Darkshines Seven
Bleeker Hill Book 2
Russell Mardell
Copyright © 2015 Russell Mardell
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
To the memory of my beloved writing companion Fergus.
My Blarney.
Things are better in a dog world
Contents
Cover
Also by Russell Mardell –
Part 1:
PARTY HQ & BLEEKER HILL SAFE HOUSE
THE ROAD
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
THE CITY
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
THE LIBRARY
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
THE GETAWAY
1
2
3
4
5
PART 2:
THE HIDEOUT
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
THE BUTTERFLY
1
2
3
4
5
THE COMMUNITY
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
THE HOUR
1
2
3
4
5
PART 3:
THE ASYLUM
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
THE COAST
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Also by Russell Mardell –
Bleeker Hill
Stone Bleeding
Silent Bombs Falling on Green Grass
www.russellmardell.co.uk
Part 1:
Beyond Bleeker Hill
PARTY HQ & BLEEKER HILL SAFE HOUSE
TO – PARTY HQ
FROM – BLEEKER HILL SAFE HOUSE
Friends,
We have secured the safe house at Bleeker Hill. We are still ascertaining the status of all members of the first team and what exactly has transpired here. Although the main building has been destroyed the purpose built bunker remains intact. We have fought back an attack from a small group of stragglers. The surrounding areas have been cleared. We question Sullivan, but as yet his answers are proving incoherent and somewhat fantastical. We regret to inform that Mia Hennessey has eluded us and escaped in one of our vehicles. It is firmly believed that she alone may be responsible for whatever horrors have played out at Bleeker Hill. Please advise.
TO – BLEEKER HILL SAFE HOUSE
FROM – PARTY HQ
Friends,
Please clarify what is meant by ‘fantastical.’
TO – PARTY HQ
FROM – BLEEKER HILL SAFE HOUSE
Friends,
Sullivan is insistent that whatever happened here is due to the supernatural and not the work of a human. He has spoken of an evil. An entity of evil. Dr Mann attributes such nonsense ideas as symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Personally I think it is merely that he has read too many books. Please advise.
TO – BLEEKER HILL SAFE HOUSE
FROM – PARTY HQ
Friends,
We cannot allow concessions to madness. Such ravings are punishable under Party outlawed practices 101 sub-section C. We advise you act accordingly. Additionally, it is important that Mia Hennessey be made accountable for her actions. In the current climate, justice, both the quest for and the execution of, is of paramount importance. If people are not judged appropriately for their actions we will never repair this country.
THE ROAD
1
Mia Hennessey walked the road because something told her she had to. There was a reason for her to be on this A-road, heading north to City 17, and it didn’t seem to matter to her that she didn’t know what the reason was. It felt right. In a world gone mad and past the hazy, jumble of memories and nightmares that she carried in her mind, heading north at that moment seemed to be pretty much the only thing that made sense any more.
Her faithful friend walked at her heels, occasionally gazing up at her with that unadulterated worship in his innocent hazel eyes. She would hear her father’s voice from time to time, deep within her, and he would be saying that the world could take a lesson or two from the dog. He would say that if there were more people working from the attributes of a dog, we’d all be in a better place. Rather than where we are now. Wherever that is. Dogs were loyal, unquestioningly so, and they didn’t demand much from life or the people they met. Treat them right and they will give you their world. “We’re in a cat world, I reckon, Mia. That was when it started going wrong.”
Mia had found him two months ago. Four months after leaving Bleeker Hill behind, and most of its nightmares. Thinking about that moment when she first laid eyes on him, sitting by the side of a country lane like a hitchhiker, she would often wonder whether she had actually found him at all. Sometimes it felt like he had found her. Chosen her. As if he had known all along that she would be walking by that spot one day and all he had to do was wait. She’d known he was an Irish terrier from the moment she laid eyes on him. The wiry, ginger coat (which she had since trimmed) the bushy beard (which she took to diligently washing every week) and those inquisitive, slightly mischievous eyes, they were all part of an old memory for her. When she had been even younger than her fragile eighteen years, and before the country had fractured beyond repair, she had spent many weekends volunteering at her local shelter, losing hours on long rambling dog walks with a posse of hounds. It was as close to bliss as she had ever come. She had decided on the spot to call her new friend Blarney and he always seemed to respond to the name with a deep, throaty bark, and a quick shivered, wag of his tail. The name, like their meeting, was, it seemed, meant to be.
Ahead of them, City 17 was rising up on the horizon; its decimated buildings like broken teeth growing out of greying gums. Mia tried to recall the city’s original name for a moment, but soon let the thought go. Since The Party had moved in and changed things, given everything and everyone a name and a number, such trivialities didn’t seem to matter any more. She would keep her own identity. That was all that mattered these days.
The approaching city was where she needed to be. Somehow she knew it. She had drifted between towns and cities, skirted around newly assembled, ramshackle communities out in the forests, and dodged the ever-watchful eye of The Party, all without any idea of where she was going or what she was doing. She kept moving, looking for purpose or answer, and at the first sight of City 17, she finally felt like she would get both. In a world gone to the dogs, (or cats, if you believed her father) you may as well trust your instinct.
The places she had stayed in up until now had all felt wrong; the old houses, that primary school that still, somehow, smelt of polish, even the cute little B&B
with its white washed walls and its two bedrooms (two that still stood intact anyway) they had all been wrong places. She had known it from the moment she took shelter, but she had no idea what was so wrong about them, only that she couldn’t stay there. Mr and Mrs Barnes at the B&B had been a lovely couple and had treated her well but she knew from the off that it wasn’t going to be enough. Initially she had found the idea of the Barnes’ still trying to run their life and business as if nothing had happened rather sweet. Mr Barnes would meet her every morning with a cup of black coffee and his wife, forever beavering away in the kitchen it seemed, made sure Mia was always fed, even if the pickings were paltry. Mr Barnes had even made Mia sign her name in the register. It was the way things were done, he had assured her, and she hadn’t argued. She had signed in under the name of an old schoolteacher, just in case.
