The Brink

by Pass, Martyn J.

  “But then the gangs came and at first we were scared until we put a kind of posse together and saw them off. But then they came back. Stronger and better armed and in greater numbers. Some of us knew it was escalating but others thought that help would come before it got out of hand.

  “People started going missing during the night. They’d be out hunting for supplies and never come home. We built walls and barricades but still they came and it was then that we realised that it was over. We’d come out of the disaster alive but we were in shock all that time. When the reality began to set in we knew that help wasn’t coming, that we’d die or worse and so-”

  “You got out of there,” finished Alan. Henry nodded, his eyes glistening.

  “Me, Carol, Mikey, a couple of others went out on a hunting patrol and just ran. I had to think of my family, I had to think of them. If they-”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I get it.”

  “We could’ve stayed there; we could’ve made it work if it hadn’t been for those bastards. Vultures. Feeding off the corpse of the old world.”

  Henry fell quiet and, as with many of the stories that were coming out of the ashes of the disaster, Alan had nothing to say. People often asked him what his own story was and he’d always avoided the question. He had to. Not even Teague knew where he’d spent those 12 months when the eclipse - if that’s what it’d been - had brought the entire planet to its knees rendering all mankind’s works powerless, plunging them back into the dark ages.

  A year, that’s all. But a year without warmth, without power to run the sun-dependent machines that kept the man-made world alive, might as well have been a century. He didn’t want to know how many had died and were still dying. And all that time he’d been buried alive in a steel and plastcrete tomb until the dawn came and the doors had opened and-

  “You okay?” asked Henry, looking directly at him.

  “Yeah, sorry. I was somewhere else. What did you say?”

  “I asked how you made it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  The road meandered a little, passing between the ruins of two small detached houses and Alan gave them a wide berth. Then he saw the roadblock ahead made from the blackened wrecks of two trucks and swerved around it, driving right through the gap he’d made earlier on his way down.

  “What were you doing so far south?” asked Alan when the road levelled out and he was happy he’d left the worst of the Scavenger gang behind.

  “We were supposed to be meeting up with a solar collector crew who’d volunteered to restart the plant on the coast a few miles west of where you found us,” said Henry.

  “What went wrong?”

  “It was an ambush. No sooner had we showed up than those bastards came down in their cars and-”

  “They had vehicles?” asked Alan. He noticed that the silent Mikey had stretched his hand over the seat and was stroking Moll’s belly.

  “Yeah. Cars.”

  “How many?”

  He hesitated. “Three? Four?”

  “Models?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t get reg plates, pal. Is it really important?”

  Alan pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the engine. He passed the fob to Henry and took his rifle, calling to Moll who jumped out of the jeep and onto the road.

  “Where are you going?” cried Henry.

  “Drive north and follow the map on the dash. You’re about three hours from the edge of the camp. When you get there, radio to Teague and he’ll send a team out to get you.”

  Alan slung his rifle and took a bedroll off the racking, throwing it over his shoulder.

  “Stop for no one, not even a child. Do you understand?” he said.

  “Yes. But-”

  “Go. Now. Tell Teague I’ll be back in a few days.”

  Henry moved into the driving seat and started the engine. Carol and Mikey looked back and Alan smiled. The boy was waving at Moll.

  When they’d disappeared around the bend in the road he turned back and set off to find the cars.

  “We can’t leave them driving around now can we, girl,” he said as the dog walked beside him. “It’ll slow them down a bit if we can break ‘em for them.”

  She looked up at his words but soon sprinted off into the bushes after a scent or a trail and he watched her bound along with her tail low in concentration. He was glad that his own story included her because he didn’t know if he could’ve managed this long without her. The silent support that’d followed him out of Fort Longsteel had been a rock on which his survival had been built and without her he wasn’t sure he’d have made it. The tomb. The death. The relief when the lights came back on. The open doors.

  Moll had been the only survivor from those lab cages and if he could read her mind she’d have had her own story to tell - one that might have matched his own, terror for terror, loss for loss.

  Perhaps, he wondered, that was the cause of the friendship they had. Perhaps in her own way she knew that they shared the same suffering, the same experiences and that there was room for companionship. He often attributed her uncanny obedience to this and took a great amount of comfort from it.

  By early evening he’d found the camp again and this time, as he approached the clearing, he saw the cars had returned and were parked near the cook fires.

  “There we go,” he said to Moll. “I should’ve seen the tracks the first time.”

  She yawned and showed the sharp white points of her teeth, dropping to sit on her backside whilst he scanned the settlement with his scope. It had a handy night-vision setting and he watched the women and the men move around in a sharp black and white image.

  “Sleep would be nice,” he whispered.

  He took a chocolate bar from within the pouch of his smock and opened it, taking a small bite and breaking off a piece to give to Moll. She swallowed it whole and licked her lips.

  “It’ll spoil your tea,” he said.

