Sending up the spinnaker - the smaller, second sail - would make the boat even harder to control, but he needed the speed. With a curse, he released the mechanism and felt the speed of the boat increase. Once the sails were secured, he bolted into the cabin and heaved the wheel to the right with all his strength, shaking and sweating at the effort required to battle the howling wind, drawing the boat around in a huge, looping arc that seemed to take forever, until he was approaching Rachel and the others from the opposite side of the bay.
The Infected now blocked his approach.
With a savage grin, John mowed them down, feeling a powerful rush of satisfaction as the hull echoed to the impact of their bodies. He doubted he had stopped them all, but he had scattered them and left choppy waters in his wake that would slow their progress dramatically. It was the best he could do.
When he got close enough to see the fatigue etched on Rachel's face, he twisted the wheel hard, sending the boat into something approximating a slow, flat spin. The sudden deceleration threw him against the wheel, and his ribs - which had only just begun to heal after the last torment he had put them through - sent a white-hot pulse of pain up into his mind.
Gasping for air, he ran from the cabin and threw the rope ladder over the rail and into the water below. When he saw Rachel's face appear, it was all he could do not to laugh hysterically. Her expression somehow combined anger, relief and terror all at once.
"Fuck the Infected," Rachel stammered through chattering teeth. "Next time, we get a boat with a fucking engine."
"Or a submarine," Ray gasped as he hauled himself onto the deck behind her.
John couldn't hold the laughter back any longer.
14
“Hywel is dead, Ma.”
Annie hadn’t thought it possible that four words could do such damage, but each one hit her like a hollow-point bullet, expanding on entry and devastating her.
For a moment she just stared at Rhys blankly, unable to pull herself out of dark thoughts that sucked her down like tar.
“Dead,” she repeated slowly, as though saying it again might somehow throw some light on it.
“The guy - Voorhees - he got out. He killed Hywel.”
Even Rhys looked downcast. Or maybe just scared; it was difficult for Annie to tell the difference. Rhys had hated Hywel ever since the runt of the litter fell noisily out of Annie’s uterus, but family was family. Annie had drilled that into all her sons; that one thing above all others. Family was the only thing that mattered. And now one of her family was dead. Not just one of her family; one of her children.
Something shifted deep in Annie’s mind, something that slid away from her grasp into a yawning black crevasse.
“How?”
Rhys shrugged, and the gesture made Annie want to slap him. Hard. The fury his apparent indifference stoked within her pulled Annie back into the present more efficiently than an electric shock.
“How?” she repeated, dropping her voice to a dangerous whisper that her son should have known very well.
Rhys blinked and took a step backwards. He towered over his mother physically, but sometimes threat radiated from the smallest of foes. He began to stutter, a habit Annie had always detested, and had forcibly broken him of more than thirty years earlier. Her eyes flashed dangerously.
“I…I don’t know. I heard breaking glass and...Hywel must have untied him for some reason, and he broke Hywel’s neck. I’m sorry, Ma, I should have kept an eye on him, but he was doing so well, I didn’t think even he could fuck it-”
Annie did slap him, then. Hard enough to make his cheek sing, and his head snapped to the side violently. When he brought his eyes back to her, Annie saw tears in them, and told herself that if he began to cry, she might just have to lose another son.
“Where is he?”
“Uh…Hywel? He’s in…”
Rhys trailed off when he saw his mother's expression reach a dark place he hadn’t seen since he was a small child. Not since his barely-remembered father was still alive.
“Voorhees. Where is Voorhees?”
Rhys squeezed his eyes shut.
“He’s…gone.”
Kept them shut. He didn’t need them open to see his mother’s anger. He could feel it.
Annie glared at Rhys for a moment, and then stepped past him, heading for the stairs that led down to the ground floor. When she reached the bar area and saw her dead son, her breath caught in her throat and her eyes shimmered.
