Panic (15 page)

Then it has started.

He frowned, struggling to figure the relevance of the words, and then it hit him. The hooded man. The words had made no sense to Michael at the time but now, suddenly, they practically screamed at him.

The carnage in St.
Davids was no accident, not the outbreak of some new disease. That man had been expecting it. If there were answers out there, the hooded man would have them.

He poured the rest of the water down his throat and crushed the plastic cup, letting it fall from his fingers unnoticed, staring intently at the padlocked weapons cupboard.

*

Victor had watched the motionless picture on the monitor for a long time, his expression thoughtful.

It was, he had to admit, kind of funny that the policeman had made it so close before succumbing to his wounds. At the very least, he had put on an entertaining show. A real life action movie.

Ultimately though, it had proved a disappointing end for Victor, the thrill of the chase ending in such anticlimax. He wished he had planned for the event a little more carefully, thinking of all the wasted nights during which he could have ventured into St. Davids and discreetly installed cameras to give him a view of the
tiny city.

It wasn't his fault, of course, Project Wildfire had never been given an official start date, and Victor had thought it would have been a few years yet before they set it in motion. It was a missed opportunity that nagged at him, but at least the policeman had turned up that morning. That had been a stroke of luck.

He was still staring at the monitor when the proximity alarms began to beep, and the anti-personnel devices began to detonate, far off thumps that sounded harmless in the bunker, but which he knew were devastating up close.

They had reached th
is far then, the Infected. Presumably St. Davids was now picked clean and they were moving further afield. He cycled the monitors through the cameras installed around the woods. Maybe the show wasn't quite over after all.

The 'weapons cupboard' was something of a misnomer. A metal box that was attached the wall in much the same way as the first aid kit, it was roughly the size of a typical bathroom cabinet, and covered in dust. To Michael's knowledge, it hadn't been opened since the day it had been installed.

He imagined that in London or Birmingham or Manchester there were huge armouries, enormous rooms filled with tear gas and riot shields and M4 assault rifles. When he fished the keys to the cupboard from a desk drawer and popped it open, what he found was a flare gun and three rounds, and two tasers.

The tasers, he recalled, had been distributed amongst all UK police a few years back in a bid to whip up some positive press about bolstering security with 'non-lethal' solutions. He'd seen one in action once, in Cardiff; a junkie waving a pathetic knife around brought to the ground, flopping like a landed fish after the two wicked prongs the device shot out caught him in the chest and delivered thousands of volts into his system.

They would have to do. He had slipped on a spare jacket, discarding the torn, bloodstained iteration he had worn earlier, and he slipped both tasers into the side pockets. After a moment's consideration, he took the flare gun as well. It would make a lousy weapon: at anything but the closest of ranges accuracy was all but impossible – and of course, if he needed to use it against any infected people, it would be useless: the burst of light wasted on the eyeless monsters.

Still, better to have it and not need it...

He retraced his steps
taken that morning, trying to figure out the location of the hooded man's strange, squat dwelling. He would be able to find the spot that he had entered the woods fairly easily, just a few hundred yards South of Ralf's café. After that, he would be trusting to luck, and hoping that in his wild flight he had managed to notice at least some landmarks.

At last there was nothing left for him in the police station. He took one last fruitless crack at the radio, and moved to Glenda's reception desk. He hoped Glenda had made it away safely, though he knew deep inside that the hope was just delusion. The explosion would have drawn her out onto the streets inexorably. At least, he hoped, she had been one of the lucky ones: the dead that now littered the streets. The alternative, that ghastly transfor
mation into a blind cannibal, a deranged artist’s impression of humanity, was too awful to contemplate.

She had left him one final gift: her keys sat in a dish on her desk, nestled among paperclips and post-it notes. Glenda always
walked to work - she only lived about ten minutes away - but Michael knew that she owned a small hatchback, which he would find parked outside her house. At the very least, he would not have to move through the streets looking for an unlocked car or search through the pockets of the dead to find keys. It was a relief.

