The Dawn: Omnibus edition (box set books 1-5)

by Michelle Muckley

  “What if they don’t let me pass?” Ronson said, clutching the card to his chest, even the thought of failure a painful prospect.

  “They will.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I just can. Now listen. Focus,” Zack said. “You go through the lobby and take the far double doors. They are marked Finance and Shipping. Go to the nineteenth floor and turn right out of the door.” Zack stopped and picked up his glass of Moonshine and knocked the rest of it back whilst Ronson used the time to recap the information. Zack waited until Ronson was ready to listen again. “Follow the corridor all the way along. Don’t stop to talk to anybody,” Zack warned, holding up a precautionary finger, “but don’t keep your head down either. Look like you belong there. You remember what that feels like, right?” Ronson nodded and they both smiled.

  “What if the Guardians see me?”

  “They will see you, but they don’t patrol nineteenth. Half of it is sealed off, but the doors you will use to get in and out are good.”

  “Why is it sealed?” Ronson asked, crouching his elbows onto the bar, minimising the distance that information had to travel, in case should get lost along the way and he would remain forever curious.

  “In the beginning, when Omega came, they checked every floor. They deemed floor nineteen a no-go zone. Said it was contaminated, that the windows were broken. They boarded everything up. The doors are supposed to be chained, but they’re not anymore. It has a one-way lock, so just push the bar and you’ll be in. Follow the corridor to the stairs. Go up them. I’ll be waiting for you.” Ronson looked pensive, and he held the card to his chest, gripped so tightly that even his knuckles were white. “That stairway is quieter. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”

  “What if they check me?”

  “You’ll be with me.” Zack sat back on his stool, pushed his shot glass towards Ronson’s side of the bar and tapped his fingers. “I’ll take another.”

  Ronson slipped the card into his trouser pocket, trousers that were perhaps once brown, but were now a mixture of rust red and black from dirt. He wiped his fingers over his lips, pursed and contracted by the wonder of possibility. He picked up the clear unmarked bottle and poured another Moonshine without looking at Zack. After setting the bottle down he scanned his fingers, brown and scaly, encrusted with years of filth. He ran his fingertips over his forearms before they eventually found their way up to his face, resting on his scars. “But they’ll know. They’ll know that I don’t belong. They’ll take one look at me and they’ll know it.” He covered as much of his scar with his hand as possible, his fingertips resting into the scarred shut eye socket, his palm against his cheek as if he was still shocked at the thought of what had happened to him. “They’ll never let me pass.”

  “Listen,” said Zack taking a sip from the beaker. “It’s true. It’s obvious that you weren’t there originally. Even if you were unlucky and still somehow got that scar that you’re trying to hide from me up there,” he said, pointing above ground, “it would still be impossible that people wouldn’t remember you. Wear this,” Zack said, taking off his deerstalker hat. “This’ll cover most of it.” Ronson positioned the hat and traced the outline of it against his skin. Zack couldn’t help but smile when Ronson realised that the scar was almost covered. It was as if the hat could turn back time. Time that neither of them counted anymore. “You see?” Ronson nodded, smiled, and filled up Zack’s glass before grabbing a dirty cloth and mopping up some sort of spill that wasn’t really there.

  Zack picked up his third Moonshine and swivelled around on the old barrel. He heard Ronson say that he would go and get the trade and Zack nodded in agreement. But Zack's attentions were already elsewhere. There was a woman with a child, a boy about ten, maybe eleven years old. The boy's cheeks were the same sullen grey of the clouds outside, a mixture of light and dark as the shadows cast on the hollows of his face. He sat listlessly on a chair at the woman's side, his hands dropped into his lap. He didn’t move or cry. He noticed Zack looking at him, and Zack smiled, waved to try and get him to respond. The boy half smiled, revealing a set of brown teeth, and perhaps if Zack's eyes didn’t betray him, a set of shrivelled and receded gums. Some of the teeth were missing. It was the radiation. Zack ran his tongue along the back of his own full set. The smooth, intermittently interrupted sensation of enamel against flesh reminded him that in some ways at least, he was one of the lucky ones. It was hard to remember that sometimes, but it was true.

