by Tim Lebbon
CONTENTS
Cover
Also Available from Tim Lebbon and Titan Books
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One: Bone
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Part Two: Ascent
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
Acknowledgements
About the Author
A RELICS NOVEL
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TIM LEBBON AND TITAN BOOKS:
Coldbrook
The Silence
THE RELICS TRILOGY
Relics
The Folded Land
The Edge
Alien: Out of the Shadows
THE RAGE WAR
Predator: Incursion
Alien: Invasion
Alien vs. Predator: Armageddon
The Cabin in the Woods
Kong: Skull Island
Firefly: Generations
A RELICS NOVEL
TIM LEBBON
TITAN BOOKS
THE EDGE
Print edition ISBN: 9781785650321
Electronic edition ISBN: 9781785650352
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First edition: June 2019
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Tim Lebbon. All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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This one is dedicated to my good friends
Olaf and Yuka Buchheim
PART ONE
BONE
1
“Do you trust me?”
The kid doesn’t know. He respects the creature before him. He fears it, is fascinated by it, loves it, and sometimes even finds it intimidating, especially on those evenings when it descends from the caves outside town, moving through shadows like a shadow itself to come and visit his mother. The creature’s name is Mohserran, and it is his father. He knows that it troubles his mom as well, but he also realises that there’s something else between the two of them, something grown-up and mysterious. Even though he’s only eleven years old, he understands love.
But trust? He’s not so sure about that.
Especially now, with all the blood.
“It doesn’t matter,” the creature says. The boy has never seen it like this, or heard it sounding so flustered and panicked. It’s only rarely that he has seen Mohserran without his mother also being there, and some of those memories are magical. Now, though, the fact that he doesn’t know where she is frightens him. He might be growing up, but a kid his age still wants his mother, especially when something strange is happening. Something bad.
The kid has felt sick for a couple of days. He’s vomited everything up, and still dry heaves. He’s slept and woken, and confused the two. He’s sweating even though the night is cool. And he has thoughts that are unfamiliar and frightening, about blood and broken bones, torn flesh and teeth clogged with meat. He has wandered back and forth through the town, hardly knowing where he is, or sometimes even who he is.
“Where’s Mom?”
There are strange noises coming from the surrounding darkness. From one direction something is banging again and again, like a door being slammed over and over. From elsewhere he can hear pained shouts, like someone trying to cry past a blocked throat. From further away, a scream.
Overhead, a gentle whoop-whoop noise drifts back and forth over the town, the echoes heavy in his chest. A shadow blots out the stars, moonlight glimmering from dark metal. The boy has seen helicopters before, but never without an accompanying roar. He’s finding it difficult to ally the sights and sounds. Confusion twists all of his senses. He wonders if he is still asleep. He blinks and sees teeth again, and his jaw aches with a dreadful need.
“You must listen to me,” the creature says. It has taken the boy out into the garden, down past the small pond to that uncertain area where garden ends and countryside begins. There are no fences here in Longford, no distinct breaks between civilisation and wilderness. The boy has grown up with that, and he understands it is an aspect of this place that his mother treasures. She says she likes the sense of the wild.
She likes Mohserran, too. This wild thing. That doesn’t stop him being afraid. Even more so now, because its eyes are wider than usual, dripping a strange yellow substance that is luminous in the moonlight, almost afire. Blood is splashed across its skin and fur, and trapped between its teeth he can see dark blots of what might be meat. It’s like looking at himself in a future mirror.
“But I want Mom.”
“Boy, listen to me. It’s important. It’s...” The creature growls and spits, shaking its head like a wet dog. It looks confused, glancing around, clamping its jaws on a shadow. Shaking, fighting against something the boy cannot see or understand, it takes a few slow, deep breaths to compose itself. It stands still for long, long seconds before speaking again. “Something very bad is happening.”
The boy knows. It’s obvious, from the whoop-whooping above the town, and the lights he can now see moving up on the surrounding hills, like distant fireflies with malevolent purpose. He knows from the way he feels—the violent things he imagines, the deep, sick hunger gnawing at his belly—and what he’s seen other people in the town doing. Maggie Parks was down by the river, choking creatures and throwing them in. They might have been kittens, or puppies. Albert Roy, the post office manager, was sitting beneath a tree on the town square, carefully threading sharp sticks through the loose skin covering his old thighs. Mrs Carter was naked in her garden, walking in tight circles around a pile of red clothes or meat on the ground.
“I’m scared.”
