Mutation (Twenty-Five Percent Book 1)

by Wheatley, Nerys

  Alex took a key from a hook by the door and inserted it into the keyhole, then walked the length of the room to the button which opened the main garage door and turned the key next to it. Unfortunately, the control was on the far side of the room to where they would be leaving, but since it was his plan he had been unanimously voted to be the one who did it. As he stood, his heart racing, about to open a very large door to a very large number of eaters, he was beginning to regret his idea.

  He looked over at Micah, Janie and Kenny. Micah and Janie gave him the thumbs up. Perched behind Janie on her motorcycle, Kenny looked like he had his eyes closed.

  Alex took a deep breath and hit the button.

  The mechanism’s motor whirred into life and the bottom edge of the door lifted from the concrete floor with the grind of metal against metal.

  A cacophony of moans and thuds erupted from outside, rattling the door in its channel.

  Alex ran.

  By the time he’d reached his bike, the bottom of the door was already three feet off the ground. Micah was gingerly opening the smaller door. Alex’s plan was that all the eaters on the other side would have been attracted by the opening of the larger door. When he heard Micah cry out, he knew it hadn’t worked.

  Micah stumbled back as two eaters shoved through the door after him. The skull-spiker was in his hand before Alex could reach him and the first eater went down. The second tripped over the body of the first. Micah bent and drove the knife into the back of its head.

  Alex heard Kenny whimper. He glanced back to see the shortest eaters in the crowd ducking under the door. Several hit their heads. It didn’t slow them.

  “Help me,” Micah grunted, struggling to pull the dead eaters from the doorway.

  Alex grabbed onto the top one and heaved. The man was lighter than he was expecting and he was thrown off balance, sending the body flying through the air to land at the feet of the leading eaters. Several of them stumbled over it and fell and Alex just managed to stay upright. He tried to look as though he’d planned the whole manoeuvre.

  Micah was dragging the other body out of the way and Alex took over while he lodged open the door with a brick. Janie’s motorcycle roared into life and they leaped out of the way as she barrelled through the door with Kenny hanging onto her, his eyes squeezed shut.

  The garage door was fully open now and eaters were pouring into the room.

  “Go,” Alex yelled.

  Micah ran back to his bike and leaped on, switching on the engine. Alex pulled out his pistol and shot at the closest of the eaters as he ran for his own bike. Hit two, missed two. They were within a few feet as Micah manoeuvred through the door, somewhat slower than Janie had, and Alex heard him speed away.

  He swung one leg over his bike as the first eater reached him. He’d holstered his pistol to hold onto the motorcycle, so he leaned his weight onto his left leg and kicked with his right, connecting with the woman’s stomach. It stumbled backwards into another eater behind it, pushing both of them off balance.

  Alex gunned the engine, kicked out the stand and drove, ducking beneath the hands of an eater by the door and bursting into the sunshine.

  He couldn’t help smiling when he saw his plan had mostly worked. The majority of the eaters at the back of the building had gone through the main door. More, however, were coming around from the sides. He spotted Micah, Janie and Kenny some way along the street, waiting, and he carefully circumvented a group of eaters and sped up to reach them.

  “What kept you?” Janie said.

  Kenny was clamped to her back like a limpet, his arms wrapped tight around her waist, although he had opened his eyes.

  “You’re welcome, for my brilliant plan,” Alex said, revving his engine and grinning. “Let’s go.”

  It only took them five minutes to get back to East Town, despite having to make their way around a couple of snarl-ups of now empty vehicles and several large groups of eaters. They would have been even quicker, but they were being careful not to lead any eaters back to Alex’s home.

  He had forgotten how much he enjoyed riding a motorcycle and despite not having ridden for so long it came back to him like, well, riding a bike. Micah seemed to be enjoying it too. For the first mile he had a huge grin plastered to his face, until he had a coughing fit after swallowing a bug and almost fell off. From then on he kept his mouth shut, but still looked like he was having fun.

