Mutation (Twenty-Five Percent Book 1)

by Wheatley, Nerys

  Alex turned away from him. “What do you know about it?”

  “I know what that kind of anger feels like. It ate me up for too long after Caroline died. Sometimes, it still does. But you don’t have that luxury. Tomorrow, we’re going to have to go back out there and you need to have your head on straight. So do what you need to do. Scream, cry, smash things, whatever, but do it now. Then get some sleep and tomorrow we’ll go and hopefully help to make the people responsible pay.”

  After a few seconds of silence, Alex heard Micah’s footsteps leave the room. He stood for a while, staring at the table in front of him, its metal restraints glinting in the fluorescent light.

  With a roar, he grabbed the cold edges, hoisted it into the air and hurled it at the corridor window.

  25

  When Alex woke the next morning he was alone in the room. All the other beds were empty.

  His watch read 9:23am. After a quick trip to the bathroom and a coffee run to the lounge, he went in search of everyone else. He found them in the Omnav labs.

  Micah was applying duct tape to the empty frame of the window Alex had destroyed the night before. The steel table was back in the lab, looking a little the worse for wear, now listing to one side on a bent leg and with a gouge across the top.

  Hannah gave him a wave from inside the lab. Alex waved back.

  “Why didn’t you wake me?” he said to Micah.

  He shrugged. “I thought you could use the sleep, what with your table throwing efforts last night.”

  “You told me to smash something.”

  “I meant a few test tubes. Maybe a Bunsen burner.” He smiled. “It took three of us to get it back in there. That thing’s heavy. I’m surprised even you could throw it.”

  Now he looked at it in the cold light of day, so was Alex.

  “It was also bolted to the floor,” Micah continued. “You ripped the bolts right out of the concrete.”

  That surprised Alex even more. He gave a small chuckle. “I didn’t even notice.”

  “Feel better now?”

  “I think calmer is more the word.”

  Micah nodded and went back to covering the exposed edges of the frame. “I’ve been giving some thought to what we should do next. Everyone here is pretty sure the powers that be didn’t know anything about what was going on here. That means they have no idea what they’re up against, should they ever decide to come in and do something.” He indicated the man sitting at Phil’s computer. “So Dave is copying everything onto a flash drive and I said we’d get it to someone outside the city.”

  Alex lifted an eyebrow. “You mean you volunteered us to go back into the hordes of eaters at the barriers?”

  “Yeah.” He smiled. “I knew you’d be thrilled.”

  “In that case,” Alex said, “I’m going to need more coffee.”

  . . .

  An hour later, they were back in the storage room leading to the back door.

  They planned to return to the lab after they got the flash drive to someone who could do something with it, so they were leaving their packs and most of their supplies behind, just taking their skull-spikers and pistols.

  Leaving the sword behind was a wrench. Even though he hadn’t used it much, Alex was becoming attached to it.

  Although they now knew where the main entrance was, they were leaving through the shed again as there would probably be more eaters on the main street and they didn’t want to attract any attention. Even though it was further to the barrier this way, they had the bikes so it wouldn’t make much of a difference.

  Hannah walked them to the door. She looked up at Alex, concern in her hazel eyes. “You don’t have to do this, you know. We can find another way.”

  He shook his head. “We don’t know what’s going to happen to the city. The authorities need to know now and the people who did this brought to justice. Besides, we can’t do anything here. All you brainy types are doing your thing. We can do ours out there.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Micah said. “Pre-med, remember?”

  “For six months.”

  Micah smiled. “We’ll be back before you know it, Hannah.” He headed down the corridor to the stairs leading up to the shed.

  Standing on her tiptoes, Hannah reached up and kissed Alex’s cheek. “Be careful.”

  Alex tried to keep the shock from his face. “I... we will. Thank you.”

  She smiled. “For what?”

  “Um... for caring.”

  It was really for the kiss, but he was too embarrassed to say so. He told himself it was just an innocent peck on the cheek and to stop feeling like she’d stuck her tongue down his throat.

  “Well, bye.” He smiled, waved and turned, walking away before an idiotic grin made it onto his face.

  Micah was smirking when Alex caught up with him in the shed.

  Alex tried for nonchalance. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  They locked the shed and Micah replaced the key under the flowerpot.

  “I’m pretty sure that this time,” he said, “the pretty girl is definitely not a psychopathic maniac.”

  They started walking towards the car park.

  “I think I may have waved at her,” Alex said, shoulders slumping.

  Micah burst into laughter.

  Crossing the emerald green lawn, they circled around to the front of the warehouse, and stopped.

  “No!” Micah exclaimed.

  They broke into a run across the car park to the spot where Alex was certain they had left their motorcycles the day before.

  “Where on earth could they have gone?” He looked around, in case he’d made a mistake and there was an identical car park with their bikes in elsewhere. There wasn’t.

  “We took the keys with us,” Micah said, throwing his hands into the air. “Whoever did this would have had to push them away. And they’re heavy. Why would anyone do that? They can’t even use them.”

  “Looks like we’re walking again,” Alex said with a sigh, starting for the gate.

