Ecko Endgame (42 page)

And then her arms were round his shoulders, sliding, and she was there against him. She was strong and sweet and supple and he could feel her leather armour and the leanness of her body beneath it and his hands were going around her back as if he’d never, ever let her go. He had a split-second of pure, cold panic, and then her mouth was warm, and wanting, and he could kiss her like he knew what he was doing and just let the rest of the world fall away…

But there was still a shadow between them. Something a lot closer than Tarvi had been.

He pulled back with an effort, needing to know. “Triq…”

“What?” She was still close; she was breathing the word almost into his mouth.

“Redlock…”

“Redlock is
dead
,” she said. The word was abruptly fierce, and she pulled back to meet his gaze, her expression afire. “Ress is dead, Jayr is dead, Taure is dead, Mostak is dead, Roviarath is dead, the Banned is
dead.
The world is crawling on her knees.” She was whispering, but each word was a slap. “I’m desert-born, remember? Life is sacred. The life of the world, and the celebrations of what really matter. Redlock will never be forgotten: he’ll be with me ’til the day I die. However damned close that might be. You,” and now her hands pulled him closer, and her voice was in his ear, “you’re
here
. And tomorrow, you go too – you and Amethea both – and I have to grow up, once and for all. I have to rebuild a world.”

For a moment longer, he teetered on the edge of massive, world-shaking indecision. But the simple urge of
want
was roaring loud, drowning out everything else. It flexed him under the touch of her hands, it pushed him closer into her, it wrapped his arms around her back.

It made her catch her breath in response.

In the darkness, the moonlight caught the opal stones in her face, the blood scattered across one side of her jaw. It caught the gold of her skin.

And it made her shine.

Drenched in disbelief, Ecko wished he could keep this one image, this one moment…

And then his indecision was gone and he touched his mouth to hers. He had no clue what he was doing, but she kissed him back fearlessly, a murmur of pleasure in her throat. And he found himself responding, losing everything else to the sensations and the scents of her.

And later, when she was there under him, a tangle of hair and blankets and rocklight, when her smooth thighs were hard around his hips and pulling him into her, when he was kissing her, still in astonishment and wonder and incredulity, when he was feeling the arch of her back and her slender, callused hands on his skin and her body wrapped all hot and sliding round him…

Then he would have given his entire fucking soul for that world, for that lust and closeness and release, to be real.

It was the ruin that finally gave Lugan his insight.

The building was a stone cot, walls crumbled and beam roof half-collapsed, all of it grown over by creeper that had long since dried to desiccation. It looked like the kind of place you’d find some lone Highland warrior, battle-scarred and hell-bent on revenge. And Lugan knew it – or something like it – from the throttle-dropping days of his youth.

The old shell stood in silhouette, guarding the mountain pass.

He reached it as the sun was lowering in the sky ahead, and he paused to lean his weight on his knees, legs and lungs straining from the long, ragged climb. The wind cut like glass, making him cough, and swear, and cough again.

Memories passed him like tail lights: urban desolation, revving engines through abandoned buildings, a sore arse and stiff back, cold hands, ears that thundered with ferrocrete echoes. Then he grunted, half-reminiscent and half-scornful, and straightened up, wincing. He closed his eyes to the sunlight, absorbing much-needed warmth.

His Pocket of Eternal Dog-Ends had finally run dry, old baccy re-rolled and re-rolled until it was almost pure tar. Even his flask was empty – though he’d stopped to refill it with water at every possible chance. He wondered if there was anything in the cot that he could smoke, or eat.

“Yeah,” he muttered aloud, “Fuckin’
moss.
”

When he opened his eyes to look down, though, he ran right out of sensible thoughts.

“Bloody ’ell!”

Below him, spread out like some artist’s map, was a vista of pure impossibility, immense beyond words. It was a vision, land and time and distance that robbed him of breath and left him coughing all over again. It was plains and rivers and clouds, tiny points of cities, long roadways that unrolled between them. It was distances vast, all of it afire with the setting of the sun. It was…

It was fucking
magick.

