“No, we need to know more about it first, exactly where it is, how to get in and learn its secrets. Just get out, leave us,” Alexander ordered with a wave of his hand.
As the guards left, Ben mumbled “mountain,” ''door,” and “pager.” His words were barely audible or intelligible, but Alexander was able to pick up on it.
He removed the pager from his pocket and turned it over again in his hands, pressing the small button that activated the number display. He wondered if the numbers 6479 were maybe a secret password, to be spoken at the door, or a reference to its position on a map. Without more information, he didn’t want to send a team against an unknown enemy. It wasn’t that he felt any compassion for the men he commanded, most days he would have gladly killed them all himself, but he didn’t want to give any enemy an advantage and warn them that he was coming. As far as he was concerned, information was ammunition, and should be used accordingly.
Alexander stood and pondered things for a while longer before turning and leaving the cell without comment or explanation, mumbling to himself as he turned and made his way down the corridor.
Hmm. It’s all in the details. This calls for a different plan of action entirely.
Ben fought weakly with the coat that Joe had covered him with, pulling at it as he stretched and retracted his legs, fighting an unseen force. The sudden activity pulled Matthew from his doze, the gun gripped tightly in his hands as the shuffling and the whimpering called his senses into action.
Kicking off the small mountain of hay that he had managed to bury himself in, he quickly scanned the insides of the barn. The rain was still drumming on the roof, making the location of the sounds more difficult to determine, but Matthew’s gaze was soon drawn to Ben’s slowly flailing body. As he cautiously and quietly approached him, Ben had already started to slow down his actions and drift back into the comatose sleep that had claimed him for the last day or more.
Matthew pulled the coat away from Ben’s face to ensure that there was nothing more sinister happening. He’d seen the use of Droca weed before, and knew it wasn’t uncommon for the victim to choke on his own vomit as his body eventually gave up. He could see that Ben was still breathing, shallow to begin with but slowly getting deeper. He decided to sit with him until Carl took over the guard duty sometime nearer dawn.
It was late the following day that they found the empty, abandoned farmhouse. Peter approached as he had done on the previous day, knocking politely on the door in a ruse to acquire them some more food. After finding the building deserted, he went against all of his training and broke in.
The large window at the rear of the building was easy to lift out, and he was confident that he could replace it if he had to, and make it look reasonably normal and untouched. He climbed onto the metal sink unit beneath the window, being careful not to knock over any of the crockery that was precariously balanced along its length. After a preliminary check to ensure that the building was truly empty, he opened the back door and called for the rest of the group to follow him in.
Carl had resumed his role of carrying Ben on his shoulder, taking him across the threshold and placing him carefully on one of the two beds in the back room. So far, he had shown no more signs of life since the brief episode the previous night, but no one would have ever considered leaving him behind. He was one of them now, one of the few survivors from the Road Trains, and it was a very exclusive club that couldn’t face a drop in its members.
Catrina had started walking by herself, but she still refused to speak or interact with any member of the group, even Matthew. She took direction, accepting food when it was offered and following the group from behind as they made their way south, but her mind was still elsewhere.
Matthew and Peter began rummaging through the cupboards and shelves in the kitchen, looking for anything that would hold back the gnawing hunger that was consuming all of them. Unfortunately, it looked as though whoever lived in the house had taken all the food with them.
“Hey, you should see it back there,” Carl commented as he returned from the bedroom. “The room's almost entirely empty.”
“Same here,” Matthew said as he stood, closing the last of the cupboard doors.
“What do you think? They take everything with them wherever they go?” Carl asked.
“Or they’re not planning on coming back any time soon,” Peter cut in. “Maybe it’s not only the people in the city who are going to war.”
“Well, whatever the reason,” Matthew said, “it’ll be dark soon and this is the best-looking shelter we’ve seen all day. If someone could start a fire, I thought I saw some chickens or something over the back as we came in.”
Matthew and Peter left the house to try to catch some food, Arian following close behind to draw some water from the well beside the house. There were still snippets of sunlight colouring the landscape, but the land was strange and unfamiliar and she didn’t want to get caught outside by herself after dark. She drew as much water as she thought she could easily carry and returned hastily to the house.
It wasn’t long before the two men returned with five plump chickens, holding them by their feet, the chicken’s heads swaying about their cleanly broken necks. A little after nightfall, the house warmed by the roaring fire in the living room and the heat from the stove, there was food and water enough for everyone. However, there was none of the usual fun and frivolity that was shared by the people of the Road Trains, none of the laughter that had been so present as they had sat around campfires only a week or so before.
At Arian’s objection to leaving the house for a second time, it was Carl who collected the second bucket of water, which they used to clean themselves up. Though they had been travelling with the Road Trains for as long as most of them could remember, few of them were actually used to roughing it, the trailers carrying all of the comforts of home.
Most of them would have admitted to enjoying time out in the countryside, fending for themselves, catching their own food, and finding their own water, but when it became a necessity, it was a different story. Catching your own meal lost any of its appeal when there wasn’t the comfort of a friendly farmhouse just over the next hill, or a delicious home cooked meal only a short ride home. With the farmland quickly giving way to The Wastelands in only a few days travel to the south, their situation could only get worse.
