“Is that...him?”
For a moment Annie seemed puzzled.
“Oh, the screaming? Well, yes and no.”
A fat tear escaped from Claire’s right eye and rolled down her cheek.
“Don’t worry, child, he is perfectly fine, but I do need to ask you about him. You want to keep him safe, don’t you?”
Claire nodded slowly.
"Then I just need you to answer a couple of questions, and no lying to me, right? I'll know if you lie, and if you do I will be forced to hurt your dad."
Claire stared at Annie in horror, and nodded again.
"Your father was important around here, wasn’t he? That's why he had the gun."
Annie pulled back and gripped Claire’s narrow shoulders, drilling a piercing, unnerving gaze into her. After a moment, Claire nodded.
"Was he in the army, too? Like John?"
Claire shook her head and sniffed, pulling away from Annie. Once she was free of the old woman’s grasping, bony fingers, she wiped her eyes and stared at Annie defiantly, pursing her lips.
Annie laughed.
"Raised himself a tough cookie, did he? It doesn't matter what your father was before. I know exactly what he is now."
She stared at Claire, and her face hardened, all the maternal pretence slipping from it.
"I have a message I'd like you to pass on to your dad. Just a little something for him to think about, okay? Will you do that for me?"
Claire decided that passing on a message didn't sound so bad, and if it got her away from the old woman and her strange son, she'd gladly do it. She nodded.
"Good girl. Tell your father that if I feel like I'm not getting his full cooperation, that I’m thinking of letting Bryn here have his way with you. Do you know what that phrase means?"
Claire furrowed her brow and shook her head a little.
Annie clapped her hands together and grinned.
"Perfect," she said brightly, and nodded curtly at Bryn before returning her glittering eyes to Claire. "Your father will."
Moments later, Claire shuddered as she felt Bryn's hands on her back once more, touching her almost tenderly, and she allowed herself to be guided back out into the courtyard.
As soon as she felt the crisp air on her skin, Claire wriggled free of the man’s touch and ran without looking back, straight to the tower that had become her home, and wished she had been locked in after all.
*
“Do you think that was wise, Annabel?”
Annie’s eyes narrowed dangerously. She hated anyone using her full name, and hated the thought that she was being questioned even more.
Gareth Hughes had always been a trusted advisor to her, and on the surface the question was no different to many others that he had asked across two decades as he helped her navigate the quagmire of small town politics. Yet under the surface, Annie detected something different in the man’s tone; something that had appeared only since the world fell apart. Something that bubbled up and seeped out until she felt like she was standing ankle deep in it.
Reproach?
Challenge?
“Our friend Michael,” she said in a low tone. “Would make an excellent poker player, I think. A man who would cut off pieces of a person when told to is either completely broken or very dangerous indeed. I don’t get the impression that Michael is broken, do you?”
Annie watched Gareth’s face closely as he pondered the question, searching for some visible clue as to what was going on in the man’s head.
“I…suppose not,” Gareth said finally. “Not exactly. But threatening a man’s child with…you wouldn’t actually let that happen, would you?”
Annie felt her jaw clench involuntarily.
Gareth Hughes was getting ideas way above his station.
She shuffled forward, closing the gap between herself and Hughes with speed that slackened his face in surprise. Hughes stood several inches taller than Annie, and she lifted her chin and stared up at him.
“Nobody has chastised me since I put my father in the ground,” she whispered. “Are you chastising me, Gareth?”
The expression of blank confusion on Gareth’s face resolved itself into something approaching understanding, and Annie felt a smirk building inside as fear and comprehension appeared to reach him simultaneously. The tone of the conversation had been radically altered, and apparently Gareth hadn’t been aware it was happening until it punched him in the gut.
“If I decide a threat needs to be carried out, then I will carry it out, Gareth. Do you understand?”
Gareth nodded hurriedly.
“Of course, Annab-”
Annie’s eyes narrowed.
“Uh…Annie,” he stammered.
“Michael is broken though, Ma.”
Annie turned to face Bryn and stifled a sigh. The boy generally took in conversations like a time-lapse camera. As usual, he was taking a while to catch up.
“His back, I mean. Rhys stabbed him, and he's definitely a cripple. I mean, even if this scares the shit out of him, what’s he gonna do?”
Annie frowned at shit, and Bryn stammered to a halt.
“You can tell a lot about a person by how they respond when their child is threatened, Bryn,” she said finally. “It’s very hard to conceal emotions behind a poker face when the stakes are that high, no matter how good a liar you might be. Michael’s reaction will be probably the only genuine thing that man ever does.”
Annie slumped down onto the uncomfortable throne.
“And it will help me to decide whether or not he has to die.”
Chapter 7
Precautions had been taken, but there was no way for Fred Sullivan to be certain that they would mean anything. After all, the mutation that Fred's research team assured him could be valuable beyond measure was an aberration that hadn't even existed until a few short days earlier.
It was impossible to ensure safety or to guarantee results when nobody truly knew what the thing was capable of.
