MoonFall (14 page)

“Huh.” Noah could tell from Sophie’s tone that she considered the Elders assholes, and he’d seen nothing yet to contradict that view. But as much as they might be hindering him, these walls were pretty sturdy, and the folks in here were the best fed he’d seen since things fell apart. If you weren’t busy getting thrown in jail, and if you could stomach other people for more than an hour at a time, then there were far worse places than Apollo.

Of course, that was two strikes against it for him, and he wouldn’t be sorry to see the place over his shoulder and fading from view, but the world wasn’t just made for the likes of Noah. Not even this broken world of ruins and rubble.

“Alright then.” Noah said. “Reckon this is gonna get tight. If I get stuck can you shove me through?”

“You don’t want me to go first?” Sophie asked. “I can show you the way.”

“That’s alright, I can manage this one on my own.”

“But I’m coming with you, right?”

He’d figured this was coming – after all, she’d said she wanted out of town. Now they were here it was time to burst the girl’s bubble, stop her from getting herself killed.

“Listen, you don’t want to go out there tonight,” he said. “Can’t you hear what’s happening on the other side of them walls? More fighting outside than’s even going on in here, and it sure ain’t pretty round the gates. What you gonna do, hide in the shadows and watch the carnage?”

“I s’pose I’m gonna do the same as you – get away from this town, with its shitty laws and its shitty fight with the shitty Dionites.”

“Your Mama know you talk like that?”

“Dionites killed my Mom.” Sophie crossed her arms and glared up at him. “Killed my Dad, too. So less you’ve got a soap clean mouth yourself you can knock off that adult knows best bullshit.”

“Sorry kid.” He really was, though it was hard not to laugh in the face of that indignant scowl. “Sorry ‘bout your Mama and your Pa. Sorry I called you a kid for that matter. We’ve all been through some rough shit, and if you’ve made it this far then I reckon you’ll carry on making it.

“But seriously, once you get past this wall and them guards and this whole mass of brutality going on out there, what you gonna do then?”

“I’m gonna come with you.”

“I… you… what?”

“Said I’m coming with you, and I
reckon
you heard me just fine.”

Noah glanced up at the guards. It seemed they hadn’t heard them despite Sophie’s voice rising in both indignation and volume. This was ridiculous.

“You can’t come with me,’ he said. ‘I’m not a coming with me kind of guy. Where I go, I go on my own.”

“Oh, like you got to this hole in the wall on your own?”

“That’s different. That’s asking favors, not asking to follow someone around the rest of their live-long days like a sad puppy dog.”

“I ain’t no sad puppy dog. I can take care of myself. I can run and hide and find ways through places. I can pick pockets, even pick locks some. I can be useful.”

“There ain’t no pockets out there in the wild. Ain’t hardly no locks neither, and those there are, I can just smash. The rest of the world ain’t like Apollo. It’s a mad and dangerous place, and not one a young woman should be part of.”

“Fuck you and your young woman shit. Weren’t you ever young?”

“Well yeah, course I was.”

“And you never had to tag along with no-one? No-one taught you what you know, how to live in this mad, dangerous world you’re so keen to get back out to?”

She was right of course. Sure he hadn’t been a wanderer then, but the best years of Noah’s life had been spent tagging along with Jeb and Pete. First in the days before it all went to hell, following them around town as they met up with friends, shot pool, shot guns, shot the breeze over beers from the Seven Eleven. His Pa had taught him to track and hunt and tune up a car, but Jeb and Pete had taught him how to survive in the world of young men and small towns, how to swagger and to steal and to duck the authorities when the need came. They’d passed him his first smoke, bought him his first beer, rolled him his first joint. Of course, then they laughed when he coughed, sputtered, and grimaced at the taste and puked his guts up the first time he had too many. But would he have known about any of that stuff, how to fit it into his life and make a man of himself, if he hadn’t been tagging along with them?

Then there’d been the aftermath.
 

