Fractured Refuge

by Annabelle McInnes

  ‘Just don’t do anything stupid,’ he told Euan belligerently. ‘And come back in one piece.’

  Chapter 10

  Euan was careful as he stalked through the forest; each boot placed deliberately. It pressed into the undergrowth with strategic intent to eliminate the inadvertent snap of a fallen branch, or the unnecessary crunch of frozen leaf litter. He was as noiseless as the wind that wound through the naked trees, that took the mist that left his mouth to whisk it away into nothingness.

  He knew this area by heart. He avoided the shallow ravine that cut through the landscape perpendicular to the homestead. He utilised the boulders as vantage points that enabled visibility over uncompromising terrain. He effortlessly stepped over their trip-wire mechanism that lay concealed in the mulch, and motioned for Smith to do the same. The low-hanging branches were avoided without a glance and he retained a direction of north even without the guidance of a compass or sun. An intuitive instinct he had obtained in the constant hunt for his enemy, an enemy who would never cease to haunt them.

  An enemy who now followed his every footstep.

  Smith was as silent as he was. It further solidified the unresolved question that had gnawed at him since the man had divulged to Euan who he was. He was hard-pressed not to keep looking over his shoulder to ensure he was there. The skills he possessed were more than just innate talents learned after the destruction of humankind. This boy must have learned them from an early age.

  ‘Did you cut the connection to the hidden camera?’ he asked without elaborating. If it had been Smith, he’d know what he referred to.

  ‘Had to,’ Smith confirmed without inflection.

  Euan stopped and turned. ‘Had to?’

  Smith’s regard was acute, as though he was the organism under the microscope. A wave of uncertainty washed through him, and suddenly, Smith didn’t look so young.

  Smith’s words were more for himself. ‘You truly don’t know.’

  His hand gripped the weapon. ‘Know what?’

  But in that instant, Smith focus shifted to earth at Euan’s feet.

  ‘There,’ Smith pushed past him to crouch and scan the displaced dirt.

  Euan followed his gaze and watched as he tenderly traced dirty fingers along the slight impressions in the dark mulch.

  Tracks. Tiny footprints that retreated away from the house and deeper into the forest.

  Smith didn’t wait for Euan to respond. He simply began to run on borrowed boots into the trees.

  Despite the unease that swirled inside him after Smith’s menacing omen, Euan didn’t hesitate. He fell in quickly behind Smith’s charge.

  Branches whipped at his cheeks and he was less careful regarding the amount of noise he made. Time was now their nemesis. She was potentially hours ahead of them. But their advantage was significant. She was insufficiently clothed, without shoes and severely malnourished. The willpower could drive the body, but it was only a matter of time before the body overcame the mind. She would be sluggish, likely easily disoriented and overly careful. In contrast, Smith’s form was black mass of fatigues and waterproof fabric. His blond hair, still high in a topknot, was the only colouring amongst the dim undergrowth. They’d fed him before Euan had allowed him to leave. It was testament to his hunger that he inhaled the stew without argument despite the time lost to consume it.

  Together, they ran as fast as they were able, following the path of broken twigs, crushed mulch, loose-leaf litter and disturbed mud.

  His heart raced. His rifle was held in both hands and it shifted with the sway of his body. Smith was without a weapon. But Euan had a Sig strapped to his hip if the necessity arose.

  He trusted the boy with the truth, but not with a gun.

  They followed the trail until it led out of the forest. She’d purposefully avoided the driveway, the surveillance cameras, the trip-wire. Smith only periodically looked at the ground as they crashed through the trees.

  ‘Where are we headed?’ There was no infliction of his voice.

  Smith didn’t respond. Quickening his pace, Euan reached out, gripped his shoulder and forced him to halt. The clavicle protruded under his palm. The sharp jut of bone pushed through the multiple layers of fabric. Smith jerked with the contact but turned to face Euan, his checks flushed, his lips bloodless, dark circles a deep mauve under his artic eyes.

  ‘Tell me,’ Euan demanded.

