Trauma (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 5) Page 3

  Or hunting.

  Annie had lost count of the days when she noticed that she had begun to absent-mindedly drag her nails across the withered flesh of her hands until they bled.

  Something had to be done.

  When the creatures outside disappeared from sight, the streets would again become still, and usually remained so for a couple of hours at least. It gave Annie a window of opportunity.

  By the time desperation took hold, and the men and women hiding in the town hall began to think they would gladly walk through fire just to get something to eat, Annie had already decided that the convenience store down the street might lead to death, but the row of houses next to the town hall surely did not. None of the houses would contain enough food to sustain seventy - no, sixty, now. That's something, at least - people for very long, but the situation had reached a dire point at which no one was thinking about any sort of long-term future. Nothing existed beyond the possibility of the next meal. Some had even said they would happily eat dog food, and Annie understood: her own hunger was a gnawing, sickly pain that had come to dominate her every thought.

  Even the fevered speculation about what sort of disaster might have befallen the world outside the town hall had quietened, and Annie wondered how long it would be before people started talking about that movie that had been popular a few years back, the one about the survivors of a plane crash that were forced towards cannibalism. Those people at least had the excuse that they were stranded miles from civilization. The notion that the people of Anglesey, just a half-mile away from the north coast of Wales, would eat each other simply because they were afraid to go outside seemed ridiculous.

  On that day, Annie began to hallucinate; waking dreams of devouring Doctor Turner and enjoying every last bite, wishing only that she had a little salt and pepper to season the man's bitter, flabby flesh.

  I've lost my mind, Annie thought as she sized up Turner's limbs and decided that he had remarkably hairless arms, which might not taste so bad at all.

  "We have to go outside," she said loudly and abruptly, surprising herself.

  The response to her statement was a collective moan, low and sickly.

  "We'll die out there, Annie," Turner moaned weakly.

  "We're dying in here, Doctor Turner," Annie snapped, surprised to find she had enough energy left to pour scorn into her tone. "Help is not coming and we are going to die in here. It may be more peaceful than dying out there, but I'm not really prepared to choose which death I prefer. Not yet. Are you? The store is obviously too dangerous, but those things don't seem to come around here more than once every two or three hours. We can go next door, to the first house we see, break in and get their food. It won't be much, but if we get that far we can plan our next move."

  Turner snorted.

  "By 'we' I'm assuming you don't mean you," he said pointedly.

  Cheeky bastard, Annie thought, hunger has made you brave.

  "No, Turner. I mean you. Consider yourself volunteered."

  "Says who?"

  Annie hadn't expected Turner's response, and she blinked in surprise. The closest thing the man had to a spine sat in his surgery, propping up an example of the human skeleton that fascinated the children who visited him with various illnesses and infections.

  "Boys," Annie said sharply, and her sons immediately rose and moved to her side. They knew the tone all too well. When Annie Holloway's voice dropped an octave, sinking into an animal growl, disagreement was no longer an option.

  "Says me, Turner. Perhaps you've forgotten who's in charge around here? I haven't. In fact, let this be a lesson to all of you. Times have changed. But I haven't. You understand?"

  Annie's voice was rising back up. Hunger was making her sound a little unhinged. She reined her fury back in, fearful that once she lost herself in hysteria she would never find her way back.

  "You'll go, Turner. Your only choice now is whether you walk through the front door or I have my boys throw you out the fucking window. Got it?"

  Annie very rarely swore. It was, she believed, a crude and overused method of attempting to intimidate anyone. Curses were far more effective when used sparingly, when the unfamiliarity of the words gave them an edge like a blade. Most of the people in the town hall had, in fact, never heard her swear.

  Turner flinched, and Annie noticed with satisfaction that the flinch passed from person to person like a rumour. No one argued, though, and Annie realised with satisfaction that there was no longer any need for her to concern herself with couching her orders in politeness and politics. Newborough needed a different sort of leader.

  Times had changed.

  4

  The beach seemed endless, stretching away from the water and becoming expansive sand dunes that sucked Jason's feet down and made walking difficult. He felt exhausted, and his body ached and throbbed, demanding that he rest. Just when he began to believe that maybe he had died after all, and that Hell was an endless desert, the sand gave way to grass that shuffled softly in the coastal breeze, and then to a thick forest. At the edge of the trees, Jason sat down, breathing heavily.

  I should be dead, he thought. The way things had unravelled back in Aberystwyth, so suddenly and so chaotically, left him unsure as to what exactly had happened. He remembered pushing the boat away from the harbour, and the expression on Rachel's face as she understood what he was about to do was etched deep into Jason's mind. The horror and remorse and fury in her eyes.

  He remembered turning to face the Infected as they rushed toward him, and swinging and stabbing as they overwhelmed him, and he remembered getting trampled before the memories abruptly cut off.

  Trampled, he thought. The Infected didn't trample things. They bit and clawed at them.

  They couldn't see me. Ran right over me.

  He stared again at the dark scar on his forearm, and his eyes widened a little in understanding. The farm outside St. Davids. A seemingly insignificant bite from an infected rat. He had expected to die then, too, but all he had experienced was an extraordinary pain, like his innards were dancing a messy jig, and then that strange phantom itch.

