“I don't understand,” Jason said. “Where's Dad? Where's Mum? Is that blood?”
Rachel sobbed, and nodded, and Jason felt his stomach drop like an elevator.
*
A storm of shredded bark whirled around Michael's head, falling softly on his hair and face like dry snow. He breathed in, feeling the dust coat the inside of his mouth and throat, and coughed painfully.
He'd felt the impact of the shotgun blast, though not as he had expected. Instead of the shredding of muscle and flesh, it felt more like a hammer blow, vibrating through his back. The hooded man had aimed high, blasting the trunk of the tree that Michael was tied to. A warning shot.
"Let's try that again Officer, and remember that I have a fondness for fast learners. Why are you here?"
Michael coughed again, working saliva around his mouth, clearing out the dust.
"You shouldn't have done that."
"Oh?" The hooded man sounded amused.
"They'll be coming."
The hooded man's voice dropped to a sibilant whisper. "Who will be coming?"
Michael drew in a deep breath, and took the only option he had. The truth.
"I am here because I was running for my life. From two men I have known for years, one of whom I would have trusted with my daughter’s life until this morning. Two men who ripped out their own eyes and began killing people with their teeth. I ran from them, I ended up here. The end."
The gun lowered, just a fraction.
"How were they chasing you if they had no eyes?"
"They move like animals. Seem to operate based on their hearing, which seems unnaturally accurate. They weren't that far behind me, half a mile or so I'd guess. That little show you just put on with the shotgun? They'll have heard it, and they'll be coming."
The hooded man said nothing. After a moment, he stood, striding over to Michael, looming over him.
"Then it has started. Eight years of waiting, and when it finally happens, I feel unprepared. Funny, huh?"
"What do you mean?" Michael asked. "What do you know about what's happening here?"
The man pulled back his hood. When the grey light diffused through the ocean of mist fell upon it, Michael found that the man did not look like the grim reaper, or some sneering caricature of a terrorist. He looked about fifty: a craggy, nondescript face under a thick tuft of hair long since turned a dull grey. Just another guy; someone that would not receive a second glance in a crowded bar or on a busy street.
There was something in the man’s eyes though, some slippery quality that made Michael’s nerves jangle.
"What I know," said the man, "is that there is little point now in me killing you, no more point than shooting a beached whale. The die has already been cast, and there are already enough voices whispering at my conscience to add yours to the list. All I really need to do is persuade you to leave my property in a manner that ensures you will not find your way back."
Michael's brow creased.
"What? I don't understa-"
The butt of the gun filled his vision again then, moving at lightning speed, and the lights went out.
*
Rachel's heart twisted in fresh agony as she watched her brother's face contort in dismay and incomprehension. They stood in the cellar, staring down at the ravaged body of their father. The air felt thick, as though she couldn't quite get enough oxygen from it.
Jason's eyes misted up.
“What happened?” He said, his voice heavy, as though the words were a little too wide for his throat to comfortably accommodate.
Rachel reached out and squeezed one enormous shoulder.
“I don't know Jase, I got here and he was...like this. And the dog was...the dog went crazy and attacked me. That's all I know.”
“What about mum? Where's mum?”
In a way, Rachel found herself feeling glad that she had no answer for him. Jason had always been much closer to their mother than she had, and the thought of leading him to her lifeless body was too much to bear.
“I don't think she's here. I haven't been upstairs yet, but-”
Jason didn't hear the rest. He turned, and shot up the basement stairs, heading quickly past the blood in the kitchen and out into the hallway.
By the time Rachel made it to the kitchen, he was already upstairs. She could hear heavy footfalls as he pounded into each of the three bedrooms and the bathroom that made up the first floor. She followed him up, trepidation increasing with each step.
When she reached the upstairs landing, she found Jason, face flushed and eyes wild, emerging from his old bedroom.
“Empty,” he said. “She's not here. Everything looks normal.”
