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

Evian cast a desperate glance at Bud, her mouth ajar. Tears stung her eyes.

She could usually see all his clever plans flitting behind his eyes. Bud always had a plan. But right now, there was nothing in those soft brown eyes but blankness.

He took her hand and pulled her against the wall alongside Pepper where they cowered in unthinking, shuddering fugue.

No. They can’t be back. They can’t. They left. They went away. There’s nobody left to burn. They’re all gone.

Her heart leapt.

Except us.

The silence deepened yet again, clawing at her ears. After a moment she realised it hadn’t deepened but only been contrasted by a new noise, one rising from silence like a leviathan from the deep.

Somewhere out there, beyond the blackened walls, many footfalls upon muddied ground. A great many.

Evian pressed tighter against the remains of the Pepsi Squad, and they cowered together in a ball of tears and nerves as the sound grew louder, rising above the dying flames and the trickling breeze. For a few odd hanging seconds it seemed it could grow no louder, then metamorphosed into a rumble that shook out showers of ash from the wall. The earth throbbed to the marching beat.

It can’t be. It can’t. There aren’t that many people in all the world.

In defiance of her, the rumble grew louder still. The house seemed ready to crumble to so much sand.

Bud trembled against her skin. Even a minute ago she would have given anything to have him against her like this. Now she only hoped he didn’t wet his pants.

“Look!” Pepper squeaked. She pointed a shaking finger out through the denuded window frame beside them, past the barn and across the valley.

The grey morning, dark and lifeless under lacklustre clouds, had been stained by a dark cap upon the hilltops. Evian watched the wilted grass become smothered by the first lapping waves of some dark encroaching ocean, thrusting its fingers over the horizon. Spilling down into the valley to the rhythm of the marching beat underfoot, the smudge resolved into something that took Evian’s thundering heart and stopped it entirely.

A carpet of people marching south. All armed with blades, with guns, with long poles trailing a symbol she had hoped never to see again: a white bird painted with four aggressive slashes; round body, two wings, and a bulbous head. The sigil of a pigeon.

Something clicked in Evian’s head; a primal will to survive that overcame the numbness steeling through her conscious mind.

She crawled from the huddle, dragging the others in her wake. Bud and Pepper hissed and yelped, but she sent a blazing glare over her shoulder, and they fell silent, yielding to her. She yanked them until the three of them pressed against the legs of the dining table. She nodded to the chimney stack where a small hollow lay exposed, where the fire had partially eaten through to the wall space.

The dark stain upon the land grew closer, stretching from horizon to horizon.

Oh my God. So many people. So many!

They had to get to the crawlspace. If they were found, three little piggies in their house all fallen down…

A shiver ran through her, and her skin crawled with a foreign chill.

Evian counted down on her fingers, mouthing:
Three, two, one, now!

Grimacing, the three of them half crawled, half tumbled over the smouldering floorboards. A breeze had picked up from nothing, rustling Evian’s hair, tugging at her as though a vanguard of the coming leagues. How could so light a touch of air upon her skin bring such a strong urge to throw back her head and scream?

Pepper reached the crawlspace and scurried inside, hissing and cursing, and Bud followed close behind. Pepper, so small and lithe, managed to squeeze herself into a cranny only inches wide. But Bud’s body, thick with freshly-blossomed muscle, took up almost all the remaining space. On any other occasion, Evian would have said she would never fit.

Not today. I’m getting in there.

She vaulted in after them, ignoring gasps of pain and the crushing embrace of the walls around cramped ankles and bent limbs.

A strange, distant part of her mind flashed up a memory of an Old World book she had seen once: an encyclopaedia of animals out there in the world. She had loved the water animals the best. And her favourite of all had been the strangest: the octopus, eight-legged and boneless and so wonderfully
weird
. They could squeeze their entire bodies into milk bottles to get at their food.

They probably looked like that now. Three human beings, bottled inside a chimney.

And yet, even in here, the wind persisted—there was no space between them for air to flow, yet the wind blew.

Despite the growing rumble, amplified by the hollowness of the chimneys above their heads, Evian frowned.

It wasn’t a wind. Not really. It was something else: a caress, so gentle and cold that she thought her arm might become covered with tiny snowflakes.

“What’s happening?” Pepper hissed from the chaos of bodies.

“It’s so cold. There are embers under us. We should be boiling.” Bud breathed.

“Shh!” Evian said.

The three of them grew silent, their breathing terrifyingly loud, reverberating in the enclosed space. From here, all they could see was a small window of the house before them, facing southward—shielding them from view, but also blocking their line of sight of what approached.

Outside, the rumble grew still, and the army marched ever southward. Wide-eyed and shaking, they waited as the cold grew only stronger, seeming to intensify at the same rate as the footsteps’ volume—almost as though the army brought with it a halo of otherworldly chill.

Evian died a small death when shadow first splashed over the garden path. A single human profile that immediately became several, then many, then smothered into an amorphous undulating wave heading towards the barn. The cold seemed to steel into the chimney with bony fingers and grip her by the throat when the marching men and women began to pass. A single mass of starved bodies, sticklike and angular, shuffling forth over the land, their faces fallen and mute.

Like a river the army flowed around the burned-out ruin, spilling into sight from both sides and passing on. Evian kept her hands clamped over Bud’s mouth, and Pepper kept hers over Evian’s. Her skin thrummed with cold so intense, she was sure it would flay her alive.

Then footsteps separate from the marching beat, deeper and closer. Somebody had passed through the house’s fallen walls, moving over the floorboards to their left. Evian bit her lip hard to staunch a scream. Bud and Pepper had become stiff as the chimney’s bricks.

