Abomination (The Pathfinders Book 1)

by Jane Dougherty

  “Don’t ever do that again,” Tully murmured melodramatically.

  “Do what? Get attacked by a giant humanoid rat? It wasn’t my idea of a fun way to spend an afternoon, I assure you.”

  Tully smiled and stroked her hair. “You know what I mean. Frightening me like that.”

  “And I wasn’t frightened, I suppose? Tully, I was scared shitless!”

  “I said to myself, there’s something terribly wrong here. Carla must have been abducted. She’d never just go out and leave body parts littered about the place.”

  Carla thumped him and gave a little gasp as the tension broke and laughter mingled with tears of relief. Wiping her eyes, she raised her head from Tully’s shoulder and looked at the small group standing in awkward silence. The boys hung back, pretending to be on the lookout for enemies of some kind.

  Kat stared at nothing in particular, the glimmer of animation the brief conversation with Carla had lent to her features had dulled and died. “We have to hurry back to the kitchen. Flo—”

  “Bugger Flo!” Carla hung onto Tully as if she didn’t intend to let him go again.

  But Tully released her and took a step back. “Kat’s right. No point in riling the old cow, is there?”

  “But—”

  “Now that I know you’re safe—”

  “Safe?” Carla’s face was white. “Don’t you even want to hear about what happened?”

  “Course I do! We’ll talk about it when I see you later. Right now I’ve got a plan to work out, remember? This is going to be a really great show, Carla. You’ll see.”

  Kat took Carla’s arm, steering her away from the grinning boys. “C’mon. We’re late as it is.”

  Tully waved and sent Carla what he hoped was an encouraging smile. He had just had a wonderful idea for his defense plan.

  Carla had looked back. Once. Tully was laughing, slapping Jim on the back. She blinked and choked back the tears. Later, when the power was turned off and an exhausted silence had descended on the women’s dormitory, she crossed her arms across her chest and drew her knees up to her chin. Beneath the too-thin quilt she shook, hoping that no one would hear her desperate sobbing.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Carla?”

  A hand shook her gently by the shoulder.

  “Carla, are you awake?”

  The last thing in the world Carla wanted to be was awake. The last thing she wanted to do was to pull back the filthy quilt from her face and look across the slowly stirring sea of filthy quilts and to know this was all she had to look forward to until… There was no until. Until implied a future. There was no future. Least of all did she want to face another day without Tully.

  He hadn’t found the time to talk to her as he had promised. He had left her stewing with images of the rat man, the blood, the squirming severed fingers, running over and over in her head. Kat had tried to explain that the men didn’t have access to the women until all their jobs were finished, but Carla wouldn’t accept that Tully would let Flo keep him away. It had to be because he was having too good a time with his new friends. She muttered something under her breath that made no sense, not even to her, but the hand was still shaking her shoulder.

  “Wake up, Carla. Flo always gives the disgusting jobs to the last girls to get up.”

  Carla threw back the quilt angrily, but her expression softened when she saw the look on Kat’s face. She was smiling.

  “She might send us back outside again. Outside we can talk. Otherwise”—she jerked her chin in the direction of the red witch kicking the girls beneath the mounds of blankets—“Flo listens.”

  Carla sat up. “Do you want to talk about…before?”

  Kat nodded. She hung her head and her voice became a cracked whisper. “I need to…to tell…someone.”

  Carla put a hand on Kat’s arm and squeezed it gently. “Only if you want to.”

  Kat just nodded, but there was gratitude in her eyes.

  * * * *

  Jah and Clyde were a little deeper in the hole, a little closer to the restaurant cellar. The same girls were heaving what looked like the same pieces of broken concrete. The sky was the same filthy gray, the cold wind as keen. Only the sentries had changed.

  “Kat,” Carla asked hesitantly, half expecting a rebuff. “What did you do…before?”

  It was as anodyne an opening gambit as Carla could think of. All she could do was hope Kat would take the bait, the olive branch, the helping hand. Kat raised her head slowly and stared off into the banks of swelling cloud.

