She stepped through, pulling Emma along behind her, muscles tensed and ready to flee for her life. Once outside, a quick scan of her immediate surroundings revealed no movement, and she closed the door softly behind her, sealing the creature inside the cottage and praying that it hadn’t detected the soft clicking of the closing door.
The shriek that erupted on the other side of the wood, just inches away from her face, told her that luck was in even shorter supply than time.
Please, let that be the only one. Please, don’t let any others hear that shrie—
An answering shriek, to her left.
Judging by the volume of the noise, the creature was about fifty yards away.
Without pausing, Rachel bolted to her right, trusting that Emma was following and expecting that at any moment she would feel hands clutching at her, dragging her to the ground, and then teeth…
As she ran, Rachel felt a scream building in her lungs, but it wasn’t a scream of terror, though there was plenty of that. No, this was a scream of rage and frustration, a primal roar that had been building inside for days. A scream that had wanted to be unleashed since the moment she saw her damaged brother pounding John’s head into the ground and knew that all hope was lost.
Little Jason. The shy guy who didn’t know his own strength, the kid who had always needed the protection of his big sister despite his intimidating size.
Harmless little Jason.
St. Davids’ gentle giant.
He’s killed us all.
She heard the rattle of footsteps on the street behind her and risked a look over her shoulder.
Emma was about ten yards behind Rachel, struggling to keep pace and slowly falling further behind. Beyond her, Rachel saw the Infected rounding the corner onto the street, and felt her heart leap. She counted six...no, seven. A couple of whom she recognised instantly as some of the young women that had survived Darren Oliver’s reign of terror at the castle.
They had survived Annie Holloway, too. In the end it had been Rachel’s own brother that had brought death to their door. After everything that had happened, after surviving Victor and Darren and Annie, nobody was going to survive Jason.
Rachel turned away and poured every ounce of energy into pumping her legs, praying that the uneven cobbles would not betray her.
Seven Infected.
Her mind immediately ran to a more terrible number.
Four.
The amount of bullets she had left in the revolver.
This is the end.
Get off the street.
Small boutiques and coffee shops blurred past as she ran, and her legs began to burn. Nothing offered itself up as a means of escape. Getting into one of the buildings might offer her a faint chance, she thought, but pausing to try a door only to find it locked would get her killed for sure.
Gasping for air, Rachel twisted her neck again, hoping to see some sign that she was pulling away from the Infected.
What she saw instead was Emma, now forty yards back, collapsing to the ground and exploding, her abdomen ripped wide open by clawing fingers and snapping teeth.
A shocking spray of blood erupted across the cobbled street. A glistening rope of something arced behind it; something that Rachel couldn’t identify for moment, until her mind finally offered up the obscene answer with a horrified scream: intestine.
She had seen the devastating effects of a human being encountering a single Infected, and they were horrific, but watching seven of the creatures bringing one young girl down was something else. Like a pack of starving hyenas, each desperate to tear away its fill before the meat ran out.
Rachel saw Emma open her mouth to scream; saw one of the Infected driving its snapping jaws down onto the girl’s lips. It was a kiss drawn from the depths of a nightmare. A kiss that ended with Emma’s tongue hanging limply from once-human teeth, torn out at the root.
Another jet of blood spurted into the air, painting the window of a nearby clothing store a grisly shade of red-black.
So much blood, Rachel thought dimly, but the blood wasn’t the worst part. Emma was still alive, still trying to scream as her eyes began to cloud over with a deep angry crimson and the virus raced with the Infected to claim her.
Still human until the last terrible second.
Without realising what she was doing, Rachel suddenly found the revolver in her hand, and she blindly loosed a couple of rounds at the seething mass of violence on the street, letting her rage at the obscenity of Emma’s death overcome her. For a moment she felt as blinded by emotion as the eyeless creatures that tore at the poor girl’s warm corpse, and the fog in her mind only lifted when she saw the Infected drop Emma’s body back to the cobbles, whipping their heads toward the deafening roar of the revolver.
Well done, Rach. Smart move.
With a chilling shriek, the Infected left Emma’s ruined body on the cobbles and lurched toward Rachel.
She turned to run with a heavy heart and aching legs, knowing that escape was impossible; unable to do anything other than try.
The small buildings huddled along the street became a blur once more, though less so this time. Rachel had spent a lot of time over the years jogging to keep fit, but she was built for endurance rather than speed. Maintaining a steady pace for many miles was one thing; terrified energy-sapping sprints another entirely. Already she was beginning to slow.
To her left, a small art shop with a single large pane of glass comprising its frontage caught Rachel’s eye, and without thinking she fired the gun one more time, shattering the window and hurtling through, praying there might be a door she could lock inside. Something—anything—to slow the creatures that hunted her.
There was nothing. Just an open-plan space designed to mimic a tiny gallery. Lots of paintings and small sculptures adorned the walls; local art that focused on the grim, desolate beauty of the Welsh coastline; art that no one would ever buy because art was history now. Like everything else.
