Ruin (The Ruin Saga Book 1) (26 page)

“So, what? I’m the new babysitter?” Norman shifted, trying to keep his eyes from the window. “I’m supposed to go and fix him up?”

Allie started, uncomfortable. “We just thought, since you’ve known each other so long…”

“Lucian’s always been that way. He’s a fighter. Maybe this one’s got the better of him, but…it’s been a tough year.” He waited for them to say more, but they merely stared back at him. “Was there something else?” he said.

“We just wanted to check on you. You haven’t been at your best the last few days,” Allie said.

Norman patted his book. He tried to smile, but his cheeks had been tightened by fright. “I’m fine. Nothing that
I Am Legend
can’t fix.”

She shook her head. “You’re not talking to anybody. You’ve been cooped up in here on your own.”

“I’m
fine
. Really. I just needed a change of scenery.”

“What about Ray’s funeral?” Richard gabbled. He was eyeing the tension between them with mounting concern in his eyes. “People are starting to get worried about what’s decent, keeping him out of the ground so long. But we still can’t spare the manpower from the fields…”

Norman barely heard him, his attention still on the window. The hairs on the back of his neck hadn’t fallen flat since leaving the doorway. He did his best to nod along, but still their faces became only more concerned.

Richard looked to Allie—whose tentative smile had faltered without grace—and then back to him. “Are you sure you’re alright?” he said.

“I’m just tired.” Norman wasn’t sure he sounded convincing.

They lapsed into silence until Richard and Allie slid to their feet.

“We’ll be off then,” Allie said.

Norman nodded once more. He heard himself speak, but his voice sounded far away. “Alright.”

He followed them back out into the hallway, where they stood for a few moments longer.

Looking at them in the half-darkness, dripping and unsettled, he saw them afresh: young, at odds with one another, but drawn together and to him in search of comfort—of direction.

Yet he couldn’t bring himself to say a single word.

A long silence stretched out between them, forcing all eyes to the ground. Norman edged past them to open the door. A gale screamed in, rustling the millions of pages around them. He squinted into the night, seeing naught but swirling rain, and turned to bid them farewell.

Allison scowled as she ducked out into the storm, covering her head with her arms.

Richard made to follow, but turned back at the last moment. “Listen, I know it’s not pretty, taking all this crap from everybody,” he said, “but they need you. We all do.”

And then he was gone into the night. In a few moments he and Allie had been consumed by darkness. Another crack of lightning revealed their retreating forms, sprinting beneath the gushing torrent.

Norman sighed and looked around. Once again, there was nothing. No stragglers from Main Street tonight. But that wasn’t only on account of the storm. Only the sentries walked the streets after dark now.

He shut the door. It took considerable effort to turn his back on it yet again.

Though Richard and Allison were gone, he still felt a definite presence. A tingle ran across his skin, heralding the unmistakable sense of being watched.

He returned to the living room and looked down at his chair. Suddenly, sitting down didn’t seem very attractive at all. Adrenaline still coursed his veins. Tired as he was, he felt like running a mile.

Absentminded, he bit into a knob of bread and grimaced. No matter how many times he swallowed, he couldn’t shift the gummy paste coating the inside of his mouth. He made to wash it down with a mouthful of water, but the jug was empty.

Cursing, he picked it up and stomped across the room, pulling the curtains shut against the storm. The sound of the rain slashing against the glass was still loud in his ears, but at least he didn’t have to deal with the nagging worry of somebody staring in at him. Heading into the hallway, he cursed when the tingle at the nape of his neck failed to abate.

I’m being skittish,
he thought.

Nobody would have a chance of getting back into the city with the increased security. The previous night he had taken a shift himself, and had seen firsthand how much the attack on the mill had affected people.

His kitchen was large, but cluttered with a thousand unnameable utensils. He suspected that the old lady who had once lived here had loved to cook. He slouched between myriad hanging pots and pans, heading towards the sink, the empty jug trailing from his hand.

Before he had taken two steps, he knew that something was wrong. Freezing in place, he had just enough time to register a shadow behind the kitchen door slither in his peripheral vision—purposeful movement, unquestionably human.

