Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2)

Radley leapt a fallen log, holding in a scream. The way ahead was blurred by a slick of snot and tears, the young black forest swimming in the predawn light. All he recognised was the clearing of rusted metal ahead—the gates of Twingo.

The town was close, but so were his pursuers. In seconds he would be within shouting distance, but until then he had to keep quiet. If he squawked now, they would be on him before he could take another step.

The trees were close all around, winding seamlessly up and around old tarmac roads and suburban terrace rows. A town had been here once, full of people, thousands of people. But that had been long ago, before they had all vanished from the Earth. Though only forty years had passed, the trunks of these trees towered over the ruins of the Old World. They seemed to loom up at his flanks to bite at his ankles.

He knew this path through the forest better than the streets of Twingo itself, but still his mind’s eye filled with terrible images of a wall of foliage having sprung up ahead, barring his path. His back muscles clenched spasmodically, expecting a bullet, spear or arrow to come tearing from behind at any moment. But none came.

He shouldn’t have snuck out. His mother had warned him about it every day since the cradle, wagging her finger and tapping her foot over breakfast in the same faded apron.
“World’s a dangerous place, Rad. Don’t you go snooping. It’ll be the end of a little wisp like you.”
And he had been a good boy, most days. He scarcely went against her will.

But so much wonder lay beyond Twingo’s walls. So much to touch, see, and smell. The handiwork of countless long-dead men, mysterious and powerful. They had machines that could beam your face clear across the world, his grandma used to say. All those rusted hunks of metal on the road had once been magic carts, ones that went along without the aid of a horse. And there had been food as well. All the food a person could eat, and so much more.

Not like today, where you had to scrounge in the dirt for a morsel. Last year’s famine had levelled what mankind had rebuilt since the End, sucked the land dry of life and hope.

How could he stay cooped up in that godforsaken dump when the secrets of fallen gods lay just beyond the trees? If he could find something worth trading, maybe he could make something of himself and move with his mother to the great trading post at Canary Wharf, maybe even New Canterbury, home of
the
Alexander Cain. He’d heard things weren’t quite so bad there.

He’d been sneaking out before sunup whenever the guard grew lax for a few months now. It had never hurt anyone; he had always been back before daybreak. But now things had gone very wrong. This morning, things had been different; he’d known that as soon as he’d slipped under the fence. There had been something in the air, a prickle, like somebody had been watching.

And no more than half a mile into the forest, shadows had appeared in the trees, moving slow and steady toward him, converging from all directions. He ran for all his worth, but all the while they had stayed a short distance behind, as though it were nothing, as though they were teasing him.

And now, finally reaching the edge of Twingo and safety, he sensed how close they had gotten. He could almost feel their breath on the back of his neck.

He was young, only a nipper, but he was no fool. They could have killed him ten times over already. Why hadn’t they?

He decided it didn’t matter. He just kept running.

Max felt his guts twist, pulled from sleep by distant screams. He took a moment to make sure he wasn’t dreaming, then sat up and sighed. He wasn’t surprised, nor did he hurry. He’d been waiting for this.

Twingo had seen better days. There had been a time when dozens from all the settlements in the southern counties passed along their single thoroughfare daily to trade and share news. Nestled on the edge of the City of London, beside what had once been the green expanse of Greenwich Park, they were second only to Canary Wharf itself, the hub of commerce for all of England. But here, things had been a little looser, the rules laxer, and the trade more risky. Men of ambition and vision had traded here, where the meddling influence of the southern cities was largely absent. They had enjoyed a healthy, symbiotic relationship with the powerhouse across the way.

But then they had gone and started trouble. It was all that fool’s fault. That Alexander Cain and his flock. They hadn’t been able to let the Old World go. They had gone into people’s lives and disrupted any peace they might have found with how things were. And now it was coming back to bite them, and everyone else who had dealings with them.

As he swung his legs out of bed and pulled on his clothes with unhurried, steady hands, the knot in Max’s gut faded, turning off the fear, something he’d learned to do long ago. Once dressed, he took up his rifle from beside the bed, checked the load and safety, and pulled open the door. Across the hall, Bill emerged from his own room a moment later, his eyes set and face grim.

“Do you think it’s them?” he said.

Max nodded and headed for the balcony. The Royal Observatory, empty save for the heavy barricades upon all the doors, groaned and echoed around their heads, the vast stores stacked up in each room, and the few senior Twingites who bedded here. Atop the hill of Greenwich Park, they could see all of Twingo and the surrounding landscape from here, and in the distance, London’s ruined, cragged skyline. They both stepped under the murky sky, struggling toward dawn, and looked out over all they’d built.

