Yet the other members of the group seemed encouraged by the exchange and stepped forwards. The young couple stayed back a little farther, grasping each other for support and regarding Alex with a shadow of suspicion, but the others surrounded him with excited mutterings.
“What’s your name?” the woman said.
Alex hesitated, but under their expectant stares he managed to speak, “Alex… Alexander Cain.”
“Alexander,” she said, “it’s an honour.” She swept a hand towards her chest. “I’m Agatha. Auntie Aggie to the young’uns—ain’t that right, sugar?” She tickled James, unbothered by his continued wailing, and flicked her head to indicate the others beside her.
They were introduced in sequence. Their names broke against Alex like waves against a pier, but he nodded nonetheless to each of them.
The man with the bulging lazy eye was Oliver Farringdon. “Sir Farringdon, no less,” he cried. “Officer of the late British Empire!” He shook Alex’s hand with sound enthusiasm, clapping him on the back. His fingers were rough and calloused, yet tapered and dextrous: intelligent, practical hands.
An engineer? Alex thought.
The young couple were Helen and Hector Creek. They nodded politely, yet stayed some distance away. Hector seemed warm enough, tall and wiry, with a mop of thick, unkempt hair. Helen, small and wispy, held back, swaddled close to her husband’s chest, still wary.
The remaining man was Paul. Agatha seemed eager to skip him, perhaps owing to his hostile stance and his refusal to shake hands. Sporting a meaty paunch covered by a vest only, with a shaved head and red face, he looked like somebody Alex would usually have avoided at all costs.
He did his best to keep his greeting neutral, but was sure a slight waver had crept into his voice.
The young child, meanwhile, ignored Agatha’s attempts to get his attention. Sitting on the concrete floor, he faced resolutely away from them all with his spindly arms wrapped around his knees. But she didn’t seem put out in the slightest, sending a soft, affectionate reprimand his way before turning back to Alex. “What you doin’ out here?” she said.
“Sleeping,” Alex said. “Searching for…I don’t know. Somebody. Something.”
They all nodded without further question. At that, the remnants of their reservations dissolved, and even the Creeks relaxed. Oliver and Paul marched away and began to filter their way along the aisles once more, looking at the boxes high above.
“Don’t go frettin’,” she said. “We’re not looting. Just ganderin’ for engine parts,” Agatha said.
“What for?”
She seemed to find some difficulty explaining. “The cars don’t work,” she said eventually. “Just don’t.”
“Not much seems to,” Alex replied.
“Televisions, phones, computers…”
“Yes.”
“It’s the circuit boards,” Oliver called, hefting a box into his grasp. “They’re dust now.”
“We’ve been trying to get a motor goin’. Maybe then we’ll find what the Beelzebub is goin’ on. Though I don’t rightly think there’s a soul else around for miles. Have you seen anyone?”
Alex’s throat grew tighter as a memory of Paul Towers flashed before his eyes, with his bare, seared flesh. Flashes of the conflagration amidst the pile-up followed, then the figure he’d seen, standing across the street—all dark-ringed eyes and leering maw. He swallowed with difficulty. “No,” he said.
Though he could see she made a valiant effort to keep her features warm and motherly, he saw the disappointment in her eyes, and the almost imperceptible slump in her shoulders. “Neither did we,” she said.
She gazed down into James’s screaming face and seemed immediately brightened by his chubby, wriggling body. “And what about this’un?” she said. Her voice changed to one of interest and delight. “Wasn’t your big brother ’n angel to bring you so far?” she cooed. “Yes, he was.”
“James,” Alex said. “His name is James. I don’t know who he belongs to. He’s not my brother,” he said.
Agatha’s smile only widened. “You’re brothers now,” she said simply. And then, as though she had been privy to a hidden secret all along, she placed James back into his clumsy grasp.
The crying came to an abrupt end. James looked up at him, grasping his toes, and a partially toothed smile broke out upon his face. Alex blinked, and looked back to Agatha.
Her eyes twinkled. “You’re welcome to stay with us,” she said. “’Less, o’ course, you got an appointment to keep.”
Alex laughed. But as soon as his chuckling began, sobs welled up from the pit of his stomach, and his vision clouded with tears. He hung his head as his shoulders began to heave. Without a break in her stride, Agatha took his arm and led him into the aisle, soothing him all the while.
Once she’d brought him to a run-down Land Rover parked askew in the warehouse doorway and seated him with James against a nearby wall, he felt better. While his sobs abated, he watched the strangers work.
Paul revealed his true nature soon after: a garage mechanic turned God-fearing zealot, judging by how he held a greasy wrench in one hand and a tattered bible in the other, one from which he had yet to remove the library sticker. When not speaking, he busied himself with muttering scripture under his breath. To everybody else’s bemusement, he seemed under the impression that they now inhabited a world on the verge of Tribulation—after the Rapture of the New Testament.
Agatha and the Creeks seemed equally at odds with him as Alex, but for the time being nobody bothered to speak against him.
On several occasions Alex rose to his feet to help, but each time was forced back to the wall, for James would now grow increasingly distressed at his absence. He was from then on relegated to watching over the child while the others worked.
