Psychosis (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 3) (14 page)

John joined her at the narrow window, and all thoughts of getting back to the base, of taking his revenge
on Sullivan, simply melted away. He hadn’t learned much about the project, but he knew what was supposed to be waiting for him when the chopper landed at St. Davids. Mindless animals at best. Yet the things outside were clearly organised.

He’d survived only a matter of hours in Wales, and only throug
h blind luck. If anything, the Infected were only becoming more dangerous. John realised abruptly that he had no choice but to trust the people he was with. They might be the last people he ever saw.

The herd
- John could think of no other name for it - passed, the hum eventually fading away to nothing as the figures disappeared into the gloom.

In the farmhouse, no one spoke for a very long time.

*

The
Mouse and Hound
sat not quite on the main shopping street that ran through Aberystwyth, instead lurking at its shoulder like a nosy neighbour.

From the window in the room that had served as the landlord’s bedroom, Bill could see a
sizeable portion of the High Street, and a good deal of a couple of the tributaries that flowed into it.

The last time he had checked outside – several days ago, now – the streets had been pretty much emptied, enough
that he had begun to wonder if maybe he was the only human being left in the town. Claire’s headlong dash to the cellar that had become home for him had changed all of that dramatically. Now he could see a mass of bodies filling the streets outside, and more seemed to be coming every minute. They looked to Bill like swarming insects, like a colony of ants descending on some spilled sugar.

How much the creatures
knew
or
thought
Bill had no idea, but staring down into the street, it was impossible to conclude anything other than that they were aware of the presence of humans nearby. For the moment they appeared dormant; waiting. Once they received some stimulus, some indication of the means by which they might get their hands on the prey they knew was close, Bill was certain they would be moving as one, tearing the pub to pieces.

Even the cellar would not be safe. He had to get her out.

His first thought had been to try and barricade the pub somehow, find some way to board up all the windows on the ground floor, maybe nail the front door shut, but the creatures outside were too close and he swiftly dismissed the notion. The noise would bring them upon the place in seconds.

There were cars on the street outside, some of them abandoned at incongruously jaunty angles; maybe they even still had keys in the ignition, but getting to them looked almost impossible. Actually starting the engines in the middle of all those crazy people would be
no different to walking up to the first of the creatures he could find and sticking a finger in its mouth.

He sighed.

There was one other way out. The one that had dawned on him immediately because he had spent several days looking at it. The one he resolutely did
not
want to pursue.

In the cellar, a large grate on the floor took care of all the spillage that went along with moving large quantities of liquid on a daily basis. If it could be pried loose, it was more than big enough for Bill to get his body through. It would present no problem at all for Claire. Presumably it led into the sewer system that ran beneath Aberystwyth. Whether it actually offered a way out of the town – or even out of the pub, Bill had no idea, but as he looked at the gathering crowd of murderers in the streets outside, it felt
increasingly like the only option available to them.

He knelt down, putting reassuring hands on Claire’s narrow shoulders, and looked her in the eye.

“You’re not afraid of the dark are you Claire?” He asked softly.

She shook her head, eyes widening in confusion.

“How about small spaces?”

Claire thought about the closet
s she’d spent the best part of the past week hiding inside, and shook her head again.

“That’s good. I think there is a way we can get
away from this pub.” His face split in a sardonic smile. “Never thought I’d consider that a good thing. Crazy days.”

He laughed softly to himself.

“We’ll have to go under the ground. Into the sewers below the basement. It’ll be dark, and it’ll smell pretty bad, but I doubt there’s much down there that’s going to try to eat us. What do you say?”

Claire nodded without hesitation, and he ruffled her hair affectionately.

His hands were still on her hair, and an ephemeral trust was just burgeoning in the air around them when Bill heard it, and his fingers locked in place.

The clatter, downstairs, wood
crashing to the floor.

The barstool.

Dawn broke like a promise over the farmhouse, the cold light of the sun illuminating a world suddenly rendered alien, leaving a deep ache of despair in the gut
of those who saw familiar light breaking over the unfamiliar horizon.

They’d had little in the way of sleep: the cold tiled floor would have made for an uncomfortable bed even if their thoughts hadn’t been occupied by their
witnessing the end of the world as they knew it only hours before.

Michael woke first,
laid prone on his ruined back, staring at a fixed point on the unfamiliar ceiling above him, trying to forget that everything beyond that point was now abnormal. It didn’t work.

Claire dominated his thoughts, as she had for two years and more. It didn’t matter what else was happening in the world, didn’t matter that civilisation was apparently wheezing its last rattling breaths. The hole in Michael’s life remained the same size it had been since Elise had walked out and taken
their daughter with her.

She’s probably dead already
.

