Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4)

by Griffiths, K. R.

  Mutation

  K.R. Griffiths

  Copyright © K.R. Griffiths 2013

  Also by K.R. Griffiths

  Panic (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 1)

  Shock (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 2)

  Psychosis (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 3)

  www.krgriffiths.org

  Prologue

  “Movement.”

  The word was a barely-audible hiss, like air escaping from a slow puncture.

  “Where?”

  “One o’clock. Five hundred yards.”

  David sighted the rifle, scanning the dark, empty fields that radiated outwards from their elevated position on the stubby hill. Nothing. He switched to thermal.

  Ah, there it was.

  One man. Shuffling toward them slowly.

  “One of them?”

  David squinted. The thermal scope turned the landscape into an artistic impression, messily daubed in shades of black. The figure, little more than a dot at this distance, hovered in the gloom like a spectre, a bright white splash against a dark background.

  It was heading toward them slowly, but it didn’t move like one of the Infected; didn’t have that strange animal gait. And then there was the fact that it was alone: increasingly, the Infected tended to move in packs, sometimes numbering a handful, sometimes many, many more, though it had been a while since David had watched a herd moving past in the distance; an army of sightless death that numbered in the hundreds, and remained oblivious to the presence of humans nearby. Thank God.

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t think so. Difficult to tell.”

  To his immediate right, David heard his spotter sigh impatiently, and he grimaced. He would shelve the rebuke for now, but later - when noise wasn’t such an issue - he would have a word. For a member of a sniper unit patience wasn’t just a virtue. It was everything.

  He glanced at his partner. Larry had good eyes - a prerequisite for a spotter - but he was raw. Never tested in the field. Until ‘the field’ turned out to be the very lands that surrounded the barracks; training areas abruptly turned live. Suddenly everyone was getting tested. Ready or not, here they come.

  David and Larry were stationed on a hill overlooking the northern perimeter of Catterick Garrison, or at least one sector of it. The garrison itself was huge, and had slowly developed in a moderately-sized town of around fifteen thousand nestled near the northern border of North Yorkshire. It represented one of the UK’s most formidable strongholds; the largest British Army garrison in the world.

  Catterick had survived the initial encounter with the virus. Just. When the dust finally settled there were a little over a thousand survivors left, trampling on a carpet of the rotting corpses of their former comrades which covered most of the ‘town’ itself.

  The centre of Catterick comprised a small area of buildings - living accommodation and barracks; a school; a recently-installed commercial area - surrounded by thousands of acres of training ground. That huge empty space had provided a buffer from the worst of the violence that had swept through the country, but when the infection made its way into the population at the garrison, the soldiers stationed there had quickly found that all their weapons and training hadn’t quite cut it.

  When the enemy attacked at a microbial level, what good were bullets?

  They had taken heavy damage.

  It had only taken a handful of the Infected stumbling through the stretched-thin, panicked defences. Just a handful that had ended up reducing the numbers of what David increasingly felt was a resistance movement by as much as ninety per cent before bullets had finally done enough to stop the infection in its tracks. The only way to fight death was with death. When the infection knocked at the door, the only prudent response was to blow up the whole damn building.

  Whatever biological apocalypse had been unleashed on the UK, there was no treating it; no hope of quarantining the afflicted. It was as incurable and uncontrollable as it was ravenous. The only hope was to cut it out like a tumour, and that meant killing. A whole lot of killing. Infected or not: they just kept killing until the violence stopped. There was a grim, terrible irony to their survival.

  He squinted through the scope, sweat beading on his brow; stinging as the sharp night air hit it.

  One figure. One pale ghost in the night. Could be human. But if he was wrong, one would be all it took to start the cycle of mayhem all over again, and this time David doubted they would be able to fight it off. There was only so much killing that could be done.

  Catterick Garrison was still regrouping after the infection had decimated its numbers days earlier, and pulling itself together despite the sudden absence of all high command. That vacuum told David all he needed to know. High command had known what was coming, and they had evacuated like cowards in the night, slipping away like phantoms, leaving the grunts to fend for themselves. In the end, there were a few who had thought themselves important, but had been left behind to die. As it turned out, with the exception of a very select few, they were all grunts.

  All forms of communication had been cut off, but even if they still had phones and satellites, David was certain there would have been nobody listening. The radio still seemed to work; but the frantic transmissions they sent were met with static and silence. The infection was part of a co-ordinated attack, and those at the top of the military had either been part of it, or had fled.

  David knew they weren’t the type of people that fled. Not from anything.

  He grimaced as the thought about the motto of the Royal Air Force, the one that one of his buddies used to repeat ad nauseam. Rise above the rest. As it turned out that motto had been cut short. They had omitted the part which said and then cut them loose.

  What was left at Catterick after the bloody battle with the plague-ridden creatures - a few broken regiments that had served on active duty, a lot of trainees and some families - would still have represented a formidable force. If they could shore up their defences, they might stand a chance of putting together a retaliation that could attempt to take back North Yorkshire one mile at a time; to at least push the infection back.

