Ruin (The Ruin Saga Book 1) (3 page)

The day of the apocalypse started like any other: a lazy mid-June Tuesday in the late noughties that passed without incident until, at precisely 08.15 Greenwich Mean Time, the End struck.

There were no warnings or signs, nor was there hysteria or panic. The people of the world were waking in their beds, watching their favourite soaps, sitting in traffic, laughing, eating, or fast asleep. Perhaps for a single moment, as one, they felt an odd sensation in their bones and a chill in their lungs, coupled with a white-hot pain in their extremities.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time for them to react before their bodies dissolved into vapour and they vanished from existence.

Then it was over. The disaster had come and gone, the clocks had stopped ticking, and the world was changed forever.

An instant later, upon the lawns of a backwater Cumbrian village, a young man fell to the ground, screaming and alone.

Cold. Raw, gnawing agony.

Alexander Cain was surrounded by darkness. He was suffocating on a vast, viscous something that filled his mouth, throat and lungs. Whether he was spinning and falling, or whether the world was spinning and falling around him, he couldn’t tell. All he knew was that
something
was moving at breakneck speed, tearing at his body amidst an endless void.

Here, there was no time. Forever was now, now was forever, and nothing new could ever be. He would remain here until the infinite had grown small, and everything had faded completely.

And yet, eventually, something emerged from the ether, something that seemed to consume all else: a light. The faintest, most distant light. It was above. There was no direction here, and yet Alex was certain that the light was
higher
—was
up
.

He thrashed and fought his way towards it. The void shrank back and his body pressed against a great barrier, one that stretched and ripped at him with vicious talons. He was being pierced by icy tendrils. The void was pulling him back, desperate to hold onto him.

For the briefest of moments it was over—he didn’t exist at all—and then he broke into the world beyond.

The first thing he became aware of was his own screaming voice. The next was the agony, which had followed from the void. The spinning ceased with a jarring jolt, slamming his eighteen-year-old body against unseen ground with bone-crushing force.

The darkness had been replaced by blinding light. Dense fog surrounded him on all sides, and above was a sky of midmorning baby-blue tones, complete with wispy tracts of stratocumulus.

From every direction came an ear-splitting ring, pressing in on him with percussive force, a decibel short of perforating his eardrums. His jaw clenched hard enough to pop a filling free from a premolar. The tendons on his neck, arms and legs tensed to breaking point, drawing him into a ball upon freshly cut grass.

He was shivering—no, quivering. It was cold enough for a layer of frost to have accrued on his body, puckering his skin and clinging to his hair in icy shards. Through double vision and barely opened eyes he could make out his own hands, gnarled and curled into claws akin to those produced by advanced arthritis.

He was granted a small mercy then, a momentary lull—a split second during which the fabric of existence seemed to undulate, almost to pulse. The sky rippled with ribbons of impossible colours, auroras that dwarfed any that had ever been seen over the Earth’s poles. With those colours came intense sensation: the grass caressed his skin with a passion that surpassed that of the most dedicated lover’s.

And then pain washed over him with renewed vigour, blanketing all else as the ringing reached an unbearable crescendo, driving him across the floor as though with a booted foot. An unbroken wail stormed from his throat, but he heard no trace of it. If the noise persisted he would go mad. He was certain of it.

He wished for death, for peace. As he writhed and bellowed upon the grass, the sky lost its ribbons of absurd colours, and the screech intensified a final time. A small part of him registered a sudden, crushing absence in the world, and he realised with horror that the screech was not artificial, not alien or cold-minded, but the product of billions of screams no different from his own.

This was the last moment, the brink of insanity. He was at an end—

…

…

Silence.

The world was still, without pain. Warmth kissed his skin.

Alex blinked.

High above, the sky was blue—just blue. His hands fell from ears accosted by nothing but the chirps of a distant chaffinch. The frosty glaze upon his skin was gone. He was dry, no longer shivering.

