“Heather!” Allie screamed.
Heather only kept rocking, shaking her head. “No, no!”
Allie shook all over. She hadn’t thought a person could shake as much, a full-body trembling that threatened to pull her apart. She kept firing, missing almost every shot. The army grew close, resolving into individual faces wrought by terror and rage, some eyes wild and others streaming with tears, sweeping towards her like a wave.
Then silence consumed everything, and her heart almost stopped.
I’m dead. I was hit, I died, I’m dead—
She wasn’t dead. Those in her sights still rushed forwards. But it wasn’t silent; her ears still rang. She cast her gaze wildly to Abernathy and saw him bellowing soundlessly.
The gun had run through its reel of ammunition. Allie made to leap from cover to reload from the barrel beside him, when the side panel of the Nissan Micra beside her disintegrated in a hail of hot metal.
They were waiting for us to run through the reel. They can afford to. There are that many.
Allie gritted her teeth and started forwards, but another burst of shrapnel tore away the Micra’s wing mirror, just inches from her chest, and she cowered back with a whimper. Abernathy scrabbled with the gun himself, hauling out a fresh reel. A thud reverberating through Allie’s chest told her it was too late: the invaders had reached the bottom of the roadblock.
“We can’t stay here!” she yelled.
“What do we do?” Abernathy wheeled away from a red-hot round that shattered a headlight by his side.
“Get to the cathedral. It’s the only place we might be able to hold them!”
“Hold against this?” Abernathy’s voice broke, so high was his scream. Before she could reply, he jerked. The tiniest sliver of red arced from his temple, and he rolled to the side, tumbling out of sight. It happened so fast that Allie didn’t even have time to reach out to catch him.
She screamed a curse. Flinging herself after his lifeless body, she landed with a crack on the ground. Something in her back ripped, but she didn’t pause, didn’t give the pain time to blossom. She grabbed at Heather, slapping her across the face, pulling her hair. “Get up, get up, get up!” she screamed.
Heather shook her head quite calmly, staring at the ground.
“Don’t do this, please don’t do this. Please, Heather.”
Thumping on the other side of the roadblock, now. They were climbing.
“Please!”
Heather’s eyes cleared a tad. “Go, Allie,” she said flatly.
“Get the bloody hell up, you stupid cow!”
That maddening calm voice. “It’s okay. Just go.”
“No, I—”
A high screech cut across her as a figure fell in her peripheral vision across the street. For a heart-stopping moment Allie thought they had come over the top, but then she picked out little Tommy Doogan spreadeagled in the rubble, the left side of his ribcage torn away.
Allie swayed, saw black, then gripped Heather’s lapels. “Don’t do this to me,” she whimpered.
Heather looked dully into her eyes. “Go.”
Allie ran. Glancing over her shoulder, she glimpsed what seemed like a tar oozing up over the head of the roadblock, a wave of human bodies thrust forwards by an unfathomable legion from behind. The first few crashed down into the street without grace, pushed by those behind. The next jumped, scrambling for cover, then fired along the street itself. Allie threw her arms over her head as rounds snapped and whizzed close by. She didn’t dare look back again.
Elsewhere, the screams ringing out had changed from those of fear to those of pain. Already the returning volleys had died to a trickle. In place of the sound of gunfire was that of groaning metal and toppling cars. The city had been breached.
XVI
Billy walked in shadow. Things amorphous and veiled in darkness shifted around her in constant motion. Cold rained down on her shoulders and slicked her skin, each moment seeping deeper into her, stopping her breath in her throat and weighing her down. She wanted to lie down and sleep in the grass. Right here would be fine. She just needed to rest for a while. On the verge of looking around for a comfy spot, she wondered how long she had been walking.
Don’t know.
Where had she been before?
Don’t know…
Who was she?
Doesn’t matter. Sleep now.
She was about to start bending her legs when a sharp crack cut through the shadows, washing it all away like cobwebs parting in a gale.
