A Fractured World: A Post Apocalyptic Adventure (Gallen Book 1) (7 page)

“I kept your name,” he muttered.

He had known from a very early age that silence would help him remember.

“I kept your name,” he repeated.

The snoring was fading, Emil’s sobs were fading; he could hear the gallop of horses as armed men tore into the camp, hacking and chopping, slashing and burning.
The screams. The awful screams.
A tear pinched his eye and he quickly wiped it away. Silence would allow him to keep the name, keep it safe for all these years, protect it from being forgotten. It would never be forgotten. It would be held until it was spoken again.

Walk. Breathe. Survive. Wait.

“That’s enough … we need some of them alive … not the children … spare some of the children…”

“I kept your name,” he said, and opened his eyes, the final map in his grasp, detailing corridors and rooms and subterranean tunnels.

He yawned, leaned back in his seat and, after days without sleep, could fight it no more. It washed over him. His eyes closed. The map slipped from his fingers. His hands relaxed against the photograph.

Surely, only an hour had passed but, when Stone slowly opened his eyes, grey light filtered into the building and a knife was pressed against his throat and his revolver was jammed against the side of his head.

“Thinking of taking the girl with me,” said Lucas. “Especially now I hear there’s a bounty on her.”

Eleven

With an idiotic grin spread across his face, Mauricio nodded in an exaggerated fashion as the man begged for his life. Then he slashed the man’s belly wide open with a machete.

Chuckling, he knelt down to ransack his pockets as he lay at the roadside, clutching his bleeding stomach and moaning. Mauricio found nothing and checked the man’s shoes. Sometime people hid things in their shoes. Still nothing. Frustrated, he opened the battered satchel that was tied to his bicycle. There was no food or weapons and only a meagre collection of items he didn’t recognise. His vision wasn’t strong enough to make out the finer details so he threw them on the ground. It had always been this way. Objects close to him would blur and become indefinable. Mother had said they would find him eyeglasses to fix the problem but he preferred the dark sunglasses he wore and was in no mood to swap them over for something practical. Thinking of her, he scooped up the discarded odds and ends and stuffed them into his own pack.

Annoyed at his paltry loot, he kicked the dying man and took the bicycle. He wiped the blood from the dull edge of his machete and sheathed it, the fearsome weapon hanging from his belt. The red slashed blue sky above stretched over the endless cratered landscape of brown scrubland and mountain ranges. He jumped on the bicycle. He had no idea what today would bring or if he would even see the night sky again. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. The road was wide and empty and he stopped pedalling once he felt a downward slope and let the pedals spin freely. He sailed ahead, yelling in delight. It was already the second best part of his day. As the road curved around a bend, he slammed his feet against the surface and gasped; the road snaked down the mountains and there, spread across the barren ground, was a vast town, of concrete buildings and black roads, surrounded by miles of craters filled with rubble and twisted metal. He could see the tiny dots of people moving about.

“Yeah,” he cried out, thrilled at his new discovery.

He had to get back and tell everything. Not only had he found a bike and rode it without using the pedals but he had also found a new playground for the family to venture into. The cave was horrible. He hated the cave. It was cold and dank and where he slept was hard and draughty. He cycled back up the road, towards a narrow track in the rocks and was about to disappear from view when he heard it. It came from far away, little more than a distant rumble, possibly thunder, but then it grew louder and more intense and the ground beneath his feet began to shudder. The sound took shape, formed into a grinding and mechanical sound, drowning out the pleas of help from the man he had attacked and left on the verge.

Quickly, Mauricio ducked back along the path through the rocks, wheeling the bike with of him. He threw it into the dirt and crouched from view, holding his breath.

A heavily armoured vehicle rose over the brow of the hill. Its engine roared savagely and a large gun was mounted at the rear and manned by a warrior. His face was obscured by a scarf and thick goggles. Mauricio saw plating across the wheels and windows and a fearsome spiked crash bar. A huge yellow sun streaked with red was painted across the front. The road was wide enough for more than one vehicle and two smaller cars flanked it; one a jeep, one a pickup truck with a smaller weapon mounted in the flatbed, a cartridge belt hanging from it. Both vehicles were rusted, dented and battered. They had grilled windscreens and iron meshes fixed over the tyres. More cars and bikes followed, bristling with armed warriors, and at the rear of the long convoy were trucks covered with tarpaulin. The man riding in the lead vehicle thrust out a thick arm covered with ink and the entire convoy began to slow. It ground to a halt and Mauricio felt his mouth turn dry. Not a solitary engine could be heard. The man pushed open his door and stepped slowly from the lead vehicle, arching his back as he did so. He was tall, long grey hair plaited down his back. He walked to where Mauricio’s victim laid bleeding and groaning, skin deathly pale, filmed with a cold sweat.

