*
Jason didn't see the heavy wooden doors swing open behind him. Didn't see the old woman emerge into the massacre, oblivious to the steaming, leaking bodies that scarred the ground in front of the town hall. Her eyes were fixed only on his comatose body, her mouth open in astonishment.
5
"Is he here to save us, Ma?"
Annie rolled her eyes. Rhys was her eldest son, and he was meant to be the smartest, but unfortunately only fifty per cent of the ingredients that had made him came from Annie. The other half came from a man long-dead, who had been her most enduring mistake.
"He didn’t even know we were here, Rhys," she said wearily.
Rhys nodded, as though the answer was sufficient, but Annie thought it was far from it. Whatever had happened to turn the quiet people of Newborough into demented cannibals seemed to have no effect whatsoever on the huge man.
Why are you here? Annie thought. What are you?
Annie had instructed her sons to carry the comatose man into the town hall. It had taken all three of them to do it; the guy looked like he weighed half a ton. She had watched in amazement from the first floor window as the huge man moved through the crowd of the Infected, hollering so that they came to him, and executing them. None of the creatures seemed to know or care that he was among them. He was the bolt gun, and they were cattle. But he was much more than that. Annie recognised it immediately.
The strange man was power.
She had Rhys tie the man up, and then led her people forth from the town hall like a prophet, delivering them through the ruined bodies to the convenience store where they took virtually everything that sat on the shelves and carted it back to the place that had kept them safe. Most ate as they walked, lost in a happy fog of calories that gripped them like powerful narcotics.
Annie had half expected that the people - at least some of the people - would head away from the town hall; maybe to search for loved ones or simply to go home, but it seemed as though it occurred to none of them to go their separate ways. All shuffled silently back toward the town hall like animals returning to a nest. To Annie they felt like a strange, nightmarish family; bonded by violence and death rather than blood.
While the rest of them pillaged as much food as they could carry, Annie took Rhys, along with his younger brother Bryn, to the pharmacy opposite the convenience store, and she filled a bag with everything that looked potent enough to affect something large.
In a way, it was a shame the doctor was dead, Annie thought. He would at least have been able to tell her what some of the medications were for. In another way, of course, Bob Turner had been an insufferable coward, and it wasn't a shame that he was dead at all.
Every cloud... Annie thought, as she dropped opaque bottles of pills into her bag, and let a rare smile break her wrinkled features. She found herself hoping that Turner had the time to feel truly terrified before he died. Once it would have been the kind of thought that society would have judged harshly.
Not anymore.
The changes in the world were, she thought, of great interest, but nothing interested her quite like the unconscious man. Once she had eaten and the resulting wave of dizziness and euphoria passed, she motioned at Rhys to follow her into a small room adjacent to the main hall, and stared at their saviour. He looked young - younger than all her children - and even comatose, his face wore a sad, anguished expression.
She slapped his face sharply, hard enough to make her palm sting.
His eyes opened, but they were unfocused, lurching around the room like a drunk. He tried to get up, and found that the chair he was tied to had other ideas. He grunted.
"Get him some water," Annie said, and smiled at the bound man benevolently.
"Who are you?" she asked gently.
The man didn't respond, instead railing against the ropes that bound him. For a moment, as his muscles bulged, Annie took a half-step backwards in concern, expecting the rope to snap. After a moment of furious struggle, the man seemed to deflate.
"Why am I tied to a chair?"
The man sounded oddly boyish.
"I haven't decided if I can trust you yet," Annie said. "Who are you?"
He shook his head as though trying to clear it.
“Where am I?”
Annie stared at the man, planting her hands on her hips and waiting for him to answer her. After a moment, the man cocked his head to the side, as though listening to a distant voice that she could not hear, and then he nodded.
"Voorhees," the man said. "You can call me Voorhees."
Annie opened her mouth to speak, but again the man cocked his head to one side, as though he were listening to something else. He emitted a sickly moan that dissolved into a wheezing cough.
"Voorhees," Annie repeated absently. The name seemed familiar to her somehow, but she couldn’t place it. It certainly wasn’t a Welsh name, but the man’s accent was South Wales through and through.
Rhys reappeared with a mug of cold water, and Annie took it from him and stepped directly in front of the bound man, putting her bony fingers under his jaw and lifting it up before tipping the water down his throat. Voorhees drank greedily. It was, for Annie, an oddly tender moment that reminded her of her youth and happier times, when her children were small and hadn't yet disappointed her.
For a brief moment her eyes were lost in memories, until Voorhees coughed and ripped her back into the present.
"Look," he said, "I don't know you people, or what you want, but I have to go. You have to let me go.”
"I was afraid you'd say that," Annie interrupted. "That’s why I had you tied up. You’re not well, child. You’re injured. You have to stay here for now."
Voorhees shook his head.
“There's somebody I need to find and-"
“I said no,” Annie said sharply, and the man blinked in surprise at the sudden venom in her tone. He struggled against his bonds again; gave up a little quicker this time.
