When he was finished, the haze of excitement that had lent the world a soft focus fell away and he turned his thoughts to his predicament.
The world – if the rest of it was anything like Rothbury and the surrounding areas – had been turned into a marvellous playground, the primitive constraints of society removed. It felt like a gift that had been wrapped all for him, but it would all be for nought if he carried on running blindly from packs of mindless savages. Sooner or later – sooner probably – he would wind up dead. It would be a terrible waste of potential.
He stepped cautiously over the bodies in the doorway, peering with interest at the eyeless faces, and out into a cool breeze that delivered the faint smell of Rothbury’s cremation.
The creatures that had been swept downriver would be returning shortly, he was certain. This presented a problem: Northumberland was huge, and Rothbury stood miles away from the nearest population centre. He could simply set off in any given direction, but that would be as likely to get him killed as walking straight into the town centre. He needed a vehicle, he would need food. And knives, of course. There was nothing for it. He had to go to town.
Shopping always made him think about his parents. Not remember, since he had no memory of them. They had given up on him when he was barely five years old, apparently deciding that the best course of action for dealing with a difficult child was to take it to the centre of London, enjoying the anonymity of the crowd, and simply leave it there.
He remembered none if it; all he had of his parents was second-hand information. Nothing, unfortunately, that might lead him back to them, which ranked as perhaps his biggest regret. The things he would have liked to force them to do to each other before he finally ended them…
The story went that he had been discovered, wailing, by a policeman somewhere near Oxford Street, and thus began a long journey through the care system: a variety of homes and centres, all white plastic and disinfectant; and foster families, most of whom developed Teflon skins, sliding away from him at the first sign that his ‘complex needs’ went way beyond anything they were equipped to deal with.
Finally there was one, who through sheer stubborn determination not to have Jake become her first failure, clung to him like a magnet, doing her utmost to ‘cure’ him with platitudes and hugs and home cooking. Technically, she hadn’t been his first kill, but in his mind, she counted. Hung herself from a banister after he had wormed his way under her skin and into her psyche, and begun to work on her.
He had been sixteen. Old enough, he decided, as he watched her sad, bloated ankles swinging gently back and forth in the hallway, to go out into the world and make his own way. And he tried. Sort of. He didn’t kill anyone for another six years, and then only when the thrill of rape and humiliation had worn thin.
He supposed the start of it all, that abandonment in the country’s busiest shopping street, was the reason that crowds and town centres made him feel murderous, but deep down he knew that there had been a reason for his parents to dump him. He hadn’t been turned into the thing he became because of that rejection; they had left him there precisely because they knew exactly what he was. Knew it better than any of the trained professionals that came after. He had to give them credit for that, but it wouldn’t have saved them.
He breathed deeply, trying to catch the scent of blood on the breeze. And then, as he filled his lungs and the world seemed to pause for a second, he heard it.
A helicopter, flying low.
He craned his neck until he saw it, heading west, heading out into the National Park. When it was barely more than a speck against the clouds, he saw it begin to descend.
Weapons can wait, he thought. That is far more interesting.
Checking to make sure nothing was ready to leap out at him as he left the relative safety of the mill, Jake headed west.
*
“Swords,” John said hesitantly, expecting a snort of derision in response. There was none. Maybe for the group that now travelled north toward Aberystwyth, the outlandish had become the norm, and nothing could surprise them any longer. He wondered briefly if there would have been a different response if he had suggested that their best choice of weapon against the Infected might be heavy sarcasm.
Finally, Michael grunted his agreement.
They had been walking for a few hours now, creeping silently along the tarmac, straining their eyes for signs of movement and finding nothing. Michael sat on a small trailer they had found at the farm, which doubled as both a makeshift wheelchair and storage for their food and supplies. Jason towed the thing behind him without complaint, his eyes fixed on the tarmac; not seeing it.
After a while, they felt safe enough to murmur low fragments of conversation, and John was glad of it. Spending time in his own head only led to thoughts of Sullivan, and how unlikely it was that he would ever get his hands on the smug old bastard.
Sullivan had been there when the suits at the base finally decided that their only option was to venture out into the world to try to close the chasms opening in their beloved project. It had been the old man who volunteered John for the task, no doubt. There were a few hundred men and women at the base with military training, all serving as glorified bodyguards for the flabby, wrinkled idiots who’d caused the catastrophe. A small army, drafted unwittingly, and given no choice but to serve once the world went to shit. Any one of them could have taken John’s place on the doomed mission to St. Davids, and yet here he was.
Sullivan’s doing. The fucker had appeased his daughter by bringing John into the fold, but he obviously understood that she held a candle for the man who’d saved her life on the streets of London, and his response had been to get John as far away from her – and as close to harm – as possible. Sullivan was manipulative enough that John even briefly wondered if he had somehow fabricated the problems Project Wildfire had run into just to get rid of him.