Billy blinked. Light. Green hills, trees, an iron-grey sky. She turned on her heels and saw she was alone upon a hillside, three hundred feet above a city of wibbly-wobbly stone houses. A pall of loneliness fell heavy around her shoulders as she realised the others were gone—just gone.
Poof, she thought weakly.
She turned in a wide circle and found a pile of the others’ things nearby in the grass. Darkness lay wrapped around the city’s far side, made of thousands and thousands of people. Angry people, smirching everywhere nearby with darkness that slowly crept into the fields.
I have to go down there.
The itch in her feet that had carried her from the cottage with Daddy to the forests of Radden Moor awakened and bade her to advance. She started forwards, but an almighty burst of gunfire coming from the city’s biggest road forced her back with almost physical force.
I have to go, or we all go away.
Already she could feel the Frost creeping about her heels, rising over her shins. Soon it would cover the whole city, if the Bad People kept rushing in, and then… once everybody was dead, it would spread.
Gripping the hem of her sleeves and biting her lip, she started forwards, heading down the hill. At first it was hard to take each step, and she jumped at every gunshot. But soon the itch took hold, and the Light lit up a path before her, guiding the way. The mindless haze crept back over her, and she went gladly to that place where there was no fear, where there was only her against the shadow.
*
“Down! Everybody down now!”
Sarah and the children flung themselves sprawling onto the cobbles as a blanket of hot metal spewed into the street. The town hall’s cladding vanished in a puff of splinters. Inside, a few errant cries of pain rang out from the handful who had taken shelter there.
Sarah scrabbled up, grabbing at her belt for her pistol as a group of thin skeletal creatures appeared before her. Those at the front were armed, those behind holding knives and pickaxes. A beat passed in which she and the party stared at each other, then their eyes moved over the children. Their stances softened for a moment—the tiniest flicker of hesitation.
Sarah had been counting on it. She crouched down and took careful aim. It took everything she had to go through the motions and to not merely close her eyes and start spraying bullets, but surging adrenaline brought a strange outer-body deliberateness over her as time stretched, and she found her mark and fired. She missed.
No!
She aimed again, fighting back panic, and fired. The first figure dropped to the cobbles with a muffled oof. By the time the others blinked from their stupor, Sarah had found her second target, and a third. She shattered an elbow instead of hitting the chest she aimed for, and a round went wild and hit what would have been her fourth target. It didn’t matter. She kept shooting. Five bodies hit the cobbles in lifeless heaps. None of them got a single round off.
Absurdly, she had time for a cogent thought to run through her head, calm and ponderous as an armchair philosopher’s: so that’s what it’s like to take life.
Then she was hauling children up by their hair, screaming, clawing, beating. They rose under her coaxing voice, shaking and weeping. Not fast enough. Even as she ripped them bodily into the air and placed them on their feet, a few lost their courage and sank back to the cobbles.
“Don’t! Go, go all of you. Run!” she howled, scooping them up one by one.
Eddie Petrie wept and after a stutte
r in his stride, clipped her side and went hurtling off down the street. Sarah’s heart stopped as she watched her pistol spin from her grasp and go wheeling through the air. She made to dive after it, but the children were all moving now, spurred into motion by Eddie’s flight. As one, they rose, more terrified of being left behind than the remaining people loping forwards.
“Keep running. Don’t stop for anything,” Sarah called, waiting for them all to pass before turning in a horror-filled moment in search of the gun. She didn’t have time to spot it. Arms seized her from behind, locking around her midriff and lifting her into the air. Sarah thrust her head back, made contact with flesh with a satisfying crunch, and a shriek rang out. A pot-bellied bald man stumbled back holding a nose pouring with blood, and she hit the pavement hard. Her cheek smarting, she rolled onto her haunches and searched for the gun. All she saw were feet sprinting closer, too close, all around her. Sarah watched a booted foot loom up towards her face with unstoppable rapidity, and then pain exploded in her jaw. Jerking back, her head made contact against the curb, and a moment of darkness threatened to swallow her.
