RUNNERS Read online

  Runners

  Sharon Sant

  RUNNERS

  Sharon Sant

  Kindle Edition Copyright 2015 © Sharon Sant

  All rights reserved

  No part of this e-book may be reproduced in any form other than that in which it was purchased and without the written permission of the author.

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  www.sharonsant.com

  To Louise, for her steadfast faith in Elijah when even mine failed.

  One: The First Time Death Comes Knocking

  Elijah finally opened his eyes, but lacked the strength to move. Darkness, heavy and insidious, held him. He wasn’t sure if it was night. Perhaps he had gone blind. With this last terrifying thought he began to gulp shallow breaths, desperately trying to swallow the hard knot of panic in his throat. And in the midst of this, from somewhere close by, he gradually became aware of whispering.

  ‘Bet he’s got tokens.’

  ‘Bet he had tokens.’

  ‘Have a look while he’s still out.’

  ‘Don’t you dare!’

  ‘Alright, there’s no need to get stressy.’

  ‘Those kids looked pleased with themselves. If he had any, he hasn’t got them now.’

  ‘He’s been out a long time. You don’t reckon he’s…’

  ‘Nah. Give him another half hour, if he doesn’t come round we’ll have to clear off.’

  ‘Leave him?’

  ‘Don’t whinge at me! It’s not my fault. We’ll leave a few clues or something so he gets found, if it makes you happy.’

  ‘Xavier, you can’t. He’s a Runner!’

  ‘He might not be.’

  ‘He is. Look at him.’

  ‘Even if he is… so what?’

  ‘The CMO will pick him up.’

  ‘Do you want them to pick you up?’

  ‘No… but…’

  ‘Right then. Half an hour.’

  The conversation faltered. They sounded like young voices, but he couldn’t be sure.

  A Runner. The word crashed into Elijah’s consciousness. It hadn’t occurred to him before but, he supposed, that was what he was now.

  With an almighty effort, his arm responded, propping him up to sit. But even that small exertion had been too much. He leaned over to his side and vomited. Shivering, his head spinning and icy sweat erupting from every pore, he passed out again.

  Xavier leaned against the wall of the alleyway and folded his arms.

  ‘We’re not taking him with us.’

  ‘But, Xavier –’

  ‘There’s enough of us as it is.’ He cast an appraising eye over the unconscious boy. ‘I don’t trust him.’

  ‘How can you say that? You don’t even know him.’ The speaker was a girl with long, blonde hair.

  ‘I don’t need to know him. He’s a Runner.’

  ‘We’re Runners!’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It just is.’

  The boy on the floor groaned.

  ‘He does look in a bad way,’ said a second boy. ‘He might die if we leave him here.’

  ‘Not my problem,’ Xavier said.

  ‘Jimmy’s right,’ the girl cut in. ‘What if you had said that about Rowan? Think of all the ways he’s helped us out since we met up with him. Maybe this kid could do the same, maybe he’d be good for us.’

  Xavier nudged the boy with his foot, but he didn’t stir. ‘I doubt it. He looks as though he’d just eat everything we have and then scarper.’

  The girl looked down at the injured boy with a pained expression. ‘Please, let’s just take him back to the cottage. I couldn’t bear it if I found out something had happened to him and we could have helped.’

  Xavier sighed. ‘Alright then. But don’t blame me if he steals everything you own once he wakes up.’

  ‘I don’t own anything,’ the girl smiled.

  ‘You two can carry him if you’re so desperate to get him back.’ Xavier threw a last glance at the figure on the floor and then turned to leave.

  When Elijah came to the second time he felt better, as if he had just woken from a good night’s sleep. His eyes remained closed while he savoured the sensation. Some instinct he couldn’t name told him he wasn’t in immediate danger. When his eyes finally opened, he could see that he had been taken indoors. Instead of concrete hardness beneath him, he was lying on something lumpy - but soft, at least. As he pushed himself up to investigate, his head reacted to the change in position and exploded with pain. He clapped his hands to it, holding himself until the pain subsided into a pounding throb. Gingerly, he felt the spot where the blow had struck. His hair was matted and sticky. Inspecting his fingers, he recognised what could only be his own congealed blood. As he dropped his hands to wipe them on his trousers, he looked up and found two faces near his, watching him with a mixture of concern and curiosity.

