Wiping tears from his eyes with his sleeve, Alex walked up to the two men. “I’m Alex, and this is Micah. I’d shake your hands, but I’m covered in eater blood.” Even with the sword, it had oozed onto his hands, seeping into his bandages.
“I’m Kevin, this is Jack.” The man who spoke looked worried, staring at Alex’s hands. “Aren’t you going to get infected?”
“He’s a wh...” Jack looked at Alex and gave an apologetic smile. “Sorry. He’s a Survivor. He’s immune.”
“Oh.” Kevin smiled. “Cool.” He looked at Micah.
Micah lifted his hands. “These are special protective gloves that kill the virus on contact.”
“Ohhh,” Kevin said, drawing the word out. “That explains it. I wondered why you were wearing evening gloves.”
Micah’s shoulders drooped. “Why does everyone think that?” He held his arms out in front of him. “They don’t look like evening gloves. Do they?”
“Sorry we didn’t get to you sooner,” Jack said, “but we’re up on six and it took us a few minutes to get down the stairs. We’ve shut down the lifts because there are eaters in the lobby and we don’t want to risk them getting into the rest of the building.”
Alex waved a hand. “We’re just glad to be alive, believe me. Is there a bathroom somewhere we can clean up?”
. . .
Jack showed them to the men’s toilets on the first floor where they rid their weapons of eater blood and brain matter and Alex stripped off his blood-soaked bandages. A first aid kit Jack brought them contained some plaster strips and Alex decided his cuts were healed enough for those to be sufficient. He was tired of having to bandage them every few hours anyway.
Micah’s ripped jeans had stuck to his damaged leg and he winced as he peeled the material away.
“Well, it’s an interesting shade of purple,” Alex said.
The denim seemed to have taken the brunt of the damage, but Micah’s calf was still badly grazed and bruised, with a plethora of wounds caked over with blood. He removed his shoe and bloody sock and sat sideways on the counter, resting his foot in one of the three sinks. Alex hopped up onto the other end, leaning his back against the mirror as Micah turned on the tap and began to clean the dirt and blood from his leg.
“Are we doing the right thing?” Micah said after a minute or so of silence, other than the sound of running and splashing water.
“You’re asking me?”
Micah sighed. “Up until now, I haven’t felt like we’ve been through anything that we couldn’t handle. I mean, we’ve been in some tight situations, but nothing like what happened out there.” He stopped working liquid soap into his skin and stared, unseeing, into the sink. “I’ve never been so afraid in my life. I knew we were going to die and I was terrified. The truth is I don’t know if I can do it. I want to help, but what can we possibly do against that?”
Alex leaned his head back against the glass of the mirror and looked up at the beige ceiling tiles. “I have felt that afraid, once before. Five days after I was bitten, in hospital, when my symptoms began and they chained me to the bed and put the bars up around me. I knew I was going to become an eater and there was a very good chance I’d die that way and there was nothing I could do about it.” He took a breath and sat up, looking at Micah. “And now I’ve faced death again, I can tell you one thing, I’d rather die fighting. Although, given the choice, I’d rather not die at all.”
“Do you really think we can do anything against that?” Micah said. “There are so many of them.”
“I have no idea. But if we’re going to try, I think we need to start making more intelligent decisions.”
Micah snorted. “I’ll put it on my to do list.”
. . .
When Micah had finished cleaning his wounded leg and wrapped it with a bandage from the first aid kit, Jack took them up to the sixth floor where the rest of the people left in the building were hiding out.
Most of the floor was open plan, apart from some offices and a kitchenette, with the windows on three sides of the building visible. Cubicle dividers had been moved out of the way into one corner and sofas were distributed around the open area, along with some chairs and tables.
Maybe fifty men and women were scattered around the floor, lounging on sofas, sitting at tables, staring out of windows.
Kevin rushed towards Alex and Micah, grinning. “This is them,” he said, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear.
Every face turned towards them and they were quickly surrounded by people talking excitedly.
A woman in her thirties with short brown hair looked up at Alex. “Kevin says you’re a policeman. Are you here to help us?” she said, an expression of hopeful desperation on her face.
Alex looked at Kevin.
He shrugged. “I saw your badge.”
He’d put the badge on because he thought it might help people to trust him. If he’d known it was just going to cause disappointment, he would have thought twice.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m in the same boat as you. I’d really like to help, but I don’t think I can.”
It was heartbreaking to see her face fall. All the training he’d received to enable him to help people, to keep them safe, felt utterly useless. A woman near to the back of the crowd began to sob. Everyone wandered away, their expressions telling Alex everything he needed to know.
These people had lost hope.
“Would you like some coffee?” an older man said. He was wearing a dishevelled grey suit, but he held himself with an air of authority.
“Thank you,” Alex said.
They sat at a table with Jack and Kevin as the man disappeared into the kitchen.
“That’s Cal Evans,” Jack said. “He used to run the whole building. Now he’s trapped like the rest of us.”
“Are these the only ones here?” Micah said.
