MoonFall Read online

  ‘So this is what passes for civilization around here,’ he muttered to Bourne as he walked past the rusted remains of a children’s playground and on towards what appeared to be a high school.

  The stores might be empty, but there were always opportunities for a wanderer who knew where to look. Community centers, if they could be found, sometimes had a stockpile of emergency blankets and old dried food for the homeless. If you could break through the reinforced doors then town hall emergency shelters sometimes held secret stashes, as rare and as precious as toilet paper in an abandoned outhouse. They almost made Noah wish he’d spent his youth hanging out with the kids who liked breaking into cars, not the ones who enjoyed repairing them – those criminal skills would have been mighty handy now.

  But schools, schools were best of all. Most folks underestimated schools. They’d only ever seen them as places for learning, but a homeschooled kid like Noah didn’t have that disadvantage. He didn’t see a lunchroom as a place for gossip and the dreary routine of half-warmed burgers, he saw it as a place where people worked to prepare food, vast amounts of food, much of it preserved for storage on an efficiently industrial scale. Then there were lockers. People abandoned all sorts of things in lockers. An old lighter might not amount to much, but go through a few hundred of those teenage hiding holes and you could end up with a heap of lost treats, from the odd bag of weed to a well oiled flick-knife. Staff rooms had coats and coffee, janitor’s closets had tools, even corridors had vending machines.

  School libraries he could take or leave. Paper made good kindling, but so did fallen leaves for half the year, and the stuff they’d used in the last generation of textbooks wasn’t great for wiping your ass – too slick and shiny, not like the good old college books Ma had kept around the house. Not that he’d have ever dreamed of wiping his ass with Mama’s books. Life wouldn’t have been worth living the day he’d done a thing like that.

  Still, wander around a school long enough and eventually you end up in the library. This one was well preserved despite the devastation that had descended on the rest of the town. The books were spotted with mildew and rats had made a nest in a corner full of what had once been stacks of magazines. The banks of computers along two walls stared at the world with dead, blank screens, like giant square eyes on a row of corpses. But there was still reading to be had.

  As he strolled through the library something caught Noah’s eye. The familiar spine of one of the books, bold gold letters against a blue background, one his father had had. Noah pulled it off the shelf. A sense of warm familiarity spread through him as he eased open the cover, revealing the packed pages behind a picture of a jet plane and a man with a gun. He flicked through, lost for a while in scenes he hadn’t read in half a lifetime. Tales of fights and chases, the likes of which had thrilled him as a kid. But even better were the scenes in bars, casinos and shopping centers, reminders of the rich life that had once been. A world of comforts that seemed decadent now.

  At last he sighed and stowed the book away in his bag for later. The sun was sinking in the sky and part of him knew he ought to move on. But where would he find better shelter tonight?

  “C’mon, let’s get more books,” he said to Bourne. “See if they’ve got your namesake. Don’t reckon we’ll have to worry about a library card.”

  He prowled down the rows of fiction, looking for stylish spines or familiar names. How long had he stood looking through that one book, lost to the world and everything in it? How great would it be to find more of the same, something comforting to see him through the next terrible winter? Not as great as a crate more of Paul’s whiskey, sure, but good enough to make this whole school business worthwhile.

  Behind him a door creaked open.

  Noah spun around. A man stood in the entrance to the library. Dressed in body armor with metal plates protecting his arms and legs, his height added to his intimidating bulk. He raised a musket towards Noah, eyes sparkling above the red bandana around his neck.

  Drawing Bourne as he moved, Noah turned towards the library’s other exit, a pair of double doors leading onto a stairwell. But another man blocked it, also armed and armored with the same red bandana and the same bow and arrow symbol stenciled across his chest.

  If there was one thing worse than men with weapons it was men with uniforms.

  “Hold there, Dionite.” The first guard’s voice rang clear with a hint of a European accent. Between that and his cropped black hair he could have been the villain from one of those precious spy books.

