The Change 3: Paris Read online

  Published 2017 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-096-4

  Copyright © 2017 Guy Adams

  Cover art by Pye Parr

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  FIRST: DARKNESS. THE rustling of things unseen in the aisles, the creak of ancient seats and ancient bones.

  Then a single spotlight falls onto the stage finding a thin young man, his dreadlocked hair glistening in the dust-filled beam of light.

  For a moment he looks hesitant. He’s reluctant to be here of course, aren’t they all? Then, accepting, he begins to speak.

  ‘You want to know?’ he says. ‘You want to know what brought me here? About the world outside?’ He stares into the darkness and his hooded, tired eyes are filled with anger. ‘Fine, then I’ll tell you.’

  Chapter One

  ‘WHERE WERE YOU when it happened?’ That’s what everyone always wants to know. That’s the question everybody asks. Where was I? Where I always was, beneath the ground and beneath your attention.

  I’ve been living on the streets four years, since my twelfth birthday. No, you do not get to ask why (or, at least, you don’t get an answer, I suppose I can’t stop you asking). You just have to understand, I came here because it was all I could do. It is all any of us could do, that is why we’re here, living in the airless bubble of your indifference.

  People look at the homeless as if they are expressing a choice. They think we could be elsewhere. They think we brought it on ourselves. I suppose some played a part, their addictions, their illness, robbing them of better alternatives. But even then… Do you ask a crippled man why he doesn’t walk? Nobody lives out there because they want to. Whatever brought them here: fear, illness, addiction, poverty—it was something they couldn’t control. If you could control your life you wouldn’t guide it out into the cold and the dark. You would aim for the sun.

  It doesn’t matter. You’ll think what you want to think. Even now when we’re all the same, adrift in a world that hates us. Living side-by-side with the dead.

  Of course, this is not new. Paris has always co-existed with the dead. Beneath the streets, beneath the tunnels of the Metro, are kilometres of catacombs that hold the bones of the forgotten. In the old days, when people cared, they tried to keep you out. There were policemen, catching people who thought it was exciting to climb down from their world above. Sometimes they were caught, sometimes they weren’t. They were not as clever as we were. They were tourists in the underworld. We knew how to hide, how to turn the blindness of the authorities to our advantage. To most people we were dead anyway, why not live in a necropolis?

  Now, some of the bones move again. They are not dangerous. They mean no harm. They just sit in the shadows and stare out of empty eye sockets. Sometimes they shake. Nobody really knows why. The tongues that could have told us have rotted away. I think I know. I think they are crying, or coming as close to it as they can without their eyes. I think they are remembering what they once were.

  There is no point in this. People think the past is where you were safe, I think it’s the most dangerous place of all. It can hurt you more than the future.

  If any of us really have one.

  There are more of us living there since The Change. Once people realised the dead were no danger, the tunnels seemed a safer bet than the streets. It’s just as well there is plenty of space.

  Not all the new visitors were welcome. Some tried to bring their old rules, their old sense of superiority. They thought they were still better than us. They thought their money and their expensive clothes meant something. We showed them that wasn’t true.

  The rest have fitted in. They have learned the skills they need to survive. They have become builders, hunters, medics, guards. Some, like Adrien, have become friends.

  I need to tell you about Adrien.

  Adrien should not have survived. Sometimes, when things are hard, when we are under attack from the things that prey on us down there—safer it may be but that doesn’t mean we don’t have our fair share of threats, nowhere is completely safe anymore—I see the panic in his eyes and I wonder if maybe it wouldn’t have been easier for him if he’d been with his parents that morning. All of them could have looked up into the sky, seen the things that appeared there and broke the world. If he had seen them, as so many did, he would have died like all the rest. It would have been quick, it would have spared him from the world they left behind.

  But Adrien was not with his parents. He was in bed. He was asleep.

  Adrien was spared a quick death by a virus.

  Adrien missed the end of one world and the birth of another.

  I found him during one of my food runs. He’d been hiding on a shelf in the supermarket, surrounded by half-eaten food and wrapped in a packing blanket. Adrien is ten years old and I should have left him where I found him. Instead, I brought him back with me. I made him my problem. I have done my best to keep him alive ever since.

  I should have known it was impossible. I was bound to let him down sooner or later.

  On the day that brought me here, that tore me from the safety of the tunnels and facing you now, I failed him.

  Chapter Two

  I TOLD YOU there were things that preyed on us in the tunnels. Creatures from above, looking for food. The purple worms that push themselves up through the earth, needing somewhere warm to plant their eggs. The Vampire Shadows that fall across you and drink you dry. Then, of course, The Impressionists.

