Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) (31 page)

They had to get out now, before they were cut off. Already they were surrounded on two sides. Without knowing which streets were occupied by the invaders or had been shelled, their options waned by the moment.

Time to go, Allie. Get the girl out. Find the other kids and get out.

But she didn’t move. Frozen upon the cobbles, something congealed in her gut. The figures ahead were suddenly maddening, inhuman things—the only object that seemed real was Sarah, wriggling against her restraints, a fire burning in her eyes to match that consuming the city.

“Billy, you heard what I said,” Allie muttered. She took the girl’s hand gently from her shoulder and rose onto her haunches. Before Billy could protest, she launched herself forwards, following the garden wall out into plain sight. The others’ milling meant that she went unnoticed in her approach. Sarah saw her long before her captors.

When their eyes met, Sarah’s gaze filled with defeat, as though she had just watched Allie gunned down or stabbed to death alongside Heather. So powerful and unfettered was that expression that Allie almost stopped, and only kept going through sheer momentum. Then she was on her knees and scrabbling at the bindings around Sarah’s wrist, madly pulling at the knots.

“What are you doing here?” Sarah seethed.

“Saving your sorry backside. Keep still.”

“Go. Get out, now.”

The knots were tight, expert. Her ministrations had done nothing but tighten them. Cursing, glancing fretfully at the others’ turned backs, she leaned over for a better look.

Sarah’s air of resigned dignity had shattered, giving way to simmering fear. “Allie, if you don’t go right now, they’ll get you too, and trust me—trust me, you do not want to stick around here.”

Allie kept pulling, cursing. She knew she had already lingered too long. Now every moment she went unnoticed was a gift.

A hoarse whisper in her ear: “Please help me. Help me!” The woman with whom Sarah was tied back to back leaned over, her mouth a smear of mucus and tears.

Allie didn’t reply, working on the bindings. If she could work out the knot, she would free them all. Dad had been a dab hand at knots, always showing her all kinds of hitches and bends at the kitchen table when she had been small. What had they been called? Sheep Bend? Sailor’s hitch? Which was which?

Why didn’t I ever pay attention to anything?

“Please! You have to help us. They’ll kill us all!” the woman squeaked.

“Shut up. They’ll hear you,” Sarah muttered.

“You can’t leave me. Hurry up and get us out of here!”

“I said shut up.”

The woman’s eyes bulged and flicked to the crosses. “I won’t go. They won’t take me. No, no, no!”

Suddenly the woman jerked, pulling her feet towards her and dragging her bottom over the cobbles. The bindings jerked in Allie’s hands and tightened to impenetrable nubs. Sarah jerked backwards with a curse.

Allie looked to the woman with horror as her legs jerked desperately, and the three of them jerked sideways again.

“Stop it! Stop it now or you’ll kill us all,” Sarah hissed.

Allie picked at the knots with her fingernails, but they had become far too small. “Shit!”

“Allie, go,” Sarah said.

“No.”

Another jerk.

“Stop that!”

The woman wept wordlessly and jerked purposefully now, as though heading for the alley. Despite the commotion, they had moved but a spare few inches.

“I can’t…” Horror seeped into Allie’s chest, dripping ice-cold onto her stomach. “I can’t…”

Sarah’s gaze sought hers. “It’s okay. Go.”

“No. I’m staying—”

Allie felt the moment she was spotted as though an arrow had struck her. The pressure of a human gaze pinged in some primitive part of her mind; the very same sense that sings in the dark when one is not alone.

No cries of alarm came, nor the clatter of running footsteps. The main body of attention was still on the straw being piled around the crosses. Yet she had been spotted. There was only one thing for it: she didn’t bother looking away, just kept working. She wouldn’t leave, not now, not if there was the slightest chance. Her fingers found nothing but smooth rope, nor a single break where the twine had folded. Her vision blurring with tears, she devolved into a shuddering wreck. Sarah’s head came down gently and rested on hers, and the both of them waited for whatever might come.

Snick
.

Allie almost screamed as a blade shot into sight, expecting it would momentarily be embedded in her face. Then she noticed how short the blade was, though sharp, and the soft chubbiness of the hand gripping the handle. Billy crouched beside her, pushing her way roughly between Sarah and the sobbing woman, and began sawing at the bindings without a word. There was a dull thud, and then the bound women’s arms fell slack, and Billy was yanking at loose twine, casting it aside.