“Today,” Bill said. “I can feel it.”

“Today,” Max said.

Below, lights popped on. The screaming came from the trees, a single source moving straight for them. He recognised Radley Tibble’s voice even from this distance, though he couldn’t yet hear what he was saying. Not that it mattered. Everyone knew what it meant. Their time was up.

Smoke had been appearing on the horizon for weeks now. News had reached them of burning, raping, and pillaging. And not just here, but everywhere, all over the country. A scourge swept over the land: a new army bent on enslavement and destruction, driven by the smouldering hatred stoked by Cain and his lot during the famine. They had lost contact with the last of their neighbours three days ago.

“Looks like they saved us for last.”

Max looked past the trees, across the swollen banks of the Thames, toward the single twinkling spire in Canary Wharf. “Not quite last,” he said.

The others slowly joined them on the balcony, rubbing their eyes. Some uttered forlorn cries, a few scowled, while others only stared. But there was no panic. Twingites were made of stronger stuff. They had all known this was coming. Other places might have seen disorientation and fear take over, but there had never been room for that here. Instead, the elderly founders of the rickety trading post turned on their heels and disappeared back inside, some to strengthen the barricades, others to sound the alarm. Only Max and Bill remained, still scanning the land below.

“I don’t see them,” said Max.

“They’re using the tree cover. They’ll come from the west.”

At that, they too headed back inside and sealed the balcony behind them. Bill turned over his rifle to young mop-haired Jordan, their best sniper, and bade him head up to the service hatch at the top of the observatory, and cover them. “I was never any good with a gun, anyway,” he said, flashing his long programmer’s hands, still delicate and free of callouses after these long years of strife. Some things never changed.

“Pieter,” Max called. One floor above them, a hunch-backed scarecrow stooped over the railing, eyebrows raised. “We’ll be needing that alarm, now.”

Pieter nodded, his brow low and untroubled over his face. The granite will and resilience was something they all had, even if a sea of broiling terror lay underneath—and Max had no doubt they were all scared shitless. But in this world, you had to look strong, even around your closest friends. Twingo Glare, some called it.

Pieter disappeared into a side room, and a moment later the whine of an old air-raid siren started up, thrumming through the corridors of the observatory, rattling Max’s bones. He and Bill headed for the stairs, descending together, side by side, and stepped through the open main doors. Friends and companions they had known for these long decades sent their affections with a single flick of their eyelids. Then they were moving out across the grass, descending the hill, and the doors were barricaded shut behind them.

There was no room for soppy goodbyes. It was the only chance they had of surviving this.

They raced towards the town ahead as the siren spooled up to its full wail. The screaming in the forest continued to rise above the racket. It would be on them within the minute. Without a word to one another, sensing each other’s thoughts, they broke into a run towards their lives’ work.

Max Vandeborn had founded Twingo off his own back, along with Bill Bateman, just weeks after the End. The entire city of London, all of England—maybe the world—had been stripped of all its people in a single moment, leaving merely a few scattered random survivors. All there had been then was the whistling wind and millions of pieces of empty, deflated apparel littering the streets, left by their departed owners where they fell during the morning commute. They hadn’t even known if there had been any other survivors. But what else had there been to do?

Max had been a city banker, Bill an e-commerce entrepreneur. Buying and selling was what they knew, all they knew. And so with an empty, naked and deathly silent world staring them in the face, they had collected supplies from the infinitude of unattended supermarkets, picked a spot, nailed up a sign, and opened the business. And they had waited.

For weeks they had waited like that. But neither of them had been fazed. After the shock of the End, little fazed a survivor. Bill had lost a family of five, young wife, kids, a big five-bedroom townhouse in plush Muswell Hill. He’d been barely thirty then, but his face was on magazine covers. A real gold-star deal. After the End, he shut down, went cold, and the businessman within took over. That was how he coped.

The End was fine with Max. All he’d had was a pet chinchilla, and the damn thing had bitten him every time he went near it. He had no attachments but his money. He might have lost it all when the world’s microprocessors fizzed and turned to ash during the End, and all those ones and zero that passed for currency in the bank computers vanished right along with all those people, but you could always make money where there was demand. And he was betting on a lot of demand now the bottom had fallen out of everything.

It had been the
Maxwell and William Trading Post
then. It came to be called
Twingo
much later. The place began as a fenced-off chunk of homes and shops on the edge of the park, and spilled onto Her Majesty’s—as Max insisted they still were, and always would be—lawns, leading up the dome of the Royal Observatory upon the hill. Capping the central thoroughfare, conveniently blocking off the entire width of the street, was a transport lorry with a full complement of brand-new Nissan Twingos.