Ruin

by Harry Manners

  *

  A sting erupted from the gloom.

  Norman yelled. Fresh pain seared his cheek. He tried to wrench backwards, but his lower half was only so much numb flesh. Vaguely, he sensed that he’d been hoisted into a seated position. After a bout of extreme effort, he managed to open his eyes by a fraction of an inch. Blurred colours gnawed at his retinas.

  Pain erupted across his other cheek. Something solid and sharp—perhaps a ring—split his lip. A voice spoke far away, strung out by the fog clogging his mind. “Wake up.”

  Norman grunted as his vision resolved and the world morphed into definite form.

  He was still in the kitchen. The hallway lights had been extinguished. His attacker was seated directly before him, having pulled up a stool from the stove. He expected it to be the man with the neckerchief, the one he was now certain had been staring in through the window. But it wasn’t.

  Norman had never seen this man before. He was surprisingly small for the strength he had wrought. Dressed in a ragged shirt and a tattered pair of jeans, wrapped in a floor-length black overcoat, he had an unassuming, ugly face, peaky and sallow.

  He waved his hand through the air. “Can you understand me?” he said. His voice was an unsettling sigh, lisped and snakelike.

  Norman nodded, something he regretted as stars flashed before his eyes and nausea revolved the ground beneath him. He tried to answer, but his lips were still numb. “Wh-Who are you?”

  The man smiled, but the expression was disturbing, almost horrific. The teeth were rotten, patched with brown decay, the canines stunted. His grin, closer to a sneer, made him look almost like a wolf. “My name is Jason,” he said.

  Norman glanced around, but saw nobody else in the room with them. Looking down, he saw that he was slumped in a dining room chair, bound to its armrests with handmade twine. “What do you want?”

  “To talk to you, just like you wanted to talk to us.”

  “And what’s to stop me calling for help?”

  Jason’s lupine sneer grew wider as he looked through the window at the storm raging outside. “I wouldn’t waste your time.”

  “You never know until you try.” Norman jerked his shoulders, trying to shift towards the doorway. But the chair didn’t tilt a single degree.

  Jason produced a wicked, curved knife from behind his back. In the highly polished blade Norman saw his own reflection, slumped and bleary-eyed. “How’s this? Make a sound and I’ll open up your jugular,” he said, pointing the tip of the blade towards him. “It’ll take but a second.”

  “Like you did to Ray?”

  His eyes twinkled. Sickly delight lurked amidst their inky, lifeless depths. “That’s right.”

  Norman wriggled his wrists, testing the knots holding them to the chair. Flawless. No fool’s knots. It’d take hours to worm free. He sighed. “What do you want?”

  “I’m here to deliver a message.”

  “So send a letter to the office.”

  Jason gave a full-throated belly laugh that sent his head flying back. “Sorry, postman’s got a day off,” he said once he’d recovered.

  “Why me?”

  Jason shrugged. “Word on the street is you’re next in line for the Chair, that the Big Cheese is on the way out, that he’s got his knickers all in a bunch over a few birdies.” He tittered at that. “Also,” he raised an eyebrow, “you make an easy target. Been alone in the dark for days.”

  “Just like the old man, eh? You had a message to give him, too?”

  “He saw us. We reacted,” Jason’s face had fallen slack. “You weren’t supposed to see us. Not yet. The old man wasn’t part of the plan. I was just clearing up a stupid mistake of some…associates of mine. Same goes for the boulder head at the mill.” He took a step forward, twirling the blade in his grasp, observing Norman with frank curiosity. “But then you had to step in, didn’t you? You couldn’t just let things rest. You had to come after us, had to rock the boat.”

  “You killed two innocent men. Who’s rocking the boat?”

  Anger flashed behind those onyx shark eyes. Yet Jason’s face creased into another smile. Somehow, seeing his cheeks upturn was so much worse. “After all that you and yours have done—after all the lives you’ve ended—I can’t imagine where you could find the gall to say something like that.”

  “That we’ve ended!” Norman surged forwards, straining against his bindings. “We’ve done nothing!”

  Jason’s grin widened, such that it almost reached the lobes of his ears. “You have no idea what you’ve done, do you?” he whispered.

  Norman swallowed. The slight, hissing voice reverberated deep in his chest, sending a vat of liquid fear boiling in his guts. “What are you going to do, finish me off as well?”

