Psychosis (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 3) (18 page)

This is all too easy.

The lights went out.

*

Claire woke up, and for just a second forgot what waking up actually meant.

I’m still alive
.

She was in a cramped, dark space.
Twisting her neck uncomfortably, her eyes widened in surprise.

The boy
sitting next to her in the dark space clamped his hand over her opening mouth, and shook his head firmly. Releasing her, he touched his forefinger to his lips, and jerked his head up. Claire lifted her eyes, and saw the sliver of light above her, a perfect rectangle of it. They were in a bin.

Her eyes widened, and she nodded her understanding.

She was still on the street. The boy had seen her, and his attempt at a rescue had ended here, in island in a deadly sea. She mouthed him
thank you.

He nodded, and seemed to relax a little.

It was hard to tell in the darkness, and through the layer of filth that covered his skin, but he looked a couple of years older than her. Ten or eleven. It dawned on Claire that she was probably filthy too; she hadn’t seen her reflection in a week.

They sat there, statuesque in the filth, for what felt to Claire like an eternity, trembling every time something shuffled into the dumpster with a thud, expecting at any moment to feel the lid being ripped open and the monsters coming in.

Finally, when the sliver of light around the lid of the bin had all but gone, and dusk had fallen, it was the boy that moved, rising up slowly to peer through the gap like a periscope.

He sat back down carefully.

“I think they’ve gone,” he breathed. “They move like that now, in flocks, like birds. Back and forth. Until they hear someone. Have to be really quiet. They don’t seem to know otherwise, they…can’t see.”

Claire nodded.

“Thank you so much, I don’t remember –“

“You fell,” he whispered, “from the roof. I think you were
freerunning
.”

He grinned, and Claire felt her own mouth split in a smile.

“They were all still going into the pub, I dragged you in here.” He puffed out his chest a little and smiled broadly.

“But where have you been hiding? Shouldn’t we try to get there?”

He looked a little crestfallen.

“Uh…”

“Oh!” said Claire, and he lifted his palms, wincing, bringing her volume back down.

“You’ve been hiding
here?
”

He nodded glumly.

“For how long?”

“Since it started.”
His eyes hit the floor.

Claire caught the next question in her throat. Hunger was at the forefront of her thoughts, but staring around the dumpster, she realised asking what he’d been eating
the past week probably wasn’t wise.

“I’m Pete,” he said,
extending his digits for an oddly formal handshake.

“Cl
aire,” she said, and he grinned, before his eyes filled with concern.

“You fell pretty hard. Are you hurt?”

The truth was that Claire’s hip hurt like nothing she had ever felt in her eight-and-a-bit years, and her head was doing its best to catch up.

She shook her head firmly, eyes flickering only a little at the pain of the motion.

“You think we should find somewhere else?”

Claire nodded.

“I do, too.”

The lid of the dumpster was heavy plastic,
and it took all Pete’s strength to lift it, and to balance it as he gingerly propped against the wall.

They peered over the side. The roads looked to have cleared, the creatures apparently concluding that their prey had escaped. They clambered out.

It was a simple twist of fate: Claire had no way of knowing that the bottle had snagged on the hem of her pyjamas, no idea until her leg was already over the side of the dumpster and she noticed the unfamiliar weight, and by then gravity took the bottle away from her and, with a smash, the week of careful dumpster-living Pete had endured was undone.

Claire was out of the dumpster even as the blood was draining from h
er face, and for a brief second her gaze caught Pete’s and she saw her terror reflected in his eyes. And then they were running.

Pete’s legs burned from several days of immobility, but he pumped them like well-oiled pisto
ns when he saw the first of the Infected loping around the corner of the pub. He didn’t need to look to see if Claire was following: he could feel her presence beside him, heard her panting for breath alternating with his own as they ran.

The
open street would kill them; they both knew it, and so they bolted as one for the archway that led to the small underground car park that served the high street shoppers and filled every Saturday afternoon with cars and muttered curses.

Inside there was a lift, but Claire dragged Pete away from it, her eyes wide
with remembered fright, and they burst through flimsy swinging doors into the stairwell, throwing themselves down the steps as fast as their balance would allow.

They descended two flights, to the basement level. Only a few cars were parked there, the harsh lighting casting long shadows from them, turning the floor into a chessboard
of light and dark patches. In several of the lighted areas, Claire could see blood; in one, a severed leg, just sitting there, as though its owner had only put it down for a moment.

There was no way out. Just the
angled stair they had come down. Snarling erupted through the doors two floors above them, and Claire knew what the sound meant: they were trapped.

Pete pointed frantically: a small hatchback stood in the centre of the car park, the driver side door wide open. Pete sprinted over and leapt inside, and Claire landed on top of him. She pulled the door shut as quietly as possible and they both held their breath, watching in horror as creatures began to emerge through the doors, fanning out, flickering in and out of sight as they moved under the lights and
into the shadows.

You will not
scream,
Claire thought, and then the lights went out, plunging the car into impenetrable darkness.

