Didn’t see the shock in their eyes or the barely contained fear on their faces.
<><><>
Julian woke the next morning unrefreshed after a listless night fruitlessly trying to achieve real sleep. He moped and dawdled and finally decided to avail himself of one of the few luxuries open to him.
A private shower.
Occupancy levels in the centre were vastly below those anticipated and that meant that most of those present resided in what were classed as VIP quarters. These included showers and lavatories. Nothing amazing but better than the dormitories on the higher levels that shared communal washing facilities.
Julian had inspected those facilities, if you could call them that, as he’d quickly familiarised himself with the bunker. He’d felt mild despair at the thought that he’d have to sleep, wash and relieve himself in the company of strangers. He’d felt a corresponding sense of relief when Pearcey informed him that the dorms weren’t in use due to the minimal numbers at the complex.
A private shower was a luxury for people who were important. Standing in the tiny shower enclosure, sprinkled by the weakest spray of water he could ever recall having experienced, what felt like a lukewarm dripping tap, it didn’t feel so luxurious. His feeling of good fortune receded alongside any sense of undeserved importance.
Still, he relaxed a little and began to unwind.
The world was going mad, God only knew what had become of his friends and family.
All he could do was to try and cope with things. He was lucky on two fronts. He wasn’t affected by the disease, whatever it was, and he was somewhere safe amidst what was rapidly turning into some twisted alien zombie nightmare.
He had sluiced maybe sixty percent of the soap from his body when all of the lights went out and the water stopped completely.
Pitch black.
A total absence of light.
“Power’s failed,” he muttered to himself.
“The backup will kick in shortly.”
The time and the darkness stretched like warm toffee and despite the cooling water on his goosed skin and a doglike shiver running through him, he felt his armpits grow wet with hot sweat.
The constant background hum of the bunker was gone.
He didn’t like that hum, it irritated him and disturbed his sleep in the same way that air-conditioning played on his nerves when he visited hotter climes.
But he missed it now. The reassuring hum. The way a man will miss a wife or a mother that nags and grinds at him but nevertheless cooks his meals and cleans his dirty skivvies. The lack of hum meant that things had just gotten even more fucked up than they were.
And, in purely prosaic terms, it meant that he was standing naked, damp and soap-sticky in a little dark space, beyond which was a massively bigger complexity of dark spaces.
He was also just a little bit spatially disorientated. Well, quite a lot disoriented if truth be told.
He slapped at the enclosure door and eventually fumbled out, hands splayed out in front of him like a newly blinded child.
“Oh, come on, come on. There’s a backup power supply, I’ve seen it on the schematics. It’s a buggery-bollocks government bunker for Christ’s Sake, it has to have bloody back-up power ...or ...or there’s no bloody point in any of it. Kick in you bastard, come on and kick in.”
Stood still and attempted to quell insipient hyperventilation. Counted to ten and then counted again.
Smelled the acid tang of his own fresh perspiration overlaying the metallic concrete dankness that permeated the room, permeated the whole shelter.
Wondered if he might be able to find his sensible Rockport ankle boots by sense of smell alone in this undesired sensory-deprivation test reality.
Lights flickered and failed and his spirits flared and fell with them.
Flickered again for a longer period and then held.
A lot dimmer than mains provision but blessed light nevertheless.
The shower resumed with even less force, the water splattering out with a dull pathetic patter onto the steel surround.
Julian reached in and shut it off and then scrambled at clothes.
Clumsily dragged underwear over damp legs onto soap-sticky genitals, lost his balance and crashed to the floor and bounded up again to finish dressing. Mindless of bruised head and elbow, uncaring of suds caking and drying on his body and in his hair.
He was partially dressed when the klaxon started going off.
Not deafening, not like the alien movies, but strident enough to be an unpleasant noise.
Uncannily like the alarm ringtone he had on his Iphone. He looked at the handset even though he knew the sound was too loud and too all-pervasive to be his phone.
He could feel panic bubbling just below the surface and he forced it down. He’d suffered panic attacks in the past and had developed his own routine to maintain his equilibrium.
Slow down and think it through.
The power switching to emergency meant that something with the grid had failed. Maybe not the entire grid yet but something to do with their connection to it. Maybe localised, but failure whichever way you figured it.
He’d been expecting that but it actually happening hit him with a reality that was somehow much realer than the concept. He’d been instructed that in the event of the alarm sounding, they were to convene in the communal area. The cafeteria.
“Thornton’s probably calling a school assembly to inform every one of the blatantly bleeding obvious ...calm down and carry on boys and girls, it’s only that the power is down.”
Said out loud to himself.
Julian took another deep breath and decided he’d get there when he got there. When he was good and ready. Fuck Thornton, the fat officious little prick. Fuck him.
A decision that, in the grand butterfly whirl of things, helped keep him breathing longer than many of the other inhabitants of the centre.
“Screw you professor twat. You can wait on me because I’m going to finish getting dressed in a civilised manner ...and take a leak while I’m at it.”
