Latif drew parallel with Evelyn. “May I?”
She didn’t respond for a moment, standing drenched in her shawl, which stuck unceremoniously to her body, her hair lank around her face. She stared for so long he thought she might banish him, but instead she reached out and cupped the back of his head. “You’re just like him, you know,” she said.
“The old man?” Latif scoffed. “Never in a million years, not that old goat…” He cleared his throat. “I’ll never be as wise as that.”
He caught a wry look from her in the corner of his eye.
“Do you think we’ll be heard?” she said.
He could only shrug. It was so cold now, so very cold—a thousand tiny insects nipped at his bones. The clouds were lower every time he looked up, as though the sky itself were falling.
Maybe it is, he thought.
A gush of fear ran through him as he realised all this was really happening. While he had dallied with the radio and everybody had moved around him, he had lost himself in the work. Only now did the realisation truly hit home.
Something squeezed his fingers, and he looked down to see Evelyn’s hand around his.
The ice in her gaze thawed, and she squeezed tighter. “You scared?”
Latif nodded as the wind rustled his hair and the rain slashed down without end. At the far end of the dual carriageway stretching away from the gate, a dark mass had appeared at the edge of sight, made fuzzy by the storm. A hard sphere formed high in his throat. “I’m scared,” he croaked.
She blinked as a reverberating rush faded into audibility: the roar of thousands of voices. “’Atta boy,” she said.
*
“You son of a bitch!” Charlie barked.
Jason vanished in a blur before Charlie’s knuckles could come within ten inches of him. A moment later Charlie’s cheek was a mass of pain, and the world hazed over. Then he hit the floor, his gammy leg splayed awkwardly to one side. “How could you? They were our people!”
He whirled onto his back and looked up at the wolfish thing standing over him. He was on the verge of throwing another insult when Jason’s long curved blade swept down to touch his chin.
“Stay still, pup,” Jason said. “Very still.” He cocked his head, observing Charlie with the curiosity of a child watching insects scurry under a magnifying glass.
Charlie looked at the bleeding, torn people around them. Grit and pebbles lay embedded in faces, razor-sharp metal sticking out from bellies and shoulders. They had lost over a thousand people back in the square, half of them cut to pieces by their own artillery.
Jason had given the order. Before Charlie had been able to fight his way to the front line to countermand the order, the damage was done, and the fight in the square had been over.
“How could you?” he spat. “Our own!”
“No, not ours. We are not brothers. They’re just things.” He waved to those bleeding out not ten feet from him. “Things.”
Charlie looked to them, gaping.
Why don’t they kill him? There are a hundred people in earshot. They could cut him down in a moment.
But could they? Looking at Jason afresh, all hope drained out of him. Their sheeplike, languid forms watched, just watched. They visibly wilted as Jason turned to survey them, holding out an arm as though in welcome.
“Anybody have anything to say?” he called. He grinned, a horrific thing that sent Charlie’s nerves crackling. “No? Then what are you still doing here?”
The silence that followed could have stopped hearts. Ever so gradually, those still able to walk headed east, towards the Alliance compound. Jason’s mad stare persisted until the trickle had become a steady flow. Those whose blood oozed over the ground watched from the pavement with long, laboured breaths, babbling in horror as they were passed without a second glance.
“You can’t do this,” Charlie said.
“I am doing this.” Jason danced the tip of his knife over Charlie’s cheek. “Are you going to stop me, little boy?”
Charlie remained frozen in place, watching the blade sweep down under his chin and up over the other cheek. He winced as it rested against his temple and pressed inwards sharply, slicing his hairline.
“I asked you a question, pup.”
Charlie shook his head fractionally.
“I don’t hear you.”
“No.”
The blade carved fire along his cheek and Charlie grated his teeth until it was level with his ear. Then the knife dropped, and blood beaded on his chin.
“I’ll take it from here—oh, and I’ll be back for you after. Run if you like. I’ll find you.” Jason winked. “Have fun.”
Then he was gone after the others.
Charlie lay dripping blood as mortar pipes pushed past him, moving east, while the main body of the army passed in earnest.
Suddenly he felt hollow. Not horrified, but empty. He was nobody.
Thousands passed, staggering on legs barely working, dead-set eyes trained forwards, following the ragged mass that had consumed them. They vanished into the storm, and Charlie was left with the fallen.
His father’s voice spoke inside his head: “Time to wake up, boy. Time to get out of this.”
No! I won’t let them get away with it.
He couldn’t give up. It was all he had left.
Ambling to his feet, he steeled himself against the long searching gazes of those dying beside him and limped away in the wake of the army—Jason’s army.
*
The storm gathered about the compound, smothering the Isle of Dogs in milky tendrils. Evelyn shivered constantly but no longer felt the cold, nor even her feet under her; all bodily senses had abandoned her.
Distant rumblings and cracks reached them; the sounds of stone and metal being torn and people dying. The world seemed to be losing depth and focus, a fading so gradual as to be almost imperceptible. It was as though reality itself was fizzling.
“Ma’am, you should go inside,” said Marek’s deputy, a wall of muscle towering over her.
