Wildfire Chronicles (Book 3): Psychosis Page 7

  He came across one of them, pinned to the floor by one of his new siblings, struggling, hurting his brother. As he approached, the resistance of the creature broke, and she was reborn, delivered by teeth and blood. Lloyd Thomas stood for a moment, swaying in the breeze, bearing silent witness to the miracle, and was surprised to hear his new sibling humming at him, a low, rumbling sound.

  Was surprised to find that he understood it.

  He hummed clumsily in acknowledgement, and the creature’s head shot up sharply. For a moment it squatted, a ragged strip of flesh dangling like spaghetti from a slack jaw. It cocked its head; hummed again.

  Lloyd Thomas hummed in response and the creature leapt to its feet, victim forgotten.

  When Lloyd turned away, striding toward the prey he felt in the distance, he felt the footsteps of his brother and the new-born keeping pace behind him.

  As they walked, they hummed, and their numbers swelled, and the humming grew louder.

  *

  Alex felt a hand clench his wrist and begin to pull, and he squeezed his eyes shut, and found himself, not for the first time that day, wishing that they had locked up the right man, and that he had been safely absent.

  “Move!”

  Deborah’s voice; rising above the insistent roar of the river.

  She snapped the branch away, and suddenly he was moving again, her hand guiding him to the shore. He gripped the branches, and pulled himself out of the freezing water, just as one of the creatures was swept past, its grasping hand clasping only the air he had been breathing moments earlier.

  Alex pulled himself upright, gasping, choking on the solid lumps of oxygen that tried to force themselves painfully into his lungs.

  Deborah was still pulling at his hand, pleading with him to run, but he shook his head.

  “Look,” he panted, gesturing toward the river.

  The water heaved with the eyeless bodies, some rendered still; fleshy driftwood. Others, still frantically thrashing, helpless against the current, drifted past, roaring in impotent fury at the figures watching from the riverbank.

  Deborah stared for a moment, her mouth dropping open.

  “It’s like they’ve never been in water before.”

  Alex nodded.

  “Mind you, that is what I thought when I saw you swimming in there.”

  She grinned.

  Alex held up a sheepish you got me gesture, and scanned the surroundings. The land had flattened out: they were almost all the way back to Rothbury. A hundred yards or so behind them, back up the river, stood the ruins of an ancient-looking watermill, which had once stubbornly grasped for the last of the river’s energy, before the levelling of the ground tamed the water a few hundred yards downstream. The area looked still; no movement beyond the creatures harmlessly drifting past them.

  He pointed to the mill.

  “We should get inside; get out of sight until we figure this out.”

  Deborah nodded.

  It was as Alex turned toward the mill that distant warning alarms began to sound in his mind. Some part of his brain had information that he needed to heed. Something he’d seen without recognising.

  He turned back, frowning at the figures in the river, and he noticed it immediately. The odd movement in the distance. As he watched, one of them seemed to split off from the pack, and Alex realised suddenly what had made the movement catch his eye. Intent.

  He squinted, trying to bring the shape into focus. The figure was moving against the current, moving toward the bank of the river. Suddenly there was another figure behind the first, slightly further downstream, clawing itself through the water toward the ground. Swimming.

  Alex sucked in a sharp breath.

  They learn.

  And then the creature reached the bank and pulled itself clear of the river, and shot toward them, and Alex turned and let the rush of fear pump his weary legs.

  *

  They approached the farmhouse like abused pets: cautious, silent, watching warily for any sign of movement, and it was immediately obvious that the farm had succumbed to the virus: the body near the entrance said as much. Throat torn out, cooled in the night air, making the world its morgue.

  The rain was still hammering down from storm clouds that seemed to be gathering rather than dissipating. Lightning forked across the bleak sky, momentarily illuminating the farm buildings that stood close together, as though huddling for protection against the winds that drove across the open fields.

  The body belonged to a young-ish man. A farm-hand, Michael guessed, rather than the owner of the land. Rachel led the way, followed by Jason and Michael, with John bringing up the rear. As she entered the courtyard between the farmhouse and the several outbuildings clustered around it, Rachel slowed their pace to a crawl, peering left and right with each step, until she was satisfied that they were alone.

  The farmhouse itself was a small, squat affair, and as they reached the front porch Michael could see that his initial assessment of the place as being fortress-like was not that far wide of the mark. There were a number of buildings in the area dating back as far as the sixteenth century, a time during which walls were built of stone up to eighteen inches thick. The farmhouse was one such dwelling.

  The front door was solid-looking wood, and if they barricaded that entrance, anything trying to get into the building would have a hard job succeeding: the windows were little more than narrow slits that even a child would struggle to fit through.

  Rachel pressed her face to one of the small windows, shining her torch into the gloom beyond. Inside she saw the kind of authentic farmhouse kitchen that owners of apartments in London spent a fortune to recreate: solid oak cupboards and a counter huddling for warmth around a large Aga stove that was the centrepiece of the room.

  It was dark, and still.

  “It looks empty.”

  Rachel tried the door, and it swung open easily.