  The Garrison represented a safe zone. Possibly the only one that remained in the UK. It had to be maintained. The infection had to stay out.

  Despite the chaos and confusion within the garrison following the collapse, that was the one thing everybody agreed on. That meant hyper-vigilance.

  Letting someone in, human or not, was a risk. David and Larry were just two of the snipers manning the boundary. They had orders, but also an unusual level of autonomy. This was David’s call; no one else’s.

  “Sorry, buddy,” David breathed, focusing on the figure shuffling toward them. His finger found the trigger.

  And suddenly his scope was empty.

  “What the hell?”

  He shot a glance at Larry, brow furrowing, and got a bemused shrug in return.

  Returning to the scope, he swept the area where the ghostly figure had been. The spectral image had melted into the night; the thermal now offered nothing beyond the blank, dark canvas of the Yorkshire countryside.

  Great, he thought, now I’m losing my-

  He didn’t get to finish the thought.

  At his side, Larry croaked and gurgled, and when David’s eyes travelled to the right, they settled on a sight his mind couldn’t comprehend.

  The figure he had been watching through the scope stood over the two men. It had somehow travelled hundreds of yards in an instant. It was huge, over seven feet tall. Deformed; bulbous. Grinning.

  Its enormous hand was buried in the small of Larry’s back, withdrawing slowly, with a sound like flames licking at wet wood
.

  Tearing out Larry’s spine.

  David began to roll onto his back and tried to bring up the cumbersome sniper rifle that he knew would be worse than useless at such close quarters, but it was plucked from his grasp even as his finger began to squeeze the trigger, so quickly that his mind thought he was still clutching it, like the ghostly itch of an amputated limb. His finger squeezed on nothing.

  The creature - there was no other word for the thing: it looked a grisly parody of something that had possibly once been human, but wasn’t any longer - dropped a foot like an anvil onto David’s chest, crushing him into the soft, wet earth, and lifted Larry’s dripping spine into the night like a trophy.

  Licked it.

  David’s mind retreated from the horror; cowering. He felt like crying for his mother to save him. Years of training, years of combat; nothing had been enough to prepare him. His thoughts froze like a cornered animal as his sanity began to collapse.

  The creature dropped Larry's severed spine and looked down at him, and David saw utterly inhuman eyes; saw a dark and terrible future written in the savage gaze, and realised that all that was left now was to pray for a quick death.

  God didn’t listen.

  1

  This is the end.

  Darren Oliver shivered a little as the thought crossed his mind, yet it wasn’t the crossing itself that caused the tremor, but the relentless cold. The truth was that Darren had been looking forward to the end for quite some time. Ever since his sixtieth birthday had lumbered across the horizon. Something about that milestone made his bones feel old. Fifty-nine hadn’t felt that way.

  He had made the decision months ago to make the current expedition his last: his body was still strong, but it was also fatigued, and when it came down to it Darren had simply grown tired of being cold all the damn time.

  Even so, the thought of retirement was a troubling one, when it was to be a solitary undertaking. Nothing to look forward to other than daytime television and microwave meals and a slow deterioration, until one day you found yourself walking down a street in your underwear with no idea how you got there. After twenty years of carefully avoiding spending any time in his own head, retirement was going to trap him there until the bitter end. A different sort of cold.

  No, he wasn’t looking forward to that part at all. But clambering up mountains was - if not a young man’s game - definitely not an old man’s game. The last couple of climbs had taken their toll. It wasn’t so much that his strength was waning, or even his fitness, really. More his power of recovery: it took a lot longer now for the cold of the mountains to seep away from his bones; longer for the energy and the appetite to return. It was time to call it quits.

  Still, it was disheartening to end on a low note. In nearly twenty years of taking groups of enthusiastic young climbers across the mountains, he had only been forced to cut a couple of trips short, and on both occasions the decision had been foisted upon him by illness. Not his, but those he led. Darren hadn’t suffered anything more than a mild cold in decades. Probably something to do with spending most of his time at altitude, closer to God. Or maybe the big man upstairs figured Darren had suffered enough for one lifetime without adding illness to the list.

  This trip was cut short for an entirely different reason. One that sat heavily on Darren’s broad shoulders, making them slump more than the searing low temperatures and biting winds ever had.

  Fear.

  Darren had been away from civilization for three days, leading the team of semi-experienced mountaineers across Mount Snowdon. It was the highest peak in either Wales or England, a vast rocky wilderness that beckoned all the climbers who had experienced everything else the UK had to offer and wanted one last challenge before moving on to bigger peaks on foreign shores.

  It was an easy climb. After twenty years of regular visits, it was his climb.

