Psychosis (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 3) (9 page)

Claire shook her head.

“Hah! No, I don’t suppose you do. I probably don’t know what I mean either, but I think whatever is going on out there, it’s nothing to do with nature. It’s not some sickness. It’s
us.
History has shown it time and time again: when people start dying in their thousands or millions, it’s other people that caused it.”

He burped, and fixed Claire with a thoughtful gaze.

“Well, come on. I had help in London, so I’ll help you now. Might not be as fun as drinking my way out of this, but I’ll probably rest easier come the end.”

He stood.

“Where are we going?”

“Out of this basement young lady.
Comes a time when you realise there’s no point running from the bombs, not when there’s more important things to do.”

Claire nodded, though she didn’t understand.

“Besides,” he said with a wink, “There’s got to be food up there, and I’m starving.”

He beamed, and threw back the bolt on the door.

*

John didn’t mind the rain. There was something isolating about it, something that
meant that even though he walked alongside the three strangers, just a stride apart, each had invisible walls around them. Heads down, eyes blinking out the water that ran from their hair down their faces, the rain gave them all time alone with their thoughts.

He hadn’t mentioned the remembrance of gunfire to the others. Hadn’t mentioned either that the name
Victor
had resonated in his mind. He’d wanted to ask more questions, but some bone-deep sense of caution held his tongue.

As he walked, he pondered his new-found friends. The woman was interesting: petite
and attractive, and yet something about her was steely and sharp. The big guy was a worry: he radiated menace, and when John looked at his eyes, he saw nothing looking back. Jason was troubled, he was sure of it, he had probably seen some terrible things to corrupt him in such a manner, but his troubles were no concern of John’s. Right now the guy was an angry, starving bulldog. Sooner or later, such an animal was always likely to turn. He resolved to keep a close eye on Jason.

The two siblings clearly looked to Michael for guidance and leadership, despite his impaired body. John liked him instinctively, liked the easy manner and the way he seemed able to find humour – no matter how bleak – in their situation. If anybody was going
to make it through to the other side of whatever was happening in South Wales mentally unscathed, John’s money was on the policeman.

Former
policeman. The thought hung in John’s mind like a cloud. Everything seemed to be
former
now. Again frustration reared up in his mind, and he willed himself to remember. There were fragments of feelings there, colourless shards of memory that refused to resolve themselves into a meaningful picture.

John had been as surprised as anyone by the way he leapt up to fight their attackers at the cliff top. He certainly hadn’t picked himself a
s military, or as the type who would rush to heroic deeds. In fact, when he thought about the military, a feeling he could only describe as disdain bubbled away in his psyche.

Maybe that meant he wasn’t ex-army. Maybe, he acknowledged to himself, it meant he
was
.

“You look like you have a lot on your mind.”

Michael’s voice. John was trudging along behind Jason, easy to forget the giant had a man strapped to his back, watching the rear.

“Or maybe not enough.”
He responded with a grim smile.

“Nothing coming back to you?”
Michael asked.

“Uh…no, nothing,” John said, and pointed over Jason’s shoulder. “There’s a farm over there by the looks of it, reckon we should get out of this weather for a while?
Looks like it’ll be getting dark soon.”

Michael twisted his neck. The farm looked old: solid stone walls, very small windows. Not quite a fortress but as close as they were likely to get. He nodded, and waved to catch Rachel’s attention. She followed the direction of his gesture, and gave him a thumbs-up.

The four of them left the road, making for the farm warily.

Michael kept a watchful gaze on John, his eyes narrow with suspicion.

Ahead of them, the road left the thickest of the forest behind, giving way to rolling fields and wide open spaces. The farm stood in isolation, battered by the elements, darkened and still, like a watchful sentry.

The south-w
estern tip of Wales had a higher than usual number of artists per capita: painters, writers and photographers were drawn to the area by the stillness, the silence, the isolation. St. Davids and the surrounding area had long been a muse to many, inspiring poetry with its harsh, empty landscape; all rocky cliffs and forbidding forests and swaying grassland. The epic scale of nature was writ large in the area, drawing in soulful spirits.

Lloyd
Thomas had been one such artist; a landscape photographer, who specialised in the sea and the sky, his visions illustrating the enormity of nature that crowded around the insignificant dwellings of humans. His work had been gathering momentum: there had even been a little interest in showcasing his photography in a small gallery in London. Even better, he had met and fallen in love with a wonderful woman, Lucy, who supported him completely and provided him with a second muse, lending his work a touch of optimism and romance that it had always lacked, but all of that changed the day he ate her.

He didn’t know it of course: he left the Lloyd that had existed before behind the moment the blood in his veins began to boil and the
synapses that his brain had spent a lifetime building were suddenly snapped and violently remade. His eyes, on which he had relied for so long, the eyes that were unique and saw the world at unusual angles, became two poisonous infections, sending daggers of pain into his new mind, until he ripped them out.

Lloyd never got to see Lucy’s eyes widening in fright and confusion as he dragged her to the floor and sank his teeth into the soft flesh of her long, elegant neck, finding her jugular vein and tearing it from her.

