None of the policeman's actions made sense to him, and his lack of understanding made him feel stupid.
The last time Victor had felt stupid, he had been a child of around ten. He had spent weeks one summer collecting spent matchsticks and, left to his own devices for much of the time while his father worked and his mother drank, he had retreated to his room, where he spent hour after painstaking hour carefully glueing them together, following the instructions in a modelling magazine one of his school friends owned.
For days, the structure resembled little more than an angular mess but then, as Victor continued to work, the final model began to take shape before his amazed eyes: The Queen Elizabeth class Battleship Valiant, the ship his father had served aboard during World War 2.
When it was finished, after the long, agonising hours spent waiting for the last dab of glue to dry, he had excitedly run to his father, grabbing the large, rough hand and dragging him to the bedroom.
He had expected his father to be delighted, to grab Victor and hug him, congratulating him on the magnificent ship, which measured nearly two feet across. Instead, as Victor watched, his father's eyes seemed to mist up for a moment before fixing Victor with a cold, hard stare.
You're too old to be playing with toys, his father had said, his voice laced with steel, and then he had balled up one calloused fist and smashed it down onto the model, severing the ship nearly in two.
The tears had come for Victor then, spewing forth; uncontrollable, and his father strode away, shutting the bedroom door behind him with a bang, never once looking back.
When the tears finally stopped, Victor continued his father's work: pounding on the remains of the ship with his small fists until it was just matches again, just a mess that needed to be cleaned up. With each blow, he vowed that he would never again let himself be so stupid.
Victor blinked at the monitor, and realised his fists were clenched tightly enough to make his fingers ache.
The building toward which the cop was now running revealed all: St. Davids' tiny police station. There was no great heroism or mystery to his deeds after all: he was just a man running for help. A man blissful in his ignorance and running in the wrong direction.
Victor laughed aloud, a cruel, mirthless cackle that made some part of his personality, the part that long ago had tried to build something to make his father smile, shrivel back into a dark corner.
*
Michael ran, a trail of spattered blood marking his passage, mingling with the crimson torrents that stained the road beneath his feet. He wondered dully how much of the precious liquid he had lost, and how much there was left to lose.
They were still coming after him, but the journey through the wedding shop had bottlenecked them, slowing the majority down, giving him a chance to put clear daylight between himself and his pursuers.
Ahead the street was clear. Bodies lined the streets like gruesome monuments, cooling in the wintry air. They told the story of what had happened here, of what had swept through, and by their stillness they reassured him. The virus - the disease, whatever it was - moved like fire, burning up the resources in the area and moving on, leaving only death behind. He had feared that the town centre would be packed with the monsters, but there was nothing here left to kill. The only ones present now were the ones spilling out of the rear entrance of the wedding shop, the ones following him.
The sign marking the police station hung over the street just ahead of him, lit like a halo. The building was small, but the doors were heavy, and solid. Once inside, he would be able to lock them and keep his pursuers at bay. Getting to the radio was all that mattered now. If he had to, he could lock himself into the station's single cell and stay there, like an exhibit at a deranged zoo where all the dangerous creatures roamed outside the bars.
He hoped it wouldn't come to that, and knew from experience that silence was the most important part of evading the afflicted people that chased him. Eventually, surely, they would be pulled away toward other, more interesting prey, and he could think about exiting the station, and the town, and just how he was going to get to Aberystwyth before the infection reached it.
There was no time for caution when he opened the door to the station. Now that he was on foot, the distance between himself and the murderers chasing him was narrowing rapidly. He threw himself inside, slamming the door shut behind him.
A metal bar could be placed across the interior of the door as a security lock, and Michael heaved it into place before sinking to the ground, gasping for air.
Sitting on the hard floor, his back against the heavy door, Michael felt rather than heard the frantic, enraged pounding of the creatures that he had eluded for the second time that day. The dizziness and pain swelled inside him, his headache now a constant, sickening thump, threatening to pull him into oblivion only for the shards of glass embedded in him to bring him back with their stinging bite.
His uniform was drenched with his own blood, the fabric sticking to the wounds. His vision swam, and as the pounding on the door receded, fading in his ears like the chugging of a departing train, he allowed the darkness to take him.
He dreamed again of betrayal, as always. A familiar friend that comforted and undermined.
In his dream, he sat in a room, waiting for someone; someone he knew intuitively would never come. The dream was lonely and frightening: the room he sat in darkened, with menacing shadows that loomed in the corners, shadows in which a hungry presence also waited, waiting for him to fall asleep.
He was sitting on a small single bed, the only furniture in the room, next to a window. The curtains were pulled back, and the window seemed filled with a bright orange light, yet none of this illumination seemed to enter the room.
The shadows lengthened.
He had to stay awake, even though he knew that whoever he was waiting for, whoever was going to rescue him from the gaping maws that waited in the dark would never come.
