Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) (26 page)

He cast a look in Norman’s direction, his lips tightened, and he said, “The girl.”

Norman turned and knelt before Billy, holding her shoulders tight. Her eyes remained unfixed, wandering the skies as though seeing another world entirely. “Billy, I need you to stay here. We’re going to go and do what we can, but I can’t do that if I’m worried about you.” He shook her hard, and her eyes shifted to him vaguely. For a moment he thought the fog in her eyes might have cleared. “Billy. Promise me that you won’t move from this spot. If anybody comes, you hide.”

“I thought we needed her to stop… I dunno, bad voodoo,” Richard said.

“She’s here, ain’t she?” Lucian said.

“I don’t think that’s what the Jester meant.”

Norman rounded on him. “You want to take her down there?”

Richard turned away, shaking his head.

Norman clutched her tighter. “Billy. Promise me.”

The slightest hazy murmur: “Okay.”

He remained a moment longer, her shirt bunched in his hands, then forced himself to say, “I’ll be back soon.”

Shrugging off a bloom of fear in his loins, he turned to Lucian. “We need a plan for once we get in there.”

“Round up who we can and get them into the sewers,” Lucian said immediately.

“What about the militia?”

Lucian gave him a stony look that said it all. There was no fighting back. He just didn’t want to accept the obvious: the city had been lost the moment the army showed up.

Lucian snapped his gun’s chamber closed and addressed Richard with a tight sigh. “Look, kid. This isn’t some book, this is balls-to-the-wall real. You go down there, you probably don’t come back. But nobody’s going to make you go. We got five seconds, so choose. If you’re with us, you’re with us. If not, mind the girl.”

Richard’s eyes lost their glaze, filling with hate as a bucket is filled with boiling tar. “Norman, do you still have my master’s king?”

Norman smiled thinly and patted his pocket, where John DeGray’s black chess piece still rested snugly to his side. “Right here.”

“Keep hold of it until we’re done.” He turned a steely eye on Lucian and nodded, sweat beading on his brow.

Lucian grunted. “Maybe you’re okay.”

“You’re still an arsehole.”

The tiniest twitch bunched the side of Lucian’s mouth, then they turned and ran down the hill. Norman remained with Billy a moment longer. “Be safe, Billy.”

She nodded but still didn’t see him, so very far away.

A momentary panic stabbed at his heart—
what if we need her; what if this really is going to bring the End if she isn’t with us
—but he thrust it aside. There was nothing else to be said: he wasn’t going to take a little girl down there. If it took that to save the world, then the world would have to end.

He ran a hand over her cheek, then tore himself away, chasing the others towards the crumbling bastion of New Canterbury.

Allie screeched, trembling uncontrollably. She could barely hold her gun straight, let alone settle on a target. Figures moved back and forth ceaselessly in her sights. They had lost precious moments when the army appeared at the far end of the High Street, pouring in from the fields in all directions and converging on the central parade.

She, Heather, Abernathy, and the others had just stopped. Not a single one of them had fired, dumbstruck by the sheer enormity of the crowd. It didn’t seem possible. All the while, the army had approached, first at a cautious lope, then at a sprint. She and the others simply watched for what seemed like an age, frozen in place, as a thousand people had come screaming down the road towards them. Not until shrapnel started pinging off the cars around them had any of them squeezed a trigger.

Abernathy had been the first, taking the enormous 30-calibre in his hands and started spraying rounds down into the crowd. A dozen people hit the pavement, though most rounds went so wild they ended up embedded in masonry over fifteen feet up. It wasn’t enough to scatter the approaching ranks. Instead they moved onto pavements, ducking behind lamp posts and postboxes, lunging from doorway to doorway, diving behind bushes and the rusted hulks of old trucks. The dark, unstoppable ooze gained on the militia with terrifying speed.

Allie could hear nothing over the sound of Abernathy’s fire, the sheer volume of it thrumming in her chest. It seemed such a horrific thing of destruction, rending flesh and cleaving dozens of people by the second. But for every one Abernathy took down, ten more took their place. By the time Allie and the others had found their first targets, the front lines were a mere forty feet from the base of the roadblock. Returning fire began a moment later.

As soon as she and the others started shooting, she realised just how inadequate they were. Back on the ranges under Sarah’s instruction, she had watched straw men cut in half and felt so powerful. Like they stood a chance.

Now any notion of their having become gunsmiths in the past few weeks melted away. She emptied her first clip with stunning speed. She thought she might have made a single hit, and she knew it hadn’t killed. She cast a glance to her right to check on Heather and blinked in shock. Heather’s gun lay against the hood of a Jeep. Heather herself lay behind its thick tyres, crawled into a ball, her hands over her ears, rocking back and forth.

“Heather!” Allie screamed.

Heather only kept rocking, shaking her head. “No, no!”

Allie shook all over. She hadn’t thought a person could shake as much, a full-body trembling that threatened to pull her apart. She kept firing, missing almost every shot. The army grew close, resolving into individual faces wrought by terror and rage, some eyes wild and others streaming with tears, sweeping towards her like a wave.

Then silence consumed everything, and her heart almost stopped.

I’m dead. I was hit, I died, I’m dead—

She wasn’t dead. Those in her sights still rushed forwards. But it wasn’t silent; her ears still rang. She cast her gaze wildly to Abernathy and saw him bellowing soundlessly.

The gun had run through its reel of ammunition. Allie made to leap from cover to reload from the barrel beside him, when the side panel of the Nissan Micra beside her disintegrated in a hail of hot metal.

They were waiting for us to run through the reel. They can afford to. There are that many.

