Dragon City. James Axler

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СКАЧАТЬ the kind of place where you’d let your kids walk their new puppy, where the evening sun would keep you warm as you sat and read a book on the rocking chair hitched on the wooden veranda, the balmy air granting you that indefinable sense of contentment. Now, it looked like a suburb of hell. One half of the street was just gone; it was simply not there, only the occasional markings where houses or apartment blocks had once stood, old pipes overflowing with swarming plant life and buzzing insects.

       The other side of the street still looked somewhat like a street. There were houses there, eight or nine of them, but it was hard to be sure given the state of the last two, which looked more like something that had washed ashore from the ocean depths even out here, two hundred miles away from the nearest shore. The other houses stood on ruined foundations. Three of them had sunk into the ground, crumbling so that they sat like the steepled fingers of a pair of hands, propped against one another for support. A conifer grew out of one and into the roof of another, its cone shape striving up through the eaves of the second house and into the sky where birds flocked all around it, cawing and chirruping. The other houses were dirty, weather-beaten and overgrown with moss and mold, but they at least looked durable. If nothing else, the street seemed about right for the state that Farrell found himself in—a blue funk.

       The suburb of Bradley was surrounded on all sides by swamp and jungle and forest, much of it impassable even in these days of so-called civilization after the Program of Unification had brought humanity back from the brink of extinction. There were pathways through those jungles, hidden routes that Ohio Blue and her men knew, ways to reach all of these forgotten little corners of middle America that had been largely ignored since the nukecaust.

       Sinclair and Farrell had holed up in one of the broken buildings, choosing the place with the strongest walls and traipsing back and forth to furnish it as best they could from the bombed-out remains of the other houses in the street. Ohio’s people visited every three or four days, bringing with them parcels of food, some of it fresh but much of it tinned or dried goods, cured meats that would keep despite the lack of refrigeration or power in the ruined shack. The place itself smelled like the cloying atmosphere of a hothouse, as if they were living in an arboretum. Mold grew a dark greenish-brown up the walls, and some kind of fungus had taken over the bathroom, pretty violet spores popping and bursting from the walls, ceiling and floor the first time Sinclair had pushed open the door. After that, they had left the room shut, and converted what had once been a downstairs home office into a latrine.

       In the forty-two days that they had been here, Farrell and Sinclair had barely spoken. They were both in shock, and both were quite unable to comprehend what was going on around them. Days had passed where not more than two words would be grunted between them. Farrell took to staring through the gap in the boarded window at the front of the house, watching the churned-up street as if waiting for a parade to arrive, some kind of parade that only the Devil himself could bring. Ex-military, Sela Sinclair lost herself in a punishing fitness regime, exercising obsessively, well into the night. At least, she thought, if we do get attacked I’ll stand a chance.

       She was doing push-ups, listening to the sound of distant drums, when Farrell called her to the window.

       “Sela? Come quick, look.”

       Sinclair expelled a hard breath as she curtailed her routine, wiping sweat from her neck and underarms on a dirt-stained towel as she made her way across the cramped front room, boards creaking as she walked.

       “What is it?” she asked.

       Farrell sat motionless at the window, and the sunlight painted a single stripe across the bridge of his nose where it cut through the gap in the boards. “Someone’s coming, I think,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

       Sinclair looked at him, the way his body had become more like skin wrapping over bones these past few weeks. “Blue’s people?” she asked as she stepped closer to the gap in the window and peered outside.

       Farrell shook his head briefly. “I don’t think so. See there? Look.”

       Sinclair peered through the gap in the window, feeling the thin draft of air stabbing against her face with the constancy of a knife. It was late morning out there, the bright sun burning against the ruined landscape. Bushes and ferns lined the center strip of the old road, their leaves fluttering in the breeze. One clutch of bushes rustled, and Sinclair watched as a white cat came bounding out of them chasing after some insect or other, its prey’s wings glistening with the rainbow sheen of oil on water as it took flight.

       It was quiet after that, quiet and still, but Sinclair could still hear the noise of the drums.

       “You hear that?” Sinclair asked, tilting her head unconsciously, the way a dog might. “Music.”

       To her it sounded like the drumbeats of a marching band on parade, and it sounded real distant. It was like hearing the ocean before you could see it, that constant batting noise as the waves crashed against the shore, the heartbeat of the world.

       Farrell looked at her, eyes narrowed. “I don’t hear anything,” he admitted with confusion. They had been holed up here for more than a month now and he had noticed how sometimes Sinclair would stop and listen to something he couldn’t hear; sometimes he would catch her drumming her fingers against the arm of a worn-through chair as she took a break from her exercises. He watched her now as she continued to listen to the noise, watched as her hand reached up to touch her face, the strawberry-shake-pink insides of her dark fingers playing across that lump she had right in the middle of her forehead. It looked like a blind boil to Farrell, but it had been there a long time, never quite emerging or retreating the way a boil usually will. He hadn’t thought much about it; for the past forty-two days he hadn’t thought about much of anything if he could very much help it, just waited and hoped and prayed for Lakesh or someone else from the Cerberus hierarchy to get back in touch with them and call him and Sinclair home.

       “You can’t hear that?” Sinclair asked, her eyes still fixed on the slit in the windows. “It’s getting closer—it’s getting louder.”

       Farrell peered again out at the street, watching that point where he had seen movement before, where he thought he had seen a figure disappear into one of the tumbledown houses along the street. “Music?” he clarified. “I don’t—”

       Then a figure appeared, pushing its way through the undergrowth that had taken over the road in the past two hundred years. Farrell had fallen silent automatically, watching as the figure pushed through the plants. The figure wore a fustian robe in a dirt-colored brown, the hood over his head, pulled low to hide his features, but Farrell could see the rough salt-and-pepper beard that daubed his chin. He had wide shoulders and he moved with a certain heaviness—a big man, then, powerfully built. A moment later another figure appeared behind the first, this one slimmer but wearing an identical robe, hood low over the face. The robes were largely shapeless, going down past the knees like a monk’s habit, but Farrell could tell that this one was a woman from the way she moved her hips. Something glinted on the breast of the robe, a red shield like the Magistrates used to wear when they had guarded the villes, back before the fall of the baronies.

       “They’re Ullikummis’s people,” Farrell identified. “We should probably—”

       Before Farrell could finish, Sinclair was on her feet and had scampered over to the door in three quick steps. She moved like a jungle predator, her tread silent and fluid, the movement admirably economical. There was a gun there, a refitted Colt Mark IV. Sinclair checked the little eight-shot pistol swiftly, assuring herself the clip was home, and Farrell watched as she flicked the safety off.

       “Sela, I don’t think we should do anything that’s going to attract their attention,” Farrell СКАЧАТЬ