Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (2 page)

Some places were named after great men, battles, or ideas. Some were named for glory or in remembrance. Some, it seemed, were named for the sheer hell of it.

They reached the first of the huts, having slowed to a walk to stir confidence. They nodded in turn to each of the armed men and women standing atop the roofs of homes they had built with their own hands. They each nodded back, then went back to scanning the treeline. Max felt a spark of pride.

Soon, they had left Her Maj’s lawns behind and strode over the tarmacked thoroughfare, past stalls and stores, warehouses, and stock pens. The children, sick, and elderly were holed up inside the deadbolted concrete store sheds, each the nexus of a cluster of armed Twingites. Everything had been battened down in thirty seconds flat, and all of Twingo was ready to face whatever emerged from those trees, despite the sleep dust fresh in their eyes.

Young Radley Tibble came tearing out of the forest a moment later, sprinting on his gangly legs across to the chain-link fence and scrambling under it. His voice had become ragged and broken, but now everyone could make out what he was saying. “
THEY’RE HERE! THEY’RE COMING! THEY’RE COMING!
”

He was on his feet and running again, all the way down the thoroughfare until Max caught him in his arms, where he sagged like a sack of wet grain. “They’re coming!” he screeched, straining against Max’s grip, his eyes wide.

“Hush, now,” Max said. His voice was among the quietest in town, but people always listened. And even in the grip of stupefied terror, Radley heard him, and a last scream died in his throat. “How many? What direction?”

Radley only stared up at him.

“Speak!”

The eyes of a wounded fawn met his iron-hard gaze. He looked at Bill, who shrugged. “Fine,” he said. “Go to your mother. Lock up tight.”

Radley scrambled away towards one of the store sheds, leaving a cloud of dust in his wake.

“What are you smiling about?” Max said.

Bill turned to him. He was grinning with a nostalgic glaze to his eyes. “The dust. Like Roadrunner. Remember, in
Looney Tunes?
Meep, meep!
”

“I remember a lot of things, Bill.”

A moment passed, then Max let a smile blossom on his own lips. “We had a good run.”

“The best.”

They didn’t need any more. Long, hard years of tribulation had forged a link deeper than words. All it took was a flick of the eyes, and Max knew Bill would be there next to him to the end. He flicked the safety of his rifle. “Alright, let’s go see what these bastards want.”

They advanced along the thoroughfare until they stood a short distance from the spot where Radley had crawled beneath the fence. There they waited in silence, and waited. Long minutes passed as they all scanned the treeline, trigger fingers at the ready. The air-raid siren cut out and wound down in a long, unspooling drone. Then there was only the wind, kicking up the usual dust devils in the dirt around the edge of town, obscuring what lay beyond.

Max squinted into the haze. Dawn broke, and fingers of sunlight clawed over the tops of the trees, further impeding his vision. But he didn’t move, didn’t give any sign of weakness. He just waited for whatever might come. Eventually, something did.

Two figures materialised from the dust and walked down the thoroughfare toward them. The air was filled with the sound of cocking rifles and footsteps as the entire town’s guard readjusted their stance to aim down at the emissaries. One was young, thin and gangly, almost like Radley except for a heavy limp and a face that looked like it had seen things nobody that young should see. The other was older, squat, and immediately set Max’s heart aflutter. There was something dangerous about him, something primal, unhinged. An enormous, curved hunter’s knife hung from a sheath at his belt.

The two of them stopped twenty feet away from Max and Bill and looked around at the town for a good while, their faces untroubled, as though the place were empty and they had stumbled across a curious relic. They didn’t acknowledge anyone besides each other.

Max knew he had to keep quiet to avoid appearing weak. He also knew Bill’s patience wouldn’t hold out that long. But he didn’t try to stop him; doing that would have looked even weaker.

“This is private land!” Bill said. “We’re not trading today.”

The younger, gangly man looked at them for the first time. “We’re not looking to trade, friend.”

“Then you’ll kindly get off our property before we shoot you both for trespassing.”

It was the squat man’s turn to lock their gaze. “Well, now, that would be a big mistake.” His voice was level and calm, but Bill caught something veiled behind his eyes, something that couldn’t be hidden. It frightened him. He tightened his grip on his rifle.

