Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (14 page)

It wasn’t their custom to lower oneself to any man, but even Norman felt the queer urge to bow.

Evelyn Fisher’s sonorous voice filled every cranny under the tower’s vast glass-capped ceiling. “Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated and hold your tongues,” she said, her usually haggard and dishevelled body ramrod straight. Norman was privy to a dazzling tessellation; thousands turned their heads in rapid succession towards her as she sat immediately to Alexander’s left. Somehow, the silence deepened to something Norman imagined only the dead had heard before. She swept a final stern glare around at those gathered, then nodded, and the rear doors of the chamber slammed shut. “Thank you,” she said after some time. “Council is now in session.”

Billy smelled lemons. Someone was brushing her hair, slow and steady. Her head was heavy, full of iron wool. Her tongue seemed too big for her mouth, and her eyes were gummed together. She worked them open while she tried to swallow, but the sides of her gullet seemed welded together.

“Time to wake up, darling.” The voice was one she had never expected to hear again.

“Ma?”

“It’s almost noon, clover.”

Billy’s heart ached at the sound of it. Through gummed eyes, she could see a heart-shaped face framed by short dark hair. The teardrop shape of her mother’s face surrounded by a pall of bright light. She had always smelled of lemons.

“What happened?” she rasped.

“Shh, it’s okay.”

“No … You went away, Ma. I remember. You got sick …” She had starved and ended up not dissimilar from Daddy: bedridden, babbling nonsense, withering by the day. They had buried her in the bluebell patch by the reading tree. “Ma, we lost Grandpa. The monsters took him away. And now Daddy’s sick too and … I’m all alone.”

“You’re not alone, darling. I’m here.”

“Ma …” Billy smiled, and for a moment, she was okay. There was light everywhere, and she lay in the folds of something so soft it could only have been her parents’ mattress. That meant Daddy and Grandpa were probably coming home from the fields. She had been in a bad way, perhaps ill, but now she was on the mend. She was home.

Then there was noise: muttering somewhere out of sight, excited and sibilant. She had heard it before, just before the darkness had consumed her in the forest. She had been near death, lost in the darkness, and she had fallen—Daddy would surely die now she had failed. And Ma? Ma lay under six feet of dirt, hundreds of miles away.

“No!” She made to sit up, but Ma’s hand pressed down on her chest. “Calm, Billy, calm.” Her voice was strange, deeper, half hers and half another’s. Suddenly, she had dark streaks running under her eyes.

“You’re not Ma!”

“No.” The fair, motherly expression had become a hard stare. Ma’s teardrop jawline now jutted out several inches more, square and trim. The cheeks had sunken, revealing sharp high cheekbones. “Time to wake up, Billy.”

“
You!
” She struggled, but the strange noise was closer now, and she sensed urgency in the morphing figure’s gaze.

“Stay alert, Billy. Stay safe. All is not as it seems,” the Panda Man said.

“Where’s Ma?” she cried, struggling under his hand. The muttering separated out into two distinct voices. She had the sudden sense that the light and the face hovering above her was only a veil, and behind it something else was going on altogether. She could feel her body now, heavy and weak, slowly stirring. She fought to sit up. “Where’s Ma?”

The face above her smiled, and suddenly it was Ma again, marked by the same pair of dark streaks under her eyes. But when she spoke, the voice was still that of the Panda Man. “Wake up, now. And remember, you have a job to do. Unless you want Daddy to end up like me.”

“Daddy!” Billy was sitting up, gasping and cold. The Panda Man was gone, as was the pool of white light. Now she was surrounded by a murky, grey gloom. She was almost certain that this had been the reality hiding behind her vision of Ma all along. Her mind had retreated to a safe, happy place. An echo ran through her mind, a voice charged with urgency.
Be safe. All is not as it seems.

