Abomination (The Pathfinders Book 1)

by Jane Dougherty

  Jim put a hand on Tully’s shoulder. “She’s right, you know. Who’s to say we aren’t just going to shop you both to Ace? Carla knows nothing about us. How could she? The girls here are treated worse than shit.”

  Carla looked from Jim to Tully, her eyes wide with surprise. She nodded. “Okay, we’ll all talk. But now. There’s no time left for playing soldiers.”

  Jeff tugged at Carla’s sleeve. “If you go, and Kat goes too, promise you’ll take me with you. Promise you won’t leave me behind.”

  Kat rumpled Jeff’s hair in a gesture of infinite tenderness. “As if I’d run off and leave you. After all the trouble I took distracting attention from that fridge that smelled astonishingly of little boy’s pee?”

  Jeff blushed, then grinned and jerked his thumb at Jim and Matt. “Can they come too?”

  Jim and Matt looked at Carla with the same question in their eyes.

  “I’m in,” Matt said taking a deep breath.

  “Try keep me out,” Jim drawled, a lopsided grin on his face.

  There followed a deal of backslapping and hugging, then Tully said with a frown, “The only problem I can see is how Ace is going to react when the stars of his terrible B movie all go missing.”

  “He’ll be flippin’ furious,” Jeff said with a nervous laugh.

  Tully went on. “I mean, we can’t just walk out, can we? There’s drax and other tribes and rat men out there. We have to have a plan. We have to be aiming for somewhere specific. Otherwise, we won’t stand a chance, just wandering about until something nasty picks us off.”

  “I’ve got an idea,” Kat ventured. “But we need to go somewhere to discuss it, and Carla and I are already going to catch it from Flo for dawdling, even if we run.”

  “Carla, don’t take this the wrong way, but how would it be if I told Flo to send you to me tonight?”

  Carla lowered her eyes and her cheeks flushed an angry red, but she nodded.

  “And I’ll say I want Kat too. There’s no limit, I suppose?” He raised an eyebrow and looked at Matt and Jim.

  “As many as you can handle,” Jim said. “Ace sometimes calls out a whole posse of girls. I wouldn’t like to say what he does with them—not in mixed company, anyway.”

  “You’re just a load of pigs!” Carla exploded. “If you think I’m having anything to do with people who can make fun of—”

  “Joke, Carla!” Jim raised his hands in surrender. “Ace hardly ever calls for a girl. His tastes are more…bloodthirsty. The Burnt Man will expect to find most of the women in one piece when he comes back, so Ace does the kind of things he enjoys with drax or the occasional prisoner we capture.”

  Carla’s face went white.

  “Other tribesmen, he means.” Kat reassured her. “Now, we really have to go. The slops need serving out.”

  Carla gave Tully a frightened smile. “The news will have to wait. But I will see you later, won’t I, Tully?”

  Tully took her hands and drew her to him. “I promise,” he whispered and kissed her on the forehead. “First, though, Matt will call by to give all you girls your first briefing on Warlord Tully’s Supercenter Defense Plan.”

  “Unless Flo’s arranged to take you out on a picnic this afternoon or something.” Matt grinned.

  Carla let out a hoot of laughter, the first in what seemed like a lifetime.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  For the rest of the evening, Flo kept Carla firmly within sight. The women’s quarters hummed with unaccustomed activity, talking about Tully’s defense plan and searching out some of the stuff he needed to equip his army. The girls had snapped out of their usual lethargy and were all fired up with excitement, though Flo looked even sourer than usual and chewed the inside of her lip incessantly, as if she was plotting something diabolical. Carla tried to keep out of her way, but it was difficult to avoid Flo’s hawk-like gaze and the lash of her tongue.

  Flo set Carla to cleaning the plates, which involved a lot of scraping and very little water, then sent her outside, alone, to tip the refuse onto one of the many piles that had been allowed to build up beyond the east side exit. Carla was allowed to take a dynamo-powered flashlight that offered little comfort in the oppressive darkness. Tags and savage graffiti messages flashed along the filthy walls. Broken glass caught the beam and threw it back in lightning flashes. Wreckage and yawning doorways cast ominous shadows that seemed to move with life as Carla hurried past.