  The expedition was meant to last a week: Darren’s specialty was preparing climbers for the much longer ascents they would face when the siren song of the Himalayas or the Alps or the Rockies finally wormed its way into their consciousness and put down roots. No serious climber would be happy until they at least attempted one of the world’s more formidable ranges. By comparison Snowdon was straightforward, and it had been many years since Darren's expeditions had been troubled by anything more than a little frostbite or the occasional missing piece of equipment.

  Until this time.

  This time they had lost all communication at the end of day two.

  There had been a little freaking out among the members of the group, of course. Most of the twelve people Darren led toward the distant peak presented themselves with the typical bravado that came with not-quite-enough experience, but the sudden death of their mobile phones and the silence of the radio was not quite the same as a vertical climb. Communication was their safety net: the removal of that net brought the vertiginous drops and the jagged rocks into a sharper sort of focus.

  It was not the first time Darren had been without communication on the slopes; not the second or third time either. He knew the phones were an illusion: under most circumstances, if climbers needed to call for help it was because they were faced by a danger that probably wouldn’t wait for the arrival of rescue. The best thing to do on the climb was forget about whatever you had in your pockets; forget everything that wasn’t either your feet or the next foothold.

  Maybe it was weather disturbance, maybe some satellite problem. It didn’t matter. The phones were down; the rocks were still the same. Debating it when you were clinging to lethal terrain was pointless.

  Eventually Darren had snapped, and roared at the group of young men and women to shut the fuck up and watch their footing, or they would end up discovering that mobile reception was far worse at the bottom of a ravine. He hadn't meant it to sound like a threat, but that's the way it came out. It got the job done, though, and a pregnant silence fell on the group until Darren finally called them to a halt.

  It was only then, as they had made camp at two thousand feet on a wide plateau that shivered under the first traces of the snow that covered the peak itself, and Darren had sat next to the fire, half-listening to the younger climbers turning over theories about their dead phones that ranged from the mundane to the fantastic, that he noticed something. Or more accurately, the absence of something.

  Where are all the planes?

  Snowdon was a busy peak, although it didn’t seem that way when you were clinging to some stubborn part of it. There were a lot of trails, a lot of climbers, and generally there was a lot of traffic in the skies above. Darren had long since stopped noticing the gleaming cylinders that made their way across the sky from the airports of northern England toward Ireland and the Atlantic Ocean beyond: they were just background noise to him after twenty years.

  But suddenly that noise had been silenced.

  When the rest of the group finally retired to their tents, Darren slipped away from the camp to find a perch that offered a panoramic view of the endless night sky. For almost an hour he scanned the blanket of stars that took away the breath of those that travelled to Snowdonia from the light-polluted cities, searching for the tell-tale blinking lights of aircraft. The night was cloudless, and he knew he should have seen several planes in the time he spent watching, but there was nothing. It was as if the flight path had simply ceased to exist.

  When Darren returned to his tent, deep in troubled thought, he retrieved the satellite phone from the bottom of his pack. He hadn’t ever needed to use it, but the device was faultlessly reliable. He would look like an idiot using it to ask why there were no planes in the sky, but so be it: the crawling sensation in his gut needed to be halted.

  The satellite phone was fully charged, and as the dim green grow of the screen illuminated the tent, he thought for a moment that he had been getting worried about nothing, letting the infectious fear of the younger climbers get to him. Only when the phone had been scanning for a connection for a full five minutes withou
t success did Darren’s gut finally get its point across to him.

  There was something wrong out there beyond the barren wastes of the Snowdonia National Park.

  That’s when Darren finally gave in and labelled the crawling sensation in his gut; gave it a name and made it real.

  Fear.

  As much as he had tried to deny it; to lay it squarely at the feet of the inexperienced climbers, fear had him in its clutches, and that could only end badly. There was no place on the slopes for fear.

  He made up his mind then to cut the expedition short and get off the mountain. At the time it felt like the safest option; like the sensible way to keep the group safe and healthy.

  At the time. But that had been before they packed up camp and left the plateau, heading back the way they had come. Before they followed the winding trail down to the foot of the mountain. Before the bus station.

  The Snowdon Sherpa was the ostentatiously-named bus that orbited the base of the mountain, making stops at each of the six main routes that wound up toward the peak, and delivering groups of climbers to the remote region from the nearby towns. The stations themselves were small and unremarkable; just squat concrete buildings and small car parks stuck in the wilderness like thumbtacks. Most were staffed by only two or three people; hardy souls who scraped a meagre living from the rocks and cliffs, and looked to have been there almost as long as the mountain itself. It had been years since Darren had paid either the stations or the staff any attention; they simply hadn’t warranted it.

  The tiny bus station took his full attention the moment the trail he had been following down the mountain brought it into his line of sight. Once he saw it, he could not look at anything else.

  Darren made the sign of the cross in the air in front of his chest. It was a gesture he hadn’t performed in years, but it was programmed deep into his muscle memory, and his shocked mind ran backwards at the sight laid out before him; all the way back to a time when he had believed in something greater, hoping to find some comfort in the old routine and discovering that there was none.