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Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4)

Page 8

by Griffiths, K. R.


  *

  "I imagine you have a lot of questions," Darren said as they climbed the winding stone steps. "And I will answer them all in time. But the important thing is that you know what we are up against. Then you'll see there is only one question that matters."

  The steps ended abruptly at a heavy wooden door. Darren pushed it open with a grunt and stepped out onto the battlements.

  "This is the highest point of the castle. It's the only place high enough to see it."

  "See what?" John growled. The guy was clearly loving the pantomime of it, the big theatrical build-up, and John felt his annoyance growing. Glancing at Rachel's face told him she was a little further down the road toward outright hostility, and having difficulty keeping a lid on her temper.

  Darren walked to the edge of the battlements. A small chair and table had been set up, turning the roof into a lookout position. Someone would have sat there and watched our boat approaching, John thought, and the notion made him uncomfortable. Darren snatched up a pair of binoculars from the table.

  "You wanted to know where the Infected are. See for yourself."

  He handed John the binoculars.

  When he lifted them to his eyes, it took John several seconds to see it, and a further couple to understand what he was looking at.

  Beyond the limits of the town, a dark stain blotted the countryside. It looked like someone had drawn a dark circle around the town that stretched from one side of the peninsula to the other.

  What is that?

  Even as the question formed, John knew what the answer was. The Infected. Thousands of them, ringing the entire town from coast to coast, gathered at some invisible boundary. His mouth dropped open, and he lowered the binoculars.

  "As you see, they have us cornered," Darren said.

  John passed the binoculars to Rachel, and grimaced when he heard her sharp intake of breath.

  "So why aren't they attacking?" Rachel said.

  "Ah," Darren said. "That is the question."

  8

  Confined to quarters.

  It would not have been so bad if Nick's quarters were not also currently 'confining' a couple of hundred other people. Some chattered in low voices, some leafed through old books and magazines. After an hour or so, Nick decided that oblivion was the best way to spend the time, and he pulled the thin blanket over his head until he fell asleep.

  He woke to find Drake standing over him, silently watching.

  “What?” Nick slurred as he struggled toward consciousness. “How did you get here? What do you want?”

  “Shhh.”

  Drake put a meaty finger to his lips and flashed Nick a conspiratorial grin.

  “Follow me,” he whispered.

  Nick stifled a groan, and glanced at his watch. He had been asleep for about an hour. His limbs felt heavy, his eyes gritty.

  He sat up, pushing back the blanket that did nothing to keep the cold at bay. Nick’s bed was in an overcrowded dorm on the third floor of Harden Barracks. He glanced around the large room. There were sleeping bodies everywhere, crammed together, almost on top of each other, like animals huddling for warmth in a nest. Everybody else looked to have opted for blissful oblivion too.

  Drake had picked his way carefully between the sleeping bodies, displaying surprisingly light feet for such a big guy. He beckoned at Nick to hurry.

  With a final glance around to make sure no one was watching him breaking the curfew, Nick carefully lifted himself to his feet and followed the path Drake blazed through the bodies, wincing a little every time one of them sighed heavily, or turned uncomfortably in their sleep.

  When they were clear, Drake pushed the door that opened out into a corridor beyond, closing it carefully once Nick joined him.

  “I think I’ve found our murderer,” Drake whispered in a breathless tone.

  He grabbed Nick’s arm and led him to a large window that overlooked the newly-built wall and the empty moors beyond. He passed Nick a small pair of field glasses and pointed outside.

  A thick, low mist hung over the fields beyond The Heart like a veil. It took Nick a moment to find what Drake was pointing at. He swept the binoculars left and right, and finally saw a small, flickering light.

  Fire.

  It looked like it was moving. Coming toward The Heart.

  Nick looked at Drake, puzzled, and then returned to the binoculars, adjusting the focus in an attempt to understand what he was looking at. As he watched, the fire split in two, and one half of it seemed to grow. It looked like a tree had gone up in flames.

