Claire and Pete watched the grisly dance in silence, both wondering if they might ever again leave the car, when suddenly the inaudible music stopped. Every shuffling step halted, every mutilated face picked out by the glare of the headlights rose to the ceiling in unison, as though they had simultaneously caught the hint of a sound.
And then they did something new. Something Claire hadn’t seen before.
*
Michael felt Jason’s bulky body stiffen underneath him as the place fell into impenetrable darkness. A trap. He could almost feel the clenching of Jason’s jaw.
John dropped instantly into a defensive crouch, blade raised in front of him. With his left hand he reached out and found Rachel’s arm, and pulled her down into a crouch next to him. He left his hand on her forearm, straining to hear anything, ready to squeeze a warning.
Nothing.
“It’s not just the lights,” Michael hissed, “Everything in the offices is dark. It’s a power cut.”
John allowed himself to relax a little, rising up on his haunches. Michael was right, even the blinking lights representing answerphone messages had winked out of existence.
“It’s okay,” he whispered, guiding Rachel back up.
“Or maybe power failure is closer to the truth,” Michael said, and their hearts sank. Rachel had been right about the future that lay in store for the country, the steady unravelling of the world the people had taken for granted. But it had happened so fast.
We were always so close to this, Michael thought, only ever a few days away from things ending. The thought terrified and saddened him. Civilization was just a flimsy floor that could have been whipped out from underneath them at any point.
Gradually their eyes adjusted to the heavy darkness, and they were able to pick out the shapes of the glass walls and doors, but little else. Progress through the offices, if it were to remain silent, would be painfully slow.
John reached into a pocket and pulled out a small flashlight he had retrieved from the wreckage of the car the day before, flicking it on.
Almost immediately he felt Rachel’s hand shoot out, covering the light.
“No light,” she hissed. “It’s not just the Infected we need to worry about.”
John stared at her in surprise, just able to pick out the expression in the soft glow seeping out from beneath the hand that blocked the light. She looked deadly serious, and for a moment John could see the pain written on her features, the toxic memory of five days spent alone with Victor Chamberlain. He flicked the light off, trying to quickly construct a mental map of the path ahead. At the end of the glass corridor created by offices to either side, he knew there was a left turn, leading to a closed door underneath an exit sign. If they were lucky, that would lead them out into the store itself, and moonlight streaming through the windows might give them a chance to see their surroundings.
It felt like moving through soup, like a thickness hung in the air itself.
When they reached the door and John opened it, inch by dreadful inch, they saw it immediately: flashlights winking into life in the building opposite them.
Seeing the lights sent a quiver through Michael. It meant the chance of Infected nearby had to be small; to them the presence of humans seemed to act like a black hole, slowly sucking them toward it. It also meant there were humans who had survived through the week. Just as they had.
When Michael thought about the toll the previous week days had taken on the four of them, he couldn’t help but wonder if other people were really something he wanted to run into either.
As the four of them approached the windows in the dark, staring across at the cones of light, and realising that the movement of them seemed odd, John didn’t see philosophy: he saw a combat tactic.
He twisted even as the first of them charged through the doors separating them from the main mall area to the right.
Two men and a woman. Armed exactly as John had envisioned himself being; laden with knives. Bloodied. Not friendly.
He reached into the sheath at his side without missing a beat, bringing his arm up smoothly and releasing the smaller of his knives, sending it on a brief journey into the shoulder of the first of them, spinning him around. The section of John’s mind still capable of analytical thought registered disappointment: missed the throat, and then all thoughts were gone, and he was charging forward.
*
As one, the Infected surrounding the car hummed, as if in acknowledgment of something, and Claire felt the significance of the change in their behaviour despite her lack of understanding.
The creatures snapped into motion like one coiled entity, all sprinting back toward the doorway, crashing into the walls, draining clumsily out of the room through the narrow exit like congealed fat.
Claire and Pete sat, stunned, mouths dropped open, until the last of the Infected exited the basement level. They heard the noise of the creatures’ passage receding, finally disappearing back through the door two storeys up.
In the light cast by the headlights, Pete turned and saw Claire’s face, pale and white, hovering in the gloom; disembodied. He hoped she could see no more of him, and he felt his cheeks burn a little as he clenched his thighs uncomfortably on the wet warmth at his groin.
After an age he whispered: “Holy shit” and Claire frowned a little at the word.
“It was like they all heard something.”
Claire nodded, lips trembling wildly.
“Did you hear anything?”
She shook her head.
“I didn’t either,” he said, sounding perplexed. “They were…humming. I’ve never seen them do that. Like they were talking to each other.” His brow knitted.
“Thank you, for turning on the lights,” Claire said, by way of her feeling that she should say something. “How did you know where the switch was?” Her eyes were wide, as it suddenly dawned on her that in the dark, Pete could easily have sounded the horn instead of finding the lights.
His pale face dropped, eyes squeezing shut.
“This is my Dad’s car,” he said. “This is where we were, when...you know.”
