A single bus stood in the parking area at the front of the station. It wasn’t a full-size coach: those were very rare sights around Snowdon. Only a couple of times a year did a large group of climbers make their way from one of the bigger cities to the Welsh mountains.
The bus, a cheerful green machine that looked to have been built in the seventies and had seen the last of its better days in the same decade, seated around twelve people. Darren’s party had taken a very similar vehicle from the coastal town of Caernarfon three days earlier. The vehicle stood dormant, with the door at the front, next to the driver's seat, wide open like a silent scream. Yet it was not the bus that held Darren's gaze like a magnet and made his breath catch in his throat. It was the passengers.
What was left of them.
It was impossible to count the bodies; as futile as trying to guess how many animals had been used in the processing of a packet of minced beef. All across the car park around the bus, Darren saw recognisably human parts mixed with frozen streaks of gore that he didn’t want to recognise. For just a second the sight of the blood gave life to an ancient memory, one he believed had been buried deep in the monochrome past.
Suddenly he was staring at the broken bodies of the two people that mattered most in the world to him, trying to comprehend that his young family had been alive one moment and fused terribly with the steaming metal of the car the next, and that it was all his fault.
“Darren?”
Lexie. One of the young women he had been leading toward the summit of Mount Snowdon. She stared at the car park in horror.
Lost in his memories, Darren had forgotten the group of climbers was even there. He blinked, tried to keep his lower lip from trembling. Almost managed it. Lexie looked like she was almost scared out of her mind. She suddenly looked very young. No bravado left.
“What do we do?”
There’s no wild animal in Wales capable of this, Darren thought. No other damage; this wasn’t some accident or explosion.
Darren’s mind swam, grasping for an explanation for the carnage that lay only thirty feet away.
Find the next foothold.
He dropped into a crouch, letting the bushes surrounding the bus station block out the sight of the car park.
“People did this,” he hissed at the group, raising a warning hand to stop any debate in its tracks. One by one, the group dropped into a crouch beside him. “More than one, to kill a group that large.”
He saw something in Lexie’s big, frightened eyes snapping.
“They might be gone. They might not. We stick together, okay? We move slow and quiet, and we get to the landline in the station. Once we’re inside, we’re fine, right? We call the police and barricade the door until help arrives. Stick together.”
He put a finger to his lips, and unzipped a pocket, sliding out a sleek multi-tool and releasing the small blade with a faint snap.
You’ll only cut yourself with that, you idiot.
Darren silenced the voice in his head. There was no room for doubt. Not now. Even as he looked at the small blade, Darren was dimly aware of a thrill coursing through him. A feeling of excitement - of life - so unfamiliar he almost did not recognise it. The climbing and the rocks had long ago lost their thrill, the edge of danger blunted by experience.
With gritted teeth, he eased himself up and crept forward, twisting his neck with each step to search for a sign of movement.
The station was nestled against a crescent in the road that meandered around the base of the mountain. Darren was approaching from the trail at the rear, passing rocks that obscured most of the building. Each step brought a little more of the place into sight, and with every passing second as he approached the car park to the left of the station, he expected to see something charging toward him. A psychopath with an axe, perhaps, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, a manic grin and murderous eyes, coming at Darren swinging and shrieking. There was nothing.
When he reached the horror that stained the floor around the bus, his brain wanted not to look, but his eyes just wouldn’t co-operate. All around the vehicle, the passengers had died grotesquely, their bodies sundered by some sharp instrument and, worse, some looked to have bite marks, ragged tears in their flesh that exposed muscle and bone. Several looked as if their eyes had been ripped out.
Freezing sweat ran down into the small of Darren’s back.
Most of the bodies were clustered in one spot; a couple had died further toward the front of the building.
It’s a trail. They were running for the bus.
Needles of fear slowly pierced down into Darren’s mind.
Running from what? What would scare so many people?
He stepped past the bus and headed for the main station building, pressing himself against it to provide cover. Darren paused there for a moment to heave in deep, quaking breaths. Just being able to press his back to something made him feel a little less exposed. As the team joined him, he peeked around the corner, taking in the front of the building in a quick snapshot. It looked deserted.
He held up a hand.
Wait.
He listened, imploring his ears to rise above the insistent pounding of his pulse.
What is that noise?
The sound was faint. A sort of soft scraping, like something wet being pulled along metal. He looked quizzically at the team, trying to confirm in their eyes that he wasn’t hearing things.
He leant close to Lexie’s ear. Smelled a trace of exotic perfume diluted by sweat and dirt and terror.
“Where’s that coming from?” He breathed.
Lexie started to shrug, but then her eyes fixed on a point over Darren's right shoulder and widened in horror, and he heard it.
Thump.
Darren turned slowly to face the bus, and the sight of what had dragged itself out through the open door made his blood run cold. They had walked right past it, assuming the vehicle was empty.
His thoughts froze as he tried to understand what his eyes were seeing, and one of the little sayings his wife had been so fond of threw itself up from a pit of long-forgotten memories.
