"Where are all the Infected?" Pete blurted out.
John smirked. The kid hadn't spoken much since they left Aberystwyth, but clearly he could not keep a lid on the question that everyone else was trying not to ask any longer. Good lad, he thought.
Darren waved a dismissive hand.
“No Infected left here,” he said almost breezily. "Caernarfon had been hit when we arrived, but mostly they seemed to have moved on. So we took the castle, and we haven’t been bothered since. It's safe here.”
He smiled.
Bullshit. John knew the smell all too well. He had been steeped in it his entire life.
“You haven’t had any come to you, not even a few?” Michael said, his tone dubious. “Not even with that thing running?”
Michael pointed to the generator that provided power to the spotlight in the centre of the castle's wide, open interior. The same one that had shot the distress signal up into the sky. It chugged away like an idling truck with an ancient engine that badly needed servicing.
Darren shrugged.
"Like I said, we haven't been bothered. Not for days."
John remembered the way the Infected had pursued him through dense forest, the way they had come streaming from the trees when they had heard the chopper engine as his team landed in a field outside St. Davids. The creatures possessed extraordinary hearing, and the generator was loud enough that voices had to be raised to be heard above it. It should have acted as a beacon to the Infected for miles around.
John caught Michael glancing at Gwyneth and saw the old woman shake her head slightly in response.
John grimaced. He did not believe any of Gwyneth's story about being able to sense the presence of the Infected after she herself had been bitten. Couldn't believe it. But he had been very clear to warn them not to bring it up in front of Darren as they approached the castle. There was no way to predict how the man or his strange group of followers might react, but John had spent a lifetime watching people kill each other over things that they perceived as valuable. If Gwyneth could do what she claimed, or even if others simply believed she could, she would be in jeopardy.
They all would.
He glared at Michael.
Michael pressed his lips together, catching the warning.
“Okay, Darren, thank you so much for taking us in,” John said. “We’ve had quite a journey. Is there somewhere we can sleep?”
“Of course,” Darren said with a benevolent smile. “There are plenty of rooms in each of the towers, we can-“
“Just one will do,” John interrupted. “We’d like to stay together. We’re all family. You understand.”
John's tone left no room for further questions.
Darren’s eyes narrowed, just a little, and John thought he could read in the man’s gaze that he knew bullshit when he smelled it too.
“I completely understand,” Darren said amiably. He pointed to a tower at the southern end of the castle. “That one’s empty, you’ll have plenty of space in there.”
“Thanks, Darren,” Michael said. “We’ll talk in the morning, okay?”
Darren smiled, and nodded. He strode away without another word.
*
Michael wheeled himself into the tower with a wariness that was beginning to feel like second nature.
The tower was cold and bare, but it seemed uninhabited as Darren had promised, and as he made his way inside, just being surrounded by the thick stone wall made Michael feel safer than he had at any point since driving to a café for bacon and eggs and finding a bloodbath instead.
A winding stone staircase led up. Michael figured there might be as many as six or seven levels to the tower, and he was grateful that no one seemed to even consider suggesting that they should ascend. The castle had been built a long time before wheelchair access had become a law, and though some concessions had clearly been made when the place had become a tourist attraction, getting wheelchair-bound people to the top of the towers had obviously been a step too far.
John shut the heavy wooden door behind them as they entered the large circular space. The others made for the wall opposite the door without speaking, sitting with their backs against it, facing the entrance.
Even now, Michael thought, we’re putting ourselves in the safest place, burrowing deep. Getting as far away from the entrance as possible. It had not taken long to condition human beings to think like hunted animals.
Michael watched as John stood for a moment at the door, listening intently, before apparently satisfying himself that Darren was not lurking outside listening to them.
“What’s on your mind, John?”
John left the door and slumped against the wall alongside Gwyneth. Michael saw him cast a glance at Rachel, whose silence was obviously worrying him as much as it did Michael.
“Two things,” John said softly. “One: this place is perfect. Two: at least, it would be if they weren’t here.”
Michael nodded.
“How many of them are there, you think?”
John’s eyes lifted to the ceiling as he counted the memories.
Rachel beat him to it.
“I counted twenty-three,” she said flatly, and the two men blinked in surprise.
“You don’t need to worry,” Rachel said bitterly. “I know what you’re all thinking. But I’m not Jason. I’m not…broken. I’m angry. And the subject you two are skirting around is that the guy out there is trying just a little too fucking hard to appear friendly. I’ve seen that fake smile before.”
She shuddered. Didn’t need to say the name.
“They’re afraid of him," Pete said suddenly.
They all stared at the boy.
“You can see it in their faces,” Pete continued. “They all look at the floor when he looks at them.”
Michael clapped a hand on Pete’s narrow shoulder and smiled at him. He had feared that the whole group had been damaged psychologically by the events of the day, but putting a stone wall around them was gradually encouraging them to open up. Pete had a habit of vocalising what everybody else was thinking but seemed unwilling to say.
