Victor had known more, of course. It would have been difficult for them to have him working like some brainless automaton, given just how crucial and complicated his portion of the work was. And of course, to put it bluntly, he was simply too intelligent to remain in the dark, and too suspicious. He didn't know a great deal about how the biology of it worked, but he certainly understood the intentions of it. Those in charge tolerated his knowledge, he guessed, because of the leverage that they had over him, but Victor was keenly aware that he was an irritant, and he was certain that he was the subject of many fraught meetings between those who truly knew what was coming.
Subsequently, it was obvious that his remuneration, when the work was finally done, would be bullet-shaped.
When he realised that as inevitable truth, Victor became...self-employed.
Why the eyes, though?
Perhaps, despite all the efforts of those involved in Project Wildfire, some vestigial semblance of humanity or conscience remained, some unexplored sector of the brain that raged impotently against what it saw, and took the only way out it could.
Certainly he could not imagine that it was an intentional outcome, for it limited the effectiveness of the subjects, and it would make clean-up after the event a bitch. The original plan was to have them crashing together like magnets, making them easier to target when the time was right. Now, surely they would drift like dust on the wind, spreading far and wide.
Victor shrugged mentally. Conjecture was an exercise in futility now. It was done, and it would complete its journey like a driver-less diesel train. All that was left was to survive it, and make sure that the aftermath, with all its ripe opportunity, was available to him.
His eyes flicked back to the most important monitor as the speakers attached to it emitted a distant, tinny rumble.
Damn, he wanted a cigarette.
*
Jason watched as his sister cracked open the front door and peeked out, the blood draining from her face. Her jaw dropped open.
His mind was reeling, struggling to put together the pieces of the last half an hour. It was like a box containing portions of two different jigsaws. No matter how he tried, he could not get the picture they formed to make sense.
He heard the screaming outside, and for a second he believed it was a product of his own imagination, a reaction to the horror of finding his father ripped apart in the basement.
Then he heard it for what it was: a chorus. A great wail of many anguished voices, rising to the heavens as one. Something was going on outside, something terrible.
The realisation snapped Jason back to reality.
"What is it, Rach?"
"Not sure," she responded, her voice cautious. "There are people out there, on the street. They're all looking at something."
"Looking at what?"
"I don't know, I can't see."
Rachel turned to face her brother, her eyes full of concern.
"I'm going to go and look. At the very least, someone out there should have a working phone we can borrow. You want to stay here?"
Rachel's voice was soft and caring, and Jason realised she was wrapping him in cotton wool as she had so often when they were younger. He felt a little fire of shame ignite somewhere deep inside him. This was all wrong; it should be him looking after her, not the other way round. He set his jaw firmly.
"No, I'm okay. Let's go."
As they stepped out into the mist, and away from the horror of their parents' basement, Rachel immediately felt a little more secure. The claustrophobia of the house behind her, she felt herself breathing more easily.
The street was filling up as the residents of the houses spilled out to see what had made the ground under their feet tremble, and their very normality was reassuring. The morning that had, only moments before seemed somehow supernatural and terror-inducing suddenly seemed far away.
In the gardens opposite her, she could see elderly women, their hair still in curlers, preparing for their usual trip out for afternoon lunch, a young mother rocking a squalling baby in her arms; a family huddling together, the two young boys that had been spending their school holiday tethered to their game consoles finally torn back into the real world.
All were staring in the same direction.
Rachel followed their gaze and saw, rising above the mist that seemed thickest at ground level, the column of boiling black smoke making its way steadily up toward the heavens, and she gasped. Now she understood the noise the people on the street were making, the confused wails and frightened yells.
Immediately her mind went to the day that had now become the default image for such events in the collective Western psyche: the terrorist attacks on New York a decade earlier.
She had watched the events at the World Trade Center unfurling that day on TV, just days before she was due to leave home for the first time to attend college. The politics of the event were alien to her, and she did not foresee the impact that jarring September morning would have in the years to come, but she had known instinctively that she was watching something historic and era-defining.
The column of smoke rising from the centre of her home town brought a little of that feeling rushing back, a little of the incomprehension. Rachel always wished she had more patience for the news and current events, but the truth was that keeping up with the various ways people around the world managed to kill each other, or worrying about whatever invisible menace was threatening some aspect of her way of life just made her feel sad and helpless.
Now, as she realised that a huge explosion had taken place near the Cathedral in the centre of St. Davids she found herself wondering if maybe something had happened in the world that she should have been taking notice of, some dreadful event in a far off land that might affect her life even here, in the United Kingdom's very own middle of nowhere. Was this some terrorist attack?
The notion seemed faintly ludicrous. After all, surely if terrorists wanted to attack the UK, there were about a thousand targets that would be more important than a rural town in Wales?
