Reaction (Wildfire Chronicles Volume 6)

by K. R. Griffiths

  Just get the job done, he thought, whatever the hell the job is—and get off this ship.

  "What do you need us to do, Sir?"

  Sanderson seemed to respond well to being addressed so formally. Kyle figured if he was going to get any simple answers from the head of research, it would be by deferring to him.

  Sanderson took a final look at the clipboard and passed it back to the ashen-faced woman dressed like a doctor.

  "You’re here for protection. Specifically, of me. We need a sample of the mutation’s blood. And unfortunately, chemical changes induced by its unconsciousness mean we need the blood when it is awake. And quite possibly when it is enraged. Though I don’t think that part will be a problem."

  He glanced at the young doctor.

  "Start reducing the dose, but do it slowly. I’d rather it wakes gradually."

  The doctor nodded and left the room, her face stricken.

  "Sykes," Sanderson said. "Check the emitters. Low frequency noise is the only thing we’ve found that slows the mutation down. I’d rather they were up and running at a low level before it wakes, just loud enough to keep it…friendly. I wouldn’t trust a motion detector to catch this thing if it gets free, and when it wakes up it’s going to be pissed."

  "And what do we do in the meantime?" Kyle said.

  "We wait. And make sure we have every weapon we can get our hands on pointed at the mutation until this is over."

  Chapter 17

  Like sand trickling through an hourglass, the inhabitants of Caernarfon Castle had finally begun to filter from the segregated safety of the towers. Slowly at first, in faltering twos and threes, the people formerly of the quiet town of Newborough crept into the courtyard and sought the comfort of the herd.

  Michael’s door was unlocked, which he presumed was either his reward for engaging in the torture of a terrified kid or another test to see what he would do once free.

  He cracked the door cautiously and watched for a long time as people began to enter the courtyard. It was like a dam cracking. As soon as those watching from the towers saw someone outside who didn’t terrify them, they added themselves to the trickle until it became a flow.

  When there were around twenty people out there, he turned to Claire.

  "Are you ready?"

  Claire nodded.

  Michael's instinct had been to wait before trying anything. To bide his time and look for the right opportunity. But caution had so far got him nowhere.

  The element of surprise. John had been all about that. Attack before the enemy can settle. End the fight before they know it's happening.

  Michael couldn't fight Holloway's people. Not directly. But he could surprise them.

  It had to be done immediately. There was no telling how long he had before Linda was taken from the cells. And a darker reason for acting promptly lurked in Michael’s mind: every moment he delayed was a moment during which he might get to know the people standing in the courtyard talking in hushed whispers. A chance to discover that they were lost and terrified; no different to himself.

  That would make it much harder to do what he had to do. Maybe even impossible.

  It's now or never.

  He checked the cells. Rhys and Bryn Holloway, along with an older man that Michael had seen hovering around Annie like an advisor, rotated guard duty between them. After a moment he picked out Rhys, leaning against a distant wall and keeping a bored eye on the people in the courtyard, occasionally glancing toward the cells.

  "Okay," Michael said, pointing at Rhys, "watch him. When he leaves that spot, you go talk to Linda. The cell on the far left. If he doesn't leave, you stay here, right?"

  Claire rolled her eyes.

  "Got it, Dad."

  Michael winked at her, and threw the door open. He pulled it nearly shut behind him, leaving just a crack for Claire to watch through, and wheeled the chair away from the tower without looking back.

  Distracting the Holloway brothers was a course of action that had the potential for any number of poor outcomes. They seemed slow-witted, but they were suspicious. Any obvious effort Michael made to interact with them would be reported back to their mother. From there, anything could happen.

  The best option was to play on their ignorance and their arrogance. Make them come to him.

  He wheeled himself to the nearest set of the steps that led up to the battlements. Knew that Rhys' eyes were on him as soon as he appeared, but didn't acknowledge the man. When he reached the base of the steps, Michael placed his palms on a low wall and hauled himself from the wheelchair. He slipped and crashed to the ground.

  And heard a snorted laugh.

  Perfect.

  He pulled himself onto his backside and dragged himself to the steps, heaving himself up them one by one, feeling a fire beginning to build in his triceps. After four steps, he made a show of slipping again, and threw himself back to the ground.

  For a moment he remained on his back, staring up at the grey sky, and hoped he wouldn't need to do it all over again.

  "Told you that you had to see this."

  Rhys' voice.

  A giggle.

  "What is he doing?"

  Bryn's voice.

  Moments later, the faces of the two Holloway brothers loomed above him, blotting out the sky. Both wore a mask of sneering mirth.

  "What the fuck are you trying to do, Cripple?"

  *

  Linda had stretched out across the cell and shut her eyes hours earlier, desperately trying to persuade her mind to retreat to a better place and failing miserably. Lying on her back, she was almost able to touch both walls of the cell that she had spent two freezing nights in. It turned out that it was difficult to go to your happy place when your current place was little bigger than a coffin.

  She was starving, and frequently found herself daydreaming of chocolate, and she had been forced to defecate into a bucket in front of two complete strangers. Until a couple of weeks earlier her idea of a bad day had involved walking into a classroom full of unsupervised children. It was amazing how quickly things could change.