“And you should be scared. Scared will keep you safe. Afraid keeps your senses sharp.” The creature talks as if it knows scared and afraid. The boy would never have believed that Mohserran was afraid of anything. Not with those teeth, those claws.
“Where’s Mom?”
It avoids the question and says, “I won’t let you...” It growls and slams the flat of its big, clawed hand against its head. Its eyes roll, spilling speckles of yellow fire like glitter, then refocus on the boy. It seems he is their only focus. Everyt
hing else is a blur. “I won’t let you fall. I can’t look after you for much longer, not with the change, and not now that... now that I have to fight.”
“Fight?”
Mohserran does not elaborate. The kid thinks it’s because there is so little time.
Something is changing. The world is moving, with shifting lights and a vibration through the ground. There’s a strange smell on the air, a sweet burning taint like popcorn popping or apple pie warming in the oven. He hears what might be a scream, but when it comes again he realises it’s more like a roar from a human mouth. It sounds so unnatural. It sounds mad.
“There isn’t long,” Mohserran says. “Trust me. I’ll save you. Because I love you.”
The kid blinks in the night and the creature comes close.
Teeth and blood and torn skin and flesh and the taste in my mouth and the storm in my head—
Mohserran holds his face between its hands and the boy feels the tackiness of blood. He isn’t sure whether it’s from his father’s strange hands or his own face, but now it’s on both.
“Now get ready to run, and hide, and don’t stop running and hiding until you’re out of the valley. Never stop.” Mad and covered in blood, still Mohserran looks sad as it holds the boy’s cheeks with its soft, downy hands, vicious claws withdrawn, and brings his face close. It whispers, “Hold this breath all the way.” It presses its mouth to the boy’s and exhales.
He feels himself expand, his senses brightening and sharpening, and his knowledge of the mortal danger all around becomes clearer and more focused. I’m only eleven years old and this shouldn’t be happening to me, he thinks, and it is a very grown-up thought followed by one so childlike: It’s not fair.
Mohserran falls to its knees, one hand clawing into the ground, the other waving at him to go.
The boy holds the breath he has been given and runs.
* * *
He does what Mohserran told him. Impossible though it is, he holds his breath all the way up the hillside and out of the valley. He’s come this way a hundred times before, sometimes with his mother, occasionally with his father, more often with his friends Jake and Emily, lunch packed in their rucksacks ready to be eaten when they reach the hilltop. Sometimes they are explorers, sometimes soldiers, sometimes astronauts landing on a strange planet and charting each footstep for the very first time. Always, they are adventurers.
As he reaches the top of the slope he wonders where Jake and Emily are now.
He gasps out his held breath—he has been running and climbing for half an hour, at least—and he feels a wrench at letting it go. He understands that it is something exotic and mysterious, but he is a child whose mind is open to such things. He has never known anything different. When he draws in a fresh chestful of air, it tastes of heathers and darkness. It is tainted by the fear that his whole life is about to change.
His mind is now clear of those images of blood and violence. He feels empty.
Still unsure if he is out of danger, he hunkers down beside a pile of rocks and turns to look back into the valley below. He has to rest. More than that, he has to know what is happening.
Like how I can hold my breath for half an hour even when it wasn’t really my breath.
That was Mohserran’s last breath. He understands that, at least. And his father gave it to him so that he could survive, and everything he does from now on will be to honour that gift and to treasure that sacrifice.
Down in the valley an uneven ring of lights surrounds Longford, far out from the town’s furthest extremes. It’s made of vehicle lights and larger, stationary lamps that all shine inwards, illuminating the town’s perimeter. He’s too far away to make out these lamps, but he guesses they’re big barrel-sized apparatus mounted on the backs of trucks, similar to the one they use on TV to send the bat signal into the sky. There are no bat signals here.
He starts to shiver, and not from the cold, because he’s warm and sweating from his rapid climb up the hillside. He’s shaking because he is afraid. He can’t remember ever feeling so alone, and what he can see in the valley reminds him of things he’s seen on TV, movies about aliens and the army, monsters and men with guns coming to blow them away. The kid understands the distinction between truth and make-believe well enough, even though a small part of him—perhaps one informed by his experience of television and comics—understands that something about his life might well be regarded as make-believe by most other people.
Caught within the circle of lights, the air above the town appears heavy with something he can’t quite make out. It’s like mist—although the air is light and dry—rolling and pulsing, moving above and through the town like a living, breathing thing. He can’t see where it’s coming from. He doesn’t know what it is.
This is why he told me to hold my breath.
He thinks of the strange noises he heard in the town, and wonders whether there are still shouts, roars and screams in Longford now. He guesses he won’t hear from this distance.
