Wildfire Chronicles (Book 3): Psychosis

  Psychosis

  K.R. Griffiths

  Copyright © K.R. Griffiths 2013

  All rights reserved

  Also by K.R. Griffiths

  Wildfire Chronicles Series:

  Panic (Vol. 1)

  Shock (Vol. 2)

  Mutation (Vol. 4)

  Trauma (Vol. 5)

  Reaction (Vol. 6)

  Coming Soon:

  Adrift

  www.krgriffiths.org

  PROLOGUE

  Breath poured from her lungs like fire as she ran; exploding from her throat, impeding her ability to take in a fresh supply of oxygen. She knew she couldn’t keep it up for long.

  She was small, and so far that had worked to her advantage. When the world had gone crazy, she had been able to wriggle through the gaps in the insanity, and to lever herself into tight spaces, hidden from the carnage. Out in the open like this, though, her size was a hindrance. Her short legs, no matter how fast she pumped them, simply didn’t cover as much ground as the longer stride of her pursuers. She didn’t look back; didn’t need to: she could feel them gaining on her.

  She caught the scream she felt building in her throat; wouldn’t let it escape her lips. There were about ten of them in pursuit, she guessed, though it was likely more were joining in; that’s what they did, gathering in strength like an avalanche. Almost a week spent scurrying from corner to darkened corner had taught her that: there was almost never just one. Screaming, as natural and necessary as it felt, would only bring more; slimming the odds of her escape down to zero.

  She’d learned that the first time she had been chased. In her hysteria, she had charged down the middle of the street, certain that one of the adults would save her. That’s what adults did. Instead, as she shot down the road, a normally-busy market street lined with stalls selling cheeses and fish and imitation-branded clothing, she found that the adults were screaming too. Veering left and right, she found her path continually being reshaped; evolving as the madness swept along like the tide. Wherever she turned, the adults were leaping on top of each other, dragging friends and family and strangers to the ground, and sinking in their teeth. Blood filled the air like a warm, heavy rain. She got it on her pyjamas; felt like she might be sick.

  That first time, as she zigged and zagged through and underneath the market stalls, she hadn’t understood any of it, beyond the fact that it had seemed to start with the jaw-rattling crash that came from the roof of the apartment block as the sun flirted with the horizon, and with her mother rushing up the stairs outside their flat’s front door to investigate. As she had been instructed, she had waited patiently by the open front door for her mother to return, nerves dancing to a fraught up-tempo number.

  The neighbours opposite, a couple with white hair and wrinkles that made them appear ancient to her young eyes, emerged blearily into the corridor, the lines on their face deepened by concern. The man, orange-tanned and burly, who always smiled when he saw her and sometimes slipped her a half-melted chocolate bar with a friendly conspiratorial wink, took a couple of steps toward the stairs that led to the roof and then cried out in shock as her mother reappeared, leaping through the air at him, screaming, her eyes like two bright red inflammations ready to burst.

  She had cried then, bawling her eyes out as the man caught her mother mid-flight and somehow twisted so that she hit the ground hard with him on top of her. Why was the man hurting her mum?

  The man was yelling at his wife to call an ambulance, and the woman, her face ashen, scurried back into her flat.

  “It’s okay, honey,” the old man grunted at her as he pinned her mother’s arms to the ground, “It’s okay, she’s sick, we’ll get help.”

  She watched, tears streaming down her face, as her mother snapped and snarled, craning her neck to get close to the man’s big, calloused hands.

  “She’s trying to bite me!” He yelled through the open door. “Tell them she’s got rabies or something, get them here quick!”

  She had watched in disbelief as the paramedics arrived and had to subdue her mum, pinning her to the floor and injecting her with a large, frightening needle that hardly seemed to slow down her wild thrashing. She heard the paramedic speaking into his radio; calling it in: lots of big words she didn’t really understand. The man stammered as he spoke. He sounded scared.

  “Psychotic episode…possible infection. We’ll need quarantine…it’s the eyes…”

  As she had listened, she had been staring at her mother’s eyes, the ones that had always shimmered with love and pride when she had looked at her daughter. Now, those eyes were just bright red pools of blood, pupils all but gone, darting rapidly as her neck whipped side to side. She looked like a trapped animal searching for some means of escape.

  The men had tried to drag her mother toward the stairs, but there were only two of them, and her thrashing made it almost impossible, so they bundled her into the lift, pushing her against the far wall, pressing and holding her there. No one said a word to the small girl standing stunned and terrified in the doorway as the lift’s dull-chrome doors slid closed, and for a moment she just stood there, shocked, remembering with disbelief that only a few minutes before she had been grinning as her mum teased her with the possibility of porridge instead of her favourite crunchy nut flakes for breakfast.

  Then she remembered how slow the old lift was: she and her mother hardly ever bothered using it unless they had lots of shopping to carry. She made for the stairs, rushing down them.

  She got to the bottom when the lift was still trundling lazily between the third and second floors, and watched the numbers crawling downward, panting for air. A man stood next to the lift doors, carrying a newspaper and a bottle of milk, looking at her, puzzled.

