Reaction (Wildfire Chronicles Volume 6) Read online

Michael stared in astonishment. Jason was soaked in the blood of what looked like a lot of people. A lot of Infected.

  Aberystwyth hadn't been a death sentence for Jason because the words normal human being did not apply to him. The big man was infected. Mutated, just as Gwyneth had been. The only question was how the virus had affected him.

  Michael watched as Jason moved through the castle like a ghost in a dream, apparently unaware of his surroundings, until the bald man led him into the main tower and they both disappeared from sight.

  What are you, Jason?

  "Cripple. The nails."

  Michael blinked the thoughts of Jason away, and stared at Rhys Holloway. The man who had sliced John's neck open, and who had driven nails through his wrists.

  "Wake up, Cripple. I said I need nails for his feet."

  Michael suppressed a shudder, and swallowed back the urge to strike out at the man; to clutch the nails tightly in a fist and see how far he could drive them into Rhys' pale, hateful flesh.

  It would solve nothing, Mike, he thought. Not yet. Do what you have to do. Watch. Learn. Gain their trust.

  Michael forced himself to nod meekly, and held out an outstretched palm. Two nails left: huge six-inch monsters that looked more like weapons than tools.

  "Good boy," Rhys said with a sickening grin, reaching for the nails.

  He paused.

  "Tell you what, Cripple," he said. "I'll let you do the feet. This was your glorious leader, after all. So it’s only right that you should do the honours."

  Rhys handed Michael the ancient mace he had been using as a hammer, and his eyes glittered with menace as Michael took the weapon silently.

  A test, then, Michael thought. A chance to prove my loyalty. Or how far I'm willing to lower myself in order to survive.

  Michael stared at Rhys for a moment, and saw the challenge in the man's gaze as Michael's fingers curled around the handle of the mace. He could well imagine what was running through Rhys Holloway's mind.

  Go ahead, Cripple. I dare you. Try it.

  Michael swallowed painfully, and felt bile rising in his throat. John had been right, and Michael hadn't listened. The castle was dangerous. People were dangerous, and Michael had stopped running too soon, and might never get the chance to run again.

  Sorry, John, Michael thought.

  And then he leaned forward as far as his damaged back would allow and drove the nails through John's dead flesh.

  *

  By the time Michael was allowed to return to the tower to see his daughter and get some sleep, he had a pretty good idea of just how he would be expected to demonstrate his loyalty to Annie Holloway.

  After he was done with the grisly task of crucifying John's corpse, the old woman informed him that she was looking forward to having a conversation with him about 'circumstances in the castle', and that in the meantime he was to take bread and water to the prisoners in the cells, and to ensure that each cell had a slop bucket.

  Which it would be his task to empty, of course.

  Holloway didn't just want loyalty. She wanted fealty. She wanted willing slaves. Michael imagined she would let the others out of their cells one at a time, giving them the opportunity to integrate and adjust to their new reality. Time to indoctrinate and dehumanise them.

  She wasn’t a cult leader. She was an aspiring cult leader. Somehow, that prospect seemed even more terrifying.

  He had seen the scars that laced almost every inch of Jason Roberts' flesh. It didn't take a genius to work out how Annie felt persuasion was most easily accomplished, and how true obedience was obtained.

  So I’m the test subject, he thought. I’m the one she will break first. Because I’m in a wheelchair and I’m the least threatening.

  He carried dry bread from the stockpile of food that Shirley and the others had gathered during the raid on Caernarfon, and took it to the cells, accompanied by Rhys, who hadn't left his side for a moment. The man smirked and whistled cheerily as he opened the doors for the wheelchair to slip through, but Michael was under no illusions: Rhys gave the impression of being relaxed; bored even, but he watched like a hawk.

  There were six cells in total, each crammed with anything up to six people. They weren't separated by gender, and Michael hadn't expected them to be: bullies operated on intimidation and humiliation, and the Holloway family conformed to the letter.

