Panic (13 page)

Rachel dragged her brother down an alley that branched off the main street. The alley was short: just a vein that connected the arteries of two larger streets, and it was immediately obvious that the road ahead of them was suffering the same fate as the one they had just left.

They stopped halfway down it.

"You should have run, Rach," Jason gasped between huge lungfuls of air. "You could have made it."

Rachel shook her head angrily, placing her hand on the handle of a narrow green door set into the brickwork of the alley. Locked.

"
We're
going to make it, you bastard. I'm not losing everyone this morning. Now, how about you put those muscles to some use and get this door open?"

The screams were all around them now. They would be on them in seconds.

Jason lowered his head, tensing the muscles in his arms and neck until veins bulged, and charged.

For a moment, as Jason's massive frame collided with the wood, Rachel was afraid it would resist
, but then, as the full weight of her brother just kept coming, like the rear carriages of a crashing train, the door seemed to bend and buckle before her eyes, before finally popping open with a loud
crack
.

She risked a quick look around as Jason staggered inside cradling his shoulder. For now, as the carnage continued on the streets, they didn't seem to have drawn any immediate attention.

She slipped inside behind Jason, closing the door quietly. The lock was broken beyond repair, but there was a deadbolt, and after a struggle she was just about able to engage it. It was misaligned, and Rachel was extremely doubtful that it would hold up against anyone charging into the door as Jason had, but for now it would have to do.

Outside, the awful noise filling the streets became a little muted.

Inside, the siblings found themselves in a narrow, dark corridor. At the far end they could see a staircase, and an open doorway to a small kitchen. A small window at the far end of the room let in a little natural light. On either side of the hallway were closed doors. The layout brought to Rachel's mind her entry into her parents' house earlier that morning and she shuddered.

Jason was still rubbing his shoulder, wincing.

"We have to check the rooms," Rachel whispered. "Make sure there is nobody else in here. We'll do it together, but be as quiet as possible."

After checking, if the house turned out to be clear, Rachel thought they would have to barricade the door somehow. What they would do beyond that, she had no idea.

One thing at a time, Rach.

It looked like the property was almost entirely bereft of ground floor windows, save for the narrow strip of glass in the kitchen. She doubted anyone could squeeze through there. A stroke of luck.

They moved through the ground floor cautiously, as silently as possible. The place was tiny, low roofs and cramped, square rooms. It was hard to believe this was anyone's house. Modern houses were all about space, and the property market was dominated by airy houses aimed at growing families. A place like this, Rachel thought, would be sneered at by anyone looking to buy. Yet, in days gone by, it had probably been sufficient to house a whole mining family.

Things change.

Her initial assessment had been correct: the tiny house, jammed between two businesses either side - a hairdressers and a small grocery store - had no other windows on this floor, and the only entrance was the one they had broken through.

Rachel felt a little spark of hope flicker to life inside her. Whatever was going on out there, they might just have stumbled upon the perfect place to survive until help came.

They ascended the narrow, winding staircase. The steps were irregular and crooked; a distillation of the house itself: all obtuse angles, everything crammed into a space just slightly too small to accommodate it.

The first floor was
made up of two small bedrooms, similar in size and shape to the two rooms downstairs, separated by a narrow bathroom. Each bedroom held a small single bed, side table, closet and a small TV. Each had, like the kitchen, a narrow strip of glass serving as a window to let in some daylight. Rachel crept up to the glass and peeked out. All she could see was the brickwork of the alley wall opposite. The windows were functional: ventilation and daylight only.

The first floor was as empty as the ground
had been, and Jason let out an audible sigh of relief.

"Where do you think the owner is?"

Rachel shook her head, frowning. Looking about, she saw no signs of anyone having lived here very recently. A sheen of dust had settled over the surfaces. There were no empty mugs, no filled ashtrays; no used towels or discarded clothes. Nothing to suggest anyone had been in the cramped little house in months.

She tested the handle of the wardrobe, and it swung open easily. All was revealed. Inside, alongside a whole lot of not very much at all, was a wetsuit.

"Surfers," she said.

She knew from phone calls to her mother that St. Davids had seen a growing trend for people buying properties to use as a base for surfing in the summer. The houses were cheap, and the waves some of the best the UK had to offer.

Her mother hadn't liked it, of course – if the trend continued, she said, St. Davids would be nothing more than a ghost town; all empty houses. People dropping in for a couple of weeks a year before rushing off to somewhere more important.

No one to gossip about.

Rachel grimaced. It looked like St. Davids was destined to be a ghost town one way or another.

