Wildfire Chronicles (Book 3): Psychosis Page 17

  Simon Ripley was just idly working through the question of how long it would take McIntosh to work his way up five floors when two things happened that snapped him back to an abruptly altered reality. Firstly the door to the elevator at the far end of the corridor – the one he himself had ridden up only moments earlier – burst from its hinges with a deafening crash.

  Secondly, an instant later, before he even had time to blink in response, the lights went out with a clatter of falling glass.

  Only the soft glow of the buttons on the main elevator Ripley had chosen as his strategic advantage provided illumination, barely enough for him to make out the shapes of the men next to him. And then he heard it, in the darkness to his left.

  Ragged panting, like an exhausted dog.

  He turned and opened fire, and then they were all shooting, the staccato flash of muzzle fire showing them the empty corridor in captured images, like a slideshow. In one of those flashes Ripley thought he saw something, some blurred hint of movement, and then the man immediately to his left simply disappeared. Ripley heard his scream of surprise start way down the right hand side of the corridor, and his blood ran cold. Was still running that way when the other soldiers were plucked away like stray hairs, and didn’t make a sound between them.

  His felt the gun being snatched away from him, but by the time he did, it was gone, and the ragged panting was on his face, and something that felt like a bear trap clamped onto his neck. For four long, deep breaths Ripley was permitted to do nothing but smell the blood and meat on McIntosh’s foul breath.

  “You were right, Mr Ripley,” Jake breathed in a voice like an idling truck, and the fact that the thing could talk, could remember, that it was still Jake McIntosh, wrapped itself like barbed wire around Ripley’s mind.

  “This has been fun.”

  And then Ripley wasn’t thinking anything other than pain as Jake McIntosh slowly and deliberately tore away each of his limbs in turn, the expression on his misshapen face one of vague interest, like he was a bored child plucking the wings from a fly.

  When Ripley was just a torso, his life gushing from his sundered body at an obscene pace, Jake found himself grateful that the man had been so tough. That toughness meant he still clung stubbornly to consciousness, and Jake got to look into Ripley’s eyes as he grasped his head.

  And began to pull.

  *

  John had been pinned down once before, immediately after the vehicle he’d been travelling behind on a dizzyingly bumpy road suddenly erupted into a cloud of metal and glass that partially obscured the blinding sun for a heartbeat or two.

  And then the shooting had started: the whine and oddly-anticlimactic patter of the bullets rattling on the side of the armoured truck like a light, insistent rain, against the distant soundscape of muzzles exploding.

  He’d run away on that occasion too, as soon as he had ascertained that they were being flanked on three sides, which left him one potential escape route, and as the smoke of the explosion in front of them still hung thickly in the air, he dived out of the truck and rocketed toward the cover of a bombed-out husk of a building.

  He watched carefully for a moment as the attackers closed in on the truck slowly, peppering it with bullets. They hadn’t seen him.

  Nine of them.

  John had an assault rifle, but was nowhere near the best shot in the convoy, let alone the army at large. He excelled at close quarters.

  He laid the assault rifle down gently against the crumbling wall that obscured him from their view, waited an eternity for the men that had set the trap to close on the two stranded vehicles, listening to the roar in his body as every nerve howled at him to flee, and took out his pistol.

  The men advanced in increments, pausing occasionally to shower the truck he’d leapt from in bullets; moving on again.

  When they were close enough that he could hear them chuckling, he sprinted around the corner, lifting the pistol, getting as close as possible in the small window of opportunity the surprise would give him.

  Headshots on three before they even knew a gun other than their own was firing. Three more took significant damage as they dived for cover, and suddenly it was them pinned down, in the open, and the four men he’d been riding with piled out of the armoured truck as one and killed them all. Privately, John’s actions that day earned him praise. Publicly, he was just a part of a convoy that lost five men, and might have lost five more but for the intervention of dumb luck. In John’s experience, that’s what surviving war was. Not heroism, but a fuck-load of preparation and chance.

