What’s happening to me?
He checked his watch, saw that the council was due to convene any moment, and any thought of his dream vanished from his mind. A few other stragglers trudged around him. As a group they lumbered towards a set of large, wooden doors ahead. A great buzzing wafted from within, thousands of voices. There was no mistaking the excitement and apprehension.
The air was heavy, humid and yet lacking in warmth. It made the already laborious task of breathing almost impossible.
“The cheek of it,” a nearby man muttered to himself, his heavy green overcoat masking his features and contrasting against his twisted white hair. “Holding this meeting now, of all times.”
He spoke to nobody in particular, but seemed to speak for the collective, as several others around him grumbled in unanimous agreement.
“We’re about to be slaughtered, and they want to play politics. How about putting some effort into getting some food? Forget this rabble playing arsonist; we’re all still bloody starvin’.”
More murmuring.
So discontented were they that they failed to notice Norman beside them, for which he was grateful. It had been many hours since he had gone unnoticed. The buzz grew closer, the blending of a thousand different conversations, mixed with the racket of chairs scraping and the clapping of shoes on wooden floorboards.
Norman rubbed his chest absently, and they passed from the hall into an enormous room, the council chambers. During the Early Years, when the empty shell of London had first been surveyed by those looking to rebuild, Canary Wharf had become a meeting place, and the tower had been in service since then as the coalition had formed under Alexander’s hand. This room had seen every major negotiation between every power in the South since the End.
“So few. So few have come,” the farmer said. His gruff grumble had given way to an awed tremble at the back of his throat.
So few are left.
The chambers were housed in a hollow that had formed of its own accord as the tower decayed in the first years; support struts close to the glassy pyramidal structure at the tower’s peak had given way and carved a path of destruction through the spire’s heart, cutting a channel dozens of floors deep before reaching the twentieth floor, where they had come to rest, along with many tonnes of debris. Under its weight, three whole floors had collapsed, leaving a cavern that filled almost the whole width and depth of the tower.
When they had found it, the cavern had been unstable and ready to collapse further, but they had cleared the rubble, strengthened the floors, and converted it into what it was today.
The result was a true wonder. There was no need for artificial light in here. Golden shafts of light lanced down a pyramid of glass hundreds of feet above and pooled before a parabolic bench that housed over two dozen elevated seats. Though these seats were closer in appearance to thrones.
Positioned upon each of the three floors in the chamber were thousands of chairs: designer stools, executive swivel chairs, ergonomic recliners, and unwieldy chic things of leather luxury, all poached from the tower’s many derelict offices. The overall layout was that of an amphitheatre, centred on a large oval of open space, a polished concrete dais upon which the sunbeams glittered.
It was an embodiment of what they truly were: the dregs of the civilised world, fizzing lights in the dark, brought together under one spire for mutual warmth and comfort.
Despite any humble truths, Norman could never get over the fact that Alexander had a penchant for the grandiose. The chambers reminded Norman of Olympus.
There had been a time when the space had been so crammed with bustling bodies that the floor and walls seemed alive with endless beds of insects. Now, the council chambers seemed enormous in comparison to the paltry numbers in attendance, which barely filled the lower stalls, leaving at least five thousand empty seats in the higher tiers.
Nevertheless, he felt a swell in his chest at the sight of such numbers. To know that, no matter the odds, they were not alone, was worth taking a moment to appreciate. He thought for a moment of all of the hundreds who remained in Canterbury, missing out on such a spectacle. Without power, surrounded by the enemy, with their leaders all missing in action, the situation must by now have been grim indeed.
An unexpected desire to be back there with them washed over him.
Conversation was rife, still, and council was not yet in session. Around half the council members sat at the bench, all dressed in white robes, all shrivelled old relics of a world that had moved on. Some seats would never be filled. Their owners’ bodies were spoiling under the sun upon the streets beyond their walls, but a few that should have been filled, were not. Including Alexander’s.