He snatched up the keys and slipped the one for the car off the fob. Glenda seemed to possess about a hundred keys on a massive ring, and Michael did not want to carry them all, jangling in his pocket like a bell on a cat's collar, warning the animals of his approach. He slipped the key into a breast pocket, and stepped to the door.

Carefully, making as little noise as possible, he lifted the heavy bar that blocked the door and set it down gingerly, wincing as the tiny clanging noise it made as it connected with the tiled floor. The action made him feel like a child again, creeping around his parents’ house like a ghost, trying to make as little noise as possible, doing all he could to avoid having his father's attention fall on him. It was something he had become exceedingly good at: moving slowly and carefully. Silence and stealth were just a matter of discipline and endless patience.

He eased the station door open a crack, and spent long moments surveying the darkening street outside.

It was early evening, and the mist that had been woven through the streets that morning was gone, leaving a clear, starlit sky. The street itself was deserted, and dark, every window, whether shattered or still in one piece, utterly devoid of light.

The centre of St. Davids was a ghost town.

Michael studied every corner, every shadow for a long time, battling the uneasy feeling that the street was staring back at him somehow. He saw no movement anywhere. From what he had seen of the people infected by whatever virus had crippled the town, the primary symptom was chaos. They were pure primitives, moving and striking without thought or strategy. Michael could not believe that now they might be waiting patiently for him, luring him out into a trap.

No, they were mindless savages, operating on some primal animal instinct, and the silence meant that they were definitely gone.

Widening the door a little, he slipped out into the cold night, casting a glance to the left and right, ready to spring back inside at the first sign of movement.

Emboldened by the stillness of the street, he crept forward, his confidence gradually increasing, and began to walk the shortest route to Glenda's house.

He continued to move as silently as possible, and kept his ears pricked for any unnecessary sound he might be making. It was this focus that allowed him to hear it.

Whenever Michael took a few faltering steps forward, there was a faint rustling that ceased whenever he halted.

He tested the theory a couple of times, moving and stopping, ears straining to catch the sound, until he was absolutely certain.

He was being followed.

*

Jason had not moved or spoken for hours.

Rachel watched her little brother closely, a knot of worry churning in the pit of her stomach.

They had remained on the roof for a long time with their dead mother, Rachel barricading the door to the attic as best she could, and keeping a careful watch on the alley below.

While she stood lookout, Jason slumped to the ground, sitting cross-legged, as he had always sat in front of the television as a little boy, and stared unblinking into the distance.

She had tried to coax whispered conversation out of him, tried to reassure him that he had done nothing wrong, that killing their mother had been the only option, but Jason did not seem even to hear her pleas.

He was in shock, Rachel was sure, his mind retreating from the horrors of the world to the safety of some inner sanctuary, but as the hours wore on, she became more and more concerned for his mental health, and increasingly frustrated that she had no idea how she might be able to help him.

When two hours had passed, and the streets below remained empty, she ventured down into the house to get some water for Jason, and, in the isolation of the narrow kitchen, allowed the strength that she had tried to maintain for her brother leak away, to be replaced by overwhelming despair. She cried then, for her dead parents, her ailing brother, and herself.

What could have happened to the people of the town? Rachel had seen plenty of zombie movies: silly apocalyptic stuff featuring shuffling corpses hungry for human brains, and the way the people of St. Davids had turned on each other brought these to mind, but there was no such thing, not in the real world. Not the world of jobs and bills and microwave meals.

Besides, these people were not the walking dead, slurping on brains. When they were injured too badly, it seemed as though they died in just the same manner as anyone else. The frenzied bl
oodlust, the terrible violence: that seemed to come from some primitive place, as though logic, reason – humanity itself – had simply been turned off. Like the generator of civilisation had run out of fuel.

She wept softly for a few minutes, releasing the pent-up emotions that threatened to drive her mad, and then pulled herself together. Whatever had happened in the town, whether it was some mass hysteria or some terrible contagion, Rachel and Jason had survived the worst of it. And they would go on surviving.

On the roof, some hours later, she looked at Jason again, and the untouched glass of water, and doubt crept into her mind. Was there any point in surviving, only to find your mind broken by the savage, incomprehensible restructuring of the world around you?