“State your business,” Bill said.

Max wished he’d shut up. He was acting as though he could talk their way out of this.

“No business, just an offer,” the young man said. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Charlie. And this”—he gestured to his lupine companion—“is—”

“Not an offer, a choice,” his elder companion interrupted. “A real simple choice.”

Charlie looked annoyed at the interruption, but pressed on. “Yes, I suppose, a choice.”

“Cut to it,” Max said. Three words that brought all possibility of further pleasantries to an end. He was through waiting.

Charlie paused, then shrugged. His face settled into something altogether more apathetic. “You know who we are. You know what we can do. You must have seen enough fire on the horizon by now. Your allies are gone, and now it’s your turn. So choose: you can join us, or you can burn.”

“Join you in what?” Bill said.

The squat lupine man grinned, a terrible, wicked expression that made Max sick to look at. “Killing scum, that’s what.”

Charlie held up a hand, though visibly withered when his companion bared his teeth like an excited dog. Max had the impression that the true balance of power between them was far from equal. “Our quest,” he said. “We have a mission—to rid the land of the greed and injustice it’s been shown by the dominant powers. These
civilised
people with their morals and books and history, waltzing into everyone’s lives and taking what they see as theirs, leaving a trail of destruction behind.”

Bill scowled. “It’s been a bad year for everyone. The famine would have kicked everyone’s arses whether Cain and his people were around or not.”

“Yet those who could have helped the starving and helpless instead chose to help themselves, to further their own plans, their little schemes to bring back the Old World.” Charlie laughed cruelly. “Leaving behind a trail of destruction and death wherever they went.” A bitterness had infected his face. He changed tactic. “There’s no need to make this hard. People talk highly of this place for miles around. Lay down your weapons, fall in line, and none of you will be harmed.”

“We’re not laying down anything,” Max said before Bill could utter a word.

“Think about it. Things might not be so tough anymore, but the damage is done. People are starved, the Old World supplies are spent, and it’ll take months for the next harvest to come in. The lands are empty.” A note of genuine anger flashed on Charlie’s brows. “Trading posts aren’t much use if there’s nobody left to trade. You rely on your clientele for your own supplies. What do you think will happen to you now?”

They didn’t say anything.

“There would be no shame in it,” Charlie said. He even offered a hand, as though he were a brave sailor plucking floundering fools from stormy seas.

“No shame in bowing down to bully-boys and intimidation?” Bill muttered.

Charlie ignored him. The fingers of his proffered hand waggled. “We were all different, once. We were all just like you.”

Max found himself leaning back away from that hand despite the twenty feet between them. “Somehow I don’t believe that.”

The hand dropped. The kind expression flickered, revealing the ugliness lurking beneath. “Don’t be fools.”

“The fools here are those who wandered into this town with nothing but an itty bitty knife to threaten us and expected to just walk out of here.” With that, Bill raised an arm and swirled a hand above his head, signalling Jordan to blow them away. Max didn’t bother trying to stop him. There had been too many pyres of smoke afar of late. The time for mercy had passed.

In unison, the armed guards atop the stalls and homes all along the thoroughfare braced their stances against the lips of the many roofs and took aim. Snaps, clicks and twangs filled the air as they cocked their weapons. Max readied himself to pick one of them off if Jordan’s high-calibre rounds failed to kill on impact. “I’m sorry, but we can’t take any chances.”

Neither man moved, nor did they show an ounce of surprise. Instead, they stared directly up the hill towards the observatory, straight at where Jordan would have been perched in the service hatch. They knew they were being watched.

Max made to turn to Bill and the others, alarm bells jangling behind his eyes, but before he could do more than start with shock, the squat man moved. Max had never seen anyone move so fast, so blurred as to be almost imperceptible. It would have looked as though he had only twitched, if it weren’t for the hunting knife vanishing from his belt. All that remained was the bare leather holster. A short whistle accompanied a wisp of air that blew against Max’s face as something passed by very close. For an instant he might have perceived an amorphous spinning glitter of a wicked sharp blade. Then there was a solid, meaty thump, and Max turned to look at Bill.