  “What would be the point in telling you a titbit of jack shit if I was here to kill you?”

  Norman licked his bleeding lip. “A message, huh? You want to get me a pen?”

  Jason’s smile lost its strength—died a slow and sickly death. He took yet another step forwards and dropped to his haunches. The two of them were now at eye level. “You took everything,” he hissed.

  The intensity of his stare felt as though it would set Norman’s flesh ablaze. He swallowed. “What?”

  “All of it. Every scrap, every weed, all of it. You took it all. You just wandered into people’s homes and took what you wanted like it was yours, not a care in the world. All those people’s work—all the sweat and blood they put into growing enough to scrape by… you took it all.”

  Norman looked at the ground. “What do you want?” he murmured.

  Jason’s face became uglier. “Do you know how many people you killed? How many children died in their parents’ arms, shrivelled up like rotting prunes?”

  Norman grimaced. As the words washed over him, pangs of pain danced across his heart. His mind’s eye spat out images of the begging, emaciated creatures at Margate once more, reaching for him…

  He shook his head and glared at Jason. Despite his own guilt, he saw nothing stir in his captor’s eyes. He couldn’t have been more certain that the man cared little, if at all, for the troubles of others. “What do you want?” he repeated.

  “I'll bet you haven’t even seen it with your own eyes, have you? The hundreds of starving skeletons, crawling around like worms?”

  Norman started, gritting his teeth. “I’ve seen it.”

  “Yet still you took. And now everybody’s gone, moved away, left everything that they had, because of you.”

  Norman felt his guilt putrefy into shame, dripping along his spine and festering in his bowels.

  Still, Jason stared back at him without a flicker of emotion. He’d spoken with intent, but there had been nothing to the words, no glimmer of genuine feeling. They had merely escaped his mouth mechanically, as though rehearsed.

  “What do you want?” Norman breathed.

  “We’re not going to tolerate your greed anymore.”

  “Who?”

  “Survivors. Those of us who managed to hold out long enough. People who’ve lost everything. People who want to see justice done… People who want revenge.”

  Again, not a trace of sincerity touched his eyes. Some other voice was speaking through this monster; another greater will, far more sinister than Jason’s feral wickedness.

  It was enough to send Norman’s skin crawling. He leant forwards against his restraints. “What do you want?” he yelled.

  Jason bore his scream without even a twitch. Then he inched forwards. “We want you to run,” he whispered. “Disband, scatter—all of you. Run to the corners of the earth, along with everyone like you. We’ll give you this one chance to atone for what you did.” His voice slowed to a halting shudder. “Then we will descend upon you, and we will show no mercy.”

  Norman leant back against the chair. “You’re crazy,” he muttered. “You kill innocent men, crawl into our homes like rats, and you think you’re in a position to make demands?”

 
; Jason leapt forwards, anger flaring in the depths of his eyes as he brought the blade up to Norman’s throat. There, the blade hovered a millimetre from the skin of his trachea, shaking as Jason’s eyes searched his own. Norman remained as still as possible, desperate to hold the snarling beast’s gaze despite his racing pulse.

  After almost ten seconds, seconds that seemed to stretch into an age, Jason let the knife fall to his side. “We’re the rats?” His lip curled. “If most had their way—if I had my way—you’d all be dead already. The only reason you’re still breathing is because He—”

  “Norman!”

  A deathly silence stole over the two of them as a voice rang out from the front door, accompanied by a rapid succession of hammering knocks.

  Jason’s expression had contorted, a small distance removed from surprise, more intrigued than angry. Norman realised that he was taken aback, almost impressed. “What’s this?” he said, bringing the knife back to Norman’s throat.

  “How should I know?”

  “Why’d they come back?” Jason looked out through the back window, cursing. His eyes darted in their sockets, considering.

  The pounding at the door came again, accompanied by another yell. “Norman!”

  It was Allison. Minutes before, Norman would have wished for nothing but for her to leave him alone. Now, hearing her babbling voice made him almost delirious with joy.

  Jason appeared to have weighed his choices. Norman was sure that he could have put an end to her in a trice, but something seemed to be holding him back—perhaps that same greater will that had been speaking through him all this time. “Well, Norman, I hate to cut it short,” he said.

  “Oh, hush.” The pain in Norman’s chest was growing sharper, driving his peripheral vision towards darkness. “No need to apologise.”

