The Dawn: Omnibus edition (box set books 1-5)

by Michelle Muckley

  It had been a long time since his driving skills had been called into service, but with the exception of a couple of ropy gear changes he managed to control the vehicle well. The suspension felt old and loose, and even on the smooth roads of the Omega Tower Compound the ride was bumpy and nausea-inducing. Millward approached the gates. Even if he hit the accelerator and tried to force his way through there was no chance he would make it. The gates were reinforced with triple-layer metal fencing reaching over eight feet high. He would have to talk his way out.

  He pulled up just in front of the gates and a Guardian stepped out from a small cabin waving his hand up in the air. Millward pulled up the handbrake and left the engine to idle. He wound down the window and felt the chill of the late afternoon air as it swept through the cabin of his vehicle. His breath fogged the air as the Guardian approached. The summer had ended as quickly as the war began. The golden leaves rustled in the trees as a light breeze snaked through.

  “Good evening, fellow Guardian. They are sending you out towards the Barrens on such an afternoon?” He held out his scanner expectantly. “I wasn’t expecting anybody to pass.”

  “Well, you know how it is. There is a lot of uncertainty with the current situation. The Red Eyes have all gone south and there are still pockets of Drifters popping up. You know they are close by, don’t you?”

  The Guardian glanced behind the gates at the wall that now encircled them. The progress really had been exceptional. The border was complete. “How close?” the Guardian asked, worry creeping onto his face, wrinkling the lines and furrowing his brow.

  “Close enough,” Millward said, certain that he had unnerved the young Guardian. Border Control was easy work, Millward knew that. Only the weakest Guardians would be used here. Millward opened the door to the van, taking the young Guardian by surprise. “I’m sure I can hear something rattling by this back wheel. I don’t want to get out there and find a problem.” Millward left the door open and moved around the front of the van, leaving the Guardian alone.

  Millward pushed at the corner of the bonnet as if testing the wheels. “I don’t hear anything,” called the young Guardian. “I used to know about cars, but not much about vehicles this size.” He joined in with Millward’s testing and gave the vehicle a shove for good measure. “I can’t hear anything. Was it like a rumbling?” he asked as they met up towards the back of the van. Millward nodded. “I’ll take a look at the wheel. Probably a bearing which you’ll have to notify them about.”

  Millward had struck lucky, found a young man who loved a vehicle, even an old one. And he relished the idea of being able to help. Maybe it was years since anybody had struck up a conversation about cars. It might have even been years since somebody struck up a conversation. The young Guardian dropped to the ground without a second thought for his uniform and began assessing the wheel, talking to himself about bearings and oil and the poor condition of most vehicles in New Omega. In that moment he was so unlike a Guardian that Millward nearly couldn’t bring himself to do it. But he steeled himself and delivered one quick blow to the back of the young Guardian’s head. He buckled to the floor. Millward dragged him out before propping him up in the cabin by the gate.

  He was about to drive away, and was even half way through the gates when something told him to wait. He looked back at the Guardian who he knew would have to explain how he had let a man escape. He would pay a heavy price for his incompetence when all he was trying to do was help a fellow Guardian in need. Millward pulled on the handbrake and stepped from the van. He pulled open the door at the back and hauled the Guardian out of the cabin, shoving him into the van.

  The road south was passable for the most part, but quickly turned into an obstacle course of brick and debris as he approached what used to be Alpha Tower. The first thing he noticed was the giant propeller sticking out of the ground like the blades of a windmill. He slowed to a crawl to negotiate the road and he stole snatched glances at what was once a true and sturdy tower, one that had withstood a nuclear explosion. Now it lay a pathetic heap of its former self, crumbled layers and piles of glass, brick, and sheets of what looked like floor tiles sticking out at irregular angles. He saw a bed, a settee, a shoe. The items became more and more personal until he saw the first. A head. Short blond hair. He looked closer and saw other bodies. Others with a stronger stomach for death may have stopped to investigate, but Millward drove south, cutting into smaller roads which led away from the remains of Alpha Tower, and which seemed altogether safer.

