Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4) (20 page)

She understood then what she had felt on the boat in her dark dream.

The last thought on Gwyneth's mind was the son she and Steve had created when they had been far too old. The son they had taken to London and left there, after they saw the twisted darkness in his young eyes, evil and malevolent and inherent. The little boy that they tried so hard to forget; just a whisper of guilt in the shadows.

Gwyneth had always hoped the little boy had found
the care and stability she and Steve could not provide.

As the light faded away, and the connection was made once more, linking them
together across hundreds of miles, and she felt the endless abyss of his rage, she knew he had not.

*

Rachel was on the bridge when she heard the gunshots, distant and muffled, the sound barely wriggling free of the castle's stone walls.

She had improvised a stretcher for John, instructing the two men she now held at gunpoint to load him onto a surfboard she found at a small shop near the waterfront. John's face was a mess: battered and bloody, his left cheek already beginning to swell. He had a deep gash in his leg that refused to stop leaking. Rachel had dashed into a pharmacy and loaded everything she could think he
might need into a bag: bandages, antibiotics. Even a needle and thread, though who might actually sew the leg up she had no idea.

If it came to it, Rachel
thought, she would do it herself, but she didn't fancy she would make a very good job of it. Still, she owed John that much. It was obvious to her now that he had tried to get her away from the trouble she hadn't even seen brewing.

Idiot
, she thought, as she leant in close to check his breathing when they loaded him onto the surfboard. He was unconscious, but he seemed to be breathing okay. For now, Rachel had done all she could do for him, wrapping his leg in a bandage that quickly soaked through with blood.

They were returning to the castle, and Rachel was just wondering if she was going to have to walk in there brandishing the shotgun without any real idea whether it was even loaded, when she heard gunfire inside.

"Move," she said, jerking the barrel of the gun at the two men. Without the big guy to hide behind, they suddenly looked like frightened boys, and for the first time Rachel noticed how young they were. Younger than her: twenty, maybe; twenty-one. Just kids. No wonder they looked so scared.

When they reached the gate, she pressed the barrel of the gun into the face of
the youngest-looking of them, the one that had been too frightened to pick up the gun himself. He had a scrawny, underfed look that Rachel guessed had been with him long before getting hold of food became a matter that required thought and planning.

"Get the gate open," she said in a low, steely voice.

"Uh...hey? It's Glyn, we're back, open up!" He called out in a voice that shook almost as much as his trembling hands.

After a moment, the gate opened, and Rachel entered the castle, holding up the shotgun, expecting to meet trouble immediately.

Instead she saw several people staring in shock toward the sound of the gunshots. Toward the tower they had slept in the night before.

Michael.

*

Rachel burst into the tower and stopped in her tracks. The atmosphere inside felt like the aftermath of a violent storm.

Michael was toppled from his wheelchair, clutching the gun, his face anguished, his lip split and bleeding. In front of him: the body of Darren, his hand curled around a small blade. Gwyneth was crumpled against the curved wall with a hole in her chest; the two kids stood halfway down the staircase, looking terrified. A guy sat propped against the wall close to Gwyneth's body. Alive, though just barely by the look of it; both arms amputated, leaving hideous stumps that looked burned and possibly infected: Rachel could smell the sweet, sickly odour that poured off the man, who sat and stared vacantly through her.

Something about the man's gaze was broken. It reminded her of the way her brother had looked, after he had been forced to kill his mother to protect his sister.

Dimly Rachel was aware that the fact she found the scene inside the tower confusing rather than sickening or horrifying was a sign that something was slowly being stripped away from her soul, flaking off like old paint. A thin veneer of something that she hadn't even been aware of; something necessary.

"What happened?"

Michael shook his head.

"Darren," he said, his voice trembling.
"Came in and pulled the knife, knocked me out of the chair. I got the gun, we struggled."

He looked at Gwyneth's open, fixed eyes, staring straight at him.

"It just went off," he said.

Rachel spat on Darren's corpse.

"They tried to kill John, too," she said. "Beat the shit out of him. I had to shoot one of them. John killed one."

Her voice faltered, just a little.

"At least you got this bastard," she said.

Michael nodded, and pulled the wheelchair upright. He levered himself up and onto it."

"It's not all of them," Michael said. "Just Darren and a few others."

"Just the men," Rachel said
with a grimace. "And I think a couple of the ones that are left aren't in the mood to cause trouble. Darren had these people terrified of him."

Neither of them needed to say it. Rachel knew what needed to be done, and the message in Michael's eyes was clear. They both had guns. Whether they liked it or not, they had just
staged a coup.

Rachel nodded at the man propped against the far wall.

"And him?"

Michael looked at the amputated man. "They had him locked up," he said, and shook his head. "You don't want to know."

Rachel grimaced again.

"I think I already do," she said grimly. "I talked to the girl they've got tied up in the town, Michael. Whatever she is, she's not one of the Infected. She's terrified."

Rachel stabbed a thumb at Darren.

"Why try to kill us? Why even let us in here?"

Michael laid the rifle across his lap.

"He wanted the kids," he said.

Rachel felt the cold, toxic rage washing through her again.

"Just another fucking psycho," she said bitterly.

Michael paused a moment, then nodded.