  “Why didn’t I ever try this before?” he said when they came to a stop at the sign announcing the edge of East Town.

  “Because it’s no fun in the rain?” Alex said.

  Micah shrugged. “I’m definitely going to get a motorcycle licence when this is all over. Maybe I’ll go on a tour around the coast, just me, a motorbike, and the open road.” He stared off into the distance.

  “So when you get to the guard at the line of cars, tell them Janie and Alex sent you and you’ll be fine,” Janie was saying to Kenny.

  He took his helmet off. “Thanks. For saving my life and everything.”

  “Um, we kind of brought the eaters to you,” Alex said.

  “Yeah, but I was going to have to leave sooner or later anyway. I’ve been living off the snacks people left in the break room and I was down to my last Pot Noodle.”

  “Thanks for the bikes,” Janie said.

  “That’s okay.” He smiled at her before looking at the ground. “Um, I was wondering, when you’ve found your son and everything and all this is over, if maybe you’d like to get a coffee or something. With me.”

  Alex had never seen Janie speechless. After a few seconds of staring at Kenny in stunned silence, she shuffled her feet and studied a nearby house for no apparent reason.

  “Erm, I... maybe, yes.” She smiled. “Yes.”

  Alex had also never seen her blush. It felt like he’d strayed into an alternate universe.

  Kenny lit up like a Christmas tree. “Great. That’s great. I’ll look forward to it.” He gave a small laugh. “Well, good luck with everything. I’ll see you when you get back.” He gave a final wave, smiled at Janie and turned to walk down the road.

  Janie turned round and saw Alex and Micah watching her. Her smile vanished. “If either of you say a word, you will be singing soprano for the rest of your lives.”

  “Nothing,” Alex said.

  She looked at Micah. “What are you smirking at?”

  “It’s just interesting to see you have a human side,” he said.

  She shook her head and turned to Alex. “I’m going to find my son and bring him back here,” she said. “I don’t know if he’ll want to come, but I’m done with not being in his life. If I have to knock him out and carry him back, I’ll do it.”

  Alex smiled, knowing she wasn’t joking. “He’ll be glad to see you.”

  A flicker of doubt crossed her face. “You think so?”

  “When men are scared,” Micah said, “we always want our mothers.”

  Janie stared at him for a moment then amazed Alex by smiling at him. “You two be careful,” she said. “I don’t want to be having to come and rescue you.”

  Alex smiled. “We’ll do our best.”

  “That does not fill me with confidence,” she sighed, then grinned, revved her engine and sped off, yelling, “See you later, white-eyes” as she disappeared around a corner.

  “The eaters won’t know what hit them,” Micah said, watching her go.

  “Yeah,” Alex said, chuckling as he mounted his bike. He pulled his helmet on. “I want to check on Gaz and the other two on the way.”

  “What are you going to do with them?” Micah said.

  “I have no idea.”

  Despite having to avoid eaters and abandoned cars on the roads, it didn’t take long to get back to the house where they’d left the three would be rapists duct taped in musical hell. It was so quiet when they arrived that at first Alex thought they may have made a mistake and turned onto the wrong street. No Birdie Song blared from the upstairs windows and no eater
s crowded around the building. The front door was wide open.

  Alex killed his engine. For a moment, he thought he heard another engine, but the noise vanished and he shrugged it off as an echo. Or maybe someone else was travelling, like they were. Just because they hadn’t seen many people, and no-one else with a vehicle, didn’t mean there weren’t any.

  Giving it no more thought, he climbed off his motorbike and drew his pistol.

  “Maybe they got free somehow,” Micah said, looking around apprehensively as they approached the door.

  As soon as they stepped into the living room, Alex could smell it. “I don’t think so.”

  They crept up the stairs, alert to anything that might be waiting for them at the top. Alex had to cover his nose and mouth with his hand to keep from gagging when they reached the landing. Micah took one look in the bedroom where they’d left Pi and Buzz taped to the radiator and turned away, retreating to the landing.

