Trauma (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 5)

by K. R. Griffiths

  For a long time, the man had no idea where he was, or who he had been before the empty beach and the rolling sigh of the waves. His past was a mirror in the shadows, images that loomed and faded, nimbly evading him when he grasped at them. None of the fragmented images in his head made sense; nothing stacked up. The events of his past seemed linked by only one common thread: there was death and blood everywhere.

  The beach was calm, and the man wanted to stay, but he knew he could not: something wanted to drag him to his feet. An insistent something that pulled at his thoughts, demanding his attention like a fresh wound. He tried to ignore the impulse, and he stubbornly stayed on the damp sand for a long time, just staring up as the skies darkened over him and the temperature dropped. He clung to the brittle sense of serenity for as long as possible, relishing the silence.

  Until he heard the voice, and the fleeting sense of peace rotted away and became toxic.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping the voice would let him be, but it was futile, because the voice was inside his head, familiar and venomous; an infection of the soul. It whispered at him, clawing and pulling at his memories, determined to knit them together into a terrifying whole.

  He pulled himself upright, and the motion was like stepping into a wall of fire. Pain exploded across his body, and the man looked down in anguish to determine the source of the agony, discovering that his entire body was covered in livid bruises and lacerations. He let out a wordless yell of horror.

  What happened to me?

  As if in response, his body offered up a different sort of pain; crawling and insidious. An itch that burned like poison, making his left arm feel like it had been set alight. The man stared at his arm, his brow furrowing, and saw a patch of angry flesh. He scratched at it furiously, like an animal, thinking of nothing beyond easing the irritation. All the scratching seemed to achieve was transformation in the source of the itching, driving it inward until it felt like it was in his mind. The man squeezed his eyes shut, and clawed at his temples, but the itch worsened, increasing and increasing until-

  The man's eyes flared open and he saw the eyeless creature shambling toward him along the beach, and the memories finally came together, clicking into place, and he saw everything he wished he could forget.

  Memories of blood and fire.

  He knew what the eyeless thing was, but its behaviour made no sense. Every time he had seen one of its kind, they had charged towards humans relentlessly, crazed with the desire to kill. But not this one. It stumbled around aimlessly, swinging its head back and forth, searching for the source of the sound it had heard, but apparently unable to locate it. The creature emitted a low moan that sounded almost like confusion.

  It can't see me.

  None of the creatures could see, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. But that didn't stop them hunting: they seemed to track their prey by sound alone, visualising the world around them almost like bats.

  Yet somehow this one was completely oblivious to his presence mere yards away from it.

  The man walked slowly toward the infected creature until he was standing right next to it, breathing in the sickening stink of blood and shit, and threw it down onto the sand, placing a foot on its neck. The thing gurgled and shuddered, but made no attempt to free itself, as though it was struggling to comprehend what had just happened.

  With a hollow roar, the man raised his fist to the stars, and dropped it like an anvil into the creature's already ruined face, decimating it. Again and again he drove his knuckles through the flesh, down toward the bone, until the creature became still, and its blood clotted the sand.

  The voice in the man's head screeched in delight; it cavorted in the blood and the violence.

  It gave him a name.

  Jaaaaaaaassssssssssooooonnn…

  2

  Emergency town meetings were unusual in the tiny town of Newborough.

  Isolated at the south-eastern tip of the island of Anglesey off the coast of North Wales, the town was distant enough from the pressures of modern-day life that the word ‘emergency’ very rarely cropped up anywhere other than on television.

  Annie Holloway relished being the one to call the meeting.

  The Holloway family had been a big deal in Newborough for the best part of two centuries. Holloways had always been the principal land owners, and had sat on the town council for generations, wielding huge influence over their little corner of the world since long before electricity came to town.

  To be a Holloway was to be a part of a fine old legacy.

  Thus it was, as Annie had been repeatedly told by her long-dead father, a terrible shame that Annie had no siblings - although what he meant, of course, was no brothers - because the family name would die when Annie married.

  It will be the end of the Holloways, her father used to slur in despair, as though his daughter would simply cease to exist after his death. Albert Holloway would die and the family name would be left with a woman. When she married the name would die. When finally she opened her legs and spat out a child, the Holloway coffin would receive its final nail.

  Annie was grateful that the old bastard clung onto life bitterly, until she had not one but three children; long enough for him to blame his impending death squarely on his misery at his own failure to continue the family name, rather than his diseased liver.

  Annie had picked her husband - a good-looking but simple-minded idiot with a stutter - purely to spite her father, and she revelled in the distaste that soured the old man's face whenever he found himself in the same room as his new son-in-law; at the knowledge that the Holloway name hadn’t simply faded away. It had been demolished.

  When her father did finally die - of what she hoped to God was a broken heart - Annie had the good fortune to bury her husband less than three months later. She reclaimed her name.

  She had ruled Newborough with an iron fist for nearly four decades since, and she spat on her father's grave once a year for luck. It seemed to work, but luck was only a tiny part of it, and Annie was smart enough not to rely on something as flimsy as fortune.

