Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (27 page)

“The point is somebody knew about the End before it happened, and planned for it.”

Norman shivered as a full-body chill worked over his skin, as if a bucket of insects had been poured over his head.

Alexander slowly leaned back from the bench and steepled his fingers. “Are you sure?”

“Positive,” Lincoln said. “There’s a bombshell to be going on with.
Somebody knew
.”

Charlie grimaced at the pigeons flapping around his head.

Dirty fucking rats with wings, shedding feathers and shitting everywhere, all day.

Once this was over, he never wanted to see a bird ever again.

Wood-smoke and a sickly charred smell—one he was unsettled to find he was growing used to—clogged the deep meat of his nose.

Jason’s voice trickled like black, boiling tar in the back of his mind. “It’s the fat under the skin. Like bacon.” He had been grinning when he said that, an ugly sight that made Charlie’s skin crawl. “That’s the smell of barbequed bumpkins. Don’t it give ya the jones to slit more throats?”

Charlie pushed the sick feeling rising in his gut out of mind, watching the man with the emerald eyes crouched on the other side of the fire. Hooded and taciturn, he had hung his balaclava on a post to air in the wind. Every second longer, Charlie’s stomach grew only more unsettled at the ruined face, the shiny masses of scar tissue and exposed cheekbone.

From far away his father’s voice spoke to him. “How did you end up with this crowd?”

He shook himself as the grey-haired murderer flashed before his eye.

The bastards killed you, Dad. That’s how. I have to make it right.

And he would. If he had to burn a thousand backward hamlets and trading posts to get a shot at tearing down the edifice of those who had beat him, kicked him like a diseased mongrel, he would do it.

“So why the stomach ache, Charlie boy?” the voice of his father muttered.

He wiped his hands on his trousers. They were still sticky from clearing the last village—

From hauling slices of little boys and girls, cooked medium rare.

“Shut up!” he hissed aloud, through grated teeth. He squeezed the nauseating thoughts deep down in the shadows.

Emerald eyes shifted to him from across the campfire, and Charlie blushed despite himself. A few pigeons alighted on the hooded figure’s arm, and he caressed their delicate feathers. “Don’t forget what they are, and what they’ve done. Stay focused,” he said.

Charlie looked away from the working, bare jaws. “I’m fine,” he muttered. “It’s nothing.”

Those eyes locked fast upon him, magnificent burning gems that could have set Charlie’s clothes ablaze. Charlie had spent more time with that monster Jason that he thought he could stomach and watched him do things that would haunt him in the night for the rest of his life. But no matter how much Jason disgusted him and sent his skin prickling, he could never match the fear that bubbled up in Charlie’s gut when those eyes turned on him.

In those moments he felt himself shrink, turn to transparent brittle crystal. Those eyes scared him because he knew he could never hide anything from them.

A thousand retorts welled up on his tongue, but he bit them back. What would be the point?

They lapsed into silence, filled only by the crackling of the fire and the pigeons’ fluttering. Charlie looked down at his hands.

Would they wash clean, or had they been forever stained?

Every now and then a cry of pain reached them from the valley below, where the captives were fed slops and flogged in equal measure. That was their life now: move from place to place, raze anything standing, kill those who fought back, and take the rest to join the others in the nearest ravine or riverbed, slowly breaking them.

Lucian was down there now. Maybe it was him crying out.

Charlie grunted.

Probably not. The bastard was tough.

He felt those eyes on him again, pressing into his mind like a spoon into jelly. “Your prisoner is still alive?”

Charlie shrugged. “For now. You should have let me kill him when I first got my hands on him.” But he knew he didn’t mean it. He hadn’t lied back in the bunker: just killing the son of a bitch would have been unsatisfactory.

Still, he wanted to be angry at something. The rage felt good. “What do you want
him
for, anyway?”

No reply, just soft muttering to those damned pigeons.

