Psychosis (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 3) (6 page)

“Have you looked outside? I’d say we’re go
ing to want this car on the edge of town when we have to get the fuck out of here.”

He saw the logic of it hit home, and she killed the engine.

*

John Francis
.

The words meant little to him. H
is mind was like a dry sponge. It offered up nothing.

The
small rectangular identity card he had found in his pocket while he had sat propped against that tree all through the fiercely cold night, listening intently until the three figures huddled around the fire had fallen asleep, told him nothing. A name, a long serial number, the name of some organisation – his job, probably.
Chrysalis Systems Ltd
. Suitably generic and utterly unhelpful.

He had worked constantly at his mind, trying to summon up something other than fragmented snapshots, but all he got was a series of images: a blonde woman.
A vehicle exploding in front of him on a sun-bleached dirt road. The soundtrack accompanying the images was always the same, though.

Gunfire.

Remembered shots repeated in his head at the very moment that the massive man sitting opposite him leapt up like he’d received a dose of adrenaline and smashed a lead pipe into the eyeless thing’s head.

Gunfire.

He didn’t know what it meant, but suddenly John Francis was on his feet and moving forward, and he felt a strange sensation building in his gut, a familiarity, like returning home.

*

Rachel’s astonishment at the sudden change in the morning was matched only by self-recrimination.
That was stupid Rach. Don’t do that again.

“Michael can’t walk, stay close to Michael!” she yelled, and lunged forward and up, scooping up a knife and driving
it into the neck of what had been a teenager, all black mascara and piercings, surprised at the way it felt, the way the neck resisted briefly for a moment before letting the knife in. Warm blood spurted out onto her arm, and she felt her stomach heave and staggered backwards.

The thing went down gurgling, still focused on her, st
ill clawing at the air, like its mind had not received the message from its body, or was unwilling to accept it.
Sniffer
…she thought absently, and then her foggy eyes lifted to see Jason obliterating another forehead and John…well…
what was John doing?

*

Military.
Michael knew it as soon as he saw the bare-chested man move, knew it deep in his gut, the way he’d know that he was hungry or that he needed a drink.

Sat on the floor next to the fire,
with the gun beyond his reach, Michael was reduced to limply throwing rocks at their attackers, seething in frustration at his useless body, and he saw the difference immediately. Where Jason was a juggernaut of brute force, each mighty swing of either weapon clutched in his huge hands ending each particular encounter, John fought in the manner that a dancer might show off a well-practiced routine. He was sharp, graceful,
quick
; attacking them high and low, incapacitating them with devastating subtlety. Michael watched as he met them low, bringing them to the floor, and then killing in the next, upward motion. It was breath-taking.

Who is this guy?

There had been six of them, reduced to one in seconds. The last one, launching itself toward Jason from his blind side.

Jason cried out in shock when John deflected the thing
’s jump with a shoulder charge, and it crashed harmlessly past the big man, the snapping teeth and grasping hands missing their mark.

It hit the floor with a snarl, and then popped back up, coming
for him again. Jason caught its neck in one massive paw, and lifted it off its feet.

Michael watched, stunned, as Jason carried the thing to the cliff’s edge and held it there, for several long seconds, peering at it intently, observing every desperate snap of its jaw.

“For god’s sake,
Jason!
” Rachel said sharply in a tone like crushed glass; Jason opened his hand, and the creature fell to its death.

It
frantically grasped upward toward them the whole way down.

“What the hell was
that
?” Michael snapped.

“I know,” Rachel said
flippantly, turning away from the cliff’s edge. “How come you can fight like that John?”

Michael stared at her, eyes narrowed. She returned the look steadfastly.

“Uh…I don’t really know.” John said. “I wasn’t really thinking. Autopilot, right?”

Michael continued to meet Rachel’s eyes. He could read something there, he knew it. She was uncomfortable. She had felt it too, watching Jason. Felt the detached cruelty of it. Still, he thought he understood her look:
I’ll handle it.
He nodded slightly. “I’d say that’s apt,” he said, turning his gaze to John. “You’re military, have to be. That was so,” he paused, searching for the right word, “efficient.”

John shrugged, and Michael
thought he could tell from the gesture that John was speaking the truth: the man really
didn’t
know. Michael wasn’t sure whether that knowledge made him feel more or less secure: on the one hand John’s presence, much like Jason’s, was reassuring: he could handle himself. On the other hand, how was it possible to totally trust someone that didn’t even know themselves whether or not they could be trusted?

A familiar anxiety nagged at him, the uncertainty, that inability to make a decision. He pushed it back. Trusting John might get him killed, but he had a feeling that in the new world, indecision would get him killed quicker.
He remembered the odd sense of liberation he’d felt upon the discovery that his legs no longer worked, as if he had touched the bottom and the only way left was up. He tried to cling to the notion.

“So…” John
said, “Never mind me, can someone fill me in on
them
?”

He waved his bloodied knife at the corpses littering the ground.

He doesn’t know. Doesn’t remember
.

Michael searched for the words, for some way to explain the events of the past few days without sounding like a lunatic.

“Infected.” Rachel said flatly. “Now you know about as much as we do.”

John stared at her, perplexed.