  “Student. Biochemistry.” She swallowed to clear a way for the words, concentration lining her forehead. She began again. “I was in my final year at Jussieu. In a month, I’d have taken my Masters exams.”

  And to the rhythm of the chain, Kat related the last five years of the history of the world.

  * * * *

  Five years ago

  Kat was in the supermarket, comparing the sugar content of two brands of yoghurt, of all the futile things, when the first seismic shock arrived. There was no warning, no meteorological alert, no government announcement, although they must have known. Somebody must have known. Dead volcanoes in the middle of Europe don’t wake and burst into life without giving just a teensy-weensy bit of warning.

  Certainly none of the shoppers in the mall imagined what was going on beneath the earth’s crust, just beneath their feet. Most of them assumed it was a bomb, another terrorist attack. But the store alarms didn’t go off. Instead, the floor buckled and cracked. Shelving toppled over and slid crazily about. Pieces of ceiling and light fittings rained down. Electrical fires broke out everywhere in a fountain of sparks and spitting yellow flame. The nightmare scenes of madness and horror that Kat witnessed, children separated from parents and trampled underfoot, pushchairs concertinaed beneath cascading shelving, would haunt her dreams forever.

  Rather than be crushed to death in the panic to get out, Kat took her chance with the falling superstructure, hopping behind the meat counter where she hoped the heavy butcher’s table would offer some protection. She sheltered there as the supermarket shook itself apart around her ears, not realizing that with the falling sheets of roofing, the tons of cosmetics and pet foods and the gallons of alcohol and fizzy sodas, her entire world was toppling into the void. When the din of the quake gave way to the screams of pain and fear of the trapped and injured, she made her way outside. What she saw told her that the quake had been just the beginning.

  Flames shot up dozens of feet into a charcoal-colored sky from the petrol station, the tangled wreckage of smashed cars and the tankers of combustible products that lay on their backs like overturned insects. Part of the mall had collapsed, and an entire home furnishings store had slid into a huge fissure, leaving plumes of dust in the heavy air. The cold wind had turned into a gale, fanning the flames and spreading the fires. It brought with it hail and ice and howled like a furious animal.

  Kat shivered in her thin summer clothes and looked out across the desolation. Everything was gray—ash, dust and cloud gray, like an old photograph of a bombed out city. Jagged concrete spikes replaced the tower blocks, like grotesque war memorials. The teeming road network was a tangle of buckled and smoking asphalt, twisted crash barriers and mounds of wrecked vehicles. The sky was a wild ocean of black billowing cloud, flickering lightning and the deafening, growling roar of thunder.

  But worse than the terrifying noise of the furious elements was the din of stuck car horns, alarms and the piercing screams of the people trapped inside with no hope of being released. Numb with shock and cold, Kat clapped her hands over her ears and stumbled back into the mall.

  People picked themselves up out of the rubble and just stood, hands dangling uselessly at their sides. Parents scrabbled in the piles of debris for missing children, an old lady dug through a mountain of cans with trembling hands, searching for her husband. The air was a single high-pitched shriek of despair, a tangle of names, sobbing and screams of pain.

&nb
sp; The emergency generator for the supermarket cold store was still functioning, and somebody plugged in a TV to catch the last sporadic satellite images before everything died. Disoriented survivors watched in horrified disbelief a succession of disjointed images from around the world—volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, shifting tectonic plates, gaping fault lines and buckling mountain ranges. The images fuzzed and juddered, flickered erratically, and died. Then there was silence.

  Some people broke down in tears, some prayed, yet more went into deep shock, but the most pitiful were the people who continued to believe that their own little corner of the world was still there. They just left, walked away into the desolation, trying to orientate themselves in a wilderness with no familiar landmarks at all.

  There were old ladies worried that the cat wouldn’t be able to get back in, mothers who had children to pick up from grandparents, kids suddenly afraid to be away from home. They all set off into the freezing gale. Kat watched them struggle across the no man’s land of the car park, into the war zone of the dual carriageway and the freezing desert of suburbia. She watched as they stumbled and fell, slipped into crevasses, burnt themselves on the exploding carcasses of vehicles. Some staggered back, white-faced and silent. Others carried on out of sight and into oblivion.

