Chasing Imagination

Amy

The world was in slow motion as Casper hoisted me to my feet and we began to run. We charged away from the abbey and into the main street, looking all ways once we reached the junction.

He was still on the phone as we ran, refusing to break contact with Nightshade, but he put it on loudspeaker for us all to hear.

‘Where are you?’ he asked. ‘Where have they invaded from?’

‘Waterloo, Oxford Circus, St Pauls and Liverpool Street,’ she was saying, ‘though Liverpool Street is too far away. I think they may have even sent a few into Westminster; towards the Vaults—I was just calling to see if you’d seen them—‘

‘We just got out,’ said Casper grimly.

‘Oh good, good,’ Nightshade said, her voice irrationally calm, finally with a reason to be happy. ‘I have no idea if they’ve sent any Marauders anywhere. They’re all heading for Tottenham Court Road though, where we all are. I’ve brought everyone up here, only for us to be caught in a web.’

‘No,’ Casper insisted. ‘No, it’ll be fine. We’re coming to help you.’

‘No!’ Nightshade cried. ‘You can’t! It’s too dangerous.’ There was a pause on the other end, replaced by heavy breathing. ‘I’ve got to go now, Casper,’ she then said, ‘I’ll speak to you later.’

‘Call as soon as you know anything more,’ said Casper seriously. ‘Bye.’ He hung up.

‘What do we do?’ he asked, so much fear on his face that he looked more vulnerable than I’d ever seen him.

‘We’ve got to go underground,’ Linzy said.

‘We can’t!’ Dan cried. ‘It’s suicide.’

‘We have to.’ I found myself echoing Linzy’s bold statement. It was stupid, yes, but what else could we do? We couldn’t just leave them to fight alone.

Casper nodded slightly. ‘I agree. But we go in from a different angle.’

‘You’re insane,’ Leah insisted.

Casper glared at her. ‘You do what you like. But I’m going, and anyone who wishes to can follow me.’

She huffed, but followed as he headed across the road.

‘We go through St James Park station,’ he said, making decisions as we speed-walked. ‘It’s less dangerous. Going in near here would be too close to the same passage the police are taking.'

Adrenaline and horror pumped through me in equal amounts as we headed down the river towards the station. There were less people and fewer cars around now, but south bank and central London were still far from deserted. A cool wind whipped up the Thames, making the spring night considerably colder than it could have been.

We reached the subway, lit bright and greenish, and Casper let Leah take over; apparently she was the only one who had used this route before. She led us away from the main area, through an inconspicuous door and into another tunnel. The door had barely shut before she broke into a run, and we all followed suit, sprinting through the darkness, not stopping for anything. I thought I knew London well, but I had no idea where we were or where we were going.

Several things happened at once.

Gunshots rang out in the distance, far away still, but certainly not out of reach.

Casper’s phone began to ring.

Barely ten seconds after; before he had even finished saying ‘hello,’ so did mine.

I shrieked out loud—no one had called me since before I became a Dreamer. I wasn’t aware that anyone other than Casper even had my number.

‘Run,’ Dan hissed quietly. Linzy grabbed me and pulled me gently to follow her away from the gunshots, as I pressed the ‘accept’ button.

‘Hello?’ I said, my voice shaking.

‘Amy! It’s Imogen,’ came Imogen’s voice from the other end. She sounded panicked and my stomach gave an uncomfortable lurch. ‘I tried Casper, but he was engaged. Oh God, I think we’re trapped.’

I almost dropped the phone; my hands were shaking so violently.

‘Amy?’

‘Where?’ I whispered. ‘What happened?’

‘We were fighting Marauders,’ she said, ‘like we’ve been doing all night. It wasn’t going too badly. But then...then Nightshade phoned to say that we’d been detected, and the first wave of police has come, but it’s all we can do to fight them off, and more are due. Nightshade said she’ll send reinforcements, but I don’t believe anyone can get here in time.’

‘We’re coming,’ I said automatically. ‘I don’t know how, but we will. Casper will think of something.’

‘Thank—thank you,’ her voice was trembling even more than mine. It was hard to believe I’d ever considered her anything relating to the word ‘monstrous.’

‘We’ll be there soon,’ I assured her, hanging up.

Casper looked up with fear. ‘What was that?’

‘Imogen’s trapped,’ I said darkly. ‘They all are.’

‘She phoned you?’ Casper asked.

I nodded. ‘Who called you?’

‘Nightshade again,’ he said. ‘She was calling to tell us the same thing, about Imogen and Matt and all the others. She said they’re in Hammersmith—‘

‘Hammersmith?’ Leah retorted incredulously. ‘How are they over there?’

‘It’s where the Marauders are,’ Linzy said coolly. ‘Carry on, Casper.’

