Ruin

  *

  The night was a long one. Many people were too frightened to return home in the dark and opted instead to remain in the cathedral. Dozens of guards were posted all over the city until sunrise, which brought with it only a tenuous sense of safety.

  When Norman and those following him—following him, not Lucian—returned, they learned that the old man had died, having slipped away in his sleep. After talking to Norman, he’d never said another word.

  While Norman and the rest of the hunting party made for bed, Lucian refused to check his weapons back into the armoury, and stood on sentry duty until midday. By that time he had sagging bags under his eyes, and his head would droop to his chest without warning.

  After several complaints from harried guards, Heather convinced him to take an anxiety pill of her own making, after which he finally slouched into a clinic bed and dropped into a deep sleep.

  Once he’d rested, Norman went north-west with him and Robert to look for any sign of the young man from the fireside. Lucian was still convinced that the sneering youth had been too severely wounded, and would not have survived.

  They found him as sunset neared, face up in a patch of bluebells.

  His mouth and eyes were already crawling with insects, and his skin had drained to a sickly marble pallor. A wound in his abdomen had been bound with makeshift bandages, torn from the hems of his trousers. The blood upon them had long since coagulated, and had spread into sticky pools on the forest floor.

  They buried his body without a marker, beneath a pile of stones amidst the bluebells. They spoke sparingly while they worked, and afterwards there was a moment’s silence before they returned to the city.

  They continued to search from then on for the man with the neckerchief—but, for reasons Norman couldn’t explain even to himself, he never spoke of those green, hypnotic eyes.

  They found nothing. No sign of him, none at all. He had simply vanished.

  FOURTH INTERLUDE

   

  Morning.

  Alex held up a hand to shield his eyes from the sun’s rays and groaned from the depths of his duvet. He rolled over, and for the briefest of times enjoyed the sun’s warmth, along with the sound of dying embers crackling in the grate.

  Then there was a thump, and the crying began.

  Beside him the dog groaned, rose to her feet and slumped away to the recesses of the cottage once more. He wished he could have gone with her. He stumbled to his feet, taking James in his arms and walking him around the periphery of the room.

  The previous night, the two of them had eaten a meal together by the fire. After dusk the rain had continued well into the evening, and its patter upon the roof had been almost peaceful. The abundance of tinned food and a few pieces of unspoiled fruit had allowed them to take their fill, and then some. Alex was sure he’d burnt, maimed and spoiled every last bite, but the two of them had eaten ravenously nonetheless.

  However, before and afterwards, all that James had been content to do was cry. He cried when he was talked to, sang to, left alone, held, swayed and rocked, for so long and with such force that Alex was at times entertained by the notion of him wailing himself unconscious.

  He had cried overnight too. It had only been in the early hours of the morning, when the storm had lost its voice and the rain had abated, that he had finally succumbed to sleep.

  Now, it seemed he had been rejuvenated by his short bout of rest. He ignored Alex’s pleas, wriggling and screaming, his face scrunched into a puckered maze of puppy fat.

  After an hour, Alex found that the noise had lost its edge. He abandoned his attempts and sat with James in the armchair, watching the embers fizzle until he felt enough strength to stand.

  He then left James to cry on the floor beside the grate’s residual warmth, heading for the shower. There was still some hot water. Apparently the water system had yet to fail, along with the power grid—for now.

  Grime sloughed from his skin and tangled hair in great mudslides, basting the bath in a layer of jet-black sludge. The water splashing against his face was blissful, ruined entirely by the fact that he was obliged to keep the door open, lest the child fling himself onto the ash pile in his unattended state.

  Afterwards, wrapped in a towel, he brought a bowl of lukewarm water to the fireside. Dipping the struggling child into its depths, he did his best to clean James’s stinking, soiled body. Lathered with soap and sporting tufts of hair that stuck out at wild angles, the boy’s screaming quietened. Once or twice, a gap-toothed smile broke out onto his face—one that seemed to light up the world.

  Alex changed into another set of clothes from his bag, along with a waterproof coat, and set about shuttling in the last of the containers he’d put outside to fill in the rain, all of which were by now full to the brim.