  Although the way was bumpy, the vehicle proved strong, and as they arrived at the edge of what was once an official border, marked by burnt-out cars, he heard the first Red Eye groaning in the background. The remains of the old rebel compound were still smoking in the background, sending drifts of grey smoke into the sky. He pulled his van into the shadow of an old red London bus while the Red Eye cleared out. Just then he heard the Guardian stirring in the back of the van.

  “What the…?” he asked as he staggered onto all fours. He brought one hand up to the back of his head, and when he looked up and saw Millward’s face the confusion was replaced by anger. The Guardian staggered forwards but was unsteady, soon finding himself back on the floor of the vehicle. “You struck me on the back of the head!”

  “That I did. I admit it.” Millward held his hands up as a sign of surrender. “But don’t make a sound. There is a Red Eye just the other side of this red bus, and if he sees us we are both dead. Whether you like it or not you are on the run.”

  “Where are we?” It looked as if he was struggling to focus on Millward’s face, and the bump on his head seemed to have sent him a bit delirious. “What the hell is a Red Eye?” The young Guardian looked down at his uniform paying attention to his skin-tight black gloves, as if he had never seen it before in his life.

  “A Challenger Two. As for where we are, don’t worry about that for now,” Millward said. It seemed to do the trick. The young Guardian curled up in the foetal position and dozed back off to sleep. Millward waited for the Red Eye to move on, all the while listening to the guttural sounds of heavy breathing coming from his reluctant passenger. When there were no more sounds he restarted the engine and continued south.

  After avoiding several other Red Eyes as he weaved his journey south, he found the old railway line. He followed the course, the van making an effort of every overgrown sleeper, the hanging branches of the trees scratching at the roof as they passed underneath. The route was throwing both driver and passenger about as they made progress along the track, stopping only once when Millward was sure that he heard something up ahead. He pulled the old van off the tracks and drove into the hedgerow for protection, only to see that the screeching that he had taken to be the rotating turret of a Red Eye was the howl of a lone fox directly up ahead.

  It took twenty five minutes before he reached Brighton Checkpoint Station Ten. He had never been this far away from the compound, and the feeling of running from New Omega didn’t fill him with excitement in the way that he had hoped it would. For years he had dreamed of leaving, finding a different life, and something of the person that he once was. Yet he had become strangely accustomed to life since that first day when he put on the Guardians’ uniform and wondered who the person was looking back at him. He enjoyed the relative comforts of Omega Tower and appreciated the security that he felt in his life, in comparison to how he imagined many of the other residents of New Omega must feel. The knowledge that he could sleep with both eyes closed was welcome, knowing that nobody would take from him because everybody was provided for. There was a level of security in Omega Tower which he had stopped pretending he didn’t welcome. He had lost a wife, a child, his parents, his friends, his career. Nothing that nobody else hadn’t lost, but still it wasn’t easy. He had found something good in Omega Tower and running away from the last bit of security was harder than anticipated. But still he trusted what he was doing. He reminded himself that nobody had ever promised him that the right path wo
uld be well lit or easy to follow.

  After finding there was nowhere that he could pull the car from the tracks and get onto the roads surrounding the old Crystal Palace Park he abandoned the car in a thicket of dead trees and ruffled the branches about until the van was almost invisible. He didn’t feel right leaving the other Guardian in the back, but when he opened the door he was still unreachably asleep. Millward checked for a pulse the best he knew how, and upon feeling some sort of response decided to leave him there. He felt a little as if he was abandoning a caged bird into the wild that wouldn’t know how to feed himself. But he figured he had no other choice and so set forth towards the old sports stadium where he knew that there was a chance of finding life.

  The thing that struck him most as he wandered through the silent streets was the normality of them. The houses stood tall and proud. Many had roofs intact. The cars were free from paint; burnt-out shells with nothing inside, yet still they sat in rows, neatly parked as they had been left by their owners. At first he was disorientated, uncertain where exactly he was. He should know this area well, and yet most buildings bore little resemblance to anything his mind was capable of recalling. He decided to keep his head down, ignore the warped image of the past, and get to the stadium. He managed it for a while, but there was one house that he couldn’t ignore. His own.

