It appeared to serve only as a way-station for the huge numbers of troops that waited to be shuttled across to the fleet, and Kyle imagined that when everyone had finally made it over to their new posts, the town would cease to exist. Maybe it would look like it had never been there in the first place.
Kyle and Tom had spent a couple of days camped out on the hill that overlooked the town, watching from the cover of trees, searching for an opportunity to somehow blend in.
In the end, opportunity came to them: a couple of soldiers in the now-familiar black uniforms that bore no insignia stumbled drunkenly towards them in the dark, laughing raucously.
We have to kill them, Tom had hissed at Kyle and, before Kyle had even had a chance to respond, he found himself watching in mute horror as Tom hurtled down the hill toward the men, pulling a flick knife from his pocket.
With a stifled curse, Kyle had taken the only option he had left, and chased after his brother.
By the time Kyle reached the bottom of the slope, Tom had already buried his knife in one of the men, and was struggling with the second.
And losing.
Even with the element of surprise on his side, Tom was no fighter, and his knees began to crumple as the stunned soldier wrapped his hands around the neck of the man who had appeared out of nowhere with a sharp knife and a set of bad intentions.
Kyle had no choice. He withdrew his own knife and charged forward, planting it to the hilt in the neck of the man trying to choke his brother.
He saw a dark spray of blood arcing into the night air, and a look of stupid surprise on the face of the stricken man as Tom stumbled away.
Kyle felt a light slap on his wrist that confused him, until he realised it wasn’t a slap at all; it was a splash, warm and sticky and terrifying.
An obscene torrent of blood pumped from the ragged tear in the soldier's neck, dousing Kyle's forearm up to the elbow.
Kyle’s eyes widened in horror, and for a moment he felt oddly connected with the face that loomed in front of him, linked together invisibly by a shared sense of shock.
The dying man opened his mouth, though strangely it didn’t look like he was about to scream in pain or horror or fury. He looked more like he was going to ask a question. Just some dopey question.
Kyle saw his brother reappear with his own knife, watched him plunging it into the man's back. The dying soldier fell away and the dopey question became nothing more than a sad gurgle.
"Quickly," Tom hissed, breaking the paralysing spell that had fallen over Kyle. "Their uniforms. You get that one."
Kyle blinked at his brother. Tom’s face was covered in blood. It made him look like a monster from a horror movie; like a cleverly constructed special effect.
"Kyle," Tom said sharply as he hauled up one of the leaking bodies at his feet. "It’s done. It had to be done. They are just a means to an end, that's all. We have to move."
A means to an end.
Kyle rubbed at the blood that covered his forearm, watching as it dripped to the ground, and couldn’t help but wonder if Fred Sullivan told himself the same thing to help him sleep at night.
Maybe not, he thought. Maybe when you plan to kill in the millions, death just becomes a statistic, like points on a scoreboard. Maybe it feels different when your arm is soaked in warm blood and you can see the light in the dying man’s eyes as it flicks off forever.
After they dumped the bodies in the woods a few miles south of the coast, the two brothers washed the uniforms clean of the blood as best they could in a stream, and put them on. They were ill-fitting, and to Kyle they looked ridiculous, but he had little doubt they would serve their purpose. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of identically-clad men and women in the tent city. The black uniforms would render Kyle and Tom all-but invisible in the crowd.
Wearing the uniforms and doing their best to wear a military attitude to match; and with credit-card style identity cards issued by Chrysalis Systems in their pockets, Kyle and Tom had made their way to the tent city, and ultimately to the fleet, and Kyle had spent his time ever since trying to remind himself that he and Tom were supposed to be the good guys.
Serial killers.
Good guys.
The world had become a fucked-up place weeks before Project Wildfire destroyed it.
And now, as Kyle sat in the chopper, surrounded by men for whom the military attitude he had tried to fabricate came naturally; drafted into a mission he did not understand, he thought once more about Tom's words on the hill, and wondered if they would ever stop feeling so relevant.
We have to kill them.
The chopper lurched as turbulence buffeted it. Or maybe that was just Kyle’s stomach, doing its best to warn him that things were careering out of control now, just as they had been when Tom charged down the hill in the dark with a knife in his hand.
Kyle couldn't help but wonder if he was charging down a hill after his brother once more, and death was waiting at the bottom.
Chapter 9
Fred Sullivan drummed his fingers on the polished table and idly daydreamed about the days when ship’s Captains were able to make the irritants they had aboard their vessels walk the plank.
He wasn’t the ship’s Captain, of course, but the man who was in charge of the boat understood the concept of hierarchy well enough, and had the good sense to appear terrified whenever Fred’s piercing eyes drilled into him.
Sitting in the makeshift boardroom, in what would be his last ever senior management meeting, Fred cast a glance around the seven familiar faces seated around the huge table and felt a twinge of regret that his revolver held just six bullets. Meetings had always been an infuriating time-sink, and he had often dwelled on fantasies of ending them in bloodshed.
You may never get another chance...
Fred shook the thought away. The people that sat around him had all been pivotal in the smooth running of Project Wildfire, and none of them was technically to blame for the way it ended.
Technically.
