Ferine Apocalypse (Novella): 4 Hours (9 page)

It didn’t sit easy but Pearcey was willing to accept the wisdom of experience. Even this far away he could feel the heat. See cars ready to be engulfed by flame. See the wildfire spread threatening.

Best just do it.

Before it was too late.

Gallagher spoke up from behind them.

“He’s right, we’re close now.”

Pearcey turned to look at them.

Gallagher was tired, worn out and used up.

The girl hovered in the background, a persistence of memory in black and white. Reluctant and as wild as the fire in her own way.

It was fucked up beyond measure. The whole situation. Wrong from the start and getting wronger all the time.

There wasn’t time to debate it.

The clock was ticking.

The sun setting.

The fire burning.

Best just get it done.

The fire burned behind them.

Wayne Raylens had been right when he’d said they were close.

A few streets back, the world was wrapped in heat and flame.

Disintegrating timber and red-hot brick.

Buckling steel and splintering glass.

For Pearcey, negotiating that street had felt like a sneak preview of the future. They’d scuttled along the opposite side of the road in constant fear of the scorching heat and collapsing houses.

It had been empty of people and creatures alike.

The living things had fled the fire. It would spread, that fire. There would be no intervention. It would spread until it hit a natural firebreak or the rain came. No fire brigade, no emergency services.

The infection was indiscriminate and widespread. Devastatingly widespread.

So extensive that little or nothing would be spared.

Not the police and not the army for that matter. Not the paramedics in their ambulances or the hospitals where they would have taken their patients.

They were gone.

Things of the past.

It felt like it was all going. Everything he knew and took for granted. It wouldn’t be back soon. Not if what he’d seen so far was anything to go by.

There was a despondency growing in him.

Pearcey shook if off.

He didn’t have time.

<><><>

A few minutes after that, they’d arrived at Gallagher’s building.

And come to a stop, crouched between a hedge and parked car. In front of more terraced housing.

Smoke swirled around the higher floors of Lancaster Court.

Blurred it in a shifting haze that caught the last of the sun and cast the scene in an apocalyptic light.

Gallagher’s apartment was on the fourth floor of what amounted to a high rise block of flats. Maybe eleven or twelve stories at a quick glance.

A cruciform shape that was out of fashion these days. Plenty of light, but they cost more to build.

A nice high rise.

Red brick and white concrete balconies.

There was space around it. Trees and some grass.

They’d probably have been called apartments now. It sounded so much cooler than living in a flat.

Definitely expensive given the location.

Pearcey vaguely wondered how Gallagher could have afforded it. Maybe he’d ask him one day.

Not today.

They had more important things to worry about.

Like getting into the flat without getting eaten.

The green upon which it sat was littered with glinting shapes and bodies.

Twisted creatures lying on a lawn spiked with sharp glass.

Pearcey scanned the windows and could make out broken windows that corresponded to the location of the glass shards.

He didn’t know for sure, but he was pretty certain that it was a mirror of what had happened to them when the Jaguar bit the dust.

Those broken windows were exit signs.

The occupants had caught the City Flu and retreated to their apartments to collapse.

Lay there changing, mutating into something new.

Woken with a hunger that burned stronger than caution. Found themselves confined and simply battered against the nearest obvious escape route.

The window.

Until it broke and they were free.

Free to fall.

As alien and resilient as their new bodies were, the fall to earth had shattered some of them. Destroyed them too completely for survival.

Pearcey could see seven or eight crumpled heaps in the gathering gloom.

Not all dead. Two of them continued to twitch and make small, desperate movements. Immobilised, but not finished. Clinging to their new existence with a tenacity that awed him.

Dear lord, they were tough.

<><><>

Pearcey glanced at Sonny Gallagher.

“Can you see your windows? Are any of them broken?”

Gallagher nodded and then shook his head slightly. He’d come to the same conclusion as Pearcey, knew exactly what his friend was asking.

Had his daughter turned and already left.

“They’re intact.”

He pointed, but Pearcey didn’t bother looking. He trusted Sonny not to lie. It meant that Anne Gallagher hadn’t jumped of the window. That was all. It didn’t tell him much else.

Besides which, he was more worried about what was around them. It was quiet, no creatures in evidence. It appeared that Raylens had been right once again. They’d run from the fire.

Pearcey didn’t trust it though.

He felt exposed, squatting there in the street.

Naked and defenceless.

Those things could come from anywhere at any moment. Their fear of the flames might not be as strong as their desire for prey.

Their need to hunt.

And the light was fading.

Pretty soon it would be dark and then everything would change again.

If he’d learned anything in the last couple of hours, it was that the rules of the game, along with most of the human population, had undergone a radical metamorphosis.

A savage transformation.

He was struggling to grasp those rules in daylight. He didn’t want to start figuring them out in the dark.

Gallagher interrupted his reverie.

“The garages are at the back of the flats at the edge of the green. A block of lock-up units. I rent one. Costs an arm and leg but what can you do, they’re like fucking gold dust.”

Pearcey thought that the cost had probably just plummeted. Like the creatures lying on the grass there.

The rent wouldn’t be collected this month.

And not for the foreseeable future.

Gallagher delved into his combats and produced a bunch of keys.

“Keys to the lock-up and the motor.”

Pearcey chewed his lip and tried to improvise a plan of action.

