Ruin

by Harry Manners

  *

  The first thing he became aware of was his own screaming voice. The next was the agony, which had followed from the void. The spinning ceased with a jarring jolt, slamming his eighteen-year-old body against unseen ground with bone-crushing force.

  The darkness had been replaced by blinding light. Dense fog surrounded him on all sides, and above was a sky of midmorning baby-blue tones, complete with wispy tracts of stratocumulus.

  From every direction came an ear-splitting ring, pressing in on him with percussive force, a decibel short of perforating his eardrums. His jaw clenched hard enough to pop a filling free from a premolar. The tendons on his neck, arms and legs tensed to breaking point, drawing him into a ball upon freshly cut grass.

  He was shivering—no, quivering. It was cold enough for a layer of frost to have accrued on his body, puckering his skin and clinging to his hair in icy shards. Through double vision and barely opened eyes he could make out his own hands, gnarled and curled into claws akin to those produced by advanced arthritis.

  He was granted a small mercy then, a momentary lull—a split second during which the fabric of existence seemed to undulate, almost to pulse. The sky rippled with ribbons of impossible colours, auroras that dwarfed any that had ever been seen over the Earth’s poles. With those colours came intense sensation: the grass caressed his skin with a passion that surpassed that of the most dedicated lover’s.

  And then pain washed over him with renewed vigour, blanketing all else as the ringing reached an unbearable crescendo, driving him across the floor as though with a booted foot. An unbroken wail stormed from his throat, but he heard no trace of it. If the noise persisted he would go mad. He was certain of it.

  He wished for death, for peace. As he writhed and bellowed upon the grass, the sky lost its ribbons of absurd colours, and the screech intensified a final time. A small part of him registered a sudden, crushing absence in the world, and he realised with horror that the screech was not artificial, not alien or cold-minded, but the product of billions of screams no different from his own.

  This was the last moment, the brink of insanity. He was at an end—

  …

  …

  Silence.

  The world was still, without pain. Warmth kissed his skin.

  Alex blinked.

  High above, the sky was blue—just blue. His hands fell from ears accosted by nothing but the chirps of a distant chaffinch. The frosty glaze upon his skin was gone. He was dry, no longer shivering.

  He took a hesitant breath, heard his strained throat whistle with the gentle inhalation. He kept still for over a minute, too afraid of the nightmare’s return to move an inch.

  When nothing came, he tried moving his fingers. They wriggled feebly, brushing fresh grass cuttings. Once he had grown confident enough to sit up, a great many aches and pains shot through his body, but he scarcely noticed.

  The thick, swirling mist remained. A few feet of visible ground lay in any one direction before the blanket of fog took over. All that he could make out through its depths were the ghostly outlines of nearby trees, and the faraway fence that skirted the park—

  The park.

  With a sudden rush of recollection, Alexander remembered: the morning school rush, the last-minute revision for the finals, the mad dash through the park in the blind hope of a shortcut…and then darkness.

  He had been on his way to the last exam of the summer, the one upon which his entire future pivoted. And now he was certainly late, perhaps too late.

  It must have been a fit. He’d heard of people having stress-induced seizures before.

  But the exam boards wouldn’t let a little thing like a nervous breakdown keep them from starting on time.

  The emergency room could wait. For now, there was a desk nearby with his name on it.

  Ignoring his injuries, along with any thoughts of the macabre dream-void, he pushed himself into a standing position and hefted his bag—laden with the great tomes of Hardy, Faulkner and Steinbeck that had been decreed as the year’s set texts—onto his shoulder.

  He wobbled on his feet and put a hand to his eyes, squeezing his forehead as a wave of nausea washed over him. He looked around again, spitting the remains of his popped filling into the leaf litter, tasting blood.

  The mist encircled him, unbothered by wind or the heat of the still-rising sun. There were no signs to indicate that anybody or anything lay near him. He was alone on the slight rise that marked Lovers’ Leap, which overlooked the town of Radden.

  He paused, speechless. His memory of the morning was clearing. He should not have been alone. The park was a popular cut-in point for those late for the eight o’clock bell, and he had been surrounded on all sides by over a dozen stragglers, each as desperate to make the exam’s sit-down time.

  Now they were gone.

  But there was something else, something all the more jarring: there had been no mist as he’d entered the park. None at all. Only moments ago, it had been a perfect, clear summer morning.