It was most likely what his three travelling companions thought, though they kept the curtains
shut tightly around the notion; didn’t let him peek through the gap. It had occurred to Michael a thousand times of course, it was written there on the back of his eyes, floating like a watermark on everything he saw and everything he thought. But his gut told him she was still out there. She was a smart girl, Claire, smart enough that he used to tease Elise about their postman being a genius. Back when teasing Elise meant getting a laugh. Before the laugh twisted into the blank expression-vacuum that had made his heart ache.

He
turned over the message from the Aberystwyth police in his head for the thousandth time.

Missing.
Not dead. Not infected.

Michael repeated the phrase silently over and over, until it became a prayer.

Claire had gotten away somehow. Maybe at the very moment that Michael had been trying to outrun the slavering monster that his partner Carl had become, Claire had been trying to outrun her infected mother. The thought made his eyes sting, and under the cool surface of his features, the face he kept straight for the people around him now, frustration at his broken body bubbled and spat like boiling oil.

The others were still asleep, and so Michael let the rage consume him, let it seep through the cracks in his face, distorting his features.

He was still stuck, still fixed on that point, and so he didn’t see it when it happened. Wouldn’t have seen it anyway under the boot he was wearing.

His little toe, twitching ever so slightly.

*

The stove was a
wood burner; Rachel volunteered to fetch wood once they were all awake, and John joined her, leaving Jason and Michael in a kitchen full of the uneasy silence that followed Jason around like a shadow.

The morning was crisp, peaceful even. Hard to imagine that somewhere out there in all that stillness and silence there were
probably people hiding out just like them; and others less fortunate being ripped to pieces, or remade into abominations.

They moved warily, but they both felt it, the absence of the danger that had come to be a fundamental part of their lives.

They’ve all moved away,
Rachel thought, and the notion seemed almost more unsettling to her than the mindless carnage she had thought would become an ever-present part of reality. Thinking of them as anything other than mindless monsters was terrifying. Thinking of them as an organised…
herd
was far, far worse.

“Where do you think they went?”

Rachel jumped a little, startled. They’d been as silent as possible until John broke the morning air. He could obviously feel it too, the absence of
them.
Or maybe he could read her mind.

She shrugged, stepping past a cheerful red tractor and finding a bin full of firewood.

“Does it matter?”

“It mi
ght. Maybe more than anything.”

She nodded.

“No clue. Maybe that’s just what they do now, moving around like that in…herds.”

John looked dubious.

“Looked like an army marching to war.”

“You’d know.” Rachel aimed for light-hearted; missed.

John smiled grimly.

“I guess I deserve that. But my aching jaw says maybe I’ve paid for my crimes.”

He rubbed the bruised jaw with a wry smile, and was grateful to see Rachel return it.

“Remember that if you think about re-offending.”

John chuckled, and Rachel fixed her eyes on his.

“
That’s only half a joke, John. I know I can trust Jason. I think I can trust Michael. So far, you’re not doing too well on that score.”

John’s eyes dropped to the ground, and he nodded.

“So…Aberystwyth…”

“Michael’s daughter is there.”

“And you two are…”

Rachel shook her head hurrie
dly. A little
too
hurriedly; she flushed.

“It’s not like that,” She piled
up an armful of thin pieces of wood, and for a moment John saw her eyes depart, saw her seeing some other place and time.

“We were thrown together in St. Davids, the three of us. And, I don’t know, it sort of feels like we’re in this together now. If that little girl is alive, we have to find her.
Have to.
If we don’t, we might as well offer ourselves up to the next set of teeth we see, because we’ll be no better than
they
are.”

John
nodded, his expression thoughtful.

“In my experience, people undertaking a mission based on some hope of redemption or some sort of symbolic victory…well, they usually end up dead.”

Rachel grimaced.

“This wood is wet. Breakfast is going to take a while.”

John looked at the empty skies. Skies that humans had looked on for millennia. Skies that had been conquered only a century earlier. Lost to them now.

It m
ight be the last cooked breakfast he got to eat for a while. Ever, maybe.

“It’ll be worth the wait.”

*

Bill sobered up.
Fast.

He felt Claire’s neck stiffen under his hand, and felt the tremble in his fingers.
A little more than usual. More than just letting his blood/alcohol level drop to numbers that doctors wouldn’t baulk at. More than the accumulated motion of spending seven decades on earth.

The air seemed to freeze around him.

A shuffling, a bump.

Inside
.

Bill’s mind went blank, the room around him
fading away into a memory: charging through air thick with brick dust, coating his small lungs until they ached, the roaring of the explosion all around him. And then emerging to find himself face to face with a man who seemed somehow merged with debris, and he just stood, stunned, until a second explosion tore the man away from Bill’s sight.

The sound of a bottle smashing on the floor downstairs snapped him out of it.

He grabbed Claire’s hand and caught her eyes, putting a finger to his lips. The blood drained from Claire’s face.

