Wildfire Chronicles (Book 3): Psychosis Read online

  In his dream, Jason was a child again. A toddler, sat in a high chair in a warm, bright kitchen, listening to the soundtrack of his childhood: the gurgles and bangs of the hot water pipes that seemed to have a life of their own, thrumming against their moorings, trying to break free.

  The smell: baked beans. Just the memory of it tickling his nostrils, and he smiled. The high chair was safe; steady, he liked to lean his tiny bulk against the sides, liked the way the chair felt like it might move but never quite did. The way the tray pressed up against his stomach, anchoring him in place like an embrace.

  He could hear his mother humming along to the tinny radio that sat in the corner of the kitchen; a cheerful tune by a girl group long since forgotten.

  Jason’s face split in a toothy grin, and his gurgle of happiness merged with the gurgling in the pipes and the sunlight spilled in, making the world seem happy, and then his mother was in front of him, sending a spoonful of beans on its meandering journey toward his waiting mouth…

  And then Jason was frozen in terror, and his mother was a blood-soaked horror, black blood oozing from the twin voids under her brow, torn, ragged flesh peeling away from her bare torso, and the high chair was a prison.

  And he was screaming.

  His massive body, barely lit by the flickering embers of the fire, twitched spasmodically.

  Rachel watched him, the flames barely illuminating his expression of deep anguish, and felt a stab of hopelessness.

  Michael dreamed of the door. That nondescript red door that stubbornly refused to be dethroned as his principal memory of his time spent as a police officer in Cardiff. The entrance on the wall he had attempted to build in his mind. When the nightmare was a door, building a wall was a useless exercise.

  In the dream, he was approaching the door without being aware of moving, without being able to focus on anything but that cracked, weathered wood and the lock, ringed by scratches, the fossilised remains of a thousand fumbled attempts to insert a key.

  As always, the door began to swing open of its own volition. An invitation into the darkness beyond. And when the light pierced that darkness, it was there as always, the corridor of blood and hair and bone, filled with the sound of an infant squealing in pain and-

  Michael woke with a start, the sheen of sweat on his body stinging as the bitter coastal breeze hit it. For a moment, he laid on his back and breathed deeply, pushing the nightmare back into the shadows. Looking up at the clouds passing across the sky through gently swaying branches, listening to their soft rustle, he was almost able to believe the world was normal.

  Until he tried to get up and found that his body ended at the waist; his legs a useless anchor to the ground. Straining, he spent a moment trying to move something, to feel anything.

  Nothing.

  Lifting his head, finding that the parts of his back that weren’t now just dead flesh hollered in protest at a night spent on the cold ground, he saw Rachel, hunkered by the smouldering embers of the fire, rooting in her backpack for a few morsels of food to serve as their breakfast.

  She looked tired, dark circles smudged under her eyes, making the face that had been fresh and youthful just days earlier look a decade older. And not just tired, Michael realised, but haunted. He remembered the glimpse of trauma he’d seen in her eyes back in the bunker. He hadn’t asked what Victor had done while alone with Rachel; hadn’t needed to. Rachel did an excellent job of covering up her wounds, but when her guard was down, Michael saw the scars.

  Jason slept to her left, his back to the fire. They must have taken shifts keeping watch, Michael realised, and flushed guiltily. He had been left to sleep all night.

  “You know I don’t know anything about you,” said Rachel, never taking her gaze from the backpack.

  Michael blinked, and wondered how long she’d been aware of him staring. He reached for the bottle of water he’d placed next to his makeshift bed, took a long, delicious drink.

  “I guess there’s not been much room for conversation, with all this going on,” he said finally.

  “There’s room now,” she replied pointedly.

  Michael caught the hint. Was surprised he hadn’t seen it coming sooner, really. Circumstance had thrown the three of them together in St. Davids, and sticking together had seemed the best way through the nightmare. Back then they had looked at him as someone to follow, authority bestowed on him by a uniform that was most likely now nothing more than a symbol of a lost time. The reality now was that Michael was something else they had to carry. Something heavy.

