The dark woods gave up nothing, save for swaying branches and the whispers of the leaves. Until a noise stopped them in their tracks: an aircraft engine, distant but increasing in volume, heading toward them.
Before Michael could even think about the possibility of a rescue service flying over the area, the noise of the engine died in an enormous explosion. The sound drained the blood from his face. Every one of the infected for miles would have heard it. He had no idea whether that meant they would be drawn away from the three figures silently traversing the woods and toward the downed aircraft, or whether the entire area would be overrun.
In either case, there was nothing to be done other than press on, furtively searching for the signs of movement that would bring about their violent deaths.
Finally, the trees thinned and they found themselves at the coast, steep cliffs dropping down into the crashing waves of the Irish Sea.
“This will have to do,” Michael said softly. “At least they can only come at us from one direction.” He nodded back at the woods.
Rachel nodded, and shrugged off the small rucksack she carried on her back. “And if they come at us, we’ve got a way out.”
She stared for a moment at the lethal drop, and met Michael’s eyes with a challenging gaze.
“I’ll go out on my own terms,” she said quietly, her voice even. “It won’t be like that.”
Michael stared at the firm set of her jaw, the clear, confident gaze, and nodded. She was right, of course. It was just that she was the only one who’d say it aloud.
“We should rest here awhile,” Michael said.
Rachel nodded, scanning the surroundings.
“Do we risk a fire?”
Michael’s brow furrowed.
“I think we have to. They are blind, so at least the light won’t draw them here. The smell might, but it is freezing. We won’t last long out here without heat anyway.”
Rachel rubbed her freezing limbs. Michael was right.
“I’ll get some wood.”
It was Jason who spoke, the first words they had heard him utter since they left St. Davids. His voice was low, flat, and almost robotic. He set Michael down on the floor and strode into the forest without another word.
Michael fixed Rachel with a meaningful stare. She shrugged.
“At least he talks now. It’s progress.”
Rachel thought of the look on her brother’s face after he had saved her from their demented mother by driving a shard of roofing tile into her brain, of the way his eyes looked suddenly broken and empty. Tears stung her eyes. Jason was here, alive, but some part of Rachel feared that she would never see her little brother again.
“He killed those things without even blinking, Rachel.”
“And? He saved us.”
“Yes, but-” Michael trailed off, letting the matter drop. She was right. Bathed in the crimson of the blood-soaked headlights, Jason had looked remorseless and terrifying to Michael as he despatched the three infected creatures. It had been chilling, but maybe it was just a sign that Jason had adapted better than anyone to the new life that had been forced upon them.
Michael stared down at his useless legs. The ground was freezing, but the dead appendages didn’t convey that information to his brain. Won’t convey anything ever again, he thought. He stared into the dark woods, lost in black notions that filled his troubled mind.
Rachel searched her pack for the food she knew she had stashed in the bottom.
“Pastries, biscuits, some chocolate,” she murmured to herself as she emptied the contents.
All cold, all loaded with sugar. None of the food she’d grabbed would do anything to quell the feeling that her body temperature was slowly and inexorably dropping, but at least it was high in calories. They’d be moving on foot now, that much was obvious. They would welcome the energy the junk food offered, but it was only a short term solution.
Maybe that’s all the world is now, Rach. Short term solutions.
She glanced at Michael, staring blankly into the woods. The crippled man was wary of Jason. She understood it, felt it too a little despite herself, but Jason was still her little brother. The gentle soul she had always known must still be in there somewhere, submerged under muscle and shock. The alternative, the possibility that this lifeless clone of her brother was all that remained, made her ache with sadness.
Her thoughts were broken by the snapping of twigs, and her heart lurched, hammering away at her chest until she saw her brothers hulking form emerge from the trees, arms weighed down by an unnecessarily vast amount of wood for a fire. She smiled. He’s still in there.
They doused the wood with a little lighter fluid and set it alight, huddling close to the flickering flames, wrapped in every item of clothing they had brought. For a long time, no one spoke, all of them on full alert, ears straining for any sound, any indication that the fire would bring death upon them.
Eventually Rachel allowed herself to relax, and focused on wishing that the thin tendrils of smoke curling up from the fire might be laced with nicotine.
Awkward silence settled on them. Conversation of any kind seemed ridiculous, unless it formed around the one thing no one wanted to discuss. In the end, it was Rachel who broke the spell.
“What are we dealing with here?” she whispered, glancing from Michael to Jason and back. Jason prodded at the fire with a branch, staring into and through it. Whether he had heard her, Rachel had no idea.
“I mean. Uh...what? Zombies?”
She flushed as she uttered the word, yet the scornful smirks she half-expected did not appear.
Michael’s brow knitted. He thought of Victor, the maniac that had imprisoned them in St. Davids. Of the way the man had hinted at being part of some organisation or group that had manufactured the disaster, of the lunatic’s constant references to film. “This is not a movie.”
He caught her dubious expression.
“We’re all thinking it, Rachel, and I think it is right, sort of,” Michael said. “But not quite. It’s an infection, they transmit it with their bite, and when you’re infected you’re nothing more than a killing machine.”
