Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2)

by Harry Manners

  The man trembled. “My daughter. My Billy. Is she with you?” A weak and desperate anger flashed upon his sallow cheeks. “What have you done with her?”

  “Nobody around, friend. But maybe I can help. What’s your story?”

  The man blinked. “It’s a long one. And I’m near the end of it.”

  Alexander dropped his satchel onto the ground with a thump, slid off the hood of his robe and squatted down onto a stool beside the bed. “Well, that makes two of us. I’m Alex.”

  The man made to speak, but then bent double and choked his way through a hacking fit of dry, wrenching coughs, sputtering droplets of blood onto the sheets and whimpering all the while. The smell of faeces intensified. He collapsed back, gasping, and Alexander leaned forward to set the sheets straight. He rinsed a sponge in a nearby basin and squeezed a few drops of water into the man’s arid mouth.

  The man sputtered and wheezed.

  “What?” Alexander said.

  “Don. My name’s Don.”

  “Don.” Alexander gripped his shoulder.

  “My daughter. My girl. Billy.” His bloodied eyes darted sideways desperately, searching the room in delirium. “Billy!”

  “There’s nobody but me.”

  “Where is she?” Bony fingers gripped Alexander’s arm. “Where?”

  “Tell me, Don. Tell me what happened and maybe we can find her.”

  A weeping splutter. “Like I said”—another gasp—“it’s a long story.”

  Alexander lowered himself back onto the stool. “I’ve got time.”

  EIGHTH INTERLUDE

  James would have never expected that Alexander would follow him so far without protest. Yet they had been riding well through the day and not a word had passed between them. Cambridge, Corby and Nottingham had slid past, and they had stopped by a few friendly homesteads to rest and feed the horses, not talking and not planning. Then they had gone on.

  Slowly the land changed as they went farther north and the buildings grew sparser, the roads more overgrown and potholed.

  They began keeping one eye on the horizon and the other on the shadows as the sense of being watched became too obvious to ignore. There was no doubt they were being watched. Homes, apartment towers and offices were fewer and farther between, but they still pockmarked the sapling woodlands sprouting up everywhere, and lights were on in more than a few. But they wouldn’t dream of wandering close to these places.

  James had nothing but bad memories of the North. Every time he had journeyed beyond Leeds in the past, things had gone from bad to worse, and somebody had always ended up hurt. That it had usually been the other side to suffer losses had been blind, dumb luck.

  Prowlers inhabited this wasteland, preying upon those taking the chance to pass through. Anybody who wasn’t at the top of their game would either come out the other side chewed up and penniless, or they wouldn’t come out at all. The mission could have all the luck in the world and unite the entire South under a single leadership, but they wouldn’t touch this place, not for a long time. This would be the great unending desert at the periphery of their lands for ages to come.

  It was a lot to ask of Alex, coming all the way out here on a whim. Hell, less than a whim. The whole thing was built on a crazy vision from a drunken stranger. They were risking their lives, and the alliance with the Moon was in direct jeopardy, not to mention Beth …

  He shook himself. He wasn’t going to think about that. He couldn’t afford to be distracted, because they were getting close. He knew they were getting close because he was almost delirious with the intensity of the itch in his legs now, and in the corners of his eyes were twinkling lights like those before a migraine. Somewhere at the back of his mind he could hear that alien voice whispering incoherent words.

  But for the time being he had to keep straight and strong, keep guiding them north. Alex had kept quiet thus far, but how long would that last? And if he started mumbling and spouting all the crazy going on in his head, he was bound to turn them around right now and march him back home in a straitjacket.

  In any case they couldn’t stop. Their pace might have been their only reason for not running into trouble thus far. If they lingered anywhere too long, they were bound to attract attention. He could only hope their luck held out.

  So he kept mum, and they kept going. Sheffield passed by at the far reaches of sight, a blitzed shell, the site of a thousand skirmishes and stand-offs between rival clans. Soon it too was gone, and they left even the scant suburbia behind. In its place was true countryside, rugged and untraversed and eternal.

  As one day became two, and two days dragged into a long tiring week, the flatlands buckled into rolling hills, then sharp valleys and exposed rocky bluffs. Mountains crawled up over the horizon, the serrated teeth of some fallen behemoth. In time the first road signs for Radden County started dotting the roadside.

  CHAPTER 22

  Billy’s face exploded into a slab of stinging flesh. The calloused hand striking down from above belonged to the sneering monster who had dragged her from the leaves. He had ordered the others to shepherd her through a campsite full of hot metal shafts, spluttering fires, and cowering skinny people before herding her into a large beige tent at the base of a cliff. Then he had shut them out and rounded on her, as though she were a delicious dish, the two of them finally alone.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  His jeering superior face darkened with sudden anger and he slapped her across the face again, harder this time. “Quiet,” he hissed. “No talking.”

  Then his face was smooth and untroubled once more, and he set to walking about the edge of the tent while she cowered on the floor, holding her stinging hot face in her hands and trying to hold the tears in.

  Her legs itched and her mind’s eye was full of pictures of outside—though she had never seen this place before, she knew every part of it, could feel every clot of mud and the rough outline of every pebble between her fingers.

