Diary of the Displaced - Book 2 - The Broken Lands
Date: 2013-11-10 00:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Element 12 Ltd

Diary of the Displaced

Book 2

The Broken lands

Glynn James

My memories have not completely gone...

It's strange. It seems as though memories that are built in, the sort of memories that you learn so well that they are instinct, have remained. But any knowledge of who I am or where I came from is still missing. I'm not sure how I can describe it. Anything about my past prior to waking up in The Corridor that I have to think about to remember, is gone.

The device must have damaged me in some way, but how, I don't know. I look at Adler and Rudy, and although they are technically dead, they still know who they are, or who they were when they were alive. They have complete recollection of most of the things that happened in their lives. I seem to have none.

I'd hoped to get answers from DogThing, and I think I pushed him too far with the barrage of questions, to no avail, though. My conversation with him was not as clear as I had first hoped. After first speaking to him when we had just escaped from The Corridor, his answers had been clear in my mind, but I soon discovered that his understanding of my questions was very vague. He wasn't even able to grasp some concepts that I considered simple.

"How did we get into The Corridor in the first place?" I had asked him.

"We just went in."

That was all he could muster, and he seemed confused at even that.

"But we got in there somehow," I pressed. "Was it a door, like the one that we escaped through?

"Door is confusing."

"But you told me to close it."

"I knew it must be closed."

"How?"

"He must not come through."

"But how did you know that it was the right escape route?"

"You knew."

"What do you mean, I knew?"

"You knew to escape through the door and you knew he would follow, and that it must be closed. I only know what you know."

"You really only understand what I understand?"

"Yes."

"So do you know who I am?"

"You are James."

"But what am I? Where do I come from?"

"From where we have been."

I could tell that he was as confused as I was, and that he didn't really understand most of what I was asking him. I stopped asking questions when he began scratching at the floor and making a low whining noise. He was uncomfortable.

"Have I angered you?"

"No, of course you haven't. I just hoped that you might be able to help me find out who I am. I was hoping to learn more."

"Did I not? You are James."

"Yes. Thank you."

I let him be and sat there quietly, staring at the wall, wondering where to go next.

It didn't take long to find another journal to write in, not even hours, let alone days. DogThing took me to a place where there was one.

"You will want your things."

I turned to him. He was sitting in the doorway of the run-down building that I had just slept in. He looked like he was frowning at me. I thought he meant the pack and the few belongings that still lay at the back of the room.

"Yes, I'll get them in a bit. I'm not sure where we are heading yet. Kind of a bit lost."

"No I mean the things you left here."

My turn to frown.

"What do you mean?"

"The things that you hid near here, long before we went into The Corridor. You knew you might want them. If you came back this way."

"I left things here?"

Now I was curious.

"Yes. It was long before we came into The Corridor. I think. Come. This way."

How could he remember that I hid something here, but he couldn't tell me who I really was? It had to be something to do with the complexity of the memory. I was sure of it. Was he also suffering from some kind of memory loss?

"Did you lose your memory too?"

"No. I don't have a good memory like you. Things go."

A good memory? I could barely remember yesterday.

I quickly packed away my stuff and stepped back out into the street. Across the road, some of the Maw that had been sleeping out on the pavement, stirred and began to wake up.

"Are we leaving already?" asked Rudy.

"DogThing wants to show me something."

Rudy and Adler looked puzzled, but didn't question me. I'd forgotten that they didn't even know that DogThing and I could talk to each other now.

I followed DogThing along the side of the road, skirting around burned out cars and piles of rubble. We turned left at a crossroads after a hundred yards or so. Across the street I could see a boarded up building, with the front door wedged closed by a plank of wood. That was where DogThing led me. I forced the plank away, drew my blade and stepped into the dim light of the shop entrance. My eyes were more comfortable in that room than they were in the bright sunlight outside. Spending so much time in the dark had left me a little sun-blind.

DogThing shuffled past me and headed to the back of the shop. He scratched at a door that was at the side of what would probably have been some sort of small storage space or staff room at one time.

"In there."

I tried the door but it was jammed shut and I eventually just kicked it in.

Dogthing hadn't been joking about a stash.

"I left this here a long time ago, you say? Not recently."

"Yes and no. We haven't been this way in a while. I don't really remember."

A rucksack was perched against the back of the small closet, next to a long brown jacket that looked like it was made of some sort of tough leather. The shoulders were reinforced with armour plates of some kind, as was one side of the chest panels and the elbows. It looked and felt like some kind of hard plastic. I didn't recognise it, but I somehow knew that it was mine, and wasn't at all surprised when it fitted me perfectly. Underneath the jacket was a pair of trousers made of the same leathery material, and some loose armour that looked as though it should strap around my lower legs.

Why had I left all this stuff behind? Why leave a stash?

It didn't end there. There were boots, long ones with toe-caps that were studded at the end. In the rucksack was a treasure trove of tools and food supplies, and lying behind the rucksack was a utility belt that made the one that I was wearing look like a kiddie's toy.

And then there were the guns.

I hadn't a clue why I would have left these behind anywhere, let alone before I went into The Corridor. Why would I have gone in there and left guns behind? Maybe there was a good reason, maybe I knew before I went in there what was likely to happen. It puzzled me.

Handguns. Four of them. Yes, four. That's too many handguns isn't it? Why did I need so many? There was even a holster for each of them, with a strap to hold them in place. Two of them attached neatly to the sides of the utility belt, but it took me a lot of messing around to figure out where the other two were supposed to go. I finally settled on strapping them around my thighs so that they sat just below the two on my belt. There were worn marks on the trousers that suggested I had chosen correctly.

I picked up each of the guns and felt very strange as I did my best to check that each of them was in working order.

How did I know? Instinct. Had to be. There was no other way to explain it.

Not one of the guns had an ammunition clip, just some kind of built in mechanism and a clip-in battery no bigger than a cigarette lighter. These guns didn't need ammunition and they didn't fire solid bullets. It didn't make sense to me but I knew that it was correct. I couldn't even remember ever holding a gun, but they felt comfortable in my hands, as though they had been worn away by my using them over time, or maybe they were made for me.

After ten minutes or so, I left the shop and stepped back out into the road with all of my new found gear, which had apparently been put here by me.

Adler was standing a few feet away and looked bemused as I walked back out into the sunlight. Then he saw the guns and frowned. Rudy caught up with us. I don't think he wanted to leave the birds nest behind.

"Where did all that lot come from?"

I nodded my head at the door to the shop.

"In there. It would seem that I left all this behind when I went into The Corridor."

"Oh...but how did you know? I thought you couldn't remember anything. Are your memories coming back?"

"No." I smiled and looked down at DogThing. He was sitting on the pavement a few feet away.

"He told me."

Adler looked surprised.

"DogThing told you? You can talk to him?"

"I can now, yes. It would appear that he was with me all along. I couldn't hear him or understand him very clearly at the time, when we were in The Corridor. Not until we destroyed the mirror. I occasionally used to hear a voice talking to me in my head, but it never occurred to me that it was him. Out here we can talk to each other. Sort of."

"That's incredible," said Adler, with a smile. "You can actually communicate with the Maw! Or is it just him? What about the rest of them?"

"Only with DogThing. He is different to the rest. We're connected in some way. He says that I raised him from when he was a puppy."

"Amazing. But of course that explains so much." Adler began pacing the pavement. "He has followed you ever since the two of you met in The Corridor, but what you are saying is that he was there with you right from the start. That explains why, does it not? The other Maw, they were native, or at least had lived there a long time. It explains why he even looks different."

"He does?"

"Have you not noticed how the other Maw have bigger eyes? They are struggling with the sunlight and always hiding in the shadows."

Adler pointed at DogThing.

"He isn't having any problems with it."

"I don't like the dark."

I laughed. I'm sure Adler thought I was laughing at his comment because he joined in.

"It's not funny."

"We're not laughing at you my friend," I said, giving DogThing's head a quick pat.

Then I realised something.

"DogThing, can you understand what the others are saying?"

"Not really. Some. They are not as clear as you."

"How so?"

Adler and Rudy looked confused. To them I suppose it was a one sided conversation.

"Can he?" asked Rudy.

DogThing barked. I'd never heard him bark before. It sounded more like a human's hoarse cough. Nearby, some of the other Maw jumped at the noise.

"He says he can, sort of, but not clearly. But then most of the time he can't really understand me either."

"What do you mean?" asked Adler.

"I've asked him all manner of questions, but he can't grasp some of what I'm asking. I asked him about the door, and our escape, but door was beyond his understanding."

"Well, he is a dog," said Rudy.

"What?"

"He is a dog," he repeated. "Would a dog know what a door was?"

"Why, yes," said Adler. "Of course, you are right, Rudy. You may be able to converse with DogThing on some telepathic level, but that doesn't mean he understands you any better than any other dog, or Maw, would. His mind is still that of a canine, of sorts. He may know what a door does, but not necessarily what it is."

"Oh," I said, shaking my head. It was obvious really.

The Maw had been on edge ever since we left The Corridor, always keeping to the shadows and out of the sun. Most of them had been hiding in the ruined buildings along the street. I saw movement in the ruins directly across from us, and recognised one of the bigger Maw, just edging out of the entrance. Most of the buildings didn't have doors or windows anymore, just empty concrete shells rising floor after floor. Some of them must have been ten floors high at least, and a few of the ones that I could see in the distance were easily ten times that. Huge, monstrous, empty shells that would once have been home to thousands of people were now just home to the sparse wildlife.

I couldn't imagine how long this place had been left here, abandoned. It was probably decades or maybe even centuries. Even the tallest of the buildings had a web-like skin of overgrown creeping plants reaching nearly to the top. Just along the road, at the very bottom of a tall building, the roots of one of the creeping plants had grown to such a size that I could have mistaken it for a tree trunk. It was easily five feet thick and had broken up the pavement and even part of the road around it.

"So where now?" asked Rudy.

I didn't answer straight away.

"You know, I have no idea."

I looked either way along the street, wondering which way to go. No clues. Now that we had escaped from The Corridor I had no goals, no aims.

Then I noticed the movement. It was a long way off, down the street that led away from the bigger buildings, but it was moving very fast towards us. DogThing must have noticed it at the same time, because his head shot round to face it and he lowered himself to the ground, growling. Then the other Maw reacted. I could see them taking positions in the doorways of all of the surrounding buildings.

Adler and Rudy looked in different directions, confused.

"A kre'esh"

"A what?" I whispered back.

"A kre'esh. Nua'lath's lizard pets. It must have picked up our scent, or your scent. If it sees us then Nua'lath will know where we are. We will be hunted."

I crouched down and waited for it to get nearer, and yet again an instinct that I didn't know I had, made me draw one of the handguns and take aim.

Crack.

The sound was much quieter than I anticipated. I had expected a loud bang as the gun went off.

At least a hundred yards away the creature tumbled to the ground, sliding along the road, to lie motionless. A cloud of dirt and dust rose into the air. Three Maw darted out of the building closest to it and dragged it back into their refuge in the ruins.

I stood up, holding the gun out in front of me. I don't remember ever firing a weapon before, let alone being a good shot. As I stared at the gun, a glowing, blue indicator on the top lit up and then turned white.

Where the hell did I learn to fire a gun?

"We should go, there will be more. They are never alone, always a pack."

"How many?"

"I don't understand. There will be many."

"Okay. You were here when we went through the door. Do you know where we came from before going to The Corridor? I mean the last place we went to. Can you lead us there?"

"Yes, it is that way."

DogThing turned and took a few steps towards the direction of the huge buildings, towards what I suspected was the centre of the city.

"How far?"

"All the way through, and out into the big sand. Many rests."

"Then let's get going."

I explained to Adler and Rudy and they agreed that we should get moving. As we made our way along the street heading further into the city, I wondered if the Maw would come with us. They did, pouring out of the surrounding buildings and following us along the street as we weaved our way through wreckage and fallen walls.

"There are many minions in these dark places."

"Minions?"

"The dead ones that walk again."

"The same as the ones in The Corridor?"

"Yes, some, but others are different. The plague carriers, the ones that make the humans sick and die and become one of them. They are also here. Somewhere."

It was a haunting sight walking through the streets of the city. As we made our way towards the tallest buildings where there was even more wreckage, I saw countless ruined and empty shops. The remains of a long dead civilisation were everywhere I looked. I've never seen so many skeletons. In places they littered the streets or lay crumbling inside rusted vehicles.

We searched some of the shops as we passed, but there were no supplies to be found anywhere. Everything of value had been picked clean a long time ago.

Worse than the remains of the dead were the bodies that hung from lampposts and buildings, strung up by ropes or chained to fire escapes. I suspected that these people had been executed, and it made me ache with wondering who they were and why they were slain so brutally. Were they looters? Were they criminals that the local populace put down, taking the law in to their own hands when civilisation began to fall apart? Had something more monstrous done that to them?

I guessed that I would never know.

By the time it started to get dark we had travelled quite a way into the city, and the tall buildings stood around us on either side of the road. Immense, empty shells covered in the same creeping plants, rows upon rows of glassless and hollow windows, gaping holes of darkness that could hide all manner of hideous creatures or haunting scenes that I really didn't want to see.

Day 40

I had expected to be woken during the night by the noise of a fight, but there had been nothing. Whether or not the Maw had been keeping any danger away, I didn't know. I still thought that I would have heard something. DogThing's warning about the plague walkers had me on edge. It had all of us on edge. The closest I can think of to his description were the very first zombies that I encountered during my first days in The Corridor. They had been different to many of the creatures that I had seen after that. Most of the zombies in The Corridor were more like twisted and tortured abominations than the walking, rotten things that I now envisioned occupying the dark recesses of every building in the city. I was just waiting for them to come pouring out of the darkness, groaning for my blood, or whatever it was they hungered for.

It rained heavily, a torrential downpour that pummelled the ground and the buildings around me. The street outside had become a river that ran strongly enough to sweep a man away. Water poured through gaps in the structure around me, leaving few places dry. The Maw that shared the building that I had chosen to sleep in had made their way up onto the second floor. I joined them, huddling against the wall next to one of the empty spaces where a window would have once been. There was no way that we would be able to leave whilst this weather kept up.

How could the street be so dusty and dirty if it rained like this? Shouldn't it all be washed away?

Day 41

The rain stopped during the night, and when I awoke this morning most of the flooding had subsided. Somehow all of the water that had deluged the city overnight had drained away. As I leaned out of the window and looked up the street, I could see that there were small pools dotted about everywhere, but most of the flooding had gone.

I hauled my pack onto my back and set off down the stairwell, then out into the road. DogThing had slept on the stairs not far from where I had made camp for the night, and he shook his head groggily before following me out.

"Everything good?" I asked as I passed him on the stairs.

"Good."

I noticed that Rudy and Adler were not there. When I had gone up the stairs to the second floor, they had stayed out on the road. I sat watching them from the window for a while and the river obviously made no difference to them. They seemed to find great amusement at being able to stand in a torrent of rain that must have been more than a foot deep, the water rushing past them at an incredible speed. I vaguely remember them still wandering around out there when I finally drifted off to sleep.

I looked in either direction and called out a few times, but there was no answer.

Should I have kept moving and hope that they were somewhere nearby? I hesitated, and stood in the middle of the road as DogThing sat on the broken pavement a few feet away.

Finally I saw them, far away, down the road, as they came out of one of the buildings. Rudy stopped and waved at me.

After a few minutes I caught up with them at a crossroads in the street. The road opened up into a large square, surrounded by buildings that might once have been huge shops. All around the square were smashed up and rusted vehicles, many with the skeletons still sitting in the seats. It was something that puzzled me. What had killed these people so fast that they hadn't even managed to get out of their cars? I wondered if that wasn't the case, and that they had locked themselves in their vehicles to avoid what was outside.

The fronts of many of the empty shops had crumbled and collapsed, spilling out broken masonry, and dry, splintered wood onto the paved ground. I shivered as I noticed a pair of skeletal feet sticking out from underneath a pile of bricks just a few feet away from me. Had that person been crushed, or had they died long before the building covered them?

Rudy and Adler were staring wide-eyed at something that I couldn't see until I got nearer to them. As I approached, it appeared as though they were looking into open space, but then I got closer and the object of their fascination came into view.

It was a hole.

This one was nothing like any of the tiny holes that I had seen after the storm in The Corridor. This was much larger, big enough that I could have walked through it if I chose, but the view on the other side caused me to step back.

Flames burned in the dark place beyond the hole and the fire was so violent that I was surprised that it didn't lash out at us. An endless blaze of inferno rippled across a landscape that was blackened and scorched.

I heard a quiet growl behind me and glanced back to see that DogThing had caught up. He was shuffling around uncomfortably.

"Strange isn't it?"

It was Adler. Rudy was just standing there shaking his head.

"The heat doesn't even travel through to this side, but I wouldn't want to step through it."

I wondered how long they had been standing there, watching the fire burn, and it occurred to me that I hadn't known that Adler and Rudy could even feel heat or cold.

"When did you find this?" I asked, stepping sideways to see if I could see more of the landscape at a different angle.

"Last night whilst you were asleep," said Adler. "Rudy and I decided that with the entire Maw pack around, you were safe to be left alone, so we decided to take a wander, have a look around. There are more of them, dotted about, holes, I mean, but this one is the biggest by far."

"They all seem to lead to the same place," said Rudy.

"This burning place," said Adler.

I peered through the hole again, trying to make out any kind of detail through the flames that might have given me a clue as to where it was, but I couldn't recognise any of it. Visibility was so distorted and blocked by the fire that seemed to be consuming everything.

Then I saw movement amongst the flames. It was distant, but it was there.

"What's that?"

I pointed.

"Oh, yes. There is that as well," said Rudy. "We couldn't figure out what it was. It hasn't come close enough for us to make it out amongst the flames. It's been wandering around all the time and I'm certain I saw it through one of the other holes, but Adler doesn't think that possible. Not the same one."

Adler shrugged. "That the holes are all connected to a single other place is curious enough, but that they could all be close enough to show the same location just seems a little unlikely."

I took a step back, a feeling of loathing somehow creeping under my skin. Something was very wrong with what was moving around in there.

"How in hell's name does anything manage to survive in that?"

"It is quite feasible that a creature could exist, whose make up and physiology is so different to ours that the fire could be their natural environment. It would be highly irregular, but not entirely impossible."

The creature, if that was what it was, was now moving closer to the hole. I could make out a humanoid shape, but it didn't move like a human would. It stumbled around and its steps were jerky and sharp.

"It's coming nearer," said Adler. "Maybe we will see it this time." He stared through hole, oblivious to the danger that my instincts were now screaming about.

Stumbling, clumsy steps carried the apparition slowly towards us, until it was within a few feet of the hole, and then the horror of what was staring back at us took hold of me, and by the reactions of Rudy and Adler, they saw it too. I took yet another step backwards as I heard the growls of DogThing getting louder behind me.

"James, get away," stuttered Rudy as he backed away from the hole.

Adler didn't move. "Wait, we don't even know if the creature can even get through the hole, or even see us."

It could see us. Or in the very least it could see me. The skeletal inferno was staring directly at me with piercing, cold, white eyes that I felt would burn their way into my soul if I stayed there much longer. It was so humanlike that I swore it might once have been a person, except all that remained now were bones, blackened but somehow glowing. Was this hell itself that I was staring at? Was this the fiery abyss for those who were to burn forever as their punishment? Was the creature staring back at me through the hole once a living person who was now condemned to burn forever?

Then it stepped through the hole.

"It might not be hos..." said Adler, but he was cut off as the searing heat burst from the creature and blasted into our world, behind me I heard the sound of something catching fire and over to my left a few pieces of scattered wooden debris turned black and burst into flame.

The heat was staggering.

I vaguely heard Adler shouting over the tremendous noise that erupted all around me. A shape moved past me quickly. It was Rudy, heading away from the flames and the heat that now seemed to be engulfing everything.

Then it was gone, leaving the crackling sound of the fires that were already burning around us.

I opened my eyes, stunned, and looked around. Adler and Rudy were standing a few feet away, looking as shocked as I felt. DogThing was crouched by my side, panting, with steam rising from his fur. I was crouched on the floor.

"That was close."

Over near where the hole had been was a leg, or at least the blackened and glowing bones from a leg. Smoke was rising from it like it would a camp fire that had just been put out.

I looked down, frowning, and I noticed that one of my guns was lying on the ground next to where I was now kneeling. Somehow I had collapsed to the ground, and in my left hand I held the compass key tightly, so tight that my knuckles were pale and blood now trickled down my arm.

Something had happened as I fell to the ground. As much as I tried to comprehend it, I couldn't. Somehow I had acted on instinct once again. Without even thinking about it, I had pulled out the key and closed the hole.

I wished that I could remember how.

For a while, no one said a word, and I was aware of the Maw moving around us, but my mind was cloudy and confused.

Finally I got a grasp of myself.

"I'm going to bottle up some of the rain water and then we should head out again," I said. "I'd like to get out of this place today if we can."

Rudy nodded.

We didn't get out of the city that day. Weaving in and out of the ruins slowed me down and about five miles or so later through the ruins of the city we found a building that still had some doors intact, so I made camp again and blocked up the door, leaving DogThing on guard outside. I tried to persuade him in, but he was stubborn. As the sun began to drop behind the skyline of the city, the rain came again, and the streets flooded as they had before.

Still no sign of any of the plague walkers.

Day 42

I woke up with a stinking headache, wrapped the towel that I'd been using as a pillow around my head and sat there, sweating, hoping it would go away, or someone would come and take me away. Eventually I gathered up my stuff and pulled away all of the junk blocking the doorway. DogThing was on the hood of a rusted car just across the street and was already sitting waiting for me when I finally managed to unblock the door and step out onto the street.

Adler and Rudy had been investigating some of the buildings during the night and I followed them down the road to a run-down supermarket that still had an almost intact front. The main door was rusted shut and I pulled hard on it for about five minutes before it broke free and nearly fell on me.

It was dark in there, but there was just enough light coming in through the broken windows that I was able to pick my through rows and rows of shelving and stacks of old goods. The place stank of old, dried up food and something even worse that I didn't try to identify. The floor was littered with broken glass and bits of ceiling tiles that had cracked and broken, bottles were strewn across the floor. Everywhere I stepped there was something to avoid.

At the back of the shop was what they had brought me there for. Most of the tins of food on the shelves were cracked and useless, but on one of the top shelves was a whole row of canned soup, untouched and potentially still edible.

I looked up and down all of the aisles and finally found what I was looking for next. Near the front of the shop, hidden behind a collapsed shelf was a stack of small, wheeled shopping bags. They were the kind that came with a handle to pull them along with. I took the least damaged, and threw my old rucksack into the bottom, and then wheeled the thing back round to the cans, loading it with everything that looked useable.

Also found a small box of disposable cigarette lighters and a stack of musty but still clean towels.