  Jason stirred, sat up next to his sister with a yawn, his eyes unfocused. The way they were positioned, the two of them with their backs to the forest, Michael with his back to the sea, gave Michael the impression of being grilled by some sort of panel of investigators. Long-buried memories scrabbled at their shallow graves, clamouring for his attention.

  He shook them away.

  “What would you like to know?”

  He drained the remaining water in one long, soothing gulp.

  “I spent some time on the Force in Cardiff, transferred to St. Davids a couple of years ago. Was married, now separated. Probably a widower, I suppose.” The word caught in his throat. “I have a little girl, Claire. There’s not much else to tell really.”

  “Why move from Cardiff?” Rachel asked. Michael was impressed despite his discomfort. She had instantly picked out the relevant piece of information, the one thing he didn’t want to discuss, filtering through the bullshit. She’d have done well in the police.

  “I...wasn’t cut out for city policing I suppose. And I wanted to be closer to my daughter. St. Davids was the opportunity that came up.”

  “You think she’s alive?”

  The bluntness of her tone startled him. It was a question he had tried to avoid thinking about since he’d first received the message that originated from a friend that worked in Aberystwyth’s modest police station. He had no reason to distrust the message. Your wife has been taken to hospital. She had something wrong with her eyes. Your daughter is missing.

  Missing.

  He had scrutinized the words in his mind over and over, trying to read the truth between them. Missing, not dead. When the infection had taken his wife, Claire had survived. For the moment, it was all Michael was willing to consider.

  “Doesn’t matter what I think,” he said. "My job is gone. My family - my whole life - gone. Finding Claire is the only thing for me to do now.”

  Rachel paused for a moment, and nodded. Took a bite out of a biscuit.

  As she chewed, Michael stared over her shoulder. He’d seen the movement in the bushes moments earlier, slow and stealthy. His mind raced, and on some level he recognised how swiftly the world had been distilled to a single variable: safe or unsafe.

  “There is someone standing in the trees behind you.”

  Michael kept his voice neutral as he delivered the information, hoping that it would take a moment for them to process it.

  “Don’t react. Don’t look. Keep your voices low.”

  Jason merely stared at the charred remains of the fire. It would take more than being watched to shake him from the stupor that clouded his mind, Michael guessed. Rachel’s eyes narrowed.

  “How many?” she whispered.

  “One, that I can see. Crouched behind you, about thirty yards. Just watching.” He saw Rachel eyeing the small pile of weapons they’d left by the fire, just out of reach. Lesson learned, Michael thought. Sleep with a weapon on you.

  “Don’t,” he said quietly, his tone steely. “If whoever that is has a gun, all you’ll do is spook them.”

  Rachel gave Michael a dubious look. Wales was home to very few guns. The look on her face gave him the impression that she thought the only person for a hundred miles with a gun was him.

  “He’d have to be a good shot to take out all of us before someone got to him.” It was Jason who spoke, startling Michael.

  “Wouldn’t need to, Jason. He could miss us
all. But you know what’s out there. If he fires a gun, we’ll have more to worry about than bullets.”

  Jason pondered that for a moment, and nodded.

  “So what, then?” Rachel hissed.

  Michael thought a moment.

  “I’d say our best option is to say ‘hello’.”

  *

  Bailey had worked as a receptionist at Moorcroft for almost eight months, and had quickly discovered that the term reception was somewhat misleading: very few people ever visited the place. Most of the two hundred-or-so inhabitants had families; hardly any of them ever kept in touch with what was undoubtedly the black sheep of their family. Even government officials and safety inspectors tended to give the place a wide berth. Moorcroft received almost nobody.

  So, the fifteen-mile commute from Rothbury, the small town in which recession dictated she must live with her parents despite pushing thirty, was a pain in the rear, but the money was decent for the area. The job itself mainly consisted of flirting with the younger members of the staff and checking Facebook. She kept her reception in pristine order, and so on the morning the computers went down, Bailey found herself with nothing to do.

