The bloody deluge, p.1
The Bloody Deluge, page 1
THE AFTERBLIGHT CHRONICLES
THE BLOODY
DELUGE
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY
ABADDONBOOKS.COM
An Abaddon Books™ Publication
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First published 2014 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
Editor-in Chief: Jonathan Oliver
Commissioning Editor: David Moore
Cover Art: Sam Gretton
Design: Simon Parr & Sam Gretton
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Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley
The Afterblight Chronicles™ created by Simon Spurrier & Andy Boot
Copyright © 2014 Rebellion.
All rights reserved.
The Afterblight Chronicles™, Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84997-764-7
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
The Afterblight Chronicles Series
The Culled
by Simon Spurrier
Kill Or Cure
by Rebecca Levene
Dawn Over Doomsday
by Jasper Bark
Death Got No Mercy
by Al Ewing
Blood Ocean
by Weston Ochse
The Afterblight Chronicles: America
An Omnibus of Post-Apocalyptic Novels
Arrowhead
Broken Arrow
Arrowland
by Paul Kane
School’s Out
Operation Motherland
Children’s Crusade
by Scott K. Andrews
With thanks to Jarek Rybski, Michael Czajkowski, Shane McLean and Irene Bock for their assistance in researching the world before the Cull.
PART ONE
BETWEEN THE EAGLES
CHAPTER ONE
AMIDST THE BONES
THE VAN HAD taken them as far as Wrocław before running out of gas. Katy had been driving two whole days and half a night by that time, running on fumes herself. She had barely been able to see the road by then, dusk and her own leaden eyelids making the obstacle course of abandoned cars into a deathtrap.
“That’s it.” Her voice came out as a dead croak. “Emil, that’s all I’ve got in me. We’ll hunt some fuel tomorrow, when I can see straight.” There was a tight fist of a headache dug in between her eyes, like she always got if she drove too much, or stared at a computer screen...
Oh, yes, staring at computers. When did we last do that?
“Miss Lewkowitz, they’re still out there,” came that cautious, measured voice from the back.
“Listen, Emil.” She had her eyes closed. They were on the outskirts of the largest city in Western Poland, and surely there were still people here, but the night was silent. No shouting, no screaming, no gunshots, no vehicles on the move. They might have been in some other world entirely from all those things. Makes a change from where we came here from.
“There might be... looters, cannibals—or more fanatics. Please,” pressed the soft voice of Dr Emil Weber. He had two modes, she knew of old: very, very polite, and his sudden rises to impassioned rhetoric. And his cringing embarrassment after the latter, she supposed, made three. But he had been polite all the way since they fled the executions at Forst.
“There’s going to be a road accident right here if I don’t sleep. Car crash, right? Ah, Autounfall?”
“Miss Lewkowitz, my English is perfectly—”
“And the car’s out of diesel. Argue with me all you like, but—”
He hissed through his teeth. “Then you may by all means sleep for precisely such time as it takes for me to siphon some fuel out of any of these vehicles that still have any.”
“They won’t. Why d’you think they’re abandoned?”
“You don’t know that. Arguing from a position unsupported by evidence—”
“Oy, Emil, not now. Save it for the show trials.” She settled back in the driver’s seat as best she could, reflecting that his patient, almost accentless tones became incredibly annoying after prolonged exposure. It was something she had never noticed when he was her tutor.
SHE DIDN’T IMAGINE anyone would be studying to be a biochemist any time soon. She might as well have gone to the Brandenburg Technical University to be a wizard or a Disney princess: the ambitions were just as realistic, had she only known.
Her German had been rusty when she came over from the UK, and learning the language and the science at the same time had almost broken her. But she had trained and studied, under Emil Weber, and thanks to his meticulous assistance she had passed, and secured a starter position with a GMO lab in Kolkwitz nearby. Her golden future as a bona fide scientist was right there waiting for her.
And then the Culling Year had come and everyone had died. Everyone at the lab but her. She had stumbled out into a country that had degraded shockingly fast into somewhere she could not even recognise. She had only survived because she was often the closest thing to a doctor that anyone could find. Practical medicine was another thing she had to learn fast. Those first few years had made all of her study at Potsdam look absurdly leisured and simple. Every day had taught her something; every day had confronted her anew with the fate awaiting those who failed to learn.
She had thought that she had found a new life for herself, by then. Not a good life, most certainly not the life she wanted, but unless someone had a magic wand, then she was never going to get that. She had set up shop as quack and sawbones in a walled community and fended off the advances of the local young bucks.