  “Are you alright sweethea-“ he started to say as the lift reached the ground with a ping and the doors slid open, but his words were lost when her mother and the two paramedics charged out, roaring, and dragged him to the floor, ripping him apart with their teeth. The man’s chilling cries made her scream again, and she was still screaming when she saw her mother’s teeth clamp onto the man’s ear, tearing it from his head with a wet smack, and then she turned and fled out onto the street. She heard the building’s front door open behind her, only a second or so after she had slammed it shut, and her young mind tried in vain to comprehend that her mother was now a murderer, and was chasing her, snarling like an animal.

  As she dashed along the street and into the market, the soundtrack to a nightmare swelled behind her, cries of confusion and horror quickly becoming high-pitched squeals of pain. It was still very early; mostly it was just traders setting up their stalls and a few early birds hoping to get the prize cuts of meat.

  It was when her frantic sprint through the market ended that she really learned something about the way the world had begun to work since that first crash on the rooftop minutes before. She was hiding under a stall that heaved with fresh fish, the pungent odour making her gag, and peeking out through a gap in the fabric draped over the table that provided her cover. The insanity in the street was all around her now, bodies hitting the floor and being savaged. For some, the wounds they received proved too much, and they simply lay there on the cobbles, blood trickling toward drains, eyes fixed and empty.

  Others leapt to their feet and charged away, hauling down the first person they encountered, mauling them; tearing them apart like wet paper. As she watched, two police vans screeched into view, and she almost cried out in relief. The doors slid back, and four figures carrying shields and batons piled out of each, forming a line, advancing toward the unfolding mayhem.

  She saw a couple of them falter even before they
reached the first of the crazy people, saw it in the way their steps slowed. Behind the plastic masks, she could see wide, disbelieving eyes.

  Surely, now that the police were there, the madness would stop.

  Instead, she saw the people in the market swarm toward the uniforms like starving dogs. The first few, bouncing off the shields or recoiling as the batons struck them, were ineffective, but then sheer numbers told, and the police disappeared in the frenzy of bodies. Moments later the police were them, just another part of the madness, and the uniforms meant nothing.

  She understood then, as she watched a policewoman tear off her helmet and claw out her own eyes before launching herself through a window and into the room full of shocked onlookers beyond, that help would not come.

  That screaming would bring only death.

  And so, five days later, as she again raced away from them, Claire Evans did not scream. She kept her eyes focused on the path, making sure nothing would trip her, and scanned the street for some means of escape, even as she berated herself for emerging from the closet in which she had hid for days while Aberystwyth fell into blood and ruin. She had needed food, and the convenience store had seemed so inviting…another lesson learned. She was one of the top members of her class at school; she had beamed every time a teacher told her what a fast learner she was. Now her life depended on it.

  Finally, as she was sure her lungs were about to explode, she saw something that offered potential escape: a narrow opening in a wall near to the floor: it looked like a tiny window that led to the basement of a large pub. The Mouse and Hound. The front doors were shut, and the building looked as though it had escaped damage thus far. As fire built in her muscles, Claire realised that pausing to consider whether the pub was a safe haven or not would get her killed.

  She focused on the little window, far too narrow for an adult to consider as an entry, but big enough for her slim frame, maybe. There would be glass, she would cut herself. She hated the sight of blood; it always made her sick and fearful.

  There was no time to consider it – with the things behind her closing fast, only barely out of arms reach, she veered toward the opening and threw herself at it, wincing as the concrete scraped the skin from her legs. And then with a loud shatter she was through, and falling, glass slicing a long clean line down her calf, and hitting the floor with a thump that knocked all the breath from her small lungs.

  She rolled over, facing the window, expecting that she would see one of them tumbling after her, teeth bared, but all she saw were the arms frantically reaching in for her, swiping through the gloomy air of the basement, grasping at the space she had occupied moments earlier. The gap was too narrow, they couldn’t get through, at least not yet. The snarls of frustration and ravenous hunger made her blood run cold.

  Still, she knew, she had to get away, had to put walls between herself and that window. Hauling herself to her feet, she turned to flee.

  And then the strong hands grabbed her in the dark, and all that she had learned in five days of solitary torment and terror and survival on the streets of Aberystwyth deserted her young mind, and Claire Evans screamed.

  Chapter 1

  Eight miles.

  The distance between themselves and the dead town they had left behind. It had taken Michael, Rachel and Jason most of a day to cover ground that only days earlier would have been traversed in minutes.

  With each passing mile, every panicked stop, every time they’d had to disappear into the forest at the road’s edge, Michael had come to realise the truth in the dead maniac’s words. The die has been cast. The world had already changed irreversibly. He was alive, but he was playing catch-up, struggling to acclimatise.

  They’d taken a car at first, of course. But logic had no place in the order of the new world that emerged from the ashes of death and insanity. The safety of the vehicle; the speed of it: both rendered useless by the noise the engine made.

  The noise that brought them.