  Power was just a matter of patience, and Annie had it in abundance. Mastering the fine art of power accumulation, she decided early on, was all about longevity and straight-up willpower. Opposition always faded away, given enough time, and faced by enough trouble. All that was required was stubborn resolve.

  By the age of seventy-one, Annie had expended several decades of her life to occupy a number of key roles in the tiny town, and each added a layer of influence. As a school teacher, she had the children of the community - and by extension their parents - under her spell. She let the headmaster of the school, a watery sort of a man by the name of Patterson, have his name on the throne, but everyone in Newborough knew who truly sat on it.

  Annie more obviously sat on the town council, as her father had before her.

  During her first years on the council she attended every committee, debating every topic to a standstill with an almost religious fervour, precisely because she knew that eventually everyone of Newborough's several hundred residents would get used to the fact that if they wanted to get anything accomplished, they'd have to go through her. So she sat and mulled over itineraries that held no discernible interest: vague nonsense about road closures and town improvements that would almost certainly never come to pass; petty land disputes and tedious event planning, and she conjured up a strong opinion about every single one.

  That had been just the start of her reign though, that long period of taking control of all the matters that seemed unimportant to everyone else. Influence crawled toward her from a hundred different directions, and she collected it all. By the time anybody realised there was a silent coup in progress, it was already done and dusted. She won by default, by attrition; wearing her adversaries down like the tide until they crumbled away and she consumed them.

  Her father had everything handed to him on a plate simply because he was born with the right genitals. Anni
e had it all taken away, and so she took it back.

  Once Annie’s sons - Rhys, Bryn and Hywel - were grown, and after Annie had put the fear of God into them whenever one expressed a desire to leave Newborough someday, she got them installed in positions of power around the town. Rhys and Bryn comprised the entirety of Newborough’s police force. Hywel - the runt of the litter - Annie provided with the job of landlord of the town’s most popular pub, where he at least proved useful as an eavesdropper.

  Newborough nestled at the edge of the Warren, one of the UK's largest sand dunes, and the expansive Newborough Forest. The island itself was separated from the Welsh mainland by the Menai Strait, a strip of water only a half-mile wide, but it might as well have existed in a parallel dimension. Few strangers ever found their way to the town, and the rest of the UK either forgot Newborough existed or didn't care in the first place. The latter, most likely.

  Occasionally - usually when a new government settled into power in distant London, brimming with enthusiasm and as-yet unbroken promises - edicts about this or that initiative would arrive at the tiny council offices, and Annie would promptly ignore them, unless they could be turned to her benefit. No one from the government came calling to ensure their policies were being implemented. The place, Annie thought, was perfect.

  Patience.

  Power.

  It had all been going so well until the world ended around her and the majority of the population died in a storm of blood and torn flesh.

  Annie had survived the initial assault of the virus precisely because of her status in the town, and because the town was so remote.

  While the rest of the world collapsed into violent chaos, the most the residents of Newborough knew was that their phones and televisions had stopped working. It was inconvenient, rather than apocalyptic. So isolated was the town that for almost a full day after the communications network went down, business proceeded as usual.

  Only a handful of the people of Newborough commuted to jobs on the mainland, and when their spouses began to report to the police that they weren’t returning home word reached Annie quickly, and an intuition bred of a life spent with her ear to the ground, watchful for change, made her suspect that Newborough’s long and comfortable separation from the world might be at an end.

  Her response was to ruin everyone’s day, and call the emergency town meeting.

  Most town meetings were poorly attended, many of the residents having long since given up putting their point of view across on any matter. It was far simpler to do away with the charade and simply let Annie decide what was best. The addition of the word emergency swelled numbers, but the numbers had been anaemic to begin with. So there were a little less than seventy people sitting on uncomfortable wooden chairs in the town hall when the virus reached Newborough like a pebble dropped into a still lake, just one creature stumbling onto a farm outside town and giving birth to three more, that quickly became seventeen.

  As the ripple of destruction flowed toward the town hall, it left a trail of dead behind it, sloughed across the fields and the cracked roads. It approached implacably, like light breaking across a distant horizon.

  By the time Annie heard the screaming outside and scurried to the front door of the town hall to see something that made her mind feel like it was leaking somehow, there were dozens of Infected in the streets, and Annie did the only thing that was sensible for the town.

  She barricaded the doors and let them all die, thinking to herself a little numbly that it had turned out to be an emergency after all.

  While the rest of the people locked inside the town hall were wailing and sobbing, Annie was calculating. All her sons were safely inside. She had lost nothing. All she had to do was survive whatever strange apocalypse was unfolding beyond the sturdy wooden doors. When the bizarre event had passed Newborough would rebuild, and the influence of the Holloway family would be unassailable.

  The makeshift barricade - chairs wedged under the door handles and piled high around the entrance - looked passable, but Annie knew that if that assumption proved to be incorrect, her death would immediately follow, and while she was many things, she was no taker of unnecessary risks.