The hunting knife had reappeared, embedded to the hilt in Bill’s chest. He was staring down at it, his mouth open in a faintly surprised O, a brilliant scarlet rose already unfurling across his shirt, radiating from the polished wooden handle. Max dropped his rifle and caught him before he hit the ground, easing him to the dirt as a single blood bubble popped from his lips. He looked up at the two men, considered diving for his rifle, but found all the strength had gone out of his legs. Instead, he turned back to his dying friend, his hands now slick with rivulets of blood oozing out in rhythmic dribbles. The blade must have pierced the aorta.

“Oh, Bill,” Max muttered.

A book could have been written on the important things they had never said to one another. Too many things. Max mouthed wordlessly, and in the end, he said nothing at all.

It was over in seconds. The friend he’d lived, slept and fought beside for forty years faded to a meaty vessel in mere seconds. There wasn’t time for fear or pain to settle in. The surprise simply drained from his face as the light left his eyes, and his grip spasmed and then grew slack upon Max’s sleeves. Then he was gone.

Max stared into his sightless eyes. The blood had stopped oozing from his chest. His hands lay curled and limp on the thoroughfare dirt. No shots came whizzing down from the observatory, nor from the armed sentries of the thoroughfare itself. He turned back to face the two men, leaving Bill’s body to slump beneath him, and struggled to his feet. He didn’t bother going for his rifle. If he was going to die, he’d rather do it standing.

“You’re coming with us,” Charlie said.

“No,” Max said. “We’re not.”

The young man’s face flattened. His cheeks were oddly shaped, like putty. Plenty of ugly brawls had broken out in Twingo over the years, and he knew a face that had been recently stomped on when he saw one. Somebody had really gone to work on this kid. He had the stench of ruined goods about him, a good apple made bad by cruelty. “Then you’ll burn.”

Max turned in a wide circle, along with those standing upon the rooftops, to look at the observatory. Even at a glance he could tell there would be no help coming from the hill. Stoic silhouettes lined the entire ridge, black against the rising sun. They outnumbered all the men, women, and children of Twingo twice over—at least two hundred. The roof of the observatory, where Jordan would have taken his perch, was spattered with at least a dozen more silent watchers. They had all come silently, without notice, and they each watched without moving an inch, yet in each hand was the outline of a weapon: all kinds, from automatic rifles to pistols, machetes to hunting bows, hatchets to pitchforks.

The wolfish squat man leered. It looked as though he was almost salivating, and a redness had crept into the whites of his eyes. “I wonder how your stuck-pig friend tastes, roasted on a spit,” he said. “I guess I’ll find out.”

“Fuck you, and your rotten mother.”

The lupine man ignored him, grinning, his tongue stuck hungrily between his teeth. “Morning’s best time for a feeding.”

“You all know what do to,” Max called to the others on the rooftops. He didn’t have to raise his voice, didn’t have to rally, didn’t even have to glance up. They would all fight to the end, no matter how short an end it might be. He sensed them in his peripheral vision, closing around the store sheds in concentric circles, some shaking and some weeping silently, but all ready, all Twingites. He felt a great momentary swell of love for them all, and then he turned it all off like a switch; emotion muddied the reflexes, and any chance of surviving this required an unfeeling soul.

He had hoped to have Bill with him when the end came. In a way, he was. Bill would have found that funny.

He’d always expected things to end like this. That was the way of this new world. He’d gunned down enough bent traders with the townsmen in hails of bullets to feel no real animosity towards these men. Everyone served a higher purpose, gears of a great machine. The world moved on, the tides changed, and crowns were ripped from cold, bloody hands. The Old World’s ruins littered the Earth, but it and all its civility was only a distant memory. For some, it had only ever been a dream.

Max eyed his rifle, lying a few feet away, and tensed his legs, ready to dive. “I hope you brought plenty of rounds,” he said, and then he lunged, and the air was alive with gunfire.

When it was over, Max was blinded by his own blood. A gash on his forehead was trickling a steady stream into his eyes, and with his arms tied fast behind his back, it dribbled without check over the contours of his face. Strong arms shoved and corralled him forward, kicking him when he fell, cursing him when he stumbled too fast. He’d taken a ball to the thigh, but it had only skimmed off a chunk of muscle close to the surface, missing the femoral artery.