  The camp began to settle as the evening slid lazily by. The cook fires roared and the men took steaming bowls of broth or stew from the pots. Alan wondered what kind of meat was in them and he hoped it was the deer from earlier. He could smell it from his vantage point in the woods and that made the possibility of it being human flesh even worse.

  Eventually the night came and one by one they retired to their primitive shelters leaving the cook fires to burn down to nothing. He watched the bright white patches in his scope dull to black shadows and sighed.

  “Here we go then,” he muttered under his breath. “You’d best sit this one out.”

  He looked and saw that Moll was laid on her side, snoring softly. He got up and she lifted her head. “Stay,” he commanded and crept into the clearing.

  The cars were reconfigured solars and they’d been retrofitted with cells from household units which made them severely unstable if overcharged. Alan only knew this because before the disaster it’d been a common way of avoiding expensive charges at service stations. It also contributed to the number of fatalities caused by cell meltdowns.

  This information, comical as it was, had no real value to him. To overcharge the vehicles he’d have needed a charging point - which he didn’t have. He couldn’t just blast them with the rifle as that wouldn’t do much damage by itself. What he needed to do was remove a delicate component that would be impossible to replace and smash the thing to pieces, effectively decommissioning the machine.

  He crept towards the cars and dropped onto his side, crawling under the rear of the first and, taking a flashlight from his pocket, shone the red glow into the workings of the vehicle.

  His previous life as a gardener offered no help when it came to the workings of the solar cells but a stint of patrols with Teague had taught him a few things. First, that all laser powered tech relied on focal lenses which were precision machined
glass discs that couldn’t be made without some of the best machinery money used to be able to buy. The nearest factory was Germany, hundreds of miles away, and he doubted they were still operational.

  Second, solar cells used a similar lens in their converters and were normally located in the same place on all common cells - beneath the primary and secondary heat exchangers. These were large, bulky things that were always kept near the outer shell of the unit behind round panels. It didn’t take him long to find them and begin removing the screws that held the panel in place.

  The night was cool and the birds that sat in the trees around the camp made enough noise to drown his work. The chattering and chirruping of the creatures, the clicks and natters of insects, the buzz of flies, all served both to mask and irritate him as he lay there, dissecting the machines until he’d exposed the cores and removed the precious lenses.

  By the time he’d reached the third car he was confident that he’d pulled it off without disturbing the camp. It was only when he heard the flaps of a tent rustle and listened to the stream of urine that fell near his feet that he felt the first pangs of panic.

  Instantly he switched off his torch and lay there as still as he could be, willing the person to go back to sleep. The noise of the night continued but with less effort and the silence began to enfold him like a spectre. From where he lay he could see a pair of boots in the moonlight, unlaced, and they were so close to him that he was sure he must have been seen.

  Alan wondered how long he would have if the man saw him and raised the alarm. He and Moll would have to run and not stop until morning, maybe head west a little and circle back, throwing them off. Even as he thought this his stomach knotted and he realised he was biting down so hard on the torch in his mouth that the plastic casing was beginning to crack. He didn’t fear the chase. He feared being caught. It’d been his worst fear since he’d discovered what had been done to him in Longsteel, since the rest of the staff had died of starvation and thirst down there in the darkness while he and the other volunteers had lived. If they knew, if they realised, his life would become a living hell of unending torture without even death to release him.

  The man zipped up and moved back towards the tent and Alan sighed with relief. When he heard the rustling of the fabric he turned on the torch and finished his work, removing the lens and putting it in his pocket.

  As he crawled out from under the car he stood up, turned and saw the barrel of a pistol a few inches from his face.

  “Who the fuck are you?” asked the man. Alan slowly looked down at his boots and saw that it was the same guy from before. “What were you doing under there?”

  He said nothing. The man flicked off the safety with his thumb and asked again. It was a matte-black automatic that fired bullets, not laser, and Alan could see it was well looked after. A museum piece perhaps? There were more and more of them showing up in the hands of gangs now that laser rifles were starting to fail without the skills available to repair them.

  “One more time,” said the man. “What the-”

  Moll leapt up and fixed her jaw around his throat without making a single sound, other than a gargle that escaped from his blood flecked lips as he fell. The hunk of flesh came away from his neck without effort but as his writhing shape hit the ground, the pistol fired and the report tore through the night, sending the birds and insects into a fresh frenzy.

  The bullet, angled up at Alan, slammed into his body and tore through his right lung, felling him with the impact and a sudden rush of air into his chest cavity. The agony was beyond compare as he tried to breathe using his collapsed lung. The noise alone was a horror in itself - a slurping, sucking sound that came from somewhere out of his swimming vision, somewhere important to him.

  The camp came to life and tents were ripped open exposing lamps and torches that seemed to burst into life by themselves. Alan was aware of the glow that bathed him, aware too that he could hardly see clearly enough to escape. Fear and panic overtook the physical pain and he tried to stand, to get up and crawl at least, anything other than stay still and be taken.

