Psychosis (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 3) (10 page)

The farmhouse itself was a small, squat affair, and as they reached the front porch Michael could see that his initial assessment of the place as being fortress-like was not that far wide of the mark. There were a number of buildings in the area dating back as far as the sixteenth century, a time during which walls were built of stone up to eighteen inches thick.
The farmhouse was one such dwelling.

The front door was solid-looking wood,
and if they barricaded that entrance, anything trying to get into the building would have a hard job succeeding: the windows were little more than narrow slits that even a child would struggle to fit through.

Rachel pressed her face to one of the small windows, shining her torch into the
gloom beyond. Inside she saw the kind of authentic farmhouse kitchen that owners of apartments in London spent a fortune to recreate: solid oak cupboards and a counter huddling for warmth around a large Aga stove that was the centrepiece of the room.

It was dark, and still.

“It looks empty.”

Rachel tried the door, and it swung open easily.

Virtually all houses across the country must be the same
, she thought. The speed of the infection, the way it rode on confusion and panic; most people would not have thought to lock their doors. Fewer still would have been given the chance to do so in time.

She remembered watching from
a rooftop in St. Davids as the Infected, sensing the presence of their next meal in the buildings around them, had forced entry: smashing through doors or leaping through windows, oblivious to the glass that blocked their passage, and she shuddered.

John saw the shudder, and thought it all the more interesting that Rachel simply shook it off and wa
s the first to enter the house, when the easier option would have been to send in her giant brother first.
She’s protecting him
, he thought in amazement.

He watched Rachel disappear inside, saw the light of her torch bouncing around in
the darkness beyond, and then Jason, still carrying Michael, eased himself through the gap. He only just fit: houses hadn’t been built for men of his size hundreds of years ago. John took a final glance around the farm, satisfying himself that the virus wasn’t creeping toward them silently in the night, and stepped inside, closing the heavy door quietly behind him.

The smell hit him like a middleweight, snapping his neck back, making him gag. Choking, he clamped his hand over his mouth
and nose in a futile attempt to keep the stench out. In front of him, all three of his companions had already tried the same manoeuvre with clearly similar degrees of success; Rachel had already given up, apparently accepting that the sickening rot that weighed down the air in the farmhouse was unavoidable.

She put a finger to her lips, staring each of the men in the eye in turn, and nodded at the door that led
from the kitchen to the rest of the house.

“Wait
with Michael. Watch the door,” she whispered to Jason, and then she motioned at John to follow her.

Creeping silently toward it, Rachel slipped the baseball bat from its makeshift sheath and used i
t to push the door open gently.

A
stinking wave washed over them, even more sickening in its potency. John’s breakfast – a handful of chocolate biscuits – began to treat the walls of his stomach like a cell that demanded escape. He swallowed hard, focusing all his energy on quelling the waves of nausea.

Beyond the door was a narrow hallway, further doors leading off to either side, culminating in a narrow right-angled staircase leading to the floor above. The walls of the corridor wer
e laden with family photographs, most depicting a young happy couple maintaining the farm. Only one picture deviated: the same man who had appeared in the other photos, but now his wife was missing, replaced by a sullen-looking young boy. None of the photos looked recent.

Rachel brushed away her curiosity at the pictures. The smell came from the first floor, the air thickening with every step she took toward the staircase. She advanced toward it, hearing John gently pushing open the side doors behind her
, confirming that the ground floor was empty.

The silence in the place was heavy,
oppressive, closing around the soft noise of their passage like invisible fingers. Rachel’s heart began to hammer: she had done this once before, at her parents’ house in St. Davids. She had been oblivious then, untouched by the horror of the virus. The discovery of her father’s corpse, being eaten by the family dog had struck her like a locomotive. She steeled herself for the horrors her instincts told her lay above, and began to ascend.

The upper level of the farmhouse was comprised of three rooms: a small bathroom near the top of the stairs, the door standing open, revealing nothing untoward. The stench in the upstairs corridor was like a living presence, some foul spirit that clung to the walls and the carpet.

To Rachel’s right, a bedroom door, again standing open. She peered inside. A teenage boy’s room, judging by the mess and the faded posters of rock bands lining the wall opposite her. Again, the room was empty. Just one door left.

Rachel turned to face it, the door that stood at the end of the short corridor, the door that was cracked open an inch or two, revealing nothing of the room beyond. She lifted the bat a little higher, fixed John with a meaningful stare, and took a step forward.

And then she heard it.

Soft, scuffling, scraping sounds. A noise that seemed like it did not want to be heard.

Rachel’s pulse increased, thundering through her veins.

They weren’t alone.

*

The watermill dated back to the middle ages. It was hewn out of rock standing alongside the river, and had fallen into partial ruin before being restored by the National Trust after a lengthy petition from local residents. The structure itself was sturdy and whole, b
ut lacking in doors and windows.

To Alex, the mill looked skeletal. The restoration of the place had only served to recreate the building’s death.

It might have made a good place to hide temporarily, if Alex and Deborah had reached it before the things began to give chase. As it was, all it offered was a means to slow their pursuers down.

