Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) (16 page)

Norm stopped and turned despite the craziness around them. “She’s just a little girl. Where we’re going… People are going to die. A lot of people.”

Fol just stared.

“I’m going,” Billy said.

Norm sighed as though all the stars overhead rested on his shoulders. “Why, for God’s sake?”

“Because I’m meant to.”

“Norman? You and your voodoo pals better be keeping up, or I’m going to skin the lot of you,” Lucian called from ahead. “If we get lost…”

They kept moving, now just her and Fol at the rear, following the others as they tiptoed behind the curtain of reality. “Why did you do it?” she said. “What you did?”

Fol didn’t answer right away. She sensed he was mad; she could see into him, and he didn’t like it.

“You did a bad thing, and you lost your hat… Banished.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Why?”

The darkened lessened ahead. Wherever they were going, it was getting close.

“Because if you live long enough, eventually you end up the bad guy,” Fol said. He sounded old then, much older than Grandpa. “Now I’m one of the only ones left, and I have to put things right.”

“You need me.” It wasn’t a question. “Like you need the others, out there.” She gestured to the void.

“You feel them?”

She nodded. Other Lights, infinitely far away, fuzzy and indistinct, just on the edge of her sight. “They’re waiting.”

“Yes.”

“We have to go to them.”

“In time.”

“Why not now?”

The light ahead grew, a brightness like sunlight at the end of a railway tunnel. The others became lost in its glare. She heard birds singing.

“Because if we don’t stop the End this time, it won’t matter,” Fol said, his cold hand still on her shoulder; maybe friend, maybe foe. “Because… that is another story altogether.”

Allison Rutherford watched the light bulb hanging overhead more intently than she would have thought possible. Something so insignificant, so commonplace as to be part of the world, another seamless element of the Old World’s leavings. She had grown up without electricity, but the dormant technology had always been there, ready to be awakened.

We’re only going back to that,
she told herself.
It’ll all still be here, waiting to get lit up again. As soon as we’re back on our feet, it’ll all return.

So why did she feel as though she was losing a part of herself? That this was in some way a symbolic death, a sealing of their fate?

Before her eyes the bulb fizzed, spluttered, endured in momentary brilliance, then died to a glowing ember, fading fast to dull and lifeless tungsten.

All across New Canterbury, the same last gasp swept every home, street light and outbuilding.

Allie kept watching for a moment, hope lurking inside her that the bulb would pop back to life. When it remained so much inanimate metal and glass, she made her way out into the street, where Sarah and Heather were playing cards by a small fire on the cobbles.

“That’s the last of it,” said Mr Abernathy with a grimace, emerging from the generator shed.

Heather cursed. “I never thought we’d get this close to losing everything. Not really. I think, inside, I always expected some miracle to come and save us.”

“Well, miracles can’t replace gasoline,” Abernathy said, wiping his hands on an old rag. “If Robert were here, maybe he could have squeezed a few more drops of power, but I don’t think it would have made any difference.” He shrugged. “Nobody works the fields, nobody tends the oil mills, no biodiesel, no power. People knew the stakes as soon as the wind farm got blown to hell.”

“They’re scared,” Allie said. “We’re all scared.”

“That doesn’t change anything,” Abernathy said darkly.

“How would you like to work the fields, knowing that they might appear any moment, just come pouring out of the trees?” Allie was too close to his face, suddenly angry enough to reach for his collar. She took a breath and unclenched her hands. “Like I said, we’re all scared,” she muttered.

An awkward silence passed, then Heather shrugged. “Miracles might be just in my head, but we got something.” She nudged Sarah with her foot.

Sarah threw her a look that was simultaneously dismissive and affectionate. “Don’t do that.”

“A little bit of adulation’s in order, after all you’ve done.”

“I did what I had to.”

“That’s just it: you
did
something, when nobody else would.”

Sarah let her cards drop to the cobbles. “Don’t put me on a pedestal.” Her eyes flamed, but when she cast a glance around at the rest of them, her expression was sheepish.

“They’re going to be having kittens in the cathedral,” Abernathy muttered, arms akimbo. He chewed his lip, staring off into the middle distance. “And all those idiots sat on Cain’s lawn. If they get wind of things going south, what if they get in a flap?”

“Don’t let them,” Sarah said, taking up her cards again.

Abernathy shrugged. “How? No power.”

“Figure it out.”

A note of alarm crept into the old man’s gaze. “But… how? I’m sorry, miss, but what do you suggest?”

Allie noted the defensive contempt in his look and wondered what he saw before him: three young women, two in their twenties and one in her late thirties; and him, a self-professed handyman who had known the world before the End.

Not our place to tell a man how to deal with a crisis
, she thought with an internal grunt. Some relics of the Old World she could live without.

“How about you pull your head out of your arse and start using it for something?” Allie said.

He rounded on her. “You got any bright ideas?”

“Candles. We’ve got stockpiles of them in the lock-up. Round up some of the kids and get them to run a batch out to every house. Send the rest to the cathedral.”

He tongued his lip, eyeing her carefully. “What are candles going to do when
they
start showing up? We going to waft magnolia and coconut at them?”

“She’s right. Give out the candles,” Sarah said, setting down a straight flush by the fire.

“Bitch,” Heather muttered.

“It’ll give them hope. That’s all we can offer.”

The fight had gone out of Abernathy’s gaze. His shoulders drooped. “You’re right. I’m just…” He gave a tiny shrug and set off towards the cathedral. He sent a loose salute over his shoulder. “For what’s it worth from an old billy goat, thanks.”

Once he was out of sight, Allie turned to Heather and Sarah. Never before had she felt so close to anyone as she did to them right now.

