The Last Escape

by T. W. Piperbrook

  No one answered.

  And then a little girl whispered his name.

  "Bray…."

  "Where are you? What do you want?" he demanded.

  He groped around the darkness, trying to find the source of the noise. If a child— Harriet—had found her way inside, he'd locate her. He lowered his sword and stepped forward. His feet stumbled over his bedding, his bag. He fought for balance. He kept moving, thinking he'd run into his companions, someone, but the room was empty. He found no sign of Ella and William. Even the bodies of the settlers seemed to have disappeared. He'd just reached the wall when a cold hand grabbed his wrist.

  Bray screamed and swung his sword. The blade struck the wall; the child blared his name. Someone pushed him to the ground. Bray tried scrambling to his feet, but a flurry of hands were pinning him down, forcing him to—

  He awoke in a sweat. Bray shot up and swiveled around.

  "Bray?" a voice called through the darkness.

  "Who's there?" he asked, shaking.

  It wasn't a child this time. It was Ella, checking on him. He exhaled deeply. It'd been a nightmare. Nothing more.

  "Are you okay?" Ella asked.

  "I'm fine," he said, regaining his composure.

  "I heard you talking in your sleep."

  Bray grunted. "You must've been mistaken."

  He didn't ask what she'd heard. He didn't want to know. He lay back down for several seconds, trying to control his heartbeat, and stared at the ceiling. The dwelling was pitch black. The scratches and whimpers he'd heard before had melded into the sounds of the forest. But he still felt the clammy grip of a child's fingers wrapped around his wrist.

  He pictured Harriet's charred face, luring him into the land of the dead.

  "Bray…"

  Bray gritted his teeth and cursed at himself. He'd never had nightmares. Not since he was a boy and his father was showing him the forest, not since he'd killed his first demon. The nightmares had long faded, leaving him to face real dangers. He had no time for imagined ones.

  Still, he couldn't wait to get out of this place. It had him rattled.

  He set his sword down and listened to Ella fall back asleep. Once she'd quieted, he listened to the animals filling the forest with chatter, calming him.

  He lay awake on his bedding until the first rays of morning gleamed through the cracks in the walls.

  Chapter 24: Beck

  With an ancient book deep in his pocket, bound in old cloth, wrapped in sheepskin to protect it, Beck walked past the stinking skinners' plots. He thought, as he always thought when he had the misfortune to find himself walking down this particular street, that if the skinners would exercise the good sense to bury or burn the byproduct of their work, rather than piling the rotting bits of flesh behind their houses in open pits, the smell wouldn't be a problem.

  It was morning, and the snow had stopped falling, but it was still cold. At the moment, that was a good thing. The swarm of black flies that usually cast a shadow over this part of town was gone.

  Beck recalled how there had only been a few houses and proprietorships in this area when he was a boy, constructed to incorporate large pieces of ancient stone. The stones, made up of every shape and size, stood on edge or lay flat. Some were crumbled into uselessness. Some single stones made solid walls for houses that were built against them. Many bled rust and crumbled away to expose the remnants of metal skeletons inside.

  Grandpa Beck, the oldest man Beck had ever known, told him the stones had been made by the hands of the Ancients. The Ancients had learned the secrets of forming stone into liquid, a liquid that they'd pour into molds, like enormous cakes. In the absence of further explanation, Beck guessed there had to have been ovens even larger than the mold in which to bake the giant cakes into stone. But how could such stones be moved? He shook his head in frustration. Every one of the Ancient stories ended that way, in questions that led to more questions. In the end, they could only be answered with an exasperated surrender to the simple demoralizing truth—that the Ancients had some kind of magic, some special knowledge that made it all possible.

  He hated to acknowledge that he and his contemporaries were so profoundly ignorant of the Ancients' processes. Every fantastical device the Ancients possessed, every marvelous power they wielded, was so far beyond present knowledge that its workings could only be guessed at. All of it might as well have been magic. Tech Magic. At least, that's what the commoners called it.

  The only other alternative was the simple one, that Grandpa Beck and those like him were storytellers with vivid imaginations, shirkers looking for ways to avoid working the field or patrolling the frontier for the monsters.

