Searching the kitchen until he came across a suitable bottle complete with a plastic teat, he filled it with rainwater. He set it beside the fire to warm and took the infant into his arms, swaying it experimentally. It had no effect. The wailing continued.
It was some minutes—minutes full of mind-withering screams and hacking cries—before the water was fit to drink. When he finally pressed the bottle against its mouth, it latched onto the teat with astonishing zeal and began to squelch away, its eyes fixed upon his in an eternal stare.
He laid it back into its nest with the bottle, knowing that the peace would only last until the water ran out, and filled another from the containers, setting it beside the fire.
He changed his clothes once more and searched the bedroom until he found the child’s compartment in the wardrobe. Picking out whichever items he thought suitable, he took a pile to the living room.
He returned just as the child drained the bottle, and the wet squelching sound shifted to a dry whistle. Before the wailing could resume, he replaced the empty bottle with the new one. The squelching began in earnest once more.
Leaving the pile of clothes beside the fire, he wandered away to assess the cottage. He tried the telephone and heard nothing, no dial tone or noise of any kind, just as with every other he’d tried since…since that day.
How long had it been now? Three days? A week? More?
A laptop left on the coffee table was unresponsive to every attempt he made to bring it to life. When he shook it, he heard only a rolling hiss, and was at once certain that the innards had disintegrated into dust.
The lights, however, still worked. He wondered how long the power grid could operate on its own, without anybody to maintain it. He guessed they had a few days, maybe less.
He’d have to find some candles; it was going to get dark at night.
In the study he rifled through cheque books, utility bills and bank statements addressed to William and Martha Chadwick—who he supposed had been the ones wearing the sleep masks and pyjamas in bed before vanishing, leaving their child to wilt in its crib, alone. On the desk he found a book containing the child’s birth certificate, first handprints and suchlike. He took it into the living room and sat down in the armchair to read while the toddler rolled in the blankets, drinking in great gulps. Already, he noticed, colour had returned to its lips, and it looked a good deal stronger.
The birth certificate named the child as James William Chadwick. He flipped through the baby book to find a large, colour photograph of the toddler bundled into the arms of a beaming couple in their forties. Together, they all smiled giddily out at him.
James Chadwick spat the empty bottle from his lips and belched explosively. He smacked his lips for a while and then, after some reflection, began wailing once more. His skin regained its vile puce colour within moments.
The dog seemed as annoyed by the noise as Alex. Groaning, it rose to its feet and slumped away to the bedroom in search of quiet.
Alex steeled himself and approached James, kneeling down beside the fire. Taking a gulp of air, he unfastened the boy’s rotten nappy, praying that his shaking fingers wouldn’t slip. James refused to help his chances, and wriggled in his grip, screaming all the while.
After being changed, dressed in fresh clothes and given yet another bottle of water, James promptly urinated. Hydrated and warmed, he now screamed only louder and seemed on the verge of struggling from the nest of duvets to run rampant.
Alex dashed away to the refrigerator, and was pushing his way through its contents, throwing aside pieces of pungent cheese and curdled yoghurt, before he realised that the box was at room temperature. It was just as broken as the phone and computer.
He cursed and began opening cupboards at random, staring at tins of corned beef and bottles of ketchup with a sinking heart.
There didn’t seem to be any baby food. Of course there would be, somewhere. But how long would it take to find?
“Do you eat food?” he shouted over the roar of the rain.
The toddler glared at him and then returned to its busy schedule of rolling and screaming.
“Food,” Alex repeated, dragging out the syllable until the consonants were lost in a sea of supplementary vowels. “Fooooood?”
Again, James appeared nonplussed by the sound of his voice. This time he didn’t even stop crying to listen.
A banana eventually became the most serviceable meal to Alex’s eyes, mashed viciously with the back of a spoon and spilled into a bowl. After having the pap placed before him, James wasted no time in placing his hand into the bowl and smearing its innards across his cheeks and past his gums.
The screaming, it seemed, had ceased for the time being. Alex collapsed onto the floorboards beside him and let loose a long sigh. With his hands extended out towards the fire, he slowly warmed himself on the living room floor. Once the chill had left his bones, he sat forwards to observe James finish the banana paste.
James smacked his lips together and sucked on his fingers with glazed, satisfied eyes.
Alex couldn’t help but smile at the clumsy and yet deliberate way in which he conducted himself, as though great intelligence was concealed behind the blankness of his features.
Overcome by sudden and all-consuming affection, he leaned towards the boy and muttered into his ear, “Hello, James. I’m Alex.”
IX
Billy stared into the light of the fire. Grandpa was singing to her. Her eyes lolled, half-closed, and her heart seemed to beat to the rhythm of his voice:
“Oranges and lemons, Say the bells of St. Clement’s…”
She sank further towards sleep. Her lips formed the silent words, ‘You owe me three farthings’ in perfect unison with those he sang aloud. The blankets enveloped her, and within moments she was barely aware of anything else. She was on the verge of sleep when her stomach rumbled explosively.
“I’m hungry,” she said.
Daddy’s tired sigh rang out from somewhere nearby. “I know, we’re all hungry, Billy. We have to save our food. We don’t know when we’ll be able to get more.”
