Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) Page 2

  He would expect a fair share of the loot, of course, even if Evian and Pepper did all the scrambling around the hot cinders themselves.

  Evian stepped carefully over the still-smoking outer wall, no more than a strip of foundation sticking a few inches out of the ground. Everything was still warm, a dry kind of heat that came only from intense fire, filling the air with a clinging acidity that etched the back of her throat. She wrinkled her nose. “What’s that smell?”

  Bud grunted, his gaze locked fast on a small pile of debris he’d collected, filtering through it. A shadow crossed his expression.

  “What is it?” She waved a hand in front of her nose, kicking idly at a blackened table leg. “Smells pretty good. Like bacon.”

  “Evian.”

  “I could go for some bacon right now. We haven’t had meat in so long.”

  It had been a rough year. To even speak of bacon would have been heresy a short while ago when the meekest scraps of food had all but vanished. People had died, a lot of people. Even the lords of the North had starved.

  A year ago, the Pepsi Squad had been over two dozen strong, Robin Hoods of the wilds, robbing from the lords and giving to those in need—and seeing as they were all orphans, who could have been more in need than themselves? Times had never been easy, and when food ran short they were the first to struggle, but they had had each other.

  Then the food ran out completely.

  Sunny D, Horlicks, Sprite, even Bovril. All gone now… It had been just the three of them since winter’s end.

  “Seriously, where is it? You found breakfast, and you’re hiding it from me,” Evian said.

  The shadow on Bud’s face deepened. “Evian…”

  She whirled, stomach gurgling. “Stop holding out. I saw the barn on my way in. They had pigs. So, bacon. Gimme!”

  A half-cindered book tumbled from Bud’s hand. “Evian, bloody hell, would you think for a moment!” he yelled.

  Evian flinched. Bud never yelled. “What’s up with you?”

  He just stared, his eyes big and round and—yes—tearful. Beaten into action, Evian’s mind turned anew to the burned-out house around her.

  Just like all the others. They littered the landscape like tiny beacons, any free-standing inhabited structure for all the miles in the Pepsi Squad’s territory—and probably much farther beyond. A few days ago people had just showed up, swept through this place on their way north, and set fire to everything in their path. Thin, broken, mean-looking people, marching under the flag of a white bird.

  The highwaymen and lords of the North had squabbled over this land since long before any of them were born. Evian would be fifteen soon—she wasn’t quite sure when, but soon—and she had never seen anything that could match them. This land belonged to them.

  No longer. They had been extinguished, exterminated like a pack of wild dogs, in a single day of bloodshed.

  Evian didn’t understand it. Didn’t care to. They’d got more loot out of it over the past few days than the previous six months combined.

  She realised now, staring around, that she had forgotten. So busy had she been hauling away all she could, thinking only of what they could trade for, of who they could become if they stockpiled enough—the new lords of the North! People would come scrabbling to them instead of the other way around. She had forgotten what these burned-out husks really were. Homes. People’s homes.

  These things had been precious to people. These were their walls, their food, their books. All set ablaze in a great string of conflagrations that had lit up the whole valley. Her nose wrinkled again, but this time it brought not hunger, but horror.

  The smell of burned meat…

  A hand flew to her mouth. She turned away, uttering an unladylike urgh! and vomited bile into the ash. It sizzled at her feet, cooking off and rising up into her face, eliciting a further bout of retching. It didn’t stop until she was on her knees, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She looked sheepishly at Bud, but he didn’t laugh or sneer, just offered a sympathetic blink and went back to sifting through the junk.

  “Where’s Doc?” Evian muttered.

  “Here,” called Pepper, screened from view by the chimney stack, the only piece of the burned-out house still standing. “This place is a dud. There’s nothing that’s not melted but a few cookbooks and pots. Nothing to actually cook,” she added bitterly.

  “Let’s move on. The next one will be better,” Bud said, rising from his haunches.

  “I haven’t looked!”

  “Trust me, there’s nothing.”