  Moll was growling behind him as he turned, moving slowly on all fours towards the spot in the shadows he thought were the bushes they’d hidden in. The lenses clinked together inside his pocket and he cursed himself for not destroying them there and then.

  Moll snarled and attacked, was repulsed by a long spear branded by one of the older men, the hunter, and growled again. More gathered around them, some trying to get past her to reach him but Moll stood her ground, moving this way and that, always between him and them. Still he crawled and left a bloody trail of bright pink fluid in his wake.

  The bushes came into reach and he felt the sharp briars pluck at his hair, his beard, his face. He pushed himself inside and felt nothing other than demonic agony that danced inside him, poking him with fiery goads and thrusting molten lead into his stomach.

  Moll let out a whine as her body was pierced by the spear but was able to shake herself free of its point and limp away towards him. Still she growled but it was lessened now by her own suffering and on they came, circling them, closing around them with their torches and weapons.

  “Moll!” he cried as he plunged further into the brush. “Here, girl. You’ve done your bit.”

  Alan stood breathing deeply as the pain began to subside and the lung began to inflate again. He still clutched the entry wound with his right hand but even that was closing now and somewhere near his throat he could feel the lump of lead just beneath the skin that would have to be cut out later.

  The men and women who’d gathered near him stopped when they saw him standing there, glaring at them in the firelight with baleful eyes that looked like they, too, were on fire. In his hands was his laser rifle, found where he’d left it earlier and fully charged.

  He blasted the spear holder square in his chest making a hole the size of his fist that smouldered around the blackened edges. As he fell down dead, the others followed with each pull of the trigger until they turned and fled in terror from the avenging demon they mistakenly thought was dead.

  Alan didn’t follow. When he saw that they were in flight, he took the lenses from his pocket and threw them on the ground, stamping on them until they were only fragments and half-buried in the mud.

  Moll came and stood beside him, licking her reddened lips and looking up at him.

  “I hope this’ll clean,” he said, looking at his stained smock. “It’s my favourite.”

  2

  Three days later they arrived back at Captain Teague’s camp and were met at the gate by two guards dressed in fatigue pants and looted hoodies that bore the famous sports logo in big white letters across the chest. Like most of Teague’s men they all wore large, wild beards and favoured gym sessions over drinking ones. Teague had taken his choice of troops seriously from the start and there were no slackers to be found on his team, no lazy troopers and no fat blokes who couldn’t run his obligatory 5 miles around the camp. There were a number of women as well who took their share of patrols like the rest, not content to let the stereotypes continue on into the scary new world that seemed to be ever on the horizon without a dawn.

  Alan was glad to see them after three days living rough with only a tarp and a bedroll for shelter.

  “You’re late,” joked Lenny, the tallest of the three and the only one carrying a weapon.

  “If it irritates the Captain then I don’t mind. Did Henry and his wife make it here?” asked Alan.

  “Yeah, we found them and we even towed your car back for you. We’re kind like that, though the thing is pretty much useless now without the repairs or the fuel.”

  Lenny opened the gate and let them both through, running his hand along Moll’s back as she went by. She stopped and wagged her tail, wanting more.

  “Fuel? Are we short?” he asked.

  “We are for non-essential trips, Alan. Teague has something planned but he’s holding a briefing at the end of the week to fill us in. T
he rumour is he’s planning a move.”

  “Wow,” said Alan. “I thought this place was pretty well secure.”

  “A retail park will never be secure. It’s a beacon to every scavenger and looter for miles around and now that the supplies are at their lowest Teague expects we’ll be getting more and more visits from the bigger groups of crazies. Eventually they’ll get through no matter how hard we try and there are a lot of women and children to think about here.”

  “Any ideas where he’s thinking of going?” he asked.

  “Not a clue, mate. Best just wait for the briefing I guess.”

  Alan said his thanks and walked on towards the main building but Lenny called out to him.

  “Not your blood I hope.” Alan shook his head, looking down at his smock with the duct tape patch.

  “Nope,” he lied.

  Teague was right - a retail park would never keep out the gangs forever and as Alan and Moll walked up the road towards the complex of former shops and restaurants he began to see what Teague must’ve been seeing. Weak walls. Unsecured sewers. Too many ways in and out. Fire hazards. Plus the most obvious one of all - the treasure trove of supplies kept in the warehouses. Sure, their quantities had been dented by the need of the ever growing number of survivors, but the pallet stacks looked as high as ever and shrewd management coupled with efficient looting raids had kept them from being wasted or unnecessarily diminished.

  The park itself was a fair size and it’d been a ‘new build’ in a flattened area of land that boasted a large, empty perimeter which Teague had cleared of debris in the first weeks of moving there. From the rooftops teams of spotters, snipers and LMG crews were stationed overlooking an almost perfect kill-zone and enormous flood lights could be switched on at a moment’s notice, bathing the area in a cold blue glow.