  She had refreshed her page a hundred times, even tried to call Joe, the laughably under-qualified I.T. Support, but found the external phonelines were down. In the absence of all other options, she fished out her mobile phone. The screen was small and fiddly, but at least 3G would get her back in touch with the world.

  Nothing.

  Of course, if she had been able to access the internet, Bailey might have been lost in the virtual world, and she might not have seen the man sprinting toward the front door of the Moorcroft Hospital. As it was, with no distractions, she noticed him almost immediately, and she had as much as thirty seconds to react as he made directly for her.

  Unfortunately, she also had time to see his face, to see the flesh ripped away from it, the bleeding holes where his eyes should have been, and the sight glued her to the spot, frozen like a mime, only her lower lip trembling, as though it possessed some advanced understanding of the situation that her brain did not.

  She was still rooted in place when the man, who some deep level of her brain recognised in horror was growling, snarling like an animal, crashed through the main door and hurled himself across her reception desk and smashed into her, cracking her spine painfully across the small table that held the fax machine behind her, and sinking his teeth into her neck, sending a spray of blood – my blood! – arcing into the air above.

  Her last thought, the last action of Bailey’s brain before it became something else, was that the smear he had left across her tidy desk would need cleaning.

  And then she was up, and nothing in the world mattered more to her than ripping out her eyes. Removing them felt like bursting painful infections, squeezing out the pus that rotted in her skull and removing a terrible pressure. Cleansing.

  Bailey clumsily stumbled out of the hopelessly inefficient four-inch heels she only wore to try to impress the man she’d had her eye on since taking the job and sprinted after the man that had bitten into her flesh, and she too was snarling.

  Standing in the corridor, stunned by the sight of the receptionist streaking toward him, her face drenched in blood, was Robert, the man that had unknowingly prompted her to wear the high heels, and the thing that had been Bailey Smith charged at him, drooling, and finally got her kiss.

  Even at that last moment as the corridors began to fill with blood and pain, Moorcroft might have survived the evolving onslaught but for a matter of timing, and the fact that Stuart White, head of the hospital’s small security team, was standing chatting to a colleague, and propping open the heavy security door with his foot.

  Lost in conversation about the last round of football matches that would ever be played, Stuart didn’t see them coming until the chance to react was lost, and he fell with a whimper and a spurt of arterial blood. Once inside the Hospital proper, the infection spread like steam, filling every crevice and gap, painting the walls red, and the fight was lost before the staff and patients even knew it had begun.

  On the second floor, in Dr Jackson’s spacious office, the calming atmosphere her Feng Shui expert had meticulously constructed broke like dropped china when the screaming began.

  Alex heard and understood the commotion on the floor below them, was able to logically process that something had gone badly wrong: a riot perhaps; some poor unfortunate snapping and setting off a chain reaction. Yet his emotions remained flat.

  The damn pills have neutered my mind.

  Clearly, Dr Jackson had no such trouble: the blood drained from her face, taking away all colour beyond the ridiculously bright red lipstick she insisted on wearing. Suddenly she looked like some terrified porcelain doll. She stared blankly at him, and Alex realised that despite their relative positions, she was actually looking to him for guidance.

  You won’t last long at this place, Dr Jackson.

  Alex stood and crept to the door, easing it open. The noise was approaching, moving through the hospital like an express train, almost as though the security officers had taken the day off. Why would they let trouble get out of the main hall and upstairs to the offices?

  As he watched, Alex saw a woman – one of the patients – careering around the corner, running like her life depended on it. Seconds later, he saw a bloodied man wearing a security uniform catch her trailing gown, dragging her to the floor. The man proceeded to tear out the woman’s throat, pulling away from her with a large chunk of her neck still gripped between his teeth.

  Quietly, Alex closed the door, and turned to Dr Jackson.

