Abomination (The Pathfinders Book 1)

by Jane Dougherty

  * * * *

  The present

  “I hated that bastard,” Matt said. “I laughed when the Kusha slit his throat a week later.”

  “Jesus, Matt!” Tully’s voice registered shock. “What did he do, try to kill you or what?”

  “He pinched my fuckin’ trainers, didn’t he,” Matt said with a grin.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Carla wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. Kat’s face was pale, her eyes distant, as the horror of her memories came flooding back. Her voice tailed away as she sank into her thoughts.

  “What did he do?” Carla whispered.

  Kat turned her eyes to Carla’s face and her eyes gradually focused on the present. “What did he do?” she asked. “The Burnt Man started such horrors, Carla. I didn’t think human beings were still capable of behaving like that. I thought it was just in history books. I thought…” She shook her head. “I was wrong.”

  * * * *

  Five years ago

  The Burnt Man stood in the center of the hall, his companions and the tribal leaders encircling him at a respectful distance. Clustered in their tribal groups, the gangs of boys and young men waited to hear what the chief had to say. Huddled as far from the tribesmen as they could get were those the tribes didn’t want—the adults, parents clutching the adolescent girl children still left to them, the older men and women. Many of them were in shock, some cried silently, hopelessly. None of them knew how to resist. None dared take the initiative. Cold mist wreathed their lower bodies and rime had formed on all the metallic surfaces, safety rails, benches, and escalator steps, and when the Burnt Man spoke, his breath curled out of his mouth like smoke.

  “I will take the men to search among the ruins for more warriors and my companions. To you, young men, I leave this entire land, to divide among you as you will, and enough women for your needs. You will stay and learn to fight and to become men, ready for my return and the last battle of all. For I am the Light-Bringer and I will lead you into the darkness.”

  “Matonge, Kusha, Flay, Khan, Sürmene, Tchôk, Gouge,” he called them all out, like a teacher calling the register, and the tribal leaders stepped forward. “Show me your men.”

  The tribesmen moved up, some hesitantly, some eager to hear what they would be called upon to do next, and the single red eye of the Burnt Man ran over each one of them. He raised his hand and some of the boys shrank back nervously. He grinned, amused at the fear he inspired and pointed, motioning each man selected to one side.

  When he had finished, a small group of the youngest boys, and one or two skinny adolescents, stood waiting on little islands of fear. They cast about uneasily, trying to look tall, thrusting out narrow chests. The Burnt Man grinned again and the isolated boys, gripped by a rising terror, began to back away.

  The Burnt Man waved a careless hand. “Not these.”

  They bolted, but there was nowhere to go. The wall of tribesmen closed in around them and the screams for pity were soon stifled. What was left of them was thrust to the side where the horrified adults cowered.

  When the excited tribesmen had settled down again, the Burnt Man said, “Now choose your women.”

  The boys hesitated for only a fraction of a second before they pushed into the huddled crowds, dragging unwilling girls from their parents, slapping and punching those who tried to stop them. Kat tried to hide. She slunk to the back, hoping to slip away unnoticed to the hollow walkways of the ground level, profiting from the shouting and pleading, the scuffling and fighting that accompanied the choosing of the women. She didn’t make it. A sharp pair of eyes spotted the furtive movement at the back of the crowd—a boy with tattoos all over his shaved head slapped her with the stock of his rifle and dragged her by the hair back to the hall.

  “Flay,” he shouted.

  The Burnt Man nodded in approval. “You will need a couple of older ones to keep order.”

  Kat felt sick as rough hands shoved her into the group of girls, some only children of eleven or twelve, who stared about, red-eyed and disheveled, searching for parents, not daring to call out. They had already been taught the lesson of silence. She was one of the last to be chosen. Apart from the still vociferating parents, the commotion had died down and a sense of dread was settling on all but the tribesmen. The Burnt Man looked long and hard at the different groups then nodded in satisfaction.

  “Order is established. The tribes are formed. Learn to fight and become men before I return. Now, destroy the outsiders among you—the non-men—and order will be complete.”