  There were also a few other men, single men sitting balanced on tables or makeshift stools. In one corner a woman with dirty blonde hair tied into a topknot, and who might or might not have been Roxanna, was chatting up the liveliest of the drinkers. One of the other men was sitting on an old tea chest and Zack mused that the man looked like a cast member from one of the West End shows that used to play not so far from here. He looked like he should break into song.

  In the far corner with her head resting on the wall, there was a girl that looked out of place. She didn’t belong here. Her clothes were too clean, her face a shade of flesh rather than dirt grey. Her skin actually looked pink. Pink in the cheeks, as if she was healthy. He watched her a while as she sat with her back against the wall, her head tipped to the side. She was stationary, mentally somewhere else with the only exception her foot, which was moving to a beat, something he hadn’t seen in years. She was feeling something, as if she was listening to music. Her hair was also blonde. But it was nothing like the other woman in the bar. It looked clean. He imagined that it might smell like rosemary or sage, but then realised that such ideas were just words now, and that he had no idea what rosemary or sage even smelt like anymore.

  The girl was young, and actually looked it. He hadn’t seen something this perfect, something that looked so much like life before the war in so long. The sight of her was addictive, and before he was aware of what he was doing, he was moving towards her, absorbed in the vision of the past. She realised whilst he was still approaching, and she straightened herself up in the makeshift tea chest chair.

  “Hello,” he said, awed as if he had seen an angel descend to Earth. “Can I sit with you?” She didn’t say anything but she moved back on the chest and nodded her head. She pulled her sleeves to cover her hands. White clothes, actually white, he thought as he spotted them, not grey or brown or green from mould. White. “I’m Zack,” he said holding out his hand. He sat on a metallic box at her side. She watched his gesture as if it was an infection moving towards her, even edging further back. She didn’t offer her hand in return. Zack dropped his hand in his lap, embarrassed, so he shuffled the box underneath him for a distraction. From up close her skin was almost translucent, like a new and alien race. People just didn’t look like this anymore. “I haven’t seen you here before.”

  “I’ve seen you.” She was staring at him from behind an unbreakable wall of judgement. Under her scrutiny he felt the onset of an unreasonable sense of shame as he looked down at his finger tips and his dry dusty skin. He dragged his palm over his hair, still messy from where he had pulled the deerstalker hat from his head. “I’ve watched you in here before. You're a trader, aren't you? You take things from people.”

  Her direct approach captured his tongue, sucked him dry of words. It was true that he was a trader, and he was waiting for Ronson to provide his reward for the illicit water ration card. But it seemed that she had already made up her mind about him, and her conclusion wasn't favourable. This angel before him had judged that his intentions were selfish, that he was a chancer who was out for himself, and that he had no place in the heaven from which she came.

  “I trade things, yes,” Zack finally managed, his hair now smoothed into place after a lot of effort. “But for something that people want.” He felt a desperate urge to justify himself, to prove to her that he was good. That he wasn't what she had assumed. “For things people need.”

  “What about the things they have to give up? What is he going to give you? Free
drink? Drugs? Or maybe he is giving you something he needs. Something he can't afford to lose, but doesn't have a choice.” She pulled her hands in close to her armpits, her shoulders hunched up. “Isn't life comfortable enough for you already up there,” she said, tipping her head towards the ground level and above, “without taking from the people down here?” She was about to stand up when he reached out and took her hand. She snatched it back but the shock of his touch was enough that it stopped her in her tracks.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t do it too,” Zack said. “What are you trading? Everybody trades because there is no other choice in New Omega.” He knew as soon as he had finished saying it, the emphasis all on the you, that he had implied that she was trading herself. He wished he could take it back, but there was part of him that thought that she deserved it. She had been quick to judge him too, so why should he not judge her?