Jason peeked into the wardrobe and saw the lonely we
tsuit hanging on the rail. "Ah," he said. "That's good news right? I mean, at least the place is empty."

"Good and bad, I suppose
," Rachel said. "It depends how long we have to hide out here. I doubt there's any food, and if the owners only come by once a year, they might have the water and electricity turned off. But yeah, I'd rather that than have anyone else in here."

Jason's eyes widened alarmingly at the suggestion that they might be there long enough to worry about supplies.

"Good news," Rachel said with a nod.

Jason stepped into the tiny bathroom, his bulk all but filling it, and twisted one of the chrome taps. A thin trickle of water fell from it.

"Water, at least," he said, and then looked up as something caught his eye.

A hatch in the ceiling.

"Looks like it might be for roof access," he muttered, pointing it out to his sister. "You think we should check out up there too?"

Rachel pondered for a moment. On the one hand, the thought of stepping outside again filled her with a cold, slick dread, but on the other, she knew she wouldn't feel entirely secure until she was certain of the boundaries of the property, and whether it
really was all clear.

They had to check. Besides, maybe the view from the roof would give them more of an idea about the scale of...whatever was happening
outside.

She nodded, and Jason reached
up, twisting the catch on the ceiling panel and gently lowering the hatch. A small telescopic ladder fell smoothly out, meeting the carpeted floor with a soft
thump
.

Once up the ladder, they found themselves in a tiny space that served as an attic. There was just barely room for the two of them to stand upright in the dark. Directly in front of the ladder, they could see a tiny sliver of light: the crack around a door, held shut
by a heavy deadbolt.

Jason shot his sister a questioning glance, and, when she nodded, slid back the bolt, letting the light in. Beyond the door
stood a small, flat roof, which had been decorated with a couple of long-dead pot plants.

The screams became audible again, rising
into the air all around them. Rachel carefully approached the low wall that separated the roof from a nasty drop into alleys on either side. The angle didn't present much of a view of the streets beyond, but it was enough to confirm that the violence was still being unleashed on the roads below. It looked, to Rachel, like it was spreading outward toward the edges of the town. She wondered what would happen then. Would they turn back in, hunting out those people, like herself, who were surely hiding out behind locked doors, or would they simply continue to spread, fanning out across the country?

Neither seemed like a particularly reassuring outcome.

Jason stalked about the roof like a caged lion, peering down at the fragments of the streets that the awkward position of the roof allowed him to view. He moved to the edge furthest from Rachel and peered straight down, at the alley through which they had made their escape.

Rachel's attention was caught by something of an anomaly, a group of the people affected (
by what? Illness? Poison? Madness?
) was moving against the tide, pouring back the in the direction they had come like water running uphill. Rachel squinted, trying to make out what they were doing through the mist. More and more of them seemed to be turning and joining the swelling group. They were chasing something, something that, incredibly, was moving
into
the carnage.

As they drew a little closer to her position, she heard a tinny rattle, the whining, lawnmower-plus hum of a scooter.

A gap between the buildings gave her a view of the machine as it moved past at full tilt: on the seat, head down against the wind, was a man in a tattered police uniform.

Rachel was pondering what this might mean, where the cop was going and whether he might have some method in mind for putting a halt to the bloodshed when Jason's voice brought her back to her immediate surroundings with two words that curdled her blood.

"It's Mum."

"Go
on
my son," Victor breathed in something like awe, as he watched the momentum of the picture on the monitor suddenly pick up.

He
uttered the words in a rickety Cockney accent: he had long ago started talking to himself, vocalising the meaningless, empty tasks that filled up most of his solitude.
That's a smashing cup of tea, Vic. Time for bed now, Vic, or you'll sleep through the whole morning. Better change these batteries before they die, Vic.

It had troubled him a little at first: the first sign of madness, as the old wives' wisdom would have it, but he put it down to nothing more than a need to hear a human voice, even if it was just his own. It wasn't doing any harm now
, was it?

By the time he began to add a variety of regional accents to the empty discussions
, he had long since stopped worrying about it. Now, meaningless phrases would pour forth from his mouth in Cockney, Birmingham, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, French and German accents. It was oddly comforting.

He had noticed the cop picking up on the German accent, which he had delivered as though he were trying to suppress it. There had been no point to the exercise really, just a little game to confuse the policeman. Watching him take mental notes on the accent had almost made Victor burst out laughing.

The grainy picture was rattling along now, the buildings of the town centre approaching fast. Victor didn't think much of the cop's choice of vehicle, but he had no option other than to sit back and enjoy the show. He hoped the cop would make it at least to the centre of town, though he rather thought that the first hurdle might prove too much.

