Diary of the Displaced Box Set

by Glynn James

  "Come out," I said.

  "No chance," replied the darkness. "Your pets there might eat me."

  I couldn't argue with that logic.

  "Who went that way?"

  "The one that came before, with those people in chains," replied the voice. "You chasing him? Got to be with the hurry he was in. He was proper skiddadlin away like someone was hot on his heels, dragging those poor folks behind him."

  I peered into the darkness, to the spot where the voice was coming from, but my eyes struggled to adjust enough to see him clearly.

  "You could say that, yes."

  My mind swam with questions, but I was sure this man, drunk as he was, may not be able to answer most of them.

  "Where is this place?" I asked.

  Silence for a moment.

  "What do you mean?" asked the stranger. Now I could vaguely make out his outline in the corner. He was huddled behind some broken boxes, a knife in his hand. His face was hidden under a hood and the mass of grey beard that must have reached his chest. I could see the fear in his eyes.

  "I mean where am I?"

  "Huh?" He sounded puzzled, but then laughed. "You really don't know do you?"

  "No, obviously not," I said, my voice low.

  "This is Riverfall. The City."

  No recollection came to mind and the rush of dizziness before a flashback didn't come.

  "It's a human city?"

  "What?"

  "Is this a human city?"

  The man coughed out a laugh at that.

  "Of course it's a human city, well what's left anyway."

  "No Zombies?"

  The expression on his face was more puzzled and amused than fearful now.

  "Zombies? What's one of them?"

  "Dead people that walk."

  "Oh. You mean Dwellers. Well, there's some here if you wander off the roads too far, or into the abandoned parts of the city. Of course then there's over the wall."

  "The wall? What's over the wall?"

  "Don't know. People say nothing, people say the old world. People say everything is over the wall. I think that there's just millions of Dwellers out there, but no one ever gets to see. The Ward don't let no one go out. And the wall is too high. Hey you really don't know anything do you?"

  "I just appeared in front of you through a gate didn't I?"

  "I don't see no gate. But, yeah, that tall fellow with his slaves and then a few hours later you and your dogs. I figured I'm wasted. I drunk a bit too much of the shine, see? It's damn good stuff. Man, I'm actually talking to you and you're not there."

  "I see. You say he went right."

  "Yeah," and the man laughed again. "Oh I'm not touching that stuff again."

  "Did he have creatures with him? Lizard things?"

  "No, just those slaves. What am I doing? I'm still talking to ghosts."

  I left the drunk to his rambling, stepping out into the street, followed by DogThing and his little sidekick, both looking warily at the throng of people moving around us, and both sniffing at the ground frantically. The street was a mass of movement. In both directions I could see wooden stalls selling everything from clothing to food and tools.

  "We will hide and follow you."

  "Yes, good idea," I replied, this time remembering to only think the words and not say them aloud. "We don't know how these people will react to you."

  A smell wafted towards me from the market.

  Food. Food that wasn't mushrooms. I still had the mushrooms in my rucksack, but the thought of eating them, even though I was hungry, soon dampened my appetite. There is only so much mushroom you can eat before you get sick of it.

  I walked down through the lines of stalls, looking at all the food. Around me, people moved away, giving me some distance and puzzled looks.

  How had CutterJack come through here? People must have noticed. I was surprised that the place hadn't been in uproar, or that there weren't dozens of dead bodies lying in the streets.

  "Can you pick up his scent?" I asked DogThing, hoping our thought speech still worked here.

  "Yes, slight, but not clear enough yet."

  "Keep tracking."

  I stopped at a stall that was selling cooked meat of some kind. It looked like some kind of rodent, but I didn't bother to ask.

  "What do you want for these?"

  "Ten each."

  "Ten what?"

  The seller looked puzzled.

  I took out the only thing I had that I thought I might be able to trade with - a small half empty bottle of oil that was in the bottom of my rucksack. It was all that I had left, but I needed to eat and so did the Maw. Anything but mushrooms.

  "How many will you give me for this?"

  The woman peered at the bottle for a moment, puzzled.

  "Is that..."

  "It's oil. Petrol?"

  "Oh. But, how did you get that?"

  "I travel a lot. Will you trade? I'm in a hurry."

  "You travel? How? Um...yes," she said, reaching out and taking the bottle. She sniffed the top, and then quickly slipped the bottle into her coat, glancing around as though she was doing something she shouldn't.

  "Take whatever you need," she said.

  I frowned.

  "What I need?"

  "Whatever you can carry. Look I have a dozen cooked and I've got thirty or more stripped and cleaned."

  "All of these?" I asked, puzzled. Then it clicked. Petrol must be very valuable here. I had no time to consider what else I could get for a half bottle of petrol, and no desire to carry raw rats with me...if that was what they were.

  The woman wrapped all of the ones that were cooked and handed me the filled cloth. I stuffed it into my rucksack, nodded and moved away quickly, pushing through the crowd. If word got around this market that I had petrol to trade, and it held the high value that I suspected, I would draw attention to myself, and all I wanted was to be away from there.

