“From what I’ve seen, the number of Infected out there has thinned a little, but I think waiting and hoping they would all wander off or starve has turned out to be a bad plan.”
John snorted. It had never been his plan in the first place. If John had his way, the castle would have been firmly in his rear view mirror. He was still there purely because of Rachel.
“How do you propose we do that?” John asked. “I’d say there’s maybe ten people here that I trust to swing a sword and not chop off my head by mistake, or stab themselves. Barely enough to defend the gate if it comes to it. Going out there is a suicide mission. I’ve never been much of a fan of suicide missions.”
Michael nodded wearily.
“If we move slowly, we can do it, John,” Rachel said.
“No, Rachel, we can’t,” John snapped. “Anything that seems like a good idea in here is going to look very different when we’re out there. You and me, sure, maybe we’re experienced enough or crazy enough to go straight at them and not lose our shit. But everyone else here? The first scream will bring it all down. We don’t know how many of them are out there. It could be tens, it could be hundreds. The odds are against us, whichever way you look at it. There’s no way for us to kill every one of them in the town. No way it doesn’t turn bad.”
Rachel glared at him, but Michael responded first.
“He’s right, Rachel. But I’m not thinking of attacking them. In fact, I’m not thinking about killing them at all.”
John shot a confused glance at Michael.
“So what are-”
He didn’t finish.
What is that noise?
They all heard it. John saw the confusion on Michael and Rachel’s faces; saw them working their own way to the conclusion he was reaching.
An engine.
The noise was distant, but getting closer, and with each passing second it became more and more unmistakable. A guttural drone that oscillated in pitch with almost clockwork regularity.
An outboard motor.
John turned to face the sea, all thoughts of the town behind him forgotten. It was misty, impossible to see anything other than a vague hint of a dark shadow flitting across the rolling waves.
As John squinted into the distance, the noise of the engine abruptly cut out, and a heavy silence fell, broken only by the endless white noise of the ocean.
“Why have they stopped?” Rachel whispered. “I can’t see anything. Can you see them?”
John shook his head. Visibility was no good. All he saw was the grey canvas of the ocean under a blanket of mist. Still, he had a feeling he knew why the engine had stopped out there in the fog, and the knowledge made him clench his jaw until it ached.
Recon.
No sooner did he think it than he heard the engine buzz back into life, slowly receding into silence as the boat moved away.
“They’re leaving?” Rachel said. “If they saw the fire, why not come to the castle?”
John felt his stomach drop, and he knew what it meant. Like everything to do with the damn castle, it meant trouble.
“They will be coming,” he said grimly. “That was a scouting mission. If they needed help, they’d be at the gate right now.”
"How long do you think we've got?" Michael asked in a low voice.
John shrugged.
"Impossible to say. But we know one thing."
Michael arched an eyebrow.
"There's a lot of them. Figure a boat that size holds four to six people. If they're thinking of taking the castle it means wherever they are now is less safe than here. So if they are able to send out a group of people on a recon mission, they must have strength in numbers."
"Could have just been one person in the boat," Rachel said, but her tone said even she didn't believe her own words.
"Could have been," John agreed. "But I'd expect it to be more."
A dark shadow passed across Michael's eyes.
"You're sure?"
"No," John snapped. "I'm not sure of anything. But we have a castle and twenty-nine people. How many groups have we sent out on recon missions?"
Nether Michael nor Rachel said anything.
"Exactly," John said.
A heavy silence fell over the three of them as they calculated the possibilities. Holding the castle against the mindless onslaught of the Infected had been one thing - and even that had only been accomplished through luck, though no one really wanted to admit it. Holding it against a large force of people felt like a very different proposition. One that might have a drastically different outcome.
"Twenty-eight," Rachel muttered in a low voice.
John looked at her quizzically.
"Colin died last night," she explained.
"Great," John growled. "We don't have many people left that I'd trust in a fight."
"I don't get it," Michael said suddenly. "Say they do have a large number of people. Why come here? Why look to take on a castle full of people?"
John snorted.
"You tell me, Michael. Why did you attack the castle?"
"I didn't att-"
"Sure you did," John interrupted. "Not head-on, maybe, but you had a chance to walk away from this place and find somewhere else. You didn't take it."
Michael flushed angrily.
"I just wanted us to have a safe place to-"
"Yup," John cut in. "I'm sure that's what they want, too. Like it or not, the way the world is now, the castle is a pot of fucking gold. There will be others that want it."
"But we're practically advertising that we want people to join us," Rachel said, pointing up at the fire on the castle's main tower. "There's no need for anyone to come here aggressively."
John shrugged.
"Tell that to Darren," he said wryly.
It was Rachel's turn to flush. John saw the heat of anger burn across her cheeks.
"Darren was-"
"A psycho," John finished. "Sure. For all they know, we're psychos too. Don't trust anybody, remember?"
He stared at Michael pointedly. The crippled man looked glum at hearing his own words repeated back to him, and said nothing.