  Alex cursed, spinning on the spot. His head was as clouded as the air around him, and so only two possibilities presented themselves. Either the fit had been more serious than he’d thought, and he’d been unconscious for some time—long enough for bad weather to have rolled in off the coast—or something terrible had happened.

  The latter struck him as infinitely more likely. There was something about the absolute silence and the soupy nature of the mist that suggested something was very wrong.

  He was on the verge of setting off down the hill, while his mind’s eye offered him images of the town having been levelled by a terrorist bombing or freak storm, when he began to pass piles of clothing.

  The first few he registered as only shapes in his peripheral vision, but within a few steps a dozen or so had emerged from the mist, not quite neatly stacked in the grass: jackets, shirts and blouses, denim jeans and skirts, underwear of every shade and pattern, and socks of all lengths, tucked into the inners of a dozen pairs of shoes. A few were topped by objects unique enough to set them apart, and to allow Alex to identify their owners: Simon Wells’s flat cap, Connie Black’s spiked choker, Sally Macklintock’s nose bar and hooped earrings, and nearest to him was a pile topped by the headphone wires of Jerry Peter’s iPod. Beside them were heavily stuffed bags all too similar to Alex’s own. They lay precisely where his fellow stragglers had been before his blackout. But their owners were nowhere to be seen. It was almost as though they had stripped naked, calmly dropped their belongings in perfect head-to-foot sequence, and walked away into the mist. Or they had quite simply vanished.

  Disbelief throbbed in his head, which had set about a fantastic panic. Only the sheer strangeness of what his senses were telling him kept his eyes from rolling back in their sockets.

  “Hello?” he called. His voice bled away down the hillside, utterly alone except for the twittering of faraway songbirds. An echo returned from where the trill of the town’s morning traffic should have emanated. That was enough to send him running.

  Alex left the stacks of clothing behind. Within a single bounding step they’d disappeared into the mist. He ran with his arms outstretched, fearful of running into a lamppost or fence at full speed. He tripped every other step, and was sure he would break an ankle any moment, but was powerless to stop his own advance. His thoughts had abandoned him, leaving a baser part of his mind to operate on instinct alone.

  Distantly, he was aware that he remained parallel to the slope, still moving towards the school. The notion of still trying to make the exam on time was so bizarre that he almost laughed—but he was sure that if he did, then the wild scream of terror lurking behind his tongue would break free, and hysteria would swallow him whole.

  He was less than a hundred yards from the gates of Radden High when the mist departed. It did so without warning, as though a gale had torn across the land and peeled it away. The lifeless mass of thick whiteness seemed to expand, wither and twirl upwards simultaneo
usly, revealing Radden and the great moorland in which it sat.

  Alex froze. “No,” he whispered. He shook his head, as though he could jar the world back to making sense. But the absurdities before his eyes remained.

  The town was untouched, pristine. The cliffside gathering of Victorian terrace-rows twinkled in the morning light, along with an outlying halo of ancient cottages and farmsteads. Together, they were a twee mass of autumnal-shaded roof tiles and rustic brickwork amidst the moor’s vast reaches. The town appeared as it had done on any other day, and at first he could have expected the distant whistle of the Marshall-Aimes Quarry over in Bleak to ring at any moment, kicking off the morning shift.

  But then he saw that there was a very good reason for the silence.

  The town centre was still a considerable distance away, but Alex could make out thousands of piles of clothing strewn across Radden’s streets, arranged in little piles identical to those in the park.

  Not a single person was in sight. All was still and lifeless, frozen in place.

  Alex did scream then. Once. It broke free from his lips as a single, ragged cry, not dissimilar to that of a wounded animal.

  And then he was running once more, moving on legs that seemed a million miles away. The school forgotten, he made for home. If he could make it back to his room, back to his bed, then he would surely wake from this hellish double nightmare—for that was all this could be: a delusion brought on by fatigue, twelve-hour study marathons and one too many cups of coffee.

  It wasn’t until a final blow had been dealt that this last semblance of hope died a quiet death.

  When the great blaze on High Street burst to life, it reached some sixty feet into the air. Alex had made it to the first of the outlying terrace-blocks when it roared forth from the twisted wreckage of a severe road accident, which had involved over two dozen vehicles. Their crushed and shredded aluminium shells were cast in the brilliant light of igniting fuel, and then a fireball enveloped the mass, blowing out every window for thirty feet and throwing a great column of jet-black smoke into the sky.