Somewhere deep at the back of her mind, she could hear her father cackling, taunting her from beyond the grave. She wanted nothing more than to be alone with her dead boy, to scoop him up in her arms and cry, but Annie knew that showing weakness was not an option, and so she focused on the smashed window, and crouched down to put a hand on Hywel’s forehead.
“Still warm,” she muttered absently.
“Ma?”
Rhys’ voice, behind her. He sounded scared. Annie ignored him and stepped to the exit Voorhees had created in the large sea-facing window. In the soft earth outside, she saw footprints that led north.
“Go get your brother, Rhys. Round up as many people as you need. Quickly. He’s gone north, and you’re going to bring him back, understand me? Bring him back alive.”
Rhys stared at his mother for a moment, apparently trying to process the order.
“How should-”
“Go,” Annie interrupted in a flat, dangerous whisper. “For your brother. Go. Now.”
Rhys nodded, and left her.
*
By the time Rhys and his brother Bryn left the hotel, along with Gareth Hughes and a burly farmer by the name of Stan, Annie had covered her dead son’s body in a sheet, and vowed to make the man who had killed him pay. Not with his death: even as her emotions raged inside her, Annie knew that she needed Voorhees alive. But she would make him pay nonetheless, with an endless barrage of pain and suffering.
She stared through the smashed window at the rolling sea, and didn’t even hear the engine of the boat as Clive Baxter returned to the jetty. When he found her, and told her that there were people in Caernarfon Castle, Annie was so lost in dreams of bloody revenge that she barely heard him.
15
"Strip," John said, and kept his tone carefully neutral.
Shirley and Glyn - especially Glyn - looked at him dubiously. Looking at the kid's horrified expression, John doubted that Glyn had ever taken his clothes off in the presence of a woman. The notion that such an act would concern anybody who had just been through the sort of ordeal they had nearly made him burst into laughter again.
"Don't worry, kid," John grinned. "This isn't a sex boat. It's freezing, everyone's clothes are soaked. You want to warm up and avoid hypothermia, you gotta get those clothes off. Wring them out, let 'em dry a little. You'll thank me in the long run."
Glyn's eyes maintained a firmly horrified look, and his cheeks flushed.
"Christ's sake," Rachel snapped, and stripped off her soaked shirt without hesitation.
John couldn't take his eyes off her, but the stare had nothing to do with attraction. As she stripped down to her underwear, John saw a sickening network of scars that laced her torso and thighs. It looked like someone had repeatedly taken a razor blade to her. He knew who, and for the first time he thought - really thought - about what Rachel had been through. Five days spent at the mercy of a man that made Darren Oliver sound sane. He stared, and his heart broke a little.
When he lifted his eyes, he found Rachel staring back at him, jaw clenched, eyes clear and defiant, daring him to say a word. Somehow she looked proud and dignified, and John found himself struggling to resist the urge to kiss her.
John had seen plenty of guys in the army that functioned on pure bloodlust and the need for vengeance. He had grown to understand it: for many it was simply what held them together. Revenge was the sticking plaster that kept the cracks in their mind from spreading and pulling them apart.
It was, he realised abruptly, the
same for Rachel. Had been ever since her brother died. Focusing on getting even was no more or less than triage for her, a necessary band-aid. At least he could understand it. He understood also that there would be no chance of him getting close to her. It was embarrassing that he had even thought about it. After Victor, any sort of romantic involvement would be the last thing she wanted.
In another time and place, maybe John and Rachel would have had a shot. But in the aftermath of St. Davids and Aberystwyth, John imagined that Rachel was as far away from thinking about him as anything other than a comrade as it was possible to get. There was no hope for him, not with her. There never would be.
The knowledge hurt, but it was a good sort of pain. It helped him let go. Helped him focus.
He looked away from Rachel, and got an eyeful of Shirley's pasty white body, at the wobbling, tattooed flesh as the man struggled to peel off the sodden t-shirt that clung tightly to him. If nothing else, it helped clear his mind.