Then I noticed the hardware section of the shop. There were knives, cutlery, cooking pans, everything, stacked up high. By the time I pushed the trolley back out onto the street the trolley was nearly full. It would slow me down even more trying to haul this thing through the ruined streets, but I wouldn't last very long otherwise.

Rudy and Adler had gone back outside during all of this and were waiting for me out on the street.

Rudy grinned as I stepped out into the sunlight.

"We thought you'd find a lot of stuff in there. We really did look all over the place, but a lot of what we found didn't look to be much use."

"We also found a few things that we are best avoiding," said Adler. He pointed up the street to a huge shop front that looked like it might have been some kind of furniture store. "In there, on the second floor are dozens of what look like zombies. They are just lying around on the floor or standing still looking into thin air. They didn't notice us, though we didn't try to go too close. We didn't want to wake them from whatever slumber they were in."

Plague walkers.

"Right," I said. "Let's get out of here then."

"How far do you think it is to the edge of the city?" he asked, as I walked away.

I was just about to answer that I had no idea, when I heard a clattering noise nearby.

I span around, looking to where the noise had come from, but there was nothing there.

DogThing sniffed the ground, but looked puzzled.

"I can't sense anyone."

Another noise right behind me, near where several cars were parked along the side of the road.

I reacted too slowly and a moment later I was standing in the middle of the street with the end of a double barrelled shotgun pointing at my chin.

"Easy now," said the stranger. "Nobody do anything rash and no one needs to get hurt."

DogThing growled and crouched down low, ready to pounce. Adler and Rudy stood perfectly still, both with shocked expressions. I could hear the movement of the Maw around us as they surrounded us, but it made no difference. I was still at the mercy of whoever held the gun.

I couldn't see all of his face, only his eyes. He was wearing what looked like a long leather duster coat similar to my own and a brown Stetson hat that was worn and ripped. He wasn't carrying just one shotgun, but two, both of them double barrelled, both of them pointing straight at me.

He shifted his weight and looked slowly around.

I just stood there, perfectly still, with a handgun in each hand, but neither of them pointing in a direction that was useful. I wasn't aware that I had even drawn them.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"I think I'll be the one who asks the questions for now if you don't mind. Now if I pull this away from your face are you going to be nice? One flick of this trigger and you won't have a head anymore, but that isn't what I'd really like to happen."

"Then what do you want to happen?"

Something moved on the edge of my vision. It was distant and barely noticeable, but I had to fight back the urge to turn away from the man that now held me at gunpoint. Something was moving towards us, and fast, but it seemed that no one else had noticed it.

"Danger is coming."

"Well, I was kind of hoping that we could sort this out amicably..." he said, but was cut off mid sentence as I shouted.

"Get down!"

I dived to the side as the kre'esh tore between us. I had only just in time recognised what was approaching. It was so fast that I almost hadn't reacted quickly enough, but I dived one way and the stranger leapt back towards the nearest car. The kre'esh barrelled across the road and collided with some of the Maw, sending them all, including the kre'esh, tumbling to the ground.

Then everything went crazy.

The air shifted around me and I rolled sideways, coming back up just as another kre'esh bolted through the space that I had just occupied. I wasn't fast enough with my gun, but the stranger was, and as the creature raced towards him, he lowered a shotgun and blasted it from barely three feet away. The creature exploded into a mass of flying body parts that splattered the ground and the car next to me. I looked directly across at the stranger, who was now leaning, wide-eyed against one of the car wrecks.

I span around and looked along the street to where the kre'esh had come from, just as another leapt up onto the top of the car next to me a lashed out at me with its teeth. This time I didn't hesitate, and raised my gun and shot the thing in the face. I hadn't known up until that point if I even had the courage to stand and fight with these new weapons, but it seemed that instinct was more powerful that courage. It flew backwards just as two more kre'esh came leaping over the car, bearing down on me. The roof of the car buckled under their weight and a single intact window exploded into shards of glass that scattered across the ground.

I raised the other gun and fired, knowing that the second kre'esh would surely have me. The first kre'esh screeched and fell off the back of the car as the other bore down on me, but a hard shove on my shoulder sent me stumbling sideways and down onto the pavement amongst the glass as several large, black Maw collided with the kre'esh in mid air. I barely saw them vanish over the other side of the car, taking the second kre'esh with them, as I hit the ground.

I hit that ground hard, and tried to stumble back to my feet, crouching behind the car again as DogThing's friends poured over the area. The street on the other side of the car that was protecting me became a mass of teeth and claws as I realised that there weren't just a couple of kre'esh, but dozens of the damn things.

A shotgun blast went off behind me, and I span round again just in time to fire two shots straight into the kre'esh that had knocked the stranger to the ground and was about to bite down on him. The man hauled the dead body off, grabbed the shotgun that had been knocked from his grasp and raced over the gap between us, to join me by the car.

Another kre'esh managed to break free from the battle and jumped over the car towards us, but we were both ready and it was sent flying back into the fray by the blast of a shotgun and my handguns.

More kre'esh were rushing down the street towards us in what appeared to be an endless stream of the glistening, black nightmares.

Two of the kre'esh leapt clean over the ruckus that was blocking the road and both the stranger and I ducked down behind the car as they came crashing into the clearing. One of them hit the ground and tumbled away, not getting up quick enough before I shot off two blasts into its side, sending it crashing into one of the cars opposite. It still jumped up and made a dash for us, but DogThing sped past us and clamped his jaws on its neck. The thing thrashed and screamed but DogThing kept it pinned down until one of the black Maw jumped over me and landed on top of it, crushing the creature with its weight.

That didn't stop the other one, though. It landed hard, but on all fours, and darted around the back of a car as the stranger blasted away with his shotguns. Another Maw chased after it, but the kre'esh was faster, and as it came thundering around the other side of the car and raced straight towards me I dropped my two handguns that were still re-charging and grabbed for the other two, but I knew I wasn't going to be fast enough.

I rolled sideways, desperately throwing every bit of strength I had into getting out the creature's way.

A shotgun blast behind me made my ears ring and I felt the creature hit the ground barely a foot away from me.

Then it was over.

The whole fight had lasted for only a few seconds, but it had seemed like hours as time appeared to slow down.

I stayed down on the ground, breathing hard and watching the stranger just a few feet away from me doing the same.

He looked over at me.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Yes, you?"

He nodded again. "I'm all good here."

There was quiet for a few minutes before he spoke again. Only the noise of the Maw moving around us broke the silence.

"I have been travelling the roads of this land for years and I've never seen anyone stupid enough to be inside one of the cities other than myself."

"We were just leaving."

He nodded, still getting his breath back.

"Leaving from where? What were you doing here? What did you find here?"

"Nothing. We found nothing."

The stranger didn't take his eyes off of me.

I wasn't sure that I wanted to tell him the truth, but I couldn't think of a good lie, and we had just saved each other's lives.

"We arrived here, through a door."

"A door? What kind of door?"

"A portal. A gate."

He squinted at me.

Around us the Maw were gathering in large numbers. For a moment I saw the stranger's eyes give away a hint of fear.

"You know how to move between worlds?"

I took a deep breath.

"No not really. It was by accident."

"I don't want any trouble," he said looking around. At least twenty of the big, black Maw were watching him. I'd have wet myself if that had been me, but although I could see the fear in his eyes, he was still holding it together.

"Me neither," I said.

I nodded at DogThing.

"Ask them to back off."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"It is done."

The Maw backed away and relaxed a little. Some of them broke off and headed back towards the buildings that they slept in. Others began dragging the bodies of the kre'esh away.

The stranger heaved a sigh of relief and holstered his shotguns.

"Thank you for that. And, well, we already established that neither of us particularly likes the local fauna. Any reason why we can't get along?" he asked.

"That would be good," I said.

I holstered both of my handguns and then offered him my hand.

"James Halldon. Pleased to meet you."

He glanced at my hand and hesitated, but then he shook it.

"Reginald Weldon. Happy to meet you also, James. You can call me Reg."

Reg leaned back against the rusted remains of the car that had been our cover during the fight. He took off his hat and the scarf that had been tied round his face and for the first time I got to see what he looked like. He was older than I expected. His face was wrinkled and worn as though he had seen years of troubles, and his eyes looked tired. He hadn't shaved for a while, and like me, he sported a scruffy beard and a moustache. What was strange was that all of his hair was almost white, as though he was many years older than he really looked.

"Tell me, friend," he said, "I need to know if you can really move through those portals. Can you make them appear?"

I shook my head.

"We have done before, and that's how we got here, but I don't know how to create them, at least I haven't figured out how to, yet."

He looked disappointed.

"Where do you come from? I mean where did you come from?"

I hesitated to answer.

"We escaped from somewhere that was dangerous."

Reg laughed out loud.

"Well you haven't landed yourself somewhere safe now, this place is dangerous too."

"Trust me," I said, shaking my head. "It can't be as bad."

"You give it a couple more days and see if you still think that."

I sat there, trying hard to think of something to ask the first living person I had seen in ages.

"What about you? Why are you here?"

He stared at the ground, his eyes slightly glazed as though his mind is far away, remembering.

"Oh, that's one long, long story. I'm looking for my wife. She disappeared a long time ago and I've been tracking her down ever since. This is where she came, through a portal like the one I also came through, but it's been so long that her trail is hard to follow, and it sometimes takes me to places where no one should ever go. I also never came from this world."

Reg looked up at me.

"What about you James? Where are you headed?"

"Nowhere really. I had an accident of some kind that means I can't remember my past. I don't really know who I am. I suppose I'm headed anywhere that might give me some clues."

I look over at DogThing

"My furry friend over there is leading me to where we came to this place once before, where there might be some answers, but other than that I'm lost."

"You can talk to your wolves? I guessed that you had some kind of control over them, but talk to them?"

I laughed.

"Not all of them. Just him."

Reg looked over at DogThing, who was sitting on the pavement opposite us. DogThing started shifting around as though he was uncomfortable with the attention.

"And, which way is he taking you?"

I pointed along the main street.

"Out to the desert. Where after that, I don't know. He seems to know where to go though."

Reg stood up.

"Well, it looks like we're heading in the same direction for the time being. What do you say we travel together?"

I looked at Adler and Rudy. Reg glanced over at them.

"I don't see why we can't travel together. It will be nice to have someone new to talk to," said Adler.

Rudy looked warily at Reg.

"I'm okay with it if you promise not to point those guns at James again, though I can't say that I trust you."

"I won't be doing that again," said Reg. "I was just defending myself. I hid between the vehicles when you two came by, hoping to stay unnoticed, but then those wolves and James came along and I knew I wasn't going to stay hidden for long."

I looked over towards Adler and Rudy.

"So what were you two up to before?"

Rudy's eyes seemed to light up, he grinned.

"We're not bound to the compass anymore, at least we don't think we are," he said. "We realised it whilst you were asleep. I thought it was strange how I could see much further after we had left The Corridor, but I figured it was just because we were in a different place. Then when you went to fetch the stuff that you had stashed in the shop and I was left listening to the birds sing, I realised. You were hundreds of yards away from me, much farther than you had ever been before and I wasn't being dragged away."

"I also noticed it," Adler cut in. "When you were asleep last night and the rain was coming down, we wandered off. We kept a visual check on where we were, of course, so that we didn't get lost, but I wasn't even thinking about it. I just presumed that we would be still bound to the compass, so getting lost was really a moot issue. We got further and further away and I realised that the rules had changed. I must admit I panicked a little when the thought occurred to me that we would need to be sure we could find you again."

"So you are free."

It was a statement rather than a question.

"Yes," said Rudy.

We made our way slowly through the streets. DogThing was in front with some other Maw, guiding us. He stopped at each junction and sniffed the ground, looking around until he decided which way to go. I trailed behind him, with Reg at my side, both of us with weapons ready, watching the streets for trouble. Rudy and Adler followed behind us, chattering all the time, and behind them trailed the rest of the Maw pack.

I could have sworn that the Maw pack was getting bigger, and that there were some new ones, with different markings that I hadn't seen before. I shrugged it off. I didn't really know exactly how many of them came out of The Corridor with us.

"So do you know where it is that you are heading next?" I asked Reg.

"Yes, well, roughly. I found some clues in the last settlement I was in, weeks ago."

"So there are settlements? People alive here?"

"Yes, there are some. They're dotted all over the place and mostly hidden away, avoiding the attention of the things that still walk and crawl this land."

"Anyway, I found a clue that she had left the town maybe thirty years ago and joined a coven of some kind. It took me a while to get directions, but out of this city and across the desert there is supposed to be a range of mountains. At the foot of the mountains is a forest. I was told that there was once a settlement of some kind in those woods, near a city that had been abandoned a long time ago, and that they traded sometimes with the coven. It's the best lead I've had so far."

"What sort of coven? Like a religious group?"

"Yes, sort of. An old man in Rockroad, the settlement I left, said that the Sisters of Rahl, that's what the coven is called, travelled through the settlement and they took several other women with them. Not by force, but they left all the same. He said that his wife was offered to go with them, but she stayed to marry him, and they had told her that if ever she wanted to join them that she should travel to the mountains, to the Narrowfang as they call the forest. I thought it was a strange name for a forest, but that old guy said that it was supposed to be because of the shape of the woods if you saw them from the mountains. Anyway, his wife left him in the end because the coven still haunted her and she felt an uncontrollable urge to join them. So she went after them. He said that he followed her, and found the settlement, but he never found out where the coven was and never found his wife again."

"Poor man."

"Yeah, but well, there are a lot of sad stories in the world if you take the time to listen, and that's without the old stories of the days before the invasion."

"Invasion?"

"The invasion. The time when Nua'lath and his minions stormed across Gaia. Destroying and enslaving everything in their path. Billions of people once lived on this planet. I'd be surprised if there were even few hundred thousand left. The most I've seen in my years of travelling is a few scattered towns hidden away with a few hundred or maybe a thousand people in them. Even all these years on from the invasion, the creatures of Nua'lath's horde still ravage this land and prevent anyone from rebuilding something from the ruins. Too many people get caught out every year, or a town gets overwhelmed by shamblers."

Nua'lath. That name again. CutterJack.

“I’ve met Nua'lath, though I know him by another name, CutterJack.”

Reg stopped walking and turned to me. He looked shocked.

“You’ve met the creature?”

“Yes, that’s where we just came from. We escaped from his prison.”

“I didn’t even know he had been imprisoned, all I ever heard was how he led his armies across countless worlds.”

“I didn’t know what he was until after we had escaped,” I replied, “I still don’t, really.”

"What's a shambler?" I asked.

"A shambler? Well, they are basically dead people who have been killed by other shamblers. They spread a disease through their blood. It somehow brings their victims back to life after they die. If you can call it any kind of life. The disease kills pretty quickly if the wounds don't. Well, you end up with a walking corpse that is just as contagious as the last. Whole cities got overrun with the damn things in the early days, now, every now and then someone runs across a few of them and gets themselves bitten, and then stupidly goes back home hoping to get help, ends up turning the whole damn town into shamblers."

Plague walkers.

"And these Sisters of Rahl. What are they all about?" I asked.

"Oh, I don't know enough about them yet, only that they are a community of only women, and that they live up in those mountains somewhere. I've heard that they don't deal with men very kindly, but I have to believe that they must be decent in some way. Marie would never have joined them if they weren't. There are rumours I've heard about them being mystics and mind readers, and also tales of them killing men, but I don't know if any of that is true and I have to risk that if I'm to find my wife."

"I guess we will find out."

Reg smiled at me.

"You're planning on travelling that far with me?"

"Well I don't have a lot of leads about my past at the moment. If you are willing to travel with us to where DogThing is leading us, so that I can at least try and find out something from there, then I reckon the least I can do is travel that bit further and go find these Sisters with you."

"I'd be glad for the company."

"I must admit I'm also curious. You never know, they may even be able to help me. I need to regain my memories, and if they are mind readers they might be able to tell me at least something that I don't know."

Reg nodded.

"There is that."

It was nearly dark when we left the city. The relief was obvious in everybody. Even the Maw seemed to be more relaxed as they spread out across the dry, barren land either side of the highway.

There was a rundown building that looked like it had been some kind of factory, just a quarter of a mile or so from where the city buildings ended. We split up, Reg going one way around the building and I went the other, checking between the piles of trash and rubble and inside the half dozen rusted cars for unwelcome inhabitants. Nothing. The building itself didn't look like it would provide much of a defence if it came to it, but the Maw had settled down in small groups, completely surrounding the ruin and the area around it, so we cleared the inside and set up camp. Reg even lit a fire.

I spent an hour or so telling Reg everything that I could remember from our time in The Corridor. It was strange recounting it again and I was surprised just how much of it I could remember. I didn't even have to get the first journal out of my rucksack.

"So, are you going to tell me a bit more about yourself?" I asked. "I can't really tell you much more about me. No memory and all that."

"Sure, well, where do I start? I reckon I'll cut to the why and how I ended up here. Not enough time to recount my whole life story. That's maybe a tale for another time."

Reg's Tale

As I said before, my wife disappeared, just vanished right in front of me when I was only a young man, and I've spent the rest of my life trying to find out where she went to, but it took nearly dying to actually get somewhere. See, I'm a hundred and twelve years old.

Well, when I was one hundred and two years old, I was dying of a cancer. I was sitting on a bench out in the middle of the grounds of my house, in a spot where Marie used to sit. You see I eventually did find where she vanished to all those years ago. A man named Laurence had made a deal with a demon of some kind and stole her away from me, or so he said. It was decades before I finally found out about it and tracked him down. But when I got there, she had disappeared again and Laurence didn't know where she had gone either. Well, it turned out that Laurence wasn't even what I thought he was. He wasn't human at all and there hadn't been a demon to make a deal with. He was the demon. That was another thing that I didn't find out until I was nearly dead.

Many years before, when I was a young man, a man named Andre had come into my life. Now he was a traveller, a traveller that could go across worlds and possible through time for all I knew. Well, on that day, as I sat dying out in my garden, he showed up again. Right in the spot where I suspected there was some kind of magical door that my wife had travelled through, and one that I couldn't open.

That door just opened right in front of me. I tried as best I could to struggle to my feet. I had to get through there and follow her somehow, but I was too weak and nearly dead and I just collapsed on the grass.

Then Andre stepped through the door and the door closed.

"You're still alive," he said to me. "Good."

Then I blacked out. I'd passed unconscious to the world. When I came round I felt sick as anything. I had never felt so bad in my whole life. Every muscle in my body was screaming at me.

I was lying in my bed in the house and Andre was sitting in the chair by the window.

"Just lie down and don't try to move. The feeling will pass. You will feel sick over the next few weeks, but then you will feel better," he said.

"What happened? I passed out."

"Yes, you did, well actually you died."

"I what?"

"You died, but don't worry. I fixed that."

"You fixed it?"

I couldn't get my brain around that.

"How?"

"I gave you a dose of a drug that will change you."

"Change me? How?"

"You'll become like me."

It took a while for it to all sink in, but as the sickness passed over the next couple of weeks, Andre told me all about what he had done to me.

They're called The Resistance, you see, the organisation that he belonged to. And now that he had given me this serum or A-17 as he called it, I was one of them. He had given me my life back. A-17 is some strange concoction that stays in your body and doesn't ever go away. It fights all diseases, reverses the aging process, all manner of outlandish and godly things. It's hard to grasp. But that A-17 stuff is why I'm so old and yet I have the strength of a young man again. And that won't ever change.

It's an immortality drug.

Can you believe that?

Andre had a reason for coming back. He wanted something from me, and he wasn't going to get it if I was dead. He needed information that he believed I might be able to help him find and he said it wasn't until he remembered me that he realised that I'd encountered what he was seeking.

Laurence's deal with a demon.

Over the next few weeks I went back through all of my memories, and my memory is good I'll have you know. I told him everything I could ever remember. I was surprised how much of it there was.

Then one day after about three weeks, during which time I had gone from dying of cancer to being in full health again, Andre discovered something.

He called me down to the small cemetery that was on the grounds of my house and showed me what he had dug up.

I was furious at the time. There in the middle of that cemetery was the grave that Laurence had laid for my wife, even though he had known, and I knew, that she wasn't dead. Andre had dug up the damn grave and broken open the coffin.

I shouted at him, asking him why he would do such a thing. But then he pointed into the coffin, which was crumbled and rotten by now, after so long in the ground.

There was a skeleton in there.

"That, I think, is Laurence," he said.

"What? How?"

"The Laurence that you met when you came here was not the real person. Though whoever it was probably was the one responsible for burying him."

We didn't have to look very far.

Right in the middle of the cemetery was a small chapel, I had been there many times before, but I hadn't realised that there was a space underneath the chapel. The moment that Andre found the entrance and pulled the stone away, the creature came at us.

At first I was just shocked. Out of the dark cove came a rustling noise, and then footsteps on stone, and then Andre jumped back as the creature shot out of the darkness and grabbed a hold of my neck.

It was Laurence. Not the dead one, not the real, human, Laurence, but a creature that was masquerading as him.

I thought I was going to die, but in reality the creature didn't stand a chance. I pushed back at it, expecting it to resist, but I hadn't realised just how strong A-17 had made me. It flew across the room and crashed to the floor, and by the time it was trying to get back on its feet, Andre had a hold of it by the neck and pinned it to the ground.

"You will not be helping Nua'lath to influence this place any longer," growled Andre.

"There are others," the creature hissed as it turned from the Laurence that I recognised into the creature it really was. A blood covered and hideously skinny wretch of thing with eyes as large and bright as the moon.

"Yes, and you will help me to find them," said Andre.

"I will never help you," it hissed. "Blud far Nua'lath. Kiy e Nua'lath."

"Shut your crap," cursed Andre, striking the thing across its face. It cursed and spat at him. He then reached to his belt and took out some kind of device, which he put against the creatures head.

"Oh I never said I would be asking nicely for your help."

There was a cracking sound and the creature writhed for a few seconds, before collapsing.

"Is it dead?"

"No, just stunned."

"Will you kill it?"

"Yes, but not yet. I need to know where the others are."

"What others?"

"The others like it. Nua'lath's minions."

"Who is this Nua'lath, really?"

"As I said on our last meeting, he is what is known as an Old One. I'll tell you more in good time. Right now I need to get this thing somewhere where I can interrogate it. He is still using these creatures to cause havoc."

"Interrogate?"

"Where I can torture the information I need out of it. Look, Reg, you've helped more than you can know, so I'm going to help you in return. Come with me and I'll take you to where your wife went. I can't tell you exactly where she is, but I know which world she ended up on and I can take you to the place where she arrived there."

*

"So," said Reg, "that is how I ended up here, standing in the desert, all kitted out with my new Resistance weapons and gear, and on the trail of my wife. That was quite a few years ago now. They gave me that much grace. I could search for my wife so long as I also spent my time noting down the places where the survivors were, where people still managed to live on after all the devastation that killed this world."

"That is quite a story," said Adler.

