He sniffed, and his face wrinkled in distaste.
“But I am impatient. And something of a traditionalist.”
He brightened.
“And torture just works.”
He grabbed the collar of Alex’s sweater and dragged him to the floor, marching toward the door, hauling Alex behind him like a sack of meat. When Alex began to struggle, he found the man’s fingers locked in place like rusted deadbolts; immovable, and then he was out of the cell and in the corridor, and the two armed men reappeared, and Alex felt his legs being lifted from the floor, and he screamed helplessly.
*
As they ran to the hardware store, past darkened storefronts and an empty doughnut cart that made her stomach growl, Rachel caught the look that John shot at her, the subtle nod of the head in Michael’s direction, and she understood.
Michael was the reason they were heading toward Aberystwyth, and extreme danger. It was a thought that had occurred to her more than once, and on each occasion she had dismissed it. Michael was, literally, dead weight, and leading them on what was in all likelihood a fool’s errand.
She shook her head, and glared at John as he ran beside her.
Claire Evans might well be dead, and Michael might well be an anvil around their necks. It didn’t matter. To her their direction of travel was the only option; all other roads led to monstrous destinations.
It hadn’t even occurred to Rachel to question why John was still with them when he was clearly capable of looking after himself. Even if she had pondered it, the surprising answer may not have presented itself.
She was breathless by the time they reached the hardware store, and saw the flashlights suspended on string tied to shelves laden with paints and brushes. They had just entered the store that they’d been staring into minutes earlier, she realised. The dangling lights were the distraction that had given the three strangers that now ran with them the chance to sneak toward them unnoticed.
Once they were inside, John found the mechanism that released a metal shutter to divide the store from the mall’s common area, and it squealed to the floor. Rachel eyed the flimsy metal dubiously: it was just a wire cage. Wouldn’t hold for long.
John saw her doubt and shrugged.
“Might buy us a little time.”
The words only reinforced the growing, gnawing doubt in Rachel’s mind: that she might never again see the outside of the store. As the three newcomers piled forward into the aisles that they had made their temporary home, searching out anything that might serve as a better weapon than the knives, it began to feel a little like a last stand. Frustration surged through her.
Jason set Michael down on the counter, next to the tills, facing the door. Rachel watched as the crippled policeman lifted the rifle in his good arm and aimed it through one of the gaps in the shutter, and felt sympathy shove the anger aside. Michael had barely mentioned his daughter, had seemed to focus only on getting them from one situation to the next, but as Rachel stared at the firm set of the man’s jaw, she thought she understood that every action he took was calculated to bring him closer to his little girl.
Inviting John into the group, stopping the inevitable murder of the three strangers now taking up arms alongside them, even subtly taking charge of the rifle. It all had a purpose. Without Michael’s intervention, Rachel envisioned a meeting of Jason and John going very differently, and almost certainly ending in violence. The existence of Claire Evans, and Michael’s determination to reach her, might just have saved all of their lives.
She cast her frustration and despair aside and ran to the Do-It-Yourself section, snatching up a nail gun before moving on to kitchenware, and the knives.
*
Alex had always supposed that torture was meant to be accompanied by questions. Ripley had none, just a relentless barrage of pain that slipped in stealthily, leaving no marks beyond the reddening of the ear that suffered repeated blows. The rest was invisible. The slapping graduated to pinching and twisting and pressure, all accompanied by that savage grin, and then finally, when Ripley seemed to bore a little of inflicting torment on him personally, he gestured for one of his colleagues to bring over the wet towel and the jug of water.
Alex had heard about waterboarding. In truth, he hadn’t thought it sounded that bad, like it probably ranked fairly low on the league table of potential ways one human being could inflict torment on another.
The first jug cured him of that misapprehension. The trickling cascade of water appeared gentle, but underneath the soaked towel the effect was all-consuming, the theft of breath from his lungs swamping his entire being in abstract terror. It was the torture of death without release.
When the eternity of torment that was the first jug finally ended, Alex coughed and sobbed and begged to talk; would have said anything. He received a familiar clout on the ear and then the crawling deconstruction was on him again, fracturing his mind in a long, slow torrent of agony.
By the end of the second jug, Alex prayed that he might die, but as soon as he felt like he might actually find oblivion, the trickling stopped, and the world rushed back in on a lung-searing cough that seemed to wrench every muscle in his body.
After the fourth jug, he was allowed a brief respite, and he filled the break in the torture with hysterical sobs.
Ripley sighed impatiently and whipped away the sodden towel.
Alex was pinned down by strong hands on a table in the centre of an otherwise empty room. A dim glow rose from floor lights, not quite reaching the ceiling. As his vision swam, he was almost able to imagine that there was no roof, and that the darkness above him was expansive sky. Only the sour stink of Ripley’s sweat and his own urine broke the illusion.