  Jason grunted. He was pacing closer to Norman’s side, prowling close enough to fill his nose with the nauseating, raw pang of sewage, so intense that it made his eyes water.

  The knocking at the door was louder now, more emphatic.

  Norman blinked his vision clear, and struggled to speak through rubbery lips. “We were desperate. We did what we had to.” He swallowed with difficulty. The floor was falling away. “I can believe that people want revenge. Even justice—even now, after all that’s happened.” He locked his gaze on the feral man’s wild eyes, desperate to keep the darkness at bay. “But I bet you didn’t lose a thing. Men like you get blown towards trouble like tumbleweed in the wind. So what are you doing here?”

  When Jason answered, his maw constricted into a half-grin, half-grimace—a step away from mania. “Every wasteland needs a devil,” he said, bringing the curved blade’s handle above his head. “We’re done waiting. Your time’s up, so think about what I said.”

  Norman saw the blade flash before his eyes for only a split second before the handle came down, and a thousand bells erupted in his head. Then all was black, and Allison’s cries were muted.

  XVIII

   

  “You have to go,” Don muttered. His sentence’s end was followed by a great, wracking wheeze that sent him sliding down the face of the rock upon which he rested.

  Billy, cross-legged on the floor with her arms clamped over her shins, started. Her head, ducked into her lap, shook violently. “No!” she whined.

  Don was powerless to stop himself sliding until a mere inch above the dirt. Even moving his arms was now beyond him; breathing itself occupied the entirety of his attention. He had reached the point of no return days ago. He wasn’t at all sure how he’d kept going since then. Even staying alive for Billy’s sake wouldn’t have been enough to sustain him, had it not been for her incredible tenacity.

  She had shown him no mercy, had marched him day and night.

  Every village, town or hole in the ground along the way had been unapproachable. It seemed that people here had fared even worse than back home. The wreckage of entire communities, built on top of the Old World’s wonders, lay in growing ruin, blowing in the wind. Overgrown motorways had been dotted by the shrivelled bodies of the recently deceased.

  In some towns, life had held on. But these places had been barricaded or road-blocked by stacked Old World motorcars. Enormous painted signs had hung from the tallest buildings, declaring: ‘NO FOOD HERE’, ‘STEAL AND DIE’, and ‘WANDERERS SHOT ON SIGHT’. Beside a few of these signs had been the bloodied bodies of those who had ignored them, nailed to walls or hanging by the neck from nearby tree branches.

  Even the merest scraps of food had disappeared. They had once again reached the coast, but Don hadn’t a clue which it was, or to which sea the waves belonged. He’d lost all sense of direction in the forest days ago. In his exhaustion, he hadn’t even been able to make sense of the stars.

  “You’ve been a very good girl,” he said, managing a single word per exhalation. “You’ve been strong. I’m so proud of you.” He swallowed, and dragged another ragged breath. “But Daddy’s not getting any better. I’m just going to get sicker, so you have to go now. Find someone who’ll help you.”

  Billy unfolded her body into a sitting position. Her eyes were wild, aflame with a light that Miranda had once commanded. “No! You said that there would be food here. When we find it, you’ll be better.”

  Don shook his head. “I was wrong, Billy.”

  “No!” she cried. She leapt up and marched over to him, tugging at his sleeve.

  His body bent to her will without resistance, and he felt his back lifting away from the rock behind him.

  She had pulled him to his feet many times now, and on each occasion had managed it with a little less effort. At first he had thought such ease had come with her growing strength, but now a sickening truth seemed obvious: he had withered to the point that an eight-year-old girl could lift him without trouble.

  The thought stirred a pang of fear in his gut as she righted him and looped his arm over her shoulder. She began to haul him from the rock, silent tears spilling from her eyes.

  “Stop it,” he muttered.

  She wiped her eyes with a jerk and shook her head. “No,” she sobbed.

  “You have to—”

  “No.”

  “Billy, you have to go. I want you to leave me!”

  “No, Daddy! No. I’m never leaving you.”

  “Let go, Billy. Run.”

  “No, Daddy.”

  “Let me go and run!”

  “No!”

  “BILLY, YOU HAVE TO—”

  The rest of Don’s roar died in his throat. Something had caught his eye, nestled in the foliage ahead. Recognition blared behind his eyes, but he contained his surge of relief with enormous effort, suspicious of any good fortune after all they had lost.