First the aftermath of Mama’s death, with Pa no more present than he’d been before and only Jeb and Pete to keep him on track. A year of what now looked like limbo, faced with a loss that rocked his own small world but not the bigger one. Getting in and out of trouble, in and out of jobs, all with Jeb and Pete showing him how to get back on his feet.

And then the real aftermath. All of them reeling at the world ripped apart, not least Jeb and Pete. But they’d still shown him how to survive, how to negotiate a place in what remained of their town. To turn his skills to survival when the lights went out. To keep himself entertained with the TV and the radio gone. To barter with neighbors for what was needed and negotiate with other townsfolk as a new order arose from the rubble of the old. He’d been tagging along with them every step of the way, only forging his own path when he didn’t have a choice no more.

So, maybe Sophie was right. Maybe everybody had to tag along sometime. Maybe that was no bad thing. Maybe he even owed her for her help, owed the world for what Jeb and Pete had done for him.

But that didn’t mean he was up to the job.

“Look, Sophie, I ain’t saying you’re wrong.” He tried to look her in the eye. It was the least he could do. “Everyone’s got to learn from someone. And I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t rather be roaming the roads than living with a whole mass of folks like you’ve got here. Maybe one day you’ll choose that life too, and I hope I see you out there in the world. But I ain’t the guy to show you it.

“I ain’t a good man. I ain’t one to stop and look after others, or to step in and help them when they need it. I’ve stood by and let terrible shit happen rather than put my own ass on the line. I’m a coward, and I’m selfish, and I ain’t fixin’ to change any time soon. The only person I ever looked after was myself. Only one who’s ever tagged along with me is my gun, and it ain’t done him any more good than it’s done me. We both spend most of our days with empty bellies and no direction to go in, and that ain’t changing anytime soon neither.

“I know you don’t want to hear this, but you’re still a kid. And in a place like this you get to be a kid. You get to have people look out for you, keep you in one piece, help you learn about life before it grinds you into the dirt. Folks like Sergeant Burns, your Molly, they’re good for that. I admire them for it, truly I do. They make a better world while I just scrape by in the one I’ve got.

“And that’s why I can’t take you with me. Because it wouldn’t be no good for me, and it sure as shit wouldn’t be no good for you.”

Sophie hung her head, hiding her face beneath the wild mop of her hair. Her arms were still folded across her narrow chest and she seemed to have shrunk back into herself.

“Fuck you,” she muttered at last. “Hope you get stuck in the hole.”

She ran off down an alley, away into the darkness.

“Reckon we deserved that,” Noah said to Bourne. “And by we, I mean me, on account of you’re a gun and I’m just some asshole talking to himself in the dark.”

Asshole or not, it was time for action. The guards were as far from the works as they’d been the whole time he’d stood here. He took a deep breath and hurried out of the alley, darting from a heap of rocks to a pile of pallets to a stack of bags of sand, always keeping something between him and the eye line of at least one of the soldiers.

He paused at the base of the wall, looking up to see if he’d been spotted. One of the guards was looking down into the street, and for a terrible moment Noah thought he’d been caught, but then there was a cry from the far side of the wall and the man turned away, busied himself firing arrows down into the night.

It wouldn’t be much of a climb up to the hole for a man who was on the scaffolding. But for Noah, climbing up under the scaffold to stay hidden, it was a little trickier. He managed by jumping to catch the bottom edge of the opening, his fingertips scraping across rough stone. With weary arms, he heaved himself upwards, feet scrabbling against the rock wall beneath him, kicking off from any outcropping or unevenness that gave him the slightest grip. Half a minute’s hauling and grunting saw him halfway up into the hole, his shoulders tight between the stones, dragging himself forward with tiny, cramped movements as he heaved the rest of his body up from behind.

“Hey!” Somebody yelled behind him, and Noah realized how terribly exposed he was, with only his ass and his frantically waggling legs to protect him from anyone behind. He wriggled forward as fast as he could.

“Hey!” The voice called out again and Noah scrambled even faster, scraping himself against the stone.

