“But?” Alexander said.
Lincoln shrugged. “Well, boys and girls,” he said, addressing the room at large, “would you believe an old goat’s tall tale?”
“Stop playin’, Oliver. I have minutes before I git back to droolsville,” Agatha said.
“When they stopped shooting, we came out and saw their banners all over the city—they wanted us to see. They were marching north.” He barked, and slapped his knee. “Praise God for small miracles, folks, because they’re gone.”
By the time Lincoln finished, the room was on its feet, cheering.
*
“They’ll be back,” Evelyn said. Even her icy crispness couldn’t quite stamp out the celebrations.
People hugged and cheered. From elsewhere in the tower echoed laughter from the wounded and those tending them on the higher floors. Norman spotted Allie and Richard embracing, and he smiled.
He would have given a whole lot to be up there holding her, then. Mystery or not, good news was good news, and he’d seldom had opportunity to celebrate of late. He’d have liked to do it with her.
He settled for a hearty pound on the back from Lincoln and a shared smile of relief with Alexander.
The jubilation died down and eventually they were all seated again.
“It seems the knife is no longer at our throats,” Alexander said. “Perhaps we have a little time to prepare. If they are gone, we may stand a chance of communicating our plan to all of us who remain.”
“For the grand finale? The big showdown on horseback?” Thompson snorted. “What is this? The Lord of the Rings?”
“It is what it is,” Norman said. He blinked, surprised that he had spoken. Yet he found that the words came easy, and the pressure of all the stares afar failed to rattle him. “We’ve been suffering too long to go on wittering. We’re in the shit, and we have to dig our way out. Marek’s right: brass tacks, and now!”
The crowd bustled with cries of assent.
“Braah, he speaks the truth!”
“Leastways, the young’un sees sense.”
“The Chosen One’s got a tongue, after all. Hear him, every’un!”
That last cry had had a rough and gravely sheen, but had a touch too much of Allie and Richard’s voices to miss.
He thanked them silently.
Lincoln growled appreciatively, and his eyes twinkled with amusement as he turned them upon Evelyn and Thompson.
Evelyn shook her head with a tired sigh. Thompson scowled in turn and put her hands up in mock surrender.
“What is this you’ve brought before us?” Evelyn blustered, jutting her chin in the direction of the package in the centre circle.
“Ah! A treat for us all, and no mistake!” Lincoln said. His voice was suddenly excited, the kind of mindless enthusiasm of a young boy.
Norman knew that tone. Lincoln always sounded that way around machines. Especially Old World machines.
He leaned forward in his chair, along with hundreds of others as Lincoln clambered from the bench and shuffled to the leader of his companions, a young oval-faced Arab in his late twenties.
Latif Hadad. If Richard was the world’s last scholar to the last professor, then Latif was the last apprentice to Lincoln, the last engineer. He sported a threadbare baseball cap, and his copper skin was aglow, making him achingly handsome. He dismissed the other men with a flick of his head.
They fell back and took seats close to the front, leaving Lincoln and Latif hunched over the embalmed object. They stepped either side of it and, with a nod to one another, gripped the protective blanket and pulled it away. Underneath, a large cardboard box had been stuffed with sleeping bags, hay, rucksacks and spare clothing. Nestled amidst the wad of padding with almost religious care was a block of metal around fifteen inches square.
A HAM radio.
“The message you received, it was from this?” Alexander said. He sounded unlike himself, distant and awed.
Lincoln looked pleased by the gasps echoing around the chambers. “The very same.”
Norman leaned forward. He couldn’t bring himself to look away from the cobweb-strewn metal box, covered with knobs and switches. Ringing silence had taken the place of the restless whispering, as though the crate were warping space into a black hole that sucked in the light, sound, even fear.
“It works?” Thompson said. It sounded as if her throat had narrowed to the width of a needle. “Really works?”
By way of answer, Latif leaned over with reverential care and flicked a large red switch on top of the radio.
