Shock

by K. R. Griffiths

  Shock

  K.R. Griffiths

  Copyright © K.R. Griffiths 2013

  All rights reserved

  Also by K.R. Griffiths

  Panic (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 1)

  Psychosis (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 3)

  Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4)

  Trauma (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 5)

  Reaction (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 6)

  www.krgriffiths.org

  This one’s for everyone that read Panic

  Thank you.

  1

  Bodies everywhere. Pieces of bodies, to be more precise. The oozing, glistening lives of what looked like dozens of people reduced to smears and stains on the trees; obscene puddles on the ground.

  John Francis took in the scene, trying to remain as impassive as possible, at least externally.

  Inside, his guts churned. He’d seen bloodshed before, of course. Hell, he wouldn’t be anywhere near his current job – or this godforsaken place – if he hadn’t. He’d seen bodies in the desert, punctured by bullets, exposed; the sand creeping over the wounds as though trying to preserve the modesty of the dead.

  At its most extreme the violence he had witnessed took the form of a roadside device, drawing human flesh and fragmented steel together like some terrible magnet. That had been bad enough. Nothing could quite describe the feeling of seeing a severed human leg sitting on the ground in front of you, hearing the dumbstruck screams of its former owner, so John never tried. When people asked about those days spent in that Hell of baking sun and baked sand, which wasn’t very often, John let his eyes bore holes into them until they went away.

  None of that was like this.

  That was violence with an agenda, no matter how plain wrong anyone thought it might be. This was violence on a massive, almost cartoonish scale.

  Explosives had been used, that much was obvious. Guns too. Small calibre, high rate-of-fire. Edged weapons? Almost certainly. Teeth? Fingers?

  The bloodbath was inexplicable and slippery; skipping away from the rational mind’s grasping attempts at comprehension.

  John looked at the carpet of entrails and gore that covered the forest floor, felt his stomach lurch. He had been briefed on what to expect, they all had, but nothing could have prepared him for this. What they had seen from the chopper en route had been unsettling enough: great swathes of the countryside they passed over seemed to be burning, the towns and cities pockmarked by craters and eruptions. It looked like something directly from Hollywood; a huge budget blown on special effects.

  The end of the world is manmade. Batteries included.

  John shook the thought away.

  When the chopper had landed outside the tiny town, John had thought he had it all under control. But up close…Christ.

  The violence was an expanding universe, spreading out in all directions. From the look of it, the infected, reduced to mindless animals, had begun to tear at anything that moved with whatever they had to hand, and then someone had waded into the midst of it all, armed to the teeth like fucking Rambo on crack.

  Well, not just someone.

  Someone in particular.

  He cast a glance around the group. The faces of the team were grim, stoic. John wondered if he was the only one feeling like the hinges in his mind were rusting over.

  “Fucking chaos.”

  The Cap’s voice, low and even, cutting through the still air. The first words he’d spoken since they left the chopper at the clearing.

  “You get anything from this, Hound?”

  They all had codenames, to be used at all times. It had seemed like overkill, given the situation, but still, orders were orders. Just animal names, which they picked themselves. Hound was the best tracker they had, hence the name. He was wiry, intense. Scary eyes. John trusted him instinctively.

  Hound shook his head.

  “Looking for a trail in this is like looking for an appendix in a, uh, forest full of fucking dismembered organs, Mouse. I’d guess maybe we’re close, as for which direction…”

  He shrugged.

  ‘Mouse’. The Captain’s idea of humour. John kind of liked it despite himself. He had expected the Captain to go for Lion, Tiger, Bear, Shark. Some typically macho shit like that, but the choice had proven a canny one, generating a belly laugh among the team and helping to dissipate some of the tension that had built up in the hours after they had learned they were to leave the safety of the base on what was, none of them liked to admit aloud, probably a suicide mission.

  All six of them had followed the Captain’s lead and picked their names with heavy irony once they boarded the chopper.

  The pilot, Ash, went for Butterfly. In addition to Mouse and Hound (“Sounds like a pub name,” Butterfly had giggled, sending another roar of laughter through the group) there was Flea, the smallest of them; Rabbit, named for what he declared were his usually successful attempts to fuck anything that moved; and Panda.

  John had made the mistake of calling himself Cat, because he was the quickest among them. Clearly not quick enough however, to realise that the name would inevitably be amended to ‘Pussy’.

  The Captain’s shoulders slumped, almost imperceptibly.

  “Looks like we’re doing a footsearch then lads.”

  “Shit, Cap,” Rabbit mumbled glumly. “You’d think the assholes in charge might have left us some form of communication as a contingency you know? They really have to dump all the GPS satellites? Sent us back to the damn dark ages here.”

  Panda snorted. “You reckon those assholes know what they are doing Rabbit? We wouldn’t be here if they did. Hell, we’re meant to be tucked up safely, guarding nerds and bastards sitting on solid gold chairs, right? And yet here we are: ‘safety’ lasted less than a week and we’re out in this shit already. And given who we’re looking for, I’d say the satellites are the least of their problems. They fucked up mate, big time. And he got out years ago, I heard. This is a fuck up that’s been a long time in the making.”