His voice broke on that last word, and Rachel wanted to hug him.
“We have to call the police, Jase,” she said. “Whoever did this might still be close by. Mum might need our help. We have to get help.”
Jason nodded slowly, almost absent mindedly, as though the words had made it through his ears, but his brain was having trouble making sense of them.
“No signal.” He said, his voice clotting again.
“Same here.” Rachel replied. She put a hand on his arm and led him into the nearest room, their parents’ bedroom, and sat him on the bed.
“I'm going to use the landline, okay? I'll get them to come out. In the meantime, just stay here. You're in shock. I'll get you some water.”
Jason nodded, eyes on the floor.
“I'll be right back,” Rachel said, and hurried downstairs. The house, previously so terrifying, seemed much smaller now that Jason was there, and so much less intimidating. She recalled how the prospect of searching the upstairs had scared her so badly, and gave silent thanks that her brother had turned up. It was awful seeing him so heartbroken, the normally grinning face stunned and frozen in misery, but his presence in the house gave her courage, like carrying a formidable weapon.
The house phone was in the hallway, sitting on a small side table that served no other function. Reaching it, Rachel cast another quick glance around the downstairs, just to check that nothing had crept in while they were in the bedroom, and lifted the receiver, keeping her gaze firmly focused on the back door, which still stood ajar.
She knew as soon as she pressed the receiver to her ear that something was wrong, the dial tone she had expected replaced by harsh undulating static, yet still she pressed the buttons anyway, hoping for a miracle. None was forthcoming, the beeps that accompanied each button push dissolving back into the static.
Clammy fear gripped at her again. Had someone cut the phone lines?
During her first year at university, long before the requirement to do any actual work kicked in, Rachel and her house mates devised a drinking game, brilliant in its childish simplicity. The catchily-named drink and hide and seek incorporated two floors of their halls of residence, ample square footage to find a spot to evade someone who was, in all likelihood, already seeing double. The rules of the game were thus: play hide and seek. If you get found, you do a shot of tequila. If, after ten minutes, not everyone has been accounted for, the seeker has to do one shot for every unlocated hider.
Rachel had played the game enthusiastically, almost always getting caught due to her inability to stifle the giggles when the seeker drew near. Until the last time she took part: an ill advised game that took place when she returned with all her friends from a heavy night out. With all the participants already in various states of disarray when the game commenced, it proved to be an unfortunate time for Rachel to squeeze herself into a trunk that just barely encompassed her slight frame, and which, it turned out, could not be opened from the inside.
Months later that night became something she could look back and laugh at, but the night she spent locked in that trunk, while everyone else playing the game either fell into a stupor or just plain forgot they were playing and wandered off, gave Rachel her only glimpse into claustrophobia, and it was an experience that, even when she thought of it months late
r, sent icy chills through her.
Echoes of that feeling came back to her now, and Rachel was suddenly certain that she could not stay in the house, feeling so vulnerable and trapped, a moment longer.
She dropped the phone receiver back into its cradle and hurried back upstairs to Jason.
He didn't look up when she entered the bedroom, holding his hands to his temples and staring, wide-eyed, into the carpet, as though the fibres held the answers to the mysteries of the universe.
“We have to go Jase.” She said, a little disturbed to hear a note of panic in her voice.
Jason still lost in the carpet, didn't respond.
“Jason,” she said firmly, wincing a little as she saw him jump at her harsh tone. “The phone's dead. We have to go. Now.”
Jason nodded for a second, seeming to mull it over, then stood.
“Get your bag,” Rachel continued, trying to keep a lid on the hysteria clawing at her gut. “We're going to the police station. I don't think it's safe here.”
Jason's eyes clouded over, as though this was beyond his understanding, but then he seemed to snap out of it, and nodded again, more vigorously.
