Finding Gabriel
an excerpt

Together, they walked. Two intrepid explorers exploring the great city mankind had built for itself, they journeyed onwards, and in doing so were watched by many hidden eyes, some watching sadly, some watching uncaringly, and some watching maliciously.
One such pair of eyes belonged to a boy Lucy noticed following behind them. She said nothing to Mik, fearing his reaction, but instead she led him down a different road, trying to avoid the person who was following them. But no sooner had she thought that she’d lost him did she see his figure once again, looming through the darkness. No matter which way they turned, the person was always behind them, constantly following, watching.
Lucy realised they had to move quickly. She broke into a run, Mik following confused. Each step crunched noisily on broken plastic, fragments of concrete, litter strewn across the floor. Their pursuer was still following them, and she was quickly running out of options of where to hide.
Suddenly they were surrounded; figures rose from doorways and staircases and formed a tight ring around them. Mik screamed and leapt back in fear, but Lucy bought him to her side and pulled out a thick black tube from her pocket. Instantly fire erupted from it, roaring and red hot, and the people around them shrunk backwards away. The fire stopped and together they ran through the darkened streets, twisting this way and that, followed by indistinct figures, shouting, loud bangs until eventually they found themselves descending a staircase and were in a street below the street; there were no Dusk Creatures here; it was full of people wrapped in dirty cloths, huddling together in the dank, damp darkness. They couldn’t tell if they were still being followed but they carried on running, up onto ground level again, round several street corners until Lucy pulled Mik into a seemingly abandoned building.
As they ran towards the building, a sign flashed past. It read ‘Cryogenics Laboratory’ but Mik couldn’t read, and had no idea what that meant.
Darkness.
The fast, urgent breathing of the pair of them began to slow down to a normal pace. The air smelt musty, like some sort of mix of chemicals, and a chilly breeze ran through past them, making them shiver. Other noises became apparent; the whirr of generators still humming softly in the gloom, distant water bubbling. Soon, shapes appeared in the darkness; an old reception desk, on the point of collapse, an empty vase, a screen hanging off the wall. Lucy led the way through a pair of doors into another room.
The moment they entered, they were awestruck. The cavern they had entered was colossal. Aligned in a grid, which extended to the far reaches of the room and as far as they could see ahead of them, were hundred of clear plastic cylinders, sticking out from a tangle of machinery and feeding upwards into more machinery, which stretched upwards into the ceiling, high above them. In each cylinder was a dead person. The light which allowed them to see this was coming from below, and the people were suspended in clear ice, making them look like ghostly apparitions. They were all dressed in clothes which were also perfectly preserved; one old man had a large black coat billowing to the edges of his cylinder, another had a large square hat, which had slipped over the person’s dead eyes. They all had arms outstretched, their feet hung below them and they stood, like the army of the dead. All sorts of people were there; mostly old, who had obviously died of natural causes; many were younger, and sometimes you could see a head jutting out at the wrong angle, the symptoms of some terrible disease, or in some cases great cuts across their faces, or clothes which had been slashed to pieces. There was one body Lucy noticed which she failed to distinguish any head, or limbs.
“What are they?” asked Mik. Lucy realised at once that he was too young to understand what the word Cryogenics meant; she thought that all the laboratories had been closed years ago, after the collapse of the Governing Powers.
“They’re dead,” she explained, “in the past, rich people would bring their dead relatives here, and they would be frozen, in the hope that someone in the future would make them live again. It was a futile hope…”
Mik was staring at a young girl, not dissimilar from his sister, who had long, red hair and was wearing some sort of uniform, yet there was a large gash running right the way across her forehead in an arc, stretching from one ear to the other.
“I’m sure Gaby will be fine,” she assured Mik, “We’ll find her, and we’ll find Danny. But he’s old enough to look after himself. Let’s find somewhere to sleep.”
“Do you know who was following us?”
“No. I expect it was Calix though. Either he or the Professor; they’re the only ones who could have made those people surround us like that.”
As they walked past the unseeing eyes, expressionless faces and cold, dead limbs, Lucy felt sad that these people thought that they could cheat death, and had committed themselves to be displayed here like some freak show. Although perhaps sometime scientists would work out how to reawaken these people, once the war was over -
A figure rose, grinning madly at them, from the darkness ahead, and Lucy’s cries were lost to Mik as she ran away and he recognised the man instantly - the Professor, the person who had taken Lucy away before, and Mik found himself running, no idea which way Lucy had gone; the dead flashing past him in a mad scramble to get away. Then he was bursting outwards into the street and he couldn’t stop running; the Dusk Creatures scattered from the noise he had made, he ran into the night, so that the darkness itself would not be able to catch him.
He passed corpses in the street, ripped bare by the Dusk Creatures, dilapidated Pods long since crashed at the roadside, makeshift shelter, families fleeing, feral cats, collapsed buildings, signposts, people, creatures, death, all around him, but still he ran, as fast as he could, his breath thundering through his lungs and his heart thudding through his chest.
Then he hit something head on and the darkness caught up with him.