They had been the engine that had helped him to drive Chrysalis Systems toward its ultimate goal. Each of them had performed admirably in the past—which was why they were still breathing—but none of them seemed to be taking the spectacular failure of the project personally, and Fred wasn't sure they even realised how lucky they were to be alive and sitting on the boat.
‘Boat’ was, of course, a singularly underwhelming way to describe the ship that Fred had made his floating HQ after abandoning the underground base in Northumberland. The newly-renamed Conqueror had been one of the jewels of the French navy before Fred’s bank balance persuaded the government of the time that they needed to decommission it and begin work on a newer model.
The carrier was a shade under one thousand feet long. In its previous life it had been home to sixty fighter jets and fifteen attack helicopters, and had been the first vessel built outside the USA to allow for catapult-assisted take-off. Now ‘decommissioned’, it was able to comfortably act as a base of operations for the twenty-five Harrier jets and seven attack helicopters Fred’s company had procured. With around four thousand troops on board, the nuclear-powered ship was technically under-populated, yet Fred felt claustrophobic on his floating HQ. Trapped.
The Conqueror’s static weapons fell a little short in Fred’s opinion, but carriers had never been designed as fast-attack vessels. Instead, they sat back while destroyers got up close and personal, and utilised their long-range aircraft to rain death from the skies.
Still, even without satisfactory on-board artillery, the Conqueror was a floating fortress, and quite possibly the most powerful man-made object still active on planet Earth.
Only the American fleet boasted vessels that exceeded the power of the Conqueror, and, of course, contact with America had been plunged back into the pre-Columbus era. The sheer distance between Fred and whatever was left of the United States meant their power was worth little more to him than a whispered promise.
Sometimes Fred
indulged himself in imagining how Wildfire might have gone down in America; a country with a vast and well-armed population. Messily, he suspected.
In all likelihood, he would never know. The New World might be nothing more than a continent of decaying corpses by now; a gargantuan graveyard spanning more than three thousand miles. Wildfire hadn't trimmed humanity as originally intended. Instead, Victor Chamberlain's global-level interference with the delivery system had rebranded the project as an extinction-level event.
That didn't bother Fred in the slightest. Most of the human race had been no more than worthless vermin, scrabbling around ineffectually in the cages of their unremarkable lives. For most, Fred would not even accept that what he had done to them was a crime. No, it was a mercy. Given another fifty years of the feverish expansion of the human race and the fucking cretins would have gladly eaten each other without any prompting from Fred.
No, what mattered to Fred now was what was left in the ashes of Project Wildfire. A vacuum. Power just waiting to be claimed. If Phil Sanderson was correct, Jake McIntosh offered him the opportunity to control humanity at a species-level. Even if the Americans did make it to the rally point before him, he felt certain they wouldn’t have leverage over him. Fuck their big ships. The mutation's blood was all that mattered now, and Fred was the one that had it.
“Fred?”
Fred blinked. For a moment there, lost in dreams of death and power, he had completely forgotten that he was in the middle of a meeting.
He glared at the woman that had interrupted his thoughts. Sandra Adkins, a prissy bitch with a nasal voice and almost comically ratty features. Adkins had been Director of Human Resources at Chrysalis, and her job title now seemed a little ironic to Fred. He fixed her with a stare that he hoped conveyed contemptuous disinterest.
"Uh, Fred, I was just asking what sort of measures are in place to protect the safety of the staff once you wake the monster up?"
Fred twisted his wrinkled face into a snarl. No missing the contempt. Not now.
The staff? For a fraction of a second, Fred wondered if Adkins was joking, but the businesslike expression on her face said otherwise.
"I have taken the measure of purchasing seventeen ships and putting my staff aboard them, Ms Adkins. I’d say the only thing threatening any of my staff is a proclivity for asking stupid fucking questions."
Adkins stared at him in shock for a moment but gathered herself quickly.
“It seems that the only questions left to ask are the fucking stupid ones, Fred,” she said curtly.
Fred chuckled. So few ever dared to spar with him.
“You don’t give any more of a shit about the staff than I do, Adkins. You want to know why your own bony arse is in danger, and just how much, isn’t that right? Come on, now, the time for boardroom bullshit is over, wouldn’t you say?”
Adkins flushed.
Fred stood. Age had done nothing to curve his spine, and when he drew himself up to his full height, he towered over the rest of them.
“You all want answers. Fine. Here are some truths for you.”
He turned to his left, fixing his gaze on Charles Ennis. A company man for twenty-five years, and a bona fide genius when it came to adding zeroes onto spreadsheets.
“Ennis, I haven’t liked your face for twenty-five years, and now I find that your skills are of little use to me.”
Charles Ennis’ mouth formed a perfect ‘o’ that matched his round features as Fred smoothly withdrew the revolver from its holster under his jacket and painted the wall with the man’s brains.
Fred let out a satisfied sigh as the roar of the gun echoed around the enclosed space. Damn, he thought, I do love firing that weapon.