  We'll figure it out, Jase, Rachel had said, although Jason had barely registered the words at the time. But he knew, now. He'd figured it out all by himself. He was immune, like the old woman in Aberystwyth. And somehow his immunity meant the Infected couldn't zero in on him like they did everyone else.

  If only I'd known before. Things would be so different. I'd still be with-

  Rachel.

  Jason stood, and began to slide his massive frame between the tree trunks, over tangled roots that seemed to grasp at him in the dark.

  He had no idea where he was, or even if his sister was still alive, but Jason had to find her.

  Jasssssssssonnnn...

  He grimaced as he heard his mother's voice, thick and gloopy; a noise that bubbled, like it was seeping up through a deep pool of something foul.

  She's already dead, Jassssssoonnnn. You couldn't protect her, because you're just a little baby, and you left her to die. She's out there now, looking for you, but her eyes are gone and she can't seeeeeee yoooouuuu. Jassssooooooonnnnnnnn...

  Jason squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, trying to clear out the poison that lurked in the shadows. For several long moments the world around him seemed to dim, as though his mind was slipping through the cracks, back towards a state of catatonic bliss. With an effort, he focused on blocking out the hideous vision of his mother swinging from the trees around him, dropping chunks of flesh from her rotting body like falling fruit.

  He breathed deeply.

  Opened his eyes.

  And heard screaming.

  *

  Bob Turner hated Annie Holloway; hated her with a passion that burned like the surface of the fucking sun. He always had: the seeds of his enmity germinated long before she became the person that forced him from the safety of the town hall out onto a street stained with blood and broken bodies; alive with the fizzing pot
ential for sickening violence.

  In what now felt like a previous life, Bob had hated Annie simply because of her enormous influence over his small town, and her relentless snide asides about his professionalism, or lack of it. She prodded and needled at him mercilessly, and she seemed to be everywhere. And if she wasn't physically standing in front of him, it seemed one of her hulking, simple-minded offspring was. There was no escape: no part of his life she didn't spread into like a growing, malignant tumour.

  Even Bob's marriage had collapsed because of Annie Holloway, when his wife, Kate, had finally decided that she couldn't take another moment of her husband's incessant and impotent complaining about the woman and walked out.

  Often Bob imagined that Annie Holloway was a giant, squatting over the town of Newborough, shitting on the residents and somehow persuading them that it was raining. It seemed only he saw it. Or maybe they all knew it, every last one of them. They just weren't willing to be the ones to say it. But being trapped in the town hall had finally forced the woman to show her true colours: no one would be in any doubt now that Holloway was poison. It was too late, though, for anything to be done about it. Her three sons were now her private army, more than powerful enough to dominate the few dozen cowering, broken souls in the town hall. Even when the entire world had gone up in smoke, Annie Holloway still found a way to shit on him.

  When Annie had threatened to have him thrown from the window, Bob had looked pleadingly around the people that silently stared at him, praying that they would rush to his side and offer their support.

  What he got was blank-faced stares that reminded him of the way people pretended to be oblivious when a drunken vagrant began ranting in their immediate vicinity.

  I'm the vagrant, Bob thought sadly, as he let their cold stares usher him down to the ground floor. But I'll take some of you fuckers down with me.

  When they had cleared the messy barricade of wooden chairs away from the entrance, Bob turned toward Annie and drew himself up to his full - and disappointing - height, and mustered every ounce of hatred he held for the woman, letting it fuel his courage.

  "I'll go," he snarled. "But if you want me to come back with any food, I won't go alone."

  Annie blinked.

  "Because if you push me out that door alone," Bob continued, "I won't be coming back. If I make it into that house alive, I'll stay there and eat every scrap of food I can find. I'll eat until I'm sick and then I'll eat some more."

  Annie rolled her eyes.

  "Even your threats are weak, doctor." Annie laced that word with venom. That was nothing to do with their predicament, though. She'd placed special emphasis on that word for twenty years.

  Bitch.

  "Who wants to go with him?"

  Bob watched as Annie turned to face the hateful crowd that gathered behind her, and smirked when he saw their smug, complacent expressions dissolving into stunned fear.

  He watched all of them running through potential objections in their minds, and saw them all come up hilariously short. Everyone had seen how Annie responded to her authority being questioned. She didn't reserve disdain for Bob alone; there was more than enough for everybody. Arguing would be as pointless as it was likely to be incendiary. They had all feared Annie before; now they acted as though they were trapped in the lion enclosure at a zoo.

  "You," Annie said, pointing at Patrick Dunn, a slow-witted barber whose face slackened in anguish.

  Bob grinned savagely, but his triumph was short-lived, crumbling away immediately as Annie stepped past him and threw open the door to the street, staring at him expectantly.

  "Good luck, Bob," Annie said in a tone that sagged under the weight of insincerity loaded on top of it. Bob opened his mouth to respond, though he had no smart comeback, and was more than willing to settle for a simple fuck you, but he didn't get the chance.