"I'll say. And it leads me to ask something of you, James."

I frowned.

"What?"

"I want to check the back of your neck," said Reg.

"My neck?" I asked, puzzled. "Why?"

"Because If I see what I think I will see there, I may be able to answer something of your past right here and now."

I reluctantly pulled the collar of my jacket down and waited apprehensively as Reg came over and peered at the back of my neck. He didn't say anything at first, but went back over to his seat on the opposite side of the fire.

"You have the same scar that I have," he said quietly.

"What does that mean?"

"It means, my friend, that you are a member of The Resistance."

"I am?"

"You say your name is James Halldon?"

"Yes, that much I'm sure of."

He nodded.

"I knew it when I first saw you. It's in your face. It's a spitting image of his. It's so similar that you could have been twins, even though you aren't. And all these Maw around you, drawn to you for a reason that you probably aren't even aware of, even though you once would have been."

"Who? Tell me."

My heart was almost jumping out of my chest.

"James Halldon, brother of Joshua Halldon, one of the commanders of the Resistance Outriders. He told me all about you after Andre took me to stay with him. They called you the 'Maw tamer'. On account of you being the one who could talk to the creatures. You're the one who made the pact between the Maw and The Resistance in the first place."

"I have a brother?"

"No, not one. You have four brothers, though I don't know the others, but they are all in The Resistance."

Day 43

We had talked long into the night and it was getting late when I finally went off to sleep. So much so that I was still tired when the sun rose the next morning, and I pushed open the door out to the desert. It was strange still, having sunrise to judge the days by.

Reg was still asleep so I shut the door and left him there, stepping outside onto the cracked concrete and weaving my way through the weeds until I was out at the edge of the building's grounds. The desert was such a beautiful thing to see, endless barren sand and rocks that seemed to go on forever. Dotted in different places were some very strange plants that were a cross between a palm tree and a cactus. The bottom part of the trunk was round and fat, and covered with spikes, with the trunk of the tree rising from middle to climb maybe twenty or thirty feet before blooming into a mass of green leaves.

They looked quite comical.

The most amazing sight, of course, was the Maw. I hadn't considered that there would be so many of them. I knew that there may have been a few hundred that followed us out of The Corridor, but there were far more than that clustered in groups, which I presumed were families, all over the desert floor.

"Others have come to join us."

It was DogThing. I hadn't even heard him join me, but he was sitting on the ground just a few feet away.

"Good morning."

He whined and scratched the ground.

"So there are Maw here as well?" I asked.

"Yes, many of them. They will be coming with us."

"All of them?"

"All of them."

"Even though I don't know where I'm really heading."

"The door place is not far from here."

"The door place?"

"You asked for us to go to where we came from before. It is the door place."

"Okay, good."

I sat there for a while, looking out at the desert, wondering quietly why the Maw followed me as they did. I was the 'Maw tamer'. At least that is what Reg had said. I was a member of something called the Resistance, an entity that I had no idea about. Then there were brothers, four of them. Yet through all of this, everything that Reg had told me about, I still couldn't remember a single thing.

"Well, good morning," said a voice behind me. It was Adler. Rudy wasn't with him.

"Quite an eye opener, last night, was it not?"

"Yes, yes it was. If it's true."

"You have a reason to believe it may not be true?"

"No, not really, I just can't remember any of it. I'd hoped that when I learned something of my past it might trigger my memory, but that didn't happen. Where's Rudy anyway?"

"Oh, you must come and see, we have found something quite interesting. You may want to wake Mr Weldon up, it's quite a distance."

Reg had already woken up and was packing up the camp when I went in. Ten minutes later and we were outside of the building and ready to go.

We followed Adler around the front of the building and out into the desert for a few hundred yards until we reached a ridge where the ground dropped away down into a chasm. As we walked along the top of the chasm, heading further into the desert I could see the Maw rising from their slumber and following us, spreading out across the dry, cracked ground as far as I could see.

"What is this place?" ask Reg. "I didn't know this was here."

"We don't know, yet," said Adler, "but something about a mile from here is very interesting."

"This is the way to the door place. They followed me last night."

I looked at DogThing.

"It was this close? You went there last night?"

"Yes, whilst you were sleeping. You were tired after the fight and the journey from the city."

The chasm continued to wind its way through the desert, and after half an hour or so the heat of the morning sun was starting to become unbearable.

Then I saw it in the distance, another building, or at least the top of another building. It was jutting out of the desert floor right where the chasm appeared to end. As we got closer and closer I realised just how large the building really was. At least five floors of broken windows rose from the ground and the same amount was tucked against the side of the now quite deep chasm. A stairway wound its way along both sides of the building and we made our way down them to the very bottom, where I saw Rudy waiting.

We scouted out around the building and up through the lower floors. Countless rooms filled with broken office furniture and smashed glass. I was beginning to think that we would find nothing, but then DogThing stopped and peered down a stairwell.

"It's actually a few hundred yards further, just over the back of the ridge behind the building," said Adler.

"Wait."

"Yes?"

"Down here."

I looked over at Adler and Reg.

"We'll catch you up. DogThing wants me to go with him."

"We looked down there," said Adler, "but didn't find anything."

"I'll be back soon."

I followed DogThing down several flights of stairs, my eyes adjusting slowly to the darkness, until we arrived at the bottom, which opened up into a massive underground chamber.

"This is where we arrived. We came through here."

"In this room?"

"Yes, over there."

He walked into the darkness and disappeared. I stopped for a moment and hauled one of my torches out of my pack. I guess my eyes had re-adjusted to daylight again, so much so that the darkness in here, that I would previously have seen clearly through, was like a black pit.

Bare ground was all that greeted me, and some kind of scorch mark on the stone. I reached for the compass and tried to concentrate on it, but twenty minutes must have passed and I still had no idea how to re-open the door.

"There has to be more here."

All this way to find nothing.

I paced around the edge of the huge room. No doors. No debris. It was almost as though this room had no function, no reason to be here. It wasn't until I had moved away from the centre of the room that I saw something. A glimmer of some kind, shining off of the light of the torch. I don't know why I hadn't spotted it when I first lit the torch.

I walked around the centre of the room again, shining the torch down on what appeared to be some kind of a pattern. It was a circle, roughly twenty feet across, the centre of which was an elaborate twisting collage of strange symbols and winding patterns. No visible lettering or anything that made sense, except that the scorch mark was dead in the centre of the pattern.

"What is this?"

"I don't know."

"Have you seen this before?"

"Yes, many times, when we arrive by going through."

"So before, I used to open doors and these markings were where we would arrive?"

"Yes. But not always."

Then it struck me.

"Did I have this compass back then DogThing?"

"No. It was another thing."

"So this wasn't mine originally?"

"No."

"What is this thing?"

"I don't know."

"So I didn't make it?"

"No."

He shuffled around and sniffed the floor, just as he had the last time I attempted to drill him with questions, days ago.

How was I ever to find out?

I turned and made my way to the stairs.

"Let's go and find the others."

I saw what Rudy and Adler had found before I spotted them. Just over the top of the ridge. It was impossible not to see it. As I walked down the slope to where they were all standing I couldn't help but gawp at the sight.

The land stretched out as far as I could see, miles and miles of perfectly flat ground disappearing into the distance, and covering every bit of the ground were billions and billions of white flowers.

White flowers.

I made my way down the slope to where the others were and bent down to examine the nearest of the flowers. It was unmistakeable.

"The flower that I saw through the door in The Corridor."

"Yes," said Adler. "Absolutely. Up in the passage above the shack. They are the same species exactly, I'm sure of it. They are not something that I recognise from our world, so I can't tell you what they are, but they are indeed the same."

"You know what this means?" said Rudy.

"This world must be where one of the doors to The Corridor is. One of the real doors."

"Precisely," said Adler, "and although you would not have been able to see it, the same flowers grow outside the other door as well, the one that I died near, down in The Warrens."

"Does that mean that Nua'lath's prison is actually here on this world?" asked Reg.

"I don't know," said Adler. "But it would seem quite likely. Maybe somewhere near here is the other physical door. I stood outside that one for years, so would be able to recognise the land."

"No wonder The Resistance is so interested in this place," said Reg. "I always did wonder. So many worlds to cover, so many places where Resistance folks are helping to rebuild and protect, yet the amount of them on this world is far greater."

"Then we can find them?" I asked.

"If we travelled a long way in the other direction, then yes, but that takes us away from the Sisters of Rahl, and Marie."

"Okay," I said. "We'll go there first."

"I'd understand if you wanted to leave now," said Reg.

"No. I said I'd go with you, and I want to know if these Sisters can help me with my memory. This place, down in the bottom of that building, was where I arrived here with DogThing at some point, but I can't find anything down there apart from a pattern on the ground that makes no sense to me. I'm not going to find out much about myself at this rate. I need someone who can help me remember, and maybe these Sisters of Rahl can help."

"Then we better head back to the road, grab the trolley and get moving," said Reg.

We hiked a long way along the road that day, which was clear, apart from a few abandoned vehicles along the side of the road that looked like they had been shunted out of the way by something big, moving fast enough to smash the sides in as it went by. Maybe twenty miles along the road and I caught my first glimpse of the mountains that Reg had spoken of. He also stopped as they appeared, far in the distance, through the dust of the desert.

"It's strange to be so close after all these years," he said.

I nodded.

"We'll find her."

Roughly five miles later and we saw the edge of a small, ruined town along the road. We made our way slowly and carefully towards it, always wary of what might be waiting for us there.

It was a one street town, and most of the buildings were blackened ruins, as though the place had been burned to the ground a long time ago. One or two brick buildings still stood, and the one we chose had an upper floor that was mostly intact. No sooner had we set up camp than the rain came again and the bottom floor was the only place that we could find that was moderately sheltered. I don't know where the Maw went, but they seemed to have vanished in amongst the ruined buildings. I could only presume they found their own places to shelter from the rain.

I did manage to set up a few water traps before attempting to get some sleep.

Day 44

The town was infested with zombies, and we hadn't spotted a single sign of it until the damn things came crawling up out of the ruins. Even the Maw hadn't noticed them. I don't know how. Adler thinks that maybe the dust and dirt from the desert had buried everything, that is, before the rain came down. He thought that the desert sands had hidden the scent from the Maw. As soon as the rain began to wash the streets and the buildings clean, the undead came clawing and crawling up from almost every hole and cellar in the town.

"Wake up," was the shout. It was Reg, and I looked up to the top of the stairs, bleary eyed, to see him holding both of his shotguns. His pack was by his feet.

"What's going on?" I asked, but then heard the noise. All around us the moans and growling cut through the din of the pouring rain. I stumbled up the stairs, lugging my pack with me, to look out of the broken window.

A war was raging in the town around us. Through the deluge of rain I could see Maw darting around in the shadows. For one moment one of the plague bearers stumbled out into the street from a doorway of a building a hundred yards away, only to be pulled to the ground by two of the large black Maw.

I dropped my pack and drew two of my guns, glancing down the stairs. If they came this way and there were a lot of them, we would have to hold this stairway and hope.

But at that time we had no idea just how many of them there were. To the Maw, these things were almost no danger. They just weren't quick enough to fight back and I'd seen just half a dozen Maw take on hundreds in The Corridor.

Ten minutes later and the streets were filled with plague bearers. Hundreds of them. Reg and I were huddled down on the top floor, watching the stairs when the first wave of the zombies burst into the building. We both knelt at the top of the stairs, shooting them down one by one as they crawled over the top of each other, trying to get through the door, and to us.

"Reg, there are too many of them, we have to get out of here."

"We can't," he shouted back. "The streets are full of them, we wouldn't get through."

"Then what do we do? There are too many for the Maw to handle. They'll overwhelm us if we stay here."

"We have too. Hold tight and let your furry friends clear up. There can't be endless numbers of them."

There was a gap of maybe twenty seconds as some Maw attacked the area outside the front of the building and I realised that if we didn't do something fast, then we might die there. I looked around. Nothing but bricks and stone and...

The stairway was made of wood.

Creaky, rotten, brittle, dry wood, that was now even weaker after the rain.

I put my guns away and quickly grabbed the biggest piece of masonry that I could lift and hauled it over to the stairs, hefting it up as high as I could and letting it drop.

Crack. One of the steps collapsed as the block smashed through it.

Then Reg must have realised what I was doing and slung his shotguns, running over to wall and picking up two large bricks. He knelt down by the edge of the stairs and started pounding as hard as he could on the support beam. It cracked and began to collapse further and further with each hit.

I lifted up the next biggest lump of cemented bricks that I could find and hauled that over to the stairs, just as the doorway filled once more with groaning, crawling bodies. Two of the creatures broke away from the rest of the mass, and stumbled up the bottom of the stairs, falling over themselves to get to us. The first was faster and reached out towards me as I slammed the piece of masonry down on the top of the stairs as hard as I could.

The whole stairway screeched and cracked as the wood gave way and crashed to the ground floor. I stumbled back as the zombie that had been in front clawed its way up onto the remaining floorboards and reached out for me, grabbing my ankle and making me fumble and drop the gun that I had just drawn.

"Lie down," shouted Reg, from behind me.

I threw my shoulders back and lay my head against the wooden floor just as I saw the shotgun barrel inches away.

One loud blast and the zombie went tumbling away into the mass that was gathering below us.

I lay there for a moment, breathing heavily, then grabbed my guns and headed over to the window that Reg was now looking out of.

"It's pitch black out there. I can't see a damn thing, but I can hear your Maw friends doing their thing out there."

It was pointless lighting a torch. The rain would put it out in seconds.

Then I saw Rudy below in the street and Adler close behind, they were running through the mass of zombies, flailing their arms around. I'd clean forgotten how deadly my ghost friends were to zombies.

Rudy rushed through the ones that were trying to cram their way through the doorway and into our building. He didn't even reach out or touch any of them, just ran straight through them and into the downstairs floor. I was shocked to see the ones he ran through dropping to the ground and not moving.

It would seem that Rudy and Adler only had to touch the things to kill them.

Less than a minute later and the ground floor was silent. None of the bodies moved. Rudy and Adler had just run around, almost like they were performing some strange and manic dance, dropping the zombies with barely any effort.

We tried to rest for a few hours, up on the second floor, with Rudy and Adler guarding the downstairs throughout most of the night. I don't think I managed to drop off for more than a few minutes at a time with the constant din outside made by the Maw and the zombies.

When daylight came, the rain had finally subsided, and Reg and I climbed out of the window and down the wall to get outside, we saw just how many zombies there had been.

Everywhere, all over the ground were bodies, some pilled two or three high in places. There were enough gaps for us to weave our way between them, but the sheer number was mind-numbing.

Thousands.

"Whole damn town must have gotten infected and been sat here waiting for someone to come by for all these years," said Reg, "though I reckon that there is a lot more here than would have lived in just this town."

DogThing showed up as we were slowly winding our way through the mess, heading out of the town once more.

"But where were they hiding?"

"They weren't," said Adler. "I saw it from down on the street as you were settling in up in the building. They were buried under years and years of desert sand and dust. When the rain came it loosened it all up and they started crawling out of the ground.

"Crazy."

"But it must have rained before? They must have been washed out before now?"

"No," said Reg. "The rain only started a few days ago. I'd never seen anything like it in all the time I've been travelling these lands. Something strange happened just before I met all of you. Something changed and the rain came down. It's never rained like this before."

"Do you think we did this?" asked Rudy. "Did we do something to make the rain come?"

"Not anything that I can think of," said Adler.

"The rain from The Corridor?" I asked.

Adler looked thoughtful.

"Do you think that maybe the rain is somehow linked to us? Maybe to the compass?" he asked.

"I have no idea. But do we know anything about it?"

Wait

"DogThing. Did it always rain a lot where we went? I mean before we went to The Corridor."

"No."

"No. That's not it then."

"Look, folks," said Reg. "I hate to break up your little chat, but I think we need to get the hell out of this town. We don't know if that is all of the creatures. There could be more that haven't washed up."

No arguments there.

We headed straight out of the town, weaving our way through the mass of torn bodies. My stomach churned a few times as I saw the Maw feasting on their kills. I know that the creatures aren't human anymore and that they are monsters, but they had been once. At least DogThing didn't eat them in front of me.

It took us an hour to get out of the town, and several times one of us would fire a weapon into one of the piles of bodies where something still twitched.

I was relieved to be out on the open road and the desert again and we soon left the town behind. It felt safe out there, even though we were out in the open. I could see for miles.

Roughly thirty miles later and we found an outcrop of rock just off of the road that provided a good shelter in case the rain came down again.

Day 45

I saw something during the night that I will never, ever forget as long as I live.

It must have been the middle of the night when I awoke to the strange sound above us. Reg was asleep and Rudy and Adler were sitting on top of the rocky outcrop, looking out over the desert and talking in their usual hushed tones. I should have been exhausted, but for some reason got up and walked around the back of the rock and climbed up to where my ghost friends were sitting. I was surprised to find DogThing also up there, just a few feet away, snoring contentedly.

"Can't sleep?" ask Rudy.

"No."

"I should be..."

That was all I managed to say before the thing in the sky appeared. All three of us just sat there, staring, as it swept across the sky.

It was bigger than even some of the clouds, with wings that must have spread out for miles. If it hadn't been for the moon reflecting light down upon us, we probably would never have even seen its passing.

I can't even begin to describe completely how vast and beautiful the creature was, but I imagined that if it had landed it could have flattened an entire town. Maybe it was perspective, maybe I was just imagining that it was so huge, but underneath it, the clouds drifted. Long jagged wings bore a body that was covered in scales and a tail that seemed to trail out behind it for miles and miles. Its head was much like that of a lizard's, except the eyes that glowed a piercing orange light that burned brighter than the stars.

It gave a single, long and moaning sigh as it swept across the sky above us, pushing the vast clouds aside.

It was only there for a few moments, travelling at an immense a speed across the sky. A few seconds after it disappeared from view the wind hit us like an instant tornado that nearly knocked me off of the rock. A wall of sand and dust from the desert swept past us and then continued on its way across the desert.

Below, I could just make out the shapes of many of the Maw, all of them sitting looking up at the sky in the direction that the creature had passed.

"What manner of gods live in this place?" asked Adler, though I think it was more of a statement than a question. Rudy didn't say a word and I couldn't think of anything either.

As I settled back down to sleep again under the outcrop I wondered how many other strange surprises lay ahead of me.

When Reg woke me up, the sun was high in the sky already and the heat was blistering even though we were sheltered by the rock.

"I left you to sleep on account of how little we got in the town," he said.

I nodded and rubbed the dust from my eyes.

"You missed quite a sight last night," I said.

He looked up from the small campfire he was prodding with a stick.

"Oh?"

"Something huge flew over in the middle of the night. I've no idea what it was. I looked like some kind of massive lizard with wings. I mean, it was as big as a town.

He sat back and smiled at me.

"They are quite a sight, aren't they?" he said.

"You've seen them before?"

"Oh, I've seen them many, many times." He said with quiet laugh.

"What was it?"

"Legends in this world call them the Wind Gods. I've heard all manner of different tales about them from all over the place. They've been here as long as people can remember. Myth would have it that they are the ones that create the weather and the winds. No one has ever been able to make contact with them and they go about their lives just drifting across the sky, never even noticing those on the ground."

"It was an amazing sight."

"There are many amazing sights in this world," said Reg. "you want some soup?"

We saw our first glimpse of trees in the distance today, about midday. Just as Reg had said, they seem to spread across the foot of the mountains. He estimates that we are maybe two days from there now since we seem to be covering ground quite quickly. I hope we find another town soon, preferably one not so ruined, and not quite so occupied. We're running low on supplies now that there are two of us to feed, even if it does mean that the trolley is lighter and easier to pull along the road.

We camped out in the open again, this time in a small rock crevice.

Day 46

A quiet night for once.

We rose early, ate a rushed breakfast and then headed off soon after. There was no point wasting too much time.

The land was now changing with every mile. Flat, dry barrens were giving way to rockier ground that had a very slight uphill slope. The road was fortunately still running almost directly straight, so even though it was slightly harder work to walk along, we were still making good time. By the time the sun began to set, we were passing the odd copse of trees and there was grass in small patches. I'd noticed during our journey that there was little wildlife about, but now I could hear the odd chirp of birds in the trees, and glimpsed the occasional mouse or hare running for cover between the bushes.

We were just about to set up camp in a small copse of trees when Rudy spotted it.

A light in the distance, further up the road and only just hidden amongst some trees.

"It's probably only another half mile or so," said Reg. "Should we risk it?"

"Friendly do you think?"

"No idea. We better take it carefully," answered Reg.

"It may be worth the risk if they aren't hostile," suggested Adler. "Maybe Rudy and I could go on ahead and take a look around?"

Rudy nodded his agreement.

"Okay, do that, but don't go approaching anyone. We don't want to scare the life out of them. You are ghosts after all."

Rudy and Adler sped up, quickly leaving a gap between us as Reg and I slowed down.

A few minutes later they disappeared from view behind the trees that surrounded what appeared to be some kind of road-side station.

As I slowly approached, I could see that the building had recently been in use. Tracks in the dirt on the side of the road showed the passing signs of a vehicle, or more than one. There were footprints in the sandy ground that led up to the wooden porch at the front of the building, and more leading away.

It was a mostly single floor building, apart from one small area at the back that was brick built and two stories high. The whole place was boarded up, and the windows were covered with corrugated steel sheeting and in some places wooden planks. The front of the building had a low barricade, about waist height, that was built from broken pallets, metal panels from cars and some kind of metal railing or fence.

The place had been reinforced to be as defendable as possible.

Strangely the front door was wide open.

Rudy appeared through the door, just as I was slowly edging around, my guns aimed, to get a better look. Reg went round the back of the building, both shotguns ready.

"No one home," he said, "but it does look like someone lives here, or has done recently. There is even a cooking fire that looks like it's recently been put out."

"Why would they leave the front door open?" I asked.

"Maybe they didn't mean to?" said Rudy.

"Did you look upstairs?"

"Adler has just gone up there," answered Rudy, "but there is no one on the ground floor, we checked all the rooms and the shop front, even the garage."

Reg stepped out from the side of the building, having been full circle. He glanced at DogThing for a moment, who was standing in the road and sniffing the air.

"Fresh wood chopped up out the back. There's someone living here."

"But they aren't here right now."

Then I heard the noise. It was faint and distant, but definitely heading our way. The sound of a vehicle approaching down the road.

"Get to cover," I snapped, ducking behind the barricade and aiming both guns in the direction of the noise. Reg joined me, Rudy stepped back into the building, peering around the doorway, and DogThing ran over the road and hid in the bushes opposite. I couldn't see any of the other Maw, but I could sense that they were there. How hundreds of them could disappear so easily was baffling.