The words of a guy she had met at university came back to her then. One of those guys who, as his eyes were opened suddenly to politics and counter-culture thought, became an expert on world affairs: If they really wanted to strike terror into the people, wouldn't taking out some country town somewhere do the job? Who'd feel safe then? London is obvious, Everyone is expecting that, it's just part of the paradigm. But if they flatten Shrewsbury or Stafford or Middlesbrough, everything changes.
She hadn't paid much attention at the time because the guy, whose name she was surprised to find she now couldn't recall had been insufferable, in love with the sound of his own voice and convinced of his superior intellect. He was erudite, for sure, but when the nuggets of truth were buried under nonsense about aliens or shadowy cultists secretly running the world, you pretty quickly stopped digging for them.
Yet it was terrorism that first came to mind as she watched the smoke, and she shuddered.
"Holy shit," Jason breathed next to her, his voice awestruck.
Rachel looked around. There were perhaps fifty people on the street, or standing in their gardens and doorways. She swept her gaze from face to face, hoping to see comprehension written there, someone who might be able to tell her what was happening. All looked as confused as she felt.
"There's no TV!" Rachel heard someone say, and she frowned. How could there be no TV? Television was the cockroach of modern life: it survived everything, nibbling at the fringes of disasters natural and man-made, always ready to bring high definition torment directly to your living room.
Rachel didn't really think a moderately-sized explosion in Wales would exactly bring the news choppers screaming overhead, but no TV just added to the surreal feel of the situation. A lack of television was like an angry wasp in your bedroom: it had to be dealt with before life could move on. If television was gone, something big must be happening.
She searched for the speaker: a middle aged woman
in a bathrobe, her hair bundled up in a hurriedly-arranged towel, and approached her.
"Mrs...Tallis?" She said, moderately impressed that the name was still stored in her brain somewhere.
The woman looked at her for a second, eyes cloudy, before recognition dawned.
"Rachel!" She said brightly, "I haven't seen you since-"
"Did you say there was no TV?" Rachel cut in.
"What? Oh, yes! Every station, just static! I thought it was our aerial, but John next door said it's the same for him. And the internet is down too! Do you think it was the mast that blew up? It must have been the mast!"
Rachel shook her head slowly, processing this new information. She felt a sinking, gnawing sensation in her stomach.
"Mrs Tallis, does your phone work? Or your mobile? We have to call the police."
Mrs Tallis looked at her thoughtfully.
"I don't know dear, I'll just check for you." She gathered her bathrobe about her and rushed back into her house.
Rachel turned to Jason.
"There's something seriously wrong here, Jase," she said in hushed tones. "I don't know what it is, but I think this is all connected somehow. To Dad."
Jason stared at her, and said nothing. Around them, people were starting to head toward the smoke. Fragments of their conversations reached Rachel. They were going to see for themselves what had happened in the centre of their town.
"I think we should go with them, Rach," Jason said. "Safety in numbers, right? And there's bound to be police there, or...someone that we can tell about Dad."
Rachel thought on this for a second, and nodded. There didn't seem to be a better plan at the moment.
"Okay," she said, "But just hold on a second."
Rachel turned back toward Mrs Tallis' house in time to see the woman exiting the front door, shaking her head.
"Phones are down too, dear," she called. "I think it's definitely the mast, or the servers or what have you."
Rachel nodded.
"Thanks, Mrs Tallis. We're going to go and see what's happened, we'll come back and let you know, okay?"
Mrs Tallis smiled her thanks and rushed back indoors. Rachel had a feeling that she would see Mrs Tallis catching up with them in as much time as it took to throw off a bathrobe and jump into clean clothes.
"Let's go," Rachel said to Jason. "But keep your eyes open for anything weird. This doesn't feel right to me."
Jason nodded.
"Will do. But I'm hoping I've already seen all the weird I'm going to."
*
St. Davids Cathedral had stood as a place of worship for almost 1,500 years. Taking its name from the man who built it in the sixth century, the forbidding building around which the city sprang rose and fell like the tide, regenerating, cell-like, after suffering repeated attacks of man and time throughout its history.
The cold stone had watched impassively as Vikings swarmed over it and murdered its bishops, as bandits pillaged the precious metals within; as a twelfth century earthquake shook loose its foundations. The heavy iron doors had withstood the ravages of wind and fire and water; they had provided sanctuary as plague and disease ravaged its congregation.
It was during these times, when nature turned on mankind and provided a reminder that flesh is a temporary prison; a crumbling façade, that people flocked to the Cathedral in search of answers, seeking some reassurance that their decaying, faltering flesh was merely transitional, a step on the journey to a better place.
In recent years, Father Leary's Cathedral had seen attendances drop greatly. Even a town like St. Davids, with an elderly population, many of whom proclaimed themselves religious folk, saw the pressures of the modern world erode old traditions.
Leary had taken it all in his stride. Such was the way of things. For him, the Church's role was not to press people into service, but to remain there and welcome their return when they once again decided that they needed the comfort of God.