The other stragglers made their way to their seats, and Norman craned his neck in search of someone he recognised until he spotted a familiar face beckoning him. Richard, apprentice to the master scholar John DeGray, raised his head above the sea of hair and sunburned necks.
“Where have you been?” Richard said as Norman squeezed in beside him.
“I …” Norman made to reply, but in the next moment his mind thrummed with a ringing scream. A nauseating wave overwhelmed him; suddenly, the room was full of people, hundreds of bristling figures in expensive business suits. They were at once there and not there, sitting upon non-existent chairs and at invisible desks. In the moment he saw them many walked right through the seated council crowd.
The same things he’d seen on the stairs.
Echoes, he thought. Echoes of Before.
How did he know that? He had no idea. But he knew.
“Norman?” Alexander said.
Norman jerked and took a breath, and the Echoes were gone. In their place were all those expectant faces once more. He felt cold all over, a bone-deep shiver deep in his chest.
Just broken ribs huh? What the hell is happening to me?
“Norman?” Richard hissed.
“Huh? Uh, sleeping. I was sleeping.” Norman leaned forward to peer down the row. The others who had travelled from New Canterbury in their convoy were bunched together; surrounded them were similar islands from the other settlements. Previous summits had seen a general mixing throughout, with no order to the seating. But that was not so today. Everyone huddled close to their own clans, those on the edges hunching their shoulders as though to ward off attack even from their last remaining allies.
Allie was sitting on Richard’s other side. “Hi, stranger,” she said.
“Hi, yourself.”
Her face looked as though she had questions, but he shook his head minutely, and she held her tongue.
“Where have you been?” he said.
“The infirmary,” Richard said. “Doing my best with the wounded.”
“Where’s Dr Abernathy?”
“Gone. The doc went out to Surrey a week ago, just before it went dark. Nobody’s heard from there since.” He shrugged. “I studied medicine from my master’s texts. We even used New Canterbury’s models to practice a few procedures. But I’m no expert. And”—he gave a wry laugh devoid of humour—“it’s a little different working on a live patient.”
Norman nodded. It was difficult to be heard or to hear over the noise, but he persisted. “It would be a lot easier if Heather were here,” he said. New Canterbury’s doctor had stayed back home to help the sick and frightened.
“She’s best staying where she is,” Richard said. “All the same, some people up there are going to die of eighteenth-century illnesses. Blood infection, gangrene, pneumonia, good old-fashioned shock …” He shook his head. “We’ve got no shortage of people willing to pitch in and help, but I’m surrounded by poultices and herbs up there. A lot of apothecary merchants, nurses and midwives … nobody who could use a scalpel.” He sighed. “We’ve even tumbled back to the brink of chanting. Sometimes I wonder what’s going on out there … whether they’ve started bathing in fox piss and hunting witches …”
His young face, peaky and pale from too little sunlight and
too many years spent alone in DeGray’s classroom, looked far older than Norman remembered it. Like Allie, the last year had changed him. Alexander’s web of fluffy, artificial safety had been swept from under them all. The harshness of the world had rubbed the puppy fat from their skin and the wool from over their eyes.
Norman and Allie shared a look.
“Where’s DeGray?” Norman said.
“My master was called away on urgent business with the council members. From what I hear, he’s preparing a presentation.”
“About what?”
“I try not to make a habit of prying. His temper …”
Norman couldn’t help smiling. “Beat him at chess yet?”
Master and apprentice had played a score-and-ten times every day for as long as Norman could remember. To his knowledge, Richard had never come close to defeating John DeGray.
The shadow of a smile touched Richard’s lips. “I have faith,” he said.
“There are worse things to hold onto right now.”
The buzzing was suddenly cut short by the groaning of the iron hinges set into the door at the rear of the chambers, behind the council bench. For a moment there was silence, then there was movement. Alexander Cain strode in, dressed in the full ceremonial white robes of New Canterbury, complete with a sweeping cape billowing out behind him. With an unreadable face, he approached the bench, his footfalls echoing in the terse silence that now hung heavy over the room.