Alex glanced back as he ran. Only
two of the Infected had been able to reach solid ground before the embankment had steepened to meet a bridge leading into Rothbury. It was, he thought, something to be grateful for. The notion struck him as funny under the circumstances and he became aware of hysteria rising in him. Felt the shifting somewhere deep in his mind, down in the foundations, like continental drift.

He was already
long overdue some pills. The schedule was tightly packed: at virtually any given time during the day he was meant to be taking one of a range of capsules that invariably came in bright primary colours. Cheerful. Like toys someone might give a baby during the initial phases of development. Most of the pills vanished into his stomach and appeared to have no effect whatsoever, though he knew that was the intention. Sometimes he suffered painful contortions in his stomach; headaches, but miraculously little else, given that his body – his entire being – moved like a hovercraft over a cushion of Clozapine and Zotepine and countless other less pronounceable chemicals.

That
cushion was deflating steadily. The absence of medication, coupled with the stress and omnipresent terror, left Alex feeling like something inside him was loosening.

Suddenly he felt as though there was another presence chasing him, something far more insidious;
something terrible and familiar and impossible to outrun. His nerves danced painfully.

Deborah was pulling ahead again, her superior fitness telling once more. He burst into the remains of the mill a few seconds behind her, and almost crashed into her back.

“Why have you stopped?” He shrieked, and the fright apparent in his voice made him shrivel inside.

Deborah turned, and he saw his own terror echoed in the frantic twitching of her eyes.  Saw too why she had stopped: they hadn’t entered the mill itself.
Just an out-building. A storage area.

Just one entrance.
A death trap.

Snap
.

He couldn’t hear it of course, the fracturi
ng in his mind, but he felt it, like an underground earthquake.

There were lengths of pipe leaning against the wall: ancient
parts of tools now made almost exclusively of rust, hanging there to tell a tale of a world that had long since been tamed, a world in which getting anything done had meant cutting or lifting or smashing.

Deborah was screaming, the sound like an under
current to him; something heard through the walls of a dream. He lifted the nearest of the stretches of pipe. Dull, but surprisingly heavy. Swung with enough force, just maybe…

There was no time to think about it: he turned just as the first of their pursuers bolted through the doorway, and he swung
like a baseball player, catching the thing across the jaw, feeling the bone shatter on impact. It went down hard and then he was swinging again, a guardian against their entry, smashing it back every time it leapt to its feet, slowly crushing its skull away to nothing until finally its mind accepted death, and relishing the cracks and the sudden softness of the impact as bone gave way to brain. The first of them finally died as the pipe shattered, leaving him holding a wicked shard of rusted metal.

It was easier that way, with the
now-sharp weapon, and he thrust the decayed point into the neck of the second creature he continued to stab long after it stilled in a spreading pool at his feet, feeling the familiar thrill of death course through him.

It’s just like riding a bike
.

The floor was slick with blood, the air heavy with the
metallic stench of it. And something else. A whimpering voice, full of fear and trepidation.

“Alex?”

He froze, eyes narrowing to dangerous slits.

“
Alex
was in no condition to handle this. What was he going to do,
complain
his way out of trouble? ‘It’s so unfair, boo-fucking-hoo’.”

Deborah felt something inside her begin to subside, some rickety layer of stability dropping away. In the madness of Rothbury, she’d actually forgotten.
About
him.
Her hands began to clench and unclench slowly, operating independently; imploring her mind to catch up.

“Jake?”

Jake turned and grinned, and the sight of Alex’s handsome face; the same and so different, twisted into something that emitted menace, travelled through Deborah Jackson like radiation, reorganising things at a fundamental level.

“Hello Dr Jackson.”

The peanuts were delicious. Claire had only managed to scavenge some rock-hard bread in the days she had spent alone on the streets of Aberystwyth. Most of her time had been spent hiding in a closet at the back of a
clothing store with smashed front windows, her only companion the stink of the bleach that tried and failed to hide behind a ‘lemon fresh’ label.

There hadn’t been any space in the closet, just mops and buckets and boxes. Barely enough room for
even her small frame, and she had gradually begun to discover that even remaining still can induce dizzying pain.

She had made her way out of the closet after three days,
starving and grateful to leave behind the bucket that she had used as a toilet, and the smell that even the bleach couldn’t quite mask.

The streets had been pretty quiet then; dark and
empty. She had crept around them until she saw the bakery. The shelves were almost cleared of food, and she wondered how many other people there were out there, scurrying like frightened mice around the streets that they had owned just days earlier.

That’s where she got the bread, and the
opportunity to spend more time in another storage closet, with a broom propped against the door, half-expecting that at any moment some hideous abomination would burst into the tiny space and begin eating her.

The pub had peanuts. It had snacks of varying quality, all sharing one thing – a high salt content designed to get the punters thirsty for another drink.

Claire didn’t care, and threw back enormous handfuls of the salted nuts, feeling her pained stomach growling in appreciation at having something to do once more. Compared to closets, the pub was paradise.

Bill had propped a stool up against the inside of the main doors to the pub on the day he had fled to the basement, and he was pleased to see it was still there. He added to it now, slipping a pool stick through the door handles like a deadbolt. He gently tried the doors. They moved an inch or so. Wouldn’t hold up against something that was determined to get in, but it would keep out anything that blindly blundered toward the building.

He nodded, satisfied.