  “Does this lock?” he whispered, pointing at the door.

  Deborah Jackson nodded, terrified, and threw her key to him. Alex caught it and locked the heavy oak door with a click.

  A second later, the door shook in its frame as something thumped into it from the other side.

  “Okay, Dr Jackson,” Alex said, and the breezy tone of his voice unnerved him. “I think our session is over. And we have to get out of here.”

  “W-What?” she stammered. “Are you crazy? I can’t take you out of here!”

  “I actually am crazy, Doc, and you know it. But right now, something very, very bad is happening on the other side of this door, and by the sound of it, it’s happening on the other side of every door in this place. We have to go, out of that window, to the car park, and then as far away from here as we can possibly get.”

  The bemused look on her face told Alex she wasn’t buying it, so he stood to one side and pointed at the floor. Following the gesture, she saw what had been obscured by his feet: fingers, covered in blood, clawing at the space between the door and the floor. As she watched, the fingers gripped the edge of the sturdy door, and pulled, ripping away a fingernail. Then she moved, leaping up and snatching a small key from her desk.

  They hurried to the window and looked down. The ground beneath Dr Jackson’s office looked empty. It was a fair drop, but Alex figured as long as they landed correctly, bending their knees at just the right time, they stood a good chance of making it without injury.

  Alex waited impatiently as Deborah fumbled with the lock. When she finally got the window to swing open, a muffled chorus of screams drifted in on the biting morning air.

  “Okay, we’re going to go,” he said, “Lower yourself from the window, hang from the sill and drop. Make sure you bend those knees when you land, or your thighbone will be having a party in your belly. Okay?”

  She nodded, whimpered. He saw her eyes tearing up.

  “Listen,” he said, grabbing her narrow shoulders and putting his eyes directly in front of hers, “You can do this. We both can. Fifty yards to the car park and we’re out of here, and the police can deal with whatever the hell is happening here, okay? You’ll be fine.”

  Another thump on the door. Heavier. It sounded like there was more than one of them out there now, trying to break through.

  Deborah nodded,
and brushed the tears away, and then to Alex’s surprise, she hauled herself up and out the window without another word, and dropped. He was impressed; had expected persuading her to take a good deal more effort. The yelp as she hit the ground below might have been a problem, but he didn’t waste any time thinking about who – or what – she might have drawn the attention of, or even if her bones had made the journey in one piece. Instead, he swung a leg over the sill, let his weight drop down onto his hands, and gravity did the rest.

  He fell facing the building, and time seemed to freeze for a moment as he moved past one of the ground-level windows and saw the bloodbath in the main hall. He had time to think that no one at Moorcroft was that crazy and then the ground met his feet, knocking all the air from his lungs.

  The pain in his knees was excruciating; white-hot. He hadn’t listened to his own advice; had forgotten to bend. Gritting his teeth to stifle the curse that begged to be screamed aloud, he tested his joints and a powerful rush of relief surged through him. Nothing vital seemed to have broken in the fall, and he hauled himself up and set off after the doctor as fast as his protesting knees allowed, praying that she hadn’t reached the car and decided to flee without him.

  When he rounded the corner into the car park he almost yelled out in relief: she was in the car, turning over the engine and flicking open the passenger door for him.

  I owe you one, Doc.

  He leapt into the car alongside her as the engine roared into life.

  “Did you see…?” she started to ask, but he just nodded at the road ahead.

  “Drive.”

  Deborah floored the accelerator and the car lurched forward, swerving wildly, shooting toward the exit. Alex jammed in his seatbelt and grabbed the dashboard.

  “Hey, slow, slow. We’re clear. ”

  Deborah gasped out a terrified breath that appeared to have been held in for some time, and lifted the accelerator a little. When he was certain she wasn’t going to crash into the first object she happened across, Alex focused on the wing mirror. Several of the lunatics had left the asylum, smashing through windows, tearing after the car through the grounds. He watched them recede until he could see them no more.