She turned her stare on him, and he stalled. She enjoyed a glimmer of satisfaction. She might be old and frail, but she wasn’t done yet. “I am going nowhere.”
“It’s time to seal the tower.”
“Then do so. I am not going to cower in my keep.”
“We can’t protect you out here.” He gestured between her and Latif. “Neither of you.”
She waved a sharp hand at him. “If I am to die, I will do it standing!”
From the corner of her mouth, she said to Latif, “You get inside while you can.”
He jerked. “Run? Now? Get lost… Ma’am.”
“Oliver is preparing whoever can put up a fight. If the walls fall, we’re going to need everyone. He’ll need your help.”
“I can’t help them!”
“You’re no good here. Go, darling. Please.”
Latif looked forlorn, blushing. The noise ahead was building, the ghostly sighing of some titanic being on approach.
“I’ll be back. As soon as we’re secure.”
She pulled his hand from her arm. “Go on.”
He whirled and pattered down the stairs. She watched him cross the empty courtyard and vanish into the tower lobby. The doors slammed shut behind him, and she caught a few winks of activity through the revolving doors as hasty barricades were thrown together on the marble floor.
The catwalk’s length was lined with dozens of their best fighters. They were few, but she stood among the closest things to soldiers this world had to offer.
Let them come, she thought.
Lightning arced overhead. As one, they stared into the mist. Then from the monotonous rumble of pattering rain, noise from ahead, and the skies. The medley boggled her momentarily, and she searched for the source.
The strange double rumble took on form simultaneously, resolving into the roar of voices ahead, and a strange whine from the sky. The darkened streets morphed into a rushing mass of people, more people th
an she had seen together since the End, sprinting for the compound. Above, the whine became ear-splitting as somebody bellowed, “Get down!”
The next instant, a section of the wall to her left spattered into a thousand pieces as fire burst upwards. Evelyn blinked, dumbstruck.
“No,” she breathed. “No, they can’t have—”
Another section of the wall detonated. Evelyn saw the deputy running for her, shouting inaudibly. He came to within five feet of her when the air became a solid wall, and a giant hand thrust her clear from the catwalk. She tried to scream as fiery teeth chomped at her legs, but it was too late.
Darkness.
*
Marek ran. His leg throbbed, threatening to buckle, but he kept going. Everywhere, other survivors from Trafalgar Square were shot in the back as they fled.
Christ, we’re being mown down.
There was nothing else for it. If they stopped for cover, they would be swarmed in seconds. If they crouched, their gain would diminish, and they would only be easier targets. All they could do is run.
“Keep going! Don’t—”
A ginger-haired woman he had been reaching for dropped out of sight, red mist spraying Marek’s cheek.
Canary Wharf loomed from the mist that had entombed it, amorphous shapes emerging from the milky blanket. Relief flooded him as he picked out the antlike figures on the catwalk. They were so close!
Another minute and they would reach the gate. It would be a huge risk to open and close it in time, but they had to take it: there were still two-hundred people out here, two hundred they couldn’t afford to lose.
Marek got ready to give the order. They would have to time it perfectly. In his mind he was already scaling the catwalk stairs to take control, picturing the battlefield in his mind, where he would concentrate fire—
A whine he recognised all too well built suddenly overhead, plummeting down with ferocious speed.
“Get down!” Marek yelled with everything he had, tearing something in his throat.
The ground shook as the wall vanished in a hail of rubble. Hammering down from above, no less than a dozen shells landed together and obliterated the wall along a twenty-foot stretch.
Marek could only gape, running still as the dust cloud swept down over him.
The wall was all we had. And our firepower just went along with it.
Breathing vaporised concrete, he reached where the gate had been. Before him lay a buckled twist of iron, gaping wide. On either side the wall was pockmarked with ragged holes, denuded to a few feet in height.
Already the whine was building again.
“Get under any cover you can find. Be ready!”
Marek passed through the gate and got behind the wall’s remaining cover. With the creeping dread of taking a bullet to the back stalled momentarily, he searched the rubble in a mad frenzy, checking smoking bodies for anything useful.
Maybe they could lay down enough fire to cover the bottleneck at the gate.
Every body he checked bore a face scorched and inhuman. Any weapons were twisted, useless. Cursing, he yelled, “Here they come.”
While the others took cover, Marek kept searching, yelling in pain as his leg cracked ominously. He stopped when he unearthed something that punched all the air from his lungs: a single scrap of shawl.
Marek stared dumbly while the world span, until the moment the gate darkened and the first of the emaciated figures came rushing through. In the same moment, the next wave of shells hit, peppering the courtyard.
Marek ran for them, swinging the sabre, slashing with wild abandon, knowing he had only a few moments left. The sheer ferocity of his swings sent the first wave sprawling back, but there was no fooling hard numbers: the sheer mass of their ranks continued pouring through the gate and gaps in the walls like a scourge of locusts. A bulbous beachhead formed in moments.
Hot metal flew down from the tower, spraying the wall and the asphalt, eliciting screams and grunts that were half-drowned by the intermittent explosions gouging the ground.