"Look," John said, "I doubt they saw much, even if they have binoculars. Maybe they saw the three of us up here, but they have to figure there's more of us. If it were me, I'd be planning another recon mission, trying to find out what sort of force we've got in here. So we should have a couple of days. Next time they come, I'd suggest we get everybody that can stand up on the battlements, and have them all holding weapons. Let them see taking this place won't be easy. If we're lucky, they don't have many more bodies than us, and they'll think twice. Maybe they'll decide talking is the best option."
"If we're lucky," Michael repeated grimly.
John shrugged again.
"We won't be. But for now it's all we can do, unless you feel like running and letting them have the place."
Michael stared at John in disbelief.
"Thought not," John said flatly. "No one wants to give up the pot of gold."
"Fuck it, then," Michael snapped. "We need Caernarfon cleared. We need supplies. Will you go?"
He stared at John, who in turn glanced at Rachel.
"Of course, as long as I’m not walking right into the middle of trouble," John said.
Michael nodded his gratitude.
"You won’t be,” he said. “Get a team together. Whoever you need. You leave as soon as possible."
John took in the words impassively, but Michael saw Rachel's eyes flash with eager anticipation.
11
John stood in the shadow of Caernarfon Castle's main gate, lost in thought.
He had to admit, Michael's plan was pretty good, under the circumstances. There were far too many Infected in the town itself for a frontal attack to be anything other than a suicide mission. So Michael argued that the best idea was not to fight them at all, but to sail down the coast a few miles and set off an explosion loud enough to draw them away.
At
first John thought generating an explosion large enough would be beyond their means. It wasn't as though they had a ready supply of C4 or dynamite, and John had serious doubts that blowing up a car would do much more than bring the nearest batch of Infected down upon him. Only after speaking to Emma and asking about the area surrounding Caernarfon did a flicker of an idea begin to burn in John's mind. He told Michael and Rachel enough of his plan for them to trust him; not enough for them to suspect, as he did, that what he was planning was completely insane.
Once the Infected left Caernarfon, following the noise John planned to make, there would be a window for the people in the castle to descend on the town and loot everything they could carry. Michael had argued that the Infected would likely come back, and John didn't disagree: they had all observed the way the creatures acted when there was no external stimulus to give them direction. They wandered in ever-expanding circles, until some noise gave them purpose once more. It was a bizarre and unsettling sight, watching them prowl around, like cats patrolling their territory.
Michael estimated it might take as much as a couple of days for the Infected to circle back to Caernarfon, and even then their numbers were likely to be drastically reduced as some wandered off or got distracted by alternative prey. Relying on the town to be empty would be foolhardy; there were always likely to be a few that wandered in after the decoy explosion was detonated, but he hoped their numbers would be small enough to handle.
They'll have to be, John thought as he stared up at the towering gate that kept the horrors of the world outside.
It hadn't taken long for John to pick the team that would head out with him; in truth his choices were severely limited. Ray and Shirley, two of the bikers, had already seen their fair share of fighting. Neither was particularly skilled, but they came with a fully-loaded fuck it attitude that John much preferred to working alongside terror and anxiety. Neither of the men volunteered for the mission, but neither refused when he asked them. John got the impression they were going a little stir crazy in the castle and would have leapt at any chance to get away from the atmosphere of despair and gradual decay that hung over the group of survivors.
One of the young guys that had tried to kill John in Caernarfon at Darren's command actually did volunteer, most likely because he was desperate to demonstrate that he was now firmly on John's side. The tactic was slightly pathetic, and the way he had tried to worm his way into John, Michael and Rachel's good books so soon after conspiring to kill him made John cringe a little, but he let it slide. Without the fear of Darren to motivate him, the kid seemed harmless and enthusiastic.
Nevertheless John resolved to keep an eye on him. If anyone was going to let fear get the better of them, It was Glyn.
And then, of course, there was Rachel, who John had tried to convince to stay put, but who had shot him down almost before the words left his mouth.
The last thing Michael did before wishing John good luck was tell him to keep an eye on Rachel, but he needn't have bothered. Rachel's thirst for blood and vengeance was plainly written on her face. Of course, John told himself, he would have kept an eye on Rachel anyway, because he was pretty sure he was falling for her.
He blinked at the gate. It was the first time he had fully acknowledged his growing feelings for Rachel, even to himself. The abrupt realisation that despite his best efforts to remain isolated he had developed such a strong bond with Rachel should have made him happy, and maybe once it would have. Under the current circumstances, admitting the depth of his emotions to himself just made him feel sick with worry.
Those feelings, and the potential they held to induce John to make bad decisions, felt more dangerous than any number of Infected.
Already he had evidence of that: without Rachel, John knew he would have been long gone already, leaving the castle and all the fucked-up problems that came with it far behind him.
Not for the first time, John resolved to keep his mouth shut, and to keep Rachel at arm's length. It would be safer for them both that way. And it wouldn't be difficult: they could barely hold a conversation without getting under each other's skin. John didn't think Rachel had ever forgiven him for lying to her about who he was when they had first met. He couldn't blame her for that.