  Alex didn’t pause, not this time. He kept running while the flames began to lick higher. Around him the alarms of shop fronts and parked cars honked and trilled, the only sounds other than his ragged breathing and the hollow slapping of his shoes against the tarmac. He drew closer, and from even a hundred yards away began to receive mouthfuls of acrid smoke, along with the first waves of heat.

  The bulk of the accident appeared to have been caused by a twelve-wheeler that had fishtailed at the intersection and then toppled onto its side. It had from then on acted as a solid wall, stretching across the breadth of the street. Vans, cars and motorbikes had proceeded to splatter against its underside like flies against a swatter.

  Alex coughed, stumbling as a gag reflex wracked his upper body, but pressed on, driven by a surge of adrenaline. While the bellow of the fire enveloped the trills and honks, and his breathing became laboured due to the growing heat, he threw desperate glances around at the upper-floor windows on either side of the street.

  By the time his lungs seared in earnest and he was mere feet from the first of the flames, nothing had stirred. Not a single curtain had been disturbed by a parting hand, nor had a concerned face graced one of the many doorways.

  He passed into the column of acrid smoke, and the world was whipped away under a sheet of black. Holding his shirtsleeve to his mouth to keep out the worst of the fumes, he gagged without pause, blinking tears from his eyes. Flames reared up on either side, and the hairs on his arms began to char as his sweat evaporated, leaving behind a tightly packed residue of salt and grit. His throat and lungs soon became lined with ash despite his makeshift sleeve mask, and he choked most of the way to the first of the cars.

  The flames were almost too bright to see through, and had rendered most of the windshields translucent. While a great many tyres melted and unexploded fuel tanks threatened to extinguish his life any moment, Alex skirted the edge of the pileup and scanned the wreckage for any sign of survivors.

  Flaming headrests, billowing airbags, crumpled steering columns. But no bodies. Nothing. Through the few panes of glass still transparent, it was quite clear that each vehicle was devoid of occupants.

  Alex froze, dumbstruck. Somewhere distant, he told himself to move, that his now oxygen-starved mind was stuck trying to cope with what he was seeing, but he had to move. With superhuman effort he forced shaking limbs to send him leaping to the other side of the street. Choking, he emerged into fresher air and cast another desperate search around him. He put his hands on his knees and bent over, spitting tendrils of blackened saliva onto the curb. By the time he could straighten again he was still breathing raggedly, but the urge to vomit had eased.

  Then a scream of pain rang out behind him. He winced instinctively. The very tone of it—the shrill, panicked trill of a trapped animal—cut at him like glass. “HELP ME!” It was emanating from the heart of the flaming wreckage, from the carcass of a yellow executive saloon sandwiched fast to the bulk of the eighteen-wheeler.

  Alex was already springing forward when he spotted a figure across the street, just beyond the pavement, beneath the shadow of an old oak. His impression of it was fleeting, but detailed enough to send shivers of relief coursing through him. It was a man in his mid thirties, dressed head to toe in what looked like a black overcoat. Upon his lupine, marble-coloured face were two streaks of purple-black directly beneath his eyes—maybe eyeshadow, maybe not. A strange half-smile was plastered over his face, his gaze fixed resolutely on Alex, almost as though the blaze between them weren’t there at all. Despite his relief, Alex felt something stir in his gut: an irrational fear response, one that nudged at him with alarm bells ringing.

  What was wrong with him? There wasn’t time for turning help away, oddball or not. Help was help. Pushing suspicion aside, he fished his mobile phone from his pocket. “You! Hello? Help!” he called, waving his arms over his head, heading for the saloon. “There’s somebody trapped! Give me a hand!” As the fire licked at the passenger window, a hand struck against the translucent glass, followed by the profile of a terrified face.

  At the driver’s door there were no flames, and so without hesitation Alex grabbed the handle. He screamed as the scolding metal ate at his flesh, and drew his hand back up his sleeve, cradling it against his side, cursing. Before the pain could set in and send him reeling away from the wreckage, he bunched what remained of his sleeve further over his burned arm, gritted his teeth, manoeuvred the swelling hand back towards the door, and pulled it open.

  A young man dressed in a cheap suit and matching tie tumbled out onto the ground, his jacket trailing a carpet of flames. He had been brown-haired from what Alex could tell, but his eyebrows and most of his crown had been burned clean away. All over his body the skin was blackened and had taken on the texture of charcoal in palm-sized patches. He shivered in teeth-chattering judders, as though freezing.

