Edge of Chaos Page 11

  Chapter Eleven

  Charles Bull, Inside the Dome

  He didn’t try to hide his disgust about the cavernous Great Hall, with its marble floors and faraway walls that echoed his words back at him, dangling them there for judgement.

  In front of him, screened by a twenty-metre sheet of bullet proof glass, were the Capita Five. They were sitting along a table that reminded Charles of the last supper. A shadow obscured them, blurring his view of the masks on their faces and cloaks that hung on their shoulders.

  Nobody had ever seen the Five without their masks. Rumours spread that if one of them ever died, they vowed to disfigure the corpse’s face with acid, and each of them carried a vial in their cloaks.

  In the centre of the table was Grand Lord Ishkur, and around him were Marduk, Nabu, Sin, and Tammuz. The other four were Ishkur’s disciples, nodding at his decisions and waiting on his words. Outside of the Great Hall they all wielded power of their own in the Capita, but in here, they answered to one man.

  Their names didn’t fool Charles. Nor did the gentle heartbeat beating across the Hall, which was a psychological trick. A Capita worker was standing outside the Great Hall, beating a drum to make the sound effect. Supposedly, it unnerved people.

  The Five, underneath their masks, were people. They had bad breath, wore glasses, sported acne, and were unhappy with how their nose stuck out, or how their bodies looked. They weren’t called Ishkur or Sin. They were probably called Clive and Sue. One day he’d catch them without their disguises, and then they’d worry.

  Ishkur was the only one who bothered Charles. He watched how he acted around the Grand Lord.

  Charles stopped forty feet away from the glass. Five shadowed faces watched him.

  “The farms are ready for production,” said Ishkur. His voice was a tremor, a mini-earthquake that could tear down the Hall if he cared to raise it loud enough.

  Another, Nabu, placed his hands in front of him on the table and folded his fingers. “We need you to round up as many of the Darwin’s Children as possible.”

  You’re a few months behind the program. As usual, Charles’s initiative trumped the council’s reactionary decisions. The mouth breathers were easy to find. They were the ones who tried too hard to blend in. The ones who learned all the Capita’s pathetic slogans by heart, the ones made a show of saluting Capita soldiers. He’d become so good at finding them smelled their genetic mutation from miles away.

  It was like when he had met the family on the meadow. Lovely people. They maintained respect around him, and they wore their masks. It upset him to tear the unit apart. But within seconds of meeting them, he’d known they were DC’s.

  They tried to trick him, but they didn’t count on his savvy. Now the girl and the mother were on their way to the farms. He’d find the boy too, before long.

  How long before he could stop? All the heartbreak he’d caused, all the families he’d broken. His soul strained under the weight. He was a practical man, but extreme practicality had extreme spiritual consequences. A god, or gods, existed and they regarded him with stern eyes. They wrote his deeds in a tattered notebook, the same way he recorded the memories which made him smile.

  The family on the meadow made him happy with how content they were. It reminded him of better times, ones he fought hard to forget but all the same didn’t want to see vanish.

  He’d written a page about them in his book so that later, alone in his room, he could relive the experience. Straight after meeting them, he’d ordered the father killed and sent the mother and child to the farms. He’d stolen their happiness and written it in his book for his own selfish indulgence.

  “I wonder,” he said, not caring how much his words echoed in the chamber. “How will we be judged in history?”

  Ishkur, in the middle of the table, larger than the rest of them, spoke. “Are you having an attack of conscience, hunter?”

  “I’m wondering where my place will be in the annals of time. When they weigh the things we did.”

  “Your place is in the Dome.”

  “That is,” said Marduk on the far left. “If you can prove yourself further. You still have … part of your family, do you not?”

  “I do.”

  “And wouldn’t you like to live in the Dome?”

  It wasn’t a question of like, but a question of necessity. After everything he had done for them, and with all their power, they still wouldn’t let him in the Dome. He knew why.

  “If your daughter were no longer a variable,” they told him, “Your entry to the Dome would be a lot swifter.”

  He spat at their feet when he heard that. For the Five, those in the Dome and in the areas surrounding it weren’t people. They were numbers; resources to be shifted from one part of a map to the next. If a town needed clearing from the infected, a hundred residents would be sent with knives and clubs. If only twenty returned, who gave a damn?

  In truth, Charles didn’t enjoy his work. He didn’t agree with the principles of the Capita nor did he hate the mouth-breathers. He simply had the foresight to know it was his only option, and the ability to turn his conscience off at will.

  “I’ll round up as many as I can,” he said.

  He left the Dome and rode to the furthermost corner of Capita territory. His horse, Ken, knew the way on his own. He understood when to cross the busy stream, and that he needed to slow down at slope of a hill. Charles could have shut his eyes and let Ken guide him all the way home.