Rachel ushered her giant brother down the stairs. His bag – a huge and surely unnecessary rucksack sat in the hallway next to her suitcase and shoulder bag. He swung the bag easily up onto his shoulder with one bearlike hand. Rachel decided to abandon the suitcase. Everything she might need – phone, purse, keys – lived in the shoulder bag. It was as she slipped the strap over her shoulder that they heard it, a sound that cracked the silence of the morning in two, entering the house like an intruder, stopping them both dead in their tracks.
A huge roar, louder than anything Rachel could remember hearing in her entire life, a sound that shook the house, making the windows rattle in their frames.
Rachel whipped her head round toward Jason, and saw her own panic reflected in his haunted eyes.
The roar rolled and echoed, fading away like the rattle of a spinning coin on a hard surface.
“What the hell was that?” Jason said in the swollen pause that followed; his voice barely a whisper.
Before Rachel could respond, the world erupted with noise as people flooded out onto the streets, screams of fear and confusion filling the air.
It was that exodus, that sudden emptying of all the houses in town, as people sought what they thought was the safety and comfort of the herd, that truly marked the beginning of the end.
*
Victor kept a vehicle, an old flat bed truck, about a mile away from the entrance to his bunker, buried under foliage.
The truck was carefully blemished, dented and scarred so that anyone who might happen across would simply think they had stumbled upon an abandoned wreck. Distressed, he thought with a grim smile, like the fashion for artificially-aged clothing that the internet informed him was currently all the rage.
He cut the cop loose and hefted his slack body. The guy wasn't small, and the journey to the truck would be arduous. He briefly considered leaving him where he lay but decided against it. Just wouldn't be sporting.
Victor had spent years wondering what it would look like, when it all went down. If it went down, though his research – the pitiful, cautious net-trawling he had been restricted to by his isolation and paranoia - had always suggested that they'd go through with it. To deny himself now would make it all so much foreplay. All preparation and no end product. The cop provided an excellent opportunity, one that he just could not pass up.
He wouldn't get too close to the town, he promised himself. Curiosity, after all, would kill even the most cautious cat.
In the trees, buried somewhere in the mist, he heard the rustling and cracking of people approaching, fast, and nodded in satisfaction. The cop hadn't lied. No one lies to the shotgun.
A thrill coursed through him, and he placed the limp policeman back on the ground gently, like a mother returning her child to its crib.
Then he lifted the shotgun, aiming it in the direction of the approaching noise, and waited for them to appear.
Chapter 6
Derek Graham knew Paula Roberts well, having been her source of minced beef and sausages for fifteen years.
Trade had slowed down for Derek in the last few years as the supermarket in the next town pulverized the competition with impossible prices and buy-one-get-one-free offers. Loss-leaders, for Christ's sake. Special offers designed to lose money. The free and fair market was a smirking misnomer, a barely-concealed sham.
Derek's father had been a butcher, a man who taught Derek to take pride in his work, to make the last slice of the day as carefully as he had the first, and it bewildered him that the majority of people flocked to the giant, soulless food warehouse, seemingly oblivious to the fact that every chicken breast looked identical and every slice of bacon was watery mush. After all, if you weren't going to pay care and attention to the things you put into your body then what would you pay care and attention to?
Derek stuck to his principles and his higher prices. Living creatures had died to make his produce, and to his mind, the least they deserved was to be prepared correctly for the next -and final- stage of their lives and their usefulness.
All of which meant that Graham and Son's Butchers didn't have a huge amount of customers, but the ones that did remain did so loyally, and Derek got to know them all. He knew what most would order as soon as he saw them opening the door.
Mrs Christie wanted gammon, sixteen Lincolnshire sausages, a rack of lamb and six free range eggs. Mr Bale was a poultry man: chicken and duck for week nights, a pheasant for Sunday roast and an eight pound turkey every Christmas Eve.
Mrs Roberts...well, she just wanted gossip. She was Derek's least favourite customer, always hovering around his counter for too long as though she couldn't make up her mind what she wanted (though in reality, Derek knew, she simply stayed in the hope that more people would come in) and she never complimented him on his cuts in the same way his other patrons did. Derek worked hard to ensure that as much fat as possible never made it from animal to customer, and a little appreciation of that fact would not have gone amiss.
