Wildfire Chronicles (Book 3): Psychosis Read online

  “Will she be okay?” John asked Michael, and nodded at Gwyneth, passed out on the deck where the infected creature had felled her.

  “I think she’s just unconscious. No bites, no other injuries I can see.”

  John nodded, and continued to struggle with the sails, as he had ever since they had cleared the harbour. He cursed as he pulled a rope and the small sail he’d almost sent up to catch the wind collapsed back down.

  “You want to share this plan of yours?”

  “You were right,” Michael said. “We can’t keep running, but we have to find somewhere safe. Our species is being slowly exterminated. We’ve been poisoned. We need to fight back.”

  “You have somewhere in mind.”

  Michael nodded and looked north.

  “Caernarfon. Stick to the coast, keep heading north and we’ll see it.”

  “What’s in Caernarfon?”

  “Caernarfon Castle.”

  John pondered this for a second and nodded grimly, and then finally the sail he’d been wrestling with shot up to catch the wind and the boat skimmed across the black water, heading north.

  *

  Time proved Michael right: they wouldn’t have missed the castle even under normal circumstances: it stood imperiously on a hill overlooking the ocean and the small town of Caernarfon, guarding the Menai Strait: a thin channel of water that separated mainland Wales from the island of Anglesey a half-mile or so off the coast.

  The castle was large and imposing, built at a time when the English King wanted a symbol to demonstrate his might to the barbarian Celts that battled him across Wales, and mostly it had survived the ravages of time, appearing almost as forbidding as it once must have been.

  The exhausted group on the boat wouldn’t have missed it, but the beam of light shooting up into the sky from the castle ensured they did not.

  “There are people there,” said John, and from his tone Michael could tell that the fact made him wary.

  “Good,” said Michael, staring at the signal that shot up into the dark sky. “We’ll need numbers if we want to survive.”

  “And if they’re hostile?”

  Michael grimaced and pointed at the beam of light.

  “It looks like they want company.”

  John nodded, but the doubt remained.

  A groan from Gwyneth startled them, and they stared as the old woman slowly eased her eyes open, wincing at the pain in her head.

  “I felt something,” she said, when she realised they were looking at her.

  Both men frowned in confusion.

  “Something out there, while I was asleep. Like them, but worse. Much, much worse.”

  “Close by?” John asked.

  “I don’t know, I don’t think so,” Gwyneth said uncertainly. “But I know it sensed me.”

  She stared at each of the men in turn.

  “And it’s coming.”

  *

  Deep in the earth, under the layers of blood and bone and terror that the monster had left behind, the panic room had become an office, of sorts. Nowhere else felt as safe. Blinking monitors and the soft emergency lighting filled the room with shifting shadows.

  “You can control it? You’re sure?”

  Phil Sanderson nodded hurriedly; sweat beading on his expansive brow.

  “I think so, given enough time. Recreating the changes induced by psychosis will be difficult, but not impossible. It’s a good job we took samples.”

  Fred Sullivan lifted up the small test tube and peered into it. The dim light of his office made the contents appear dark, removing all colour.

  Black gold, Sullivan thought, as he handed McIntosh’s blood back to the scientist.

  “Get it done.”

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  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

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  EPILOGUE