  Alex recognised him. It was Paul Towers, a junior partner at Aimes & Logan Law. He had been quite the town mascot of late, having turned away from a bad path of heavy drinking a few summers before. Paul had been the focus of attention for the Moor’s crop of young women since hitting puberty due to his floppy fringe, striking good looks, and sharp ‘I know what I want’ stare—something that was now almost impossible to believe.

  Paul tried to move away, but simply whimpered and collapsed onto the bubbling tarmac. Alex grabbed him by the arm and dragged him from the crash site, towards the side of the road. Struggling, he felt yet more grit and ash cling to his face, caking him in a thick paste, adhering to the rivulets of perspiration streaming down his cheeks. By the time they reached the kerb, the fire had burned his eyes dry, and streams of tears had joined the grimed rivers of sweat. Even here, waves of heat still buffeted his body.

  He glanced up at the man he had seen across the street, expecting to see him making his way over to their side. But the figure was standing in precisely t
he same spot, still staring at him with that same half-smile. He didn’t seem at all concerned, nor did he even seem as though preparing to step forwards. Instead, he merely cocked his head, as though fascinated by their scurrying.

  “HELP!” Alex bellowed.

  The figure cocked its head the other way, but moved no more.

  Alex felt his heart skip a beat from sheer disbelief.

  Had the man not heard him? Surely he had. Perhaps he’d been struck dumb by the sheer oddity of what was happening. Or maybe he just didn’t care.

  The figure’s gaze pressed hard into Alex’s temple as he fumbled with his mobile phone. The hell with him. He hit dial, blinking until his vision cleared. But the screen was blank. He beat against the phone’s underside, but there was no response. It was dead.

  He cast it aside with a curse of fury and bent over Paul, who was shaking on the ground. “Can you hear me?” he said.

  Paul merely whimpered.

  Alex glanced up again, saw the figure still standing beneath the tree—now staring across at him with an expression closer to a jeering leer—and then looked away. He didn’t bother to call out again.

  “I have to turn you over,” he said. He meant to sound confident, but his voice cracked, trembling in the air. In the back of his mind he knew he shouldn’t touch Paul until an ambulance arrived. With those burns, he could do more harm than good. But a firm voice from somewhere even deeper told him there would be no help coming anytime soon. And so, before Paul could protest, Alex grabbed him and turned him over in a single swift movement.

  Alex saw the pain in his eyes. Paul’s mouth opened in what could only be described as beyond screaming. Tears dripped down his face onto the pavement as a tiny sound escaped from deep in his throat. Blood was oozing from a slash across his forehead, revealing the startlingly white skull beneath. Alex checked his body and saw that the front of his shirt was gone. The flames had eaten through the flesh of his belly, such that a horrific mash of charred skin and blood-red muscle tissue lay where his navel had been.

  Alex flung his hands to his mouth as a wave of nausea swept over him. He turned away to the grass and vomited with a great heave. Fighting black rings encroaching in his peripheral vision, he fought his way back to Paul, who now had only one eye half open, unfixed and catatonic.

  “I don’t know what to do… I’m sorry,” Alex breathed. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry… There’s nobody here. I—I…”

  Hyperventilating, he looked around in desperation for the figure once more, ready to surge to his feet and drag the static onlooker from the shadows. But his eyes were met only by the sight of the old oak, unblemished by the figure’s presence. He’d vanished, just like everyone else.

  Alex accepted it without argument, too blank and addled to cope with any more. He was spared instant insanity only by Paul’s sudden bout of gargled choking. Alex grabbed him by the collar. “Hey,” he yelled. “Hey!”

  Paul’s eyes flew open. For the briefest of moments he stared skyward, his face blank, almost peaceful, and then he began to vibrate against the ground. With his feet hammering the floor, he whined while his head snapped back and forth in vicious spasms.

  Alex could only moan, clinging to the writhing body. “Are there others?” he cried. “Are there others? Please, tell me!” He was wailing now. “Tell me there’s somebody else!”

  No answer. It took almost a minute for Paul to become still. Alex checked for a pulse, then stumbled back, sat on the kerb, mouth open with shock, and put his head between his knees. “This isn’t happening,” he whispered to the grass. “This can’t be happening.”