  Billy was staring up at him, open-mouthed, tugging at his sleeve. She looked frightened by his sudden pause. “Daddy, what is it? What’s wrong? Is it the Bad Men?”

  Ahead, through the foliage, he could see a break in the trees, and a cliff edge beyond. Nestled beside it, he discerned a rectangular mass of slate tiles, capped by the unmistakable profile of a chimney. Beneath it were four walls of shoddy brick and plaster.

  “It’s a cabin,” he whispered.

  Billy whirled, fixed her gaze in the direction of the structure, and then turned back to him. Her eyes were wide. “Safe?” she whispered.

  There was no time for caution. Either they got under shelter now, or there would be no chance for either of them.

  He nodded. “It’s empty. It’ll be fine.” He sent a silent prayer and nudged her. “Come on, let’s go.”

  Billy began to haul him towards it immediately, moving faster than ever.

  Don couldn’t quite keep himself from indulging in the same beginnings of hope that now seemed to infest her every move.

  FIFTH INTERLUDE

   

  “Find anything?”

  “Nah! There’s nothing here!”

  “Keep looking!”

  Alex was drawn from a nightmare—one of
fog, fire, and a pair of leering, darkened eyes—by the voices, which at first he assumed had hailed from the tail end of a better dream. When he opened his eyes, however, he still heard them yelling from afar.

  “What about these ones?”

  There was a reverberating series of metallic clatters and a spate of cursing, and then Alex was fully awake and upon his haunches. The dog stood nearby, emitting a steady whine.

  He checked on James. The noise had failed to rouse the boy, and he showed no sign of waking any time soon.

  Good, he thought. God, please let it stay that way.

  Satisfied, he rose to his feet, pressed himself against the wall, and listened.

  “What are you doing?” one of the voices bawled.

  “What does it look like? I’m trying to reach,” said another.

  “If you’re going to help then do it properly. Those things are no good to us if they’re broken.”

  People. Survivors.

  Alex almost yelped. He whirled back to James and took the boy into his arms, hushing him as he whimpered and stretched. He ruffled the dog’s fur and nudged her aside, turning the doorknob with the utmost care.

  He took a steeling breath and stepped out of the office.

  Out in the warehouse, the aisles still lay in every direction, and the behemoth door was still ajar, but there was a stark difference about the place. The floor was littered with gutted boxes and mechanical parts of all kinds and of various sizes.

  Between them, bickering and reaching for a set of high shelves, was a group of people. Not military, not aliens, not demons. Just regular folk, dressed in work denims and the remains of business suits, sporting boring haircuts and budget Seikos, their pockets bulging with the profiles of wallets and keys.

  Alex stood in the doorway of the office and watched them, stunned. James gurgled as he woke in his arms, and the dog continued to whine by his side, but the people continued in their search, none the wiser. He stared without a single thought for a long time, his duvet still hanging from his shoulders, unmoving. Slowly, he began to believe that they were really there, right in front of his eyes, arguing and talking.

  His frozen stupor stretched on until the dog gave a somewhat louder whine. The noise whistled along the aisles, echoing under the warehouse’s vast roof.

  The people froze and glanced over their shoulders, some with heavy boxes held precariously in their arms. Upon spotting the three of them, crammed into the office doorway, their mouths fell open, and they stared just as Alex had stared at them.

  A tense moment of silence stretched out between them.

  Then James began to cry. A moment later, the warehouse was ablaze with noise.

  They burst into motion, leaping down from the shelves and sprinting forwards. Alex surged from the doorway at an equal pace. They met at a fork in a wide aisle and skidded to a halt, still some distance apart, each group uncertain of the other. Alex hefted James’s struggling body in his arms and hushed the dog, which still whined at his side.

  The group was composed of a young couple barely older than himself, a powerful-looking woman in her forties, a young child, and two middle-aged men. All of them observed him with calculated stares. Their numbers and obvious unity automatically leant them authority over the motley crew of teenager, baby and household dog.

  Alex waited for them to make the first move.

  Eventually, one of the men cleared his throat. “You choose strange company, lad,” he said. His face was striking: far longer than it was wide, marred on the right side by a lazy eye that bulged almost free of its socket.