He
felt
it though: felt the warmth of her blood as it flowed freely over his mouth and torso, felt her trembling body go limp. By then she was just one more of
them
, one of the alien presences that provoked deep, consuming rage inside him. The sudden absence of her, as her life pooled on the patio, made him feel like howling in triumph. Suddenly the world felt
alive
, and he was aware of it in every glorious nuance: the wind washing over his bare forearms, the scents clamouring for attention in his nostrils…and the noise. Suddenly the thing that Lloyd Thomas became didn’t just hear sound; he saw it;
felt
it.

The world was vivid, overpowering, making his body jangle like the infusion of a powerful drug.

He stumbled from the garden, never to return, and made his way into the open, delighting in the feel of the kindred spirits being born all around him and snarling at the presence of the others. He didn’t understand that he could have given Lucy this wondrous gift had he inflicted a less serious injury upon her; but it mattered little. Lucy would never again cross his mind.

His progress was slow at first, faltering, but he grew in confidence, each experience new and wonderful and fresh. He had, after all, only just been born.

There was no conscious thought behind the killing: it was a biological imperative. As he walked through the suddenly unfamiliar streets, he found the alien presences darting away from him, their shrieks smashing into his delicate ear drums, making his head hurt. The only way to stop the pain was to change them, to transform them with his teeth, and to make them his own
, and if that failed, to remove them altogether. It wasn’t something he knew, or something he thought. It was something he
was
.

He came across one of them, pinned to the floor by one of his new siblings, struggling,
hurting his brother. As he approached, the resistance of the creature broke, and she was reborn, delivered by teeth and blood. Lloyd Thomas stood for a moment, swaying in the breeze, bearing silent witness to the miracle, and was surprised to hear his new sibling humming at him, a low, rumbling sound.

Was surprised to find that he understood it.

He hummed clumsily in acknowledgement, and the creature’s head shot up sharply. For a moment it squatted, a ragged strip of flesh dangling like spaghetti from a slack jaw. It cocked its head; hummed again.

Lloyd Thomas hummed in response and the creature leapt to its feet, victim forgotten.

When Lloyd turned away, striding toward the prey he felt in the distance
, he felt the footsteps of his brother and the new-born keeping pace behind him.

As they walked, they hummed, and their numbers swelled, and the humming grew louder.

*

Alex felt a hand clench his wrist and begin to pull, and he squeezed his eyes shut, and found himself, not for the first time that
day, wishing that they had locked up the right man, and that he had been safely absent.

“Move!”

Deborah’s voice; rising above the insistent roar of the river.

She snapped the branch away, and suddenly he was moving again, h
er hand guiding him to the shore. He gripped the branches, and pulled himself out of the freezing water, just as one of the creatures was swept past, its grasping hand clasping only the air he had been breathing moments earlier.

Alex pulled himself upright, gasping, choking on the solid lumps of oxygen that tried to force themselves
painfully into his lungs.

Deborah was still pulling at his hand, pleading with him to run, but he shook his head.

“Look,” he panted, gesturing toward the river.

The water heaved with the eyeless bodies, some rendered still;
fleshy driftwood. Others, still frantically thrashing, helpless against the current, drifted past, roaring in impotent fury at the figures watching from the riverbank.

Deborah stared for a moment, her mouth dropping open.

“It’s like they’ve never been in water before.”

Alex nodded.

“Mind you, that is what I thought when I saw you
swimming
in there.” She grinned.

Alex held up a
sheepish
you got me
gesture, and scanned the surroundings. The land had flattened out: they were almost all the way back to Rothbury. A hundred yards or so behind them, back up the river, stood the ruins of an ancient-looking watermill, which had once stubbornly grasped for the last of the river’s energy, before the levelling of the ground tamed the water a few hundred yards downstream. The area looked still; no movement beyond the creatures harmlessly drifting past them.

He pointed to the mill.

“We should get inside, get out of sight until we figure this out.”

Deborah nodded.

It was as Alex turned toward the mill that distant warning alarms began to sound in his mind. Some part of his brain had information that he needed to heed. Something he’d seen without recognising.

He turned back, frowning at the figures in the river, and he noticed it immediately.
The odd movement in the distance. As he watched, one of them seemed to split off from the pack, and Alex realised suddenly what had made the movement catch his eye.
Intent.

He squinted, trying to bring the shape into focus. The figure was moving against the current, moving toward the bank of the river. Suddenly there was another figure behind the first, slightly further downstream, clawing itself through the water toward the ground.
Swimming
.

Alex sucked in a sharp breath.

They learn.

And then the creature reached the bank and pulled itself clear of the river, and shot toward them, and Alex turned
and let the rush of fear pump his weary legs.

*

They approached the farmhouse like abused pets, cautious, silent, watching warily for any sign of movement, and it was immediately obvious that the farm had succumbed to the virus: the body near the entrance said as much. Throat torn out, cooled in the night air, making the world its morgue.

The rain was still hammering down from storm clouds that seemed to be gathering rather than dissipating. Lightning forked across the bleak sky, momentarily illuminating the farm buildings that stood close
together, as though huddling for protection against the winds that drove across the open fields.

The body belonged to a young-ish man. A farm-hand, Michael guessed, rather than the owner of the land. Rachel led the way, followed by Jason and Michael, with John bringing up the rear. As she entered the courtyard between the farmhouse and
the several outbuildings clustered around it, Rachel slowed their pace to a crawl, peering left and right with each step, until she was satisfied that they were alone.