A screech like bear claws on a chalkboard filled the room, one that made Norman want to sink his teeth into the bench. Everyone was covering their ears and groaning, mostly with discomfort but also with disappointment. Latif, wincing, flicked it off again.
“Mr Lincoln?” Evelyn said.
The old lion grumbled. “I’ve spent the better part of forty years trying to fix communications equipment. Our only chance of reaching the wider world, and perhaps those stranded in the North by highwaymen, lay in establishing radio contact. But all I could ever pick up was that same scream, covering every frequency.”
The Blanket, Norman thought.
Lincoln continued. “As far as we can surmise, radio and microwave bands of the spectrum are useless for comms, and there’s been no sign of the Blanket decaying.”
Norman had heard stories of people going crazy listening to the Blanket’s wailing, searching for hidden messages.
“The whipper-snapper can barely keep his mouth shut since we found it, so why don’t I hand this to him?” Lincoln said.
Latif stepped forward with a courteous bow. “The Blanket is fractured,” he said. “A little over a fortnight ago, we were on a salvage run to the dockyards, gathering spares and backup components for our generators in anticipation of the siege. We knew we were pushing our luck staying so long after the recall order, but we thought we could make it—and we wouldn’t last long if we lost power—”
Just like New Canterbury. Despite Latif’s spiel, Norman’s mind conjured an image of the darkened city after nightfall, surrounded by a horde of black shadows perched on hilltops, predatory eyes glinting in the starlight.
“—by the time we knew they were after us, we were surrounded. We lost Hicks and Carmichael before they pushed us back to the airport. We set up in one of the hangers and sealed it off.” He shrugged. “We dug in, and held them for a day or so. But we’re tinkerers, not military men. Sitting so close to all those Old World air birds … We explored during the lulls. I think we all wanted to keep looking when the bullets starting flying again. We were boxed in, after all. We got into some deep, dusty corners; that’s the only reason we found the hatchway.”
“Hatchway?” Alexander said. He was leaning forward with brimming intensity.
“It was some kind of door. Secret, like, built into the wall. You’d have to know it was there to find it … or be a hell of a nosy so-and-so. That’s when we got our first surprise: there was a service elevator inside, which lit up ready as you like. There was power.”
He paused and knelt down, tinkering with the dials, consulting a dense scrawl of biro on his forearm. “They hadn’t attacked for an hour, but they were coming back, and we didn’t have a lot of help, so what the hell? We went down. It was a treasure trove, all kinds of delights.” He rubbed his hands like a child faced with a room of honey jars. “Aircraft, motorcars, comms equipment, a few tonnes of stored sundries and foodstuffs, barrels of purified water, enough linen to clothe an army, enough weapons to arm one, and a truckload of these.” He gestured to the radio. “It was all perfectly sealed, all ready, all whole. The lights came on right away—some fancy power source must be hidden down there somewhere, but we couldn’t find it.”
Agatha leaned forward and made to speak. For a moment her milky eyes filmed over and Norman thought she had slipped away, but then—though it only seemed through sheer force of will—she cleared again. “Somebody wen’ an’ repaired
all tha’ after the End and stuck it down in the dark?”
“No. There was no sign of the damage we usually see in transistors and other advanced circuitry. It was all fresh off the production line, never used.”
“How’sat possible?” Agatha glanced at Lincoln. “Billy goat ‘ere searched high an’ low for summat like that years before you sat on your mum’s teat.”
“The whole place must have been shielded somehow. We dug into the wall and found some kind of lining, though I couldn’t tell you much about it. We’ve never seen anything like it. It almost looks like there’s some kind of integrated circuitry woven into it on a molecular level—”
“Mr Latif, we’re short of time,” Evelyn cut across him. “Forgive my bluntness, but what’s your point?”
“The point is somebody knew about the End before it happened, and planned for it.”
Norman shivered as a full-body chill worked over his skin, as if a bucket of insects had been poured over his head.