  “Nothing,” Pepper confirmed.

  Evian pouted. “Fine. Let’s go.”

  Bud looked over the marred paperback in his hands, wrinkled and blackened with the heat, and cast it aside on the table. He filled his pockets with a few salvageable odds and ends—nothing worth trading, the kind of useless trinkets only boys liked: a large silver coin, string, and a few stained playing cards. He gave Evian a brave smile. “We’re doing good. We just have to keep going; soon enough we’ll be back on our feet. You’ll see. We’ll be rich as any king of the Old World before long—”

  A section of the chimney stack crumbled as Pepper burst over a pile of rubble, seeming almost to cleave right through it from sheer panic. Her stout body radiated alarm, and her eyes were enormous in her head. A strangled “Ack!” escaped her throat as she collided with them, and the trio spilled across the floor. Before they hit the ground, she was shushing them viciously, clamping her ashy fingers over their mouths hard enough to split Evian’s lip.

  Suddenly a great weight seemed to have fallen over the house, an oppressive silence only enhanced by the distant crackling of remnant embers somewhere in the cellar.

  Evian struggled, but Pepper held fast, tears spilling from her eyes.

  Bud managed to shake her off. She feinted as though daring him to make a sound, but he held up his hands, one warding hand out in front of him, the other held to his lips to show he understood.

  Pepper bared her teeth, fists bunched, snot dribbling over her lips. Her eyes darted in their sockets as she inched back towards the walls.

  What? He mouthed.

  Her lips retracted completely, the snarling leer of a cornered dog. THEM!

  Evian’s stomach imploded to the size of a grape, pouring liquid fear into her abdomen. “Oh no,” she squeaked.

  “Shhh!” Pepper abandoned silencing them and pressed against the nearest wall, huddling into a shuddering ball.

  Evian cast a desperate glance at Bud, her mouth ajar. Tears stung her eyes.

  She could usually see all his clever plans flitting behind his eyes. Bud always had a plan. But right now, there was nothing in those soft brown eyes but blankness.

  He took her hand and pulled her against the wall alongside Pepper where they cowered in unthinking, shuddering fugue.

  No. They can’t be back. They can’t. They left. They went away. There’s nobody left to burn. They’re all gone.

  Her heart leapt.

  Except us.

  The silence deepened yet again, clawing at her ears. After a moment she realised it hadn’t deepened but only been contrasted by a new noise, one rising from silence like a leviathan from the deep.

  Somewhere out there, beyond the blackened walls, many footfalls upon muddied ground. A great many.

  Evian pressed tighter against the remains of the Pepsi Squad, and they cowered together in a ball of tears and nerves as the sound grew louder, rising above the dying flames and the trickling breeze. For a few odd hanging seconds it seemed it could grow no louder, then metamorphosed into a rumble that shook out showers of ash from the wall. The earth throbbed to the marching beat.

  It can’t be. It can’t. There aren’t that many people in all the world.

  In defiance of her, the rumble grew louder still. The house seemed ready to crumble to so much sand.

  Bud trembled against her skin. Even a minute ago she would have given anything to have him against her like
this. Now she only hoped he didn’t wet his pants.

  “Look!” Pepper squeaked. She pointed a shaking finger out through the denuded window frame beside them, past the barn and across the valley.

  The grey morning, dark and lifeless under lacklustre clouds, had been stained by a dark cap upon the hilltops. Evian watched the wilted grass become smothered by the first lapping waves of some dark encroaching ocean, thrusting its fingers over the horizon. Spilling down into the valley to the rhythm of the marching beat underfoot, the smudge resolved into something that took Evian’s thundering heart and stopped it entirely.

  A carpet of people marching south. All armed with blades, with guns, with long poles trailing a symbol she had hoped never to see again: a white bird painted with four aggressive slashes; round body, two wings, and a bulbous head. The sigil of a pigeon.

  Something clicked in Evian’s head; a primal will to survive that overcame the numbness steeling through her conscious mind.

