Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (43 page)

Billy’s face exploded into a slab of stinging flesh. The calloused hand striking down from above belonged to the sneering monster who had dragged her from the leaves. He had ordered the others to shepherd her through a campsite full of hot metal shafts, spluttering fires, and cowering skinny people before herding her into a large beige tent at the base of a cliff. Then he had shut them out and rounded on her, as though she were a delicious dish, the two of them finally alone.

“What do you want?” she said.

His jeering superior face darkened with sudden anger and he slapped her across the face again, harder this time. “Quiet,” he hissed. “No talking.”

Then his face was smooth and untroubled once more, and he set to walking about the edge of the tent while she cowered on the floor, holding her stinging hot face in her hands and trying to hold the tears in.

Her legs itched and her mind’s eye was full of pictures of outside—though she had never seen this place before, she knew every part of it, could feel every clot of mud and the rough outline of every pebble between her fingers.

Because it’s the place the Panda Man wanted to go
.
This is the place I was coming to. Why would he want me to come here? These are Bad Men. How can I do anything to stop Bad Men? I’m just … I’m just Billy.

She searched the edge of the tent for Fol’s signature smile and dark billowing coat, but he was nowhere to be seen. The one time she wanted to see him, and she couldn’t have been more alone.

“You’re not of this place,” the man said. “You speak some kind of tongue from aways.”

She didn’t say anything, just crawled up tighter in a ball and cradled her cheek. Her face was slicked and dripping with tears and snot. She had been so close to doing whatever it was she had to do, so close to going home. And now she was stuck here with this man—no, he wasn’t a man. She could see no trace of a person behind his eyes.

The way he looked at her made her feel sick. Grownups did funny things sometimes, things she didn’t like and things that seemed downright silly. But they were almost always good and clever in the end.

This man was different. He was like the medicine ladies. He wore the same sneer Sammy had smeared over her lips as she had reached for the buckle on her trousers; the hungry leer of a starving dog.

He was a monster, the monster.

“Let me go,” she whispered.

The monster tensed. From his belt he brought out a curved knife longer than Billy’s arm, and the amber glow of the fires filtering in from outside sent stars of reflected flames winking off its edge. “I said no talking.”

There was no doubting now that this was the same man who had attacked their camp and chased her and Daddy and Grandpa through the night. He was the one who had taken Grandpa away. She had listened to him attack Grandpa in the darkness, beating with his fists, stamping down from above …

It really was Him.

A bottled surge of anger filled her up and overflowed despite her shuddering throat. “I know what you are. You’re a Bad Man!”

He laughed, a ringing high-pitched chuckle that again reminded her of the kind of thing she expected from a hungry wild dog. Somehow his laughter was more chilling than any scream of fury. Her skin puckered in goosebumps and she tensed against a shudder propagating along her spine.

She remembered the little knife she had taken from the medicine ladies, tucked into her belt. She let one hand fall from her face and slither down to her side now, and her chest ached with relief when she found a slight bulge there at her hip. It was still there. But it was so small compared to his, little more than a potato peeler. He would gut her like a pig before she could break his skin.

“You’re right about that, squirt. Bad man.” He dragged out the latter words into a tuneless song,
Baaad man
. He stopped in front of her and lowered down on his haunches so that they were looking each other in the eye. “You talk funny. Where you from?”

She blinked, lowered her face behind her hands so his glaring blue eyes couldn’t burn her skin, and bit back a whimper. She sensed the anger building inside him; the air was charged with it, but she kept still and kept her eyes off the knife.

I want to go home. I wanna go home, go home! I want Ma and Daddy and Grandpa, I want to go home!

The monster was quiet a moment, then shrugged like it didn’t matter. “Fine. You’re not a talker. I don’t need that. I can get all the fun I need elseways.” And Billy’s heart almost exploded in her chest as the knife began a slow arc up from his side toward her.

She told herself to reach for her dagger, commanding her fingers to reach under her tunic and grasp the handle. But her arms were frozen with fear, her body stupid and unresponsive.