“Kid’s right,” John said, and Pete beamed. “He’s got some hold over these people. They’re here because it’s safe, but they are still afraid.”
“The question is,” Michael said, “afraid of what?”
"Not the Infected," John said, and rolled his eyes when Michael looked at Gwyneth.
"Gwyneth, can you...uh...feel them out there?" Michael said.
John sighed loudly.
"I can't feel anything at all," Gwyneth said. "I think Darren was telling the truth. If they are out there, they must be a long way off."
Michael felt his shoulders slump. Every time he thought he was getting a grip on the world, something happened to rip it away again and plunge him back into confusion. He knew that John did not believe in Gwyneth's proclamation that getting bitten had imbued her with some sort of second sight, but after everything Michael had seen, he was not willing to rule anything out.
Back at the farmhouse, when they had watched a small army of Infected marching past the windows, they had all got the impression that they were communicating with each other. It wasn't beyond the realms of possibility that they could sense each other, just as some animals could sense the presence of others, or the onset of a storm. And if they could, maybe Gwyneth could too.
One thing was certain: Gwyneth believed it.
Maybe you just want to believe it, Michael thought, because then Gwyneth will be like an early warning system, and God knows you need something like that.
"On the boat, you said you felt something else out there," Michael said. "Something different."
"Something worse," Gwyneth said in a low voice. She looked at the children, and Michael realised the conversation was likely to be scaring them. He should have realised it sooner. But he had to know.
"Can you still feel it?"
Gwyneth shook her head vigorously.
"Not sin
ce the boat."
Michael rubbed his aching temples, and realised suddenly just how tired he felt. It wasn't just the constant fear or the seemingly endless pursuit of the Infected. His mind was weary of the constant attempts to make sense of a world that he was beginning to believe could not be understood.
He nodded, and let silence fall over the group. After a few moments his eyes closed slowly, and as sleep took him he thought that everything would make more sense in the morning, but he knew deep down that he was lying to himself.
*
In the end, John was surprised that Gwyneth remained awake as sleep took the others. The kids had fallen asleep early, and Rachel had waved away the attempts John and Michael made to engage her in further conversation. Not now, her shake of the head seemed to say, and both men were content to leave her alone. In truth, John thought, he didn't know what to say to Rachel. Keep your chin up just wouldn't cut it.
Eventually they realised that she had dozed off, and they lowered their voices.
Even Michael did not seem to be up for talking much, and John could not blame him really. The fact was that there was only one subject that needed discussing, and it was the one they needed a break from. They seemed to have spent every spare moment speculating about the virus, or contemplating which angle of attack death would take when it next came at them. Just thinking that way got wearing. John knew that well enough from his years spent in the desert.
But that had been a different sort of dread. At least there the enemy was something that he could comprehend. Every time he felt like he was getting to grips with the death rattle of British civilization, a new horror coughed itself up to take him by surprise.
Not always a horror, either, he thought as he looked at Rachel, who even in sleep wore a troubled frown. Surprises around every corner.
“How are you holding up, dear?”
John felt his jaw slacken a little. He had thought Gwyneth had fallen asleep. She had looked the most exhausted of all of them.
“Uh, I’m fine.”
“Pfft.”
The wrinkles on the old woman’s face deepened as she smiled.
“You’re troubled.”
John gave a shrug.
“Aren’t we all?”
“Not just by…the world. By me.”
John arched an eyebrow in surprise. Apparently Gwyneth could read minds now too.
“By what I can do. By my…ability.”
She smiled again.
“You should have a little faith.”
John sighed; kept his voice low.
“Look,” he said. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. You seem like a nice person, but I don’t believe in ghosts. Don’t believe in magic. I don’t believe in mind-reading or psychics or any of that bullshit. Asking me to believe that you can somehow sense the things out there, or see them in your mind, or whatever, is like asking me to believe in Father Christmas."
John shrugged.
“For all I know you’re just a crazy old woman,” - she smiled at that - “and maybe you were crazy long before any of this happened. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have been bitten, and you haven’t changed.”
Gwyneth opened her mouth and John held up a hand.
“What I mean is you haven’t turned into one of them. That changes everything. That’s not meant to happen. None of this has anything to do with special powers or magic or fate or God. Man did this. It was designed and planned and executed by very powerful people. By the very powerful people. This isn’t what they intended. Faith has nothing to do with this, just people with a plan they couldn’t carry out. Maybe you believe in all the other stuff. I don’t.”
Gwyneth chuckled softly.
“That’s all very interesting, John, but I didn’t mean faith in God. I meant faith in me. In the people around you. You can believe in anything you want, but if you’re not going to believe in the people around you, I don’t think you’ll go too far. And even if you do, what would be the point of the journey?”