John stripped too, and began to wring as much water as possible out of his clothes. In moments, the floor of the small cabin was soaked.
"Better all stay in here, out of the wind. Try to get as warm as possible," John said.
"You want us to hug or something?" Shirley responded in disbelief.
The man's tone made John chuckle, and went a long way toward diffusing the tense atmosphere building in the cabin.
"Sure," John said, "If you've got any takers, go for it." He grinned widely. "I was thinking more like keeping moving, jogging on the spot, or doing some push-ups or something."
Shirley pouted in mock disappointment, and they all laughed.
For a moment it was possible to forget that they were being hunted to the point of extinction. Out there on the boat, safe from any possible attack by the Infected, John almost felt a sense of normality, just for a fleeting moment.
It would, he realised, probably be the last time.
They sailed south. John kept the boat as close to the coast as he dared, and kept his eyes peeled for rocks and shallow water. When he had taken the boat in the other direction after leaving Aberystwyth, he had spotted a small beach that he remembered being a few miles south of Caernarfon. He leaned on the wheel, staring out keenly, determined not to miss it in the fog that clung to the sea.
After a while, a vaguely comfortable silence fell over the five of them. Most likely, John thought, they were all relishing the rare sense of safety, as he was. He felt a presence moving alongside him at the wheel. Ray.
“Reckon you’re a hero, then, mate. Right? One of our brave soldiers fighting for Queen and country and all that?”
John smirked.
"Or you're a driver," Ray continued sardonically. "Don't know too many drivers that could pull off the type of shit you did back there, though."
A hero. It wasn't the first time John had heard the phrase, of course: soldiers were routinely described as heroes by those who had no idea what the armed forces actually did.
He hadn't heard it applied to him specifically, though. When he had left the army, his departure had taken place under a thick cloud of disgrace. Dishonourable discharge. Somehow, whenever he thought about those words now, he heard them in Fred Sullivan's smug, gravelly voice.
He dearly wanted to get his hands on the old bastard's wrinkled throat.
“There are no heroes," John replied distantly. "There was never even a hint of heroism about anything I did in the army. I believed in it all when I signed up, because I was a kid who didn't know any fucking better than what the TV told me. Protecting Queen and country.”
He spat the words out bitterly.
“I believed it right up to the moment I was ordered to infiltrate a family home and wound up killing two children. The fucking Queen didn’t need protecting from them. I executed people with no way of defending themselves, over and over again. That’s what I was. Not a hero. Not even a villain. Just a weapon. I was the finger on the trigger. That's all I was.”
Ray seemed a little taken aback by the venom in John’s tone.
“Didn’t mean anything by it, feller,” he said, raising his hands in apology.
“I know,” John muttered. “Sorry. I don’t like talking about it.” He shrugged.
Ray nodded solemnly.
"Reckon it's a good job I'm a pacifist," he said.
"A pacifist who carries a crossbow," John replied. "Yeah, I'd say that worked out well. You're a soldier now, whether you like it or not."
Ray looked like he hadn't really considered that at all.
“Seems like it’d be pretty hard to get over being a soldier, if it was like you say,” he said.
It wasn’t a question, but John answered it anyway.
“You don’t,” he said. “You live through it, or you die and get your name on a fucking plaque somewhere. Only it's not really your name, not anymore. It’s the name of the guy that went in. The war kills all those guys, one way or another. No one gets out in one piece.”
Ray rubbed his jaw thoughtfully.
“Doesn’t sound too good for us, then mate, if we're all soldiers now. How do you get through it without getting fucked up? Getting, uh, stress disorder or whatever?”
John grimaced.
“You don't,” he said, and turned the wheel sharply. "This is the place."
16
It had taken a little less than an hour for them to reach the small beach John had remembered as being the closest place to Caernarfon that he could make land. He would have liked to be closer to the castle, but the forbidding cliffs of the Welsh coast wouldn't allow it, and there was no fighting nature.
