Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4)

by Griffiths, K. R.

  The place looked about as defendable as any John could imagine. Warfare had been set back hundreds of years. The enemy didn’t use guns and planes and warheads anymore; it used fingers and teeth. Huge walls were suddenly a tactical necessity, as they once had been. The violence of mankind had come full circle: eventually weaponry had become so advanced that the only place left for it to go was right back to the start, right back to bare fists and blades and slow, agonising death.

  With the mountains of Snowdonia at its rear, cutting off land approach from the south and the east, Caernarfon was a town surrounded by natural fortifications. And then there was the castle itself: a building that had died centuries before and become a tourist attraction had been given a shot at a full resurrection.

  The place was perfect.

  But someone else had taken it first.

  John scurried to the cover of the nearest building and searched for the beam in the sky, among the brilliant carpet of stars. After a few seconds he spotted it and reoriented himself.

  There was no doubt in John's mind that the approaching boat had been spotted, but he thought it unlikely anyone would have seen him making his way alone onto the harbour. He had the cover of night and dark clothing, and of course the streets were completely dark: the electrical grid serving the UK had wheezed out its final breath hours earlier.

  Only if someone had been studying him carefully with binoculars would they know that he was heading for the castle.

  It was a recon mission, and it wasn’t John’s first. He had to know what they were dealing with. But the castle was a few hundred yards away and there was just one way in: across a long, narrow bridge that spanned the river which stabbed deep into the belly of the town. It would be impossible to get very close without being spotted, but that was a puzzle to solve later: for now, the crooked, narrow streets needed to be traversed, and any number of Infected could be lurking in the shadows.

  John had a small flashlight in his pocket, but dismissed the notion of using it immediately. He had to retain the element of surprise and conceal his approach. It was his only tactical advantage.

  He slipped into the nearest street and out of the castle’s line of sight, and then stopped for a moment to survey his surroundings.

  A narrow shopping street, pedestrianized. Blood on the cobbles. John felt tension rising and his jaw clenching involuntarily, and he slipped out the larger of the two knives he carried on his belt.

  Where are they?

  The streets looked deserted; the windows at the front of each store displayed nothing but empty, dark spaces. John had expected the place to be crawling with Infected: he knew from experience that they seemed almost magnetically drawn toward humans. The castle should have been surrounded, yet Caernarfon looked like a ghost town.

  Keeping his steps as light as possible, John made his way through crooked alleys in the direction of the castle, slowly arcing around it, ensuring the beam of light stayed to his left. Several times he caught brief glimpses of the bridge. It didn’t look like anyone was crossing it to cut him off.

  Maybe they really do need help after all, he thought as he turned a corner and entered a small market square.

  And then he was stumbling backwards, and the only thing on his mind was the eyeless creature that stood right in front of him.

  *

  Before the world had collapsed into violence and chaos, Rachel Roberts had been known for her temper. Her friends had laughed about it and pretended to be afraid of her and made her giggle helplessly about it, but the truth was that Rachel's tendency to lose her cool was generally a source of trouble. Throughout her school years her teachers had bemoaned that her focus on doing good work was punctuated by violent altercations, and Rachel’s penchant for defending her actions rather than offering humble contrition left them shaking their heads and predicting a troubling future for her.

  When she moved from St. Davids to London to find work and her boss had finally had enough of staring at her butt and decided that some things simply had to be squeezed, Rachel had responded with a straight right that broke his nose and effectively cleared her desk.

  As she had been escorted forcibly from the building her only regret had been not following the straight with an uppercut or, better yet, a solid knee to the groin. It had taken many hours for the red fog in her mind to finally clear and a semblance of calm to return.

  In retrospect, that episode had turned out to be little more than a tantrum.

  Sitting on the boat, barely even aware of John’s absence and the fact that they had reached their destination, rage consumed Rachel, twisting around her gut like fire; writhing and spreading in the shadows of her mind like a malignant tumour.

  The loss of Jason had landed like a nailbomb, devastating every part of her. It was the latest shattering blow delivered by the faceless suits that had turned themselves into gods, smiting the land with a flood of insanity and murder.

  She had lost everything. Her parents, her brother, her home, her dignity. Her belief. No part of Rachel Roberts had escaped injury at the pitiless hands of the architects of Project Wildfire. They had destroyed everything that mattered to her like bored children plucking the legs from an insect. Because they could. Just to see what happened afterwards.

  They had to pay.

  “Rachel...Rachel?”

  I was supposed to protect him.

  “Rachel, are you okay? Rach?”

  Rachel snapped back into the present and drilled her gaze into Michael. When she spoke, her voice simmered with unrestrained fury.

  “Don’t call me that. Never call me that, understand?”

  Michael flinched and nodded. His daughter, Claire, gripped his torso, her eyes widening in fright. The sight of the young girl’s fear poured a little water on Rachel’s white-hot core, pulling her back from the precipice before she tumbled down into a destructive, all-consuming rage.

  “Are you okay?”