He grimaced, trying to force the memory of the old man to one side.
Swords, knives – anything that required getting up close and personal – would be of little use to Michael, John realised. At the moment, the man’s best weapon – better even than the rifle he cradled like a new born – was the three people accompanying him.
“When we touched down, we had the lot; enough weapons to make Al-Qaeda think twice. Assault rifles, explosives, grenades, flashbangs. All that shit did was put a big neon sign over our heads. Swords were what did the job. They’re quiet, they have reach, and they require almost no training. Maybe a crossbow or a flamethrower would be better; I don’t know. But I do know we are far more likely to find some long fucking knives than one of those.”
John looked at each of them in turn.
“Any of you know Aberystwyth? Any places to get hunting supplies?”
Michael smiled grimly at John’s question. “I don’t think we’ll be finding any swords there. I’ve been there a few times, and hunting isn’t exactly high on the agenda. It’s a university town. Cheap vodka: yes; swords: no.”
His eyebrows arched as a thought occurred.
“But there is a hardware supplies place near there, I remember that.”
John looked dubious.
“Kitchen stuff, tools, gardening. That kind of place. Chef’s knives,” Michael said by way of explanation. “Nothing three feet long I suppose, but we’ll be able to get cleavers, maybe skewers, machetes. Lots of things there that are designed for cutting.”
John nodded. It would have to suffice.
“And it’s a few miles outside of town, a retail park,” Michael continued. “A few minutes’ drive away from most the population. This all started pretty early in the morning, before that place would have even opened. If we’re lucky, it won’t be overrun.”
“Perfect,” Rachel interrupted, keen to limit the conversation she feared carried further than they realised in the still air.
“Decision made.”
She rested the baseball bat on her shoulder, and thought about the designer coat
she’d worn on her arrival at St. Davids, an item of rare value that she’d treasured. She had hoped it would be the first such item she could afford. It had turned out to be the last.
In a previous life, she’d loved nothing more than heading to malls and killing time dreaming about being able to buy the goods that teased her from strategically-positioned windows.
Windows now smashed.
“Let’s go shopping,” she said with a grin.
*
Claire was good at puzzles, had loved them ever since she could remember, but the infatuation really took hold when her mother bought a tablet computer, which Claire had swiftly acquisitioned. At first her mother had always asked for the device to be returned when Claire was finished with it; eventually she had simply given up when she realised that Claire had played a canny hand, and Elise had been reduced to asking whether she could borrow her own computer.
Claire spent long hours spent playing all the various free games she could get her hands on: she tried arcade games, driving games, even shooters. Nothing held her interest like the puzzle games that she was soon sinking her evenings into. Mostly variations on the classic Match 3 theme.
The games required a quick mind. She studied the objects in the dimly-lit loft, and concluded that this situation required her mind to move like lightning. The skylight that illuminated her challenge was maybe ten feet above her head. She had no idea if it might open, or if she’d have to smash it somehow, but that was the last level of the game; first there was groundwork to put in.
Moving as quietly as she could, gritting her teeth at every scrape and creak her progress made, Claire began to stack the boxes in the loft, quickly determining which ones were beyond her ability to lift. She was lucky: one of the larger boxes, one she couldn’t even have moved never mind lifted, was placed directly below the skylight. That would be her base. Onto it she hefted two plastic storage crates. They were sturdy; they would take her weight.
Nodding to herself, she scurried to a dark corner, almost screaming as she ran into a large spider web, feeling it drape across her bare arms and face like a veil. She hated spiders, and the thought that one might have been sitting on the web, and was even now scurrying about her person somewhere, running up her back – in my hair! – made her blood run cold, and she froze in place, brushing away the web as best she could.
The hatch leading up to the loft thumped as something below bumped into it, and all of a sudden spiders did not seem so terrifying after all.
She had just cardboard boxes to work with now, some of them damp and rotting, drastically reducing her options. Having her makeshift ladder fall apart underneath her would mean certain death. She swallowed painfully, trying not to let the images of her meeting the same fate as Bill dominate her thoughts.
She glanced back at the structure she was building.
Just a few feet higher.
All she needed was something the right shape, something light. Something that fit perfectly. Just like Tetris.
Claire stared around the loft.
There was nothing. Just flimsy cardboard that would never support her weight and heavy wooden crates that she had no way to move. Frustration built up inside her, and she felt the overwhelming urge to scream and cry.
Yet there were no adults here; no parents. Her crying would not yield a hug, and her screaming had long since stopped being effective as a means of getting what she wanted.
Don’t be a baby, Claire. Her mother’s words, always delivered with a gentle smile, came back to her, and she sniffed softly, informing her nose that it was to stop running immediately.
And then she saw it, propped up against the far wall, covered in dust and webs: an old ironing board.
It would be unstable; there was a good chance it would topple off the storage boxes.
It was her only option.