Alex looked at the people around the room. He had to agree, it didn’t look like many for a building of this size, or a company this busy.
“Most of the people here left the first day, when things started to get bad and the phones went down,” Jack said. “I have no idea if they made it. We were too afraid to leave after it got dark, then the next day this started to happen.” He tilted his head towards the window overlooking the main road where the eaters were gathered. “There were over a hundred of us here then. We made sure the building was clear and secure from the first floor up, found all the food we could, set up the sofas so we could sleep, made a watch schedule. We were waiting for the army to arrive or something. We thought we’d be rescued. But yesterday, about half of the people here decided they couldn’t wait any longer. Some were afraid of starving to death and others wanted to get home to their families. By that time there were thousands of those things out there. We tried to talk them out of it, but they wouldn’t listen.”
Cal returned with five coffees and distributed them to the group at the table, sitting down next to Kevin.
Alex nodded his thanks and returned his attention to Jack. “What happened?”
Jack stared into his mug, a haunted look on his face. “They left the same way you came in. We waited for them at the door, in case they needed to get back in quickly. At first, we thought they’d made it.” He paused and shuddered. “Then the screams began.”
He was silent for a while. Alex noticed everyone else in the room listening, each wearing the same look of despair. The woman who had been crying sniffed.
“They came running back into the car park,” Jack continued, “so many eaters behind them. Some were being grabbed as they ran. Some got further, but more eaters came around the building, cutting them off. There was nothing we could do.” He rubbed his hand over his eyes.
Alex leaned back in his chair. He remembered the remains in the car park, shredded clothing, bones gnawed and stripped clean.
Next to him, Micah was clutching his mug so tight his knuckles were white. He abruptly let go, stood and stalked over to the window.
After a minute or so when nobody spoke, Alex stood, picked up their mugs and walked over to join him.
He handed Micah his coffee and took a few mouthfuls of his own. Both of them looked down at the eaters crowded together on the street below. The faint sound of their low moans drifted through the double glazing.
“What do we do now?” Micah said, his voice quiet.
“What we came here to do,” Alex replied.
“But what about them?” He glanced back at the people scattered around the large room.
Alex leaned a shoulder against the window, feeling the cold of the glass radiate through his sweatshirt. His breath fogged a circle in front of him. “We barely made it in. I don’t even know how we’re going to get out again. Everything that involves them stepping out of this building is going to get them killed.”
“But if they stay, they’ll starve.”
“The human body can go more than forty days without food before it begins to suffer permanent damage. This can’t go on for that long. They’ll survive.”
“And if the eaters somehow get in?”
Alex didn’t answer. The more time went on, the more he realised he didn’t have the answers to anything. The feeling of helplessness made him want to punch something.
He turned from the window to see Cal Evans walking towards them.
“Listen,” he said when he reached them, “I’m responsible for these people and I’ve already lost too many. You’re the only uninfected people we’ve seen for days and I get the feeling you’re not out for a casual stroll. If there’s anything you can do to help us, I will do anything I can to help you.”
Alex handed him his empty mug. “For now, you can point us in the direction of the roof.”
. . .
It occurred to Alex that he really needed to work harder on his cardio fitness.
As he placed his foot onto the final step before the door marked “Roof Access”, he gasped in a breath. Ahead of him, Micah glanced back, looking like he’d been doing nothing more strenuous than tying his shoelaces.
Alex immediately closed his mouth and tried to pant surreptitiously through his nose.
Micah smirked. “Just breathe, old man.”
“I’m only five years older than you,” Alex said. The act of speaking opened the floodgates and he was immediately forced to start panting through his mouth. “Oh, sod it.”
“Only thirty-two and can barely make it up a few flights of stairs,” Micah said. “So sad.”
“Keep that up and I’ll throw you back down them.”
Still smiling, Micah pushed down on the bar and opened the door onto the roof. Sunlight flooded the stairwell as Alex followed him outside.
There was a handle on the other side of the door, but Alex nevertheless used a hook fastened to the outside of the door to secure it to the wall beside it. There was also a breezeblock nearby so he lodged that against the door too. He didn’t want the inconvenience, not to mention the embarrassment, of getting locked out.
They walked to the eastern edge of the roof and looked down.
“No wonder the eaters are all here,” Micah said .
The metal barrier butted up against another, shorter building beyond the one they were on and they could see over the top of it from where they were. Some sort of low, temporary observation tower stood in the centre of the road about fifty feet on the other side of the barrier. Beyond that, it seemed as if the entire British army was gathered.
The whole area bristled with heavy artillery, tanks and combat vehicles. Alex even saw what he was certain was a rocket launcher. Military helicopters buzzed back and forth while support vehicles of all shapes and sizes wended their way through the streets or were parked by temporary canvas structures dotted around. Alex had little doubt the entire city was surrounded.
It was as if the whole country had declared war on them.
Beyond the might of the British army, Alex could make out crowds of people filling the city streets. More helicopters, these ones civilian, patrolled the skies. It occurred to him that the military helicopters were there to keep prying eyes out rather than anything in.
