Wildfire Chronicles (Book 3): Psychosis Page 8

  After a lifetime of struggle, the end would be ignominious; a creeping shadow. A long descent punctuated by chemotherapy and sessions with well-meaning therapists and nurses, and all the while, life had been sadistic enough to give him an expiry date, and to let him know about it. Time to think, and to turn over his life in his mind and find only regrets. That had been the cruellest part of all.

  Bill had heard the expression bucket list. But what good was that to a man in his seventies, a man that struggled every morning to persuade his stubborn joints to move? He wouldn’t be doing any bungee jumping. Wouldn’t be travelling to far-flung corners of the world to see as much as possible before his eyes closed forever.

  Worst of all, the news had forced upon him a fresh wave of longing for Donna, who had lost her own cellular war all those years before. In the intervening period, Bill had found a way to anaesthetise himself against that loss; not to get over it but to submerge it beneath a layer of new memories. To forget.

  When the doctors told him the news, and he knew that his time was to be measured in months rather than years, he had wished more than anything that Donna could have been there to hold him, and to walk the dark path alongside him, and the grief returned all at once; two decades’ worth of it, and the pain of that was worse than anything cancer could ever throw at him.

  Drinking his way to oblivion had seemed the only logical choice, and for three months he had done just that, slowly clearing out every last penny from his meagre savings and dropping the lot behind the bar at the Mouse and Hound. He wouldn’t walk alone in the dark. Jack Daniels and Jim Beam would be his travelling companions.

  And then the world erupted in bloody chaos, and Bill watched from the windows of the pub as faces he recognised twisted into fearful masks of murderous rage, and the people of Aberystwyth turned on each other with shocking violence, and he retreated to the cellar and the stockroom to accelerate his plan.

  Claire represented a hitch, because even as Bill tried to persuade himself that she was not his problem, he knew that the argument was as futile as prayers to stop the mutation rampaging through his body in its tracks. She was alone, exposed to a world of horrors no child should ever have to witness, and he knew well enough that fear and solitude were a lethal combination.

  The girl needed help.

  Bill was going to have to sober up.

  *

  The noise, soft and stealthy, came from behind the door, mingling with the stench of death and decay, making Rachel’s nerves howl with tension.

  Hands trembling wildly, she placed the tip of the baseball bat against the door and pushed gently.

  It was like the curtains coming up on a special effects extravaganza: the bedroom was awash with blood, painted like a Pollock from hell, stringy spatters of gore decorating the walls; even hanging from the low ceiling.

  She heard John’s intake of breath close behind her, shallow and tremulous; heard the dumbstruck fear and wonder echoed in her own ragged breathing. This wasn’t just the standard level of insanity that she had already come to expect from the Infected: this went way beyond. The atmosphere of the room was charged with the fury of the killing that had occurred inside, like the violence wrought between the ancient walls had left a permanent imprint.

  What was left of the farmer’s body was strewn across the bed. The man’s head was almost completely removed and, even from the doorway, Rachel could see the teeth marks on the ruins of his neck.

  Someone tried to chew his head off.

  The thought settled in her mind like oil on water, blocking out the light, leaving her feeling greasy; tainted. The world was moving beyond her comprehension, moving at a pace she was not sure she could match.

  Hold it together, Rach.

  Her eyes found no respite further down the bed: most of the flesh had been ripped away from the man’s arms, and his torso had an obscene new orifice torn into it; a grisly gash from which the smell of the man’s last meal oozed, lending the stink of his death a terrible familiarity. He reeked of rot and bacon.

  Rachel turned away, trying and failing to meet John’s eyes, searching for a point of focus, anything that might suppress the urge to vomit. She clutched her stomach.

  And then it occurred to her: aside from the remains on the bed, the room was empty. Where had the noise come from?

  The answer to the question forming in Rachel’s mind nearly sent her over the edge: the corpse on the bed suddenly twitched.

  It’s moving, oh dear God, it’s moving…

  All their talk of zombies and the undead suddenly did not seem so far-fetched to Rachel, and her mind was filled with the images from the movies: hands clawing their way out of graves; shambling corpses, stiff with rigor mortis; the dead ravenously seeking out the brains of the living.

  And then the torso on the bed erupted.

  “Rats!” John yelled, and then his hand was on her shoulder, twisting her, propelling her back into the hallway, just as a half-dozen of the creatures spilled from the distended belly of the corpse and charged straight at them.

  Rachel saw their eyes as she stumbled backward, and again the image of her beloved family dog surfaced in her mind, and something clicked into place. It’s not just humans. She had known it, of course, had seen it with her own eyes, but the horror of the event had dulled her senses, and she hadn’t considered its significance.

  John leapt backwards, slamming the door shut, crying out as the expected thud turned out to be a crunch. One of the rats, caught between door and frame, as though it had sacrificed itself so that its brethren could attack them.

  Terror took Rachel then, and she scrambled backwards without looking, swinging the baseball bat crazily, catching one of the murderous vermin mid-air, catapulting it into the wall with a wet thump.