  Micah traipsed after him. “I loved that bike.”

  “I know.”

  . . .

  It was over a mile and a half from the lab facility to the nearest of the metal barriers.

  At first, the streets were empty. A handful of uninfected people were venturing out, but otherwise the city seemed deserted.

  An older couple opened a window as Alex and Micah passed and asked them if it was over.

  It was eerily quiet.

  “This is weird,” Micah remarked after a while. “Where are all the eaters?”

  Alex took some deep breaths. “There’s a faint smell in the air.”

  “Like from the eaters yesterday?”

  “Kind of, but it’s slightly different. A different pheromone message, maybe.”

  “What’s it saying?”

  Alex turned to face him. “Do I look like a termite to you? I don’t know what it says! I can just smell it.”

  “Okay, okay,” Micah said, the corners of his mouth twitching, “don’t get your antennae in a twist.”

  They’d walked almost a mile before they began to hear the low murmur of the horde. Indistinct at first, the sound grew in volume the nearer they got to the barriers.

  Walking towards it took immense willpower, when Alex’s every instinct was screaming at him to run in the opposite direction. By the time they finally reached a place where they could see the horde, his heart was hammering in his chest and his mouth felt like a desert.

  He and Micah were hiding to one side of a post office, behind a cluster of dome-shaped glass recycling banks. Down the road, the back end of the horde swayed and groaned.

  There were no stragglers like there had been before. Every eater was packed in tight with all the others. Thousands upon thousands of the infected, creating a huge, living, breathing, moving mass.

  The metal barrier was visible around a third of a mile further along the road. Even from this distance and above th
e moans of the horde, Alex could hear the sound of metal grinding against metal.

  One of the military helicopters was hovering nearby. Alex pointed at it.

  “If we could get to that building right next to the barrier, they’d be able to see us.” He didn’t have to whisper, it was impossible for the eaters to hear them from this distance and over the cacophony of their own moans, but he did anyway.

  They peered around a white fibreglass dome. The building he meant was two storeys, just high enough to be able to see over the barrier from the flat roof. If they could get there, that was.

  They backed out of sight again.

  “I have an idea,” Micah said in a tone that made Alex nervous.

  “Go on.”

  “If one of us could draw the eaters off, the other might be able to get through.”

  It sounded to Alex like suicide. “That’s insane.”

  “Probably.”

  Alex pushed his hands into his pockets and stared at the ground for a few seconds, trying to marshal his courage. “So how would you draw them off?”

  “Why is it me drawing them off?”

  “Because I can sneak past any eaters that are left more easily. And I can run faster.”

  “I can do a hundred metres in eleven point four seconds.”

  “Seven. More or less.”

  Micah’s jaw dropped. “You can run the hundred metres in seven seconds?”

  Alex shrugged. “My cardio fitness may need some work, but the extra strength in my legs helps. Just don’t ask me to run a marathon.”

  “Why are you not in the Olympics or something?”

  Alex snorted. “You think they allow Survivors to compete in the Olympics?”

  “Oh, right. Yeah. Well, those cars that we passed just now, I saw one with the keys still in the ignition. The roads aren’t so bad for blockages around here. I thought one of us, me apparently, could drive round with the car, make a load of noise and draw as many off as possible, then get away and come back when you need to get out again.”

  Alex rubbed his face as he thought about it. “It’s just ridiculous the number of things that could go wrong with that plan.”

  Micah pinched the bridge of his nose, slumping back against the wall. “I know, but what other choice do we have? We haven’t seen any other helicopters since yesterday. With all the eaters evidently gathering at the barriers, that’s the only place they’re going to be watching now. I’m almost pissing myself being this close to that horde, but I need to do this, Alex. Eater soldiers...” he shook his head, “...anyone who would do that has to be stopped. We can’t do anything stuck in here, but we can get that flash drive to people who can.” He sighed and looked at Alex. “I know I have no right to ask you this, but I can’t do it alone.”

  Alex puffed out a breath. “Alright. Let’s selflessly risk our lives. Again.”

  Micah chuckled. “When all this is over, maybe we’ll get a statue.”

  “We’d better. Okay, give me ten minutes to get as close as I can, then bring the car. And be careful. I don’t need to be rescuing you too.”

  “Please. We both know if anyone’s going to need rescuing, it’ll be you.” Micah smiled and stuck out his right hand. Alex stared at it for a moment before grasping it in his own.

  “Good luck,” Micah said as they shook hands.

  Alex smiled. “In my experience, there’s no such thing as luck.”

  Micah grinned and turned to leave. Alex watched him make his way back down the side of the post office and disappear around the far end of the building, then looked out at the crowd of eaters. Every one of them had their backs to him.

  Taking deep breath, he left the cover of the bottle banks and crept across the street.

  Risking his life without Micah to help if he got into trouble felt ten times worse.

  26

  It took Alex a few minutes to make his way along the street.

  He kept to the cover of the buildings as much as he could, doing his best shuffling eater impression when he couldn’t. None of the eaters even looked in his direction, but that wasn’t reassuring. It would only take one.