  “I don’t understand what I’m looking at,” he whispered. “A burning tree?”

  He looked again.

  Why is it moving?

  Nick's mouth dropped open as he saw the tree suddenly lifting several feet into the air, drawing back in an odd, mechanical motion, like it had been loaded into a catapult.

  And then the tree was arcing through the misty sky, becoming a flaming missile, fired up and over the wall, and smashing into the medical centre opposite the barracks with a crash that sounded like a drum pounding in Hell.

  He heard faint screams emanate from the other building, and saw people start to scurry from the building, scampering left and right in confusion, searching for an enemy they could not see.

  Something just threw a fucking tree at us.

  He looked at Drake, his mouth open. The big man’s face had paled.

  “Wasn’t expecting that,” Drake mumbled, and then his eyes widened, and Nick saw flames reflected in them.

  In the gloom beyond the wall, another fire had sprung up, and another. Nick swallowed painfully, shrinking away from the window as another of the trees lifted into the air and launched itself toward them.

  And then the sky seemed to be raining fire down on Catterick.

  *

  Jake had uprooted about thirty of the trees, tearing them from the ground like dead flowers. At first he had thought about just tossing them over the wall, to scare the people cowering inside as much as anything. But then he had remembered an old survival tip one of his foster fathers had shown him on an extremely ill-advised camping trip.

  Fire was just a matter of creating friction. The only difficulty was getting the wood moving quickly enough to generate heat. On that camping trip, when his foster father had smiled patronisingly at Jake’s futile attempts to create fire from nothing, he had wished for nothing so much as to be big enough to wrap his hands around the man’s throat and squeeze the life from him.

  He remembered the sudden look of dark understanding that passed over the man’s face as he looked into Jake’s murderous young eyes. They never went camping again, and four months later Jake was back in the care system; back on the wheel of misfortune, wondering what might be in store for him when the spinning stopped.

  Friction wasn’t a problem for Jake now. He lazily twisted the piece of wood in his enormous mangled hand and flames burst into life almost instantly as the stick became a blur of impossible motion, like the fire was eager to be born.

  He held the trees in his enormous hands, edging them toward the flames like cigarettes. Once the fire took hold on the wood, he drew the trunks back like a javelin thrower and speared them through the foggy air into the tiny walled settlement. With each throw he cackled as his extraordinary hearing picked up the distant cries of panic and pain. On the ninth throw he hit something that sent a ball of fire up into the sky and his mouth dropped in delight even as he clapped his hands over his ears in a futile attempt to keep the pain of the deafening explosion at bay.

  *

  When the propane tank went up, blowing out every window in The Heart and sending a shockwave of liquid fire through the crowd, Nick knew that the time for planning was over.

  He stared down into the square, slack-jawed, as he saw several figures stumbling from the blast, shrieking human torches that cast a grisly glow on the horror being unleashed below, before they finally dropped to the ground, smouldering. The sickening stench of
their cooked flesh floated on the air like confetti, so thick that Nick could taste it, and bile rose in his throat.

  He turned to Drake.

  “Hopper,” he choked. “Where’s Hopper?”

  Drake shrugged and nodded his head down at the square.

  Of course Hopper would be down there, in the thick of it. His rank had taken him away from the action of war and into what was largely administration. He would be right in the middle, barking orders, loving every minute.

  Nick would have killed for a job in administration. He had been a coward all his life, shying away from the merest hint of confrontation, let alone any that might involve firearms. Even when he had been appointed as leader of a group of thirty soldiers, he had led by suggestion, never by command.

  As he smashed open the cabinet that held the fire extinguisher, he wondered idly if his actions would still be considered cowardly. He was about to do the bravest thing he’d ever done in his life, and all so he could run away once more.

  A huge flaming tree trunk crashed through the window at which he had stood with Drake only moments before, crashing through the door opposite and into the dorm, ploughing into the terrified mass of people that huddled inside, where they had believed themselves to be safe.