  The cold deepened as she approached the vast, empty hall with its mountain of twisted wire trolleys. Beyond lay deep, starless night, a night of suffocatingly dense darkness, filled with ash and low cloud. Filled also, when the flashlight beam hit them, with hundreds of pairs of red eyes that drew closer as she hesitated in the hall at the edge of the exit. The east side was almost completely derelict, and the flashlight showed that the place had been used as a rubbish dump for years.

  Carla swallowed hard to get rid of the lump in her throat. Somewhere out there, at the end of a section of motorway, had been Chartres. On the edge of the vast flat grain land of the Beauce lay the little town and the massive cathedral that had dominated the landscape for nine hundred years. For almost a millennium its spires had soared intact and untouched, as invading armies ebbed and flowed around its stone buttresses like a bloody tide.

  Carla swept the torch beam across the invisible horizon. Even in the broad light of day, a day full of light and sunshine, she would have seen nothing rising above the flat landscape. There was no jewel of gothic art there now, just a big pile of rubble, like the pizzeria.

  Carla let the beam wander through the rubbish dumps beyond the entrance hall. The ground swarmed with life—a rippling blanket of vermin covered the piles of refuse, cleaning up everything their teeth could get through. Tattoo. Carla felt bile and sorrow rise in her throat and refused to take a step farther. The owners of the red eyes crept closer still, their nostrils quivering as the scent of the slop pail reached them.

  Then she heard the fluttering and the thump of heavy bodies landing on the rubbish mounds. She swung the light, and the beam caught the dull black of beaks and feathers as hundreds of crows hopped and flapped closer and closer. The dump was too far. She’d never make it! Tattoo. Images of his last sickening moments flashed through her mind. Her heart pounded wildly. With a rattle of feathers, a bird launched itself at the pail in her hand. With a scuffle of claws, one of the rats jumped, followed by another and another.

  Carla screamed and leaped backward, throwing the pail as far as she could. Squeals of pain and anger rose up from the spot where it landed, followed by a muffled swish and patter, as scores of the vermin darted and hopped in the direction of the pail and their injured comrades. Carla turned and fled back to the kitchen.

  Carla was shaking when she arrived and slammed the door behind her. Flo allowed one corner of her mouth to twist into a cruel smile. Kat hurried over, and in defiance of Flo’s barked order, led Carla to a chair and made her sit down.

  “That was awful, what she made you do,” she said in a ferocious whisper. “Nobody goes out with the slops after dark—nobody! And using a flashlight would only have drawn the vermin to you. Anything could have been out there—rat men, drax, not to mention the things that came out of the wormhole.”

  “The vermin were bad enough, thanks.” Carla took a swig of her water ration and tried to calm her breathing.

  Kat shook her head. “Flo knew what she was doing. If you’d died out there, that smirk on her face would only have been wider.”

  Carla did her best to smile in a carefree sort of way. “Forget it. I’m back. Nothing attacked me. And tonight—”

  Kat tapped Carla’s hand and widened her eyes in warning. Flo was listening. Not overtly, but her unnecessary pulling about of chairs and rearranging of grimy hand towels had brought her within earshot of loud whispering.

  “Tonight,” Carla yawned and raised her voice, “I don’t know about you, but I intend to sleep the sleep of the just.”

 
Kat grinned. “Me too.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Silence fell in the smoke-filled cafeteria when Tully and the others entered. Ace and the rest of them were sitting in a circle around the Holy Man, who still looked like death and could barely stand. He held aloft two batons hung with drac tails that he swished feebly from side to side, while spittle drooled from the corner of his mouth. His mutterings petered out as Tully, Matt, Jim and Jeff approached.

  “Can anyone play?” Tully asked innocently.

  “Shut it, big mouth,” Joe snarled.

  “Now, now, it was a civil question. What are you all up to, anyway? It’s like an opium den in here.”

  “As Warlord of this Tribe,” Ace said icily, “this concerns you more than anyone. You should have been here from the beginning of the meeting.”

  “Sorry, Ace, for wasting time on trivia. I was just running through a few plans for the annihilation of the surrounding Tribes, and how to avoid Armageddon when your Burnt Man turns up again.”