  There were a lot more than nine enemies headed to the store though, and this time he had no gun.

  He’d wanted to tell Rachel his intention, but she was already running to the front of the store, and there just wasn’t time; no slender gap for conversation and debate.

  The hardware store was going to get them all killed. Maybe, if they’d had time to fortify somehow, they might have stood a chance.

  The strangers were right. Firing the gun had been reckless. John knew only too well the way the things hunted for sound. There would be no time to fortify anything. He realised his mistake then. The retail park would have been a good place to defend against human attack. The Infected did things altogether differently, indifferent to the loss of their own ‘lives’. They would pour at the shopping area relentlessly. There were too many ways in.

  For the retail park to be viable there would have to be total silence.

  Not gunshots.

  Unprepared and under siege, the store was going to be the end, and John wasn’t ready for that.

  He sprinted up the stairs even as he heard the first crack of Michael’s rifle behind him. The first floor was an office area, staff room, small kitchen, bathrooms. And a door that led to the roof.

  He slipped through it and crept to the edge of the flat roof on his toes, and the sight that met him stopped him dead.

  Hundreds of the Infected, all pouring through shattered windows into the central mall area. He waited breathlessly until the mass of bodies had moved away from him, and then slid noiselessly down a drainpipe to the ground. With a quick glance around him to confirm that no teeth were aimed in his direction, John took off through the car park, running on his toes, trying to stay light, and headed across the road to the truck stop.

  He’d seen it on the way in, and his mind had only alerted him when all other options crumbled away: a petrol tanker, and a dead driver hanging from the cab. A driver meant keys.

  He reached the tanker in about twenty seconds and glanced around him again. Nothing was coming for him. Yet.

  John hauled the dead driver from the cab, and was thankful to see the keys in the ignition. He leapt back down to the ground, and opened the truck’s fuel cap, ripping off his jersey and stuffing it deep inside. He grabbed a heavy rock, removed his belt, and felt the bump of a lighter in his pocket.

  Memories of the pilot that had brought his team to South Wales simmered. For all his training and expertise, Ash’s usefulness had boiled down to him possessing the lighter. John slipped it out of his pocket. If there was no way to prepare, cause some chaos and pray for luck.

  He had all the ingredients he required to create some chaos.

  He tied the wheel to keep the truck straight, and twisted the ignition key. The roar of the engine would bring them, but he hoped it would be too late. Leaning out of the cab he set light to the jersey, wedged the rock against the accelerator and released the handbrake, and then he was running as the truck lurched into motion, trundling forward at first, picking up pace until it was rocketing straight toward the mall.

  John clicked the button on his walkie-talkie, praying that Rachel was listening.

  “If you’re in the basement, get out. Now.”

  *

  Straining every sinew, Rachel emerged onto the flat roof in time to see John backing away from the approaching truck, and she noticed the fire travelling through the night immediately. Squinting at the ta
nker, she realised that John had found some lighter fluid of his own.

  “Down!” she screamed, and grabbed hold of the drainpipe that dropped to the floor, her hands barely gripping it at all as she fell, and then she was sprinting, praying that her brother and Michael were right behind her, passing the advancing petrol tanker, heading toward the truck stop, and John.

  The crash as the tanker hit the front of the mall, shearing through the glass like paper, was loud, but it was no explosion. Faltering, her steps slowing a little, Rachel turned to see the truck embedded deep into the structure, and for a moment the world seemed to hold its breath, and then the ball of fiery light that swallowed most of the mall with a deafening roar smashed her to the floor before she could even gasp.

  As her vision swam, slow and unsteady, she saw her brother and Michael crash to the floor to her right, saw flaming smoke billow into the night sky above her, heard the shower of glass and debris crashing to the floor all around, and all her stunned muscles could do was leave her rooted to the ground; prone, waiting for the shard of glass she was sure would come to end her life.

