Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (51 page)

And the others knew it. Panic was creeping into their eyes.

Norman waited a moment longer, but Robert was blank—Norman realised the blankness in him was a depth of fury he’d never seen. Robert had stalled; Norman could see the battle to keep still in the micro-expressions on his face.

It was taking all he had to fight his own demons.

Norman was on his own. He wheeled around with his hands still on his head and that voice that wasn’t his burst forth yet again. “Look at me. All of you, look at me! Don’t look at them. They’re nothing. You all keep watching me. We’re going to be fine.”

“Like hell,” Richard squeaked. “We’re dead—we’re so dead.”

“No. We’re going to be fine.”

John DeGray was looking at him as though from a great distance. “There’s a time for pep talks.” His voice was shaking with adrenaline. “I don’t think this is it.”

“Shut up. I said keep your eyes on me.” He was tense, leaning over and ignoring the blinding pain in his chest and the bite of the bone-chill of this crazy place, breathing fire and pulling their gazes toward his through sheer force of will. “We are all going to be fine. We’re going to go along with them because we’re smart, and we’re going to watch and learn. And when the time is right, we’re going to get out of here.”

By the time he stopped, the ragged men and women had formed a silent solid circle around them, watching. But the riders from the South ignored them, each of them watching for Norman’s word.

Norman nodded to them, and then turned to a dark-skinned man holding the flagpole. “Alexander Cain and the people of the South send their regards,” he said.

The man, with skin like stretched moleskin, didn’t say a word. He turned to his companions and made a claw-like symbol with his free hand, and then turned back to Norman and strode towards him.

The circle closed in on the riders. The stench of dried blood grew stronger. All those blank faces came closer, hungry and tortured faces turned ugly by anger and pain.

Amongst all this, Norman had forgotten just who these people were: farmers and traders, everymen, people whom they had once called friends. All of them had been starved out by the coalition in their pursuit of keeping the Old World alive.

They had brought this on themselves.

They were led away in silence.

Norman found himself watching Robert. Their ragged captors had ripped his weapons from him, hissing like wildcats, leaping back out of range of his enormous arms and Obsidian’s nipping teeth. But Robert had shut down.

In the end, Norman saw why. He followed Robert’s gaze as they crested the ridge and began the long descent back towards the moorland floor, and saw what Robert must have seen when they first arrived—what had locked up his gears.

He knew why he hadn’t seen it before, well hidden as it was. It was easy to forget how much more Robert saw than the rest of them, how unprepared they were for any of this.

Below the ridge was a pit thirty feet long and four feet wide, freshly dug out of the earth. A thin layer of soil had been kicked over its length, but it wasn’t enough to hide the horrors therein. A myriad of blank, staring faces, and naked bodies tangled and white as porcelain. Arcs of blood as black as treacle. At least a hundred people lay partially exposed in the ground, piled on top of one another, their bodies ripped and torn. They stared at the sky, unseeing, their radio message never answered.

The emissaries from Scotland. They really had been here. But they had been no more of a match for the army than anybody else. And there was no telling where in the vastness of the North the rest of their people called home—if any of them remained.

Well, Norman thought. Now we know.

Nearby lay a spoil heap of pebbles and scree. It must have taken an army to dig that pit out of the thin, rocky topsoil. An army of slaves.

Their captors led them down the mountain and over miles of moorland, toward the distant campfires they had seen during their ascent. Soon they were being led on a hidden switchback path, ascending yet again. They were heading toward a cliff top. A single tent billowed in the wind on the peak above it.

Allie and Heather kept a close watch over Sarah, but she didn’t need it. Allie scarcely recognised her.

The days had passed so slowly that at times it seemed that the leaves falling from the trees would freeze in mid-air and the clocks would wind back on themselves. New Canterbury’s militia took turns on sentry duty, scouring the hills and forests for any sign of change. But things seemed frozen, shut up and waiting.

Allie couldn’t take it, sitting up on the rooftops, jumping at every shadow.

What are we waiting for? For our families to come home? Or for the fire-starters?

It was getting harder to tell by the minute.

They had quickly run out of things to say. The hollow ring of the silence between them was more frightening than the night watch. They were friends, good friends, she and Sarah and Heather.

They were best friends and they had nothing left to say to one another.

All they could do was sit and watch and wait.

This isn’t me. I don’t worry. I never worry. Even when Dad died. I always knew I would be okay.

But this was different. She had fought long and hard in London to be somebody, and scratch out the label of Town Gossip hanging over her head. Before she had been assigned to Norman and Lucian’s scavenging party to Margate, she had been content to wallow on the sidelines, taking what she needed and doing the bare minimum on the duty rota. Going into the wilds had been sobering.

She would never forget the sight of the skeletal refugees crawling toward them, desperate for help. She would never forget riding away from them as though they had the plague.

The game’s changed. New rules, and nowhere near as many players.

So here she was, sitting in the hot seat. People looked at her as though she had a clue as to what she was doing—and that was the most terrifying thing in the world.

Looking back, she could barely recall the old her. Only in the blur of distant memory could she make out a shadow of the stupid, little ignorant snot she must have been.

Who would have guessed?

Presently she sat up on the rooftop of an old Edwardian three-storey house beside Higgins and his young companion, whittling away the hours playing a card game she didn’t understand, nor cared to learn the rules for. She could feel a thin smile stretching her lips, though she did her best to hide it. Smiling at a time like this felt inappropriate, but she couldn’t help herself.

“What’s so amusing?” the kid kept saying.