  I moved through the crowded street, and it wasn't until I was fifty or more feet away from the rat seller, and just turning a corner into the next street, that I looked back. She was talking frantically to two men, and holding up the bottle. She pointed at me and the men looked straight at me, and then began to move in my direction.

  I turned the corner and stepped behind the nearest market stall.

  "We're being followed."

  "Yes. And we have his scent."

  "Where?"

  "He came this way."

  "How? He would have been seen. He must have Abegail and..."

  "Yes, I have their scent too. It was many hours ago."

  Of course. The market must have been closed when he had arrived. Maybe most of the people in the city had been asleep.

  "Move. Quickly. Follow the trail."

  I jogged behind DogThing, moving through the darkened and ruined streets. All around us were the same signs of a world that had already been destroyed; rows of buildings that were falling into disrepair, their windows long broken, the roads cracked, weeds growing from holes in the middle of the road.

  "The men are no longer near us."

  "Good. We must have lost them."

  We stopped briefly and huddled in an archway of an old church, quickly and ravenously eating our way through all of the cooked rats that I had traded with the market seller, and then with a careful glance in all directions to make sure the men from the market were not in sight, we moved on again.

  For hours we travelled through the city, the only sound my footsteps on the old cobbled road. Some of the streets were lit dimly by lanterns that were connected to some kind of wiring that hung in the air above me, barely a few feet from my head. None of the houses were lit, and only some of the streets were inhabited. We passed street after street of old and dilapidated houses with makeshift repairs to keep them standing. Most of the windows were gone, and in some of the houses the holes had been either boarded up or covered with plastic sheeting. After an hour or so of walking, the signs of habitation drifted away, and the s
treets became barren and empty, the houses ruined or collapsed.

  Eventually we came to the end of a street and DogThing stopped on the corner, peering around the end of a collapsing wall. I stopped and listened, hearing the faint sounds of conversation drifting towards us. About a hundred yards away was some kind of makeshift barrier, a wall built over the top of a row of rusted cars. Tall stilts of wood - probably old telephone poles - jutted up into the air and were used to hold up the ragged and patched together wall that was atop the walkway. In the middle of the road there was a gap maybe ten yards wide blocked up with metal railings. There was debris strewn across the street and piled up nearby.

  "Some kind of checkpoint?" I whispered.

  "I don't know, but Nua'lath's scent leads this way and through there."

  "Damn."

  How were we to get through there without being seen?

  I crossed to the opposite side of the road that we were on and walked along the path, keeping close to the buildings and hoping that the men - and I could now see that there were three of them - wouldn't notice me.

  As I suspected, the next road along was the same, except there was no gate in the middle. Then it occurred to me. Was that even a gate back there in the other street? All of the debris piled around it suggested that maybe it wasn't. Had Nua'lath forced his way through? Did he really have that kind of power? If so, how was I to fight that?

  "Let's see if we can get over this one," I whispered.

  We crept forward towards the barrier and it wasn't until we were right up to the cars that were used as its foundation that I discovered that this wasn't a different section. Whoever built the barrier had made it into one long endless wall, even to the extreme of knocking the houses down where they were in the way. I had thought, and hoped, at first that they had just blocked up the middle of each street, but I could clearly see up onto the platform from where I was crouched, and the wooden planks went on and on. Every twenty or thirty yards another one of the same lanterns hung from the barricade wall, the same wrapped wire hanging loosely from the tall poles that held each section of wall. There was no dark spot to sneak through and even if we travelled further away there would be a good chance of being spotted.

  "Maybe I should just walk up to them and ask to be let through?"

  But gut feeling once more stopped me. I needed to get through this place as quickly as I could. If I were to be stopped I might be asked questions, they might not let me through, and they might want to know things that I didn't want to tell them.

  A quiet noise from behind made the decision for us, the click of footsteps on cobbles. I glanced around, back up the street.

  It was the two men from the market again. One of them was kneeling on the floor pointing at something.

  My footprints or maybe paw prints.

  They were tracking us.

  The fools, I thought. If they tried to stop me I would have to fight back. I really didn't want to kill anyone that wasn't an ally of Nua'lath.

  That thought made me wonder. How many had I killed in the past in places like this? Had I had to kill before just because people who have no business being involved just won't leave well alone? In some ways my lost memories were a blessing.

  The kneeling man stood up and they began to walk slowly down the street towards us. They hadn't seen us, but within a minute or two they would.

  "We have to go. Now."

  "Yes. Go."

  I jumped up from my hiding place and pulled myself up onto the platform, rushing forwards towards the makeshift wall. The boards underneath my feet bent with my weight and creaked; the roof of the car that was underneath groaned. The barricade wall was only a yard high from atop the platform and I easily hopped over it and dropped to the street the other side. Five seconds was all it took, and the Maw were over it quicker than I was, but five seconds of noise and fast movement was enough to alert the guards further up the street and the men tracking us.

  A shout went up from both.

  "Halt! Don't move or we shoot," came the shout from the guards at the barrier.

  "Stop!" came the call from behind us, back up the street where the two men were probably running towards the barrier.