  When he finally stumbled away from Paul’s body, he didn’t bother searching for the eyeshadow-wearing figure again. He probably hadn’t even been real. Instead, he wandered back towards the rise of Lovers’ Leap.

  He stumbled back through the streets and across the park. Countless piles of clothing and jewellery passed underfoot, occasionally accompanied by handbags, briefcases and infants’ pushchairs. It all seemed to glare at him, daring him to stray too close.

  He skirted each item in a daze, ascending the hill without as much as a single glance from his path. His mind was muggy, enamelled, too shocked to register much of anything. In what seemed only moments he was scaling the steep incline that marked the crest of the Leap.

  It would be fine. He would signal for help. By now the government or army had mobilised a response to the terrible accident in the Moor, and were on their way in full force, accompanied by herds of gabbling reporters from around the world. He would be surrounded by press, harried by intelligence officers for an explanation, tested for alien probing, and dragged into the limelight as the sole survivor of the Radden Moor Disaster.

  But he would be alive. He would be safe.

  He sobbed as the desperate, paper-thin sentiment cracked and fragmented in the face of what he knew awaited him just on the other side of the rise. As he tore his way over the crest of the Leap and looked down upon the lands below, he saw that his imagination’s worst predictions hadn’t been far wrong. But that did nothing to lighten the blow.

  From here he could see for miles over the countryside—the entirety of Radden Moor and a crowd of neighbouring towns, along with the stretch of dual carriageway that snaked between them.

  Far away, nestled in a nook of coastal mountains, was Bleakstone Down, and perched directly above it the village of Lorndale. On any other day they would have appeared as little more than distant smatterings of antiquated spires and chimneys. Today, they were invisible behind a column of smoke as black as the one rising from Radden Moor, courtesy of a blaze that seemed to have consumed Lisey’s Bar ‘n Grill in Bleak. Alex suspected that the morning run of the good lady’s famous bacon-and-mushroom omelettes had charred to combustion point without her there to flip them.

  Alex’s gaze swept across the moorland lakes, which glistened silver-white in the sun, and every other settlement in sight—Chester Walden, Stanfield, Eppinsborough, Langlebridge, Finstynne, Tinners’ Lodge, and, nestled between the slopes of Porters’ Pass, at the very edge of visibility, the twinkling lights of Milton Percy’s radio tower—scanning farther back into the distance until his line of sight met the horizon.

  Every one of them was utterly still. Unattended toasters, gas hobs, careening motor vehicles and hair straighteners had sent at least three of them up in flames along with Radden Moor and Bleak.

  There was not a single person in sight. Thousands of cars, trucks and coaches sat on the dual carriageway, most in pieces, torn into great mountains of shrapnel and shattered glass. Some had careened through the centre divider or into the wooded ditches that ran downhill on either side of the tarmac, having by chance avoided total destruction. No attempt at braking had been made, for their drivers had vanished along with everyone else. Their motors still ticked amidst the fields and creek beds where they had come to rest.

  Alex sank to his knees, covering his eyes with his hands, and let loose a wail of bewilderment. Once that first cry had escaped him, he was powerless to stop those that followed, and merely sat watching the flames, clutching at the grass. His screams rang out until his throat had become raw, the distant smoke columns had blossomed into rippling firestorms, and the monstrous carcasses of transcontinental airliners had begun to fall from the sky.

  No screams answered his, nor did anyone cry out to be rescued from the burning wreckage. The world had grown still and silent.

  He was alone.

  II

   

  Norman called a halt and pulled the reins towards his lap. His mount took a single step farther before coming to a stop, snorting in the evening gloom.

  Allie stopped beside him but said nothing. Her mouth was pulled into a tight grimace.

  “You’re still mad,” Norman said.

  She was quiet for some time before responding, “How could you do that?”

  He leaned from his saddle until they were almost face to face. “There was nothing we could h
ave done. We can barely feed ourselves.”

  She rounded on him, her eyes flaring. “We could have helped. We could have done something. We could have given them something.”

  Norman shook his head as he watched Lucian ride across the field behind them. His steel-grey hair and horse to match made him difficult to miss amidst the meadow of browning grass, even when he stopped abreast the posts of an ancient wooden fence, scanning the horizon.

  “We knew that people were starving,” Norman said, sighing.

  “That doesn’t make it all right.”

  Allie took an apple from one of the bags swinging beneath her saddle and looked at it for a while. She soon took a bite, but her expression was disgusted.