  Forcing the prisoners to humiliate themselves in front of the opposite sex was probably on page one of the torturer's handbook.

  He wheeled himself into each cell in silence, avoiding eye contact wherever possible as he handed out the food and the buckets. Only in the final cell—the one that held Linda and Rachel and Ed, the kid whose appearance had coincided with everything falling apart—did Michael's resolve weaken.

  He looked at Rachel; at the impotent fury written on her face, and felt his heart break a little. It was clear from the fire in her eyes that she had watched through the bars set in the door as Michael had helped to crucify John's body.

  Clear also that her confusion was matched only by her anger.

  Michael gave a barely-discernible shake of his head and grimaced as he passed the bread and water to Linda. He desperately wanted to speak to Rachel, to reassure her that the trust she had built in him during the horror of the previous weeks hadn't been misplaced.

  He didn't dare. With the eyes of Annie Holloway's son burning into the back of his skull, Michael took the bucket he had placed on his lap and set it on the floor apologetically.

  Rhys wheeled the chair back outside and locked the cell door behind him, and Michael watched from the corner of his eye as he attached the key ring securely to his belt.

  The only way to get those keys, Michael decided, would be if the man was dead.

  So be it.

  Chapter 2

  When Michael's horrific work was finally done, Rhys wheeled him to the tower that had become Michael’s home.

  "You get to take the rest of the night off," Rhys said amiably, as though he was the manager of a shop telling a cashier they could knock off fifteen minutes early. For his part, Rhys seemed to find it hilarious.

  Michael felt his fingers clench involuntarily at his sides. Almost got away with it, too, but Rhys had razor-sharp eyes. He leaned in close.

  "There it is, Cripple. Not as meek as you've been making out, huh? Something you'd like to do?"

  Michael stared at Rhys for a moment, searching for an answer and a tone that wouldn't guarantee the conversation would head to a bad place.

  Before he could say anything, Rhys whipped a knife from his belt and aimed it between Michael's eyes.

  Michael found himself transfixed as he watch the blade dancing in front of his face, cleaving the air as the atmosphere thickened around it and became heavy with menace.

  After a moment he lowered his head in surrender.

  And saw the tip of the blade eat into his thigh.

  Michael's eyes widened in shock.

  Rhys snorted. It sounded to Michael oddly like rueful disappointment, as if the man had just lost a friendly bet.

  "Not even a twitch. So you actually are a cripple."

  Rhys shook his head and chuckled as he wiped the tip of the knife on his shirt and slid it into his belt.

  "How the fuck did someone like you survive all this?"

  Michael stared at the man, wondering if he expected an answer. Apparently not.

  "Get inside," Rhys growled, and Michael turned the chair and entered the tower without a word. Only when he heard the lock engage loudly and the sound of Rhys' footsteps dissolved into deafening silence did he realise that he had been holding his breath for an eternity and allow his lungs to fill with air once more.

  He let it out in a long trembling breath and stared down in wonder, focused on the dark bead of blood and the shallow wound in the middle of his thigh.

  And the wondrous agony that blossomed from it, like petals opening to receive the rays of a long-absent sun.

  The roo
m was illuminated only by failing light that crept apologetically through a window that was no more than a scratch in the castle's stone flesh. When he was finally able to tear his gaze away from the cut on his leg, Michael squinted into the gloom, and felt his heart race. The tower looked empty.

  "Claire?"

  For a heart-stopping moment the silence and the darkness prevailed, and Michael let out a soft, trembling laugh of relief when he heard footsteps tumbling down the stairs from the level above.

  His daughter appeared like a speeding train and braked only a little when she reached him, throwing her arms around his neck and hugging him fiercely.

  He let her sob awhile, and found her outpouring of emotion infectious. Before long, tears ran freely down his own face and dissolved into her hair for several minutes, until Claire’s sobs became coughs and, finally, weary silence.

  All I wanted was to protect her, he thought.