The sound of the vehicle grew louder, and moments later a bus slowed down and pulled over on the side of the road. It was a battered old mini bus that may have originally carried twenty or so people through a local city bus route, but now it was rusted, the windows were all covered in metal grating, and the front of the bus was reinforced with metal plating that had to have come from other vehicles.

The driver's door opened and someone stepped out. I say someone. They were human, living I would say, and covered from head to foot in brown and green clothing wrapped around every part of their body. Their face was covered by a scarf that was the colour of the desert sand.

There was movement inside the bus. There was more than one of them.

"Wait," said the man in a deep rough voice. He was staring at the front door and began to raise a crossbow that I hadn't seen concealed inside all the clothing.

"We don't want any trouble now," said Reg.

The man span round and aimed the crossbow in Reg's direction. Peering, trying to spot the speaker.

"Dad?" said a voice from inside the bus, young, female, probably a young child.

"Stay quiet," said the man. "Stay down."

A gasp of air from the bus.

I slowly stood up, aiming both guns at the stranger. Reg copied me, moving slowly. I could almost see the fear in the man's eyes at realising that there were more of us.

"We are just passing, we don't mean any harm," I said. "You lower the crossbow and we'll lower the guns."

"What do you want from us?" he asked.

"We were looking for somewhere to stay the night, also hoping for friendly faces, but if you don't want us here, we'll keep moving."

"You look like Resistance folk," he said, peering at my armour.

"We are," said Reg.

The man lowered his crossbow and Reg and I lowered our guns, as promised.

"Then we don't have a problem at all do we?" said the man, pulling off his scarf and smiling.

"Roberts is the name, Cory Roberts. This is Cheserton road stop. Resistance folks are welcome here. I've had you folks up here quite a few times and never had any trouble."

The he spotted DogThing on the other side of the road and began to raise his crossbow again.

"No!" I shouted, "He's friendly. They all are."

"All?"

"There are a few hundred of them in the woods at the moment, a whole pack, but they're with us and they won't harm anyone. If anything they'll keep this place damn secure whilst they're here."

"They Maw?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Okay. I'm not used to them being around. I've seen a few out in the desert a few times, killing off shamblers, but not seen one up close. You fellas fancy giving me a hand offloading all my stuff?"

Half an hour later and we were all sitting down eating stew. I didn't know what was in it and didn't ask, but it tasted fantastic and filled a gap that was so empty that I'd forgotten what it was like to have a full stomach. Cory's daughter, Shelly, was older than I had expected, at least in her teens. I was surprised how welcoming they were.

"So where are you all headed to then?" Cory asked us."

"Up into the forest," I said, glancing over at Reg, who was sitting stuffing his face. He nodded.

"We're looking for the Sisters of Rahl," I said. "I don't suppose you've heard of them or happen to know where we can find them?"

Cory stopped eating.

"Oh I've heard of them alright, and that's a dangerous place that you're headed to. I don't know exactly where they are, but if you head up into the hills following the road you'll eventually come to a crossroads. Take a left and follow that and you'll find the ruins of Landshaw. They live in that city somewhere. I never go up that far myself, heard too many tales of people disappearing up there. You know those Sisters don't have a good reputation for being friendly to visitors."

"It's only hearsay, dad," said Shelly. She looked over at me. "Not many people have made contact with them after they hid themselves away years ago. They used to go around all the towns, recruiting new members for their monastery and they used to take supplies to the towns and trade. I remember seeing them when I was very little. But they just went recluse all of a sudden and all contact stopped.

"I've heard enough stories to believe that some of it has to be true," said Cory.

Shelly smiled. "You'll have to excuse my dad, he doesn't trust many people. Well, apart from Resistance folks anyway."

"Resistance saved the town I was born in a long time ago, and brought us all here. They earned my trust by saving a lot of folk's lives. You were too young to even remember."

"Have many people travelled up to find them? I mean people coming through here," asked Adler. Cory frowned at him. Both he and Shelly seemed to find Rudy and Adler a little disturbing.

"A few over the years, and I never saw any of them come back again," said Cory.

"That's because not many people come by here twice unless they're traders," said Shelly, shaking her head.

I smiled.

"You don't get many visitors here then?" I asked.

"Not so many as we used to," said Cory. "At one time this road was busy, and we'd have folks come through here almost every week. You know, travellers moving to new places, traders shifting their salvage around. Last few years the road got quite. Must admit it suits us fine though. Less trouble."

"Trouble?"

"Occasionally we'd get a bunch of folks who were up to no good pass through. They soon learned that me and Shelly can look after ourselves good enough."

Day 47

I woke up late, with the sun already blazing high in the sky. For the first time in ages I'd had an amazing night's sleep, in a real bed. Well, in a bunk, and Reg snored the whole night on the top bunk. It didn't matter.

No one was up yet, so instead of disturbing anyone, I went outside and walked around the back of the buildings and then over to the fence on the edge of the trees. From there I could see almost to forever across the open desert plain. Everywhere amongst the trees outside of the fence I could see the Maw. I imagined that if Cory or Shelly had come out here and seen them it would have been quite unnerving for them.

It's strange how you get used to something so quickly.

"Good morning," said a voice nearby. I looked round to see Rudy approaching from the tree line. That was something I still wasn't used to. It didn't matter that he was walking on the ground that was covered in dry twigs and leaves. He still made no sound.

"It is," I said, "A very good one, for a change. Is Adler around?"

He smiled. "Oh, he is about here somewhere, seems to be intent on studying the local wildlife and plant life. Always the obsessive. Look, is anyone else up?"

I frowned. He looked concerned, or serious. I wasn't sure which, but I suspected I was about to find out.

"No. All still asleep, I think."

His tone became hushed.

"We found something last night. Whilst you were all asleep."

"What?"

"Underneath the station."

My nerves tingled.

"It's nothing bad. Don't worry. But we're pretty sure that it's something that they don't want us to know about. I knew that Cory wasn't happy about me and Adler. He was wary. And we both suspected that there was a reason. Well, we were right. When they all went to sleep, we had a little look around."

He looked around as though he was expecting to be found out at any moment.

"Rudy. Stop messing. What's under the station?"

"People," he said.

Now I was nervous and my mind immediately jumped to Reg, asleep in there on his own.

"People? Who? How many?"

"Eleven. We counted them. Nine children and two women," he whispered, "they were all asleep when we went down there. There is a hatch under the stairwell that leads down into what looks like some kind of shelter. They've got everything down there. Electricity, lighting, food stores."

"But why would they be under there? Do they have them locked in?"

"No. It's locked. We checked, but the lock is on the inside. The people down there must have locked it."

My mind was racing.

"That explains the open door."

"What?"

"The open door. When we got here the front door was wide open. When Cory arrived, when he and Shelly pulled up in the bus. He was looking at the front door."

"Oh."

"Yes. Oh. They saw us coming maybe? Look. Go and get Adler. I'll speak to Reg."

A couple of minutes later, and I was sitting on the chair opposite our bunks as Reg rushed to put his clothes on.

"Let me get this straight," he said. "You're telling me that there are a whole lot of people hiding away underneath us? Like they're entire family maybe?"

"Could be. Rudy says that it's locked up, but from inside. So they can't be prisoners. Whoever is down there locked themselves away before we got here."

"They must have seen us coming."

"Yes. They must have seen us and dashed for the bolt hole."

"Can we be sure of that, though?" asked Reg. "Is Rudy absolutely sure that the lock is on the underside?"

"He seemed sure of it. He said that they looked."

"So what do we do now? Go on pretending that we don't know? "

"I don't know."

"We can't leave them down there if they are locked up. We have to do something."

"Yes. You're right."

We were sitting with them over breakfast when I just came out with it. I'd stewed over how to approach them about it for about an hour and in the end decided that the best way was to just ask.

"Who are the people underneath the house?"

It was a very hard question to ask. They'd welcomed us in, fed us, and everything was cheerful up until that moment.

Silence. Everyone stopped eating. Shelly looked nervously at her father, who in turn just looked directly at me.

"What people?" he asked.

I shook my head.

"No point in trying to hide it, Cory. Eleven of them. Two women. The rest are children. Do you have them locked away or are they hiding from us?"

He took a deep breath and looked over at Shelly.

"Sweetheart. Go tell your mother that they don't need to hide anymore."

Shelly got up and left the room, heading for the stairs. Cory looked back at me.

"They would have hidden when you arrived. They're my family. Well, mine and my friend Jacob's. He and his sons are out on a trade run at the moment."

"We can leave if it makes you nervous," I said, looking at Reg, who nodded back.

"No," said Cory. "No need to leave. I didn't trust you when you first arrived, but now I can see that you're all decent folk who don't mean any harm."

Something occurred to me.

"That's why the door was open when we arrived, wasn't it? They were in a hurry and forgot to shut it."

"I would say so, yes," answered Cory. "Sentry would have alerted them before you were close."

"Sentry?"

"Oh. You're not the only ones who have helpers around," he said looking over at Adler and Rudy.

"There is someone like us here?" asked Rudy, looking surprised.

"No. He's not like you fellas at all. I'm sorry. He won't show himself to strange folks, especially with them Maw all over the place. He watches over the place, mostly watches over the children. Arrived a few months ago. Just turned up and started loitering around. Made everybody very nervous at the time. But then one day one of the kids nearly got attacked. It was little Ella, the youngest here. She's not one of mine or Jacob's. We kind of adopted her when her folks passed on. Anyhow, she was out near the back fence, just playing around, and half a dozen kre'esh came bounding through the trees. They would have been on her before anyone even had the chance to do anything, but no one had to. Our loiterer killed all of them before they could get anywhere near the child. It was the most surreal thing I'd ever seen in my life, and I've seen some strange things. I heard all the noise, and ran around the back as fast as I could, to find little Ella sitting on the ground, still playing with her toy car in the dirt. All over the place were the torn apart bodies of the kre'esh. She was still singing to herself, and our new visitor was standing perfectly still just a few feet away, watching her."

"Fascinating," said Adler.

"He never talks. Never interacts with anyone. Just stands watching out over the desert and kills anything that comes near that he deems a danger. Sometimes he will go to the children and point into the house. That means get yourself away, quickly. I don't know much about him, only that you can't see him very clearly, like a shadow, and that I'm more grateful to him than almost any other living thing I ever met. He's like some kind of guardian. If you ask Ella about it, she just says the angel is her friend."

"So we're actually quite lucky that he hasn't taken offence to us," I said.

"Very much so. I'm not sure how you found out about them being under there, but I'm very surprised that whoever looked didn't get themselves killed."

Rudy stood up from the chair he was sitting on.

"It was me that spotted them. I saw a light coming from a gap near the stairs and was just curious."

He looked over at Adler.

"I said to you at the time that I thought we were being watched."

"So you did," Adler agreed. "I'd forgotten. I never felt the presence you were speaking of. I thought you were being paranoid. It seems, my good friend, that your instincts once more prove me wrong."

We were planning to leave early, but once we were all outside, with the children running around and playing, any sense of urgency to leave just vanished. I could see by my friend's expressions that they were just as thrilled to see life once more. At one point, later on in the day, when I was standing out by the back fence, just watching over the desert, I heard some quiet footprints behind me. I turned to see one of the children, Ella, the youngest one, standing smiling at me.

"Hello little one," I said.

"I'm not that little. My angel says I'm specially made to be small, and that small is the bestest."

"Does he now?"

"That's what I said, didn't I?" she said, frowning at me.

I laughed.

"Yes, you did."

She climbed up onto a box next to the fence and peeped over.

"My angel likes your doggies. He says they are going to be his friends now."

I frowned this time.

"Oh? Really? I'm glad he likes them. I kind of like them too."

"You've got too many of them though," she said.

"Yes, I do seem to have picked up a few more than I expected."

She beamed a smile at me that was dazzling and infectious. I couldn't help but grin back at her.

"It's okay, though. Some of them are going to stay with me and my angel. They like it here."

"Um...okay. How do you know that?"

She looked back out towards where some of the Maw were sleeping in the shade of the trees.

"They told me so. My angel told them they should stay here and look after me and the other children, and that we can help them look after all their children too. So they said yes. I like the big one with the big bright fluffy bit on her head. She's funny."

"Yes, I like her too. She's been with me for quite a while.

"Her name is Mo," she said.

"Yes. It is. I gave her that name."

I felt a tingle run down my spine. I gave Mo her name only in my head, weeks ago, when we were in The Corridor, and I've never told anyone.

"That's okay. I won't tell anyone if it's a secret."

Then Ella went off to play with the other children out the front of the house, leaving me both puzzled and not just a tiny bit unnerved.

Day 48

We rose early the next morning whilst it was still dawn. The plan was to leave as soon as the sun came up. We packed up some new supplies that Cory had given us and said our goodbyes, making more than one promise to come back this way soon. I tried giving Cory something in return for their hospitality, but he wouldn't have any of it. Not that I had a lot to give.

Just as we started off up the road, Ella ran after us and handed me something small wrapped in a grey cloth.

"Promise don't open it til you are a long, long way. It's a surprise and secret."

"I promise, and thank you."

She ran back to the station and stood next to Cory. As we headed up the road I looked back more than once. She was still there, even though everyone else had either gone back in the house or in the children's case, probably off to play. I could still see her watching us when we were nearly a mile away, just as we turned a bend and the trees obscured the building.

I stopped pulling the trolley along, and reached into my pocket, taking out the small cloth that she had given me. Rudy, Adler and Reg were walking ahead of me. Only DogThing stopped and peered back.

I opened the cloth and looked at what was inside. Just a single folded up piece of paper and a tiny flower. A white flower, and the kind of which I knew only too well.

I unfolded the tiny piece of paper. Until I could see what was written on it. It was just a few words, not much, but I felt my heart jump at reading them.

I wil be redy wen tis time for me to go wif yoo ganda. Eleanor

That was it. Nothing more, but it was enough to scare the crap out of me. First she could read my thoughts, and then that. I folded the paper back up with the flower and put it away into a pocket that I could button up. Tried to take my mind off of it and think of something else, but it was almost impossible. As we had left I noticed how a few of the Maw had just stood and watched us from the trees. She had been right. They were staying.

Throughout the day we made our way at what felt like a snail's pace, gradually uphill as the road wound its way through the trees. Along the way we passed run-down buildings that may once have been houses or farms. The buildings were mostly collapsed and crumbling ruins. One of the houses, right up next to the road, still had some clothes on a line that was stretching from inside one of the windows to a pole near the side of the road. The clothes, that must once have been white, were now a muddy grey colour and were barely clinging on. I wondered how long they had been hanging there.

It was mid afternoon when we finally reached the crossroads that Cory had mentioned. Further on ahead of us the road seemed to crumble into nearly nothing as it wound further upwards and into the mountains. I could see that even further up a collapse had happened at some point in time and the road was completely covered with mud and stones that had to have come from the huge chunk that was missing in the rock face above it. To the right, the road ran even steeper, winding its way up and over the top of the area of rock that had collapsed.

Left.

That is what he had said.

No words were spoken. We simply all turned into the new road that fortunately ran almost straight along the top of the ridge. It wasn't until we had walked a few hundred yards that I noticed the first of the blackened buildings in the distance.

Landshaw. The buildings had to be the beginning of the ruined city, where Cory said The Sisters of Rahl lived.

We walked on for maybe two more hours, so that some of the buildings were about half a mile away, and then stopped. I'd already said I wanted us to go into the city in daylight, just in case. No one disagreed. We all knew that what we were going to find in there might be easier to handle if the sun was shining.

We set up camp and even lit a fire this time. Reg insisted on it. He wanted to cook before we went into the city. I watched him as he set up the pot and poured some random tins into it. Beans, Lentil soup. Beef chunks.

"I thought you might try and rush into there tonight," I said to him.

"Oh. Yes. It did cross my mind. But after the warnings that Cory gave us, I want daylight just as much as you do."

"I'd have expected you to be in a hurry, considering that your wife may be in there, somewhere."

"Well. You would think that wouldn't you? I've been waiting so long that another day won't make much difference. And to come all this way and get killed by some night creature just a short way from finding her is not in my plan. I may not look old anymore James, but I've got a lot of years of patience behind me and I've learned to trust my instincts."

"Understood."

"And damn it if a few hundred of those Maw around us hasn't convinced me to wait as well. Why go alone?"

I laughed at that.

Rudy appeared from behind one of the trees nearby.

"Me and Adler are going to go into the city to investigate. Unless you have any objections?"

I couldn't think of any reason why not to have a heads up on the place. And some ghostly and unkillable scouts were the best people for the job.

"Sure. Go for it. Just keep low and don't draw too much attention if you can help it. I'd rather not have a whole city of dead things wandering about, ready for us when we go there tomorrow. If that is what is in there."

"We'll take care of any that we find. Don't worry."

I smiled. My own personal zombie clearing advance party.

Rudy started to walk away, but then stopped and turned back.

"Is it just my imagination, or have more than half of the Maw left us?"

"Yes. They have. I noticed it too. I'd ask DogThing what's going on, if he were around. A lot of them stayed back at the station, but I've seen quite a few wandering off in various directions into the woods the whole day."

"Good," said Rudy."Well, no not necessarily good, but at least It's not just me seeing things. The young ones and the females have gone, haven't they? It seems to be mainly the big black ones left. Adler is still trying to figure out what he calls their 'social structure'. It baffles me. I hope they don't all go running off. I liked having them around to watch over you. Made me feel a little less worried."

"We'll be fine. There are enough of them still prowling around to alert us of anything coming our way."

"Okay. Good. We'll be back before the sun comes up."

"Good luck."

I watched him head off into the woods, and smiled as he just stepped through one of the trees. Finally he was getting used to his new form. Is that what it's called? His new life.

Day 49

Rudy and Adler were waiting on the road when I woke up, but DogThing was still not around when the sun had been up for over an hour.

"Did you find anything?" I asked.

Rudy shook his head.

"Lots of empty buildings."

"The place is absolutely huge," said Adler. "It goes sprawling for miles. We didn't really get to look around that much of it and we were walking all night. It was very quiet in there, no animals moving around, which may not be a good sign, but also nothing else that we could find, and we delved quite deep in some buildings."

"Also no supplies," said Rudy. "The place is completely burned out. You'll see when we get there. Looks like the whole city burned."

We were soon all packed up and waiting, the Maw milling around us and looking edgy.

Still no DogThing.

"Do we wait longer?" asked Reg.

"No. No point. Where the hell is he?"

"No idea, my friend," said Adler. "But it's not like he hasn't done it before. He usually seems to know where to find you."

"True. Let's get going. Maybe we'll catch up with him."

As we moved along the road, I noticed that the Maw were sticking closer to us. I also noticed that Reg had both of his shotguns at hand, where he would normally only carry one, with the other slung over his shoulder. I guess he was as edgy as me.

There were significantly less Maw now. Maybe only a dozen of the big black ones surrounded us. They were even walking in the road alongside us, where they would normally have been creeping through the trees at a distance. One of them even walked at my side. I wasn't sure whether to be re-assured by him or more nervous.

Roughly half an hour of walking and we passed the first of the burned out buildings. Everywhere around us the blackened ruins rose from amongst the trees. It seemed that over time a whole forest had risen up in the streets, between the hollow ghosts that had probably once been a thriving place. In amongst the trees were the rusted ruins of vehicles, but there were no skeletons in the seats, and there were no remains anywhere to be seen. All of the buildings were blackened with soot.

Reg stopped and looked towards a massive high-rise building that rose out of the tree line a few hundred yards from us.

"You were right about this whole place being burned to the ground," said Reg, shaking his head.

"Indeed," said Adler. "Quite an astonishing sight isn't it?"

Reg looked at me. "Did Cory say anything about where to look?" asked Reg.

"No. Just that they live in this city, somewhere."

"Christ. The Sisters could be anywhere. We have no idea how big this place is."

"Cory said it was once a city, so it's probably going to be big, but we have to start somewhere. Just keep looking for any signs of life."

There were none. We searched street after street all day, and must have walked for miles. Several times we ended up back in the same place having managed to go full circle around a block of buildings. Then late afternoon we crossed over a bridge that spanned a dried up river, or a canal. It looked far too straight to be natural.

"We didn't come this far," said Rudy. "We stopped just back there because the sun was coming up.

We headed further along the street, moving slowly between the ruins and the trees. It was strange to see trees that were hundreds of feet tall just poking up in the middle of the road. At one point we came across one that Adler said was an oak tree, or at least similar. It must have been three hundred feet tall, with the branches spanning across the entire road. In places the end of the branches continued out of sight into the sides of various buildings, and I could see that the walls and windows of the buildings had collapsed inwards to let the mammoth creature spread its arms wide.

Eventually we made our way to what I believed must once have been the very centre of the city. All around us the trees grew together and wound around each other. There were no buildings in the way here, and I could see that the area had once been a huge plaza of some kind, so large that you might have been able to land a plane in it. All around the outside of the plaza were the remains of some of the biggest and most elaborate buildings I had ever seen in my life. They were massive, sprawling affairs, with columns and rows upon rows of open stone balconies that seem to climb their way up into the very clouds.

It was there, in one of the smaller buildings where there were still a few doors and the place looked reasonably untouched by the massive fire that must have destroyed most of the rest of the city so long ago, that we found a second floor room overlooking the entire plaza and camped up. Reg lit a fire in the centre of the room, which must have been some kind of meeting place if the piles of broken chairs and broken vending machines were anything to go by.

Strangely, I noticed that the Maw were staying very close to us, still. They were all in the same room with us, where normally they would wander out and find somewhere to hide away for the night. These Maw were all sitting at the windows and the stairwells, watching.

I went over to the nearest vending machine and prodded around in the wreckage, smiling as I spotted three cans of drink buried under the dust and twisted plastics and metal. I pulled them out and wiped them down.

Cola. The same brand that I had drunk myself nearly to death with in The Corridor.

Reg and I were sitting drinking two of the cans when it happened.

First, one of the Maw, a large one that was over near one of the windows, stood up and snorted sharply. The other Maw immediately jumped up from their positions and began sniffing the air. Some of them started growling very quietly and scratching the ground.

I may not have been able to communicate with them, but I knew what those signals were.

Something was coming. Something that was not friendly.

I put the can down and grabbed the two guns that were at my feet, checked the two that were strapped to my thighs, and stood up. Reg moved quickly to grab his shotguns, frowning at me.

"Something coming, you think?"

I nodded. Walking over towards the window where the first Maw was now standing, staring out into the darkness.

"What's that noise?" asked Rudy, but was then silent, listening.

The sounds were distant and quiet, screeches echoing through the buildings far away, drawing slowly closer to us as the minutes went by. They seemed to be everywhere, yet nowhere that I could pinpoint. One high pitched rasp would echo through the skeletal buildings and be answered moments later by another. The sound made my skin crawl. It was like nothing that I had ever heard before, and much more chilling than the groan of a zombie or the howls and barking of the Maw. Gradually the screeching sounds drew much closer. They were in the buildings around the plaza now. We kept close to the edges of the windows, all of us silent.