  Noah jerked to his left, out of sight between two rows of shelves. He ran down the aisle, only to see the second soldier appear at the far end.

  The guy’s gun wasn’t raised yet, and there were only yards between them. Straight on looked better than turning back.

  Noah kept running, slamming into the guard. The man dropped his gun and grabbed for Noah. The two of them staggered back and forth, banging against shelves, books tumbling down around them.

  Noah yanked his knee upward. The soldier was wearing a cup and pain jolted up Noah’s leg, but he’d managed enough impact to hurt the other guy, who crumpled over wheezing on the floor.

  Fast as he could, Noah disentangled himself and ran for the empty doorway.

  Except that it wasn’t empty. As he burst through the doors and into the top of the stairwell he almost ran straight into another soldier, a woman with long, black hair. Noah shifted his grip on Bourne, tried to hit the woman over the head with the pistol, but she was faster. She ducked under his swing and grabbed his arm, trying to drag it around behind him.

  Noah yelped in pain and staggered back, trying to ram the woman against the wall. But the floor was smooth and the soles of his shoes were worn flat. He couldn’t get the grip to gain an advantage, while she maneuvered around behind and then slid him forwards, slamming him up against the stair rail and twisting his arm further.

  At last his numbed fingers gave in and Bourne slid from his grip, clattering to the ground. The woman kicked the pistol away and Bourne span out over the stairwell, tumbling towards the ground below.

  “No!” Noah jerked back, the rail giving him enough leverage to bring his greater height into play. With the soldier off balance, he snaked his left arm around behind her shoulder, got a grip and pulled. She stumbled against his outstretched leg and lost her footing, tumbling down the stairs.

  Not for the first time, Noah found himself grateful for the experience he’d gained fighting Jeb and Pete when they were young. A younger brother had to learn all the hardest, filthiest tricks if he was ever to stay standing.

  He followed the soldier down the stairs, leaping over her as she started to rise, turning back for a kick that sent her sprawling once more. Better to fight dirty than to fight half-assed.

  Glancing around on the landing below, he looked without luck for any sign of Bourne, then he hurried down the flight of stairs, pausing again as he reached the second floor.

  There the pistol was, lying just in front of a classroom doorway. Noah ran over and bent down to scoop up his traveling companion.

  A shadow slid out of the doorway and what felt like a meteor strike slammed against the side of Noah’s head. He sank to his knees as spots danced across his vision. He tried to reach for Bourne but only fumbled uselessly as the world split in two and spun around him.

  “Dionite scum.”

  Another blow, against the back of his head this time. Noah sprawled flat on his front, cold tiles pressing against his face. He turned his head just enough to see the first soldier looking down at him, pure disdain in his eyes. What the hell was this guy’s problem? What was a Dionite? And who cared this much about a bunch of old books?

  “Taking you back to Apollo,” the soldier said, his accent giving the words a harsh edge.

  Before Noah could even wonder who or what Apollo was, the soldier’s musket butt descended one last time, smashing against Noah’s face and sending him into darkness.

  CHAPTER FIVE
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br />   A PLACE OF SAFETY

  IN EVERY STORY Noah had ever read or watched, when the hero got knocked out he woke up in captivity, usually someplace dark -- whether it was a prison cell, the bowels of a ship, the boot of a car, or a secret bunker buried somewhere in the mountains. Two things told Noah this wasn’t one of those stories. First, he wasn’t yet in that darkened room, waiting for some pissed off guy on a power trip with slicked back hair and a bad accent to interrogate him. And second, he was no kind of hero.

  His first awareness was the feeling in his feet, a stuttering stab of pain as he was dragged along, toes trailing on the hard, broken surface of a poorly kept road. If there was one thing Noah’s feet could recognize by touch, it was a poorly kept road.

