“Hide me, Kat! Don’t let him find me, please.”
Kat felt the child’s terror, felt an echo of it in herself, a feeling that was growing stronger by the minute. Something, she feared, even more devastating than the quakes and the ice and firestorms was about to start. She took Jeff’s hand and was about to pick her way back down from the barricade, when movement in the hall below stopped her dead.
From every side, figures appeared, creeping stealthily, warily, into the open space in the center. Some were slight and wiry, some massive but moving with the power and menace of big cats. Some wore their hair gelled up in peaks, crests or random spikes, dreadlocks, or coils of false braids. Others sported shaven heads decorated with colored designs, their skin rippled with tattoos and glinting body jewelry. All stalked with weapons drawn. The tribesmen were answering the call, all of them, keeping their distance, one tribe from another, but drawn irresistibly to the call of the Burnt Man.
“Kat, please!”
“Wait, just a second, I want to see—”
“No! He’s going to tell them…to send them… They’re going to get us, Kat. Please, hide me. Now!”
Reluctantly Kat slithered from her perch, leaving the others staring down into the hall. The sound of the Burnt Man’s voice seeped out of the walls around her. Jeff was right. There was no need to stay to hear.
The back section of the home furnishings store was the kitchen and bathroom showroom. Most of the useless fittings had been ripped out to make room for bedding or had been used to build makeshift walls. Fridges, washing machines and kitchen units were pushed out of the way in a disorderly jumble. Despite the mess, the overwhelming impression of the back room was of hard white surfaces, sharp angles and uniformly harsh lighting. There were no shadows, no dark cupboards or dust-filled corners.
As Kat and Jeff cast about, staring at the cold, white desert and finding no hiding place, the growing agitation of the group on the barricade reached them. The words of the Burnt Man stole out of the lolling doors of kitchen units, the hollow drums of washing machines. He was calling up the tribes, designating leaders, sending them out to—
Jean-Marc’s voice roared out. “They can’t. I don’t believe it! Those little Arab bastards aren’t really going to—”
More voices rolled up from the hall, strident in indignation, and Kat recognized Geneviève, a retired teacher, Maria-Lourdes a Portuguese member of the cleaning staff, and Brahim, a construction worker who had earned the grudging respect of the tribesmen. She couldn’t tell what they were saying, but she recognized the hiss and swoosh of the Burnt Man’s mysterious flamethrower device and Julie’s shrill, piercing shriek. Jean-Marc yelled insults at the tribesmen below until he was silenced by Jérémy’s horrified scream.
“Mattieu, get down off o’ there!”
Mattieu had left his construction game with the other kids and had been slowly, but with the single-mindedness of the very young, climbing the barricade to see what was so fascinating at the other side. He was standing on the back of a charred sofa bed, swaying a little unsteadily on his short legs, with a makeshift nappy bunched up to one side and sagging to his knees.
“Mattieu!” Jérémy screamed again and scrambled frantically toward the child, one arm outstretched to grab him. A war whoop came from below, followed by the rattle of automatic fire and the screech of bullets ripping along the top of the flimsy barrier. Then came the duller thud that sent Mattieu spinning, spraying blood in a wide arc. Jérémy, still reaching up, caught the next three bullets and the brothers fell together, limp and strangely tumbled, in a lighter rain of chipboard and pine.
The mall erupted. Philippe and the skinny woman finally stirred themselves and stumbled, shocked, from their perch to snatch up their own children. Jean-Marc stood and stared at the two bodies, wiping his hands nervously down the side of his trousers, unsure how to tell if they were still alive. Kat saw him crouch and heard the sob that rasped out of his throat. She shook the tears from her thoughts and grabbed Jeff’s hand, dragging him deep into the tangle of useless white goods.