Shame burned inside him, and something else; a cold fury was gathering familiar momentum. For a fleeting moment he felt the change taking place in his head, was able to discern a sense of titanic outrage slowly filling him, rising up inexorably like sun-blasted mercury. He struggled to keep his hand on the wheel, but he had gone many hours without meds by now, and he approached like a driverless train.
Snap.
Jake bucked his back as he awoke, let the muscles in his shoulders and chest spasm wildly, and felt the grip on his left wrist slacken a degree. The wrist was soaked; slippery. In an instant he tore it free and drove the point of his forefinger up into the eye of the man that had been holding him, feeling the wet pop as he drove his digit through the man’s eyeball. The room filled with a high-pitched scream of horror as Jake curled his fingers around the bundle of nerves that had linked eye to brain and squeezed.
Ripley clapped his hands in delight.
“There he is!”
Snarling in blind rage, Jake felt himself being hoisted off the table by several strong arms, and carried over to a door that suddenly gaped open and swallowed him whole, before shutting behind him with a bang.
He hit the floor with a thump even as he realised that he was not alone in the room, and that whatever was in there was not human. He rolled; heard the movement as something crashed through the space he had vacated, and then he was up, and he saw.
He was in a small room, maybe twelve by twelve. The room held only one thing: a middle-aged man drenched in blood; gaping sockets where his eyes had been, leaping toward him, teeth bared.
Jake had always found it difficult to resist acting on impulse. Sometimes his mind just went on its merry way and took him along for the ride.
The thing drove its snapping jaws toward the soft flesh of Jake’s underarm, narrowly missing as he twisted. Rage consumed him, and he smoothly brought his arm up over the creature’s head and smashed it down, knocking it off balance, and then Jake followed the only course of action his mind offered up, the distinctive and familiar tug of insanity, and clamped his own jaws shut on the thing’s neck, tearing away a chunk of foul tasting flesh, spitting it aside with a cackle, and driving his teeth down again.
Alien molecules danced in his bloodstream, bonding and altering, mut
ating at a chromosomal level, genes recoding. Neurons fired and receptors flared; fireworks erupting in his mind, backlighting the world and casting long shadows.
His pupils widened, and he let the bleeding creature drop from nerveless fingers, oblivious to the thump as the thing landed twitching on the floor, grasping feebly at his ankles, its life being pumped out like floodwater from the ruined jugular vein.
An immense pain wracked his body, a pain he had never before felt, like every cell was screaming in unison. The pain became his entire world for a few decades-long moments. Buried deep inside him somewhere, Alex screamed along with those cells, writhing in agony, and Jake McIntosh cackled manically for the entire duration, a high-pitched, shrieking laugh that intensified as his brain was shuffled like a pack of cards.
When the pain faded, and the cackling ebbed away into silence, Jake realised with a wicked grin that he had become something else.
Something better.
*
“You need to see this.”
John waved Rachel over to him as soon as he saw her enter the kitchenware aisle. She jogged to his side.
He tossed her a walkie talkie when she was a few feet away. She caught it with a puzzled look.
“Not that,” he said, nodding at the radio. “But that works. Keep it on you. You need to see this.”
When Rachel reached him, and saw the wall he was pointing at, it took her a moment to work it out. The only thing she could see was a staff door: presumably the one that led down to the basement.
And then she saw.
They both stood in front of the swinging door that led to the stairway protruding from the hardware store like a limb.
Swinging. There was no possibility of locking the flimsy plastic door. Rachel felt her stomach heave. She pushed it open. Stairs leading up, stairs leading down. Into the basement. Twice recently she had descended into the earth. Both occasions had left terrible scars that she wouldn’t acknowledge, not even to herself.
Retreating down those steps meant death. She was as certain of that as she had been of anything in her whole life. The hardware store was a death trap. They had to get out. If they tried to make a stand here, in the middle of all the aisles, all the blind corners, they wouldn’t last two minutes. The basement might have another door they could lock; it might not. Either way, trapped in the basement or butchered in the store, the place meant death.
“Come on, we have to go,” she gasped, and sprinted back toward the front of the store, where Michael and Jason were watching keenly through the gaps in the shutter.
“We need a new plan,” she started to say breathlessly as she approached Michael, but the explosion of noise in the mall beyond the metal stopped her dead. Shattering glass, snarling aggression, thunderous movement.
“They’re here,” Jason said, and the desolate emptiness of his tone, the utter lack of emotion, made Rachel feel like weeping. She turned to John, and saw nothing but an empty aisle behind her.
John was gone.
And then, before she even had time to curse the man for a coward, Michael started shooting.
*
“What is he?”
Fred sent a poison-tipped stare at his heads of security and research, and the vacant eyes that greeted him only served to deepen his irritation.
“I…uh…”
Fred glared at Phil Sanderson’s infuriating comb-over, a handful of stubborn hairs grasping across an expanse of over-educated skin, clinging to the shiny pate like an apology. The head of research was extraordinary at his work, but his whiny, nasal voice and absent social skills made him a poor choice of company for being stuck underground.
“You have no idea,” Fred said matter-of-factly.
