Lucian scowled. “What good is that?” he said. “Two got away, and one of them is perfectly capable of bringing others right to us. They already know they can waltz right onto our streets and slit our throats.”
“But why?” Richard said. “We didn’t get an answer… Why would somebody do this?”
A silence fell over them as they stared about themselves. A concentrated sense of isolation had crystallised from the ether, making the short distance that separated them from home seem far greater. The trees seemed suddenly sinister, as though their darkened bark concealed untold evils.
Norman thought he sensed something change about Lucian—he seemed to stiffen and avert his gaze. But he said nothing. Norman sighed. “That doesn’t matter now.” He stood up. “We need to get back. We’re going to be missed.”
He made the comment in passing, without thinking. He was therefore surprised when everybody, including Lucian, froze mid-action and set about gathering their things, preparing to leave.
He watched them, disbelieving, and felt his gut squirm with distant unease. They were looking to him.
They left the emaciated man’s body in the clearing beside the dying fire. At the tree line, Norman looked back at his sprawled profile, slumped against the oak. The pity he’d felt moments before was now overshadowed by fear of retribution.
*
The night was a long one. Many people were too frightened to return home in the dark and opted instead to remain in the cathedral. Dozens of guards were posted all over the city until sunrise, which brought with it only a tenuous sense of safety.
When Norman and those following him—following him, not Lucian—returned, they learned that the old man had died, having slipped away in his sleep. After talking to Norman, he’d never said another word.
While Norman and the rest of the hunting party made for bed, Lucian refused to check his weapons back into the armoury, and stood on sentry duty until midday. By that time he had sagging bags under his eyes, and his head would droop to his chest without warning.
After several complaints from harried guards, Heather convinced him to take an anxiety pill of her own making, after which he finally slouched into a clinic bed and dropped into a deep sleep.
Once he’d rested, Norman went north-west with him and Robert to look for any sign of the young man from the fireside. Lucian was still convinced that the sneering youth had been too severely wounded, and would not have survived.
They found him as sunset neared, face up in a patch of bluebells.
His mouth and eyes were already crawling with insects, and his skin had drained to a sickly marble pallor. A wound in his abdomen had been bound with makeshift bandages, torn from the hems of his trousers. The blood upon them had long since coagulated, and had spread into sticky pools on the forest floor.
They buried his body without a marker, beneath a pile of stones amidst the bluebells. They spoke sparingly while they worked, and afterwards there was a moment’s silence before they returned to the city.
They continued to search from then on for the man with the neckerchief—but, for reasons Norman couldn’t explain even to himself, he never spoke of those green, hypnotic eyes.
They found nothing. No sign of him, none at all. He had simply vanished.
FOURTH INTERLUDE
Morning.
Alex held up a hand to shield his eyes from the sun’s rays and groaned from the depths of his duvet. He rolled over, and for the briefest of times enjoyed the sun’s warmth, along with the sound of dying embers crackling in the grate.
Then there was a thump, and the crying began.
Beside him the dog groaned, rose to her feet and slumped away to the recesses of the cottage once more. He wished he could have gone with her. He stumbled to his feet, taking James in his arms and walking him around the periphery of the room.
The previous night, the two of them had eaten a meal together by the fire. After dusk the rain had continued well into the evening, and its patter upon the roof had been almost peaceful. The abundance of tinned food and a few pieces of unspoiled fruit had allowed them to take their fill, and then some. Alex was sure he’d burnt, maimed and spoiled every last bite, but the two of them had eaten ravenously nonetheless.
However, before and afterwards, all that James had been content to do was cry. He cried when he was talked to, sang to, left alone, held, swayed and rocked, for so long and with such force that Alex was at times entertained by the notion of him wailing himself unconscious.
He had cried overnight too. It had only been in the early hours of the morning, when the storm had lost its voice and the rain had abated, that he had finally succumbed to sleep.
Now, it seemed he had been rejuvenated by his short bout of rest. He ignored Alex’s pleas, wriggling and screaming, his face scrunched into a puckered maze of puppy fat.
After an hour, Alex found that the noise had lost its edge. He abandoned his attempts and sat with James in the armchair, watching the embers fizzle until he felt enough strength to stand.
He then left James to cry on the floor beside the grate’s residual warmth, heading for the shower. There was still some hot water. Apparently the water system had yet to fail, along with the power grid—for now.
Grime sloughed from his skin and tangled hair in great mudslides, basting the bath in a layer of jet-black sludge. The water splashing against his face was blissful, ruined entirely by the fact that he was obliged to keep the door open, lest the child fling himself onto the ash pile in his unattended state.
Afterwards, wrapped in a towel, he brought a bowl of lukewarm water to the fireside. Dipping the struggling child into its depths, he did his best to clean James’s stinking, soiled body. Lathered with soap and sporting tufts of hair that stuck out at wild angles, the boy’s screaming quietened. Once or twice, a gap-toothed smile broke out onto his face—one that seemed to light up the world.
