Ruin (The Ruin Saga Book 1) (23 page)

The chill of the air outside was bracing, even more refreshing than the shower. With his arms full, he paused in the doorway and looked out over the land surrounding the cottage, which was no longer obscured by the storm’s cloak of mist and rain.

It was another moor, stretching away in all directions towards the horizon. Heather, moss, tall grasses and dense forests were dotted here and there, painted onto the surface of the land as though by an artist’s brush. Far away, blurred by extreme distance, was a small chain of mountains, their peaks capped with a fine smattering of snow.

Radden Moor was now far away indeed, as was every other town that had lain along the road. Even the peak of Porter’s Pass—the tallest in all of Radden County—had fallen out of sight. Not a single human construction was visible. The only thing apart from the cottage hinting at habitation was a dirt road leading away down the hill. He suspected that, eventually, it would lead back to the motorway he’d left the previous evening, before the storm had taken hold.

“Where am I?” he said.

The wind answered, whistling in his ears. It snatched his voice from the air and carried it away down the hill until it bled away into nothing, leaving only another gust in its place.

It seemed impossible that he could have wandered so far into the middle of nowhere, and in so short a time. It also seemed impossible that the trance he’d been under—an emotionless pall that had been marbling his mind—had passed. He knew that it still encapsulated him, shielded him from the shock, yet he was unable to lift it. He was merely privy to a dim knowledge of it, along with the knowledge that at some point it would lift, and leave him exposed to the harshness of reality.

He turned and stepped back into the warmth, and to the wailing. Returning to James, he crouched and sighed. “What am I going to do with you?” he said.

James was whimpering, having cried himself into a state of exhaustion. He watched Alex’s every move and beat at the air feebly with his tiny fists, but still seemed unable to stand, talk, or move much at all. However, the unhealthy tinge remained absent from his lips, and his skin was far less pruned.

“Why you?” Alex said. Looking down at the child, tiny and pathetic upon the blankets, he was suddenly at a loss to explain why, of all of the people in the world, it had survived.

He backed into the armchair and huffed. “Why
me
? I’m nothing special.”

James merely rolled around and gurgled, oblivious.

After a while, Alex found himself speaking again, “We can’t stay here.”

He was all at once certain that he’d spoken the truth. He was ill equipped to deal with a child by himself, dangerously so. The only decent chance the boy had of survival was if they found others—if there
were
others.

He spent the day searching the cottage for anything of value, adding it to a small pile beside the fireplace, before repacking. Most of the clutter he’d taken from his bedroom ended up being replaced by water bottles, canned food, lighters, maps and bedding.

By the time he had done even this, the sun had passed its zenith and he was forced to accept that he would have to spend at least another night in the cottage. He cooked them another meal, faring no better than he had the previous day. Together, the two of them once again ate a burnt dinner.

James still cried often, stopping only occasionally to regain his breath before continuing. Irrespective of whether Alex held him, watched him from afar or ignored him entirely, he blubbered. It was only at dusk that he stopped, and dropped into a slumber from which there was no waking him. Alex took his duvet and spread out on the floor beside the snoring infant, watching his splayed body rise and fall with each breath until he drifted off himself, still helplessly caught in his emotionless trance.

The next morning, just after dawn, the three of them left the cottage. Alex marched along the dirt path, James swaddled close to his chest, held tight by a loop of cloth that ran across his back. In one hand he held a strong stick, and with it he propelled himself towards whatever lay ahead.

The air was cool, and the morning dew still clung to the grass at his feet. Refreshed, he made good progress. The cottage had become a mere speck on the horizon within the hour.

The mountains grew steadily closer, and by midday he had left the path in favour of open grassland. The path would only lead back to the motorway. There was nothing for him there, only the crushed remains of thousands of vehicles, housing as many piles of empty clothing.

The chill and dew had disappeared without grace as the sun took its place directly overhead, replaced by a heat that Alex, with his fair complexion, found intolerable. In the open fields he grew hotter by the moment, until a sticky layer of perspiration soon coated his skin, and the dog panted without pause.

All the while, James cried in protest.

The wailing and the heat took their toll. He could only bear the sun for a further hour before retreating under cover. Once beneath the canopy of a nearby forest, however, seeing green spots and stumbling over roots, he realised that shade would come at the price of speed.

As he struggled through the underbrush, the first bird he had seen since the Great Flocks landed upon a high branch and cooed as though in greeting, cocking its head.

James gurgled at the sight of it, uttering an unmistakable cry of joy. His chubby, stunted fingers reached for the canopy, wriggling.

“You like him?” Alex said. He looked up at the bird, recognising it as a homing pigeon. As he watched it, he saw that it was swaying from side to side, as though dazed.

The dog sat low on her haunches and yipped, staring up at the bird with distrust in her eyes. A low whine thrummed in her throat. She glanced to Alex, as though pleading with him to get rid of it.

There was definitely something odd about the birds.

“You got turned around by whatever killed the microchips, huh?” he muttered. “Some magnetic storm?”

The pigeon cooed in reply, and took to following them for a while, swaying less each time it landed on a new branch. Sometime later it departed, taking a route that at first seemed uncoordinated, but soon settled into a more defined flight path.