“Now who are you, little man?” he asked, bending at the waist.

Shaking fingers reached for him.

“Help me … please … please.”

“I cannot help you, I am sorry; I do not have that skill. That is the curse of the Mutants.” He spoke calmly, as the man writhed in agony at his feet. His voice was articulate, educated, urbane. “But you can help me, little man; you can help all of us.” He gestured at the vehicles behind him as he got to his feet. The dying man’s face filled with confusion. “You can be breakfast.”

There was laughter and armed warriors leapt onto the road. The men wore light, baggy trousers and long shirts, halk fur and hide. Quickly, they finished him off and carried his body into one of the trucks.

“And you there, hiding in the rocks,” said the tall man, his voice measured, urbane. “Show yourself.”

Mauricio hesitated but then emerged looking sheepish, dragging the bicycle in one hand, his other hand on the handle of his machete. Two warriors wearing grilled helmets stepped forward, both armed with crossbows.

“I am the Cleric. I am leader of the Blood Sun tribe. Did you attack this man?”

“Sure,” said Mauricio.

“Why?”

Mauricio scratched his lumpy head.

“Dunno, I wanted his things, you know, his stuff.”

It was almost a question and some of the Cleric’s men began laughing.

“You are different,” said the Cleric.

“What do you mean?”

The tall man opened his arms wide.

“He asks what I mean.”

There was more laughter now. Even the two men watching Mauricio with crossbows were laughing. Mauricio wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to join in or not so he decided it was best to do so.

“You can have it.” He offered the bicycle, grinning, as more warriors laughed. “Mean, if you want it?”

The Cleric leaned his face towards Mauricio and removed his dark glasses.

“Why are you laughing?”

“Give me my glasses back,” said Mauricio.

“I asked you, mutant, why are you laughing?”

“I was, I thought, you …”

He realised a hush had descended on the Cleric’s warriors. There was only the sound of the wind.

“Why are you laughing?” asked the Cleric.

Mauricio shrugged.

“Guess I’m not,” he said. “Can I have my glasses?”

“Gallen is not for you,” said the Cleric, and crushed them. His hands suddenly thrust at Mauricio and clasped his mottled throat. Mauricio gasped. His arms flailed wildly as he wrestled his machete from its sheath. The Cleric stamped a boot against his wrist and the weapon dropped loudly onto the road. His feet jerked as he was lifted from the ground and shook vigorously. A shoe fell off, revealing a shrunken foot. He tried to prise the choking fingers from his throat but the Cleric’s grip was vice like and he couldn’t budge them. His vision began to blur. He felt his bladder loosen. He stretched out his arms, reaching with every ounce of strength he could muster, straining every sinew, trying to claw the face of the Cleric, but his fingers snatched at empty air. Mauricio felt dizzy. His eyes began to close. There was a terrible crunching sound and then blackness as the Cleric threw his limp body aside.

“Gallen is not for you,” he repeated.

He stared down at Mauricio’s body; the lumpy skull, the rippled skin across his face and neck, the deformed foot.

“Not for you.”

A bearded warrior came running up the road, a rifle on his back, binoculars in his hand.

“Cleric, there is a town ahead.”

“Good, we need a place to rest. Are there more of these things there?”

The warrior shook his head.

“Not that I could see.”

The Cleric signalled for them to move on and the convoy thundered into life, exhaust fumes filling the air. The town would know they were approaching. The snarl of the engines alone would have given them away and any defences would already now be in place but he had no reason to slaughter unless the deformed were amongst them. Window down, he banged on the door of his vehicle and it began to move along the road. He felt the wind whip his face and cleanse his skin. He loved the morning air and the brightness that came with it. He felt his body invigorated the moment the sun broke in the torn sky. He hated the night. The dark held voices and sharpened blades and places his mind did not wish to visit. He feared the night. No one knew of this weakness and nor would they. Gallen was a beautiful world in the light, a world of sweeping deserts and forests of black trees where nothing grew. It was a clean world but the mutants were still here, a wretched plague upon the soil. He had worked so hard, recruited so many warriors and still the monsters were rampant. They caused the suffering. They caused the misery. They broke the order of Gallen with their evil gifts. They hid in the dark and spawned in nests and poisoned a land that was rich with colour and filled with hope.

