Devastation Read online

  Table of Contents

  Legal Page

  Title Page

  Book Description

  Dedication

  Trademarks Acknowledgement

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Epilogue

  New Excerpt

  About the Author

  Publisher Page

  Devastation

  ISBN # 978-1-78651-769-2

  ©Copyright Jane Dougherty 2016

  Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright June 2016

  Edited by Jamie D. Rose

  Finch Books

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Finch Books.

  Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Finch Books. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

  The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

  Published in 2016 by Finch Books, Newland House, The Point, Weaver Road, Lincoln, LN6 3QN

  Finch Books is a subsidiary of Totally Entwined Group Limited.

  The Pathfinders

  DEVASTATION

  Jane Dougherty

  Book two in The Pathfinders series

  One problem with jumping down wormholes is you’ve no idea where you’ll end up. Another is the psychotic celestial beings who might decide to follow you.

  The end has finally come for the shopping mall, the Flay tribe and possibly everything else too. Carla, Tully and their friends have taken the only way out—another wormhole. It drops them in Lutecia, a city in a parallel world, where everything is green, society is peaceful and they learn to develop their innate psychic talents. They are taught the true history of the universe, what Wormwood has done to Carla’s dad and what he’s really after. Unfortunately, one of the things Wormwood is after is Carla and Tully.

  The Sages of Lutecia form a desperate plan. Carla and Tully will lure Wormwood to the gateway to Hell, before he and his souleaters reduce this world to the same dead wasteland as ours. Once they have him on the brink of the pit, all they have to do is push him in. Simple. Well…not really.

  Pursued by Wormwood’s gray men, golems and his army of dead souls, Carla and Tully travel the star paths, looking for Carla’s mother in the Himalayas of our dying world—hoping to catch her in a dream, hoping she’ll be able to release Carla’s dad from possession and hoping Wormwood doesn’t find his third companion, Eblis Azazel, the angel of destruction, whose trumpet will sound the apocalypse in all the worlds.

  Dedication

  This one has to be for Lisa, who introduced me to the Land of the Thunder Dragon.

  Trademarks Acknowledgement

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll

  Darth Vader: Lucasfilm Ltd.

  The Wild Bunch: Warner Brothers-Seven Arts

  Batman: DC Comics General Partneship

  Jurassic Park: Michael Crichton

  The Grand National: Aintree Racecourse

  Hamlet: William Shakespeare

  The Wizard of Oz: Frank Baum

  Conan the Barbarian: Robert E. Howard

  Jacuzzi: Jacuzzi Inc.

  Goldilocks: Disney Enterprises Inc.

  Mickey Mouse: Disney Enterprises Inc.

  Kleenex: Kimberly-Clark Worldwide Inc.

  Rambo: David Morrell

  Starship Enterprise: Gene Roddenberry

  Radio Merseyside: BBC

  The Last of the Mohicans: James Fenimore Cooper

  Robinson Crusoe: Daniel Defoe

  Paradise Lost: John Milton

  Another Fine Mess: Laurel and Hardy

  “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” (Gone with the Wind): Margaret Mitchell

  Prologue

  Beneath the Stars of Another World

  Deep night. In the observatory of the Assembly building, seven dreamcatchers slept, and moonlight bathed their faces in a silvery light. In the shadows, at the back of the long room, seven watchers sat, their hands folded in their laps. As the dreamcatchers slept, they dreamed, and when they dreamed they left their sleeping bodies behind and walked among the stars. The watchers watched, their gaze fixed intently on the sleeping dreamcatchers, waiting for a sign that they had caught what they were searching for—the last of Earth.

  High above their sleeping earthly bodies, among the stars, the dreamcatchers walked, watching and listening for a sign of the travelers. They sensed the holes, raw wounds dug into the fabric of the universe and all the creatures that hurtled along them—light, ethereal beings, black demons and ponderous maggots. None of these creatures dreamed.

  The dreamcatchers wandered farther, listened harder.

  Then they captured it! The pulse of life, heartbeats, frightened and exhausted, falling into a dark tunnel. Seven wills focused on the heartbeats, caught the life pulse and guided it Earthward.

  The dreamcatchers stirred. One murmured in his sleep. The watchers stood and approached on silent feet. They stood behind the seven couches, careful to cast no shadow on the sleeping faces. With a sigh, the watchers’ furrowed brows relaxed, and radiant smiles transformed the worried faces. One by one, the dreamcatchers’ eyelids fluttered and opened. The watchers looked at one another. A dreamcatcher turned her head and caught the chief watcher’s eye.

  “We have them.”

  The watchers looked at one another again, and their eyes glowed with triumph.