  Smith inhaled in attempt to stop the panting. It didn’t. ‘I can’t be certain.’

  Euan tightened his fist. ‘But you have a hunch.’

  Smith swallowed, his gaze moved back over his shoulder. He nodded.

  Euan’s gut tightened. His grasp on Smith tensed. ‘Where?’

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ Smith said, before pulling out of Euan’s grip and taking off into the trees.

  Euan growled, his heart rabbiting inside his rib cage, his hold on the weapon in his hands slippery with sweat. He was forced to run after the skinny blond boy in the borrowed boots further into the trees, further away from the only refuge he’d ever known since the fall of humankind, further from the love sheltered there, and further into the unknown dangers.

  ***

  Darkness had descended. As the sun set, it sucked the light from the land. But Euan had the ominous feeling that this location had been bereft of the touch of tranquillity gifted by the sunshine for some time. The shadows were in abundance. Black recesses concealed hidden agendas, malevolent natures and depraved deeds.

  This was in addition to potentially masked observers and obscured weapons between buildings, trees and machinery.

  ‘What is this place?’ Euan whispered.

  Smith was a silent statue crouched at his side. His emaciated muscles were strung tight, his focus immovable from the cluster of buildings before them. ‘This is where it all started.’

  Euan eyed a number of small, dilapidated timber, concrete and tin structures, the useless rusted farming machinery, the stripped and mutilated skeletons of forgotten vehicles. ‘Her home?’

  Smith silently shrugged.

  ‘John,’ Euan called softly.

  He was slow to shift. Either his waning strength or his reluctance to disconnect his attention from what lay before them caused the delay. When he finally held his gaze, Euan could see the knowledge he hid behind apathetic words. The icy flash in Smith’s eyes had dulled. He looked worn, exhausted and crushed. The energy that had carried him through the trees, over the grassland and along the abandoned highway had withered. The adrenaline that had pumped his body with vigour and fortitude had dissipated, leaving only a shattered and starved body behind.

  He knew what this place was, what it was used for. The knowledge caused another fissure in the boy’s maimed soul.

  Euan took a calming breath himself. ‘What happened here?’

  Smith swallowed. The muscles in his throat shifted and the prominent Adam’s apple bobbed with the movement. His voice cracked. ‘Go see for yourself.’

  Euan turned his focus back towards the cluster of buildings. There was a single shipping container, its blue-powder coat rusted. The iron bolts and levers that held the door closed tainted with corrosion. Smith’s eyes deliberately avoided its presence, and Euan suffered as a sickness in his stomach formed at the implication.

  There was something evil about this place. A malevolence that pushed past rational thought and transcended into the obscure. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want any part of this.

  As he scanned the terrain, he spotted the sign they’d been searching for. Smith’s instincts were correct. A lost sock was captured by sticky mud, sucked from a dirty foot that had moved in haste without looking back.

  ‘She’s here—wait,’ he snapped as he grabbed Smith’s tight bicep when he tried to launch from their hiding place. ‘We don’t know if it’s occupied.’

  Smith’s hesitation was pronounced. ‘Only the dead reside here now.’ His focus moved from Euan’s grip at his arm to the main structure; a timber, hu
nting cabin.

  As with the shipping container, the cabin was consumed in shadow. A lone conifer stood tall beside it. Its branches overhanging the rusted tin roof. The grey-green needles littered the forest ground around it. Euan didn’t think about the memories that tree provoked.

  Euan’s gut sank; from the look of horror that had washed through the boy’s features, this place was the mouth to the entrance of hell. ‘I’ll go through the front. You take the back just in case. Careful, yeah?’

  Smith’s nod was listless, but he moved to do as he was bid. He was pushed to the limit, and moved forward on legs that took command from an innate inner drive. Instinct kept him crouched low and Euan regretted not giving him the Sig.

  The hunting cabin was nestled obtrusively amongst the outbuildings. It was a typical wooden structure made only to service limited periods of habitation, but substantial enough to endure the weather without upkeep during extended absences. However, three years of neglect, regardless of whether it had been occupied during that time, had left nothing but rotting wood, rusted framing and missing tin sheeting. If men had been here recently, they had not stayed for any length of time.