  “No, Michael.”

  She didn’t want the words to come out drenched in bitterness, but they did. Michael meant well, of course. And it wasn’t his fault, although Rachel could tell that John sometimes thought it was, and that they had all followed Michael on a reckless mission that ended up getting Jason killed. Effectively exchanging her brother for Michael’s daughter.

  But even lost in bottomless anger at the way things had turned out in Aberystwyth, Rachel couldn’t find it in herself to blame Michael. He had not forced any of them to help him find Claire; they had all gone willingly. Rachel herself had been dedicated to finding the girl and proving that there was still some hope left in the world.

  There was nothing to indicate that if she and Jason hadn’t tagged along with Michael that they wouldn’t both be dead already anyway because that was how the world worked now. Death lurking around every corner, waiting to pounce. Every step rich with dark opportunity. A multitude of ways for everything to end without warning.

  No, it wasn’t Michael that Rachel blamed. Wasn’t John either, despite his limited involvement with Project Wildfire. She blamed the men who had created the disaster, the same men that caused wars and economic collapses and guided the world recklessly with only their profit in mind. People with power. Allowed to have power and to wield it across continents.

  In the past, Rachel’s only option to strike back at them had been voting. A pointless charade that boiled down to choosing between whether you wore a red hat or a blue hat.

  Rachel had never bothered with it.

  But they hadn’t killed her entire family before, and now only one thing mattered: tracking them down, however impossible a task that seemed.

  And killing them.

  She blinked at the castle that loomed over the town. John and Michael wanted a place to defend; a place to stay and be safe. As the rage boiled away inside her, Rachel no longer thought that would be enough for her.

  *

  “Please, don’t...I know you are there, don’t. Please.”

  John’s mind retre
ated and he froze, stunned.

  It’s talking.

  He raised the knife.

  In the small market square, tied to a lamp post, stood a girl of about thirteen. She was shivering with the cold or terror or both. She looked weak; on the verge of collapsing to the cobbles.

  Infected.

  Her eyes were gone, ripped from their sockets.

  The knife shook a little in John's grip.

  “I’m not like them, please, I’m-“

  Her plea dissolved in a whimper of fear, hysteria ripping a meaningless jumble of noise from her throat. It was an animal sound.

  What the fuck…

  “Afraid I have to stop you doing that, mate.”

  A man’s voice, deep and clear.

  Behind him.

  John span around, dropping low, smoothly pulling out the smaller second knife and slipping his grip down to the blade in a single motion, readying the throw that would land at upper chest or neck height.

  Someone had crossed the bridge, someone who knew a thing or two about staying quiet.

  John hated surprises.

  A few feet away, stepping out from behind a wall with his arms raised in surrender, John saw a guy of around sixty. He was mostly bald, and had a white beard that still looked vaguely well-trimmed. He was big and looked physically fit. He reminded John a lot of some of the guys that had made their way to the top of the army, just before they reached the age where politics and meetings and sitting at desks took over and bellies began to expand.

  John had seen plenty of those guys, the once-active men embittered by age; more dangerous with a pen and a smile than they ever had been with a gun.

  “Didn’t mean to startle you,” the man said, raising his arms higher. “Exact opposite actually, that’s why I came alone. But I can’t let you do that."

  He motioned to John's knife and the shackled girl. "It’s important. Vital.”

  John’s eyes narrowed, and he shot a glance around the square, quickly calculating the possibility of more shapes lurking in the shadows. He dismissed the idea. One man might be able to creep up on him, but John couldn't imagine that he would fail to notice himself being surrounded.

  “There are more of you? How many?”

  “Enough," the white-haired man said. "But I don’t want it to come to that. We don’t need to have trouble here.”

  John jabbed a knife at the Infected girl tied to the post.

  “The fuck is that? You people keep the things as pets? Why does she fucking talk?”

  The bearded man smiled affably, but John didn't see a hint of it reflected in his eyes.

  “It’s a long story. I imagine you’ve got one of your own, right? So get your friends and come in, and we’ll trade tales of the apocalypse. What do you say?”

  The smile widened, and the man dropped an arm, holding it out for a handshake.

  “Darren Oliver,” he said. “Welcome to my castle.”

  3

  It was something to do with the blood.

  Even that tiny taste of it had sent a surge of power coursing through Jake McIntosh's twisted muscles, lighting up his veins like an electrical storm. Just a few delicious droplets on his tongue. He wanted more. Craved it.

  It hadn't been like that when he had killed and eaten animals. The blood of the humans was different somehow, like distilled energy that lifted him to a place of endless euphoria; making him feel like a god.

  Am I a vampire?

  The thought amused Jake, almost made him laugh out loud. The cretins in the underground base had tried to lay waste to humanity with some sort of virus based on a hundred clichéd zombie movies, and had ended up creating a vampire instead. It was just too funny.