Kat was all Jeff had. Separated from his parents and sister in the panic to get out of the supermarket when the first quake hit, he had just hung onto her. Kat hoped they’d turn up, looking for him when things began to settle down, but they never did. Jeff was all Kat had too. She was as terrified at the idea of losing him as he was of being caught by the Burnt Man. She decided on a hiding place inside a big American refrigerator with just a plastic tub for Jeff to pee in. He stayed there for the next three days while the tribesmen rounded up all the children and old people.
The memory of that time was the hardest, the sound of children screaming when the tribesmen found them. Jeff didn’t see what happened to the children he used to play with, but he heard, and he understood. Kat saw all the horror of that understanding, lying in the depths of his eyes.
Chapter Twenty
The present
Tully woke up to his first morning as Warlord of the Flay tribe. He stretched and opened his eyes to the grinding sound as someone heaved up the metal shop blind. Jim and Matt were already moving, letting in the gray light and thinking about breakfast. Jeff was still a mop of spiky brown hair protruding from a pile of blankets. Tully stretched again and smiled.
Warlord Thor and his bodyguard, he said to himself, savoring the sound of the words in his head. He let his eyes wander over his personal apartment. The stains on the walls didn’t show up too much in the gloom. He wrinkled his nose. So close to the grimy carpet he noticed how unpleasant it was. Too bad. He didn’t plan to hang around long enough to give it a shampoo.
“Hey, Thor, get a move on, will you? Or there’ll be nothing left for breakfast.”
Jim had shoved his shapka down over his ears and was threshing his arms in the cold air that blew in from the walkway.
Matt poked his head beneath the blind. “Yeah, the girls’ll have everything cleared away if you hang about much longer.”
The girls! Suddenly Tully’s good mood evaporated. He remembered Carla, remembered his broken promise and wondered what kind of an awful night she’d spent. The shame of his thoughtlessness was like a slap in the face. His ears burned as he sat up and threw off his quilts with an angry movement.
“Jeff, we’re waiting! The school bus leaves in five minutes.”
* * * *
As Matt had predicted, there wasn’t much left to eat in the canteen. The women had been herded out to the pizza restaurant to carry on with the excavations and only a couple of girls were left with Flo, scraping the plates cleanish and shaking out the bedding.
“Gives the vermin a bit of exercise,” Jim said with a grin. Tully shivered and forced himself to curb an overwhelming urge to scratch himself.
“I’ll see you later,” he said, getting to his feet. “I want a word with Carla.”
Jim wagged a finger at him. “And get fired your first day at work? No fraternizing with the womenfolk when they’re working. Anyway, we’ve got a battle plan to work out, or had you forgotten?”
“All that stuff your Holy Man came out with is just a load of bullshit. Who’d want to attack this heap of rubble anyway?”
Jim frowned and shook his head. “This heap of rubble is a damn fine heap of rubble, compared to the places where some of the other tribes live. And the Holy Man’s always right. If he says the tribes are preparing to attack us, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
Tully ground his teeth but made no move to leave. “Fine. But I want to hear everything you know about these tribes. I know next to nothing about what’s out there. And we’ll go back to the boutique to talk.”
He glared at Flo, who was eavesdropping quite openly. It was then he noticed the fragile-looking girl with a face like a china doll, peeping at them from behind the kitchen door. The girl blushed and ducked back out of sight. Tully turned to see Matt staring at the empty doorframe, chewing his bottom lip. He slapped him on the shoulder and was surprised to see a similar red
ness creep across Matt’s cheeks.
“Who was that?”
Matt shrugged. “Dee. Just one of the girls.”
“Hey, Tully,” Jim called from the walkway. “You want to hear this story or not?”
* * * *
“So, then what?” Tully leaned with his elbows on the table, his eyes brilliant with excitement. The boys had described how they’d come to be in the shopping mall on that fateful Saturday five years previously. Matt took up the story.
“Well, like Jim said, we’d just come out of the shop with these new trainers.” Matt shook his head as if he still found it hard to believe. “I was so bloody thrilled! I’d wanted the stupid bloody things for months. So, we come out of the shop and the place starts to fall down around our ears. That was pretty awful, the screaming an’ that.” He licked his lips. Jim nodded again and nudged him to continue. Matt sighed and looked at his hands.