  He hadn’t even realised that he was on the street that he used to call home. But then something caught his eye in the window, a curtain still hanging as it had been left over ten years ago in the peeling bay window. There was a face drawn onto it in felt tip pen. Big red clown lips, blue eyes. Yellow straw-like hair. The face his son had drawn when there had been no paper to hand. How he had berated him for that, and now it was the only thing that he recognised when he looked back at the old rust red bricks of the Victorian semi.

  He climbed across the overgrown front garden with its opportunistic foxglove plants, and pushed open the rotten wood door. He skipped over scraps of paper, engrained dirt spreading from the ceiling down to the floor, or the other way around. He wasn’t sure. He moved through to the kitchen and the cupboards looked different to how he remembered them. He thought that his were white, but maybe they were brown and he just couldn’t remember. He looked through the remains of an old life on the floor of the living room and found photographs in frames which were so faded that he couldn’t make out the faces of most of the people in them, and those he could he no longer recognised. A cruel trick of memory, he thought, to remember every detail about the war and not those of the faces he once loved. There used to be a bedroom at the back of the house but it had been raided by Drifters because the bed wasn’t there anymore. He moved upstairs and searched the cupboards. He walked into a bedroom and looked in the cupboards. Women’s clothes hung like ghosts on the rail. But he was startled by a shuffling sound coming from behind him, so much so that he fell into the cupboard. The dresses disintegrated as he lashed out with his hands to steady himself, the shreds of cloth cascading over him like snowflakes and soft feathers. It was to no avail because he fell to the floor anyway as the person staggered towards him.

  “What do you want?” came the voice. Millward had taken the person as a woman on account of the long hair. But the voice was deep and croaky, unmistakably male. He wore a green oversized wax jacket that swamped his form. “What are you doing here?”

  “This was my home. I used to live here.” Millward lurched forwards, scrambling to his feet. He was too large for dexterity and his clumsy movements kicked up a storm of dust. He tried to focus, pawing at the dust motes as they drifted through the air. He saw that what he had taken for a bed was actually just a settee. There was a blanket draped across it, brown with filth. That had never been his. He looked around the room and realised that there was nothing of his.

  “That’s not true.” The man jabbed a stick at Millward in neanderthal fashion, scared to approach or get too close. “This was my home.” A child crawled out from behind the man, its head swollen and irregular in shape. There was something wrong with its eyes.

  “Why is he looking at me funny?” asked Millward, pointing at the child.

  “Because you’re one of them.” Millward looked at his gloved hands and then scanned his white tunic. The Assister was hanging from a loop on his belt. “What are you doing here?” He prodded the stick forward, catching Millward on the top of his leg. He jumped backwards, pulled his black hat from his head.

  “I’m looking for Brighton Checkpoint Station Ten,” he said as he held up his hands to surrender. “It’s the old Crystal Palace Park. It’s nearby, right?” So this was freedom. Living in a rotten old house with a sick child who needed a doctor. There were doctors in Omega Tower. Was this what he was fighting for?

  The man dropped the cane and reached down to pick up his son. “So you are one of those rebels who wants to fight. I’ve heard about the likes of you. What are you fighting for? What’s the point?” The man looked frail as he tried to stand with the boy in his arms. Millward moved in as if to help, but the man soon backed away. His son must have been about eight but he couldn’t walk properly because of his leg. His leg, Millward thought as he took a proper look at it. He hadn’t noticed before but it was swollen and bulbous, the skin painfully stretched across the oversized limb.

  What was the point? Millward couldn’t answer that, so instead he backed away, stepping over boxes and old papers and something brown that smelt bad. “This wasn’t my house,” he said as he backed through the door. He negotiated the stairs, finding that in places they were completely destroyed. The man was calling something behind him but he didn’t wait to hear it. By the time he arrived at the door he was running, stopping only to look back at the curtain. In place of the felt tip face there was a brown stain, some sort of watermark that he had mistaken for a faded pair of lips and a crown of straw-coloured hair. This wasn’t his house. This had never been his house.