Alexander slowly leaned back from the bench and steepled his fingers. “Are you sure?”
“Positive,” Lincoln said. “There’s a bombshell to be going on with. Somebody knew.”
*
Charlie grimaced at the pigeons flapping around his head.
Dirty fucking rats with wings, shedding feathers and shitting everywhere, all day.
Once this was over, he never wanted to see a bird ever again.
Wood-smoke and a sickly charred smell—one he was unsettled to find he was growing used to—clogged the deep meat of his nose.
Jason’s voice trickled like black, boiling tar in the back of his mind. “It’s the fat under the skin. Like bacon.” He had been grinning when he said that, an ugly sight that made Charlie’s skin crawl. “That’s the smell of barbequed bumpkins. Don’t it give ya the jones to slit more throats?”
Charlie pushed the sick feeling rising in his gut out of mind, watching the man with the emerald eyes crouched on the other side of the fire. Hooded and taciturn, he had hung his balaclava on a post to air in the wind. Every second longer, Charlie’s stomach grew only more unsettled at the ruined face, the shiny masses of scar tissue and exposed cheekbone.
From far away his father’s voice spoke to him. “How did you end up with this crowd?”
He shook himself as the grey-haired murderer flashed before his eye.
The bastards killed you, Dad. That’s how. I have to make it right.
And he would. If he had to burn a thousand backward hamlets and trading posts to get a shot at tearing down the edifice of those who had beat him, kicked him like a diseased mongrel, he would do it.
“So why the stomach ache, Charlie boy?” the voice of his father muttered.
He wiped his hands on his trousers. They were still sticky from clearing the last village—
From hauling slices of little boys and girls, cooked medium rare.
“Shut up!” he hissed aloud, through grated teeth. He squeezed the nauseating thoughts deep down in the shadows.
Emerald eyes shifted to him from across the campfire, and Charlie blushed despite himself. A few pigeons alighted on the hooded figure’s arm, and he caressed their delicate feathers. “Don’t forget what they are, and what they’ve done. Stay focused,” he said.
Charlie looked away from the working, bare jaws. “I’m fine,” he muttered. “It’s nothing.”
Those eyes locked fast upon him, magnificent burning gems that could have set Charlie’s clothes ablaze. Charlie had spent more time with that monster Jason that he thought he could stomach and watched him do things that would haunt him in the night for the rest of his life. But no matter how much Jason disgusted him and sent his skin prickling, he could never match the fear that bubbled up in Charlie’s gut when those eyes turned on him.
In those moments he felt himself shrink, turn to transparent brittle crystal. Those eyes scared him because he knew he could never hide anything from them.
A thousand retorts welled up on his tongue, but he bit them back. What would be the point?
They lapsed into silence, filled only by the crackling of the fire and the pigeons’ fluttering. Charlie looked down at his hands.
Would they wash clean, or had they been forever stained?
Every now and then a cry of pain reached them from the valley below, where the captives were fed slops and flogged in equal measure. That was their life now: move from place to place, raze anything standing, kill those who fought back, and take the rest to join the others in the nearest ravine or riverbed, slowly breaking them.
Lucian was down there now. Maybe it was him crying out.
Charlie grunted.
Probably not. The bastard was tough.
He felt those eyes on him again, pressing into his mind like a spoon into jelly. “Your prisoner is still alive?”
Charlie shrugged. “For now. You should have let me kill him when I first got my hands on him.” But he knew he didn’t mean it. He hadn’t lied back in the bunker: just killing the son of a bitch would have been unsatisfactory.
Still, he wanted to be angry at something. The rage felt good. “What do you want him for, anyway?”
No reply, just soft muttering to those damned pigeons.
“I’m talking to you! I’m here to get even, to hurt them the way they hurt me, took away everything. So tell me, just when are we going to stop playing around and end this?”
