The Alpha Plague (17 page)

In an attempt to cool himself down, Rhys pulled his shirt away from his stomach and billowed it like a fan. Although the cheap nylon didn’t cater to this kind of heat nor this kind of exercise, he could hardly go skins—not a great way to impress Vicky. A beautiful and fit young woman nearly ten years his junior could hardly be attracted to Rhys, a slightly portly thirty-something bloke whose best physical attributes were his calf muscles because they kept his odd-shaped body stable.

The bare concrete stairs ran a spiral all the way to the top of the building. It made Rhys dizzy to look up the centre of them.

More dust ran up Rhys’ nose, and his eyes watered. A sneeze stirred in his nostrils, but with a hard rub of his face and a sharp sniff, it passed. He didn’t need to attract those things too early. If he did, he wouldn’t be able to outrun them up what must have been at least twenty flights of stairs.
 

A final deep breath, and he began his climb.

***

Tools lay strewn about the floor, dropped where workers left them. This place had been abandoned in a hurry. When the explosion sounded out and the shutters went up, if they had any sense, the builders would have gotten off the island in a flash. He hoped they’d made it, but it was doubtful. It would only be a matter of time before Rhys figured he’d see a diseased in a high-visibility vest. Good job they left the tools behind; they hardly needed to be armed as well.

***

By the time he’d made it up five flights of stairs, Rhys’ lungs had tightened to the point where he couldn’t carry on. Sweat stung his eyes as he stopped to rest, and the dusty environment made his throat dry.
 

Rhys pulled the photo of Flynn from his top pocket. The photographer had asked his boy to lean forwards on the table in front of him—a very adult pose for a little boy. The slightest smile tickled Rhys’ lips and he kissed it. “Not long now, mate. Daddy’s coming.”

With that, he carried on.

***

By floor ten, Rhys paused again. Although he remained on his feet, he hunched over, placed his hands just above his knees, and fought for breath. While he stared at the floor, he watched his sweat land on the dusty ground and form dark little circles.

The need to sneeze returned, the fine dust in the air impossible to avoid. It danced in a nearby beam of light and made his eyes itch.

When a loud shriek flew into the building, Rhys stood up straight and peered down the centre of the stairs. Nothing had entered yet; he had to keep on going.
 

Rhys moved off again. Every step set a fire beneath his kneecaps. If they came in now, he couldn’t outrun them to the top.
 

As he climbed, Rhys heard another shriek and looked down through the stairs again. Time seemed to stop at that moment. Shame it hadn’t stopped a few seconds before—or, more precisely,
he
hadn’t stopped. If he had, he would have had a second to catch his breath. If he’d have stopped, he would have realised that, although unmistakably close outside, nothing was on his trail. If he’d have stopped, he would have seen the tray of paints before he stepped on them.

Half of the paint tray hung over the edge of one of the steps as if put there as a trap. When Rhys’ foot made the slightest contact with it, it nudged it off the edge. Dread sank through Rhys as the tray, and six large paint cans, fell to the ground.

They tumbled in silence and the entire world seemed to hold its breath with Rhys.
 

The first can connected with a stair with a loud
crash
.

Rhys’ entire being tensed up to the point where he felt brittle. The next five cans shattered him as they hit the floor, almost as one. A deep
boom
shot up the stairwell. A large cloud of dust kicked up from the point of impact
 

And then silence…
 

Unable to still his heavy heartbeat, Rhys held his breath and listened.
 

Nothing.
 

Nothing inside, but nothing outside either; no bang of fists against the steel shutter at the front of the florist, no moans from the mindless mass, no shuffle of tired feet. In a world were chaos reigned, everything had turned deathly still.

Then he saw it: one diseased man. At a guess, Rhys would have put the guy in his forties. For a moment, he looked at the paints on the floor as if they would provide answers for him. Then he looked up and his bloody eyes stared straight at Rhys.

“Fuck it.”

When he drew a deep breath, Rhys took off, his legs on fire from the effort.
 