Then I saw them, moving swiftly through the trees and across the plaza, like shadows. Hundreds of them darting between the massive trunks and jumping over the car wrecks that littered the ground.

They were running fast and heading straight towards our building. The rubble between us and them seemed to slow them down only for a moment before they leapt up and over it.

"What on earth are they?" asked Adler. He and Rudy were crouched by the window next to me.

"I have no idea, but they don't look like they are here just to say hello."

"There's a lot of them," said Reg.

As I glanced around the bottom of the plaza and the area around our building, trying to see where they would enter the building, the first of them hit the wall below us and started climbing. Others joined it, clawing their way up the broken stone work at a speed that made my heart jump, and yet more of them burst into the ground floor through the broken windows. I could hear them running across the ground below, heading for the stairs. The first of them reached just ten feet away when we started firing. I could see its eyes glowing in the darkness, the mass of sharp teeth that were bared and ready to bite. They were humanoid and roughly the same size as a man, except they were thin. Their dark skin looked stretched over a fragile frame of bones, like a human that was near starvation. Come to think of it now, they looked like they were starving. Hungry for us.

I'd only just managed to take in all of the features of the nearest one when Reg's shotgun tore the creature apart, also knocking three others from the wall to fall backwards to the ground.

More climbed the wall faster than I could take in. I fired at one of them that was climbing up the edge of the building, just a few feet from where I was standing, then at another that was close behind. My guns didn't have a blast effect like Reg's, so I was going to have to aim carefully and make every shot count.

Growls and screaming erupted behind us and a quick glance back revealed that the fight between the Maw and whatever these creatures were had started on the stairs. Three of the Maw were blocking the way up, taking it in turns to dart forward and bite at the creatures, each time catching one in its teeth, shaking it furiously and then launching the dead thing back down the stairs on top of those trying to make their way up. The other Maw were blocking the other windows, lashing out at any of the creatures that tried to get through.

There was no exit. They had us completely surrounded, and there were so many of them that I was sure that this was to be the end of us.

One of the creatures darted into sight from the wall next to me. I hadn't seen it come up from the ground. It had to have come down from above. It lashed out at me, claws scratching deep into my shoulder but not penetrating my jacket. I stepped back and kicked out with my boot, connecting hard with its chest and sending it stumbling backwards into the mass below. Another dropped down to take its place, but this time one of the Maw darted forward and ripped the things legs out from underneath it. Grey liquid splattered the ground as the top half of the creature fell backwards out of the window to tumble down to the ground below.

My eyes focused beyond the gap that was left behind, a window in the chaos that was around me. Down in the plaza, the creatures were still swarming over the trees and wreckage. There were far more of them than I had first thought, and there was no way that we were going to be able to withstand this kind of assault for the time it would take to kill them all.

There were too many of them.

In my head I screamed. Where the hell was DogThing? Had he already died, been killed by these creatures?

"Not dead. Trapped."

My heart jumped yet again as his voice echoed in the back of my mind. I dodged down and shot rounds off at two more of the creatures that leapt into view.

"Where are you? You must be close."

"Trapped."

"Where?"

"Under the ground. Tunnels."

"What? How did you get down there?"

"Under the buildings. Ways. I searched. The Tunnel collapsed."

"We're under attack. So many of them."

"Go to the tunnels."

Down. We had to go down.

"Reg, Rudy, Adler. Get ready to go. We have to leave."

Reg looked back at me for the briefest of moments, wide eyed.

"Where the hell are we gonna go? They're everywhere."

"DogThing is close and says that he is trapped underground in some tunnels. We may be able to escape down there. We have to go down the stairs and have to somehow get the Maw to clear the way."

"You can't talk to them," shouted Rudy. "Or can you?"

I went into my head again, still somehow able to fire at the creatures that were now swarming into the windows. Reg and I backed away, unable to keep up with so many of them jumping at us from different directions.

"DogThing. Can you reach the Maw that are with us? Can you speak to them?"

"Yes."

"Guide them. Please. Tell them we need to go down to the tunnels. They need to clear the way."

I backed further away, edging slowly towards the stairs. Reg was now standing shoulder to shoulder with me, unloading shot after shot into the creatures. Rudy and Adler tried to help, but their ability to hurt zombies didn't seem to apply to these new creatures, whatever they were.

Come on, DogThing, I thought. Get them moving.

Almost as though the Maw had heard me, they moved as one, backing away from the windows and towards us. Three of them broke off and dashed across the gap, leaping past us and down into the stairwell to join their brothers. As we began to take the stairs, slowly at first, but then faster as the Maw intensified their assault, it became more difficult with each step to try and fire weapons up the stairs. There were half a dozen Maw up there, furiously tearing at the mass of creatures that now poured down the stairs after us. How the Maw manage to fight on without seeming to suffer injury just baffled me.

We took the first few flights of stairs steadily, but after that the way seemed to clear. We passed the ground floor and just kept on going. The Maw in front of us were now running, taking down the few night creatures that had strayed downwards instead of heading up the stairs to the floor that we had been on. Flight after flight of stairs I ran down, nearly stumbling several times, but Reg was always behind me.

Then the stairs ended. A set of double doors and scattered broken glass was at the bottom. Beyond the doors it was dark, but there was just enough light coming from above to figure out that we were on some kind of platform. A few yards ahead and the floor dropped away, down onto railway tracks.

An underground railway.

"We need to block up the door," shouted Adler.

"With what?"

I glanced around quickly, trying to find something, anything. Every second or so the quiet of the station was shattered with the sound of Reg firing at the creatures that were still following us down the stairs. There weren't so many now, but I was convinced that our escape route would not remain quiet for long.

I spotted it. Over the top of the doors and ran forward.

"Shutters. There are metal shutters."

"Then you better figure out damn quick how to get them down," said Reg, taking aim and firing another shot. "I can hear them coming, lots of them, and we don't have long."

I glanced around. I needed something to climb up on, and I'd abandoned the trolley in our rush to escape. But I couldn't see anything.

"Over here," shouted Rudy.

I ran over to the dark corner of the platform, where his voice was coming from, and saw the stack of boxes. They were empty, and only made of flimsy wood, but I only needed them to hold together for a few seconds. I grabbed two and ran back to the doors. Reg was now firing as fast as he could out into the stairwell. Behind him, the dozen Maw were crouched, ready to take down anything that got through.

I dropped the first box and stacked the second on top, jumped up, took hold of the bottom of the shutter and pulled down as hard as I could. There was a creaking noise, followed by something snapping, and I nearly fell on top of Reg as the steel shutter came slamming down into the ground, just as some more of the night creatures appeared at the bottom of the stairs.

Moments later and the steel shutter was shaking and rattling as they tried to get through.

I collapsed to the ground, breathing heavily, next to Reg, who was covered in sweat and gasping as loud as I was.

"What the hell are those things?" I asked.

"I have no idea," said Reg, shaking his head. "I've never seen anything like them before."

I was exhausted.

"I really hope these Sisters of Rahl are going to be worth this."

"Me too."

Rudy was pacing the ground and looking warily at the dark entrances either end of the platform.

"What if they find another way down here?" he asked.

"They more than likely will," said Adler. "They seem quite determined."

"Yes. We need to move. We can't stay here. Anyway, DogThing is trapped down here somewhere, and needs help."

"He is? Is he hurt?" asked Rudy.

"I don't think so. Just stuck. Give me a moment. I need to try and talk to him."

I closed my eyes and thought of DogThing again.

"Where are you DogThing?"

"I don't know. In the tunnels, the wall broke and I was stuck. Here."

That last word was almost like a beacon to me. He was there. When he spoke to me, I could feel it. I could vaguely sense where he was. There was a room off of a platform similar to the one that we were now on, somewhere along the same line. He had gone in there and somehow not been able to get out. I just had to try and figure out where it was.

"What were you doing down here?"

"Following a scent. I knew the smell. I can't think of who it is. I went to look."

I stood up, glancing left and right at the two dark holes either end of the platform. We had to pick one.

"Okay. He is down here in these tunnels, off of one of the platforms, but I don't know exactly where."

Reg frowned.

"So I guess we just pick one?"

I walked to where the boxes had been, trying to see down the tunnel, but it was too dark.

"This way?"

There was a low growl behind me, and I turned to see one of the Maw standing a few feet away. It sniffed the ground and then moved a few feet in the other direction, stopping and turning to look at me again. The other Maw were on their feet now, some of them moving towards the other end of the platform.

"Can you smell him?" I asked the Maw.

It scratched at the floor and then took a few more steps along the platform, sniffed the ground and then looked up at me. It made a low whining noise.

"You can, can't you?"

I moved forward, following the Maw.

"Follow the Maw," I said. "They can find him."

A few minutes later, torches lit, and we were jogging along the rail track behind the Maw. We passed three platforms that were a few hundred yards apart, the entrances collapsed and littered with debris, old broken boxes and shopping trolleys lying on the ground, covered in decades of dust. In amongst the rubbish and the decay were skeletons, covered in huge cobwebs that had to have been made by particularly large spiders. They covered areas metres wide. I tried not to think about it too much as we searched for signs of DogThing.

At the fourth station I noticed paw prints in the dust that lead over to an open doorway. This platform was very different to the previous ones. Most of those had been simply laid out, with one set of doors that were either already shuttered, or collapsed. This one had two levels, with a stairway leading up to the higher platform. Three doors lead off of it. Two that were closed, and another that was wide open.

The paw prints led inside.

One of the Maw took a sniff of the door and then backed away.

"Looks like we're near," I said. "Wait out here. I'll look inside."

"I'm coming with you," said Reg.

I shined the torch through the gap, and saw almost straight away where DogThing had gone. The room was large, and stacked high with dusty boxes, but straight through the middle was a wide path that led to another opening, and his paw prints were visible in the dirt.

"Looks like some kind of storage depot," said Reg. "We might find something useful here."

"We're near. I know we are."

I walked slowly through the room, wondering what was in the boxes that were stacked up a dozen high in places, and glancing into the dark corners. This place made me feel uneasy.

On the other side of the room the second entrance led out into a passage that went on for a long way, but I didn't need to go far. Just as I reached what looked like a small section of collapsed wall, on the right, about twenty feet down the passage, I heard a bark.

I looked down, shining the torch so that we could both see. Some of the wall and the floor had collapsed down into what looked like some kind of drainage area. At the bottom, maybe ten feet down, was DogThing, and he was lying underneath a pile of rubble and metal pipes.

With Reg's help, I hung down from the passage and dropped to the ground, next to DogThing, and began shifting the rubble off of the pile of metal pipes that he was pinned under. Ten minutes later, I was sweating like crazy and breathing heavily, but DogThing managed to crawl out from underneath the mess. He was limping.

"Did you hurt your leg?"

"Yes. But it will be okay soon."

It's not an easy task to lift a massive dog that is easily as heavy as a man, up on to your shoulders. I had no idea that the Maw were that heavy, and DogThing was relatively small when compared to the huge, black things upstairs.

He hopped off of my shoulders and scrambled up the few feet of rubble, into the passage above. Reg reached down and helped me climb back out again.

Outside on the platform, we all sat down on some of the boxes from the store. Reg was busy opening some of them up and throwing aside what look like table cloths and bottles of cleaning fluid.

"Damn maintenance stores for cleaners by the looks of it," he cursed.

"Didn't think we would be that lucky," I answered.

I looked over at DogThing, who was busy licking his leg.

"So, what were you searching for down here?"

"I don't know. I was just wandering around the city and smelled what I thought was a person. I went to look, but it led me here."

"We should get moving," said Rudy. "We have no idea if those creatures up there will find their way down."

I started to go down the stairs with the others following me. DogThing was still limping a bit, but seemed otherwise okay. I'd seen him recover from worse.

The Maw were waiting down on the lower platform. I sensed that something was not quite right, even before I got close to them. They were all crouched low, looking at something along the track.

I moved between them, peering through the darkness until the torchlight reached the end of the platform.

A figure was standing up on the platform, barely twenty feet away. Humanoid.

Reg went to raise his shotgun, and I lifted my handgun, ready.

"You will not need those weapons here," said a woman's voice. "If you have peaceful intentions, then nothing here will harm you, and those outside will not come here."

She moved forward, stepping further into the light of the torch. She was tall, easily my height, and very pale skinned. Her eyes were so dazzling that they seemed to almost be on fire.

"Are you a Sister of Rahl?" asked Reg.

"Indeed," said the woman. "What reason do you have to be here? Men should not come here, lest they become what you have seen outside."

"Those creatures?" I asked. "They were once men?"

"Yes," said the woman. "They were the original inhabitants of the city. The male ones at least. The city was attacked by The Horde and everyone infected with the same affliction. The virus doesn't react very nicely with men's blood. Now they will forever be bound to a torturous fate. As would you, if you were bitten by one of them. I do hope you weren't. I would have to deal with you if that was the case."

"Well, we didn't come here to harm anyone," said Reg. "We are from the Resistance."

Her expression softened for a moment.

"Be that as it may. Then you may be welcome here, but that is not for me to decide."

"Who is the one who decides?" asked Adler.

"If you chose to come further, then the council will decide. You may come, but you must promise that your Maw will behave themselves, and that you will put away your weapons."

I nodded.

"We agree."

In my mind I spoke to DogThing.

"Tell the Maw they must relax and not attack anyone in here."

There was a moment of silence.

"They understand."

The woman looked at the Maw.

"You can guarantee that they will not attempt to attack anyone?"

"Yes."

She was looking straight into my eyes now. I could feel something. Some kind of prying.

"What is your name?"

"James. James Halldon."

At that, her eyes opened wide. Surprised.

"How is this so? You were believed to be dead," she said.

"You know of me?"

"Of course I know of you. What is wrong? If you don't remember the Sisters, then you are either lying, or your brain is faulty. Either way. Come, quickly. I don't like walking these tunnels."

I wanted to answer, and to ask her questions. At last, someone who knew of me in the past. But she turned away.

"This is not the time," she said.

We followed her into the darkness of the next tunnel, our torches barely giving enough light to see twenty feet ahead of us. Along the new section of tunnel was even more rubble and debris than we had seen in the others. Some of the walls had given way and lay crumbled on the ground a few feet thick, and water poured from some broken pipes that had been exposed by the collapse. After a few hundred yards I saw the light ahead. It was a sharp, white light, not like the glow that came from a natural fire. This seemed harsh somehow.

After another hundred yards or so we emerged from the tunnel into another platform. This one was clear of all rubbish. A bright florescent light hung from a wire over the top of the doorway in the middle of the platform. It flickered on an off every few seconds, but was bright enough for me to see that the end carriageway of a train was sticking out of the opposite tunnel. Across the top of the train, the tunnel had collapsed. Stone, bricks and mud filled the entrance so that only about half of the carriage was not submerged. There would be no way of getting around the train.

The woman jumped up on to the platform and led us towards the train, pulling open the rear door to let us in. I was the first through, with Reg right behind me. Rudy and Adler followed. I saw straight away that all the fittings and furniture that may have once been on the train had been removed so that the carriages had become a metal tunnel through the tonnes of fallen rock outside.

The woman waited whilst DogThing and rest of the Maw shuffled their way through the door and onto the train, then she pulled the door shut.

"You will wait in here whilst I go ahead and speak to my sisters."

We waited for what seemed like hours, but I would imagine that it wasn't really that long. As I sat on the floor, I took out the small note that the girl from the road station had given me and read it again.

They had called her Ella, but she had called herself Eleanor. Somehow that was important, but I just couldn't place why. I was still puzzled that she seemed to think that I would be going back for her. Why would she think that I would do that? It's not like her adopted parents would just let a stranger take the child away.

A noise from the other end of the carriage snapped me out of my thoughts. Three robed figures approached us along the train, stopping a few feet away.

"You may come," said one of the figures, a different woman by the sound of her voice. This voice was deeper, sterner.

We followed, and I was surprised to find how long the train was. At least four carriages held up the collapsed tunnel, and another two emerged at the other end. The platform that we stepped out onto was also abandoned. The door in middle of this one was much larger, as was the platform itself. As we walked into the passageway I glanced up towards the huge, rusty sign that hung on the wall above, lit up by yet another florescent light.

Landshaw Sports Stadium.

The women in robes walked ahead of us, not even glancing back to see whether or not we followed. The passageway that they led us along was much larger than any of the others had been, and it sloped upwards gradually. Along the walls were broken glass panels that still held in place the remains of huge pictures. People dressed in bright clothing standing upon small platforms with bright medallions around their necks. Soon the passageway opened up into a vast hall. All around were shop fronts and broken seating. Hanging from the ceiling were the cracked and broken remains of large display screens. It looked like some kind of shopping mall, where there would have been cafes and gift shops. One large, open space looked like it might have been a bar of some kind. Now, of course, all of the furniture was falling apart, and various stains tainted the frayed carpet.

We climbed an escalator that was covered in rust and cobwebs and probably hadn't worked for many, many years, and then entered another walkway. This one had an old ticket booth in the entrance. The windows were long gone and even the wooden booth itself looked close to collapsing in. Still sitting in the chair, slumped over the counter, was a skeleton without a head.

No one spoke. We all just followed.

The walkway finally opened out into a wide grass field, surrounded by sloped stalls of chairs that climbed higher and higher into the sky. Dotted all around were the same hanging florescent lights. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, glowing eerily and reminding me far too much of the strange, glowing plants in The Corridor, all of which only emphasised the sight that awaited us in the middle of the stadium.

I couldn't have counted how many there were, but at least fifty, maybe a hundred, massive marquee tents were laid out across the huge field. Some of them must have been fifty feet high in the centre, and they were all joined together by covered walkways.

I was too busy standing and staring in awe at the sight in front of me to notice that the women had stopped, and one of them was now just a few feet away from me.

"This is the home of the Sisters of Rahl. You are fortunate to see it. Not many men have seen this place and lived. In fact, from my knowledge, only some of the soldiers of the Resistance have been here. You of course," she said, looking directly at me, "have been here before. Though, it is apparent that you do not remember."

I looked back at her.

"I had an accident and lost my memory. That is why I'm here."

"I see," she said. "We will have to do something about that.

"That is what I had hoped."

She looked around at the others, and then the Maw.

"All of these are with you?"

"Yes. Well, Reg here is looking for someone."

Reg stepped forward and bowed.

"My name is Reginald Weldon. And I lost my wife many, many years ago. I have tried to find her, and it has led me here. I hope that you can be of some help. Is there any chance that she is here? Or if not, could you tell me where she went to?"

The woman stared at Reg.

"Reginald Weldon you say?"

"Yes maam."

She turned to one of the others and spoke quietly to her.

"What is your wife's name?"

"Marie. Marie Weldon."

She nodded.

"The woman who was once your wife is here. She has been a member of our order for many years. Word will be sent to her that you are here. I cannot promise that she will want to see you, though. Sisters of Rahl leave their old lives behind when they take up their vows."

She looked at me.

"You must all rest. In the morning we will talk."

Day 50

It was only a few hours before the sun came up. Most of our night had been spent running from the creatures that had swarmed the city, and then stumbling around the underground railway, but I still managed to get some sleep in the tent that they took us to.

Tent seems hardly the word to use. Inside, the marquee was huge.

I glanced around when I woke up. DogThing was lying at my feet, but no one else was around. He shifted his legs, and then looked up at me. How did he do that? He always seemed to wake up the moment I did. Something to do with our mental connection, maybe.

I walked out of the nearest exit and into the sun. It was blisteringly hot outside, the glare of the sun almost too much to bear, but I wandered around for a while with DogThing tagging along behind me. I saw some of the Maw up in the stadium stands, lying on the chairs in the shade, and then I spotted Reg. He was walking along one of the paths that wound all the way around the stadium between the rows of seating, about half way up the stands, and he wasn't alone.

With him was a young woman, obviously one of the Sisters by the way she was dressed. She was walking with her arm in his.

"Amazing isn't it?" said a voice behind me.

I turned to see Rudy sitting on one of the seats. I hadn't noticed him there.

"What is?"

Rudy nodded towards Reg.

"He has been looking for her for about ninety years."

I looked up at them both and then back at Rudy.

"So she really was here."

"Yes. It would seem so. She has been for a very long time. Apparently she doesn't remember everything from the time they were married, but she remembers enough of it. Seems you're not the only one who has lost their memory. Their mind-seer, at least I think that's what they called her, tried to restore Marie's memory a long time ago, but it didn't work completely. It has taken a lot of time."

"Hmm. I was wondering if she would want to see him, based on how the Sisters spoke last night. Speaking of which, have you seen any of the other sisters?"

"Yes. Adler was talking to some of them over in their garden, and the one in charge left a message that you should go to the centre marquee when you are awake."

I looked up at Reg and his wife one more time before heading back inside. After nearly ninety years, he really had found her again, and they were both alive. Strange how things turn out.

I eventually found my way around the maze of tents to the central marquee, a much larger space than the others. There were a lot more Sisters than I had first thought. Whilst wandering around, I met at least a hundred of them. They were all deeply involved in one thing or another, so I didn't disturb them.

"Ah. I see you have finally woken," said a voice from near the back of the vast chamber. Her voice echoed slightly, which was odd. I wouldn't have thought that tents could echo.

The speaker was different to the Sisters that I had already met. She was short, maybe five feet, and very thin. She was also the only one who looked old, which was unusual. If Marie was anything to go by, the Sisters were ageless, just like The Resistance, yet their leader was old and grey and wrinkled.

"James Halldon, The Maw tamer. It has been a while since I saw you. Apparently you won't be able to remember me at the moment, though."

"No, I had a slight accident in the memory department."

She laughed.

"Well, at least you haven't lost some of your humour. Come. Let us retire to a quieter place and I will see what can be done. DogThing can come if he promises not to interfere and to stay calm."

I frowned at her.

"Really," she said. "Quite pointless me explaining anything to you isn't it? If I can help you remember, then I won't have any explaining to do at all."

I sighed. Seemed to make sense.

She looked down at DogThing.

"You will behave yourself this time won't you?"

DogThing turned his head sideways and whined.

"This time?"

She waved her hand at me.

"Bah. Come on."

We followed her out of the great chamber and into a smaller side compartment, where there was just a single chair placed in the middle. Nothing else.

"Sit there."

I did as I was told.

"Now. First I must discern the extent of the damage. This bit won't hurt."

She placed her hand on the top of my head and closed her eyes. Mumbling to herself.

I sat there, sceptical, wondering if this was a complete waste of time and that I would be no better off than before, when there was a slight twinge in the back of my mind. Something felt strange.

"Ah I have found some of the problem," mumbled the old woman. "Now, I can't promise that this bit won't hurt. It might not, but it also might be painful."

I took a deep breath and waited.

Nothing. She was still mumbling under breathe. A slight warm feeling tingled in the back of my mind.

"Senga," I said, not sure of where it had come from.

"Good," she said. "Very good."

"That's your name isn't it?"