  “What are suggesting?” she snapped.

  He swallowed hard. “Look at you.” He figured once he had started, he might as well continue. “You must be getting extra rations. No way do you eat the shit I eat day after day. Got a deal with one of the Guardians, have you?” He looked her up and down, his initial admiration for her angelic presence banished by her harsh and unjust scrutiny of his actions. How dare she judge him? She didn’t answer, just sneered, her nose flared, the corners of her mouth turned down in disgust.

  “Whatever,” she said as she stood up.

  “Not got so much to say now, huh? Who is it? Sam? Croft? One of the others?”

  “I don’t need to say anything to justify myself to you.” She wasn’t looking at Zack anymore, instead her eyes were focussed on the bar, and a smirk settled on her otherwise sour looking face. “At least I was right about you.”

  Zack looked up just in time to see Ronson approach. He sidled up close and passed a dirty edged and frayed cushion into his lap. “There you go, Shiner. And a little something for your troubles.” Ronson placed a small once-white tablet on the dimpled metal table top that would have once shone and glistened under the sunlight in a bistro or cafe. It rolled like the mangled slug from a gun, settling in one of the divots made through damage, fights, time, or a mixture of all three.

  “Like I said,” the girl said as she leant back across the table. “You take the things he needs, and the things you don’t.” She motioned her eyes in turn from the cushion to the tablet, all the while her head shaking. The tablet was lumpy and poorly formed. A homemade concoction that offered an hour of dreaming. An hour of escape from Delta Tower.

  “Don’t you dare judge me,” Zack said as he too stood up, knocking the table. He was surprised at her height. He was over six foot tall and she matched him inch for inch, her aqua green eyes level with his. For a moment he thought he heard the sound of the ocean, like when as a child he would convince himself that he could hear the waves in an upturned conch shell. He could almost smell the salt as the summer heat burned it from the surface of a calm sea.

  “Come on now, Shiner,” Ronson said, breaking Zack's trance as he placed a cautionary hand against his chest. He was still wearing the deerstalker and it was true that even up close the scar was almost fully covered. “Take it easy.”

  “All I was doing was trying to be nice, Ronny,” Zack said, ignoring the girl. “I just wanted to talk to somebody.”

  “Come sit at the bar. Talk to me. Take your pill,” Ronson said as he picked up the puckered tablet. Zack watched as the smirk grew across her face. “Don’t let this get to you. It’s nothing.” The pressure underneath Ronson’s palm was growing until eventually with the girl still watching him, even as the distance between them grew, Zack started walking back to the bar. He sat down on the oil barrel stool from where he had got up only moments before. He picked up the tablet and the shot of Moonshine that Ronson had poured him without asking, and knocked them both straight back. His head was starting to swim, and he could feel his eyes drooping heavier than lead shutters. He slammed his beaker back down onto the flimsy bar top, shaking the structure from its base to its surface before standing to walk away. Just before he walked through the door of NAVIMEG he turned and said to Ronson, “After the double bell, got it?” Ronson nodded, and as Zack's eyes scanned the room for the final time he saw that the girl who had ruined his evening had already left. Still pissed at her ignorance, and as drunk on that as he was the Moonshine, he took the stairs two at a time. Several times he stubbed his toe and only just managed to correct his balance before he fell. He stopped on each level and scanned the crowds for her face and her golden hair which cascaded over her shoulder like a waterfall. He ignored the crowds making trades, most as high as he was. He paid no attention to the girls who offered themselves, pushing their flimsily covered bodies away. But by the time he got to the surface, the ground level where life was supposed to flourish and where he used to believe it was possible for dreams to come true, he still hadn't found her.