Three men stepped into sight, looking around at the charred remains of the living room, a mere six feet from the chimney. One was wolfish and round-shouldered, another young and limping. They paused a few moments to look at the remains, then moved on, stepping over the walls and following the army south, as though shepherds following their flock. The last man, however, remained. Tall, covered in an oilskin duster, he stood before the dining table, facing away from them. Upon his shoulders, two pigeons bobbed and cooed. The birds stared directly at Evian, and for a horrific moment her mind tortured her with a mental image of the birds leaning into the man’s ears and whispering,
There. Over there.

Instead, the man held his arm out to the side, his gaze fixed on the book in his hand. The half-burned paperback Bud had cast aside.

The pigeons cooed contemplatively upon the man’s shoulders.

He was so close that even from their hiding place, Evian could read the title:
Alice in Wonderland.

The following moment could have stretched on for years, thrumming with something
more
. The biting cold screamed down upon Evian’s skin, and in her peripheral vision she realised that snowflakes really
were
forming on her skin, blossoming upon her forearms’ fluffy down.

Struggling for breath, she watched the man turn to face the chimney, his eyes still on the book.

His face. His face… Where is his face?

She glimpsed bone and exposed muscle, a terrible mask of beauty spoilt. Above cheeks half-missing, through which exposed molars peeped, a pair of bright green eyes moved over the book. Eyes intelligent and sparking with intent and rage.

Evian knew she would never forget that stare, one broken and twisted, lost between life and death.

The man with the emerald eyes took the book gently in both hands, held it there before him a moment, then with sudden violence tore it in half. The pages fluttered down like so many feathers, twirling amidst the snowflakes raining upon the ashy floor.

Norman Creek chased a ghost through the forest.

Little Billy Peyton’s shadow flitted between the trees far ahead, wisps of flaming red hair and pale Irish skin amongst the branches. Despite his calls for her to slow down, she kept her relentless pace, giving no indication she’d heard. Cursing and praying he didn’t get lost out here in the ancient foggy woodlands, hundreds of miles from home, Norman plunged onwards.

His lungs burned from running, and fog pressed in close all around. Gnarled branches loomed from the white blanket so fast that he relied on instinct to dodge them, ducking and wheeling on the balls of his feet. His head throbbed to the beat of a single looping thought:
This is stupid, this is stupid, this is stupid.

One false step from any of them would result in a broken ankle. But there was no slowing. No time to think. Not when the stakes were so high.

Robert, Lucian, and Richard pursued a few paces behind. Of the two dozen who had set out from New Canterbury to this strange place in England’s far north, only the four of them remained. The others lay in pools of blood, back upon the clifftop from which they had just descended.

With every blink, Norman saw their blank staring faces in his mind’s eye. Cut down by James Chadwick, the architect of all their strife, the man with merciless emerald eyes. Their enemy. Their brother.

Stop that
, he scolded himself.
You can’t help them now. The others still need us. Keep your head.

If he let himself wander, everything that remained of the Old World would vanish forever. Right now an army marched to erase New Canterbury and the Alliance of the South from the face of the Earth. And once that happened, there was no going back. The world as they knew it would plunge unheeding into a new dark age. Everything they had worked for would be lost.

“Keep your bloody hands to yourself.” Lucian scowled behind him. The vicious grey-haired little man sounded fit to tear the world a new orifice and forget his weeks of starving and slaving away as James’s prisoner.

“You’re stumbling. You can barely stand,” Richard grunted.

“I’m fine!”

“Keep your damn feet up then, you knackered old goat!”

Despite apocalyptic stakes and the bloodbath from which they had just emerged, Norman grinned. To think that Richard, a scrawny little bookworm, would ever square off against Lucian McKay.

He had changed. Watching your master die in front of you could have that effect.

It had been two hours since the man who perhaps had been the world’s last scholar, John DeGray, had been gunned down along with the others. Richard, his apprentice, had been right beside him. His face still bore dried flakes of his blood.

Neither of them were meant for this world. They belonged to the Old World, a place of knowledge and relative civility. Not today’s world, a place of tooth and claw. A land of survivors.

Robert Strong’s deep no-nonsense voice followed them all through the trees from the rear. “The more you two talk, the slower you move. Now shut it before I smash both your heads together.”

A moment’s silence reigned, and Norman felt the old forest press in on them from all sides. He realised just how alone they were out here. With James’s army departed, for all they knew, they could be the only people for dozens of miles in any direction. And this was no ordinary place.

Radden Moor, cloaked in its veil of wandering fog, heath-clad and barren and iron-skied, was a special place.

Something told him that if they became separated in these woods, they would never be reunited, not even if they passed within ten feet of each other. The forest would consume them.

“Billy, wait!” Norman called.

Her distant voice echoed from up ahead. “No time.”

“We’ll lose you!”

“Then move faster.”

“The fog’s too thick. If I lose you…”

“You’ll find me. I feel you.” He could no longer see her save for the dimmest flicker of shadow through the creeping fog. Her disembodied voice crept through the branches. “Don’t you feel me?”

He didn’t answer, didn’t need to.

“How much farther?” Robert bellowed.

Billy’s voice again, sounding even farther away, terrifyingly faint. “Almost there.”

How can the kid be so calm? Calmer than four grown men? She can’t be more than nine or ten years old.

Because kids still had that magic spark alight inside them. The willingness to look into the abyss, see monsters and vampires born of imagination, and keep going anyway. This kid in particular had something extra too. A certain brightness, like she had been spliced into the world from a place where the sun was brighter.