“Let’s be clear about something," Fred said finally, breaking the silence that had settled over the room like radioactive dust. "Chrysalis Systems no longer exists. Your jobs no longer exist. This is to be the last of these meetings that I will suffer through. If you all wish to continue prattling away without my input, feel free, but I don’t want you to toil away under any illusions. None of you matter, not in the slightest. Your continued presence on this boat is a mild irritant, but I am willing to endure that much because the work you once did for me was useful."
Fred paused for a response. As he expected, there was none. Nothing underlined authority in a meeting quite like killing the attendees. He wished he had done it many, many years earlier.
"This is no longer a corporation. It certainly is no longer anything resembling a democracy. You’d be wise to proceed under the impression that this is in fact a dictatorship, and not a benign one. So here is what will happen: we will hold this position until the scientists give me something I can work with. If that does not transpire I will have all the various parts of this fleet that I consider to be redundant destroyed. Then I will give the order to move to Australia. Not before.”
Fred saw Sandra Adkins’ face contorting, as if she was trying desperately to hold something in. Eventually she failed.
“And what if we don’t have that long to wait?” she said cautiously, eyeing the smouldering corpse that sat to her right. “People are getting…anxious Fred. Most of the troops don’t even know what happened. They’re becoming…difficult to control. Unpredictable.”
“I am fully aware of the mutinous atmosphere on this ship,” Fred barked. “And it shall be taken care of. That is the end of the matter.”
Fred slipped the revolver back into its holster. It felt warm against his ribs.
"I hope I’ve made myself clear."
Fred turned and strode out of the thunderous silence of the boardroom, and couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. At one time he had believed his senior management team to be brilliant people; the best and the brightest. Yet it appeared they were only just now concluding that an army of hired thugs who were slowly waking up to the fact that their payment was meaningless might prove to be trouble.
So slow, he thought. So reactionary.
The plan was never meant to involve them ending up on ships staffed with mercenaries, travelling to the other side of the planet. If the people that had once been his staff could not adapt to their new reality, they truly had outlived their usefulness.
Fred grimaced, leaving the boardroom behind him and stalked through the narrow steel corridors, making his way to the quarters of one of the very few people on board the ship that did matter.
Chapter 10
Rachel Roberts sat with her back against the cold stone wall, her eyes fixed straight ahead; seeing nothing.
She had been locked in a cell with three other people, including two that she knew at least moderately well—Linda and Emma—but their attempts to engage her had been like seeds dropped on concrete.
Lost in her thoughts, locked in memories both recent and long-passed, Rachel’s mind bubbled and spat like an active volcano. Her rage sought an outlet, trying to break free of her and inhabit the world like a living entity. Only by erecting isolating walls in her thoughts to keep her away from the people around her could she guarantee their safety.
The impulse to do harm—to lash out at the nearest person in the most violent way possible—was almost overpowering.
Finding the brother she had been certain was dead had been her one shot at clinging to some sort of hope; some faint semblance of an idea that the world had not sunk into a bottomless abyss of pain and horror.
The darkening of her soul that she had felt ever since the disastrous escape from Aberystwyth had not been lessened by finding Jason alive: instead it had hardened like cooling steel, until it felt like a part of her that she would never be able to remove.
Jason was alive, but Jason was also dead. Lost to her, corrupted by the old woman’s torture; broken in mind and spirit until he hadn’t even recognised his own sister.
It was Jason that had killed John, though he hadn’t been the one to slice his throat open. Yet it was Rachel who felt responsible. For forcing John to go to Anglesey on a hopeless rescu
e mission and bringing the psychotic old bitch and her people to the castle. For leaving Jason alone in Aberystwyth in the first place.
For giving up on her little brother when he had needed her most.
Rachel’s cellmates gave her as wide a berth as was possible in the tiny cell, and soon gave up trying to talk to her.
Rachel’s gaze was pointed at the stone wall, but what she saw was the emptiness in Jason’s eyes when she had run toward him in Anglesey. Not the same sad emptiness that had been there after he had been forced to kill their mother, but something darker. Something almost inhuman.
She closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. The cell stank of damp and sweat and cloying fear. Worse, it smelled to Rachel of inevitability. She would never be freed, not unless the old woman decided to kill her. Rachel thought she’d be dead already if Annie Holloway was convinced that the grip she had over Jason was unbreakable.
It was just a matter of time before Annie was certain of Jason’s loyalty, or of the totality of her destruction of him. Rachel was on death row. Maybe they all were.
You can do this, Rach.
John’s final words haunted her.
Do what? There's nothing I can do.
Only when someone came to take Ed from the cell did Rachel's attention flicker back to the present. From the corner of her eye she watched the man as he bundled Ed out of the door. He was slight, balding.
And he carried the shotgun she had taken from Darren Oliver's men. The one she had used to save John's life.
She knew all too well that the gun had just one round in it. She had searched the castle for more shells and found none. If Darren had more ammunition he had hidden it well.
One shot.
She wondered if the man had checked the ammunition himself, and just how good a shot he might be. Not that it particularly mattered with a shotgun; not unless you were trying to use it at range. She had seen what the weapon did at close quarters. It ripped flesh apart like an explosive charge.
She lapsed back into dark thoughts for a time, and her mood only darkened further when she heard distant, muffled screaming. A man's voice. She couldn't tell whether it belonged to Ed or Michael.
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