Even if it all comes to nothing, we did something
, she thought.

Allie climbed up onto the hood of what had once been some executive’s shiny toy and poked her head over the barricade blocking Main Street. “They’re really out there, aren’t they?” she said. She stared out into the hills beyond the limits of the old city. The day was pleasant and balmy, a slight chill on the air countering the shining sun. A few butterflies winged in majestic dance between the shattered windshield panels of the Mercedes beside her.

She spoke to the wind but knew Sarah and Heather overheard. “It won’t sink in.” She recited: “People are coming to kill us. I thought we were trying to save those people. In the end, we almost killed everyone who was left.” She shook her head. “We were stealing. Somehow it just didn’t feel like it at the time.”

“Don’t think about it too much, you’ll just tie yourself in knots,” Heather said, pouring a few cups of dandelion tea from a pot off the fire.

Allie took in the sight of them for a moment, on sentinel duty with guns slung over their shoulders, slouched in the dirt playing cards, unwashed and hungry and exhausted. None of them had slept more than a few hours a day in the past week, and like a lot of others, they sent half their rations to the cathedral.

What’s become of us? How did we get here?

She felt so different, so unlike herself. A little while ago, she had been so young and stupid. A dead weight with a big mouth. Now here she was, getting ready to stand against an army, waiting for Norman and the others to come back when she knew they were probably all dead…

Her heart lurched.
No, Norman isn’t dead. He isn’t. They’re all coming back.

She laughed. “Makes me feel like a damsel in distress,” she said. “Waiting for the burly men to come home and save us.”

Heather snorted around her steaming tea. “In our flaming tower, wringing our hands.”

“I never got to have my honeymoon. As soon as Robert gets back, I’m going to make him
my
little princess,” Sarah said.

“Filth,” Heather said, shaking her head. “Absolute filth.”

They laughed together, and for just a moment a bubble of warmth blossomed between them. They were themselves again, and it served only to highlight just how far they had come.

We’re all different. Living here, with all the lights and guards and crops… we forgot what it was to live in this world. Us and the kids, anybody young enough to forget the wilds… we were growing up green.

That hadn’t always been so for her. She had been tough before she had come here. She had had to be.

Before the famine, Allison thought she’d seen everything that could surprise a person. The End had ripped away most of humanity after all and left the rest of them crawling on their guts like flies with their wings pulled off. Her dad had brought her up to respect the Old World, but they had been alone, and Allie hadn’t seen much worth in all the dusty books and dormant laptops and abandoned buildings—though she was careful never to admit that in front of him.

Theirs had been a quiet life, out on the east coast by the mouth of the Thames. She snared rabbits while her dad collected cockles from the rock pools. They had a little Old World cottage, and they kept themselves entertained at a little town a ways down the road, which made its way putting on stage shows.

They hadn’t had much, but it was enough. The End had come, but the sun kept rising, the stars still wheeled overhead, and life went on.

“One day,” her dad had said, clapping his hands as he worked on a bucket of cockles with his penknife, “all this will be yours, and you’ll make it something better.”

“Wow, thanks,” she had replied, but she had never had the heart to say what she felt.

I’ll never make anything of it. What’s the point? The world keeps on spinning anyway.

Why risk rocking the boat? She wanted to be like everybody else: find a man and have a few kids. The simple life. She had had no intention of giving up what she had; her husband could find cockles when dad got too old, the kids could hunt rabbits with her, and they could all go to the performances in town in the evenings. Maybe she’d have made a few friends. That was the only thing missing: somebody to talk with. Her dad said she could
talk the tail off a donkey
, whatever that meant.

That was how Allie had seen her life, laid out before her like some comforting tapestry: simple and inevitable.

Then one night the little town had been torn down. The performance of the night had been Chekov’s
The Cherry Orchard
, one of her favourites. She had been so caught up in the third act that she hadn’t noticed anything wrong until her dad had clutched his throat, his eyes wide and blood gushing between his fingers.

The Snatchers ruled most of old Norfolk, a ragged clan of murderers with a penchant for casual arson. They seldom roamed outside their own territory, but that was what made their occasional raids so much worse. The coast had its troubles and thieves, but it was quieter than most places. None of them had even been armed.

The Snatchers had crept into the theatre’s every corner while the candles were dimmed. When they started cutting, there was nothing to stop them. The only thing that saved Allie had been her father’s dying act: he had thrown himself onto the Snatcher reaching for her, and they had both gone toppling down the steps towards the stage. The town burned that night. Stage actors who might never be replaced, and a theatre that could well have been the last in all the British Isles burned on the horizon as she fled crying through the marshes.

Lucian had found her the next morning, on the verge of passing out on her hands and knees. By the time she came to, Heather had been hovering above her, and she had been in the New Canterbury infirmary. She had imagined she would stay a few days, recoup her strength, and chase down the bastards who had taken Dad away from her. She had been ready for it when she woke, had to be held down by Norman and Lucian. But then she had seen the city, seen its people, known what it was like to be one of them. There had been so many people to talk to, a community that she could be a part of; a real home.

She had retreated into this life, into gossip and chat. Here, in the city of the great Alexander Cain, seat of the Alliance of the South, people had fought all their lives to put thought before action. By then she had been all too eager to let them do the thinking for her. She knew the same was true for Sarah, who had breathed books, lived for books. Nowhere else in all the land—maybe all the world—could somebody spend the their days cataloguing and sorting masses of bound volumes brought in from the far reaches of the Old World by scavenging parties, tradesmen, and pilgrims come to see the city for themselves. Only here, a thin scrim of civilisation that had been nurtured and carefully tended, could
literature
ever be spoke of without snorts of derision.