  “Don’t be smart, Thor,” Ace spat out the name with disdain and Tully grinned.

  “Isn’t that exactly what I’m supposed to be? You’d hardly want a warlord who was as thick as say…Joe here, now, would you?”

  Joe got to his feet with a growl.

  “Sit, Joe!” Ace lolled back in his chair. “You too, General, and your army. And listen!” He waved to the Holy Man to continue. The boy tried to stand straighter, the heavy drac head lolling, too heavy and too big for his feeble frame. With an effort, he raised his arms again and flicked the drac tails about, weaving smoke wreaths in the dope-filled air. Jeff wrinkled his nose, and Matt looked longingly as the joints were passed from hand to hand. Jim dragged up a chair and helped himself to the joint as it passed.

  “There is more in the dark holes than is dreamed of in your philosophy,” the Holy Man intoned. “The creatures of the dark are spewed forth into the world, and their like has never been seen by mortal men. Their number will surpass the flakes of ash in the wind and the drops of rain in the air, and they shall inherit the earth. Their lord will be Lucifer and he will lead his companions, Belial and Dagon, in the final hunt to seek out the fourth rider, Eblis-Azazel. For it is Eblis who will cry, Havoc! And let slip the dogs of war!”

  “Some of that sounds vaguely familiar,” Jim commented under his breath.

  Tully grinned. “Yeah, our Dog Skin’s got his wires crossed with some pretty powerful poets.”

  “The other numbskulls are lapping it up, though.” Jim nodded at the intent expressions on some of the faces. Even Jeff appeared transfixed.

  “It’s the dope,” Matt said, taking a long drag. “We found tons of it hidden about the place—that and other things. Not surprising really. Karim and his mates didn’t hang around here for the scenery.”

  “I’d like to know a bit more about this Eblis guy,” Tully said, getting back to the point. “He’s the one who’s going to light the blue touch paper, is he?”

  Matt frowned and Jeff opened his mouth to speak. Jim silenced them both with a look.

  “Later,” he said.

  “Will you lot shut the fuck up!” Joe was crimson. For such a young man, he had terrible high blood pressure, Tully thought. The Holy Man had finished, though, and supported by two tribesmen, was escorted back to his chair next to Ace.

  Taking a long drag on his joint, Ace got to his feet a little unsteadily and looked around at the company. His legs might have been shaky, his hands might have trembled slightly, but the cold, pale glitter of his eyes was as intense as ever.

  “So, you have heard—most of you anyway—that the prophecy concerning the Bringer of Light is entering a new phase. There are…things—probably to do with the Light-Bringer—creeping about on our territory. For the moment, it looks like they’re waiting. The Gouges, Matonge, Kusha, Rippers and Stranglers, though, are moving in. Ben, Tom, Ju and Clem have all seen groups crawling along the frontier, though they all steer clear of the wormhole on the Gouge side.” The men glanced at one another uneasily and Ace threw a crazy grin in Tully’s direction. “About forty enemy have been sighted so far, strung out the length of the frontier. In the light of this new information, I’d be interested to see how Thor here modifies his master plan. Because, frankly, that chocolate soldier shit he gave us this morning might be okay for the scrubbers in the kitchens, but the rest of us would like to hear something a bit more virile, hey, lads?”

  “Yeah, fuckin’ cowboys and fuckin’ Indians shite,” Joe added indignantly.

  Ace gave Tully one of his twisted smirks and sat down. Tully faced the crowd of men and boys who thought of themselves as his warriors and found himself fighting back a hot wave of shame. Carla was right. He did get a kick out of the adulation he saw in their eager faces, and he knew it was totally unjustified. He knew as much about military strategy as his Great-Grandma Quinn did, less probably. She at least followed Gaelic football, which was the closest to undeclared war Tully had seen on a sports field. Still, this was only gang warfare he was organizing, not the invasion of Poland!

  If he was going to lead these boys into a real fight, he was going to do it properly, even if he was the only one to see there was nothing in this broken world worth fighting over. It would be nice, though, he thought, to know exactly what was going on. And he had a nasty feeling that Jim and Matt were holding something back, something to do with the wormholes, something that Tully suspected he wouldn’t much want to hear.

