London no longer looked like a city.
Only shattered buildings, broken shopfronts, and black skeletons of trees rising through layers of dirty ice.
Harvey adjusted the rifle against his shoulder and kept walking through the frozen ruins beside Cole Maddox, the scarred soldier Stewart had sent with him toward Bank Station.
The wind carried radioactive ash across the remains of Greenwich Peninsula. Above them, the torn dome of the old O2 Arena stood like the carcass of something enormous that had died years ago and never fully collapsed.
Neither of them spoke much. In the world beneath London, silence had become another survival instinct.
Somewhere in the distance, metal groaned beneath the frost.
Harvey tightened his grip on the weapon.
“We’re close,” Cole muttered through the gas mask.
Then they saw the tracks in the snow.
Three separate trails. Too heavy for humans. Too controlled for animals.
Harvey crouched slowly beside one of them. Four narrow extensions spread outward from the center like elongated claws pressed deep into the frozen ground.
Cole removed a shock grenade from his belt without taking his eyes off the ruins ahead.
“Don’t fire unless we have to.”
The tunnel entrance ahead breathed cold mist into the open air.
Something moved inside.
A creature crawled out first on four distorted limbs, its pale translucent skin stretched tightly over thin bones. Behind it came three more shapes, silent, watching.
They did not attack.
They only stared.
And then, without warning, they disappeared back into the snow and fog, leaving Harvey with the same terrible thought echoing inside his mind:
They saw us.
And they chose to let us live.
Inspired by The London Tube, a growing post apocalyptic universe beneath the ruins of London.
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