  Nick’s eyes fell on the fire axe that sat next to the extinguisher. He grabbed that instead, and hurtled toward the stairs.

  When he reached the ground and burst out of the barracks and into the warzone that the square had become, Nick heard Hopper’s voice immediately, screaming at no one in particular, barking out the order to get to the wall and open fire.

  Mostly Nick saw people milling around in confusion and terror; most were unarmed thanks to Hopper, and Colonel's words fell on deaf ears. He saw a few, the ones he had come to think of as King Hopper’s royal guard, hoisting assault rifles and heading to the wall, and moments later the chatter of gunfire fractured the night.

  Heart hammering, his breath exploding from lungs that tried in vain to choke out the acrid smoke filling them, Nick cast his eyes left and right.

  Where the fuck is Hopper?

  *

  Jake had loved killing ever since he had been four or five years old, when he had meticulously pulled the wings off a butterfly, slowly and deliberately, relishing the notion that if the thing had been capable of screaming, it would have. The insect hadn’t been delicate and pretty. At least not until Jake had finished with it.

  That first kill, tiny and insignificant as it had been, had sent an unforgettable shudder of pleasure through his small frame. He had been chasing that thrill ever since, on each and every occasion that he had managed to struggle free of the prison in his mind, the sickness that meant he had to share headspace with a tedious bore.

  He had chased the thrill across the deaths of increasingly larger animals, and eventually human beings, and on each occasion he had been fascinated with tearing them apart; with seeing their insides and remaking them.

  Even the killing of seventeen people in his previous life had turned out to be a case of thinking small, though. The gift given to him at the underground base; the transformation of himself into an apex predator: that had changed everything.

  The battle with the puny creatures at Catterick felt just like killing that first insect, all those years earlier. It felt new.

  He was powerless to resist the lure of their blood now, reduced to a creature of impulse, as hopelessly directionless as the mindless prototypes that wandered the earth blindly trying to spread their pathetic seed by biting and tearing.

  It troubled him a little; that he was drawn toward the people at Catterick as if his actions were predetermined somehow, almost as if he had no say in the matter. He felt a little like a bee that made for pollen mindlessly, with no concept of why it was fulfilling its destiny.

  Those concerns were cast aside in a haze of shuddering fury when the pathetic creatures lined the wall in the distance and began to fire their weapons in his direction. All thoughts of caution were abandoned to the addiction. He had to kill them all. Philosophy did not enter into the equation.

  When the pitiful weapons the creatures held poured bullets at him through the misty air, Jake McIntosh had already moved. To him, the squeezing of their fingers on the trigger seemed to last forever, bones and ligaments creaking loudly in their flesh like rusted hinges, firing off long, slow warnings long before they fired projectiles. He saw the bullets heading toward him slowly, like a distant storm.

  He was weakening; getting tired. The prudent course of action was to retreat, to leave them with the terror and damage he had inflicted and rest until he could return and attack at full strength.

  A bullet whined past his head, the whining song of its passage an insult that bored down into the bubbling chaos of Jake’s mind and scattered his thoughts like dust on the wind.

  He would have their blood. Every last drop.

  With a roar of pure, unhinged fury, Jake put his head down.

  And charged.

  9

  Michael could not hide his relief when he saw John and Rachel descend the steps unharmed. Fantastic scenarios had played out in his mind, of Darren locking them in some room at the top of the tower like characters in a fairytale, or worse; pushing them from the roof before returning to kill the helpless cripple.

  He immediately noticed the stunned look on their faces.

  "What is it?" He said sharply.

  John shook his head, his eyes far away.

  "This place is under siege," Rachel said grimly. The Infected are all around Caernarfon, thousands of them, just waiting there."

  "What? How is that possible?" Michael tried to keep a lid on the hysteria in his response.

