Wildfire Chronicles (Book 3): Psychosis Page 16

  Her gaze came to rest on the breakfast counter, and the box of Crunchy Nut Flakes, and her eyes filled with tears even as her stomach growled. She picked up the box and gave it a shake. The milk in the fridge would be bad by now, but at least it was something. She opened the cupboard next to the sink, pulled out two bowls and poured generous mountains of the flakes into each. Pete’s eyes lit up as she passed him one.

  “Claire?”

  The whispering voice, disembodied; floating in the air behind her, froze her hand on the bowl.

  *

  Fred snapped back into action like a taut rubber band.

  “Get the elevators sealed off,” he snarled at Ripley. “If that thing gets into the upper levels we’re going to have a big problem.”

  Ripley glared at the old man. Just what the fuck did Sullivan think of him? He had been conveying precisely that order via the radio while the wrinkled bastard was still standing there open-mouthed like a cheap whore.

  Simon Ripley was forty-six, and had the best part of three decades’ experience of dealing with combat situations. This situation – more bizarre than any he’d faced previously, admittedly – was in some ways no different. There was still a self-important bastard in a suit somewhere struggling to get to grips with the notion that when the trouble started, their input was as useful as that of a bawling child.

  The thing that had smashed through the wall in the adjacent room electrified him. He’d taken the gig as head of security at Chrysalis Systems Ltd because he needed the money, and because it transpired that being charged with violent assault damaged career prospects fatally. Once he had been clued in on Sullivan’s plans – or at least the parts he was allowed to know – he was eager for the action to begin. Discovering that he was likely to be no more than a babysitter to the affluent while the action went down elsewhere had been bitterly disappointing.

  This was more like it.

  Ripley had been in charge of a manhunt before, and it had ended badly for the raghead bastard who had the information he needed. Ripley never got the information – he’d conducted the manhunt a touch too…enthusiastically for that – but he got the raghead.

  After that, the top brass had decided that catching people was probably not Ripley’s forte, and Special Ops had come calling soon enough. He thought about those days sometimes, and felt rare stabs of soft emotion. Those had been good times. He hadn’t lost a single target. Even the one that ended his career, the one that ended up dying in public and causing a ‘diplomatic incident’. No one got away from Ripley.

  His radio crackled.

  On the fifth of the levels that remained a secret from most inhabitants of the base, the single elevator that connected the lower levels to the base proper was already being secured by five men he’d hand-picked from the several hundred combat-trained souls protecting the base to be his personal team.

  McIntosh might have broken through one wall, but unless he was prepared to smash his way through miles of rocky earth, the only way out was up. The old man was shuffling away, the infuriatingly pudgy scientist trotting along behind like a puppy. They would be heading for Sullivan’s panic room. Ripley raced to the nearest elevator that would take him up to level five. When McIntosh went up, Ripley would be waiting.

  The elevator moved up swiftly and silently, reaching the fifth level in a matter of seconds, and Ripley sprinted out before the doors had fully opened.

  Each of the levels that comprised the base was enormous: any one level could comfortably accommodate anything up to thirty football pitches. Some, like the third level – a weapon and research testing area – were cavernous. Endless spaces that proved disorientating and uncomfortable even to Ripley. Being in a room so large that you could hardly make out the walls was unsettling. The fourth and fifth levels represented more domestic, familiar surroundings. Most of the scientists that had worked on various segments of Project Wildfire now lived on those levels, and most were not permitted to enter the levels above to avoid arousing suspicion. Levels six through twenty seven comprised what Ripley thought of as the hotel – all rooms bought and paid for by influence and power, or by years of combat training, and in some cases by plain old monetary wealth.

  Ripley could only imagine that the base had cost a lot to build.

  Personally, Ripley didn’t much care what happened to any of the engorged buffoons on any of the levels, but he did care about the hunt. Cared very much, and the choke point that the fifth level represented was his best shot at cornering McIntosh.

  He reached the elevator that was the only conduit leading up to find his five-strong team standing guard. All were heavily armed: M27s, frag grenades, C4, flashbangs. Ripley thought about the swords that the team they’d sent to South Wales had been given, weapons with a primary attribute of silence. They wouldn’t need them here. Ripley grinned as one of his team tossed him an assault rifle.

  He intended to make a lot of noise.

  *

  The rifle held five rounds.

  Michael hit the target with all five, but it would have been more difficult to miss: the target filled the whole mall, wall to smearing wall, and the sight of the Infected tumbling over each other in their desperation to get at their prey sent blinding floodlights on his mind, and his thoughts were reduced to one cowering shadow.

  My legs don’t work.

  If the things got through the gate, he would be dead in an instant. Or worse.

  Fuck the noise. They have to stay out.

  Hit five.

  Stopped maybe two.

  Fingers trembling, he began to reload as the first wave crashed against the security shutter and time seemed to sigh for an instant, as the metal bent inwards, inwards…and held.

  “Fuck it, then,” Rachel said.

