by Andy Graham
A BROTHER’S SECRET
The Misrule: Book One
Andy Graham
Contents
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A Note About This Edition
A Map (of sorts)
1. Ray Franklin's Monster
2. Hallowtide
3. The Ward
4. An Incentive
5. Left
6. The Kickshaw
7. Playground Economics
8. Tattoos
9. X517
10. White Plague
11. The Bits in the Middle
12. Captain Electric
13. Vulnerable Old People
14. Cats, Dogs & Buckets
15. Naive & Bitter
16. Everyone Should Lift
17. The Sit-in
18. Back Doors & Buckles
19. Head. Heart. Hand.
20. The Pregnancy Directive
21. The Angel City
22. A Fisher Gull & Four Horsemen
23. The Dawn Rock
24. The Disease Dog
25. Enough
26. The Northbridge
27. An Annoying Buzz
28. Greenfields
29. The Spokesperson
30. The Angel Nation
31. An Ambulance
32. A Farewell
33. Substation Two
34. Donarth Taille
35. Gwenium
36. A Subterranean Sun
37. Noise, Noise, Noise
38. A Coin
39. Good News for Some
40. The Watchfires
41. A Cowboy Hat & a Code
42. Left or Right
43. Ancestors
44. An Old Friend & a Dumb Waiter
45. Reza
46. Phoebus Donohue & Coincidence
47. Stella
48. An Unexpected Visitor
49. A Wooden Chair
50. The Wind at a Window
51. You Are a Hypocrite
52. You Know Me?
53. A Folly Tree & a Field-Marshal
54. Genes & Diseases
55. A Question
56. Finding Rhys
57. The Dead Could Wait
58. Epilogue
A Mother’s Unreason
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Reviews
Also by the Author
Contact
The Cast of This Book
Acknowledgements
Copyright and Disclaimer
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A Note About This Edition
This book was first published as Franklin: A Brother in Search of Himself. (The Lords of Misrule: Book Two)
This 2018 edition has been re-edited and re-covered. Some of the places within the series have been renamed.
The story remains the same: a brother in search of himself.
A Map (of sorts)
In place of a real map, which rarely show up well in eBooks, this ‘written map’ should help you imagine where and when this story takes place.
Fifty years from now, a second moon is ripped into the orbit of planet Earth. The tidal upheaval drowns much of the world. Once the waters retreat, the survivors emerge to find that most of what they knew has been lost. Humanity is reset to a technological year zero.
Post-Flood, as humanity scrabbles to re-establish itself, the still partly-submerged country of England (UK) is renamed Brettia. At an unspecified time before The Misrule starts, Brettia becomes Ailan.
Approximately two thousand years after the Great Flood, and twenty-eight years after the epilogue to A Father’s Choice (the prequel novel to The Misrule), we find ourselves in this story.
A large part of the action is based in the triangle formed by London, Oxford and Cambridge – now known as Effrea, Axeford and Camp X517.
Ailan’s territory has spread west, taking a chunk out of its neighbour Mennai (Wales). After centuries of shifting fortunes, Ailan is dominant and Mennai exists as a form of protectorate.
The Donian Mountains (the Snowdonian National Park with a few extra crags and folds and mines thrown in for the sake of the story) straddle the border between the two countries. A race of people from the Middle East fled there for safety just before the Flood hit. A combination of the harsh conditions and being caught between the Ailan-Mennai feuding, have led to the Donian people developing a proud, warlike tradition in order to survive.
This is a familiar future: the infrastructure and vehicles are similar to what we have now, as are the weapons and medicine. Fragments of pre-Flood history survive, along with some traditions and technology. There are also differences. Religion has been banned, at least officially. Science is in the ascendant. Government control is ubiquitous.
Most human traits remain, however, both those we aspire to and those we succumb to. This story is built around two of those timeless needs: love and power.
1
Ray Franklin's Monster
‘There are no monsters but those we make of ourselves. Whatever you are told to believe or do, remember that and own your consequences.’ They were the last words Rose Franklin said to her son on the day he signed up. He’d been sixteen years old, chasing glory and brotherhood. Twelve years later, with the dreams long gone, Ray still couldn’t get his mother’s voice out of his head. That needled him. Next he’d be hearing her telling him to stop slouching. He did. But only to adjust the sight on his rifle.
Far above him, clouds billowed out of huge chimneys. An occasional gust of wind sent tendrils of smoke into the night sky. The identical structures were tightly packed in this area of the power plant. Each was topped by semi-circles of flashing red lights that lit up the underbellies of the clouds. All but this one. The lights blowing was a bonus. Ray’s team had ruled out doing it deliberately as too obvious a decoy but he’d take whatever edge he could.
