The weight of realisation crashed down on Michael, crushing him like a sudden increase in gravity. Somehow the bastards behind the apocalypse had poisoned the human race, altering the very structure of human DNA, preparing it for the time when they finally decided to push the button and start the end.
Victor's attempt to create immunity had failed. All the lunatic had accomplished was to ensure that in certain people, the virus would mutate wildly, changing them into something else.
Not everyone would become the eyeless monsters. But everyone, once exposed, once activated, would become something. Everyone was susceptible. There was no stopping it. No fighting it.
No immunity.
The only hope was to find somewhere to hide, somewhere the teeth and tainted blood that activated the virus could not reach. Try to live out a semblance of a life in perpetual quarantine, and hope that whatever the key to the virus was, it would die out naturally, or never find them.
He had thought the castle would be safe.
And it might have been, if they were just dealing with sightless hunters; with something they could fight. But Michael knew that was no longer the case. He felt the truth of the revelation squirming in his mind.
The Infected weren't the enemy. Even the people behind Project Wildfire weren't the enemy. The virus was the enemy.
And even now it coursed through the system of an old woman that he had left in charge of his daughter. It had already breached the castle walls. They had brought it in with them.
Gwyneth was not immune.
She carried the virus. Activated. Deadly. Contagious.
She was a timebomb.
12
Another crash, closer this time.
The creature that had single-handedly laid waste to Catterick Garrison, stabbing deep into The Heart that the soldiers had believed was their fortress, was heading toward Nick and Drake unerringly. It sounded as though only a couple of doors now stood between them and a guided missile that would tear them apart. It was approaching slowly, and for a moment Nick was confused, until he remembered the way the thing had grinned; its dead eyes and psychotic stare.
It's enjoying the hunt, he thought. Getting a kick out of terrifying us.
Nick bit his tongue painfully, trying not to scream, and desperately searched the vehicles in the cavernous garage, hoping that somehow he had missed a tank sitting among the jeeps and flatbed trucks; wondering if a tank would even be any use against an enemy that seemed to have been spat into the world from a vengeful Hell.
There was nothing. He saw useless crowd control vehicles that had been employed during the last round of riots in the UK, when people finally began to wake up to the idea that the politicians dressed in designer suits were spoon-feeding them bullshit about prosperity while poverty crippled them. Trucks with armoured radiator grilles and water cannons intended to intimidate and disperse crowds of terrified people.
But this had nothing to do with people, and it seemed that only Nick felt terrified. Water cannons might as well have been water pistols.
"Here," Drake hissed, leaping into the largest vehicle in the garage. It was a heavily armoured crowd control truck, and it was probably their only chance. But Nick knew even as he leapt into the cabin that it was nothing more than a death trap; a bolthole that would do nothing to hide their presence from the predator stalking them. Nick had seen what the creature did to the trucks they had used as a wall: obliterated them; shattering the thick metal like a mini-nuke. The steel frame of the truck might slow the monster for a second, maybe just long enough for Nick to look again at its dead eyes before he was torn apart.
The door they had sprinted through moments before exploded from its hinges and travelled across the room like a deformed bullet, lodging itself into a Jeep that sat with its engine exposed for repairs with a crash that sounded like a god roaring in the enclosed space.
Nick whimpered.
The thing wasn't running anymore; wasn't moving at lightspeed.
It doesn't need to, Nick thought. It knows we can't harm it.
He watched, teeth gritted, as the enormous figure ducked its head and sauntered through the ruined doorway. Even now Nick's mind tried to conjure up some reason for the creature's existence, but he found it coming up short.
It stood roughly seven feet tall, naked; rippling with twisted muscles that bulged like swollen infections. It looked like some insane scientist had tried to crossbreed a human with an enormous bear. It moved slowly now, with deliberate purpose; a swagger that came from being in absolute control.
It never took its dead eyes from Nick.
I am going to die.
Nick's hands began to move independently, stabbing at the controls on the dashboard wildly, flicking on the truck's lights and wipers, arcing a jet of screen-wash over the windscreen that made the hideous image approaching him ripple, lending it an even more alien look.
Finally he hit a button that sent a powerful jet of water at the creature from a side-mounted water cannon.
For a moment, as the jet hit the creature, it seemed to take a half-step backwards in surprise, and then Nick's stomach dropped like the stock market, crashing all the way down to the bottom, and the bubbling chaos that lived at the edge of insanity.
The thing laughed.
Nick was unaware of his own whimpering, unaware of the tears that streamed down his face. His entire consciousness was swallowed up by that laugh, by the evil cruelty of the sound. By its twisted humanity.
And then, as Nick continued to slap wildly at the dashboard, his fingers landed on the most hopeless button of all: the sonic generator that sent a low frequency rumble into crowds of protesters to instil headaches and gently persuade them to move on.
And his jaw dropped in astonishment as the terrifying creature collapsed to its knees, clapping its club-like palms to its ears, and screamed in pain.
Nick turned to look at Drake, and cried out in surprise when he saw the passenger seat was empty, and the big man had apparently dissolved into the air.