As the crow flies, he thought, we're probably seven or eight miles away from the castle. Too far.
The small strip of pebble-strewn sand was deserted, and he hoped the chances of encountering the Infected was slight: the beach looked isolated. No sign of any buildings, and if Ray had been right, most of the Infected within a huge radius had converged on Caernarfon, diluting the numbers in the surrounding countryside.
Isolation might just be the only way to survive, he thought idly.
He blinked as his mind suddenly raced, solving a puzzle he hadn't even been aware of. Isolation.
It was probably the only reason any of them had survived. The cities would have become hell on earth. The UK was a small island that heaved with people, heading rapidly for claustrophobic overpopulation. There were few parts of the country that weren't teeming with people, packed together densely like battery chickens. He stopped on the beach abruptly, and turned back to face the sea, lost in thought.
The nagging sensation he had felt back at the castle, like the answer to an important question hovered just beyond the boundaries of his understanding, suddenly made sense, and his blood cooled in his veins.
"You look like you're trying to remember if you locked your car or not," Rachel said. She turned and followed his gaze. Only the rolling grey ocean filled the horizon. "What's up?"
"We have been lucky," John said in a distant tone.
Rachel frowned.
"Huh?"
"The only reason we've lived this long is that this part of the country simply doesn't contain that many people. The virus is actually weak here."
Rachel snorted.
"You could have fooled me," she said flatly.
"Can you imagine what London is like?" John said in a tone laced with dread and wonder. "Birmingham? Manchester? All those people piled up on top of each other when the virus hit?"
John let the image float in the air for a moment, until he saw Rachel's eyes flicker with recognition.
"So?" Rachel said. "It would have been worse in a city." She shrugged. "Of course. What's your point?"
"Project Wildfire was an aerial attack. Like a bombing. When you hit a target, you don't just spray bombs everywhere. You focus your fire on the place you need it. On the land. On the cities. The high-value targets."
Rachel nodded slowly, and John gritted his teeth at his inability to frame the
words that tumbled in his mind.
"Darren was right," he said suddenly. "What about all the people on the ships?"
Something lit in Rachel's eyes.
"No one dropped bombs all over the ocean. It would make no sense. The target was the land, and even then you'd concentrate fire on the places with the highest population. Places like the Welsh coast would have been low priorities, and the bombs would have been widely-spaced. Nothing would have hit the sea at all. So where is the navy? Where are all those ships that were out there when the virus dropped?"
"Not Infected," said Rachel, and John knew she'd got it.
"The safest place is the sea," John said triumphantly, jabbing a finger back at their small boat. "There will be aircraft carriers, battleships. Thousands of soldiers stationed at sea."
"Like I said," Ray interrupted. "Next time get a submarine."
Ray's words melted slowly into John's mind, entering his consciousness by osmosis.
The sea.
All of a sudden John knew exactly where the navy was, and exactly why he had seen no trace of it. And he knew immediately that they had to leave the castle.
Or die there.
"We have to go back," he said suddenly.
"What do you mean we have to go back?" Rachel snapped, and John thought she did an admirable job of biting back the vitriol that her eyes clearly revealed she wanted to pour all over the question.
"Sullivan has control of the navy," John said.
"So?"
"So his little project has fucked up, big time. And if they haven't stopped it by now, it's because they can't. Hell, even my being here was a last throw of the fucking dice, and look what good that did them. There's only one other way for him to get this country back under his control." He stared at Rachel, his eyes wide. "He'll nuke the whole place."
"And then what?" Rachel said. "I thought the whole point of all this was to take over the country, not blow it up."
"Sullivan only cares about control. If he has to destroy it to own it, he will absolutely do it. Losing his grip on the project, abandoning it; failing…that would...offend him. He won't allow it."
Trauma (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 5) Page 9