Psychosis (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 3) (16 page)

And then she saw it, propped up against the far wall, covered in dust and webs: an old ironing board.

It would be unstable, there was a good chance it would topple off the storage boxes.

It was her only option.

Creeping over to the dusty board, wincing at every creak, almost jumping clear out of her pyjamas when the hatch wobbled under the weight of another thud, she brushed aside the webs and lifted it. Rusty. Stiff. Just opening out the ironing board would make a noise. Claire’s stomach rolled like thunder, long and slow and troubling. She was only going to get once chance, she had to get it right first time.

Thankfully the ir
oning board was light but it was also unwieldy, and she moved as slow as decay, inching across the floor, checking each end of the board to ensure it wasn’t about to knock something over with a clatter that would cost her life. Once she stood at the base her makeshift pyramid, she leaned the ironing board against the storage crates and swept her gaze around the loft, looking for something to smash the window. She hoped it would have a catch that she could open silently, but if not, she didn’t want to risk having to clamber back down.

The image of her being stuck up there under the locked skylight as the creatures below flowed up into the loft and surrounded her made
Claire shudder, and suddenly she wanted nothing more than to find a bathroom.

Finally she saw it: a lonely old screwdriver, waiting patiently in the dark, as though whoever had placed it there
understood that one day it would be important. A rusted
Excalibur
, every bit as important to her as the one from the old stories she loved.

She snatched up the tool, gave it a quick test. The blade of the screwdriver wobbled in the handle, but it would definitely do the job if needed. She slipped it into the pocket of her filthy Pyjama bottoms.

Gingerly lifting the ironing board onto the first of her makeshift pyramid’s ‘steps’, Claire began to climb, slowly, taking great care with every movement, limiting every creak and bump as much as possible.

She was just about to lift the board up onto the second level, the one at which she could open it up and hop on top, when the hatch leading up to the loft thumped again, and then: another noise; one that made her blood freeze in her veins.

Swoosh
.

The hydraulic system, delivering the ladder to the floor below.

Her heart lurched.

Light flooded the loft as the hatch opened smoothly, and the stench of
them
reached her nostrils, the rotting stink of meat gone bad, and her efforts to stifle the terrified whimper clamouring behind her lips proved futile.

The soft noise sounded impossibly loud.

The creatures moved like freshly-squeezed acne, spurting up and into the loft, only their inability to move in an orderly fashion slowing them down; they tumbled and collided with each other, blocking the small entrance, wrestling to be the first to get to her.

Claire was screaming, hauling the ironing board up and flipping the release mechanism to stand it upright. There was no time to test whether the flimsy structure would hold her weight; she leapt up onto the wobbling contraption, and grasped the handle of the screwdriver, slamming the business end into the pane of glass above her. The shattering noise, deafeningly loud in the confined space, seemed to send a fresh wave of fury through the creatures, and she felt one of them grab the base of the ironing board and tear it away even as she jumped up, trying to avoid the worst shards of glass, and hauled herself out onto the roof. The cold air stung like a slap.

She glanced back down into the loft. The creatures piling into the cramped space had knocked over the ramshackle structure she had built to reach the skylight. It would slow them down, but they’d be on her quickly: sheer weight of numbers meant they were rising up toward the opening in the roof like high tide.

The roof was treacherous: steeply sloped, paved with tiles that felt like they might give way at any moment. Claire scurried along as quickly as her terror would allow. The pub stood at the end of a terraced street, which was a blessing in that
she didn’t have to make her way directly to ground level, but the height of the buildings adjacent was uneven: there was a drop of about ten feet or so down to the next roof, which offered less of a gradient than the roof of the pub, but still sloped down toward the road.

Claire knew there was no time to worry about the possibility of falling. It would be a better death than the one that now pursued her, a death of snapping jaws and tearing hands. She jumped.

The impact knocked the breath from her lungs, and fire exploded in her knees.
Enjoy your knees, girl.

In her mind, she had been certain t
hat landing on the roof and then continuing forward would be a relatively easy task. In practice, gravity had a say in matters. Claire’s feet slipped from underneath her immediately, even her modest weight loosening the roof tiles, and then suddenly the world was spinning, like someone had dropped her into a tumble dryer, and then she was falling.

S
he didn’t feel the impact; the world went dark before she even hit the ground.

Patrol.

Eric Grant had
barely been at the base five minutes when the duty he got assigned to turned out to be fucking
patrol
. It had always been like that. Eric always got the shit detail first. Couldn’t ever figure out why. He was either the best or the worst person to deal with the shitty problems, he didn’t know which. Each possibility led to conclusions he didn’t much like.

‘Patrol’ to Eric in this situation
meant only one thing:
early warning system
. A ring of men spread out around the base, each patrolling a quadrant of tricky terrain, all rocks and streams and trees, approachable from almost any direction. He was under no illusions: patrol duty meant being the alarm bell that rang in the night. If patrol ever nudged the needle above
boring
, it was because you were dying.

His quadrant was, typically enough, about as bad as it could get: hilly, dense patches of trees either side of – god help him – the only road that led to the base. If he was their alarm clock, he was the old
analogue kind, the type that you had to smack to silence.
Bad times.

Right
after he’d been a target in the desert, and right before he ended up being a target in the woods at night, Eric had been part of the security team working for an utterly nondescript businesswoman, the last person he would have imagined might require such protection. At the time, he had believed the job was too good to be true. He hefted the assault rifle, adjusting its weight, and did a jittery 360 degree scan with the night vision. So it proved.