You know what happens when you assume…
A blood-soaked woman was hauling herself toward them using her arms to lever herself forward, dragging herself along the floor.
Both the woman's legs had been severed at mid-thigh height, like some movie assassin had sliced them away with a sword, and her passage left a chunky streak of red-black gore on the cold tarmac. Both her eyes had been ripped out, and one hung uselessly against her stained-red cheek, like it had frozen there, sticking in place.
For just a moment, Darren’s mind went completely blank, just for a split second, and he lost his foothold; felt like he was tumbling away into some endless ravine.
“Jesus, get some help, go call an ambulance!”
The words entered his mind slowly; foggily, like he was hearing them through thick walls.
One of the kids he had been leading, one of the ones Darren liked the most - Trevor, a nice sort of guy who would have been more tolerable if he hadn't spent the whole trip trying to win Lexie over with a little-boy-lost act - completely lost his fucking mind and ran to help the woman.
Darren watched in horror as the thing on the floor grabbed his legs and pulled him down, clamping her teeth onto his flailing hand and clenching, tearing away a finger with a sharp snap that cleaved the still morning air in two.
Trevor screamed and tore his arm away, sending an arc of blood across the floor.
And then abruptly the screaming stopped, and Darren could almost swear he heard the kid let out a sigh and then Trevor was tearing his eyes out and snarling and leaping on top of Lexie and the little-boy-lost routine evaporated in a storm of teeth and blood, and Darren was running for the bus station door and all around him there was screaming.
Darren was weak; scared. Certain he was going to die. He ran blindly, like an animal terrified by the shriek and pop of fireworks, smashing his way through the door an
d into the station. Footsteps followed him inside; he had no idea whether they belonged to the group of excitable kids he was meant to be leading or the hideous monster that Trevor had suddenly become.
There was no time to think about that.
In the gloomy half-light of the bus station, teeth were aimed at him, driving toward him, snapping and tearing.
Darren crumpled backwards, slashing at the eyeless horror wildly with the tiny blade, driving it deep into its neck.
It's not stopping, he thought dully, as the creature pushed its snapping jaws closer to Darren's face, forcing its flesh further onto the blade, apparently oblivious to the grievous injury, immune to the pain as it impaled itself to get to him.
With a roar, Darren flexed his old, weathered muscles, mustering all his strength to keep the mouth of the thing at bay. He couldn't find the energy he needed to throw it away from him, and so he was left there for seconds that felt like hours, feeling the creature's blood pumping steadily across his arm, holding it in place while it died slowly atop him.
Even when the life had pulsed from the thing, its final action was a weak, pathetic snapping of its jaw.
It took a full minute for it to weaken enough that Darren was able to push it away from him.
He screamed the whole time.
When he hauled himself upright, he saw that seven of the kids had made it inside with him. None of them seemed to be injured; all of them were pressed against the door, holding back the relentless attempts of their former friends to get inside the building and kill them.
Darren saw Lexie outside, eyeless and enraged, throwing herself at the glass panel on the door. He heard the splintering of the glass and knew there was to be no barricading themselves in.
The small room was filled with sobs and shrieks. For several long moments Darren simply stared down at the small blade, at the blood which drenched his forearm, and he thought about the lack of planes. The empty skies, and the satellite phone that found no signal, and he shuddered as his nerves blazed like wildfire.
For the first time in twenty years, Darren felt alive. Truly alive. It looked like he wasn't going to be forced into a lonely retirement of gardening and bland quiz shows after all. The world had thrown a curveball, and he would catch it and run.
As the handful of kids pressed themselves against the door and shot terrified looks back toward him, Darren realised they were waiting for him to tell them what to do, and he mumbled a few reassuring words.
And grinned broadly into the gloom as a plan formed.
*
That had all been days ago. Enough time for Darren to lead the mountaineers to safety, as his contract with them had promised. Well, all but one. But that one had been a noble sacrifice. Without the distraction he had provided, how else would Darren have got them all onto the bus and away from the mayhem in the car park?
Enough time for them to realise that the world itself had become a vast mountain, and they needed a guide more than ever.
Enough time for Darren to find the perfect place for them to stay and slowly expand their numbers with fresh blood. Enough time to plot out a future that would require every last one of them to look to him before they chose to do anything. Enough time for him to have been responsible for at least ten deaths.
And enough time to discover something extraordinary. Something that would give them a shot at survival, and Darren a shot at being someone far more important than a guy that teenage climbers spent a week with and promptly forgot.
A lot can change in a week.
Not the excitement, though. The thrill of the new world still coursed through Darren's veins like a powerful drug.
And more excitement was headed straight for him, propelled by large white sails and the choppy waves of the Irish Sea.
Darren had been so lost in thought that he jumped when the man with the binoculars appeared at his side.
“Sir, there’s six of them," the man said. "They’ve docked further down the river. Looks like two men, two women. Couple of kids.”
Darren nodded. Six was a lot. There was a definite threat of...dilution.