  The chill of the air outside was bracing, even more refreshing than the shower. With his arms full, he paused in the doorway and looked out over the land surrounding the cottage, which was no longer obscured by the storm’s cloak of mist and rain.

  It was another moor, stretching away in all directions towards the horizon. Heather, moss, tall grasses and dense forests were dotted here and there, painted onto the surface of the land as though by an artist’s brush. Far away, blurred by extreme distance, was a small chain of mountains, their peaks capped with a fine smattering of snow.

  Radden Moor was now far away indeed, as was every other town that had lain along the road. Even the peak of Porter’s Pass—the tallest in all of Radden County—had fallen out of sight. Not a single human construction was visible. The only thing apart from the cottage hinting at habitation was a dirt road leading away down the hill. He suspected that, eventually, it would lead back to the motorway he’d left the previous evening, before the storm had taken hold.

  “Where am I?” he said.

  The wind answered, whistling in his ears. It snatched his voice from the air and carried it away down the hill until it bled away into nothing, leaving only another gust in its place.

  It seemed impossible that he could have wandered so far into the middle of nowhere, and in so short a time. It also seemed impossible that the trance he’d been under—an emotionless pall that had been marbling his mind—had passed. He knew that it still encapsulated him, shielded him from the shock, yet he was unable to lift it. He was merely privy to a dim knowledge of it, along with the knowledge that at some point it would lift, and leave him exposed to the harshness of reality.

  He turned and stepped back into the warmth, and to the wailing. Returning to James, he crouched and sighed. “What am I going to do with you?” he said.

  James was whimpering, having cried himself into a state of exhaustion. He watched Alex’s every move and beat at the air feebly with his tiny fists, but still seemed unable to stand, talk, or move much at all. However, the unhealthy tinge remained absent from his lips, and his skin was far less pruned.

  “Why you?” Alex said. Looking down at the child, tiny and pathetic upon the blankets, he was suddenly at a loss to explain why, of all of the people in the world, it had survived.

  He backed into the armchair and huffed. “Why me? I’m nothing special.”

  James merely rolled around and gurgled, oblivious.

  After a while, Alex found himself speaking again, “We can’t stay here.”

  He was all at once certain that he’d spoken the truth. He was ill equipped to deal with a child by himself, dangerously so. The only decent chance the boy had of survival was if they found others—if there were others.

  He spent the day searching the cottage for anything of value, adding it to a small pile beside the fireplace, before repacking. Most of the clutter he’d taken from his bedroom ended up being replaced by water bottles, canned food, lighters, maps and bedding.

  By the time he had done even this, the sun had passed its zenith and he was forced to accept that he would have to spend at least another night in the cottage. He cooked them another meal, faring no better than h
e had the previous day. Together, the two of them once again ate a burnt dinner.

  James still cried often, stopping only occasionally to regain his breath before continuing. Irrespective of whether Alex held him, watched him from afar or ignored him entirely, he blubbered. It was only at dusk that he stopped, and dropped into a slumber from which there was no waking him. Alex took his duvet and spread out on the floor beside the snoring infant, watching his splayed body rise and fall with each breath until he drifted off himself, still helplessly caught in his emotionless trance.

  The next morning, just after dawn, the three of them left the cottage. Alex marched along the dirt path, James swaddled close to his chest, held tight by a loop of cloth that ran across his back. In one hand he held a strong stick, and with it he propelled himself towards whatever lay ahead.

  The air was cool, and the morning dew still clung to the grass at his feet. Refreshed, he made good progress. The cottage had become a mere speck on the horizon within the hour.

  The mountains grew steadily closer, and by midday he had left the path in favour of open grassland. The path would only lead back to the motorway. There was nothing for him there, only the crushed remains of thousands of vehicles, housing as many piles of empty clothing.

  The chill and dew had disappeared without grace as the sun took its place directly overhead, replaced by a heat that Alex, with his fair complexion, found intolerable. In the open fields he grew hotter by the moment, until a sticky layer of perspiration soon coated his skin, and the dog panted without pause.