He’s not too far away to hear the first crackle of gunfire.
* * *
By the time dawn arrives the boy is cold and damp. The horrible thoughts of blood have been purged from his mind, but he knows with a shattering certainty that he cannot go back home. Home is safety and love and warmth, Longford is now just a place.
He has seen people wearing special suits and breathing apparatus sweeping the hillsides with strange gadgets, walking in lines and flushing out any living thing ahead of them. He only avoids detection because he knows these hillsides well, and he hides in an old hollow oak.
From high in the tree he sees a fox in the distance, climbing up out of the valley. It has blood around its mouth and is growling, hissing, head darting left and right as if looking for something to kill. It does not look afraid. It looks vicious.
He sees deer and squirrels and rabbits shot as they’re frightened out of hiding ahead of the lines of people. Not every person carries a gun, but most of them do. They bag up the creatures’ corpses, tie the bags and then bag them again. Then they leave them out in the open, attaching a small balloon filled with helium which floats a couple of metres above the ground. So they can find and collect them later, he thinks. He used to like balloons.
A scurrying thing runs close by the entrance to the hollow tree. He hears its ragged breathing accompanied by a series of pained grunts, and when he glances down from a crack high in the tree he locks eyes with a Labrador puppy. He thinks it might be Lucas, the Thompsons’ dog, but it looks different. Muddy, wet, there is also blood spattered around its nose and across its face. He worries that the dog has been injured, but then he sees its eyes.
This is no longer the friendly family pet he stroked a few days ago. They said they’d named him after the Star Wars guy. The boy said they should have called him Chewie. His mother laughed.
Lucas growls and runs at him, and he only just ducks back inside the tree before the dog strikes the opening, scrabbling with oversized puppy paws, growling and spitting as it does its best to get at him.
The boy climbs quickly back up inside the tree. He’s done this before, but never with a mad dog trying to bite him. He wants to shout and cry, but a strong part of him he never realised was there takes control, guiding his hands and feet as he heaves himself up and away from the sick puppy. It’s inside the tree now, but he’s beyond its reach. It cannot climb.
He sits high up for what seems like hours while the dog growls and leaps beneath him. Calling its name does nothing. He even tries “Chewie”. There’s no sign of recognition, no indication at all that the puppy knows its own name or knows him. Teeth are its only response.
Later, as the sun climbs high, the puppy tires of trying to reach him and leaves. Later still he hears a bark and a single gunshot.
He curls up inside the tree, wishing he had food and water. He wants to cry but will not allow himself the tears. He thinks that once they begin they will not end, because all his fears are backing up inside.
Around noon he looks out from high in the tree to see what is happening back down in the town. He can no longer hear gunshots. A calm has settled over the buildings. The strange mist has gone, burnt away by the sun, and now sunlight glints from a tall fence being erected in a rough circle way outside the town’s outer boundary. He hears drills and hammers, and several helicopters drift in from down the valley, heavy platforms laden with building materials swinging beneath them. These are normal helicopters with loud rotors, not the stealthy things he heard over the town last night.
Back inside the oak he remembers Jake and Emily, and how they once climbed this tree together.
* * *
He doesn’t know where to go, so he stays close to the only place he has ever known.
A day and a night have passed. The boy spent the night in the tree, and next day he stole some food from a big army truck he found beside a forest track with no one inside. He’s seen several army vehicles, and soldiers wander the hillsides looking threatening and important. None of them have seen him.
He has a talent for not being seen. Sometimes his mother said he could flit by the corner of her eye all day long. She told him he was sleek. She said it like it was a special word, a big word, and he always believed there was much more behind it still waiting to be told.
She will not tell him now. He’s pretty sure she is dead, along with his father Mohserran and the rest of Longford. That is a truth he keeps to one side and views from the corner of his eye, because if he allowed it in close it would break him, and he would no longer be sleek, and they would find him and do the same to him.
None of the soldiers goes down into the valley. The only people going into and back out of the valley are the people in the silvery suits, the ones building the fence. He guesses they’re soldiers too, but they’re different. Occasionally he still hears a lonely gunshot.
On the fourth day after fleeing Longford and home, he doesn’t hear any more shooting at all.
* * *
The boy moves around the valley. He pretends he’s carried with the breeze, drifting from bushes to trees to rocky outcroppings, hiding in their shadows when soldiers are nearby. He’s afraid and alone and confused about what has happened and is still happening, but he is also determined not to be caught. Mohserran didn’t give him his last breath just for that to happen.