Leary's faith did not waver as he turned up each Sunday to the disappointment of a steadily dwindling congregation. He had been a man of devout strength, convinced beyond all persuasion in the presence and work of his Maker. Right up to the last moments of his life, the moments which saw his mind snap in two, his final conscious thought being that the soft flesh of his wife's throat tasted just right, and that Hell was very, very real.
And still the Cathedral stood. And on the morning of the explosion, it drew the people of St. Davids toward it like a magnet; the landmark by which they all navigated as they made their way toward the site of the explosion that had put their lives on pause.
Darkened by the morning mist and the tower of smoke that cast a heavy shadow over it, the Cathedral watched again, as impassive as the absent God that those who still attended prayed to, as humanity began to tear itself apart outside its very doors.
The wave of blood-letting spread outward in all directions, and as more people made their way into the town centre from the outskirts, it began to pick up pace, a tiny replica of the expanding universe; of perfect chaos.
Rachel felt something wrong in the air when the group of people she walked with, her parents' neighbours with their familiar and friendly faces, were still several hundred yards away from the Cathedral, and the town centre.
The roads were twisted, densely packed and lined closely with buildings, making it impossible to see very far even if the mist had not been around to complicate matters, and so it was another of Rachel's senses that first alerted her.
The noise on the streets had remained fairly constant: loud chatter, some screams of surprise, but within them, she detected something else. Diluted at first, yet getting stronger. Increasing in intensity.
Other screams. Screams that mirrored her own in that dark basement: screams of horror and confusion and pain.
For a moment Rachel thought that the screams must be a sign that people had been hurt in the blast; people who were now screaming for help, but there was something about the noise that gave her pause, something that she couldn't quite put her finger on.
Rachel stopped, even as the people around her, becoming aware of the screams themselves, began to pick up pace, and put her hand lightly on Jason's forearm.
Jason stopped a half step ahead of her and looked back, puzzled.
"What is it, Rach?"
"Listen," Rachel hissed, cocking her head to the side as though the movement might let extra noise in, and give her some understanding. "You hear that?"
"The screaming? Yeah, people must be hurt, we should go and help-"
Rachel gripped his arm then; gripped it tightly, her nails digging into his flesh and making him jump, as she realised just what it was about the noise that had unnerved her.
It was getting closer.
Quickly.
"Run!" She screamed, and the unnerving note of terror in her voice drove all doubt out of Jason's mind.
The two siblings turned, sprinting back the way they had come, moments before the first of their neighbours, only a couple of hundred yards further down the road, sank to the pavement in a fountain of blood.
Jason had never been a runner, his sheer size and weight making him ungainly and quick to fatigue. Even during his rugby-playing days he had got by mainly by being hard to bring down; by chugging forward with the ball while the grasping hands of his smaller peers clutched at him, eventually bringing him to the deck via sheer weight of numbers.
As his panic rose, he ran the only way he knew how, charging like a bull at full tilt, with no thought of pacing himself. His lungs began to burn quickly, and he knew immediately that he wasn't going to make it. He had a couple of hundred more yards in him. After that, even terror would not be able to motivate his pounding heart and burning chest to work any longer.
Rachel would have no such issues, he knew. She ran fairly frequently as a cheap means of keeping fit, and while she wouldn't be winning any races, she could comfortably keep going for many minutes.
Rachel could get away, Jason wa
s sure of it. As sure as he was that if he told her he could not, she would stay with him.
He slowed a little, and risked a look over his shoulder.
Behind him, death moved like pouring water, tumbling over obstacles and into spaces; filling all the gaps. It was hard to make sense of it in the mist, with only a glance, but it looked as though everyone was spontaneously attacking each other with their bare hands. There was no rhyme or reason to it; what Jason saw was just an orgy of unfettered chaos. Some who were attacked fell and lay still, others, seemingly oblivious to their injuries, scrambled to their feet and launched themselves at the nearest person.
Each attack brought the wave of violence closer, just as each stride made the ache in Jason's lungs swell.
He was three or four yards behind Rachel, and panting heavily, when he made his decision, and turned to face the onslaught.
A strange, numbing sensation crept over him as he watched them approach. Shock, he supposed, his mind dislocated. Just over an hour had passed since he had arrived at Mum and Dad's house with a grin on his face, expecting a hearty welcome. Right now, he should have been knocking back his second or third cup of tea and attempting in vain to resist his mother's attempts to feed him.
Change had always frightened Jason, and he shied away from unusual experiences, always aware of the shyness that lurked within him, ready to pounce and cause withering embarrassment. When it came down to it, he simply wasn't built to cope with a morning like this. But now he understood what real fear was, and it was not the hopeless social anxiety that had beset him previously. This was fear, this confrontation with imminent death, and it left him cold and numb.
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