  John nodded. He wasn’t alone then, they all felt it, that unease deep in the gut. They had been sent here out of desperation. Their presence was a dice roll.

  John had gambled on infrequent occasions. Never won.

  Mouse was letting them get it off their chests, John knew it. He had been a highly decorated soldier, a devout believer in authority and the chain of command. Mouse had been a leader, but he didn’t strike John as a thinker. He would lead the team to the gates of Hell itself.

  Orders.

  “Alright lads, stow it. We’re here, we have a job to do and we’re doing it. We know the bastard is underground someplace, and we know it’s close, close enough that he popped up to empty a few thousand bullets into these miserable fuckers. Either he’s part of this mess, or he has returned to his little nest. We move out, five metre spread, and we move quiet. We all know what noise means.”

  John thought back to the chopper landing with a shudder.

  The town had been almost entirely dark as they had circled overhead, only a faint glow from the embers of a huge fire that had nearly burned itself out in the centre of town providing any illumination. The streets appeared still. It had looked to John, with his face pressed up against the chopper windows, his cheeks numbed by the heavy vibration of the engine, like something from a museum.

  It reminded him of one of those historical towns preserved by some well-meaning charitable society or other to give intrigued onlookers a glimpse into the past. It was true of St. Davids as well, he had supposed. True also that this place was now just another piece of history, a relic of a time that, although it had passed only recently, certainly did not look like it would be coming back.

  It was different to the bombed-out, crumbling settlements he had seen in the desert. Different
and the same.

  The chopper had circled three times, the men inside searching keenly for movement and seeing none in the dark land far below, before finally settling down on farmland a mile or two from the town.

  They came from the trees before the rotor had even begun to slow: ten, perhaps fifteen of them; drawn toward the shrieking engine. Oblivious to anything else. Guided missiles made flesh.

  “Do it quietly!” Mouse had hollered over the fading roar of the engine, sliding the door back and charging out of the chopper, unsheathing his sword.

  The weapons had seemed ridiculous to John at first, and he hadn’t been alone in thinking so, but their usefulness quickly became apparent. The damn creatures weren’t deterred in the slightest by weapons; couldn’t even see them. Knives would have allowed them to get too close. Knives meant death or infection. Guns were noisy, and would bring more of them down upon you until the bullets ran out. The length of the swords - and their silence - gave the team a chance.

  They were clumsy with the weapons, untrained and faintly ridiculous, but the swords were effective: the mindless horrors running straight into the wide arcs of swinging steel, their deaths a chorus of whispers cut into the air and dull, wet thuds. Barely loud enough to hear above the wind, silent enough to ensure they drew no further attention once the chopper engine hum had died away into the night.

  The chopper ride had been full of talk about zombies, about the walking dead. The man who had sent the team to St. Davids had promised they weren’t dealing with reanimated corpses here. There was nothing supernatural about the mission.

  Staring at the fallen bodies, John had known the intel had been correct.

  The creatures died in exactly the same manner any human cleaved in two by a sword would die: messily, instantly. They weren’t reanimated corpses. They were humans, and the difference was all the more unsettling.

  What the hell was John a part of? What had these men, these rich bastards wielding science like a weapon, done? To reduce a human being into a blind, shrieking predator, willing to impale itself on the business end of a sword to get closer to its prey?

  John drove the point of his weapon into the neck of a twitching shape at his feet, a middle-aged woman wearing a homely beige cardigan. One of her feet was bare, the other still locked snugly inside a bloody slipper. As her movement had ceased, and the field finally became still, he found himself wondering about her. Somebody’s mother; granny maybe. Probably home baking or watching quiz shows or gardening at one moment, a remorseless killer the next. Christ.

  “Pussy!”

  The Captain’s voice; raised a few degrees above room temperature. John shook away the thoughts and returned to the present.

  “Move out.”

  John measured out a gap of five metres or so from his nearest two colleagues, and began to advance, stepping carefully around the chunks of gore that littered the ground at his feet.

  The ‘search’ was laughably short, barely ten feet of progress into the trees made before matters devolved into chaos.

  John knew, as soon as he heard the distinctive snick five metres to his left, how woefully underprepared they really were; how all their weapons and all their training had been rendered useless by a situation they never had a chance of controlling.

  In the split-second following the snick John had time to hear Panda cry “Shi-“ before his voice was lost in the deafening roar of the landmine erupting up through his body. The blinding flash that accompanied the explosion took a grisly snapshot of the forest around the men.

  Fractions of a second later, the concussive blast ploughed into John, an invisible juggernaut that lifted him off his feet and deposited him in darkness.

  *

  To most men it would probably have been remembered as the night they took on a pair of knife-wielding thugs with their bare hands. To John it was simply the night he met her.

  When he got a chance to look back, he realised it was that chance meeting that started it all.