“The electricity went, o’ course, but somebody got the generator going, and the rest of us began to sort ourselves out. After all, we were in a shopping mall, weren’t we? All we had to do was take what we needed, but it didn’t work out like that. The families were the first to get it together, making cozy shelters for themselves with mattresses, food and warm clothing. Even the gangs of kids weren’t too much of a nuisance to begin with. All they were interested in was breaking into the electronics shops after all the stupid gadgets they’d always dreamed about.” Matt gave a short, dry laugh. “Fuckin’ cretins! It took them just as long as it took the batteries to run down for them to realize just how fuckin’ stupid they’d been.”
That was when the groups of friends had become gangs, weapons had appeared and the first fights had broken out. First it had been over things they could never use, then it had been over drugs and weapons, then women, then food. Any attempt to work together had fallen apart. The gang leaders had beaten up the men and women who tried to keep order. They’d marshaled the young men and boys into gangs, formed their territories, picked out the girls they wanted, stolen all the food, and smashed up what was useful.
The tribes had been formed when friendship ceased to exist.
“Me and Matt tried to stay out of it,” Jim said. “It was scary… Anarchy! Then we saw Aziz, one of the kids from our school. He was all right, was Aziz. But he was with Karim, a real maniac everybody kept clear of, the type who has knives in all his pockets and a shooter in his school bag. I called out to Aziz and he turned. He looked straight through me. Then this psychopath, Karim took a pistol out of his jacket pocket and fired at me. No messing, he was serious. He’d have carried on shooting till he got me too, but a gang of blacks jumped him, and Matt and me scarpered. After that, we joined one of the Frenchie Tribes, one of the soft ones that didn’t make it, got wiped out after, in the fighting. Had no choice. Nowhere was safe. Everyone was an enemy.”
“Then this burnt bloke wanders in one day with his gang of followers and starts ordering everybody about like he was… Like he was…” Matt fumbled for the right words.
“What burnt bloke? How burnt?” Tully asked impatiently.
“Like he’d been in an accident,” Jim said.
“Yeah, a fatal one,” Matt added with a shudder.
“He called out the tribesmen,” Jim went on, “one after another, and they all came, like zombies.”
“They were fuckin’ zombies, most of ’em,” Matt said. “The burnt bloke just snapped his fingers and they did whatever he said.” Matt hung his head.
“Well? What did he say?” Tully wanted to know.
Matt and Jim looked at one another and licked their lips nervously. Eventually Jim went on, “He said the old folks and the kids were just useless mouths to feed and they’d have to go.”
“Go where?”
“Just go,” Jim shouted, his eyes full of shame at what he had seen and not done. “He said we didn’t need children anymore, that he’d repopulate the Earth when the time came.”
“So?”
“So, all the zombies and shitheads and cokebrains charged all around the mall like they were kids on a really wild treasure hunt, and they hunted down all the oldies and the kids. And they killed them.”
“You what?”
“Killed ’em.”
“And you let him do it?”
Matt hung his head.
Jim held out his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “What could we do?”
“If you’d all stood up to him—” Tully blustered with indignation.
Matt raised his head and his eyes were the eyes of a man who has witnessed what no man should ever have to witness and who cannot live with his guilt. “There was nothing anyone could do,” he said in a voice raw with suffering. “Not even Warlord Thor.”
* * * *
Five years ago
Most of the smaller tribes had been busted up and absorbed by the bigger, tougher ones with more serious weaponry and no qualms about using it. Matt and Jim’s Bleu Marine Tribe, was scattered to the four winds when Horselips, the leader, was chucked off the second level by a gang of acidhead Matonge.
Jim and Matt profited from the ensuing confusion to disappear back into the woodwork. They were scavenging around the supermarket delivery bay when they saw what looked like the ragged members of a medieval leper colony stumbling their way out of the fog and onto the mall forecourt. Even though the cold was raw and they were out in the open air, the stench would have knocked a dog down.