  At his side, Michael heard a soft whump as she opened fire with the nail gun, firing in bursts, sending a river of iron into the advancing horde, aiming high, faces wherever possible. The things snarled and hurled themselves into the shutter, the ones at the front being slowly minced through it, clutching at them. The nails slowed them, but they weren’t stopping them, just adding a layer of numbing horror to their appearance.

  Michael snapped in the fifth bullet, and joined Rachel in spitting metal at the creatures. They were so close now that he was able to level the rifle at each forehead in turn, before blasting a hole between the grisly eye sockets. Each creature that fell away was swiftly replaced by another.

  He snatched a glance about him. He saw Jason at the opposite end of the shutter; saw the three strangers sprinting to their aid, brandishing knives and garden implements. Someone was missing.

  “Where the fuck is John?”

  Rachel cast another look about the store. John was gone. Hiding in the basement or hiding on the roof. She grimaced, and shook her head abruptly.

  To their left, Jason was stabbing the spaces in the shutter with a kitchen knife clutched in each massive paw. The sight of him, drenched in blood, eyes wide and unfocused as he stabbed and stabbed and stabbed, made Rachel’s blood run cold. She focused on the shutter, blocking out the horrific image of her brother.

  The shutter groaned, and above the snarling rage of the Infected, above the clicking of Michael reloading the rifle and the wet thumping impact of Jason’s knives Rachel heard something that shook her into action: a metallic snapping, something in the shutter mechanism starting to give up the fight for them.

  There were too many Infected. More were still coming, an endless supply of snapping jaws and sightless faces. They were going to get in, unless she could think of another way to stop them. Frantically, she pleaded with her mind to offer up something meaningful.

  Fire.

  Something Rachel’s subconscious had noted on the way into the store surfaced, and she ran to the shelves behind the till. Lighter fluid.

  She grabbed two of the cans and popped the lids, squirting the fuel onto the creatures pressed into the gate, emptying both cans, and pulling out the box of matches that still s
at impatiently in her cigarette-less pocket. She struck them two at a time, tossing them through the shutter, and the hideous moaning of the burning creatures, and sickening stench of their flesh as it began to melt onto the steel made her gag.

  She grabbed more cans of the lighter fluid, passing two to Michael, and they both began to spray, spreading the fire as far as possible. After a moment, the three newcomers followed her lead, gathering up cans of the fuel and squirting it into the flames. The fire was spreading, but it was small yet. It wasn’t going to stop them.

  “It won’t hold,” Rachel said. “The gate’s coming down; we have to get to the basement.”

  Michael nodded.

  Rachel ran to Jason’s side and grabbed his massive arm, halting its movement as he began to drive the knife forward again relentlessly, like a machine.

  “We have to go, Jase,” she said, and he turned to her, his eyes blank. “I need you to carry Michael.”

  Jason stared through her, swaying, as though drunk.

  “Jason,” Rachel said sharply, and his eyes finally saw her. “Come on.”

  She dragged her brother over to Michael, and heard another snap of metal.

  “Come with us,” she yelled at the three strangers still plunging their weapons through the gaps in the shutter and spraying thin streams of fuel into the flames, but only one of them looked at her, eyes wide.

  They don’t trust us, she realised, and knew that distrust was going to get them killed. There was no time for persuasion, no space for saving anyone but the people she already knew.

  She turned to run as Jason lifted Michael, and then they were running to the back of the store, through the swinging doors and down, scrambling toward hopes of survival that lay in entombing themselves in another underground room.

  Rachel led the way, charging down the steps and into a single large storage room. No doors, nothing beyond the swinging door they had just entered through. Even if they were able to remain perfectly silent in the basement, it would only be a matter of time before the Infected stumbled across them.

  “Shit,” she breathed, “up!”

  And then, in the store above them, the shutter gave way with a deafening roar, and Rachel heard the screaming start.

  *

  “Mrs Blake?”

  Claire stared, stunned.

  The woman in the flat opposite her, peeking through a crack in the door, had to be dead. Claire wondered if she was dreaming.

  “Come in my dear, come in, you don’t need to worry, they’re all gone.”

  Claire nodded dumbly, and the mere fact that there was an adult to tell her what to do made her feel like sobbing in relief. She grabbed Pete’s hand and led him into the apartment opposite.

  Gwyneth Blake shut the door behind the two children, and slid the bolts home.

  “Where’s Mister Blake?” Claire asked, looking around the small apartment for the man’s wide grin, and bit her lip when she saw the old woman’s eyes fill with tears.

  Oh.

  Gwyneth brushed her eyes and gave a watery smile.

  “You must be hungry,” she said brightly, and Pete jumped.

  “You have to be quiet,” he whispered sternly.

  “Oh, not at all!” Gwyneth said with a smile. “Don’t worry dear, they’re all miles away. Can’t hear you here.”

  “How do you know?” Claire said.

  “Because of this,” Mrs Blake said, and rolled up her sleeve to reveal her wrinkled forearm, and the mouth-sized chunk taken out of it.

  “Because I can feel them.”

  *

  Jake could feel them.

  At first the rush of power had overwhelmed him, and the bewildering changes in his senses had been like a crushing weight, strangling the life from him. It took time to acclimatise.