  ‘D’you think he’s ok?’

  ‘Dunno, looks a bit rough still.’

  ‘You could check him.’

  Elijah looked from one to the other. In a weak, hoarse voice that he hadn’t expected from his own mouth, he interrupted: ‘I am actually here, you know!’

  The boy addressed Elijah uncertainly. ‘Sorry… um… how many fingers am I holding up?’

  ‘How many am I holding up?’ Elijah raised two fingers of his own in a dubious salute. The boy’s frown changed into a broad grin. It was such a disarming grin that, despite himself, Elijah couldn’t help a small smile in return.

  The boy was about Elijah’s age, slim, taller than him, brown haired with a floppy fringe. It was a frank, honest face; the corners of the boy’s mouth had a natural upturn which gave the impression that he was constantly suppressing a grin, and lively brown eyes added to the air of mischief.

  Elijah’s gaze flicked briefly to the girl. She was about his age too; blonde, blue eyes that spoke of summers past, with a melancholy to them that made Elijah wonder just how long she had been running. Judging by the way she was dressed, in jeans that looked far too large tucked into battered lace up boots, her wrists covered in coloured beads and fabric bracelets in varying states of decomposition, he figured it was quite a long time.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked Elijah.

  Did he lie? He stared dumbly at her, not knowing what to say. She smiled patiently.

  ‘You’re ok here. Maybe you should just lie down again. D’you want some water?’ Elijah nodded. ‘I’m Sky,’ she continued. ‘And this,’ Sky gestured toward her companion as she crossed the small room for a plastic bottle of water, ‘is Jimmy.’

  Jimmy grinned in acknowledgement and pushed a hand through his fringe.

  Elijah took a chipped mug of water from her. It wasn’t cold, but it was clean and fresh. ‘How long have I been here for?’ Elijah sipped again, his eyes not moving from them.

  ‘Well,’ began Jimmy, ‘we found you yesterday afternoon…’

  ‘And it’s about four now,’ completed Sky, looking at a nurses fob watch pinned to her grubby jacket, ‘so about a day.’

  Elijah was going to ask how they had found him, but Sky anticipated the question.

  ‘It’s a good job you’ve come round before Xavier got back.’ She glanced at Jimmy as she spoke. ‘We saw two guys at the precinct before you got there. We were out looking for stuff in this boarded up store and we saw them hanging around in that alleyway. They looked a bit dodgy, so we hid and waited for them to go. Next thing we see you come along with another boy and get clobbered.’ She looked suddenly pained. ‘They went through your pockets… and they took your rucksack. I’m sorry we couldn’t…’

  Elijah stopped listening. He remembered that he had been running. He remembered what he had been running fro
m…

  The food tokens were in the flat, along with a small amount of money hidden in his dad’s bedroom. At least he wouldn’t starve straight away. It was all tucked safely in the pocket of his dad’s old greatcoat, the same coat which was pulled tightly around him now, fastened in place around his slender frame by a cracked leather belt and the collar turned up against the wind. Driving rain was whipped into needles that stung every inch of exposed skin and flattened his black curls against his head. Elijah had to throw himself into the roaring wind just to stay upright. His father’s coat was a good one, so it kept him from getting soaked from the rain, but labouring under its damp woollen weight, he was slick with sweat. Exhaustion like he had never known finally forced him to cling to a creaking lamppost scaled with rust.

  Only the richest suburban streets were bathed in warm pools of benevolent light during the hours of darkness. This lamp hadn’t been lit for years, though no one had bothered to tear it down - a sad monument to better days that Elijah had never seen. His breath came in searing gasps. He squinted out over the boiling sea, screwing up his eyes as the spray whipped his face. On the blurred horizon, the ghost of a squat, round, stone coastal defence, a long since disused remnant of the twentieth century, drew his gaze. It stood proud of the waves, lonely and abandoned.