"Indeed. Now shut up."

She mumbled some more, and the more I listened to her voice the more my eyes began to cloud over. The sounds she was making were gradually becoming more and more audible. Then I realised. She wasn't mumbling at all, she was talking to the part of my mind that I no longer had access to.

"Now this is going to hurt, but it will unlock what has been locked, and your memories will start to come back."

FLASH

My mind felt like it had exploded, and searing pain shot through my nerves. I felt my arms tense up and my spine cracked so loudly that DogThing whined. My eyes felt as though someone had stuck a hot needle into the centre of them.

FLASH

I am no longer in the tent.

Where the hell am I?

I'm in a field. It is daylight here, and the fields stretch for miles and miles. Barley is swaying in the wind. It's almost hypnotic.

There is a laugh behind me. Someone else is here with me.

"Are you coming?" asks the voice. Another laugh.

"Yes," I say, except this is not me now saying this, this is me back then. I have no control of myself. I am merely a passenger in a scene from my own past.

I look round. A face that is familiar smiles back at me. She is tall, nearly as tall as I am, and beautiful, so beautiful. Long, dark hair, the colour of midnight, blows in the wind. Brilliant, bright eyes, shine with mischief. She wears a long flowing dress of green and white, with a loose belt and a hood made of cotton.

It's 1773. I'm fifteen years old and she is fourteen.

Abegail is her name.

I'm in love with her. My first love.

I chase her across the field, and we fall over, laughing together.

These were the happy days.

"I'm going to marry you one day," I tell her.

"What makes you think I'll marry you?"

She laughs and runs off again through the barley. I jump up and chase after her.

I live in Georgia.

I do come from Earth, but not from London.

I come from America.

Georgia.

It's just a few years before everything changes, before the war, before we rebelled against the British and made our home our own land.

I never married her back then.

Why didn't I marry her?

FLASH

More pain. My head feels like someone has smacked me around the face several times. My vision swims, blurring everything. But then I focus. There are people around me, lots of them watching me from a distance.

I'm not in the field anymore. I'm not in the chair, with Senga standing in front of me. I'm somewhere else, yet again.

Where am I now?

I'm standing in a line with many other men. Some are my age, and some are older. We're in the village square. Someone is speaking, but I can't make out what he is saying. He is tall, with a long beard and a jacket that makes me think his is...

He is recruiter for the militia.

I'm frightened.

It's 1775, and I'm seventeen years old, and we are being mustered for war. The war that changed everything.

I have everything I own packed in a small bag that hangs over my shoulder. It's hot. It's summer here. I can feel the sun burning on the back of my neck. I'm sweating, but it's not just the heat that is making me sweat. Fear.

Abegail is standing not far away in the entrance of a building. My mother is next to her.

Gabriel Halldon.

We say goodbye. There are tears.

This would be the last time I would ever see my mother. She would die in the winter to come of a fever and I would not know that for years. I wouldn't know that until I saw Abegail again.

FLASH

My mind swims again, this time I seem to drift. I'm in pain, but I can't sense where the pain is coming from. It's excruciating. Am I wounded? Yes.

My legs. They are broken.

I'm lying down in the mud. There are bodies around me. The smell of blood and the reek of the dead. I'm coughing.

Dying.

It's cold. It's winter.

It's the end of winter and nearly the beginning of spring. The year is 1778 and I'm twenty years old. We are at a place called Valley Forge. The war has stopped for the winter, but we weren't able to return home. I haven't been home for three years, and now I know that I may never go home. I will die here, just like the others.

I look down and realise that I'm sitting on bodies. Dozens of bodies. I'm in a pit. Blood covers my legs, but it's not my blood.

I try to move, but my legs are screaming with pain. I remember now. They are broken from when I was run down by the horse that charged us. I have been in the field hospital for weeks now, gradually getting weaker and weaker by the day. I know that gangrene courses through my bones and my veins, ever eating away at me, killing me slowly. They never tried to save my legs. They didn't even try to save me. Too many injured men. Too many sick and dying from disease or their wounds. Some would get help, but not someone with my wounds.

We had fought a battle. Black Hill comes to mind, though the memory is fuzzy and confused. I had been wounded. They dragged me for miles and miles on a stretcher. Both of my legs were broken and useless. I heard them talking. The tall one. He said that I should just be left to die. The other one. Shorter and thinner. He says no. The boy may live.

I was sick with fever. A lot of men were sick with fever.

We had stayed at the camp at Valley Forge over the winter, along with thousands of others from the army. There were multitudes of the sick and the dying. The field hospital smells of the dead and the dying, of the ointments and alcohol the doctors use to treat the wounds of those who may live.

Time moves on. The camp is packing up, now. The doctors visit the remaining sick. I am barely conscious. They say I am dead, but I'm not. I can hear them, but I can't tell them, I can't move. I try to call out, try to tell them that I'm not gone yet, but they walk away, and two other men come to lift my stretcher. They carry me somewhere and I feel myself falling.

I wake up. I'm still not dead.

I'm in the burial pit.

But they think I'm dead.

Somehow I manage to move. My arms and upper body still work, even though the cold of the winter numbs my fingers, my hands, and my face. I can't feel my face.

I crawl across the bodies and somehow manage to haul myself out of the pit. It takes so long. Just a few feet to climb, but it takes forever. Something moves underneath me. There is a cracking sound. I look down and the bodies below me in the burial pit are moving.

I must be delirious. I must be seeing things. No. They keep moving, crawling, writhing. Then one of the dead opens its eyes and looks straight at me.

There is death in those eyes.

Death and hatred.

I am out and crawling across the ground, one yard after another. Just a few more yards to escape into the bushes that seem so far away, yet they can't be more than a hundred yards away. I can feel something, some dark presence and I'm frightened.

There is a voice. I hear a deep voice. A harsh voice. It's back near the pit. I glance round, but my vision is still blurred. There is a tall figure standing next to the pit, looking down into the horror that I have just fled.

"Arise my brethren. Arise," says the voice. It chills me to my very heart. Evil has come here.

There are more cracking sounds.

Movement.

I see movement from the pit. Someone crawls out and slowly stands up. I can hear his bones snapping, as though his body still refuses to move. His head is lying on one side.

The dead man is standing up.

I crawl further away, further into the bushes, frightened.

The bushes are thicker here. I might be able to hide. I crawl into them as far as I can before they are too overgrown for me to force my way any further. I lay there, quiet and still.

The voice shouts.

"I know you are out there, you little rat. You will not escape from me."

My heart beats, thumping in my chest.

That voice.

"I have come to claim you all."

Moaning sounds, lots of them. I can barely keep my head from spinning, but I see well enough to see the dead men from the pit rising up, crawling out and wandering into the mist that spreads across the valley. There are dozens of them, maybe hundreds. They should not be walking. They should be dead.

Then there is a buzzing noise. I can't place what it is, but it's very near. A flash of light, nearby, and a faint popping noise, and then I can see someone standing near to me. My vision is so blurred now that I can only make out a silhouette of the new arrival, and nothing more.

Is this another evil?

The tall figure near the pit looks directly at whoever has just arrived, and he smiles a wicked, evil grin.

"You will be mine one day, rat," he says, and then he turns and walks off into the mist, with the mass of dead soldiers stumbling behind him.

I feel someone touch my shoulder. I try to push away but can't. I'm too weak.

There is cold on my back, my jacket has been torn open. Then pain, in the back of my neck. I'm being stabbed, a blade, or something else sharp. It bores into my neck and feels as though it will burst from the front at any moment. It's like nothing I have ever felt before. It digs inwards, to the centre of my head, to the nerves in my finger tips, even to my stomach. I try to scream, but nothing comes out.

Is this to be my last moment? Murdered by a stranger whilst I already lay dying? Will I ever see my family or Abegail again?

FLASH

My vision blurs for a moment. It's hard to find orientation. My neck hurts. I feel nauseous.

I am sick, everywhere.

My legs and arms don't seem to want to move. I can feel my heart beating all the way up into my throat. My right hand hurts more than anything else.

I look down at it, and try to raise it to my face so that I can see.

My hand is pale, like the dead. My veins seem black against my almost transparent skin. I start choking on my own vomit. Hands grab me and turn me over.

Then I can breathe again.

I feel my whole body shaking, convulsing.

There is a voice.

"I told you we should have sedated him first."

Who is that? Who is talking? I try to speak, but still nothing comes out.

"I know. We didn’t have time. He was nearly dead already."

The other voice is angry.

"It doesn't matter. It works anyway, so long as they still have a heartbeat."

"Yes. Okay. Next time we sedate."

I cough again, feeling the blood pumping through the veins in my head. It feels like someone is hitting me with a hammer.

Everything goes black. No bright flash this time. No more pain.

I awake some time later, open my eyes and take a deep breath.

"He's awake," says one of the voices.

A face appears in front of me. My vision is still blurred, so I can't make any features out.

"Stay calm, my friend. You are not dead and this is not Valhalla or Elysium. Your vision and your faculties will return. You need to rest."

"It's heaven in his culture."

"What?"

"Heaven. They believe in heaven. Valhalla and Elysium were years ago and that's Europe, anyway."

"Whatever."

FLASH

I'm standing on a ridge overlooking a vast plane that is completely covered with makeshift buildings. This is The Resistance evacuation camp. A sprawling city of tens of thousands of people from many worlds, all saved from death by The Resistance. It's called Evac. I think that they could have given it a more imaginative name. I always thought that.

A voice calls to me.

"Are you okay, my love?"

It's Abegail. She is here too. As are my brothers. I have been here for three years now and they arrived barely a month ago. Something happened in my home town. Some kind of disease that was not caused by man.

I was not allowed to go, even though I am a Resistance soldier now. I should have kept quiet, but when they mentioned the name of my town I just blurted it out, told them we had to save the people there. They did, but they didn't let me go.

"You look better today."

She smiles.

"I feel a lot better. Whatever it was that they gave me has got rid of my sickness."

"It does that."

I step round her and move the hair away from her neck, looking at the red scar on the back of her neck. She flinches.

"It still hurts?"

"Yes, a bit."

"It does heal, but it takes quite a while. Don't worry, a couple of months and all you will have there is a nice scar like mine."

She looks out across the sprawl of the city-camp.

"Will we ever go home?"

"Maybe. I don't know."

"They don't want people to go home do they?"

"No, they need all the help they can get to fight the Horde."

"Is that why you never came home?"

"Yes. I am needed here. But they came to help because I asked them too."

"It's okay, you don't need to apologise again. I understand. You're a soldier now."

"And you, you will be soon if you join up. Then we don't need to be apart again."

She laughs.

"They take girls?"

"Yes. Lots of them. Some of the best soldiers in the Resistance are women. It's hard, and it's tiring, and sometimes it's upsetting, when we get somewhere and we are too late. But when you help some people escape the horror and bring them here. It's the best."

I look down the road to an area that has been set apart for the children to play in. I helped set that up. We took the swings and the slides from various abandoned places and brought them back here.

I point at the children playing, and Abegail turns to look.

"They wouldn't even have had the chance of life if it wasn't for what we do. It's important, Abegail. Much more important than anything I've ever done in my life. When we go out to fight, we go out to save people, we go out to destroy the horrors that invade the worlds that the Horde attacks. They say one day that we will find a way of getting there first, before the Horde has already done the worst of the damage and killed so many people. One day we will be there when they get there. We will be strong enough and we will be waiting."

She smiles at me.

"Okay I'll join. I don't know how much of a monster killer I can be, or whether I'm even strong enough to be a soldier, but I'll try."

"Thank you. You know, years from now you'll look back on that decision and wonder why you even had to think about it. Look at how quickly my brothers joined."

"They were all already soldiers," she says, laughing louder. "I make clothes."

FLASH

"Easy, take it easy."

It was Senga, leaning over me.

"Easy."

I was back in the present. I could feel my heart beating heavily, thumping in my chest, just as it had each time my head had exploded from the inside.

"I saw things."

"Yes, yes. I know you did. I was in there with you remember?"

"No I don't remember."

I took a deep breath and let out a heavy sigh.

"They were my memories coming back, weren't they?"

"Yes, they were. I found what was wrong inside your mind and triggered it."

Confused.

"What do you mean? You triggered it? Triggered what?"

Senga walked slowly across the room and sat down on the floor.

"Something or someone has been tampering with your mind. There was something blocking your past memories. Something that was not natural. It had been put there by someone, or something."

"Why would anyone do that?"

The Mirror. Was it the Mirror?

"I don't know. That is down to you to find out. But I don't think you'll have any trouble doing that now, you just have to be careful. Your mind is still fighting against the memories returning, but I have made sure that there is nothing holding them back now. Eventually, all of your past will come back."

She was also breathing quite heavily.

"I am very tired now. I think I will go and rest. You should too."

"Yes."

She stood and went to leave the chamber.

"You must be wary now, James. You will have no control over when your memories come back. I would suggest you stay put for a while and allow it to just happen. You don't want to be out there in the world, and in a predicament, when you mind decides it's time you remembered something."

I nodded, and watched her leave.

"Thank you," I said, under my breath.

I sat there for a few minutes, just taking it all in. An hour ago I had no idea who I was and where I came from. Now I knew so much more, but there was also so much still missing. It frightened me to think what might come next, what I would remember next.

Abegail. I remembered Abegail, but that was quite literally hundreds of years ago. Where was she now? Was she still alive? Had we married? This I now had to find out, but was I best searching for her, or just waiting for the memories to return?

I looked at DogThing, who was still sitting on the floor and watching me, from a few feet away.

"Well, I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted."

"I was worried."

"You were? Why?"

"You were in a lot of pain."

"Was I? Yes, I suppose I was. But now I remember who am, where I came from. And Reg was right, I am a member of the Resistance, which means I now have to go and find them, somehow."

"We are leaving again?"

"No, not yet. Soon though. Let's go and find the others. I've got things to tell them."

We found Rudy and Adler in the Sister's gardens on the north side of the stadium. The pair of them were busy poking around amongst the trees and the plants, accompanied by three of the Sisters.

They called it The Arboretum. Rows upon rows of fruit trees lined the ground, all of them cut short and kept very neat. Every tree was overloaded with nearly every kind of fruit possible, and the ground around all of the trees was home to so many types of vegetables and plants. There were many that I had not even seen before.

My ghost friends stopped what they were doing and stood watching me. Waiting.

"Well?" asked Adler.

"Come on, tell us," said Rudy.

I smiled.

"My name really is James Halldon. I was born in America, in Georgia, in 1758."

Adler's eyes nearly popped out of his head.

"1758?" he blurted. "But, that makes you hundreds of years old."

"So it would seem," I said. "Reg was right as well. I am a member of The Resistance. Have been for a very long time."

"What else can you remember?"

"I can remember seeing CutterJack when I was seventeen years old."

"You've met him before?" asked Rudy.

"Yes. And I have terrible feeling that I may remember that I've met him a number of times afterwards. Something inside just tells me so. Look, I don't remember everything. I remember most of my youth, and joining the resistance, even some of the wars and rescues I've been involved in, but after than I've not remembered, yet."

Rudy frowned.

"Yet?"

"Yes. Senga says that I will remember it all over time, but there is no way of knowing when it will all come back. It comes in these strange flashbacks. I just have to..."

FLASH

My mind races to catch up with the scene that I am thrown into.

My ears are bombarded with the sounds of gunfire, lots of weapons firing.

I'm running. Around me I sense, more than see, dozens of Resistance soldiers running along with me.

I stop for a moment, spin on my heels and fire. Others around me are doing the same. Run a few yards, turn, fire.

The Horde is behind us, a mass of shambling zombies lurching along, trying to catch us. There are thousands of them, poor tortured souls from countless worlds, but with each turn that I make and each time that I fire into them, a dozen more fall, a dozen more are saved from their horrific existence.

Something is driving them at us. Something I can't see, but I know it's there. Some presence that is the reason that we are here.

"Keep moving," I shout.

"Keeping firing."

A hill is in the distance, just a few hundred yards away, and over the top of that is our destination. We scramble up the slope and reach the top. I see that below, in the grasslands at the foot of the hill on the other side, a hundred or more Resistance soldiers are lined up, kneeling in the dirt. Behind them is a vehicle of some kind.

"Flat out. Run. Keep going," I shout, and the soldiers with me stop firing and run as fast as they can down the hill towards the line of safety.

Then I remember. This is years later and these soldiers are under my command. Below awaits the trap. The trap for the thing that drives the zombies towards us. Years of planning, years of failure, yet this time it will work. I know it will.

"Move. Move," I shout. "Get behind the lines."

My troops move fast, flowing through the firing line. I am the last to step behind the line.

This has been practiced so many times.

I head towards the vehicle, then I turn and stop, looking back, as the creature that we are here to trap appears over the top of the hill.

"Charges ready?"

"Ready," shouts a familiar voice to my right. I glance and see Abegail. She has her hand in the air, waiting for the signal.

"Hold your fire," I shout. "Wait."

The line of troops stays kneeling on the ground as the mass of zombies stumbles its way down the hill towards us. On the top of the hill the tall creature stops and watches. I can see the expression on its face. Curiousity. Nervous. Doubting.

"Light it up," I shout and I hear a noise behind me as the vehicle's generator kicks in. On the top of the hill a glimmering, shifting light appears, surrounding the creature.

"Open fire."

Guns blaze. The zombies begin to fall.

"We got it," says Abegail, her hands over her ears to blank out the noise of the guns that are yet now decimating the zombies.

"Yes," I say. "Finally we have one of them."

"What now?"

I look up at the creature on the top of the hill. It smashes its hands against the barrier, screaming with rage, but I know it won't escape. The defence grid technology can withstand much more than one creature's futile blows. It would take thousands to break it.

"Now we find out how to hurt it, find out how to get information out of it."

"But we will kill it, right?"

"Yes. When it has squealed everything that we can possible wrench out of its filthy mouth. Then we will kill it."

FLASH

I'm in a room in Evac City.

Abegail is lying on a bed. Sweat covers her face and there is blood on the sheets. For a moment my heart jumps and I think she must be ill. But she isn't. Far from it.

She smiles.

In her arms she holds a small bundle of cloth.

Wait

It's not cloth.

The bundle moves. It starts to cry.

A child.

"What will you call her?" asks someone nearby. I don't look to see whose voice it is. My eyes can only look at Abegail and our baby.

Abegail smiles.

"I want to call her Chione."

She looks at me, seeking approval.

I can't take the grin off of my face. I don't even try.

"It's a beautiful name. Chione it is."

FLASH

We are sitting cross legged on the ground. Chione and I. She is now four years old. We're drawing pictures.

She looks at me and grins. She has a gap in the middle of her smile, where her baby teeth fell out recently. She looks stunning.

"Where do you go daddy?"

Her voice has gained the sweetest lisp.

"When you are gone for weeks. Where do you go?"

"I have my job to do sweetheart. One day I'll tell you all about it."

"Do you help people? Or do you make things?"

"Mostly help people, but sometimes I make things."

"I want to help people too one day. And I want to make things."

"You will, honey. One day."

FLASH

We're out in the desert, standing on the roof of an open topped vehicle. It's one of the ones we use to move troop squads around. This one is mine and has two sets of bunk beds as well.

Chione is standing next to me, a rifle in her hands. It's a sniper rifle, and it's bigger than she is. She points the rifle out across the desert. Holding it tightly and peering through the view finder.

She is older now. Sixteen years old. I feel then that time has passed too quickly. She is everything I would want in a daughter, but I miss her being small.

She fires, and a hundred yards away a lone zombie drops to the ground.

"Excellent shot, sweetheart. You're getting better at this all the time."

She lowers the rifle, turns and smiles at me. I remember when that smile had two missing teeth in the middle. I can see her mother in her. Her eyes burn with the same wicked mischief, and her hair, the same dark flowing locks, even now blows in the wind.

"You think I'm ready?"

I sigh.

"If it's really what you want. Then yes."

"Mother says I will make an amazing Outrider."

"You will."

"And I don't have to stay at home when you go out any more. I can come with you and mum now."

"Hmm. We will see about that. You have a lot of training to do first. It's hard work, and you will have to be focused and strong."

"I'm tough."

I laugh,

"Yes, just like your mother."

"Mum's the best shot in the Outriders."

"She is indeed, but I think she is going to have competition from her own daughter if you carry on the way you're going."

FLASH

The same bed. Blood on the sheets. Except this time it isn't Abegail laying there with a child in her arms. It's Chione, and this is not long ago, only a few years. She smiles at me the same way that her mother had all those years ago.

"Can I hold her?" asks Abegail.

Chione nods, and hands the baby over to her mother, who smiles and talks quietly to the frightened infant.

I turn and grin at the soldier sitting on the seat next to Chione, the father of my new granddaughter. His name is Andre, and he is one of my best men. He looks guilty for a moment, then smiles and lowers his head.

"What will you call her?" Abegail asks Chione.

Chione frowns.

"I thought about this a lot, and I think I like the name Eleanor."

Eleanor.

My granddaughter.

FLASH

I stumbled to the ground and waited for my head to clear.

"Are you okay?" asked Rudy.

"Yes...I'm fine. Give me a minute."

Adler walked over and knelt down next to me.

"You glazed over for a second. I thought that you were going to pass out."

"He should rest," said one of the Sisters. I didn't see which one.

I wil be ready.

That was what she wrote.

"How long was I like it for? How long was I out?" I asked, reaching into my pouch and taking out the cloth with the note in it.

"Not for long," said Rudy. "Barely a moment. Less than a second I would say."

I unfolded the cloth and read the note again.

I wil be redy wen tis time for me to go wif yoo ganda. Eleanor

Ganda? How could that one word have got past me? How had I missed it?

I will be ready when it's time for me to go with you Granddad. Eleanor

The little girl at the road station was my granddaughter? Cory had said that she had been left behind when her parents passed away. No, he said passed on. But did that mean dead? Did this mean that my daughter was dead?

And how long had I been away? We just travelled through that road station and left again. What must she have thought? That her parents and her grandparents had forgotten her? That they had abandoned her?

I looked up at Rudy.

"The little girl. The one at the road station. She gave me a note. The one called Eleanor."

I went to hand the note to Rudy, but of course he couldn't take it. I forget that even now.

I read it out loud to them and they both stood there looking thoughtful, puzzled.

"What does it mean, do you think?" asked Rudy.

"In my last flashback. I saw her after she was born, I saw her mother and father. Her mother is Chione. She's...She's my granddaughter. Eleanor is my granddaughter."

I look over at DogThing.

"Did you know any of this?"

"No. I don't remember things."

"What do you mean?"

"Things don't stay in my head that long."

"Oh," I laughed. "You forgot too, except you forgot naturally."

"Yes."

I stood up.

"I have to go back and get her."

Rudy and Adler looked at each other, worried.

"Shouldn't you wait until your memories have all returned?" asked Rudy

"No. She may be able to tell me much more. And she is my granddaughter. I need to go to her."