Okay, so he was still tripping his arse off, he
knew
that. Crystal trees and two moons, for fuck’s sake, you didn’t tell him
that
shit was anything normal. He’d been able to feel it, all through the pale trees and up the toiling, zigzag path – soon now, reality would spike its cold, grey fingers into this… whatever the hell it was. Christ, he’d done his share of psychotropics, once upon a time, and he knew how the story went.

Like that time when—

It was then that the insight really hit him: the broken cot, the memories of his youth. From the days when they could ride as they wanted, racing through derelict warehouses, dropping LSD, mescaline, peyote, whatever they could score. Watching Moorcockian colours rippling fantastic in shattered urban walls. He remembered it so clearly – the insight, the wonder, the worlds they’d seen and built and craved – and he remembered what it felt like as those worlds came apart. As they thinned to two dimensions, burned through, became bleak and chill as a pencil drawing.

As reality manifested once more.

Comedown.

Like the little cot, those broken walls of memory were pure dereliction.

Standing there, cold wind in his face, he looked at the dream spread in front of him, its glow now fading as the sun sank.

And then he saw smoke.

It wasn’t ordinary smoke: it rose briefly white, then billowed into a writhe of black and grey and tan. Sparks danced upwards into the darkening sky. And the
smell…

Rising to the pass where he stood, it was nauseating and sweet, putrid and steaky. It reminded him of childhood barbeques, or of an old leather being cremated on a fire. More echoes – once you’d smelled the stench of decomposing bodies burning, you never, ever forgot it.

Bring on the zombies…

At the meaty reek, his belly rumbled, making him gag. He crouched down by the mossy side of the empty cot, one hand over his nose. Focusing his telescopics, he steadied himself against the momentary head-spin and began to scan the land below.

He needed Fuller, for fuck’s sake, needed Collator to tell him what the hell was going on. And he needed a weapon – he wasn’t sure he wanted to face Dusk of the Living Dead with only his bare hands…

Arse, bollocks and shite!

The fire was close – less than two klicks away, east down the pass – and it was gutting a cot rather bigger and newer than the one beside him. It was hard to see through the smoke and the heat, but the whole place was apparently ablaze, crops, outbuildings and all. There was at least one figure standing there watching it burn.

Ecko?

The thought made him lean forwards, instinctively trying to see more clearly, but the figure was heavily built, bulky-shouldered, and watchful, neither Ecko nor zombie. Lugan was too far away to hear it if it spoke, but he could see it as it turned, its mouth and nose covered, and its forehead etched with… were those scars deliberate? They were more like tattoos, consciously curving and artistic.

They writhed in the heat-shimmer.

Don’t tell me this trip’s gonna turn nasty before the end…

He swallowed bile, tried not to breathe. He searched his pocket for the dog-end he knew wasn’t there. Combing his telos across the site, strip after strip, he found billowing flame and thick, dark smoke, then more figures, faces covered, several of them bearing uplifted flambeaux.

Looking further, he found their mounts – ugly, slope-backed things that resembled camels more than horses – picketed a distance upwind. He supposed he ought to get his arse down there and nick one, saddlebags and all.

Yeah, an’ then what?

The thought made him chuckle.

’Alf a tonne of muscle an’ a brain the size of a lug-nut? Even if it don’t turn into a giant octopus ’alfway down the road, you’re pullin’ my bleedin’ chain. I ain’t ridin’ nothin’ without an engine.

The picketed creatures nosed the grassless ground, uncaring of his opinion.

Motionless, he watched.

After a time, the masked arsonists threw their torches into the blaze. Leaving the fire, they remounted, formed up into a loose gang. He watched them ride away, turning to shout gleefully at one another with faces now exposed and bad teeth bared in laughter. Only one of them had the distinctive scarring, and her face was covered with it, wrought with careful gouges.

Ritual?

Body art?

Self-’arm?

They turned behind a spur of land, and he lost them from view.

Disturbingly loud, his belly grumbled again.

Great. Now what?