  After his short rest, Elijah rubbed at his swollen eyes and hitched up his backpack. He pressed back across deserted, crumbling tarmac towards a row of dilapidated two storey buildings. They looked old; Elijah hazarded a guess that they had been built around the same time as the coastal defences. His dad would have known. He had walked past these buildings maybe half a dozen times that day. But as the afternoon wore on and the storm raged he became bolder, more desperate. At a safe distance from the weather ravaged frontages he paced again, trying to get a quick look into each window. Some of them were in gloom; some were lit behind ragged blinds. They all looked like they had seen better days. There was no choice, if he was to avoid curfew, he would have to approach one before the twilight moved in.

  ‘Oi! Kid!’

  Elijah spun round to find a tall, thin, sallow-faced youth, approaching him from the coast road. Elijah was alarmed that he had been so careless not to have noticed him before. Now, more than ever, he needed to be vigilant and silently cursed his lack of attention. Muscles were tensed, ready to run. As the boy drew closer, Elijah could just make out the small circle of his face that wasn’t obscured by a tightly fastened hood. With the lean look of a scavenging jackal, the boy shivered, hugging himself in a flimsy waterproof jacket that only covered him to the waist. His jeans were soaked to a deep indigo by the rain. Elijah guessed the boy was a couple of years older than him, around sixteen or seventeen, though it was hard to tell.

  The boy called loudly over the wind as he drew close. ‘What you after? Want food?’

  Elijah glanced around tensely and nodded.

  ‘Ain’t no good there.’ The boy tilted his head in the direction of the crumbling terraces. ‘I could show you somewhere.’

  ‘And what would I have to do for you?’ Elijah fingered the tokens in his pocket.

  The boy grinned, showing ugly stumps for teeth. ‘What do you think I want?’

  Elijah wouldn’t forget that face in a hurry. He wanted to get rid of the boy as quickly as possible but he had to be careful, and he did need to eat. A café or a market where he felt safe enough would help to shake the empty, nauseous sensation that only added to his emotional suffering. There was no other answer he could give except the one he did. ‘I could get you something to eat.’

  ‘Got plenty of tokens then have you?’

  ‘No,’ Elijah corrected quickly as the boy eyed him greedily. ‘But I’ve got enough to get you something… one meal though.’

  The boy gave a curt nod and began to walk away, following the coast road north towards a larger single structure in the distance, perhaps half a mile away. Visibility was poor in the driving rain and twilight sky and Elijah hesitated before following. The boy hadn’t looked back once.

  He was tired; his head spun, he hadn’t eaten since the previous evening. The decision to come to the coast hadn’t been made, it had just happened. Right now, he began to wonder whether it was the most stupid thing he had ever done and, as his dad had so often reminded him, he had done some spectacularly stupid things. He was starting to think that he might have been better off staying closer to home… whatever that meant now. At home, Elijah knew everywhere that was safe, the best places to eat, he knew where he wouldn’t get ripped off, or mugged, or poisoned by the inventive food substitutes served by some unscrupulous café owners. And as well as the obvious, like getting food, his survival depended on his staying out of sight of CMO officers, though, right now, that seemed the least of his worries. Most people wearily suffered the feral kids that roamed the streets as long as they became anonymous, silent shadows, and most of them did. It was understood that the victims of war weren’t always on the battlefields. But there were some who would take an unhealthy interest in Elijah’s food tokens and his small supply of money. While the penalties for stealing tokens and food were incredibly harsh, there were always people willing to take the risk. Looking back, Elijah knew he had been stupid to trust anyone.

  As he walked, he sized up his guide, calculating his chances if it came to a fight. Elijah was small, but he was wiry, and the boy looked as if he hadn’t had a proper meal in days.