What if the whole world was like this? What if St. Davids wasn't the start of the epidemic, but just another outbreak, nothing special about it at all? Was there another Rachel, cowering on a rooftop in London or Leeds or Glasgow, waiting for help to come? What if there was no help?

Rachel dismissed the thought angrily. Diseases – and this had to be some sort of hideous disease – didn't just
happen
. There was a starting point; a zero patient; an epicentre from which everything spread.

If the horrors unleashed on St. Davids over the past few hours had already occurred in other towns and cities it would have
been all over the news for days, and she would have seen the signs. Quarantines, alert levels, and above all, panic buying, the all-too-familiar parasite that travelled alongside any national disaster story.

No, St. Davids had to be the start, the initial wound from which infection
was spreading, and they had survived that. Beyond the borders of the town, somewhere out there in the empty countryside, far enough away to be safe, there would be a quarantine in place, she was sure of it. A military ring thrown over St. Davids as if it were a prize in one of those unwinnable games at fairgrounds. Some prize.

Help was out there. She just had to get to it.

She looked at Jason. Getting to help would be impossible if she had two hundred pounds of dead weight to drag along with her.

She had to bring him back to something like normality.

There was only one thing she could think of: the age-old remedy for a trance-like state of shock that always seemed to work in comedy movies.

It was all she could think of, and doing it made her heart ache, but it had to be done. She wound her arm back and slapped her brother's face with all her might.

Jason's head rocked backwards, and he blinked, his eyes coming to rest on her face.

"We have to go, Jase,"
Rachel pleaded. "We can't stay here. If the government or whoever has this place hemmed in they'll be forced back here, all those infected people. You understand? We can't stay. Please."

She grabbed his huge, limp hand and pulled. Jason's eyes remained unfocused and distant, and Rachel felt the despair well up inside her again, bubbling toward the surface like destructive lava.

She almost cried with relief when she felt his strong fingers suddenly return her grip.

*

Victor had been right about one thing: the show wasn't quite over. In fact, it had built to a wonderful finale. A pulse-quickening storm of activity.
Fireworks
.

At no point did Victor allow himself to worry that the mindless monsters stumbling through the woods were aware of his presence, and were in some way hunting him. He knew that wasn't the way they worked. The people, all those flesh and bone pieces of furniture that at one point had housed a supercomputer each, were now just empty-headed animals, operating on sub-human instinct. They were commanded by an imperative in their very DNA, something so fundamental that it was as vital to them as breathing.

External stimuli drew them in as a lit garden would draw insects at night. They had no strategy.

The first of them to stumble across one of his traps, detonating the anti-personnel mine with a deafening roar, merely started a chain reaction that was impossible to stop.

Every bang that shook the dark woods brought more of them toward it, milling around, confused, until another device was triggered. Cause and effect.

Victor had not placed the traps for them, and the careful artistry of the design and layout of his garden of death was wasted on the drooling imbeciles, which was a shame. But it was unlikely now that the
SWAT teams he had expected to be killing in his garden would ever come.

Well, more than unlikely
, he thought with a sneer.

At least the explosives were not going to waste, as dozens of the sightless critters kept stumbling toward them, the light of their demise illuminating the woods like the flash of a camera. Besides, he would be able to rearm the traps, not that there was likely to be any need.

Still, caution was paramount. It was caution that had gotten him this far, caution and his ability to perceive the intentions and strategies of those who thought themselves above the rest of their species. When the dust of Project Wildfire finally settled, and the rebuilding began, Victor would be able to emerge from his cocoon, forgotten by those who had hunted him previously, and those selfsame attributes would fuel his rise to power.

Their solution to the problem of humanity will make them complacent
, he thought.
We'll see how they evolve when new problems arise.

Victor had made his way to the surface building that marked the entrance to his bunker. Inside, looking through narrow slits in the brickwork that afforded him a close-up view of the party in the woods, he saw one of the creatures stumble across a mine, and blow apart like pollen in the wind, and
he smiled.