Alex did scream then. Once. It broke free from his lips as a single, ragged cry, not dissimilar to that of a wounded animal.
And then he was running once more, moving on legs that seemed a million miles away. The school forgotten, he made for home. If he could make it back to his room, back to his bed, then he would surely wake from this hellish double nightmare—for that was all this could be: a delusion brought on by fatigue, twelve-hour study marathons and one too many cups of coffee.
It wasn’t until a final blow had been dealt that this last semblance of hope died a quiet death.
When the great blaze on High Street burst to life, it reached some sixty feet into the air. Alex had made it to the first of the outlying terrace-blocks when it roared forth from the twisted wreckage of a severe road accident, which had involved over two dozen vehicles. Their crushed and shredded aluminium shells were cast in the brilliant light of igniting fuel, and then a fireball enveloped the mass, blowing out every window for thirty feet and throwing a great column of jet-black smoke into the sky.
Alex didn’t pause, not this time. He kept running while the flames began to lick higher. Around him the alarms of shop fronts and parked cars honked and trilled, the only sounds other than his ragged breathing and the hollow slapping of his shoes against the tarmac. He drew closer, and from even a hundred yards away began to receive mouthfuls of acrid smoke, along with the first waves of heat.
The bulk of the accident appeared to have been caused by a twelve-wheeler that had fishtailed at the intersection and then toppled onto its side. It had from then on acted as a solid wall, stretching across the breadth of the street. Vans, cars and motorbikes had proceeded to splatter against its underside like flies against a swatter.
Alex coughed, stumbling as a gag reflex wracked his upper body, but pressed on, driven by a surge of adrenaline. While the bellow of the fire enveloped the trills and honks, and his breathing became laboured due to the growing heat, he threw desperate glances around at the upper-floor windows on either side of the street.
By the time his lungs seared in earnest and he was mere feet from the first of the flames, nothing had stirred. Not a single curtain had been disturbed by a parting hand, nor had a concerned face graced one of the many doorways.
He passed into the column of acrid smoke, and the world was whipped away under a sheet of black. Holding his shirtsleeve to his mouth to keep out the worst of the fumes, he gagged without pause, blinking tears from his eyes. Flames reared up on either side, and the hairs on his arms began to char as his sweat evaporated, leaving behind a tightly packed residue of salt and grit. His throat and lungs soon became lined with ash despite his makeshift sleeve mask, and he choked most of the way to the first of the cars.
The flames were almost too bright to see through, and had rendered most of the windshields translucent. While a great many tyres melted and unexploded fuel tanks threatened to extinguish his life any moment, Alex skirted the edge of the pileup and scanned the wreckage for any sign of survivors.
Flaming headrests, billowing airbags, crumpled steering columns. But no bodies. Nothing. Through the few panes of glass still transparent, it was quite clear that each vehicle was devoid of occupants.
Alex froze, dumbstruck. Somewhere distant, he told himself to move, that his now oxygen-starved mind was stuck trying to cope with what he was seeing, but he had to move. With superhuman effort he forced shaking limbs to send him leaping to the other side of the street. Choking, he emerged into fresher air and cast another desperate search around him. He put his hands on his knees and bent over, spitting tendrils of blackened saliva onto the curb. By the time he could straighten again he was still breathing raggedly, but the urge to vomit had eased.
Then a scream of pain rang out behind him. He winced instinctively. The very tone of it—the shrill, panicked trill of a trapped animal—cut at him like glass. “HELP ME!” It was emanating from the heart of the flaming wreckage, from the carcass of a yellow executive saloon sandwiched fast to the bulk of the eighteen-wheeler.
Alex was already springing forward when he spotted a figure across the street, just beyond the pavement, beneath the shadow of an old oak. His impression of it was fleeting, but detailed enough to send shivers of relief coursing through him. It was a man in his mid thirties, dressed head to toe in what looked like a black overcoat. Upon his lupine, marble-coloured face were two streaks of purple-black directly beneath his eyes—maybe eyeshadow, maybe not. A strange half-smile was plastered over his face, his gaze fixed resolutely on Alex, almost as though the blaze between them weren’t there at all. Despite his relief, Alex felt something stir in his gut: an irrational fear response, one that nudged at him with alarm bells ringing.