  He felt a meaty hand on the small of his back - one of the woman's obnoxious sons, no doubt - and then he was shoved out into the night air.

  He forgot all about Annie Holloway immediately, as soon as he caught the metallic stink of blood on the faint breeze. Tasted it.

  For a moment Bob stood alongside Patrick in frozen terror, straining to hear or see some evidence of death rushing toward him. The streets looked quiet. Almost peaceful, Bob thought, if you discounted the ruined corpses that decayed slowly in the cold air.

  He waved frantically at Patrick to follow him, and set off toward the row of terraced houses to the right of the town hall. They were only the width of a small car park away, but it felt like the longest journey Bob Turner had ever endured, like a slow crawl through Hell on his knees. With every step his heart felt like it was about to plunge into cardiac arrest.

  I'm actually whimpering, he thought dully, twisting his neck from left to right as he ran, almost sobbing in gratitude at the empty streets that greeted him.

  When he reached the first house in the terrace, Bob pressed his back to it as he fumbled at the door handle. Locked. Obviously.

  "Shouldn't we go around the back, in case they see us?" The fear-laden whisper came from Patrick, and nearly made Bob jump out of his skin.

  Bob wanted to shake the man for breaking the silence; wanted to scream at him that the creatures stalking around Newborough had no fucking eyes, and that it wouldn't matter whether they moved to the rear of the house, away from the street. The only thing that mattered was that they might hear them, and Patrick was a fucking idiot for doing anything louder than breathing. He had to settle for giving Patrick the best withering look he could muster, before turning away.

  "Do we need to smash the window?" Patrick breathed. "Because they might hear-"

  Bob clapped his hand over Patrick's mouth, clenching his fingers tightly on the man's loose cheeks, squeezing until he saw pain on the dumb bastard's face. With his free hand, Bob put a finger to his own lips and glared at Patrick until he saw recognition in the man's eyes.

  Bob released his grip on Patrick's jowly face, and scampered lightly to the next door in the terrace. Also locked. He didn't wait for Patrick to process the disappointment, moving along to the next door without pausing.

  When the third door swung open silently, Bob very nearly let out a triumphant yell of relief.

  He stepped inside cautiously, and immediately stopped, nearly screaming in fright as Patrick stumbled clumsily into his back.

  The hallway that led into the house was pitch-black. Unable to see anything other than the dim outline of two doorways and a staircase, Bob froze, waiting for something unseen to come at him in the dark, and tried very hard to keep a lid on a rising wave of hysteria that sloshed around his empty stomach. Forcing his legs to move, Bob stepped forward, carefully avoiding a low table that held a dish and some car keys, pointing it out to Patrick as he passed.

  It took two paces for Bob’s eyes to adjust to the lack of light. By the third he saw the blood that smeared its way up the stairs. His eyes followed the dark smear all the way up, bulging and unblinking.

  There's something up there.

  By the fourth step, Bob's legs were already turning, way before informing his mind that they were getting the fuck out. In fairness to Patrick, Bob thought dimly as he bumped into the barber and saw him stumble into the table, he couldn't have known I was going to do that.

  It was an odd thought, Bob decided, as the dish smashed on the floor and the keys skittered noisily across the carpet. Odd to focus on something so mundane even as the door behind him crashed open and he heard snarling. Odder still that when the air shrieked behind him, and teeth sank into his shoulder, deep enough to scratch bone, the only thing Bob could think was that he'd been wrong. It hadn't been upstairs. It had been right in the next room.

  Stupid, Bob. Just like she always said.

  As Bob Turner began to plunge his fingers deep into his eye sockets and proceeded to twist, Patrick Dunn screamed loud enough to wake the dead, and then Newborough came to life.

  *

  Jason didn't sto
p to think. Thinking meant enduring another conversation with his mother, and the nightmares of the real world were infinitely preferable. When he heard the scream, he trundled forward, building momentum slowly like a heavy locomotive, and burst from the trees at full pace onto what looked like a kid's playground.

  Across a muddy field that hosted two lonely goalposts, Jason saw a row of terraced houses. He charged toward it, even as he heard the shrieking start in earnest. It sounded like there were dozens of them. The dull, ghostly itch returned, growing stronger by the second as he crossed the field.

  When he reached the street, he saw the man stumbling backwards from the open doorway immediately, but he was already dead; already crashing to the ground under a scrabbling figure that drove its jaws down onto the screaming man's neck. It didn't matter. Saving the man wasn't Jason's goal. Never had been.

  With a hoarse bellow, Jason snatched up a heavy rock from a carefully-sculpted garden and sprinted at the Infected creature swinging his massive arm in a wide arc, nearly taking its head clean off. He saw others swarming onto the street, bolting around corners and through broken windows, slipping on the gore-slick streets as they frantically hunted for the source of the noise.

  Jason yelled again, and lifted the makeshift club, and smashed skulls until his bones ached and his voice cracked. None of the Infected reacted to his presence.

  When he drove the rock through the brain of the last of them, Jason dropped to the ground, overwhelmed by the pain wracking his damaged body, and the world began to spin and fade.

  I am the cure, he thought, and darkness claimed him.