Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (3 page)

Waves of heat buffeted his skin and something crackled and popped nearby. They had started setting fires. Gunfire crackled and the occasional scream still rang out, but the battle was almost done. He tried to judge how long they had lasted. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, which seemed impossible. The raiders had been so fast, so silky smooth in every movement, so accurate with every shot. It was eerie.

They had looked like barbarians perched like crows on the hilltop, but they were nothing of the sort. He had taken down maybe a dozen, and they had all been farmer types, emaciated and ropey from the famine, but they had each gone down snarling, often picking off another Twingite before they bled out. Something had turned them all into trained killers.

They were heading uphill. He could hear others’ ragged breathing around him and tried to get their attention, but every time he called out, somebody pressed a thumb into his leg wound, and he ended up biting clean through his lip trying to hold in the screams.

Why were they keeping any of them alive? To barter or torture, maybe for slave labour? He promised to kill the others before himself. No Twingite would be a slave, nor suffer a lingering death.

Someone kicked the back of his knees and he fell forward with a grunt, white-hot agony flashing in his pelvis and up his spine as his full weight landed on the shredded meat of his leg. Others landed in the grass on either side of him and then his hands were free. He wiped the blood from his eyes.

They were sacking the observatory nearby, hauling out the last of those barricaded inside like hounds rooting foxes from a run. Those who blabbered and begged were shot or hacked to the ground. Those who fought back were knocked out cold and thrown on the grass beside Max and the other captives.

Charlie stood over them, unscathed. He and the wolfish man had vanished before he had ever reached his gun, even with his limp. “You people and your pride,” he said and spat at Max’s feet.

“Just finish it,” Max growled.

“Finish?” Charlie grinned, and Max saw a shadow of the wolfish man’s leer buried somewhere behind it, an infectious inner madness that seemed to radiate from every one of these creatures. “Nah. You people have a reputation for being real tough bastards, and you put up a hell of a fight. You’ve got the spark He wants. You’re all with us now.”

Max looked at the others beside him in the grass. He expected them to be veterans, nail-hard folk from before the End. But instead, most of them were young, some only kids. Among them he spotted Radley Tibble, snot nosed and whimpering in the grass, clutching a ragged strip of his mother’s dress, one end charred, the other dripping red.

They didn’t deserve this. He knew what it was like to lose everyone you loved in the blink of an eye. Better if they had all died down there with their families. His mental switch flickered on and off, and a wrenching twist was working into his guts. “Who’s He?” he said.

Charlie stepped aside, and another figure took his position—a tall man with a balaclava tied around his face. A pair of wood pigeons bobbed on one shoulder, cooing and cocking their heads to watch the smouldering wreckage below. The man’s striking green eyes lanced into him. He felt like a pincushion, speared by that gaze.

I know those eyes
, Max thought.
But no, it can’t be
. “You can burn our homes, but you can’t take away what we are. We’re free. We’ll never fight beside you pigs, so get it over with.”

The tall man stepped forward and loosened the balaclava, letting it fall to one side. A few of the kids cried out at the maw revealed in the virgin light. Even Max repressed a grimace. It was hard to believe he was alive; there was so much scar tissue, so much shrunken, retracted flesh, exposed membrane and muscle. Patches of bare skull showed in a few spots around where the cheeks and chin should have been.

“It’s been a long time, Vandeborn,” he said.

“James …” Then Max could only shake his head, speechless for the first time in memory.

The fires of Twingo were dying low, and the last survivors were being thrown down on the grass. The flock of victors—filthy, stick-thin and stinking—gathered around the gutted observatory, surrounding their prey on all sides.

But Max scarcely noticed anyone but the tall man before him. Eventually, he found his voice again. “What happened to you?”

He didn’t answer, just turned and pointed east. The pigeons cooed, cocking their heads, as though following the line of sight drawn out by his arm. Max’s eyes followed it too, and his gaze fell upon the horizon. Glistening in the early morning haze, amidst the sagging ruin of London, was the single lit spire in Canary Wharf.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

—Plato

Every man gotta right to decide his own destiny.

—Bob Marley

“Geoffrey, get down!” Alexander Cain bellowed.

A hundred other warnings joined his own, but they came too late. The line of dark figures holed up on the mezzanine of the old skyscraper had already snaked their rifle barrels into view. Before the members of the ambassadorial convoy from Bristol could raise their heads, three dozen muzzle flashes winked in the gleaming midday heat.

The first volley killed Geoffrey Oppenheimer’s son and his two nieces, along with three of his other companions. Red mist fizzed into the air as they dropped to the cracked pavement, and the procession of carts, horses, and trailers scattered like insects. Then the air filled with cracks, whines, and screams, and Alexander ducked back under cover.

So close, they were so close to home. Only fifty feet separated them from the safety of the fortified walls of the compound around Canary Wharf Tower. But it was all open ground without a speck of rubble to shield them. The bastards had known right where to spring their trap.

The guards up on the compound’s walls returned fire, still yelling for Oppenheimer’s group to flee, but Alexander doubted they were hitting their marks. The majority of the enemy had likely fled already, ducked back into the endless tracts of chrome and steel that made up the city’s bulk. They would never find them if they searched for a week.