What was wrong with him? There wasn’t time for turning help away, oddball or not. Help was help. Pushing suspicion aside, he fished his mobile phone from his pocket. “You! Hello? Help!” he called, waving his arms over his head, heading for the saloon. “There’s somebody trapped! Give me a hand!” As the fire licked at the passenger window, a hand struck against the translucent glass, followed by the profile of a terrified face.
At the driver’s door there were no flames, and so without hesitation Alex grabbed the handle. He screamed as the scolding metal ate at his flesh, and drew his hand back up his sleeve, cradling it against his side, cursing. Before the pain could set in and send him reeling away from the wreckage, he bunched what remained of his sleeve further over his burned arm, gritted his teeth, manoeuvred the swelling hand back towards the door, and pulled it open.
A young man dressed in a cheap suit and matching tie tumbled out onto the ground, his jacket trailing a carpet of flames. He had been brown-haired from what Alex could tell, but his eyebrows and most of his crown had been burned clean away. All over his body the skin was blackened and had taken on the texture of charcoal in palm-sized patches. He shivered in teeth-chattering judders, as though freezing.
Alex recognised him. It was Paul Towers, a junior partner at Aimes & Logan Law. He had been quite the town mascot of late, having turned away from a bad path of heavy drinking a few summers before. Paul had been the focus of attention for the Moor’s crop of young women since hitting puberty due to his floppy fringe, striking good looks, and sharp ‘I know what I want’ stare—something that was now almost impossible to believe.
Paul tried to move away, but simply whimpered and collapsed onto the bubbling tarmac. Alex grabbed him by the arm and dragged him from the crash site, towards the side of the road. Struggling, he felt yet more grit and ash cling to his face, caking him in a thick paste, adhering to the rivulets of perspiration streaming down his cheeks. By the time they reached the kerb, the fire had burned his eyes dry, and streams of tears had joined the grimed rivers of sweat. Even here, waves of heat still buffeted his body.
He glanced up at the man he had seen across the street, expecting to see him making his way over to their side. But the figure was standing in precisely the same spot, still staring at him with that same half-smile. He didn’t seem at all concerned, nor did he even seem as though preparing to step forwards. Instead, he merely cocked his head, as though fascinated by their scurrying.
“HELP!” Alex bellowed.
The figure cocked its head the other way, but moved no more.
Alex felt his heart skip a beat from sheer disbelief.
Had the man not heard him? Surely he had. Perhaps he’d been struck dumb by the sheer oddity of what was happening. Or maybe he just didn’t care.
The figure’s gaze pressed hard into Alex’s temple as he fumbled with his mobile phone. The hell with him. He hit dial, blinking until his vision cleared. But the screen was blank. He beat against the phone’s underside, but there was no response. It was dead.
He cast it aside with a curse of fury and bent over Paul, who was shaking on the ground. “Can you hear me?” he said.
Paul merely whimpered.
Alex glanced up again, saw the figure still standing beneath the tree—now
staring across at him with an expression closer to a jeering leer—and then looked away. He didn’t bother to call out again.
“I have to turn you over,” he said. He meant to sound confident, but his voice cracked, trembling in the air. In the back of his mind he knew he shouldn’t touch Paul until an ambulance arrived. With those burns, he could do more harm than good. But a firm voice from somewhere even deeper told him there would be no help coming anytime soon. And so, before Paul could protest, Alex grabbed him and turned him over in a single swift movement.
Alex saw the pain in his eyes. Paul’s mouth opened in what could only be described as beyond screaming. Tears dripped down his face onto the pavement as a tiny sound escaped from deep in his throat. Blood was oozing from a slash across his forehead, revealing the startlingly white skull beneath. Alex checked his body and saw that the front of his shirt was gone. The flames had eaten through the flesh of his belly, such that a horrific mash of charred skin and blood-red muscle tissue lay where his navel had been.
