Ruin (The Ruin Saga Book 1) (17 page)

“You stay here,” he said.

“But—”

“You stay!”

She nodded, and he dived headlong into the fray. From then on any distinguishing features blurred into nothing more than a stifled struggle between shadows.

“Daddy! Grandpa!” she wailed.

But this time her cries didn’t bring Daddy running back. After half a minute, somebody else toppled into the grass, but by that time one of the fallen figures had regained its footing. The fight continued with equal ferocity.

From her left came Grandpa’s voice, “Donald!”

From her right, Daddy’s choked reply, “Dad!”

In the darkness, a woman shrieked, momentarily visible as she flew over the fire’s remains. She crashed into the grass and moved no more.

The odds had turned, and the fight broke. Four of the figures had bunched together, flailing on the ground. Two others remained in the grass, unmoving.

Two further shadows dragged each other to their feet and dashed to the side. Once clear, they paused and turned to her. “Billy!”

She ran to them, skirting the fallen menaces. Strong arms gripped her, Daddy’s face flashed somewhere above, and then she was being dragged through the grass.

Grandpa puffed alongside—a single bag slung over his shoulder—but he soon fell behind, limping badly. He stopped and started, faltering, and could then only take a few steps at a time.

Daddy let go of Billy and ran back to him, looping an arm over his shoulder and hauling him along. Billy ran alongside them, crying, and Daddy hushed her as they crashed into the forest at the meadow’s edge.

At the very same moment the moon crested the horizon, and the first of its silver beams thrust through the canopy, throwing their cover of darkness to the wind. Billy tripped over the roots of trees and ducked beneath overhanging branches, struggling to keep pace. The forest, now dressed in a steely veil, was dark and yet blinding, gnarled and terrifying.

Behind them, their attackers plunged into the trees’ midst and gave chase, taking far less care with how much noise they made, breaking fronds and branches in great swathes. It sounded as though a great, grumbling monster was in pursuit.

With Grandpa’s limp slowing them down, they would be caught in moments. Already Billy could feel a creeping along the back of her neck.

Daddy jabbed her chest and pointed towards a rocky outcrop, silver-white in the glare of a dense patch of moonbeams. It was cragged and riddled with fissures, in such a way that its shadowed crevices would make ideal hiding places. He gripped her arm and plucked her into the air, planting her feet atop the nearest rock. She leapt out upon the archipelago of boulders and bluffs, painfully aware that one slip would break her ankle, and headed towards the deepest cleft in sight.

Grandpa scrambled after her while Daddy glanced over his shoulder at the approaching shadows. “Hurry up!” he whispered.

The three of them bounded towards the cleft, which turned out to be at least six feet deep, and wedged themselves in place. In the sudden stillness their exhalations were deafening.

Billy tried to slow her thundering heart and wiped cold rivers of tears from her cheeks. “Daddy!” she whimpered. He hushed her, but she couldn’t help it. Terror was rising in her chest in waves. “
Daddy!
”

He took hold of her arm and held it tight. The fear burned lower—just enough to let her take control of herself.

The heady stink of rotting mulch and mildew swam around her, clawing at the delicate flesh at the top of her nose, and something that moved too fast and had too many legs was crawling along her thigh.

But now she scarcely noticed. All her attention was focused on the darkness beyond their hiding place.

Less than a minute later, their pursuers arrived at the outcrop. The group of shadows skidded to a halt at the lip of a sharp decline—which lay just beyond the rocks, leading some fifty feet down to an empty streambed—and bent double, catching their breath and cursing.

Billy made not a sound. Her lungs burned, begging for air, but she resisted the urge to gasp—though that did nothing to stop her heart pounding in her chest. Beside her, she sensed Daddy and Grandpa holding their breath. Together, they peered at the steaming shadows as kittens would spy a prowling fox.

As their attackers regained their composure, they began to scan the streambed and the forest beyond. But they didn’t throw a single glance in the direction of the outcrop.

There was a moment when Billy thought they had escaped, a moment in which elation and relief dared to flare up amidst the terror.

But then Daddy’s grip upon her arm became vice-like, hard enough to make her wince. In the moonlight, his darkened features were furrowed and his eyes were wide with horror. Billy nudged him to get his attention, but he had begun to shake.