  All the while, James cried in protest.

  The wailing and the heat took their toll. He could only bear the sun for a further hour before retreating under cover. Once beneath the canopy of a nearby forest, however, seeing green spots and stumbling over roots, he realised that shade would come at the price of speed.

  As he struggled through the underbrush, the first bird he had seen since the Great Flocks landed upon a high branch and cooed as though in greeting, cocking its head.

  James gurgled at the sight of it, uttering an unmistakable cry of joy. His chubby, stunted fingers reached for the canopy, wriggling.

  “You like him?” Alex said. He looked up at the bird, recognising it as a homing pigeon. As he watched it, he saw that it was swaying from side to side, as though dazed.

  The dog sat low on her haunches and yipped, staring up at the bird with distrust in her eyes. A low whine thrummed in her throat. She glanced to Alex, as though pleading with him to get rid of it.

  There was definitely something odd about the birds.

  “You got turned around by whatever killed the microchips, huh?” he muttered. “Some magnetic storm?”

  The pigeon cooed in reply, and took to following them for a while, swaying less each time it landed on a new branch. Sometime later it departed, taking a route that at first seemed uncoordinated, but soon settled into a more defined flight path.

  It seemed that, at the very least, the birds were recovering.

  They spent the rest of the day wandering on a loose diagonal through the forest, during which time Alex’s map-reading skills were shown to be as abysmal as he’d feared. When the trees finally cleared, the moor was nowhere in sight. They were now at the edge of an industrial district.

  James had seemed comforted by the constant movement throughout the day and had cried somewhat less, but now with the grinding stop he resumed his wailing. The sun was falling again and they had only an hour to get settled before the light began to fade. Alex had no intention of being caught out in the dark.

  Spying a vast warehouse close to the perimeter fence, he approached with trepidation, dwarfed by the structure. He passed through the doorway—four storeys tall, left ajar like a gaping maw—and found endless aisles of boxes before him: tens of thousands of Clingfilm-wrapped packages, waiting for customers that would never come. He opened a few, and found auto parts, mostly spark plugs and ignition coils.

  To one side were a series of offices, sealed off by plasterboard walls, cluttered with computers, desks, and mountains of unfiled paperwork. He coaxed the dog inside the largest, though she was mistrustful of the strange smells and industrial surfaces, and settled them on the floor. He then built a small enclosure for James out of bulging ring binders, hoping that it would contain him.

  “Don’t die,” he commanded as he set him within it. After propping open the window and setting a desk fan beside him—it seemed the power grid was more resilient and automated than he could have hoped—he set about making them a fire in the waste bin. Once the flames had caught and he was sure the smoke would be blown outside instead of choking them, he set enough paper aside for fuel, and unpacked their blankets.

  The two of them were wrapped up and set to sleep in a mere handful of minutes, both utterly defeated by the day’s travelling. Alex kept close watch over James as night fell. The child was only visible in silhouette as darkness set in, as the fire threw out meagre light, but neither of them would sleep if he turned on the harsh fluorescents overhead.

  They had both started to grow groggy when a stray thought crossed his mind: to lock the door.

  At once the idea struck him as ridiculous. There was no point in sealing a door against nobody. Yet the niggling urge refused to fade. Eventually, cursing, he scrambled from his blanket and flipped the latch, stepping away from the door with an added sense of security.

  As darkness cloaked the land in earnest, things of the night—things that had once been pedestrian, but now seemed primal and threatening—came to life and prowled the woodlands. The twilight symphony of hooting owls and yipping foxes was now complemented by the barks and meows of a great many cats and dogs, wandering across the land in search of absent owners.

  The dog’s ears flipped and turned with each of their cries. At first she paced by the window to ward away any that strayed too close to the warehouse, but she was soon overwhelmed by the sheer number of trespassers, and curled against Alex’s leg for the night, whining.

  Alex reached over the wall of James’s pen and rested his hand on the boy’s shoulder, feeling it rise and fall, taking comfort from its warmth. At some point, he saw the fire’s licking flames no more, and slept. All the while, the dog continued to whine at the endless droves of abandoned pets.