  You kept her alive; no more than that. You protected her from nothing.

  Michael blinked in surprise at the response he heard in his head: at the reproachful voice of his dead wife, twisted until he almost couldn’t recognise it; sagging under the weight of aching loss and sadness.

  He pushed her words away, banishing the eager darkness that lurked between each syllable, beckoning him forward.

  The depression Michael had inherited from his father had crushed the life out of his marriage, and Elise had hated the way her husband had slowly begun to focus inward, yet even as Michael had turned on himself she had never once joined in. He couldn’t remember a single time at which it felt like Elise Evans hated Michael as much as he himself did.

  Which meant it wasn’t her voice he was hearing at all, but his own; camouflaged and insidious and familiar and terrible. The voice of the yawning dark chasm.

  Stop that.

  He pulled Claire away from him gently and looked into her eyes.

  "Are you okay?"

  She nodded.

  "And Pete?"

  She shook her head sadly.

  "The old lady took him away. She said it wasn't proper for us to be 'sharing a room'."

  Claire stared at Michael, puzzled, and her lack of years hit him like an invisible juggernaut. There were some things his daughter had no knowledge of; not yet. Ordinary, everyday things like why a boy and a girl approaching their teens shouldn't share a room.

  Yet she knew death. Intimately. Childhood innocence was a thing of the past for Claire. Maybe for everybody.

  "Do you know where she took him?"

  Claire shook her head again, and Michael wiped a fat tear from her cheek.

  "It's okay," he said. "I'm sure Pete's fine. She told me she wouldn't hurt the children, and I believed her. You believe me?"

  Claire looked at him for a moment, and nodded.

  "Good. And I'm going to get us out of here. You believe that too?"

  Claire grinned through the tears and nodded fiercely.

  "Good," he said, and held his daughter in his arms until sleep took her.

  Eventually, despite him believing that it was impossible, sleep found him too.

  *

  "Pain is a construct, Mr Evans," the doctor said with a warm smile. "Think of it as nothing more than information. It’s just some part of your body sending an email to your brain which reads Hey! Pay attention to this!"

  Michael looked at the doctor dubiously. The miniature apocalypse that seemed to have been unleashed on the lower part of his spine didn’t feel much like a construct. It felt more like someone had buried a serrated blade into his back, and every time he tried to move, they decided to twist it.

  "Pain is a relic of an outdated phase of human evolution. It existed so that you would examine its source to determine whether it was likely to be life-threatening and requiring of immediate treatment. Well, now you have doctors to do that for you."

  The doctor smiled again, almost eagerly, as if he’d said something particularly funny.

  Ah, that was a joke, Michael thought. Good one, Doc.

  The doctor’s face fell a little when Michael didn’t return the smile.

  In truth, Michael couldn’t smile: ever since he'd wrenched his back even that bare minimum of movement felt like it was yanking a cord in his jaw that connected all the way down to his vertebrae, where it wrapped like razor wire around bundles of tender nerves and squeezed mercilessly.

  So far the injury had kept him away from work for almost two weeks, and he was beginning to feel a little stir crazy.

  "You’ve seen people walking on hot coals, right?"

  Michael gave a hint of a nod, and immediately regretted the movement as a surge of information shot up his spine and detonated at the base of his neck.

  "Same thing," the doctor said. "Those people are simply able to disconnect their conscious mind from the concept of pain. I’ve heard about people involved in accidents that suffered horrendous trauma which they weren’t even aware of until they were able to see it; until it became real in their minds. Only then did they feel the pain that accompanied their injuries. Pain exists only in the mind. Am I making any sense?"

  "I guess," Michael said. "But how does that help me? Because I am feeling the pain."

  "Your muscles need to move, Mr Evans. I realise that might seem illogical, but the swelling in your back isn’t helped by remaining immobile. When you keep yourself tense because you anticipate pain, or avoid movement or use incorrect posture, what you are actually doing is creating multiple other sources of pain that feed into the primary cause and slow down the healing process."