Time snowballed in a heady whirl. They were free! But they had been spotted. Somebody, somewhere, was very close.

“Go, go, go!” Allie yelled, abandoning stealth and heaving at Sarah and the woman with everything her muscles had left. They made it to a half crouch when blinding pain exploded in her stomach, as something very solid sank into her midriff. She had time to glimpse a fist pull away from her body before she hit the ground, and all around her everything was in motion. She crawled into a ball and watched the figures whirling above her.

The man with the sick face cast Sarah’s fellow prisoner and Billy to one side with careless flicks of his fist. He had eyes only for Sarah.

Sarah had adopted a boxer’s stance. She seemed ready to take on an army all on her own, but there was no denying the obvious: though small, the man had at least fifty pounds on her, and he moved with the easy assurance of one who had fought all his life.

Sarah lashed out with a wild fist, and he stepped back so that her fist went whistling by harmlessly. He gripped her free hand, span her around, and licked her neck from shoulder to the bottom of her ear. “Silly girl,” he uttered, a high-pitched sigh, eerily clear despite the commotion, shelling and city-consuming blaze.

Allie found herself standing before she knew what was happening, somehow uncurling her body and diving forwards with a yell born of adrenaline and wild abandon. She hit them off balance, and three of them toppled in a spinning pile of clawing limbs, skittering over the cobbles. As they span and a hand gouged at her cheek, narrowly missing her eye, she caught sight of others, dark shapes running towards them from the crosses.

Allie fought madly, punching, scratching, wheeling her arms every which way in a desperate bid to separate herself. Beside her, Sarah’s own clawed hands worked away at the stinking thing under them.

“Over there!”

“Get ’em!”

The cries reached down into Allie and wrenched at her insides. For a moment it looked as though between them, they might beat the man into submission, pummelling his chest and arms and neck like crazed apes. Then Allie’s head exploded with stars and she toppled sideways, her ear singing and gorge rising in her throat. The world span, and amidst the medley of confusion she picked out fire and slanted running shadows. Then rank breath snorted into her face, and a livid pair of murderous eyes bored into her own. Hands closed around her throat and tightened.

This is it.

Allie realised in a heart-stopping moment that there was no getting away from this. This was no fairy tale. The life was about to be choked from her and nobody was going to come riding in to save her.

The world seemed a remote and inconsequential place from which she was rapidly receding. Pain throbbing in her cheek dropped away, and she realised she was dying; the very fact that she didn’t mind was the most horrific thing of all, reduced to an academic curiosity. Shadows drew in from all sides—whether by her narrowing tunnel of vision or the approaching figures from the crosses, she couldn’t tell.

This is what it’s like to die
, she thought peacefully.

A roar of rage reached her from a great distance, and the pressure around her throat was gone. Allie coughed explosively, surging up as fresh air hit her lungs, and gagged. The darkness flew back as though a curtain had been torn away, and before her the man writhed on the ground. Upon his back, riding him like a horse, was Billy, her flushed rounded face drawn into a terrifyingly adult snarl.

As the man struggled to his feet, waving his hands over his head, Billy stabbed down with her paring knife, jabbing at his fingers, his shoulders, and his scalp.

“You bitch, you bitch, I knew it was you!” he roared, twirling on the spot. His hands flailed until he caught hold of Billy’s heel, and then with a single merciless yank, he ripped her from his back and sent her sailing through the air. She hit the cobbles hard, rolling end over end in a boneless heap, and he was upon her within the moment, eyes bulging.

Allie stumbled, fell, saw yet more stars. The woman to whom Sarah had been tied had run screaming—right into the figures approaching from the crosses. They took her to the ground with a single jab from a rifle butt and kept coming. Any moment now and none of this would matter, for they would be surrounded. She had to get him off Billy and go, just go—somewhere. She got up again, managed a few steps, fell again. She spat vomit onto the cobbles and touched her head. Blood came away with a few strands of hair. The world revolved, a graceful, terrible dance. Allie could only watch as the man beat down with his fists, consuming the tiny girl’s figure with his gritty, bloodied bulk. With unmistakable joy, he pinned Billy down and reached for the curved blade at his belt.