In the end, she always ordered minced beef and sausages. There was no artistry in minced beef and sausages.
Still, she was a customer, and Derek had gotten to know her habits extremely well.
Which was why he knew something was amiss as soon as he saw her walking down the street toward his shop. Well, not walking exactly, more...stumbling.
He paused, the sharp blade hovering an inch or two above the leg of lamb that he had been trimming, lamb that had arrived in the middle of the night, so fresh it was still chewing, and frowned.
Derek's shop was in a narrow alley leading off the small square that comprised the town's area of commerce. Not quite an ideal location, but only steps away from it, and the plate glass frontage afforded him an excellent view of the town. It was, he had realised long ago, one of the reasons why Paula Roberts was so hard to shift once she had appeared. Like a grease stain.
It was a foggy morning alright, foggier than any Derek could remember, but he could see that the figure approaching was Mrs Roberts, even though her head was bowed, as if in prayer. There was something wrong with the picture though, and it took a moment for him to realise just what it was.
It was her walk. Paula Roberts was moving...stiffly. Not the stiffness of someone who has pulled some muscles the day before, though. More like the stiffness, he imagined, of someone who had woken from a long coma, and had forgotten what muscles even were, let alone how to use them. Like someone learning to use their legs for the first time.
He watched, his work forgotten, as she drew closer, each step somehow faltering. An incongruous image flashed into his mind: Bambi, sliding about on the ice uncertainly, in the magical movie his parents had driven him twenty miles to see all those years before at the small picture house in Haverfordwest.
And then, as Derek watched, he saw something even odder: an
other figure appeared, perhaps thirty yards behind Mrs Roberts, just barely visible in the shroud of mist. This one, Derek noticed, seemed to be levering themselves to their feet, standing for a moment swaying, as though dazed, before stumbling away. Whoever they were, their gait was a carbon copy of Paula Roberts' shuffling, angular movement.
It dawned on Derek then that there had been an accident of some sort; maybe a car had hit these people. He'd seen in TV dramas the way that people involved in a car accident might stumble around in shock, unaware of their surroundings.
Derek wiped his hands on his apron and rushed around the gleaming counter, his mind suddenly filled with excitement and tension, and though he would never admit it, a little hope that he might be given the chance to play the hero, to do something that would make his bafflingly miserable black-clad teenage sons proud.
He rushed out onto the pavement, and stopped dead when he heard the scream, a chilling, piercing yell of pure fright. The sound was disturbingly close, emanating from somewhere in the square.
And then he saw Mrs Roberts' face, and his jaw went slack with horror when he saw the empty sockets where her eyes should have been. A slight whimper escaped his lips, and when Mrs Roberts suddenly exploded into motion, coming straight at him, charging, Derek Graham had a moment, just a fleeting frozen second, to realise that he would not be playing the hero after all.
As Mrs Roberts mounted the butcher, sending him crashing to the floor, her teeth frantically seeking out the soft flesh of his cheek, tearing it away with a wet popping sound, the screams in the square began to multiply, fanning out from the epicentre that she had become like ripples on a pond, slowly devouring the calm reflection that had existed before and replacing it with jumbled chaos.
Of course, she had long since ceased to be Mrs Roberts at all, and the person she had been, the person who had woken up that morning, cold toes emerging from the duvet and finding the slippers she needed to start the day, did not even exist now as a memory.
It wasn't hunger that drove her, not exactly, though certainly that was a part of it. No, it was a simple biological imperative, something entirely divorced from logic, or reason, or even insanity. Her existence now was dependent on sinking her teeth into the creatures that moved around her unseen, the malevolent forces she felt ranged against her. She could no more fight against it than could a man hold back the desolate, remorseless advance of age.
Panic (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 1) Page 9