  Some whispers went so far as to claim Grandpa Beck had turned crazy from reading over shreds of ancient books and papers. Beck was a skinny kid back in those days, smaller than most boys, and ignored the jabs when he was able. When he wasn't, he raised his fists and fueled his strength with thin-worn patience and a growing temper.

  Now that Beck was a grown man, sometimes when he was staring at the ceiling in his dark bedchamber, suffering the weight of his failure to unearth any profound ancient secrets, he feared those whispers from his childhood might be true. If so, his life had been and would be a waste of time.

  To combat the despair that lay always under the surface of his thoughts, Beck put his hand in his pocket and touched the firm book through its wrapper of animal skin. He looked at the tumbledown walls of ancient stone along Skinner's Row. The book and the walls were made by the hands of men—men who lived in the same magical age. If Ancient hands could make such things, then so could the hands of future men. It was only the men of the present day who'd misplaced their knowledge of the world's magical secrets. Finding those secrets was Beck's goal. That, and ferreting out which of the legends were wrapped around a kernel of truth and worth pursuing, and which were wrapped around a rabbit pellet, exaggerated and not worth anything.

  Skinner's Row ended where it intersected The Hay Road. Beck walked past modest wooden houses owned by farmers and hunters. Not many of those people were around. They were either in the fields trying to gather up what the snow hadn't destroyed, or they were in the square, pointlessly repeating militia drills. Beck shook his head. Whatever Blackthorn was up to, the drills were only serving to make the matter worse.

  Chapter 25: Ivory

  Ivory opened the door to his father's house, stepped in, and was surprised to a halt. Minister Beck was sitting at his father's table. His father was not in the room. Ivory glanced back and forth, searching for Muldoon, but the room appeared otherwise empty.

  "Don't be alarmed, boy." Minister Beck waved Ivory in and then laid his hand on a stack of three books on the table, Ivory's books.

  Crap.

  Tentatively, Ivory moved forward, the weight of a backpack full of exotic, smuggled metals enough to set his pulse racing. Which would be worse to explain? The metals or the books? He glanced out into the street as he pulled the door closed behind him. Like every other resident of Brighton, Ivory was apprehensive—terrified—of the ministers. They wielded absolute power, and from what Ivory had seen, no good ever came of the ministers' use of that power.

  Thankfully, Ivory had taken the time to kill three rabbits on his way back to Brighton. He laid them on the table in front of Beck and slowly removed his backpack, trying to hide the awkward weight of it. With his bow and quiver in hand, Ivory contorted and slipped the bag off his shoulder. The strap hit his forearm as he was leaning over, and the bag hit the floor with the obvious clunk and jingle of metal.

  Ivory sucked in a pained breath.

  He turned around to see Minister Beck still watching him, waiting patiently, saying nothing, holding an innocuous expression. Ivory forced a smile and laid his bow across the table. He placed his quiver beside it.

  Minister Beck pointed at the bow. "Please, put it away. It is not necessary to leave it on the table."

  Ivory put a hand on the bow and hesitated, re
luctant to have the bow out of his reach. Nevertheless, he turned toward the wall above where he'd dropped his backpack on the floor and laid the bow across two pegs at shoulder level on the wall. He hung the quiver from one of the pegs and turned back to Beck.

  "Those are good-looking rabbits." Beck smiled.

  Ivory nodded.

  "Why not move those as well?"

  Ivory took the three skinny rabbits and laid them across his bag on the floor.

  "Not many to bring back. How many days were you on the hunt?"

  "I lost count," Ivory lied.

  Beck shrugged. "Would you guess the number of rabbits in the forest has dwindled?"

  "Possibly," Ivory answered, hoping that Beck's ignorance of life outside the wall had inadvertently gifted him a plausible explanation.

  "Please, sit." Beck motioned Ivory toward a chair across the table.

  Ivory scooted the chair out and seated himself. "Are you here to see my father?"

  Beck's face seemed suddenly distressed; it turned immediately back to placid calm. "You've been outside since before The Cleansing."

  "I left the day before," Ivory answered.