"Let me go you crazy old bitch!" he roared, and Annie smiled. A tantrum, she thought. She had learned to deal with tantrums decades earlier.
"I think you need something to relax you, Mr Voorhees," she said benevolently, and pulled a small bottle of pills from a pocket, holding them in front of his eyes like a hypnotist's watch. His eyes followed the bottle warily.
Annie made a show of reading the warning label on the bottle.
"Take two daily. May cause drowsiness."
She poured out a handful of the pills. Red and black. They looked like poisoned pellets designed for eradicating vermin.
"Big guy like you probably needs more than two, though. And I'd prefer something a little more definite than 'may cause drowsiness', if you know what I mean."
The man's eyes filled with a burning fury. Annie paid it no attention, grabbing his nose and squeezing, waiting for the inevitable opening of his mouth.
"Open wide," she said with a grin.
*
It didn't take long for the man who called himself Voorhees to slide back into oblivion, leaving Annie with something of a dilemma. There was no way she could let him go, not when he had just displayed the strange effect he had on the creatures that had killed everyone else they had encountered. Annie didn't understand how the man was different, but she didn't need to. It had been over a week since she had last understood anything, and yet still she survived.
No, letting him go was absolutely not an option. But keeping him tied up was almost as useless: if the eyeless cannibals returned to Newborough, she would need him to fight them off, and he couldn't do that as long as she had him drugged and tied to a chair. Only one option presented itself to her: the man would have to be trained, like a dog. Dogs, in Annie's experience, responded best to a cycle of punishment and reward.
She beckoned Rhys to come to her side.
"We need to make sure the town is clear," Annie said, ignoring the fact that Rhys nodded and looked confused simultaneously.
"I need you to organise people
into groups and move them out slowly. Search every building on this street first, one at a time, and come back here, understand?"
Rhys nodded again, though at least this time his eyes weren't fuzzy with bemusement.
"Slowly," Annie repeated. "If you think you hear anything, anything at all, you bring everyone back here."
Rhys turned to leave her side, stopping in surprise when Annie grabbed his arm tightly.
"And bring me back a sharp blade, and some salt," she said, and pushed him away.
Rhys left with a final puzzled look at his mother, and Annie heard him ushering everyone out of the building, and leaving her alone with the drugged man.
*
Jaaaaaasssssssonnn...
Jason sank into a clawing darkness that gripped him more tightly when he tried to break free of it. His body felt heavier than it ever had before, and yet simultaneously it felt like he was being propelled forward; like he was dizzy and off-balance.
Once he had got so drunk that the room literally span in front of his eyes, but this was more like it was him that was spinning, like his cells were riding a hellish carousel that he was powerless to stop.
Bring me a sharp blade and some salt, Jasssssoooonnn...
His dead mother's voice made cuts of its own, worse than any blade; invisible and devastating.
When he saw his mother in the dark there with him, and saw that she looked strangely like the old woman that had drugged him, and that she was rotting away, her ribcage exposed and the diseased organs pulsing underneath, Jason wanted to scream or run or anything, but the darkness had him, dragging him inexorably towards her fearsome wet embrace.
His mother chuckled as she wrapped her rotting arms around him, and he did scream, then.
*
The scream startled Annie, pounding into her old heart like an adrenaline shot, and she glanced quickly around the empty town hall, fearful at what the noise might bring. After a few moments she heard footsteps pounding along the road outside, coming straight for her. She froze.
The door opened, and Rhys charged in, his face twisted in fear and concern.
Annie laughed.
"You okay, Ma?" Rhys gasped breathlessly.
"Fine," Annie chuckled. "Just our guest here screaming in his sleep."
She stared at Rhys.
"I suppose we’ll have to get used to hearing that."
6
Things fall apart.
Michael Evans had come to understand that intimately. His career, his family, and then finally the entire world itself had all been ravaged by entropy; ground away by time until they were little more than dust on the wind; memories that had already begun to fade.
Michael sat on the battlements of Caernarfon Castle, staring out across the river at the dark town beyond, and shivered. The cold on the west coast of Wales was unrelenting, and the wind drove it home like a hammer. He didn’t mind the wind though: watch duty on the battlements meant that at least he was out of the towers, away from the rest of them.
You have your castle, and here’s your army. So what now?
John's words to Michael after they finally secured the castle following the Infected attack clung to him like Velcro.
What now?
In the euphoria of evading what had appeared to be certain death, Michael hadn’t thought of anything beyond the fact that they were safe. All he wanted was to rest. The frantic chase that began outside a cafe in South Wales had come to an end at last, and his daughter was safe behind thick walls designed hundreds of years earlier to repel enemy attacks.
The what now turned out to be endlessly defending the gate against the tail end of the ghoulish army that had besieged the place, and slowly starving to death. Darren Oliver, the maniac that had dominated the castle right up until Michael blasted a hole through his forehead with the rifle he kept at his side, had never bothered to stockpile supplies. There had been no point: he had a living scarecrow to keep the Infected out of Caernarfon, and his team went on daily runs for food.