Michael’s eyes clouded over a little as he remembered that crazy scooter ride, a demented journey into the hellish centre of St. Davids, the tinny whine of the little engine; the horrific landscape of bodies torn to shreds passing under the thin wheels.
“So far, so Night of the Living Dead, but this isn’t the undead,” he said, his voice thick. “Their bodies are still completely human, vulnerable, just like us. It’s like it’s their minds that have been corrupted, like their humanity has been erased, or something. I don’t know.”
“They die, just like we die.” Jason’s low, rumbling monotone cut through the night.
Michael stared at the big man’s unfocused eyes in the gloom, searching for some reassurance, finding nothing but that vacant not-quite-there look. Without even looking, he could feel Rachel’s gaze drilling into him. He settled back, rested his head on a rolled up t-shirt, and had time to think that he had never seen the stars looking so vibrant and clear before sleep took him.
*
Rachel watched as Michael’s eyes closed, and his breathing became deep and regular. Exhaustion and anxiety battled for her attention, and the latter was winning.
Throughout most of her life, the correct path had always seemed obvious to Rachel, and her mind, once made up, usually wasn’t for swaying. School, university, employment: she chose the sensible path and only a low tolerance for the idiocy of people around her, and subsequent ill tempers ever led her astray.
The sudden and apparently total collapse of the world, following hard on the heels of the collapse of her attempt at a life in London, left her feeling rudderless. Yet she had a nagging sense that following a recently-crippled man on a quest to find his almost-certainly dead daughter did not represent the sensible choice.
She stood a moment, trying to collect her thoughts. She remembered the attraction sh
e had felt for Michael days earlier. Before Victor. Remembered too how she and Jason had turned to him for protection, and felt shame. Now though, in a world of constant terror, how would they manage travelling with a man who could not walk?
Rachel stared into the darkness beyond the trees, and found no guidance there. She couldn’t see how they could survive what seemed like a suicide mission, couldn’t see how to proceed for the best.
Couldn’t see the pair of eyes staring back at her intently.
Chapter 2
Lying on the dew-wet grass, blinking up into the light creeping slowly across the sky, the huge, deformed man tried to piece together the snapshots of blood and chaos that made up the days before he had fallen unconscious, only to wake covered in blood in the middle of nowhere.
He had no idea how much time had passed, and jumbled, confused memories jostled in his mind, some his; some not. Time itself had become something of a conundrum. It seemed no longer willing to abide by its own rules.
The chaos had begun - however many days earlier - when the deformed creature had just been a shadow in a dark corner of another man’s mind. A man sitting in a carefully sculpted doctor’s office that followed textbook instructions on creating a relaxed atmosphere to the letter.
Soft music, copious amounts of indoor vegetation. Framed pictures depicting soothing landscapes, rolling hills and still waters.
It started with Alex.
*
“And how do you feel about that?”
Alex gave the therapist a baleful glare, and was gratified to see her squirm a little. He did his best to allow none of the clichés so rife in her profession escape censure.
“How do I feel about the fact that it’s me here instead of him? I feel like life is unfair. One long, remorseless kicking. He is the one that needs to be locked up, not me. He could handle this place far better than I could. And I know why it’s not him in here, but me: it’s because he would be running the place by now.”
Dr Deborah Jackson, attractive and young – far too young for Alex to believe she was any sort of authority on the subject she claimed to be – nodded slowly, eyes focused on the forms and pamphlets in front of her; on her notes.
Alex felt impotent anger trying to rise up inside him; felt the drugs squash it for the feeble rebellion it was. She wasn’t even listening, just looking to tick the boxes that needed ticking so she could get out of the place. Friday afternoon. Doubtless she’d be shaking her perfect arse in some stranger’s liquor-stupid face within hours. That’s what she was focused on, not on Alex. If it had been him, such an affront would not have been permitted. Then the forms would have been the last thing she looked at.
Alex sighed and slumped back in his seat.
“We’ve discussed this many times, Alex. You understand that he is locked up – even more so than you?”
Alex nodded, and sighed again, defeated. The conversation was no different this time than it had been on the previous hundred occasions he had attempted to have it with Dr Jackson. She understood, but she didn’t understand. Couldn’t. What she read in her textbooks and reports bore no correlation to actually living through it. Jackson had no idea what it was like to be locked away in the place by authorities who knew perfectly well that he hadn’t committed the crime.
Well, technically, he had.
The place in question was the Moorcroft Hospital. A wonderfully generic name that gave the residents of the neighbouring towns a slender chance of forgetting just what kind of people they had locked up on their doorstep. It had previously been the Moorcroft Centre for the Criminally Insane, but that left nothing to the imagination, and it had become rare for a Town Hall meeting to pass without mention of the place, accompanied by clucking and head-shaking and dramatic sighs.