Sanderson dropped his gaze, and the endless forehead seemed to expand.
They were standing in the room adjacent to the one in which McIntosh now stood, and had watched through the large one-way window as the man’s body began to ripple, transformative waves sweeping through every muscle and sinew, a cellular tsunami that destroyed and remade everything in its path inch by devastating inch.
McIntosh had grown. Or perhaps swelled was more accurate. Wider, taller: Fred estimated he now stood at something like seven feet tall. He still had his eyes, sunk deep into the misshapen wall of flesh that the man’s face had become. He hadn’t become one of them.
Wildfire hadn’t ever been about creating such a creature. Whatever Victor Chamberlain had done to the program had ultimately introduced chaos into the mix, fouling up the recipe. All the expensively-educated scientists at the base had been able to discover was that it had something to do with blood type, and that it was most likely an attempt to make that type immune from the effects of the virus. It naturally followed that Victor’s own blood type would be pivotal: He shared his blood – AB negative – with only around two per cent of the population. One of whom they had just turned into some stretched facsimile of his former self in the neighbouring room.
McIntosh’s arrival, the perfect guinea pig, with not only Chamberlain’s blood but also his particular mental idiosyncrasies had been like a gift from God. Victor Chamberlain’s particular brand of psychosis lent him a rare brain chemistry. Finding someone to replicate that while the world collapsed into violence would have been all but impossible.
As Fred stared grimly at the pitiful, swaying creature in the next room, wondering idly what such a stretching must have done to the poor bastard’s brain, he realised that McIntosh meant nothing. There would be no winning back the planet with genetics. No quick-fix for the catastrophe. The scientists were operating in the dark, on problems that would have taxed them even before chaos played its part.
They had set humanity back centuries, and then tagged along for the ride. There was no hope of fixing Project Wildfire. Clusterfuck was actually a savage understatement. It was almost funny.
It was just as a wry grin broke across Fred’s wrinkled face that Jake McIntosh became interesting again.
With an inhuman roar, what had been a lumbering replica of a human being became a frenzy of motion, almost moving too quickly for Fred’s eye to catch, bolting from the centre of the room, shoulder charging the wall opposite them with a solid crunch that made Fred wince, before returning to the centre of the room and charging again.
Fred’s mouth dropped open in detached wonder. It was impossible for a human being to move so fast. The creature in the cell was no more than a blur, like a phantom image left on the vision after too long spent staring at a bright light.
“He can’t actually…” Phil Sanderson started to say in a terrified whisper, and then, with a thunderous crash, McIntosh was gone, and a dark, crumbling chasm left in the wall was the only sign he’d ever been there.
Ripley was screaming into his radio, important and ridiculous-sounding phrases, but his noise barely made a dent on Fred’s consciousness. He simply stood there, sucking in air through his open mouth and staring into the newly-formed abyss.
Chapter 14
“You lived here?”
At first, their movements had been trembling and intermittent, like hunted vermin. Checking every corner for predators before moving on.
Claire nodded.
When they had exited the underground car park into the frosty night air and the abandoned street, she had been unable to think where else she and Pete should go. The street had been still and silent, and remained so until they felt alone enough to quicken their pace. When the sound of their footsteps brought nothing but silence they began to run until finally Pete stopped Claire, and asked her if either of them had any idea where they were running to. They didn’t.
Going home had struck Claire as the only option.
“With my mother,” she said. “At the top.”
Pete looked up, squinting into the gloom. The lack of light made the dark tower difficult to pick out against the darkened skies; slippery somehow.
He shrugged.
“I guess we’ve got nowhere else to go.”
The apartment building she’d left several days earlier looked different without the central column of light that always illuminated the main stairwell. The building seemed to glower, the familiarity of the place stripped away, leaving something darkly intimidating.
Memories lurked inside the walls. Unhealed wounds that she was afraid might never scab over. She tried not to think about the last time she had been there.
When she led Pete inside, Claire found that the doors to the apartments on the ground floor stood wide open; dark passages leading into terrors that she tried desperately not to conjure up in her mind. She saw the dried spatter of blood around the door to the elevator, and her skin prickled.
When Pete made for the door, she grabbed his arm and shook her head, eyes filling with tears, and led him to the stairs.
Step by gruelling step they tiptoed up the winding staircase. On the third floor they were forced to navigate around the body of a neighbour that Claire did not recognise. Even in the heavy gloom she could make out the ripped-open stomach, and she squeezed her eyes down to slits, so that the stairwell became fuzzy, obscured by her eyelashes, a trick she had employed with limited success whenever something scary came on the television. Even so, enough of the visual information sneaked in.
Finally they reached the top floor, and she saw the door to her mother’s apartment. Wide open, just as she had left it several days and countless terrors earlier.
“That’s it,” she whispered, and she led Pete inside. The place smelled stale, but at least the lingering stench of blood and death that seemed to coat the buildings and roads of the town was absent.
Wildfire Chronicles (Book 3): Psychosis Page 15