  The car had proven its unsustainability twice in the space of those eight miles. Two packs of snarling sub-humans, thankfully little more than a handful. The first, a group of perhaps six, Michael had spotted in the distance, blood-soaked silhouettes on the horizon growing larger by the second. That group they had been able to evade, slipping into the woods quietly long before they reached the car. The evacuation had been clumsy, Jason’s strong arms hauling Michael out of the car, pounding away into the forest with the older man slung over his shoulder. The road was no place for wheelchairs.

  They’d been lucky: the creatures were downwind from their position, or they would have surely picked up the stench of sweat and fear. Michael watched through the trees as the group of blind killers milled around the car for a couple of minutes before wandering away. Downwind. That’s all. That close.

  When the coast was clear, they returned to the car.

  The second time wasn’t so lucky. One of them had staggered from the trees that lined the road, letting the radiator wash over it like a steel wave. It was a tactic Michael recognised, though of course, to give such a label to the mindless monster’s actions was a fallacy. The creatures born from the plague that had devastated St. Davids were rage incarnate, eyes ripped from their heads; directionless chaos made flesh. They didn’t employ tactics or strategies. They attacked.

  When the engine chugged and died, drowned in gore and bone, three more had burst from the trees, alerted by the noise, sightless faces swinging in the gathering gloom like flashlights, tracking down their location by sound alone.

  For a heartbeat, Michael, Rachel and Jason had sat and watched, frozen like cornered animals. It was Jason who reacted, slipping from the car without a word, snatching up a length of pipe and a wicked-looking knife from the stash of weapons they’d gathered from the ruins of St. Davids.

  Michael watched with a slack jaw as the big man manoeuvred himself in front of the car, casting a cursory glance at the once-human wreckage decorating the front bumper, before putting his head down and bolting toward the three Infected.

  Three pairs of emptied eye sockets swivelled toward the noise of his approach, but too late. Jason reached the first of them already swinging, the pipe smashing into the temple of the creature with a cracking sound that travelled through the still evening like gunfire. Even as that one fell, the knife rose, burying itself in the abdomen of the second, tearing up and through, and effectively disembowelling the shrieking creature.

  The third of them was on Jason in a blur, leaping atop his shoulder, teeth aiming for the man’s thick neck but clamping down only on pipe; shattering. Jason shoved hard, sending the creature to the ground, and brought the pipe down from high above his head, all the way from the clouds to the ground, destroying the thing’s skull against the concrete with a loud crack.

  Noise.

  They would be coming.

  Jason’s giant form loomed over the caved-in remains, barely flinching as Rachel tried to turn the ignition and the car responded with a phlegm-drenched cough.

  “Out,” she said, and opened her door. She was halfway out of the vehicle when she paused, and Michael knew that his useless legs had just entered her thoughts.

  She leaned back in, flushing a little, and started to help Michael with the task of getting his dead weight out of the vehicle, calling to her brother for help. It took Jason a moment to respond. That’s how things were with Jason, ever since he’d been forced to save Rachel by killing their mother. After that, he’d operated on a different wavelength, a frequency that wasn’t visible to either his sister or Michael, like ultraviolet.

  They’d abandoned the car then, making their way into the woods without speaking, Jason hauling Michael on his back. Michael stared sadly at the foldaway wheelchair that sat in the rear of the car. He had hoped to limit the burden his presence would put on Rachel and Jason, to at least be mobile, but the world had other ideas. Wheelchairs were of little use if you happened to find yourself running for your life in a dark forest.

>   All three of them took whatever they could from the supplies they had stacked in the car, various items raided from the dead streets of St. Davids. Weapons. Water. A little food. Michael had heard of the rise of ‘prepping’, people stockpiling goods for the troubled times they believed the human race was headed for. Hell, he’d seen it first-hand in the bunker he’d spent the past five days in, but when it came down to it, he had little idea what items would be most valuable to him now.

  It was frustrating, that constant sense of confusion, and Michael tried to tell his nerves to cut him some slack. No one, after all, could possibly have known what was coming. Only the most paranoid could have prepared for the complete destruction of civilization.

  As he tucked a bottle of water into a pocket hurriedly, he wondered if all those paranoid preppers were out there now, hiding away in bunkers as Victor had, torn between smugness and dismay at being proven right so comprehensively.

  Somehow, he doubted it. Whatever they had been expecting - war, economic collapse - would have come with some sort of warning sign. The insanity that had befallen South Wales, and presumably everywhere else, had been virtually instantaneous. No amount of preparation would suffice when the apocalypse dropped from nowhere into their laps.

  He grabbed their only gun from the back seat, a battered old hunting rifle that was one third weapon and two thirds antique, and which, thanks to the noise it made and the fact none of them had the first idea how to shoot it with any degree of accuracy, was likely as useless as the wheelchair. At least against them.

  Every step through the woods felt like walking through the minefield they had traversed outside of Victor’s bunker, ground gained inch by petrified inch, every cracked twig and rustling leaf sounding impossibly loud in the thick, silent air. The forest felt alive, crackling and fizzing with the potential for violence. Michael, useless legs hanging limply from Jason’s broad back, sent his eyes left and right relentlessly, scanning the gloom for signs of movement, of pursuit.