And then, to Billy’s disbelief, he coughed explosively. His grip upon her arm paralysed her. During the ensuing seconds she could only watch while he bent double and set about great bellowing gargles.

“Don!” Grandpa hissed.

Billy watched as Daddy clamped his hands over his mouth to stifle the sound, but it was far too late. The attackers had turned towards the outcrop and dropped into feline stances, half-crouched amidst the chrome-plated woodland.

“Come out!” sang a high, feminine voice, almost sweet, and yet chilling, without a trace of feeling. Another bout of Daddy’s coughing answered.

The shadows began to creep forwards, as though sensing weakness. The manner in which they moved pulled a string deep in Billy’s mind, one that sensed something unmistakably predatory.

“We know you’re there.” The woman again, her voice a chilling jeer.

Daddy was holding his chest, groaning. His grip on Billy’s arm had redoubled, and Billy was forced to bite her lip to stop herself crying out. He bent low and gasped while the shadows grew closer.

“Donald, run,” Grandpa said. His voice was no longer a whisper. He swung the bag down from his shoulder and pressed it into Daddy’s lap, patting him on the shoulder.

“We can’t,” Daddy gasped. “Your leg.”

But as he spoke, Grandpa was climbing out from the fissure, onto the cragged bluffs. Before Daddy or Billy could utter a word of protest, he gave a huge roar and surged towards the looming pursuers, who merely stood in his path, stunned. He spread his arms and caught them all in his reach. Colliding with them at chest level, he sent them all hurtling over the lip of the hill.

“Dad!” Daddy cried. He was on his feet and had climbed to the other side of the rocks before Billy had had time to react at all. He skidded to a halt at the precipitous edge and bellowed down at the streambed.

From below came Grandpa’s voice, weak and stifled, “Run!”

Billy now stood beside Daddy, but had no memory of having moved from the outcrop; everything was being blurred by instinct and terror. Together, the two of them searched for Grandpa amongst the darkness.

As they watched, the shadows materialised below and proceeded to race over the moonlit streambed. They converged on a huddled figure, and seconds later Grandpa’s voice filled the air once more. This time, however, he yelled only in pain.

“DA—!” Daddy bellowed, but his voice caught in his throat and he doubled over, wheezing as another coughing fit overtook him.

“We have to help him!” Billy shrieked, and leapt over the lip of the hill. For a moment she felt wind on her face as she fell into blackness, but then she ground to a halt in midair, held aloft by Daddy’s arms. She thrashed and kicked in his grasp, squealing in protest as she was lifted back to even ground.

“Donald!” Grandpa wailed. By now he was crying out every other moment, and his voice was slurred. “Run! Take Billy! Run!”

After a further moment of crying out, Daddy stopped.

Billy continued to thrash, shouting for him to help her save Grandpa from the shadows. But instead he slowly stepped back from the decline, and whispered in her ear, “We have to go.”

Billy saw silver tears glowing on his cheeks.

“No! No, we go down. We have to get Grandpa!”

He didn’t answer. He only looked at her, and in that moment Billy realised that there would be no saving anyone.

She flailed in his grasp, but could do nothing against his iron grip. He was lifting their bag from the crevice and heading back towards the campsite. All the while, she twisted and kicked beneath him, hauled backwards through the dirt by her collar.

She wailed at the sound of Grandpa crying out in the night as monstrous shadows stamped at his body. “Daddy, what are you doing? We have to go back! Grandpa—Daddy, no, wait, please—GRANDPA!”

Her screams echoed in the forest for a long time.

The old man awoke in the dirt, shuddering. His vision was blurred, and his arm lay stretched out before him. What had once been his hand was now only a misshapen mass of flesh. He tried to breathe, but his chest only fluttered, delivering a dribble of air to his burning lungs.

Behind him, somewhere in the woodland, voices chattered. Slumped against the silt of the streambed, he could only lie still and listen. Each breath was sacred now, as satisfying as water in a desert.

“Idiots!” said a new voice—a sighing, sibilant hiss that struck a chord deep behind the old man’s eyes, sending his heart pounding and his balls shrinking. A moment’s pause followed. “I think I’m a reasonable man. I’ve a fair heart, I do. So I’ll give you a chance to explain yourselves… What did you
think
you were doing?”