And then the first word had come from Emil. He, too, had survived. More, he was working. He had gathered up students, colleagues, everyone he could find with a pulse and an education. Faced with the oblivion of everything he had ever known, the deaths of almost everyone he knew, Dr Emil Weber had got to work. She had pictured him, a short, stocky man, grey peppering his dark hair and stubbling his cheeks, pushing his glasses back up his nose and reducing death from the apocalypse to just another problem for science to solve. And every little death had its own nemesis. The letters she got from him said he was working on the biochemistry of the Cull virus. He was after a cure.
And of course he had asked her to join his little community, and of course she had meant to, but there had been people close at hand who had needed her—or who would have tried to stop her leaving. She had never quite broken away.
And if she had, they would both be dead by now. Procrastination had saved her, and she had saved him.
SHE WAS STARTLED awake by him banging on the side of the van.
“Miss Lewkowitz! Miss Lewkowitz!”
He would never just call her Katy.
“Seriously?” She took a deep breath in which the last few exchanges between them replayed in her mind. “You’ve filled the tank? Already?”
“No!” And still maddeningly polite, but there was an edge to it now, a man strained towards breaking point. “They have found us.”
“How do you know?” Because she thought he was just overreacting to something. He was a man of infinite calm, in his laboratory kingdom. Take him out of that, and he jumped at every shadow.
But then she heard them: the growl of the bikes.
Emil jumped into the passenger seat. “Drive us!”
“Doc, still no diesel!” she snapped. “We’re going to have to make it on foot.”
“No, that is not acceptable.”
“Just follow me.” She kicked the door open and was out, scanning the dark road, the strewn debris of dead vehicles. How did they find us? But then the enemy had been on their trail since Forst, never far behind, never catching up. That had lulled them into a false sense of security. And taking the biggest, straightest road east might not have been the best move. So what now? Can we hide? Surely the ruins of Wrocław offered a thousand boltholes. How many were unclaimed, though?
Still: “Into the city,” she told him. although she had to drag him by the cuff. He was still wearing one of those pinstripe shirts he had never been without, though it had gone through at the elbows, and hadn’t seen an iron in a year. They had taken his lab coat off him when they caught him, though. White was their colour, and they were jealous of it.
Emil and she should have made it, she would decide in retrospect. They should have melted away into the ruins. All those houses with vacant-eyesocket windows, all those hollow shells cast up by the tide of the Cull, moulded around the vacant impressions of their lost owners. She and Emil should have been able to hide there forever.
The dogs betrayed them, in the end. She had not thought about dogs, but of course the Cull was like some message from a green messiah. The innocence of the natural world was not the target of its sermons, only sinful mankind. There had been a lot of dogs i
From the look of the pack that loped into view, they had recruited some wolves along the way. They were big, scarred beasts, and there was no recognition in their eyes that they had once bowed their heads to masters. Only the moon gleamed back from their fixed gaze. No collars, no chains, that stare seemed to say.
“Just keep still,” Katy hissed, but Emil was already shuffling backwards. Dogs were just one of a long list of things he was not fond of.
“They’re just—” she started, and then the growling started: a low, deep sound that seemed to reach her through the ground more than through her ears. It spoke to something primal in her, something that had hidden up trees and trembled when the pack gathered to greet the moonrise.
She dragged the pistol from her pocket. There was a look in the dogs’ eyes—or it was her imagination—that said they knew what it was, and what it could do. The growling grew steadily louder, and then they were barking furiously, first one, then all of them. Compared with the silence that had reigned moments before, the sound was deafening.
Emil ran, and she was backing away right after him. The dogs advanced a few steps, and kept up their savage racket. Go away! Go away! This is our place now!
And that was how the enemy found them. She almost ran straight into Emil at the far end of the street. Three bright orbs confronted him: headlamps. The growling yammer of the dogs gave way to the thunderous rumble of the bikes.
The moon caught them: they wore old leathers, painted up white so that they shone like broken angels, the colour flaking away at the joints and creases as though the darkness within was leaking out. Only one had a helmet, in the same livery, painted with a dark cross. The others had shaved heads, pale faces, the whitest of the white, with that black bar across their eyes, that stripe from forehead to chin. Black cross on a pale field; the ghosts of history.
She was behind Emil. The thought came to her that they had not seen she was armed.
One of them reached up high, arm thrust into the air. He had an air-horn there, the sort of noisemaker she remembered from the football games her dad had dragged her to. Even as she recognised it, he let out a long, piercing hoot that echoed out across the broken rooftops.
It was answered almost immediately, and from not far away.
“You’re going to have to run now, Doc,” she murmured.