Without a word, the two boys melted back inside and climbed up to the second level, from where they had a grandstand view of the newcomers. The leper colony had a leader, disfigured and scorched-looking, with a voice that carried into every corner of the mall. And he had a weird sort of weapon they couldn’t see that threw flames wherever he pointed it. He didn’t have to use it very often before he had the attention of even the thickest of the gang members. The leader finished his speech but his last words, Find them all. Find them all, continued to crawl down the walls thick and slow as excrement, to seep out of the ground and creep like loathsome maggots into their ears.
“They won’t do it,” Matt whispered, shaking his head. “Not even those thick Bulgarian Khan bastards would do that.”
“You want to bet?” Jim asked.
The entrance hall was a heaving, swaying mass of bodies as African braids and corn-rows, dreadlocks, Mohawks, and rainbow-colored spikes bounced up and down and brandished weapons jabbed out the rhythm to a sinister chanting. With a final whoop, the war bands bounded away, scattering through the mall. Matt and Jim ran, stopping at a heap of spewed out shop innards, grabbed a section of railing and using it as a ladder got up under the false ceiling. There were so many holes in it that they had no trouble seeing what was going on below.
The mall was bathed in a strange light that pulsed like some kind of hospital monitor. The temperature had dropped even further, creating a ground mist through which they could make out the leaping shapes of tribesmen as they scoured the place for hidden children and the pathetic old people nobody bothered to hide.
They held out for twenty-four hours before thirst, hunger and the pressing need to take a dump forced them back onto the second level. They were still searching for something to eat when a kid with a spiky red Mohawk and a long, curved katana leaped out of a shoe shop, blocking their path. They had run out of boltholes. It was join the Flay tribe or die.
The kid with the Mohawk pushed them down to ground level, swinging down the broken escalators, the katana slashing the air behind them, forcing them along. The ground level was packed with different tribes, still on a high, dancing and jogging on the spot, their voices at fever pitch. Many of the tribesmen exhibited blood-spattered clothing. Some had blood up to their elbows.
Matt felt cold, colder than the icy temperature of the mall, colder than the icy wastes outside. He began to shiver and wrapped his arms around his chest. Jim gritted his teeth to stop them chattering. The improbable cold exuded by Hell that pierced them to the bone was almost more than th
ey could bear. Their minds froze over, their emotions buried beneath a mountain of snow, hearts held in a glacier of unyielding ice.
“What’s your problem?” the Mohawk asked. “You’ve got nothin’ to worry about. You’re Flay now.”
“Just cold,” Jim replied through clenched teeth. His eye was caught by a sudden movement. He moaned and nudged Matt. “Oh, Christ, look who’s over there,”
Matt looked over at the group of guys shouting and gesticulating at one another.
“It’s Karim. He’s probably running for president. He’s a natural for this kind of shit.”
The shouting was over a long knife. It was obvious the small, slim boy holding it did not want to hand it over to the bigger, older one. Obvious too that blood was about to be spilled over it. The dispute was settled when Karim, with the rapidity of a rattlesnake, stabbed the younger boy in the arm and took the knife himself.
“That bunch of dickheads is what we’re after first. Kill said.” The Mohawk jerked his chin in the direction of the squabbling Kusha.
Jim raised his eyebrows. “Kill?”
“Your leader, mate. An’ if he tells you to wipe out a gang of dickhead Arabs, you do it.”
“An’ why would we want to go after a bunch of dickhead Arabs?” Matt asked, his voice dull, like his eyes, dull and empty, unable to care anymore.
“That blonde chick they got, the one with big fat red lips and her arse hanging out of her jeans? Kill wants her.”
The Mohawk peered into the carrier bag Matt had been clutching since the start of the Abomination. He peered harder and took the bag out of Matt’s hands. Matt tried to snatch it back, but the katana blade somehow seemed to have got under his chin.
Abomination (The Pathfinders Book 1) Page 12
