Take Back The City - Part One of the 'Life in London Town' series

19 - Piccadilly Circus

Calm. Composed. Regimented. These are all words that could well be used to describe the exact antithesis of what ‘Operation Acre’ had become. The constricted, cylindrical space of the Piccadilly Circus ticket hall was so cramped that most of the fighting was now hand-to-misshapen-hand; whenever a shot was fired among the mass, it was almost certain to smack against a piece of bronzed marble or a roof light. The longer I glared into the abyss, the more the sulphurous glints in the yellow eyes warned me that our situation was bleak. They were expressionless creatures, the Faceless – hence the name – unless they had found a target they could overpower. Every so often, the lights of the hall would flicker off; when they did, only suspended balls remained to be seen, containing only tiny pinholes for pupils, and when the lights regained their life at least a dozen more bodies would be in the mound on the floor.

  The runners and the reinforcements were all safely located around a bend in the subway exit. Withdrawing my head from the corner from which I’d been watching the action, I addressed them. “We’re going to have to force our way in somehow,” I noted, stating the obvious but drawing a few nervous looks from the reinforcements. I hardly blamed them for their attitude, though; worry began to strike me in the pit of my stomach as I first gazed upon the gory scene down below, but I tried to keep my fear to myself. After all, I’d promised I would while I was underneath Eros. “I must admit,” I continued, “that I’ve got no idea how to get into the thick of it.”

  “You want to get in there!” called a heavily-accented North Londoner’s voice. “You’re mad!”

   “We have no choice,” I yelled back. “No. Choice.” I returned to spying around the corner. There was nothing much else to see that I hadn’t seen before. There hadn’t been some great upsurge from the Brigade operatives in the ticket hall, nor had all of the Faceless miraculously died. All I could see was, every so often, another one of our lads dropping to the floor, pale, wounded, dead.

   The floor.

   The thought hit me like a well-timed punch to the chest. My head shot back around the bend in the passageway and, within seconds, I had divulged my plan.

   “So,” called a voice from the back of the reinforcement group, “let me get this straight. You’re going to crawl into the ticket hall!”

   “Uh-huh,” I nodded. The more and more I thought about it, the stupider the plan sounded. I decided not to think so much in the future.

   “You are going to crawl along the floor.”

   “Have you got a better idea?” I asked angrily. “Okay, so it’s not a brilliant plan, but it’s the best plan we’ve got. I reckon I’m small enough to crawl between the bodies.”

    Cynical faces greeted me from the crowd.

    “Hmph,” I groaned. “I’ll radio you once I’m by the escalators.”

    And so, my hundred-foot long journey began. I tried to stick to the walls as best as I could, snaking my way along the tiles and freezing my body in place regularly to look as much like a corpse as possible, so as not to arouse suspicion. It was difficult to stay still. Every sense, every synapse and every muscle was revolting against me. They wanted to be somewhere else. Of course, I had all the sympathy in the world. I wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else, but I had to keep going. The stench of blood, sweat and mould punctured its way into my nostril; I kept going. The sound of screams and battle cries bounced off of every wall and crashed into my eardrum with earthquake tremors to accompany them; I kept going. Every so often I would shudder as I felt the squelch of assorted body fluids under my hand or leg, and lift it just an inch to find tiny offcuts of flesh squirming about on my skin. I felt the urge to yell out or cry but yet I kept going.