A minute or two to wait.

Victor blew the steam off his black coffee and took a sip, casting a glance around the other monitors.

The television signal had gone down a while ago, probably around the time that Victor had been
busy driving the butt of his gun into the cop's jaw. It was no surprise to Victor to find swirling static on every station, but it did provide yet more confirmation that it had started at last.

Disabling mass communication had been step one for Project Wildfire and, he supposed, for any project with such ambitious scope. Phones, TV, Internet. Cutting them off was like cuttin
g the head off a chicken: just a matter of waiting until the flapping body realised it was dead.

He had been relieved to find that it was only the surface Web that had been broken: the deep web, the portals by which those with information that the general population must never see travelled, was still open for business, for the time being at least. As much as the
people in charge wanted to keep the infrastructure undamaged as possible, he doubted the web would remain up for long.

The deep web, the invisible playground for terrorists, drug-runners, paedophiles and governments
, was not browseable in the same way as its brightly coloured, sanitised younger brother. Sites were marked only with long numeric strings: the virtual equivalent of bouncers on the door. If your name wasn't on the list, you were not only not getting in, you didn't even know there was an 'in'.

There were a few sites there, of course, more well known open(ish) fora with people loudly proclaiming that the events of the day were a conspiracy; petty endless arguments about whether this nation or that government was behind it all, but when the information was so hidden, so esoteric, what was the point in publishing it? The deep web was never going to alert the world to anything, because the world did not know it existed. Putting the warnings there was like printing a newspaper in a long-dead language.

It was through these hidden conduits, the sewers of the electronic world, that the signal was beamed from the micro-camera Victor had placed in a button on the cop's uniform, to the monitor in front of him. Reality television at its finest.

The last show on
Earth.

*

Michael hadn't thought much of the scooter, but he was less keen on continuing to haul his aching body toward the town on foot.

The Johnson's house, a few hundred yards from the edge of the town proper, stood alone, like an outpost. Michael had hoped that Ben
Johnson would be around, and would agree to give him a lift to the police station, but his frustrated knocking on the front door had been met only with echoes and silence.

He had been cursing his luck and turning toward the pavement again with a heavy heart when he saw the door to the shed standing open, and the scooter just inside the doorway, leaning invitingly against the washing machine. Ben was a cautious, solid type of a man, and so this lapse in security seemed out of character, but it felt like the first break Michael had
received all morning, and he wasn't about to turn his nose up at it.

When he entered the dusty shed, full of gardening tools and riddled with spider webs, he found that his luck did not stop there. On a shelf above the washer and dryer, nestled among half-empty paint cans
and rusting tools, were the keys.

He searched for something with which he could leave Ben a note explaining the theft, but
, finding nothing, decided that a beer and an apology at a later date would have to do.

Relief flooded through him when he heard the tiny engine buzz into life. An old-school fuel gauge on the handlebars informed him that he had half a tank of petrol. Plenty.

The scooter belonged to Ben's son David, who would have been about fourteen or so, and it was comically small when Michael trundled it out onto the driveway and gingerly lowered his six-foot frame onto it.

When he released the little chrome kickstand and found a small bar to rest his feet on, his knees hung mere inches above the ground.

He didn't see a helmet, not that it would matter much. The machine probably only boasted a 100cc engine. If he could get it above twenty miles per hour he would be astonished. Crashing it would almost certainly do him no lasting damage, and the thought of fastening a helmet onto his pounding skull was not appealing at any rate.

Live dangerously, Mike
.

He snorted to himself, and
set off towards the town.

The outer streets he found eerily quiet, as though the lingering mist had simply swallowed up all the residents. Once or twice he thought he saw faces in windows
; anxious eyes looking out, trying to spot some clue as to what might have caused the mushroom cloud that now blossomed hundreds of feet into the air above St. Davids.

It was as he got further in, deeper into the labyrinthine warren of streets that he heard the commotion, and
he eased off the throttle, bringing the scooter down to little more than walking pace.

Screams drifted on the wind like confetti, widespread and
impossible to miss; warning him to stay away.

Michael
thought back to the two men at Ralf's café. To the way Carl had turned suddenly. It was a virus of some sort, had to be, yet surely it had erupted out there near the coast. There had been no sign of trouble earlier that morning when he and Carl had set off. Equally, he was certain that Carl and Craig Haycock must still be stumbling about in the woods far from the town, blind and direction-less. There was no way they could have made it this far already, surely?

Michael brought the scooter to a halt, and listened to the distant cacophony, rising from the streets like a warning siren. He was torn by indecision.