Alex changed into another set of clothes from his bag, along with a waterproof coat, and set about shuttling in the last of the containers he’d put outside to fill in the rain, all of which were by now full to the brim.
The chill of the air outside was bracing, even more refreshing than the shower. With his arms full, he paused in the doorway and looked out over the land surrounding the cottage, which was no longer obscured by the storm’s cloak of mist and rain.
It was another moor, stretching away in all directions towards the horizon. Heather, moss, tall grasses and dense forests were dotted here and there, painted onto the surface of the land as though by an artist’s brush. Far away, blurred by extreme distance, was a small chain of mountains, their peaks capped with a fine smattering of snow.
Radden Moor was now far away indeed, as was every other town that had lain along the road. Even the peak of Porter’s Pass—the tallest in all of Radden County—had fallen out of sight. Not a single human construction was visible. The only thing apart from the cottage hinting at habitation was a dirt road leading away down the hill. He suspected that, eventually, it would lead back to the motorway he’d left the previous evening, before the storm had taken hold.
“Where am I?” he said.
The wind answered, whistling in his ears. It snatched his voice from the air and carried it away down the hill until it bled away into nothing, leaving only another gust in its place.
It seemed impossible that he could have wandered so far into the middle of nowhere, and in so short a time. It also seemed impossible that the trance he’d been under—an emotionless pall that had been marbling his mind—had passed. He knew that it still encapsulated him, shielded him from the shock, yet he was unable to lift it. He was merely privy to a dim knowledge of it, along with the knowledge that at some point it would lift, and leave him exposed to the harshness of reality.
He turned and stepped back into the warmth, and to the wailing. Returning to James, he crouched and sighed. “What am I going to do with you?” he said.
James was whimpering, having cried himself into
a state of exhaustion. He watched Alex’s every move and beat at the air feebly with his tiny fists, but still seemed unable to stand, talk, or move much at all. However, the unhealthy tinge remained absent from his lips, and his skin was far less pruned.
“Why you?” Alex said. Looking down at the child, tiny and pathetic upon the blankets, he was suddenly at a loss to explain why, of all of the people in the world, it had survived.
He backed into the armchair and huffed. “Why me? I’m nothing special.”
James merely rolled around and gurgled, oblivious.
After a while, Alex found himself speaking again, “We can’t stay here.”
He was all at once certain that he’d spoken the truth. He was ill equipped to deal with a child by himself, dangerously so. The only decent chance the boy had of survival was if they found others—if there were others.
He spent the day searching the cottage for anything of value, adding it to a small pile beside the fireplace, before repacking. Most of the clutter he’d taken from his bedroom ended up being replaced by water bottles, canned food, lighters, maps and bedding.
By the time he had done even this, the sun had passed its zenith and he was forced to accept that he would have to spend at least another night in the cottage. He cooked them another meal, faring no better than he had the previous day. Together, the two of them once again ate a burnt dinner.
James still cried often, stopping only occasionally to regain his breath before continuing. Irrespective of whether Alex held him, watched him from afar or ignored him entirely, he blubbered. It was only at dusk that he stopped, and dropped into a slumber from which there was no waking him. Alex took his duvet and spread out on the floor beside the snoring infant, watching his splayed body rise and fall with each breath until he drifted off himself, still helplessly caught in his emotionless trance.
The next morning, just after dawn, the three of them left the cottage. Alex marched along the dirt path, James swaddled close to his chest, held tight by a loop of cloth that ran across his back. In one hand he held a strong stick, and with it he propelled himself towards whatever lay ahead.
The air was cool, and the morning dew still clung to the grass at his feet. Refreshed, he made good progress. The cottage had become a mere speck on the horizon within the hour.
The mountains grew steadily closer, and by midday he had left the path in favour of open grassland. The path would only lead back to the motorway. There was nothing for him there, only the crushed remains of thousands of vehicles, housing as many piles of empty clothing.
The chill and dew had disappeared without grace as the sun took its place directly overhead, replaced by a heat that Alex, with his fair complexion, found intolerable. In the open fields he grew hotter by the moment, until a sticky layer of perspiration soon coated his skin, and the dog panted without pause.
All the while, James cried in protest.
The wailing and the heat took their toll. He could only bear the sun for a further hour before retreating under cover. Once beneath the canopy of a nearby forest, however, seeing green spots and stumbling over roots, he realised that shade would come at the price of speed.
As he struggled through the underbrush, the first bird he had seen since the Great Flocks landed upon a high branch and cooed as though in greeting, cocking its head.
James gurgled at the sight of it, uttering an unmistakable cry of joy. His chubby, stunted fingers reached for the canopy, wriggling.
“You like him?” Alex said. He looked up at the bird, recognising it as a homing pigeon. As he watched it, he saw that it was swaying from side to side, as though dazed.
The dog sat low on her haunches and yipped, staring up at the bird with distrust in her eyes. A low whine thrummed in her throat. She glanced to Alex, as though pleading with him to get rid of it.
There was definitely something odd about the birds.
“You got turned around by whatever killed the microchips, huh?” he muttered. “Some magnetic storm?”