Disappointingly, perhaps, no giant octopuses emerged, the sky didn’t erupt with tentacles. The smoke continued to rise and the sun continued to sink, and the clouds glowed, striped with lavender and gold. Lugan sighed.

Onwards it is, then.

His exploration of the ruined cot showed him neither baccy nor food, so he picked up a decent, heavy length of old beam, and wondered if he could make the blaze before full dark.

The sun faded slowly from the plainland, and Lugan used the firelight to lead him through the gathering dusk.

* * *

The gang hadn’t left much.

On his half-clamber, half-skid down the pass, Lugan had been very conscious of leaving the sun behind him, had felt the mountains’ darkness creeping, shadows down the slope.

He’d had bad trips before, and had no fucking intention of letting this one go off the rails.

Instead, he tried to clear his thinking, made an effort to focus – he found himself reflexively asking Fuller to detail the threat. He needed the info-feed, the background, the scans for local populace and security and infrastructure. He needed Ecko to run scout, needed his old Remington, a decent blade, a drone, an aircar with miniguns whirring – hell, don’t do this shit by halves – he needed the whole kit an’ bleedin’ caboodle. The absence of urban sprawl he could do, he’d been enough time on the road to understand space, but the lack of foreknowledge? Right now, he’d settle for a
map.

The info-vacuum was trippy in itself, messing with his head.

Christ almighty. Lugan searched his pocket for a dog-end, swore. Fuller and maps and miniguns were a world away, explain it however you fucking liked. He’d got himself and the shit in his pockets, and he’d better get on with it.

At least it meant the baccy craving was only in his head.

As careful as he could, he eased closer, boots scrunching. He paused as he felt the whack of heat, scanned the rising shimmer.

No zombies, no gang, no traumatised and fleeing civilians.

No security. No fire services.

No fast-response, absolutely bloody nothing.

He raised an arm to shield his face. The wavering of the air made the whole thing completely unreal.

Realising he was sweating, he opened the zip of his jacket. His mouth was dry, tasted like ash. He knew he was jittery – if he didn’t get a roll-up soon he was gonna—

Do what, pillock? What you gonna do?

He could see more clearly now – the place was larger than the cot he’d left behind. It was almost a hamlet, nestled right up here in the cleavage of the mountains. Drystone walls marked simple farming; there was a tiny storehouse, a single standing stone, a scatter of still-burning huts…

As he tried to count them, one collapsed in a shower of sparks.

Nothing else moved.

Baffled now, increasingly freaked and wary of the heat in the stonework, he began a circuit – seeking movement, outbuildings, anything that might’ve escaped.

And slowly he began to understand that something, somewhere, was very badly fucked up.

Okay, so Lugan’d torched stuff a time or two in his life – though he usually used more petrol. When the corporations’ drones didn’t put out the fires, the flames spread swiftly, gobbling their way downwind to take out entire warehouse units, black market stock, squatters, whatever was necessary. As problem-solving went, it was a quick fix.

If you knew what you were doing.

Downwind here, the land was empty – no crops, woods, trees, or fences – and the fire was suffocating for lack of fuel. As Lugan completed his circuit, though, he realised the clearance hadn’t been deliberate.

This farmstead – whatever the hell it was – had no life surrounding it at all.

What?

Sweating profusely now, conscious of his own stink, Lugan paused on a slight rise. This whole thing was becoming more fucked up by the moment. Fuller’s absence was loud as a shout. Informationless, feeling a rising, formless anxiety, he turned to look round him properly, tuning his oculars to see through the failing light.

To see something – anything! – that would tell him what the hell was going on.

And slowly, Lugan began to understand that everything, all round him, as far as he could see, was barren. Bereft of life. Crops and forests, grasses and heathers – everything was dead. Brown and shrivelled, rotten against cracked soil.

Holy fuckin’ mother of God.

As his understanding grew, so his heart shrank in his chest and he stared in disbelief, in rising panic. His vision expanded further, desperate; it roved wider, looked for life, for something still moving. The horror in him swelled, suffocating, leaving him choked and breathless. In the pass, the sun had been in his eyes; now, he could see clearly, and he was surrounded by just…