  From the corner of her eye she saw one of the things clamp its tiny jaw onto John’s t-shirt, heard him yelling in disgust as he tore it away, throwing it back down the corridor, and then her attention was snatched away: one of them was coming right for her, something like determination on its face, leaving her rooted to the spot.

  She didn’t move as the thing leapt away from the floor, cursing her paralysis, expecting that at any moment her life was going to be ended – after all this – by a fucking rat.

  The rat sank tiny teeth into flesh, gnawing and tearing, but the flesh did not belong to Rachel. Her eyes widened in horror as she recognised the solid, muscular limb held protectively in front of her.

  Jason.

  Even as tears of understanding welled in her eyes, Jason, crushing one of the remaining rats under his boot, plucking the other from his arm and squeezing the life out of it, whispered to her softly.

  “Better go, Rach.”

  He dropped his eyes to the wound on his arm, little more than a scratch, insignificant and all-consuming.

  Rachel didn’t have time to think as John wrapped an arm around her waist and lifted her from the floor, sprinting down the stairs to the kitchen, slamming the door behind him and dragging one of the kitchen cupboards across it.

  She screamed Jason’s name the whole way down.

  *

  Alex – Jake – regarded Deborah with a sly grin.

  “What a shame, doctor, for us to finally meet under these circumstances. I confess: I had hoped that we would get a chance to…chat somewhere a little more private. Without so much…competition for your corpse.

  “World’s gone to shit, huh Doc?”

  He spread his arms wide and smiled.

  Deborah stammered.

  “On the plus side, the idiot at the wheel didn’t get me killed before I could sample it. Small mercies. And I suppose I have to thank him. For leaving me a present.”

  The smile faded, and the stare intensified, and Deborah suddenly needed very much to urinate. How could she have forgotten just who she was running with?

  Jake McIntosh had been incarcerated three years earlier, finally caught after escaping police custody once to kick-start an eight-month
manhunt during which he managed to kill three people. His final tally, including his last kill, one of the police who had finally tracked him down, stood at seventeen. For a small country, unused to the creative atrocities people are capable of unleashing on each other, the McIntosh case was like being shaken awake in a strange place.

  McIntosh’s crimes had oscillated between sickeningly violent and outright insane. The courts, persuaded by the chilling testimony of the only person he had let live – a woman he had forced to eat several of her own fingers and her entire left foot – decided on the latter. He would spend the rest of his life locked in Moorcroft, in a drug-induced stupor.

  As Deborah had attempted to understand and treat his psychosis, she had thought about that one the most, the survivor. Wondered about what kind of fear a person must be able to instil to get a human being to devour themselves. All of McIntosh’s crimes, in all their varying executions – bore a consistent trademark: sadism.

  The country’s most popular tabloid had dubbed him the ‘Painkiller’. A pun. He regretted that the world falling to the apocalypse had robbed him of the opportunity to find that particular editor and eviscerate them.

  Deborah thought about that name now, about the way it seemed to fit: a monster like him deserved a scary name. She had only one chance.

  “Alex, you know how often we’ve talked about this. I want you to focus on your breathing, go through the steps, okay?”

  Her voice shook like a barn door in a hurricane.

  Jake snorted a laugh tinged with genuine mirth.

  “You’ve been labouring under a misapprehension all this time, Doc. Alex tried to tell you, but would you listen?”

  Deborah shook her head in confusion, felt the tears spill onto her cheek.

  “I am not a product of Alex’s imagination, doctor. He is a product of mine.”

  “Why keep me alive, then? Why not just kill me right now?” Her terror, left with nowhere to go, transmuted, becoming a bleak, impotent rage.

  “Maybe some part of me yearns for redemption,” he said sombrely, and then burst into a fit of giggles.

  “You’re a distraction, Jackson. Bait. When I need something to draw them away from me, I’ll be using you. Tough deal.” He gave a sympathetic shake of his head.

  Deborah choked out a sob. Jake sighed.

  “No, you’re right. When you’re right, you’re right.”

  He lifted the jagged shard of pipe and impaled Deborah’s throat in a smooth, arcing motion. She felt the blood gushing down over her chest, felt the weight of it, the terrible impact. It doesn’t hurt a bit, she thought, and the notion made something in her soul shriek.

  “That’s for the fucking drugs,” Jake said, leaning in close, dipping the last syllable in poison.

  Deborah gurgled, and the light faded away.

  *

  Jason stood in the narrow corridor, staring dumbly at the tiny scratch on his forearm that was going to end his life.

  After a few long seconds he felt it, deep inside: a sort of shifting, accompanied by an avalanche of pain that seemed to consume everything, blocking out the light momentarily. It felt like every cell in his body had caught fire, and he shuddered and writhed, willing his hand to grasp the handle of the knife he carried and plunge it into his neck to end the torment, but he found himself paralysed.

  And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the pain simply faded away, and Jason collapsed to the floor.

  I’m still me.

  The thought was incomprehensible. And untrue, he realised abruptly. Something had changed.

  He saw his ruined mother standing at the end of the corridor, glaring at him, but it was different now, like he could feel her, like her presence was an itch at the border of his consciousness.

  She looked furious, her ghastly face twisted into a mask of rage, and Jason shrank from her, pressing himself into the wall, his mind reeling.