  “You ought to save those,” Norman said, motioning to the bag. “We had to leave a lot behind.”

  She swallowed with a heavy gulp, as though to make a point of defying even so small an order, but when she replied her voice had fallen to a mere whisper. “At least they have that much.”

  “Allie…”

  “How could we leave them?”

  Norman turned to her. “What do you want me to do?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Something.”

  “It’s not my job to make those kinds of decisions.”

  “It’s going to be.”

  “I’m not a leader,” Norman hissed. “I didn’t ask for this.”

  There was a pause.

  “For what?” she said.

  Norman gestured to the sacks beneath them. “For this!”

  Lucian, over by the fence, held up his hand to give the all-clear signal. He then wheeled around and rode back towards them, turning his head occasionally to peer over his shoulder, as though fearful of taking an arrow to the back. His face was creased into an ugly frown.

  He pulled up beside them and grumbled to himself, brushing a tangle of iron-wool hair from his face. He looked to Allie, and then the apple in her hand. “Got another one of those?”

  She threw him her own. “You didn’t see anything?” she said.

  He shook his head, taking a bite. “There’s nobody there.”

  “They couldn’t have followed us anyway,” she said. Her eyes were swimming with sorrow.

  Lucian’s gaze settled on her. “We were stealing from them, don’t forget that,” he said.

  “I’ll never forget that.”

  Allie turned her mare towards the slight rise before them. Norman and Lucian followed without question, sharing a meaningful look. Lucian put on an encouraging voice, addressing her in an upbeat tone entirely unlike his usual grumble, “Those people had been starving for a long time. We didn’t do any harm.”

  She didn’t answer, but Norman thought he saw her shoulders relax somewhat as they reached the foot of the hill.

  The horses snorted to each other as they began to climb, their hooves slipping on wet mud, uprooting tufts of gnarled, dead grass as they went. They lost traction and slid backwards several times, but they were urged on by swift kicks to their flanks, and soon crested the ridge.

  Norman felt a weight lift from his chest. Raised high over the landscape, they could now see for several miles in every direction. The sun was dipping below the horizon, sending the world into a deeper state of shadow.

  Below were the remains of what had once been Canterbury. Surrounding it on three sides were wild fields and barren farmland, growing darker by the second, being consumed by a monochromatic haze. On the remaining side were cultivated fields, but the crops lay limp and dying, close to the ground, in various stages of decomposition.

  The city itself looked much like it had done many decades before. Most of the buildings were crafted from solid stone, and had been built long before the previous century. In the mere forty years since the End, they had changed little. The jagged architecture was lent a stark beauty by the dying light; the winding streets and quaint cobbled roads rendered in a picturesque golden tint. After the horrors of the coastal ruins, it was a sight born of fairy tale and dreamscape, brought forth by the magic of dusk.

  The city was now home to eight hundred people, the largest settlement for at least thirty miles. As the trio watched from the hilltop, distant booms echoed from the riverside, and a portion of the city became illuminated by sharp artificial light. The lampposts of the north-eastern labyrinthine streets blinked to life in rapid succession, leaving the uninhabited, unlit remainder to darken further towards obscurity.

  Snaking through the city’s centre, the river Stour reflected a thousand twinkling lights—a thin ribbon of silver-white, meandering its way through the city’s heart. In the distance, the great cathedral was outlined in profile against the sky, its innards emanating a spectral glow through its many-coloured windows. Its mighty spires thrust towards the sky, towering above their surroundings, monuments to a bygone era, lording over their own private Lilliput.

  They simply sat for a while and watched. Norman sighed, comforted by the sight of the city’s lights rallying against nature, pushing back the shadows. In his twenty-nine years, he’d never seen anywhere quite like it.

  Here, at least tonight, nobody would starve. Here was home.

  It had only been a few days since he’d last laid eyes on it, but it felt as though it could have been years.

  Ablaze with light, the inhabited pocket of the city looked like a glowing torch, suspended in fading limbo. In the growing darkness it was becoming quieter atop the hill, and the lights drew them like sailors to a siren.

  “I need a shower,” Allie said, setting off down the hill.

  Norman and Lucian watched her go until she was out of earshot.

  “She’s right. The time’s now. You need to start taking charge,” Lucian muttered.

  Norman ground his teeth, but kept his voice level. “I’ve told you… I’ve told all of you: I don’t want this.”

