Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (22 page)

“No. He wasn’t.”

“How can you say that?” James yelled. He was on his feet. “There’s no such thing as magic powers or psychic visions. You taught me that. Anyone with a mote of rationality knows that.”

“James,” Alex said, “look out the window. Does anything out there look like a world that subscribes to the rational? There’s a reason the North is overrun with the Rapture sects, that the roads are overrun with zealots. It’s so easy to think all this is God’s punishment, or aliens swooped down and took everyone. It’s just that crazy.” He pulled the door open and stepped onto the threshold. “We have to go, as soon as possible.”

“You’re serious?”

Alex said nothing, just nodded.

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

James watched him until any doubt he was joking had dissipated, then said, “Fine, then I’m coming with you.”

“Yes.”

James realised he didn’t have a choice, either way.

Later, one of James’s pigeons fluttered onto the windowsill. He untied the scroll tied around its leg and read the fine cursive scrawled upon it. He recognised Ms McKinley’s hand at once, and breathed a sigh of relief.

She had been the first person to ever reply to the endless messages he had sent across the land when he had been a boy, when he had been feverish with excitement, certain he could unite the world with a few handwritten greetings, and goodwill.

Since then, the messages they exchanged were the one thing James kept to himself. It was his little secret.

Today, however, his heart sank. The message ended with a shaking scrawl.

Looks like Malverston’s tired of my meddling. I hear them coming. Be careful, you little shit.

Canterbury cathedral hadn’t known the ravages of the End. A few short years of vacancy had elapsed before survivors had once again sought shelter and guidance under its roof. Since, various groups had come and gone, but the transept floors had stayed swept, and the myriad spires had been well cared for. Like many other ancient buildings, the decay of time had left it almost untouched, especially compared to the modern homes that had all but melted into plasterboard sludge after a few short years.

The figures depicted in the stained glass windows, beauteous gilded things of dazzling complexity and splendour, stared out over the encroaching wild lands, untroubled and angelic.

It was the only place left anyone felt safe. And now Robert suspected even this last bastion was crumbling in the people’s minds. A significant number of the city’s eight hundred inhabitants had taken refuge here when the attacks had started and the wind farm had been destroyed. Most hadn’t left since.

Robert had made the mistake of bringing some food—food they couldn’t afford to waste—hoping to ease their fears and quell the worst of the rumours. With so few men and their perimeter in shambles, it was all he could do.

Now they were upon him, hundreds of bedraggled figures, all soiled and hungry, demanding to be saved. Not long ago, these people had been his fellow citizens, his neighbours and friends. These were the people who had greeted him each morning and worked away in the fields beside him for years. He knew almost all of them by name and their everyday lives intimately.

But these creatures he barely recognised. Their wild, bulging eyes and bared teeth took up too much of their faces, and their reaching hands had become a wall of scrabbling talons. The racket was deafening, echoing under the high roof and smearing their voices into a riotous hubbub. Before he knew it, he was backing away towards the doors, and as a single dark mass, they followed.

Myriad questions bombarded him from every direction.

“Where are they now? How many of them?”

“
What of our food stores?
”

“Has there been word from the ambassadors?”

“They haven’t gotten to the last of the grain, have they?
”

“We haven’t had power in days. When will the lights be back?”

“What are you doing to stop them? Why haven’t you killed them all?”

“My children are hungry, you must bring us food! Where’s Alexander?”

He backed up until his six-five frame was pressed flat against the wall, and the maddening racket closed in an unbroken half-moon around him. Time and time again he tried answering, but could scarcely manage a few words before an uproar of protest silenced him; why was
that
question important, and not theirs? Frozen and powerless despite all his strength and stature, Robert felt like cowering for the first time in memory.

Then a single voice cut across them, one he knew but at the same time didn’t recognise, so full of power and fury. “Be silent! All of you, shut up!”

It was a voice that usually carried a feminine breathiness, conveying peace and reserved consideration. It was one the city-folk were accustomed to hear subsumed into the susurrus of public socials, a dignified central component of any well-to-do congregation. Now it was rough edged and undercut by crass aggression. One would expect its owner to be wielding a freshly smashed glass bottle.

Sarah stood before Robert and her hair flagged out behind her in a forest of tangled ends. The blouse she had been wearing the past two days was spattered with mud and grease, and in her hand, instead of a glass bottle, were her thick-framed spectacles, almost opaque with dust. “I said
shut up
!” she roared.

Hundreds of voices died with her screech’s ringing echo. The crowd shrank before her. Some fell back on their haunches, staring.

Sarah’s form inflated and sank as she drew a single enormous breath. “How dare you?” she breathed. “How dare any of you?”

Suddenly, the crowd was not a crowd at all, but a gathering of scared men and women dressed in the same clothes they’d worn for days, their faces puffed from weeping and sunken with fatigue. There were no bared teeth now, only quivering lips. A few children whimpered, pressing their faces into their guardians’ legs.

Sarah and Heather, the city’s doctor, had entered through the barricaded side doors from the courtyard. Heather hung on the threshold still, her medical overalls in an unsettling state of disarray. She looked hangdog and almost grey with exhaustion. Like dandelions in a high wind, the city’s elderly folk had wilted from the stress of being under siege. She hadn’t emerged from her clinic for at least ten hours; he didn’t think she had slept since before the attack.

Any other time, he was sure she would have been inundated with complaints of aches and ills, but right now, nobody seemed to have noticed her presence. All eyes were on Sarah.