Two figures emerged out of a smog that churned and pulsed crimson as if it were alive. One of the figures pulled a box across the rickety walkways that connected the tower tops. The other clutched a weapon that was probably older than Ray. He sandwiched himself between a pair of steel pipes that snaked through the compound, hoping he wouldn’t be seen.
“‘Hope’s cheap, right? Until you end up indebted to it.’” That was another of his mother’s sayings. He wasn’t sure whether thinking about her when he was one bullet away from his own wooden-box-for-one was healthy or not. Would Rose even turn up to his funeral? She had missed so much of his life, why should his death be any different?
“Stop. Focus,” he muttered and crept along the wall, tracking the men above him. The sweat trickling down his back itched. Just like the growing sense of discomfort. Ray had a gnawing doubt his unit had missed something and were about to walk into another top secret cock-up. He could still hear Sub-Corporal Orr joking about it in his odd border accent. ‘What could possibly go wrong with no prep time and weapons we’ve never used before, when sabotaging shit in the heart of territory that belongs to people we’re technically friends with?’
The irritable bastard had a point, Ray conceded, though none of the squad had wanted to hear it. He shifted to get a better view of the men above him and knelt in a pile of mottled leaves. The damp, earthy smell of autumn wafted through the air. They’d be celebrating Hallowtide back in the Free Towns tonight. It’d been one of his favourite festivals when he was a child: the fire, the dressing up, the stories, sneaking drinks off the adults’ tables. Then every year Stann Taille drank too much and decided to man up his young grandson with his stories. There would come a tipping point in every celebratio
n when the spiteful old soak would stop trying to make his put-downs clever and settle on making them obnoxious.
“Focus,” Ray hissed. The bitter old man wasn’t his problem tonight, and the bonfire the 10th Legion were planning here would be a good enough celebration of his own.
A clanking noise. A shout of annoyance. The itch running down Ray’s spine disappeared. The two figures, one repairing, one guarding, had reached the faulty lights. The faint sounds of their conversation filtered to the ground. Ray looked away, not wanting to get stung in the same way he hoped the patrol was about to be.
The rim lights flashed on. A burst of light scudded across the cloud. Ray uncoiled and sprinted across the floor in a half-crouch. Skidding as he rounded the next chimney, he crashed into a bulky figure.
“Bastard. Who the—” There was a mad scramble that was bitten off as quickly as it started. “Franklin? The fuck, dude?” The other legionnaire lowered his weapon.
“It’s me, Nasc,” Ray said.
“Worked that out, thanks. Who d’you think I was? The Grim Reaper?”
“That camo paint makes you look more like the Dim Reaper.”
Nascimento thumped the body armour on his chest. “Too dumb to die.”
Jamerson ‘Nasty’ Nascimento (and no one used that nickname to his face unless they really did fancy meeting both the Dim and Grim Reapers) claimed to have ‘the dubious distinction of being one of Ray’s closest friends’. The other, Ernest Hamid, was leading the second prong of this attack. The trio had first met in EBT, the Extended Basic Training, required to move up to the 10th Legion. On day one, class one, Nasc had set the tone by playing dumb. His aim? To get their curvaceous instructor
(“Woman got so much goodness oozing out of her itty-bitty uniform I could drown happy in her.”)
to lean over his desk for every question on his test paper. When she had finally realised what was going on, the class had earned forty-five minutes of up-downs in full-kit as payback, one for each minute she’d had to ‘look at Nascimento’s overly-muscled face’. The drill sergeant had then tagged another forty-five up-downs onto the punishment just because he could.
“You do look like you have an overly-muscled face in this light,” Ray said. The red gloom reflecting from the clouds was twisting the black and green streaks on Nasicmento’s skin into demonic lines.
“Dude, it was ‘oddly-muscled’, not ‘overly’.” He pointed at another chimney. “A7. Let’s move.” Nascimento took a step into the darkness, boots crunching in the dirt.
Ray checked the power pack on his new weapon.
“You not coming?” Nascimento asked.
“I outrank you now, Sub-Corporal. Remember?”
“No idea how that happened.” Nascimento clipped his helmet in a mock salute. “Sub-Corporal Jamerson Nascimento, sir. Requesting permission to get a move on, sir. If you don’t mind awfully, please, sir. Hey! Wait—”
They sped in silent shuttles from one tower to the next, dodging patrol lights and ducking under pipes until they reached a low building on the edge of the main power plant. Ray pulled a card out of his belt pouch. “You ever wondered why they have lights on these towers anyway?”
“You been doing thinking again?” Nascimento was on one knee, scanning the area with his rifle sight.
“This is a no-fly zone. Why have warning lights at the tops of tall chimneys if you’re not allowed to fly over them?”
“Maintenance? Aesthetics? Makework? Gonna get a move on or ponder some more?”