  The two men were still taped to the radiator. At least, what was left of them. Blood soaked into the carpet over much of the room. Two disjointed, twisted skeletons and a few lumps of mangled flesh was all that remained of the two men. The eaters had done a thorough job.

  Despite the knowledge that these men had left him little choice, Alex felt guilty. He had left them here, unable to defend themselves from the hordes of eaters roaming the streets. This was his fault.

  A wave of nausea swept over him and he was about to leave the room when something caught his attention. With a grimace, he squelched across the blood saturated floor to get a closer look at one of the skulls, which was now hanging across the stripped, bloody ribs, the spinal cord the only thing keeping it attached to the rest of the body. Around the eye socket, the bone was chipped and sliced. There were marks on the rest of the bones where eaters had gnawed into them, but this was different. Some kind of sharp instrument had created the marks on the skull.

  His disgust temporarily forgotten, Alex studied the rest of the bones he could see without resorting to touching anything. On the other corpse, he saw similar marks on a few of the ribs around where the heart had once been.

  “What on earth are you doing in there?” Micah said from the landing.

  “I don’t think eaters killed them,” Alex said, still peering at the bones.

  “They look pretty eaten to me. Of course, I’m not studying them as if they were porn.”

  Alex straightened. “The eaters ate them, but I think they were already dead.”

  Micah turned to look at him. “How on earth can you tell from what’s left?”

  He pointed at the ribs. “Look at these marks. And here, on the skull. Don’t you watch CSI? Those are stab wounds.”

  Micah’s gaze flicked down to the mangled crimson flesh before he turned away again. “I’ll take your word for it. But who would do that?”

  Alex took one last quick look around for clues, then walked back out again, pausing to wipe the soles of his shoes on a relatively clean area of carpet.

  “I don’t know.”

  Micah’s eyes opened wide. “You don’t think Gaz somehow got free, do you?”

  They both looked at the closed bathroom door. Alex took out his gun and opened the door carefully.

  They looked inside.

  “Well,” he said, his words muffled as he covered his mouth with one hand, “I think we can safely assume it wasn’t Gaz.”

  Without any windows to let in the air as there had been in the bedroom, the smell of blood and early decomposition had become almost corporeal. Gaz was slumped where they’d left him against the toilet. There was little doubt he’d been stabbed. The lime green handled knife was still buried in his left eye.

  “I’ll be outside,” Micah said, his voice sounding strained.

  Alex turned to see him almost run down the stairs. He found it odd that they’d been killing eaters for three days, and yet Micah was freaked out by the sight of a dead body. Maybe it was the smell.

  Shrugging, he turned back to Gaz. The eaters hadn’t got into the bathroom so he was intact, apart from the knife. Something about it seemed familiar, although Alex couldn’t think what it was. After a few seconds of staring at the knife, he sighed in frustration, closed the door and went back down the stairs.

  He found Micah outside the front door, taking deep breaths of the fresh air.

  “I thought you were studying to be a doctor,” he said.

  “We hadn’t got to the dead bodies bit,” Micah replied, “it was all academic. Our anatomy tutor used to boast that after two months in his class we’d be able to stab someone in the chest and miss all the major organs.” He looked back at the house. “Who would do something like that?”

  “Maybe someone they’d had a run in with before found them and decided to take advantage of the situation,” Alex replied, although he was unconvinced. The feeling that there was something he should remember was still nagging at him.

  “Well, unless you want to go poking around any more bloody remains, may I suggest we get out of here?” Micah said, already striding back to his bike.

  20

  The location of the supposed secret laboratory was to the north west of the city, in a largely industrial area filled with retail parks and warehouses.

  The most direct route was through the city centre, but after their Tesco experience they had decided to avoid that whole area. Other than East Town, all the more densely populated areas were closer to the centre, with a smattering of twenty storey luxury blocks of flats along the river and streets and streets of narrow Victorian terraces next to an ugly sixties concrete council estate.

