Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) (43 page)

Marek could only gape, running still as the dust cloud swept down over him.

The wall was all we had. And our firepower just went along with it
.

Breathing vaporised concrete, he reached where the gate had been. Before him lay a buckled twist of iron, gaping wide. On either side the wall was pockmarked with ragged holes, denuded to a few feet in height.

Already the whine was building again.

“Get under any cover you can find. Be ready!”

Marek passed through the gate and got behind the wall’s remaining cover. With the creeping dread of taking a bullet to the back stalled momentarily, he searched the rubble in a mad frenzy, checking smoking bodies for anything useful.

Maybe they could lay down enough fire to cover the bottleneck at the gate.

Every body he checked bore a face scorched and inhuman. Any weapons were twisted, useless. Cursing, he yelled, “Here they come.”

While the others took cover, Marek kept searching, yelling in pain as his leg cracked ominously. He stopped when he unearthed something that punched all the air from his lungs: a single scrap of shawl.

Marek stared dumbly while the world span, until the moment the gate darkened and the first of the emaciated figures came rushing through. In the same moment, the next wave of shells hit, peppering the courtyard.

Marek ran for them, swinging the sabre, slashing with wild abandon, knowing he had only a few moments left. The sheer ferocity of his swings sent the first wave sprawling back, but there was no fooling hard numbers: the sheer mass of their ranks continued pouring through the gate and gaps in the walls like a scourge of locusts. A bulbous beachhead formed in moments.

Hot metal flew down from the tower, spraying the wall and the asphalt, eliciting screams and grunts that were half-drowned by the intermittent explosions gouging the ground.

From the mass of skeletal bodies, Marek spotted a figure moving with such grace that, for a moment, he thought he was dead already, and he watched the pirouetting of an angel. Then the figure resolved into a snarling man with a face like a wild dog, cutting through people as though they were inanimate slabs of meat.

Marek rolled hard to the left, bringing them to face one another. The man halted for a moment, and they looked each other up and down. Marek lunged, sabre in hand. Only then, seeing the man feint to the side with the fluidity of water, did Marek realise how weak he had become. All he could do next was watch the sabre carry him uselessly forwards, while the dog man crouched with easy grace and brought the knife up under him.

Pain shot through him and set a thousand bells ringing. For an instant the man was by his side, breathing hot stinking breath over his face. Then the knife was pulled back, and Marek watched the floor rush up to strike him in the face.

The world receded as fast as the pain, spinning down a long black corridor. As Marek died, the orchestra of destruction wound down and warped into a deep, gloopy hum; and for just a moment, that sound became the laughter of something beyond the world, a mad staring evil that closed its fist over the dying earth.

Norman kicked at his horse’s sides and rounded the corner of what had once been the NatWest skyscraper, followed by two dozen riders. The explosions had reached them minutes ago, and the sound of battle had begun soon after. He knew they were already too late, but it took all his resolve not to haul the reins.

The city, the storm
, he thought as the dream that had plagued him for so long flashed before his eyes.
The day all this started. We’ve come full circle.

Canary Wharf lay in turmoil. Hordes surged in through the broken gate, smoke rose from a hundred craters gouged into the street, the wall had been shattered to so much rubble, and about it all, a swirling leviathan descended upon the tower from the black clouds.

The shelling of the walls ended, and a moment of comparative deathly silence followed. Then with a tinkling that sounded like a thousand ringing bells, myriad panes of glass blew out on the tower’s western flank. Moments later a second volley tore the guts from a floor close to the tower’s peak, sending shredded office furniture spinning out into space. Constant shelling resumed, peppering the great spire of chrome and glass with holes.

Norman cursed into the rain. How many kids and injured refugees were in there? Hundreds, or thousands?

The Frost inside him thrummed to effervescent life, threatening to burst out of him like a moth emerging from a chrysalis.

It’s here. It’s from here the End will spread, once and for all. This is no rainstorm, and those are no clouds.

One way or another, this fight was going to be over fast.

He kicked harder, urging the horse onwards. If he stopped now, the others would halt, and if that happened they would be fodder in the open. They raced down the street towards what had once been the wall.

Norman brought his rifle up to head height. Jouncing along, it swayed wildly in his grasp. He let go of the reins, squeezing the horse with his knees. Beside him, Robert rested his own rifle on a forearm, taking aim.

Norman fired, and a moment later a dozen other blasts sounded over his shoulder. Several figures dropped to the ground—a handful from a crowd that seemed infinite, stretching into the mist as an unbroken carpet of bloody faces and bony bodies.

“Hit them head-on!” Norman said.

Their only chance was to penetrate as far in as they could. Most of the army had passed in through the walls, blind to their approach. But if they got caught outside the wall, they wouldn’t last a minute. They had to get into the courtyard and make for the tower.

He gritted his teeth. The ragged figures ahead heard them too late: they turned just in time for the horses’ bodies to collide with them, screaming as they fell under dozens of hooves. As one they plummeted headlong into the crowd, passing through the gate and parting the crowd as a boat ploughs the waves, leaving a bow wave of flying bodies in their wake.

He cast a hasty look about, stealing the lay of the land. The lobby had lost all its glass panes, and the battle raged for the most part inside or immediately outside it. Other pockets of resistance held near the stables, Lincoln’s workshop, and near the catwalks.

He stabbed down with the butt of his rifle, beating unsuspecting heads as he passed, praying an errant shell didn’t hit ground and bring an abrupt end. Behind him he could hear the others sticking close as he steered towards the lobby. Seventy feet, then sixty, fifty.

We’re going to make it!

A lone figure leaped from the crowd, one he would have recognised anywhere, even now amidst the surging chaos. Jason leered in Norman’s path, standing perched with his dripping knife held out to one side.