  He eventually reached the perfect place to wait for Micah, a shop with its windows smashed in, forty feet from the back edge of the horde. He glanced back to make sure there were no eaters behind him. Movement caught his eye. He frowned, squinting against the glare of the morning sun. He was almost sure he’d seen someone dart into a doorway.

  But why would any sane person be anywhere near the terrifying horde? Unless they had some stupid idea they could save the city, that was.

  Dismissing the notion, he turned away. It must have been a trick of the light he’d seen, the sun reflecting on a window or something. With one final check that no eaters were watching him, he crept inside the shop to hide and wait.

  This close, the deep drone of the moans of so many eaters was uncomfortably loud. Alex wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but their tone seemed to have changed. Before, it had been a low susurration, like a wordless conversation. Now, he heard agitation.

  The horde’s movement was more dynamic too. They were still all swaying together, but instead of a slow ripple, the undulations now resembled more of a stormy swell.

  Providing a percussive background to the moans and rustling oscillations of thousands of eaters, the metallic barriers were grinding in their channels. And underlying that, difficult to hear, but undoubtedly there, was the groaning of metal under stress. Alex began to wonder if the barrier could hold against all these eaters. If they moved against it en masse, which didn’t seem unlikely given what he now knew about them, would it be able to withstand that much pressure?

  Another sound joined the ceaseless symphony of moaning and metal, the revving of a car’s engine. Alex crawled behind a sales counter to where he could watch the street without being too visible from outside.

  A bright red Ferrari hurtled onto the road and raced towards the eaters. Alex rolled his eyes, imagining Micah’s glee at being able to drive the sleek, stunningly expensive machine. He was a little jealous.

  The car spun in a tight, drifting u-turn at the last second, tyres skidding and squealing across the road and Micah screaming a crazed, “Whooooo!” from the open windows. Alex almost laughed out loud at the grin on his face as he came to a halt facing away from the horde. Guns ‘n’ Roses blasted from the car’s speakers.

  Pandemonium erupted amongst the eaters. They whirled towards the car, stumbling over one another in their eagerness to reach the source of all the noise.

  “Come on, you bastards!” Micah yelled.

  He revved the engine. The first eaters closed in.

  Their speed was startling. Alex was used to eaters being uncoordinated, slow, only able to move in a shuffling lurch and easy to outpace. Some of the eaters in front of him were managing a clumsy semi-jog. Like toddlers learning to walk, they were improving. How long would it be before they could run?

  “What’re you doing?” Alex muttered. “Move.”

  With the eaters now only feet from the back of the car and Micah still stationary, Alex began to worry something was wrong. Finally, as the eater leading the pack touched the back of the car, Micah took off in a screech of rubber on asphalt.

  Alex dropped to the floor, huddling out of sight as a flood of eaters streamed past the shop window. It took at least five minutes for the sound of pounding feet and excited eater moans to peter out. By the time he dared to lift his head and creep to the window to make sure it was clear, at least eighty percent of the eaters had gone, leaving the back edge of the horde significantly closer to the barrier.

  He couldn’t help but smile. Micah had done it.

  Patting his pocket to make sure he still had the flash drive, he moved out onto the street just in time to see the helicopter fly past overhead.

  “Well, that’s just great,” he muttered, hoping they came back soon. He didn’t want to have to do this twice.

  He made his way as rapidly as
he could along the street. There were no stragglers. He’d been afraid eaters would be left dotted around, but they had either left to follow Micah, or stayed clustered at the barrier. They were behaving like swarms, sticking together. In the long run, he wasn’t sure if that would be a good or a bad thing, but for now it was definitely helpful. He could still hear heavy metal drifting on the breeze from somewhere behind him and he hoped Micah was being careful as he led the eaters away.

  The front of the building he was aiming for was still blocked by the horde, but Alex was able to circle around to the back and find a door that was, thankfully, unlocked. Once inside, he made his way upstairs.

  The ground floor was an off licence, the first floor a flat. They were both empty. Alex wondered if the people who had lived and worked here were now part of the horde. There were photos on the wall of the living room in the flat, but he intentionally avoided looking at them. It was unlikely, but if by some chance he did find himself face to face with whoever had lived here, he didn’t want to be flashing back to seeing them smiling and happy with their loving families, then get himself killed because he hesitated.

  There was no access to the roof from inside the building, so he had to find a window big enough for him to climb through. He made sure to do it at the back of the building. If he fell, he didn’t want the added pleasure of being devoured as soon as he hit the pavement.

  Standing on the windowsill, he leaned out precariously, clutching onto the frame with his left hand while his right found the edge of the roof. Making sure he had a good grip, he said a quick prayer and let go of the window frame.

  His feet lost purchase on the sill, his body swinging out. For a few heart-stopping moments he hung by one arm with nothing between him and the ground thirty feet below. He reached his left hand up and grabbed the edge of the roof, dangling by both arms for a few relieved seconds before hauling himself up.

  He rolled onto the roof with a grunt and lay still, waiting for his heart to stop racing. Heights didn’t worry him particularly, but he did have a fairly well developed sense of self-preservation.