Eventually it had been renamed to keep the peace. That was just how it was with mental illness these days in Alex’s opinion: the more people actually acknowledged that mental conditions weren’t just someone putting on an act, the more things got relabelled; sanitised. That way it was possible to discuss them, without actually talking about them. He himself had been relabelled: no longer was he schizophrenic, or suffering with multiple personalities. No, now he suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder. Bland, uninspiring. Confusing and vague enough to allow those dealing with the issue to feel safe.
“Yes Doctor, I understand that he is locked up in this place, if you want to be pedantic about it. But he is not in any way doubly locked up, as you believe. The drugs are not a prison cell; they are an escape. It’s me that sits in here day after day watching the paint fading on the walls. Me who has to eat the slop you serve up. Me who feels the side effects of the fifteen different tablets I have to choke down every day. It’s me that spends every waking moment locked up with drooling lunatics.”
He saw a touch of alarm in her eyes then. It was speaking like him that did it, even just a modicum of that man bleeding through to the surface made her clench those relentlessly gym-worked cheeks a little tighter. Deep inside somewhere, he almost felt something to go along with the words, some vague simmering, like someone had run a hot knife under the pool of rage that he knew still sat in him; caused a slight ripple. Her response, that moment of fright, was delightful, but he knew he’d regret it in the long run.
The pen was scrambling across the paper, falling over itself, and he could imagine the gist of the message: up the dose.
He felt his heart sink a little. He knew his presence in the place was inevitable: it was his hands that had done the deed – deeds – and he didn’t deny that. Once they had come to understand that he was two people, once the authorities were aware of the malevolent presence of another, that he cast two shadows, and still they remained obstinate in their judgement, he accepted his fate.
It wasn’t the fact that his body was here: it was his mind. It could have been Alex enjoying some dope-fuelled vacation in the foggy recesses of his brain, while the true perpetrator paid for what he had done. Instead it was Jake, hiding out somewhere in the bowels of his psyche, laughing while Alex suffered. It had always been the same: the body was a timeshare – Jake fucking wrecked the place and Alex had to clean up the mess.
They made that choice, the authorities. Made it not because Alex needed curing; he wasn’t naïve enough to believe it would ever happen. No, they took the easy option. They could have provoked Jake out of hiding, but being locked up with Jake would have been murder. Maybe literally. So they plied him with enough drugs to bewilder an elephant, and left Alex, doped and pliant, to suffer the consequences.
Alex had always spent a lot of time inside his treacherous mind. Far too much, one way or another. Anything that took him outside, locking him back into the real world for a moment was to be cherished.
So he watched with keen interest as movement entered his field of vision in the large window that overlooked the hospital grounds behind Dr Jackson’s pert rear.
The movement was unusual for two reasons: firstly because the grounds of the hospital were off-limits unless escorted by staff, and secondly because Moorcroft Hospital existed in splendid isolation, almost fifteen miles away from the nearest town. Close enough to piss off the residents. Not close enough for anyone to visit on foot.
In point of fact, the hospital wasn’t just isolated: it was about as lonely as it was possible to get in the UK. It had been built nearly three centuries before as a stately home for some Lord whose family had long since in-bred themselves out of existence, right in the middle of Northumberland, England’s least populated and most forgotten county. Northumberland offered rolling countryside and not much else. A wilderness that few ever thought about and fewer still visited.
The handful of towns that the county boasted, barely-populated relics with quaint names like Cramlington, Ashington and Haltwhistle, clung to the southern border like children clinging to skirts, drawn into the orbit of the larger cities to the south. Most of the county was dominated by the Northumberland National Park, which presented the p
erfect place for the UK to hide away unwanted detritus like Alex.
A quarter of the park was off limits to the public, owned by the Ministry of Defence and used for no-doubt shadowy military tests. England’s own Area 51, the only difference being that people actually gave a shit about the American version. Maybe the presence of the military, all No Trespassing signs and forbidding barbed wire, was enough to put off potential visitors, who knew.
Moorcroft Hospital riding the military’s coattails into convenient obscurity was just a bonus.
So why was there a figure, running at full tilt toward the hospital from the east, where there existed nothing other than forests and fields of bored cows for mile after tedious mile?
To someone that had been subjected to the excruciating boredom of the place for three years, the sight was an electric shock of excitement, and highly perplexing.
What kind of lunatic wanted to run towards Moorcroft?
*
Head uncomfortably positioned on a rolled-up sweater that quickly absorbed the cold damp from the floor beneath, Rachel dreamed of the bunker, and of those five days spent satisfying the sick whims of a demented psychopath while Michael had lain unconscious and her brother had remained locked somewhere inside his own mind. The memories haunted her during her waking hours too, lurking somewhere just behind her eyes, but at least when awake she was able to suppress them. In sleep, helpless and vulnerable, the putrid memory of Victor clawed at the fragile structure of her mind. She slept with clenched fists, knuckles turning white.
She woke in darkness feeling hollow and drenched in cold sweat, and took her turn on watch, perched next to the fire, scanning the trees for movement.
His watch over, Jason stretched out next to the fire, and allowed sleep to take him.
Wildfire Chronicles (Book 3): Psychosis Page 2