Allie gritted her teeth and started forwards, but another burst of shrapnel tore away the Micra’s wing mirror, just inches from her chest, and she cowered back with a whimper. Abernathy scrabbled with the gun himself, hauling out a fresh reel. A thud reverberating through Allie’s chest told her it was too late: the invaders had reached the bottom of the roadblock.

“We can’t stay here!” she yelled.

“What do we do?” Abernathy wheeled away from a red-hot round that shattered a headlight by his side.

“Get to the cathedral. It’s the only place we might be able to hold them!”

“Hold against this?” Abernathy’s voice broke, so high was his scream. Before she could reply, he jerked. The tiniest sliver of red arced from his temple, and he rolled to the side, tumbling out of sight. It happened so fast that Allie didn’t even have time to reach out to catch him.

She screamed a curse. Flinging herself after his lifeless body, she landed with a crack on the ground. Something in her back ripped, but she didn’t pause, didn’t give the pain time to blossom. She grabbed at Heather, slapping her across the face, pulling her hair. “Get up, get up, get up!” she screamed.

Heather shook her head quite calmly, staring at the ground.

“Don’t do this, please don’t do this. Please, Heather.”

Thumping on the other side of the roadblock, now. They were climbing.

“Please!”

Heather’s eyes cleared a tad. “Go, Allie,” she said flatly.

“Get the bloody hell up, you stupid cow!”

That maddening calm voice. “It’s okay. Just go.”

“No, I—”

A high screech cut across her as a figure fell in her peripheral vision across the street. For a heart-stopping moment Allie thought they had come over the top, but then she picked out little Tommy Doogan spreadeagled in the rubble, the left side of his ribcage torn away.

Allie swayed, saw black, then gripped Heather’s lapels. “Don’t do this to me,” she whimpered.

Heather looked dully into her eyes. “Go.”

Allie ran. Glancing over her shoulder, she glimpsed what seemed like a tar oozing up over the head of the roadblock, a wave of human bodies thrust forwards by an unfathomable legion from behind. The first few crashed down into the street without grace, pushed by those behind. The next jumped, scrambling for cover, then fired along the street itself. Allie threw her arms over her head as rounds snapped and whizzed close by. She didn’t dare look back again.

Elsewhere, the screams ringing out had changed from those of fear to those of pain. Already the returning volleys had died to a trickle. In place of the sound of gunfire was that of groaning metal and toppling cars. The city had been breached.

Billy walked in shadow. Things amorphous and veiled in darkness shifted around her in constant motion. Cold rained down on her shoulders and slicked her skin, each moment seeping deeper into her, stopping her breath in her throat and weighing her down. She wanted to lie down and sleep in the grass. Right here would be fine. She just needed to rest for a while. On the verge of looking around for a comfy spot, she wondered how long she had been walking.

Don’t know.

Where had she been before?

Don’t know…

Who was she?

Doesn’t matter. Sleep now.

She was about to start bending her legs when a sharp crack cut through the shadows, washing it all away like cobwebs parting in a gale.

Billy blinked. Light. Green hills, trees, an iron-grey sky. She turned on her heels and saw she was alone upon a hillside, three hundred feet above a city of wibbly-wobbly stone houses. A pall of loneliness fell heavy around her shoulders as she realised the others were gone—just gone.

Poof
, she thought weakly.

She turned in a wide circle and found a pile of the others’ things nearby in the grass. Darkness lay wrapped around the city’s far side, made of thousands and thousands of people. Angry people, smirching everywhere nearby with darkness that slowly crept into the fields.

I have to go down there
.

The itch in her feet that had carried her from the cottage with Daddy to the forests of Radden Moor awakened and bade her to advance. She started forwards, but an almighty burst of gunfire coming from the city’s biggest road forced her back with almost physical force.

I have to go, or we all go away.

Already she could feel the Frost creeping about her heels, rising over her shins. Soon it would cover the whole city, if the Bad People kept rushing in, and then… once everybody was dead, it would spread.

Gripping the hem of her sleeves and biting her lip, she started forwards, heading down the hill. At first it was hard to take each step, and she jumped at every gunshot. But soon the itch took hold, and the Light lit up a path before her, guiding the way. The mindless haze crept back over her, and she went gladly to that place where there was no fear, where there was only her against the shadow.

“Down! Everybody down now!”

Sarah and the children flung themselves sprawling onto the cobbles as a blanket of hot metal spewed into the street. The town hall’s cladding vanished in a puff of splinters. Inside, a few errant cries of pain rang out from the handful who had taken shelter there.

Sarah scrabbled up, grabbing at her belt for her pistol as a group of thin skeletal creatures appeared before her. Those at the front were armed, those behind holding knives and pickaxes. A beat passed in which she and the party stared at each other, then their eyes moved over the children. Their stances softened for a moment—the tiniest flicker of hesitation.

Sarah had been counting on it. She crouched down and took careful aim. It took everything she had to go through the motions and to not merely close her eyes and start spraying bullets, but surging adrenaline brought a strange outer-body deliberateness over her as time stretched, and she found her mark and fired. She missed.

No!

She aimed again, fighting back panic, and fired. The first figure dropped to the cobbles with a muffled
oof.
By the time the others blinked from their stupor, Sarah had found her second target, and a third. She shattered an elbow instead of hitting the chest she aimed for, and a round went wild and hit what would have been her fourth target. It didn’t matter. She kept shooting. Five bodies hit the cobbles in lifeless heaps. None of them got a single round off.

Absurdly, she had time for a cogent thought to run through her head, calm and ponderous as an armchair philosopher’s:
so that’s what it’s like to take life.

Then she was hauling children up by their hair, screaming, clawing, beating. They rose under her coaxing voice, shaking and weeping. Not fast enough. Even as she ripped them bodily into the air and placed them on their feet, a few lost their courage and sank back to the cobbles.