  Forcing the question from his thoughts, Elijah peered through the gloom as their destination loomed ahead. Though what he could see of it was distorted in the sheets of rain and now failing afternoon light, he thought the sprawling, monolithic structure showed the signs of desertion that he was getting good at recognising: crumbling masonry, claws of scrubby weeds protruding from the highest points and silhouetted against the evening sky, darkness at every window. Feelings of foreboding took hold, but he knew there was nothing to be done now but shake them off. He had made his choice and he couldn’t turn back. A little further on and, clearly visible at last, Elijah saw it to be an ancient concrete shopping precinct. His first impression had been right, what he could see of the shops appeared to be boarded up and in darkness. But the faintest possibility of food and warmth and dryness was all he had to keep the engulfing despair at bay, and Elijah quickened his stride to catch up with the skinny boy.

  ‘Here.’ The boy continued to lead him on. Elijah followed obediently and found himself entering a covered walkway, out of sight of passers-by. Within the gloom of the concrete walls the distant crashing waves sounded as if they were inside a seashell. The stench of stale urine mixed with sea salt filled the stagnant air and the same concoction slicked the paving slabs beneath his feet.

  Elijah’s guide stopped and turned to face him. His features broke into a sneering grin. Elijah knew, before he could fully compute the information, that they were no longer alone, but it was too late. In his confusion, the blow and the pain, at first, seemed to belong to someone else, and then the world spun wildly out of orbit, taking his feet from under him. Desperately, he clung to consciousness. His head swam with a confused jumble of sensations and sounds: raucous laughter, hands pulling at his clothes and his body. His vision darkening, he feebly raised a hand to push them away.

  Running footsteps echoed then faded, along with everything else.

  After that there were only vague recollections: the low hum of voices in earnest conversation, a soft hand on his chest, and movement. Now he had woken to find himself in a new place with strangers.

  The room was dull and rundown with crowds of black spores climbing every wall, pathetic grey daylight struggling in through meagre, boarded-up windows the only source of illumination. The damp on the air chilled his lungs with every breath. But it was a roof, and better than being out in the storm, which even now still battered the aged glazing. He gazed at the boy and girl and they glanced at each other. They looked friendly enough.

  Even so, Elijah now regretted running so far from all that he kn
ew. Putting down the empty mug he sank back onto the mattress, shifted onto his side, and closed his eyes. Surely he couldn’t want to sleep again. That was the last thing he remembered thinking as he drifted off.

  Elijah followed the coast road. He turned to see a pack of boys chasing him. He ran. Faster, but he turned again to see that they were gaining. Terror gripped him, but no cries for help would leave his lips. The scene changed. His father was on the sofa. Elijah crept towards him, afraid of the stillness. He reached out and the skin was cold. Looking around, the flat was empty, but there were voices, so many voices around him, the smell of cooking meat…

  He twitched and woke, pushing himself up quickly.

  Sky turned and smiled at him. ‘You’re awake! We’ve got sausages.’ She handed him a plate with two fat, spitting sausages on it. They burned his mouth as he devoured them but he didn’t care and when they were gone looked up hungrily for more. By the light of the fire he could see that there were now two more boys and another girl in the room, all eating and watching Elijah with curiosity.

  ‘There’s only two each.’ The new girl threw a haughty glance at Elijah’s empty plate. She was graceful, tall and strong looking, with a head of black braids, flawless skin the colour of honeyed chocolate, high proud cheekbones, dark eyes and a sensual mouth. When she spoke, she seemed to command everyone around her to listen. Elijah had thought Sky was pretty, but this girl was something else, something utterly compelling. Dressed in army combats, she looked like a warrior queen. She was tending to a metal pot over the fire; Elijah was mesmerised as he watched her. Sensing his attention, she looked up and fixed him with a confrontational glare. He tore his gaze away to the small, scrub fire that spluttered at the centre of the room, paying it far more attention than was reasonable.

  Sky shifted over. ‘Here,’ she said handing him half a sausage from her own plate, ‘I reckon you need this more than I do.’

  Elijah looked up at her gratefully before cramming it in his mouth. The other girl shot Sky a withering look.

  Nobody else offered Elijah any more food, but they did pass round the hot pot that the girl had been stirring. The metal handle was thickly insulated with an old rag and it was filled with a strange, orange-black brew.