Darren had thought long-term, focusing on planting seeds and building shelter and numbers within the castle. His short-term plan had always included access to the town, but access had slit its own throat and bled to death right outside the gate.
Inside, they had found enough food to last for a couple of days at most. They rationed it out until nobody was eating any more than a few mouthfuls a day. There was almost none left. By the time Darren’s seeds bore fruit, the inhabitants of the castle would be decomposing corpses.
Few people in the castle spoke much beyond the monosyllabic. When they did talk, the conversation usually veered toward theories about the Infected; about how the virus had come about, why some swam and others didn't. Whether the creatures would also be starving out there.
It was Michael’s eight-year-old daughter, Claire, who solved the puzzle of the swimming Infected, informing Michael that she had seen one acting like a conductor in Aberystwyth, leading one of the large herds that now roamed the countryside as a general might lead troops to battle.
Michael had seen the same thing from a farmhouse outside St Davids: one leader with a small army marching at his back. Some of them could communicate, rallying the others behind them.
It fit with what they already knew: the virus did not affect everyone equally. Some of the Infected seemed able to adapt in some way, to evolve and learn. Or maybe they were all evolving at different rates: the ratio of swimmers to non-swimmers seemed to increase as the days passed. When the conversation turned to speculation about what they might all evolve into eventually, talk dissolved into brooding, fearful silence.
But it wasn’t the Infected or even his painfully empty stomach that dominated Michael’s thoughts. It was a number.
Twenty-nine.
When the Infected assault had been turned back by the exploding helicopter, the occupants of the old building had numbered thirty-four, but the injuries sustained in the attack were taking their toll. Five had already died.
The number felt like it was branded on Michael's mind. Painted across his forehead; daubed messily in an old woman's blood. He told himself Gwyneth’s death - be honest, Mike, her murder - was justified by the mathematics. As long as the number of uninfected people in the castle rose or remained steady, as long as Claire remained safe, he could square it off.
But the number wasn’t rising.
"You thinking about food?"
Michael blinked; lost in his thoughts, he hadn't even noticed Rachel ascending the steep stone steps that led up to the battlements. She was, he suspected, coming to see if he needed help to get down, but couching the offer in friendly conversation.
"How did you guess?" Michael asked with a rueful smile.
"I don't think there's anyone here that isn't thinking about food right now."
Michael snorted a bitter laugh.
Rachel sat beside him, and for a while there was a comfortable silence; just the two of them and the wind and a view of distant monsters.
"Lot of history in this place, you know," Michael said eventually. "They've got little plaques on everything here. Everything in the castle seems to have a story. Did you know this place has been under siege three times?"
Rachel shrugged.
"Last time was back in the civil war. Nearly four hundred years ago. Three times, and it was held every time. Nobody ever took this castle."
"We did," Rachel said.
Michael nodded morosely.
"And look what good it's done us," he said. "It might as well be a prison. There's no way out past them." He waved a hand at the dark town over the water.
"Then we have to go through them, Michael," Rachel said earnestly. "We can't just hide in here and wait to die. We have to fight."
Michael dropped his gaze to the black water that flowed past the castle walls.
"And then what?" he said. "Fight our way to where? I know you want to get out there. I know John doesn't think this place is safe-"
Rachel interrupted h
im with a snort.
"John doesn't think anywhere is safe. I don't think he knows the meaning of the word."
"And maybe he's right," Michael said. "But then what's the point? Going out there, fighting. Where do we go? Where would be safer than here?"
Rachel had no answer.
"People are getting worried about you, you know," she said finally.
Michael arched an eyebrow.
"People?"
"Me, John. Everybody."
"They don't even know me, Rachel. You barely know me."
"They know you killed Darren. They saw you save John. Like it or not, they believe in you, and they need somebody to give them some purpose. If we aren't all in this together, things are going to fall apart pretty quickly."
Michael felt Rachel staring at him until he finally dragged his eyes from the river and looked at her.
"I know you blame yourself for Gwyneth," she said, and he flinched. "But frankly, Michael, you're going to have to get over it. You've got a lot of people looking to you now. Including Claire. Including me. You can pull them all together. We have to take Caernarfon back. Have to. Or this place won't be a prison, it will be a tomb."
Rachel hugged herself, shivering in the cold night air. She stood.
"When you're ready, everyone else will be too. I'm ready."
Michael stifled a sigh. He had only known Rachel a couple of weeks, but even in that short time he felt like she had changed drastically, and he wasn’t sure it was for the better. When he first met her she had seemed impetuous; following the death of her brother at the hands of the Infected that impulsive streak had twisted and darkened into something a little more like recklessness. It wasn’t safety that Rachel wanted. It was revenge. With no chance of bringing justice to the people responsible for the catastrophe, she seemed willing to settle for killing the Infected.
She wasn't ready. She was eager. A subtle distinction that made Michael's nerves jangle. He saw the thirst for blood in her eyes, heard the dark inflection of it in every word she spoke, her restless tone simmering with undirected anger.
Trauma (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 5) Page 4