  XIV

   

  Alexander was in a hurry. There were many problems to deal with today. The most notable: recovering their exhausted supplies. The End Day celebrations had fallen flat and short, but what hadn’t been consumed had already spoiled.

  And then there was Ray’s murder, the unknown assailants, the old man’s note…

  But that would have to wait. They had to eat first.

  He was so preoccupied that he didn’t notice the pigeon on his doorstep until it hooted underfoot. He looked down, lifting his leg. The slightest of gasps escaped his lips when he saw the bobbing, silver form before him.

  Numbness stole along his arms as he pressed himself against the doorframe. He blinked fiercely, hoping that it would disappear—would vanish as any hallucination should.

  Instead, it cooed and bobbed a moment further before taking flight, riding the breeze, as real as the ground beneath his feet.

  He cast a glance around at Main Street, but saw only the usual sights: the cathedral doors being swept open for morning prayer, children flocking to the school building, and those on the early shift dragging themselves towards the fields or a quick breakfast. Nothing untoward met his gaze. Apart from the dozen guards posted at Main Street’s edge, and the nervous glances every second person aimed at the hills above the city, it was a perfect summer morning.

  Nevertheless, venturing any farther from his door now seemed impossible. It seemed as though a vast chasm had formed between him and the rest of the world.

  He slunk inside without taking his eyes from the street, and slammed the door.

  XV

   

  “Wait, wait,” Don wheezed, sinking against the trunk of a sapling y
ew. The soft bark bent under his weight, sending him sprawling on the ground. There he lay gasping, staring up at the sky, which had grown far away and dim.

  He and Billy had spent the last hour trudging through boggy wetlands, braving stinking pits of tar-like mud in lieu of skirting a precipitous ravine. But now that the way was finally clear—a gently sloping meadow lay before them, cropped short by a milling herd of distant goats—he was spent. Taking another step was beyond him.

  Each breath seared his lungs. It was as though the air contained not oxygen, but instead thousands of tiny, red-hot knives.

  Billy shuffled up beside him and fell to the dirt with a thump, her eyes dead to the world. He’d kept them moving since the attack, and they’d stopped for no more than three hours a night to sleep. During that time they had eaten only what they could snatch from the deepest reaches of the forests, where the trees hadn’t been picked clean: overripe berries, shrivelled fruits and half-rotten tubers.

  In all that time, he’d been too busy keeping watch to take a good look at her—at what was happening to her. Now that they both sat a mere foot apart, slumped and panting, tears welled up in his eyes.

  She was filthy. Her eyes were glowing masses of sclera amidst her mud-spattered face, surrounded by a maze of tear tracks that converged at her chin. Her hair reached for the sky in a matted tangle, thatched with dried leaves, and her eyelids drooped almost to a close.

  “I’m sorry… I’m so, so sorry,” he wheezed, reaching to cup her chin. Then he shook his head and fell back in the grass. “I can’t…”

  He wanted to tell her to go on without him, to find food, shelter, people, and to never look back. But before he could say a word, the numbness festering in his limbs rushed along his spine and into his head, consuming all thought. He fell towards thoughtless nothing. Threads of darkness invaded the meadow from his peripheral vision, and the sky receded along a tunnel of blackness.

  But then his arm jerked in its socket, tugged by insistent fingers. He opened his eyes and fixated on Billy. Her face was set, her eyes alight with fiery intensity. She was pulling with shocking strength—strength that seemed to defy common sense.

  Despite his disbelief, she hauled him from the ground and scrambled into the nook beneath his shoulder, draping his arm over her back. “Come on, Daddy,” she said. “Take a step.”

  He complied without thinking, staggering a few feet forward. Their motion was unsteady, and brought tears back to his eyes, but it was a step nonetheless.

  Together, they proceeded from the midst of the sapling grove, teetering every step of the way.