  So far, the tiny cell and the bucket didn't even represent her worst day since days officially ended. Technically, this had actually been one of the better days.

  The worst one had been the day of the amputations. The cutting up of the meat that would feed the horror that Darren Oliver kept chained up outside the castle.

  No ordinary life would ever involve a day as bad as that. Linda couldn't help wondering how long that day would remain the worst in her memory. She had a nagging feeling it might be surpassed soon.

  "Linda?"

  Linda's eyes flared open and she sat bolt upright. She stared at Emma and Rachel. Both looked to be asleep.

  "Dad told me to give you a message," Claire whispered through the bars set into the centre of the door.

  Linda nodded.

  "They're going to let you out next, and they are going to ask you to do something horrible and you must do it. Tell them you're a doctor, and they'll ask you to treat the big man. When you do, you have to get something, and give it to Claire."

  Claire flushed.

  "Uh, to me," she corrected.

  Linda stared at the little girl.

  "Get what?"

  *

  There was nothing to do but wait. Eventually Bryn and Rhys had grown tired of watching gleefully as Michael struggled to ascend to the battlements. They had laughed in particular when he told them that he just wanted to see the sights, but finally the joke had worn thin, and they had roughly bundled him back into the wheelchair and told him to fuck off in a tone that left no room for doubt that the fun was over.

  Michael nodded and tried to look broken and humiliated. Inside his nerves hummed like a herd of Infected, and he focused all his efforts on keeping the anxiety he felt from reaching his face.

  When he returned to the tower and saw Claire waiting for him he knew immediately from the look of eager pride on her face that she had done as h
e had asked.

  And so they waited.

  After an hour Michael watched as Bryn hauled Linda from the cells and followed her toward the dungeon, prodding her in the small of her back with a shotgun. It was another thirty minutes or so before he heard the screams, and guilt surged within Michael when he realised he was glad it was Ed's voice he heard, and not Linda's.

  He didn't see Linda for a couple of hours after that.

  Chapter 18

  Linda stood at the door to the cell, trying not to give away the fact that she was waiting. She saw one of the old woman’s sons approaching soon enough, walking alongside a middle-aged man who wore a troubled look on his face that didn’t quite negate the importance of the knife that hung from his belt.

  The younger one, who Linda was fairly sure was called Rhys, carried a rifle slung across his shoulder. Michael’s rifle.

  Linda trusted Michael. If pushed she would have been hard-pressed to say why exactly. The man had darkness in his past that she thought reached his eyes a little too often, but there was a genuine tone to his words. The things he had confessed to her had been ripped from him, and even as he spoke Linda had the impression that he was trying to claw back the words, as if he wanted to force them back where they came from. It hadn’t been an act. No one could be such a good actor.

  Still, as she watched the men approaching the cell, and knew from the businesslike look on Rhys’ face that they were coming for her, just as Claire—as Michael—had predicted they would, she could not help but feel some doubt.

  The expression on Rhys' face chilled Linda, but it was the other one’s look of concern that troubled her most. The older one.

  His was the expression of a man who knew he was about to do something that he wanted no part of.

  Linda shrank away from the cell door as it opened, and when Rhys said you’re the doctor, right? Linda thought for a moment about denying it.

  Only for a moment.

  They led her silently to one of the castle’s huge towers, and up to a room on the second floor.

  To Jason’s room.

  *

  Jason was unconscious on a four-poster bed that looked like something from a Disney fantasy, and a rope leash around his neck was tied off around one of the bed’s ornate pillars. To Linda, he looked like someone’s dog, chained up outside a store and waiting patiently for its master to return.

  “What has he been given?” she asked Rhys, aiming for an authoritative tone and painfully aware that if Rhys started throwing the names of various medicines at her, she probably would not have a clue what they actually were.

  “Uh…” Rhys stared at her blankly.

  “Just painkillers,” the middle-aged man said. “A lot of painkillers. Some sleeping tablets too, I think. Zopiclone, I think they’re called.”

  Linda nodded thoughtfully.

  Never heard of it.

  “Is this all of your medical supplies?”

  She pointed at carrier bags full of bottles and packets, knowing full well that there was more. Everything in the castle had come from the nearby pharmacy, and Rachel had all-but cleaned the place out.

  “I think so,” the middle-aged man said.

  Linda suppressed a knowing smirk, and moved to the bags, searching through them and making a show of examining various bottles, scrutinising labels that meant nothing to her and tossing them aside.

  Jason had wounds—a lot of wounds—that looked to have become infected by the filth that covered much of the man’s huge body. That much was obvious, and might explain his sickly appearance (and the smell), but whatever caused his bizarre, detached behaviour was beyond solving for her. Maybe for anyone.

  Oddly, it looked to Linda like someone had tried to treat some of the wounds. A few appeared to be cleaner than the others and healing nicely, but the rest…

  Jesus Christ...

  Jason’s body was a roadmap of cuts: some thin and precise, as if somebody had attacked him with a scalpel. Others were long, ragged tears that glistened and oozed a noxious yellow pus.