It was all improvisation and that had been the problem from the outset. One improvisation led to another and before you knew where you were, you were in a shitload of trouble. Neck deep and floundering to keep your head above the waterline.

Or shitline, if you wanted to be pedantic.

God, he’d had enough of this.

Like the character in the film had once said, he was too old for this shit. Too old and too tired.

He wanted to be at home. Watching a movie or reading a book and dreaming about his next spell of leave.

“Okay, here’s the plan. We scoot round to the garages and make sure that everything’s peachy there. Get it all ready to roll before we go in and grab your daughter.”

Gallagher agreed with his habitual nod and the girl stared at him blankly.

She may as well have been wearing a sister to Raylens mask for all he could judge from her expression. Maybe one of those disturbing but beautiful harlequin things.

He had no intention of abandoning her, but in his heart Pearcey wished he’d never laid eyes on her.

She was just another complication.

Another problem, when he had more problems than he could handle.

“I’m not going in there.”

Wayne Raylens voice was emotionless and unequivocal, a monotone made flatter still by the mask.

The rifle cradled in his arms like a precious child.

“It may be an alien hive now. Where they lay their eggs. No way baby. I’m not taking that chance. Being trapped in one of their filthy fucking nests.”

Pearcey was almost relieved. However good Raylens was at killing monsters, the guy was a loose cannon in a stormy sea.

Loop-de-fucking-loop.

He’d vaguely dreaded being in an enclosed space again with the man.

“I’m not that keen to go in there either.”

Angela’s voice was a soft whisper. For a moment, she held Pearcey’s eyes and then diverted her gaze.

It didn’t sit quite right, but it suited him.

When they went into Lancaster Court, Pearcey didn’t want the random factor of Raylens and he didn’t want the potential burden of the girl. He was caught in an impossible situation. If you tracked it back, it was a situation largely of his own making.

Leaving her with Raylens was wrong on all sorts of levels, but it made life simpler.

He was supposed to be out here assessing the state of things. He’d subverted that to help his friend and had started regretting the decision as soon as they breathed unfiltered air.

Everything else had led from that.

In his opinion, the girl was a basket-case.

A burn-out. Blown away by the cataclysmic events of the last few days. That didn’t mean that he felt good about leaving her with the looney tune in the long coat.

“Okay. Fine. We get to the garage and Sonny and I will go and get his daughter. You and Angela stay with the car and wait for us. It probably makes more sense than all four of us traipsing up there.”

Raylens head angled up to consider the building. The lenses of the mask a darkly shifting reflection of the world.

“I want the car keys. If you’re going into that building without me, I want the keys to the wheels baby. I want to get into your shelter,
Bunker
Man, I want directions and instructions on how to enter. In case you don’t come back, you know?”

Pearcey nodded.

Anything to get moving.

<><><>

They skirted the green.

Pearcey cast glances at the bodies as they moved. There were more than he’d originally thought.

Amidst the glass, he could see limbs.

Scattered remains.

Human, unchanged. A leg lay close to the path they were following towards the garage units.

More bone than leg. Maroon, black and white in the faltering light. Tattered bits of flesh and shreds of cloth clinging stubbornly.

Teeth marks scored into the white of the bone.

As they neared the garages, he saw something on the ground.

Twenty feet ahead. Moving away from them and then becoming still as they got closer.

Pearcey quickened his pace, overtook Gallagher.

He wanted to be first to get to whatever it was. Gallagher was beginning to rush, anxious to get to his daughter, and Pearcey was worried that might result in a lack of caution in how he did things.

Caution seemed more important than ever as they neared the objective.

Since they’d reached Lancaster Court, Raylens had dropped back.

He was no longer taking the lead, appeared content to bring up the rear with Angela Gacek.

Pearcey had no idea if she was happy with that and he didn’t have time to worry about it.

He was more than a little unnerved at having that nutjobby from crazy town at his back, but there wasn’t a lot to be done about Wayne Raylens right then. The man had delivered what he’d said he’d deliver and that deserved something in return.

Even if it was only the benefit of the doubt.

That was a risk. Giving anyone that much leeway.

Sometimes, the circumstances dictated and you just had to live with it.

That wasn’t quite right. Sometimes you just had to stay alive with it.

<><><>

As he got closer, more detail was revealed.

Pearcey thought it had been a woman. Mainly because of the shredded remains of what looked like a skirt.

It was horrible. Sickening.

Her lower half had been shattered.

Smashed.

And tried to reform. To mend.

Leg bones had broken through the skin. Splintered and pierced. Driven by unimaginable force. From the waist down she’d become a melded mass of bone and flesh. Spines and fractured spikes partially wrapped with dead red wetness and leathery patches.

It whirled at the last moment.

Reared on its arms and turned to Pearcey.

Took him by surprise, if he was honest.

He’d been entranced by the monstrosity and stillness and forgotten where he was, what he was attempting to deal with.

The lower half of it was useless, but its upper body hadn’t given up.

The hunger still burned within it, driven by whatever dark miracle had worked the transformation. It should have been dead, but the infection had changed that. The process that it triggered, the result of the metamorphosis, was incredibly tenacious.

Unwilling to let its victim go once the mutation had taken hold.

The creature raised its upper body and swivelled to meet him.

The horror below its hips fishtailing behind like an after-thought. Dead weight that left no option but to crawl, to propel itself with clawed hands and transfigured arms.