“I’m talking to you! I’m here to get even, to hurt them the way they hurt me, took away everything. So tell me, just when are we going to stop playing around and end this?”

But the man with the emerald eyes wasn’t listening. The pigeons had risen into the air in an explosion of wing beats and wheeled away. A frown had settled low over the hooded figure’s gaze, dark and forbidding. “Do as I ask,” he said at last. “Keep him alive. Let him come to us.”

“But—”

“You’ll get what you’re owed when the time is right.”

Charlie scowled. He nodded to the sky. “What happened to your friends? They get sick of you?”

His words fell on deaf ears. That frown had deepened into a mask of disquiet and, maybe, confusion.

Was there something out there even he didn’t know about?

“The point is academic,” Evelyn said. “We haven’t time for this.”

John DeGray stepped forward without warning, his face twisted with indignation. “I beg the council reconsider. We must hear more of this!”

“Mr DeGray, the wolves are breathing down our throats, and you’d have us waste yet more time on this curiosity?”

“You’re damn right! This changes our understanding of history and all of reality as we know it. Think of the implications—”

“Mr DeGray, please take your seat.”

“I’d hear more o’ this,” Agatha chimed. “I got precious seconds left o’ clarity, and I’d spend ‘em learning’ some God’s honest truth.”

“There isn’t time!” Evelyn cried. She looked to Alexander for help.

Alexander drummed his fingers on the bench. After an uncomfortable pause he said, “The Chair speaks true: we haven’t much time. But every detail counts. Please continue.”

“As it pleases the council,” Latif said. “It didn’t take us long to start fiddling, unpacking things, rooting around. We expected them to drop a grenade or two down the shaft from up top any moment, so why not enjoy ourselves? I checked the radio and got the Blanket on every channel, just like I expected, and then … just twiddling the dials, I came across something else. A signal.

“We risked going back up top. They were still out there, so we needed runners to get the message back home. We drew straws …”

“And sent half a dozen men to their deaths,” Lincoln growled matter-of-factly.

“We’ve been stuck there ever since. And then earlier today … they were just gone. In the meantime, we’ve learned …”

Latif stopped there with abrupt finality. He looked like a man resisting the urge to vomit up something vile.

Norman’s mind worked at a furious pace. The other councillors’ faces were masks of concentration. Between them he was sure he could hear the distant clanking of a thousand mental cogs. It was a strange thing, to be speaking of hidden messages and conspiracies of the Old World, with the threat of being torn apart by savages so imminent. But here they were.

“Why have you brought this before us?” Thompson said.

Agatha giggled, but it was a harsh sound, grating and derisive.

And I’m the one with dementia. Stop being such head-in-the-sand chickenshit
, that tone said.

“Ain’t it obvious?” she crooned. “They brought it back so we could hear the transmission. Right, wrinkles?”

“Right you are, madam,” Lincoln said. “You’re in for a treat.” He nodded to Latif, who consulted the biro on his arm and nodded in reply. Lincoln flipped a final switch and stepped back.

Norman braced, ready to throw his hands over his ears. He blinked when something quite different came rattling from the Old World speakers: a tiny, scratching, broken voice.

He body jerked of its own accord.

There’s a man’s voice on the radio.

Others seemed caught in the same breathless revelation. Eyes were wide and unfixed throughout the chambers. Those aged enough to have seen the Old World had the light of nostalgia in their eyes, while those who had only heard stories of the big Before gaped open-mouthed—all the bedtime stories were true!

“—on? … Ga’darn thing, just work … Wait, the light, it’s on!”

An odd clicking, a solid thump, and then a grunt. The voice went on, though it jittered and thrummed, thin and watery despite its gruffness:

“Arghright, here goes: Broadcastin’ from Milton Percy radio tower. We bring werd from Dunburgh Alliance of t’eh Far North. We’re seekin aid, to send a warnin’ to those where the lights is still burnin in the South.
”

The voice was strange, thick as custard and stuffed with rolling vowels. Norman had heard an accent like that from only one person, someone who had spent his earliest years in Old World Glasgow. He’d heard it from Lucian.