She stopped, breath held in her throat. The whispering came closer. Before she knew what she was doing, she was patting around on the ground, ignoring her throbbing head, until her fingers ran across the rough canvas of her bag. She pulled it towards her, hugging it briefly before thrusting her hand inside for the paring knife, hidden in a side pouch. She ran her hand over the cold blade gingerly and pulled it out, invisible in the darkness.

Then before she knew it, something alien forced its way up from the pit of her stomach, and she was coughing on her hands and knees. The attack lasted for only a few seconds, but in that time a coppery-tasting slime dribbled from her lips, and her ribs ached from the strain of such hacking contractions. Then it had passed, and she was gasping.

Daddy’s cough had started like that. She shivered.

The voices were just outside now. Both had a rough-edged bass, overlaid by a high-pitched whine. Their accents were strange, nothing like how people spoke back home. She had heard people speak strangely before, like the tradesmen who had come south from Dublin or Derry, but these accents were very different. All people in New Land spoke like the monsters who had taken Grandpa.

“How can they’s be all gone, eh?” rattled one, almost a screech.

A deeper rumbling voice answered. “I dunno, but they’d all been burnt to a bloody right crisp.”

“That’s the third this week. We’re gonna run out of places to hit if we ain’t careful.”

Billy pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and began crawling back, away from the voices, blind to whatever lay behind her. The voices echoed metallically around her head. She guessed she was in some kind of backroom. Her hand met vertical concrete, damp and slimy, cold to the touch. She gasped and darted sideways, but met another flanking wall within a few feet. She had crawled into a corner.

“We ain’t there yet,” the first voice was saying.

“S’pose we do.”

“Then we move on like always. They was gonna find us out sooner or later.”

“I don’t like all these stories they’re telling about this ghost army.”

“Don’t be daft! They’re just pulling your leg. It’s one of them Chinese whispers they tell to people like you who are stupid enough to believe it.”

The first voice, wounded, gave a grunt. “I dunno. It gives me the willies.”

“Shaddap. I’m done thinkin’ for the day. My dogs are killing me and I need a little … refreshment.”

A pair of high-pitched giggles floated across the darkness. Billy’s heart leaped a beat, and she squeezed herself as far as she could into the corner. For a moment there was silence, then there was a metallic squeal, and light flooded into her eyes. She held up her hand to shield her vision, and between her fingers she discerned two hump-backed silhouettes, one squat and fat, one tall and thin. They advanced into the room.

“Well, lookie here, Jerry. She’s awake,” croaked the first of the voices. It belonged to the squat figure.

“Indeed she is, Sammy,” crooned the second. “Indeed she is.”

The two figures grew closer until no longer washed out by the light flooding in, and their silhouettes fleshed out into detail. The squat one was at least fifty with tufts of short, spiky grey hair, a forehead greased with a forest of oily spots, and a flat nose that had obviously been stamped in some distant time. The taller figure was younger, pale to the point of translucence, with long greasy bangs framing a skull-like face. Though their bodies were very different in build, their expressions were remarkably similar: puckered and coy, tortured by poor nutrition and not enough sunlight.

Now that they had stepped from the light, Billy saw that they were both women. Both were dressed in stinking masses of rags with black plastic bags wrapped around their rotten shoes. Black grime streaked their arms and necks. Dried flowers and herbs hung from every scrap of their clothing; desiccated scraps and bunches bound with decaying twine, pinned to the lapels of their coats, woven into their sleeves, jostling upon their belts, and braided into their masses of matted hair. They almost looked like the swamp creatures from one of grandpa’s storybooks.

“Don’t be shy, honey,” said Sammy, the short one.

Jerry, the taller, shrugged. “We won’t bite.”

Both of them giggled at that, and a look passed between them.

Billy pressed herself harder against the wall. In response, Sammy held up her hands and took a sharp step forward. She smiled and bent over with her hands planted on her lap, succeeding only in framing her rows of tiny, rotten teeth. “You look pale as a sheet, sweet pea. No need to go fretting. Jerry and I are friendly.”