But the man with the emerald eyes wasn’t listening. The pigeons had risen into the air in an explosion of wing beats and wheeled away. A frown had settled low over the hooded figure’s gaze, dark and forbidding. “Do as I ask,” he said at last. “Keep him alive. Let him come to us.”
“But—”
“You’ll get what you’re owed when the time is right.”
Charlie scowled. He nodded to the sky. “What happened to your friends? They get sick of you?”
His words fell on deaf ears. That frown had deepened into a mask of disquiet and, maybe, confusion.
Was there something out there even he didn’t know about?
CHAPTER 12
“The point is academic,” Evelyn said. “We haven’t time for this.”
John DeGray stepped forward without warning, his face twisted with indignation. “I beg the council reconsider. We must hear more of this!”
“Mr DeGray, the wolves are breathing down our throats, and you’d have us waste yet more time on this curiosity?”
“You’re damn right! This changes our understanding of history and all of reality as we know it. Think of the implications—”
“Mr DeGray, please take your seat.”
“I’d hear more o’ this,” Agatha chimed. “I got precious seconds left o’ clarity, and I’d spend ‘em learning’ some God’s honest truth.”
“There isn’t time!” Evelyn cried. She looked to Alexander for help.
Alexander drummed his fingers on the bench. After an uncomfortable pause he said, “The Chair speaks true: we haven’t much time. But every detail counts. Please continue.”
“As it pleases the council,” Latif said. “It didn’t take us long to start fiddling, unpacking things, rooting around. We expected them to drop a grenade or two down the shaft from up top any moment, so why not enjoy ourselves? I checked the radio and got the Blanket on every channel, just like I expected, and then … just twiddling the dials, I came across something else. A signal.
“We risked going back up top. They were still out there, so we needed runners to get the message back home. We drew straws …”
“And sent half a dozen men to their deaths,” Lincoln growled matter-of-factly.
“We’ve been stuck there ever since. And then earlier today … they were just gone. In the meantime, we’ve learned …”
Latif stopped there with abrupt finality. He looked like a man resisting the urge to vomit up something vile.
Norman’s mind worked at a furious pace. The other councillors’ faces were masks of concentration. Between them he wa
s sure he could hear the distant clanking of a thousand mental cogs. It was a strange thing, to be speaking of hidden messages and conspiracies of the Old World, with the threat of being torn apart by savages so imminent. But here they were.
“Why have you brought this before us?” Thompson said.
Agatha giggled, but it was a harsh sound, grating and derisive.
And I’m the one with dementia. Stop being such head-in-the-sand chickenshit, that tone said.
“Ain’t it obvious?” she crooned. “They brought it back so we could hear the transmission. Right, wrinkles?”
“Right you are, madam,” Lincoln said. “You’re in for a treat.” He nodded to Latif, who consulted the biro on his arm and nodded in reply. Lincoln flipped a final switch and stepped back.
Norman braced, ready to throw his hands over his ears. He blinked when something quite different came rattling from the Old World speakers: a tiny, scratching, broken voice.
He body jerked of its own accord.
There’s a man’s voice on the radio.
Others seemed caught in the same breathless revelation. Eyes were wide and unfixed throughout the chambers. Those aged enough to have seen the Old World had the light of nostalgia in their eyes, while those who had only heard stories of the big Before gaped open-mouthed—all the bedtime stories were true!
“—on? … Ga’darn thing, just work … Wait, the light, it’s on!”
An odd clicking, a solid thump, and then a grunt. The voice went on, though it jittered and thrummed, thin and watery despite its gruffness:
“Arghright, here goes: Broadcastin’ from Milton Percy radio tower. We bring werd from Dunburgh Alliance of t’eh Far North. We’re seekin aid, to send a warnin’ to those where the lights is still burnin in the South.”
The voice was strange, thick as custard and stuffed with rolling vowels. Norman had heard an accent like that from only one person, someone who had spent his earliest years in Old World Glasgow. He’d heard it from Lucian.
Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) Page 20