Losing my mind, Nick thought, and this time it was he that cackled as he understood. There was no Drake. Never had been. Somehow, in the absence of his abusive father, Nick had dreamt up a bastard moulded in the old man's image to get his cowardly arse moving. He didn't know whether he should finally thank Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Hurt or curse him for the mental damage he had inflicted on his little boy.
Framed by the windscreen, he saw the creature struggling back to its feet, shaking its head wildly, as though it hoped to shake the sound out of its mind.
Still cackling, Nick gunned the engine and stamped on the accelerator, and the truck roared forward, smashing into the hideous mutation at waist height and driving it into the wall behind it with a shattering crash.
The creature slumped across the bonnet, sending a shiver through the truck that felt like a distant earthquake.
Nick jumped out and stared at it in terrified curiosity. Its fearsome eyes were shut.
Is it dead?
Nick decided the only prudent course of action was not to hang around to find out. With a final glance around the garage to confirm that Drake had been nothing more than a figment of his imagination, he sprinted through the wrecked door and the twisting corridors that were now filled with debris, wondering idly if hallucinating a carbon copy of his father meant he had gone completely insane, and emerged onto the street that was awash with blood and sundered bodies.
Nick heard a few low moans: a mixture of terror and stupefied pain. Not everyone on the street had been killed outright: the creature had ploughed straight through the middle of them like a tornado, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake.
He frantically scanned the twitching flood of gore on the ground for some sign of Colonel Hopper, unsure whether he expected the man to be alive or dead, and hoping fervently it would be the latter. He was certain Hopper would be carrying the key that would enable Nick to get to the chopper on the roof, but the more he searched, the more hop
eless he felt. It was difficult to distinguish which parts of the horrific scene splattered before him had even been human, let alone which particular human they might have belonged to.
He thought back to the garage, and briefly considered that he might be able to head back there and find a jeep or a truck to flee in, but he quickly discarded the idea. The notion of going anywhere near the monster pinned beneath the truck left his stomach attempting to perform cartwheels, and in any case, a truck would not be safe in the long run. The Infected were still out there, a blight that stained the entire land, and sooner or later he would either run into them or run out of fuel. Either scenario would mean his death.
He felt like screaming in frustration.
And then he spotted the fire axe.
He tried to picture the door that led to the roof of the medical centre. Was it steel? Would swinging an axe even leave a dent on it?
He was just bending down to retrieve the axe when he heard it. The low hum of the helicopter's engine, the whipped-air noise of the blades slowly beginning to rotate, picking up speed, and Nick knew what the sound meant, knew it deep inside, where there was no room left for doubt.
Hopper.
Nick was running then, crashing through the wide double-doors that led into the medical centre, a rectangular building three storeys high, expecting that at any moment the creature might pop into existence right in front of him and that the first he would know of it would involve the sudden tearing away of some vital part of his body.
The ground floor of the medical centre was filled with equipment that had been rendered obsolete: all the stretchers and intravenous drips in the world weren't going to matter now. The game had changed.
At the far end of the building, an elevator door stood open, wide enough to accommodate up to three gurneys comfortably, and effectively killed by the sudden loss of electricity. Even if the lift had worked, Nick would not have trusted it. He veered through a door to the left and onto a featureless grey stairway, hauling his aching legs up two steps at a time.
When he reached the third floor he was greeted by the sight he knew he would see: the exit door leading to the roof unlocked; standing open.
He charged through it and out onto the roof, dominated by the helipad and the chopper that wobbled as Colonel Dave Hopper wrestled ineffectively with the unfamiliar controls.
Hopper's eyes lit up when he saw Nick streaking across the roof toward him.
"You there, soldier! Can you fly this thing?" The Colonel hollered above the roar of the engine.
"Absolutely, Colonel," Nick snarled with a savage grin, and he grabbed Hopper by the lapels of his meaningless uniform, and hauled the old man from the chopper.
"Take your hands off me soldier, that's a direct order!"
Hopper screamed, showering Nick's face in hot spittle, and for a brief moment Nick looked into the old man's eyes and saw the fear there. Saw the terrified gaze of an eight year old coward paralysed by the impending arrival of the beast.
"I'm done taking orders, Hopper," Nick hissed, and threw the spluttering old bastard off the roof, grimacing as he heard the man's scream of terror end in an abrupt crunch.
He jumped into the pilot's seat, slamming the door behind him and took a second to study the helicopter's controls. He didn't know how to fly it; not exactly, but he knew enough. A damn sight more than Colonel Hopper had known, apparently.
He yanked on the collective control lever, a little too hard, and the chopper lurched violently into the air, tail down, threatening to collapse back onto the building. Alarms began to sound, frantically chiming to catch Nick's attention. Gritting his teeth, cursing the weight and size of the chopper - large enough to serve as a medical vehicle for much of North Yorkshire - he grappled with the pitch, getting the nose down, and finally lifting clear of the building.