  It wasn’t long before the groups of teenage kids became gangs, and the gangs became something more sinister, more deadly—the tribes. The tribes took over the places where there was food, and it got dangerous to try to take any of it. People with young kids to look after ended up arming themselves and going on raids into the supermarkets and cafeterias. There were always one or two who never came back, leaving even more orphans. Little ones died of simple cuts, curable illnesses, diarrhea, dehydration. The tribes controlled the pharmacies and bartered infant antibiotics for telephones and jewelry. There was nowhere to get rid of the bodies, not enough to eat or drink.

  Kat hunkered down in the corner of a furniture store and waited for the end.

  * * * *

  The present

  The images of horror had burrowed deep down, under Kat’s skin, like metal shards, festering. Telling Carla about it was a release. She hadn’t realized how much they had taken over her memories, leaving no space in her thoughts for anything that wasn’t death and darkness.

  “The first days were the worst,” she said, “watching the wounded die. After the first few hours, it was obvious no help was ever going to come.”

  “We saw the beginning, in Paris,” Carla murmured, thinking of the shocked faces of the survivors stumbling out of the smoking ruins of the Louvre, hearing again the screams of the students caught by the falling crane.

  “We thought that nothing worse could happen,” Kat said, her eyes staring back into the horror of five years ago. She shook her head and bent to pick up another piece of rubble. “How could we have known?”

  Carla looked up sharply. “You mean there’s more?”

  Kat flipped the piece of concrete onto the pile and licked her lips. Her eyes stared off into the middle distance, glazed, unseeing.

  “The tribes were laying down the law—their law—and I’d joined a group of people who talked about defending ourselves, maybe even getting out.” She shot a quick glance at Carla from beneath her lashes, as if to check she was still listening. “Then the first of the wormholes opened, up on the hill beyond the pizza house. A man stumbled out of it, his clothes in tatters, singed black, half of his face a mass of red burn scars. He was leading a group of men and women, all ragged and burnt like himself, some with limbs that hung wrong, all smelling like the unburied corpses.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Five years ago

  The man stumbled out of the wormhole, cursing the borrowed body that refused to respond to his commands—the limbs that had been twisted and bruised in the explosion, the inadequacy of the face that had lost an eye, the skin charred and wrinkled with flash burns that pulled the mouth out of shape. He had taken this body because of the brain. It was sharp and quick, of an intellectual capacity that would serve him well.

  Recovering his balance, the Burnt Man faced the mound of broken concrete across the swirling mists of frost. Gray ash cloud hung heavy, and the earth still trembled as though poised on the brink of a new phase in the Abomination. Behind him, the passengers and crew of the plane filed out of the dark tunnel, unfazed, uncomplaining. None of them noticed the cold, the wind that lashed them with ice and rock fragments, the wreckage that cut, the potholes and crevasses that broke or twisted the limbs of the unwary. They seemed oblivious to everything—everything except the Burnt Man.

  * * * *

  Kat peered out from her nest of carpet and quilts. Philippe, Jean-Marc and Jérémy crept to the top of the barricade of sofas and bed frames that sectioned off the area squatted by a group known jeeringly as the Kindergarten and peered down into the main hall of the mall. A pale gray mist rose from the cracked tiles of the hall. Frost formed along the broken safety rails and the dragon coils of the exploded escalators. The mist swirled about a shabby group of newcomers, indistinct in the gloom except for the one who stood a little apart, tall and straight and commanding. The man put his head on one side, as if listening. Then he raised his eyes to stare at the defenders of level one east and grinned a ghastly grin.

  The men ducked back down out of sight.

  “Who the fuck is that?” Philippe asked in a whisper, turning to Jean-Marc.

  The older man shivered. “I have no idea, but he gives me the willies.”