Kids, he thought. Children had great value in a world riddled by death.
“Then get ready,” he said. "I think we'll let this group inside."
“Yes, Sir.”
Sir, Darren thought, and smiled.
2
It looks like they want company.
Those had been Michael Evans’ words when he first saw the light that lanced the sky from the stone guts of the castle as they skimmed across the pitch-black water.
John Francis had stared long and hard at the beam of light as he wrestled against the sails and guided the boat from the open sea toward the mouth of the river that funnelled into the town of Caernarfon.
Three fast, three slow, three fast.
John knew what the sequence of flashing lights meant, of course; anyone with even the most rudimentary military training would. He also knew how an SOS could be employed as a lure in a trap. That they wanted company was in no doubt. What John needed to know was why. In a warzone, you don't just stumble forward blindly.
He made up his mind before the boat got anywhere near the shore. If he was going to walk into that castle, he would do it on his terms.
“You stay, I go,” he said when the boat reached the dock.
John kept his voice low and his tone harsh. He expected a frown from Michael, and he got it.
“We should stick together.”
John finished tying the boat off, and played out a few feet of line, letting it drift away from the harbour wall, just far enough that only someone with Olympic prowess would have a chance of jumping anywhere near the hull. He clenched his jaw in frustration.
Of course he wants to argue the point.
“Michael, I hate to be a bastard about this, but I’m not carrying you through a strange fucking town that is probably heaving with psychopaths to find out whether or not the people in that castle mean to do us harm. We need the boat, and if I come back running I want the fucking thing untied and ready to go, right? There’s no possible outcome for me that would be helped by being accompanied by two kids, a grandmother and a cripple. No offense.”
John hadn’t mentioned Rachel. He saw Michael making a mental note of the omission and stifled a sigh. One way or another, Michael absorbed information and found value in it.
Or maybe 'leverage' is more accurate, John thought. He could see why Michael would have been a good cop, back when law and order had been words that meant anything. Somehow Michael Evans had survived the apocalypse despite his paralysis, and had surrounded himself with people willing to go to great lengths to help him. John had seen men he would have considered far better equipped to deal with a world of relentless savagery fall at the first hurdle. Somehow Michael kept clearing them almost effortlessly. Maybe because he wasn't jumping. He was being carried.
“I’ll be back,” John said flatly and, giving Michael no time to respond, hauled himself onto the rope, wrapping his legs around it and shimmying across toward the harbour wall.
As he made his way across the improvised rope bridge, John let his mind dwell on his own words for a second. He would be back, though as they had made their way up the coast he had again spent half his time considering the best way to ditch the group of people that had become his travelling companions. To let them all follow Michael down whatever path best suited him.
And what’s stopping you?
The answer was obvious, though he didn’t let it settle in his mind. Didn’t want to admit it to himself, he supposed. Forming attachments was only going to weaken him, and the woman had been badly damaged even before the horrific events at the harbour in Aberystwyth; before she watched her last remaining relative get torn apart in front of her.
He reached the wall and carefully swung a foot across, using the strength in his arms to lever himself upright with as little noise as possible. When he was safely on solid ground, he dropped onto his haunches out o
f habit and his face contorted into a wry grimace. There was little point trying to keep a low profile: the Infected were blind; hunters that used preternatural hearing to track down their prey. Crouching low would have no effect on whether they were going to swarm toward him. And if the people signalling for help in the castle were keeping lookout - as they surely must be - they would likely have seen the boat approaching long before it actually reached land, and they would be expecting company.
John took a moment to study Caernarfon’s picturesque waterfront, trying to gather enough data to form a rough map of the place in his head. Their approach by sea had obscured most of the town behind rolling hills that swept away from the ocean toward the foothills of the Welsh mountains.
When the town had finally hovered into view, John had been forced to admit a grudging respect for Michael. Caernarfon had been his idea, and it wasn’t half bad. The crippled man was self-serving, but by luck or judgement his decisions had kept them alive.
But not undamaged.
John shook the thought away and reminded himself sternly: forming attachments will weaken you.
They had approached Caernarfon from the south, skirting up the coast under the vast, cloudless sky. The castle jutted from the landscape like a clenched jaw, with the town at its back. A river that curved inward around the castle made it virtually unapproachable by land, save for the bridge connecting it to the town.
The town on the inland side was huddled close, small buildings leaning over narrow streets that were typical of old Wales; all crooked angles and glowering claustrophobia. Blind corners and hiding spots everywhere. A great place to defend; not so great to enter alone.
Caernarfon's concessions to modernity were daubed across the ancient buildings like paint; chain stores and high-street brands crammed into narrow structures on cobbled streets. John saw a number of shops that sold fashionable clothes and gifts for occasions no one would be celebrating any time soon; mobile phone shops suddenly rendered obsolete. A market, a handful of pubs; a tiny church. The castle dominated them all, towering far above the rooftops of every other building. Eight huge stone towers clustered around a central node behind a wall that had to be at least fifty feet high.
Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4) Page 2