  Virtually all houses across the country must be the same, she thought. The speed of the infection, the way it rode on confusion and panic; most people would not have thought to lock their doors. Fewer still would have been given the chance to do so in time.

  She remembered watching from a rooftop in St. Davids as the Infected, sensing the presence of their next meal in the buildings around them, had forced entry: smashing through doors or leaping through windows, oblivious to the glass that blocked their passage, and she shuddered.

  John saw the shudder, and thought it all the more interesting that Rachel simply shook it off and was the first to enter the house, when the easier option would have been to send in her giant brother first. She’s protecting him, he thought in amazement.

  He watched Rachel disappear inside, saw the light of her torch bouncing around in the darkness beyond, and then Jason, still carrying Michael, eased himself through the gap. He only just fit: houses hadn’t been built for men of his size hundreds of years ago. John took a final glance around the farm, satisfying himself that the virus wasn’t creeping toward them silently in the night, and stepped inside, closing the heavy door quietly behind him.

  The smell hit him like a middleweight, snapping his neck back, making him gag. Choking, he clamped his hand over his mouth and nose in a futile attempt to keep the stench out. In front of him, all three of his companions had already tried the same manoeuvre with clearly similar degrees of success; Rachel had already given up, apparently accepting that the sickening rot that weighed down the air in the farmhouse was unavoidable.

  She put a finger to her lips, staring each of the men in the eye in turn, and nodded at the door that led from the kitchen to the rest of the house.

  “Wait with Michael. Watch the door,” she whispered to Jason, and then she motioned at John to follow her.

  Creeping silently toward it, Rachel slipped the baseball bat from its makeshift sheath and used it to push the door open gently.

  A stinking wave washed over them, even more sickening in its potency. John’s breakfast – a handful of c
hocolate biscuits – began to treat the walls of his stomach like a cell that demanded escape. He swallowed hard, focusing all his energy on quelling the waves of nausea.

  Beyond the door was a narrow hallway, further doors leading off to either side, culminating in a narrow right-angled staircase leading to the floor above. The walls of the corridor were laden with family photographs, most depicting a young happy couple maintaining the farm. Only one picture deviated: the same man who had appeared in the other photos, but now his wife was missing, replaced by a sullen-looking young boy. None of the photos looked recent.

  Rachel brushed away her curiosity at the pictures. The smell came from the first floor, the air thickening with every step she took toward the staircase. She advanced toward it, hearing John gently pushing open the side doors behind her, confirming that the ground floor was empty.

  The silence in the place was heavy and oppressive, closing around the soft noise of their passage like invisible fingers. Rachel’s heart began to hammer: she had done this once before, at her parents’ house in St. Davids. She had been oblivious then, untouched by the horror of the virus. The discovery of her father’s corpse, being eaten by the family dog had struck her like a locomotive. She steeled herself for the horrors her instincts told her lay above, and began to ascend.

  The upper level of the farmhouse was comprised of three rooms: a small bathroom near the top of the stairs, the door standing open, revealing nothing untoward. The stench in the upstairs corridor was like a living presence, some foul spirit that clung to the walls and the carpet.

  To Rachel’s right, a bedroom door, again standing open. She peered inside. A teenage boy’s room, judging by the mess and the faded posters of rock bands lining the wall opposite her. Again, the room was empty. Just one door left.

  Rachel turned to face it, the door that stood at the end of the short corridor, the door that was cracked open an inch or two, revealing nothing of the room beyond. She lifted the bat a little higher, fixed John with a meaningful stare, and took a step forward.

  And then she heard it.

  Soft, scuffling, scraping sounds. A noise that seemed like it did not want to be heard.

  Rachel’s pulse increased, thundering through her veins.

  They weren’t alone.

  *

  The watermill dated back to the middle ages. It was hewn out of rock standing alongside the river, and had fallen into partial ruin before being restored by the National Trust after a lengthy petition from local residents. The structure itself was sturdy and whole, but lacking in doors and windows.

  To Alex, the mill looked skeletal. The restoration of the place had only served to recreate the building’s death.

  It might have made a good place to hide temporarily, if Alex and Deborah had reached it before the things began to give chase. As it was, all it offered was a means to slow their pursuers down.

  Alex glanced back as he ran. Only two of the Infected had been able to reach solid ground before the embankment had steepened to meet a bridge leading into Rothbury. It was, he thought, something to be grateful for. The notion struck him as funny under the circumstances and he became aware of hysteria rising in him. Felt the shifting somewhere deep in his mind, down in the foundations, like continental drift.

  He was already long overdue some pills. The schedule was tightly packed: at virtually any given time during the day he was meant to be taking one of a range of capsules that invariably came in bright primary colours. Cheerful. Like toys someone might give a baby during the initial phases of development. Most of the pills vanished into his stomach and appeared to have no effect whatsoever, though he knew that was the intention. Sometimes he suffered painful contortions in his stomach; headaches, but miraculously little else, given that his body – his entire being – moved like a hovercraft over a cushion of Clozapine and Zotepine and countless other less pronounceable chemicals.

  That cushion was deflating steadily. The absence of medication, coupled with the stress and omnipresent terror, left Alex feeling like something inside him was loosening.

