MoonFall (5 page)

But as they marched him down the street, Noah heard familiar accents too, mostly local but some from deeper in the south or up the east coast. This place was thriving, and it still seemed to be American.

Something else grabbed his attention as they made their way towards an ugly concrete building on the far side of town. A girl, somewhere in her teens, scrawny as a spring fawn. She shadowed them as they walked, peering at Noah through gaps in the crowd, scurrying across junctions rather than staying out in the open. Her ragged clothes would have fit in anywhere else, but here they were distinct, and while the folks around them seemed determined to ignore her, to Noah she stood out.

They exchanged glances as he passed, her look filled as much with curiosity as with a challenge to him, wanting to know what this disheveled stranger was about. Places like this had hot water, mirrors, and sharp razors. There weren’t many beards here as wildly impressive as his, and even without the escort he’d have been distinctive.

“If I was you, I would not be looking so happy.” Poulson glared at Noah. “Your friends are not going to save you.”

“No change there then,” Noah said. “I can count my friends on the fingers of one ass-cheek.”

At last they came to a complex of grim concrete buildings, barbed wire trailing across the tops of the walls, dead cameras still standing on a couple of posts around the yard. The sign out front still held the words “County Jail,” though the name of the county had been whited out and the word ‘Apollo’ neatly painted over the top.

Seemed these folks took pride in everything, even the dark places they reserved for crooks and strangers.

The raggedy girl stopped a hundred yards from the jail, hovered anxiously in an alley, her eyes flitting between Noah and the flat gray edifice. At the gate, a smaller door swung open on well-oiled hinges and Noah was shoved once more, this time across the doorstep and into an exercise yard. There wasn’t much exercise going on, only two guards taking a break at a faded wooden table. Again there were religious icons all around the place – a cross in one corner of the yard, a bunch of little statues along railings and ledges. It was as if someone had taken a great big guide to world religions and shaken the pictures out all over this town and its jail. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the Pope and the Dalai Lama had rounded the corner laughing about who was getting into heaven first.

Well, maybe a bit surprised. He’d heard only the faintest and least reliable of rumours about what was happening in the rest of the world, but if the Pope or the Dalai Lama were still alive so long after the apocalypse then he’d be pretty surprised. Like all the great musicians, all the top politicians, all the innovators, artists, actors, and damn near everyone else in the world, they were almost certainly dead. Just a handful of people were left, and some of them still insisted on locking him up.

It wasn’t until another door clanged open and he was led into the prison building itself that Noah saw his fellow inmates. Suddenly the jail didn’t seem such a bad idea. These were folks such as he’d met on the trail, only more so – rougher, angrier, hairier, more scarred. As he passed from a tiled corridor into a two story hallway lined with barred cells, a great noise of howling and whooping rose around them. Hands stretched out between the bars, clawing at the empty air. Savage looking men and women, all heavily tattooed, some with sharpened teeth or nails cut down to points. There was none of the neatness or cleanliness so prevalent in the town, but wild flowing hair, mohawks and dreadlocks, beards in a dozen different styles, and most of them dressed in little more than loincloths or a few scraps of fur.

“See what happens when you come for us?” Poulson paused in the middle of the hall and gestured towards Noah. “We get you all in the end.”

Noah tried to protest, but his words were drowned out by the clamor of voices, all yelling at Poulson and the guards. Heavy hands dragged Noah down the last few yards of the hall and flung him into an empty cell. One more clang – the day’s signature sound – and he was behind bars, just like his neighbor Mrs. Tallowitz had always predicted.

He doubted she would have pictured it happening like this.

The cell held only two pieces of furniture – a lidless toilet and a bed with a stained, threadbare mattress. But threadbare was still better than the no mattress Noah usually had. He sat down on it, leaning back against the wall, able to feel the wire mesh of the bed frame through the feeble padding.

The cell was maybe seven feet each way, enough space for a tall man to lie down but not much spare. Every inch of it gray except for a cross painted on the back wall – it looked like these folks liked to keep people holy but didn’t trust them with the sort of crucifix you could take down and maybe stab someone with. Noah hadn’t been stuck with walls so close around him for a good long time. It wasn’t long before he could see them filling the edges of his vision, feel them closing in around him. His chest tightened like the jail was squeezing him in a vice grip.

He took a deep breath, focused on the open hallway beyond the bars, tried to keep his shit together.

“We’ve been through worse,” he said, trying to convince himself. “Ain’t that right buddy?”

He patted the empty holster where Bourne should have been, an absence that felt like a missing limb.

He reached up for his top left pocket, looking to steady his nerves with a smoke, but his cigarettes were gone. So was his lighter, his penknife, and as he frantically patted around his pockets he soon found everything else was too.

Sorrow turned to anger, then back to a terrible tension as he tilted his head and saw the walls closing in against him.

“Goddammit.” His hand drifted back down to the empty holster. “I really am alone.”

C
HAPTER
S
IX

B
EAUTY
AND
A
B
EATING

D
AWN
WAS
CREEPING
through the bars of the cell when they came back for Noah, waking him from the little sleep he’d gotten despite the occasional howl from one of his fellow captives. Several of them seemed to suffer from nightmares, and he reckoned he would too if they kept him here long with the tightening walls and the yelling in the night. Someone had clearly been in pain, screaming every hour or so, and Noah was willing to bet the townsfolk didn’t waste medicine on prisoners.

They provided food at least. There’d been some sort of slop before lights out, dished in plastic bowls so old and scratched they were probably no more hygienic than the poorly cleaned toilet in the corner of the cell. His stomach had been growling by then and he wolfed the lot down, only stopping at the end of licking the bowl to wonder if they’d put anything harmful in it. But why take him alive if that was their plan?