  Chapter One

  At the End of the Wormhole

  Tully’s last conscious thought had been one of cold fear, the fear of undertaking a journey of unknown dimensions. The last time he had been drawn into a wormhole, he’d traveled five years, in which time the world he’d known had torn itself apart. It was as if he had changed planets. This time, the journey could be to anywhere, anytime. Behind him lay utter devastation, the galloping Horsemen and the approaching Apocalypse. Before him was a black, sucking mouth, toothless but voracious, fathomless and filled with the terror of the unknown. Carl
a’s grip on his hand had transmitted none of her feelings except the urgency to be gone, to blot out the sight of the Burnt Man, her father. They had no choice. They jumped.

  There was the dreaded sensation of nothingness, of having no composition at all, of feeling even his thoughts disintegrating and slipping into the void. Only the voices were missing, the millions of unintelligible words like a phone signal breaking up. This time, a roaring like a storm on the ocean drowned the whispering. It was wild and fierce but strangely comforting. It dashed the mutterings and gnashings into fragments and washed them out into the emptiness. Then silence fell.

  Until the singing started.

  It began as a single pure note, taken up by hundreds and thousands of unearthly voices, before splintering into a cascade of sound. Never had Tully heard anything so magnificent. He’d never imagined that he had a soul until that precise instant when he felt it soaring in rapture. From now on, his quest would be to recapture that moment of pure joy.

  The music was still ringing inside the chambers of his consciousness as Tully recovered his senses, with dappled sunlight falling on his face through the green branches of a summer forest. He had no idea how long he’d lain there, letting the sensation of utter contentment well up inside him. The light shifted a little, an ant crept across his hand and he felt the pricking of a blade of grass behind his ear. The heavy odor of damp earth and grass stalks drying in the sun filled his nostrils. Blinking, he turned his head slowly, almost afraid to find the rubble heaps and crumbling ruins of the shopping mall rearing up at the edge of his line of vision. All he saw was Carla, her small, elfin face, her brow furrowed in a frown, her eyes tight closed in sleep. He let out a sigh. Carla was safe. The world could go to Hell for all he cared. In fact, it already had. But Carla was safe.

  * * * *

  Carla sat up with a scream, looking about in bewilderment. She gasped, her breath coming in short, painful bursts, her eyes full of flames, burnt flesh and darkness. With a sob, she scrambled to her feet and ran, letting her feet carry her where they would. She lost her balance and stumbled, falling to her knees in the cool, green shadows where alders overhung a narrow stream. Her hands slipped on the damp earth of the bank, crushing the stalks of wild garlic. The strong earthy scents and the sensation of the ice-cold water on her fingertips began to clear the fumes in her head. She scooped up stream water and splashed it over her face, washing away some of the filth and anxiety of the dying shopping mall. She dipped her hand back into the stream and let the cold, clear water trickle between her fingers, listening to its babbling voice and the song of an unseen bird in the branches overhead. She felt the breeze riffling through the leaves…and soft, familiar breath on the back of her neck.

  Tully.

  She turned as he tucked a heavy chestnut lock behind her ear with gentle fingers. Tully’s eyes were full of concern, and reflected in them, she saw what he was seeing, the flames and shadows the Burnt Man cast about himself and the despair and horror that this creature should be her own father. The awfulness broke over her again and she let Tully take her in his arms and hold her tight until the flood of tears was over.

  “We’ll find out what happened to Lucio, Carla,” he whispered into her hair, “and we’ll sort it out, even if it means going back there.”

  Carla gave a fleeting, grateful smile at the idea that Tully was prepared to go back to the broken world of the Abomination to sort out the unutterably awful mess that her father was caught up in.

  “If anybody had said to you a couple of weeks ago,” Tully went on, “that you’d be traveling through time to the end of the world, to meet a psychopathic demon in a bombed-out shopping mall and get chased by the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and a mob of the undead down a black hole chewed out of time and space by giant maggots”—Tully paused to draw breath and gauge Carla’s reaction—“what would you have said?”

  Carla battled with her mouth to make it grin. “I’d have told him to go get himself buggered.”

  “Course you would! But since all that bullshit really did happen, why should traveling backward in time be so difficult?” Tully took Carla’s hands and looked earnestly into her eyes. “It’s just a question of going back to the time before…you know. When your dad was…just your dad.”

  “Easy! We’ll just round up a bunch of dragons and elf warriors and hobbits to help us, and everything’ll be hunky-dunky!”

  “Hunky-dory. But—”

  Carla squeezed Tully’s hands gratefully and shook her head with a faint smile.

  “Don’t try to work it out. Not now. Not yet.” And she turned her face to the sun and closed her eyes.

