The Beauty of Destruction by Gavin G. Smith

long-lived as he was, but he was going to miss the Range Rover. Absurdly he found himself worrying if Alexia had damaged his Vincent Black Shadow. He was worried about his brother … his sister. Despite her augmentations she was not ready for a situation like this. Nobody really was.
    The roads into London, however, were just too jammed with wreckage. Much of the Heathrow area, and indeed the westernmost parts of London, was on fire from what must have been a rain of falling planes.
    From raised ground they had caught sight of the M25. It had become one big bumper-to-bumper traffic jam interspersed with huge piles of wreckage. Some of the road was burning and the drivers seemed to have formed tribes and were battling each other across the roofs and bonnets of their now-abandoned cars.
    Du Bois had parked the Range Rover in a back street just off the A30 by a Kawasaki dealership. He had taught Beth how to smear her blood onto her clothes. The nanites in her blood used the matter in her clothes to replicate themselves. Her clothes looked the same but, like his, would harden when they were hit and distribute the kinetic energy of blows and bullets. He provided her with some simple webbing that could carry ammunition for the Heckler & Koch USP and the Benelli M1014. Then he shut and locked the concealed weapons locker and ordered it to destroy the remaining ammunition they couldn’t conveniently carry. Du Bois tossed an incendiary grenade into the Range Rover and walked away knowing that he had just started yet another fire.
    They walked in through the glassless windows of the bike dealer – it seemed people had got there before them. Du Bois smeared blood onto two of his keys and passed one to Beth.
    ‘I’d say I can’t ride a bike, but that’s not true any more, is it?’ Beth said, her boots crunching on broken glass. Du Bois glanced over at her. Beth was solidly built, quite heavily muscled. Her face was plain but not as unattractive as she seemed to think it was. He didn’t really approve of the Celtic-style tattoo creeping up her neck, though it matched the interlocking knotwork design painted on the back of her leather jacket. Her dirty, dark blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail. ‘Where are we going?’
    Du Bois reached one of the remaining bikes and straddled it. ‘We’re going to see the King of London,’ he muttered, unable to keep the distaste from his mouth. ‘We need transport.’ Beth just frowned. Blood changed the shape of the key as he slid it into the Enduro’s starter. The bike fired first time and he gunned the throttle.
    ‘You want to go to London? After what we just saw?’ she demanded.
    Du Bois said nothing.
    ‘Look, my father …’ she tried.
    He could see the guilt all over her face. There was no need to mask his own as the only bit of guilt he felt at having killed her father was the pain that it would inevitably cause her.
    ‘I think you should stick with me for the time being,’ he said. ‘But it’s up to you.’
    When he roared out of the showroom Beth was following.
     

    At one point on the ride into London they had found themselves on a deserted, sunken, dual carriageway. At the top of the grass banks on either side of the road a firestorm had raged. Ash rained down on them like snow and only their augmented bodies had enabled them to breathe. It was strangely beautiful. Du Bois had glanced behind him to see a look of wonder on Beth’s face.
    They had made their way through the city towards Kensington. They had seen a few people in the streets. Many of them had seemed lost and had little idea what to do. There was some sort of migration towards the centre, however, and every Tube station they had passed had been crammed with people. He had seen double decker buses lying on their sides but some of the underground trains still seemed to be moving and full. The streets were jammed with abandoned cars. Only a few of them had been wrecked, or burned, though the sky was full of