The bowl still sat by the bars of his cell when two soldiers marched in through the cold gray light and the silence that had finally fallen somewhere in the deep of night. Noah was waking up – the dawn would do that for you if you lived in the wild – and when they stopped by his cell he propped himself up on an elbow, watching them as casually as he could.

“Mornin’ ladies.” He rubbed his sleep crusted eyes, gave an exaggerated yawn. “I believe I ordered breakfast with my wake-up call?”

If these two thought he was funny, they didn’t show it. It made Noah miss the Russian fellow from the day before. At least he knew how to laugh.

A heavy key turned in the lock and the cell swung open.

“Come with us,” one of them said. “Sergeant Burns wants to see you.”

“You didn’t say the magic word,” Noah said, sitting up and stretching his arms.

The guard reached him in two swift strides, slammed a metal club into his side.

Noah crumpled over as pain blazed through him.

“That magic enough for you?” she said.

He eased himself to his feet, wincing as he moved. Had that click been a rib cracking?

“After you,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Oh no, wise-ass. After you.”

The room they took him to looked like it had a long history of interrogations. Shattered remnants around the edges of the hole showed where observers had once watched conversations through one-way glass, and the animosity unleashed against that window had clearly extended to a hatred of the space itself. The table bolted down in the center of the room was charred and a little warped in one leg. It took a certain retarded determination to try to set fire to a metal table, and Noah almost admired whichever prisoner had tried it.
 

Then there was the mural on the wall, a stylishly rendered lightning bolt crossing over an ankh. He’d have admired it a lot more if it didn’t seem like another part of this place’s craze for religion.

No-one cuffed him or clapped him in irons. He was kind of disappointed to find that they didn’t even consider him worth tying up, though relief outweighed that by a fair amount. Where there were free hands there was hope, as his Grandpa had never said.

They pressed him into a plastic chair and left him alone, taking long enough when closing the door that he could see the guards lurking outside, all with metal beating sticks at their sides, one with a musket.

“This is what I expected to wake up in,” he said to the world in general. “Dim light through a barred window, distant dripping noises, maybe a rat or two just out of sight.”

“You expected to wake up?” A woman’s voice emerged from the room beyond the broken mirror. Noah squinted to make out her shape in the shadows, an indistinct patch amid a larger darkness.

“I don’t have high standards,” he said, “but that’s one of them, sure.”

“I wouldn’t be getting any expectations if I were you.” She moved suddenly forward, vaulted through the broken window and landed surely on her feet. But even though the sudden movement made Noah jump, it sure wasn’t the most striking thing about her.

Whoever else this Sergeant Burns was, she was the most beautiful woman Noah had seen in the best part of a decade. Her eyes were the green of a forest on a fine spring morning, and Noah knew he was in trouble when he started thinking poetically. But how could he help it? She had wavy auburn hair tied back to reveal tattoos that ran from her neck across her shoulders and down her arms. Her tank top could have been chosen to show off her figure, but more likely was meant to show off her ink, which appeared again from beneath cut-off shorts and ran down her legs. The woman would have been a work of art in her own right, but with intricate swirls and pinpoint pictures adorning her skin she became art laid upon art, a moment of breath-taking wonder in this place of pain and confinement.

Her club crashed down on the table, denting the top. Noah jumped again.

“Got enough of an eyeful?” she growled. “Or should I take off my shirt and show you the rest?”

“If you’re offering…” Even knowing what would follow, Noah couldn’t resist.

Sure enough, the club slammed into his shoulder, almost knocking him from his seat. He clutched his shoulder, the movement only adding to his pain. Why did folks do that, he wondered. Did they think their hands would somehow gain magical healing powers, make it all better at the touch of flesh? He sure as hell wasn’t feeling any magic.

Burns prowled around the edge of the room, circling in and out of his vision.

“What were you doing at the school?” she asked, stopping to lean across the table towards him. “What information were you after?”

“No information,” Noah replied. “Just supplies. I was hoping to find food.”

“In a library?” Burns snorted. “Yeah right.”

She started prowling again, slapping the club against the palm of her hand, a steady drum beat of menace.

“What’s the plan?” she asked. “Go through the old sewers maybe? Because I’ll tell you now, we scooped up the municipal plans years ago. You and the rest of the savages won’t get anywhere that way.”

“No plan,” Noah replied. “No savages. I’m just a drifter looking for supplies. Check my pack. Would a savage be carrying a book, or a set of snares, or, umm–”

“Or this?” She reached round into a holster at the back of her belt and pulled out Bourne.

Relief swept through Noah like a good-natured flood. Bourne wasn’t lost. He still had something to cling onto in the wilds.

Well, he might if they somehow agreed to give the gun back.

And if they agreed to let him go.

Damn, there were a lot of ifs today. So much for his rising spirits.

“So you’re just some innocent drifter.” Burns turned Bourne as if inspecting the barrel for clues. “Some innocent drifter who goes sneaking around towns, and who pulls a gun at the first sight of the Apollonian Guard.”

“It ain’t a good idea to roam the wilds unarmed,” Noah said. “There’s a lot of bad people out there.”

“There certainly are.” Burns glared pointedly at him.

“I’m not bad people,” Noah said. “Whoever you think I am, I ain’t. I don’t know no plans or no maps, or no Dionites, whatever the hell one of them is.”

“I didn’t say anything about Dionites.” Molly stuck Bourne back through her belt. She looked triumphant.