Billy nodded, but her stomach kept grumbling nonetheless. “We need to get more soon,” she said.
“I know. There isn’t any here.”
She didn’t understand. Food had grown all over the place back at home. She had collected her own breakfast from the berry bushes behind their house since she had been able to walk.
Not this year, though. This year there had been none. They had gone hungry—so hungry that there hadn’t been enough to go around for the four of them, not enough by half. Billy had been scared, not just by how Daddy and Grandpa would leave home for days to find them a meal, but by Ma.
Ma had started sneaking her food away at mealtimes. After dark, she’d come to Billy’s room and force her to eat it. Eat it all.
Billy had begged her to stop, to take it back—to eat just a spoonful herself.
But she hadn’t stopped. She had forced Billy to eat every bite, day after day. When Daddy had asked why she was getting so thin, she had lied—lied to his face. Billy knew that had hurt her bad. She had seen her crying after telling a lie one morning. As the winter had worn on, and the forests had turned black, she had forked over her share again and again, wasting away before Billy’s eyes.
When she had finally gotten sick, she had been too weak to put up much of a fight.
Billy’s heart ached, just as it had done each day since they had buried Ma in the barley fields behind their house. But tonight her rumbling stomach hurt just as much as the heartache. Maybe more.
New Land seemed to have even less food than home. In fact, she had seen none at all. She, Daddy and Grandpa had been walking since dawn, having left the beach and headed inland, and seen nothing but abandoned towns, rotten crops, and bones.
She no longer dared guess how far they had come.
“Where has it all gone?” she asked.
There was a silence, during which she refused to look away from the fire. The c
ampsite was full of ominous, angular shapes, spread in a recess at the edge of an endless stretch of lifeless meadows.
“I don’t know,” Daddy said.
Billy hugged her knees closer and sighed, settling back into her bundle of blankets. Grandpa said nothing for a while, and then began to sing once more, quietly at first but then louder, until eventually he was back in full swing, as though nothing had happened:
“When will you pay me? Say the bells of Old Bailey…”
Billy continued to mime the words along with him as she once again sank towards a black abyss, her hunger almost forgotten in the wake of his gentle voice.
After a while, Daddy joined in. At first, he was quiet like Grandpa had been, and his voice was rough—his coughing had made his voice hoarse as the day had worn on—but after only a few moments he too sang merrily, and Billy smiled.
She soon stopped miming and sang along with them, watching the blood-red ghosts of dancing flames through her closed eyelids. Together, the three of them overwhelmed the crackling of the fire, the singing of the insects, and the barren whistle of New Land’s winds; they could have been back at home, where they belonged. There were no meadows, no foreign skyline, and no hunger. Just the three of them, and their singing.
After all their tunes had run their course, their voices petered out until, once again, Grandpa sang alone. His tone, however, was undiminished. Billy wondered for how long he could go on before even he tired of it, but then remembered that Grandpa was so old that, to him, years were probably like minutes.
She hoped that it wouldn’t be years before Oranges and Lemons stopped filling her ears.
Sleep still eluded her. Occasionally she fell towards it in great swooping dives, but would return to wakefulness at the last moment. Something other than her empty stomach was keeping her awake, but she couldn’t figure out what it was.
After a while she turned onto her back and looked up at the night sky.
The stars twinkled and fizzed above like fireflies. She wondered how many people had looked upon them in times past, and how many were doing so at that very moment.
There was a rustling in the grass nearby, and then a shadow crept up and lay down in the grass beside her. Daddy’s distinctive cheekbones were cast in silhouette against the sky. She snuggled against his chest and looked back at the heavens while Grandpa continued to sing.
“What are they?” she whispered.
“Stars?”
“Yes.”
He uttered a formless grunt, and cleared his throat. “I couldn’t tell you,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It means that I don’t know.”
“Oh.”
On the other side of the fire, Grandpa stopped singing Oranges and Lemons, and began to mutter the words of Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
“Is he drunk?” Billy asked.
“No, he’s just old.”
“Does he know what stars are?”
“Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky…”
Daddy shuffled in the grass—Billy suspected that he was looking at Grandpa over the fire—and then settled beside her again. “Probably,” he said.
“Should we ask him?”
“I think we should just let him sing. We’ll ask him another time.”
“Okay.” As Billy stared at the stars, she began to see the outlines of bunnies and dragons in their midst. Then a thought occurred to her. She turned to Daddy, whose face was a black mask against the glow of the fire, and said, “Where does Grandpa get his songs?”
Even though it was dark, she knew he was laughing at her. “I’ll eat my hat on the day you stop asking questions,” he said.
“Why would you eat your hat?”
Instead of answering, Daddy only laughed harder. He didn’t stop until he was wheezing. “It’s a figure of speech,” he said finally.
“Where did it come from? I’ve never heard that one before.”
Daddy sniffed and raised his hands. “Where does anything come from? What you know, you got from me, and what I know I got from Grandpa, and so on.”
Billy leaned back, dissatisfied. From the words ‘so on’, all she could surmise was that Grandpa had simply been gifted with every shred of knowledge at the beginning of time. It was the only way that made sense.
