Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4)

by Griffiths, K. R.

  "You coming down then, mate?" A voice called up to him. "We're not gonna hang around here all day."

  Shit.

  15

  Michael felt Claire's grip on his neck tighten.

  He tried to grasp the words Gwyneth had just said, but they slipped away from the surface of his mind.

  "Feeding him to her," he repeated slowly.

  "Pete, why don't you take Claire up to the bedroom upstairs, okay?" Gwyneth said. "I need to talk to Michael. I'll be up soon, okay sweetheart?"

  Gwyneth stepped close and ruffled Claire's hair affectionately, not noticing the way Michael flinched slightly. Claire nodded, and released her grip on Michael, following Pete upstairs. Gwyneth waited a moment until she heard the door above open and close.

  She led the amputated man over to the wall, and gently guided him down to sit on the floor.

  Michael stared at the man in horrified fascination. It wasn't just the grisly stumps where his arms should have been, not even the way the wounds seemed to have been burned extensively, presumably to stem the blood loss.

  It was the man's eyes. A sort of madness lurked in those eyes, a screaming, clawing darkness that made Michael's skin crawl.

  "He doesn't talk much," Gwyneth said. "I managed to get a few words from him. It was enough."

  She rubbed her temples, as though trying to ward off an irresistible headache.

  "They think the girl needs human flesh to survive, Michael. To keep the Infected away, if that makes any sense. If anything does. They think we're dealing with zombies. This man was locked up in a room at the top of the tower. They've been...keeping him. Taking parts of him..."

  Michael held up a hand to stop her. For the first time since he had first stepped into Ralf's cafe on the outskirts of St. Davids a million years earlier, he felt his stomach do a barrel roll, and the meagre scraps he had eaten tried to force their way up into his throat. He choked the bile back down.

  "Darren said she was bitten," Michael said weakly. "She has some effect on the Infected. Like a repellent. She's what's keeping them out of Caernarfon." Michael's voice sounded as weak in his ears as his stomach felt.

  Gwyneth looked stunned.

  "She's immune?"

  Michael winced.

  "She's just a child, Michael. Just a little girl. Bitten, just like me, but she is still human. This is monstrous, we have to stop-"

  He held his hand up again and nodded, and Gwyneth paused.

  We die fighting them, not each other. Michael had said those words, back in the retail park outside Aberystwyth, said them to avert the disaster that would have been John and Jason killing three innocent, terrified people.

  Those people had died anyway. Jason had died anyway. The world was death now. There were no peaceful solutions. He had hoped he could make it through the disaster with his conscience intact. He had been a fool.

  Michael felt the room spinning around him, felt the image of Gwyneth standing in front of him dimming, and then he was back there, all the way back in Cardiff, locked in the memory he had tried so long to suppress, confronted by the version of himself that he had tried for years to outrun. The version whose clutches the brutality of the world seemed determined to stop him from escaping.

  Cardiff.

  The nightmare corridor of blood and bone and screaming.

  The darkness.

  *

  Michael killed the engine and unbuckled his seatbelt.

  "Just another domestic," Michael said. "I was here a few weeks ago. The guy beats his wife. The neighbours call us. The wife sends us away."

  He sighed, even as his partner rolled his eyes. The story was all-too familiar.

  "It's alright mate, I'll go. I can see you're busy."

  Michael stepped out of the police car. His partner, James, waved a dismissive hand, preoccupied with his mobile phone and a burgeoning text relationship with a girl he had met in a bar a couple of weeks earlier. The girl, James said, was a 'nine'. He always ranked women like that. Didn't hide the fact from the women either, and Michael was continually baffled that James seemed able to pick up girls almost at will, when he made no effort to conceal his nature. He was a sly bastard, but a good officer. He had taught Michael a lot in the three years they had been working together.

  Michael was still in uniform. He had been overlooked for promotion on the two occasions that he had been certain he would get the nod. It was baffling, a source of constant frustration. When his last application had been rejected, they had told him he would make a fine detective. He just wasn't ready yet. They did not said why.

  Michael shut the door, leaving James alone in the car with his phone.

  He remembered the house well from his previous visits; this would be the fourth time that Michael had personally visited the place. He knew other officers who had been there even more often. The joke around the station was that uniformed officers spent more time visiting number 44 Queen's Drive than they did in the staff canteen.

  The road was one of the rougher in Cardiff's poorest neighbourhood, far away from the harbour front that was undergoing significant redevelopment, with foreign money and Government investment pouring into designing sleek buildings that offered a marvellous and expensive view of the crashing waves of the ocean. Queen's Drive felt like another world entirely: riddled by poverty and petty crime. There were some nights that James and Michael joked that they might as well just park the squad car on the street and wait.

  He stepped up to the terraced houses, not making eye contact with the faces he saw peering at him from behind twitching curtains. Number 44 had a cheerful red door, although Michael always noticed the scratches around the lock. Gavin Edwards was permanently drunk: his key appeared to miss the lock more often than it connected.

  Looking at the familiar scratches, Michael wondered with a heavy heart how often Rhiannon Edwards sat in her living room, listening to the key scratching around the lock, praying that her husband wouldn't make it through the door that night to unleash his latest drunken rage upon her.