*

The electrical grid serving the UK, the lifeline that was warmth and light, the blood that pumped through the veins of every man, woman and child in the country, finally coughed out its last breath a week after the small army of people required to keep it running abruptly had their shift ended. In major cities the severing of power proved catastrophic and subtle, like a belly wound. The loss of power was fatal, but the death of the country was to be slow, an inevitable decay that would be punctuated by explosions, like boils bursting on rotting skin.

Darkness fell.

The base located at the heart of the Northumberland National Park was a splinter
in the skin of the world; a jutting intrusion driving down twenty-seven levels into the earth like an inverted skyscraper.

Construction had begun in 1971: an endless stream of mighty trucks arriving to pour millions of tonnes of concrete down into the bowels of the country, leaving and returning incessantl
y like bees visiting their hive over a period of many months.

To the vast majority of the nearly four thousand people that now inhabited the base, it comprised of just twenty two levels: even with
in the most secret of cabals, there were some who knew more than others. The existence of the lowest five levels was known only to a select few.

Some even knew the locations of the twenty other such bases that blemished the earth, and had a rough idea just how many people would be left when the project was completed, but all were drawing up their plans, carving up their particular slice of the planet that would be born when the fire
burned out:
Wildfire
, boiled down to its essence, was a coup. Humanity had been doing it since the notion of hierarchy first dawned on the species. This was simply a new weapon, a genetic dirty bomb detonated everywhere simultaneously. Small, invisible Armageddon.

It was supposed to have a lifespan.
Wildfire
was supposed to have officially ceased operation entirely some forty-eight hours earlier. But in the hive of activity that was one of the base’s five secret research floors, the minds that had worked for years to perfect the ultimate cleansing of the planet had known that the train had come off the rails a long time before that. Each passing hour merely underlined the scale of the failure: the infection was supposed to spread and then cannibalise itself. The Infected were meant to kill each other.
They didn’t.

Victor fucking Chamberlain
.

Fred Sullivan had been part of the human race for seventy-three years and counting, and in that time he’d seen plenty go wrong. Nothing though, in quite the all-the-dominoes-in-a-line fashion
that Project Wildfire had. Even with the benefit of hindsight, it would have been difficult to pinpoint the event that set the ball rolling on the chain reaction of bad decisions and worse luck that had led to the clusterfuck, but Victor Chamberlain was at the centre of it all.

The man had been
a nobody, a programmer with an inflated sense of importance. All but invisible eight years earlier, when he had actually stood among them, but now Sullivan knew every contour on the man’s face. Everything stemmed from a problem in the guidance system of the canisters that didn’t even seem to affect anything. The guidance systems performed flawlessly because Victor’s addition to the code was a trickster: lurking in Guidance, focused on Biology.

Letting the manipulation go undiscovered had been a grievous error. Letting Victor slip away when his work was done
was a catastrophe. He just hadn’t been important.
Then
.

The loss of contact with the team Sullivan had sent
out to retrieve Victor meant death. Victor’s, most certainly; maybe everyone else’s too. Without knowing what Victor had altered, there was no way to fix what had been done. The architects of Project Wildfire hadn’t thinned the herd: they had altered it. Made it deadly and given it a singular hatred for humanity. Sullivan had resigned himself to this eventuality when the team had not returned. They were as capable as any of the few hundred men serving as military at the base.

The only thing that would prevent the temporary safe-house the base represented becoming a prison was adaptation. In some ways, it occurred to Fred, nothing had really changed.
Wildfire
had given them a world ready for the taking, and those in the bases were better off than the poor bastards out there in the crumbling world; better positioned for the clean-up operation.

What the people at the base needed was knowledge. They had some, but they needed more.

Fred drew himself up to his full height. Age had shortened none of his bones, and he towered over several of the men that stood alongside him. In an impeccable silver suit, his appearance among them was startling, and he looked the more threatening despite the fact that they carried guns.

Fred needed the
ir guns because more knowledge was on its way down to him, taking the elevator down to the main subterranean entrance of the base. Sullivan and his men formed a semicircle, training their weapons on the doors as they slid aside with a metallic rumble.

Fred grinned broadly.

“Mr McIntosh,” he said warmly. “
Do
come in.”

*

Jake had a gun of course, but his wasn’t raised, and all eight of theirs
were
. He hadn’t really believed that he would just be able to slip into the base without being noticed. Hoped it might have taken a little longer, though.

The elevator doors had opened onto a large foyer.
Sparsely decorated, all sleek metal and polished glass. Given the option to build a hideaway while the world collapsed, the people in the base had chosen to make their home look like an office building with a prestigious address.
Disappointing.

About the only thing livening up the décor were the eight men pointing guns at
him, and the tall old man whose suit looked like it had grown out of the silver floor of the place.

“You know my name?”

“Please drop that gun, Jake. It is Jake, isn’t it?”

Jake let the rifle fall from his grasp with a clatter. His eyes never left the old man in the ridiculous suit’s face. He
would
answer.

“You have an eminently recognisable face
, Jake. We have software for that.”

O
f course
.

“Mine is somewhat recognisable. More so than most here, that’s certain. My name is Fred Sullivan. Yours is Jake McIntosh.
Or Alex McIntosh. I suppose that depends.”