I hit level ground and kept running across the grass. My lungs burned. Tears streamed out of my eyes and I wasn’t sure if I was crying or if the exertion was making them water. My mind was filled with pure panic. He had found the hikers behind me up there. Killed them. Surely the sounds of screaming meant he was killing them. And when he was done, would he come down after me?
Three shapes appeared in the mist ahead of me. I slowed down and approached carefully. What if that madman wasn’t alone? What if there was a cult of killers? I had seen that on a TV show I couldn’t remember the name of right now. If there were three of them, I had no chance. I couldn’t run anymore. I was done.
“What happened, man?” Mike’s voice had never sounded so good.
I went over and leaned on him, panting, trying to catch my breath. “I… there was… mad hiker… attacked… fell.”
“Whoa, man. Take it easy.”
Lucy and Elena looked more worried than Mike. I don’t think Mike would be worried if he were abducted and woke up in the trunk of a serial killer’s car. He’d probably wait until the killer opened the trunk then give him a shit-eating grin and say, “You don’t want to kill me, man.”
And knowing Mike’s luck, the killer would probably reply, “Yeah, you’re right,” and let him go free.
Knowing my luck, I’d probably suffocate in the trunk before the killer even opened it.
I managed to get my breathing from panicked to just heavy. “There’s a crazy person back there,” I said. “He attacked me but I tripped over a rock and rolled halfway down the mountain. I got away but there were some other hikers behind me. I… I don’t think they made it.”
“What? Are you sure?”
I shrugged. “I couldn’t see anything because of the mist but I heard screams.”
“Ah,” he said. “Screams of terror or surprise? Maybe they knew the guy. Maybe he jumped out of the mist to scare them. He thought you were them and he jumped out at you by accident.”
“It was no accident and the screams were screams of terror. I’m not stupid, Mike. He really attacked me. His face…” I tried to recall exactly what his face had looked like. “The flesh was blue. His eyes were yellow.”
“Sounds like you got attacked by a smurf.”
Elena laughed.
Lucy spoke up for me. “Come on, this is no laughing matter. Alex looks scared. What if there really is a crazy person back there?”
Mike tried to look serious but I could see he didn’t believe me. He was such a dick at times. “Then I guess you should call the police, man. And we’ll have to wait for them to arrive. You’ll need to give a statement. They’ll take forever asking you questions. It’s already getting dark. I don’t want to be putting up the tents at midnight.”
“What if I call them anonymously? I just tell them what happened and hang up. They’ll come out to investigate but we’ll still get to the camp site on time.”
He shrugged. “Sure thing. Just don’t stay on the line too long. We need to get moving.”
“I won’t.” I dialled ‘999’ on my phone and waited, listening to it ring at the other end.
I waited two minutes. There was no answer. “I thought this was supposed to be the emergency services?”
“Maybe they’re busy,” Lucy offered. “It’s Saturday night. They probably get busy on the weekend.”
I hung up and redialled. The phone at the other end rang and rang but nobody answered. I looked at the screen of my phone. Everything looked fine and I had a signal. “There’s nobody there.”
“I’ll try on my phone.” Lucy took her phone from her pocket and dialled. She flicked her long blonde hair from her ear as she placed the phone there. I didn’t hang up, letting the ringing go on and on. Lucy listened to the same thing on her phone for at least three minutes before she hung up. “Nothing.”
“Well, we need to get moving,’ Mike said. “You can try later.” He set off along the path.
I caught up with him. “You don’t think it’s strange that the emergency services number isn’t working?”
He shrugged. “Like Lucy said, they’re probably busy, man.”
Elena took Mike’s arm and looked at me with something like pity in her eyes. “Don’t worry, Alex. The world isn’t ending.”
I sighed and dropped back to where Lucy was marching behind them. She gave an occasional glance into the mist behind us. At least she believed me. “Don’t you think it’s weird that there’s no answer from the emergency services?” I asked her.
“It’s strange. Maybe it’s because the signal is bad here.”
“But I could hear the ringing sound. I was connected.”
“Maybe there’s a fault on the line or something.” When she saw frustration on my face, she added, “We could try again later.”
“Something doesn’t add up,” I said. In fact, I was hoping it didn’t add up because if there was a connection between the strange radio broadcast earlier, the mottled blue skin and yellow eyes of my attacker and the fact the emergency number was dead, then something was seriously fucked up. Get a hold of yourself, Alex, I thought. Maybe these are just a bunch of unconnected incidents. Maybe you’ve been playing too many video games and you aren’t thinking clearly. This unfamiliar environment has affected you, not to mention the fact that you are walking next to Lucy Hoffmeister right now.
That thought drained all my confidence away. My throat went suddenly dry. I had talked to her easily a moment ago because my mind had been on other things. Now that I thought about talking to her, I couldn’t do it.
She sensed my discomfort and looked at her phone, pretending to be interested in something on the screen.
I took out the radio and turned it on. The station crackled and emitted white noise. I rotated the tuning dial, seeking a voice from the outside world. There were no live stations.
“The signal here really is bad,” Lucy said.