  Deep silence fell on the exiled adults, and the tribesmen turned expectantly toward the main entrance. Two men, dressed commando-style and with the physique to go with the uniform, marched into the mall from the forecourt. Between them, hands bound behind their backs, heads hung low in shame and fear, staggered a family of four—two adults, an adolescent girl and a small boy, the family from the Golden Pagoda Chinese restaurant. The grandparents were not with them. The two commandos pushed them up to the circle of tribal leaders, who stepped back to let them through, then forced them down on their knees. Their faces all bore signs of rough treatment, puffy and bruised, and the father had a long cut down the side of his face that dripped blood onto his white shirt collar. The small boy was weeping, whether in fear or for his grandmother, no one would know.

  The silence was the silence of withheld breath.

  “These are outsiders, an aberration. They belong in no tribe. They belong nowhere. Destroy them!”

  The order was too general, nobody moved instantly, and in the moment’s hesitation, Jean-Marc stepped forward, his eyes red from weeping and empty, suicidal. Kat moaned, knowing what would happen.

  “Leave them alone, you lunatic! You fucking murderer!” His voice was cracked with emotion as he turned from the Burnt Man to face the cowering crowd, his arms flung wide in a gesture of pleading. “Are you all going to be accomplices in this barbarity?”

  Kat closed her eyes, concentrating on Jeff hidden in the fridge, Jeff counting on her to keep him safe, Jeff who could no doubt hear the shouting and possibly recognize Jean-Marc’s voice. She tried not to think of Jean-Marc knocking down the thug who had leaped on her all those weeks ago when she and Jeff had nowhere to go, before Jean-Marc had brought them to join the Kindergarten. She pushed back the memory of Jean-Marc, kindly and gentle in the midst of so much brutality, giving them their first meal in days, finding them somewhere to sleep. Her eyes stayed tight shut but she heard the hiss and whoosh of the Burnt Man’s flamethrower device, felt the rush of heat on her face and clapped her hands over her ears to keep out the brief screams of agony.

  The Burnt Man’s voice burrowed behind her hands and inside her head. “What are you waiting for? You and you…kill them!”

  She had no need to look to know what was happening. She heard the click of the slide as two pistols were loaded, then the four gunshots that rang out one after another—dull, dead—then the thud of the crumpled bodies.

  “The rest of you, go!”

  The crowd stirred at last. A woman shrieked, “You can’t do this to us. It’s murder!”

  He’s a murderer. That’s what they do. They murder people, in case you hadn’t noticed, you stupid cow, Kat thought in a fury. Why did none of you react before? Animals band together to protect their young. Why couldn’t you?

  The tribesmen moved, laying about them with their rifles, baseball bats, whatever they had to hand, chanting and laughing, forcing the shouting, pleading group toward the main entrance, forcing them out into the freezing wastes and inevitable death. Kat gasped out furious tears when the mob walked over the four slight bodies, tripping and stumbling, but not even looking down at their feet. Jean-Marc was little more than a carbonized heap, but he still smoldered. They took care not to step in the hot ashes.

  * * * *

  The present

  “And then he left,” Kat said. “Took a selection of the biggest, beefiest thugs with him to go look for his
companions. The scourges, he called them—Dagon, Belial and Eblis-Azazel, War, Death and Despair. The tribes settled down to two days of minor squabbling before the real fighting started, and Flay ended up with the shopping mall. There were plenty of places for the other tribes—other malls not too far away, the amusement park, loads of big warehouses and distribution centers. The big attraction was the giant wine and spirits cash and carry out on the Chartres road. I suppose they didn’t see much point getting killed just for this wreck.”

  “What about Jeff?”

  “When the worst of the fighting was over and the last of the Turks and the Bulgarians had gone, I let him out. With the Burnt Man gone, the boys were too thrilled with being official rapists and mafia bosses to be bothered about Jeff.”

  Carla looked along the line of young girls and women, at the dull, hopeless expression on all their faces, and in it she could see the years of abuse and the fear of what would surely happen to the weakest. She knew that Kat was telling the truth.