‘She said they’re in Hammersmith, and she wants us to go and find them and help them. Apparently they’re hopelessly outnumbered, but we’re near enough the only ones who can still get out of the underground. Everyone else in London is trapped one way or another. There’s a car not far from here—parked down a road just off the river.’

Linzy was running back the way we’d come before he had even finished. We all followed—I still hadn’t recovered from the last bout of running, but there was no time to lose. We charged up a set of steps, tripping in the dark, sprinting out into the subway and turning and running left, according to Casper’s direction. Two men were walking through the subway at the time, both shabbily but still ‘correctly’ dressed, and looked at us oddly. We must have looked a sight, but being picked up by the authorities was, essentially, the smallest worry right now. We’d been detected many times tonight; being seen by a few innocent civilians really wasn’t going to matter.

The cool night air blew across my skin, allowing me to breathe for the first time since entering the stuffy underground. The wind still drifted down the Thames, but there was no time to admire the sinister serenity of the city anymore. We were running out of time.

‘Down here!’ Casper cried, suddenly diverting left down a side street. I practically crashed into Linzy as she stopped abruptly to follow him, but managed not to fall as I sprinted round the tight corner after her.

Parked at the end was a shiny black car. It wasn’t especially conspicuous; cars were uniformly black or silver only these days, and all looked much the same, but there were always subtle differences between the sizes of the bonnet; the shape of the boot; the windows; the headlights...the government had more to worry about than these slightest of differences.

‘Get in!’ Casper ordered, jumping into the back. I practically dived in after him in my haste, scrambling into the middle seat as Dan climbed in after me, squashing me as he leant in to shut the door. Leah wasn’t even fully in the front passenger seat before Linzy began to reverse out of the parking space, her driving a little reckless. I realised that virtually none of the Kingston Dreamers seemed to have cars. How long was it since she had last driven? Maybe I should have volunteered.

Nevertheless, Linzy’s reckless driving was still the least of my worries tonight. As we charged out onto the main road, skidded round corners and sped up to incredible speeds to make it through the green traffic lights by a hair’s width, dying in a car crash scarcely crossed my mind.

I looked at Casper, who was looking out the window. Were we friends again? Were we allowed to pick up from where we left off two weeks ago, or was that too much to hope for?

Although there were minimal amounts of congestion at this time of night, we still had to stop and wait infuriatingly at every red light and give way as we were expected to, and it was a good twenty minutes later by the time we arrived in Hammersmith.

Linzy stopped the car precariously at the side of the road right outside the glass-fronted, well-lit station, and Casper grabbed me, pulling me out the car in his haste. I didn’t exactly protest; I was as eager and as terrified as he was.

We charged into the station, once again the quickest way to get into the underground, and dived through a door according to Casper. We didn’t stop running even for a moment, charging through tunnel after tunnel until it opened up into a large, wide room.

I stopped dead.

Gunshots. Screams.

A bloody body lay on the floor in here, the face pale but the eyes wide open and staring blankly into the ceiling. The hands were drenched in blood and had stiffened where they clutched at a wound to the stomach; a gunshot for sure. He was wearing a mask, which immediately suggested he was a Marauder.

‘We’re in the edges of their base now,’ Casper explained. ‘The Dreamer base officially ends a little further east of here, and west London belongs to the Marauders.’

I edged round the body—weirdly enough, I’d almost forgotten about the Marauders, despite the fact that it had been Matt’s group’s original intention to raid them. They weren’t our biggest fear tonight.

No. Our biggest fear was the thousands of police that were descending on our people.

This Marauder base initially looked much the same as the Dreamer one—concrete tunnels and yellowing tiles, dimly lit and untamed.

We continued to run through the tunnels, following the sound of guns despite the instinctive reaction being to run away.

I knew as soon as we had hit the warzone, and it was worse than I could have feared. A great hoard of police officers stood in a thick semicircle around a focal point in the room, their Taser guns all out. Our lot were crouched in the middle of this hoard, holding onto each other, packed in so tightly there was no room to breathe in the centre of the pack. The ground was littered with weapons that they had been forced to surrender, and there was terror in every pair of eyes as they looked at the police officers with dread at what was to become of them.

‘You will all come with us,’ one of the police at the head of the crowd was saying. ‘If you resist, you will be shot and brought along by force. Understand?’

That was when it dawned on me: they were planning on capturing every one of the fifteen or so people in this room. All of them were innocent; their only crimes were using their imagination, and all of them were my friends.

Three police officers stood in the doorway, making sure that, if anyone did break through the hoard, which alone would have been a miracle, they weren’t about to escape the room.

Casper saw to them.

With three gunshots, each of the three of them crumpled forwards.

Every face in the room turned to see us.