  “We’re going to need somebody to step up soon. Alex isn’t going to be around forever. And you need to be ready to take over when the time comes.”

  “If somebody needs to step up so bad, then why don’t you do it?”

  “Because it was always going to be you. Alex has spent the better part of twenty years getting you ready for it.”

  “That’s just it: he picked me. I didn’t ask for this.”

  “Your parents thought you could do it. They died as much for Alex as they did to save you, to make sure you had the chance to be what we need. You might have your doubts now, but it doesn’t matter. You are going to lead.” Despite his emphatic delivery, Lucian’s words were flat, regurgitated. Not his own, but Alexander’s.

  Norman had heard it all a million times over. He whirled on his saddle, his teeth gritted. “This conversation’s so worn that it’s like a bad joke. But no matter how many times you spit out that same old speech, there’s some part of me that thinks maybe you don’t believe it at all. The others might think I’m some kind of saint, but not you.”

  Lucian didn’t reply. A breeze kicked up, casting a cascade of long-dead leaves against their calves. He drew a ragged breath and, for the briefest of moments, looked as though he meant to say something. Instead, he merely kicked at his horse’s sides and descended the hillside.

  Norman watched him go until the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and the brute that inhabited the base of his skull prodded him forwards, towards the light. He followed soon after, a curse passing his lips.

  III

   

  The Stour trickled seaward, glassy-smooth in the evening hush. Only occasional shallow wavelets sprayed the cobbled street running parallel to its meandering path. A small wooden rowboat rocked close to the water’s edge, against archaic stonework, its oars jostling within its depths with each resounding bump. This part of the city was not directly illuminated, but only caught the glare of the streetlamps across the river.

  Alexander Cain stood alone at the edge of the path, where stone gave way to water. From even here he could identify Lucian McKay, with his slim build and steel-grey h
air scintillating in the youthful twilight, which made him recognisable at a fleeting glance.

  Two more dark forms were also descending into the city, and soon the snuffling of horses was on the brink of audibility. They were still some distance away, but they would reach him shortly.

  Alexander had crossed the river only minutes before, rowing up from the cathedral as the streetlights had spluttered alight. People had seen him go, but none had questioned him. Nobody had thought to doubt him for a great many years.

  Enough time had certainly passed since the End to have cemented the kind of look that people gave him: the downcast gaze, aimed not at his eyes but the ground over which he walked; the respectful nod—in some more of an awkward bow; and the slight trace of awe, as though he carried in his pockets not fluff and lint, but tablets inscribed with divine wisdom.

  Long ago, when his struggles to unite the fractured tribes of the Early Years had begun to gain traction, he had tried to dispel the special status that people had awarded him. But the more effort he’d made to sit around campfires and work in the fields along with the everyman, the stranger the looks had grown, until eventually all eyes had turned to him whenever he made an appearance, and he had stopped bothering.

  He had been forced into a costume and mask to match, to play Fearless Leader to the masses for year upon year, until now he was to the people of New Canterbury naught but a wandering Messiah.

  Keeping even this tiny corner of the world from slipping into ruin had demanded it. Time had done the rest, just as surely as it had ravaged his body. He was a sprightly teenager no longer. Weathered by years of hardship, his cheeks now hung lank upon his skull, and his hair sprang from his head in a heavy thatch, heedless of brush or scissors.

  He’d never been one for complaining about the ageing process—there hadn’t been time to slow down, not for a single waking moment—but right now, surrounded by wilting plants and half-starved critters, he felt old.

  Before he could dwell on it, he forced his gaze towards the city—his city—and searched for the returnees. As the snuffling grew closer, the smallest of smiles played upon his lips, but was quickly replaced by a frown. Tonight, away from the city lights, he felt unnerved.

  The feather clutched in his hands had driven him here. Wreathed in shadow, its delicate edges curled and parted at his fingers’ touch. He had been holding onto it all day, and whenever he became aware of holding it, a thousand emotions reared up in his chest, the most prominent being acute disbelief. The gut reaction was so strong that he found himself suspecting it had a lot to do with the unsettled rumblings in his stomach.

  But he knew better than that. The rumblings were down to hunger, pure and simple.

  The smell of a cooking meal was dancing across the water, making his stomach ache with longing. They had sent parties out foraging for scraps in all directions during the months of hardship, and Alex was sure that many had suffered due to their pilfering, but they had felt the effects of the famine nonetheless. Even the meals he had eaten lately had been sparse at best. Now that the last of their stores were truly depleted, they were all fast becoming undernourished.

