The Collapse

Jolyon Hallows THE COLLAPSE

For Sandra

PART 1 CONSEQUENCES

1 DARIUS

Darius lay face down, pressed through weeds that had crumbled the asphalt of what had once been a parking lot. Make yourself small—even smaller than you are. With luck, the weeds would hide his slight frame from the eyes of the Peaks and from his death, his slow agonizing death, should just one of them spot him from a perch somewhere high in the towers that surrounded him.

The towers. The tuneless wind whipping through forty or fifty stories of windows that time and vandals had shattered haunted him whenever he entered the city. It was always different in pitch or intensity, but it never yielded to silence. The rooms it poured through were empty now, the corridors deserted, the contents looted. Some ductwork remained, exposed when the wind ripped down the ceiling tiles, crashing them onto the floors only to be swept by the ever-present gale out the windows onto the streets below, streets that were vacant except for desultory Peak patrols.

In the instant before he threw himself into the weeds, Darius glimpsed a flash of light from high up on a tower. Was it the barrel of a Peak immobilizer or just a remnant of glass that had fused to its frame and caught the light of the moon?

The moon. He had argued against this raid. The moon would be full, its light bathing the ruins of the city. A raid tonight was risky. But although his attacks on the Peaks had given him a reputation for bravery and ferocity, his youth denied him a vote in the decisions of the resistance council. Most days, they would have listened to his words, weighed his warning, but today, opportunity was stronger.

Darius had planned this attack almost a year ago. It would destroy the buildings that gave the Peaks shelter, killing dozens as they slept in the illusion of safety. The council had approved his plan, waiting for the right time. The right time was tonight. The Coordinator had alerted them that a contingent of senior Peak commanders was arriving. Peak soldiers were valid targets, but their commanders, like fall wheat, ripe for the blades of the scythes, were too valuable to ignore, too tempting for their deaths to be deterred by moonlight. Besides, the skies were cloudy, the moon would be obscured. And if Darius had lost his nerve, there were others eager to carry out the attack, less seasoned, less proven, but more daring.

Darius agreed to the attack. Not just because he could not refuse the council, but because this was his plan. He was the best choice to carry it out. And in his heart, the appeal of dead Peak commanders was like the sweet tart taste of fresh raspberries picked from the vines that lined the cart tracks in the early summer, their juice the colour of Peak blood.

Earlier in the evening, he had slipped into the city along the river and hidden the pouch he would use to make his escape. With his backpack laden with explosives, detonators, and timers, he slunk beneath the cloud-darkened sky up the hill to the compound. A chain-link fence, eight feet high, towered over the bodies of field mice and gophers charred when they came too close to the surge of electricity that enveloped the steel net. The stench of rotting flesh playing off the drone of the electric current brutalized a barrier just as effective as the fence itself. Up a slope to his right squatted three gasoline tanks used to fuel the Peak rovers, the only powered vehicles allowed. The five buildings within the compound were illuminated by floodlights that lit their walls and the grounds around with a glare that rivalled the noonday sun.

The administration building was the biggest, its brick and glass bulk dominating the compound. Behind it sat two barracks housing fifty Peaks each, a mess hall and training centre between them. The fifth building, squat and windowless, was the detention centre. The few who survived it reported cells too small to lie down, too low to stand up. Chambers that had never known the sun, stained with blood, replete with barbed wire whips for flaying flesh, pliers for drawing out teeth and nails, for crushing testicles and nipples, awls for thrusting into eyes and ears. Darius had spoken to some of those who had been released. Their common wish was that they could have died. Tonight, for those suffering in the foul cells, that wish would be granted.

He made his way up the hill to a spot just above the fuel tanks where, two years earlier, Alain dug a tunnel. Darius wondered if he could be as strong as Alain. The man had taken a week to die but had never revealed the location or even the existence of his handiwork.

Darius shoved aside the jumble of weeds and blackberry brambles that obscured the mouth of the tunnel. Beneath layers of leaves, the upper ones crumbling under his fingers, the lower congealed into the ooze and stench of decay, he uncovered the rock that concealed the entrance. He rolled it to one side and crawled through, pushing his backpack before him to clear the path, clogged with a fetid mix of dead field mice, dead insects, and dead earth. The tunnel was narrow. He forced his way through, the reek of rot clogging his lungs. He reached the end, solid dirt blocking his way. Alain hadn’t pushed the tunnel through to the compound; the risk of its being discovered was too great. Darius pulled a flattened stick from his backpack and dug at the dirt. Inch by inch, he moved forward until he was once more pushing through weeds.

He struggled his way through the final barricade of vegetation. His face blackened by wood ash, he pushed himself through the thickness of the brambles into a dark zone, untouched by the floodlights. From his backpack, he slipped out packages of explosives, attached a charge to the underside of each fuel tank, and ran a wire from the charges to a timer.

His last charge was an incendiary explosive that needed to go off above the cluster of buildings downhill from him. It would ignite the flow of gasoline running from the ruptured tanks, creating an inferno of flames that would cascade down the hill. He spotted an ideal place. The contours of the ground would funnel the fuel down to it, and the river of fire would spread out, enveloping all five buildings. But the spot was in the middle of the glare of the floodlights, visible to the Peak guards. Even if they were dulled by boredom, he dared not enter their view.

From his backpack, he pulled out a toy wagon. The wood was stained the same colour as the ground, thick wheels holding the box. He tied the explosive into the wagon, connected it to the timer, and pointed it downhill, playing out a line of cord as it lurched forward.

It fell to its side. Alert for Peak guards, he eased the line back, dragging the wagon toward him until he could right it and release it once more. Again, he inched the wagon down the hill. Again, it toppled. His third time worked. The wagon stayed upright until it came to rest at the spot he had chosen, just up the hill from the administration building and the barracks.

He set the timer, a clockwork mechanism that Harold had made his life’s work to fashion ever since an explosion had shattered his legs. It was crude, but Harold’s timers were more accurate than anything anyone else had been able to develop.

Darius eased his way back through the tunnel and replaced the dead branches and creepers that hid the entrance. The inferno would carry up the hill to the tanks and devour the bushes around the tunnel, but he couldn’t risk that some random Peak patrol would spot its mouth and raise the alarm before his explosives detonated.

Crouching in the darkness, he slipped away from the compound along the deserted streets, slinking to the sides in the protection of the towers, toward the river where he had hidden his escape pack.

And the moon burst upon him.