Fred wondered idly how many of humanity's scientific advances over the centuries had felt like this. Was there someone standing in the shadows behind every leap forward, wondering if their experiment was going to eviscerate them and devour their innards?
Fred leaned against the handrail that overlooked the expansive deck of the aircraft carrier that now represented the UK headquarters—or perhaps more accurately the last refuge—of Project Wildfire and its creators.
High on the superstructure that loomed above the deck, buffeted by the icy wind that blasted across the North Sea, he watched as the far-away helicopter's blades began to slice through the misty air. The sound of the engine barely reached him; what was a thunderous roar up close was a faint whine at this distance.
Fred watched keenly for several seconds, until he saw Phil Sanderson appear below him. Wildfire's head of research scurried toward the vehicle that would carry him on a short journey across churning gunmetal waves, pausing every few yards as if waiting for someone to catch up.
Fred gave Sanderson a fifty-fifty chance of ever coming back, and in truth Fred had expected the man to attempt to flee or to pass the task on to one of his subordinates. That was exactly why Fred was wasting time leaning on a rail and taking in the view.
If he hadn’t seen Sanderson making his way to the chopper, Fred would have gleefully hunted the man down and ventilated his skull with a .38 round from the antique revolver he always carried beneath his silver jacket.
He nodded in satisfaction when he saw Sanderson. The mutation was a scary prospect. Not, it turned out, as scary as the thought of disobeying a direct order.
Sending the scientist to take a sample of the mutation's blood, and witnessing the frozen look of terror on his irritating face as Sanderson processed the order had been enormously satisfying, but Fred had to concede it was a little impetuous.
He'd been called impetuous frequently in his juvenile years, and hated the label. Loathed it for its vague hint of truth and for the way it
implied weakness. The notion that anybody considered themselves sufficiently superior to him to offer such a withering analysis of his character had always made his blood boil in his veins.
The last person to label Fred impetuous to his face, when he had been no more than seventeen years old, had received a right hook which offered up a creative new look for his nose. If you were going to condescend to someone, Fred's youthful self had decided, you'd better be able to back your superiority over them. Better be able to show it.
That man hadn't been able to. Nor anyone since. Power, Fred discovered, wasn't bestowed on anyone. If you wanted it, you took it. And if no one took it back, then you took more. Darwinism at its purest; simple and elegant and brutal.
Fred had built his entire life—and his enormous wealth—on that one basic foundation: take more.
And just when taking more had seemed impossible; when it appeared there was nothing left to take, Jake McIntosh had turned up.
And everything had changed.
Wildfire was finished. The project had failed, or at least had evolved into something that was beyond Fred's control. Yet within the collapse of a project that had been decades in the planning, an opportunity had arisen, and like any good businessman, he was determined to seize opportunity wherever he found it.
Fred stared thoughtfully across at the huge deck that sprawled out below him.
The helicopter was far enough away that by the time Phil Sanderson reached it, he was no more than a tiny stick figure to Fred. Sanderson had paused next to the helicopter, apparently waiting for two men wearing security uniforms to join him. Presumably they were Sanderson's own personal insurance policy, for all the good it would do him.
Fred felt a vague twinge of irritation. He had been clear that Sanderson was to proceed alone, but he could hardly blame the scientist for at least trying to manufacture the illusion of safety. It was almost enough to persuade Fred that somewhere within Phil Sanderson’s wobbling mass there resided some sort of backbone.
Let him have his bodyguards.
A security team of Fred’s own choosing waited for Sanderson in the fat belly of the chopper: five weathered, battle-hardened soldiers that were under clear instructions that they were to escort the scientist to and from the ship and no more. If the pudgy bastard managed to fuck the situation up he was going to end up dead one way or another. Fred just hoped it would be him that got to pull the trigger if it came to it.
In any case, there was nothing left to be done about Sanderson and the mutation but wait.
In the meantime there were other things to take into consideration beyond the advancement of science or how Phil Sanderson might look with a large entry wound in the centre of his expansive forehead. Equally important things, like a small army of people floating on ships off the coast of northern Scotland, and the fact that most of them were hired grunts who hadn't even been informed that the world they had known was going to be destroyed.
Some of them weren't taking the news so well, and all of them had guns.
Yet another consequence of the interference that had doomed Project Wildfire before it began: the fleet—and the mercenaries that populated it—was meant purely for cleanup and peacekeeping after the virus burned itself out. The ships were the white horse that Fred would ride in on to clear up the aftermath of the disaster. It certainly wasn't meant to be a place for Fred Sullivan to take up permanent residence.
The collapse of the world had made everyone who hadn't been included in the plan until it had been set in motion jittery, and jittery people whose fingers were curled around triggers were, to Fred's mind, not good company.
With every passing hour that the ships spent holding their position, they began to feel more and more like floating pressure cookers. With nothing to do, and nowhere to direct their rage at the devastation wrought on their species, it was only a matter of time before the troops on the ships began to search inwardly for a target, and Fred had a suspicion they wouldn't look far.