  They appeared a few months ago, hunting in small packs. From a distance, or in silhouette, they look human enough but when you get close you see them for what they really are. Their skin glistens and moves, their bodies ripple. Wherever they go they leave stains, their fingers daubing the tunnels as they feel their way in the dark. They’re solid when they want to be, liquid when they don’t. They flood over you and suffocate you. The Impressionists, as mad as it sounds, are made entirely from paint.

  They have attacked four times now. Leaving drowned victims behind, faces covered in rich colours. They kidnap people, choke them unconscious and carry them away.

  After the second attack, a small group followed them, wanting to find out where they came from. We never saw them again.

  I always told Adrien that the most important thing to do if he ever saw The Impressionists was to run. Kids never listen do they?

  Chapter Three

  ‘I’M HUNGRY.’

  ‘We’re all hungry, Adrien. I’ll try and bring you something nice.’

  I was due to do another food run. The trips were taking us longer and longer as we were forced to move farther through a city that was already heavily raided. Adrien always asked to come, I always said no. It was dangerous enough out there without having to keep an eye on him too.

  ‘I know how to look after myself,’ he said, fidgeting with a small knife I’d given him.

  ‘That’s not a toy,’ I told him, sounding like every parent ever. ‘You’ll cut yourself. Get a disease.’ I snatched it off him, sheathed it and handed it back. ‘Put it away in your pocket.’
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  He did, in that exasperated way kids always do when you tell them off. ‘I’m careful,’ he said, ‘I haven’t cut myself yet have I?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted, ‘so keep it sheathed and in your pocket and let’s keep it that way.’

  ‘No point in having a knife if you never use it,’ he said, scratching at his straggly blonde hair. He had something irritating his scalp but I didn’t know what to do about it. I’d tried to find him some medicated shampoo but most of the chemists were empty and burned out these days.

  ‘You have it hoping you’ll never have to use it,’ I explained, ‘but keep it close in case you do.’

  He shrugged. He was feeling embarrassed now. Like a little kid trying to impress his older brother and failing. A miserable feeling. I tried to make it go away.

  ‘You don’t want to come with me anyway,’ I said, ‘not really. It’s boring. You’re better off here. I wouldn’t go if I didn’t have to. Tell you what, when I get back, we’ll go and play football in the tunnels alright?’

  He smiled. ‘Alright. I promise not to knock dead people’s heads off again.’

  He pretended to be sorry about that but I remembered how loudly he’d laughed when the ball went wild and an ancient cadaver lost a foot in height. I’d laughed too. There’s not much comedy in the world now, you take what you can get.

  ‘You’d better not. How would you like it if they pulled yours off, eh?’

  I pretended to do just that. He was almost happy again by the time I had to go. Almost.

  I left him with Paulette, who liked nothing better than fussing over the kids.

  ‘It’s all for them,’ she always said, ‘everything we do.’

  She’s always saying stuff like that. As if we’re building a future, not just staying alive day to day. I don’t see that the kids are going to have much of a world to grow up in but I keep my mouth shut; you soon recognise the people that fight to stay cheerful because the alternative is to go mad. You let them have their false happiness. After all, they’ve lost everything else.

  She ruffled Adrien’s hair—he hated it but, like me, knew she was doing it to make herself feel good, not him—and took him over to where the rest of the kids were trying to avoid boredom. We had power down here in the tunnels, thanks to the hard work from Gerard and his team, but it was easily overloaded and the use of it was controlled. The days of dumping your kids in front of games consoles were long gone.

  I met up with the rest of my crew in the Larder: Lucille, a woman with punk hair that always seemed to me to be trying too hard. It was as if she was scared of being boring so she used a lot of colour and hairspray to compensate. The result was a boring woman with weird hair. She could handle herself though, however dull her conversation, and was the best fighter of the group. Then there was Antonio, a quiet old man who spent a good deal of his time staring into space. I wondered what he was thinking about; his old life probably, just like the dead in their alcoves. He was our mapmaker and knew the tunnels better than any of us. The last of the team was Michel, who hummed tunes to himself constantly, afraid of silence. He wasn’t a popular member of the crew, when you were trying to pass through the streets without being spotted, the last thing you needed was a guy who never shut up. Besides, you spent more time trying to figure out what song he was humming than you did looking where you were going. One day I was going to get myself killed trying to remember the title of a Fadz tune. Michel was the only one of us who had any real potholing experience so we put up with him. Some of the tunnels were lethal and he’d saved our necks a few times, even if he had done it noisily.

  The Larder was Chloe’s world, she walked up and down the rows, watering and taking soil samples, adding dried nutrients and muttering to herself about the changes in humidity and temperature. It was generally agreed that Chloe preferred the company of her fungi to that of the rest of us. Michel had said as much to her face once.