This was like his worst nightmare come true, trapped in a space so small he could barely breathe. The stones didn’t just press in on his mind, they pressed in on his body, squeezing him into a passage that was nothing but blackness. What if there was nothing at the other end? What if this was all just a trick played on him by Sophie, trapping him here to die in this coffin-sized space? What if the builders had blocked up the other end? What if he died in here, enclosed, compressed, squeezed in worse than any cell or any room or any place he’d ever been in his life?

His heart was racing again, sweat breaking out across his brow.

“Hey!” Once more the voice cried out and Noah didn’t know which was worse – the thought that someone was coming to catch him, or that they weren’t and he was trapped in the wall all alone.
 

“Hey, they need us by the east gate! Things have really gone to hell.”

Noah sagged with relief. The shouts weren’t for him. But as he slumped, his forehead pressed against the cold stone beneath him and fear rose up once more.

“Got to get out,” he muttered to Bourne, or maybe just to himself. “Got to get out. Got to get out.”

He swallowed hard, pressing down the rising tide of terror, and pulled himself a few more inches through the gap. His knees were in now too, giving him another way to push forward.

“Who’d have thought the wall was this damn thick?” he said, and then, as another thought occurred to him, “Is this how Iver went mad, just muttering to himself in the dark?”

Just as he was about to panic, something cool brushed against his cheek, a breeze blowing in from the tunnel mouth. He squirmed forward a few more inches and a few more, twisted one arm around beneath him and reached out. From the elbow down it was out of the hole.

“Free!” he exclaimed joyfully, pressing that hand against the wall and dragging himself forward. His other arm emerged into the air, then his head, then his chest. Then in a rush he wriggled forward, slithering like a snake out of the hole and tumbling with a thud to the ground seven feet below. He sprawled there for a moment, face pressed against the damp earth, ass sticking up into the air, ignoring the fresh bruises and just relishing the air around him.

Free.

He was out of Apollo.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

F
IGHT
THE
G
OOD
F
IGHT

N
OT
FOR
THE
first time that night, Noah hauled himself up from the ground, counted his new bruises and considered himself lucky not to have suffered worse. His left wrist still felt like it was stuffed full of wire wool, but he could still feel all his fingers, so he seemed to be getting away with it for now.

He’d even gotten lucky in where the hole opened up to. Most of the wall ran over streets, but this bit was in the remains of someone’s garden, and dirt was less painful than concrete. Maybe the Almighty wasn’t such a bad guy after all.

He needed to get out of here before anyone spotted him, but as he started out across the open ground beneath the walls, movement caught his eye. He flung himself to the ground as a group of people came running and yelling out of the ruins.

First came an Apollonian soldier. The light from the stars and the debris belt gave her a stark appearance, the bow symbol on her chest bright white against the black of body armor, her scarf and her sword gray and angular shapes.

She turned as she came into the open, swung at one of the people following her. They were all Dionites, dressed in loincloths and wielding weapons. A small mob pursued her out of the ruins, prowling forwards with wild and bloodthirsty whoops.

The Apollonian kept backing away, trying not to get outflanked by the Dionites. But there were seven of them and only one of her. She stumbled on a patch of rubble and almost fell, swinging wildly to keep the pack from closing in, her sword ringing off their raised weapons.

As she turned to defend herself against each opponent in turn, Noah got a good look at her face. It was Sergeant Burns, with the tattoos that led to who knew where and the over eager approach with the beating stick. Sergeant Burns who’d kept quiet about his first escape attempt in return for some secrecy about her own act of kindness. Sergeant Burns whose care he’d thought he was sending Sophie back into.

There were few people here who he even halfway liked, and one of them had died in front of him less than two hours before. He was damned if he was going to let the same thing happen again.

Still lying on the ground, Noah reached around for Bourne and then for the box of ammo in his pocket. As he did so he watched the Dionites. Their way of fighting was a wild flowing way, almost acrobatic as they danced around Burns, pushing her ever backwards, darting about to avoid her blade and get themselves into better positions.

She lunged forward and hit one of them in the arm. Without armor or even clothes to protect him the sword sliced a chunk from his flesh. He leapt backwards, screaming with pain as he clutched his flapping muscle into place, trying to staunch the blood flowing from his arm.