  Six months back in the country he had been protecting for the best part of a decade, and John had found himself sleeping in an old friend’s garage, working for a pittance as a bike messenger, darting through the streets of London carrying paperwork from one businessman to another, and finding that the drivers on the cramped streets were almost as deadly and difficult to avoid as the bullets had been.

  With every rotation of the pedals, John felt a deep resentment building within him, every patronising ‘thanks mate’ from some smarmy twenty-something in a thousand-pound suit dumping a little more coal onto the fire burning in his gut.

  It was the anger, more than any sense of chivalry or heroism which made him act when he saw her. By then, he just wanted to take his rage out on something, on anything.

  He was cycling through Farringdon, one of London’s would-be ‘hip’ districts, all business HQ’s and trendy, retro pubs.

  He saw her coming out of a restaurant maybe a hundred yards ahead. Hell, every man on the street saw her: a tall platinum blonde in a knockout dress with a face just famous enough that you knew it, but didn’t quite know why.

  As the eyes on the street swivelled toward the blonde woman, John’s eyes picked up something else: a quickening of movement in the bodies on the street. Two men were hurrying toward her. He might not have noticed, but for the fact that both men were reaching inside their identical leather jackets as they moved.

  They got to her seconds before he did, pulling out the knives. One of them grabbed her by that long hair, yanking her head back, exposing her throat to the blade gleaming steel kissing her neck almost tenderly. In the distance, a few hundred yards down the street, a black transit van roared around the corner of Hatton Garden and onto Clerkenwell Road, weaving through the traffic at speed.

  A kidnapping, then. Sometimes two plus two made four.

  John didn’t spend any time debating his next move. If he had, the survival instincts that had served him so well throughout his life would surely have kicked in and demanded that he leave the situation well alone. Instead, his mind filled with bleak, bottomless rage at the city; the packed streets; the fucking bike, and he decided to act.

  The woman was screaming; facing him, eyes wide and fixed in horror as John ploughed the bike straight into her. He felt the crunch rather than heard it; probably he had broken something.

  If she lived, she’d forgive him.

  The important thing was that the grip on her hair had been broken: the man holding the knife, the blonde woman and John all crashed together to the ground.

  The men had knives; John had surprise. In his experience, awareness had almost always proved more useful than weaponry.

  He was on his feet before the fallen man had even realised he’d been floored. John turned to face the second attacker, the one who had been busy waving at the black van, not even seeing John approaching silently like a torpedo. Mouth agape, the man stared at John for a second, the knife dangling from fingers distantly attached to a hopelessly slow mind.

  It was long enough.

  John went low, delivering a heavy kick to the inside of the man’s knee, grimacing in satisfaction as he felt the bone shift beneath his foot. The man was only halfway to the floor when John plucked the knife from his fingers, reversing it, smashing the handle into the man’s nose, sending a small explosion of blood across his face; turning off his lights.

  The other one would be back up by now. John ducked before turning; felt the air moving as the knife whistled through the air where he had been seconds before.

  People always aimed high. Predictable.

  John drove the point of his knife into the man’s thigh, and as the man began to fall, John met him on the way up, the ridiculous bike helmet he was forced to wear crashing into the kidnapper’s chin. He was out before he hit the floor.

  It was over in a matter of seconds.

  Long enough for the van to close the gap. John shot a glance at it as he got to his feet, saw the window sliding down smoothly, and
knew what it meant. Guns.

  He grabbed the woman’s hand and dragged her out of her shocked stupor and back into the restaurant, half-running, half carrying her as the bullets laced the unfortunate diners who’d gotten there early enough to get tables by the window and spattered their lives across expensive lace tablecloths.

  Into the kitchen, through the back door, into the alley behind the restaurant, into the nearest open door, past a woman standing outside it smoking, her eyes wide, through a small office, ignoring the outraged shrieks of surprise, out onto the next street.

  Gray’s Inn Road. Only a few hundred feet from the attack, but thanks to the uncompromising streets of London, slow moving and full of traffic, it was probably far enough.

  John slowed to a jog, still dragging the woman, ignoring her whimpers of pain, and turned into a small convenience store, moving to the back, well away from the windows.

  “You’re hurt. How bad?”

  The woman gritted her teeth, eyes shimmering with tears.

  “My hip. I think you broke it.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  The woman affected a pout, and John felt it tugging at his genes despite himself. She was astonishingly beautiful, large eyes and lips, perfect cheekbones under a dazzling cascade of blonde hair. She looked like she’d been born, fully formed, on Photoshop.

  A model, he supposed, though he still couldn’t place her. He imagined that pout had worked a spell on many helpless men before him.

  “Who are you?” he asked. “What did they want with you?”

  “It’s not me they wanted,” she mumbled, wincing in pain. “I’m just a way to get to my father. Who the hell are you? You don’t look like a cop.”

  “That’s because I’m a bike messenger.”

  He smiled, before looking up sharply at the door.