  Euan rose to his feet with careful, deliberate movements. A sense of wrongness hung over the area like an invisible cloud. This air was thick with unspoken nightmares and with the loss of the sun; any lingering warmth was quickly dispelled. The chill that permeated the place was physical. It settled in his bones and turned them into ice.

  It was the sweet stink of death that caused Euan to pause at the chipboard door. He stood immobile on an uneven porch, caked in what looked to be black mud. He recognised the stench. Any man who survived a plague would. The pungency overwhelmed sensitive senses and caused his stomach to roil. There was flutter inside his chest. A fleeting demand to defect, to leave this place. A nagging sense to ignore the horrors here and return home to the arms of Nick and Kira, to the shelter they provided. He ignored the tug.

  Instead, he encased his heart in steel, secured his emotions inside an iron cage and pushed open the door with a steady hand.

  The door creaked ominously. The hairs on the back of his neck rose to attention. His heart thrummed, the constant rush of blood dulled his hearing. The heel of his rifle rested snugly on his shoulder and shifted with each inhalation. For a brief moment he suffocated under the smoke of memory. Another rotting wooden door, another jarring creek. Another dark portal that opened to an underworld of morbid discovery. Another moment he where he hoped open to discover life instead of death.

  This hope, however, was in vain.

  It took his eyes a moment to adjust. The weak light of dusk left little to illuminate a windowless room. When he could finally fathom the dark shapes before him, the protective layer he’d attempted to erect around his consciousness was as fragile as his hope for humanity.

  Rustic furniture had been destroyed. Fabric, timber, and aluminium was as warped and twisted as his stomach. Everything that was not bolted to a wall had been eviscerated as though an explosion had thrust the debris to all corners of the small room.

  But the chaos was only a periphery notation. Just as the full force of the stench bombarded his senses with an almost physical blow, his eyes focused though the sting, and understanding of what he was seeing stole every remaining faculty. He was sucked into a vortex where neither light nor sound penetrated.

  He was in hell. For there was no place on earth where this could occur.

  Snagged on meat hooks and chained to the ceiling were three rotting carcasses.

  Three naked men. Brutalised and deformed. Their torture evident in the contorted features, wounds, brands, absent limbs …

  One had no skin across his torso.

  Another had no genitalia.

  The third, his hair and half his face had been lost to flame.

  What had been an assumption of black muddied footprints at the door solidified into reality. There was no mud or paint. The dark stain was the result of the untreated floorboards being washed in blood.

  Christ … so much blood.

  He noticed the tremble in his body only when the stock of the rifle vibrated against his shoulder. His knees were as weak as a newborn calf. His breath was held inside his chest yet the stink of decay and rot infiltrated his pores. He tasted it. He tasted the pain, the terror the horror of each single moment that had occurred inside this room.

  This level of depravity was beyond Euan’s comprehension. He’d witnessed evil, but not malicious intent that forced a man to destroy his own kind so viscerally? It was barbaric. Worse than barbarity.

  It was inhuman.

  He was no expert, but he had seen death, and the extent of decay put this horrific event into recent times. It had been no more than a few months.

  And Smith had known exactly where to go.

  His boots were loud on the timber as he walked out with haste. The strength in his limbs evaporated along with his sense of time and place.

  Outside, his subconscious discerned Smith rounding the corner of the building, a grey tinge to his features, eyes lost to pain and remorse, his mouth twisted with regret.

  There was no help for it. Euan was a man of honour, of staunch core values that were deeply rooted in the notions of love and family. Christ, despite his intangible sexuality, and constant cursing, he’d been raised Catholic.

  This was beyond even the devil’s intervention. Euan couldn’t consider that any deity would put a hand in this, good or evil.

  The purge of his stomach was quick and efficient. He coughed once it was finished. His eyes watered and nose stung. He ignored it and met the distorted features of a blond, blue-eyed boy.