  Alex opened his mouth to answer, but only a shuddering gasp passed his lips. He suddenly wanted to withdraw into himself, to shield James from their combined stares. He had almost accepted that he would never see another person again. To have that certainty falter now, and then have this turn out to be part of some torturous dream—or another intrusion of the macabre into the real world—would drive him to insanity.

  But he was saved by the mature woman’s instincts. Smiling with such sincerity that his heart almost melted, she stepped forwards with her hands held out for the wailing child.

  Alex placed James against her bosom without protest, and looked to her for guidance.

  She smiled with such warmth that he could have sworn she had reached up and caressed his face. She held the child with an expert, soothing ease that no man could ever achieve, and began to rock him. “Beautiful, so he is,” she said.

  “Y-Yes,” Alex stammered.

  James, within the blankets, continued to cry, unheeding of the momentous occasion. Despite the great tenderness with which he was held, he cried only louder.

  Yet the other members of the group seemed encouraged by the exchange and stepped forwards. The young couple stayed back a little farther, grasping each other for support and regarding Alex with a shadow of suspicion, but the others surrounded him with excited mutterings.

  “What’s your name?” the woman said.

  Alex hesitated, but under their expectant stares he managed to speak, “Alex… Alexander Cain.”

  “Alexander,” she said, “it’s an honour.” She swept a hand towards her chest. “I’m Agatha. Auntie Aggie to the young’uns—ain’t that right, sugar?” She tickled James, unbothered by his continued wailing, and flicked her head to indicate the others beside her.

  They were introduced in sequence. Their names broke against Alex like waves against a pier, but he nodded nonetheless to each of them.

  The man with the bulging lazy eye was Oliver Farringdon. “Sir Farringdon, no less,” he cried. “Officer of the late British Empire!” He shook Alex’s hand with sound enthusiasm, clapping him on the back. His fingers were rough and calloused, yet tapered and dextrous: intelligent, practical hands.

  An engineer? Alex thought.

  The young couple were Helen and Hector Creek. They nodded politely, yet stayed some distance away. Hector seemed warm enough, tall and wiry, with a mop of thick, unkempt hair. Helen, small and wispy, held back, swaddled close to her husband’s chest, still wary.

  The remaining man was Paul. Agatha seemed eager to skip him, perhaps owing to his hostile stance and his refusal to shake hands. Sporting a meaty paunch covered by a vest only, with a shaved head and red face, he looked like somebody Alex would usually have avoided at all costs.

  He did his best to keep his greeting neutral, but was sure a slight waver had crept into his voice.

  The young child, meanwhile, ignored Agatha’s attempts to get his attention. Sitting on the concrete floor, he faced resolutely away from them all with his spindly arms wrapped around his knees. But she didn’t seem put out in the slightest, sending a soft, affectionate reprimand his way before turning back to Alex. “What you doin’ out here?” she said.

  “Sleeping,” Alex said. “Searching for…I don’t know. Somebody. Something.”

  They all nodded without further question. At that, the remnants of their reservations dissolved, and even the Creeks relaxed. Oliver and Paul marched away and began to filter their way along the aisles once more, looking at the boxes high above.

  “Don’t go frettin’,” she said. “We’re not looting. Just ganderin’ for engine parts,” Agatha said.

  “What for?”

  She seemed to find some difficulty explaining. “The cars don’t work,” she said eventually. “Just don’t.”

  “Not much seems to,” Alex replied.

  “Televisions, phones, computers…”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s the circuit boards,” Oliver called, hefting a box into his grasp. “They’re dust now.”

  “We’ve been trying to get a motor goin’. Maybe then we’ll find what the Beelzebub is goin’ on. Though I don’t rightly think there’s a soul else around for miles. Have you seen anyone?”

  Alex’s throat grew tighter as a memory of Paul Towers flashed before his eyes, with his bare, seared flesh. Flashes of the conflagration amidst the pile-up followed, then the figur
e he’d seen, standing across the street—all dark-ringed eyes and leering maw. He swallowed with difficulty. “No,” he said.

  Though he could see she made a valiant effort to keep her features warm and motherly, he saw the disappointment in her eyes, and the almost imperceptible slump in her shoulders. “Neither did we,” she said.

  She gazed down into James’s screaming face and seemed immediately brightened by his chubby, wriggling body. “And what about this’un?” she said. Her voice changed to one of interest and delight. “Wasn’t your big brother ’n angel to bring you so far?” she cooed. “Yes, he was.”