As the front of the chopper lowered, he got a clear view of the disaster on the streets of Catterick. He saw a couple of figures staggering to their feet, a further few emerging from hiding spots that had only proven marginally successful. He saw one man wandering in a daze, clutching dumbly at the oozing space that his left arm had occupied minutes earlier.
For a moment Nick wondered if he might be able to land, and pick up the few that weren't dying slowly of their terrible wounds, but then he saw something that made his gut lurch in unison with the unsteady chopper.
On the ground sixty-odd feet below, one of the stumbling figures suddenly erupted in a cloud of blood. Another quickly followed.
It's still alive.
It's free.
Sweating, panicking at the belief that at any moment the unfamiliar controls would betray him, Nick lifted the chopper higher, his only thought to get the hell away from the massacre.
He was perhaps a hundred feet above the ground, eyes still fixed on the carnage below, when he saw it approaching. A body, hurled through the air toward him like a guided missile.
It’s trying to bring down the chopper, he thought, and then: Oh, Jesus, he’s still alive…
The screaming man hurtled toward the chopper, casually tossed away like crumpled paper, and Nick saw the terror in his eyes, saw the incomprehension as he shot past the windscreen, narrowly missing the body of the vehicle.
And then the man hit the blades, and Nick's view was obscured by a sudden, heavy red rain, and he gunned the throttle blindly and screamed.
*
Jake collapsed to one knee. Getting away from the truck, and the infernal beam of terrible sound that had pinned him in place and made his head feel like it might explode had taken every ounce of his freakish strength. In the end he had been forced to crawl like an insect, dragging himself away from the nightmarish noise, until the sound of it was muted enough to allow him to stand. Even then he had felt crippling pain erupt in his lower back, where the truck had smashed him into the wall.
When he reached the street outside, the chopper was already in the air, lurching upward clumsily, and a tidal wave of rage tore through Jake at the prospect that the hateful human that had humiliated him was getting away.
Tossing one of the screaming creatures at the vehicle took the last of his strength, and he shrieked in frustration when he saw the throw had been good, but not good enough.
The chopper continued to rise, and headed south. The face of the man that had bested him was burned like a brand onto Jake's memory.
I'll find you, he thought, and then, as he sensed movement stirring around him, the few dozen-or-so humans he had failed to kill starting to emerge from their hiding spots, Jake summoned a final burst of power from his aching limbs, terrifyingly aware of the implacable darkness riding toward him on a wave of fatigue and damage, and he bolted away from the wreckage of Catterick Garrison and ran until the darkness caught him.
*
Nick flew until the fuel alarm on the helicopter began to ring out incessantly, and only then did he begin to panic.
Getting away from Catterick had been one thing. But he had no idea where he was actually heading to, and as darkness fell outside the narrow windows he realised that might just be a grievous oversight.
His original plan as he had put the horror of Catterick in his rear view mirror, had been to fly south to Birmingham or Manchester, and to land the chopper on the roof of the tallest building he could find. There was, he figured, less chance of encountering the Infected on the top floor of a skyscraper. Plenty of opportunity to work your way down, securing the place floor by floor.
Not a great plan. But a plan, at least.
When the low fuel alarm began to shriek in protest at Nick, he had no idea where he was. He had flown blindly into the darkening night, not registering any detail in the land below. Power was out across the whole country: there was no light to navigate by. No glowing cities, no snaking lines of streetlights to follow. The chopper floated across an endless black canvas.
Only once had the terrain given him any indication where he might be, and then only because it soared up dangerously toward h
im and he was forced to get the chopper up quickly before it smashed into the jagged face of a mountain.
That must have been the Pennines, Nick thought. How long ago was that? Shit.
The alarm pierced his thoughts, and a cold terror seeped from his pores. He was going to have to land, and the chopper was loud.
Shit.
He lifted the nose up, slowly stopping the chopper’s forward momentum, and then allowed the cumbersome vehicle to drop, as slowly as he could, which translated into jerkily plummeting for what felt like an eternity before he regained control. He descended in increments; jarring, stomach-churning drops of fifty feet at a time that made his already chewed-up nerves scream.
The fuel light blinked rapidly, red and ominous, and still he could not see the ground.
What if I’m over the sea?
Terror clutched at him.
None of the instruments on the dashboard meant much to him: working out how to move the chopper had been one thing. Navigation was entirely another.
He let a shuddering yelp loose as he saw rocks and trees looming below him, and then something even better: four wide lanes of tarmac. A dual carriageway. A landing even he could nail. Nick couldn’t believe his luck.
It might have been his imagination, but Nick thought the chopper’s engine died even as he descended the final twenty feet or so, hitting the ground with a thump that sent a savage shudder through the vehicle, rattling his bones and almost making him bite off the end of his tongue.
The lights on the chopper didn’t illuminate much, just enough to be sure that he had not landed in the middle of a herd of the Infected - though even if he had there was not really much he could have done about it without fuel. The road looked empty, featureless in either direction, but he thought he saw the merest hint of light glinting over the horizon to the west. The last scraps of sunset.
Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4) Page 11