Charlie held up a hand, though visibly withered when his companion bared his teeth like an excited dog. Max had the impression that the true balance of power between them was far from equal. “Our quest,” he said. “We have a mission—to rid the land of the greed and injustice it’s been shown by the dominant powers. These civilised people with their morals and books and history, waltzing into everyone’s lives and taking what they see as theirs, leaving a trail of destruction behind.”
Bill scowled. “It’s been a bad year for everyone. The famine would have kicked everyone’s arses whether Cain and his people were around or not.”
“Yet those who could have helped the starving and helpless instead chose to help themselves, to further their own plans, their little schemes to bring back the Old World.” Charlie laughed cruelly. “Leaving behind a trail of destruction and death wherever they went.” A bitterness had infected his face. He changed tactic. “There’s no need to make this hard. People talk highly of this place for miles around. Lay down your weapons, fall in line, and none of you will be harmed.”
“We’re not laying down anything,” Max said before Bill could utter a word.
“Think about it. Things might not be so tough anymore, but the damage is done. People are starved, the Old World supplies are spent, and it’ll take months for the next harvest to come in. The lands are empty.” A note of genuine anger flashed on Charlie’s brows. “Trading posts aren’t much use if there’s nobody left to trade. You rely on your clientele for your own supplies. What do you think will happen to you now?”
They didn’t say anything.
“There would be no shame in it,” Charlie said. He even offered a hand, as though he were a brave sailor plucking floundering fools from stormy seas.
“No shame in bowing down to bully-boys and intimidation?” Bill muttered.
Charlie ignored him. The fingers of his proffered hand waggled. “We were all different, once. We were all just like you.”
Max found himself leaning back away from that hand despite the twenty feet between them. “Somehow I don’t believe that.”
The hand dropped. The kind expression flickered, revealing the ugliness lurking beneath. “Don’t be fools.”
“The fools here are those who wandered into this town with nothing but an itty bitty knife to threaten us and expected to just walk out of here.” With that, Bill raised an arm and swirled a hand above his head, signalling Jordan to blow them away. Max didn’t bother trying to stop him. There had been too many pyres of smoke afar of late. The time for mercy had passed.
In unison, the armed guards atop the stalls and homes all along the thoroughfare braced their stances against the lips of the many roofs and took aim. Snaps, clicks and twangs filled the air as they cocked their weapons. Max readied himself to pick one of them off if Jordan’s high-calibre rounds failed to kill on impact. “I’m sorry, but we can’t take any chances.”
Neither man moved, nor did they show an ounce of surprise. Instead, they stared directly up the hill towards the observatory, straight at where Jordan would have been perched in the service hatch. They knew they were being watched.
Max made to turn to Bill and the others, alarm bells jangling behind his eyes, but before he could do more than start with shock, the squat man moved. Max had never seen anyone move so fast, so blurred as to be almost imperceptible. It would have looked as though he had only twitched, if it weren’t for the hunting knife vanishing from his belt. All that remained was the bare leather holster. A short whistle accompanied a wisp of air that blew against Max’s face as something passed by very close. For an instant he might have perceived an amorphous spinning glitter of a wicked sharp blade. Then there was a solid, meaty thump, and Max turned to look at Bill.
The hunting knife had reappeared, embedded to the hilt in Bill’s chest. He was staring down at it, his mouth open in a faintly surprised O, a brilliant scarlet rose already unfurling across his shirt, radiating from the polished wooden handle. Max dropped his rifle and caught him before he hit the ground, easing him to the dirt as a single blood bubble popped from his lips. He looked up at the two men, considered diving for his rifle, but found all the strength had gone out of his legs. Instead, he turned back to his dying friend, his hands now slick with rivulets of blood oozing out in rhythmic dribbles. The blade must have pierced the aorta.
“Oh, Bill,” Max muttered.
A book could have been written on the important things they had never said to one another. Too many things. Max mouthed wordlessly, and in the end, he said nothing at all.