  “James,” Alex said. “His name is James. I don’t know who he belongs to. He’s not my brother,” he said.

  Agatha’s smile only widened. “You’re brothers now,” she said simply. And then, as though she had been privy to a hidden secret all along, she placed James back into his clumsy grasp.

  The crying came to an abrupt end. James looked up at him, grasping his toes, and a partially toothed smile broke out upon his face. Alex blinked, and looked back to Agatha.

  Her eyes twinkled. “You’re welcome to stay with us,” she said. “’Less, o’ course, you got an appointment to keep.”

  Alex laughed. But as soon as his chuckling began, sobs welled up from the pit of his stomach, and his vision clouded with tears. He hung his head as his shoulders began to heave. Without a break in her stride, Agatha took his arm and led him into the aisle, soothing him all the while.

  Once she’d brought him to a run-down Land Rover parked askew in the warehouse doorway and seated him with James against a nearby wall, he felt better. While his sobs abated, he watched the strangers work.

  Paul revealed his true nature soon after: a garage mechanic turned God-fearing zealot, judging by how he held a greasy wrench in one hand and a tattered bible in the other, one from which he had yet to remove the library sticker. When not speaking, he busied himself with muttering scripture under his breath. To everybody else’s bemusement, he seemed under the impression that they now inhabited a world on the verge of Tribulation—after the Rapture of the New Testament.

  Agatha and the Creeks seemed equally at odds with him as Alex, but for the time being nobody bothered to speak against him.

  On several occasions Alex rose to his feet to help, but each time was forced back to the wall, for James would now grow increasingly distressed at his absence. He was from then on relegated to watching over the child while the others worked.

  The group bickered and debated on how best to deal with the choking engine, which stalled and whined and crunched whenever the ignition was turned. They worked away on the gutted engine for hours, growing ever more irate and slimed with grease. Spent or mismatched parts littered the floor in every direction. They reached a point in which Alex was sure every component had been replaced, but they kept experimenting, regardless.

  After some time, Agatha came away for water, sipping regally from a flask. She then filled the lid and took it to the small boy, who still sat in the aisle with his hands over his knees. She returned stiffly, backing away from him as a hiker backs away from a riled bear.

  The skeletal child looked after her until she was at least twenty feet away, his mouth twisted into a feral sneer. His eyes twitched to each of them in turn, watchful orbs set within a face rendered filthy with grime and hair knotted beyond recognition. He then tipped the lid and gulped, leaving streams of water to pour across muddied clothes.

  “What about him?” Alex whispered.

  Agatha glanced at the boy and somehow managed to draw another motherly smile from within. “We found that little darlin’ yesterday,” she said. “He was comin’ down from Glasgow, from what we could get outta him.”

  “Where was he?”

  She frowned at the boy and spoke slowly. “The woods… fightin’ off a pack of Rottweilers, with a stick.”

  Alex looked at the tiny child. “Him?”

  The boy, as though he’d heard every word, glanced to the both of them and fixed Alex with a narrow stare.

  Agatha nodded. “A fighter.”

  “Did you get his name?”

  The boy continued to stare at him with wild eyes and drew his arms even tighter over his legs.

  Agatha nodded once more. “Lucian. Lil’ Lucian McKay.”

  She returned to work without another word, leaving him to watch over James.

  Once alone, he looked from her to Lucian, then to the timid Creeks and the spluttering men working themselves to distraction. They were all there, a mere step away. Real people.

  He was not alone.

  “I didn’t think we’d find anybody,” he said to James and the dog.

  They both stared back, blank as slate. He ruffled the dog’s fur as the Land Rover was reduced to a collection of rivets and pipes, rocking James in his arms. Soon, the reality of his situation began to bear down heavily on his shoulders.

  In a sudden rush, the unshakable conclusion that the abandoned baby in his arms was no subconscious fabrication solidified in his mind. The feverish workings of the people before him were part of no dream. It was all really happening.

  He began to shake. The world blurred and his breathing became ragged. It lasted for only a few minutes, but in that time Alex was sure that anything could have happened. He could very well have disappeared himself, leaving behind only a neat pile of clothing.

  When the shaking finally stopped, the trance—the one that had shielded him from the truth for the long days since the End (that was how he thought of it now: the End, a black mark on the world’s timeline between now and Before)—had lifted.