  “This one-eyed character,” she said finally, shaking her head. “I can understand the tribal leaders, all those cutthroats and drug barons, obeying him—people like that are always looking for some superthug to worship—but not the ordinary people. Parents really let him murder their children? How could they do it? No one, not even a raving lunatic, could ever control people like that.”

  Kat’s green eyes clouded over. “It sounds stupid now, telling it like that, but at the time, he was magnetic. And the power that he seemed to have at his command, it was terrifying! He had all those…people with him, the ones who came out of the wormhole. None of them ever uttered a word. You avoided their eyes. Their wounds were appalling, and the smell…” Kat lowered her voice to a frightened whisper, “You’ll say I’m mad too, but I’d swear those people were not really alive.”

  Carla shivered and pulled her scarf tighter around the lower part of her face. “He sounds like an absolute lunatic. Do you think the creepy friends he went looking for were more psychopaths from the same asylum?”

  Kat looked at the ground and ran her tongue over dried lips. “About a year after the Burnt Man left with the strongest of the men, two more… men fell out of another wormhole, over on Gouge territory.” She glanced at Carla from beneath lowered lashes, avoiding her eyes. “They were riding giant drax. A whole pack of the creatures followed them. It was the first time we’d seen the ugly things. One of the men was wearing a suit of black armor. The other was tall and his clothes were in rags. He seemed not too different from any of the low-ranking tribesmen, until I saw his head. It was a bare skull.”

  “What did they want?” Carla asked in a whisper.

  “A friend of theirs. They expected Kill, the chief before Ace, to be the nutter they were looking for. They were disappointed.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Four years ago

  The sentries didn’t notice the riders on their strange mounts until they surged out of the smog onto the forecourt. One of the Mohawks turned and disappeared inside the ruins of the shopping mall to find Kill and tell him about the intruders. It had been over a year since the Burnt Man had organized the chaos into tribes. There was no more random violence—violence was enshrined in the law. For a year Kill had been chief of the Flay tribe, lords of the shopping mall, and none of the neighboring tribes had disputed their rights. Kill had got soft.

  “What d’you mean they’re riding giant dogs? Don’t talk crap!” Kill chewed his inner lip nervously. He knew the sentry—loyal, well-meaning, but thick as a brick.

  “They wus dogs! An’ the two riding ’em wus dressed up funny. You need to get the boys together, Kill. These guys is big trouble.” The Mohawk was a gangling nineteen year old, bare-armed despite the cold, revealing forearms dotted with burn marks. He shifted his weight constantly from one foot to the other while he waited for Kill to come to a decision and looked over his shoulder as if expecting the dog-riders to appear in the walkway behind him.

  “Bug!”

  A spiky-haired lad with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder left off cleaning his finger nails with a penknife and looked up.

  “Get the men over to the main entrance. I want them armed, but they’re to stay out of sight.”

  The boy with the penknife raised his eyebrows in a way that looked to Kill like insubordination. “Why?”

  “There’s trouble on the way. No point us starting anything. They might just bugger off.”

  “But, chief,” the Mohawk put in, “nobody just busts into our territory! We got to send a message to the other bastards out there that this is Flay territory, an’ they’re to keep out of it.”

  Kill ignored him and turned to Bug. “Get them over there, but they stay out of sight. You got that?”

  Bug looked at Kill long and hard before he replied. “Yeah, I’ll tell ’em. Where will you be, chief?”

  The hint of insolence in Bug’s tone made Kill bristle. “I’ll be up your arse if you don’t shift it!”

  Guards hustled the women away from their scavenging operation around the main entrance. As one of the oldest women, Kat was detailed to herd them back to their quarters. Most of the girls didn’t need herding. Most of them were only too glad to abandon the grueling work of digging through rubble for useful objects and get out of the worst of the cold.