  He brought the horse to a halt in front of a cottage. The exterior walls were painted white. There used to be dozens of holes in the brickwork, but Charles filled them in to stop rats from taking residence in their attic. Despite its age it was a sturdy house, and it had been home to many a family before Charles found it.

  He loved its remoteness; if he wanted to, he could stand outside his house and shout obscenities at the sky. There’d be no complaints. His neighbours had been the infected, and his week of mercy killings shut them up.

  He held his AVS in front of him. He thought about testing the air out of curiosity, but what was the point? He was sick of pretending, sick of being part of the pantomime.

  His role in this world was the villain. If that was what it took for him to protect who he loved, then fine and dandy.

  He used to watch the news and see videos of killings and massacres, and he’d think, how are people capable of that? That was a different Charles. That was the young Charles, who joined a crowd of thousands and shouted his protest at the Oil War, and who saw morality as an absolute.

  I was such an idiot back then. Morality had a context, and a person could justify anything with a strong enough reason. He did the things he did because he needed to, because it was the only way to get himself and Inez into the Dome.

  If he was alone, would he have done the same? If he didn’t have a sick child, would he still hunt the DC’s? No. He’d retire to a place far away from the Capita, get a stable full of Kens, and grow crops and watch the seasons turn.

  He opened his fingers and let his AVS fall to the ground. He lifted his boot and brought it down as hard on the sensor, smashing the plastic and circuitry into the mud.

  He uncoiled the tail of his mask, unwinding the straps until the wind kissed his neck. He unstrapped it at the back of the head and heaved it free from his face. The breeze washed over him. He closed his eyes and drank in the unfiltered air.

  The front door of his house opened. The front wheels of Inez’s wheelchair rolled over the doorstep, and a rush of energy filled his chest. He couldn’t help the smile that spread across his face, even though his muscles strained when asked to perform that rare expression.

  She wore a yellow summer dress today, laying bare the scratches and bite-marks which covered her arms and legs. He looked her beautiful eyes – her mother’s eyes – and her blonde, curly hair. She had her mother’s face; that much was certain. There was little of Charles in the way she looked. Not now, anyway.

  When he loo
ked at the stub where her nose had been, a welling of sadness mixed with anger, producing an emotion that perplexed him. The feeling of wanting to cry, but wishing there was a wall to punch. Her half-eaten nose made him want to scream into the sky.

  “Hi daddy,” she said.

  He pressed her close to him. When they separated, he pulled a plastic bag from his pocket. The inside was splattered with blood, and a lump of meat rested in the bottom.

  “Is that for me?” she said.

  Charles nodded. “You need another dose.”

  “It’s been a month already?”

  “It has.”

  This was their life now, and the reason they could never be far away from the Dome. This was why Charles, more than most people, needed to stock the farms. Immune flesh was tricky to find, but Charles knew all the hiding places.

  Chapter Twelve

  Heather

  How long before my door bursts open and Capita soldiers stream in? The question wouldn’t leave her alone.

  Every second Eric spent in her home increased the chance of a Capita raid. The thought of abandoning him made her sick, but she couldn’t put Kim in danger. Had she done enough? Nobody else would have gone back to Cresstone to help him.

  She’d pay Wes’s price and buy his escape. If Wes wanted her food, so be it. It would set their plan back, but at least she’d have done something.

  In Kim’s bedroom, she crouched next to Eric. How could she word this without being a jerk? “Listen, Eric.”

  Eric lifted his mask and sneezed. Strips of newspaper, covered in Eric’s snot, littered the floor. Heather handed him a strip, which he wiped his red nose on.

  “You know you can’t stay here forever, right? It’s not safe for you in the Capita.”

  Eric rubbed his knees up and down. “You’re throwing me out?”

  “I’ve decided,” Heather carried on. “I’m going to-”

  Her front door shook under the pounding of a fist. Eric stood up.

  It’s him. An urge to run tugged at her. “Eric, go hide. Kim, make sure there’s nothing out of place. None of his clothes, nothing.”

  Too late. The door opened, and Charles Bull walked into her house, uninvited. “Miss Castle,” his voice sang. “I have a present for you.”

  His bulky frame filled the hallway. He smiled when he saw Heather at the top of the stairs.

  “Just walk in, why don’t you?”

  “Pardon the intrusion. But I brought you these.”

  He waved a plastic bag in the air. Little seeds danced as he shook it. He threw it like a master giving his dog a treat, and it landed a couple of steps away from Heather.

  “Charles,” she said, with a lump so large in her throat it was hard to talk. “What are you doing here?”

  To her right, in Kim’s bedroom, Eric’s face drained of color until it was chalk. Was she going to have to rush into the room and stop him fainting?

  “I was wondering if I could take a look around?” said Charles. He walked up the stairs without waiting for her answer.