"John?"
Rachel's voice broke John out of the prison his thoughts had imposed on him. He dropped his gaze from the gate to her. She fixed him with a frustrated look.
"We're ready to go, you know, if you're done daydreaming?"
John grunted, and evaluated his team with a feeling of distant dread. He'd been a part of teams he considered ill-equipped before, more than once, but the ragtag collection of survivors he was about to lead into enemy territory made him more than a little nervous. The fact that he was the one leading them, assuming responsibility for their safety, made him most anxious of all. If a life of violence and death had taught John anything, it was that people were generally safer when they were as far away from him as possible.
They all looked at him expectantly, and he was suddenly struck by the notion that they were waiting for him to deliver one of those rousing speeches that the leaders of armies always made in the movies. You'll never take our freedom or some such nonsense.
"Stay quiet," he growled, and turned to release the portcullis mechanism. The metal bars slid upwards with a faint squeal that made him wince, and he pushed open the wooden gate as quickly as possible, scanning the river for any sign of the Infected.
During their time in the castle, John and Rachel had tested out just how much noise they could make before they drew the attention of the Infected, standing up on the battlements and gradually raising their voices until they found a level that crossed the river and sent a visible pulse of activity through the creatures on the other side. Talking in low voices, they discovered, was fine. Any voice raised above room temperature caused eyeless heads to whip in the direction of the castle.
As ever, making as little noise as possible would be paramount.
The first step was to circumnavigate the town by swimming downstream, around the point, and to the boat that John had left tied to the harbour wall. The screech of metal as the portcullis rose wasn’t loud, but it could have carried across the water. Maybe, John thought, the noise was not sufficiently human enough to cause anything other than mild curiosity in the Infected. Either way, he was grateful that he didn’t see any of the creatures come charging toward the river. Having company in the water would not be good.
There was no time to waste. John set off at a light jog, moving as far downstream as the rocky ground around the castle would allow before plunging into the icy water.
The cold took his breath away, despite everything he had done to mentally prepare himself for it. He paused a moment as his body acclimatised, turning to make sure the others were behind him, and then he aimed for the open sea, cutting through the water with a long, powerful breaststroke that barely made a sound.
When he reached the mouth of the river, and was able to see the harbour in the distance, he paused again, waiting for the others. All had promised him they were at least decent swimmers. Turned out they had different definitions of the word decent. John had already opened up a fifty yard gap on the others.
As he waited for them to catch up, John studied the harbour carefully. It looked almost as quiet as it had the first time he had approached it from the sea.
Almost.
It took him a minute of scanning each building in turn, but it was there: a patch of darkness that moved in the shadows that clustered between the tightly-packed buildings. Infected.
The swim meant John was travelling light. They all were; none of the group was carrying anything heavier than a knife. Any fighting that took place would be at close quarters. Far too close.
Ray was the first to reach John's position. He looked grateful for the chance to catch his breath. John put a finger to his lips and turned Ray in the water to face the harbour. He pointed at the shadows and stared into Ray's eyes
until he was certain the man had understood. When Rachel arrived, both men had their fingers to their lips. The message transmitted loud and clear.
Once they were all together, John gave them a few seconds to ease their burning lungs, but not too long. The sea had a way of sapping strength, but it wasn't the fitness of the others that motivated him to move them on quickly. It was the paralysing fear that he knew would breed in their minds every second they waited and thought about what they had to do next.
He gathered them all in close, and whispered rhythmically, trying to mask the words under the noise of the rolling waves.
"The hull of the boat is too high. We have to get up to the harbour there," he pointed at some stone steps that dropped down into the ocean about fifty yards to the left of the boat. "We move silently, we stay together, but be ready to run. Stay behind me. Clear?"
He waited until they all nodded, and turned for the harbour, slowing his pace and keeping his eyes focused on the waterfront. He almost hoped the creatures would hear them coming. At least then they'd have a chance to turn back before things got out of hand.
He saw no movement before the looming wall filled his vision and blocked his view of the buildings that huddled along the waterfront.
John dearly wanted more than the one small knife he carried on his belt. Even punching the things with his free hand seemed a risk. All were drenched in blood. All it would take was a small cut on his knuckles, and the mixing of bodily fluids would end it all.
He pulled himself up onto the steps, trying to move as silently as possible, but he knew the game was up almost immediately. The pattering sound of the water that dripped from his sodden clothes was enough to unravel everything. As the first of the Infected shrieked, John cursed himself for not realising how flawed the plan was before he carried it out. He had hoped they would be able to get to the harbour and cross to the boat silently, but there was no way to move quietly enough when the creatures were only a matter of feet away.
Stupid.
John heard answering shrieks from the crooked streets close to the harbour, and then others in the distance. A few drops of water landing on the cobbles had been all that was required to set off a chain reaction. The whole of Caernarfon was coming. The time for silence was already over.
Trauma (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 5) Page 7