He took a hesitant breath, heard his strained throat whistle with the gentle inhalation. He kept still for over a minute, too afraid of the nightmare’s return to move an inch.

When nothing came, he tried moving his fingers. They wriggled feebly, brushing fresh grass cuttings. Once he had grown confident enough to sit up, a great many aches and pains shot through his body, but he scarcely noticed.

The thick, swirling mist remained. A few feet of visible ground lay in any one direction before the blanket of fog took over. All that he could make out through its depths were the ghostly outlines of nearby trees, and the faraway fence that skirted the park—

The park.

With a sudden rush of recollection, Alexander remembered: the morning school rush, the last-minute revision for the finals, the mad dash through the park in the blind hope of a shortcut…and then darkness.

He had been on his way to the last exam of the summer, the one upon which his entire future pivoted. And now he was certainly late, perhaps too late.

It must have been a fit. He’d heard of people having stress-induced seizures before.

But the exam boards wouldn’t let a little thing like a nervous breakdown keep them from starting on time.

The emergency room could wait. For now, there was a desk nearby with his name on it.

Ignoring his injuries, along with any thoughts of the macabre dream-void, he pushed himself into a standing position and hefted his bag—laden with the great tomes of Hardy, Faulkner and Steinbeck that had been decreed as the year’s set texts—onto his shoulder.

He wobbled on his feet and put a hand to his eyes, squeezing his forehead as a wave of nausea washed over him. He looked around again, spitting the remains of his popped filling into the leaf litter, tasting blood.

The mist encircled him, unbothered by wind or the heat of the still-rising sun. There were no signs to indicate that anybody or anything lay near him. He was alone on the slight rise that marked Lovers’ Leap, which overlooked the town of Radden.

He paused, speechless. His memory of the morning was clearing. He should not have been alone. The park was a popular cut-in point for those late for the eight o’clock bell, and he had been surrounded on all sides by over a dozen stragglers, each as desperate to make the exam’s sit-down time.

Now they were gone.

But there was something else, something all the more jarring: there had been no mist as he’d entered the park. None at all. Only moments ago, it had been a perfect, clear summer morning.

Alex cursed, spinning on the spot. His head was as clouded as the air around him, and so only two possibilities presented themselves. Either the fit had been more serious than he’d thought, and he’d been unconscious for some time—long enough for bad weather to have rolled in off the coast—or something terrible had happened.

The latter struck him as infinitely more likely. There was something about the absolute silence and the soupy nature of the mist that suggested something was very wrong.

He was on the verge of setting off down the hill, while his mind’s eye offered him images of the town having been levelled by a terrorist bombing or freak storm, when he began to pass piles of clothing.

The first few he registered as only shapes in his peripheral vision, but within a few steps a dozen or so had emerged from the mist, not quite neatly stacked in the grass: jackets, shirts and blouses, denim jeans and skirts, underwear of every shade and pattern, and socks of all lengths, tucked into the inners of a dozen pairs of shoes. A few were topped by objects unique enough to set them apart, and to allow Alex to identify their owners: Simon Wells’s flat cap, Connie Black’s spiked choker, Sally Macklintock’s nose bar and hooped earrings, and nearest to him was a pile topped by the headphone wires of Jerry Peter’s iPod. Beside them were heavily stuffed bags all too similar to Alex’s own. They lay precisely where his fellow stragglers had been before his blackout. But their owners were nowhere to be seen. It was almost as though they had stripped naked, calmly dropped their belongings in perfect head-to-foot sequence, and walked away into the mist. Or they had quite simply vanished.

Disbelief throbbed in his head, which had set about a fantastic panic. Only the sheer strangeness of what his senses were telling him kept his eyes from rolling back in their sockets.

“Hello?” he called. His voice bled away down the hillside, utterly alone except for the twittering of faraway songbirds. An echo returned from where the trill of the town’s morning traffic should have emanated. That was enough to send him running.