  XVI

   

  Norman grimaced, ankle-deep in putrescent sludge. The remains of corn, beans, potatoes, and entire orchards—the result of over two decades of toil—lay in an unbroken layer across the land, having rotted down to pureed compost. The elements had seen the green-black carpet shrink and contract into a desiccated paste, but beneath the surface laid a preserved soup that exuded noxious fumes.

  When the crops had failed the previous year, it had been clear from the outset that it would be a complete loss. The only option had been to save their strength, and try again as early as they dared the next season.

  But the countrywide decay hadn’t ended, not even by the time they had come to sow the wheat in early spring. After a lacklustre and last-ditch bout of effort, they had watched the hesitant growths wilt along with the last of their optimism.

  They had resorted to scouring the wilds soon after. Now, even the ruins of all of southern England had been exhausted. Things were too desperate not to try turning the fields again.

  The odds of raising a crop worth harvesting by summer’s height were slim, but there was a chance of scraping enough to tide them over until the land recovered, so long as they moved fast enough.

  In any case, it was a distraction. Not only from hunger—for the End Day feast had been but a thimble in a caloric deficit of tens of thousands—but from the thought of Ray’s murder.

  His loss had been made only more noticeable by the bakery’s loaves of late. Somebody else had ground the daily flour in his stead, but the bread was now almost inedible; he had apparently been adding something to temper the taste of sawdust, a secret he’d neglected to share with anyone.

  Yet another shred of knowledge lost to the world forever.

  Norman stooped and took a handful of sludge into his hands. He cast it into the waiting mouth of the sack that Allison held open for him. She looked as disgusted as he felt.

  Close by, Lucian stooped beside John—who, to their surprise, had once again elected to stray from the classroom, though he and Lucian still seemed to share a certain animosity—and farther away loomed Robert’s sloping, muscular shoulders. Barely visible behind him was Sarah, who held the neck of another sack open with an expression all too similar to Allie’s.

  Beyond their close-knit group, hundreds of others worked in resigned silence.

  To clear the way for the turning of the soil, those on field duty had insisted that all hands were needed. For now, at least, things like Ray’s burial plans would have to wait. Even school had been called off. The children had been mustered into a conveyer belt, one that ran bulging sacks out to the distant tree line, and returned them empty.

  As Norman paused to flex, a pigeon landed atop the rusted skeleton of a nearby grain silo and cocked its head to look at him—to look at all of them. When it cooed, another answered from afar. Moments later, a third warbling rained down from atop a listing telephone post, directly overhead.

  He turned to set eyes on it and frowned.

  “We tried everything,” Robert said, registering his glance. “They just keep coming back.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  Robert shrugged. “Just appeared out of nowhere.”

  Sarah shielded her eyes to stare up at its bobbing profile. “Funny, we’ve never had them before,” she said.

  “I think they’re cute,” Allie said. “They make a nice change from the crows.”

  John grumbled, mopping his portly brow, leaning on the shovel in his hands. “In fact, it’s just more bad news,” he said. “They must have been forced to migrate. No food for them elsewhere. We had the same problem in the Early Years, when the perishables started rotting. You couldn’t go anywhere near the cities, couldn’t lay eyes on concrete for all the vermin. Right, Lucian? Lucian?”

  Lucian didn’t answer. He stood stock-still, gloved hands by his sides, staring over Norman’s shoulder.

  “Ooo, shoo!” cried a broken voice behind him.

  Norman followed Lucian’s gaze to see Agatha seated in the shade of a tarpaulin awning. A straw hat shielded her ash-white face from the sun as she handed out drinks to passing children from a hamper. She was flapping a hand at one of the pigeons, which had alighted nearby.

  She leaned forwards, addressing Lucian, her hands on her knees and her mouth creased into a maternal grin. She spoke to him as though he were no more than a child. “Lucian, be a dear and lock away your brother’s birdies, would you? They’re gettin’ on Auntie Aggie’s nerves again somethin’ fierce.”

  Lucian stiffened, and Norman caught a glance being cast in his direction. Then he cleared his throat and said, “I will, Agatha. I promise.”

  She scanned the bird mistrustfully a moment longer, then sat back and closed her eyes, pulling the hat’s brim down over her brow. “Thank you, dear,” she sighed. “I think I’ll have a little nap now… Recharge the ol’ batteries.”