He had only just begun to bellow for help when the form enveloped him and covered his mouth with a filthy hand, crushing his lips against his teeth. Tasting blood, he flailed for all he was worth, grasping for the assailant as he tried to yell around the muffling hand.

A pair of strong arms gripped his and forced his elbows back until his clenched fists were touching. Hot, rotten breath billowed across his right ear. The assailant’s mouth opened and a slight, snakelike voice murmured into his ear, “It would’ve been so easy to stick you, nice and quiet, and let you bleed here on the floor.” The sound of gummy lips working. “Pathetic, just like that gorilla from the mill…complacent, blind to everything going on around you—”

Norman bucked his head back and made contact with the man’s jaw with a sickening crack. A single grunt rang out, and for a moment his grip on Norman’s arms slackened. But then the constricting arms flipped him bodily through the air and slammed him against the kitchen floor.

He collided with the tiles with enough force to send his breath sailing from his lungs and the back of his head throbbing. He gagged as the walls of his throat glued together.

For a horrific moment he tried to inhale, but nothing happened.

The world swirled as pain ripped through his head. In this moment of panic, during which he was powerless to do anything but fixate on his own burgeoning suffocation, the assailant brought a booted foot down on his chest.

A dull crunch announced contact between it and his sternum. Upon trying to scream, Norman found his torso filled not with air, but instead white-hot, stabbing iron rods, squeezing tears from his eyes.

His vision began to blur almost immediately. He made to grab at the man’s boot, but his grip was loose, his arm limp. Dizziness struck with shocking force as the world overturned, and his stomach gurgled as he fought the urge to vomit. Through a blaze of flashing lights he tried to follow the dark figure—which was now walking around him, out of sight—but lifting his head proved impossible.

As his chest fluttered, drawing only the tiniest of breaths, the world became dark and blank.

A sting erupted from the gloom.

Norman yelled. Fresh pain seared his cheek. He tried to wrench backwards, but his lower half was only so much numb flesh. Vaguely, he sensed that he’d been hoisted into a seated position. After a bout of extreme effort, he managed to open his eyes by a fraction of an inch. Blurred colours gnawed at his retinas.

Pain erupted across his other cheek. Something solid and sharp—perhaps a ring—split his lip. A voice spoke far away, strung out by the fog clogging his mind. “Wake up.”

Norman grunted as his vision resolved and the world morphed into definite form.

He was still in the kitchen. The hallway lights had been extinguished. His attacker was seated directly before him, having pulled up a stool from the stove. He expected it to be the man with the neckerchief, the one he was now certain had been staring in through the window. But it wasn’t.

Norman had never seen this man before. He was surprisingly small for the strength he had wrought. Dressed in a ragged shirt and a tattered pair of jeans, wrapped in a floor-length black overcoat, he had an unassuming, ugly face, peaky and sallow.

He waved his hand through the air. “Can you understand me?” he said. His voice was an unsettling sigh, lisped and snakelike.

Norman nodded, something he regretted as stars flashed before his eyes and nausea revolved the ground beneath him. He tried to answer, but his lips were still numb. “Wh-Who are you?”

The man smiled, but the expression was disturbing, almost horrific. The teeth were rotten, patched with brown decay, the canines stunted. His grin, closer to a sneer, made him look almost like a wolf. “My name is Jason,” he said.

Norman glanced around, but saw nobody else in the room with them. Looking down, he saw that he was slumped in a dining room chair, bound to its armrests with handmade twine. “What do you want?”

“To talk to you, just like you wanted to talk to us.”

“And what’s to stop me calling for help?”

Jason’s lupine sneer grew wider as he looked through the window at the storm raging outside. “I wouldn’t waste your time.”

“You never know until you try.” Norman jerked his shoulders, trying to shift towards the doorway. But the chair didn’t tilt a single degree.

Jason produced a wicked, curved knife from behind his back. In the highly polished blade Norman saw his own reflection, slumped and bleary-eyed. “How’s this? Make a sound and I’ll open up your jugular,” he said, pointing the tip of the blade towards him. “It’ll take but a second.”

“Like you did to Ray?”