There was no movement out there. Anything that was
among the trees watching him was
lurking
, which under the circumstances Eric decided must be considered a good thing.
They
didn’t lurk.

Eric blew softly on his hands, trying to spread the warmth of his torso a little.

This duty was, in one way, unlike any of the other shit details he had undertaken previously though, and that was a thought that occurred to Eric a couple of hours into his fourth six-hour shift, and once it took root, it began to grow insistently, spreading like a weed.

Before
the world had gone to shit he had been working for his country, and following that he worked private sector because he needed money. Both were perfectly fine reasons to take up arms. This was a different situation entirely.

What am I working for now?

If the crazy fuckers had actually done the things they claimed, when they briefed Eric on why he had been bundled into a chopper in the middle of the night, then plenty of people were going to start to realise that the pieces of paper and nebulous promises that constituted their payment for services rendered had no actual value. The world was gone.

Now Eric was providing protection
, and putting himself in harm’s way night after night simply because they told him to.

Not for the first time, h
e let the thought roll around in his mind, like slowly swilling a fine wine.

The sna
pping of the twig nearby snapped him back to reality with a start.

He span swiftly in the direction of the noise, lifting the rifle, flipping on the
night vision all in one smooth movement. Had the guy sighted in seconds.

Eric’s brow furrowed. The figure was thirty feet or so away, a young-ish guy, straggly blonde hair and stubble
, handsome. An oddly familiar face. He was approaching slowly, arms raised in surrender, head down.

Sweat broke out on Eric’s b
row. Silence was a weapon now; noise meant consequences. He felt his trigger finger slowly trying to squeeze a little harder on the trigger, lobbying his mind; calling for action.

The guy was familiar, maybe someone famous.
Which could only mean he came from the base. He was dressed like a doctor.

Indecision raged in Eric’s mind.

Calling out ‘halt’ was as good as pulling the trigger and broadcasting his position. There was no knowing what would hear him. And killing some rich bastard stranded outside the base would have unfortunate consequences for Eric.

Shit.

“Just want to talk, that’s all,” the blonde man whispered when he got a few feet away. “Keep that pointed at me if you like, but I’m not here to harm anybody. I saw your helicopter.”

Eric grimaced.
The helicopter
. If he was their alarm clock, that was their fucking timer. Only a matter of time before someone, or something, followed it back to its source. A goddamned joke, it was. Anyone late to this party should have been told their name was no longer on the damn list. Every time the chopper lifted off, and they promised it would be the last, he’d wished that he had the sort of imposing physical presence his fellow patrolmen had.

Not for the first time, Eric w
ished he could have just grabbed one of the people steering this doomed venture by the throat and forced them to understand. Arrogance got you nowhere in war. They didn’t seem to see it; this wasn’t a war to them. More like a round of redundancies. Every time they allowed the choppers to leave, they were underestimating the world they had created.

The guy looked as harmless as he claimed, drooping shoulders, head bowed. After speaking, he shuffled nervously, rubbing his hands together.

Eric sighed mentally, and lowered the rifle.

“Uh, what happened mate?”
The blonde man asked. “I mean, everywhere is…you know, right?”

Eric nodded and grimaced.

“My wife,” the man said, “She…uh…she tried to fucking
eat me
man! What the fuck’s going on?”

So he wasn’t from the base.
Alarm bells chimed in Eric’s mind.

“You’re a doctor?” Eric said, nodding at the man’s
ill-fitting, bloodied lab coat.

Jake’s eyes narrowed imperceptibly.
Clever boy.

“Vet,” he said, but the question had caught him off guard momentarily, and that had been enough to shatter the illusion in the
soldier’s eyes, Jake could
smell
it on him, the suspicion. “But I do feel that it’s time to consider my career path.”

He struck like a snake, palm flat, driving the points of his fingers into the soldier’s throat, and then smashing his palm upwards into the nose. He’d have a moment, a brief second in which
the soldier’s vision would blur with tears, just enough vulnerability. He snatched the rifle away from the man’s fingers and drove the butt into his jaw. The conversation was over.

He began to strip the soldier of what amounted to his ‘uniform’, all in
a fetching shade of black, and featuring just enough straps and pockets to look authentically military. He smiled when he saw that among the other things attached to the man’s pack, wrapped in a sheath like a gift just for him, was a combat knife.

*

Jason tried to focus on the deep ache in his arms. Towing the trailer mile after mile was taking its toll even on his muscle-packed limbs. The pain, he hoped, would anchor him in the present, but still, whenever he let his attention drift, waves of memory lapped at him, pulling him into their insistent current.

The conversation around him: talk of weapons and potential places to take refuge once – if – they found Michael’s daughter, failed to hold his attention. It was the words of his mother that dominated his mind. The soft, coaxing words she had reserved
for him when he was a boy, and when she seemed to be the only one that understood that Jason was fragile despite his size. And the poisonous words that leaked into his consciousness now, as her presence walked with him.

Gritting his teeth, he squeezed his eyelids almost shut, tr
ying to banish the sight of her, but still the strange feeling remained, the odd rushing sensation in his blood. It made no sense, but it felt to his broken mind like he could actually
feel
the presence of his dead mother, like a vague itch.