Later, after night had fallen, the old man hobbled back out to the scrubland and to the black silhouette of the abandoned St Cannerwells London Underground station entrance. He knew there were kids out here, kids with sticks and knives, but he didn’t worry. He’d been around a while, and it took skill and guile to live to his age these days. He’d made it with cunning and the potency of the weapons in his own pocket, a switch knife, an electric stunner, and a small pistol. The last had been a nightmare to procure on the black market, and he had less than ten bullets for it.
He’d used just one, long ago, and a kid was dead because of it. Now, no one who knew his name bothered him anymore.
As he reached the partially broken in entrance he set down the wheelbarrow he was pushing. His back ached with the strain, but the old man wasn’t nearly as weak as he looked. The stoop and the stick, the signs of weakness, were another mask he wore.
It took him about twenty minutes to mix up the cement with a small trowel, stirring it into a thick, sludgy texture that should hold the bricks back in place.
He remembered the trains, the days when a few thousand people passed through St Cannerwells every day. Maybe the boy was right, maybe the trains still ran. The old man figured the boy probably knew by now. But in the meantime, this was a tomb, a tomb for a past age when the world was free and there weren’t restrictions on where you could go or what you could watch on TV. When gangs of jobless kids didn’t roam the streets like feral dogs feasting on whatever they could find.
You should never open up a tomb. If you did, you had to be brave enough to face whatever you found inside, and lucky you if it turned out to be some sort of revelation. But you had to understand that once you were inside, there was no turning back.
‘Goodbye, boy, and good luck,’ the old man muttered, as he slapped down the first trowel load of cement, and put the first brick back in place.
END
Going Underground is taken from the collection Ms Ito’s Bird & Other Stories, available now.
Please continue reading for a sample of the novel, The Tube Riders, a novel
based in part on the world created in Going Underground.