“I was ambushed near the ruins,” she replied, climbing out of the saddle. “I managed to lose them.”
“You should be more careful.”
And you should be a courier, she thought to herself as the gates began to part. Behind them, bathed in the light from a flood lamp ran by a wind generator, another guard waved her inside. Leading Ziggy by the reins, they walked through the opening and heard them closing again behind them.
“They never give up,” said the second guard who directed her off to the right towards the stables. “That's the eighth attack this week.”
“Eight?” she replied. “That many?”
“They're getting cocky. It kind of worries me how bold they've become over the summer. I thought their numbers had been reduced with the last ride out the Marshal organised, but maybe not. There seems to be even more of them nowadays.”
“Well there's a few less now.”
“Well done you!” he cried, slapping her on the back. “That's not a bad day's work if I do say so myself.”
“Thanks,” she said and left him as the entrance to the stables appeared in front of her. She led the sweating Ziggy inside to an empty stall and closed the door, filling up a food bag with oats and rubbing him down. She knew it was too late now to make the return journey but she wanted the beast ready for riding out at first light the following day.
When she was satisfied that the horse would be cared for, she shouldered her luggage and made her way onto the compacted mud streets that formed a spider's web of alleyways throughout the labyrinthine settlement. Abbingdon had risen out of the disaster when the refugees from the radiation cloud had fled in all directions, unsure which part of the country would be hit the hardest. Gathering in some of the richest farmland for miles, the roughly four hundred men, women and children came together and constructed the walls that now protected them, building their crude dwellings within. It was a junkyard town and one that favoured protection over beauty and strategic defence over aesthetic niceties. In the years that followed, some had left and gone south to work the larger stretches of land while others, like those at Rivington and Pine Lodge, left to build more sedate satellites of the larger town.
Sarah was familiar enough with the layout to be able to cross various streets without getting lost, making her way through the crowds of settlers with ease. When she reached the row of rusting shipping containers in the centre of the town, the darkness was closing in around her and some of the larger lamps were already being lit. With the mailbag in her hand, she approached the opening and knocked.
“Yes?” came a voice from inside that sounded hollow and tinny.
“It's Sarah; I've brought the mail from Pine Lodge.”
“Come in, dear.”
Pushing aside the stiff hinged door, she went in, barely able to penetrate the gloom. It was warmer though and the fire that burned inside the stove in one corner of the container was the reason why. It gave off an inviting ruddy glow which edged the figure stood near it with orange hues. He had a frying pan in one hand and appeared to be cooking a steak which crackled and hissed in its own juices.
“Sarah!” cried Harry when he saw her. “You got here okay?”
“I was ambushed near the ruins but I managed to see them off,” she replied. He offered her a seat on one of the two cracked leather couches arranged opposite each other near a table and a book shelf. The moment she sat down she felt her eyes grow heavy with the heat and fatigue.
“It's getting dangerous out there, thanks to Calderbank's crew of misfits. Can I get you anything?” he asked. “I've got another steak if you fancy it?”
“I'd love one. Medium-rare.” Harry laughed.
“I sometimes wonder if you'll be the one to bring civilisation back to the world once it's on its feet again.”
“Papa taught me well.”
“He did, I'll give him that. How is the old man?”
“He's doing fine,” she replied, catching herself nodding off.
“And the horses?”
“Hopefully better next year in the spring.” She was suddenly reminded of the stranger and the beautiful stallion. If only she could persuade him to stay...
“We still have the mare you sold us last spring,” he said, flipping the steak with his spatula and seasoning it with pepper. It made for a delicious smell in the small, enclosed space and the sounds of the fat spitting in the pan made her mouth water.
“How is she?”
“Doing well. Doing very well. She gets out plenty and we sometimes use her to investigate some of the attacks that happen on the slopes towards the west. She's a spry one.”
“It's in her blood.”
Harry slid the thick slab of meat onto a tin plate and set it before Sarah on the table along with a serrated knife and a fork.
“Can I get you some water?” he asked. She nodded and he brought her a tin cup filled to the brim. He returned to the stove, putting another piece into the frying pan along with some sliced onions.
“That's one thing about all this,” he said. “You begin to appreciate the little things in life, the important things. But I guess you always have, growing up after... Well, I guess it's no use dwelling on such things. Life goes on.”
“I don't mind,” she explained, taking another mouthful. “Papa sometimes talks about the old days when he was a boy.”
“Does he?”
“Yes but rarely. He sometimes enjoys too much of Sidney's beer and starts rambling about his days as a 'young scamp' just after the disaster. I don't mind - it's like listening to a story from a book. It means very little to me having not seen it myself.”
Harry flipped the steak and gave it a few more seconds on the other side before sliding it onto his plate. When he was satisfied, he took it over to the opposite couch and sat down with a sigh.
“I barely remember it,” he said. “I was younger than your father.”
“I think Papa was about fourteen,” said Sarah. “Old enough to remember it happening.”
Harry shook his head and looked past her, his eyes catching the light from the stove which was settling down now behind the piece of thick glass mounted in the door.