  A moment later, she was snoring quietly.

  Norman glanced from her to Lucian. “What was that?” he said.

  Lucian shrugged. “She’s just confused,” he muttered.

  “Doesn’t look that way to me.”

  “She’s getting on, Norm. Forget it.”

  They each glanced to him in turn as he stood unmoving. “They’re just birds,” he grumbled, then set back to the sludge with renewed vigour, not looking up.

  Norman loo
ked to Robert, who merely shrugged, eyebrows raised. They were on the verge of returning to the sludge when a series of wet, slapping footsteps rushed towards them.

  Richard appeared in their midst with a wordless cry, breathless. From even a glance it was clear that he had just sprinted quite some distance. “You’re not going to believe it!” he cried.

  They all froze mid-action, wide-eyed.

  “What is it?” Lucian said, straightening. “Did something happen?”

  “No—I mean, yeah! We just got word from London. They’ve found something.” He splashed through the rotting treacle and gripped John’s shoulder. “They’ve found a radio!”

  All activity for some distance in every direction ceased. All eyes had turned to Richard, leaving frozen hands to drip great clods of sludge onto their trousers. A few seconds of distilled silence followed, during which Richard looked to each of them in turn, his face creased into an expression of beaming satisfaction. “It works,” he breathed.

  They had all heard of radios, seen their carcasses wherever they went, lying behind every door, infesting entire towns and cities with their useless bulks. Just like the rest of mankind’s machines, none of them had worked for forty years.

  Countless people had tried to fix them, one of the first things that had been tried after the End, when people had been scattered across the country, clueless and alone. When they’d still been looking for rescue crews that had never come. When they’d still had hope that all hadn’t been lost.

  But a working radio in their world could do only one thing: blare an ear-splitting shriek of static, one that blanketed every frequency. No transmissions, no voices, nothing.

  It was just another unanswerable mystery.

  Therefore, the first word spoken after Richard’s announcement was not unexpected.

  “Bullshit,” said Lucian.

  Richard shrugged. “They’re saying it works.” He seemed to scintillate with excitement. “They’re saying they’ve got a signal.”

  The silence deepened. Richard was now staring at Norman.

  “They want to call the council’s summit early,” he said. “They say two weeks. Runners from the Wharf are waiting for an answer. We need somebody to sign off on it.”

  Norman glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see somebody of authority behind him, but there was only more black-green slime. He turned back to Richard. “Me?” he said.

  Richard frowned. “Why not you?”

  “Where’s Alexander?”

  At that, Richard looked slightly uncomfortable. “Nobody’s seen him today. He’s been acting a bit…funny, don’t you think?”

  “He’s fine,” Lucian muttered, gesturing to the fields. “Just the stress of this mess.”

  “No, he has seemed a little…off,” Sarah said, nodding.

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” John blustered. “He’s got us through worse than this.”

  Norman was still looking at Richard. “I can’t,” he said. He looked to Lucian for help, but found that he only stared back at him, unmoving.

  Since Norman had overruled him with the hunting party, they’d said little to one another. He sensed that Lucian’s protection had come to an end. He was on his own from now on.

  But it wasn’t just Lucian. They were all staring at him. He swept a glance around at them, and saw the same expression upon each of their faces: expectant, awaiting his verdict.

  He mouthed wordlessly until a sigh escaped his throat, and he shook his head. “Fine,” he said. “Two weeks.”

  Before he could look to the others for their agreement, they’d all turned away, accepting his words without comment. They returned to work, leaving him to stand and watch Richard race away to inform the Runners. The others were gabbling about the news, excitement threading their voices, but Norman heard not a word of it.

  His head was reeling. Was this how it was going to be from now on? Alexander would abandon him to make decisions in his stead? When he was so sure that he wasn’t ready?

  While his thoughts swirled in knots, he couldn’t resist the urge to look up at the pigeon atop the post once more. It was still watching them work, cocking its head. For a moment he thought that, perhaps, it had eyes only for him.