  Except that he definitely was not a vampire. He could eat a deer or a rabbit and feel the energy and vitality the food provided. Sunlight had no effect on him whatsoever, and Jake had no doubt that silver or holy water or garlic would do nothing to him. Vampires did not exist, just as zombies did not exist. Only humans that had been twisted and remade, driven back to their savage, primal beginnings.

  Some side-effect of their tampering with human DNA, then. They had created humans that were driven by a need to taste the blood of their own. Some part of that programming had made its way into...whatever Jake was now.

  In the end it didn't matter. The blood was like a powerful drug delivered in its purest form, and he needed more.

  Jake had tried drugs, of course. Back when he had been a serial killer rather than a force of nature, he had experimented with any number of ways to increase the delirious high he felt when he tortured and killed the helpless. Ultimately he had discovered that cocaine and ecstasy and crystal meth only served to pollute the purity of the experience. Killing was far less fun when your mind was swathed in a numbing fog. Drugs flattened out all the glorious nuance, and rendered the wondrous process mundane.

  He never felt the remotest danger that he might become addicted to any of the drugs he tried. He was already addicted to something far greater. Murder was a delicious elixir. Pure, dizzying power.

  The blood was different to the other narcotics, though. As he licked the traces of life from the spine of the man he had killed, he felt a sense of intense acceleration, a powerful rush that felt as if the air itself was trying to drag the cells of his body in a hundred different directions. Everything became wonderfully vivid and the dark landscape around him shimmered, like the world had been daubed in fluorescent paint.

  He stood for a moment, drinking the sensation in. He was, he realised suddenly, shaking with pleasure, every muscle twitching in unison as a tsunami of adrenaline surged through him.

  In the distance his hyper-attuned senses detected a large group of humans, and he could sense their terror wafting toward him on the breeze, and he very nearly charged forward immediately, throwing caution to the wind in his desire to taste their blood.

  Only the memory of the way his energy had drained so suddenly back in the underground prison in which he had been birthed gave him pause. His body was uncharted territory. The thought of blacking out among the humans and leaving himself vulnerable was too much to bear. To die at their hands simply because he could not control his urges would be a terrible waste.

  You should proceed with caution, he thought. There's no need to rush in blindly like the pitiful eyeless creatures that they created to kill themselves.

  He inhaled deeply, a ragged, shuddering breath, trying to calm his racing nerves and clear his mind.

  Just another taste...

  *

  Gillian Harper had been there right at the start. She had been one of the fortunate ones holding a weapon when the infection had walked in the front door at Catterick Garrison a week earlier and laid waste to the remnants of the British Army, felling the once-mighty force before the majority of them even knew there was a battle to be fought.

  She’d seen the first bite at close quarters, the utter insanity of it; the way the bitten soldier dropped to the floor for a moment, like a boxer floored by a sucker-punch. She saw the man rise and rip out his eyeballs with a yelp that sounded terrifyingly like relief and sink his teeth into the nearest stunned onlooker. Gill was there when the coruscating chain reaction of insanity began; one of the few who truly knew how things had escalated beyond anyone's control in seconds.

  After that initial moment of shock the fearful images became a smeared memory, a grisly collage of teeth and blood and bullets fired indiscriminately into a wall of bodies that had belonged to her brothers in arms only moments before they were transformed into death made flesh.

  She knew of only one other soldier that remembered it all beginning. Just one.

  Thousands had died.

  Her survival was blurry and indistinct. She remembered staggering backwards, expecting that at any moment the rifle would click instead of bang and her time would be up. She remembered the chopper roaring over her head, the soldiers inside pouring bullets into the crowd from automatic weapons, a fuel tank somewher
e going up; the impact of the blast slamming her back onto the ground as she tried to scramble to her feet.

  And the thing that had grabbed her while she was down, and the feel of the knife in her hand; Gill remembered that part with crystal clarity. She had a feeling she always would.

  Death is the only quarantine that can be trusted.

  Gill straightened with a weary sigh and a click in her back that sounded like far-off rifle fire. Every muscle complained, more than she had ever experienced on one of the pack marches she had hated so much during basic training, when she had been expected to carry half her bodyweight on her back mile after tedious mile. That had been a breeze compared to her current task: she had spent days carrying and stacking heavy furniture to fashion a rudimentary wall around Catterick.

  “Ouch, that sounded painful. Want me to rub it better?”

  Gill rolled her eyes toward Neil. Of all the people that might have survived the attack on the garrison, Gill was sort of glad to see Neil when the dust settled. The guy would probably have responded with a feeble quip on discovering his own legs had been blown off.

  Most of the people trying to come to terms with life at the garrison after the attack were pitched somewhere between solemnity and total mental collapse. Lame pick-up lines and innuendo at least carried an echo of normality.

  Neil's outdated sense of humour had apparently survived the apocalypse, but Gill didn't think it had done so without taking damage. Usually his lewd jokes made her grin despite herself, but she could tell that this time his heart wasn’t quite in it; like the script had gone stale. He still winked, but the cheerful mask he wore could not hide the haunted look in his eyes.