“My father never got over it,” said Harry. “He could never really come to terms with the idea that his way of life and all that he knew was gone, just like that. A year of darkness and he died never knowing how it happened or why. Sure, he brought us here, helped us build this place, but he was never the same according to my mother.”
“Is she...?”
“They both died around the second year after Abbingdon had been built. My Dad went first; he just slipped away quietly in his sleep.”
“And your mother?” He gazed vacantly at the far wall.
“A few weeks later. It's strange but I think she felt it was okay to die, knowing that I was all grown up and handling life in the camp pretty well. I think she knew that she'd done her job and it was okay to trust me to carry on without her.”
Sarah felt the tears gathering around her eyes but she held them back; too many had been shed already and she wasn't sure that if she started that they'd ever stop. That was the danger now, the real one that no one ever admitted existed, but which they all knew about in the darkest parts of the night when the silence came. It slipped into bedrooms and living rooms, it stole through cracks in the feeble shelters and wriggled itself inside forgotten service ducts and empty containers. It was as real as the air they breathed and it choked them unless they learned to forget it and just carry on. There'd been a life before the disaster, a life filled with plenty and comfort and love and it was gone now, maybe never to return. They hadn't seen it but they all knew that it'd once existed and that they'd missed it by only a few years.
They continued to eat in silence. Only the sound of the knives clattering against their plates broke it. Speaking about the disaster was something done in very few homes now and those that did talked with reverence. It always made a change in the mood of the place, one way or ano
ther.
“I'd best be going,” she said when the last piece was finished. “Thanks for the supper.”
“Don't mention it,” he replied. He was still eating, still going through the motions yet, in the poor light from the stove, she could see the paths the tears had taken down his haggard cheeks.
“I'll catch some sleep in the stables,” she explained, fastening up her coat. “Then I'll be gone in the morning, back to Pine Lodge.”
“Okay,” he said. She turned and headed for the door. “Sarah?”
“Yes?”
“Take care of your Papa,” he said. She nodded, opened the door and left.
Before she returned to the stables, she stood for a moment outside the containers and let out the breath she'd been holding for so long. It came out of her lungs in stuttering gasps as the overwhelming urge to cry suffocated her. She put a hand on her chest, looked up at the evening sky and tried to hold it back. Such grief was beyond her ability to restrain and she sobbed quietly to herself, hoping that no one would see her or hear her. That was this world now, she realised. The one of death and missed opportunity, the one marked by the memory of an existence they'd never known but which felt as real to them as the wreckage of speeders and buildings that served as markers where ever they went. Maybe, she thought, in a generation or two this sense of utter loss would be gone, faded, sliding into a dreamless past which would only be spoken of in legend, like a fantasy world, but right now felt almost tangible.
She gathered herself together and wiped away the tears with her scarf, taking up her luggage and rifle and heading off towards the other side of the settlement where Mickey lived. She needed a familiar face right then, someone who would cheer her up with some new discovery or a recently unearthed paperback.
As she walked along, avoiding the muddy puddles that dotted the path here and there, she felt the depression easing and it was almost gone by the time she found herself outside the book shop made of more of the same ugly corrugated sheeting.
“Mickey?” she called out to the opening near the doorway. “Mickey - it's me, Sarah!”
There was the sound of something falling over on the other side, something heavy and wooden and a few moments later the latch, riveted to the sheet-plated door, slid open and allowed the dark interior to be revealed to the cold world outside.
“Sarah?” said a voice from the gloom. “You're late!”
“I ran into some trouble. Have you-”
“Come in, come in!” he cried, throwing the door open wide. He stepped away and she walked in, breathing deeply of the scents of old paper, dampness and the smell of burning wood that had a pungent, melted paint kind of smell. “I'm down to old furniture,” he explained as if she'd asked. Maybe it'd been the face she'd pulled.
“How's things?” she asked. Mickey laughed and stepped into the light of a small oil lamp near the only chair in the room. He was gaunt and hunched over even though the roof was at least a metre above his head. He was perhaps ten years older than Sarah but he looked far more than that; he'd aged prematurely from his time as a prisoner of Scavengers a long time ago. He'd been rescued by a party from Abbingdon along with several others, but only he had managed to shake off the horror of that time with them. The others had chosen another way out.
“I'm doing g-g-great,” he stammered, running a bony hand through his thin hair. “H-h-how are y-y-you?”
“I'm doing okay,” she said. “Have you-?”
“Wait h-h-here,” he replied, turning away into another room. Sarah set her bags down and sighed. There were stacks of books everywhere, in no particular order and she longed to take hold of some, to open their ageing covers and delve into their worlds. But she knew Mickey well and he wasn't one to let you tamper with his pets, as he called them. If he lent you any, it was out of his benevolence, a kind of strange, capricious godlike attitude to all things literary.
He returned with three small hardbacks, dusty from stone or rubble and he set them before her on a small, rickety table, perfectly spaced apart from each other and in line with the spines.
“Karen f-f-found them yesterd-d-day. Aren't they b-b-beautiful?” he said, taking a step back. Sarah leaned in closer to have a look, keeping her hands clasped behind her.