  Kat followed the line of girls as it snaked up the broken escalator. At the top, the girls headed down the main walkway to the supermarket, but Kat turned back to the place the guards used as a lookout post. Where the shells had destroyed the façade of the mall, and the first level plunged away into a tangle of metal girders and concrete blocks, was a precarious eyrie that looked out on the forecourt and the desolation beyond. Kat intended to find out what was going on. The hope that rescue was still possible had not yet died.

  Smog, low cloud, and fumes from the fissures that had opened in the earth hung heavy in the cold air. Stifled coughing gave away the position of more than one tribesman as they waited, unsure why they were hiding, or what they were hiding from. Kill hung back, chewing his inner lip. He was a gang leader, used to having his lieutenants do the fighting at a snap of his fingers. He knew that they would attack the newcomers if he gave the word, knew that they were expecting the order, but something held him back. Kill feared that what was approaching was best not provoked.

  Smog filled the entrance hall of the mall but nothing else entered. Kill began to hope that the visitors would move on, but the cold deepened and the smog thickened. He pulled his scarf over his mouth, breath crystallizing in the fibers. An animal called, a deep, desolate cry of distress.

  “Come out!” The voice, a human snarl rolled through the cloud with painful clarity. Kill’s flesh erupted in gooseflesh, and he shuffled reluctantly forward.

  “Come out!”

  The wreaths of gray cloud shifted as darker shapes filtered through it slowly and leaked out onto the forecourt. The tribesmen were answering the call and Kill followed, his feet dragging.

  “Come out!”

  Peering down from her vantage point, Kat could see nothing moving on the forecourt. It was like staring into soup. Twisted debris loomed through the murky cloud, ice-crusted. A dim glow marked the distant place where a small volcano had formed. Overturned oil tankers and lorries formed dark blurs, but the landscape was silent, still, and dead. Then she heard the snarling and the commanding, ice-cold voice, and gradually her eyes made out the creeping movement of tribesmen onto the forecourt. The voice called a third time, and the smog blew away with a noise like a thousand sheets tearing, revealing the tribesmen, frozen in mid stride, in a half circle around two mounted figures.

  “Stop.” The rider who appeared to be clad in black armor raised a gauntleted hand and all eyes were drawn to what dangled from it by the hair. A severed head. The silence was absolute. No one dared breathe. All recognized Speed, the brutal chief of the Gouge Tribe. The eyes of the tribesmen flicked back and forth, from Speed’s head to the strange apparitions and t
heir mounts, giant dogs with tongues lolling in mouths filled with three rows of teeth. Lurking behind, where the smog still clung to the wreckage, eyes glowed and flickered, tongues panted, jaws snapped. A low growl rumbled from dozens of throats.

  As if in response to a silent order, the tribesmen lowered their weapons and stood easy. Waiting. The scattered figures changed from hunters hunting to a curious crowd. Listening. The second rider, ragged with long, spindly limbs, spurred his mount toward the transfixed tribesmen and threw back the hood of his cloak.

  Kat put a hand over her mouth to stifle a gasp of horror. The rider’s uncovered head was a pale skull. Dark eye sockets glowed with a black, inner light. The fingers that clutched the reins were bare bones. The tribesmen, far from shrinking back, seemed to close in on the skeletal rider, drawn to the menace it exuded, like moths to a candle flame. Only one seemed to hang back, finding himself alone on an island in the swirling mist. Kill.

  The dense fog was ripped away as if on the orders of the intruders, revealing a sight that filled Kill with terror. His tribesmen stood, relaxed, curious, and he knew he was no longer in command. Kill wanted to shout at them to shoulder their weapons and cover the riders, but his courage failed him. He sunk his head down between his shoulders and pulled the scarf higher to just below his eyes. He tried to shrink back into the relative safety of the mall, but his feet were frozen to the spot. His eyes darted between the sightless face of Speed and the eyeless sockets of the skull, and he could not turn away.

  “Where is your leader? Which of you is he?” the voice grated. Kill’s heart accelerated and terror jabbed him hard in the guts. More than anything else, he feared the confrontation with the thing he knew was not human, and he suspected was not even alive. He crouched, forcing back the whimper that rose into his throat. The men were silent, nobody turned. Perhaps he could just creep—