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

1 - A Devereux in Danger

 I really wish I could tell you that the tale of romance Peter and Carrie shared is the tale that you will read of in the coming pages, I really do. Unfortunately, the truth that you have to face, and the truth I have been forced to live with, is this: the year is two-thousand and sixteen, my parents – Carrie and Peter Devereux – haven’t seen or heard of me for three years and, worst of all, I’m trapped, styed, imprisoned in a London in the deathly grip of war. My name is Nox Devereux, and though once upon a time I was just a teenage girl trying to live as normal a life as any other, for the past three years – three long years, three years I hope to never relive as long as I live – I’ve been stuck in a very real, living, breathing, terrifying nightmare and as the real story - my story - begins, I find myself frantically crawling and scampering across the stairs below the piercing arrow of Eros, trying to escape from weapons used not to spread love, but death – haunting, chilling, petrifying death. I was stuck fast to the statue podium, able to do nothing more than duck nervously as bullet after bullet came rushing past my head, ricocheting off of the dark metal skin of Eros' podium as they flew, crying out the haunting wails of all the demented souls its ancestors had forced from the bodies of those people whom dared to stand against the line of fire over the yea...

PING!

It seems that there isn’t even time to make an emotional metaphor before dodging death these days. Oh, the times we live i...

PING!

 My head whipped around on its axis. Finally, I could see who had been shooting at me. There he stood, aloof, soulless, unlike any other man to have graced Coventry Street, eyes shining from the blackened streetscape like stars which had had all trace of romance or elegant beauty slashed from them, body hulking over the streets as a double decker would back in the place’s glory days. It tortured my delicate eyes just to look upon him, but I had no choice but to keep him in sight. The least I could do was to show him that I was intending to respond to his attacks.

PING!

It hadn’t worked. I scampered to the other side of the statue podium, shaking and almost frightened from my skin, panting with fear, panting with exhaustion, panting to stop screams being chucked from my chest.

“GET DOWNSTAIRS! RETREAT! BACK TO HOLBORN!”

My friends were fighting a battle against our foes - the Faceless, the monsters with whom this war was waged - below my feet. I couldn't see the battleground beneath my feet, but it was easy to hear that we had lost. I had been too preoccupied with saving my own backside to notice. My friends - well, the only people I knew any more - were on their last legs. They were dying. We were dying.  Everything we had been fighting for was fading away. Everything we had been fighting for was slowly being lost, retreating into the deathly, inanimate void to save itself from the inevitable for a few more precious seconds.

The undignified yells of grown men pierced the still, silent air of the Circus. It sounded like a complete bloodbath down there: dishonourable massacre for all whom had bravely tried to defend the marble halls of Piccadilly Circus Station from attack on this eerily quiet night. You could easily hear the desperate scramble over the ticket barriers which had been both friend and foe to us in battles over the years: tonight, it was incredibly obvious whose side they had taken. I almost cried for them, as I have a regrettable tendency to whenever I hear or see death, but thankfully stopped myself from doing so for fear of attack again – the man on Coventry Street was still there. A solitary tear dropped onto the photograph of Peter and Carrie, my young parents, swinging from Eros’ slender pillar, dispersing a little of the ink.

I looked up again, my train of thought broken by the sudden realisation that I was no longer being shot at. I glanced back around the podium of the statue. He was still there. He had hardly moved a step. The man – instantly recognisable as Faceless – had planted himself in the tarmac at the end of Coventry Street, feeding on the almost complete blackness of his surroundings and becoming one with the dark. He had a smirk on his face which constantly twitched from side to side, as if he was being pumped with a few thousand volts every second of every minute of every soulless day. It wasn’t the kind of smirk that a young child would give after getting away scot-free with a prank, rather the kind of haunting smirk that would fit the worst of villains, the kind who found joy in evil acts, the kind who tried to mask its lack of emotion and empathy behind a facial expression containing neither, containing only the foul sense of satisfaction it gained from staring down dead bodies it had stripped the life from - or in my case, was about to.