The Brink Read Free Page A

around the bend in the road he turned back and set off to find the cars.
    “We can’t leave them driving around now can we, girl,” he said as the dog walked beside him. “It’ll slow them down a bit if we can break ‘em for them.”
    She looked up at his words but soon sprinted off into the bushes after a scent or a trail and he watched her bound along with her tail low in concentration. He was glad that his own story included her because he didn’t know if he could’ve managed this long without her. The silent support that’d followed him out of Fort Longsteel had been a rock on which his survival had been built and without her he wasn’t sure he’d have made it. The tomb. The death. The relief when the lights came back on. The open doors.
    Moll had been the only survivor from those lab cages and if he could read her mind she’d have had her own story to tell - one that might have matched his own, terror for terror, loss for loss.
    Perhaps, he wondered, that was the cause of the friendship they had. Perhaps in her own way she knew that they shared the same suffering, the same experiences and that there was room for companionship. He often attributed her uncanny obedience to this and took a great amount of comfort from it.
     
    By early evening he’d found the camp again and this time, as he approached the clearing, he saw the cars had returned and were parked near the cook fires.
    “There we go,” he said to Moll. “I should’ve seen the tracks the first time.”
    She yawned and showed the sharp white points of her teeth, dropping to sit on her backside whilst he scanned the settlement with his scope. It had a handy night-vision setting and he watched the women and the men move around in a sharp black and white image.
    “Sleep would be nice,” he whispered.
    He took a chocolate bar from within the pouch of his smock and opened it, taking a small bite and breaking off a piece to give to Moll. She swallowed it whole and licked her lips.
    “It’ll spoil your tea,” he said.
    The camp began to settle as the evening slid lazily by. The cook fires roared and the men took steaming bowls of broth or stew from the pots. Alan wondered what kind of meat was in them and he hoped it was the deer from earlier. He could smell it from his vantage point in the woods and that made the possibility of it being human flesh even worse.
    Eventually the night came and one by one they retired to their primitive shelters leaving the cook fires to burn down to nothing. He watched the bright white patches in his scope dull to black shadows and sighed.
    “Here we go then,” he muttered under his breath. “You’d best sit this one out.”
    He looked and saw that Moll was laid on her side, snoring softly. He got up and she lifted her head. “Stay,” he commanded and crept into the clearing.
     
    The cars were reconfigured solars and they’d been retrofitted with cells from household units which made them severely unstable if overcharged. Alan only knew this because before the disaster it’d been a common way of avoiding expensive charges at service stations. It also contributed to the number of fatalities caused by cell meltdowns.
    This information, comical as it was, had no real value to him. To overcharge the vehicles he’d have needed a charging point - which he didn’t have. He couldn’t just blast them with the rifle as that wouldn’t do much damage by itself. What he needed to do was remove a delicate component that would be impossible to replace and smash the thing to pieces, effectively decommissioning the machine.
    He crept towards the cars and dropped onto his side, crawling under the rear of the first and, taking a flashlight from his pocket, shone the red glow into the workings of the vehicle.
    His previous life as a gardener offered no help when it came to the workings of the solar cells but a stint of patrols with Teague had taught him a few things. First, that all laser powered tech relied on focal lenses