It was over in seconds. The friend he’d lived, slept and fought beside for forty years faded to a meaty vessel in mere seconds. There wasn’t time for fear or pain to settle in. The surprise simply drained from his face as the light left his eyes, and his grip spasmed and then grew slack upon Max’s sleeves. Then he was gone.
Max stared into his sightless eyes. The blood had stopped oozing from his chest. His hands lay curled and limp on the thoroughfare dirt. No shots came whizzing down from the observatory, nor from the armed sentries of the thoroughfare itself. He turned back to face the two men, leaving Bill’s body to slump beneath him, and struggled to his feet. He didn’t bother going for his rifle. If he was going to die, he’d rather do it standing.
“You’re coming with us,” Charlie said.
“No,” Max said. “We’re not.”
The young man’s face flattened. His cheeks were oddly shaped, like putty. Plenty of ugly brawls had broken out in Twingo over the years, and he knew a face that had been recently stomped on when he saw one. Somebody had really gone to work on this kid. He had the stench of ruined goods about him, a good apple made bad by cruelty. “Then you’ll burn.”
Max turned in a wide circle, along with those standing upon the rooftops, to look at the observatory. Even at a glance he could tell there would be no help coming from the hill. Stoic silhouettes lined the entire ridge, black against the rising sun. They outnumbered all the men, women, and children of Twingo twice over—at least two hundred. The roof of the observatory, where Jordan would have taken his perch, was spattered with at least a dozen more silent watchers. They had all come silently, without notice, and they each watched without moving an inch, yet in each hand was the outline of a weapon: all kinds, from automatic rifles to pistols, machetes to hunting bows, hatchets to pitchforks.
The wolfish squat man leered. It looked as though he was almost salivating, and a redness had crept into the whites of his eyes. “I wonder how your stuck-pig friend tastes, roasted on a spit,” he said. “I guess I’ll find out.”
“Fuck you, and your rotten mother.”
The lupine man ignored him, grinning, his tongue stuck hungrily between his teeth. “Morning’s best time for a feeding.”
“You all know what do to,” Max called to the others on the rooftops. He didn’t have to raise his voice, didn’t have to rally, didn’t even have to glance up. They would all fight to the end, no matter how short an end it might be. He sensed them in his peripheral vision, closing around the store sheds in concentric circles, some shaking and some weeping silently, but all ready, all Twingites. He felt a great momentary swell of love for them all, and then he turned it all off like a switch; emotion muddied the reflexes, and any chance of surviving this required an unfeeling soul.
He had hoped to have Bill with him when the end came. In a way, he was. Bill would have found that funny.
He’d always expected things to end like this. That was the way of this new world. He’d gunned down enough bent traders with the townsmen in hails of bullets to feel no real animosity towards these men. Everyone served a higher purpose, gears of a great machine. The world moved on, the tides changed, and crowns were ripped from cold, bloody hands. The Old World’s ruins littered the Earth, but it and all its civility was only a distant memory. For some, it had only ever been a dream.
Max eyed his rifle, lying a few feet away, and tensed his legs, ready to dive. “I hope you b
rought plenty of rounds,” he said, and then he lunged, and the air was alive with gunfire.
*
When it was over, Max was blinded by his own blood. A gash on his forehead was trickling a steady stream into his eyes, and with his arms tied fast behind his back, it dribbled without check over the contours of his face. Strong arms shoved and corralled him forward, kicking him when he fell, cursing him when he stumbled too fast. He’d taken a ball to the thigh, but it had only skimmed off a chunk of muscle close to the surface, missing the femoral artery.
Waves of heat buffeted his skin and something crackled and popped nearby. They had started setting fires. Gunfire crackled and the occasional scream still rang out, but the battle was almost done. He tried to judge how long they had lasted. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, which seemed impossible. The raiders had been so fast, so silky smooth in every movement, so accurate with every shot. It was eerie.
They had looked like barbarians perched like crows on the hilltop, but they were nothing of the sort. He had taken down maybe a dozen, and they had all been farmer types, emaciated and ropey from the famine, but they had each gone down snarling, often picking off another Twingite before they bled out. Something had turned them all into trained killers.