Of course she knew she shouldn’t have asked; it’s just that Claire didn’t quite know it in time, but the words were faltering even as they spilled out of her mouth, and she saw the blood on the driver side window. Inside.
“Where’s your Dad?”
She bit her lip as his eyes filled with pain.
“What do you think we should do?” she said before he could respond.
In the ghostly light, she saw his narrow shoulders shrug.
“I think we should see if we can go somewhere else. If they come back, I don’t want to be stuck here.”
Claire saw his eyes fall to the blood spattered on the door next to him, and understood. She nodded. Headlights ran car batteries down in any case, her mother had told her so once in laughing frustration, and she did not want to be there when the car park went dark again.
Careful not to make a sound, they crept out of the car and over to the stairwell, and cocked their ears. A deep rumbling above them. Outside. Humming. Eyes wide, straining in the gloom to catch any sign of movement, Claire and Pete began to climb.
*
It was Cardiff that made Michael do it. The darkness that had fallen over him in Cardiff, the same darkness that had ringed his consciousness ever since, laying siege to his senses. The choice he’d made in Cardiff, taking the road that led to blood, the one he had prayed nightly he would never have to make again. He had tried to keep the images of the door; of the corridor and the screaming baby, locked away from his consciousness, tried burying them in the noise of everyday life.
Now, his mind leapt through the memories, processing them even as he saw John shifting his weight downwards, arming the strike he was preparing to deliver to the second man’s knee; computing outcomes as he felt Jason shrugging out from beneath him, snapping into action like an automated sentry.
There would be noise. But John and Jas
on would kill the strangers, and Michael saw from their faces that they were only attacking through fear. If they started killing the survivors they met, there would be no turning back. He had to stop it. Michael raised the rifle, pointing the barrel at the ceiling, forefinger cradling the trigger.
*
Claire tilted her head by fractions, until the street came into view. There were hundreds of them standing there, humming, all of them seeming to crowd around one that stood above the rest, humming at them, conducting them like an evangelist.
*
And fired.
*
The humming stopped, cut short by something Claire couldn’t hear. The creature she thought of as the conductor roared and leapt to the ground and then the whole mass of them charged south as one, hundreds of them filling the winding streets; a seething river of flesh and teeth.
Chapter 13
The roar of the rifle made them freeze.
Michael was on the floor, where Jason had dropped him as he stumbled blindly toward murder. Jason had already killed for him once, and the repercussions had damaged the poor bastard’s mind, perhaps irrevocably. Michael wouldn’t allow it to happen again.
The people that had burst through the doors screaming wildly in terror they hoped they’d disguised as threat all stared at the gun in horror.
“You’ve killed us all,” the one with the knife embedded in his shoulder grunted through gritted teeth. “Every one of them for miles heard that.”
“And you heard that,” Michael snapped. “We die killing them. Not killing each other. Is that hard to understand? In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re an endangered species. Maybe fighting each other isn’t the wisest course of action. Does everybody get that?”
He wondered then if he would have to raise the rifle again, half expected that his words would need the reinforcement of weaponry. Felt a little like weeping when he sensed the tension among them begin to dissipate.
The faces of the strangers were fixed on him. He felt Rachel’s gaze on him too. Even John turned to stare at him, and Michael realised suddenly that the man’s military background didn’t automatically confer leadership skills. Only Jason didn’t meet Michael’s gaze. His eyes remained rooted on the distance, staring at something only he saw.
They crave someone to tell them what to do, Michael thought, surprised. They hadn’t just lost their homes; their loved ones. They had lost authority, and for many people, that would be a loss almost as grievous.
“One of the shops in this place must have a basement, somewhere we can lock down. We need to find it fast.”
“They all do,” one of the strangers said, a paunchy man in office wear. “Stockrooms, maintenance areas.”
Michael felt like punching the air.
“Then the hardware store it is,” he said grimly.
*
Alex McIntosh awoke to a slow, insistent pain that sat in a sort of stasis; muted. Like a throbbing drum heard through the walls of a neighbouring building. He knew instinctively that when he moved, the beat would move uptempo. He opened an eye cautiously and let the surgical white of his cell flood in, and the pain lurking in his head kicked down the walls and played the chorus.
He groaned, lifting a hand to block out the light until his eyes adjusted, and the sight of the unfamiliar clothes, and the blood on his hands and unfamiliar needle marks on his arm told him that all was most definitely not well.
Fucking coward.
It had always been the same, waking from the strange stupor of being placed on autopilot by Jake for any period of time. Waking almost always meant finding himself waist deep in trouble. Or blood.
Alex’s earliest memory of awakening from one of the strange semi-comas induced by Jake’s presence was a blurry smear of an image, located somewhere in the days surrounding his sixth birthday. Alex had returned to the world in the garden of his first foster family, and had discovered that he was humming the tune of Happy Birthday, and his hands were buried wrist-deep in the still-warm corpse of the neighbours’ cat.
It was just the start of a series of terrifying awakenings.