The group bickered and debated on how best to deal with the choking engine, which stalled and whined and crunched whenever the ignition was turned. They worked away on the gutted engine for hours, growing ever more irate and slimed with grease. Spent or mismatched parts littered the floor in every direction. They reached a point in which Alex was sure every component had been replaced, but they kept experimenting, regardless.
After some time, Agatha came away for water, sipping regally from a flask. She then filled the lid and took it to the small boy, who still sat in the aisle with his hands over his knees. She returned stiffly, backing away from him as a hiker backs away from a riled bear.
The skeletal child looked after her until she was at least twenty feet away, his mouth twisted into a feral sneer. His eyes twitched to each of them in turn, watchful orbs set within a face rendered filthy with grime and hair knotted beyond recognition. He then tipped the lid and gulped, leaving streams of water to pour across muddied clothes.
“What about him?” Alex whispered.
Agatha glanced at the boy and somehow managed to draw another motherly smile from within. “We found that little darlin’ yesterday,” she said. “He was comin’ down from Glasgow, from what we could get outta him.”
“Where was he?”
She frowned at the boy and spoke slowly. “The woods… fightin’ off a pack of Rottweilers, with a stick.”
Alex looked at the tiny child. “Him?”
The boy, as though he’d heard every word, glanced to the both of them and fixed Alex with a narrow stare.
Agatha nodded. “A fighter.”
“Did you get his name?”
The boy continued to stare at him with wild eyes and drew his arms even tighter over his legs.
Agatha nodded once more. “Lucian. Lil’ Lucian McKay.”
She returned to work without another word, leaving him to watch over James.
Once alone, he looked from her to Lucian, then to the timid Creeks and the spluttering men working themselves to distraction. They were all there, a mere step away. Real people.
He was not alone.
“I didn’t think we’d find anybody,” he said to James and
the dog.
They both stared back, blank as slate. He ruffled the dog’s fur as the Land Rover was reduced to a collection of rivets and pipes, rocking James in his arms. Soon, the reality of his situation began to bear down heavily on his shoulders.
In a sudden rush, the unshakable conclusion that the abandoned baby in his arms was no subconscious fabrication solidified in his mind. The feverish workings of the people before him were part of no dream. It was all really happening.
He began to shake. The world blurred and his breathing became ragged. It lasted for only a few minutes, but in that time Alex was sure that anything could have happened. He could very well have disappeared himself, leaving behind only a neat pile of clothing.
When the shaking finally stopped, the trance—the one that had shielded him from the truth for the long days since the End (that was how he thought of it now: the End, a black mark on the world’s timeline between now and Before)—had lifted.
At last, a hand on Alex’s shoulder drew him back into his body again. He jerked and gazed into a pair of kind, feminine eyes, standing over him.
Agatha’s soft voice murmured, “Alex… We’re goin’ now.”
He nodded and stood on legs that had grown numb, following her towards the Land Rover, which now purred nearby. Somehow they’d got it started. “Where are we going?” he said.
Agatha responded in a tone just hesitant enough to convince him that she scarcely believed the words herself, “We’re goin’ to find answers.”
They all piled in after Alex had collected his things from the office and stowed the dog in the boot. Backing away from the industrial park, they left the warehouse behind and began to weave their way through the great burned-out wrecks upon the roadways.
As they moved onto the motorway, heading south, Alex turned to Agatha. “What happened?” he whispered. “Please, tell me. Tell me you know something.”
She laid her hand over his, and he knew that there were no answers to be had, not from her, not from the others, and not from anyone else.
Nevertheless, Paul saw that moment as ideal to pipe up. “The End of Days,” he bawled. “Mark my words, it is. And we’ve been left behind, because we’re the damned.”
Alex looked down, cupping protective hands over James’s ears, staring into his emerald eyes. There, contained within the child’s bulging cheeks and fixed gaze was everything that he would ever need to carry on. He was certain of it.
James never cried in his arms again.
2
DESTINY CALLS
The destiny of man is in his own soul.
— Herodotus
I
Norman drifted. A medley of smeared images—or maybe memories—flashed in the dark: rain, falling white stone, and a sharp pain upon the side of his head. But instead of falling into focus, they flickered and jumped, taunting him from afar.
“Got your head knocked around pretty good, didn’t you?” said a disembodied voice. It spoke with something akin to good cheer. “Not the first time, huh?”
Norman rolled end over end in a blackened void.
What are you talking about?
The voice came again, this time less cheerful, more jeering, “What’s the matter? Don’t you remember?”
Norman grunted as the stream of images flickering before him quickened, shifting between light and dark; faces and buildings; a great tempest surging above a city of towering skyscrapers; and he, horizontal, staring up at a collection of drenched, worried faces. They yelled down at him, exacerbating the throbbing pain above his ear—coursing the jagged contours of his scar—until it was almost unbearable, the urge to vomit all-encompassing.