  She crawled from the huddle, dragging the others in her wake. Bud and Pepper hissed and yelped, but she sent a blazing glare over her shoulder, and they fell silent, yielding to her. She yanked them until the three of them pressed against the legs of the dining table. She nodded to the chimney stack where a small hollow lay exposed, where the fire had partially eaten through to the wall space.

  The dark stain upon the land grew closer, stretching from horizon to horizon.

  Oh my God. So many people. So many!

  They had to get to the crawlspace. If they were found, three little piggies in their house all fallen down…

  A shiver ran through her, and her skin crawled with a foreign chill.

  Evian counted down on her fingers, mouthing: Three, two, one, now!

  Grimacing, the three of them half crawled, half tumbled over the smouldering floorboards. A breeze had picked up from nothing, rustling Evian’s hair, tugging at her as though a vanguard of the coming leagues. How could so light a touch of air upon her skin bring such a strong urge to throw back her head and scream?

  Pepper reached the crawlspace and scurried inside, hissing and cursing, and Bud followed close behind. Pepper, so small and lithe, managed to squeeze herself into a cranny only inches wide. But Bud’s body, thick with freshly-blossomed muscle, took up almost all the remaining space. On any other occasion, Evian would have said she would never fit.

  Not today. I’m getting in there.

  She vaulted in after them, ignoring gasps of pain and the crushing embrace of the walls around cramped ankles and bent limbs.

  A strange, distant part of her mind flashed up a memory of an Old World book she had seen once: an encyclopaedia of animals out there in the world. She had loved the water animals the best. And her favourite of all had been the strangest: the octopus, eight-legged and boneless and so wonderfully weird. They could squeeze their entire bodies into milk bottles to get at their food.

  They probably looked like that now. Three human beings, bottled inside a chimney.

  And yet, even in here, the wind persisted—there was no space between them for air to flow, yet the wind blew.

  Despite the growing rumble, amplified by the hollowness of the chimneys above their heads, Evian frowned.

  It wasn’t a wind. Not really. It was something else: a caress, so gentle and cold that she thought her arm might become covered with tiny snowflakes.

  “What’s happening?” Pepper hissed from the chaos of bodies.

  “It’s so cold. There are embers under us. We should be boiling.” Bud breathed.

  “Shh!” Evian said.

  The three of them grew silent, their breathing terrifyingly loud, reverberating in the enclosed space. From here, all they could see was a small window of the house before them, facing southward—shielding them from view, but also blocking their line of sight of what approached.

  Outside, the rumble grew still, and the army marched ever southward. Wide-eyed and shaking, they waited as the cold grew only stronger, seeming to intensify at the same rate as the footsteps’ volume—almost as though the army brought with it a halo of otherworldly chill.

  Evian died a small death when shadow first splashed over the garden path. A single human profile that immediately became several, then many, then smothered into an amorphous undulating wave heading towards the barn. The cold seemed to steel into the chimney with bony fingers and grip her by the throat when the marching men and women began to pass. A single mass of starved bodies, sticklike and angular, shuffling forth over the land, their faces fallen and mute.

  Like a river the army flowed around the burned-out ruin, spilling into sight from both sides and passing on. Evian kept her hands clamped over Bud’s mouth, and Pepper kept hers over Evian’s. Her skin thrummed with cold so intense, she was sure it would flay her alive.

  Then footsteps separate from the marching beat, deeper and closer. Somebody had passed through the house’s fallen walls, moving over the floorboards to their left. Evian bit her lip hard to staunch a scream. Bud and Pepper had become stiff as the chimney’s bricks.

  Three men stepped into sight, looking around at the charred remains of the living room, a mere six feet from the chimney. One was wolfish and round-shouldered, another young and limping. They paused a few moments to look at the remains, then moved on, stepping over the walls and following the army south, as though shepherds following their flock. The last man, however, remained. Tall, covered in an oilskin duster, he stood before the dining table, facing away from them. Upon his shoulders, two pigeons bobbed and cooed. The birds stared directly at Evian, and for a horrific moment her mind tortured her with a mental image of the birds leaning into the man’s ears and whispering, There. Over there.