  And then her field of vision lurched and she was being hauled to her feet, and John was there, shouting something she couldn’t hear. He was pointing.

  She nodded, and stumbled toward the spot he had indicated, and swung her head like a drunk, trying to focus on her brother. She saw Jason staggering to his feet and lifting Michael, and then she put her nose forward and ran.

  The spot John had pointed to contained a large lorry. Engine idling, headlights pouring into the gloom. Rachel reached it and heaved the passenger door open, turning to help her brother lift Michael into the cab with a grunt.

  John leapt into the cab and released the air brake with a hiss, and then the engine was roaring as he stamped on the accelerator.

  “The noise,” Michael said weakly. “They’ll hear the engine.”

  “We move fast, we meet them, we move slow, we meet them,” John growled. “So fuck moving slow. Let’s see them stop this.”

  With a roar, the heavy vehicle pulled itself forward, gathering momentum.

  As they headed to the road that severed the shopping area from the truck stop, Rachel saw the first few burning figures beginning to emerge from the smoking wreckage of the Allthorp Retail Park, followed by plenty that appeared unharmed, yet all of them clutched their hands to their ears, stumbling in agony.

  Noise, she thought, and blinked. They have supersensitive hearing.

  Noise can hurt them.

  And then the sight of the inferno was lost to her as John swung the lorry onto the dark road and sped toward Aberystwyth.

  She shot a look at John.

  “I thought you’d gone,” Rachel said, and her temper wouldn’t allow her to suppress the accusation in her tone. The look of stunned distaste she saw on John’s face surprised her.

  He glared at her.

  “I was coming back.”

  Chapter 16

  “You got bitten?”

  Claire’s eyes were wide with disbelief, and more than a little fear. She half expected Mrs Blake to suddenly tear out her eyes and attempt to eat her. Or Pete. Both, probably.

  Gwyneth nodded, a pained expression on her face.

  “When my Steve was bitten,” she said, and began to rummage in one of the kitchen cupboards. She pulled out a jar of peanut butter, and smiled at it sadly, her eyes somewhere else.

  She placed the jar on the counter.

  “Fifty years,” she said sadly. "I could have happily clipped him around the ear on most days.” She smiled fondly again. “Not with a brick, though.” Her smile fell away.

  She shook her head, as though clearing dust from her hair.

  “Wasn’t him,” she said, and Claire felt like Mrs Blake was no longer speaking to her.

  “Now then, only cold stuff of course, electricity’s out, but I’ve still got some bread here. Sandwiches?”

  Claire nodded dumbly, and was a little grateful to see Pete’s look of incomprehension mirror her own feelings.

  “Why aren’t you one of them?” Pete finally blurted. “When people get bitten they turn into them. I’ve seen it happen,” he said, and his voice faltered a little at the last.

  “I honestly don’t know, Sweetie,” Gwyneth said. “I should have changed. Steve did.” She rubbed the bandage on her forearm absent-mindedly. “I ran back up here, if you can believe that. Moved faster than I have in forty years, I should say. I felt sick, of course, oh, there was a terrible pain for a while, but it’s gone.” She shrugged. “Maybe I’m immune?”

  Claire frowned at the unfamiliar word.

  Gwyneth smiled kindly.

  “Some people can’t catch a disease like others,” she said. “Their bodies are ready for it, and they can fight it off.”

  Claire nodded, deep in thought about this new word.

  Gwyneth straightened.

  “I feel exactly like I did before. Better in fact. The only downside is I can feel all those horrible things out there, sort of like an itch inside my head. They are a long way off now.”

  She brightened.

  “Peanut butter?”

  *

  “Which elevator?”

  Jake was exhausted. His astonishing strength and speed came at a price, he had realised, sadly: fatigue. Already he felt a corrosive sapping of his energy weakening him. He had clawed and smashed his way up a handful of levels leaving a trail of spattered death in his wake, but the cost of his movement was proving alarmingly high, and a disturbing darkness began to grow in his mind.