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are…,” Grandpa muttered, and grew silent.
Daddy looped an arm over her, and the two of them enjoyed a brief lull, during which only the sound of their breathing and the crackling of the fire reached their ears.
And then Grandpa started over with Oranges and Lemons, apparently resigned to go on until dawn—or until they gagged him.
“Are we going to find some food soon?” Billy asked.
Daddy was quiet for a long time, allowing Grandpa’s singing to fill the silence.
“Daddy?”
“We’ll be fine,” he said. “I promise.”
“We’ll find food?”
He ruffled her hair. “Of course we will!”
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.”
Billy nodded. A weight had lifted from her chest. She now thought only of Grandpa’s words, and how firmly Daddy’s arm was coiled around her. As she finally fell towards the depths of sleep, the faintest cosy warmth burned in her belly.
Then the attack came. Had it not been for Grandpa’s abrupt silence, she would have had no warning. So close to black oblivion, she had very little sense of it. In one moment she was curled up on the floor, the next she was flung into the air. Then she was running and screaming. In a single moment, from peaceful silence to the deafening score of battle.
“DONALD!” Grandpa roared.
In the darkness, Billy waved her arms wildly, blinded. The fire was the only source of light, flickering somewhere in her peripheral vision, its embers having spilled into the grass. Figures darted before it, black profiles outlined against the dying conflagration. Somewhere in the darkness, people were fighting for their lives.
Amidst the din, Billy stumbled and screamed, “Daddy!” Her sobbing voice fell short in the cacophony, a mere overtone to the chaos.
A towering body rushed by, so close that a gust of air whistled against her ears. A moment later there was a thump somewhere in the dark as it impacted something unseen. She could hear Daddy shouting, but couldn’t tell what he was saying.
She wandered into the darkness with her hands stretched out before her, blinded further by tears that sprung from her eyes in torrential rivers. She managed only a few steps before another body passed close by, this time colliding with her and sending her flying through the air. She crashed into the grass while a horrible smell filled her nostrils: unwashed skin and rotten breath.
She was standing again almost immediately, groping thin air once more. She skirted the edge of the fire, which was by now dying in the dirt, blinking as her night vision began to develop.
The scuffling had grown quieter, but she could sense that she was in no less danger. As the night came into focus, she began to see the outlines of half a dozen figures, struggling on the ground. There was no way to tell one from another.
“Daddy!” she screamed.
At the sound of her voice, one of the figures looked up. A moment later it was struck across the head by the figure beneath it and toppled into the grass. The victor stumbled to his feet and dashed towards her, arms outstretched.
Billy recoiled and flailed before the figure’s shadowed mask resolved into the angular profile of Daddy’s face. A wordless cry escaped her mouth as she flung herself into his arms. “Where’s Grandpa?” she stammered.
Two people lay unmoving in the grass, but three more still struggled and thrashed some distance away. Grandpa was in there somewhere, but there was no telling which figure was his. Daddy took hold of her shoulders and turned her head so that she stared into his eyes.
“You stay here,” he said.
“But—”
; “You stay!”
She nodded, and he dived headlong into the fray. From then on any distinguishing features blurred into nothing more than a stifled struggle between shadows.
“Daddy! Grandpa!” she wailed.
But this time her cries didn’t bring Daddy running back. After half a minute, somebody else toppled into the grass, but by that time one of the fallen figures had regained its footing. The fight continued with equal ferocity.
From her left came Grandpa’s voice, “Donald!”
From her right, Daddy’s choked reply, “Dad!”
In the darkness, a woman shrieked, momentarily visible as she flew over the fire’s remains. She crashed into the grass and moved no more.
The odds had turned, and the fight broke. Four of the figures had bunched together, flailing on the ground. Two others remained in the grass, unmoving.
Two further shadows dragged each other to their feet and dashed to the side. Once clear, they paused and turned to her. “Billy!”
She ran to them, skirting the fallen menaces. Strong arms gripped her, Daddy’s face flashed somewhere above, and then she was being dragged through the grass.
Grandpa puffed alongside—a single bag slung over his shoulder—but he soon fell behind, limping badly. He stopped and started, faltering, and could then only take a few steps at a time.
Daddy let go of Billy and ran back to him, looping an arm over his shoulder and hauling him along. Billy ran alongside them, crying, and Daddy hushed her as they crashed into the forest at the meadow’s edge.
At the very same moment the moon crested the horizon, and the first of its silver beams thrust through the canopy, throwing their cover of darkness to the wind. Billy tripped over the roots of trees and ducked beneath overhanging branches, struggling to keep pace. The forest, now dressed in a steely veil, was dark and yet blinding, gnarled and terrifying.
Behind them, their attackers plunged into the trees’ midst and gave chase, taking far less care with how much noise they made, breaking fronds and branches in great swathes. It sounded as though a great, grumbling monster was in pursuit.
With Grandpa’s limp slowing them down, they would be caught in moments. Already Billy could feel a creeping along the back of her neck.
Ruin (The Ruin Saga Book 1) Page 12