  Sight would have made it all easier, of course. He could have looked around, got his bearings, prepared himself for the weight of his own body tugging mercilessly at his shoulders as the soldiers dragged him along with his arms hauled around their necks. Might have been he could have started finding his feet sooner, getting them underneath him before that big damn pothole nearly smashed his big toe.

  But no, sight didn’t even come second, as he mustered the will to drag his weary eyes open. Second was hearing, the sound of their footsteps on the road, of one soldier cursing under his breath in what sounded like Russian, and what Noah’s befuddled brain took for the sound of a town up ahead, folks talking and walking and going about their day. A sound he hadn’t heard in years, and hadn’t expected to ever hear again.

  Next came smell, the fearsome body odor of someone who’d spent far too long wrapped in layers of armor and needed cleaning up worse than a dog that had been rolling in shit. And then the taste of blood in Noah’s own mouth, which was hardly surprising given the way his last memory went down.

  So by the time he finally forced his eyes open and raised his head into the fading light of day, Noah had a pretty good idea of what was going on around him.

  The town still came as a shock.

  It was one thing to hear the sound of hundreds of people all in one place, voices bouncing off buildings, the rumble of cart wheels and the demands for someone to get out of the goddamn way. It was another thing altogether to see it and believe it. Noah blinked a few times before he really registered what was ahead of him.

  The soldiers dragged him between deserted buildings, densely packed by the standards of this part of the world. They could have still been in the town where they had found him, or in another like it. Noah could only guess one way or the other. The one thing he was sure of was the street ahead was blocked by a wall at least a dozen feet high and built of all kinds of rubble. There were sections of battered bricks, probably pulled from the ruins of other houses and crudely mortared together. There were lumps of stone, some rough, some neatly cut and stacked. There were stretches of old iron work, overturned trucks with corrugated plates bolted across the gaps. It was the patchwork quilt of defensive positions, like something God’s grandma might have made out of the scraps in the bottom of her sewing box.

  It was the best built new thing Noah had seen since the sky started falling.

  He dragged one foot forward and in the space of a few stumbling footsteps managed to get himself upright. The soldiers stepped back, the man shaking his head in amusement, the woman just scowling.

  “Holy fucking Jesus on a scooter,” Noah said, then thought of how his Ma would have responded to such language. That grandma thought had flung family into the forefront of his mind. “Pardon my language, but that there is impressive.”

  “Keep moving.” The third soldier, the one who’d knocked Noah out, strode past them and gestured towards the gates being held open by two more impatient looking guards. They wore the same red bandanas and logo that was daubed across his captors’ body armor, across the better patches of wall, even on a ragged red flag fluttering above the gate.

  When Noah didn’t respond, the woman gave him a shove with the butt of her musket, sent him stumbling on down the road.

  “No need for that, sweetheart,” Noah said. “Pretty smile like yours, all you had to do was- of.”

  The lead soldier wasn’t much gentler than he’d been at the school, his fist hitting Noah’s stomach with a force that spoke to anger and frustration or a really good workout.

  “Respect the guard, Dionite,” the soldier said, grabbing Noah by the collar and dragging him towards the gate.

  In other circumstances, Noah might have fought back. The fellow was about the same height as him, and though his extra bulk looked to be all muscle, not everyone knew how to use their own strength. But there was the armor, the gun, the two other guards behind them and more up ahead. And self-preservation aside, Noah was intensely curious to see what lay behind those walls.

  “Lieutenant Poulson.” One of the guards on the gate saluted Noah’s captor, and Poulson let go of Noah long enough to return the gesture. Then they were through, and those gates of plate steel were dragged back on what looked to be wheels taken from old cars. They clanged to a stop and bolts were thrown into place with a terrible finality that echoed down the street.

  And what a street.

  Every building was intact. Sure, some of them had seen repairs, like the hardware store with plyboard and plastic windows where its glass front had once been or the house down a side street with a canvas roof. But many of them looked untouched by the ravages of the past twenty years, and not one had been allowed to slip into neglect. The walls were clean, paintwork fresh, everything upright and in order. Little statues stood out front of many of the houses or stared from windows – some guy with goat’s legs in one, a fat Buddha in another, a bearded man clutching a thunderbolt in a third. Religious icons, too – several crosses, squiggly script he didn’t recognize, a couple of Stars of David. It seemed this was a praying sort of town.