“It isn’t that. See that green indicator? That means the radio is tuned to a digital channel. There’s just nothing on the channel.”
“Try a different one.”
I adjusted the tuner.
A woman’s voice came through the static. Her intonation was flat, as if she were reading from a script. “This is the BBC emergency broadcast. Stay in your home. The military and police are dealing with the current situation. Stay inside and lock all doors and windows.” A pause, then the recorded message was repeated. “This is the BBC emergency…”
I ran up to Mike. “Listen.” I turned up the volume.
“…And police are dealing with the current situation. Stay inside and lock all doors and windows.”
“What the fuck, man?”
“It’s the Emergency Broadcast System. They only use it if something really fucking bad has happened. We’ve got to get home. We can’t be out here in the middle of nowhere if something’s happening.”
He stopped and looked me in the eyes. “Alex, is this a joke? Some sort of prank?”
I shook my head. “I swear it isn’t.” The EBS continued to repeat on a loop.
“Turn that fucking radio off.”
I did so gladly. I couldn’t stand to listen to it any longer, either.
“Maybe it’s a test,” Elena suggested. “They test these things all the time, right? They have to know it works in case they need it in a real emergency.”
“Yeah, they do that all the time, man. They close underground stations and practice for biological warfare and shit like that.”
“Not on every station. I can’t get anything else at all on the radio. No music, no news, nothing.”
He took out his phone and jabbed at it. His eyes flickered over the screen and his face went pale. “Oh, fuck,” he muttered.
Elena put her head on his shoulder and looked at his phone. “What is it, Mike?”
“There hasn’t been an update on the internet news channel since two hours ago. It just says ‘Virus Outbreak.’ Nothing else. There’s nothing else.” He pressed the
screen on his phone a few times. “I can’t get shit on here.”
“We need to go back,” I said.
“Alex is right,” Lucy added.
Mike ran his hands through his hair and paced back and forth on the trail. “We should keep going. Make camp. It’s a lot farther back to the cars then it is to the camp site. If… if the shit really has hit the fan we might be in the best place out here. It’s getting dark and it’s going to rain. We need to set up camp. Come on.” He stormed off down the trail. Elena went running after him.
Lucy looked at me. “What do you think?”
“He’s probably right. If we went back to the cars now, it’d get dark before we got anywhere near them. I don’t fancy walking over the mountains in the pitch black.”
“Me either.”
We set off after Mike and Elena. Lucy was quiet for a while, lost in her own thoughts, but then she asked, ‘Alex, what do you think has happened?”
“I don’t know. If it’s a virus, how could it spread so quickly? I heard a news report earlier that mentioned a hospital in London and a doctor in quarantine. But when we left home this morning, there was no mention of anything on the news.”
She went quiet again then said, “I’m scared.”
I looked at the darkening sky.
Something told me this was the end of the last normal day ever.
Life was never going to be the same again.
Chapter 3
We set the tents up quickly. The trail led us around the side of the mountain Mike called the Cribyn then to a flat area of grass where we would spend the night. Mountains surrounded us and a rocky ravine ran off down a steep slope. It felt isolated. If the world had gone to hell, isolated could be good.
As we put together the steel poles and threaded them through the nylon loops as quickly as we could, I tried to piece together the fragments of knowledge I had. A viral outbreak. All media dead except for the emergency broadcast. A warning to lock all doors and windows.
It was that last fragment that scared me.
If a virus had somehow broken out from a London hospital, even if that virus were deadly, why were they telling people to lock their doors?
My mind went to places I didn’t want it to even consider going.
The infected.
Whatever this virus was, it had already spread enough to take out the radio stations and the internet. Was it worldwide? None of us could get any internet on our phones. In theory, that might just mean that the service providers in this area were down.
Or it could mean that the whole world was affected by the virus.
We erected the first tent and I looked at the flimsy fabric dome held together by hollow steel tubes. No protection. Not from the infected.
Jesus Christ, Alex, stop scaring yourself.
But even Mike had gone silent. He moved on to the next tent and started fitting the poles together. He had brought two tents, one for the boys and one for the girls. We placed them close together. It doesn’t matter how close they are, I thought, if someone comes up that ravine and attacks us, we’re as good as dead. Huddling together like frightened animals won’t help us.
I imagined a horde of infected men and women with blue skin ripping at the tents with sharp nails and teeth. Not stopping even when those nails and teeth were ripping flesh.
“Alex.”
I looked up. “Yeah?”
“Let’s get inside. It’s starting to rain.”
I nodded.
We shoved our rucksacks in one tent and the girls’ in the other. Mike and I climbed into ours and zipped up the door just as heavy drops of rain hit the tent. Slowly at first, then faster. Like a thousand fingers drumming on the fabric.
We unrolled the sleeping bags and laid them out on the tent floor. Mike lit a kerosene lamp and hung it from a hook on the ceiling.
“You girls OK in there?” he shouted.
“We’re fine,” Elena replied.
He looked at me. “Alex, I don’t think there’s really anything wrong. There’s something wrong with the internet, yeah. And the radio. But we’re in the middle of nowhere out here, man. That’s life in the sticks for you. Fuck all communication.”