The primitive and frenzied call of the diseased chased up the building after him.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Every part of Rhys’ body ached as he pushed on. If what he’d heard about a wall was true, he’d fucking hit it. Although, a wall sounded surmountable... he’d hit six-foot thick steel. He gritted his teeth and kept going. Wall or not, he had hundreds of fucking diseased on his tail. Two options sat before him: run or die.

The thunder of footsteps pounded against the stairs behind Rhys. It turned from a military march, into a drumroll, into a continuous vibration that ran through the core of the building. It seemed like the entire place could collapse beneath their collective weight, especially as the tower could be structurally unsound in its incomplete state. Rhys shook his head to himself; it didn’t help to think like that, he had to push on.
 

When Rhys looked down at the line of diseased that had entered the building, his stomach lurched. What little strength he had left in his legs nearly abandoned him. Packed so tightly together, they became a single unending entity with one thing on its mind—him.

Rhys looked up again. To look behind served no purpose; the rumble of the stampede told him everything he needed to know—
keep fucking running
.

Two more flights of stairs until the roof. Like the car park, he had to get to the gap and jump. If he could get up there, he could make the jump. If he’d done it once…

When he rounded the next bend, Rhys saw the access to the roof and nearly puked. It had a fucking door on it. Of all the places in the building to have fitted a door!

Without breaking stride, Rhys crashed into it as he snapped the handle down. The impact stung and the door didn’t budge.

Exhaustion, fear, and grief combined as he released a throat-splitting scream. “Arghhhhhhhh!”

If the door didn’t open, the only way to avoid the inevitable would be to take the plunge down the gap in the middle of the stairs. The way of the paint cans had to be better than what these creatures would do to him.

With just two flights of stairs between him and the leaders of the pack, Rhys’ breath grew shallow and pains tore through his chest.
 

The diseased showed no signs of fatigue.

For a moment, Rhys froze, transfixed as he watched the casualties of the crowded ascent. With no railings to stop them, the diseased that weren’t firmly on the stairs fell down the gap in the middle. Their fellow monsters watched them, and some even reached out as if to catch them, but none of them stopped in their push to get to Rhys.
 

The collection of broken bodies at the bottom of the stairs increased by the second; maybe Rhys should jump… at least a soft landing waited for him. He turned back to look at the door. There had to be a way through.

A small cupboard sat just next to the locked door. It reminded Rhys of the kind of place used to keep the janitor’s equipment, but it didn’t have a door—of course it didn’t; there was only one door in this building. A bag of tools lay on the floor in the corner of the cupboard. There had to be something he could use in there.

The thick bag made a
whoosh
and kicked up a cloud of dust as Rhys dragged it toward him. When he unzipped it, he gasped. A sledgehammer lay on top of all the other tools like it had been left there for him.

Rhys jumped to his feet and swung it at the centre of the door with a yell. The heavy head sank into the wood, but the door didn’t give. Hardly a surprise—he’d just hit the centre of the fucking door.

Locked in a battle with his shaky limbs, Rhys yanked the handle up and down to wriggle the hammer free.
 

One final tug and it came loose. It hung from his grip as Rhys turned and looked behind him—bleeding eyes fixed on him as they rounded the final bend in the staircase.

A surge of adrenaline rushed through him and he swung at the door again. He smashed the handle off and the door flew wide to the groan of splintering wood.

Before he made a run for it, Rhys turned to the pack. A tidal wave of disease and hate rushed up at him. He wound the hammer back and swung it with all his strength.
 

The head of the hammer connected under the chin of the lead infected like an uppercut. The force lifted it clean off its feet and sent it back into the pack. More spilled over and fell down the stairwell, and their bodies bounced off the jagged concrete steps. Each impact seemed to break them a little more until the damaged forms hit the ground like sacks of grain.

Before Rhys ran, the creatures did something that made him pause.
 