Sarah collided with him with the force of a freight train, and they went end over end on the cobbles, not scrabbling at one another this time, but both rendered utterly senseless by the force of the impact.

Allie crawled over the cobbles to reach Billy, shaking her until her eyes rolled back to focus. “Come on, come on!”

The man was already on top of Sarah, his knife already unsheathed and put to work. “Run!” Sarah screamed. “Run, run!” As she wailed, the knife cut down in rapid slashes at her face and forearms. Criss-crossing, merciless slashes.

Allie cried aloud as Sarah’s skin split in a thousand places. Closing her eyes, she tore Billy up from the ground and ran. The world turned, still, upending every other moment, but somehow she kept her feet.

“Run!” Sarah bawled in her wake. “Run, run, run, RUUUUN!”

Sarah shivered on the ground. Pain, everywhere. Her face was numb, a mass of crackling nerves. She had no idea how long the cutting had gone on. All the while, Jason’s livid, bloodshot eyes had glared down into hers, hungry and glittering. Now, curled in a ball, she waited on her side while those around her talked.

“They’re gone!”

“I want that little brat found. She’s mine!”

“I tell you, they’re just gone. Ran towards the fire, didn’t they?”

A pause.

“Towards the fire?”

“Yeah.”

A half-amused huff. “Stupid bitch.”

Jason’s face popped into view, blocking out the featureless sky, and grinned. His face was already swelling from the pounding he’d taken, but it only added to his menace; just another accoutrement to the seeping wound upon his cheek.

Not human
, Sarah thought.
He’s not human.

His fist closed around her shirt and lifted her up as though she was but a feather. “Time to face justice,” he sighed, a sickly delight radiating from him into the others, who grinned in turn.

Head lolling, Sarah caught sight of the woman she’d been tied to, lifted lifelessly up onto the bed of hay surrounding the nearest cross. She realised then that she glided over the ground, moving towards the central cross. Her heart gave a great lurch as some primal fear locked into place, something her hazy mind couldn’t quite process.

She was being dragged, her feet bouncing over the cobbles and her armpits painfully hitched up by two pairs of hands. Expressionless men hauled her towards the hay bales as she bled from countless places, leaving a trail of scarlet droplets in her wake.

I thought I’d die at home, in bed, an old, old lady.

There wasn’t time for more thoughts. By the time even that single coherent musing had coalesced, she was being lifted onto the hay, and Jason hopped up behind the post, and yanked her against it, pulling her hands behind her back. At her flanks, upon the other two crosses, her fellow captives screamed shrilly.

People gathered around below as though they didn’t hear a thing, frank curiosity and bated excitement hanging about them like a stink.

She fought to the last, but in moments she was stuck fast to the central upright. Jason stepped around the hay and observed her with something resembling lust. His hand rose up to her cheek and trailed the bleeding slashes, his lip caught between his teeth. “How does it feel to know there’s nobody coming?” he said, almost as though to himself. His gaze was upon her, yet not; he stared only at the flesh. “That you’re all alone in the world, and there’s nothing you can do to stop the darkness?”

Sarah stared back at him, squeezing the last of her energies into bringing the world into sharp focus. “I’m not alone.”

Robert is out there.

In all her struggles, she had almost forgotten him. Thinking of him now almost broke her in half, a straight fracture from top to tail.

Something behind Jason’s face twitched. She knew he saw it in her eye: he hadn’t broken her. She would never break, not so long as she drew breath and Robert waited out there for her. She would never stop fighting her way back to him.

Jason stepped down from the bales and backed up, addressing the small crowd. The distant shelling shifted: a momentary respite rang loud in the ash-strewn air, and then fresh explosions rang out, altogether louder and, somehow, more solid. It took Sarah a moment to realise all the shells now landed upon the cathedral. The centuries-old stonework burst into florets of stony fragments, showering the air with the craftsmanship of masters long dead. The shells landed in their dozens, and in a matter of seconds the spires were reduced to rubble, and the beauteous stained-glass windows succumbed to shrapnel.