  He had thundered through the wall and into the dark space beyond, astonished at the way he was able to move now. It was like the world was moving in slow motion, and even the slight breeze emanating from the air conditioning units seemed to him to move like syrup. When he was clear of the cell, and the figures he had felt watching him as his bones shattered and stretched and reset themselves, he slowed to a stagger, feeling his mind swimming at the sudden sensory overload.

  He was in a storage area. Crates and boxes were piled floor to ceiling. There was no light, but he found he could see perfectly well. Better than that in fact. It was as though his eyes were picking up a faint residue of light and amplifying it until the room was brought into sharp focus.

  But there was something else, something that it took him a moment to understand. He could feel them, thousands of them, people scurrying about in the spaces above him. He could even see some of the closer ones, and he realised it was his ears doing the seeing. Every sound, right down to the barely-there sigh of the muscles moving in their bodies, was reported to his brain, forming an image like an x-ray in his mind.

  He clapped his large, deformed hands over his ears, willing the noise to cease for just a moment to let him gather his thoughts, but in truth there was only one thought: a humming engine at the very core of his being: kill them all.

  There was a door at the far end of the storage room, and he shot toward it, not slowing his pace even a fraction as he approached, knowing in his gut that the door, sturdy metal or not – provided no obstacle. He crashed through it and into a corridor of white-hot noise. Several of the feeble creatures that he had once shared a species with were moving along the hallway, talking in low voices that erupted into screams when they saw the door smash off the wall opposite, and almost saw the furious blur that Jake had become.

  His hand was deep in the chest of the last of them, tearing out the beating heart, even before the decapitated head of the first had completed its journey from shoulders to floor. The power coursing through him was more potent than any of the drugs that had been forced upon him at Moorcroft, addictive and deliciously toxic.

  He held the warm heart in front of the pitiful creature’s face, growling in satisfaction as he saw the comprehension in the woman’s eyes for a fraction of a second before death took her.

  And in the glorious silence that fell on the corridor, Jake’s ears caught another sound, distant and muted. The sound of an elevator, whispering on a journey up and away from him.

  There were hundreds of the creatures close by, he could hear all of their hearts beating, could see the clicks of the bones in their aching feet as points of light, tiny starbursts on his vision, but none of them compelled him like the sigh of the ascending elevator, and the beating heart he knew instinctively that the moving metal box contained.

  Ripley.

  *

  Rachel put a finger to her lips and stared at Michael and Jason. She pointed up, and crept to the foot of the stairs, wincing at even the soft whisper of her pumps on the steps. She moved with as much speed as she dared allow, and reached the ground floor just in time to see the first shadows moving beyond the door, heading straight for it.

  Feeling her muscles ache in tension as she moved with everything clenched, she started up the stairs to the first floor, and reached the top just as something bumped into the swinging door below, and then she saw something that made her feel like weeping in relief: a door.

  She darted through it, followed by her brother just as the doors below opened like an overflow pipe, and the creatures spilled into the stairwell even as Rachel softly shut the door, blocking them from her sight.

  Again she put her fingers to her lips, and noticed just how much her finger shook, dancing left and right. She held her breath.

  Michael found he couldn’t take his eyes from Rachel’s wide, terrified pupils, as though even that miniscule movement might somehow alert the predators below to their location.

  He saw her eyes widen further, and her mouth drop open as the walkie talkie at her waist suddenly blared static, shattering the carefully constructed silence.

  Below, the Infected roared.

  Chapter 15

  Sullivan w
ould be watching. Ripley knew it like he knew up was up. The base had to hold the densest concentration of surveillance cameras anywhere on the planet. Even here, at the centre of the most secretive of societies, everyone was being watched. Right now the old man would be poring over monitors, clawing out his white hair at Ripley’s handling of the situation, roaring into the nearest microphone, but that would get him nowhere. Ripley had turned his radio off.

  There were at least three hundred men occupying the five concealed levels Ripley had decided to cordon off. Sullivan would want more men down there, would want every soldier available to be hunting the creature, minimising the loss of life.

  Ripley didn’t care about that. Hadn’t cared since the moment it had first become obvious to him that the eggheads steering the vehicle had no clue how to drive. Maybe even all the way back when Sullivan had outlined enough of the plan to Ripley that he understood what the project meant.

  When Wildfire went belly up, opportunity presented itself before him like a feast, laid at his lap. If the base was just a hole in the ground full of men, the ones with the guns held the power. And the people who would oppose him taking charge most strongly had now sealed themselves in the basement with a monster.

  Ripley had just five men because he had watched Sullivan carefully for four years as the crazy old bastard prepared to end the world. A small group of trustworthy, obedient men was exactly what he needed. A new government. It was exactly what Sullivan himself would have done. If the old man had been a fraction more suspicious and less arrogant, he might have seen Ripley’s intent early enough to stop him.

  Those in the levels above, when Ripley finally sealed off the base’s secret cellar, would do as they were told.

  McIntosh could have his fill of murder in the levels below. Gorge himself on it. Only then would Ripley stop him.