The pack of diseased had gathered around the one Rhys had just attacked. They held their dead friend tight and stared at Rhys. As one, they snarled and bit at the air. They hadn’t paused because they were scared about what he could do to them; they’d paused because they were angry. He’d hurt one of their own.

Rhys’ skin crawled as he yelled and threw the hammer at the mob. They screamed louder than before, cast their recently killed member aside, and gave chase again.

With no more than a few metres lead on the pack, Rhys ran. He gritted his teeth and his heart boomed.
 

The hot sun beamed down as he sprinted across the roof. The ragged breaths of the diseased in the lead got so close they damn near tickled the back of his neck. He could taste their stale aroma.

When he got to the edge of the roof, doubt grabbed him in a strangle hold, but he pushed through it and jumped anyway.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Rhys stumbled but didn’t fall when he landed on the other side. He stopped and turned around to see the lead diseased continue to run straight off the edge of the building. It didn’t even try to jump.
 

A few seconds later, Rhys heard a faint
thump
as it hit the ground below. Another one, despite some last-minute attempts to slow down, didn’t manage it in time either and followed the first over the edge. The rest stopped then snarled and hissed while they focused on Rhys.

The hot sun beat down on Rhys as he caught his breath. He watched the diseased across the metre and a half of empty space that separated the two buildings. Most of them could jump it if they put their minds to it. But therein lay the problem; they didn’t have minds, at least not ones that could perform any kind of function other than run and attack.

Rhys hawked up a ball of phlegm. It tasted stale in his dry mouth. He stepped close to the edge and spat across at them. It missed, but despite their obvious lack of mental function, it did something to incite them further. After he’d shown them the back of his middle finger, Rhys said, “Fuck you,” and left the roof.

The second building had no door to block access to the roof. Once Rhys entered it, the dust clogged his sinuses and he sneezed. When he looked down the spiral concrete staircase, his stomach lurched and his head spun. Without any railings to hold onto, the prospect of a quick descent daunted him much more than the effort of running up them had.
 

At the bottom of the second flight of stairs, tiredness got the better of him. He stumbled and fell into the opposite wall. He paused for a moment and panted as he listened to the groans and moans from the top of the first tower. He had to get up and keep going.
 

***

When Rhys got to the bottom of the second tower, he paused and leaned against a wall. Despite deep breaths, he couldn’t get enough oxygen into his body, but he couldn’t hang around either.

Rhys poked his head outside and glanced up at the top of the first tower. The bright sun stung his eyes, but he continued to look up the tall building. Without the motivation of the crazed mob behind him, there was no way he would have jumped a gap that high from the ground. As a kid, he always avoided the free-running clubs—hell, he didn’t even climb ladders if he didn’t have to.
 

The diseased continued to gather at the top and reach across the gap exactly as they had done on the car park. The stupid bastards clearly thought he would reappear at some point—long may that continue. If those things had brains too, they would be the ultimate killing machines. The fact they had empathy for one another gave him chills.
 

The sound of rapid footsteps forced Rhys back inside the second tower and into the shadows. Seconds later, two more slathering, slobbering, diseased ex-humans shot straight into the entrance of the first building and disappeared up the stairs. The entire building shook from the sheer weight of numbers that continued to run up it. If only the structure would collapse now.

Rhys didn’t know how much time he had. The diseased could spend the next day at the top of the first tower as they waited for him to reappear. On the other hand, they could work it out in five minutes and Summit City would be awash with them again.

Rhys’ heart damn near exploded, and he jumped backwards when a loud
thud
hit the ground nearby. A shake took a hold of him when he poked his head around the corner to find the broken body of a diseased. Next to the couple that fell from the roof earlier, it lay motionless save for its bloody eyes that rolled in its head before they looked straight at Rhys. Fury and frustration glared at him in equal measure, but thankfully, its voice didn’t work.

Another one hit the ground and kicked up a cloud of dust. The impact killed it immediately. A glance up at the top of the first tower, and Rhys saw the problem.