The light he’d been able to see by came from a grate high above the underground river, but it was a hundred feet above their heads. Even if they yelled blue murder, no passing citizen on the street above would hear them.
‘Can you move?’ He kept his voice low, although he thought the rushing water should be enough to cover it. The Thinkers had to get across the river.
Esme’s face was white, but she nodded. He pulled her to her feet and she staggered, putting the flat of her hand against the arching brick wall to steady herself, and he remembered she’d been knocked unconscious earlier that day. Him too, but he’d survived worse, and he had the bullet to prove it. This wasn’t Esme’s world, though.
North knew that the sewer they had jumped from wasn’t the only one pouring into the Fleet. What they needed was a tunnel this side of the river that would take them up towards the surface. Esme followed him as he edged along the side towards a patch of darkness, water gushing from it in a steady stream. It was another tunnel – a rat appeared, and then another and another, two of them making it on to dry land, one of them tumbling into the Fleet. Surely rats meant food, and food for rats meant people? It wasn’t much of a theory, but it was all he had. If he hadn’t lost all sense of direction, he thought they were under Farringdon. ‘Where do you think it goes?’ she said as they both stared into the darkness.
‘Somewhere that isn’t here,’ he said.
He pulled out his phone and pressed the torch icon. God bless whoever had designed a waterproof phone.
The water was lower, only knee-high and then dropping to shin-high, but the smell was getting worse the further they went.
Esme saw it first.
The fatberg was enormous. Blocking almost the whole tunnel, the rancid greyish lump of solidified fat and human waste, toilet paper, wet wipes and domestic garbage oozed brown and yellow in the torchlight. Esme made a retching noise in the back of her throat. ‘I would absolutely welcome an alligator eating me right now,’ she said.
North took a deep breath and then a running jump. He just about managed to keep his face clear of the worst of the fatberg as he slid down it, a repellent layer of grey grease crusting his shirt and trousers. He tried again. Failed. Failed again. He looked at Esme, who was watching in dismay. ‘There’s no way we’re getting past this. We have to go back,’ she said.
‘There is no going back.’ He took another step to generate more momentum on the way up. Plato and Nietzsche were former soldiers and they weren’t men to panic. He couldn’t take the chance that they hadn’t seen which tributary he and Esme had selected. They were coming for them.
He chiselled out a morsel of the fatberg with the toe of his left shoe, and stepped up into it, clinging desperately to the sloping surface with his hands. He lifted his other foot and dug in the toe of the other shoe. He couldn’t get much purchase, but it was enough. He said a grateful prayer to whichever corpse Plug had filched the shoes from. Reached upwards for a handhold in the mass, then another. Like climbing a mountain, he told himself, as a congealed lump came away in his hand. It was like no kind of mountain he was ever climbing again. From the top of the fatberg, he reached down to take Esme’s hand. She was already using the toeholds he’d created. He swung her up beside him and they scrambled on their hands and knees over the pitted top of the berg – the air up there so close and hot that the berg appeared to be melting – before half sliding, half crawling down the other side of it.
They had to be close to some sort of exit, he thought, because the light was getting brighter. He could see that the floor ahead of them appeared to be moving. He squinted to get a clearer view. At first he thought it had to be reflections catching the surface water, then he realized it was rats. Hundreds of rats, streaming towards them as if possessed, clambering on top of each other, biting and fighting in insane panic. He pulled Esme to one side, pressing her into the wall, protecting her with his body while the rats streaked past. He felt her catch her breath in the back of her throat as rats surrounded them, rushing between them and over her bare feet.
‘How gallant,’ he heard, as the last of the rats disappeared up and over the top of the fatberg. The Thinker, in drenched and greasy combat gear, stood ten feet away from them, his MP5 pointed directly at North. He must have made it over the berg while they were pressed against the wall avoiding the streaming rats. There was no sign of his colleague.
They had been so close, North thought. ‘Plato or Nietzsche?’ he asked the Thinker.
‘Plato.’ The Thinker’s tone was conversational, as if they were chatting over a pint. ‘Nietzsche said “God is dead”. Me? I keep an open mind.’
The light here was the brightest it had been. North glanced directly upwards, and saw a scrap of orange night sky through the bars of a grate. It was raining hard up in the real world, he realized. His face was wet from it. The threatened storm had broken. Suddenly the rats made sense, which meant they didn’t have long. Along the tunnel he could make out the rungs of a ladder climbing upwards to what he was guessing was a manhole cover. He moved to one side, making sure to keep Esme behind him, then stepped away from her.
‘The ladder,’ he said, over his shoulder.
She looked along the tunnel where the rats had come from. Back at Plato. Hesitated. She didn’t want to leave him.
‘Go now, Esme,’ North said, and moved towards the man in the mask.
The barrel of the gun followed him, as he thought it would. North was big and mean-looking and moving forwards. Altogether more dangerous than the exhausted woman in fluttering scraps of red silk slipping away from them. Plato had it all planned out – he would shoot North and then shoot the woman.
‘Why were you at the gala?’ North asked. Plato had no reason to give him an honest answer, but he wanted to keep the attention focused on him.
‘I heard there was a party,’ Plato said, raising the weapon as he ducked his head to line up the sights on North. And then it came, rounding the bend straight for them – the raging storm waters the rats had been fleeing. North leapt for the grate, his fingers bending and straining as his body lifted with the torrent of water, which had nowhere to go but to smash against the fatberg, to fill the small space at the top and to pour down the other side. The water reached as high as North’s neck, frothing and churning around him, and he kept his lips closed tight. It took minutes but it felt like hours before the water stopped coming and he allowed himself to drop from the grate. He stared at the ladder. Had Esme made it before the waters hit? Plato’s bent body lay slumped against the bottom of the fatberg, the MP5 still cradled in his arms, his eyes rolled back in his head and his face covered by a spreadeagled and equally drowned rat.
‘So gross.’ He heard the admiration in Fang’s voice before he turned round. Her face was hanging over the place where the manhole cover should be, her round eyes on the drenched fatberg. ‘I tracked your phone,’ she said in explanation, her Joe 90 spectacles dangling from one ear. ‘You reek. I mean – not enough Lynx in the world, mate.’
Below her, one hand on the last rung of the ladder, Esme stood in a pool of light. She was drenched, her teeth chattering, her skin blanched bone-white. ‘On the upside, not one alligator,’ he said.