The pigeon cooed in reply, and took to following them for a while, swaying less each time it landed on a new branch. Sometime later it departed, taking a route that at first seemed uncoordinated, but soon settled into a more defined flight path.
It seemed that, at the very least, the birds were recovering.
They spent the rest of the day wandering on a loose diagonal through the forest, during which time Alex’s map-reading skills were shown to be as abysmal as he’d feared. When the trees finally cleared, the moor was nowhere in sight. They were now at the edge of an industrial district.
James had seemed comforted by the constant movement throughout the day and had cried somewhat less, but now with the grinding stop he resumed his wailing. The sun was falling again and they had only an hour to get settled before the light began to fade. Alex had no intention of being caught out in the dark.
Spying a vast warehouse close to the perimeter fence, he approached with trepidation, dwarfed by the structure. He passed through the doorway—four storeys tall, left ajar like a gaping maw—and found endless aisles of boxes before him: tens of thousands of Clingfilm-wrapped packages, waiting for customers that would never come. He opened a few, and found auto parts, mostly spark plugs and ignition coils.
To one side were a series of offices, sealed off by plasterboard walls, cluttered with computers, desks, and mountains of unfiled paperwork. He coaxed the dog inside the largest, though she was mistrustful of the strange smells and industrial surfaces, and settled them on the floor. He then built a small enclosure for James out of bulging ring binders, hoping that it would contain him.
“Don’t die,” he commanded as he set him within it. After propping open the window and setting a desk fan beside him—it seemed the power grid was more resilient and automated than he could have hoped—he set about making them a fire in the waste bin. Once the flames had caught and he was sure the smoke would be blown outside instead of choking them, he set enough paper aside for fuel, and unpacked their blankets.
The two of them were wrapped up and set to sleep in a mere handful of minutes, both utterly defeated by the day’s travelling. Alex kept close watch over James as night fell. The child was only visible in silhouette as darkness set in, as the fire threw out meagre light, but neither of them would sleep if he turned on the harsh fluorescents overhead.
They had both started to grow groggy when a stray thought crossed his mind: to lock the door.
At once the idea struck him as ridiculous. There was no point in sealing a door against nobody. Yet the niggling urge refused to fade. Eventually, cursing, he scrambled from his blanket and flipped the latch, stepping away from the door with an added sense of security.
As darkness cloaked the land in earnest, things of the night—things that had once been pedestrian, but now seemed primal and threatening—came to life and prowled the woodlands. The twilight symphony of hooting owls and yipping foxes was now complemented by the barks and meows of a great many cats and dogs, wandering across the land in search of absent owners.
The dog’s ears flipped and turned with each of their cries. At first she paced by the window to ward away any that strayed too close to the warehouse, but she was soon overwhelmed by the sheer number of trespassers, and curled against Alex’s leg for the night, whining.
Alex reached over the wall of James’s pen and rested his hand on the boy’s shoulder, feeling it rise and fall, taking comfort from its warmth. At some point, he saw the fire’s licking flames no more, and slept. All the while, the dog continued to whine at the endless droves of abandoned pets.
XIV
Alexander was in a hurry. There were many problems to deal with today. The most notable: recovering their exhausted supplies. The End Day celebrations had fallen flat and short, but what hadn’t been consumed had already spoiled.
And then there was Ray’s murder, the unknown assailants, the old man’s note…
But that would have to wait. They had to eat first.
He was so preoccupied that he didn’t notice the pigeon on his doorstep until it hooted underfoot. He looked down, lifting his leg. The slightest of gasps escaped his lips when he saw the bobbing, silver form before him.
Numbness stole along his arms as he pressed himself against the doorframe. He blinked fiercely, hoping that it would disappear—would vanish as any hallucination should.
Instead, it cooed and bobbed a moment further before taking flight, riding the breeze, as real as the ground beneath his feet.
He cast a glance around at Main Street, but saw only the usual sights: the cathedral doors being swept open for morning prayer, children flocking to the school building, and those on the early shift dragging themselves towards the fields or a quick breakfast. Nothing untoward met his gaze. Apart from the dozen guards posted at Main Street’s edge, and the nervous glances every second person aimed at the hills above the city, it was a perfect summer morning.
Nevertheless, venturing any farther from his door now seemed impossible. It seemed as though a vast chasm had formed between him and the rest of the world.
He slunk inside without taking his eyes from the street, and slammed the door.
XV
“Wait, wait,” Don wheezed, sinking against the trunk of a sapling yew. The soft bark bent under his weight, sending him sprawling on the ground. There he lay gasping, staring up at the sky, which had grown far away and dim.
He and Billy had spent the last hour trudging through boggy wetlands, braving stinking pits of tar-like mud in lieu of skirting a precipitous ravine. But now that the way was finally clear—a gently sloping meadow lay before them, cropped short by a milling herd of distant goats—he was spent. Taking another step was beyond him.
Each breath seared his lungs. It was as though the air contained not oxygen, but instead thousands of tiny, red-hot knives.
Ruin (The Ruin Saga Book 1) Page 17