Jake, as Alex had learned painfully over the years, truly wanted to interact with the stranger renting space in his mind. Alex often wondered if the reason Jake was such an unrelenting monster was down to him, and that burning desire for communication. Maybe Jake had decided that was the only way to convey his impotent fury at the intrusion: to ensure that wherever Alex awoke, he was likely to find himself mired in horror. There was no mistaking the intent of Jake’s messages.
Sometimes it had been awaking in horrors like the cat, but those situations soon ceased. Jake, Alex guessed, had simply decided that those experiences were too much fun to share. Instead, Alex found himself sprung from his internal prison whenever there was trouble. If a situation couldn’t be resolved by violence, Jake simply removed himself from it.
The pain in Alex’s head snapped him back to the present. His head always ached when he was handed the reins, as though the flipping of the internal switch made some fundamental changes to his brain chemistry, like long-learned neural pathways were breaking and remaking themselves over and over. This pain was different though, and the waves of nausea he felt as he sat up told their own version of events. He had been knocked unconscious, and now he was sitting in a padded room, all brilliant white light bouncing off the surface of a pure white cell.
The situation was depressingly familiar, and yet the cell looked nothing like the converted-mansion affairs at Moorcroft. This cell was small and perfectly formed, shimmering with newness. The door was barely there, built almost invisibly into the wall. The entire ceiling was a square LED light, save for a small black rectangle in one corner, behind which, Alex assumed, there lurked a surveillance camera. The bed and toilet – the only furnishings – grew almost organically out of the floor, giving the impression that the room had been carved from a single block of plastic.
Alex pulled his feet up onto the bed and hugged his knees, looking up sharply as the door yawned noiselessly and three men entered, looming over him, making the cell feel suddenly claustrophobic.
He blinked in surprise. Two of the men were dressed a little like SWAT officers, though their uniform bore no insignia. The third man, flanked by the others, was dressed in a lab coat. Alex focused on the two officers; on the assault rifles they kept only a twitch away from activity.
“Jake,” the man in the lab coat began, as though winding up to deliver a rehearsed speech.
“No. Alex.”
The man in the lab coat – short, a little tubby, balding, snapped his mouth shut and stared, apparently disappointed.
“Alex,” the man repeated, and the word came out as a sigh.
“Where am I?”
The balding man tutted. “Not as important a question as who you are, I’m afraid. We don’t want you. We want him.”
Alex felt his stomach drop as the words wormed into his mind. He could see no potential way for them to get at Jake that didn’t involve matters turning very bad.
“We’re trying to recreate something, you see. Something that someone wanted very much to happen. But they are not around, and you are. But we need the real you.”
Alex felt hot anger burning on his skin.
“I am the real me,” he snarled.
“I suppose that’s a matter for philosophical debate. But I’m afraid we disagree, and we’ve got guns.”
The man turned on his heel and strode to the door, which slid open for him. The two armed men followed, and as the door closed, Alex heard him utter two words that made his nerves sing even though he had no idea what they meant.
“Get Ripley.”
Left alone with his fractured thoughts, Alex searched his memory, and as was usual whenever he tried to see what Jake had seen, came up with unfocused images, snapshots taken by a shaking camera: Dr Jackson. A helicopter. Blood.
Nothing that provided any useful insight, beyond reaffirming that Jake was utterly insane.
He remembered the terror of being chased by the horrors that had attacked Moorcroft and Rothbury, remembered the clammy, shuddering certainty that he had been about to die, the overwhelming sense of panic. And then darkness as Jake took over.
With no idea how much time had passed, Alex began to wonder about the world as he had left it. How widespread was the plague that had afflicted his corner of Northumberland? The north? The country? The world?
The cell was, apparently, soundproof: he got no warning that the door was about to slide open, and a burly man strode in, waving a dismissive hand behind him, as though he was telling someone outside to stay put. He moved into the room with an almost tangible confidence that made Alex shrink.
The man grinned widely.
“Told you it would be fun,” he said, and clouted Alex across the ear. The gesture was oddly paternal, making the pain it delivered seem surprising.
Wincing, Alex turned his head back to face the man, and got clouted again.
The grin widened.
Alex opened his mouth to speak, and again the man’s palm smashed into his ear. He stared at the man for several long seconds, and opened his mouth again; got clouted. When he again met the man’s gaze, he kept his mouth firmly shut.
“Good,” Ripley said. “Four slaps. You believe I once had a guy who lasted sixteen?” He shook his head with a sad smile. “Never could figure out if he was defiant or stupid. But you’re smart. Only four slaps.”
He clouted Alex again, grinning.
“Make it five. So, I speak, you listen. We have your file. We have some doctors,” - the word emerged laced with contempt - “here that believe they can talk you into doing what we need. And I’ve been told that there are subtle things we can do with the lights and with your…facilities here.”
He looked around the cell derisively.
“Things that might induce your other self to appear, given time. Such methods do work, I’ve seen it, and they are broadly considered humane, comparatively.”
Wildfire Chronicles (Book 3): Psychosis Page 14