  He ran all the way until he was standing outside the entrance to the old sports hall, the base of Brighton Checkpoint Station Ten. Most of the glass was missing, and as he walked through the interior he saw the pool, nearly drained of water, just a murky puddle remaining in the bottom. When he heard the screech of a Red Eye close by he ran as fast as he could, without knowing where he was going. The lights were shining on him, and he could hear somebody shouting through a megaphone. He knew they had seen him. He dodged fallen pillars and darted from one shadow to the next until he found a way out of the building. He dashed across the grassy meadow just as the Red Eye launched an attack. The sound of the bomb-shattered building collapsing in on itself was deafening. He picked up the pace as he arrived at the edge of a copse of trees. He didn’t stop or look back until he came out the other side. The lights seemed further away, the sounds more distant, coming from somewhere beyond the smoke rising from the Red Eye attack.

  Ahead he saw the old steps that once led to a grand palace that was destroyed by fire, flanked by Egyptian sphinxes to guard or impress. To the left he knew he would head straight back to where the Red Eye had first spotted him, and so he headed right towards the edge of the park. He reached a small clearing full of caravans and broken down single-storey brick buildings. He was about to leave them behind when he heard somebody shout.

  “Don’t go any further.” The voice came through, confident and strong. Millward was surprised to see a skinny boy with lank dirty-blond hair underneath a beige cap moving towards him.

  “Let’s just kill him,” said another voice, belonging to a woman who was stepping forwards with a gun trained on Millward’s face. Millward responded by snatching at his own gun. “Drop it,” the woman shouted, but Millward stood firm, watching her fingers in case she decided to squeeze off a round.

  “Sshh, the pair of you,” said the man-boy. “Why are you running away from them?”

  “Why haven’t you killed me?” countered Millward. He was dressed like a Guardian. They had every reason to kill him on sight. Just as the man in the rotten old house belie
ved, Millward represented only the regime. “Why would you keep a Guardian alive?”

  It was a risk to engage them. He didn’t know who they were. But they hadn’t killed him, and their proximity to what should have been Brighton Checkpoint Station Ten made him hopeful. They looked as if they were waiting for something, perhaps the same thing that he was waiting for.

  Then the wait was over as the man-boy began to move towards him, his face still cast in shadows. “Because I know some can be trusted. Everybody has something they would risk everything for. That can make even a Guardian forget the ten creeds of the Omega Manifesto.” The Drifter arrived just in front of Millward, who lowered his gun.

  “My name is Millward. I know Emily.”

  The man-boy smiled and motioned for Street to lower her weapon. “My name is Jackson.”

  Chapter Sixty Three

  “I can’t believe that I have actually found you.” Millward breathed an audible sigh of relief as he holstered his weapon. “I’m sorry about that with the gun. But I am so glad I have found you. I never really expected that I would.”

  What tension remained was broken by an errant screech of a Red Eye turret swinging in their direction. Even Street began to run as they slipped back towards half a remaining building.

  “We have never met before, so why would you be looking for me?” asked Jackson.

  “Emily sent me. We have a situation in Omega Tower. They captured Zack.”

  “Good. That was his plan,” said Jackson as he ushered Millward through a broken door and into a small back room. There was a collection of laptops on battery, and a flask of something that looked as if it was steaming. Jackson picked up a cup and poured him a measure of hot tea. Street remained at the edge of the building with her eyes trained in the direction of the Red Eyes while the two men sat down on makeshift chairs. “He saved a lot of people before he got captured. They are hiding out with Stoat in a nearby warehouse. We carried on here but all we found was chaos. There were Red Eyes crawling all over the place and they had already fired on the sports centre.” Jackson looked down at his feet and pulled his palms against his head to position his cap. “That was the recon point for Brighton Checkpoint Station Ten. We found the remains of the golf buggies outside. There’s no chance they made it out.”