"
I guess so," he said. "Better gather everybody together. Tell them we need to talk."

Aviation fuel was going to be a problem. Nick had told Ray that immediately. One of the few things he knew about the chopper was that you could not just dump a load of unleaded petrol in the tank and expect the thing to fly. He sort of hoped that would be the end of their plan to get the chopper back off the ground.

Ray had looked dubious, and only
accepted the argument when Nick painted a picture of the helicopter's engine dying at altitude.
I can fly that thing in the same way you can bake a cake, Ray. You might get the job done, but you won't be catering any weddings.

That had seemed to tickle Ray, and he roared with laughter.

Can't be trusted to cook toast, mate,
he had snorted, but Nick's point stuck.

They sat around a small fire for a couple of hours and Nick soon felt that he had misjudged the bikers. Mostly they laughed, usually at each other, although Nick came in for plenty of good-natured abuse when Ray recounted his attempt to descend the tree. Laughter rippled through the group, and became a roar when Nick
glumly confessed that he had landed in a wet patch of his own making.

Several times, Nick almost forgot that the world had gone to shit, but every so often a snapping of a branch or a rustling in the trees would bring a dead silence upon the group, and Nick saw
the bikers' hands hovering near the handles of their knives. Ray kept the crossbow close, occasionally reaching out to pat it like a pet, perhaps reassuring himself it was still there. The group had obviously managed to attain a sort of equilibrium with the horror of the world that had been birthed a week earlier. Able to relax and remain alert simultaneously.

That came from being out in the world and surviving, Nick supposed, rather than hiding behind a wall in a state of growing terror, as he had at Catterick.
Everything felt new and bewildering to him.

Mostly Nick
just sat and listened to their conversation, which meandered across many subjects, but sooner or later returned to music, and the prospect of a world without it. They listed album after album solemnly, like a roll call of the dead. Music that would be dead and gone without electricity to give it life. Soon enough, they miserably agreed, there wouldn't even be anyone left that remembered the melodies.

Nick felt a sudden depression
descend on him as he thought about it. He hadn't even considered the loss of music, the great soulful hole its absence would leave in the lives of humans. Most of the stuff the bikers listed sounded like what Nick thought of as heavy metal:
Back in Black, Appetite for Destruction, Master of Puppets.
Nick had heard of a couple of them, but had never thought to check them out. Now he would never get the chance.

For a moment the weight of the world that had been lost threatened to crush Nick. All the things he had assumed he would experience at some later date
. All the movies, all the books; the music. He wouldn't ever get a chance to meet a girl and take her to see the Eiffel Tower, and see her eyes light up at the pure romance of the place. Wouldn't ever see a tropical sunset. Probably he wouldn't ever leave the UK.
Maybe
, he thought darkly
, I won't even get to leave Wales
.

He lapsed into
silence, staring at the flickering fire, and let the chatter around him become background noise.

If the world was just fear and violence and struggle, was there any point to it? It took him a long time to become aware of the silence around him. When he dragged his
eyes away from the fire, he saw all of them looking at him.

"Someone take your batteries out, mate?" Ray grinned. "Looks like you're on standby mode."

Nick shook his head.

"Just thinking," he said.

"Never a good idea," Ray said with a wry smile.

Nick shook his head again.

"I guess it's just all hitting me now. I've been hidden away this past week, haven't really seen what it's like out in the world at all. I suppose you've all had a week to adjust to it. You're lucky."

The jovial atmosphere snapped away, as though it had been sucked out of an airlock
into deep space.

"Lucky?"

Ray's tone was a mixture of bewilderment and flat-out aggression.

Nick began to stammer.

"No, no, I just mean, you're all here, and-"

"We are
not
all here," Ray hissed. "Not by a fucking long shot. Can you count Nick? Because there should be fifteen of us. How many do you see?"

The
sudden hostility in Ray's voice hit Nick like a train.

Six
, he thought.

"That's right," Ray snapped bitterly.
"Next time you get to thinking any of us have been
lucky,
you remember that nine of our brothers and sisters aren't here. If we seem cheerful to you, Nick, it's because the alterative is throwing ourselves over that fucking cliff. You get me?"

Nick nodded and swallowed painfully.

"Sorry," he said, "I wasn't thinking."

"You were thinking too fucking much," Ray said.
"Don't."

Silence descended. After a few moments
Ray lowered his eyes and nodded to himself.

"So where are we go
ing to get our hands on aviation fuel, soldier?" Ray said gruffly.

Nick scratched his chin thoughtfully, grateful for the sudden change of subject
, even if it did mean returning to the troubling idea of heading west.

"We need an airfield," he said. "Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool would guarantee fuel."

"That's not all they'd guarantee," growled a huge, tattooed man who went by the name of Shirley. Nick had taken
that
piece of information in straight-faced, and hadn't asked. He told himself he never would.

Nick nodded.

"Agreed," he said. "Cities are out of the question. I think there are a couple of places in North Wales that might hold annual air shows. Mostly they would just do displays of old aircraft, but they would have a runway, and anywhere that has a runway is our best shot at getting fuel. Failing that, we'd just have to get lucky and stumble across a tanker on the roads."

"I think we've established that
luck
doesn't really figure for us," Ray said. "You know where any of these places are, Nick?"