As the vehicles swept down the hillside, they road reached a large fork in the road. The Cleric saw a twisted and rusted sign with words he didn’t understand; the right fork led away from the town, the left one went straight into it. There were burnt out vehicles, a mountain of ruined tyres and a deep pit of charred bodies; the smell was enough for him to cover his nose. The Cleric saw it must have been a great city once but most of it now lay in ruin at the bottom of huge craters, miles deep with rubble and metal. Forty or fifty buildings were all that remained; it was an island in the desert. Faces peered from windows, tiny children stood open mouthed on a patch of ground ringed with a wire fence, a woman standing defiantly before them.

Once more, he raised his hand and the tribe slowed and stopped. Once more, he stepped from his armoured car.

The barricade ahead was a line of metal drums filled with broken pieces of concrete. A plump, grey haired woman, in a tattered straw hat and stained overalls, waited to greet him. He saw the snipers in the windows and on the rooftops but she was the town’s only line of defence here on the street. He admired her pluckiness. He walked towards her with purpose, arms swinging at his side, and saw her face was wrinkled and her eyes tiny and dark. A double barrelled shotgun was casually leaning on her shoulder and both feet were planted firmly on the road as he came closer.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Name’s Marge,” she said. “Town’s called Ford. And you need the other road, mister.”

No doubt it was a well used greeting. The Cleric allowed her a moment.

“Do you not know who I am?” He gestured to the convoy. “I am the Cleric. I am leader of the Blood Sun tribe.”

“No scraps to me what you go calling yourself.” She spat on the ground. “Ain’t taking that metal and noise into our town. Roads are all dead ends.”

“Your town is called Ford?”

“That’s right,” said Marge, swinging the shotgun and pointing the twin barrels at a large, rusted sign sticking out of the earth. “Ford. Thought it sounded good.”

The Cleric studied the sign in the dirt.

“It says Ford Mot ….”

“Ford Mot would be a damn stupid dumb name for a town,” smiled Marge. “Reckon Ford sounds right and just.”

“Indeed,” smiled the Cleric. “I could open fire on Ford right now. I have long range weapons and plenty of ammunition to punch holes in your buildings and sever the limbs of everyone watching us … but I would prefer not to.”

“Yep,” said Marge, glancing back at a small group of onlookers, some with worried faces, others carrying rifles. “You could do that, I suppose. But we’ve been here for a long time. Ain’t got no fancy walls and pretty boys in uniforms like the big city Chett but we ain’t none too stupid. See the road you’re sitting on is packed with explosives and the men with the detonators are pretty good at keeping hid. Every one of your vehicles can go kaboom in seconds.”

“Kaboom?”

“Kaboom,” nodded Marge.

The Cleric laughed.

“I like you, Marge. I am very impressed.”

He clasped his hands together and nodded.

“I have decided to go around your town but we need to refuel our vehicles and take some rest. We are on a very important crusade, you understand this?”

“Best move your vehicles over the hill then,” said Marge.

“What is wrong with this road?” asked the Cleric, pointing to the road that ran parallel with the town.

“Got explosives there, too, but ain’t so many.” She shrugged. “Just here and there.”

“And we will go kaboom there as well? So if we make camp over the hill we will not go kaboom and you will permit us to come into your town? We have many things to trade.”

“We got a few shops that’ll like that,” said Marge, nodding. “Ain’t got no black energy for your metal. Got a bar. Even got a school for the little ones if you want to leave any behind. Got a few books, can give them an education.” She lowered the shotgun. “No more than four of your boys at a time. You get me, Mr Cleric?”

His eyebrows drew together.

“I am not, Mr Cleric,” he whispered. “Or a Cleric. I am
the
Cleric and this is the Blood Sun tribe and you … you will show respect.”

He glimpsed a crack in the hardness of her face but then it was gone.

“Men like their titles,” said Marge. “Got no problem with that. Can I call you Cleric?”