Everyone stood. The sound of their feet clapping the white floor sent a deep reverberating boom through the tower’s heart.
Alexander stepped up to his chair, the largest and most throne-like of them all, set a foot higher than the others, and sat while staring directly ahead. His eyes had become jewels that sucked all the light from the room bar that around his own body; when he inhaled, it was easy to believe that hats and crops of hair wobbled, as though drawn towards him.
In those few scant moments, the fibres of each isolated clan were gathered up by his gaze and twisted into a single rope. Suddenly the thousands of empty chairs seemed invisible. Before, they had been fragmented, a broken remnant. Now, they were one, united under the one most of them had bowed to upon altars, sworn fealty to, even prayed to at bedtime since birth: the Messiah. The one who would bring them back to dignity, their loved ones, and all they had lost.
It wasn’t their custom to lower oneself to any man, but even Norman felt the queer urge to bow.
Evelyn Fisher’s sonorous voice filled every cranny under the tower’s vast glass-capped ceiling. “Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated and hold your tongues,” she said, her usually haggard and dishevelled body ramrod straight. Norman was privy to a dazzling tessellation; thousands turned their heads in rapid succession towards her as she sat immediately to Alexander’s left. Somehow, the silence deepened to something Norman imagined only the dead had heard before. She swept a final stern glare around at those gathered, then nodded, and the rear doors of the chamber slammed shut. “Thank you,” she said after some time. “Council is now in session.”
CHAPTER 8
Billy smelled lemons. Someone was brushing her hair, slow and steady. Her head was heavy, full of iron wool. Her tongue seemed too big for her mouth, and her eyes were gummed together. She worked them open while she tried to swallow, but the sides of her gullet seemed welded together.
“Time to wake up, darling.” The voice was one she had never expected to hear again.
“Ma?”
“It’s almost noon, clover.”
Billy’s heart ached at the sound of it. Through gummed eyes, she could see a heart-shaped face framed by short dark hair. The teardrop shape of her mother’s face surrounded by a pall of bright light. She had always smelled of lemons.
“What happened?” she rasped.
“Shh, it’s okay.”
“No … You went away, Ma. I remember. You got sick …” She had starved and ended up not dissimilar from Daddy: bedridden, babbling nonsense, withering by the day. They had buried her in the bluebell patch by the reading tree. “Ma, we lost Grandpa. The monsters took him away. And now Daddy’s sick too and … I’m all alone.”
“You’re not alone, darling. I’m here.”
“Ma …” Billy smiled, and for a moment, she was okay. There was light everywhere, and she lay in the folds of something so soft it could only have been her parents’ mattress. That meant Daddy and Grandpa were probably coming home from the fields. She had been in a bad way, perhaps ill, but now she was on the mend. She was home.
Then there was noise: muttering somewhere out of sight, excited and sibilant. She had heard it before, just before the darkness had consumed her in the forest. She had been near death, lost in the darkness, and she had fallen—Daddy would surely die now she had failed. And Ma? Ma lay under six feet of dirt, hundreds of miles away.
“No!” She made to sit up, but Ma’s hand pressed down on her chest. “Calm, Billy, calm.” Her voice was strange, deeper, half hers and half another’s. Suddenly, she had dark streaks running under her eyes.
“You’re not Ma!”
“No.” The fair, motherly expression had become a hard stare. Ma’s teardrop jawline now jutted out several inches more, square and trim. The cheeks had sunken, revealing sharp high cheekbones. “Time to wake up, Billy.”
“You!” She struggled, but the strange noise was closer now, and she sensed urgency in the morphing figure’s gaze.
“Stay alert, Billy. Stay safe. All is not as it seems,” the Panda Man said.