  "Upstairs," she hissed at no one in particular, and made for the narrow stairway that led to a large function room that occasionally hosted Newborough's small wedding receptions. They would all follow her; she didn't bother to look back.

  When they were all safely on the first floor, Annie had them barricade those doors too, and made her way to the nearest window to survey what was happening to her beloved town. From an elevated angle, the carnage on the narrow streets made no more sense than it had at ground level.

  She watched, open-mouthed, as she saw familiar faces - some of whom she had liked well enough; others who were cretins that few would miss; and certainly not her - twisting into masks of pure hatred. Watched as they ripped out their eyes and leapt onto their former friends and family, tearing and ripping at them with teeth and fingers.

  "Some kind of sickness," a voice at her side mumbled, and Annie jumped a little. "Blood-borne. But I don't know of anything that acts so fast."

  Annie turned and flashed a withering smile at Doctor Turner, who stood behind her, trying to peek through the window. What the town GP didn't know could fill an entire shelf of medical textbooks. In fact, beyond prescribing antibiotics for all his patients and industrial-strength painkillers for himself, Annie doubted the man was any closer to being a genuine medical professional than she was herself.

  "Could it be airborne?" she asked, though she knew even before the doctor shrugged that the question was merely wasted breath.

  "Could be," he said uncertainly. "But it seems like they're only affected after being bitten. Could be, though."

  Vague as always, Turner. Antibiotics and painkillers won't help us here.

  He shrugged again, and Annie turned back to the window. She saw several corpses cooling on the road, their lives leaking away underneath them. For some, the wounds they had received had proven fatal. But there were many, many more that seemed utterly oblivious to the chunks the infected teeth had taken from them, and they bounced around the buildings like pinballs, hunting down the remaining people of Newborough remorselessly.

  "Shouldn't we go out and help them?"

  Annie sighed.

  "Take a look, doctor," she said. "Exactly what help do you think you can offer?"

  She stepped aside to let the doctor get a better view.

  Outside the window, Hell had come to Newborough.

  3

  The first floor of the town hall had room to spare, though when it came to sleeping there was no option but to curl up on the cold, hard floor like cats.

  On the first night everyone had kept a respectful distance, but when they woke in the morning frozen to the bone, the seventy-or-so people hiding in the function room realised they would have to start huddling together for warmth. In some ways, Annie thought, dignity was the first thing to go.

  Dignity and sanity.

  At least half of the people trapped in the function room appeared to be undergoing some sort of catastrophic mental collapse. Some sat against the walls, hugging their knees and staring in horror at the past. Annie didn’t mind them so much. Their oblivion, although unsettling, had little impact on her. Others mewled and whined incessantly, offering nothing but misery. She dearly wanted to push those people outside and lock the door so she could hear herself think.

  Thankfully there were working lavatories; mercifully there was one each for male and female. The bathrooms provided running water, but there was no food.

  The lack of food hadn't even occurred to Annie as a potential problem, because there was no way that whatever catastrophe had befallen her town would be allowed to continue. Word would spread, surely - even if the strange affliction that had slaughtered most of Newborough’s small population covered the entire island, and the police would come from the mainland. Or the army. Somebody.

  Nobod
y came.

  By the fourth day the town hall echoed to the endless rumble of empty bellies, and Annie began to understand that everybody was waiting for her to tell them what to do to prevent them starving to death. It was time, she decided, to be proactive.

  On day four, Annie lost ten people.

  The streets had looked quiet, if grisly enough to turn the strongest stomach, and so Annie had proposed that a group make a dash to the nearest convenience store, just a couple of hundred yards away.

  Everybody filed downstairs to remove the barricade from the main entrance; they did it quietly, their actions muted by cold terror, and when Annie eased the door open, she made it clear that they should all be ready to run back upstairs, retreating to their final bolt-hole like hunted animals at a moment’s notice.

  When the door was open, she saw no movement on the street beyond, and ushered out the ten people she had 'volunteered' for the job - none of which went by the name Holloway, of course, because Annie wasn't stupid. The group stuttered outside and disappeared from sight.

  Annie never saw them again, but she heard the screaming. They all did, and the wide-eyed fear on their faces said everyone in the town hall had reached a silent accord: they weren't that hungry. Annie had them restore the barricade, and the remaining residents of Newborough returned to their hiding place, and the slow crawl of insanity and starvation.

  After a week, when the ravenous hunger made the group feel weak and sick, they mostly spent their time sleeping. No one had given voice to the fear that soon they simply would not wake up, but it hung over them all like a bad memory, fraying the edges of every hushed word they muttered to each other.

  Annie stood at the window and searched the streets day after day as a dark shadow blossomed in her mind like a tumour. Mostly the streets looked quiet and empty, and sometimes it was almost possible to believe it was all over, or that the massacre had taken place in her imagination. But the Infected were still out there; Annie saw them occasionally stumbling around, as though they were searching for something they had lost. Over the hours, she was able to detect a pattern: the same horrific faces would fumble their way across her field of vision, almost as if they were somehow patrolling.