They were heading uphill. He could hear others’ ragged breathing around him and tried to get their attention, but every time he called out, somebody pressed a thumb into his leg wound, and he ended up biting clean through his lip trying to hold in the screams.
Why were they keeping any of them alive? To barter or torture, maybe for slave labour? He promised to kill the others before himself. No Twingite would be a slave, nor suffer a lingering death.
Someone kicked the back of his knees and he fell forward with a grunt, white-hot agony flashing in his pelvis and up his spine as his full weight landed on the shredded meat of his leg. Others landed in the grass on either side of him and then his hands were free. He wiped the blood from his eyes.
They were sacking the observatory nearby, hauling out the last of those barricaded inside like hounds rooting foxes from a run. Those who blabbered and begged were shot or hacked to the ground. Those who fought back were knocked out cold and thrown on the grass beside Max and the other captives.
Charlie stood over them, unscathed. He and the wolfish man had vanished before he had ever reached his gun, even with his limp. “You people and your pride,” he said and spat at Max’s feet.
“Just finish it,” Max growled.
“Finish?” Charlie grinned, and Max saw a shadow of the wolfish man’s leer buried somewhere behind it, an infectious inner madness that seemed to radiate from every one of these creatures. “Nah. You people have a reputation for being real tough bastards, and you put up a hell of a fight. You’ve got the spark He wants. You’re all with us now.”
Max looked at the others beside him in the grass. He expected them to be veterans, nail-hard folk from before the End. But instead, most of them were young, some only kids. Among them he spotted Radley Tibble, snot nosed and whimpering in the grass, clutching a ragged strip of his mother’s dress, one end charred, the other dripping red.
They didn’t deserve this. He knew what it was like to lose everyone you loved in the blink of an eye. Better if they had all died down there with their families. His mental switch flickered on and off, and a wrenching twist was working into his guts. “Who’s He?” he said.
Charlie stepped aside, and another figure took his position—a tall man with a balaclava tied around his face. A pair of wood pigeons bobbed on one shoulder, cooing and cocking their heads to watch the smouldering wreckage below. The man’s striking green eyes lanced into him. He felt like a pincushion, speared by that gaze.
I know those eyes, Max thought. But no, it can’t be. “You can burn our homes, but you can’t take away what we are. We’re free. We’ll never fight beside you pigs, so get it over with.”
The tall man stepped forward and loosened the balaclava, letting it fall to one side. A few of the kids cried out at the maw revealed in the virgin light. Even Max repressed a grimace. It was hard to believe he was alive; there was so much scar tissue, so much shrunken, retracted flesh, exposed membrane and muscle. Patches of bare skull showed in a few spots around where the cheeks and chin should have been.
“It’s been a long time, Vandeborn,” he said.
“James …” Then Max could only shake his head, speechless for the first time in memory.
The fires of Twingo were dying low, and the last survivors were being thrown down on the grass. The flock of victors—filthy, stick-thin and stinking—gathered around the gutted observatory, surrounding their prey on all sides.
But Max scarcely noticed anyone but the tall man before him. Eventually, he found his voice again. “What happened to you?”
He didn’t answer, just turned and pointed east. The pigeons cooed, cocking their heads, as though following the line of sight drawn out by his arm. Max’s eyes followed it too, and his gaze fell upon the horizon. Glistening in the early morning haze, amidst the sagging ruin of London, was the single lit spire in Canary Wharf.
PART 3 – THE PIGEON KEEPER
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
—Plato
Every man gotta right to decide his own destiny.
—Bob Marley
CHAPTER 1
“Geoffrey, get down!” Alexander Cain bellowed.
A hundred other warnings joined his own, but they came too late. The line of dark figures holed up on the mezzanine of the old skyscraper had already snaked their rifle barrels into view. Before the members of the ambassadorial convoy from Bristol could raise their heads, three dozen muzzle flashes winked in the gleaming midday heat.