  At last, a hand on Alex’s shoulder drew him back into his body again. He jerked and gazed into a pair of kind, feminine eyes, standing over him.

  Agatha’s soft voice murmured, “Alex… We’re goin’ now.”

  He nodded and stood on legs that had grown numb, following her towards the Land Rover, which now purred nearby. Somehow they’d got it started. “Where are we going?” he said.

  Agatha responded in a tone just hesitant enough to convince him that she scarcely believed the words herself, “We’re goin’ to find answers.”

  They all piled in after Alex had collected his things from the office and stowed the dog in the boot. Backing away from the industrial park, they left the warehouse behind and began to weave their way through the great burned-out wrecks upon the roadways.

  As they moved onto the motorway, heading south, Alex turned to Agatha. “What happened?” he whispered. “Please, tell me. Tell me you know something.”

  She laid her hand over his, and he knew that there were no answers to be had, not from her, not from the others, and not from anyone else.

  Nevertheless, Paul saw that moment as ideal to pipe up. “The End of Days,” he bawled. “Mark my words, it is. And we’ve been left behind, because we’re the damned.”

  Alex looked down, cupping protective hands over James’s ears, staring into his emerald eyes. There, contained within the child’s bulging cheeks and fixed gaze was everything that he would ever need to carry on. He was certain of it.

  James never cried in his arms again.

  2

  DESTINY CALLS

   

  The destiny of man is in his own soul.

  — Herodotus

  I

   

  Norman drifted. A medley of smeared images—or maybe memories—flashed in the dark: rain, falling white stone, and a sharp pain upon the side of his head. But instead of falling into focus, they flickered and jumped, taunting him from afar.

  “Got your head knocked around pretty good, didn’t you?” said a disembodied voice. It spoke with something akin to good cheer. “Not the first time, huh?”

  Norman rolled end over end in a blackened void.

  What are you talking about?

  The voice came again, this time less cheerful, more jeering, “What’s the matter? Don’t you remember?”

  Norman grunted as the strea
m of images flickering before him quickened, shifting between light and dark; faces and buildings; a great tempest surging above a city of towering skyscrapers; and he, horizontal, staring up at a collection of drenched, worried faces. They yelled down at him, exacerbating the throbbing pain above his ear—coursing the jagged contours of his scar—until it was almost unbearable, the urge to vomit all-encompassing.

  One of the faces was clearly Alexander’s, though much younger, perhaps no older than Norman was himself. Moments later, he glimpsed Lucian among the sea of dripping faces. His brow bore no sign of the signature crevasse that Norman knew so well, half-obscured by a shock of long, brown hair—luscious, vital locks of which there were now only silver, patchy remnants.

  The others were a blur—except for a single figure that clearly did not belong in the picture. Didn’t belong at all. It stood off to one side, some distance behind the others, crouching over him without a trace of rain upon its body—almost as though the rain passed right through it. As though it were not really there. Its face was young and angular, carved with fine detail. Norman sensed an overbearing strength and sinister intent; the eyes staring out from the pale features seemed to see right through him—no, directly into him. Surrounding each eye was a dark streak, a halo of darkness around the glowing, white sclera.

  He nodded to Alex and Lucian (their faces still younger, not yet buckled by time and strife), who still called out above Norman, bent close, shouting his name—though he could only tell from the movement of their lips, as their voices were no more than smeared, incoherent warbles.

  Norman’s own voice spoke from the ether, as though he’d spoken aloud, voicing his thoughts. What is this?

  The figure merely smiled. “Remember, Norman,” he said. “Remember. You were all there. You all watched it happen.”

  And then he was gone.

  The city’s palette of colours liquefied and reformed, swirling back into focus until the face of the man with the neckerchief was upon him, staring through the glass of his living-room window. For a moment, Norman felt a twinge of recognition, one tenfold stronger than the one he’d felt several nights before, by the campfire.

  And then nothing.

  Darkness.

  He drifted.

  Then he felt his body once more—his real body. He was being moved. Distantly, a twinge registered in the crook of his elbow, which built to a sharp pain, and something cold ran up his arm. Then nothing again.

  “How is he?” said an addled voice, warped and inhuman. It hung in the ether, faint and undulating.

  “I just gave him a shot. He should stop struggling soon,” another voice answered.

  “Will he be okay?”

  “I’m not sure. We’ll have to wait and see.”

  Norman slid further into nothingness, and the voices became silent.