“Not without you.” He had actually squared himself, as though ready to put up what miniscule amount of fight he had in him.
“Oh, I’ll be right behind you, only I’m going to put some bullets their way first.”
“That will only antagonise them.”
“Doc, they were going to hang you. I don’t figure pissing them off is going to make things worse.”
“A good point.”
The man in the centre was lazily guiding his bike forwards. He had a hockey stick over his shoulder, its inside edge studded with sharpened coins. They would have guns as well, but she had seen the way they worked. Given a victim who could not fight back, the soldiers of the Order preferred the personal touch.
“Good girl,” he murmured, grinning. Jarringly, his accent hailed from London, still flying the tattered flags of Chelsea and Fulham, but then the Order was happy to take in anyone who was male, white and bigoted as hell. “You come quietly, good girl. Step away from your friend there, nothing bad’s going to happen to you.”
One of the others made a suggestion in German about precisely what might happen to her. Probably he didn’t consider it ‘bad.’ Perhaps he thought it would be an honour.
The Englishman’s eyes glinted as he inched his bike closer. “That’s it,” he said softly, but the same desires were plain on his face. Neither she nor Emil were getting out of this, if they were caught.
So: “Run,” she said, and then gave Emil a shove when he didn’t move. He stumbled to one side, but then he was dashing off almost at random, leaping and clambering over a bank of blackened rubble where one house had come down, where the bikes couldn’t follow.
English Bigot gunned his bike forwards, and perhaps he didn’t see as she brought the pistol up. His two friends did, certainly. Would-be Rapist dived off his machine, letting it clang heavily to the ground as he scuttled for cover. The man in the helmet went straight for her, practically demanding to become her primary target.
There was a moment when her finger was on the trigger and she could not make herself pull it. Then she must have done, because the weapon bucked in her hand, the recoil jarring her wrist, and Helmet was lying flat back across his saddle, hands ripped off the handlebars by the impact. His bike slewed sideways, spilling him off and almost scything her legs from under her. She jumped aside, and was already pelting after Emil.
She got to the rubble just after English Bigot, and he turned on her, lashing out with that doctored hockey stick. As she reeled back out of reach, he dragged his own gun out of his waistband. She froze. For a long second she had no idea what to do, and if he had been able, he could have shot her there and then. He was fumbling with the safety catch, spiked motorcycle gloves making a fist of it, and she forced herself to raise her gun again, even as she scrambled up the scree of bricks and broken tiles.
He brought his pistol up, saw that she was ahead of him, and threw himself down the slope. The weapon thundered in her hand again, the shot going who knew where. Then she was off after Emil.
She hoped after Emil. He had shown a surprising turn of speed. She could only hope that if she lost his trail, so would the Order.
The sound of bike engines was loud across the barren skyline of Wrocław.
She darted through the ruined house, boots crunching and skidding on stray detritus, and then she was out in what had been a garden once, now a bristling nursery for weeds. These had been good houses with big gardens. For a moment she entertained the thought of simply hiding in the new-minted undergrowth, stalking the Order soldiers like a Viet Cong veteran.
Except she had one bullet left. One.
She hit the fence at the back of the yard, already rotten with too many untreated winters. Here was Emil’s trail; he had frantically kicked through it to get out. It couldn’t be more obvious if he had left an Emil-shaped hole in the wormy wood like Wile E. Coyote. She followed after, waving the gun behind her in case it might give the hunters even a second’s more pause.
There was another garden beyond, in the moon-shadow of a house that had weathered the fall rather better. The back door was open: Emil again. The building would provide no shelter, given even a cursory search. She only hoped he had kept on running.
He had got as far as the street out front, she discovered, and had stopped there. Two more Order bikers had turned up. They had him pinned between them, circling slowly, revving their engines. One was swinging a chain lazily, the other had what looked like a shotgun levelled crookedly over his handlebars.
She burst from the house’s front door like an avenging angel, gun thrust out towards them. One bullet. Two men. No chance they’ll line up, is there?
Emil flinched and dropped, covering his head with his hands. She caught the startled looks of the Order men, seeing her. Mr Shotgun swore and almost lost the weapon under the front wheel of his bike.
Her gun went off at point blank range. She was still running, her aim veering madly between them. She had not even decided to fire; her finger had twitched as she ran and taken the decision from her. The bullet struck sparks from Chains’ bike, making him yell in shock. Mr Shotgun was juggling his weapon, bringing it up, and she was looking right into the barrels. He had gone for heavy spiked gloves too, and she was close enough to see him trying to jam his finger through the trigger loop.