  "The day before," Beck repeated. "Some might call that suspicious."

  "I…" Ivory was caught without an exact answer to the implied question. "It was the first Cleansing for which I was of age to Cleanse myself. I…"

  "You wanted to feel your freedom?" Beck asked.

  "Yes." Ivory nodded. "That's it."

  "You're not infected?" Beck asked. "No lumps. No red skin?"

  Shaking his head perhaps a little too vigorously, Ivory said, "No. I'm in perfect health."

  "You knew about your father, Muldoon, no?"

  Of course Ivory knew. If Ivory hadn't seen his father's skin, Muldoon's mood gave it away. Also, of course, Ivory lied about it. "No. What about my father?"

  "You don't know?"

  "Know?"

  "Your father was unclean."

  "He…" Ivory couldn't finish the sentence. He'd tried to convince Muldoon to leave town, to go into the woods with him and hunt, to keep his infection secret until…well, until he couldn't. Heck, maybe for the rest of his life. Ivory had heard rumors of men who'd hidden the secret for years, some even into their old age. In those cases, the bumps came, but never progressed beyond a point. People lived normal lives.

  But Muldoon wouldn't listen to Ivory. The two had argued over it at least a dozen times, as they had argued over many things. Ivory believed Muldoon had never broken a rule in his life—outside of his gambling problems. Ivory's uncle, the man who'd taken Ivory to the Ancient City to meet Jingo, the one who'd taught him how to smuggle metals, was Muldoon's opposite. He didn't believe in rules. Rules, in his uncle's opinion, were simply the way the ministers provided regular men with the hints they needed to use to avoid the ministers' wrath. It was an attitude about avoiding the rules rather than obeying them.

  Beck said, "He was taken in The Cleansing."

  Ivory heaved a sigh and his eyes fell to the table.

  "He died bravely. He took the pyre, though I advised him to take the sword. He was a strong man."

  Ivory nodded and did his best to blink away unexpected, though sparse, tears. Still, the situation with Beck sitting in his father's house didn't make sense. "Did you come here to tell me?"

  Beck patted the pile of books. All three had been borrowed at different times from Jingo's collection through the years, but because Ivory liked those particular books so much, Jingo had given them as a gift.

  Beck asked, "Do you know the value of these books?"

  "In what way?" Ivory asked, knowing they were of immense value if sold to the right merchant. He couldn't help but think of them in the same way that Jingo thought of them, as the secret path to the knowledge of the ancients and knowledge of the world that still existed around them.

  "That's an odd question."

  "How so?" Ivory asked.

  Beck tapped the books. "If you sold these, you likely wouldn't have to waste your time on rabbit hunts anymore."

  "I like hunting rabbits. I'm good at it."

  Beck looked over at the three carcasses. "It would seem the evidence does not agree."

  Ivory couldn't help but look at the three scrawny rabbits while he cursed himself for having said such a thing. It would have been so much better to appear incompetent. Nobody worried over what stupid people were up to, especially stupid people with backpacks full of contraband metals from the Ancient City that could get them tied to a pyre pole.

  Beck dragged his fingers back and forth across the rough cloth cover of the book on top of the pile, looking at the book as he did so, as though he might learn something from it just by staring long enough. "Your father asked me a favor before he went to the pyre."

  Ivory said nothing. He realized that the fewer words he spoke, the more likely he was to live through the day.

  "He told me you can read," Beck said.

  Ivory's heart galloped. He envisioned the fate—the punishment—that might meet someone who had secretly learned to read.

  Beck said, "He asked me to take you on as a scholar."

  Chapter 26: Bray

  Despite his broken sleep, Bray charged through the forest with renewed vigor, driven by a need to get away from the dwelling. He made it seem as though he was pushing hard to reach the Davenport survivors, but he was glad to be rid of the place. The snow had stopped falling, leaving only a thin coat of evidence. Much of it had melted in the early morning hours.

  Ella and William trekked the forest alongside him. Neither complained about the pace. The importance of gaining ground was unspoken, driving the three of them onward. Bray wove a diagonal path, hoping to cut back in front of the soldiers and pick up the survivor's tracks. If they were lucky, maybe the blue-shirted bastards had gone home.