One of the faces was clearly Alexander’s, though much younger, perhaps no older than Norman was himself. Moments later, he glimpsed Lucian among the sea of dripping faces. His brow bore no sign of the signature crevasse that Norman knew so well, half-obscured by a shock of long, brown hair—luscious, vital locks of which there were now only silver, patchy remnants.
The others were a blur—except for a single figure that clearly did not belong in the picture. Didn’t belong at all. It stood off to one side, some distance behind the others, crouching over him without a trace of rain upon its body—almost as though the rain passed right through it. As though it were not really there. Its face was young and angular, carved with fine detail. Norman sensed an overbearing strength and sinister intent; the eyes staring out from the pale features seemed to see right through him—no, directly into him. Surrounding each eye was a dark streak, a halo of darkness around the glowing, white sclera.
He nodded to Alex and Lucian (their faces still younger, not yet buckled by time and strife), who still called out above Norman, bent close, shouting his name—though he could only tell from the movement of their lips, as their voices were no more than smeared, incoherent warbles.
Norman’s own voice spoke from the ether, as though he’d spoken aloud, voicing his thoughts. What is this?
The figure merely smiled. “Remember, Norman,” he said. “Remember. You were all there. You all watched it happen.”
And then he was gone.
The city’s palette of colours liquefied and reformed, swirling back into focus until the face of the man with the neckerchief was upon him, staring through the glass of his living-room window. For a moment, Norman felt a twinge of recognition, one tenfold stronger than the one he’d felt several nights before, by the campfire.
And then nothing.
Darkness.
He drifted.
Then he felt his body once more—his real body. He was being moved. Distantly, a twinge registered in the crook of his elbow, which built to a sharp pain, and something cold ran up his arm. Then nothing again.
“How is he?” said an addled voice, warped and inhuman. It hung in the ether, faint and undulating.
“I just gave him a shot. He should stop struggling soon,” another voice answered.
“Will he be okay?”
“I’m not sure. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Norman slid further into nothingness, and the voices became silent.
*
“Here,” Lucian said.
Allie started as a blanket enveloped her from behind. His rough fingers brushed her cheek and she sighed, running a hand over his wrist, blinking eyelids that felt like they were made of concrete. “Thanks,” she muttered.
She glanced over her shoulder and took in the sight of his grizzled silhouette. He looked terrible. “You’ve been up there again, haven’t you? In the hills. People are worried about you.” She hesitated. “I’m worried about you.”
He grunted. “Any change?”
She let it pass, returning her gaze to Norman’s bedside. “It’s like he’s never going to wake up.”
“He will. Give him time.” Lucian staggered over to the other side of the bed and looked down at Norman’s lax face. He glanced at her, then around at the darkened clinic. “You need to get out of here, let someone else watch him.”
“I’m fine.”
“You haven’t slept.”
She couldn’t help smiling at the sacks under his eyes and the wild angle of his unwashed hair. “Look who’s talking.”
His eyes bored into hers until she shifted and straightened. “I can’t help but feel responsible,” she said. “I was there not a minute before. There must have been some sign, something I missed.”
“Bullshit. You were the one who found him. If anything, everyone should be parading in here to thank you.” He grew quiet for a while, and gripped Norman’s forearm. “It’s me who’s responsible. I failed him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s my job to keep us all safe.”
“There’s nothing you could have done.”
“There’s always something you can do.”
She pulled the blanket tighter over her shoulders, hoping some words of comfort she could offer would fall into her lap. They didn’t.
She settl
ed for companionable silence. It was a strange thing, knowing that the two men before her had become her closest friends. When she had arrived in New Canterbury, coming up on two years before, she hadn’t expected to stay long. She had just been passing through.
Funny how things had turned out.
“What are you doing in here?” Lucian muttered.
She blinked. “What?”
“You heard me.”
She swallowed despite herself. “He’s hurt.”
“So let Heather patch him up. What do you care?” Despite the coarseness of his words, his tone was flat, probing, without edge.
She looked at Norman and found that her voice had abandoned her. What did she care?
Not long ago she had been taken in by the legend of the Champion just like everyone. He had been the paragon to which the masses could rally. Then she had been assigned to scavenging duty with him, and for a while thought him a bobblehead on which the city hung its hopes and dreams.
And now? Now that had changed again. He wasn’t the hero from the stories. How could anyone really be such a person?
But there was something about him. It was buried somewhere deep, so deep that maybe it was just her imagination playing tricks. He was no Champion, but he was no fool, no everyman. Lost, maybe, and frightened, like a deer staring down the barrel of a gun. Yet, though she tried to deny it, he plagued her thoughts.
“He’s my friend,” she said finally.
The slight curve of a faint smile touched Lucian’s lips. “Sure.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He didn’t reply. His eyes had grown unfixed, glassy. For a while his knuckles whitened, gripping Norman’s sheets, and an ugly snarl flickered over his face. When he finally stepped back, his lips were twisted into a sour slant. “Get some sleep.” He stalked away into the gloom.
“Where are you going?”
“To keep watch. Nobody’s getting in here again. Not ever.”
II
Ruin (The Ruin Saga Book 1) Page 21