From the mass of skeletal bodies, Marek spotted a figure moving with such grace that, for a moment, he thought he was dead already, and he watched the pirouetting of an angel. Then the figure resolved into a snarling man with a face like a wild dog, cutting through people as though they were inanimate slabs of meat.
Marek rolled hard to the left, bringing them to face one another. The man halted for a moment, and they looked each other up and down. Marek lunged, sabre in hand. Only then, seeing the man feint to the side with the fluidity of water, did Marek realise how weak he had become. All he could do next was watch the sabre carry him uselessly forwards, while the dog man crouched with easy grace and brought the knife up under him.
Pain shot through him and set a thousand bells ringing. For an instant the man was by his side, breathing hot stinking breath over his face. Then the knife was pulled back, and Marek watched the floor rush up to strike him in the face.
The world receded as fast as the pain, spinning down a long black corridor. As Marek died, the orchestra of destruction wound down and warped into a deep, gloopy hum; and for just a moment, that sound became the laughter of something beyond the world, a mad staring evil that closed its fist over the dying earth.
V
Norman kicked at his horse’s sides and rounded the corner of what had once been the NatWest skyscraper, followed by two dozen riders. The explosions had reached them minutes ago, and the sound of battle had begun soon after. He knew they were already too late, but it took all his resolve not to haul the reins.
The city, the storm, he thought as the dream that had plagued him for so long flashed before his eyes. The day all this started. We’ve come full circle.
Canary Wharf lay in turmoil. Hordes surged in through the broken gate, smoke rose from a hundred craters gouged into the street, the wall had been shattered to so much rubble, and about it all, a swirling leviathan descended upon the tower from the black clouds.
The shelling of the walls ended, and a moment of comparative deathly silence followed. Then with a tinkling that sounded like a thousand ringing bells, myriad panes of glass blew out on the tower’s western flank. Moments later a second volley tore the guts from a floor close to the tower’s peak, sending shredded office furniture spinning out into space. Constant shelling resumed, peppering the great spire of chrome and glass with holes.
Norman cursed into the rain. How many kids and injured refugees were in there? Hundreds, or thousands?
The Frost inside him thrummed to effervescent life, threatening to burst out of him like a moth emerging from a chrysalis.
It’s here. It’s from here the End will spread, once and for all. This is no rainstorm, and those are no clouds.
One way or another, this fight was going to be over fast.
He kicked harder, urging the horse onwards. If he stopped now, the others would halt, and if that happened they would be fodder in the open. They raced down the street towards what had once been the wall.
Norman brought his rifle up to head height. Jouncing along, it swayed wildly in his grasp. He let go of the reins, squeezing the horse with his knees. Beside him, Robert rested his own rifle on a forearm, taking aim.
Norman fired, and a moment later a dozen other blasts sounded over his shoulder. Several figures dropped to the ground—a handful from a crowd that seemed infinite, stretching into the mist as an unbroken carpet of bloody faces and bony bodies.
“Hit them head-on!” Norman said.
Their only chance was to penetrate as far in as they could. Most of the army had passed in through the walls, blind to their approach. But if they got caught outside the wall, they wouldn’t last a minute. They had to get into the courtyard and make for the tower.
He gritted his teeth. The ragged figures ahead heard them too late: they turned just in time for the horses’ bodies to collide with them, screaming as they fell under dozens of hooves. As one they plummeted headlong into the crowd, passing through t
he gate and parting the crowd as a boat ploughs the waves, leaving a bow wave of flying bodies in their wake.
He cast a hasty look about, stealing the lay of the land. The lobby had lost all its glass panes, and the battle raged for the most part inside or immediately outside it. Other pockets of resistance held near the stables, Lincoln’s workshop, and near the catwalks.
He stabbed down with the butt of his rifle, beating unsuspecting heads as he passed, praying an errant shell didn’t hit ground and bring an abrupt end. Behind him he could hear the others sticking close as he steered towards the lobby. Seventy feet, then sixty, fifty.
We’re going to make it!
A lone figure leaped from the crowd, one he would have recognised anywhere, even now amidst the surging chaos. Jason leered in Norman’s path, standing perched with his dripping knife held out to one side.
Norman bent low on the saddle and brought his rifle butt up high. For a giddy instant he thought he had won: either Jason would be trampled, or he would dive aside to be clobbered. Then in a show of litheness that defied all logic, Jason passed to the side and down in exiguous pirouette, bringing his knife over the horse’s knees.
The world revolved. The horse’s rear came up as the forelimbs crumpled, and then Norman was flying, wheeling his arms as his forwards momentum carried him through the air. He landed upon a pile of bodies two deep and rolled.
He scrambled, willing pain not to come, certain that he would be dead in a moment. He grabbed blindly as the others rocketed by, surging ahead towards the tower, and found his feet. He searched the writhing madness for his own mount. If he could get to it, his rifle still might be close by. The horse had cartwheeled in a spectacular slide, crushing at least four people under it.
Beside it, a canvas bag had come loose from the saddle and slid twenty feet in the mud. It twitched, alive. The neck of the sack opened and fell away, revealing a tiny, tearful figure. Norman’s heart stopped.
Billy.
Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) Page 32