Alex flung his hands to his mouth as a wave of nausea swept over him. He turned away to the grass and vomited with a great heave. Fighting black rings encroaching in his peripheral vision, he fought his way back to Paul, who now had only one eye half open, unfixed and catatonic.
“I don’t know what to do… I’m sorry,” Alex breathed. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry… There’s nobody here. I—I…”
Hyperventilating, he looked around in desperation for the figure once more, ready to surge to his feet and drag the static onlooker from the shadows. But his eyes were met only by the sight of the old oak, unblemished by the figure’s presence. He’d vanished, just like everyone else.
Alex accepted it without argument, too blank and addled to cope with any more. He was spared instant insanity only by Paul’s sudden bout of gargled choking. Alex grabbed him by the collar. “Hey,” he yelled. “Hey!”
Paul’s eyes flew open. For the briefest of moments he stared skyward, his face blank, almost peaceful, and then he began to vibrate against the ground. With his feet hammering the floor, he whined while his head snapped back and forth in vicious spasms.
Alex could only moan, clinging to the writhing body. “Are there others?” he cried. “Are there others? Please, tell me!” He was wailing now. “Tell me there’s somebody else!”
No answer. It took almost a minute for Paul to become still. Alex checked for a pulse, then stumbled back, sat on the kerb, mouth open with shock, and put his head between his knees. “This isn’t happening,” he whispered to the grass. “This can’t be happening.”
When he finally stumbled away from Paul’s body, he didn’t bother searching for the eyeshadow-wearing figure again. He probably hadn’t even been real. Instead, he wandered back towards the rise of Lovers’ Leap.
He stumbled back through the streets and across the park. Countless piles of clothing and jewellery passed underfoot, occasionally accompanied by handbags, briefcases and infants’ pushchairs. It all seemed to glare at him, daring him to stray too close.
He skirted each item in a daze, ascending the hill without as much as a single glance from his path. His mind was muggy, enamelled, too shocked to register much of anything. In what seemed only moments he was scaling the steep incline that marked the crest of the Leap.
It would be fine. He would signal for help. By now the government or army had mobilised a response to the terrible accident in the Moor, and were on their way in full force, accompanied by herds of gabbling reporters from around the world. He would be surrounded by press, harried by intelligence officers for an explanation, tested for alien probing, and dragged into the limelight as the sole survivor of the Radden Moor Disaster.
But he would be alive. He would be safe.
He sobbed as the desperate, paper-thin sentiment cracked and fragmented in the face of what he knew awaited him just on the other side of the rise. As he tore his way over the crest of the Leap and looked down upon the lands below, he saw that his imagination’s worst predictions hadn’t been far wrong. But that did nothing to lighten the blow.
From here he could see for miles over the countryside—the entirety of Radden Moor and a crowd of neighbouring towns, along with the stretch of dual carriageway that snaked between them.
Far away, nestled in a nook of coastal mountains, was Bleakstone Down, and perched directly above it the village of Lorndale. On any other day they would have appeared as little more than distant smatterings of antiquated spires and chimneys. Today, they were invisible behind a column of smoke as black as the one rising from Radden Moor, courtesy of a blaze that seemed to have consumed Lisey’s Bar ‘n Grill in Bleak. Alex suspected that the morning run of the good lady’s famous bacon-and-mushroom omelettes had charred to combustion point without her there to flip them.
Alex’s gaze swept across the moorland lakes, which glistened silver-white in the sun, and every other settlement in sight—Chester Walden, Stanfield, Eppinsborough, Langlebridge, Finstynne, Tinners’ Lodge, and, nestled between the slopes of Porters’ Pass, at the very edge of visibility, the twinkling lights of Milton Percy’s radio tower—scanning farther back into the distance until his line of sight met the horizon.