The rear of the gallery held a small stockroom, but there was no door. Hanging beads divided the stockroom from the shop itself.
Beads.
Fucking hippies.
It was almost funny. Almost enough to split Rachel’s mind in two.
She came to a stop, panting for air, and heard the chorus of shrieks outside. Approaching fast.
There was only one thing left to do. The thing that she had promised Michael she would do if things ever went as bad as they possibly could.
The thing she had promised herself.
You won’t take me.
Rachel pressed the barrel of the revolver to her temple and turned to face the creatures that had chased her relentlessly, right up to the bitter end.
One bullet left. More than enough.
The first of the creatures appeared, bolting into the gallery, and Rachel squeezed her eyes shut, unwilling to look at the horror that streaked toward her. Her mind shrieked at her finger, demanding that it pull the trigger before it was too late.
Do it. Do it. Do it. Do—
The tearing fingers and teeth she expected to feel on her flesh did not arrive. Instead she heard a strange sound, a strangled yelp and a thud, and a huge shadow fell across her, and after an eternity Rachel pried open her eyes in disbelief and the scream that had been building inside for days finally burst from her.
*
Inch by tortured inch, Ed helped Shirley shrug out of the damaged pack, taking great care to cup his remaining good hand over the ragged tear, clasping the packets and cans inside that desperately wanted to fall out and ring a dreadful alarm around the small alley. His other hand had been heavily bandaged by Linda until it was no more effective than a stump.
In another time it might have looked like the two men were trying to act out some sort of comedy sketch; as if they were part of a movie that was being advanced frame-by-frame.
The rest of the world wasn’t moving in slow-motion, though.
Ed caught a can of soup as it slipped through th
e hole in Shirley’s pack and lowered it gently to the ground, and from the corner of his eye he saw another blur of motion at the narrow entrance to the alley.
Another of the Infected, streaking past toward something—some person—that was unfortunate enough to have attracted its full attention.
Poor bastard, Ed thought, and shuddered as he realised that he might as well be referring to himself. It was just a matter of time before one of the Infected stumbled across the two men cowering in the alley.
This is taking too long.
He focused intently on the ground, placing another errant can down noiselessly as it slid from the pack, and saw a shadow fall across the cobbles.
He froze.
It seemed to take an eternity to persuade his eyes to wrench themselves away from the ground.
At the entrance to the alley, another of the Infected had appeared, but this one wasn’t heading away on some bizarre and grisly mission. Nothing had attracted this one’s attention. Not yet.
The creature paused.
Swaying oddly.
Like it was trying to gather more data; to confirm that it had in fact just heard something nearby.
Paralysed by terror, Ed and Shirley stared directly into the creature’s empty eye sockets. It was a matter of feet away from them.
Ed held his breath, but knew that it was a temporary solution. Already the air in his lungs felt like it was catching fire. Soon enough, it would evacuate explosively. With each passing second, the effort of holding in the toxic oxygen increased the pounding of his heart.
It’s going to hear my pulse.
Ed had listened to Michael’s heartfelt speech back at the castle; he really had. Don’t panic. How could a simple two-word command be so impossible to follow?
With each beat, his heart seemed to get louder, and it began to feel like the various parts of his body were going to betray him all at once. He felt an overwhelming urge to cough, as though a lifetime of knowing how to breathe just fine had abruptly ended, and now it had become a task that required his full attention.
I’m choking. Can't breathe.
I have to cough.
I'm going to die.
Ed’s eyes slowly fell back to the ground. As they travelled, they spent a half-second pointed at Shirley, and Ed had a moment to absorb the man’s fearful expression; the faint shake of the head as the biker realised what Ed was doing. Ed hadn’t even realised himself; not until his eyes landed on the can at his feet again, and his fingers clenched around the cool metal almost involuntarily.
Before Ed could decide whether the course of action he had opted for was a bad idea or a terrible idea, the time for debate was over. He whipped the can forward, putting every ounce of strength he had into the throw.
The can sailed through the air.
The creature whipped its head up.
And then it crumpled toward the ground as the can caught it square in the forehead with a soft thud.
Ed stared, amazed, and part of him wanted to yell out his disbelief.
Great fucking throw!
But things were still falling, still making the journey toward the ground and the inevitable noise of landing.
Oh shit.
The now-dented can hit the cobbles with an impossibly loud metallic crash, and Ed’s breath finally forced its way explosively out of his lungs.
Shirley flung the remains of the ruined pack from his back, oblivious to the clatter as the rest of the contents rattled on the cobbles like a medieval alarm system, but Ed saw none of that.
He was already running.
The buildings that lined the narrow alley became a fear-drenched blur as Ed rocketed past them, focusing only on keeping one foot in front of the other. In a strange way, he had never felt so alive; so in tune with the rhythm of his body. He could almost feel the individual muscles working, the fibres twitching. Each movement was a perfect symphony, a hundred different parts of the miracle that was the human body playing the same frantic song.
And then one of the windows set high in a building overlooking the alley erupted, showering glass into Ed’s path.
Not just glass.
Something else.
