The Factory Trilogy 01 - Gleam Read Online Free

amongst the ruins for a while, looking up at the sky, and the Pyramid that occupied so much of it.
    Eventually he stumbled off in the direction that he’d seen Eyes go after their few clandestine meet-ups. He still felt weak after the Bleeding, and grew hungry as well asthirsty. He was torn between wanting to meet somebody in order to ask for help, and hoping against hope that he encountered nobody. He followed a wide path that descended between abandoned buildings. He started to worry that he was too exposed, but none of the alleyway mouths or the holes in the sides of the buildings looked particularly inviting. All around were night-sounds: small movements, doors banging in the slight breeze, architecture settling. The occasional call of a nocturnal bird. There were no birds in the Pyramid, but Alan had heard their voices from the terraces on occasion. Now they sounded far too close.
    That night he passed out in a great hall that housed a vast machine comprised mostly of copper tubing which had long since turned green. He was awakened by a pair of emaciated hands pawing at his legs and kicked out. His foot connected with a face and something squealed.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said his new friend. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought you was dead. Just a little hungry is all. Just a little hungry. But seeing as you’re not dead I won’t bother you no more. A bit of meat’s such a rare thing! The rats and lizards are too fast for a skinny wretch such as myself. So sorry.’
    By the light of the bright moons Alan could see the man scuffling backwards, away from him. He was almost skeletal. His bald head was grey and spotty. Alan’s skin crawled. Why would he be carrying meat? Then he woke up properly and jumped to his feet. He couldn’t see aweapon on the man’s person, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have one, or couldn’t find one. But then why hadn’t he just tried to bludgeon Alan while he slept?
    Perhaps he
was
just hungry; perhaps he genuinely didn’t want to kill anybody.
    But Alan did not hang around to find out. He ran beneath the strange machine’s appendages and out of that ruined building, and he kept running.
    *
    The unpleasant night became an unpleasant day, and the unpleasant days and nights became hard, painful weeks. The Discard was teeming with animal and insect life, but all the creatures Alan encountered were faster than him and he had no aptitude for tracking, trapping or hunting. There was an abundance of greenery, but he did not know which plants were edible and which were poisonous. He frequently discovered colonies of mushrooms, but he was wary of consuming them for fear of making himself ill, however badly his hunger hurt him. It was an effort to resist, but resist he did, all the while fantasising about fat brown mushrooms sizzling on a metal plate over a campfire. Building campfires was something else that he was bad at. But he survived, thanks to the Discard’s apparently infinite population of snails. They couldn’t outrun him, and he was reasonably sure they weren’t poisonous: he remembered people in Modest Mills frying them with garlic and selling them at market stalls to passers-by. Alan ate them raw – shuddering attheir gritty, rubbery flesh – until he got better at building fires. After that, he toasted them on sticks. They were still gritty and rubbery, but they were not as slimy.
    Without intending to, he found himself in a network of buildings and couldn’t work out where the exit was. The ground he’d stood on upon first leaving the Pyramid was now lost to him. He wandered through vast, abandoned mills, clambered down rusty metal ladders, used thick twisted vines to climb up sloping chimneys, stalked quiet, dusty corridors of pale stone, crept up on nesting pigeons and sent them cooing and squawking up into the air. He stood at windows, looking for landmarks that would help him travel with more direction, but as soon as he left any particular window he