As he tried to piss in semi-darkness, it occurred to him that if it was more than Thornton simply grabbing the opportunity to have a public ego massage, he’d be wise to take his stuff with him.
Just in case ...well, just in case was all.
Cramming the last of the various bits and pieces that he couldn’t imagine living without into the pockets of his bag, he exited the room and headed towards the cafeteria.
The dull grey corridors were empty and quiet. Duller and greyer than he expected.
As he entered the final twist of passages that led to his destination, he paused.
He could hear something now.
It sounded like ...well, it sounded like screaming.
And hollow bangs. Firearm reports?
He went on and got as far as the door, by which time he knew that something very bad was happening. It was on the other side of that door, in the canteen. Something really bad.
There were five entrances to the communal area, the cafe, in the CIMC complex. The one he stood outside was the least used by the obscure virtue of an architectural anomaly. Successive renovations of the bunker had isolated his route to the centre. It wasn’t planned, it was an accident of development.
When he’d finally nerved himself up enough to do so, Julian entered the cafeteria through that least used, relatively isolated entrance.
A quirk of fate, pure chance that he had to approach via this route. The butterfly resting its wings a continent away and everything changes.
Pure good fortune that he entered the biggest space in the complex, other than the garage, through the most distant and empty part of that area.
Good fortune that allowed him to walk twenty feet into the room and bump-halt into a table before his eyes allowed the reality of what he was seeing to register in a truly meaningful way. Just blind luck that meant he did this before he was inescapably embroiled in the events unfolding before his eyes.
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There was some sort of fantasy battle underway.
Orcs pouring through two of the doors into the room and physically attacking normal human beings. Some of those normal humans were people that he knew and had spoken to. People he had talked with.
He knew, intellectually, that the orcs were really people, the collapsed people, woken up and changed, but it was very difficult to translate that into this reality. He’d seen the video footage for Christ’s sake, but this was something else.
The noise and the smell, the brutal realness. His mind found it easier to think of this as an escapist interpretation of theoretical concepts.
Orcs. Fantasy things. It couldn’t be real. It was very difficult to credit what he was witnessing as reality.
It looked like most of the occupants of the centre were here, had made it here before he arrived.
But those people were increasingly outnumbered by attackers. The attackers, the orcs, were surging into the room. Pouring in like water from several spouts.
Small knots of horror formed and swirled around the room as the creatures latched on to individuals, clawing and biting with a ferocity that was awesome in its animalistic single-minded purpose.
Little eddies of violence where blood flew and screams were torn from throats.
Thankfully for Julian, still at the far end of the cafeteria, close to the vending machines and sinks, the distance between him and the focus of the action was populated by tables and chairs, sofas and standing spaces.
From his fortunate vantage point he saw the people that he knew, however brief the acquaintance. People he had engaged in conversation, however fleeting and awkward.
Doctor Thornton, sprawled alone across a table that was meant for six, his face being chewed off by one the creatures. Crouched over him like a lover, a naked, virtually hairless thing with a body corded and rippling, as if steel cables bunched and flexed below its skin. The chewing wet and obscene in the dim illumination of the half-lit café.
Another thing, in the remnants of trousers and shirt, squeezing in and gnawing at Thornton’s left leg. Bone visible where great chunks of flesh had been rendered free by claws and teeth.
Silke, a ridiculously beautiful Danish girl, biochemist at a Ministry of Defence research institute, being eviscerated against a grey concrete wall. Liquid and lumps bubbling from her slender smooth stomach. Spilling out of her like blasphemy.
Orcs rushing to catch them.
A knot of people retreated in Julian’s’ direction. Holte, the Deputy PM, and several others. Barriered themselves behind an overturned table. Swinging chairs and pathetic table knives as creatures massed in front of them.
Nightmare beasts that darted in and withdrew, clawed with lethal, lunging swings, pounced with predatory finality as individuals became fractionally isolated from the group. Inches making the difference between life and death as an age old dance of hunter and hunted played itself out in the most unlikely of settings with unimaginable participants.
Julian was transfixed.
Motionless, clutching his bag in front of him like a schoolboy arriving for his first day at real school. The big kids here weren’t bullies or cruelly sarcastic, they were monsters who ate you.
Slack jawed and defenceless, his bowels loose and hot, he stood rooted and incoherent.
His mind stuttering and useless like the stylus on an old vinyl record stuck in an endless scratch loop that jumped and fell ...jumped and fell ...jumped and fell, never to complete the rotation and never to make sense of the circuit.
“Slaughter ....they’re eating people. It’s a slaughter ...they’re eating people. They’ve ...mutated. They’re monsters.”
And so he stood and watched as his death approached like a river of snarling hardwood and tensile steel made flesh.
A jumble of tables and chairs to his right erupted, throwing the two creatures that were crawling over it back, crashing and skittering away, scrabbling claws seeking purchase as they sought to right themselves.
First one man emerged, wrestling a creature. A second appeared and threw himself to the ground, sliding backwards and desperately swiping for something black and metallic that slid from his grasp.
