trying to see some goddamn thing. So far as I can see of anything, there’s only one other punch-drunk doolally wandering around. She got that same look in her eye. Like I said, it gets in the air.”
James rubbed his smarting leg, embarrassment forgotten. If she knew, what about Alex? Had he sensed something amiss? Somehow, James didn’t like the idea of Alex finding out. He was liable to think James’s concentration was slipping. And when anything threatened their great destiny or their mission, he was liable to start meddling.
He finished his tea and cleaned up Alice’s house awhile, dusting, setting things straight, and replacing her woodpile from the stock out in the square. Then he kissed her on the cheek and headed for the door. “I’ll visit again soon.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m too old and no good for this world as it is. Don’t need to go dragging a trailblazer like you down with me.” Now that he was at the door, she looked so much smaller, so much older, a tiny thing gnarled in the dark.
He strode back to the table, leaned over and gave her arm a squeeze. “You’re blind as a mule, too.”
Her bitter frown melted away, and then she was laughing again, blowing stale breath over him. She pinched his chin. “Get out of my house, you little shit.”
CHAPTER 6
The pigeons were everywhere. Perched upon every rooftop, fence post, and power line across all of New Canterbury. No matter how many times they were shooed and scattered, they circled back and blanketed the city all over again. It had been that same way for over a day now. Some people had started shooting them, but taking down even a dozen birds didn’t make a dent in the flock, and ammunition was precious. Even up on the ridge to the north, overlooking the city, they filled the treeline.
Robert Strong scoured the hilltop for a full five minutes before breaking cover and stepping out into the high grass. Acrid columns of smoke rose from the series of craters spaced every hundred feet along the ridge: all that remained of New Canterbury’s wind farm. He trod carefully around myriad chunks of charred shrapnel and made his way to the nearest smouldering hole. There was nothing left, not even a stump. The turbines had all been reduced to a medley of particulate glass and molten slag.
“I can’t believe it’s just gone,” Sarah whispered at his side. Two heads shorter than he, she barely reached his shoulder. His fiancée’s spectacles flashed as she turned in a wide arc, surveying the destruction. “All of it, just gone. How could they have done this?”
“Explosives. High-grade stuff.”
“Nobody’s had that kind of thing since the End.”
“Well, they got it. There’s some pretty serious stuff lying out there in depots and bunkers. All you have to know is where to look.”
She shivered. “They’re farmers.”
“They’re angry, and they’re desperate. People can do terrible things when they’re desperate.”
They were quiet for a while. Then she said, “The famine was a trigger. This is revenge. I wonder if the radio message was real at all. Maybe it was just some trick to lure the council to London, make us vulnerable.”
He didn’t reply.
They had struck without warning while Alexander had led the ambassadorial convoy to London. Most had sought shelter in the cathedral, shivering under the pews like whipped puppies. Others had barricaded themselves in their homes, sweeping their families indoors before nailing the windows shut. Others with the skills to scratch a living in the woods had fled the city altogether.
Only a handful had remained by his side. No more than half a dozen, out of eight hundred men, women, and children.
What they would do if they ran into any intruders was anyone’s guess.
They were all looking to him. Nobody said anything, but there was no mistaking the way they congregated around him. With Alexander gone and Norman in tow, and even Lucian absent, he was all they had.
But he had never expected this. At six five, his dark skin rippling with muscle, he had always been the brawn, not the brains. But, for now, there was nobody else.
Retreating up here hadn’t been his plan. He had just needed to get Sarah outside. Since the massacre out at the enemy stronghold, she had barely said a word, just sat swaddled in a pile of blankets with every candle they owned ablaze, waiting for angry hordes to come bursting through the door.