His eyes twinkled. Sickly delight lurked amidst their inky, lifeless depths. “That’s right.”

Norman wriggled his wrists, testing the knots holding them to the chair. Flawless. No fool’s knots. It’d take hours to worm free. He sighed. “What do you
want
?”

“I’m here to deliver a message.”

“So send a letter to the office.”

Jason gave a full-throated belly laugh that sent his head flying back. “Sorry, postman’s got a day off,” he said once he’d recovered.

“Why me?”

Jason shrugged. “Word on the street is you’re next in line for the Chair, that the Big Cheese is on the way out, that he’s got his knickers all in a bunch over a few birdies.” He tittered at that. “Also,” he raised an eyebrow, “you make an easy target. Been alone in the dark for days.”

“Just like the old man, eh? You had a message to give him, too?”

“He saw us. We reacted,” Jason’s face had fallen slack. “You weren’t supposed to see us. Not yet. The old man wasn’t part of the plan. I was just clearing up a stupid mistake of some…associates of mine. Same goes for the boulder head at the mill.” He took a step forward, twirling the blade in his grasp, observing Norman with frank curiosity. “But then you had to step in, didn’t you? You couldn’t just let things rest. You had to come after us, had to rock the boat.”

“You killed two innocent men. Who’s rocking the boat?”

Anger flashed behind those onyx shark eyes. Yet Jason’s face creased into another smile. Somehow, seeing his cheeks upturn was so much worse. “After all that you and yours have done—after all the lives you’ve ended—I can’t imagine where you could find the gall to say something like that.”

“That we’ve ended!” Norman surged forwards, straining against his bindings. “We’ve done nothing!”

Jason’s grin widened, such that it almost reached the lobes of his ears. “You have no idea what you’ve done, do you?” he whispered.

Norman swallowed. The slight, hissing voice reverberated deep in his chest, sending a vat of liquid fear boiling in his guts. “What are you going to do, finish me off as well?”

“What would be the point in telling you a titbit of jack shit if I was here to kill you?”

Norman licked his bleeding lip. “A message, huh? You want to get me a pen?”

Jason’s smile lost its strength—died a slow and sickly death. He took yet another step forwards and dropped to his haunches. The two of them were now at eye level. “You took everything,” he hissed.

The intensity of his stare felt as though it would set Norman’s flesh ablaze. He swallowed. “What?”

“All of it. Every scrap, every weed, all of it. You took it all. You just wandered into people’s homes and took what you wanted like it was yours, not a care in the world. All those people’s work—all the sweat and blood they put into growing enough to scrape by… you took it all.”

Norman looked at the ground. “What do you want?” he murmured.

Jason’s face became uglier. “Do you know how many people you killed? How many children died in their parents’ arms, shrivelled up like rotting prunes?”

Norman grimaced. As the words washed over him, pangs of pain danced across his heart. His mind’s eye spat out images of the begging, emaciated creatures at Margate once more, reaching for him…

He shook his head and glared at Jason. Despite his own guilt, he saw nothing stir in his captor’s eyes. He couldn’t have been more certain that the man cared little, if at all, for the troubles of others. “What do you want?” he repeated.

“I'll bet you haven’t even seen it with your own eyes, have you? The hundreds of starving skeletons, crawling around like worms?”

Norman started, gritting his teeth. “I’ve seen it.”

“Yet still you took. And now everybody’s gone, moved away, left everything that they had, because of you.”

Norman felt his guilt putrefy into shame, dripping along his spine and festering in his bowels.

Still, Jason stared back at him without a flicker of emotion. He’d spoken with intent, but there had been nothing to the words, no glimmer of genuine feeling. They had merely escaped his mouth mechanically, as though rehearsed.

“What do you want?” Norman breathed.

“We’re not going to tolerate your greed anymore.”

“Who?”

“Survivors. Those of us who managed to hold out long enough. People who’ve lost everything. People who want to see justice done… People who want revenge.”

Again, not a trace of sincerity touched his eyes. Some other voice was speaking through this monster; another greater will, far more sinister than Jason’s feral wickedness.

It was enough to send Norman’s skin crawling. He leant forwards against his restraints. “What do you want?” he yelled.