Although he was stranded behind the pillar of the underground parking lot, which exploded and fragmented as rounds ricocheted all around him, he had a sense that there was little of Oppenheimer’s group left to save. It had been the same since the ambassadorial convoys had started arriving from the outer settlements. They had been under siege for days.

Forty years ago, before the Old World had come crashing down, commuters had squeezed along these streets in their millions. The skyscrapers had gleamed then—steel and glass spires that stood testament to man’s dominion over all the world. The concrete, too, had been fresh and smooth, and the air had been alive with radio and microwaves, transmitting billions of messages and voices.

Things had changed since the End. The City of London, the small nexus that lay in the centre of London’s sprawling bulk, was a city no longer. It was a mausoleum. No computer had whirred nor phone trilled for decades. All the electronics had turned to dust that day, at the same time as almost every man, woman, and child had vanished suddenly, leaving empty clothing crumpling to the ground and a cascade of falling jewellery.

Only a few had survived. The Early Years had almost finished them, but humanity had pulled through. Since then, they had all faced countless trials and tribulations, but none as bad as now. A famine had levelled any crop worth harvesting, and a blood feud had erupted across the land. An army was gathering, bearing down on the last remnants of civilisation. All that stood between them and a new Dark Age were a few thousand precious souls.

Five of whom had just been blown away on the street outside.

Alex gritted his teeth as plaster exploded from the pillar around his head, shredded by shrapnel. Blinking the sting from his eyes, he looked around at the others crouched in the parking lot, breathless and filthy after their long cross-country ride. They’d had only seconds of warning, having flung their horses and themselves under the first cover in sight. Oppenheimer’s party had been moments behind, but they had arrived from the other direction and hadn’t been so lucky. The narrow city street had funnelled the convoy into a neat line stretching directly before the enemy skyscraper, right into the firing squad’s line of sight.

It was a turkey shoot.

“Sons of bitches!” Marek Johnson roared over the racket, inches to Alexander’s right. “Cowards, rotten cowards.” The tendons in his thick neck tensed, and his face screwed into an ugly mask of burgeoning fury. Thickset and powerful, he looked absurd crammed between a ticket turnstile and the rusted carcass of an old Audi. His grip on his rifle tightened, as if he were preparing to leap from cover.

“Stay down!”

“I’m not leaving them out there.”

“There’s nothing you can do.”

“Bullshit!”

He was scrambling to his feet when Alexander risked losing a hand, reaching out across the two feet of open ground between them. Marek easily had twice Alexander’s mass and was twenty years his junior, but nevertheless, Alexander felt the usually stoic protector yield under his hand. Such were the way of things when you were heralded as the Messiah who would save civilisation.

Marek’s eyes were ablaze, but he stayed put.

Alexander was reminded of Lucian, and a pang of anguish ran through him. In the firefight he had almost forgotten about his own brother. He was out there in the wilds somewhere. They had raced in aid of New Canterbury only a day ago and had spent a mere hour with boots on the ground at the suspected site of the enemy stronghold. It had been a false alarm; no shots had been fired. Yet still the silver-haired Lucian McKay had disappeared. They had searched for hours amidst the massacred corpses of countless slaves and innocents, but he hadn’t been among them.

Alex wished he were here now.

Gunfire still smacked with jarring jolts against the other side of the pillar, but its rate was ebbing. He tore his rifle from around his shoulder and swung around onto his toes, signalling for the others to do the same. Ignoring the aches and pains in his tired old body, he listened with practised patience until the lull reached its zenith, and then cried, “Now!”

They leapt from cover and fired a return volley as one, peppering the weathered glass of the enemy position until it was fine spray, leaving a gaping hole all along one floor of the skyscraper. Perhaps once, such destruction would have seemed a scar upon the face of perfection, when the world’s economy had been managed from these very buildings, but not now—not among the mosses, the creepers, the fallen ceilings and walls, and all other the signs of Father Time’s work.

They kept shooting until Alexander was certain the streets were empty, that whoever had survived from Oppenheimer’s party had taken shelter, and then waved to cease fire. They waited in ringing silence as plaster dust rained down on their shoulders and the tinkling of broken windows settled in the distance. Alexander’s legs were screaming from the effort of holding his crouched position—

Christ, I’m old
, he thought.

But so long as the others were behind him, he would never show weakness, not if it killed him.

“What’s the situation down there?” came the voice of a guard up on the compound walls. “How many injured?”

Alex glanced around at the taut, determined faces beside him, and all the smoking barrels of as many rifles. “None!”

“Mobile?”

“All.”

“Can you make it to the gate?”

Alex darted his head to peer at the stretch of shattered glass on the distant skyscraper. Only blackness met his gaze, the enemy nowhere in sight, for now. They might start firing again the moment they stepped into the light. But so many counted on his strength, and they were so close to safety. They couldn’t afford to be beaten into submission. He trusted every man and woman in his party with his life, but even now he felt pressure on the back of his neck. All the long years he had trained his inner circle to lead others, to be his emissaries—his very flesh incarnate—and still now they were looking to him for strength.