  Maybe they'd given up.

  As calloused as the soldiers acted, Bray doubted they were equipped for a long journey. They'd probably planned on massacring the townsfolk, finding Ella, and returning quickly. Supplies were hard to come by deep in the forest. He knew that as well as anyone.

  If we can get to the survivors in time…

  Bray was surprised to find himself immersed in Ella's quest. Since leaving Davenport, he'd assumed it as his own. The actions of the soldiers had stoked his anger. What they'd done to the residents of Davenport—and to the settlers—was cowardly. Only weak men killed on the basis of orders alone.

  Besides, the soldiers had cut off some of his trading resources. Bray would like nothing more than to thwart their efforts, to rub their inefficiencies in Blackthorn's face. Whether or not the General was his employer, Bray's loyalty was to silver, not to the man or his townships.

  He forged through the trees. Thick foliage hung at the tree line, blocking off the sun overhead. They'd entered swampland, and the muck clung to Bray's boots, dragging him closer to the ground. He heard the slick pull of wet earth on Ella's and William's feet, as well. They breathed heavily as they fought for each step. The rains had been heavy the week before, and the melted snow added to the already-moist ground. Shadows abounded. If Bray hadn't been in a rush, he would've skirted the area; given their situation, they needed to plow through it.

  "We should be on the other side soon," he told Ella and William.

  "I assume this is the quickest way?" Ella asked.

  Bray nodded and kept going. He heaved his sword into the ground, using it for leverage. William did the same, looking for Bray's approval. Bray recalled his own childhood, walking next to his father. The similarities weren't lost on him. But this situation was different. William wasn't here to learn; he was here because he was infected.

  Soon the demon seed would take him over.

  Bray recalled one of the other Wardens, Everett, who had fallen victim to the spores a year ago. Everett had been hunting the demons in the southern forests, far outside of the realm of the townships, when the symptoms had taken him over. Unlike Bray, Everett had been married
; he'd had a wife and son in Coventry.

  For some reason, Everett had hiked the many miles home, battling both demons and delusion to see his wife and child. He'd finally ended up in the woods outside of the township, just a few miles from his house. When Bray had encountered him, he'd been sitting by a campfire, yelling into the night. Bray had approached cautiously, fearing the worst. The man had been huddled over a stick, roasting something over the fire. It wasn't until Bray had gotten closer that he'd determined what it was. Everett was feasting on one of the demons, stuffing bulbous chunks of flesh into his mouth.

  Out of respect, Bray had killed the man. He'd never told the man's wife. She thought he was still out in the wild, that one day he'd come home. Sometimes it was better to have hope than to learn the truth.

  The settlers don't feast on the blood of demons. But the infected… There's no telling what they might do.

  Bray shook the image from his mind. The muck had thickened, and the stench of wet soil reminded him of the musky scent of demons. It wasn't until he'd gone another few steps that he realized the threat was real.

  Several monsters sloshed through the wet ground and toward them.

  "Ella! William!" he hissed.

  He grabbed for his companions, but they were already prepared, readying their swords. He had the brief thought that they shouldn't have come here. It was too late; it was time to survive.

  The things were closing fast. They covered the ground between them, as if they'd been lying in wait. Despite the drenched ground, the demons came at the travelers with remarkable speed. Their naked bodies were slicked with mud, as if they'd fallen several times. The closest creature charged at Bray.

  Bray swung his sword, severing its arm from its body. The creature fell, splashing face-first into the sodden ground. It writhed and wiggled, pushing itself up on one good hand, snapping at Bray. Bray raised his boot and squashed its head into the muck. He stabbed it in the back with his sword, finishing it off.

  "Look out!" he yelled at Ella and William.

  Two more demons were hurtling toward them, their bare feet kicking up mud from the swamp. Ella and William stepped backwards. Ella was farthest from Bray; the things were homing in on her. They reached her and she swung her sword, slicing the first one's chest open. It toppled to the side. The next bashed into her before she recovered, sending her sideways. She cried out. Bray sprung.