  The people matched the street’s fine condition. Noah had met some folks in decent health in his travels. The odd hunter who’d kept himself in game dinners and furs for the winter, or couples who’d grabbed the right supplies to thrive in the wilderness. Even one or two farmers who’d managed to make their lands work right, though most were just scraping by. But a community or a decent sized caravan like the one he’d followed south? Those could never find enough food and medicine to really thrive, only hold themselves together and to keep each other going.

  This place was different. These people weren’t just well fed, or clear of the scars inevitable in a world without emergency rooms to hand. They were clean, their clothes neat and well patched. A prouder man might have felt ashamed to come among them in Noah’s own ragged coat and sweat-stained shirt, but Noah was determined not to be that man. He straightened his shoulders, brushed the dried blood from his chin, held himself upright. Nobody made the Brennan boys feel like dirt, even when dirt was what they were wearing.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  The guard to his right laughed. He was mighty tolerant for a man Noah had tried to kick in the balls.

  “To the prison,” he said. Noah realized his was the Russian-sounding accent and that Lieutenant Poulson’s was something more softly alien. What was with this place – had Virginia been invaded by the goddamn Europeans? Folks back home would have had things to say about that, and none of them friendly.

  But as they marched him down the street, Noah heard familiar accents too, mostly local but some from deeper in the south or up the east coast. This place was thriving, and it still seemed to be American.

  Something else grabbed his attention as they made their way towards an ugly concrete building on the far side of town. A girl, somewhere in her teens, scrawny as a spring fawn. She shadowed them as they walked, peering at Noah through gaps in the crowd, scurrying across junctions rather than staying out in the open. Her ragged clothes would have fit in anywhere else, but here they were distinct, and while the folks around them seemed determined to ignore her, to Noah she stood out.

  They exchanged glances as he passed, her look filled as much with
curiosity as with a challenge to him, wanting to know what this disheveled stranger was about. Places like this had hot water, mirrors, and sharp razors. There weren’t many beards here as wildly impressive as his, and even without the escort he’d have been distinctive.

  “If I was you, I would not be looking so happy.” Poulson glared at Noah. “Your friends are not going to save you.”

  “No change there then,” Noah said. “I can count my friends on the fingers of one ass-cheek.”

  At last they came to a complex of grim concrete buildings, barbed wire trailing across the tops of the walls, dead cameras still standing on a couple of posts around the yard. The sign out front still held the words “County Jail,” though the name of the county had been whited out and the word ‘Apollo’ neatly painted over the top.

  Seemed these folks took pride in everything, even the dark places they reserved for crooks and strangers.

  The raggedy girl stopped a hundred yards from the jail, hovered anxiously in an alley, her eyes flitting between Noah and the flat gray edifice. At the gate, a smaller door swung open on well-oiled hinges and Noah was shoved once more, this time across the doorstep and into an exercise yard. There wasn’t much exercise going on, only two guards taking a break at a faded wooden table. Again there were religious icons all around the place – a cross in one corner of the yard, a bunch of little statues along railings and ledges. It was as if someone had taken a great big guide to world religions and shaken the pictures out all over this town and its jail. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the Pope and the Dalai Lama had rounded the corner laughing about who was getting into heaven first.

  Well, maybe a bit surprised. He’d heard only the faintest and least reliable of rumours about what was happening in the rest of the world, but if the Pope or the Dalai Lama were still alive so long after the apocalypse then he’d be pretty surprised. Like all the great musicians, all the top politicians, all the innovators, artists, actors, and damn near everyone else in the world, they were almost certainly dead. Just a handful of people were left, and some of them still insisted on locking him up.