  "Not waiting," Darren said. "That's not it at all. They aren't waiting for anything. They are there because they can't come any closer."

  "I don't understand," Michael said, frowning.

  Darren sighed dramatically.

  "Neither do I, not really. You wanted to know my story. I'll give you the truth, despite the fact you didn't give me the same respect."

  Michael opened his mouth, but Darren waved away the protestation before it began.

  "Please," he said, his tone heavy with sarcasm. "A family?"

  He jerked a thumb at John.

  "A driver?"

  He snorted.

  "I wasn't born yesterday. It doesn't particularly matter where you came from or what your story is. What matters is what you intend to do here."

  He sat heavily on one of the wooden benches, and gestured for Rachel and John to follow suit. After a moment's hesitation, they sat.

  "As I told you earlier, Rachel, I was on Mount Snowdon when...whatever this is began. I first encountered the infection, the virus, when I led a group of climbers back down after we lost communication. We were set upon."

  His voice cracked a little, his eyes lost in a terrible memory.

  "Half the group were lost immediately. I didn't have the faintest idea what was going on, just that all of a sudden the group I was leading began to kill each other in...horrible ways."

  He lifted his jaw and stared at them defiantly.

  "I ran. Maybe that makes me a coward. I don't know. I'm not sure that even matters now. The only thing that matters is survival, right? I survived, along with six of my group. We got away by...well, we got away. Still didn't grasp the full extent of this thing though. We thought it was just happening there, at the bus station."

  He shook his head ruefully.

  "We took a bus, thought we were heading toward safety. Going to get the police. All we seemed to do was draw them to us. Eventually there were dozens of them chasing the bus. Every time we thought we'd lost them, more would appear. They ran in front of us, threw themselves under the wheels..."

  He trailed off.

  "We've seen the same thing," Michael said. "They are drawn to noise. They...hunt by sound. Travelling in a car, well, it hasn't worked for us."

  Darren nodded.

  "Smart t
o travel by boat," he said. "I wonder what happened to the people out there who were on boats when this started. Are there ferries out there? Battleships? Holiday cruises full of people wondering what happened? Or just boats full of insane killers, floating around aimlessly."

  He shrugged.

  "I don't suppose it matters. Unless one of them appears in the harbour. Anyway, as I was saying, we took the bus. We ran. And then, all of a sudden, they stopped chasing us. They just fell back. It was like some forcefield had been thrown around us."

  John broke the man's story with a sigh.

  "So now it's forcefields. And zombies. I don't believe any of it. What is it then? God? Extra-terrestrials?"

  "I said like a forcefield," Darren said, and his tone lowered, revealing just a hint of menace. "Because I don't know how else to describe it. But I do know it's got nothing to do with aliens, and I don't think God is involved either."

  He stared at John.

  "The girl you saw? The one tied up in the market outside?"

  John's eyes narrowed.

  "It's her."

  *

  "Do you think there will be other kids here?"

  Gwyneth smiled. Pete had been asking questions ever since Michael, John and Rachel had left the tower. She liked the boy's spirit, but she could also see the damage in his eyes. When the others were around, particularly John, the way Pete clammed up was noticeable.

  Gwyneth did not like to think about the horrors the two children had been exposed to, or to dwell on how young minds might be affected by the violence that soaked the world now. Of course, the TV news had been full of dire warnings that children were becoming desensitized to murder and mayhem. Video games and movies and the internet were supposedly creating a generation of monsters.

  She hadn't paid much attention to the news, other than to cluck at it disapprovingly at times. Every day was a relentless barrage of information that seemed designed to terrify everybody, and parents especially. If it wasn't paedophiles and gangs, it was videogames. As it turned out, the television had been completely oblivious to the coming apocalypse. The generation of monsters had nothing to do with children hooked on cartoon aggression. The real monsters were the generations that went before them, the ones old enough to own the news stations, and to wilfully ignore the real dangers that grew in the shadows.

 

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