“What about the emergency broadcast?”
“You must have tuned in to some military test channel or something. I told you, the army train up here all the time. We’re probably in the middle of one of their war games or something. Yeah, that makes sense. That explains the media blackout. There’s like a jammer or something to simulate a war.” The more he thought about it, the more he seemed to convince himself.
I thought about what he was saying. Was it plausible? The army did come to these mountains to train, particularly the SAS who were based at Hereford not too far from here. But surely even they would put up signs telling hikers they were blocking the local phone towers, wouldn’t they? Maybe not. My knowledge of military matters was limited to video games. I had no idea if they would even consider how their training protocols affected civilians.
“I think you could be right,” I told Mike. After all, even my game-addicted mind acknowledged that scenario was more likely than some sort of zombie outbreak. It was the army. We had seen their choppers earlier so they were definitely in the area. I breathed a little easier. It made sense.
“Hey, girls,” Mike called, “I’ve figured it out. The world isn’t ending after all. It’s the fucking army playing around.”
“What do you mean?”
A smirk crossed his face. “I’ll come in there and explain it to Elena. Alex will explain it to Lucy.”
“What?” I whispered.
“Hey, man, I spent the last few hours thinking the world was ending. Now I know it’s not; I need to do something life-affirming, if you know what I mean.”
“Mike, no.” I didn’t care what he did with Elena, it was the fact that Lucy was going to come into this tent that scared me.
He patted me on the shoulder as he left the tent. “Just talk to Lucy. She likes you, man.”
I sat back on my sleeping bag, leaning against my rucksack. I had agreed to come on this trip in a moment of weakness, thinking I would get to know Lucy Hoffmeister and maybe have a chance to go out with her. That moment had long since passed and I knew in the cold light of reality that I didn’t have a chance with Lucy. I wasn’t good at talking to any girls, particularly good-looking ones. I wasn’t scared of them or anything like that, I just got tongue-tied and embarrassed around them. So I went quiet. Then they thought I disliked them because I wouldn’t speak to them.
On my twentieth birthday, Mike had taken me to Amsterdam with a couple of his friends and they had paid for a certain lady in the red light district to help me become a man. She didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Dutch so my communication problem didn’t become a factor.
Mike thought the experience would help me overcome my shyness with women when we returned back home but as soon as we got off the plane, I was back to my old self. The worst thing about it was, I didn’t want to be this way. I wanted normal relationships with girls. I wasn’t proud that I had lost my virginity to a prostitute. I would rather have a real girlfriend.
The door unzipped and Lucy climbed into the tent. She looked as embarrassed as I felt. She would probably rather be anywhere than in a tent with me.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.” She sat on Mike’s sleeping bag, facing me. She had tied her hair up into a ponytail and taken off her jacket. Sitting there in beige cargo pants and a black sweater, she looked even sexier because I had the impression she didn’t acknowledge her own sexiness. The understated makeup, tied-up hair and curves refusing to be hidden by the loose sweater accentuated the beauty Lucy was either unaware of or was trying to play down. The pale light from the lamp made her look ethereal.
“Mike said he’s figured out what’s happening?” she prompted, probably aware of my eyes on her.
“He came up with an explanation and it makes sense. We’re probably in th
e middle of some war game. The SAS train up here all the time. The emergency broadcast, the lack of signal, it’s probably part of their training.”
“What about the man who attacked you?”
“Maybe it was just a guy in a mask trying to scare his friends. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out.” But that explanation sounded lame. His eyes had burned with such fury. Those yellow eyes still haunted my thoughts. Even if the rest was a military exercise, it didn’t explain the man on the mountain.
“You don’t sound so sure.”
I shrugged. “Let’s try the radio again. There might be a better signal here.” I rolled onto my stomach and pulled the radio out of my jacket where I had draped it over my rucksack. I clicked it on.
Lucy got onto her stomach next to me, her blue eyes on the radio. Our hips and shoulders were touching. I could smell her light perfume. Concentrate, Alex.
Static filled the tent. I turned the dial slowly. Silence. Then a voice. “This is the BBC emergency broadcast. Stay in your home. The military and police are dealing…”
“It’s the same broadcast,” Lucy said. “It must have been playing all day. Over and over.”
I searched for more stations but got nothing. Turning off the radio, I said, “So what do you think? Are we in the middle of a very realistic military training exercise or is this for real?”
She looked at me and there were tears in her eyes. “I think it’s real.”
Her conviction made me realize I had been fooling myself. This had to be real. If the army wanted to train their soldiers and deny them media access, they would simply take away their radios, phones and any other devices that allowed access to cyberspace. They wouldn’t blackout the entire area.
“I think you’re right,” I admitted. That admission broke through a dam that had been holding back the emotions inside of me. I thought of my parents, my brother, Joe. My friends. Were they safe?
Reflecting my thoughts, Lucy asked, “What about our families?” Tears rolled down her cheeks.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Please hold me.” She pressed herself into me.
Undead Rain Trilogy Box Set Page 2