They crept forward, and when they reached the door that led from the bedroom, Bill eased his head out. It was empty, and full of
grim potential.

Bill saw the hatch leading to the loft and pointed at it, raising his eyebrows.

Claire gave a barely discernible nod.

He eased forward, wincing at the slight creak from the old floor. Downstairs, he heard the door leading to the bar area opening, and a cold sweat bega
n to run along the deep lines of his brow. The thing was right below them, but sharing the same space. No doors between it and them.

Bill shuffled along quicker now, and reached up, releasing the catch. The hatch swung open, and a sliver of panic
lodged itself in Bill’s mind: the ladder leading up to the loft was far more elaborate than he had been expecting, and it slid downwards on a hydraulic mechanism.

No stopping it now
, he thought, moments before it hit the floor with a soft thump. “Up now, girl,” Bill said sternly, and thing downstairs shrieked.

Claire was halfway up the ladder before the vibration of it meeting the floor had even run its course, scrambling on all fours up the steep incline like a cat.

Bill started after her, and he had every intention of making it up that ladder before the thing got up to the first floor. He grunted, heaving himself up with his arms, the unfamiliar exertion shaking into life muscles that had long since retired. He made it to the fourth step before he felt the teeth sinking into his achilles and white-hot pain exploded in his brain.

He let himself fall away from the ladder, and shoved it upwards, letting the hydraulic system pull it up, sliding across
and blocking his view of the poor kid’s petrified face.

He tried to think of Donna in those last moments, willed his mind to snap him away from
the horror of reality, but the last thing in Bill’s mind when it began to boil was the searing image of human teeth scraping at the bone of his ankle and the poor girl he’d left alone, and then all thoughts ceased.

Claire bit back the scream as the hatch sealed her in the loft, cutting of
f the sight of the old man submerged in a mass of bodies, clutching at him, pulling him to pieces.

The loft was not entirely dark:
a skylight allowed the first slivers of dawn’s light in, dimly blurring the edges of the storage boxes and old furniture that populated the loft.

The snarling downstairs grew in volume. More of them filling the corridor below, flooding onto the first floor. Terrified, she stared at th
e hatch, thinking about how easy it had been for Bill to open, just clutch the handle and pull, and the hydraulics did the rest. It was a matter of time before something pulled on that handle.

She had to get out.

*

Jaaaassssssoonnnnn…

The taunting, goading tone of her voice brought back memories of the schoolyard, of day after day spent on a knife-edge, wondering where the next humiliation would come from. It reminded him of the name they had used for him, the name he thought he had left behind years before.

Paula Roberts was squatting on the counter in the little kitchen,
pointing the obscene holes in her face straight at Jason.

He trembled.

The others were carrying on as if nothing untoward was happening, silently chewing through toast and bacon heated slowly over the modest flames of the large wood stove.

Michael had wanted to get going, naturally enough, but both Rachel and John had insisted on eating. John told them that you never turned down the chance to get decent food inside you, no matter what the circumstances.
No use to anyone with an empty tank
, he said, and his eyes were lost for a moment, wreathed in remembered sandstorms.

Jaaaaaassssssssssssooooooonnnnnnnnn
…

Jason was trying not to look directly at h
is mother, keeping his gaze focused on the floor. In response, she plucked at a ragged strip of flesh under her left breast, peeling it away to reveal the glistening gore beneath. She dropped the meat to the floor with a wet
splat
, making him jump.

“You okay Jase?”

Rachel looked concerned. It was how she always looked at him now, with worry written clearly on her face.

He nodded, picked up some toast, and began to chew. It tasted like ash.
Made him feel queasy.

They’re going to kill you
, Jassssson. The liar and the cripple. And she won’t stop them. They’ll take turns with her while your corpse is still warm. And you’ll let it happen, just like you did with Victorrrrrrr. Just like you always let them do whatever they wanted, while you cried and hid behind my skirt. Jasssssssonnnnnn…

Jason squeezed his eyes tightly shut, trying to force back the dark weight growing in his mind, expanding into every corner of his thoughts, but found that all his strength was worthle
ss there, and the darkness grew; bleak and consuming, like cold fire.

Jake had used a wide variety of methods to kill, and found that each had their merits, though firearms proved to be a profound disappointment. Drowning was some fun, feeling the thrashing panic of the victim as they realised that
no, he wasn’t going to let them back up for air,
but ultimately the water separated him from their pain, and he didn’t choose drowning often.

Fire was better, because you could really hear the screams, and if the fire was set right, licking around the feet before rising up to more necessary areas, then it could take many long minutes for them to finally die, and that time was golden; filled with pain and misery and pleading. Fire had been so much fun the first time that he had repeated the trick three times, getting more proficient on each occasion.