her.
    Emily dashed over to her brother's side. He glanced at Lucy-Anne, but she could not even blink.
    “What?” Jack whispered. He stepped closer to Rosemary, and the others all turned to look at the old woman. Their eyes were wide in the darkness, glittering with strange yellow light. “Rosemary, what? ”
    “Dogs,” Lucy-Anne whispered.
    “Yes,” Rosemary said. “I met them on the way out, but they were much further back, just beneath the Exclusion Zone.”
    “And?” Jack asked.
    “They're wild, Jack. From London. There are packs in there, big packs.”
    “We've heard about them,” Jenna said. All of them had drawn close, subconsciously shielding Emily from whatever danger approached.
    “Some of them went down beneath the city,” Rosemary said. “The Tube, tunnels, sewers. Dog, and…”
    “Other things,” Jenna finished for her.
    Rosemary nodded. Lucy-Anne knew what “other things” meant, because they'd had a series of reports left in the drops close to Camp Truth a few months before. Much could be put down to hearsay andexaggeration, they'd agreed, but it also seemed likely that some of what they read was true. Alligators, snakes, poisonous frogs, deadly spiders, and even a pride of lions, all of them escaped from various zoos and private collections in and around London following Doomsday.
    But dogs…
    “I dreamed this,” she whispered, and she was aware of Jack's torch shifting as he turned to look at her.
    Another growl came, much closer than before, and there seemed to be cunning there, and purpose.
    Jack stepped in front of Emily, a four inch folding knife in his hand. Jenna also shielded the girl, and Sparky already had a knife in each hand, torch tucked in his back pocket.
    “How many were there?” Jack asked the old woman.
    “Five,” Lucy-Anne said.
    “Yes,” Rosemary said, surprised. “But I think I broke one of their