Ruin (The Ruin Saga Book 1) Read online

  Norman, Allie and Lucian tracked the noise with pricked ears for over a minute before it died without warning, to be replaced by an anguished groan.

  Norman shuddered as the hairs on his neck stood on end despite the stifling heat of the campsite. But it wasn’t until a second source of rustling emanated from the opposite direction, followed by yet more groaning, that the beginnings of fear stirred in his gut. The noise carried and echoed in the forest, warped by the breeze into a ghostly wail.

  Lucian gestured to the horses, then to the small path they had cleared, leading away from the camp and along the edge of the cliff.

  The groaning had once again been replaced by the sound of movement. But it was pitiful now, a mere rustle, and grew no closer. Then from the distance came a single pained cry, deafening in the strained hush. For a moment there was silence, save for the chattering of a flock of passing gulls and the booming of the waves far below.

  And then another cry answered, far louder and nearer than the first, emanating from just a few yards away—beyond the screening of ash and elm that shielded the campsite from view.

  Norman took a steadying breath, glancing at the horses, and then looked to Allie and Lucian. He raised his hands, moving them in a deft series of predetermined signals:

  What do you see?

  After a pause, they both signed back:

  Nothing.

  Norman cursed.

  Which way?

  Lucian replied:

  Straight ahead.

  Norman stared into the trees until his eyes ached from the strain, but he too could see nothing. Despite the slithering fear in his gut, he began to inch towards the trees, followed closely by Lucian, with Allie creeping at the rear. Now even the tiny and unavoidable noises that he produced seemed amplified, and each one made him wince with dread.

  The groaning came again, and this time it was very close—only feet away. They froze in the underbrush and listened until it came again, so near that it sent them flinching backwards, solid as a gale.

  Once again, despite his apprehension, Norman found himself moving forward. Lucian’s harshly whispered warning did nothing to slow his pace, and together the three of them advanced on the source of the noise.

  When Norman heard the groan a final time, he gasped. It had come from directly below him. He looked into the ferns at his feet and saw somebody staring up at him through a screen of underbrush.

  It was a man, or at least had been. His body was deathly pale, so emaciated that his face was no more than a skull clothed in skin, his ribs protruding at an extreme angle.

  The three of them looked down at him as he met their gaze. A tiny groan escaped his throat. He reached forward with skeletal fingers but could scarcely manage a few inches from the ground. “Please,” he said. His voice was tiny, defeated. “P-Please…help us.”

  Another groan rang out from behind them. Norman whirled to see another deflated body, prone beside the trunk of a nearby tree, too ruined for its gender to be discernible. Then he saw the others—over a dozen people strewn across the ground. Some lay still, putrefying, but others called out, reaching for the newcomers.

  In the distance, he could hear the whimpers and groans of many more. Norman backed away from them, unspeaking.

  “Please,” the man below him repeated. He was still trying to reach for them, but could no longer lift his hand from the ground.

  Norman turned to the other two:

  Let’s go.

  Allison’s young, rounded face softened. This time signing was unnecessary. Her response was obvious from her eyes alone:

  We can’t.

  Lucian and Norman exchanged a glance, and Lucian gave him the tiniest of nods. Together, they took Allie by the shoulders. She began thrashing against them, tears seeping from her eyes, but she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds, and so they dragged her away from the bodies without hindrance. Their silent struggle raged as they walked, fighting back towards the horses. Soon, Allison’s waving arms were accompanied by a stifled gargle in her throat.

  They dragged her nonetheless, leaving gouges in the ground as they went, hushing her with warning glances and fingers mashed against their lips.

  Her protests lessened as they neared the horses and she was pushed up onto the back of her mare. She then abandoned the pursuit and took to haughty silence, but her eyes remained trained in the direction of the helpless creatures. She pointed to the floor, where split packages of food lay tangled around the horses’ hooves.

  Norman climbed onto his own mount’s saddle and answered with shaking hands:

  Leave it.

  He took hold of his reins, ignoring the self-hatred that welled up in the pit of his stomach. He wanted nothing more than to rush back to the fallen and drag them to safety, but their supplies would do no good for so many mouths, and the people in the clearing were already past the point of no return.

  He lingered a moment to close his eyes and take a breath, and then kicked at the horse’s sides. With a snort the steed burst from the tree line, racing out over the fields that bordered the cliff, with Lucian and Allie’s mounts thundering along behind.

  The bags strapped to Norman’s saddle jostled, their contents threatening to bounce free and fall out of sight. Norman did his best to close those nearest to his hands, but had limited opportunity, snatching wild grabs only when the ground was even enough. He saw several pieces of fruit spiral away into the grass, each worth more than its weight in gold.

  The wind streamed against his face as Lucian and Allie pulled up beside him. Once abreast one another, they hurried along the edge of the cliff. The ground ahead soon levelled and cleared of foliage, carpeted only by yellow grass cropped short by the stag’s former harem, which scattered in a blur of fur and hooves. It was getting late. Fading light was dancing on the waves near the horizon.

  Looking left for a moment, Norman saw Lucian’s silver-haired figure bouncing atop his equally silver stallion. He was pointing behind them, bellowing something made incomprehensible by the whistling wind.