  The snuffling continued to grow closer, but the scavenging party would be hidden by the narrow, winding streets until they were right on top of him. Eventually, he could hear the telltale clip-clop of hooves emanating from somewhere nearby.

  They appeared a short time later. He recognised Norman instantly: the slightest of the three shadows, tall and lithe, with an angular jaw and an unruly crop of black hair. Beyond, he glimpsed a flash of silver, and knew that Lucian was close behind. The last figure resolved into a young woman he vaguely recognised, one of the newer arrivals from a few years before. He tried to remember her name, and settled on Abbie, but that didn’t sit right.

  Norman paused momentarily as they rounded the corner, but his surprised expression was replaced by brief warmth, which itself then sank towards an even, polite smile—the one Alex knew, and had always known, hid a distant resentment. In turn, Lucian simply nodded, while the young woman—Allie, that was her name—gave one of the respectful bows he hated so much.

  “Evening,” Lucian said. He looked towards the illuminated oasis across the river and then back to Alex, as though questioning his presence. He then turned his head a fraction, enough to reveal his furrowed brows, but not enough to catch the attention of Norman or Allison.

  Alex shook his head minutely, and Lucian turned away, accepting the message.

  The four of them began to move along the street, towards the distant lights.

  “You’re leaving the boat?” Allie asked.

  “I’ll get it in the morning,” Alex answered. “My arms hurt from all the rowing.”

  In truth, he felt the unbearable need to accompany them. Despite the lazy atmosphere of the riverside, even the short distance between them and the stables now seemed fraught with unseen dangers. It wasn’t safe, not tonight, even within the confines of the city.

  He felt their eyes on the nape of his neck, and so made a concentrated effort to keep his voice casual. “How was it?”

  There was a brief pause, during which the hoot of a lone owl floated towards them from the spires of the cathedral.

  “It went fine,” Norman said, “but we still need more food.”

  “We need a lot more,” Lucian growled. “Whole world’s running on dregs.”

  Norman sighed. “We’ll go back tomorrow. There has to be more somewhere.”

  Allie interrupted in a hurried, high-pitched babble. It was as though a great swell of words had dammed behind her tongue and they were now spilling from her mouth in a torrent. “There were others.”

  Alex stopped and looked at her. Under his gaze she grew timid. He waited patiently for her embarrassment to wane. “Just like we’ve seen everywhere else,” she continued. “They’re all starving. Everybody’s starving.”

  Alex was quiet. They skirted the edge of the river and headed towards the illuminated portion of the city. Voices calling from near the cathedral were now reaching their ears, bouncing off ancient slate chimneys and reverberating along the intervening cobbled alleyways.

  When he glanced at her once more, he saw that her embarrassment had been replaced by a dazed frown. “There were so many,” she said thickly.

  “We’re not going back, not there,” Norman said. “We’ll go somewhere else. If we take anything more from the coast then we’ll be killing them.”

  Alex shook his head. “It’s too late to worry about that.”

  A strained silence followed, but Alex made a point to keep his steady pace. The feather in his hand kept him moving, even as they passed beneath the first of the illuminated streetlights.

  “We saw a lot of people today,” Lucian said.

  Alex cleared his throat. “How did they look?”

  “Skin and bones.”

  They rode along in silence for a moment. They were now only a hundred metres away from the row of restored buildings that the people of New Canterbury had come to know as Main Street.

  “We shouldn’t go back,” Norman said.

  Alex sensed the tension in his voice. By the sound of it, they’d had a rough time in Margate. He decided to offer no resistance this time. If things were about to take a turn for the worse, he needed to keep Norman on his good side. “Alright, not yet,” he conceded. “But soon we’ll have to.”

  There was more to say, more to argue over and report, but none of the three men said a single word further—not in Allison’s presence. He might not have known her name, but people had pointed her out to Alex before; it was common knowledge that the art of subtlety was as alien to her as the greater good. As it was, the least that they could expect was for the story of the encounter with the coast’s natives to be distributed overnight, as if by some infectious magic, to all ears within the city. The last thing they needed was gossip diluted by the hundred reiterations that would occur along such a chain of whispers.

  And so their conversati
on petered out as quickly as it had begun. They each withdrew into their respective thoughts, their shadowed faces sheer white and bowed against the harsh glow of spluttering streetlights.