“They're marvelous,” she said. “Dickens and Twain. Who's the third?”
“A man called Block. I've n-n-never read his w-w-work before. Which one w-w-would you l-l-like?”
Truth be told, she wanted all three. Instead she looked closely at Dickens and remembered the only book of his they had at home and which her Papa loved. He'd enjoy another as much as she would.
“I'll take this one,” she said, pointing at it. Mickey smiled.
“I knew you w-w-would.”
He found a small, wrinkled plastic bag and carefully tucked the small book inside it, folding over each edge as he did so like he was wrapping a present. Then he bound it with string and passed it to her with trembling hands.
“Th-th-there you go,” he said. “Take g-g-good care of it.”
“I will.” She placed it inside her coat and looked around. “What have you been reading lately?”
“A w-w-wonderful little book by a m-m-man called Alfred Mason. Very exciting. Lots of sh-sh-shooting.”
Sarah frowned. “I wouldn't think you'd like something like that.”
“I don't m-m-mind sometimes. It helps me to f-f-forget.”
“I can't imagine what it was like for you,” she said.
He walked around to the far end of the room where the shelves seemed to groan with the weight of a world long since dead and demanding that the ghosts be satisfied by her world's readers. She fancied that each page turned released another spirit into the afterlife, freeing them from the torment of being forgotten by illiterate generations.
“I should be going,” she called after him. “I'm going home tomorrow.”
“Take c-c-care, Sarah. It's a dangerous w-w-world out there. Who knows what m-m-might happen when you step outside your d-d-door.”
“You're telling me,” she mumbled to herself. “Goodbye, Mickey. Thanks for the book.”
Across the way in one of the few wooden houses that had been built inside the settlement, a light was still lit in the window of what most of the older people called the Post Office. It was far from anything like a Post Office. Sarah knew this from the various books she'd read which had them woven into their stories but she understood the reference. Through the bright red door with C R painted in gold letters in the centre, Sarah went and saw that the lamp was for Pete, the unofficial Master of Letters. It was a title he'd given himself and being one of the oldest members of the settlement, no one was going to argue with his eccentricity. He was hunched low over a desk he'd built from pallet wood and old ammunition boxes and in his shriveled fingers was a pencil, sharpened almost to nothing. He was scratching along a piece of home-made paper, thick and rough edged and still bearing the traces of old world magazine print.
“Hello Pete,” she said as she walked in. “Sorry I'm late.”
“Not at all,” he wheezed. “Your dedication is to be commended. Is that the mail?”
“Yes,” she replied, placing the sack on an empty table. “I'm expecting some things to take back.”
“Of course!”
Pete lifted himself out of his chair very slowly and shuffled off towards the back of the room where a stove grumbled in the corner. He half-dragged, half-lifted a sack of letters and parcels towards the light of the lamp and gave up just near her feet.
“You can handle that,” he chuckled. “You're much younger than me.”
She picked it up and inspected the contents.
“There seems less than normal,” she said.
“Sad times I'm afraid. Fewer people learning their words. Fewer people with families outside of the settlement. Fewer people who care to write down a message for a loved one. Sad times, Sarah, sad times. One day we'll be dinosaurs and they'll look at us funny when we say things abou
t books and words and language. I considered starting a school but I think it's too late for me.”
“Don't talk like that,” she chided. “You've got years left.”
“I wish. Anyway, be gone with you! Get some sleep before you set off home to David. How is he?”
“He's doing well, thank you. He sends his compliments as well.”
“Good, good.” He sat back down with a wheezing kind of grumble, like an unruly old goat being led from the feed. “Pass mine to him as well.”
“I will. Take care, Pete.”
“I will - as much as I can grab. You'd be wise to do the same.”
Back at the stables, Sarah slept fitfully on a straw mattress in the loft above the horses, shivering in the terrible cold. The memory of the ambush and the lives she'd taken there churned in the front of her mind. The faces came back to her as she turned inside her bedroll, first this way, then that. It was always the same; the pictures never left her and especially the ones of those closest to her who seemed to return each night to haunt her sleep. She could still remember the first life she’d taken, way back when she was only sixteen years old. He hadn’t been much older than her, charging down on them with a hatchet as she and her Papa were ambushed on the road. There’d been more after that but none of those faces had ever left her.
At some point she lay on her back, looking up at the groaning timbers and thinking that if there was a place where the dead went it wasn't very good; they seemed to spend most of their time haunting the living.
Eventually she gave up on sleep and, gathering her things, she went down into the stable and began to saddle the now rested Ziggy. She had the return mail now and there were no other reasons to delay. She led the horse out into the coldest hours of the early dawn that rose out of the misty mire around Abbingdon and, trotting out through the gate, pulled the collar of her coat even tighter around her neck. If she hurried, she might make it home in time to go to the labour market with Papa and maybe even see the stranger again. She was determined to have that horse off him even if it meant facing that hound of his for a second time.
CHAPTER FOUR
Beyond Hope (Tales from the Brink Book 3) Page 3