  Chapter Four

  “Take my hand!” The arms stretched forwards from within the darkness, and as her father lifted her up, Emily felt the man snatch at her wrists. The man pulled her up and pushed her backwards. Emily rolled away from him towards the edge of the lift. She sat up, pushing herself upright with both palms and she saw the man lunging himself back into the hatch from where she herself had been dragged. There was an electronic whirring coming from above her as some sort of generator kicked in, and the emergency lighting flickered on and off in time with the sound of the electronics. She could feel the lift rocking underneath her, and the steel girders which held the whole thing in place groaned as they flexed. The whole thing was being shaken from the outside, crumpled and moulded against its will.

  “Dad!” Emily cried, trying to poke her head back towards the hatch. “Get my Dad out!”

  “Get away from the opening, Emily,” shouted the man whose head was hanging into the hatch. He knew her name but she couldn't place his face. Maybe it was the lighting. His skin was lit up green like a cartoon character, shadows cast by intermittent light, and his eyes sunk in endless dark sockets. “It’s not safe. We have to be quick.” He pulled up another woman who blocked Emily's view. She was crying and seemed hysterical. She told Emily to calm down, that everything would be alright. It might as well have been her mother speaking.

  The third person to be brought up through the hatch was Helena Grayson. As she got to her knees on the top side of the lift Emily thought how quiet her mother seemed. She wasn’t crying, or causing a commotion. Nothing like what Emily expected and nothing like the first woman. She looked at Emily and said only one word.

  “Focus.”

  She said it with a cold conviction that Emily was not used to, and it came out as an instruction which she wouldn't dare ignore. Emily stuffed the iPod back into her pocket and clutched at her mother’s wrist. By the time the big man was finishing hauling up bodies through the hatch there was only one left. Emily's father. He came out sweating, his face red, his cheeks puffed out and hair lopsided as if he had woken from a nightmare. There was another child in their group. A small girl who reached up for Emily’s free hand. The hand was warm and slick, much like she imagined her own would feel to her mother.

  “Mum, what’s happening,” said Emily, as she watched the big man who had pulled them from the lift ascend a ladder on the inside of the shaft. The girders were still groaning their disapproval as he climbed step after step. Emily was sure that he was too heavy. His feet chinked against the metal bars, dust spraying out underneath him, flickering like plankton as it passed the wall-mounted lights. He reached the doors of the next floor and stepped off the ladder onto the shelf. He grunted, pulling at the lift doors, shards of light filtering through from the other side of the door, there one minute, gone the next as he failed to hold them open.

  The man called back down. “Sir, I can't get them open,” and without answering, Emily's father was skimming up the ladder, swifter and more athletically than the first, portly man. Together they prised the doors apart with
their finger tips and light poured through to reveal the inner working of the lift shaft, the only time Emily could remember the light making something more terrifying than the dark.

  In turn they all climbed the ladder, their footsteps the sound of raindrops striking against a tin roof. Emily was pushed forwards, her mother behind her. “Move, Emily,” she said. “Focus.” On three separate occasions Emily stopped, her fear of heights gripping her as tightly as she herself gripped the rungs of the ladder. Each time her mother pushed her, screamed at her to focus as she coughed up the dust dislodged by Emily’s feet. Tears flowed across their faces making tracks in the dirt covering their cheeks. As Emily stepped from the ladder she was dragged into the doorway by the big man. Her father grabbed her, his hands gripping her face as he shouted, “Run down this corridor, Emily. Wait by the door at the other end.”

  Emily nodded and did as she was told, not waiting for anybody to follow. Her legs were like jelly, her heart beating as violently as thunder. For a moment she was alone, and the isolation and fear was suffocating. Her throat was dry, the taste of dust and cement from the lift shaft stuck in her mouth. She stopped as the corridor opened out like a river delta into a wide glass atrium. She looked up, her hands balanced on her knees, her lungs panting. She was encased in glass all the way around, a protective dome without which she would have already choked from the thick ashes that she could see falling through the air outside. The glass above her was covered in grey soot that reminded her of Christmas morning, but a warped, unfamiliar version. In the distance she saw the orange glow, concentric rings of smoke billowing not only outwards, but upwards and pluming like a delicate fountain of death.