“It started a few days ago,” she explained. “We don’t know why or how. Just suddenly everyone started killing everyone else. It spreads through their bite we think, anyone I’ve seen get bitten jumps up straight away and joins the party.”

John stared, clearly stunned.

“They tear their eyes out first,” Michael said softly, his eyes far away in some memory.

“Yeah, that too,” Rachel agreed. “They tear out their own eyes. It’s a nice touch
.
Extra
terrifying. And then they start…hunting us. They can hear like dogs, probably smell like them too. And they’re utterly insane, blood-crazed.”

She shrugged as if there wasn’t
anything else to say.

“Christ.”

Rachel nodded.

“Yeah, his help would be nice, but
it looks like we’re on our own. And it won’t just be them we have to worry about. You said so yourself Michael,” Rachel said, planting her hands on her hips and fixing her eyes on him.

Michael nodded
, remembering their discussion as they had looked back on the smouldering ruins of St. Davids. “Right,” he said. “Victor.”

Jo
hn looked at Rachel quizzically and Michael, studying the man’s face, thought just for a second that he saw a ripple of something cross his eyes.

“A psycho,” she said
, and the temperature of her tone dropped to zero.

Michael nodded again.
“Yeah, a psycho. And a reminder. People have a habit of finding ways to kill each other. Even with all this going on. The Infected are just one more obstacle to that happening. Someone will find a way to get around it. Killing humans is what humans do.”

By everything that was good and holy Rachel wanted a cigarette,
ached
for a calming hit of nicotine. Felt her mind skittering on the surface of things, refusing to settle for a moment; her tolerance slowly deflating like a punctured tyre. For the hundredth time she checked her pocket, the side that ritual dictated would hold the cigarettes, and for the hundredth time she had forgotten for a millisecond that she had none and felt the crushing disappointment.

It was thinking about that, about the fact that whatever the world was now, it might not contain
cigarettes, that set her mind on course to a troubling destination. Her eyes widened.

“And something else.” Rachel said
suddenly, and nodded her head toward the plume of smoke that still hung in the air to the south. In St. Davids it was fire. At night we saw other fires on the horizon. Other places it will be something else. All the things we surrounded ourselves with, all the technology. The petrol stations, the boilers, the flood defences, everything. There’s no one at the controls.”

Michael pondered
this for a moment, his eyes slowly widened.

“
Exactly,” Rachel said as she saw his awareness growing. “The electrical grid. The power stations. Nuclear sites. If the world is like this, like this everywhere? Then there’s nobody maintaining anything, and that means...”

“Time
bombs, all around us.” Michael said, the full horror of understanding breaking across his mind like a stormy dawn.

“
And no cigarettes
. How much do any of us know about…well…anything?” Rachel said. “I know how to put together a PowerPoint presentation, I know how to fetch tea and coffee for men in suits, I know how to fax. I know how to email. I can order stationary and take minutes of meetings. From the looks of things, pretty much everything I know is obsolete.”

“You know why they rip their eyes out?”

Jason’s voice. They all stared at him, startled. He was, apparently, a few minutes behind the conversation.

“Uh, because they are insane animals?”
Rachel said.

“Maybe,” Jason said. “Or maybe they’re not. Maybe the person they used to be is still in there somewhere, trapped, struggling
to make it back. Maybe they rip their eyes out because they don’t want to see.”

*

“He has to
avoid
stress, the medication can’t work miracles.”

That had been the phrase Alex remembere
d most from the time before things went wrong, when the careful routine they all employed to keep him placid and anchored to reality fell apart. His stability had relied on that routine. When one of the nurses, Robert, had screwed up Alex’s medication, Dr Jackson had unloaded both barrels of her ire on him.
Stable medication, stable environment
.

Stepping out of the car and into Rothbury represented a
serious
deviation from routine. Hell had descended on the town. It looked like the scene of a historical battle re-enactment in which real weapons had been used.

He opened his door, nudging aside what looked like a mess of intestines on the floor outside, and stepped onto the street. He could smell it now, the overpowering stench of blood and shit. He almost thought he could smell the fear in the air, the terror these people must have felt as their sanitised, civilised lives ended in blood and fire. He felt it
under his boots, the slick, slippery cobbles awash with death.

“The whole town is dead.”

Deborah’s voice did its best not to convey the unravelling of her mind; failed.

Alex nodded wordlessly, scanning the streets.
Smashed windows, burnt-out cars, smouldering buildings. A riot? The thought seemed ludicrous: even if the population of Rothbury, elderly and middle class, were capable of feeling strongly about anything beyond their gardens and their Sunday dinners, who the hell riots like
this
?

No explanation that made its way into Alex’s stunned mind sat right, all the options seemingly impossible: terrorism, disease, some fucked-up accident.

“Where are the authorities?” He whispered to Deborah. “There’s no one here. How can something like this happen to a town like Rothbury and there’s no one here? There should be choppers everywhere, media.
Something
. The place is dead.”

He hadn’t intended the
pun, saw her bite her lip and he squirmed a little.

He made the connection just as Deborah opened her mouth, not quite in time to stop her.

This hasn’t
happened
to Rothbury. This is
happening
to Rothbury.

“Hello
?” Deborah cried out.