“Where’s Ma?” she cried, struggling under his hand. The muttering separated out into two distinct voices. She had the sudden sense that the light and the face hovering above her was only a veil, and behind it something else was going on altogether. She could feel her body now, heavy and weak, slowly stirring. She fought to sit up. “Where’s Ma?”
The face above her smiled, and suddenly it was Ma again, marked by the same pair of dark streaks under her eyes. But when she spoke, the voice was still that of the Panda Man. “Wake up, now. And remember, you have a job to do. Unless you want Daddy to end up like me.”
*
“Daddy!” Billy was sitting up, gasping and cold. The Panda Man was gone, as was the pool of white light. Now she was surrounded by a murky, grey gloom. She was almost certain that this had been the reality hiding behind her vision of Ma all along. Her mind had retreated to a safe, happy place. An echo ran through her mind, a voice charged with urgency. Be safe. All is not as it seems.
She stopped, breath held in her throat. The whispering came closer. Before she knew what she was doing, she was patting around on the ground, ignoring her throbbing head, until her fingers ran across the rough canvas of her bag. She pulled it towards her, hugging it briefly before thrusting her hand inside for the paring knife, hidden in a side pouch. She ran her hand over the cold blade gingerly and pulled it out, invisible in the darkness.
Then before she knew it, something alien forced its way up from the pit of her stomach, and she was coughing on her hands and knees. The attack lasted for only a few seconds, but in that time a coppery-tasting slime dribbled from her lips, and her ribs ached from the strain of such hacking contractions. Then it had passed, and she was gasping.
Daddy’s cough had started like that. She shivered.
The voices were just outside now. Both had a rough-edged bass, overlaid by a high-pitched whine. Their accents were strange, nothing like how people spoke back home. She had heard people speak strangely before, like the tradesmen who had come south from Dublin or Derry, but these accents were very different. All people in New Land spoke like the monsters who had taken Grandpa.
“How can they’s be all gone, eh?” rattled one, almost a screech.
A deeper rumbling voice answered. “I dunno, but they’d all been burnt to a bloody right crisp.”
“That’s the third this week. We’re gonna run out of places to hit if we ain’t careful.”
Billy pushed herself up onto her hands
and knees and began crawling back, away from the voices, blind to whatever lay behind her. The voices echoed metallically around her head. She guessed she was in some kind of backroom. Her hand met vertical concrete, damp and slimy, cold to the touch. She gasped and darted sideways, but met another flanking wall within a few feet. She had crawled into a corner.
“We ain’t there yet,” the first voice was saying.
“S’pose we do.”
“Then we move on like always. They was gonna find us out sooner or later.”
“I don’t like all these stories they’re telling about this ghost army.”
“Don’t be daft! They’re just pulling your leg. It’s one of them Chinese whispers they tell to people like you who are stupid enough to believe it.”
The first voice, wounded, gave a grunt. “I dunno. It gives me the willies.”
“Shaddap. I’m done thinkin’ for the day. My dogs are killing me and I need a little … refreshment.”
A pair of high-pitched giggles floated across the darkness. Billy’s heart leaped a beat, and she squeezed herself as far as she could into the corner. For a moment there was silence, then there was a metallic squeal, and light flooded into her eyes. She held up her hand to shield her vision, and between her fingers she discerned two hump-backed silhouettes, one squat and fat, one tall and thin. They advanced into the room.
“Well, lookie here, Jerry. She’s awake,” croaked the first of the voices. It belonged to the squat figure.
“Indeed she is, Sammy,” crooned the second. “Indeed she is.”
The two figures grew closer until no longer washed out by the light flooding in, and their silhouettes fleshed out into detail. The squat one was at least fifty with tufts of short, spiky grey hair, a forehead greased with a forest of oily spots, and a flat nose that had obviously been stamped in some distant time. The taller figure was younger, pale to the point of translucence, with long greasy bangs framing a skull-like face. Though their bodies were very different in build, their expressions were remarkably similar: puckered and coy, tortured by poor nutrition and not enough sunlight.
Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) Page 10