  ‘You knew.’

  The panic was back. His chest heaved and the elevated pulse beat like a winged bird at the column of lean throat. Long, bony fingers trembled as they passed over a sweaty brow, despite the chill and the clouds of mist that surrounded them.

  Smith opened his mouth. Closed it. His lip trembled.

  The space between them was mud and bark. Sticks and stones that resembled the bones of the dead. There was everything that could, should, keep them apart. Euan reached out.

  Smith hesitated. His eyes wandered over the outstretched hand as though it were unreal. A phantom created to trick him. Euan wiggled his fingers.

  It took a single step before he was in reach. Euan grasped the borrowed parka at Smith’s chest and pulled the boy into his arms. Shoulders that would be broad with muscle on them began to shudder. A height that rivalled Euan’s, surprisingly unstifled from malnourishment, enabled a dirty face to be pressed into the crook made between his shoulder and throat.

  In that moment, there was no man, just a terrified boy. A child forced to play games with rules written by monsters.

  Euan murmured, ‘You’ll tell me everything.’

  It was in the quiet moment where Smith nodded and they breathed in slow unison that they heard it: the crackle of twigs. Two sets of eyes snapped their necks towards the sound just as a tiny wraith disappeared behind one of the tin outbuildings. Smith was out of his grip before Euan had a chance to blink.

  He cursed, shouldered his rifle and launched himself after them.

  He was taller, and though his knees were still frustratingly weak, the burning sense of fury and indignity fuelled him with almost inhuman speed. A glance, a nod, and a token of a Sig Sauer in silent affirmation of trust saw Smith halt and hold back. His icy eyes scanned their surroundings in an effort to watch for predators.

  Predators that would not come in animal form.

  Euan’s efforts to push past his physical limitations were rewarded almost immediately. He spotted her after only less than a mile, a small hunched shadow that moved amongst long seeding grass in an effort to remain hidden.

  Euan wheezed. He couldn’t stop the tremble in his hands. Weakness threatened at the corner of his consciousness. He knew as soon as he allowed himself to feel the mess of horror and mayhem that writhed inside his aching chest, he woul
d crumble. It was easier to shut it down. Trap it in a pit so deep inside himself that not even Kira’s light could see it, find it, and let it take shape.

  He moved left to stay close to a cluster of pine trees, to flank her as she crept in and out of the surrounding grasslands. He stayed hidden, kept his footfalls light as the fallen conifer needles crunched under his boots.

  The scent of earth, of pine and of nature further cleared his senses. A deep breath stopped the trembling. Another strengthened his knees. One last one removed a layer of filth from his soul.

  But it was a thin one.

  She seemed unnerved by the loss of the shelter the canopy of the trees provided. He was forced to retreat further into the undergrowth as she realigned her trajectory back into the woodland for security. Euan mirrored her movements, but for every step she made, he took two.

  He saw it before she did.

  A fallen oak. Its thick trunk created a shallow crevice in the soil. An overhang enabled a running weed to shelter the opening. It was the perfect sanctuary for a terrified woman.

  She clamoured for it. The orange of her sweater lost in the gloom of the burrow as she clawed her way inside. One bare foot, a flash of white against the black, was the last thing he saw before she lost herself to the safety it created.

  He considered the trajectory this woman’s life had taken, and the effort the simple act of breathing would require after enduring such atrocities. If that ramshackle lot of buildings had been her home, then Euan suspected that the men he’d seen mutilated were her family. His own tragedies were a mockery in the face of such barbarity. To behold the savagery, the abuse of life, and to know that those that suffered were those she cherished.

  It was an impossible burden to carry without consequence.

  The result of being rendered mute seemed too insignificant.

  When all was quiet, he approached. He was purposely loud. The twigs snapped under his feet and the crunch of leaves and pine needles crackled through the hushed woodland. Rocks were dislodged, logs disturbed and his clothes brushed against the rough bark. The hoot of an owl rang out around him, only to be muffled by the growing mist.