Norman bent low on the saddle and brought his rifle butt up high. For a giddy instant he thought he had won: either Jason would be trampled, or he would dive aside to be clobbered. Then in a show of litheness that defied all logic, Jason passed to the side and down in exiguous pirouette, bringing his knife over the horse’s knees.

The world revolved. The horse’s rear came up as the forelimbs crumpled, and then Norman was flying, wheeling his arms as his forwards momentum carried him through the air. He landed upon a pile of bodies two deep and rolled.

He scrambled, willing pain not to come, certain that he would be dead in a moment. He grabbed blindly as the others rocketed by, surging ahead towards the tower, and found his feet. He searched the writhing madness for his own mount. If he could get to it, his rifle still might be close by. The horse had cartwheeled in a spectacular slide, crushing at least four people under it.

Beside it, a canvas bag had come loose from the saddle and slid twenty feet in the mud. It twitched, alive. The neck of the sack opened and fell away, revealing a tiny, tearful figure. Norman’s heart stopped.

Billy.

“No,” he breathed.

A blur in his peripheral vision drew his gaze: Jason hurtled for him with his tongue lolling and eyes bulging; an inhuman archetype of carnivorous malice.

Norman ran for the saddle. “Run, Billy!”

The girl stood staring, her lips pale, surrounded on all sides by people being stabbed, hacked, and beaten. She cringed and fell to her haunches, locking her hands over her head.

“No, Billy, go!” Norman yelled, waving his hands over his head. “The tower. Get inside!”

She only stared, still crouched, shaking.

Norman leaped upon the saddle, grabbing wildly in the dirt and torn leather for any sign of a gun barrel, stock, trigger—anything. For an agonising handful of seconds all he could do was feel blindly, watching Jason sprint towards him. There was no time! No time!

A whoosh of air was accompanied by a one-ton shadow surging past. Allie rode headlong for Jason, slapping the reins viciously.

“No, Allie!”

Jason snarled as he rolled away. Already he was coming up behind her as Norman’s pulse surged behind his eyes and he found his gun’s barrel, and he yanked at it.

Allie yelled, thrown bodily from her saddle as her own horse’s legs were cut to shreds.

Norman almost abandoned the rifle—he wasn’t about to watch Allie torn apart—but Jason had whirled back towards him. Norman tore at the rifle with renewed desperation. It was caught on something, budging just a little more each time, but wouldn’t come free.

Please. Oh God, please just this once!

“I’ve waited a long time for this,” Jason grinned. Then he was a blur of motion hurtling forwards.

Norman ran his hands along the barrel, found a snag of netting looped over the sight, and yanked it free. Threading it out, he brought the barrel up as the last few feet between them closed. His finger had just begun to depress the trigger when Jason’s knife swept in from the side and knocked the gun whirling from his hands.

No.

Jason sneered. The knife was already coming over his back.

Norman closed his eyes and waited to die.

Then Jason was yelling, and when Norman opened his eyes he saw Billy’s paring knife sticking from Jason’s arm, just above the bicep. Convulsing with his teeth bared, Jason batted the knife free and whirled towards her.

His eyes narrowed in something beyond wildness: a visceral, rending hatred, spraying spittle from his lips. “
YOU
!”

Billy screamed and ran.

Before Norman could move, Jason was gone in her wake as she scrambled for the tower. His hands grabbed at the ground for something, anything, and found a sticky handle. Then he was being dragged up to his feet, and Allie was before him.

“What is she doing here?” she screamed.

Norman couldn’t answer, just looked at what he held in his hand: an antique French sabre.

A sword?
he thought distantly.

“We can’t let him get her.” He grabbed Allie’s arm and gave chase. They fought through the crowd, pivoting and diving, cutting through legs and behind backs, until they burst into the scant space between the courtyard and the tower.

Ahead, Billy vanished inside, dwarfed by everything around her: the sheer scale of madness and sound, and the debris cascading down as the shells continued to pummel the tower’s peak.

“We have to get her, Norman. We have to get her!”

They passed through the buckled revolving door, which snagged Norman’s shirt as he passed and left a gouge along his left flank, and then they were inside the echoing marble cave. The noise was rancorous, every collision and scream amplified a hundredfold; coupled with the echoing rumble of the explosions high above, it sounded as though the gods themselves fought within these walls.

Norman had a queer moment of clarity, watching the tower’s defences crumble, the barricades being overrun, people rolling upon the floor in desperate struggles. In the chaos he had forgotten the cold; cold he now clearly felt.

The Frost was right here, inside this building. The one person who could stop it was sprinting from a creature hell-bent on cutting her in half.

He and Allie leaped fallen bodies and shredded barricades in pursuit, watching helplessly as Jason closed on Billy.

“Run, Billy!” Norman bellowed.

Ahead, Billy and Jason vanished from sight, cat and mouse, moving up into the tower’s bowels.

Charlie took the stairs two at a time, breathless and groaning, dragging his bad leg behind him. “We have a problem!”

James watched him approach without moving an inch. “Yes?”

Charlie glanced between Alexander and James. “It’s Jason. He’s firing on our own.”

“Did they push through?”

“Yes, but he fired the mortars behind our own lines.”

“Where are they now?”

Charlie blinked, wordless. “They… they’re behind the walls. It’s done.”

James’s cold, measured voice: “How long?”

Charlie paused, heart throbbing in his throat. His breath echoed loud and hollow in the empty office, with so many blank uncaring faces staring back at him.

“Minutes. They lost their front line in the first wave. But Jason won’t stop. He’s just throwing them in like meat into a grinder.”