It seemed that, at the very least, the birds were recovering.

They spent the rest of the day wandering on a loose diagonal through the forest, during which time Alex’s map-reading skills were shown to be as abysmal as he’d feared. When the trees finally cleared, the moor was nowhere in sight. They were now at the edge of an industrial district.

James had seemed comforted by the constant movement throughout the day and had cried somewhat less, but now with the grinding stop he resumed his wailing. The sun was falling again and they had only an hour to get settled before the light began to fade. Alex had no intention of being caught out in the dark.

Spying a vast warehouse close to the perimeter fence, he approached with trepidation, dwarfed by the structure. He passed through the doorway—four storeys tall, left ajar like a gaping maw—and found endless aisles of boxes before him: tens of thousands of Clingfilm-wrapped packages, waiting for customers that would never come. He opened a few, and found auto parts, mostly spark plugs and ignition coils.

To one side were a series of offices, sealed off by plasterboard walls, cluttered with computers, desks, and mountains of unfiled paperwork. He coaxed the dog inside the largest, though she was mistrustful of the strange smells and industrial surfaces, and settled them on the floor. He then built a small enclosure for James out of bulging ring binders, hoping that it would contain him.

“Don’t die,” he commanded as he set him within it. After propping open the window and setting a desk fan beside him—it seemed the power grid was more resilient and automated than he could have hoped—he set about making them a fire in the waste bin. Once the flames had caught and he was sure the smoke would be blown outside instead of choking them, he set enough paper aside for fuel, and unpacked their blankets.

The two of them were wrapped up and set to sleep in a mere handful of minutes, both utterly defeated by the day’s travelling. Alex kept close watch over James as night fell. The child was only visible in silhouette as darkness set in, as the fire threw out meagre light, but neither of them would sleep if he turned on the harsh fluorescents overhead.

They had both started to grow groggy when a stray thought crossed his mind: to lock the door.

At once the idea struck him as ridiculous. There was no point in sealing a door against nobody. Yet the niggling urge refused to fade. Eventually, cursing, he scrambled from his blanket and flipped the latch, stepping away from the door with an added sense of security.

As darkness cloaked the land in earnest, things of the night—things that had once been pedestrian, but now seemed primal and threatening—came to life and prowled the woodlands. The twilight symphony of hooting owls and yipping foxes was now complemented by the barks and meows of a great many cats and dogs, wandering across the land in search of absent owners.

The dog’s ears flipped and turned with each of their cries. At first she paced by the window to ward away any that strayed too close to the warehouse, but she was soon overwhelmed by the sheer number of trespassers, and curled against Alex’s leg for the night, whining.

Alex reached over the wall of James’s pen and rested his hand on the boy’s shoulder, feeling it rise and fall, taking comfort from its warmth. At some point, he saw the fire’s licking flames no more, and slept. All the while, the dog continued to whine at the endless droves of abandoned pets.

Alexander was in a hurry. There were many problems to deal with today. The most notable: recovering their exhausted supplies. The End Day celebrations had fallen flat and short, but what hadn’t been consumed had already spoiled.

And then there was Ray’s murder, the unknown assailants, the old man’s note…

But that would have to wait. They had to eat first.

He was so preoccupied that he didn’t notice the pigeon on his doorstep until it hooted underfoot. He looked down, lifting his leg. The slightest of gasps escaped his lips when he saw the bobbing, silver form before him.

Numbness stole along his arms as he pressed himself against the doorframe. He blinked fiercely, hoping that it would disappear—would vanish as any hallucination should.

Instead, it cooed and bobbed a moment further before taking flight, riding the breeze, as real as the ground beneath his feet.

He cast a glance around at Main Street, but saw only the usual sights: the cathedral doors being swept open for morning prayer, children flocking to the school building, and those on the early shift dragging themselves towards the fields or a quick breakfast. Nothing untoward met his gaze. Apart from the dozen guards posted at Main Street’s edge, and the nervous glances every second person aimed at the hills above the city, it was a perfect summer morning.

Nevertheless, venturing any farther from his door now seemed impossible. It seemed as though a vast chasm had formed between him and the rest of the world.

He slunk inside without taking his eyes from the street, and slammed the door.

“Wait, wait,” Don wheezed, sinking against the trunk of a sapling yew. The soft bark bent under his weight, sending him sprawling on the ground. There he lay gasping, staring up at the sky, which had grown far away and dim.

He and Billy had spent the last hour trudging through boggy wetlands, braving stinking pits of tar-like mud in lieu of skirting a precipitous ravine. But now that the way was finally clear—a gently sloping meadow lay before them, cropped short by a milling herd of distant goats—he was spent. Taking another step was beyond him.

Each breath seared his lungs. It was as though the air contained not oxygen, but instead thousands of tiny, red-hot knives.

Billy shuffled up beside him and fell to the dirt with a thump, her eyes dead to the world. He’d kept them moving since the attack, and they’d stopped for no more than three hours a night to sleep. During that time they had eaten only what they could snatch from the deepest reaches of the forests, where the trees hadn’t been picked clean: overripe berries, shrivelled fruits and half-rotten tubers.