Every one of them was utterly still. Unattended toasters, gas hobs, careening motor vehicles and hair straighteners had sent at least three of them up in flames along with Radden Moor and Bleak.
There was not a single person in sight. Thousands of cars, trucks and coaches sat on the dual carriageway, most in pieces, torn into great mountains of shrapnel and shattered glass. Some had careened through the centre divider or into the wooded ditches that ran downhill on either side of the tarmac, having by chance avoided total destruction. No attempt at braking had been made, for their drivers had vanished along with everyone else. Their motors still ticked amidst the fields and creek beds where they had come to rest.
Alex sank to his knees, covering his eyes with his hands, and let loose a wail of bewilderment. Once that first cry had escaped him, he was powerless to stop those that followed, and merely sat watching the flames, clutching at the grass. His screams rang out until his throat had become raw, the distant smoke columns had blossomed into rippling firestorms, and the monstrous carcasses of transcontinental airliners had begun to fall from the sky.
No screams answered his, nor did anyone cry out to be rescued from the burning wreckage. The world had grown still and silent.
He was alone.
II
Norman called a halt and pulled the reins towards his lap. His mount took a single step farther before coming to a stop, snorting in the evening gloom.
Allie stopped beside him but said nothing. Her mouth was pulled into a tight grimace.
“You’re still mad,” Norman said.
She was quiet for some time before responding, “How could you do that?”
He leaned from his saddle until they were almost face to face. “There was nothing we could have done. We can barely feed ourselves.”
She rounded on him, her eyes flaring. “We could have helped. We could have done something. We could have given them something.”
Norman shook his head as he watched Lucian ride across the field behind them. His steel-grey hair and horse to match made him difficult to miss amidst the meadow of browning grass, even when he stopped abreast the posts of an ancient wooden fence, scanning the horizon.
“We knew that people were starving,” Norman said, sighing.
“That doesn’t make it all right.”
Allie took an apple from one of the bags swinging beneath her saddle and looked at it for a while. She soon took a bite, but her expression was disgusted.
“You ought to save those,” Norman said, motioning to the bag. “We had to leave a lot behind.”
She swallowed with a heavy gulp, as though to make a point of defying even so small an order, but when she replied her voice had fallen to a mere whisper. “At least they have that much.”
“Allie…”
�
��How could we leave them?”
Norman turned to her. “What do you want me to do?” he said.
“I don’t know. Something.”
“It’s not my job to make those kinds of decisions.”
“It’s going to be.”
“I’m not a leader,” Norman hissed. “I didn’t ask for this.”
There was a pause.
“For what?” she said.
Norman gestured to the sacks beneath them. “For this!”
Lucian, over by the fence, held up his hand to give the all-clear signal. He then wheeled around and rode back towards them, turning his head occasionally to peer over his shoulder, as though fearful of taking an arrow to the back. His face was creased into an ugly frown.
He pulled up beside them and grumbled to himself, brushing a tangle of iron-wool hair from his face. He looked to Allie, and then the apple in her hand. “Got another one of those?”
She threw him her own. “You didn’t see anything?” she said.
He shook his head, taking a bite. “There’s nobody there.”
“They couldn’t have followed us anyway,” she said. Her eyes were swimming with sorrow.
Lucian’s gaze settled on her. “We were stealing from them, don’t forget that,” he said.
“I’ll never forget that.”
Allie turned her mare towards the slight rise before them. Norman and Lucian followed without question, sharing a meaningful look. Lucian put on an encouraging voice, addressing her in an upbeat tone entirely unlike his usual grumble, “Those people had been starving for a long time. We didn’t do any harm.”
She didn’t answer, but Norman thought he saw her shoulders relax somewhat as they reached the foot of the hill.
The horses snorted to each other as they began to climb, their hooves slipping on wet mud, uprooting tufts of gnarled, dead grass as they went. They lost traction and slid backwards several times, but they were urged on by swift kicks to their flanks, and soon crested the ridge.
Ruin (The Ruin Saga Book 1) Page 3