  It made sense that eaters would be concentrated in that locality. Although, as they drove through the streets north of East Town, Alex was wondering if they could be wrong on that front.

  Abandoned cars blocked all of the major, and even some of the minor routes. Some of the cars were burned out. Some were still on fire. Even on the bikes there were times when getting past the frequent obstructions was difficult.

  Progress was faster than walking, but hardly rapid. Coming anywhere close to the thirty mile per hour speed limit was a distant dream. Apart from the cars and other detritus making the streets a maze of potential hazards, there was always the danger of rounding a corner and running into a crowd of eaters.

  When it happened, Alex was in the lead.

  He reached a stop sign and, for the first time in his driving career, didn’t stop. They hadn’t seen any other moving vehicles. He thought they’d be safe. He didn’t factor in other possible perils. Like a large group of eaters milling around the middle of the street for no apparent reason.

  His bike almost went down as he turned sharply, trying to avoid ploughing into a wall of grasping hands. The back wheel clipped the leading edge of the horde and spun out of control, whirling for a few moments on the asphalt before propelling him with a squeal of rubber back in the opposite direction, directly at Micah who was just exiting the junction.

  Alex caught a glimpse of his panicked face as Micah swerved to avoid him. A split second later, he heard the crash.

  Grasping the brake, Alex put his left foot down as he jerked the bike round one hundred and eighty degrees to a standstill. The engine stalled.

  A wave of eaters was surging towards him. Between the horde and Alex, Micah was on the ground, his bike on its side, pinning him to the street.

  Alex leaped from his bike and ran towards him. “Are you alright?” he gasped as he skidded to the ground beside him.

  Micah winced. “I don’t think anything’s broken, let’s just put it that way. But I can’t get out.”

  Alex looked up at the eaters. They were just a few dozen feet from them, their excited moans all he could hear. He tried to tune them out.

  “Move your leg so I can get the bike up.”

  Micah twisted his right leg from across the bike. Alex pulled it upright then took Micah’s hand and did the same for him. Blood was soaking through the jeans shredded around his left calf
and he grunted as he put his foot down.

  Alex glanced at the approaching horde nervously. “Can you ride?”

  Micah looked at the eaters coming for them. “Under the circumstances, yes.”

  Alex waited until Micah was back on his bike and had started the engine. One eater had broken away from the pack and lumbered up behind them, reaching for Micah’s back. Alex whipped out a skull-spiker and stabbed it easily, but the rest were close behind.

  “Go,” he yelled.

  He danced backwards from clutching hands as Micah’s bike took off before turning and running back to his own bike. Given his luck with motor vehicles the last few days, he half expected it to not start again, but it roared into life as soon as he hit the switch and he made a tight u-turn and sped away, heart pounding with relief.

  Micah had slowed to wait for him and Alex overtook and led the way down several small streets, making at least ten turns, before stopping again when he was sure they were clear. Micah pulled up next to him.

  “Cut your engine,” Alex said, removing his helmet, “I think I can hear something.”

  Even over the sound of his motorcycle and with his ears beneath the helmet, something had got his attention. With the remaining engine turned off, the sound was easier to make out. From Micah’s expression, Alex could tell he recognised what they were hearing.

  “We should walk the bikes until we know where they are and that we’re not going to get their attention,” Micah said, climbing off his motorcycle and removing his helmet. He hooked it onto the handlebars.

  Alex looked down at his leg. “Are you alright to walk?”

  He took a couple of experimental steps, limping slightly. “It hurts, but yes.”

  “Aren’t we near Newcastle Road?” Alex said, looking around.

  “Yeah, I think so,” Micah said. “I’m detecting a pattern here.”

  Alex nodded. “Roads that lead out of town.”

  They stood for a few seconds, listening to the low thunder of a multitude of eater moans.

  “It’s worse here,” Alex said.

  He remembered the horror he’d felt seeing the huge crowd of eaters two days before, even from so far away. Just by the sound, he could tell these ones were much closer.