If the plague had made it this far there was nothing he would be able to do. The sensible thing would be to turn the scooter around and head away from the town and keep going. If things were as bad as the distant screaming suggested, the best thing he could do was surely to look after himself.

The screams were getting louder, coming toward him. Probably only a few streets away.

He turned and looked back at the empty road out of the town. The coward's way out.

It was then that the Cardiff Incident popped back into his head.

Michael had joined the Cardiff Police Force at a time when, desperate for new recruits, it had targeted graduates with the promise of a good income and fast tracking to a desk position.

He had just given up a soul-destroying job in recruitment, the fixed-grin hell to which nearly all unfocused graduates flo
ck, and the promise of a career; something to be proud of, had proven irresistible.

Ten years earlier, the prospect of
joining the Cardiff Police would have been enough to put even the bravest off: the city, riddled with drugs, unemployment and poverty had been one of the hardest beats in the UK. But years of government investment had turned Cardiff into a boom town, with renovation spreading from the docks outward, blossoming like a flower. Housing prices went up and up, the population veered from lower to middle class, and while the neglected underclass remained, it had been pushed to the edges and painted over. Forgotten.

Michael had been accepted quickly. He was physically fit, and showed a great aptitude for dealing patiently with people. His colleagues liked him, and for a while he felt happier than he had ever been in his life, part of something that could make a difference.

The fast-tracking to a desk position, promotion to detective, proved more elusive, and he walked the beat for almost five years, but he didn't really mind. The pay was good, and the cheery lieutenant who was in charge of his section became a good friend. Promotion, he was promised repeatedly, was not far off.

Until that bright October morning, and the call to attend the domestic disturbance, until the dark presence that Michael had always feared lurked inside him somewhere, the shadow of his father, finally broke violently free.

Until the corridor of blood and bone.

Michael
shook away the grasping memories and tore his eyes away from the empty road that led away from town. Running was not an option. He had failed as a police officer once already. Every instinct screamed at him to head to Aberystwyth, to ensure the safety of his wife and daughter, but he dismissed the thought angrily. If the infection, the madness - whatever it was - got out of St. Davids, it would get there long before he could. If he was going to make a difference, it had to be here; had to be in St. Davids. The best thing he could do for Claire and Elise was ensure the infection did not spread.

He twisted the throttle, and set off into the town.

He knew before he rounded the final deserted street corner that the noise he heard was something more than anguish at seeing the destruction wrought on the town centre by the explosion. Knew it deep in his gut, where the truth squirms and writhes until it can not be ignored.

Yet nothing prepared him for the sight that greeted him.

The streets were painted red with blood. Dead bodies and dismembered limbs scattered the cobbled surface of the road, and everywhere Michael looked, he saw terrified people sprinting in all directions, chased by their former friends and neighbours, blood-soaked horrors from a fevered nightmare.

A thousand Craig Haycocks had been unleashed on St. Davids. An army of men, women and children reduced to insane savagery. An army that grew
larger by the minute as those whose wounds were not fatal rose from the ground, faces twisted into masks of pure hatred, and laid siege to whatever they could catch. St. Davids was lost, a casualty of a war that had erupted from nothing barely two hours before.

The police station was a few hundred yards away, just a handful of streets. The radio inside would not save the town now, Michael was sure of that, but there was something larger at stake. Whatever this madness was, this disease that turned ordinary people into rabid animals, it had to be contained. Once it spread from St.
Davids, once it hit larger populated areas like Carmarthen and Haverfordwest, there would be no stopping it.

Michael gunned the throttle, shuddering as he saw several eyeless faces swivel toward the sound, and raced forward, squeezing every ounce of power out of the scooter.

As he swept past some rubbish bins he snatched up the lid off one, a dented metal circle that would serve as a primitive shield.

The cobbles didn't help, making the small wheels of the scooter bounce wildly, sending jarring currents of pain up into his arms, and
he was afraid that he might lose his grip on the handlebars entirely, sealing his fate. He clenched his fingers tightly, keeping his head down, trying to focus on the path ahead; avoiding looking directly at the horror unfolding around him.

The fast
-moving noise of the scooter seemed to confuse the infected people initially, and they paused, heads swinging like antennae, as though struggling to get a fix on his position.

As he ploughed through a gap in their ranks, bursting through the main bulk of blood-soaked people and out the other side, where they were less densely packed,
Michael even thought that maybe that confusion would be enough to get him through the worst of it.

Until he glanced over his shoulder, and saw the pack forming behind them. The
noise emitted by the scooter had turned him into some grisly depiction of the
Pied Piper
.