  Linda had no idea what sort of treatment the man might truly require, but it was obvious even to her that Jason needed antibiotics at the very least, and she knew the names of some of those. A teacher generally picked up tidbits like that, gleaned from the various ailments the kids brought into the classroom with them, and, in the case of the boys at least, took great delight in showing off.

  Mostly though, Linda had seen or heard of antibiotics only in tablet form, and if that was all the bags contained, Michael’s plan, whatever it was, would fall at the first hurdle.

  She almost yelled out in relief when she pulled a bottle of clear liquid from a bag and read the label.

  Amoxycillin.

  Perfect.

  Linda stood, turning to face the two men who watched her like hawks.

  I’m going to need to bathe him and dress his wounds properly,” she said. “And then I’ll have to give him a shot of this.”

  She held up the bottle.

  “Uh…I don’t know about that,” Rhys said dubiously. “I think I should tell Ma if you’re gonna stick him with something. Right, Gareth?”

  He glanced at the middle-aged man.

  Gareth held out his hand for the bottle, and Linda passed it to him.

  After a moment of reading the label, Gareth handed it back to her.

  “No need,” he said. “It’s just antibiotics. I never heard of that hurting anyone. Let’s just get this over with, shall we?”

  Linda got the distinct impression that the man called Gareth wanted to stay as far away from Rhys’ mother as possible.

  That makes two of us, she thought, breathing a soft sigh of relief.

  Linda took a long time cleaning Jason up. Long enough that the two men watching her began to shift their feet in boredom. Neither paid much attention when she fished a syringe from one of the bags of medical supplies and tore it from its packet, before plunging it into the bottle and extracting a large dose of the antibiotic.

  Neither noticed that once she was done injecting the medicine into Jason, she paused for a second before carefully withdrawing a measure of blood and dropping the needle quietly into her pocket.

  “All done,” she said brightly. “He will improve in a day or so. Be fine in a week.”

  Rhys snorted his disinterest.

  “Uh…so, what now?” Linda asked.

  “You’re not done, Doc,” Rhys said, and the bored expression on his face dissolved and became something else, a dark and intangible something that made Linda’s pulse race.

  “Now it’s time for surgery,” Rhys said, and laughed as though he had been waiting an age to say the line, and he thought those might just be the funniest five words in the English language.

  *

  Michael’s heart sank when he saw Linda being led back toward the cells. The sense of crushing disappointment he felt wasn’t just that he had hoped she would be freed from the cells once she had treated Jason; it was the look on her face. The blood splashed across her coat.

  They had taken her to Jason. And then they had taken her straight to the dungeon. To Ed, and to knives that gleamed dully in the half-light and to the sickening stench of blood and terror.

  Fury welled up in Michael; a cold rage that had lurked inside ever since he had looked into Ed’s fearful eyes as he began to methodically slice off the fingers on the man’s left hand.

  Michael had managed to block out the emotion during the cutting itself—he had focused exclusively on wondering whether or not the man was left-handed and if he played any musical instruments; mundane bullshit to occupy his thoughts while his hands did something terrible.

  Still, the mere act of forcing himself to ignore Ed’s screams felt like it had twisted something out of shape inside Michael. The look on Linda’s face—shock, maybe, but disgust and self-loathing, too—reminded Michael of the squirming in his own gut.

  He forced himself to focus.

  If Linda had done as he had asked,
she would be carrying the syringe on her person right now, and the question that really needed answering was how am I going to get it?

  Linda was not being set free; she was being returned to the cells. That presented a huge problem.

  Michael dropped his gaze from the window to the stone floor, lost in thought.

  "I can go get it, Dad."

  Michael stared at Claire in surprise. She had apparently read his mind.

  "You keep that up and I'll have to start calling you Claire-voyant," Michael said with a grin.

  Claire stared at him, puzzled.

  "I don't—"

  "Just a joke," Michael said, holding an apologetic hand up. "A bad one. They call those Dad-jokes. Better get used to them."

  Claire nodded, but it was clear from the expression on her face that she was half-wondering if her father had lost the plot.

  "They'll see you," Michael said.

  "They might not. I can run fast. I know what you’re going to do."

  “You do?” Michael said, surprised.

  Claire nodded proudly.

  “It wasn’t that hard to figure out.”

  “And you’re okay with it?”

  Claire shrugged.

  “I don’t like these people,” she said simply, and Michael surprised himself with a laugh.

  “Me neither,” he said. “Okay, if you think you can get to Linda and get back without getting spotted.”

  Claire nodded eagerly.

  “I’ll be quick.”

  She stared at Michael solemnly.

  "Okay, then," Michael said. "Do it, before I have a chance to think about what a bad idea this is. Just get back here quick. If they see you, get back here no matter what. Deal?"

  Claire nodded and bolted from the room before Michael could say another word.

  *

  Claire slipped through the door and out into the wide courtyard, and for a moment she stood still, scanning the area for a sign that she had been spotted. Increasingly the courtyard was filling up, and most of the people there—none of whom she recognised—seemed to be busy conversing with each other in hushed tones. Nobody appeared to notice the little girl watching them.