He rose from the bed and made his way to the door. Opening it, he saw a dark corridor, but there was a light at the end, a doorway. Leading to a bathroom, flooded by a beautiful bright light that chased away all the shadows. He stumbled toward the safety of the light, chased by the thickening darkness, his heart hammering and beads of sweat popping out on his brow, until finally, gloriously, he fell into the welcoming light.
Tiredness threatened to overwhelm him, tempting him toward the shadows, and he struggled to his feet, levering himself up against the sink.
He leant over the sink and twisted the cold tap. Icy water tumbled over his hands, and he made a basin of his palms and splashed it onto his face. The feeling was heavenly, invigorating. He would survive the betrayal of this solitude after all; would survive until the light of the world flooded into the building once more.
He raised his head and stared at the mirror directly in front of him. The tear-stained face of his daughter stared back her eyes red and filled with the realisation that her father had let her down.
Claire.
Michael's eyes flew open.
He was sitting in the empty police station, in silence and darkness. Hours must have passed since he lost consciousness. Panic surged within him.
With a grunt, he pulled himself to his feet, moaning as the cuts that had begun to congeal split open once again. The pain in his right calf was the worst, and when he looked down, he felt nauseated by the sight of a large shard of glass disappearing into the flesh. Grasping at the protruding end, he pulled the glass from his flesh, stifling the urge to yell in pain, and let it fall from his fingers to the ground.
There was a first-aid box on the wall, which he knew would at least be well stocked. The police station's single cell was only ever really used as a drunk tank, and people rarely made a visit without also bringing some minor injury along for the ride.
He popped the catch and pulled out some antiseptic ointment and gauze. The uniform came off like sunburnt skin, peeling away from him reluctantly and painfully where fabric had fus
ed with the gashes in his skin.
Once he was standing in his boxer shorts, he surveyed what damage he could see. He was covered in bruises and cuts, most nothing more than scratches, but two or three deep and ugly-looking. He smeared the stinging ointment on the worst of them, and wrapped the gauze around them as tightly as possible, paying particular attention to the deepest, the one a few inches above his right ankle. As he bandaged it, he wondered if the glass embedded in his leg had saved him from bleeding out while he was unconscious, and a shudder ran through his whole body. Somehow, the incredible events of the day hadn't quite seemed real while he was living through them but now, in the quiet darkness, gazing at the patchwork scars on his body, the memories made him tremble.
There were painkillers in the first aid kit, just plain old aspirin, and he poured himself some water from the cooler and swallowed a couple, then knocked back two more with a shrug, and turned his attention to the radio.
Picking up the receiver felt a little like checking the lottery numbers: there was hope, but little expectation. Michael wasn't surprised. He depressed the button, spoke his badge number and gave the code for the Haverfordwest station, and received only static in return. Several attempts, no success. The entire exercise had been pointless, as he should have known it would be.
You should have run away Mike, he thought with a grim smile, but you never did make good decisions.
Filling his plastic cup with more water, Michael limped to his desk and slumped in the chair, hoping that some idea, some strategy would reveal itself.
Then it has started.
The words formed in his mind like pooling water. They were something he had been trying to remember earlier, weren't they? Something creeping through his subconscious as he had walked, concussed, toward St. Davids.
Lost in thought, he prodded absent-mindedly at the paraphernalia on his desk: pens, a roadmap, a folded piece of paper emblazoned with his name written in Glenda's spidery, sprawling handwriting. It was meaningless detritus now, like copper pots exhumed at an archaeological dig. Remnants of the importance of days gone by.
Then it has started.
He frowned, struggling to figure the relevance of the words, and then it hit him. The hooded man. The words had made no sense to Michael at the time but now, suddenly, they practically screamed at him.
The carnage in St. Davids was no accident, not the outbreak of some new disease. That man had been expecting it. If there were answers out there, the hooded man would have them.
He poured the rest of the water down his throat and crushed the plastic cup, letting it fall from his fingers unnoticed, staring intently at the padlocked weapons cupboard.
*
Victor had watched the motionless picture on the monitor for a long time, his expression thoughtful.
It was, he had to admit, kind of funny that the policeman had made it so close before succumbing to his wounds. At the very least, he had put on an entertaining show. A real life action movie.
Ultimately though, it had proved a disappointing end for Victor, the thrill of the chase ending in such anticlimax. He wished he had planned for the event a little more carefully, thinking of all the wasted nights during which he could have ventured into St. Davids and discreetly installed cameras to give him a view of the tiny city.
It wasn't his fault, of course, Project Wildfire had never been given an official start date, and Victor had thought it would have been a few years yet before they set it in motion. It was a missed opportunity that nagged at him, but at least the policeman had turned up that morning. That had been a stroke of luck.
He was still staring at the monitor when the proximity alarms began to beep, and the anti-personnel devices began to detonate, far off thumps that sounded harmless in the bunker, but which he knew were devastating up close.
They had reached this far then, the Infected. Presumably St. Davids was now picked clean and they were moving further afield. He cycled the monitors through the cameras installed around the woods. Maybe the show wasn't quite over after all.