  He knocked loudly, and the door swung open. That wasn't unusual. Neither was the stink of liquor that washed over Michael as the door opened.

  But something was different, and Michael noticed it immediately, and felt his nerves jangling in silent warning.

  He couldn't hear Rhiannon Edwards crying and screaming at her abusive husband. Whenever Michael had shown up in the past, the woman had been locked deep in retaliation against the bastard she had married too young, and without any insight into the sort of man he might turn out to be. Usually Michael had to separate them physically, and it was rare that he escaped from number 44 without a few cuts and bruises himself.

  Never had a problem with Gavin, though. Like most wife-beaters Michael had encountered, the guy was a coward when another man entered the equation, let alone one in uniform.

  Michael stepped across the threshold, and saw it immediately.

  Blood.

  A long, thin trail of it smeared along the wall to his left, leading around a corner and into the living room, beyond his sight.

  Shit.

  For a moment he thought about signalling James to join him, but then he heard it, and all thoughts of caution and following protocol deserted him.

  A baby, screaming.

  The Edwards' didn't have a child.

  Michael started to run, but his legs felt like they were locked in quicksand, and he knew he was going to be too late.

  As he rounded the corner he heard Gavin Edwards snarling.

  "Here's what I think about having a baby, you stupid bitch."

  I'm too late.

  When Michael entered the living room, his eyes took in the horror of the scene even as his mind retreated.

  Rhiannon Edwards lay on the floor in a pool of blood; an impossible ocean of it, black and toxic like an oil slick in the dim light provided by a lamp that had been flung into a corner. Her eyes were open; fixed and sightless.

  Gavin Edwards stood over her,
gripping a large kitchen knife in one hand, and the screaming baby in the other.

  For a moment Michael froze as Gavin's eyes locked onto him, and Michael had a second to see the insanity there before the man screamed - a horrific, chilling noise that filled the room and made Michael's gut squirm - and dragged the blade across the child's throat, sending a spurt of arterial blood across the room; a spurt that was both tiny and all-consuming.

  The darkness welled up inside Michael, tearing upwards and obliterating everything in its path; erupting like a volcano. He wasn't even aware of launching himself at Edwards. Later on the evidence would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Michael had beaten the man to death, but that part of the memory was difficult to access, like corrupted data.

  He had no memory at all of James entering the building minutes later to see what had happened to his partner. No memory of the immediate steps taken to ensure the cover up. The public couldn't know. Some of them might understand why, his superiors had told him, but the fallout for the South Wales Police would be enormous. There had already been skirmishes on the streets of the city following supposed police brutality as the poor were driven back from the burgeoning wealth on the coast. Michael's actions could well spark a riot, and there was a lot of money being poured into Cardiff. No one wanted a riot.

  So it was self-defence. And the end of Michael's hopes of progression in the force. He would have to undergo extensive, compulsory therapy. He would eventually have to relocate to a quiet town where there was no chance of him ever again encountering unspeakable acts of violence.

  He was to live with the knowledge that a murderer lived inside him, to suffer the yawning chasm of depression that claimed him as it had claimed his father. He was doomed to dream of the corridor of blood and bone every night, and to wake terrified and shivering, drenched in sweat and praying that he might not remember the dreams, but he always did. He was to tell himself that he could never again allow the darkness at the heart of him to break free, for fear it might take over everything and consume him.

  "Michael, are you okay?"

  Gwyneth's voice. Tossed to him like a life-preserver. He clutched at it, dragged himself away from the horror of the memory and back into the present. When he spoke, his voice didn't sound like his own.

  There was no room left in the world for conscience. There was only action. Only killing. He saw it now, as he had seen it years before, lurking behind the red door.

  "Darren has to die," he said.

  Gwyneth's wrinkled face paled.

  "I don't think that we can-" she began to say.

  "I'll do it," Michael said, and the flat emptiness of his tone made him shrivel a little inside. The Michael he had tried so hard to leave behind. That Michael had never truly gone anywhere.

  "Well, now, that sounds interesting. How do you think you'll manage that?"

  Michael squeezed his eyes shut in despair.

  Darren's voice.

  Behind him.

  16

  Nick descended the tree clumsily, and all hope of retaining a semblance of dignity evaporated when he finally lost his foothold and fell the last few feet, landing heavily on his backside with an involuntary yelp. As far as first impressions went, Nick doubted he could have done much to make this one worse.

  The two men waiting for him laughed, and Nick saw a helping hand dangled in front of his face. He grasped it, aware as he was hoisted to his feet that his bottom was now damp.

  Landed in your own piss, Nick-yyyy. Nice touch.

  Nicky. Nick didn't want to think about why the voice of his internal thoughts would now address him using the name his father had used so witheringly. To many people, 'Nicky' might have sounded endearing. Colin Hurt had developed a way of making it sound like a girl's name. Nick hated it with a passion.

  He studied the two men carefully, and the first thing he noticed was the crossbow. At least the mystery of the disappearing dogs had been solved.

  He gestured at the weapon.

