Psychosis (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 3) (26 page)

Gwyneth
pursed her mouth.

“No need for the tone, son.” She said, and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to focus.

She shook her head.

“I can’t feel them. They’re gone
, miles away from here.”

“For now,” John said, and turned to Rachel. “Come with me, I’ll need your help for this. And I don’t want you thinking I’ve run away again.”

He grinned as Rachel scowled darkly.

“Help with
what
?”

*

John’s plan was as simple as it was terrifying: enter every flat in the building, turn on the gas and wait upstairs with his lighter.

“If they come and we’re still here, we blow the place. If we get moving first, this can be our distraction. Light a candle on the top floor and when the gas reaches it…”

They had turned the entire building into a time bomb.

“Now we just have to get out.”

For a moment Michael stared at John, astonished. At the insanity of the plan, at the fact he and Rachel hadn’t even bothered to ask what anyone else thought before they implemented it.

“We need to stop running,” He growled at them. “
I’ve been running away in panic ever since this first started. All running is doing is putting us in harm’s way.”

“No,
you
need to stop running, Michael,” John snapped. “Because your fucking legs don’t work and this reunion was always your goal. This is
not
my goal. I’ll stop running when I reach a place I think I can defend. This isn’t it.”

Michael opened his mouth, and felt the angry reply catch in his throat. As he remembered the ruins of the castle he’d seen
on the hill leading into Aberystwyth, an idea formed in his mind like smoke. Difficult to grasp, but he could see it, coalescing.

“You’re right,” he said, and savoured John’s surprised expression.
“But do you have any idea where such a place might be?”

John glowered.

“Well, you’re in luck.
I
do,” Michael said.

He turned to
Gwyneth.

“What’s the quickest way to the harbour from here?”

Gwyneth frowned.

“First right, second left,” Pete chirped confidently, and beamed at
Michael.

“Light your candle, John,” Michael said. “And let’s get out of here.”

*

Gwyneth
had protested at first. Had only given in eventually when she saw the tears filling Claire’s eyes at the prospect that the old woman would refuse to leave her home.

When they emerged from the apartment block and into the night air, and she heard the distant
sound of the Infected approaching and felt the familiar
itch
of their presence, she decided that running wasn’t such a bad option after all.

The others
were faster, and she puffed hard as her old legs struggled to keep up with them, gradually falling behind. She was surprised to find it was John, the one who acted like ex-military and reminded her of the way her husband had been all those decades earlier, who slowed to match her pace.

“
Better not suppress that itch in future. Sensing them is no good if you choose not to.” He panted with a reassuring grin, and Gwyneth snorted a laugh despite her aching lungs. The creatures would be closing on them, but they weren’t in sight yet. The group rounded the last bend on their short journey and the harbour loomed into view. There were around thirty small yachts and fishing boats gently nudging each other in the dark water. Very few looked big enough to accommodate them all.

“That one,” Michael said, and pointed at the largest of them. It looked like a miniature replica of the sort of pleasure yachts that billionaires had flaunted in a previous world. It would have an engine in addition to the sails he saw curled up along the masts, and which he doubted any of them had any idea how to operate.

The six of them rushed onto the boat, and John stooped to unwind the chain mooring it, while Rachel sprinted into the cabin.

A few seconds later
John heard the engine roar. And choke.

And die.

John paled, and shot a look up at the streets leading to the harbour. The noise of them was louder now, the humming; the thunder of their footsteps. They were close. Getting closer with every passing second.

John rushed into the cabin and found Rachel staring at him in shock.

“I think it’s got no fuel,” She said, her voice cracking.

John glanced at the dials around the wheel; didn’t need to twist the ignition to know that she was right.

Shit.

He raced back out onto the deck, Rachel at his heels, just
in time to see the first of the Infected entering the open harbour area, hurtling toward the water and the waiting boats. There was no time to run, nowhere for them to hide.

“Push!”
John screamed, and heaved against the dock. The boat lurched out a few inches. It wouldn’t be enough.

The
chaotic mass of death was a hundred yards away.

Fifty.

Rachel felt it happening before she saw it. Felt the movement as Jason leapt from the boat, and in an instant understood what he was doing.

“Jaso
n, no!” She half-screamed, half-sobbed.

He turned to face the boat, and for just a fleeting moment, Rachel thought she saw her brother again, saw him struggling to find her through haunted eyes.

“Sorry, Rach,” he said thickly, and placed his enormous hands on the side of the boat, pumping his powerful arms forward, casting the boat off into the harbour, the momentum he gave it moving the boat away from the wall foot by foot until a hint of current caught it and pulled it away.

Rachel screamed wordlessly as she saw her baby brother turn to
face the incoming horde, pulling out his trusted pipe-and-knife combination, and charging to meet them with a yell that sounded oddly like relief.

For a second she saw his massive form swinging as the tide broke around him, and then the sight of him was lost, submerged in
flesh, and Rachel screamed.

When the things
reached the harbour wall, they simply ploughed over the side and into the murky water, the waves caused by their impact pushing the boat away from the dock and out of reach.