The first, the wrestler, screamed. Horrendous screams that rose above the general din, seemed to dwarf it in their extremity. Those screams haunted Julian. The rawness of them, the sheer horror implicit in them. No person should ever make that sound. Nothing should make that sound.
The thing on the man was huge and sinewy. It sank its teeth into his forehead and tore hair and face away with a sudden jerking motion.
Julian could see its talons through the man’s arms. The man had big arms, arms that were more muscle-bound trophy than functional limb, and those skeleton fingers had punched through from one side to the other, shredding muscle and bone alike, as if muscle and bone were so much soft mulch.
The thing’s head hammered backward and forward, a relentless metronome, brutal beyond belief, obliterating the wrestler’s face and neck in a fountain of blood and tissue. The creature dropped to the floor atop him and began to tear at the rest of his body, tear and feed.
Julian looked away and saw that the group around Holte was undergoing a final fragmentation. Attacked from front and sides and, with no real weapons, they scattered as a fresh swell of creatures boiled into the room.
The sheer weight of numbers thwarted their attempts at defence. Creatures were propelled forward by those behind, slashing and snarling into what remained of the group. Breaking it, decimating it.
A tiny creature was nearing Holte, closing on him with a fluid inevitability.
Oh god, that has to be a little child, it has to be a little kiddie, mutated and awful.
It was perhaps three feet tall, all teeth and talons. Impossible to tell if it had been a boy or girl from where Julian stood.
It leapt at Holte and mercilessly ripped at his head and shoulders. Warped arms and legs pinwheeling in feverish waves that reduced Holte to so much raw meat, produced an unbearable squealing ululation from the man.
Sound as torment, one nerve shredding-noise after another blending into an unspeakable soundtrack. Accompanied by the smell of bloody copper and old perspiration and stale recycled air.
The aisle before Julian cleared and his gaze shifted to another one of those hideous creatures, another beast. The thing was looking directly at him, seemed to be staring into his eyes. Shoeless, the remains of colourless socks braceletting its ankles, clad in a shredded navy blue overall which in turn was covered in maroon stains that glistened patchily in the dim, inadequate lighting.
Julian observed this as if through a lens.
The riot of activity around that figure blurred out of focus, the noise diminished, and he understood that here was his end.
This thing, this now human beast, would be his personal usher into purgatory. This mutated delight that might not so long ago have been a painter or decorator, would kill him.
Almost certainly a tradesman of some sort.
Julian’s ratcheting mind skittered with nonsense, refused to come up with anything practical, something that might save his life.
This jobbing plumber turned nightmare animal would be his own personal escort through the intricate and less than beautiful pathways to the gates of hell.
You don’t believe in God. There won’t be any hell, they’ll just be pain, ripped skin and spilled blood. Parts of your body being torn away and you’ll join that awful chorus, you’ll scream like all the rest of them. Everyone screams down here. Where did you read that?
That thought was enough, just about enough, to break his stasis.
He bent to his right and hefted a chair as the creature closed and launched itself at him. His weak swing of the chair deflected the inevitable and the thing’s trajectory carried it behind him, simultaneously knocking him to the floor.
On his back, chest heaving, his head turned to look at his assailant.
He met eyes that were completely fo
reign.
Unknowable.
Moments mattered now.
He knew that fact in his gut and in his head.
Brain and bowel in perfect accord.
Scant feet between them, he rolled, grabbed the chair and rose on one knee, canted to one side, struggling the chair behind him in a swing that never left the ground.
He felt ropey saliva dribble onto the side of his face and felt hot, fetid breath wash over him. Inhaled the meaty moist stink of the creature poised above him. It had moved too quickly, was way too fast. He didn’t have chance to turn his head and look his death in the eye.
The deafening boom denied him that dubious pleasure. His ears rang and a silence, blessed in its entirety, descended on him like an ice cold sluice of water on a sweltering day.
The creature lay three feet away, its head holed and partially shattered, sections splattered behind it.
A hand hauled him upright and Pearcey’s face filled his vision, mouthing words that he couldn’t hear. Propelled him towards the door by which he’d entered, forceful enough to make him to stumble and fall.
Looking back, Pearcey was about to be engulfed by beasts. The man raised his arm straight out in front of him and another explosion rent the air. He maintained the position, making small adjustments in direction, and fired three more shots in quick succession.
The four creatures running at him were thrown to the floor. Two twitching but essentially motionless, parts of their skulls blown away. One of the others, wounded in the chest, attempted to rise again, slowed but not stopped, struggling on its knees, hissing and spitting.
The fourth, shot in the abdomen, launched itself at Pearcey from the ground. Startled by the unexpected attack, Pearcey reeled backwards, falling with the beast flailing at him, the gun knocked just beyond his grasp.
Holding the thing by its arms, contorting and sliding back as they fell, Pearcey managed to bring his leg between them and thrust it back, separating them momentarily.
Grabbing a chair he forced it between them as it came again, growling and ravenous, spit flying.
Ferine Apocalypse (Book 1): Collapse Page 30