  “Huh,” Michael said dubiously. He had hoped visiting the medical centre would result in a pocket full of heavy-duty painkillers, not a lecture.

  The doctor reclined in his leather chair and ran a hand absently across his expansive desk like a spider.

  "The human brain is powerful beyond our understanding, Mr Evans. Nobody can fully explain the placebo effect, for example. Nobody can really explain those feats of strength you see from entertainers, like those strongmen who pull along trucks with their teeth. But those people would tell you that they are aware of the pain; they can simply choose to ignore it."

  The doctor delivered the words with a sort of practised sincerity that made Michael feel like they were well-rehearsed.

  That was, he thought, probably true: humanity’s evolution seemed to be heading inexorably toward a state of blissful catatonia. Technological innovation almost seemed to be built on achieving an ideal of laziness: everything humans needed or desired was slowly being made more convenient, smaller; easier. Long periods of sitting, and letting the physicality of life fall by the wayside were an inevitable side-effect.

  Hell, Michael thought, even my job mostly entails sitting down, now. And eating Carl’s doughnuts. And my job description is basically patrol, for Christ’s sake.

  He imagined that Doctor Curtis had to give the same speech to several patients a week. Maybe more.

  Virtually everyone Michael knew seemed to have a bad back, although that particular piece of data wasn’t entirely unbiased: Michael would readily concede that the majority of the people he knew in St Davids were ‘advancing’ in years.

  A recurring topic of wry conversation among the inhabitants of the tiny city was the ongoing comparison of their various ailments. They treated it almost like a sport. A league table that ranked the likes of arthritis and heart disease and cancer in a way that was darkly funny.

  Maybe that's the point, Michael thought. When faced by the dawning realisation that you were destined to lose the lifelong battle with your body, what else was there to do but laugh?

  All mildly interesting, sure, but not as important to Michael as a fistful of Codeine would have been.

  "So what should I do, then, Doctor?" Michael asked a little apprehensively, as it dawned on him that he wasn’t going to get the pharmaceutical relief he hoped for.

  "You need to be active, Mr Evans. You need to push through the pain. You need to move."

/>   You need to move.

  Michael's eyes flared open, and he saw grey stone walls and smelled damp and age. He had slept in the chair, of course, and had woken with the usual aching neck after his chin spent the night getting acquainted with his chest.

  He didn’t feel the ache in his neck though, because his eyes suddenly fixed on something that took all his attention: a faint trembling in his left foot. He blinked away the fog of sleep and focused on the moment until he was sure that he wasn’t still dreaming.

  For a second there, he had seen definite movement.

  Cold sunlight slipped into the stone room. At some point in the night Claire had extricated herself from his arms and had curled up on the floor next to his wheelchair underneath an ornate blanket.

  He smiled at her sleeping face for only a moment before the dull click of the lock disengaging tore his eyes reluctantly to the door and the smile fell away.

  "Morning, Cripple. Busy day ahead."

  Chapter 3

  For Ed Cartwright, the night in the cell had been spent in a state of constant terror and morning arrived like a thinly-veiled threat.

  Every dreadful minute that passed had increased his certainty that either the old woman or one of her sons would recognise him and he would meet the kind of grisly end that the NPCs in his favourite videogames routinely endured.

  After Annie had taken control of the castle, Ed had managed to fade into the crowd, keeping his head down and letting his tangled hair fall over his face as much as possible. When the Holloway boys—each now brandishing a gun along with the ever-present knives—began to herd people toward the cells, Ed moved eagerly; diving into a cell without complaint and installing himself in the thick shadows that clung to the corner furthest from the door.

  But the morning brought light, and an insistent feeling of urgency in Ed's mind like a timer ticking down towards a terrible and significant zero.

  It was just a matter of time before one of them realised that the guy huddled at the back of the cell was the same guy that had beaten one of their friends over the head with a rock and stolen their boat.