  Norman looked over his shoulder. The forest beneath the tree line was dark and thrown out of focus by their galloping pace, but he could still see the black shapes amongst the shadows, edging out into the field.

  The emaciated people were crawling in pursuit of their fleeing chance of salvation. From a distance it was difficult to make out any detail, but nonetheless Norman felt a chill run down his spine.

  He cursed, turning to face the road ahead. He could feel Allie’s gaze burning into his temple, but didn’t dare look at her. Instead, he tugged on his reins and steered his mount until they rode parallel to a small stream, and headed home.

  FIRST INTERLUDE

  The day of the apocalypse started like any other: a lazy mid-June Tuesday in the late noughties that passed without incident until, at precisely 08.15 Greenwich Mean Time, the End struck.

  There were no warnings or signs, nor was there hysteria or panic. The people of the world were waking in their beds, watching their favourite soaps, sitting in traffic, laughing, eating, or fast asleep. Perhaps for a single moment, as one, they felt an odd sensation in their bones and a chill in their lungs, coupled with a white-hot pain in their extremities.

  Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time for them to react before their bodies dissolved into vapour and they vanished from existence.

  Then it was over. The disaster had come and gone, the clocks had stopped ticking, and the world was changed forever.

  An instant later, upon the lawns of a backwater Cumbrian village, a young man fell to the ground, screaming and alone.

  *

  Cold. Raw, gnawing agony.

  Alexander Cain was surrounded by darkness. He was suffocating on a vast, viscous something that filled his mouth, throat and lungs. Whether he was spinning and falling, or whether the world was spinning and falling around him, he couldn’t tell. All he knew was that something was moving at breakneck speed, tearing at his body
amidst an endless void.

  Here, there was no time. Forever was now, now was forever, and nothing new could ever be. He would remain here until the infinite had grown small, and everything had faded completely.

  And yet, eventually, something emerged from the ether, something that seemed to consume all else: a light. The faintest, most distant light. It was above. There was no direction here, and yet Alex was certain that the light was higher—was up.

  He thrashed and fought his way towards it. The void shrank back and his body pressed against a great barrier, one that stretched and ripped at him with vicious talons. He was being pierced by icy tendrils. The void was pulling him back, desperate to hold onto him.

  For the briefest of moments it was over—he didn’t exist at all—and then he broke into the world beyond.

  *

  The first thing he became aware of was his own screaming voice. The next was the agony, which had followed from the void. The spinning ceased with a jarring jolt, slamming his eighteen-year-old body against unseen ground with bone-crushing force.

  The darkness had been replaced by blinding light. Dense fog surrounded him on all sides, and above was a sky of midmorning baby-blue tones, complete with wispy tracts of stratocumulus.

  From every direction came an ear-splitting ring, pressing in on him with percussive force, a decibel short of perforating his eardrums. His jaw clenched hard enough to pop a filling free from a premolar. The tendons on his neck, arms and legs tensed to breaking point, drawing him into a ball upon freshly cut grass.

  He was shivering—no, quivering. It was cold enough for a layer of frost to have accrued on his body, puckering his skin and clinging to his hair in icy shards. Through double vision and barely opened eyes he could make out his own hands, gnarled and curled into claws akin to those produced by advanced arthritis.

  He was granted a small mercy then, a momentary lull—a split second during which the fabric of existence seemed to undulate, almost to pulse. The sky rippled with ribbons of impossible colours, auroras that dwarfed any that had ever been seen over the Earth’s poles. With those colours came intense sensation: the grass caressed his skin with a passion that surpassed that of the most dedicated lover’s.

  And then pain washed over him with renewed vigour, blanketing all else as the ringing reached an unbearable crescendo, driving him across the floor as though with a booted foot. An unbroken wail stormed from his throat, but he heard no trace of it. If the noise persisted he would go mad. He was certain of it.

  He wished for death, for peace. As he writhed and bellowed upon the grass, the sky lost its ribbons of absurd colours, and the screech intensified a final time. A small part of him registered a sudden, crushing absence in the world, and he realised with horror that the screech was not artificial, not alien or cold-minded, but the product of billions of screams no different from his own.

  This was the last moment, the brink of insanity. He was at an end—

  …

  …

  Silence.

  The world was still, without pain. Warmth kissed his skin.

  Alex blinked.

  High above, the sky was blue—just blue. His hands fell from ears accosted by nothing but the chirps of a distant chaffinch. The frosty glaze upon his skin was gone. He was dry, no longer shivering.

  He took a hesitant breath, heard his strained throat whistle with the gentle inhalation. He kept still for over a minute, too afraid of the nightmare’s return to move an inch.

  When nothing came, he tried moving his fingers. They wriggled feebly, brushing fresh grass cuttings. Once he had grown confident enough to sit up, a great many aches and pains shot through his body, but he scarcely noticed.

  The thick, swirling mist remained. A few feet of visible ground lay in any one direction before the blanket of fog took over. All that he could make out through its depths were the ghostly outlines of nearby trees, and the faraway fence that skirted the park—

  The park.

