The Cold Pools Read Online Free Page B

spine-splitting shriek had been no sound a man should make.  It made her shiver even now, two years later.
    They headed back towards the stairs, their clawboards slung over their shoulders.  The escalator had stopped working years ago, and now its metal teeth were rusted and gummed up with litter and dust.  They climbed up into darkness, emerging on to the old ticket corridor.  A couple more emergency lights helped them past the old turnstiles, some boarded-up newsstands and an old donut store.  Another staircase at the end led them up to the surface.  Their feet rustled through piles of leaves blown in by the wind, while all around them the smell of unwashed bodies and the decomposing remains of takeout food hung in the air.  They weren’t the only people to use the station; at night it was common for tramps to bunk down behind the metal barrier of the entranceway.  They rarely went far inside, though.  Mega Britain’s illegal magazines had seen to it that only the desperate or the very brave went into abandoned London Underground stations.
    Marta went out first and waited for the others.  It was a cold October day, the sky a leaking grey bucket that spat rain on her leather tunic and ripped jeans.  St. Cannerwells backed on to a bleak park, a rusty iron fence separated them from a slope of untended grass, a cracked, root-rippled concrete path and a small pond filled with litter.  Supermarket trolleys protruded from the brown water like half-submerged wrecks; paper-cup boats floated amongst the icebergs of old cardboard boxes while around them trees clacked their bare branches together in mocking applause.
    ‘See you tomorrow?’ Marta asked.
    ‘I’m working but I’ll come over when I’m done,’ Simon said.
    ‘I have some stuff to do but yeah, I’ll try,’ Paul said.
    ‘Switch?’
    The little man was tapping the palm of his left hand with the index finger of his right, muttering under his breath.
    ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’
    As the others said their goodbyes and left, Marta stood for a moment, looking out across the park towards the huge elevated highway overpass that rose above the city to the south.  Half finished, it arched up out of the terraces and housing blocks to the east, rising steadily to a height of five hundred feet.  There, at the point where it should have begun its gradual decent to the west, it just ended, sawn off, amputated.
    Years ago, she remembered her father standing here with her, telling her about the future.  Things had been better then.  She’d still been going to school, still believed the world was good, still had dreams about getting a good job like a lawyer or an architect and hadn’t started to do the deplorable things that made her wake up shivering, just to get food or the items she needed to survive.
    He had taken her hand and given it a little squeeze.  She still remembered the warmth of his skin, the strength and assurance in those fingers.  With his other arm he had pointed up at the overpass, in those days busy with scaffolding, cranes and ant-like construction workers, and told her how one day they would take their car, and drive right up over it and out of the city.  The government was going to open up London Greater Urban Area again, he said.  Let the city people out, and the people from the Greater Forest Areas back in.  The smoggy, grey skies of London GUA would clear, the sirens would stop wailing all night, and people would be able to take the chains and the deadlocks off their doors.  She remembered how happy she’d felt with her father’s arms around her, holding her close, protecting her.
    But something had happened.  She didn’t know everything – no one did – but things had changed.  The government hadn’t done any of those things.  The construction stopped, the skies remained grey, and life got even worse.  Riots waited around every street corner.  People disappeared without warning amid tearful rumours that the Huntsmen