"But, what if you have a flashback at an unfortunate time?" asked Adler. "You should at least wait for the night."

I thought about this. The flashbacks did seem to be coming quite quickly. Maybe they were right.

"Okay. Look, I'll stay here for one more night. I do need to sleep. But tomorrow, when it's safe to get out of the city again. Then we go."

"Agreed," said Adler.

I stood up and walked back to the marquee where I had slept before, all the time, the things that I had learned were going over and over in my mind. It was so much to learn in such a short space of time. A partner, a daughter, and granddaughter. Two of them could be anywhere, they could be dead, but one of them, Eleanor. She was alive and she was the only living connection that I had to my past, as far as I knew. And she was on her own. What must she think of me?

I lay on the bed for a few hours, thinking it over, wondering if another flashback would come soon, but there was nothing. Were they triggered by something?

I heard movement in the chamber.

"How are you feeling now?"

It was Reg, standing near the entrance.

"Better. Worse. I don't know."

"You've got some of your memories back, it seems."

"Yes, lots of them. I have...people I need to find now. We're leaving in the morning. I take it you're staying?"

I smiled at him and he grinned back.

"Not sure," he said. "We haven't decided what we're doing next."

"You must be pretty damn happy."

"Oh god, you would not believe it. I can't, still. She hasn't changed a bit, well, except her skin is paler and she has fangs. Other than that she is the same woman that I married."

"Does she still love you after all this time?"

"I guess I stuck lucky there, too. She still does, and she says that whatever I decide to do, or go, that she's coming too. Her superior was angry at her for turning away from their ways. But...She's my wife, you know?"

"Yes. Well. It would seem that I do know as well. I had a partner. I don't know if she was my wife or not. Not yet, anyway. I have a daughter, and a granddaughter."

I told him all about the flashbacks.

"I knew it. I knew that she recognised you, somehow. I couldn't place it at the time, but now it all makes perfect sense."

"Well. I don't know about perfect."

"No, but you know what I mean."

We were silent for a moment.

"You'll be going back then," he said, "back to the road station. Not only do they have your little one, but Cory and his folks, they might also know about Chione, or even Abegail."

"Yes. We go tomorrow. What about you?"

He seemed to think about that for a long time.

"I'll talk to Marie. You helped me get here. I want to help you."

"I'll understand if you don't want to come."

"I need to," he says." I made a promise to Andre. Who it appears is your son in law, that I would head back to the Resistance and join the cause once I had found my wife. I guess he presumed it wouldn't take quite this long, but I still have a promise to keep. And you don't know where the base is. I do. I can help you get your little girl, and then take you there. It's the least I can do."

"Thank you."

"No thanks required. Look. I'll leave you to rest now. You look exhausted."

"Okay, thanks Reg."

He goes to leave.

"Reg?"

"Yes?"

"They seriously have fangs?"

"They're vampires. But don't worry, we're safe. They can't drink our blood, since apparently some of their blood is in the A17 serum, anyway. They can't touch Resistance folks."

"They drink people's blood, though."

"They used to. But it seems that they found some way of avoiding it. I didn't ask."

Day 51

I can't believe that I actually slept for the whole day and the night. Unfortunately there were no flashbacks either.

We left early. The sun was just rising over the horizon when we stepped outside of the gates. Yes, gates. We went out the front door this time.

We wasted as little time getting out of the city as we could. The head of the Sisters had said that the Warped Ones, as they called them, wouldn't be back until nightfall, but the city was quite large and difficult to move through, so we had better get moving.

The only delay was in Marie saying goodbye to the Sisters. I wanted to go quickly, but I understood that she had been here for decades. It was a difficult goodbye.

She knew her way around the city very well, and within an hour she had taken us back to where the battle had been.

"There are no bodies," I said, as we approached the foot of the building from across the plaza. I had expected hundreds of them to be lying around. We had certainly killed that many.

"There wouldn't be," said Marie. "Part of their curse is that they only leave dust after they die. The bodies soon collapse, and all that is left is that."

She pointed at the grey muck that was gathering against the bottom of the ground floor windows.

"They burn up in the day?"

"No, that's just a myth, otherwise I wouldn't be standing here," she said, smiling. "But when they die they crumble to ash. As would I."

"So all the other stuff, crosses, holy water, sunlight. Does any of that affect you?" asked Rudy.

I frowned.

"Bram Stoker's Dracula," he said grinning at me."

"All myth," said Marie. "Well, mostly. Silver bullets hurt a lot."

"I thought that was werewolves?" asked Rudy.

"Bullets of any kind hurt. We're still corporeal. Anything that would hurt a human hurts us, except that we don't die very easily. It would take a lot of bullets."

"Oh," said Rudy.

"And yes, I can see myself in a mirror."

Adler laughed.

I left them chattering, and went into the building. Thankfully the trolley was still where I had left it. I just had to pick it up and put everything back in it. It must have been knocked over during the battle. I also had to bend a wheel back into place.

Outside, they were still talking.

"So werewolves are real as well?" asked Adler.

"Oh, yes, they are very real. You most certainly do not want to mess with one of them. They are lot bigger and faster than tales tell of them. And they will eat anything, alive or dead."

DogThing growled at this.

"I don't mean you," said Marie.

My turn to question.

"I don't yet remember much about the Maw," I said, giving DogThing a rub behind his ears. "Are they related to werewolves?"

"No, not at all. Maw are much friendlier, and almost as deadly."

"Really? From the way you were describing werewolves, they sound pretty dangerous."

"Oh, yes, they are. The main difference being that the Maw simply won't lie down and die."

"They don't? Not at all?" asked Rudy.

"No," said Marie. "I've never heard of a Maw being killed by anything. They have this innate ability to just vanish and then turn up later on."

I thought back to when DogThing and the other Maw had fought CutterJack in The Corridor. CutterJack had killed them, or so I had thought, but DogThing came back again. I never did ask him.

"Miala, the Head of the council of the Sisters once told me about them. No one really knows where they disappear to when they are killed. She believed it to be some kind of other plane of existence. She said that she suspected that they had some other place that they could go to that allowed them to rest and heal, and that it happened without them being conscious of it. Of course, you are the only person ever to be able to talk to a Maw, and only that one. And he's so young that he doesn't understand half of it anyway."

"I never thought of that," I said. "He is a lot smaller than the other adult ones. I never considered that he might still be a pup."

"I can hear you, you know."

"I know. How old are you DogThing?"

"I don't understand you."

I nodded.

By midday we were back at the camp we had used before, but this time we didn't stop. We just carried on until it was dark. We camped up in one of the old buildings. It was the one with the washing still on the line.

It was late when the first flashback hit me. We were all sitting around a fire in the middle of the room. The Maw were outside, surrounding the building. Marie was telling us about her past.

"I couldn't remember anything," she said. "Somehow the creature that had helped Laurence, the man who took me, had wiped all of my memories."

I knew how that felt.

"I stayed there because I couldn't leave. Something surrounding the house stopped me. I could only see darkness past the bottom of the garden. In every direction there was just darkness. I never did find out what it was that stopped me from leaving, but I always had this feeling that it was something real, an object of some kind. I even sensed where it was, hidden away in the loft. I searched, but I couldn't find it. There was this box that was hidden under piles of junk, and that was where the feeling came from. But the box was empty."

"Just like Adler and I, when we were trapped by the pieces of the key," said Rudy.

"Why yes," said Adler. "Of course Rudy, it sounds just the same. Marie, when Rudy and I were killed, we couldn't leave. We were trapped in the place of our deaths until James came along and we discovered that it was the pieces of the key that we were bound to. When James reformed the key as a whole, we were set free."

"Except that Marie never died," said Reg.

"No, I didn't, but I was bound nonetheless. Until one day when a man came to visit. He knocked on the door, and Laurence wasn't there. I never let anyone in when Laurence wasn't there. I just watched from the windows upstairs. He did this very strange thing. He walked into the back garden, and down the steps towards the summer house. I wondered what he was doing down there, so I went out the back door, and followed him from a distance, keeping quiet."

"Was he looking for something?" asked Reg.

"Yes. Well. In a way," smiled Marie, "He went down the garden to where the old ruin was. There was an arch down there. I always found that ruin fascinating."

She seemed to be lost in some memory for a moment.

"You don't have to tell us," said Reg.

"No. No. He walked to the arch, and then took something out of his pocket. A thing. I didn't know what it was. And then the portal opened. It just appeared in the middle of nowhere. He stepped through and the portal closed. He was gone."

"Another key maybe?" asked Rudy.

"Maybe," said Marie. "Anyway. After that I became obsessed with that archway. I would sit down there day after day. One day I was sitting there, reading a book, when the portal just opened again. I stood up, and walked over to it. Through the gap was a bright desert, yet on my side of the portal was wet grass. Before I could do anything else, it closed again."

"I was so angry with myself. By then, you see, I had discovered enough of my own mind to know that I wasn't Laurence's wife. I was bound there. You see Laurence would talk in his sleep. Not that I ever slept in the same bed as he. But I heard him, and I would go and listen at his door when he started. That way I found out all about how it had happened. I knew I was trapped here by him."

"But, you'd missed the door opening," said Adler.

"Yes. But I was determined that I wouldn't miss it again, so I began to prepare. I found an old satchel and started collecting things that I would need, and hiding them in the summerhouse. I still went there every day. About a year later, I was sitting in the same place, once more reading a book, and the portal opened again. This time I grabbed my things and ran."

"Into the desert of this world?" asked Adler.

"Yes."

FLASH

I'm standing in the snow. Andre is next to me. Around us, the forest burns even as the snow falls into the fires. A cold wind blows.

"So. There are no sentient races at all on this planet?"

"Not exactly."

"What do you mean? Why else would they come here?"

"There are these creatures, they are like dogs, except much bigger, much more dangerous. We think that they came here to enslave them. They may be sentient to some degree. We haven't managed to find out yet. They are quite defensive and untrusting."

"But other than big and dangerous dogs, there's nothing else for them here?"

"No. Nothing. But you should see them. They are amazing creatures. From what we have figured out so far, the Horde can't even kill the things."

This surprises me.

"They can't kill them? Explain."

"They are just too tough for them to kill. We've seen them fight. They get set on by hundreds of shamblers, and they can't seem to even scratch them."

"What about the burning ones?"

Walking skeletons that carry an inferno with them.

"I haven't seen them here, yet, so I can't vouch for that match. But, can you imagine if we were able to get these things to help us?"

"You mean train them?"

"Yes."

"I'd need a pup. A young one."

"I'll find one," says Andre.

"Do that. And get Chione to help. She is good with animals."

"Get's it from her father."

FLASH

I'm standing in darkness. Wait. It's almost complete darkness, but there is some kind of unnatural glow coming from somewhere.

"What is this place?" I ask.

Joshua, my brother, stands a few feet away from me.

"A cavern made naturally from near the centre of a destroyed planet."

"What? How?"

"When the planets collided with another, it was pulled into a naturally occurring hole, and somehow it ended up here, in this place."

"Embedded in the middle of the desert on an entirely different planet?"

"Yes, amazing isn't it? Quite an extraordinary event."

"How do you know where it came from?"

"Oh. The Sisters Seer. Senga. We brought her here."

"Oh, her."

"Yes. She walked around for a few days, warbling on as she always does. Then she just blurted out what it was. That woman freaks me out."

"And you just found it. Whilst you were wandering around in the desert?"

"Yes. Well, no. We were looking for a good spot to build an outpost, you know, somewhere secluded, but not far from a road. We found the ravine and then one of the scouts spotted the cave entrance. There are two entrances, about three miles apart."

"So, Josh. Why are we even here? I mean. It's just a big dark cave."

"It's a very special, big dark cave."

"How so?"

"Once in here. You can't portal out. I tried it."

Now he had my attention.

"What do you mean? You can't open a door at all?"

"No. Well, just one spot in the entire place. We tried a few times. There is one small area that is part of the original rock that was here before this thing popped into place. That area can be ported out through, but only if you have a key. We tried opening one into here and that works okay, but you have to have the exact coordinates, and it's very inaccurate, somehow it gets warped. There is also this very strange anomaly over on the other side of the cave. We haven't figured out what it is yet. Did I tell you that this place is thirty miles across?"

An idea begins to form in my mind.

"If you can't portal out, but you can portal in. If you blocked up all the holes, those entrances. You'd be trapped, right?"

"Yes brother. Effectively, if you put someone in here and...Oh."

"The perfect trap."

FLASH

I'm standing in the desert. I'm not alone. I'm near the portal. It's the same portal that Marie travelled through. I'm not alone. Standing next to me is...

Nua'lath.

"We have a deal then?" he asks.

"We have a deal," I reply.

"I will help you, and then you will let me take what I want."

"Yes."

My mind reels. This can't be true. I can't have made a deal with Nua'lath.

No

No. Wait. It looks like Nua'lath. But it's not him. Another that looks similar. No scars. His skin is not so pale. No metal rivets holding his face together.

Another of Nua'lath's kind.

He speaks, and his voice still chills my spine.

"The power. The gift of the old ones. It should never have been his. He has squandered it and abused the gift."

"Yes. You could say that."

"The destruction of entire worlds is unacceptable. Only the old one has the right to such an endeavour. We, the followers, must be humble. It must stop."

His name is Dha'mir.

"Agreed," I say.

"We will end this, you and I. And I, the high priest, shall become the ordained one, as was the will of the old ones, before he stole it from me. It will take time when he is trapped. He will weaken eventually, but we must be patient. It could be years or even decades before he has become weak enough for me to destroy him."

"But during that time The Horde will dissipate?" I ask. "And there will be no more invasions?"

"Yes. The Horde will cease to have a mind holding it together. The creatures will still exist, but they will not gather in force. We will start in the next world that The Horde are to travel to. I will be with him. It is a place that the native peoples call Nenshar. A swamp on a very warm planet. Here. This will allow you to travel there. Good luck."

For a moment I see a picture in my mind, of a swamp on a distant planet. Huge mushrooms grow there, and slithering in the rancid mud are massive slug like creatures. The place is etched into my mind so clearly that I know that I will be able to use the key to travel there.

FLASH

I'm standing in the dark, with Andre and my brother Joshua. Others are nearby, a dozen armed Vigilant soldiers, the heavy combat troops of the Resistance, stand watching, waiting for their orders. Their battle gear is similar in design to the armour plates that I wear, what all the Outriders wear, except that Vigilants are covered from head to toe in it, with helmets and visors that allow them to see in the dark.

We're in The Corridor, and below us, down the slope, is the part of London that we pulled into The Corridor, hoping to catch Nua'lath. I watch as lurching zombies stumble around in the darkness. We managed to capture and contain the outbreak that he released, but we somehow managed to miss him.

"Nua'lath's not here," says Andre.

"No. I know," I reply. "We failed again."

Joshua looks at me.

"What is it we are doing wrong?" he asks.

"I don't know. I will need to meet with Dha'mir. Maybe he will know. Maybe it's the machine."

"That's four times now," says Joshua. "The swamp, the waterfall, those desert caves, and now these streets. We're going to run out of space. There's only so much crap that we can haul back here."

"I know, okay?"

He shrugs.

"We'll figure it out. Next time we will get it right. Maybe we need to be closer to him when we set off the machine. He must have left the area before it activated."

"Closer to him means dead."

"Not in here it doesn't. He won't be able to control his creatures so well. Dha'mir showed us that."

"He is still lethal. And we're guaranteed to pull whatever is with him at the time."

We watch as other Vigilant soldiers sweep through the streets below, destroying the zombies.

Something darts out of an alleyway and runs at the soldiers, but they cut it down before it gets near.

"What was that?" asked Andre.

"Kre'esh," replied Joshua. "They came from Nenshar. The swamps. The Horde has thousands of them now. I guess there must be a few wandering around down here as well."

Andre shakes his head.

"This place is soon going to be too dangerous to work out of. We have to get it right the next time."

"Don't worry. It's not time to give up yet. We're close. And soon, it will work."

FLASH

I'm in London, walking the streets of an area called Gallowshill. It's 1912. Joshua walks with me, as well as Loran, Ashley and Kale, my other brothers. The streets are busy, and I feel hugely uncomfortable without my armour. I can tell that the others do as well. Fortunately we are able to conceal our guns, so we are not completely unprepared.

"So we have secured the house?" I ask.

"Yes," says Kale, "paid for, and as we speak being occupied by a detachment of Waylanders"

Waylanders. They work closely with the Outrider division of The Resistance. They are the supply and logistics division. Right now they will be setting up base in The Old Caff Trade Company premises.

"And the other occupants?"

"Recruited. They were only too happy. Vagrants mostly. The old owner has moved out of London and won't be back."

"Good. No loose ends."

"What's the plan?" asks Ashley.

"We start following the Horde's agents. They are here again, we know that. We have to somehow persuade them that the junkyard is the best place for the door to open. Then we will be ready."

"How are we going to do that? There are a lot of them," asks Kale.

"We make everywhere else too dangerous for them."

"This is risky, you know," says Joshua. "Pulling another piece of London into The Corridor, and barely a couple of miles between the two locations. We took whole streets last time. If we do it again we could cause untold damage."

"We went about it all wrong last time," I reply. "We've been too busy trying to stop the Horde, and not concentrating on the one element that will achieve that goal. This time we don't try to get the whole outbreak. This time we just want him. And if we aim to set the thing off in that junkyard, then we have half a square mile that no one is ever going to miss. And those Waylanders will be working hard to make that junkyard as enticing a lair as possible, even as we speak."

We stand on the street corner for an hour or so. Ashley looks impatient.

"We're not going to find them here."

"Just be patient," says Joshua. "Andre assured us that there were at least two gangs working out of Gallowshill that were being controlled by one or more of Nua'lath's scout minions. They are here. The Sisters will come to us when they have located them. Until then, we just have to keep our eyes open. This is where the Sisters said that they are most active."

We wait another hour before I notice the group hanging around across the street, in the alleyway next to the pawn shop opposite. I nod to my brothers, and we make our way into the crowd, disappearing from view.

I watch as a young boy leaves the pawn shop and turns into the alleyway. The gang have been watching him, and as they corner him in the alleyway and pin him against the wall I see one of them talking to him, obviously the gang leader. I glance over to Kale, who is ten yards from me, standing next to one of the market stalls and pretending to examine the fruit. He nods to me. The tell tale signs were there. Dry and mottled skin with patches that look black and diseased, rotten teeth that have started to sharpen, eyes that look somehow distant. These are plague zombies yet to be reborn, an invasion in the making.

We start moving as one towards the group, approaching from different directions, but something is happening.

There is a scuffle, and the boy strikes out at the leader, and then begins running away. Another of the gang grabs for the boy but he lashes out with something, a knife. Fingers scatter across the ground. I recognise the style of the knife. It's Resistance made.

Then the boy is running down the alley, followed closely by the gang. The leader, with his arm spewing blood all over the ground, is trying to follow his gang after the boy, but he is losing blood fast, an artery severed.

My brothers run past the gang leader and continue running, following the gang. Joshua slows and glances back.

"I've got him," I shout, and I stop and grab him by the collar of his jacket, avoiding the blood and dragging him further into the alleyway, round a corner into a dead end.

I push him to the ground, draw my gun and put it to his head. His eyes widen with fear.

"Where is the one who speaks to you in your head?"

He doesn't answer, just lays there stuttering.

"I'll kill you if you don't tell me where the creature is that you call master."

"Hemley...he is on Hemley alley."

I look into his eyes and see that fear has made him blurt out the truth.

"Please," he says. "I need help."

"Yes. You do."

I fire the gun twice, head and chest shots.

One less future zombie. I haul the body into the yard of a derelict building, cover it with oil and set fire to it, then run back into the alleyway to find my brothers.

Just as I turn the corner I see three figures, dressed in robes. I guess that they have been watching me and will have seen everything.

"I see that you have found them," says the first.

I aim my gun.

"Who are you?"

"We are allies. We are the Sisters of Rahl. Come. I think your fellow soldiers have found the rest."

The Sisters of Rahl. A Vampire sect. Why we ever deemed it right to become allies with them, I question, but they have proven helpful in tracking down Nua'lath's movements in London.

I follow them, and we turn many corners, making our way through one of the most dangerous parts of London, along dark alleyways and empty streets. Just as I begin to wonder if the Sisters have turned on us and this is a trap, we turn a corner and I see my brothers.

The alleyway is a mess. Several men lie dead, blood everywhere, and at least a dozen others are kneeling on the ground, my brother's guns trained on them.

I glance at the name on the street sign as I walk by. Hemley. The creature is on this street.

At the other end of the alleyway lie the bodies of two women. Two of the Sisters move quickly through the carnage and over to the two bodies. They examine them, and then look up to the Sister who still stands next to me.

"They are both barely alive."

She nods.

"Turn them."

The two sisters lift the dying women and take them along the alleyway and around the corner.

I walk over to Joshua.

"Well?"

"One of the Scouts is living out of a house down near a place called The Running Ground. It's some kind of storage for contraband."

"Good, well the other one is on this street, somewhere."

"We have them."

"Yes."

"Then we kill these things and then tonight we drive the minions out of their hiding places. They will move on and we will make sure that they move in the direction we want them to go. From here, they can't fail to find the junkyard."

The Sister of Rahl standing next to me touches my shoulder.

"When we are done here, I would wish to speak to you. It is in my understanding that you are able to open doors. Doors to other places."

"I can, yes."

"The Sisters do not wish to be here anymore. We would like to go somewhere where there are no crowds, no wars, and no people. We will miss London, but it is not safe for us here anymore. Would you be able to assist us?"

"Of course, you and your kin have been of great help to us and I can understand you not wanting to be here if we can't stop the invasion that is coming. I think I know the ideal place."

"You do?"

"Yes, how does an entirely empty city sound to you? It's post invasion, so there are some elements of the Horde still there, but not too much. And there is a whole city of empty buildings."

"It sounds perfect."

FLASH

I opened my eyes and looked around. Marie was still talking. They hadn't even noticed that I'd just had more flashbacks.

"...So I joined them and followed them to the stadium. Senga promised me that she would help with my memories. She has over the years. I still get the occasional flashback, and there are still memories that I'm sure are missing, parts of my mind and my past that I hope will come back, one day."

I lay down again. I was tired, and it was far too late in the evening to start telling them all about the flashbacks that I'd just had.

Day 52

The sun wasn't quite as hot today, and there was a cool breeze blowing across the desert as we made our way out of the forest and down the highway, back towards the road station. I kept thinking about how I was going to be able to explain to Cory that Eleanor was my granddaughter, and that she would be leaving with me. No easy way to put it came to mind.

As we approached the road station, around midday, I could already tell that something had changed. The front door was wide open, and the truck was gone.

We went inside, but found no one there. Things were missing, not furniture, but other things, like the cutlery in the kitchen, pictures on the wall. They had taken anything that could be stuffed into a vehicle. Rudy and Adler went through the hatch and looked around in the secret basement, but came back with worried looks.