A whimper escaped Ed’s lips, riding the current of painful breath that tore itself from his lungs, and he slammed to a halt.
A dark shape exploded into the alley. Right in front of him.
Huge.
Covered in blood.
Wielding a pipe.
Ed wanted to scream and laugh and cry in relief, but there was no energy left. Only enough fuel in the tank to stumble past Jason, and to turn and see the big man start swinging.
*
As Jason decimated the Infected that had been bottlenecked in the alley, Ed felt a presence beside him, and turned to see another figure climbing through the broken window that Jason had burst through seconds earlier.
A slight figure with eyes that burned with dark intensity.
Rachel held out a hand toward him as she clambered awkwardly across the broken glass.
“Little help would be nice,” she said with a crooked grin.
Ed nodded dumbly and offered her the hand that still had fingers, letting Rachel balance herself against his arm as she dropped from the window to the cobbles.
Once she was in the alley alongside him, Ed turned to see Jason dropping the last of the Infected that had poured into the narrow space with a blow that almost cleaved the creature’s head in two.
“Are you okay?” Ed asked a little hesitantly.
Rachel grimaced.
“I’ve been better. Emma’s dead. A few others from the castle, too. I saw them…turned, I guess. Changed. You know.”
Ed didn’t know what to say, and so he simply nodded. Rachel delivered the news with a matter-of-fact detachment, but he could tell from the shimmering intensity in her eyes that Emma's death had meant a lot more than nothing.
For the first time as he looked at her he felt something other than intimidation. Something that seemed a little more like sympathy.
She must have been through a hell of a lot, he thought, to be able to deal with this so calmly.
“Uh…is he okay?” Ed asked, pointing at Jason.
The big man was busily smearing Infected heads across the cobbles with mighty blows of the lead pipe, and seemed unaware that all of the creatures were already dead. He swung remorselessly, like a machine, until the bodies piled at his feet were reduced to little more than a horrific paste.
Rachel’s expression hardened, but Ed thought he saw something else in her eyes. Something broken.
“He hasn’t been okay for a long time,” she said hoarsely.
For a moment Ed, Rachel and Shirley stood and watched Jason silently, as if a dark spell had been cast over them. The big man, for his part, seemed utterly unaware of their presence.
“Okay,” Rachel said breathlessly, shattering the awkward silence, and staring pointedly at Ed and Shirley. “Where’s Michael?”
The answer to her question floated on the air, carried like driftwood on a fast-moving stream.
Gunshots.
Chapter 36
As the helicopter touched down on the deck of the Conqueror, Kyle toyed with the notion that he should once more jam the barrel of the rifle into the pilot’s neck and demand that he take off again.
It wasn’t the two armed men scurrying toward the chopper as the whine of the rotor blades began to lower in pitch that made his heart leap; hell, everyone seemed to be armed these days. Kyle had managed the best part of thirty years without ever seeing a gun; five minutes ago he had been threatening to blow somebody’s head off with one.
No, it wasn’t the guns that scared him. Not anymore.
It was the bodies.
In the distance, behind the approaching men, he saw a stack of bodies, like something from some grisly old photograph depicting the hideous result of a brutal war.
What the fuck happened here?
He stepped out of the chopper, half-wonder
ing if somehow the game was up, and Sullivan knew he had two interlopers in his bizarre private army. Maybe the two men running toward the chopper were here to execute Kyle and his brother. Certainly Kyle couldn’t imagine them doing any arresting. Law and justice was definitely a thing of the past, and not a matter that Sullivan had overly concerned himself with even when it had meant something.
True to form, Tom remained in the chopper, presumably hoping that he could somehow make himself invisible and avoid the inevitable shit-storm to come.
And you thought you were going to kill Sullivan, Kyle thought bitterly.
He had often felt guilty for labelling his brother delusional, but not where that was concerned. Two men with no military experience and one gun that neither of them could fire with any degree of accuracy were never going to get anywhere near Fred Sullivan.
Kyle lifted his arms aloft in surrender as the two men reached the chopper, and grunted in surprise when the younger of the soldiers pushed him aside and leapt aboard.
“Wait,” Kyle said, “What’s going on?”
His answer was an ear-splitting roar, and he turned in astonishment to see one of the nearby destroyers unleashing a devastating salvo of rocket fire at a ship further to the west. Another huge explosion tore the air over the North Sea apart.
Even more incredibly, a second or so later, Kyle heard the noise of another crunching impact and felt a sudden tilting of the deck. No more than a degree or two, barely noticeable. Kyle wouldn’t have noticed it but for the fact that nothing caused the Conqueror to tilt. Previously, he had suspected it would have taken a tsunami wave to make the gigantic ship feel like it was actually at sea.
But he saw no tsunami.
“That’s going on,” the younger soldier growled, as the older one—clutching an assault rifle identical to Kyle’s own—hauled himself into the helicopter.
“The mutation is free,” the older soldier said. “And I think it’s just arrived.”
“Here?” Kyle said in astonishment. “But we just left it on the other ship.”
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