With everything she had left, she screamed, “Run. Run, RUN!”
Then everywhere there were creatures laughing, fuzzy and bending over her. A few of them parted, and a figure holding a long curved knife appeared over her. A voice, high and predatory, washed over her as she blacked out: “Take her.”
*
Allie reached the cathedral and felt she might have passed into another world. Inside, all was silent. For a horrible moment she thought everybody might have fled or been dragged away, but then she caught sight of figures gathered in the pews, their heads bowed, praying. She searched for Agatha, expecting to find her at her podium, but it was empty. Not a single person guarded the door.
Outside, the screams had died down enough to tell her all she needed to know. The roadblocks had been swept aside like dandelion heads in a breeze, and a scourge poured into the city, decanted from the sludgy ocean beyond, sloshing up the streets and cutting down anything that lay in its path.
She hadn’t seen Heather since leaving Main Street. She couldn’t afford to think about her right now.
“Everybody up!” she cried. Her voice returned in magnificent echo, the booming voice of the wizard of Oz addressing Dorothy. Eyes turned upon her in a wave that propagated from the rear pews forwards. Hundreds of eyes popped up into view, most wide-eyed and tearful, some blank, some angry. Children and the elderly lay in the centre of such clusters, surrounded by adults who stood slowly to face her. The entire cathedral stank with the expectation, the acceptance, of death.
Allison Rutherford never expected to stand before this city and be the one to whom it looked.
Harsh, taunting whispers from within: The gossip. The dead weight. The nobody. That’s who I am.
She recoiled under the combined weight of their hopelessness, then caught sight of a slumped figure close to the transept. She was running before anything clicked in her mind, but by the time she leaped up onto the platform, she had started calling Agatha’s name.
A groan answered, and the figure transfigured into Agatha’s lolling body, her head drooping to her chest and her limbs splayed on either side. She sat teetering in a chair as though a diver preparing for a plunge. Allie crouched beside her and lifted her head and turned to those in the closest pews. “What happened?”
Nobody answered, just stared.
She scowled and cupped Agatha’s cold cheeks in her hands. “Aggie, it’s Allie. Come on, now. Look at me.”
Agatha stirred and her milky eyes turned laboriously, but there was no trace of recognition in them.
She’s gone again.
“Oh…,” Allie said, deflating. Suddenly she felt weak, as though gravity had grown stronger tenfold. Somehow, hearing her friends slaughtered outside paled in comparison to this: seeing one so wise and above all this, fade away before her very eyes.
No. She wasn’t going to let this happen. Not like this.
Cursing herself, she shook the old woman hard. “Aggie! You hear me, you old bat. I know you do. You’re not checking out that easy. You get your arse in gear, right this instant! You hear? Right this instant!”
Those milky eyes flickered with something, an oil-clogged engine sputtering and choking.
Allie gripped her hard, searching. “Come on, please. They all need you. I need you. One last time,” she breathed.
“Ms Rutherford…” Suddenly those eyes were alive. A human being had dropped into place before her. The tiniest rueful whisper: “Let go o’ me before I clock you one proper.”
Allison laughed, a hysterical and delightful absurdity amongst the pain and woe in terrible oscillation about them. “Everybody’s here now. We’re all together.”
Agatha looked for the source of the racket filtering in from outside. “It’s started…”
“Yes. It’ll be over soon.” Instead of loosening her grip, Allie tightened it to get her point across.
Agatha’s gaze filled with understanding, and she took a breath. “My flock?”
“All here. And more. We need to get out of here, right now.”
Agatha smiled and rubbed her hand, bringing it to her lips and kissing it. “So alive,” she whispered. “I ’member bein’ that way. Like you could do anythin’… Long time ago, that was. Like your heart is on fire.” She winked. “Lemme tell you a secret: we don’t ever get wiser, not a wink. But gettin’ to be an old bat does give you some favours: you get to know when the time for some things has passed. We coulda got out of here before. But listen to that out there, child. There ain’t no runnin’ now. Now’s the time to be together.”