The first volley killed Geoffrey Oppenheimer’s son and his two nieces, along with three of his other companions. Red mist fizzed into the air as they dropped to the cracked pavement, and the procession of carts, horses, and trailers scattered like insects. Then the air filled with cracks, whines, and screams, and Alexander ducked back under cover.
So close, they were so close to home. Only fifty feet separated them from the safety of the fortified walls of the compound around Canary Wharf Tower. But it was all open ground without a speck of rubble to shield them. The bastards had known right where to spring their trap.
The guards up on the compound’s walls returned fire, still yelling for Oppenheimer’s group to flee, but Alexander doubted they were hitting their marks. The majority of the enemy had likely fled already, ducked back into the endless tracts of chrome and steel that made up the city’s bulk. They would never find them if they searched for a week.
Although he was stranded behind the pillar of the underground parking lot, which exploded and fragmented as rounds ricocheted all around him, he had a sense that there was little of Oppenheimer’s group left to save. It had been the same since the ambassadorial convoys had started arriving from the outer settlements. They had been under siege for days.
Forty years ago, before the Old World had come crashing down, commuters had squeezed along these streets in their millions. The skyscrapers had gleamed then—steel and glass spires that stood testament to man’s dominion over all the world. The concrete, too, had been fresh and smooth, and the air had been alive with radio and microwaves, transmitting billions of messages and voices.
Things had changed since the End. The City of London, the small nexus that lay in the centre of London’s sprawling bulk, was a city no longer. It was a mausoleum. No computer had whirred nor phone trilled for decades. All the electronics had turned to dust that day, at the same time as almost every man, woman, and child had vanished suddenly, leaving empty clothing crumpling to the ground and a cascade of falling jewellery.
Only a few had survived. The Early Years had almost finished them, but humanity had pulled through. Since then, they had all faced countless trials and tribulations, but none as bad as now. A famine had levelled any crop worth harvesting, and a blood feud
had erupted across the land. An army was gathering, bearing down on the last remnants of civilisation. All that stood between them and a new Dark Age were a few thousand precious souls.
Five of whom had just been blown away on the street outside.
Alex gritted his teeth as plaster exploded from the pillar around his head, shredded by shrapnel. Blinking the sting from his eyes, he looked around at the others crouched in the parking lot, breathless and filthy after their long cross-country ride. They’d had only seconds of warning, having flung their horses and themselves under the first cover in sight. Oppenheimer’s party had been moments behind, but they had arrived from the other direction and hadn’t been so lucky. The narrow city street had funnelled the convoy into a neat line stretching directly before the enemy skyscraper, right into the firing squad’s line of sight.
It was a turkey shoot.
“Sons of bitches!” Marek Johnson roared over the racket, inches to Alexander’s right. “Cowards, rotten cowards.” The tendons in his thick neck tensed, and his face screwed into an ugly mask of burgeoning fury. Thickset and powerful, he looked absurd crammed between a ticket turnstile and the rusted carcass of an old Audi. His grip on his rifle tightened, as if he were preparing to leap from cover.
“Stay down!”
“I’m not leaving them out there.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“Bullshit!”
He was scrambling to his feet when Alexander risked losing a hand, reaching out across the two feet of open ground between them. Marek easily had twice Alexander’s mass and was twenty years his junior, but nevertheless, Alexander felt the usually stoic protector yield under his hand. Such were the way of things when you were heralded as the Messiah who would save civilisation.
Marek’s eyes were ablaze, but he stayed put.
Alexander was reminded of Lucian, and a pang of anguish ran through him. In the firefight he had almost forgotten about his own brother. He was out there in the wilds somewhere. They had raced in aid of New Canterbury only a day ago and had spent a mere hour with boots on the ground at the suspected site of the enemy stronghold. It had been a false alarm; no shots had been fired. Yet still the silver-haired Lucian McKay had disappeared. They had searched for hours amidst the massacred corpses of countless slaves and innocents, but he hadn’t been among them.
Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) Page 2