  Because it’s the place the Panda Man wanted to go. This is the place I was coming to. Why would he want me to come here? These are Bad Men. How can I do anything to stop Bad Men? I’m just … I’m just Billy.

  She searched the edge of the tent for Fol’s signature smile and dark billowing coat, but he was nowhere to be seen. The one time she wanted to see him, and she couldn’t have been more alone.

  “You’re not of this place,” the man said. “You speak some kind of tongue from aways.”

  She didn’t say anything, just crawled up tighter in a ball and cradled her cheek. Her face was slicked and dripping with tears and snot. She had been so close to doing whatever it was she had to do, so close to going home. And now she was stuck here with this man—no, he wasn’t a man. She could see no trace of a person behind his eyes.

  The way he looked at her made her feel sick. Grownups did funny things sometimes, things she didn’t like and things that seemed downright silly. But they were almost always good and clever in the end.

  This man was different. He was like the medicine ladies. He wore the same sneer Sammy had smeared over her lips as she had reached for the buckle on her trousers; the hungry leer of a starving dog.

  He was a monster, the monster.

  “Let me go,” she whispered.

  The monster tensed. From his belt he brought out a curved knife longer than Billy’s arm, and the amber glow of the fires filtering in from outside sent stars of reflected flames winking off its edge. “I said no talking.”

  There was no doubting now that this was the same man who had attacked their camp and chased her and Daddy and Grandpa through the night. He was the one who had taken Grandpa away. She had listened to him attack Grandpa in the darkness, beating with his fists, stamping down from above …

  It really was Him.

  A bottled surge of anger filled her up and overflowed despite her shuddering throat. “I know what you are. You’re a Bad Man!”

  He laughed, a ringing high-pitched chuckle
that again reminded her of the kind of thing she expected from a hungry wild dog. Somehow his laughter was more chilling than any scream of fury. Her skin puckered in goosebumps and she tensed against a shudder propagating along her spine.

  She remembered the little knife she had taken from the medicine ladies, tucked into her belt. She let one hand fall from her face and slither down to her side now, and her chest ached with relief when she found a slight bulge there at her hip. It was still there. But it was so small compared to his, little more than a potato peeler. He would gut her like a pig before she could break his skin.

  “You’re right about that, squirt. Bad man.” He dragged out the latter words into a tuneless song, Baaad man. He stopped in front of her and lowered down on his haunches so that they were looking each other in the eye. “You talk funny. Where you from?”

  She blinked, lowered her face behind her hands so his glaring blue eyes couldn’t burn her skin, and bit back a whimper. She sensed the anger building inside him; the air was charged with it, but she kept still and kept her eyes off the knife.

  I want to go home. I wanna go home, go home! I want Ma and Daddy and Grandpa, I want to go home!

  The monster was quiet a moment, then shrugged like it didn’t matter. “Fine. You’re not a talker. I don’t need that. I can get all the fun I need elseways.” And Billy’s heart almost exploded in her chest as the knife began a slow arc up from his side toward her.

  She told herself to reach for her dagger, commanding her fingers to reach under her tunic and grasp the handle. But her arms were frozen with fear, her body stupid and unresponsive.

  She couldn’t do anything. She was just going to sit here and let him come.

  Oh no. No. It can’t happen to me, not me—why am I here? Why? I should be at home, I should never have come—help!

  She groaned like a whipped animal and sunk toward the ground, waves of nausea and terror running through her body. She was shaking all over, and it all seemed silly and fake, but she knew she was definitely here in this stinking tent with a man who was about to kill her.

  The monster whispered, “Beautiful skin. Hold still, I’m going to carve a pretty picture …”

  “No, wait! Help!”

  Nononononono, please. DADDY!

  With a jerk, she knew she had left her body behind. Despite the knife being only inches away from her face the whole world fell away and darkness took its place. For a moment she was spinning and floating just as she had when she had stepped through the Arch from the Henge, and then she thumped down on familiar floorboards beside a familiar bedframe. When she opened her eyes, she was looking down at Daddy, gaunt and wilted like a summer flower visited by Jack Frost.

  “You’re just like your mother,” he wheezed.

  *

  Alexander dunked the sponge in the basin of stagnant warm water and rinsed it out with one eye on the quivering Irishman. They had just got to talking and Alexander had been settling into a story like so many others he’d heard over the last year about going hungry and watching the world wilt and the crops die. Don and his family had come across the sea.

  He was captivated. They had brought in the old man back at New Canterbury, but there had always been the chance that he had been an expat living in England when the End hit. But this … this man was too young to have known the End, barely out of his thirties. He was a native of Ireland itself.

  So others really were out there. After all these years, he finally had solid proof of it.

  And if Ireland was still dotted with survivors like Don claimed, what did that mean for the rest of the world? The End had left perhaps only one in a thousand behind, but the world’s population had been in the billions. If that was so then maybe the small circle of ten thousand souls left on Earth he had estimated all this time was far larger. Perhaps their true numbers lay in the millions.