“No, no.” Allie recoiled, pulling her hand away. She stood and turned to the crowd. “Come with me. There’s still time to run. We can get to the forest if we go now. They won’t get all of us, we—”
“Child.” Agatha’s hand gripped her harder than Allie thought possible, yet her voice remained soft as goose down, wafting high above the echoing carnage. “Anybody who wanted to run, ran already. The fighters fought. Us folk here, we got nothing if we don’t have this place or each other. Here we’ll stay.”
Allie fought tears but didn’t pull away. “Don’t give up, please don’t. I can’t just leave you.”
“You go do what you gotta. But right here, we’re happy.” Agatha winked once more, gave a smile so warm that Allie thought it might destroy her, and let go of her arm.
Allie turned slowly to the others as Agatha took once more to her podium and spread her arms. “Sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, I’m done with this bull-crap.” She picked up the bible by her hand and tossed it aside. “It ain’t gonna do us any good now. It’s time to live all the time we got left with our heads in the here and now. We’re all friends here, fam’ly. Whoever you got by your side, take their hand.” She paused and turned to Allie. “Go on, now. You take care.”
Allie bit her lip hard to keep the tears from flowing, backing away. “I’m sorry.”
That smile again, so serene and everlasting, keeper of those who weren’t for this world—those who before had been hopeless and tired of it all, but now seemed only ready. “Don’t you dare be sorry. You take that pain and you use it.”
Allie looked at them afresh as she reached the door. They had turned away from her now, their backs to the destruction, standing hand in hand. As one, they began to sing.
Allison turned and ran without looking back. As soon as she emerged, the sheer force of vibrating air stunned her. Everything was so very loud now, so very close. Her heart pounded painfully as she looked for somebody—something—she might be able to grab.
Sarah. Where was Sarah? If she had mounted a last stand then Allie wanted to be by her side. But there was no sign of anything she recognised. All around people were falling, shadows shifted, fires blazed. Bloody figures fought hand to hand, and bodies were being flung from upper storey windows into the roiling streets. A thin spattering of militia positions
remained, but the approaching numbers were so vast that they were but islands in a foaming ocean.
A fresh wave of people breached the roadblocks with torches held aloft and scattered in all directions. They ignored anybody in their path, even those shooting at them, as though intent to penetrate as far behind enemy lines as possible, and lighted rags stuffed into bottles filled with liquid. As soon as these bottles were hurled through windows or through shattered doorways, great conflagrations belched to life, spewing flames into the streets and blowing out windows. New Canterbury began burning in earnest.
A gaggle of kids burst around a corner, sprinting for the cathedral. Allie watched them, frozen, but as soon as their terrified eyes turned on her, she sprang forwards with her arms spread wide. “Stop, stop! Where’s Mrs Strong?”
“They got her!” the closest of the boys wailed.
Allie mouthed wordlessly, then shook herself and waved them away, to the east. “Time to go, everyone.”
“What about my mummy and daddy?” the boy cried. The other kids began babbling at once, and Allie almost crumpled. Marshalling her strength, she clapped her hands, something she had seen Sarah do a thousand times but never thought she would do herself. Now, it might be all that could save them. “Enough! You do as I say. We’re going to stick together, and we’re going to run together and… and your parents are all going to be waiting for us.”
The kids wheeled away from the cathedral once more.
God, don’t let that be the last thing to come out of my mouth, she thought.
She made to run, but in the corner of her eye a tiny figure tottered into view, tottering along the cobbles. A young red-headed girl wobbled drunkenly up the street, looking at and avoiding things that quite simply weren’t there. One of the kids must have taken a hit to the head.
Allie cast a look after the main herd of kids disappearing up the street. If she left them, they might get lost and run right into the army. But she wasn’t going to leave any more people behind, not one. Cursing under her breath, she ran for the tottering girl, who now seemed to be dancing.
Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) Page 20