Only one made the leap across and caught the railing
, pulling itself up onto the deck and charging Gwyneth to the floor with a crash before John tore it away from her and threw it into the sea, and then the time bomb they had left in the heart of the Aberystwyth ticked down to zero and sent a pillar of fire into the night above the town with a roar like distant thunder.

Jake woke to the fresh scent of dawn approaching and the wet chill of the earth under his back. His misshapen muscles ached, as though he hadn’t used them in days. Feeling the creak of his bones as he flexed his arms, he guessed that might not be far from the truth.

He remembered the running, and then nothing, like someone had simply whipped out his batteries
and plunged him into darkness. He staggered to his feet, and gnawing pain in his stomach informed him that whatever he had become, he still had to eat. He wandered for a time then, stopping to drink deeply at a river, and finally spotting a deer that he was on before it could react, ripping chunks of the beast away and chewing thoughtfully, feeling his energy returning slowly with each bite, as if the meat were petrol being poured into an empty tank.

Jake
sat heavily on the grass and glanced around, trying in vain to pinpoint his location.

Trees swaying softly in the breeze that carried the morning toward him.
Hills in the distance.

He hadn’t gone far, was most likely still in Northumberland
, though he could not be sure. When he had eaten his fill, he tossed the carcass to one side and cocked his head, feeling the strange rush of power surge through his deformed body.

He could feel them out there
, shambling around; flawed prototypes to his finished article. Different to the way the humans felt somehow. The presence of the Infected in his mind was an outrage that he would not tolerate. All would die. Human and Infected alike. Eyes narrowing, he focused his thoughts on recognising the itch of their presence in his brain; concentrating.

And then he felt something strange in the far-off distance, something that drew his attention like a magnet: a strange pulse of energy
that made the new sense he didn’t quite understand ripple in recognition. It lasted for a moment, and then was gone, leaving an echo of a feeling reverberating in his head. Not the Infected. Not human, exactly, either.

Whatever it was, it was aware of him, scanning him like an x-ray machine.

His leapt to his feet, facing south, eyes narrowing.

*

It took a long time for the lapping waves to pull the boat out into the Irish Sea and away from Aberystwyth, longer still for the glow of the fire in the night sky to finally fade as sunlight crept over the horizon to the east.

None of them talked for a long time. Rachel sobbed a while, and didn’
t shrug off the comforting hug that Claire gave her, but her eyes remained fixed on the deck, and Michael thought he saw rage cloaked in her gaze. His heart ached for Rachel even as he made a mental note that he’d have to keep an eye on her.

“Will she be okay?”
John asked Michael, and nodded at Gwyneth, passed out on the deck where the infected creature had felled her.

“I think she’s just unconscious.
No bites, no other injuries I can see.”

John nodded, and continued to struggle with the sails
, as he had ever since they had cleared the harbour. He cursed as he pulled a rope and the small sail he’d almost sent up to catch the wind collapsed back down.

“
You want to share this plan of yours?”

“You were right,” Michael
said. “We can’t keep running, but we have to find somewhere safe. Our species is being slowly exterminated. We’ve been poisoned. We need to fight back.”

“You have somewhere in mind.”

Michael nodded and looked north.

“Caernarfon.
Stick to the coast, keep heading north and we’ll see it.”

“What’s in Caernarfon?”

“Caernarfon Castle.”

John
pondered this for a second and nodded grimly, and then finally the sail he’d been wrestling with shot up to catch the wind and the boat skimmed across the black water, heading north.

*

Time proved Michael right: they wouldn’t have missed the castle even under normal circumstances: it stood imperiously on a hill overlooking the ocean and the small town of Caernarfon, guarding the Menai Strait: a thin channel of water that separated mainland Wales from the island of Anglesey a half-mile or so off the coast.

The castle
was large and imposing, built at a time when the English King wanted a symbol to demonstrate his might to the barbarian Celts that battled him across Wales, and mostly it had survived the ravages of time, appearing almost as forbidding as it once must have.

The exhausted group on the boat wouldn’t have missed it, but the beam of light shooting up into the sky from the castle ensured they did not.

“There are people there,” said John, and from his tone Michael could tell that the fact made him wary.

“Good,” said Michael
, staring at the signal that shot up into the dark sky. “We’ll need numbers if we want to survive.”

“And if they’re hostile?”

Michael grimaced and pointed at the beam of light.

“It looks like they want company.”

John nodded, but the doubt remained.

A groan from
Gwyneth startled them, and they stared as the old woman slowly eased her eyes open, wincing at the pain in her head.

“I felt something,” she said, when she realised they were looking at her.

Both men frowned in confusion.

“Something out there
, while I was asleep. Like
them,
but worse. Much, much worse.”

“Close by?” John asked.

“I don’t know, I don’t think so,” Gwyneth said uncertainly. “But I know it sensed me.”

She stared at each of the men in turn.

“And it’s coming.”

*

Deep in the earth, under the layers of blood and bone and terror that the monster had left behind, the panic room had become an office, of sorts. Nowhere else felt as safe. Blinking monitors and the soft emergency lighting filled the room with shifting shadows.