She couldn’t do anything. She was just going to sit here and let him come.

Oh no. No. It can’t happen to me, not me—why am I here? Why? I should be at home, I should never have come—help!

She groaned like a whipped animal and sunk toward the ground, waves of nausea and terror running through her body. She was shaking all over, and it all seemed silly and fake, but she knew she was definitely here in this stinking tent with a man who was about to kill her.

The monster whispered, “Beautiful skin. Hold still, I’m going to carve a pretty picture …”

“No, wait! Help!”

Nononononono, please. DADDY!

With a jerk, she knew she had left her body behind. Despite the knife being only inches away from her face the whole world fell away and darkness took its place. For a moment she was spinning and floating just as she had when she had stepped through the Arch from the Henge, and then she thumped down on familiar floorboards beside a familiar bedframe. When she opened her eyes, she was looking down at Daddy, gaunt and wilted like a summer flower visited by Jack Frost.

“You’re just like your mother,” he wheezed.

Alexander dunked the sponge in the basin of stagnant warm water and rinsed it out with one eye on the quivering Irishman. They had just got to talking and Alexander had been settling into a story like so many others he’d heard over the last year about going hungry and watching the world wilt and the crops die. Don and his family had come across the sea.

He was captivated. They had brought in the old man back at New Canterbury, but there had always been the chance that he had been an expat living in England when the End hit. But this … this man was too young to have known the End, barely out of his thirties. He was a native of Ireland itself.

So others really were out there. After all these years, he finally had solid proof of it.

And if Ireland was still dotted with survivors like Don claimed, what did that mean for the rest of the world? The End had left perhaps only one in a thousand behind, but the world’s population had been in the billions. If that was so then maybe the small circle of ten thousand souls left on Earth he had estimated all this time was far larger. Perhaps their true numbers lay in the millions.

He was so enamoured with a snowballing flight of imagination—the kind he hadn’t felt in years, like those that used to drive the fits of passion in his youth that had forged the mission’s heart—that he didn’t notice Don’s eyes glaze over.

By the time Alexander stooped forth from the stool, the Irishman was in the grips of muttering delirium, speaking incomprehensible tongues. Even in the short time Alexander had been with him, though his spirits seemed buoyed more by the moment, his body was fading. His lips were now a stark blue and his skin had the rubbery lacklustre appearance of a corpse.

The man with the sickle was on his way, there was no doubting it. Alexander couldn’t guess how long he had, but it wasn’t long. A day, maybe. Hours, probably. If Heather or one of the doctors from London were here, then maybe they could do something to save him, but there probably wasn’t another person for miles around.

In any case, Alexander had seen enough cases of Tuberculosis over the years to know it at a glance. There wasn’t a whole lot their medicines could do but make him comfortable. And that was all Alexander could hope to do, even if the only way he could accomplish it was through one last friendly chinwag.

Alexander leaned over him now and let a stream of the warm water drip down onto his forehead, splashing away the greasy sweat and bile and mucus, but still Don muttered feverishly, jittering beneath the sheets with his eyes rolled up into the back of his head. Alexander picked out only every other word, because that word was always the same. “Billy … Billy … Billy …”

“Daddy.”

Billy stood in a whirlwind of blurred shadows. It was the cabin, but it was all far away and distant, blurred as though she were looking at it through shattered sooty glass.

Like the tornado that took Dorothy away from Kansas
.
I’m just like Dorothy. But this place is dark. There’s no Oz.

No, there was no Oz. Just Daddy. He alone was in focus right in front of her, glowing despite the lack of light. She knew it was him, but she was terrified by how different he looked. He looked just like Ma had before she had gone away, shrivelled up like a prune with his hair brittle as the teeth of a broom. The dark patches under his eyes reminded her of the Panda Man—yet these patches weren’t sleek black, but a blue so vivid that it could only have been painted on.

“Just like your mother,” he repeated, shaking his head. His voice was no more than a whisper, as though the real Daddy was deep down inside, trapped under the weight of all the dead flesh she was looking at. “Scatty as you like, but always there in the end.”