If Sanderson couldn't make a breakthrough quickly, Fred would be left with no option but to destroy the creature and flee to the rally point, quite possibly abandoning the bulk of the increasingly mutinous fleet in the process. It would be a catastrophic failure, and worse, it would be the only path he could take.
Fred detested being stuck with no choice. A lack of choice was a lack of power, and he had spent his entire life building influence and accruing wealth in the billions to ensure that the one thing he would never be was powerless.
A mutiny within the fleet was something that Fred could handle. He had prepared for every outcome. What he could not handle was the prospect of running to Australia and finding himself with no more influence than the average pensioner.
Everything now hinged on McIntosh; on a creature of immense unpredictability with a predilection for savage violence toward humans in general and Fred in particular.
It was the things you left to chance, Fred thought, that would undo you in the end.
Fate, in his experience, could be controlled and tamed, its impact minimised almost entirely, as long as you had enough money. Yet there was always that sliver of light, that crack in the door through which luck could force an entry. To fail to acknowledge it was folly, and failure to prepare was, as one of the slightly nauseating slogans peppered around the gleaming London HQ of Chrysalis Systems would have it, to prepare to fail.
Those sort of trite clichés generally made Fred's teeth grind noisily, but that one contained more than a modicum of truth.
Far below him on the deck, the chopper’s blades had reached full speed.
There was nothing else to be done about the McIntosh problem now. Luck and chance had been eliminated as far as was possible, and even Phil Sanderson couldn't possibly fuck things up, but Fred didn't hold out much hope of the man being able to unlock the secrets of the mutation's blood quickly.
Which meant that Fred was going to have to deal with the growing dissatisfaction of the people aboard the ships himself, in the only way that he and they would understand.
As the helicopter lifted from the deck, Fred turned away, and made his way back into the ship.
He had a meeting to attend.
Chapter 8
The chopper speared up through the mist that clung low to the North Sea, and the all-consuming roar of the engine made it difficult for Kyle Robinson to think clearly.
That seemed to be becoming a recurring theme.
Only minutes earlier he had been engaged in the same argument he'd been having with his brother over and over, ever since they had first sneaked aboard the ship. Well, almost. Right up until Project Wildfire actually went ahead, the argument had been about how to stop it, but it turned out that knowing about Wildfire was one thing, while throwing a spanner into the works of the vast machinery that Fred Sullivan had created was another entirely.
Tom had fantasized ever-more bizarre and unlikely ways to stop Sullivan, including blowing up the entire fleet with no working knowledge of explosives whatsoever, or infiltrating Fred’s personal security and assassinating the man like James Bond, until his desperation and impotence became obvious even to him.
It became abundantly clear that stopping the apocalypse was the stuff of fantasy when Sullivan's satellites spat the Wildfire virus down onto the surface of the Earth, and humans everywhere began to tear each other apart. At that point Kyle and Tom's recurring disagreement evolved to focus more on just what the hell they were supposed to do next.
Kyle shifted his gaze to Phil Sanderson, who sat in the chopper with an anxious expression on his face and a stack of papers clutched in his sweaty palms.
The balding scientist had interrupted the brothers’ latest heated discussion, and had seemingly removed the decision of what they should do next from their hands entirely. For weeks they had pretended to be soldiers, replete in dead men's uniforms, and that had been fine. Heart-stopping occasionally, but fine.
Thanks to Sanderson, now Kyle and Tom would have to do so
me actual soldiering.
This will not end well.
Kyle scanned the rest of the helicopter's interior furtively.
There were a grand total of eight men in the chopper. Alongside Kyle, Tom and Sanderson, sat five men who clearly did know something about being in the military, and who for the most part stared at Kyle with barely-disguised disdain.
I must look like a rookie to them, Kyle thought. If only they knew. I'm not even that.
Kyle might have no experience of being in the armed forces, but he did have recent experience of killing. Experience that had been forced upon him by his brother, and which had left a dark shadow in his mind.
Following the failed attempt to kidnap Fred Sullivan's daughter, the brothers had fled London, heading north as far as the land would take them. There, they found a town that wasn’t supposed to exist, hidden among the craggy cliffs and barren, sporadic islands that comprised Scotland’s harsh northern coastline.
That was when Kyle saw the fleet for the first time.
Seventeen huge ships pockmarked the choppy waters, and a dozen smaller vessels clung to them like parasites, shuttling troops across from the coast. Among container ships and civilian ferries, Kyle saw a half-dozen battleships of varying sizes and one honest-to-God aircraft carrier.
And people. A lot of people. Most of them military in appearance, all of them looking like they were preparing for something big to go down.
For a town that didn’t appear on any map, the place sure was fucking busy.
Kyle had half-expected that they would find nothing when they travelled north; had hoped as much, though discovering a lack of evidence would have been a shattering blow to his brother’s precarious mental stability. But the existence of the town further reinforced Tom's delusion, until Kyle was pretty sure that it wasn't actually a delusion at all.
The ‘town’ was really no more than a tent city that had sprung up around a handful of ancient stone buildings that looked like they had been abandoned many years before and only recently refurbished.
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