The female voice—the one that had spoken before—stuttered, “We were just looking for some food, is all. We’ve been watching that fucking city for days, and we haven’t heard a peep out of anybody else. How were we supposed to know when we’d get supplies?” She grew bolder, “They was alone, nobody else around. Easy pickings, we thought. But they went and tried to fight, didn't they?”

The woman’s voice gave way to a metallic clatter. Her short scream was cut short by a solid thump.

The first voice had grown quieter, but still the old man’s gut squirmed at the sound of it. He’d travelled far and fought hard in his time to make a life after the End, and he’d met enough maniacs along the way to know one when he heard one. “Well, there wasn’t any food, now, was there? Not a grain. And you could’ve ruined everything before we’ve even got started. You risked it all… You risked His plan.”

The woman’s voice, wet and snivelling, “Please, Jason…”

“
Shut up!
Stupid bitch.” A pair of footsteps and a change in tone. The old man guessed he was addressing the others, “Where’ve his friends gone?”

A third voice, wavering, said, “They ran a while ago. We can’t find them.”

“You pathetic piss stains!” A tense pause. “Where’s your weapons? Give them to me, you’re not worthy to carry them.”

Even from the ground, the old man sensed the uncomfortable silence. The woman spoke again, slurred—perhaps by a mouthful of blood—and hesitant. “We don’t have any.” A moment later she cried out again—a cry that quickly became a choked whine.

“So what you’ve done is run off in the middle of the night—no lights, no weapons—and raid a troop of fucking bumblers for breadcrumbs? And then you let them get away!”

“We weren't looking for trouble. We just come across them, like.” A pause. “We was hungry.”

“So you thought you’d try risking it all?” A dark laugh echoed beneath the forest canopy. “Pathetic. You couldn’t even slit an old man’s throat.”

The third voice, still quivering, “What’s the problem? We kill people all the time, right next to you.”

“It’s not the killing, you dopey shit. It’s you being stupid is what’s wrong. You know how careful we have to be right now. What if they were from the city?”

“They weren’t, we were sure,” the woman wheezed. “I swear.” She whimpered at the sound of a pistol hammer being cocked.

“I should kill you,” the sibilant voice whispered. “Only reason I’m not going to is because I don’t want your mangy fur all over my shoes. But if you slip up again, I’ll eat your brains for breakfast. That goes for all of you. You hear?”

“Y-Y—”

“
Do you hear?
”

“Yes!”

Another silence, the sound of the pistol’s hammer being relaxed, and then, “Get up.”

The old man, with great effort, turned onto his back just in time to see a slight figure scramble to its feet, surrounded by almost half a dozen others. Apart from them was the maniac, there was no mistaking that; his outline was just as feral as his voice.

Once he’d moved, the strangers paused, considering him afresh, and then began to approach. It was as though blood had been dropped into shark-infested waters.

The maniacal, sighing voice cut through the air once more, “What happened to this one?”

“Pushed us down the bloody hill, didn’t he?” the woman said venomously.

“A little tumble wouldn’t do that to someone.”

“We might’ve helped him along a bit.” Now that she no longer had a gun to her head, she sounded amused. An unstable giggle as unsettling as the man’s voice escaped her lips. “Looks miserable, don’t he? Making me feel a bit sick, just looking at him.”

The old man, sensing the end, peered through the silver haze of moonlight to the rocky outcrop high above. Where Don and Billy had been, there was only the bare lip of the hill.

Shuddering and breathless, he managed a bloodied smile. He was sure that most of his teeth were missing, but to smile up at them felt like enough. Felt like a
victory
.

The approaching footsteps gradually wiped it from his face, until finally a shadow fell across the length of his body. The sibilant-voiced man was crouching beside him.

Up close, he was lean-faced and unshaven, with china-doll eyes and a lupine maw. From his direction came a disgusting aroma, one that made the old man suspect that he hadn’t washed in his entire life. Held in his hands was a long, curved knife, which he twirled in his grip with frightening dexterity. He observed the old man almost curiously, with his head tilted to the side. Behind the childlike stare, however, there was not a man, nor a soul, but a monster. “What’s your name?” he said.