  ‘Of course I do,’ she had replied, ‘the fungi gives, you take. I can’t survive down here feeding off you can I? At least, not for long…’

  Which was true enough and nobody held her attitude against her. Even if they had they’d have kept their mouths shut because without her we’d all have been even hungrier than we were. There were ten food crews like mine but Chloe provided more to eat these days than all of us combined. In the section of the catacombs that she’d made her own, she grew several species of mushroom that supplemented what we found on the streets. It was only a matter of time, she had argued, before we’d stop being able to find anything and, at that point, our only hope if we wanted to avoid cannibalism was that she could cultivate enough down here to fill our plates. Nobody enjoyed eating the stuff, but the alternative was worse so nobody moaned about Chloe.

  Her latest project was the installation of UV lamps so that she might widen the range of what could be grown. A year ago, nobody would have got excited about the prospect of a tomato or a lettuce, now people talked about them in revered tones. People used to get excited about gold or diamonds or oil; one day, I thought, wars will break out over salad ingredients.

  ‘Going out again?’ she asked. ‘A few more hours wandering the city for the sake of a few tins of beans?’

  The fact that our trips are what had brought her the UV lamps was forgotten, as far as she was concerned we were a symptom of the lazy “old ways”, a habit that needed to be broken. Didn’t stop her eating the chocolate we occasionally found.

  ‘I don’t know what Tomas does all day,’ Chloe continued, ‘considering how little the crews bring him.’

  Tomas was the man in charge of the stores. He catalogued everything the food crews brought in and handled its allocation. Whatever Chloe said, he was a busy man.

  ‘Any requests?’ asked Lucille, not rising to the bait.

  ‘Several more acres and a portable sun,’ Chloe replied, her attention wandering already as she checked the earth beneath her UV amps for sign of life.

  Michel raised an eyebrow but didn’t reply, just hummed a few bars of an old song.

  Chapter Four

  YOU WANT TO know how to find us? You think you can track us down? Good luck with that.

  There are over two hundred kilometres of tunnels beneath the city. Some of them are flooded. Some of them lead nowhere. The access points are often so narrow you have to force yourself through with someone pulling your hands or pushing your feet. Without a guide, you’re likely to end up trapped down there. You’ll starve or drown. Please, try and come and find us, it’s a great way of getting rid of you.

  We probably haven’t mapped a third of it. Antonio takes notes, makes sketches, builds coded signs; he’s getting there but who knows if he’ll survive long enough to finish the job?

  Even if some of the tunnels are new to us, there are traces of people who’ve been there before. People have explored there for years. They painted on the walls, built shrines, sculptures, marked their way with graffiti and piles of trash. Humans mark their territory like dogs, pissing their tags from aerosol cans. Humans will live in anything given the right circumstances. It used to be a playground, now it’s a new city. Our city.

  We do most of our travelling beneath the ground, coming up into the light only when we’re where we want to be. It’s safer that way and we’ve become more comfortable underground. People adapt quickly. We’re at home in the dark. We make trips a couple of times a week but every time we step out into the air it takes us a few minutes to acclimatise. That’s the dangerous time, the time we’re really vulnerable. It’s not just the light, though the sunglasses only cut down some of it, it’s also the open space. Every time I climb up out of a manhole or a Metro entrance, I feel a sense of sickness, of the world being too damn big. A sky that goes on forever. It’s cold in the tunnels but the chill the wind brings is different, like being breathed on by God. I used to like sitting in the sun, walking in the Luxembourg Gardens, now I hate it. It’s too exposed, too bright, there’s just too much air.

  Once w
e’ve got used to it we keep to the sides of the buildings, use the cars for cover. It’s not just the creatures you have to worry about, it’s the people who stayed above. Everyone’s a monster these days.

  So many of the shops have been raided. You’re better off searching the buildings. We find most of our stuff in apartments—tins and dried food left in cupboards. Sometimes there are still people living there in which case we steer clear. Partly because, well, who are we to mess with someone else’s belongings? We hadn’t got to the point where we were stealing from others. Not yet. The other reason was basic self-preservation. We were once attacked by a family of cannibals in a flat on Saint-Germaine. They’d sharpened their teeth with nail files and the place stank of meat and shit. We only survived because Lucille puts in as much time with a bow and arrow as she does with her hair. Once mummy was skewered, the kids were quick to run.

  That trip, pickings were even worse than usual. Over three hours moving from building to building and all we’d found was a box of vacuum-packed bread rolls and several tins of soup.

  Finally, Antonio rescued the trip by stumbling on a couple of sealed packets of coffee. It wouldn’t go far but at least Tomas would be walking around with a smile on his face for a couple of days.

  We made our way back to the closest tunnel access-point.

  Just around the corner from the manhole that would lead us back home, we heard the sound of breaking glass and took cover in the entranceway of a shop. We fought when we had to but only an idiot seeks out opportunities to die.

  We heard something large making its way along the road. Heavy feet crunching debris as it came in our direction. Its reflection appeared in the windows across the street: a rhinoceros, its head swinging from side to side as it searched for food.