Most of them spent the night in the living room, huddling together after the fire went out, necessity overriding any sense of modesty. Peter did his share of guard duty, followed by Mike some time after midnight. It was an hour or so before dawn when the noises from the bedroom stirred him, much in the same way as they had Matthew the night before.
Mike entered the room cautiously, weapon ready. For a moment, he didn’t recognise the restless blanket-covered figure for what it was.
Ben was dreaming of the interrogation again, attempting in his sleep to fight off his attackers with arms that were so weak and useless at the time. Matthew had told the group what had happened to him, and what the dangers were. Mike didn’t know if the new and unexpected movement was a good or bad sign, so he decided to wake Matthew just to be sure.
By the time Matthew entered the room, Ben’s words were almost intelligible, something about a laboratory, mountains, and a door. Matthew held him down, securing his arms as they thrashed beneath the blankets, more a danger to himself than any unseen force. For the briefest of moments, Ben’s eyes opened and connected with Matthew's, a sense of awareness in an otherwise absent face, and then he was sleeping again, unable to be roused, and alone in his nightmares. For the second night in a row, Matthew sat with him until the sun illuminated the single bedroom window with its golden glow, the start of a new day.
Most of the rest of the group were woken by the sound of the cockerel that morning, the same cockerel that later became breakfast as they distributed the few items of clothing that they could find. The clothes that had been left behind were obviously the ones not deemed good enough to take
with them, but they were still better than the century-old garments recovered from the caves below Island City.
It was midway through breakfast that Ben surprised them all and staggered from the bedroom to the kitchen, hand gripped tightly to the door frame to help support his weakened legs. He looked as bad, if not worse, than when Matthew had first found him. Mouth dry, eyes sunken, and dark with bruises, he looked as near to death as he could be. Carl helped him to a quickly vacated chair near to the fire, offering him some water that Ben sipped slowly.
“Ben, lad,” Carl said gently, “you’ve had us so worried these past few days. How you doing now, how are you feeling?”
Ben was bombarded by questions from all around him, though they were all asking generally the same thing. It was Carl he looked at as he replied.
“Like there’s someone in my head trying to kick his way out,” he managed to say, voice shallow and distant, raspy and almost unrecognisable as belonging to him. “Where are we?”
“An empty farmhouse, south of Island City,” Matthew said as he moved to help Ben reposition the blanket that was slumped around his shoulders. “Carl and Peter here have been telling us how north and south are now at war, it’s just that the Southern Baronies don’t know about it yet. We’re trying to get there first, before everyone from Island City arrives and starts telling them in their own special way.”
Ben only nodded, sipping at his water. “What happened?” he asked.
Matthew started to tell Ben about the murder of the Regent and Alexander framing the people of the Road Trains to take the fall. Ben tried to nod, but he could barely keep his head up. Matthew realised that Ben was more interested in why his head felt the way it did. Politics and war could wait until later.
“Droca weed,” Matthew told him. “There are people who take it for fun, but it has a much better use in interrogation. Whatever they wanted from you, you’re more than likely to have told them.”
“I . . . I can’t remember anything they wanted,” Ben said. “I know that new Regent was there, Alexander, but I can’t remember anything else.”
Ben rubbed his bruised and swollen jaw as he spoke, vaguely recalling the repeated blows to his face, but still not remembering why he took such a beating.
“What could they have wanted from you that me, or any of the others here, couldn’t have told them?” Matthew asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It might,” Ben said, his voice noticeably more his own the more water he drank, “but I need time to think. I need more rest.”
“We need to get moving soon,” Matthew told him. “If you’ve got something to say, then say it, but we need to get on our way as soon as we can.”
“No, I need to rest,” was all Ben replied before he pulled himself to his feet and slowly returned to the bedroom. Matthew stood, intending to follow him, but Carl got there first, his look asking the others to stay back.
As Carl entered, he could see Ben shivering violently as he pulled the blankets up over himself, even though the fire and stove in the other room had made the house quite warm.
“Don’t worry,” Carl said as he sat on the bed beside him. “You’re just coming down, that’s all. Looks like they gave you a huge dose of that stuff, and your body gets kind of used to having it in your system. You’ll be right in another day or so.”
Ben said thank you as he rolled over to face the wall, not wanting to speak, but Carl pulled him back. Ben’s face and shoulders were so hot that Carl could feel the heat radiating off them as he turned Ben over.
“Ben,” Carl said, “I’m not sure if it’s just the fever or what, but you don’t seem to understand what’s going on. There’s an army somewhere over there and it’s intent on setting my homeland alight. We need to get there and warn them.”
“Carl, please, I’m not stupid and neither are you,” Ben coughed as he pulled himself from Carl’s grip, sitting himself up against the back wall. “How much sooner do you think that we are going to get there? A day, two at most, and what do you think you can accomplish in that sort of time? There are things I need to tell you, tell everybody, but I need to sleep. From what you’ve told me, Alexander probably already knows, but I can help you, help everybody, I just need to sleep.”