A thin groove ran around the inside of the door frame. Ray had one glove off and was trailing the tip of his forefinger along it.
“Come on, Franklin.”
“Got it.” Ray reached up with the card. This was when they would find out how good their source was.
An explosion sent them spinning. Nascimento thudded to the floor. He rolled to his knees, cradling his head in his hands. Ray fought the dizziness as he struggled to his feet. “You good?” he yelled over the sirens.
Nascimento gave him the thumbs up.
Everything had been going too well. The outer doors had opened with no problem. The inside of the building had been deserted. The legionnaires had done what they were here to do — laid the charges. They’d been on their way out and the explosion they’d rigged had hit too soon. Now the corridors were washed in light from the alarms and swirling with dust. It made no sense. The gear was new. It had been checked but the explosion had almost killed them.
Ray staggered to the remains of the door. The chamber in front of them was huge, as deep as the chimneys it fed were tall. The web of walkways, ladders, stairs and slide poles that spread throughout it were lit red and amber. Churning flames licked at the base of the central column stretching from floor to roof. The technological totem pole was the heart of the Mennai power plant the legionnaires were here to destroy. The lower levels were dominated by a stygian rainbow carved into chunks by metal bands. The higher ones held rank upon rank of control panels, all interlinked by thousands of cables.
Ray whipped his head back as a secondary blast sent flames rolling across the ceiling. Wasp-like fragments of metal fizzed across the chamber. The main door had shielded the friends from the worst of the first explosion, but they were unlikely to survive another one.
“That wasn’t ours, was it?” yelled Nascimento, shielding his eyes as sparks rained down.
Ray shook his head. The ringing in his ears cranked up to a higher pitch. Through the shimmering air, he could just about make out the small grey cube plugged into the column. “It’s not connected right. It should’ve popped by now.”
Another explosion rattled the walkway under his feet. Ray sprinted towards the nearest set of steps, the gangway creaking underfoot. The metal swayed as he eased forwards. A bolt on the wall shifted. Ray froze. The steel held. Below them, a cauldron of fire raged. Jagged forks of multicoloured lightning darted upwards. Something clipped Ray’s hand and the bolt bounced off the walkway.
“Watch out!” Nascimento yelled.
The metal under Ray’s feet groaned as a second fastening burst free in a cloud of stone splinters. “Shit. No.” Ray back-pedalled, clawing at the walls. His hands slid off the stone as the metal disappeared from under his feet. He seemed to hang there for an age, weightless, then he was falling towards the flames, his own wordless cry of anger and fear shrill in his ears. His neck cracked backwards. His fall stopped. Ray stared at the red chaos below his feet, at the walls either side of him, at the soles of Nascimento’s boots on the twisted walkway above him.
“Not. Going. Nowhere,” the big man grunted. One hand was clamped around the rough material of Ray’s backpack, the other clung onto a metal slide pole that bent and warped in the heat. The veins on his neck strained as he drove his body upwards. Bit by bit, he dragged Ray back up onto the walkway. Both legionnaires collapsed, Nascimento working his fingers, Ray sucking in mouthfuls of the burned air. Around them the roar of the fire got louder. A double crack of blue-green lightning skewered the ceiling.
Nascimento nudged him. A black-garbed figure was picking its way across the remains of a steel walkway that circled the central column, inching towards the grey cube. “What’s he doing?” Nascimento yelled.
“Our job. Leave nothing behind, remember?”
The legionnaire, Hamid, had a cord looped around his arm. Another legionnaire held the opposite end, body braced between the walls of a corridor leading onto the walkway and freedom. Hamid’s gear was there, too. His pack was stacked straps up, facing away from the wall, rifle ready to run with. His meticulous attention to detail had earned him various nicknames amongst the Rivermen, the 10th Legion. Some of those names were almost complimentary.
Hamid stretched for the cube and the cables. Three went in smoothly but he couldn’t get the leverage to push in the last. He tightened the cord around his arm, leant out farther. The toes of his boots curled round the metal edges. The second legionnaire pulled back, feet slipping as the rope taute
ned. Somehow, Hamid tapped the last cable into the socket with the tips of his fingernails. Sparks shot out of the cube. Cables burnt out like gunpowder trails. The computer bank the cube was plugged into shuddered. Lights flickered on and off as smoke seeped out of sockets. Hamid wrenched the device out and thrust it into a belt pouch.
“Always trust earnest Ernest!” Ray clapped his friend on the shoulder and, for a moment, the turmoil raging around the legionnaires paused. The flames below sucked in on themselves, as if draining through a plug hole. Nascimento’s answering smile vanished as a hail of rivets clattered off his helmet. One of the huge joists above them screamed and twisted along its length. Bricks and dust rained down into the gathering inferno at the base of the chamber.