  I’m going to pass out.

  The weakness felt debilitating and familiar. It felt like Alex.

  He had to get out of the infernal place; populated by scurrying ants just begging to be squashed, before he collapsed and left himself vulnerable to them, but the base seemed unending; a maze of identical rooms and corridors.

  He could feel more of them above him. Couldn’t in fact feel any space beyond them, as though the base was all that existed now. Just another weakening, he surmised. Even his preternatural hearing was declining as he pushed his muscles to limits beyond anything they’d experienced before. That initial glorious sonar image, crystal clear to him, was slowly sinking into meaningless static.

  Staying was not an option. There would be nowhere safe enough to hide. He had to get out.

  Judging from the terrified look on the face of the suited man whose neck Jake was now squeezing, and the identical expressions of his colleagues, there was consensus on that, at least.

  “Which elevator gets me to the surface?”

  The words felt strangely unfamiliar in Jake’s mouth, and came out slurred.

  The man gasped as he felt his spine cracking, like brutal chiropractor had set to work on it.

  “T-two floors up. Main elevator starts there. The big doors.”

  “You’ve been a big help,” Jake slurred, and tore the man’s neck away with a slick snapping noise. The man’s friends began to scream, and the piercing sound of it lodged small shards of pain in his head.

  He left them before the beheaded body had even settled on the floor, bounding up two flights of stairs and into a large central hub, the walls lined with numerous elevator doors. A public area, like a grimly functional park built entirely of concrete and glass.

  Jake saw the two armed men idly guarding the largest door immediately, but then there was the siren. A mournful, mind-rending boom that arrived without warning and passed through him like a toxic shudder, and he couldn’t even bring himself to kill them.

  Get out.

  He was halfway up the shaft leading to the surface before the men with guns had even realised that something had just smashed through the elevator they guarded, and then with a triumphant roar Jake was through the last obstacle and out on the grass and under the stars; pouring the last drops of his energy into getting away from the base, running at impossible speed until his tank ran dry and he slipped into unconsciousness, crashing to a halt
in the undergrowth.

  *

  ABERYSTWYTH: 3 MILES

  “Where are they all?” Rachel asked in wonder, as the lorry powered past the road sign with a low growl of shifting gears. They had travelled a couple of miles from the retail park, making all the noise in the world, and hadn’t seen a single one of the Infected.

  “Behind us,” John said grimly.

  “All of them? Don’t you think that’s weird?”

  “I might need weird defined for me here.”

  Rachel fixed him with an exasperated look.

  “Weird for them.”

  “They’re evolving,” Michael said, and Rachel jumped a little. They were the first words he’d spoken since the retail park had disappeared from the rear view mirror.

  “What we saw, that first day, they were like…babies. Squealing new-borns. But they’re growing by the day. Changing. Evolving behaviours. Communicating. That, back there, was more like a coordinated attack.”

  Rachel nodded vigorously.

  “Exactly. That first day they were total chaos, smashing into things, attacking wildly. Now they move differently, they’re more purposeful. They work together.”

  John braked, slowing the lorry to take a bend that loomed suddenly on the dark road.

  “Which helps us how?” he growled, smoothly spinning the wheel.

  “I’m not sure it does,” Michael said. “But the one thing that’s not changing is their objective.”

  “Killing us,” Rachel said.

  “Exactly. In that respect they are still mindless animals. You saw them, Rachel, crushing each other into that shutter. They don’t care about their safety. They’ll run straight toward death.”

  Rachel thought about the way the things had lined up to die in order to tear down the barrier to their entrance to the hardware store. She nodded.

  John’s mind handed over control of the truck to his subconscious. Michael was right. The single-minded attacks of the infected could be a weakness, if exploited correctly. The things would go for bait. Vague plans began to form in his mind.