“Daddy, I’m sorry,” she blubbered. She stumbled forward and felt as though she was passing through something solid just beside the stool, a thickness that blacked out the world for a moment until she passed out the other side. She shook herself and continued on, falling across Daddy’s lap. She let out a sigh as the feverish warmth of his body enveloped her, and she curled up in a ball, crawling up until she could loop her arms over his shoulders. She didn’t care that the sheets were wet or that he smelled like the meat shed after a hot summer day. She didn’t even care that the world around them was dark and fogged, without floor or sky, and all this might be a fairy tale happening only inside her head. She only cared about the feel of his hands slipping up to stroke her hair away from her forehead, the calloused fingers like sandpaper on her ice-white skin.

She moaned soft and slight, resting her head on his, sinking into the folds of the sheets with him. It had all happened so fast, losing Ma and Grandpa and the farm, and she had come so close to going away on the Panda Man’s orders and never seeing Daddy again—not even saying goodbye.

She held on to his throat so tight he gripped her arms to ease her off, but his eyes were soft and swimming.
Big old bear eyes,
Ma had called them. He kissed her forehead. “My girl,” he sighed. “You have nothing to be sorry for. I’m the one who owes the apology.”

“I left you, Daddy. I left you all alone and I don’t know why. You don’t understand. He made me, promised that you would get hurt if I didn’t go and there wasn’t time … There wasn’t time—”

He placed a finger reeking of bed-sweat up to her lips and shook his head. “No more. I understand.”

“No, you don’t understand and I’m sorry I didn’t come back.”

“Billy. I understand.”

She blinked. “You do?”

“I do.” He frowned and looked away for a moment. “I don’t know how, but I do. I’m seeing it all now like I was there. The strangest thing I ever saw.” He gasped. “Billy, you stupid girl, what you’ve done … Those women in the forest.” His fists tightened around her shoulders and his sunken lips tightened to a solid white line. “That man … thing… whatever he is, pulling on you left, right and centre like you were his puppet.” He spoke as though seeing it all playing out in front of him like a film reel in fast motion, and she waited for the finale. He stiffened at last and she swallowed as he breathed, “Billy! That knife … oh, Billy, no.”

“It’s okay, Daddy. I’m here now.”

“No, Billy. No, you’re not here.”

She pulled away and blinked. “What?”

“You’re still right there in that tent. It’s all just … on pause.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know.” He frowned, looking off beyond her at the clouded wall of nothing. “I just do.”

“But I
am
here.” She reached out and touched his chest, pressing her palm flat against the slick pale skin. “We’re together, Daddy. And I’m never going away again.” She rested her head on his shoulder and sighed again, closing her eyes. “It’s over.”

A moment lasted when she was with him and it didn’t matter that anything beyond the bed was fuzzy and in darkness, nor that she could feel the back of her mind being stretched, as though she was being tugged back to somewhere far away by a hook attached to the back of her head. She was with him.

Then his hand touched her shoulder. “It’s not over, Billy. You have to go on.”

She shuddered. She was slipping back and away despite wanting to hold on to him. She could feel the rough canvas floor of the tent pressing into her knees. Her stomach fluttered at the thought of that knife so close to her throat. But she didn’t care. She wouldn’t believe it. This was real, it had to be.

“Billy. You have to keep going.”

She pushed her head tighter against him and her voice was muffled. “I don’t want to!”

“You have to. It’s important. I don’t understand what that man has you doing—and I’d give anything to have you a million miles away from all this, back home eating the first berries from the bushes behind the barn … But I know that you’re different. I always knew, but nothing like this. Something special. You’ve got to keep going even after me.”

“I will, Daddy, I will. I’ll keep going until I get home for real …” She paused, and frowned. “What do you mean
after you
?”

His eyes were swimming still, but now a very un-grownup sadness squatted behind them. “My time is up, Billy. There won’t be anything to come back to. You have to keep going.”

“Don’t be silly, Daddy. You’re here.”