  *

  It was a straight right, not too quick, not too powerful, and maybe at any other time John would have seen it and avoided it with ease. As it was, when Rachel drove her fist into his jaw, he did not see it coming, and it caught him flush. Hurt, too.

  “Bastard,” she spat, winding up a left hook, “Who the fuck do you think you are? That’s my brother up there!”

  John caught the second blow mid-flight, letting it defuse harmlessly against his palm.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” he said, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “But you saw him, he wanted you out of there, he wanted to protect you.”

  “What is it?” Michael said, “What happened to Jason?”

  Rachel’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “I don’t need your protection, John. And even if I did, you’re a little late.”

  She spat the words bitterly, and Michael saw for the first time a crack in the wall she had built around herself after being left alone with Victor in the bunker. He realised then just how hard she was working to hold herself together, and marvelled at the way she had managed it. With his broken body and Jason’s broken mind, it was easy to forget that anything had befallen Rachel. That was her doing, he realised.

  “Okay Rachel, fine, you got it. But I’ll protect myself any fucking way I see fit. And that includes getting as far away as possible when your wardrobe-sized brother turns into a fucking killing machine. Next time, I won’t bring you along. That’s no problem for me.”

  “They got Jason?” Michael looked confused. “Then why isn’t he in here now? You think that door would stop him?”

  Rachel stared at him for a moment, eyes lost in a cloud of fury, and then the storm of rage enveloping her seemed to pass.

  “You’re right,” she said, voice trembling.

  Michael nodded.

  “Listen,” he said.

  The three of them held their breath for a moment, ears straining against the silence. The sound they expected to hear - Jason crashing around upstairs in a murderous rage - was not forthcoming.

  “He’s okay,” Rachel said, and she placed both hands on the cupboard John had thrown in front of the door and heaved.

  “Hey, wait a minute.”

  “She’s right, John,” Michael said. “When they turn, it’s pretty much instantaneous. If Jason had become one of them, he’d have been chasing you down those stairs. He’d be hammering at that door right now.”

  Rachel let out a cry of triumph as she shoved the cupboard away from the door with a squeal of wood on tile. Michael and John winced at the noise, but Rachel was already gone, sprinting up the stairs. Michael shot a glance out of one of the narrow windows. The storm was still raging outside. It might cover the noise they were making. He hefted the rifle across his lap anyway, and kept his eyes on the door.

  “Better go after her, mate.”

  John gave a frustrated nod, and hurried toward the stairs.

  Jason sat against the corridor wall, his expression foggy as he stared down at the small tear in his forearm. Around him, the bodies of the rats, squashed like bugs, littered the floor.

  “I don’t understand,” he mumbled. “Why am I still here?”

  He looked at Rachel, and she saw a heart breaking echo of her little brother in his eyes, the boy who had found school so overwhelming, who had been frightened of everything. The one she had so fiercely protected. Tears welled in her eyes.

  “Come downstairs, Jase, we’ll figure it out.”

  She slipped a hand under his massive arm, pulling gently. After a moment of resistance he stood and followed her toward the stairs.

  As they descended John crouched and examined the rats. They had been infected, he was certain, their eyes looked ready to burst, and he was sure if they could they would have chewed them out of their own skulls. So why hadn’t they passed the infection on?

  He stared a moment longer, and a thought dawned, something that seemed important, though he could not put his finger on why.

  The rats hadn’t attacked each other.

  Lost in thought, he followed Jason a
nd Rachel back downstairs.

  *

  “Do you think it’s like this everywhere?”

  Claire had finished the entire pack of peanuts, and with the distraction of hunger pushed aside for the moment, her attention turned back to their predicament. As she waited for Bill’s response, she ran a hand along the bar at which she sat. She liked the way it felt: rough, grainy; old. A lot of people must have sat exactly where she now sat.

  Bill was standing a few feet away at one of the pub’s large windows. Thick glass, opaque. They afforded some protection, but they also meant he could not see what was happening on the street. He felt far more exposed here than in the cellar. If one of the crazed lunatics out there put their mind to getting through it, the glass would present no obstacle.

  He frowned.

  “I think it might be, Claire. If it weren’t, I suspect the place would be crawling with police right now, or army.”

  “I saw the police try to stop them in the market. They didn’t last long.”

  Bill nodded absently.

  “But we’re safe here, aren’t we?”

  Bill turned from the window and stroked his rough chin.

  “Ish. We were safer in the cellar.”

  Claire wrinkled her small nose, the memory of the smell down there still fresh.

  Bill grinned.

  “I think we should be moving on, though. Aberystwyth isn’t safe. Maybe nowhere is, but I’d sure feel a lot better if I could get you somewhere with less people.”

  Claire brightened.

  “Like where?”

  “My brother has a place. Up on the north coast. Right on the cliffs, and not a soul for miles. I can’t think there would be many safer places than that right now.”

  “How will we get there?”

  Bill smiled at her, eyes twinkling.

  “Same way you get anywhere young lady. One step at a time. And the first step is getting out of this pub. Come with me.”

  He started for the door that led out of the bar area. Claire shuffled off the bar stool that she’d been dangling her short legs from and hurried after him.