Ben was starting to slip away as he spoke, eyes opening and closing faster and faster until they eventually stayed closed. For Carl, Ben’s raspy breathing was a reassuring sign, a sign that Ben was still alive.
Instead of following his instincts and dragging Ben from his bed, Carl followed his head and left the sleeping teenager where he was and returned to the dining room. The group was sitting there in silence, waiting for him.
“What did he say?” Matthew asked as he finished the last of his breakfast.
“Outside, just for a moment,” Carl said.
Matthew reluctantly agreed and followed Carl out, closing the door behind them. The remainder of the group looked at them as they left, desperately wanting answers and a sense of hope that only Matthew could give. For all of their recent misfortune, Matthew was still their leader, and in their eyes, he always would be.
“Go on,” Matthew said as he closed the door behind him. He wasn’t happy with the way things were going. The world, his world, had changed in ways he still couldn’t believe, and the role of leader that he had always so eagerly embraced was becoming more and more of a burden. He was starting to feel like Ben, tired and drained, and he wanted only to sleep, sleep for an age and wake up to find it was all a dream, a nightmare he could escape from with the coming of day.
“It’s Ben,” Carl told him. “He said some things and, well, they kind of make sense. I think I trust him, boss. I think that you should listen to him.”
“What did he say?” Matthew asked again. “What did he tell you that’s made you think about staying here any longer than we need to?”
Carl reeled on him. “What chance have we got of getting to Maleton before the armies do?” he said. “And even if we do get there first, what do you think we’re going to be able to do anyway? Most of Draxis' troops were way south already when we left, patrolling the borders with Oster and Phalathlan. It'll take weeks to get them into a position where they can make a difference. There's just not enough time, Matthew. You can see that as well as I can.”
“So what? We just sit here and try to forget about it?” Matthew replied. “Maybe plant some crops and wait for it all to go away? I thought you had more guts than that.”
Matthew turned to re-enter the house, but Carl grabbed his sleeve and spun him around, slamming him against the door. The people inside would no doubt have heard the commotion, but Carl didn’t care. He needed to make Matthew listen to him and understand.
“Your father would have listened,” Carl said as he suppressed his rage, pinning Matthew firmly against the door. They both knew how to handle themselves, and if it came to a fight, both of them would come off badly. “Just think for a minute, won’t you. They’ve filled him full of Droca weed and nearly killed him, all because of something they couldn’t beat out of him. Something in his head. He told me it could help us, get south or defeat the armies, I don’t know, but if Alexander already knows what this secret is, you can bet he’ll use it against us. Our chances of winning this war are slim at best, and if he’s got something new that we don’t know about, our chances are pretty much gone.”
Matthew struggled to free himself. He was the taller of the two men, and was eventually able to. They squared off against each other in the courtyard as the door opened, Joe and Peter bursting out into the early morning sunlight. Each man was silent as they stood, tensed, watching each other and waiting for one of the others to make the first move.
“Think about it, Matthew,” Carl continued. “We need help, and this is all we’ve been offered. We just won’t get there before the armies.”
“We’ll go faster, travel all night if we have to,” Matthew suggested. “We have to keep moving.”
“Look at us,” Carl pointed
out. “Ben’s in no shape to travel yet, and neither is Catrina. You’re not looking too hot yourself!”
“But we’ve lost so much already,” Matthew pleaded. “I need to do something, I need to.”
“Just listen to yourself!” Carl continued. “You need this, you need that! What about us? If we keep going like you say, half of us will be dead by the time we reach Draxis. Ben, Catrina, Arian. It’s not all about you, can’t you see that! This is bigger than you!”
Matthew opened and closed his mouth a few times, searching for something to say. Eventually, he stormed past Carl, avoiding eye contact, and walked with his shoulders hunched towards the barn. Joe and Peter looked on, their heads moving from one man to the other as they struggled to understand what was happening. Carl only shook his head and returned to the house.
Matthew returned a short time later, head held low as he entered the kitchen. He sat down at the kitchen table without a word, composing himself.
“I’m sorry,” he began, looking around the room and meeting each person’s gaze in turn, “I’ve been selfish these last few days. I didn’t stop to think how this is affecting all of you. Carl tells me Ben has offered us help, a chance to make a difference to the armies marching towards our homeland. I think we need to listen to him. He needs to rest, but perhaps tomorrow, he might be able to tell us more.
“We need to face facts. The chances of us reaching Draxis before the Regent’s armies are almost non-existent. We need to be doing something, here and now, that will make a difference at home.”
Matthew sat back in the chair, giving everyone a minute to think over what he had said. “If anyone has anything to say, please say it now,” he finished.
“What’s this help Ben offered?” Mike asked. It was the question on everyone’s lips, but he was apparently the only one with the guts to ask.
“He didn’t say,” Matthew told them. “He’s still not too good, and it may all be nothing. There’s a lot of Droca weed still going round his system. He could just be hallucinating, I don’t know. But Carl here says he trusts him, and that’s good enough for me.”
Knightfall - Book 1 of The Chronicle of Benjamin Knight Page 17