Creeping over to the dusty board, wincing at every creak, almost jumping clear out of her pyjamas when the hatch wobbled under the weight of another thud, she brushed aside the webs and lifted it. Rusty. Stiff. Just opening out the ironing board would make a noise. Claire’s stomach rolled like thunder, long and slow and troubling. She was only going to get one chance, she had to get it right the first time.
Thankfully the ironing board was light but it was also unwieldy, and she moved as slow as decay, inching across the floor, checking each end of the board to ensure it wasn’t about to knock something over with a clatter that would cost her life. Once she stood at the base of her makeshift pyramid, she leaned the ironing board against the storage crates and swept her gaze around the loft, looking for something to smash the window. She hoped it would have a catch that she could open silently, but if not, she didn’t want to risk having to clamber back down.
The image of her being stuck up there under the locked skylight as the creatures below flowed up into the loft and surrounded her made Claire shudder, and suddenly she wanted nothing more than to find a bathroom.
Finally she saw it: a lonely old screwdriver, waiting patiently in the dark, as though whoever had placed it there understood that one day it would be important. A rusted Excalibur, every bit as important to her as the one from the old stories she loved.
She snatched up the tool, gave it a quick test. The blade of the screwdriver wobbled in the handle, but it would definitely do the job if needed. She slipped it into the pocket of her filthy Pyjama bottoms.
Gingerly lifting the ironing board onto the first of her makeshift pyramid’s ‘steps’, Claire began to climb, slowly, taking great care with every movement, limiting every creak and bump as much as possible.
She was just about to lift the board up onto the second level, the one at which she could open it up and hop on top, when the hatch leading up to the loft thumped again, and then: another noise; one that made her blood freeze in her veins.
Swoosh.
The hydraulic system, delivering the ladder to the floor below.
Her heart lurched.
Light flooded the loft as the hatch opened smoothly, and the stench of them reached her nostrils, the rotting stink of meat gone bad, and her efforts to stifle the terrified whimper clamouring behind her lips proved futile.
The soft noise sounded impossibly loud.
The creatures moved like freshly-squeezed acne, spurting up and into the loft, only their inability to move in an orderly fashion slowing them down; they tumbled and collided with each other, blocking the small entrance, wrestling to be the first to get to her.
Claire was screaming, hauling the ironing board up and flipping the release mechanism to stand it upright. There was no time to test whether the flimsy structure would hold her weight; she leapt up onto the wobbling contraption, and grasped the handle of the screwdriver, slamming the business end into the pane of glass above her. The shattering noise, deafeningly loud in the confined space, seemed to send a fresh wave of fury through the creatures, and she felt one of them grab the base of the ironing board and tear it away even as she jumped up, trying to avoid the worst shards of glass, and hauled herself out onto the roof. The cold air stung like a slap.
She glanced back down into the loft. The creatures piling into the cramped space had knocked over the ramshackle structure she had built to reach the skylight. It would slow them down, but they’d be on her quickly: sheer weight of numbers meant they were rising up toward the opening in the roof like high tide.
The roof was treacherous: steeply sloped, paved with tiles that felt like they might give way at any moment. Claire scurried along as quickly as her terror would allow. The pub stood at the end of a terraced street, which was a blessing in that she didn’t have to make her way directly to ground level, but the height of the buildings adjacent was uneven: there was a drop of about ten feet or so down to the next roof, which offered less of a gradient than the roof of the pub, but still sloped down toward the road.
Claire knew there was no time to worry about the possibility of falling. It would be a better death than the one that now pursued h
er, a death of snapping jaws and tearing hands. She jumped.
The impact knocked the breath from her lungs, and fire exploded in her knees. Enjoy your knees, girl.
In her mind, she had been certain that landing on the roof and then continuing forward would be a relatively easy task. In practice, gravity had a say in matters. Claire’s feet slipped from underneath her immediately, even her modest weight loosening the roof tiles, and then suddenly the world was spinning, like someone had dropped her into a tumble dryer, and then she was falling.
She didn’t feel the impact; the world went dark before she even hit the ground.
Chapter 10
Patrol.
Eric Grant had barely been at the base five minutes when the duty he got assigned to turned out to be fucking patrol. It had always been like that. Eric always got the shit detail first. Couldn’t ever figure out why. He was either the best or the worst person to deal with the shitty problems, he didn’t know which. Each possibility led to conclusions he didn’t much like.
‘Patrol’ to Eric in this situation meant only one thing: early warning system. A ring of men spread out around the base, each patrolling a quadrant of tricky terrain, all rocks and streams and trees, approachable from almost any direction. He was under no illusions: patrol duty meant being the alarm bell that rang in the night. If patrol ever nudged the needle above boring, it was because you were dying.
His quadrant was, typically enough, about as bad as it could get: hilly, dense patches of trees either side of – God help him – the only road that led to the base. If he was their alarm clock, he was the old analogue kind, the type that you had to smack to silence. Bad times.
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