  He was so enamoured with a snowballing flight of imagination—the kind he hadn’t felt in years, like those that used to drive the fits of passion in his youth that had forged the mission’s heart—that he didn’t notice Don’s eyes glaze over.

  By the time Alexander stooped forth from the stool, the Irishman was in the grips of muttering delirium, speaking incomprehensible tongues. Even in the short time Alexander had been with him, though his spirits seemed buoyed more by the moment, his body was fading. His lips were now a stark blue and his skin had the rubbery lacklustre appearance of a corpse.

  The man with the sickle was on his way, there was no doubting it. Alexander couldn’t guess how long he had, but it wasn’t long. A day, maybe. Hours, probably. If Heather or one of the doctors from London were here, then maybe they could do something to save him, but there probably wasn’t another person for miles around.

  In any case, Alexander had seen enough cases of Tuberculosis over the years to know it at a glance. There wasn’t a whole lot their medicines could do but make him comfortable. And that was all Alexander could hope to do, even if the only way he could accomplish it was through one last friendly chinwag.

  Alexander leaned over him now and let a stream of the warm water drip down onto his forehead, splashing away the greasy sweat and bile and mucus, but still Don muttered feverishly, jittering beneath the sheets with his eyes rolled up into the back of his head. Alexander picked out only every other word, because that word was always the same. “Billy … Billy … Billy …”

  *

  “Daddy.”

  Billy stood in a whirlwind of blurred shadows. It was the cabin, but it was all far away and distant, blurred as though she were looking at it through shattered sooty glass.

  Like the tornado that took Dorothy away from Kansas. I’m just like Dorothy. But this place is dark. There’s no Oz.

  No, there was no Oz. Just Daddy. He alone was in focus right in front of her, glowing despite the lack of light. She knew it was him, but she was terrified by how different he looked. He looked just like Ma had before she had gone away, shrivelled up like a prune with his hair brittle as the teeth of a broom. The dark patches under his eyes reminded her of the Panda Man—yet these patches weren’t sleek black, but a blue so vivid that it could only have been painted on.

  “Just like your mother,” he repeated, shaking his head. His voice was no more than a whisper, as though the real Daddy was deep down inside, trapped under the weight of all the dead flesh she was looking at. “Scatty as you like, but always there in the end.”

  “Daddy, I’m sorry,” she blubbered. She stumbled forward and felt as though she was passing through something solid just beside the stool, a thickness that blacked out the world for a moment until she passed out the other side. She shook herself and continued on, falling across Daddy’s lap. She let out a sigh as the feverish warmth of his body enveloped her, and she curled up in a ball, crawling up until she could loop her arms over his shoulders. She didn’t care that the sheets were wet or that he smelled like the meat shed after a hot summer day. She didn’t even care that the world around them was dark and fogged, without floor or sky, and all this might be a fairy tale happening only inside her head. She only cared about the feel of his hands slipping up to stroke her hair away from her forehead, the calloused fingers like sandpaper on her ice-white skin.

  She moaned soft and slight, resting her head on his, sinking into the folds of the sheets with him. It had all happened so fast, losing Ma and Grandpa and the farm, and she had come so close to going away on the Panda Man’s orders and never seeing Daddy again—not even saying goodbye.

  She held on to his throat so tight he gripped her arms to ease her off, but his eyes were soft and swimming. Big old bear eyes, Ma had called them. He kissed her forehead. “My girl,” he sighed. “You have nothing to be sorry for. I’m the one who owes the apology.”

  “I left you, Daddy. I left you all alone and I don’t know why. You don’t understand. He made me, promised that you would get hurt if I didn’t go and there wasn’t time … There wasn’t time—”

  He placed a finger reeking o
f bed-sweat up to her lips and shook his head. “No more. I understand.”

  “No, you don’t understand and I’m sorry I didn’t come back.”

  “Billy. I understand.”

  She blinked. “You do?”

  “I do.” He frowned and looked away for a moment. “I don’t know how, but I do. I’m seeing it all now like I was there. The strangest thing I ever saw.” He gasped. “Billy, you stupid girl, what you’ve done … Those women in the forest.” His fists tightened around her shoulders and his sunken lips tightened to a solid white line. “That man … thing… whatever he is, pulling on you left, right and centre like you were his puppet.” He spoke as though seeing it all playing out in front of him like a film reel in fast motion, and she waited for the finale. He stiffened at last and she swallowed as he breathed, “Billy! That knife … oh, Billy, no.”

  “It’s okay, Daddy. I’m here now.”

  “No, Billy. No, you’re not here.”

  She pulled away and blinked. “What?”

  “You’re still right there in that tent. It’s all just … on pause.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know.” He frowned, looking off beyond her at the clouded wall of nothing. “I just do.”

  “But I am here.” She reached out and touched his chest, pressing her palm flat against the slick pale skin. “We’re together, Daddy. And I’m never going away again.” She rested her head on his shoulder and sighed again, closing her eyes. “It’s over.”

  A moment lasted when she was with him and it didn’t matter that anything beyond the bed was fuzzy and in darkness, nor that she could feel the back of her mind being stretched, as though she was being tugged back to somewhere far away by a hook attached to the back of her head. She was with him.