  Eric’s teeth chattered as though a ghost loomed behind him, with its hands on his shoulders. Heather stared at him and made her eyes large. She hoped Eric grasped her meaning. Hide.

  She was standing on the stairs as Charles approached, and blocked his way. “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  Charles stopped midway. His pickaxe hung on his back, so heavy it would have tipped most men over.

  She glanced into Kim’s room. Eric had propped a chair against the wardrobe. A panel at the top of it, ten feet high, was big enough for him to hide in. Heather had to keep Charles away long enough to give him time to reach it.

  Charles’s eyebrows gave him the look of an angry owl. “I’m not sure when the Capita started having to explain its intentions?”

  Heather folded her arms. She tried to relax, but her skin tightened around her eyes. “What do you want with me?”

  “It’s not you, Heather. It’s the house and what’s in it.”

  In the hallway below two Capita soldiers came into view. One of them, Max Armstrong, raised an eyebrow at Heather and Charles.

  “It’s not like that, boys,” said Charles. “And if it was…would you dare tell anyone? Thought not.”

  She had to watch Charles, but she wouldn’t let the soldiers be alone with Kim. “Kim?” Heather shouted. “Come here, honey.”

  “There’s a mouth-breather boy on the loose, Heather,” said Charles, moving closer. The wood groaned under his boots. “And your questions make me suspicious.”

  “I don’t like people poking around my house”

  “All the same, I will look.”

  Six feet separated them now. Charles was two steps away from being able to see into Kim’s room. If he saw Eric, everything was lost. She and Kim would be arrested and taken to the Capita, where they’d never feel the light of the sun on their faces again. Two small steps separated her from such a fate.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why do you want the boy?” she said.

  Come on, Eric. Hurry and hide.

  Charles took another step. “It’s not for you to know why.”

  “It is, if the Capita expects me to teach their children,” said Heather. “What good is a teacher who doesn’t know the truth?”

  “We don’t want you to teach the children the truth. Teach them what we want them to believe.”

  As Charles raised his leg to take another step, Heather stared to her right. This is it.

  When the bounty hunter put his foot on the last step, the room was empty.

  Phew. The chair Eric had climbed on was propped against the wardrobe, but otherwise, the room looked normal. Kim’s bed was tidily made, and the bookcase next to it, on top of which was a ceramic jug, looked neat.

  She backed up the last step and went into Kim’s room. She moved the chair far enough away from the wardrobe to swerve suspicion.

  Charles walked through the door. He smelled of aging leather and the sweat that collected under his arms and on his forehead. His breath was sour, with a hint of tobacco.

  He put his hand on Heather’s shoulder and squeezed. Her muscles squirmed, but she fought to retain control. “You’re tense,” he said, and pinched her shoulder muscles between his thumb and index finger.

  Her carefully-built control shattered. She jerked her shoulder. Charles drew his hand away.

  “You’re making this difficult on yourself, Heather.”

  The veins on his temple bulged, ready to pop through his skin. Despite his casual tone of voice, his cheeks glowed with heat. Charles grabbed her arm and squeezed her bicep.

  She threw him off, not caring to disguise her disgust. “You’re not looking around my house,” she said.

  “I go where I please when it’s the Capita’s business.”

  A voice drifted from the bottom of the stairs. “Mum? What’s going on?”

  Charles shouted in the direction of the stairs. “It’s okay, darling. Your mother is disobeying the Capita and might have to go to prison. You can look after yourself, can’t you? You can defend yourself when the infected come for you?”

  The mask hid his face, but his eyes widened in a smile.

  She hated him more than ever in that moment. This makes him feel alive. He’s a vulture who feeds on misery and fear.

  Anger bubbled in her. The idea of him threatening her daughter made her breath catch in her throat. If only I had a gun. She could barter one from Wes. She’d point it at his stupid leather face and blow his mask off.

  She had no gun, not even a knife. Her skin itched, and blotches burned on her face.

  I’m here, and Kim is with the soldiers. But Max is there, right? And he seems…maybe not nice, but okay.

  Heather had the biggest problems. The room was a cage closing on her. She might never escape the Capita now. All because of Charles, this pathetic man.

  Anger clouded her mind. She was losing control, the same way she had in the classroom. She cou
ldn’t stop herself.

  She slapped Charles’s face. The sound of her skin meeting leather had a finality to it.

  Shit. What had she done? A force had possessed her, doomed her, and left her. Above it all, though, she felt herself smile. God, that felt good. That felt better than anything.

  Charles put his hand to his face. He stared at Heather and shook his head. Even if she apologized, there was no way he’d listen. A wall of anger guarded Charles’s mind now. Nothing she said would break it.

  Charles left the room and stood at the top of the stairs. “Max,” he shouted.