John stared; he had no answer.
“My Steve was a soldier, just like you.”
This time it was John’s turn to get a pre-emptive shush.
“I know, I know; the company line is you were a driver.”
Gwyneth rolled her eyes.
“But I know a soldier when I see one. Steve was a soldier for thirty years. How often do you think he believed in what he fought for? You don’t have to believe - in my ability or anything else for that matter. But you have to fight. And that will be a lot harder if you choose to do it alone.”
John could not come up with a response to that.
“Glad we got that sorted out,” she said with a wink. “Wondering when you were going to skip out on us was getting tiresome.”
It took a moment for her words to sink in, and by the time John had opened his mouth to protest, Gwyneth had laid herself flat, turning away from him.
John could almost swear he saw her bony shoulders shake a little as she chuckled to herself in the darkness.
After a moment, he settled back onto the floor, certain that there was no chance he could possibly sleep, and then exhaustion overwhelmed him.
*
Darren stood in the warmth of one of the castle's two large fires for a long time after everyone else had departed for bed, staring at the tower that the newcomers had taken through eyes that narrowed in suspicion.
Family, he thought, and his lip curled in a sneer. The man with the knives was selling lies, and Darren wasn’t buying. He seriously doubted whether any of the group of people that had just entered the castle was related. Maybe the little girl that clung like a limpet to the guy in the wheelchair, but the others?
No chance.
Most of the people that Darren had allowed into the castle thus far were weak; broken by the savagery of the world long before they found their way to the safety he offered, and Darren had fallen into the task of leading them easily. Much more easily than he had expected in fact. He suspected that most of them longed to have someone to tell them what to do. People, it turned out, would choose almost anything over helplessness and confusion. Even tyranny was preferable.
Of course it helped that he had muscle backing him: a group of young men that followed him without question, men whose loyalty he had secured through a combination of fear and their own complicity in Darren's sacrificing one of their friends so that they might escape the bus station where it all began.
Few things could hold a man's tongue as firmly as guilt. Darren knew that only too well. It was guilt that had driven him away from society decades earlier; guilt that condemned him to eke out a living in the mountains, where few ever asked him about anything at all, let alone whether he might have a wife and child somewhere. The mountains were a place to forget.
Once the six people that had escaped the bus station with him had made their way into Caernarfon and saw the astonishing bloodshed, Darren knew for sure that the world had gone. Or maybe he had died and finally gone to hell; it didn't really matter. As they stumbled through the narrow streets, Darren had not realised that he was leading them to the castle until they stood right in front of it, and only then did he see a foothold, and a way to keep climbing.
When they had secured the castle, Darren only allowed in those that he could see would be no trouble. There had been a few murmurs of dissent at first; pleas for an open border policy that Darren knew would result in chaos and power struggles. The protests finally died out when Darren had suggested that any one of the young mountaineers could leave if they wished and fend for themselves outside the walls. It had been as simple as that: staking a claim to leadership and seeing who baulked at it. None had been willing to meet the challenge he threw down.
After that, once Darren had set up the light to draw in survivors from the lands around the castle, he had turned several away if he saw that they were armed or if they looked remotely hostile, aiming weapons at them from the battlements until they decided to try
their luck elsewhere.
Only once in the week that they had occupied the castle had Darren truly felt like their position might be under threat, when a large group that reeked of trouble had pounded at the gates insistently until Darren himself had taken the shotgun and blown a hole through one of them to show everybody that he meant business.
The other group had departed then, spitting and cursing and hurling threats about coming back for Darren, but he hadn't been unduly worried. The castle was all but impregnable, unless someone turned up with explosives. Even then, Darren had a plan that would ensure that nobody would take his castle away from him.
That first genuine murder had turned out to be the moment when everyone in the castle understood that Darren meant every word he said. He had not been questioned since.
But the guy with the knives made Darren’s skin crawl. The manner in which he had moved when Darren first approached him; the smooth way he had lined up the knife to throw at Darren. The guy was trained. Military, maybe. That would have made him the most useful of all, if Darren believed that he could be trusted, but there was evasion in his eyes; defiance and threat. Darren couldn’t abide threat. Not within his castle.
Darren thought he could find a use for the rest of them; the young woman and the children especially, but that one? John? Letting him inside the walls felt like a mistake, and Darren knew he could not afford mistakes.
John had to go.
5
Rachel awoke first and grunted softly as she stretched out limbs that had seized up in protest at yet another night spent on a hard floor. Cold seemed to have seeped into her bones and spread outwards like an ink stain, until every cell felt as if it had frozen solid.
Castles, it turned out, had been cold places in which to live. If she was to spend another night in one, she would insist that the large stone fireplace that dominated the oval room at the base of the tower be used for something other than decoration.
A bed would be nice, of course, but it seemed like beds had gone the way of electricity and safety and sanity.
Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4) Page 5