The broadcaster was a Scot.

He blinked and leaned forward even farther, determined not to miss a word.

“Beware the comin’ darkness. All manner of crazy folk, leagues of the bastards. They came w’tout warning, and they killed all they touched. Our cities are flamin, our dead rotting in the sun. They came from everywhere, after t’eh hunger of t’eh winter jus’ gone, on t’eh prowl for revenge from us who won’t forget the ways of Before.

“We know they’ve gone south aways for a good while, that they’re moppin’ ye’s up like flies. It’s given us a wee time to prepare, but we can’t win alone. We need ye’s. We’ll be makin’ a stand, to the last man if we have’tae, but we’d not do it before we had every’un we could on our side. If anyone is out there, please, come outta the shadows.

“A break-off group’s got us messengers pinned down here, at t’eh broadcast site, but if ye could spring us from their hold, we could raise t’eh alarm elseplace—we cud bring all we’ve to give to yer lands, and stan’ beside ye. If we don’t stop them, they’ll have all t’eh lights go out fer gud.

“Please, ye must come. Our coordinates are fifty-four degrees, thirty minutes, thirty-six-point-five seconds north; three degrees, twenty-seven minutes, fifty-two-point-nine seconds west. Please, ye mus’ help.
”

Another click, a groan. An electronic whine, then, finally, so distant as to be almost part of the white noise. “
Please.
”

Then static. Latif lowered the volume to a distant hiss. “He repeats himself, over and over,” he said. “The messaging is circling.”

“Looping,” Lincoln said. “It’s looping.”

“Whatever. It’s been the same message playing for almost two weeks now.”

“He was …” Norman began.

Alexander nodded. “Scottish. We’ve never wandered farther than Northumberland; the North has belonged to the rapture cults and highwaymen since the End. But it seems the people of Scotland have themselves a shadow of civilisation just like ours.”

“Sounds like they’re up to their ears in shit, too,” Agatha said.

“That it does,” Lincoln said. “But the fact remains, there are others. We aren’t alone after all.”

At that, there was finally the beginning of a faint spell of muttering in the crowd.

Can’t blame them,
Norman thought.
It’s like Columbus finding the New World.

“To plague the Far North and us at once, their numbers must indeed be enormous.” Lincoln paused. “So many … How could chaos bring so many together, hunting for blood?”

Oppenheimer, wilted and frail, looked more sorrowful than ever. Heavy rings sagged under his eyes, and his skin was almost translucent.

Look at him; he’s too old to lose a daughter, let alone face this. They’re all too old for this.

“All it takes is a loon with a pitchfork to make the first strike,” Oppenheimer muttered. “Once the frenzy starts, there’s no stopping it.”

“I don’t think we have all the facts just yet,” Evelyn said in guarded tones. “There’s always a man behind the curtain. Or woman.”

“Can we send a reply?” Norman said.

Everyone looked at him, most blinking in surprise. It seemed the concept hadn’t occurred to them.

Lincoln was looking at him appreciatively. “No. Latif and I have tried. The Blanket holds on all other frequencies, and the message broadcasts constantly, keeping the cleared one occupied.”

Norman’s stomach sank. A few grumbled in disappointment.

Alexander cleared his throat and changed the subject. “Coordinates. He spoke coordinates. Mr DeGray, could you enlighten us?”

DeGray stepped from the crowd, ashen faced and sweaty. He fumbled with his satchel of notes as Latif turned up the volume once more. The message looped around, and this time John scratched them down. He then struggled with his satchel, eventually producing a large map of northern England, which he held out horizontally for all to see. “They’re transmitting from somewhere sandwiched between Allerdale and Copeland. A district of Cumbria called Radden.”

Alexander, Agatha and Lincoln started visibly. They each recovered fast, but everyone in the room must have seen it.