  Instead, the man held his arm out to the side, his gaze fixed on the book in his hand. The half-burned paperback Bud had cast aside.

  The pigeons cooed contemplatively upon the man’s shoulders.

  He was so close that even from their hiding place, Evian could read the title: Alice in Wonderland.

  The following moment could have stretched on for years, thrumming with something more. The biting cold screamed down upon Evian’s skin, and in her peripheral vision she realised that snowflakes really were forming on her skin, blossoming upon her forearms’ fluffy down.

  Struggling for breath, she watched the man turn to face the chimney, his eyes still on the book.

  His face. His face… Where is his face?

  She glimpsed bone and exposed muscle, a terrible mask of beauty spoilt. Above cheeks half-missing, through which exposed molars peeped, a pair of bright green eyes moved over the book. Eyes intelligent and sparking with intent and rage.

  Evian knew she would never forget that stare, one broken and twisted, lost between life and death.

  The man with the emerald eyes took the book gently in both hands, held it there before him a moment, then with sudden violence tore it in half. The pages fluttered down like so many feathers, twirling amidst the snowflakes raining upon the ashy floor.

  II

  Norman Creek chased a ghost through the forest.

  Little Billy Peyton’s shadow flitted between the trees far ahead, wisps of flaming red hair and pale Irish skin amongst the branches. Despite his calls for her to slow down, she kept her relentless pace, giving no indication she’d heard. Cursing and praying he didn’t get lost out here in the ancient foggy woodlands, hundreds of miles from home, Norman plunged onwards.

  His lungs burned from running, and fog pressed in close all around. Gnarled branches loomed from the white blanket so fast that he relied on instinct to dodge them, ducking and wheeling on the balls of his feet. His head throbbed to the beat of a single looping thought: This is stupid, this is stupid, this is stupid.

  One false step from any of them would result in a broken ankle. But there was no slowing. No time to think. Not when the stakes were so high.

  Robert, Lucian, and Richard pursued a few paces behind. Of the two dozen who had set out from New Canterbury to this strang
e place in England’s far north, only the four of them remained. The others lay in pools of blood, back upon the clifftop from which they had just descended.

  With every blink, Norman saw their blank staring faces in his mind’s eye. Cut down by James Chadwick, the architect of all their strife, the man with merciless emerald eyes. Their enemy. Their brother.

  Stop that, he scolded himself. You can’t help them now. The others still need us. Keep your head.

  If he let himself wander, everything that remained of the Old World would vanish forever. Right now an army marched to erase New Canterbury and the Alliance of the South from the face of the Earth. And once that happened, there was no going back. The world as they knew it would plunge unheeding into a new dark age. Everything they had worked for would be lost.

  “Keep your bloody hands to yourself.” Lucian scowled behind him. The vicious grey-haired little man sounded fit to tear the world a new orifice and forget his weeks of starving and slaving away as James’s prisoner.

  “You’re stumbling. You can barely stand,” Richard grunted.

  “I’m fine!”

  “Keep your damn feet up then, you knackered old goat!”

  Despite apocalyptic stakes and the bloodbath from which they had just emerged, Norman grinned. To think that Richard, a scrawny little bookworm, would ever square off against Lucian McKay.

  He had changed. Watching your master die in front of you could have that effect.

  It had been two hours since the man who perhaps had been the world’s last scholar, John DeGray, had been gunned down along with the others. Richard, his apprentice, had been right beside him. His face still bore dried flakes of his blood.

  Neither of them were meant for this world. They belonged to the Old World, a place of knowledge and relative civility. Not today’s world, a place of tooth and claw. A land of survivors.

  Robert Strong’s deep no-nonsense voice followed them all through the trees from the rear. “The more you two talk, the slower you move. Now shut it before I smash both your heads together.”