9
The 'weapons cupboard' was something of a misnomer. A metal box that was attached the wall in much the same way as the first aid kit, it was roughly the size of a typical bathroom cabinet, and covered in dust. To Michael's knowledge, it hadn't been opened since the day it had been installed.
He imagined that in London or Birmingham or Manchester there were huge armouries, enormous rooms filled with tear gas and riot shields and M4 assault rifles. When he fished the keys to the cupboard from a desk drawer and popped it open, what he found was a flare gun and three rounds, and two tasers.
The tasers, he recalled, had been distributed amongst all UK police a few years back in a bid to whip up some positive press about bolstering security with 'non-lethal' solutions. He'd seen one in action once, in Cardiff; a junkie waving a pathetic knife around brought to the ground, flopping like a landed fish after the two wicked prongs the device shot out caught him in the chest and delivered thousands of volts into his system.
They would have to do. He had slipped on a spare jacket, discarding the torn, bloodstained iteration he had worn earlier, and he slipped both tasers into the side pockets. After a moment's consideration, he took the flare gun as well. It would make a lousy weapon: at anything but the closest of ranges accuracy was all but impossible – and of course, if he needed to use it against any infected people, it would be useless: the burst of light wasted on the eyeless monsters.
Still, better to have it and not need it...
He retraced his steps taken that morning, trying to figure out the location of the hooded man's strange, squat dwelling. He would be able to find the spot that he had entered the woods fairly easily, just a few hundred yards South of Ralf's café. After that, he would be trusting to luck, and hoping that in his wild flight he had managed to notice at least some landmarks.
At last there was nothing left for him in the police station. He took one last fruitless crack at the radio, and moved to Glenda's reception desk. He hoped Glenda had made it away safely, though he knew deep inside that the hope was just delusion. The explosion would have drawn her out onto the streets inexorably. At least, he hoped, she had been one of the lucky ones: the dead that now littered the streets. The alternative, that ghastly transformation into a blind cannibal, a deranged artist’s impression of humanity, was too awful to contemplate.
She had left him one final gift: her keys sat in a dish on her desk, nestled among paperclips and post-it notes. Glenda always walked to work - she only lived about ten minutes away - but Michael knew that she owned a small hatchback, which he would find parked outside her house. At the very least, he would not have to move through the streets looking for an unlocked car or search through the pockets of the dead to find keys. It was a relief.
He snatched up the keys and slipped the one for the car off the fob. Glenda seemed to possess about a hundred keys on a massive ring, and Michael did not want to carry them all, jangling in his pocket like a bell on a cat's collar, warning the animals of his approach. He slipped the key into a breast pocket, and stepped to the door.
Carefully, making as little noise as possible, he lifted the heavy bar that blocked the door and set it down gingerly, wincing as the tiny clanging noise it made as it connected with the tiled floor. The action made him feel like a child again, creeping around his parents’ house like a ghost, trying to make as little noise as possible, doing all he could to avoid having his father's attention fall on him. It was something he had become exceedingly good at: moving slowly and carefully. Silence and stealth were just a matter of discipline and endless patience.
He eased the station door open a crack, and spent long moments surveying the darkening street outside.
It was early evening, and the mist that had been woven through the streets that morning was gone, leaving a clear, starlit sky. The street itself was deserted, and dark, every window, whether shattered or still in one piece, utterly devoid of light.
The centre of St. Davids was a ghost town.
Michael studied every corner, every shadow for a long time, battling the uneasy feeling that the street was staring back at him somehow. He saw no movement anywhere. From what he had seen of the people infected by whatever virus had crippled the town, the primary symptom was chaos. They were pure primitives, moving and striking without thought or strategy. Michael could not believe that now they might be waiting patiently for him, luring him out into a trap.
No, they were mindless savages, operating on some primal animal instinct, and the silence meant that they were definitely gone.
Widening the door a little, he slipped out into the cold night, casting a glance to the left and right, ready to spring back inside at the first sign of movement.
Emboldened by the stillness of the street, he crept forward, his confidence gradually increasing, and began to walk the shortest route to Glenda's house.
He continued to move as silently as possible, and kept his ears pricked for any unnecessary sound he might be making. It was this focus that allowed him to hear it.
Whenever Michael took a few faltering steps forward, there was a faint rustling that ceased whenever he halted.
He tested the theory a couple of times, moving and stopping, ears straining to catch the sound, until he was absolutely certain.
He was being followed.
*
Jason had not moved or spoken for hours.
Rachel watched her little brother closely, a knot of worry churning in the pit of her stomach.
They had remained on the roof for a long time with their dead mother, Rachel barricading the door to the attic as best she could, and keeping a careful watch on the alley below.
While she stood lookout, Jason slumped to the ground, sitting cross-legged, as he had always sat in front of the television as a little boy, and stared unblinking into the distance.
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