  But we weren't stopping. On the other side of the barrier there was a gap of maybe fifty feet before we would reach the cover of the ruined buildings beyond the wall. The Maw covered that ground in just a few seconds, but I wasn't as fast. I sprinted with every bit of my strength, hearing the crack of guns behind me and feeling the whoosh of air around me as the guards opened fire. Bullets pinged off the cobbles barely inches from my feet, and just as I was reaching cover I felt a sharp pain in my shoulder as one of the shots hit me. I staggered forward, losing my balance, but still managed to get to cover purely by inertia.

  I hit the ground and rolled, staggering to my feet again. I had to keep moving. I ran through the streets, turning left and right, blindly following DogThing and GreyFoot as they moved swiftly along, constantly sniffing at the ground. Behind me, for the first few minutes I could hear the footfalls of the two men chasing us, the ones who had tracked us, but finally that noise faded.

  I stopped for just a moment, checking my shoulder, and was relieved to see that the bullet hadn't punched through my jacket. Instead the shoulder plate had a new dent in it.

  "He came this way."

  "How long ago?"

  "The scent is not fresh."

  "Then let's keep going."

  Once more we moved through ruined streets, except this part of the city was much more decayed than the place inside the barrier.

  What was the barrier there for? What did it keep out? Or maybe it was meant to keep something in?

  The sun began to rise and I was almost overwhelmed with the sight of it. Sunlight again. It burst over the horizon and cast a warm orange glow over the ruined shells that had once been occupied buildings. I felt it on my face. Warmth for the first time in days.

  I stumbled into one of the buildings, one with a roof and a few tattered furniture remnants. There was a rotten old sofa that was still barely covered with leather, the foam stained and smelly, but I was too exhausted to wait so I slept.

  Day 61

  "Wake up. Someone comes."

  I snapped out of my sleep and sat up, instinctively reaching for my gun and blade.

  It was dark once more. Had I really slept all through the day?

  They were all around us before I was even on my feet, shadows in the doorways and near the windows. Many of them were in the street beyond.

  I went to raise my gun to the nearest, thinking with a rising panic that they were Zombies, the Dwellers, as the alleyway drunk had called them.

  "Don't," said a voice. "Or we fire."

  I stopped moving.

  "Who are you?"

  The voice was deep and harsh, and came from a figure that stood by the window nearest to me. I sensed danger and aggression in the voice.

  "I'm just passing through," I said. "I don't want trouble."

  "Oh, really?"

  There were murmurs from the other shadows.

  "And where might you be travelling to? There is nowhere to go out here."

  "I just need to get somewhere," I said.

  "Are you an exile?" asked another voice. This was a woman's and much softer than the first. There was no menace in her voice, at least none that I could sense.

  "No. Well. Not exactly. I'm a traveller."

  "There are no travellers in this place, only the city," said the harsh male voice.

  Some of the shadows were moving closer now and I felt a tingle run up my spine. DogThing and GreyFoot were both growling now, very low, but still.

  "And these dogs? They are yours?" asked the woman.

  "Yes."

  "They are unusual," she stated.

  She moved into view and I could see that she was older than her voice suggested, with long grey hair and sharp features. When she was younger this woman would have been beautiful. She stared at me, her eyes
squinted and calculating.

  "Another...traveller...passed this way but a day ago. Also in a hurry. Are you anything to do with that one?"

  I paused for a moment.

  What if these people were waiting here to stop me? What if Nua'lath had persuaded them to kill me? But I decided that it would happen regardless, if that was the case.

  "I am following him."

  She smiled slightly at that.

  "Ah, you are the hunter and he is the hunted?"

  I nodded.

  "Sort of."

  "The one that you follow murdered two score of my people this last day and then raised them from the ground as Dwellers that they may follow him. He is a cursed one."

  I felt a rush of panic and a pressure in my forehead as my heart sped up. I could hear myself breathing heavier.

  It had begun.

  He was raising his horde once more.

  "How did he kill them?" I asked.

  "By no weapon that I have ever seen," she answered. She sat down on the arm of the sofa that I had slept on.

  "It was as though he merely willed their deaths and they fell at his feet. We tried guns and blades but we could not get near him. He has these...people...on chains and their eyes were glowing..."

  Her voice trailed off for a moment.

  "My own brother was one of those taken, and we barely escaped," she said. "In one hour of slaughter that creature has halved the number of my people. If you are indeed his hunter then you shall leave now and we shall let you pass."

  Many of the shadows outside began to drift away, disappearing as quickly as they had appeared, until only the man and the woman were left.

  We moved out into the street and I only just caught glimpses of some of the shadows heading into the surrounding buildings, disappearing into dark corners as quickly as they had appeared.

  The woman looked at me.

  "They came this way about a day ago and headed towards the wall," she said, pointing along the street into the building beyond. "Where could he be going? There is nowhere left here except what is inside the wall."

  "That's what I intend to find out," I said. I had no words of condolence for her or her people, at least none that I could find at that moment.

  "You are being followed," said the man. I could see him now, the long dark hair tied tightly back from his face, the grey beard, and a line of triple scars running from his forehead to his chin. "We cannot stay here. If they discover us then we will have to kill them, otherwise they will alert The Ward and then we will be hunted down."