  With a sudden rush of recollection, Alexander remembered: the morning school rush, the last-minute revision for the finals, the mad dash through the park in the blind hope of a shortcut…and then darkness.

  He had been on his way to the last exam of the summer, the one upon which his entire future pivoted. And now he was certainly late, perhaps too late.

  It must have been a fit. He’d heard of people having stress-induced seizures before.

  But the exam boards wouldn’t let a little thing like a nervous breakdown keep them from starting on time.

  The emergency room could wait. For now, there was a desk nearby with his name on it.

  Ignoring his injuries, along with any thoughts of the macabre dream-void, he pushed himself into a standing position and hefted his bag—laden with the great tomes of Hardy, Faulkner and Steinbeck that had been decreed as the year’s set texts—onto his shoulder.

  He wobbled on his feet and put a hand to his eyes, squeezing his forehead as a wave of nausea washed over him. He looked around again, spitting the remains of his popped filling into the leaf litter, tasting blood.

  The mist encircled him, unbothered by wind or the heat of the still-rising sun. There were no signs to indicate that anybody or anything lay near him. He was alone on the slight rise that marked Lovers’ Leap, which overlooked the town of Radden.

  He paused, speechless. His memory of the morning was clearing. He should not have been alone. The park was a popular cut-in point for those late for the eight o’clock bell, and he had been surrounded on all sides by over a dozen stragglers, each as desperate to make the exam’s sit-down time.

  Now they were gone.

  But there was something else, something all the more jarring: there had been no mist as he’d entered the park. None at all. Only moments ago, it had been a perfect, clear summer morning.

  Alex cursed, spinning on the spot. His head was as clouded as the air around him, and so only two possibilities presented themselves. Either the fit had been more serious than he’d thought, and he’d been unconscious for some time—long enough for bad weather to have rolled in off the coast—or something terrible had happened.

  The latter struck him as infinitely more likely. There was something about the absolute silence and the soupy nature of the mist that suggested something was very wrong.

  He was on the verge of setting off down the hill, while his mind’s eye offered him images of the town having been levelled by a terrorist bombing or freak storm, when he began to pass piles of clothing.

  The first few he registered as only shapes in his peripheral vision, but within a few steps a dozen or so had emerged from the mist, not quite neatly stacked in the grass: jackets, shirts and blouses, denim jeans and skirts, underwear of every shade and pattern, and socks of all lengths, tucked into the inners of a dozen pairs of shoes. A few were topped by objects unique enough to set them apart, and to allow Alex to identify their owners: Simon Wells’s flat cap, Connie Black’s spiked choker, Sally Macklintock’s nose bar and hooped earrings, and nearest to him was a pile topped by the headphone wires of Jerry Peter’s iPod. Beside them were heavily stuffed bags all too similar to Alex’s own. They lay precisely where his fellow stragglers had been before his blackout. But their owners were nowhere to be seen. It was almost as though they had stripped naked, calmly dropped their belongings in perfect head-to-foot sequence, and walked away into the mist. Or they had quite simply vanished.

  Disbelief throbbed in his head, which had set about a fantastic panic. Only the sheer strangeness of what his senses were telling him kept his eyes from rolling back in their sockets.

  “Hello?” he called. His voice bled away down the hillside, utterly alone except for the twittering of faraway songbirds. An echo returned from where the trill of the town’s morning traffic should have emanated. That was enough to send him running.

  Alex left the stacks of clothing behind. Within a single bounding step they’d disappeared into the mist. He ran with his arms outstretched, fearful of
running into a lamppost or fence at full speed. He tripped every other step, and was sure he would break an ankle any moment, but was powerless to stop his own advance. His thoughts had abandoned him, leaving a baser part of his mind to operate on instinct alone.

  Distantly, he was aware that he remained parallel to the slope, still moving towards the school. The notion of still trying to make the exam on time was so bizarre that he almost laughed—but he was sure that if he did, then the wild scream of terror lurking behind his tongue would break free, and hysteria would swallow him whole.

  He was less than a hundred yards from the gates of Radden High when the mist departed. It did so without warning, as though a gale had torn across the land and peeled it away. The lifeless mass of thick whiteness seemed to expand, wither and twirl upwards simultaneously, revealing Radden and the great moorland in which it sat.

  Alex froze. “No,” he whispered. He shook his head, as though he could jar the world back to making sense. But the absurdities before his eyes remained.

  The town was untouched, pristine. The cliffside gathering of Victorian terrace-rows twinkled in the morning light, along with an outlying halo of ancient cottages and farmsteads. Together, they were a twee mass of autumnal-shaded roof tiles and rustic brickwork amidst the moor’s vast reaches. The town appeared as it had done on any other day, and at first he could have expected the distant whistle of the Marshall-Aimes Quarry over in Bleak to ring at any moment, kicking off the morning shift.

  But then he saw that there was a very good reason for the silence.

  The town centre was still a considerable distance away, but Alex could make out thousands of piles of clothing strewn across Radden’s streets, arranged in little piles identical to those in the park.

  Not a single person was in sight. All was still and lifeless, frozen in place.