  The men shuffled their feet impatiently or fiddled with knives and other weapons. They all knew Flay was on the point of being attacked. If every tribe in the area was going to try to rob their food depot, most of them could imagine only one response—surrender. Their gazes slid suspiciously from one to another, wondering what private deals had already been done to switch tribe. Tully needed a battle, a commotion to cover his getaway, so he was going to have to convince them that if they stuck together and used a bit of wit, they could win.

  “The other tribes suspect we don’t have many warriors, but they don’t know for sure how few, do they? They don’t know how many extra warriors we could have gained from new arrivals dropping out of the wormholes. What if we surprised them with our numerical strength? They’d hesitate, wouldn’t they? And if we attack while they’re hesitating, we have the advantage, don’t we?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” put in Mac, a skinny, slack-jawed individual, around two points ahead of Joe in the IQ stakes. “But we ain’t numerical, are we?”

  “What’s numerical?” Joe whispered loudly to Ace.

  Ace leaned back in his chair with a complacent smirk. “Our illustrious Warlord means that if there are more of us than there are of them, the other tribes will think twice about attacking us. To which our quick-witted comrade, Mac here, pointed out that in fact, we don’t have more warriors than they do.”

  “Which is exactly where you’re wrong,” Tully shouted. “If you include the women—” A deafening guffaw greeted this remark. “Just listen, will you? If we all dress the same—” More whistles and guffaws. “If we all dress the same, why would the enemy suspect that half our warriors are women?”

  “From the simple fact, my dear Warlord,” Ace went on sarcastically, “that our women couldn’t fight their way out of a knitting pattern.”

  “But we won’t be asking them to fight,” Tully explained in exasperation. “What they’ll be doing counts more as arson.” There was a short silence, followed by whispering as the word, arson was explained to those who had problems with it. Tully continued. “So, we all wear baggy coats to make ourselves, especially the girls, look bigger, balaclavas to make us look mean and we spread ourselves out so they can’t tell exactly how many we are. We’ll more than double our numbers, and what the girls will be doing will free the rest of us up for hand-to-hand fighting. Does that answer your doubts about numbers, Mac?”

  “None of the other Tribes have twice as many warriors as us, Ace,” a voice called from the back.

 
“The Bulgarian bastards joined up with the Turks and moved out weeks ago. The Romanians were giving them shit,” somebody else added.

  “The Kusha ain’t got no balls. They daren’t get close enough to use their bloody knives!”

  “The Stranglers are just a bunch of wussy rich kid wankers. Just show ’em your fist an’ they wet theirselves.”

  “And the Matonge can’t move unless their Holy Man casts his fuckin’ voodoo spells on ’em and he’s wired out of his box most of the time.”

  The atmosphere in the room was getting more animated as the tribesmen began to catch onto the idea that they might have a chance.

  “That still leaves the Gouge.”

  Ace’s remark rather deflated their newfound enthusiasm. The Gouge tribe, largely comprised of defecting members of Ace’s own tribe—the older, stronger men in particular—was notorious for its brutality. Most of the Flay tribe had reason to fear the Gouge from the days when they were Flay bullies.

  Tully intended to capitalize on the general fear and loathing. “Everybody’s terrified of the Gouge, right?” The others nodded, keen to hear what Tully was driving at. “So, if we can cause a bit of confusion among the different camps, get all the other stupid sods thinking the Gouge are attacking them from behind, we might get our enemies to bump one another off without us having to do much more than just watch them get on with it.”

  “So that’s why you’ve had us doing all these little tribal emblems, then? All these little eyes and skulls and bits of rope?” Cal sounded excited. He’d got it.

  “All the tribes tie their emblems to their arrows, don’t they?” Tully added. “Let them work out who’s firing on them, us or their friends—or the dreaded Gouge.”

  “You mean,” Mac drawled as comprehension began to dawn, “we stick a knife emblem on an arrow and fire it at a Gouge, so he thinks it was a Kusha shooting at him?”

  “You got it, Mac! Ace, this man deserves a promotion.”