  Julie, a thin young woman with stringy hair, sidled up to the men to have a look. Kat followed her. Peeping over the barricade, she watched as a silent group of young tribesmen encircled the shadowy newcomers. Their leader Rashid, a skinny lad with thin wiry hair, pointed a rifle at the Burnt Man.

  “You can bugger off! And you can take your stinking groupies with you. If you think you’re—”

  The Burnt Man raised his right hand as if he was swatting a fly, and Rachid turned into a bright flaming torch. If he even had time to scream, the sound was lost in the rattle of gunfire from his tribesmen. The rattle turned to sporadic shots, then ceased as the tribesmen, one by one, accepted the evidence of their eyes. Despite the gaping holes blown in their bodies, the newcomers had only staggered at the impact of the bullets. They were all still standing. The holes didn’t even bleed properly, just oozed a little dark brown substance. Shocked, the boys backed away, trying to creep back into the tangled labyrinth of debris that filled the main hall.

  “Stop!”

  The boys turned from the Burnt Man and ran. There was a hiss and a scream and flames sprang out of fleeing backs.

  “He who dares to stay will be your new leader.”

  Most of the terrified boys melted away into the mall. A few stayed and hung back at what they hoped was a safe distance. One stood his ground, hesitating, looking around at his fellow tribesmen, the creeping, screaming, smoking bodies, and swallowed back his fear. He took a few paces toward the Burnt Man.

  “Who are you?” A single red eye glared at the boy who stood, his chest heaving, rifle clutched in both hands.

  “Abdelkader.”

  “Tribe?”

  “Kusha.”

  “Abdelkader, leader of the Kusha, you will bring your men here. I have something to say to you.”

  Abdelkader backed up, fighting against an obvious desire to run, and the Burnt Man addressed the main hall that was now filled with hundreds of unseen watchers.

  “The rest of you, come out! Or I will have to flush you out like the cockroaches you are!”

  Kat watched, her flesh creeping with a premonition of yet more horror as the group of hunched, disjointed-looking people—the Burnt Man’s followers—shambled through the hall, spreading out like the mold on a piece of fruit.

  “Do you doubt that I can?” The voice filled the cavernous ruin. Like a viscous liquid, it seeped into every corner, into every head, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere. An unnatural silen
ce fell on the mall. Even the distant shouting of Abdelkader had died away. The Burnt Man cast his gaze about, once again raising it to the first level where Kat and her friends camped. Julie grabbed Philippe’s arm, and Kat thought how similar they looked, both worn thin and nervy, always on the brink of hysteria, scared-looking, like their children. With a shiver, she admitted to herself that their kind hadn’t a hope of making it.

  The Burnt Man looked away, fixing his one-eyed gaze on a barricaded walkway on the ground level, and threw out his hand. Like a rocket, the ball of flame burst through a pile of rails and tumbled partition walls, blasting the lightweight debris into a hail of sharp, flaming shards. There was an animal shriek of agony, and an arm flew into the air with the shredded plasterboard and fragments of plate glass. The rest of the body staggered into the open, and fell, a carbonized non-person, to the horror of the watchers. Behind it, a canine torch, one of the security guard’s dogs, made a feeble attempt to outrun the flames that engulfed it, then staggered into a crackling heap.

  “Did you hear that, cockroaches?”

  Kat was mesmerized like the others. Philippe clutched his wife until his fingers left a white mark on her bony shoulder. Jérémy chewed his knuckles, casting the odd glance over his shoulder to where Mattieu, his little brother, was playing with a group of other children. Silently and earnestly, they were building a crazy-looking house out of plastic cups and polystyrene packaging. Kat was so absorbed that she jumped at the light touch of a hand on her arm. Jeff tugged at her sleeve, trying to pull her away, back into the relative safety of the store. His face, already drawn and pinched, was a mask of terror. Only the eyes, huge and pleading and full of something only he could see, were still the eyes of a six year old child. His brow was furrowed as if he was in pain. His voice was thin as if even the effort of speaking was too much for him.