She stuck it out at the B&B for a few weeks, weeks that were as pleasant as pleasant got any more, which is to say she saw no one from The Party, and no stragglers either, no one but Mr and Mrs Barnes, and there was nothing to do but indulge them in their desperate little charade. Then one morning Mr Barnes wasn’t there with the coffee and the kitchen stood empty. It seemed to Mia like the right moment to hit the road again.
From time to time on her travels she would think of people she once loved, and sometimes even give herself a second or two to wallow in what once was, but more often than not Mia didn’t allow herself to think too much. It was dangerous. She had stored away her memories of what had happened just six months previously at Bleeker Hill. She still felt the pangs of loss, could bring herself to tears if she thought too long about her father or that stranger, Sullivan, that sad looking man, but those moments only ever came sporadically. Most days they didn’t come at all because she wouldn’t let them.
But Mia still dreamed. That was something she couldn’t lock away. Sometimes, during waking hours, she could feel the soft images of her dreams still floating around her mind like smoke clouds on calm evening air. They seemed to always be there and each image left a trace, a mark in her mind. Usually she could blow them away. Sometimes though, like now, they were too thick to ignore and she would have to wait until they drifted on by themselves.
Mia stopped by the edge of the road, turned to her left and gazed dreamily at the burnt cornfield they had been walking alongside.
She gazed into it.
Looked through it.
In her mind she could see straight into the earth.
2
Blarney had grown used to his master’s eccentricities. At first, when the girl would drift off and stare out at some unseen point in the distance, he would bark and whine and nudge her with his nose. But now, after two months of this strange behaviour, he merely accepted it when it happened, circled around on a spot near to her feet, and then slumped down to the ground.
Sometimes these moments would be no more than mere seconds, other times minutes would pass without her moving a muscle. She would seem to freeze, every fibre in her being rigid and stony. Blarney would always keep watch for her when she was like this, quickly switching his gaze from Mia to where they had been and then to wherever they were going. Until now he had only ever had to chase away another dog, some ragged, half-starved mutt that had leapt out at her from one of the cars scattered along the road. He had drawn blood for his master and she had given him one of the hard, brittle biscuits from her pocket. The mangy mutt had hightailed if off down the road, ducking out of sight in one of the fields that surrounded the south entrance to City 17. Blarney was ready should it try its luck again. Blarney was always ready.
Mia’s shoulders rolled and then rose, stopping level with her chin. Her hands clenched into fists and the nails dug into her palms. Her eyes grew wide as they fixed on the cornfield and then watered at the edges as if she were fighting back tears. The sight made Blarney whimper and he pulled himself up and moved nearer to her, circling around once more and then flopping to the ground with a satisfied grunt.
Minutes went by and Mia didn’t move.
Blarney moved his bony head back and forth along the road, his uncorrupted eyes roaming over the car parts and the debris, looking past what he could see, seeing angles and spaces for attack. He would be ready if someone came after Mia. He would protect her like she had protected him. It was what you did when you loved someone. Even in this stupid human world.
3
Galton and Babbidge left the broken down truck by the side of the road and decided there was nothing for it but to walk the last three miles of their designated route. Outside the borders of City 17 they would be relieved by the hunt team coming in from the north, and then they could return to base, and if they were lucky, a shower. Neither, at that moment, had actually given any thought as to just how they were going to get back though. It didn’t matter right then. They had got used to living in the moment. It was the only way to keep sane. Long-term plans were another man’s responsibility and both men – though neither would admit it – were intensely glad of that.
They walked either side of the faded white markings running along the centre of the old A-road, their heavy boots kicking up stones and tiny shards of shattered windscreen glass with every step. At each battered car they moved apart and rounded the debris in a smooth and practiced manner, always returning to the white markings, and each other, with almost perfect timing. Galton, as was his way, held his rifle across his chest, cradling it in his arms like a newborn baby. Babbidge preferred not to touch his at all, unless there was no other option. He had never got used to the feel of it in his hands, the weight and the recoil. He hated the damn thing and kept it slung over his right shoulder where he didn’t have to look at it.
It was the hottest day of an already tiresomely hot year, and out in the open as they were, it was impossible to ignore the sun. That fat and fulsome, white-hot baby was plum in the sky, pumping its grating heat down onto the cracked tarmac road. The sunlight rays bounced off the dented bodywork in the automobile graveyard that had sprung up around them and seemed to probe around their vision, searching them out. Both men could smell the rotting flesh, baked out by the unforgiving sun, but they wouldn’t look into the cars as they passed. “Seen one dead body, seen ‘em all,” Galton – who had seen more than most – used to say, and as time fell away, Babbidge had grown to agree with him, no matter how much he hated the notion.
Galton and Babbidge were chalk and cheese, a fact Galton reminded his colleague of frequently. Galton had been with The Party from just about day one, he’d been signed up during their first push for the capital and the years between had chiselled out a hard, cold fighter from the shell of the man he had been. Babbidge was still new to it all. He still jumped at the sound of a gun and still turned away at the sight of a corpse. Still tried to make friends. Their first tenuous, feeling-each-other-out conversation together had offered forth the fact that both had had great grandparents that had run insurance firms in the capital, back when things where normal, and Babbidge had instantly tried to make something from that, something that Galton shot down with a withered look.
‘Something isn’t it, this sun?’
‘Turn dog shit white, this sun.’
Darkshines Seven Page 1