“Friendly, that’s right,” Jerry said. She was smiling too. “We’re medicine men. Just without the danglies.”

Sammy nodded. “That’s right, child. We’re healers, so don’t you worry. You’re in good hands. What we got usually sets people back quite a price, but we couldn’t leave a little angel like you to waste away out there.”

“Nu-uh, not a little cherub like you.”

Billy almost relaxed, but then another echo of the Panda Man hit: all is not as it seems. She looked again, and this time she noticed something: neither of their smiles was quite right. There was something else mixed in there, deep down—a certain ugliness that couldn’t be hidden.

She palmed the knife’s handle, but kept still, looking for a way out. But now that there was light, she saw that the room was long and narrow, and the only exit was the door through which the women had just entered. The women advanced slowly, one step at a time. Billy froze up, her mind blank, until they were within ten feet of her bag. Then she gasped and scrabbled against the wall, pushing herself to her feet despite the spell of dizziness that washed over her.

“Woah, there, little one, easy! Don’t wanna hurt yourself,” Sammy said. For a moment, she looked frank and genuinely concerned, but then something else seemed to take over; a flicker of shadow that sent her tongue prowling her upper lip. “You’ll ruin that pretty face,” she muttered.

Billy staggered left, trying to circle them. Her legs felt like lead, but her senses were coming back to her. Her legs shook a little less under her weight. She remembered the Panda Man’s words clearly now. She had to get moving, soon. Daddy’s life depended on it. And he had been right: all wasn’t as it seemed. She wasn’t sure why, for the women seemed friendly, but she sensed danger.

“What do you want?” she tried to say. What emerged was something closer to
Wwwaa-yurwhant?

Sammy got down on one knee with her arms still splayed out in front of her. Jerry hung back a few paces, her expression stoic and unreadable, her gaze flicking back and forth between her companion and Billy, as though entranced by an entertaining show. “Nothin’ at all, honey. Oh, look at you, all confused. How long you been lost out in the woods all alone? Where’s your mummy and daddy?”

Billy inched along the wall, trying to ignore the pulsing in her head, as though her skull were full of sand, arid as their farm had become last summer after the crops had wilted to the ground. Her heartbeat throbbed the fleshy mass of her tongue. “Ma went away,” she said. She hesitated, but Sammy’s understanding little nod, coupled with that constant smile, teased the rest out of her. “Daddy’s sick.”

“So you
are
all alone? All the way out here?”

Billy nodded.

Both women uttered maternal groans and crept forth a little farther. Billy braced against the dripping moss lining the wall behind her. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” she said finally.

Sammy nodded with furrowed brows. “Clever girl. A good head you have there. But you’re not well, honey, so come on over here and we’ll get you a cool drink and something to eat.”

Billy remained still, but her stomach betrayed her, bellowing explosively and folding in on itself at the thought of food. Sammy and Jerry glanced at one another and giggled. “Now if that isn’t nature calling, I don’t know what is,” Sammy said.

“Nature, calling,” Jerry said. Her voice was little more than a sigh, a little too high-pitched for comfort. “Come on, girl, we have all sorts to eat. Once you’re fed and watered, there’ll be time for shyness. Right now, I don’t like all that white in your cheeks. Little peaches like you should be full of blush.”

“Oh yes,” Sammy said. “I agree. Come on, now. Let’s get you plumped up.”

Billy shook her head. She had craved the opportunity to talk to anyone from New Land since Daddy had gotten sick—anyone who could help her. She had rehearsed begging them to return to the cabin for her, and saved her Ma’s pendant—the last thing they had left of her—to trade for medicine. Knowing that there were still other people who hadn’t been burned to a cinder should have been a godsend. Even to be offered food instead of scrounging around in the dirt was something that would have sent her imagination into fits of joy not long ago.

They had rescued her from the forest. She would have died in there if they hadn’t come along. There was no doubting it.