"Nothing."

Growling. From outside. The Maw.

I was the first one out, with both guns raised, followed by Reg and Marie.

There was a figure standing on the other side of the road. The Maw were encircling it, but keeping their distance. We crossed the road, slowly, until I recognised who it was. A week ago I would have opened fire, thinking it was CutterJack.

"It's impossible," said Rudy, behind me, still unaware of the addition of Dha'mir to the mystery. "How can he be here? You have to kill him. You've got guns, Kill him."

"Wait. Calm down. It's not CutterJack."

"It's not?" asked Rudy.

"No, it's not," said Adler. "This one has no scars."

"I had a flashback late last night. This is one of CutterJack's kind, but he was helping us. I think he was the one who helped us trap CutterJack down there."

"You trapped him? You did it?" asked Rudy.

"Remind me tonight to tell you all about my flashbacks."

The figure approached.

Dha'mir.

"Do you have your memory back this time Mr. Halldon?"

"Yes. Of you at least. Why are you here?"

"I was watching over your offspring."

"You knew she was my granddaughter?"

"Hmm, it would seem that not all of your memories have come back, otherwise you would have known that your daughter left the child here when you went into The Corridor a few months ago. You do not remember this yet? I presumed something had gone very wrong, you have been gone for longer than expected."

"So you just decided to watch over her out of kindness?"

He laughed.

"Of course not. No difference to me, except that I knew that if you survived, your daughter would have come back for her. I believe Eleanor was quite confused that you did not recognise her. Of course, I warned her that you were not well, and that you would be back again."

"Then why didn't you show your face when we were here last? Why didn't you speak to us?"

"I entered your mind and found no reference to myself. It was quite strange. You appeared to have forgotten quite a lot. I presumed that my brethren had damaged you. You spoke of your memories, and I knew that the Rahl witch would be able to change your illness. I decided to wait. It must be very frustrating that your mind is open now, when once you were strong enough to stop almost anyone."

"You were the angel that Eleanor spoke of. Her angel."

"Yes. Ironic is it not?"

"You could have saved me a lot of time."

"Really? If I had appeared, you would all have fired your guns at me, believing me to be Nua'lath. Would you not? I would now be dead. Not a wise choice."

I had to admit that I would have shot him if we had met a few days ago.

"So where is she? Eleanor."

"They have moved on, under my instruction. To another location."

"Where?"

"Somewhere safe. Do not worry, the Maw that stayed here have gone with them. She is safe, and they will return. When you have completed your half of the deal, you will see her again. Do you remember if you destroyed the scrying device that you suspected he was using?"

"That much I do remember. I destroyed a mirror."

"A mirror, yes, a favourite method of his. Then he is trapped once more. And if you came out of there alive, then he must be weak enough now. It is time to fulfil the rest of our deal. You must take me to this Corridor. This trap. So that I can kill Nua'lath and take my rightful place. This is what we agreed, and I have waited long enough."

"You said that my daughter went with me?"

"Yes. Your daughter, and your mate, and others. I am sure this memory will come back to you soon. It would be unfortunate if they were all now dead."

"They could still be in there."

"That is also possible."

"I need to get them out."

"Yes, well then. It suits us both. You will take me to The Corridor. And you will wait at the door until I have killed him. Then it will be safe for you to go and get your kin."

"But I haven't remembered how to use the key yet. I can't get us in there."

FLASH

I'm standing in a field. Corn sways in the wind and the sun is creeping behind the horizon. DogThing is beside me. He is much smaller. Much younger.

We're alone.

"Now sit," I tell him, pointing to the ground.

He whines at me and scratches the ground, then sniffs at his feet.

"Sit," I repeat.

This is going to be harder than I thought. Three days and the pathetic little thing hasn't even learned to sit still yet.

I pat his back end and he sits down.

"That's sit," I say.

He makes a quiet growling noise.

"Okay. Now up. Stand," I say.

He sits there looking at me. Big puppy eyes all wet and confused.

"You are a stubborn mutt," I curse.

"And you are rude."

A voice in my head.

I look round, drawing a weapon, panning across the field. Looking for the source of the voice, but I see no one, there is nobody there.

I look down at DogThing.

"I'm imagining things now."

"No you're not."

The voice again.

"Who's there?" I shout, looking round again. I must have missed them. They are there somewhere, hiding.

"Just you and me."

"Where are you?" I shout, my gun ready to train on anything that moves.

"I'm right here, ManThing. Why don't you sit down?"

I turn to DogThing.

"You're speaking in my head."

"Yes."

"How? How are you doing that?"

"It's how I talk."

"You can talk."

A stupid statement.

"I can talk. Is that really a surprise? You can talk."

"But..."

"Sit."

I sit down.

"Now. Can we agree on something here?"

"What's that?"

"Next time you want me to do something. Ask me. I don't like being told to sit, any more than you do."

"Of course."

"Good."

There is silence. We sit opposite each other, working each other out. Finally I break the silence.

"So, what else can you do?"

FLASH

I'm standing in the ruins of a city. It's one that has fallen recently and is still under attack by The Horde. Around me, buildings are still burning. I'm convinced that we are too late to save anyone in this city, and we don't have time to stay here very long, or else we will miss the chance to save people elsewhere. Even now, squads of Resistance troops are portaling across the world, hunting for places that are not already burning, places that people are still alive that may still be saved. But this world is turning out to be a particularly bad one. We were just far too late in following The Horde, too slow in finding where they were going next.

Andre is standing next to me, watching up and down the street for movement, expecting the enemy at any moment. I'm concentrating on the building directly in front, waiting to hear from our forward scout.

"He's taking too long. Should I go in and check?"

"No. Wait. He's fine."

Andre shakes his head.

"It freaks me out that you can do that," he says. "Talk to him, I mean."

I smile.

"Me too."

DogThing comes out of a building on the opposite side of the road. He runs across the street and stops next to me, looking back.

"Nothing in there."

"And no burning ones?"

"No. They have already finished with this place."

"Okay. Let's get back. There's no point sending the Vigilants in here if there is no one to rescue. Andre. You need to get the squads moving to the other locations. Let's get back. I'll open some more portals. There are a few places here that I remember. One of them is the ruins of a church next to a small town. It's far enough from a city to hopefully not be too hot when you go in. But we're a week into this incursion, and we were too slow this time. We were complacent. So be careful anyway."

He nods.

"I still don't understand how. He's been locked in The Corridor for decades, yet the attacks have begun again. How is he doing it?"

"Something we missed. Something we overlooked."

I pull something out of my pocket. A small device. It's a key. It's similar to the one that I wear around my neck in the present time, but this one is different. I made this one.

I concentrate on it for a moment, and a hole pops into existence next to us. Through the gap is a dark room with a mosaic on the floor. People are moving around, preparing for war.

We step through.

FLASH

I blinked my eyes. The flashbacks were over and I was standing on the road again.

Dha'mir was looking at me, his eyes untrusting.

"Ignore what I just said," I said to him. "I know how to open portals now."

"Good," he said. "Then we need waste no more time. You must open the portal, and keep it open. I will be able to keep in contact with you that way."

I nodded.

I turned to the others. They look confused.

"I'm sorry. I just don't have time to explain everything to you all. I'm going to open a portal over in the back yard of the station, let him through, and then come back. Then we will all have to watch the door until Dha'mir returns."

"That could take days though," said Rudy. "CutterJack could be hiding anywhere, and The Corridor is a big place. Isn't it risky, keeping the door open so long?"

"We need to," I said. "If Dha'mir needs to know anything, he will need to be able to talk to me."

"I will know where my brethren is when I get there. I will be able to sense his presence. It will not take me long to find him."

"I will come in with you."

I looked across the road at DogThing, and then nodded. I walked around the building and into the back yard of the road station. The box that Eleanor stood on to look over the fence was still there and my heart jumped at seeing it.

I will find you again, little one. I promise.

I moved into the middle of the yard, took out the key and concentrated on locating the wall at the end of the bridge, in The Corridor, the place where the door had opened and allowed us to escape before. My mind reached out in a way that I had forgotten until now, and in front of me a small hole appeared. One that was similar to the random holes that I had seen in The Corridor, after the storm. I focussed on that small hole, willing it to grow, until there was a gap big enough for us to go through.

I stared at it for a moment, wondering why it wasn't in the shape of a door, like it was before.

I stepped forward into the gap and walked through, changing the hole from merely an image of the other place, into a real hole. My ears popped as the door was opened.

So, there I was once more, in The Corridor. The darkness in the pit below made my stomach churn. I knew exactly what was shambling around down there.

Behind me, DogThing shuffled through the gap, followed by Dha'mir. Dogthing walked over to the edge of the precipice and looked over. He remembered as well.

"Still zombies down there."

I turned to Dha'mir.

"This is it. As I promised. We will keep the door open until you come back. Good..."

FLASH

I move quickly through the junkyard. DogThing at my side, Andre, Joshua, Abegail, Chione and others close behind.

We're in London. At the junkyard. Many years ago. Andre had been watching the area for a long time, investigating every strange phenomenon that happened, confirming that the place called Gallowshill would be the most likely entry point.

So easily they gave up their secrets, even though they defied us at first, and then cursed and denied their admissions afterwards. The minions had been crawling around London for years, preparing for the arrival of their master, and the Horde that would follow him to Earth. We had caught them all, all of those minions sent to pave the way, and we had burned each one of them until they told us what we needed to know.

"We don't have much time," shouts Abegail.

I glance around to where she is looking. Over on the other side of the scrap yard, no more than a few hundred yards away, in the middle of the strange scaffolding platform that the original owner put up to build his house, the air is crackling with energy. Dark swirls of blackened mist are gathering into a cyclone that will precede the opening of the first portal on Earth. If that one is opened, then more portals will open all over the world, and we will have failed yet again.

I stop and drop my pack to the ground.

"Here is good."

The others pull the packs from their backs and haul out the contents. We begin assembling the device, all of us breathing heavily. This has been practiced many times before, and it will only take a few minutes to assemble the device.

"I can't believe that we are this close," shouts Chione, over the noise of the wind. I can see the fear in her eyes as she hurries to put together the main chamber, the cylinder that will fill with energy.

"We need to be," I reply, as I fix the first battery to the power coupling. "It has to work this time. This is the only way to catch him for sure."

Less than a minute later and the device is assembled and switched on, ready to use. Abegail stands behind it with the control pad in her hand, waiting for me to say go. Everyone else has their guns out, trained on the black tornado that is now forming. The six Vigilant soldiers that we brought with us form a line in front of us, also with their guns ready.

"I've never seen one this close," says Andre.

"No," I say. "Me neither."

He shakes his head.

"We actually got it spot on this time."

"Don't start celebrating yet."

Chione looks me straight in the eyes.

"Dad, what if it's not him? What if those burning ones come through first?"

"It will be him. Don't you worry about that. He is always first, along with his gate openers. The portal needs to be fully open, and to do that, the opener must step through it. That means him and his cronies. It's important that we kill those gate openers. Without them, he won't be able to open more doors."

She looks back at the tornado.

"It's opening," shouts Abegail.

"Wait," I say. "Not yet."

She nods.

The tornado implodes on itself, and the energy tears open the tiniest of holes. Then the hole begins to grow, until I can see dark figures on the other side. The hole expands further, until it is big enough to swallow an entire house. Then the dark figures step through. The misty barrier that separated this world from the other vanishes, and the hole becomes real.

Four figures appear, pale, thin and gaunt, each of them bearing a chain around their neck with a talisman upon it. They look like compasses, but are really parts of a single device that Nua'lath uses to open the door, each time draining these wretched creatures of a little bit more of their soul. Their skin is nearly dropping off of their bodies. These are the ones Dha'mir told me about, the ones that have to die if we are to trap Nua'lath.

Nua'lath is the next through, followed by some of his kre'esh pets.

"Now," I shout and there are several clicking noises as Abegail presses the switches. The device bursts into life and the shockwave deafens me as a cloud of bright energy spreads out around us. Then the noise. The wind as the device opens the rift that will drag us all away from Earth.

I look over at Nua'lath, who has now seen us and is looking directly at me. He glances behind him, seeing what I see. His portal collapses and we are pulled from Earth into The Corridor. The whole area around us is torn away and dumped into the darkness.

"Fire," I shout, and the guns answer. Shards of invisible energy tear through the kre'esh at the front. I see Nua'lath run into the darkness, followed by some of his pets. Two of his Gate openers drop dead as the Vigilant soldiers target them specifically, but the other two panic and dash in different directions, heading into the darkness alone.

I wait a moment, allowing the Vigilants to kill as many of Nua'lath's creatures as possible before they vanish from view.

"Move," I shout. "To the exit. Time to leave, folks."

"What about the other two Gate openers?" shouts Abegail.

"No need," I answer. "Dha'mir told me about them. Two are dead. He needs all four. He will need to kill them now, and create four more. Which is why we don't want anyone alive in here now. We've done it."

Then we're running through the darkness, following the markers that will guide us to the gates. Abegail is running at my side. Every few hundred yards we meet another group of Vigilants, who then join us in our exodus. They were placed there to back us up if we were followed.

"We did it," shouts Abegail over the noise of dozens of boots on the hard ground. "We got him."

"Yes," I answer, as I gasp for breath.

We pass the old London bus. The Waylander team has already packed up and is waiting for us.

I stop, out of breath. Everyone around me is crouching over, gasping for air.

"Okay. Two minutes, that's all. Then we move again. We have a day's journey ahead of us. Andre. Radio ahead. Tell them to evacuate and secure The Warrens and wait for us. Then call the team at the waterfall. We need that exit shut and sealed up."

FLASH

We're in The Corridor. It's years later. Maybe only a few months ago. Abegail, DogThing and Andre are by my side.

We are standing on Merriwether Avenue, in The City. Just down the street I see the top window of the safe house is open, music drifts from the open window and the curtains blow in the breeze.

"You really think that music will bring him here?" asks Abegail.

"I think so. We know that he comes here, and the noise of the music seems to travel like no other sound does. It has to work. It has to keep him snooping around here whilst we find out what is going on out there."

"I hope so."

"Okay. You all get down into the bunker and wait for us to get back."

"I'm worried. We should come with you."

"No. We need to be quick, and draw little attention. We need Nua'lath distracted long enough to locate whatever he is using and destroy it, and I need somewhere to run to if we get into trouble. Be ready. Chione has my key, and the coordinates for the bunker, she will be able to get us out of there."

"You be careful," says Abegail.

"Always."

I turn to the four Outriders that stand a few feet away, waiting for me.

"Let's go and do this."

FLASH

A week has passed and we have travelled across The Corridor and finally finished up at The Junkyard. Other places turned up nothing, but now we have found how Nua'lath is still causing chaos.

I'm standing on the scaffolding, looking at the door to the pocket dimension. I curse. How could we have missed it? How could we have misjudged that pulling an opening portal from Earth, and through to The Corridor would create such a strange phenomenon? It confirmed our suspicions. Nua'lath was able to reach outside because he was able to step into another dimension, albeit another sealed one. But once there, the confines of The Corridor were no longer a problem. It was surprising that he hadn't figured out a way to escape yet.

Nearby, the four Outriders stand nervously looking out into the darkness around us. None of us even see the kre'esh moving swiftly through the darkness towards us until it's too late. Before I can even react, or warn them, all four of them are knocked off of the platform, falling into the junk below. I hear guns going off, but also screams. Lot's of kre'esh are moving around down there,

I start to run down the scaffolding, to go and help them, but something moves behind me. I spin round, as Nua'lath lunges for me. I try to duck out of the way, but I'm not fast enough. DogThing is. A flurry of movement and a flash of fur and DogThing and Nua'lath tumble off of the edge and down into the junk below.

I stop. I could go and help DogThing, or I could make an attempt to destroy whatever device Nua'lath is using to reach outside.

I hesitate, but then chose the latter. DogThing may just be able to keep him busy long enough for me to do something. I dive through the open door, into the space beyond. The room is empty except for a dressing table in front of me.

A mirror.

I grab my gun and turn it in my hand. He must be using the mirror to scry. This is how he is still controlling the Horde, even from within his prison. I step forward, about to smash the mirror with my gun.

Something moves in the mirror and it's not me. I falter for a moment and try to focus on what it is. The image is clearing. A face. I don't know who he is but our eyes are locked together and now I cannot look away. I'm stuck, unable to move.

I curse, and try to break free, but I don't have the strength. Something grabs me from behind and pulls me away. A hand is around my throat and I am being lifted off of the floor and dragged back out of the room, all the time I can see the man in the mirror, his mind locked with my own, and just as terrified as I am.

We're out on the platform and Nua'lath is holding me by the throat.

"Now I shall finally feed on you, Rat."

My jacket and my armour are torn from me, weapons and equipment thrown off the platform and into the junk forty feet below. All the time his tight grip breaks bones and tears muscle. I see his mouth open as he pulls me in. Sharp, bloody teeth are about to bite me.

But it doesn't happen.

Another flash of fur, DogThing was still alive, and Nua'lath is launched away from me once more. I drop to the ground, one foot hitting the wooden planks, but the other foot kicks out into open space. I'm falling. I see the ground rush up to meet me. Then I burst through the junk and hit the ground. I lie there, barely conscious as everything seems to be slipping away. I can feel the junk collapsing on top of me. The last thing I can remember before I pass out is hearing the thoughts of someone else echoing in my head.

FLASH

The flashbacks receded, and I was back near the entrance once more, with Dha'mir and DogThing, but something was wrong. Pain exploded in my chest. I couldn't breathe. Something was stuck in my chest. Dizziness washed over me and I collapsed to the floor. I could see the handle of my blade, the one I took from CutterJack, sticking out of my ribs.

I glanced to my right, to where DogThing was still looking over the edge of the cliff, down at the zombies below. I tried to call out. He turned, his eyes lighting up with anger. He rushed forward, but there was movement next to me, and a sudden gust of strong wind, and DogThing was hurled over the edge of the cliff, down into the mass of zombies below.

Dha'mir stood over me and smiled. Even though I couldn't turn round, I knew from the darkness around me that the door was no longer open.

"What a fortunate turn of events. Those flashbacks of yours are quite dangerously distracting are they not? I was content to know that I would be able to finally kill Nua'lath and take the power that is rightfully mine. But to leave you to die in here as well, and take this? Most opportune."

He was holding the compass key. Nua'lath's key.

In the distance, below us, I could hear growling and gnashing of teeth, and the moans of countless zombies. DogThing was putting up a good fight.

I watched helplessly as Dha'mir pulled my pack from my rucksack and rifled through my things. He took out a single bottle of oil and one of the cigarette lighters and placed them on the ground, and then he threw the pack out into the darkness. It plummeted down towards the zombies and disappeared amongst them.

"Does that hurt?" asked Dha'mir. "Such a shame. I should kill you right now, and I may regret not doing so, but because you have been so helpful to me, I will let you die up here, slowly, out of the way, where the zombies cannot get to you. Maybe you will even live, maybe your friends will figure out how to re-open the door and come and help you, as unlikely as that may seem. I think that blade will be your end. I am truly regretful for doing this, but you have to understand that I could not miss out on this opportunity. You would, after all become an issue later on, and to remove one of the Horde's most prominent enemies is most fortunate. For me."

One by one he pulled my guns out of their holsters and tossed them over the edge. I couldn't help but feel the irony of being stripped of my equipment yet again.

"Farewell, Mr Halldon. I hope it does not take you too long to die."

I couldn't move. The pain was too much. All I could do was watch as Dha'mir walked off across the scaffolding bridge. It wobbled under his weight, but still held. As he walked away, I saw the trail of oil that was pouring out of the bottle that he had taken.

He vanished into the darkness, but moments later there was a spark of fire, and the oil took light. The flash rushed along the wooden boards and then spread out, until it engulfed the entire platform.

Below, the zombies were still once more and everything was quiet, apart from the crackling of the flames.

Day 53

So I'm still sitting here, up on this small rock outcropping in The Corridor, alone and injured once more, looking out at the burned ruins of the bridge across the zombies. There is no sign of DogThing after his fall. I can only presume that he fell to them or escaped somehow. If I'm right, it will be a couple of days before he regenerates, and then he may be able to help me.

After passing out at least twice, I managed to pull the sword from my chest, and it's lying on the floor next to me. The gaping hole has already closed up, and I know it will only take a day or so before most of the damage is gone. I'm surprised that Dha'mir had so little experience of the Resistance to not know that we could heal from nearly any wound if given the time.

If only I hadn't had the flashbacks. I could have turned around when he was gone, walked out of the door with DogThing, and sealed the two of them in to kill each other and then found a different way to get to my family, wherever they are. Now it seems that both CutterJack and Dha'mir are sealed in together, but I'm here as well.

Dha'mir burned the scaffold platform, so he didn't intend coming back here, which means that either he knows something that I don't know, something that CutterJack wasn't able to figure out in the decades that he was trapped here, or he doesn't yet realise that the key won't get him out of here in any other location. He has to come back this way.

What I wouldn't give to have my friends with me now. Rudy and Adler. How useful would they be getting through the zombies that now trap me? Or Reg with his shotguns. Or maybe Marie. I don't know how well she fights against zombies, but I would imagine she is dangerous.

Out there is not just one, but two nightmarish enemies, and one of them has my key.

But this time I'm not as confused as I was before. This time I know I'll be able to kill the creatures that prowl this place. And I already know where the mushrooms are.

And I know that Abegail and my daughter could well still be down here somewhere, wherever the bunker is, they must be locked away in there, waiting to be rescued and they have been waiting for nearly two months. I just need to remember where that might be, or wait for a memory flashback to tell me. They can't be anywhere else, and I won't accept the only other answer.

I know one thing. This time I won't fail. This time I will somehow destroy both CutterJack and Dha'mir.

This time it will be different.

The tale continues in book 3 “The Ways”…

* * *

Thank you for reading The Broken Lands

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If you are interested in the rest of the series or any of my other books then you can find them listed on my website - http://www.glynnjames.co.uk

Thanks! – Glynn

About the Author

GLYNN JAMES, born in Wellingborough, England in 1972, is a bestselling author of dark sci-fi novels.

He has an obsession with anything to do with zombies, Cthulhu mythos, and post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction and films, all of which began when he started reading HP Lovecraft and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend back when he was eight years old.

In addition to co-authoring the bestselling ARISEN books (over 175,000 copies sold), he is the author of the bestselling DIARY OF THE DISPLACED series. More info on his writing and projects can be found at www.glynnjames.co.uk.

First published 2012 by Glynn

Copyright © Glynn

The right of Glynn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any other means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Table of Contents

- My memories have not completely gone...
- Day 40
- Day 41
- Day 42
- Day 43
- Day 44
- Day 45
- Day 46
- Day 47
- Day 48
- Day 49
- Day 50
- Day 51
- Day 52
- Day 53