  Suddenly he felt as though there was another presence chasing him, something far more insidious; something terrible and familiar and impossible to outrun. His nerves danced painfully.

  Deborah was pulling ahead again, her superior fitness telling once more. He burst into the remains of the mill a few seconds behind her, and almost crashed into her back.

  “Why have you stopped?” he shrieked, and the fright apparent in his voice made him shrivel inside.

  Deborah turned, and he saw his own terror echoed in the frantic twitching of her eyes. Saw too why she had stopped: they hadn’t entered the mill itself. Just an out-building. A storage area.

  Just one entrance. A death trap.

  Snap.

  He couldn’t hear it of course, the fracturing in his mind, but he felt it, like an underground earthquake.

  There were lengths of pipe leaning against the wall: ancient parts of tools now made almost exclusively of rust, hanging there to tell a tale of a world that had long since been tamed, a world in which getting anything done had meant cutting or lifting or smashing.

  Deborah was screaming, the sound like an undercurrent to him; something heard through the walls of a dream. He lifted the nearest of the stretches of pipe. Dull, but surprisingly heavy. Swung with enough force, just maybe…

  There was no time to think about it: he turned just as the first of their pursuers bolted through the doorway, and he swung like a baseball player, catching the thing across the jaw, feeling the bone shatter on impact. It went down hard and then he was swinging again, a guardian against their entry, smashing it back every time it leapt to its feet, slowly crushing its skull away to nothing until finally its mind accepted death, and relishing the cracks and the sudden softness of the impact as bone gave way to brain. The first of them finally died as the pipe shattered, leaving him holding a wicked shard of rusted metal.

  It was easier that way, with the now-sharp weapon, and he thrust the decayed point into the neck of the second creature and continued to stab long after it stilled in a spreading pool at his feet, feeling the familiar thrill of death course through him.

  It’s just like riding a bike.

  The floor was slick with blood, the air heavy with the metallic stench of it. And something else. A whimpering voice, full of fear and trepidation.

  “Alex?”

  He froze, eyes narrowing to dangerous slits.

  “Alex was in no condition to handle this. What was he going to do, complain his way out of trouble? ‘It’s so unfair, boo-fucking-hoo’.”

  Deborah felt something inside her begin to subside, some rickety layer of stability dropping away. In the madness of Rothbury, she’d actually forgotten. About him. Her hands began to clench and unclench slowly, operating independently; imploring her mind to catch up.

  “Jake?”

  Jake turned and grinned, and the sight of Alex’s handsome face; the same and so different, twisted into something that emitted menace, travelled through Deborah Jackson like radiation, reorganising things at a fundamental level.

  “Hello, Dr Jackson.”

  Chapter 6

  The peanuts were delicious. Claire had only managed to scavenge some rock-hard bread in the days she had spent alone on the streets of Aberystwyth. Most of her time had been spent hiding in a closet at the back of a clothing store with smashed front windows, her only companion the stink of the bleach that tried and failed to hide behind a ‘lemon fresh’ label.

  There hadn’t been any space in the closet, just mops and buckets and boxes. Barely enough room for even her small frame, and she had gradually begun to discover that even remaining still can induce dizzying pain.

  She had made her way out of the closet after three days, starving and grateful to leave behind the bucket that she had used as a toilet, and the smell that even the bleach couldn’t quite mask.

  The streets had been pretty quiet then; dark and empty. She had crept
around them until she saw the bakery. The shelves were almost cleared of food, and she wondered how many other people there were out there, scurrying like frightened mice around the streets that they had owned just days earlier.

  That’s where she got the bread, and the opportunity to spend more time in another storage closet, with a broom propped against the door, half-expecting that at any moment some hideous abomination would burst into the tiny space and begin eating her.

  The pub had peanuts. It had snacks of varying quality, all sharing one thing – a high salt content designed to get the punters thirsty for another drink.

  Claire didn’t care, and threw back enormous handfuls of the salted nuts, feeling her pained stomach growling in appreciation at having something to do once more. Compared to closets, the pub was paradise.

  Bill had propped a stool up against the inside of the main doors to the pub on the day he had fled to the basement, and he was pleased to see it was still there. He added to it now, slipping a pool stick through the door handles like a deadbolt. He gently tried the doors. They moved an inch or so. Wouldn’t hold up against something that was determined to get in, but it would keep out anything that blindly blundered toward the building.

  He nodded, satisfied.

  Yet the girl troubled him. The truth of it was that she was a spanner thrown into what had seemed like a well-oiled machine. He was dying anyway, a slow disintegration of his body; cells engaged in a brutal civil war that the doctors had informed him would have only one conclusion. There would be no truce.

  He had taken the news well, the doctors had told him. They seemed impressed by his positivity, and they all chuckled when he told them he planned to take up smoking. Of course there had been no need to tell them that actually, on the rare occasions he’d wasted time thinking about death, he had hoped he might go peacefully in his bed one night, and the news that he would instead suffer the prolonged agony of his body tearing itself apart was a source of bottomless despair. One last cruel surprise sprung on him by life.