He wondered who the crowds of people were. Journalists and TV and radio news people certainly. Those who were just rubbernecking, wanting to know what was going on. Was the Prime Minister was out there somewhere, trying to reassure the country that they had everything under control?
Alex wondered what the general population had been told. Did they even know about the eaters?
But he imagined most of those beyond the army were relatives and loved ones of those inside the city.
Were his parents there? His brother, sister-in-law and little niece? He desperately hoped not. He wished he could contact them, tell them to get away if they were there.
The effect of all those people crammed together in the open in one place was overwhelming. It was the combined smell of thousands of normals, thousands of potential sources of food, that must have drawn the eaters here and was keeping them from leaving, although Alex couldn’t understand how that would have triggered their bizarre behaviour.
If anything, he would have expected the eaters to be crawling over each other, clawing at the barrier, desperate to reach those beyond. Instead they stood in orderly rows, swaying and moaning in unison. It was unnerving.
“There’s no way they’ll leave with all them out there,” Alex said. “You might as well hold a barbeque in front of a starving dog and expect it to not drool.”
Micah moved to the edge of the roof facing the street and looked down. “How strong do you think that barrier is?”
Alex wandered over to join him.
The metal barrier was actually made up of inch thick, four foot deep horizontal segments, a little like a security shutter, but on a much bigger scale. Every ten feet or so, a metal pole six inches in diameter jutted from the ground. On each side, these poles had channels in which the barrier rested.
The segments rattled against the poles with each surge and undulation of the huge crowd of eaters, creating the constant sound of metal grinding against metal. Even from ten storeys up, the combination of moans and metal was loud. At ground level, it must have been deafening.
“It must be strong enough,” Alex said. “I mean, it was designed for this so it must be.” Even as he said the words, he wasn’t convinced.
“You think they knew something like this would happen?” Micah said. “I’ve never heard of eaters behaving like this, have you? They probably designed it to repel a few dozen eaters at a time. Maybe a hundred, or two. But thousands? And what are they doing down there?”
Alex placed his hands on the wall surrounding the perimeter of the roof and leaned over. The updraft around the building ruffled his hair as he stared straight down onto the heads of the horde carpeting the ground below. He could smell the scent of the eaters even more strongly here. It was at once the same and yet completely different from what he was used to. He could smell the basic aroma, the one he was familiar with, but overlaying it was the new scent, its slightly sweet, acidic smell curling into his nostrils and coating the back of his throat. It was so strong he almost felt as if he could see it curling through the air, its tendrils reaching out to grasp him.
He drew his head back. “Can you smell that?” he said, breathing in some fresh air.
Micah leaned over the wall as he had and breathed in a few times. “No,” he said. “What is it?”
“I’m not sure. It’s something coming from the eaters, really strong. At least to me.”
Micah smiled. “Maybe they’re all farting in unison too.”
Alex’s laughter was drowned out by the buzzing of rotor blades as one of the military helicopters approached from the north.
“Hey,” he yelled, waving his arms, “over here!”
He removed his police badge from his belt and held it up when they closed in on the rooftop. He didn’t know if they could see it, but he thought it would be worth a try.
After circling twi
ce, the helicopter lowered, a door sliding open on one side.
Alex stood at the edge of the roof and waited in an unthreatening manner.
“Just don’t wave a gun at them this time,” he said to Micah standing beside him.
“I promise nothing,” he replied, his gaze fixed on the helicopter.
When it reached a couple of feet above the surface of the roof, three soldiers jumped down and stalked towards them, weapons raised. The helicopter lifted away, moving to wait nearby.
“Put your weapons down on the ground,” the woman in the centre shouted.
“I’m Detective Constable...” Alex began.
“I said, put your weapons on the ground!” she shouted again, louder this time.
“Screw that,” Micah yelled back, not moving.
“They have a lot more guns than us,” Alex muttered to him.
“I don’t care. I’m not letting go of the only defence I have.”
“Okay, I get it, but could you at least not swear at the woman?”
Micah huffed and shook his head slightly.
Alex held his hands up, palms out, his badge still in one hand. He hoped they weren’t trigger happy.
“We’ve been fighting for our lives for four days,” he said, speaking loud enough to be heard over the rotating blades of the chopper. “So we are, as I’m sure you can understand, reluctant to let go of our only defence. We only want to talk. If either of us goes for our pistols, you can shoot us. Okay?”
The soldier studied him for a few moments. “You’re police?”
Alex nodded. “DC Alex MacCallum, Porter Street Station.”
Another short period of perusal followed. “Alright, as long as you keep your side arms holstered.” She lowered her rifle, although the two men flanking her kept theirs trained on Alex and Micah. “I’m Sergeant Louise Traynor.”
Alex relaxed a little and nodded. “This is Micah Clarke.”
Traynor nodded at Micah. “I take it by all the arm waving that you want something?”
“Yes,” Micah said immediately, “we want to know why you are sitting on your arses instead of stopping the slaughter of thousands of people. Do you have any idea how bad it is in here?”
Mutation (Twenty-Five Percent Book 1) Page 24