Robert stepped away from the wall, and placed his hands over her shoulders. She twitched violently at his touch, and he thought she would lash out and strike him, but instead, she relented after a moment of tension. Then in a curious instantaneous transformation, she was Sarah again, a mere wisp of a woman, and the monster was gone. She choked. “How could you? Robert’s trying to help us all, risking his life out there while you all cower in here, and you hound him like dogs!”

Shame fell over the room like a blanket. Eyes fixed on far walls, floors, pews, and candle brackets, anywhere but her. The echoes died away and the cathedral was plunged into deep quiet.

Robert looked down on her in admiration. He hadn’t known such power could come from something so small, yet moments ago, she could have toppled mountains. He squeezed her shoulders in thanks, and she gripped his hand in reply.

He cleared his throat. “The turbines are gone. Once the last of the gasoline is gone, our generators are going to die. After that, we’ll only have our coal reserves. The lights won’t be coming back on.” He let the whispers whip through the room, but then continued in the most sonorous tones he could muster, before the panic could catch. “Our food stocks are thin, but if we work hard re-sowing, we’ll pull through.”

Mr Higgins, a senile, gentle old thing, stepped forward with his hands clasped. “And the others? What have we heard of our friends? Alexander? Messrs McKay and Creek?”

“No word.” Before more than a shared inhalation could sweep the room, he hastened to add, “But that doesn’t mean anything in itself. We know the convoy reached London safely, and that the council summit was due to begin. Alexander left with the others a little over twelve hours ago. So far as I’m concerned, that’s no time at all. We should be prepared to hunker down for a lot longer. For now, we’re on our own.”

Sarah said, “They’re still here, in the city. I know some of you knew that.” She stepped from Robert’s reach. “We’ve been into the vaults, and things are missing. They’re still amongst us, even now. We can’t keep hiding in here, else we’re just inviting them to keep inching closer. If we don’t make a stand, then before long, they’ll be pressed up against our doors and it’ll be too late.

“I know you’re all scared.” She paused. “I’m scared too. I’ve never been so afraid—afraid of starving, of disease, of strangers coming to kill us, of the darkness.

“But the others are gone, and they might not be coming back. We can’t keep waiting for them to save us, holed up in here like animals in a corral. We have to save ourselves.”

What’s gotten into her? She’s always been so prim and quiet.

He felt a burst of pride.
Alexander always did choose his friends well
.
That man knows people better than they know themselves. I wonder whether he knew she had this in her.

There was strength in the room, where only a minute before there had been only a wilted, listless darkness. Lethargy gave way to a single golden band of hope, threading every pair of eyes under the cathedral roof. Suddenly, he became aware that she had started something, and he hoped she was ready to step up to the plate, because these people were going to follow her, not him.

Then a voice rose up from the ether, and Robert’s heart iced over.

“Fire!” The call came from outside. It wasn’t a bellow intended to raise the alarm; it was the species of exclamation that escapes a person’s mouth at the sight of certain mortal dangers. “Fire!”

Robert was the first to the door, forcing his way out as everyone rushed for the cobbled streets. He had barely emerged into the late afternoon light when he caught sight of the amber glow on the horizon. The conflagration had taken hold near the edge of the occupied portion of the city, reaching almost fifty feet into the air, furious raging flames billowing copious spires of black smoke, the kind that could only mean burning paper.

He knew what it was long before they came in sight of the building. It was the warehouse that most called the Library, a vast hanger that stored hundreds of thousands of volumes that they had painstakingly collected—those that hadn’t yet been sorted for the vaults or sent as kindling for civilisation elsewhere. Countless antiques, first editions, rare finds and original manuscripts. All ablaze.

A wail swept over his head from behind, the cry of a mother who sees her child in peril. It was coming from Sarah.

She raced forward, but Heather was on her in a moment, grappling with the writhing librarian while crying, “It’s too late! There’s nothing you can do.”

“No!” Sarah screamed. “It can’t be. We have to do something. Robert, Robert, water.
Water!
Everyone, get water. We can save some of it, we have to.”

“Sarah,” Robert said. He had never felt so helpless. “It is too late. The fire’s too high.”

She screeched. “Do you know how long it took us—?”

“Yes.” Robert didn’t know how he kept his voice level, confronted with the raw pain etched into her cheeks, but he did it. He had to, for her. “I’m sorry.”

She sank to the floor in Heather’s arms, great hacking sobs shooting from her body. Her eyes were huge, enormous, bulging with bloodshot veins and tears the size of raindrops. Her mouth hung open in an inarticulate gape of terror and rage. Heather locked eyes with Robert and nodded toward the clinic. He nodded in reply; they needed to get her away before she did something foolish. He wouldn’t put it past her to rush headlong into the pyre if it meant saving a single book.

The cathedral refugees were rushing toward the river with buckets and pails in their hands. Something had broken; they had been spurned into new life. They were going to take charge of their destinies. Perhaps now they stood a chance.

But it had come at a price.

“I’ll kill them!” Sarah’s shriek came from out of sight, over towards the clinic, but it seemed to pierce the bellowing flames, the crash of shattering glass, and the hundreds of hollering city folk. “I’ll kill them all!”

Robert was left standing alone outside the cathedral, scanning the horizon for signs of approaching enemies. If they attacked now, there was little he could do but get to the clinic, and try to get as many running as possible. But it seemed the fire wasn’t the opening salvo of a new attack; instead, he suspected, merely a symbol, a reminder that they were not alone.

Something was glimmering by his feet: Sarah’s spectacles, one lens shattered upon the cobbles, the other cracked—each sliver catching the warehouse in reflection, burning down into a fractal infinity of roaring flames.