“Nothing.” She would play her hand, lose, and the deck was reshuffled.

It took her a long time to work out why she was smiling. She didn’t pursue it, just let it simmer away in her subconscious and bubble to the surface. When it finally popped up, she had to stifle a laugh by masking it with a cough.

Norman. It was him.

She realised with sudden piercing clarity that she was holding it all together for him. That scrawny, clueless idiot who everyone thought was a saint—but she knew was just as clueless as she was—was why she had gone all the way to London, had patched up that girl, had dragged her sorry behind all the way back here to stand guard and babysit the city folk. He brought out something in her, the part of her that made her what she wanted to be.

Bloody hell, I love him,
a voice whined in her head.
I can’t believe I’m in love with that fool.

But there it was, bared in front of her. You didn’t get to pick who you loved.

The more she thought about it, however, the more inevitable it seemed. They were in the same boat, she and him. Not long ago he had been just as lost, just as useless. Sure, he had a public face, and he hadn’t been able to get away with slacking off, but they had shared that same unignited spark.

Despite the pain and suffering of all this mess, it had brought out the good in both of them.

What if he doesn’t come home?

He will. He has to. If he doesn’t, I’ll kill him.

She shook away mental images of the horrors he and the other riders might be facing up north. There was no use thinking about it.

“Hold the fort,” she muttered. “Keep them safe, keep them breathing. They’ll be back.” She pulled her knees tighter to her chest and flicked another card down onto the slate roof tiles. “He’ll be back.”

Higgins grunted. “You must have a touch of the Sight, lady.”

She frowned. “What?”

“You’re right. He’s back.” He was standing and facing down into the streets. His face was tight and disbelieving.

Allie struggled to her feet. “Who?”

“Him.”

She stood up, gripping him by the sleeve. Though she was a head shorter, she tore him down to her height through sheer vehemence. “Who, damn you?”

Higgins’s face bore the toothy smile of a child waking on Christmas morning. “Him. He’s back.”

“Norman?” Allie breathed. Her heart skipped a beat.

Higgins shook his head. “Mr Cain. Alexander Cain has returned to us!”

She blinked and nodded. A flood of relief, tainted slightly by disappointment, suddenly swept the cobwebs from the day. “You’re sure?”

“See for yourself, lady.” He gestured to the cobbled streets below, where she could now see a lone, robed figure striding from the abandoned outer edges of the city.

He had grey-blond thatched hair, tall and wiry, with a ruddy, wise face akin to the Greeks of old. Even from this distance, there was no mistaking the Messiah of the South. Allie let loose an enormous sigh, deflating like a knackered old balloon, and watched him stride toward the city. As though sensing his arrival, people who had been locked up for days in their own homes thrust out their heads through boarded windows and barred doorways, squealing with wordless delight. The droves who had clamped themselves to Agatha and her sermons in the cathedral came running, most of them far too old for more than a careful shuffle, but hurrying still.

He was swamped in moments. The crowds of New Canterbury were upon him before he could reach the building where Allie still stood. Higgins and the kid had scampered away to join the crowd, but she couldn’t move. A wave of exhaustion that she had been denying until now crashed over her.

People were jabbering. Many were crying. Some just screamed, down on their knees.

How does one man do that? How can people believe that much in flesh and blood?

But it was a pointless question, because she knew she believed just as much as they did.

Alexander Cain had been unheedful and selfish. He had given his and all of their futures to his mission. She knew he must have played a least some part in the debacle they now faced. And in that way, he would never stop.

But he was here. He had played his hand when nobody else had in a game nobody understood, just as she had been doing up here with Higgins and the kid. In the end he had lost big, but there he was, standing down there in the street.

He had come back to them.

Allie was about to head for the window and climb down when she saw the crowd fragment and face down the street. The crying and wailing was stemmed. And amongst them, Allie saw that Alexander looked shocked.

She turned to follow their gaze, and there at the end of the street was the militia. Regimented in strict rows, rifles and pistols at the ready, two hundred of the people of New Canterbury stood puff-chested and erect upon the cobbles. Among them were Heather and the wife of Ray Hubble, and countless others whom Allie would never have believed would take a stand.

But here they were, a formidable line amidst the ruin and chaos.

At their head, Sarah Strong stood front and centre, her red hair and angular face aglow with dogged temerity.

I wouldn’t have it any other way,
Allie thought. By the time she reached the streets, Alexander and the crowd had joined the militia, and the two groups became one. Heather and Agatha were amongst those armed, a doctor and a senile old lady, standing arm in arm with the young and brave.

Allie took a pistol for herself.

The two crowds of militia and civilians chattered and mingled for a long time, nuzzling like a separated bitch and her pups. Coldness had grown between those prepared to fight and those who would never be ready, but those divisions now dissolved, spurred by a strength that even Alexander would never have been capable of on his own.

Alexander appeared before Allie and Sarah and the others. He stared right down at them as though seeing them for the first time. He wasn’t smiling, nor was he serene like she had expected. He had found a humbleness somewhere out there in the wastes. He seemed more a mortal man than she remembered.

But that did nothing to lessen the shock when he, Alexander Cain, saviour of mankind, bowed to them. Then he threw his arms over Agatha, who evidently scarcely recognised him, and rested his head on her shoulder. Agatha patted his cheek and crooned.

Alex held her tighter.

It took Allie some time to realise she had been crying.

Sarah appeared beside her at some point. They took one look at one another, and knew exactly what the other was thinking about: Robert and Norman.