MetaWars: Fight For The Future

Chapter 9

Jonah knew he had made a big mistake.

The streets around the bus-burb looked different in the daytime, alien. The sun exposed all the grime and the litter, the graffiti and the broken windows.

It was crowded out here too, with rickshaws, bikes and other bladers, all stuck at ground level, jostling each other for the limited space available.

He hadn’t been outside in the daylight for two years. Jonah had forgotten how daunting these streets could be, outside of curfew hours.

On the plus side, the crowd would hide him from his pursuers, the motorbike men. However, it also slowed him to a maddening crawl.

And what if there were more assassins waiting out here?

Jonah suspected everyone who came towards him, everyone who bumped his elbows as they skated by. He was accosted by beggars, who saw that his clothes were finer than their own rags – and, though he told them he had no money, he feared they wouldn’t believe him. Jonah had heard dreadful stories about people slaughtered for handfuls of loose change, enough for their attackers to get online for an hour or two.

He heard a motorbike engine. It sounded close.

His pursuers must have split up to search for him. Jonah imagined them pushing towards him, flattening anyone who couldn’t get out of their way. He couldn’t let them see him. He knew he would have no hope of escaping them again.

He saw a green plastic skip by the side of the road. A recycling machine. As high as Jonah’s chest. He didn’t stop to think about it.

He hauled himself up over the lip of the green container, dropped into a mound of paper, tin cans, broken bottles and something cold and slimy that he didn’t want to think about. He buried himself as best he could. Then he lay still and listened to the harsh rasp of his own breathing and his heart hammering in his chest.

And to one other sound: the growling of a motorbike engine, approaching.

The motorbike came closer, ever closer. It seemed to be right beside Jonah’s head now, and to have stopped there. He held his breath, thinking about all the people – the scores of people – who had seen him getting into the skip, the strangers who could betray him. It seemed like minutes – long, terrifying minutes – before the motorbike moved on at last, and finally the sound of it had faded.

Jonah lay where he was for a good while longer, anyway. He couldn’t make his muscles move, couldn’t face what was waiting for him outside his hiding place.

He couldn’t go back home. What if there was someone waiting for him there? Anyway, Jonah’s bus was a massacre scene now. He couldn’t ever go back. And nor could his mum. He had to tell her what had happened.

He only wished he understood it himself. Somehow, he felt responsible. Was it only a coincidence that his bus had been attacked after Jonah had filtered his dad’s avatar? Was it his fault that the Collinses had died?

He heard an ominous thunk, followed by the whirl of a motor, and the rubbish around him shifted. Jonah realised, almost too late, that the recycling machine had activated itself. He scrambled out of it, before he could be drawn down into its blades and mulched.

He had no choice now. He couldn’t keep hiding.

Keeping his head down, looking up only when he had to, Jonah headed north-east. He weaved through the crowds, gaining in confidence as he started to remember what this world was like. He passed the Tate Modern power plant, where London’s waste was burned to generate electricity. He skated over the Millennium Bridge, and blagged his way past the St Paul’s checkpoint.