  "Thanks, " he said. "For getting rid of the dogs."

  "Didn't do it on your account, mate. But glad to be of service. You with the army?"

  The man gestured at Nick's crumpled uniform.

  "Yeah," he said.

  "Come to save us?" The man grinned widely.

  Nick shook his head and flushed.

  That was rhetorical, Nick-yyyy.

  "Nick Hurt," he mumbled, extending his hand.

  The grinning man shifted the crossbow to his left hand and shook Nick's hand solemnly.

  "Bet you do," he said cheerfully. "Reckon you'll have a bruised arse for days."

  They both laughed again, and Nick couldn't help but smile.

  "I'm Ray. The shy one behind me is Gareth. Reckon that's your chopper back up the road, right?"

  "Uh, yeah," Nick said.

  "Can you fly it?"

  Nick nodded. "I could," he said. "Until the fuel ran out."

  "Ah," Ray said. "We'll have to sort that out, then. Shouldn't be a problem. After all, this is the land of opportunity now, right? No credit card required."

  He clapped Nick on the shoulder. Nick blinked in confusion.

  "Aren't you worried about the Infected?"

  For a moment Ray looked puzzled.

  "The Sockets, you mean? That's what we call 'em. Nah, there's none left here mate. They all upped sticks and headed west from here days ago. Get the odd straggler here and there. Animals too, they operate on a different wavelength, I reckon. Nothing we can't handle."

  "They headed west?" Nick couldn't keep the confusion from his voice. He had only just learned that animals could carry the virus, and now this strange man was asking him to believe that the Infected were somehow...organised. "Why?"

  Ray shrugged.

  "Beats me," he said. "But that's why we need the chopper."

  Nick stared at him blankly.

  "We're heading west, too," Ray said with an easy grin. "And you're going to be our pilot."

  Nick stared into the man's eyes, drilling down past the grin and the easygoing manner. Something smouldered in the man's gaze. Something that left Nick in no doubt that anything other than an affirmative answer might see things end badly for him.

  "Sure," he said weakly, and Ray clapped him on the shoulder.

  *

  Ray and Gareth led Nick a mile or so down the road, before following a narrow trail through the trees. Neither spoke, and the resulting oppressive silence made Nick clench his fists so tightly that his fingernails dug painfully into the flesh of his palms.

  After a walk of around fifteen minutes, they emerged into a small clearing and Nick was surprised to discover that they were near a cliff overlooking the ocean. It looked like the place had once been a spot for ramblers to stop and admire the view. Now, a small, messy camp had been set up in the clearing. It made sense, Nick supposed, to put the ocean at your back.

  He saw a handful of other men milling around the camp, and several large motorbikes propped on kickstands in the swaying grass. A group of bikers. Suddenly the devil-may-care attitude seemed to make a little more sense to Nick.

  He pulled Ray aside.

  "Where are we?" He asked. "I had no idea I was near the ocean."

  "Flying blind, huh?" Ray said with a grin. "Reckon we all are now, one way or another. North Wales coast, mate, near the English border. Not too far from Liverpool."

  That made sense. Nick had flown southwest for a long time. Any further and he would have been landing the chopper in the sea. He shuddered involuntarily.

  "Ray," he said. "Something doesn't make sense. Back there you said all the Infected had gone west. But then you said you wanted to go that way too. You meant east, right?"

  Ray shook his head.

  "West, mate, that's right."

  "But why?"

  "To right a couple of wrongs, mate," Ray said, as if the answer was as straightforward as simple arithmetic.

  Nick frowned in confusion.

  "We had a place we coul
d have been safe," Ray said. "About as good a place as you could get in this nightmare, I reckon. It could have worked, but the guy in charge decided he didn't want our sort mixing with his sort."

  Nick stared around the group of men as Ray started toward the camp again. They all looked huge and intimidating. Covered in rippling muscles under weathered, tattooed skin.

  "This person made you leave?" Nick couldn't keep the astonishment from his voice as he trotted along behind Ray's loping stride. He tried to imagine what sort of person would be able to intimidate a group of men like the ones now standing in front of him.

  "Aye," Ray said. "He did. He had a couple of guns and a big wall to hide behind. We had fists and bad language. But things have changed now, right?"

  Nick stared at him blankly.

  Ray winked.

  "Now we've got a helicopter."

  17

  Six had definitely been too many. Darren should have listened to his instincts. It was the children that did it. How was he supposed to turn away children? The youngest of the people he had managed to gather together in the castle was seventeen. If they were to survive what was beginning to look like the end of days, they would need children.

  If it came to it - to repopulating and trying to build some sort of life for the future - children would be just about the most valuable thing Darren could imagine. They had been worth the risk. But even then, Darren had only permitted the opening of the castle doors because the people with the children looked harmless. An old woman, a cripple. Another young woman to add to the growing numbers he had already secured; God knew she might be valuable as well. He had only permitted a handful of men to remain in the castle, just the ones he could control. They would need lots of women if they were to avoid veering too close to inbreeding.

  There would be little point in surviving the apocalypse, living on through dreadful squalor, only to discover that the children you produced were damaged. Not viable.