  The bright sunlight cast soft shadow patterns and its warmth penetrated to the chilled depths of their souls. Both of them marveled at the clarity of the water, something they’d never seen, even before the Abomination. Rivers and streams had run thick and murky in their world, lakes were choked with weed and starved of oxygen. Even the sun was always slightly veiled in fumes, and its harsh rays turned human cells cancerous. Tully stretched out his arm into a thick yellow beam of sunshine and stroked it gingerly with the tips of his fingers, his skin tingling with the unexpected gentleness of the warmth. He closed his eyes and tipped his face into the sunlight.

  “I could get used to this.” He sighed.

  “That’s good,” his father’s voice boomed loud in the quiet, “because I think you’re going to have to. Look back there.”

  Tully turned to the glade where they had lain when they’d tumbled out of the hole. In its center was a pit of darkness that could have been filled with anything—fog, soot, tar, oil—anything as long as it was thick and black. The blackness twittered and shivered and pushed away the blades of grass and plants that bordered it. Flower heads bent away from the nothingness, and hoar frost crept in a fringe around its edges. As Tully watched, he saw what his father meant. The blackness was no longer so black. A livid shape, like a white fish at the bottom of the ocean, could be seen moving from side to side in the humming depths. Gradually the sides of the hole began to crumble and collapse, but instead of getting larger, the hole shrank as the vegetation stretched across it. When the hole was reduced to the size of a football, a pale, blunt, maggoty snout with mud-colored mandibles shoved itself into the opening, snapped at a trailing piece of groundsel and pulled it back into the hole. When the maggot retreated, it was as if the hole had never been.

  Tully shivered. “Jeff was right then, about the worms.”

  “And I got a drac! I always said I would.” Jeff sat up, a confident smile on his face. Tully stared in surprise. The boy looked different. His face was fuller, healthier. The ugly wound at his temple that he’d received in the fighting at the mall had disappeared. He still had one arm around the neck of the drac that somehow didn’t look much like a drac anymore. His voice woke Kat, who blinked, saw the drac then leapt to her feet with a scream.

  “Jeff, get away from it! Now!”

  The drac, if it still was a drac, sat up and raised its ears, which gave it an alert, enquiring and rather lovable look.

  “It’s okay, Kat. He won’t hurt me.”

  The drac pointed its nose skyward, stretched its long neck and gave an eloquent yawn.

  “Oh, my God! What’s it doing now, laying an egg?”

  Nobody answered her. They were all peering apprehensively into the drac’s jaws.

  “Aren’t these things supposed to have a mouth full of butcher’s knives?” Tully’s dad asked. “And weigh as much as a baby mammoth?”

  “A wha’” Jeff looked blank.

  “Manner of speaking,” Jack explained.

  Jim nodded. “Either this one’s the runt of the litter, or it ain’t a drac.”

  “Looks pretty doggy to me,” Tully said. “Sort of wolfhoundy, but dog all the same.”

  The drac sat listening, then licked Jeff’s face.

  “Yup, that’s a dog all right,” Tully’s dad agreed. “What will you call it? How about Dinny, after my un
cle? He never missed a party either. You know, once—”

  Jim glanced at the drac’s undercarriage.

  “It’s a bitch.”

  The drac raised its muzzle again and howled, a plaintive but melodious howl that rose and fell almost like a song. Jack laughed.

  “She’s got a lovely voice. I’ll give her that. How about Cilla, then? My dad had a soft spot for Cilla Black, a singer from the Bronze Age or thereabouts. Or Dusty?”

  “Dusty,” Jeff repeated. “She is a bit, isn’t she?” He patted the drac’s shaggy, brindled flanks, raising a cloud of volcanic ash.

  Kat looked on with an expression of disbelief on her face. “You’re not serious about letting that animal stay, are you?” The others looked at one another.

  Carla voiced Tully’s thoughts. “Why not? We have no idea where we are or what we might find. It all looks pretty idyllic at the moment, but suppose we find the equivalent of Big Bob and the Gouge Tribe lurking over the next hill? Dusty might turn out to be extremely useful—guarding, fighting off attackers. You know, the kind of thing dogs do.”

  Kat still eyed the drac doubtfully. “One human leg tastes much like another to those things.”

  But the drac had set Tully thinking. “It’s strange, don’t you think,” he mused, “the way some things about us have changed since we came through the hole? Jeff’s wound has healed, for one thing, and he looks sort of…healthier. And the drac… It must have been like the other drax when Jeff grabbed it back there, but now it looks just like an ordinary dog.”

  Kat muttered something about there being ordinary and extra-extra-extra-large and the existence of saber-toothed ponies. The others, however, nodded in agreement. Then Jeff broke in, his voice shrill with excitement and his face glowing with a sudden realization.

  “The voices in my head, the pictures and visions… They’ve gone!” He raised his head as if listening. “Well, they’re there if I listen, or look hard enough, but it isn’t the same. Now I think I can make them be quiet.”