Alex left the stacks of clothing behind. Within a single bounding step they’d disappeared into the mist. He ran with his arms outstretched, fearful of running into a lamppost or fence at full speed. He tripped every other step, and was sure he would break an ankle any moment, but was powerless to stop his own advance. His thoughts had abandoned him, leaving a baser part of his mind to operate on instinct alone.

Distantly, he was aware that he remained parallel to the slope, still moving towards the school. The notion of still trying to make the exam on time was so bizarre that he almost laughed—but he was sure that if he did, then the wild scream of terror lurking behind his tongue would break free, and hysteria would swallow him whole.

He was less than a hundred yards from the gates of Radden High when the mist departed. It did so without warning, as though a gale had torn across the land and peeled it away. The lifeless mass of thick whiteness seemed to expand, wither and twirl upwards simultaneously, revealing Radden and the great moorland in which it sat.

Alex froze. “No,” he whispered. He shook his head, as though he could jar the world back to making sense. But the absurdities before his eyes remained.

The town was untouched, pristine. The cliffside gathering of Victorian terrace-rows twinkled in the morning light, along with an outlying halo of ancient cottages and farmsteads. Together, they were a twee mass of autumnal-shaded roof tiles and rustic brickwork amidst the moor’s vast reaches. The town appeared as it had done on any other day, and at first he could have expected the distant whistle of the Marshall-Aimes Quarry over in Bleak to ring at any moment, kicking off the morning shift.

But then he saw that there was a very good reason for the silence.

The town centre was still a considerable distance away, but Alex could make out thousands of piles of clothing strewn across Radden’s streets, arranged in little piles identical to those in the park.

Not a single person was in sight. All was still and lifeless, frozen in place.

Alex did scream then. Once. It broke free from his lips as a single, ragged cry, not dissimilar to that of a wounded animal.

And then he was running once more, moving on legs that seemed a million miles away. The school forgotten, he made for home. If he could make it back to his room, back to his bed, then he would surely wake from this hellish double nightmare—for that was all this could be: a delusion brought on by fatigue, twelve-hour study marathons and one too many cups of coffee.

It wasn’t until a final blow had been dealt that this last semblance of hope died a quiet death.

When the great blaze on High Street burst to life, it reached some sixty feet into the air. Alex had made it to the first of the outlying terrace-blocks when it roared forth from the twisted wreckage of a severe road accident, which had involved over two dozen vehicles. Their crushed and shredded aluminium shells were cast in the brilliant light of igniting fuel, and then a fireball enveloped the mass, blowing out every window for thirty feet and throwing a great column of jet-black smoke into the sky.

Alex didn’t pause, not this time. He kept running while the flames began to lick higher. Around him the alarms of shop fronts and parked cars honked and trilled, the only sounds other than his ragged breathing and the hollow slapping of his shoes against the tarmac. He drew closer, and from even a hundred yards away began to receive mouthfuls of acrid smoke, along with the first waves of heat.

The bulk of the accident appeared to have been caused by a twelve-wheeler that had fishtailed at the intersection and then toppled onto its side. It had from then on acted as a solid wall, stretching across the breadth of the street. Vans, cars and motorbikes had proceeded to splatter against its underside like flies against a swatter.

Alex coughed, stumbling as a gag reflex wracked his upper body, but pressed on, driven by a surge of adrenaline. While the bellow of the fire enveloped the trills and honks, and his breathing became laboured due to the growing heat, he threw desperate glances around at the upper-floor windows on either side of the street.

By the time his lungs seared in earnest and he was mere feet from the first of the flames, nothing had stirred. Not a single curtain had been disturbed by a parting hand, nor had a concerned face graced one of the many doorways.

He passed into the column of acrid smoke, and the world was whipped away under a sheet of black. Holding his shirtsleeve to his mouth to keep out the worst of the fumes, he gagged without pause, blinking tears from his eyes. Flames reared up on either side, and the hairs on his arms began to char as his sweat evaporated, leaving behind a tightly packed residue of salt and grit. His throat and lungs soon became lined with ash despite his makeshift sleeve mask, and he choked most of the way to the first of the cars.