Shock

by K. R. Griffiths

The next level down was also lit; Jeff blazed a trail again, followed by John and Ash. The bulk of the space on this level was taken up by a small gymnasium: a treadmill, an exercise bike, rowing machine, some weights. All looked well worn.

  Ash whistled, and nodded to the corner furthest from them. Another ladder, leading even further down.

  “How big you think this place is?” He directed the question at no-one in particular.

  “Guy had plenty of time to build it, I suppose,” Jeff mumbled. “And it looks like he knew he’d be down here a long time.”

  John said nothing; he was busy staring at the other part of the level on which they stood: a sturdy-looking closed door. He strode over to it, twisted the handle. Locked.

  “We’ll come back to it,” Jeff said, looking at the door thoughtfully. “Check the level below is clear first. Ash, watch our back. Watch that.” He pointed at the locked door. Ash nodded. Jeff moved to the next ladder, paused a moment to listen and, hearing nothing, began to descend.

  They saw the body immediately.

  The third subterranean floor was notable for three things: large shelves that took up most of the space, heaving with dried and canned food; a small construction in the middle of the room that looked for all the world like a water well and, to the right, through a doorway in some sort of utility area, unceremoniously dumped on the floor, the prone body of Victor Chamberlain.

  Jeff held a hand up, and John translated the gesture instantly: proceed with caution. They approached the fallen man slowly. He was small, greying. No sign of blood. No sign of life.

  When they were close enough John saw the means by which their target had met his end: his neck, livid with bruises, looked like it had been crushed in a vice.

  John stifled a sigh. It hadn’t just been a suicide mission; it had been a wild goose chase. A colossal waste of time and lives. This mission was going to leave John with an identical feeling to virtually all the others he had taken part in. It doesn’t matter who is calling the shots, he thought, people like me end up killing and getting killed.

  “Fuck.”

  Jeff, apparently, was taking the discovery of the body in a less philosophical manner.

  The Captain slapped a hand against the doorframe, hard enough to send a flat echo through the low room. John watched as he withdrew the hand, noticed his Captain clench his fist hard enough to turn his knuckles white.

  They weren’t going to face the anticipated standoff with Chamberlain after all, but maybe the absence of that confrontation would prove more dangerous still: Jeff’s increasing instability was beginning to make John feel distinctly uncomfortable.

  “You find anything?”

  Ash’s disembodied voice, floating down from the level above.

  “Chamberlain is dead,” Jeff responded, his tone flat and emotionless. He trudged back to the ladder and started to climb.

  John followed warily.

  *

  John had agreed of course, though even he couldn’t be sure whether the decision was based on that salary or the possibility of meeting her again.

  What followed was a short period in which he acted as little more than the old man’s driver. He learned his employer’s name – Fred Sullivan – and not much else. Of course, that name did reveal how he had known the man’s daughter: Isabelle Sullivan was a notorious ‘It’ girl, famous for being rich and famous and not much else. She didn’t quite have the profile of a movie star, but a couple of years spent falling drunkenly out of nightclubs with them into the flashbulbs and the headlines meant she wasn’t far off.

  Over the space of a couple of weeks, John realised that he was undergoing a sort of probation period: often he caught Fred watching him slyly as the old man talked on the phone, no doubt gauging how much his driver was listening in to the conversation.

  Mostly Fred visited offices in Canary Wharf; a couple of times John was required to make the longer drive to expansive estates outside London. John never got much of an inkling of just what the old man’s business might be, but the pay was incredible, and Fred had been good to his promise: nothing about John’s days seemed even remotely illegal.

  He moved out of his friends’ garage, got himself a small flat in Clapham. Nothing too expensive. John expected that at any moment his luck would run out, and Fred would decide that two hundred grand a year was way more than he needed to spend on a driver-cum-bodyguard.

  Days progressed, and John felt his guard slipping, even starting to allow himself to believe that this might be real, that maybe he just had been that lucky: an isolated act of heroism rewarded with a genuine shot at a decent life.

  The feeling remained right up until late one night, when Fred emerged from his office at a pace that belied his age, and gasped his orders to John.

  “The airport. It’s starting tonight. Go, GO!”

  John had known that Fred’s business was gearing up for something big. Some merger probably, just another shifting of zeroes on some balance sheet somewhere that would increase the old man’s wealth exponentially.

  It was only when he reached the small, private airfield in Kent as the sun disappeared beyond the horizon that he realised he had become a part of something much bigger.

  The airfield was packed with limousines and eye-wateringly expensive sports cars: John saw a couple of Ferrari’s, a Lamborghini and other exotic machines standing out among the Audi’s and the Mercedes’.

  Beyond the fantasy car park, there stood a sight even more perplexing: there were as many as twenty large helicopters waiting, engines howling, rotors spinning.

  All around John there was activity: perfectly groomed men in expensive suits and diamond-studded women, some dragging children, running from one form of transportation to the next. Along with them, John saw a hundred reflections of himself: men, some armed, some not, escorting their employers onto the choppers. All of them stank of the military, enough that John almost felt for a moment like he was back in the army, on some mission to escort VIP’s to some safe zone.

  Behind him, Fred leapt out of the limo, and gave as close an approximation of a sprint as his ancient knees would allow. John trotted after him, reaching the large black chopper as Fred boarded. This was no civilian chopper, John realised as he approached. Not quite the latest military hardware, but a gunship nonetheless. What the fuck…?

  “Get aboard John, this is it!” Fred cried out, and John heard something in the old man’s voice, something that made him forget everything else. Like rats, John thought, if you discover the rich running from something, the only sensible course of action is to run with them.

  Only as the chopper lifted from the ground, soaring above London, part of a strange metallic flock, did John identify what he had heard in the old man’s tone. A sort of childlike excitement yes, but also something else, bubbling away under the surface.

  Panic.

  *

  The three men stood in the small gym, staring at the locked door. John put his ear to it; heard nothing in the space beyond.

  “We should just get out of here,” Ash said. “Back to the chopper. This situation is FUBAR. There’s nothing for us here.” He shot a pleading look at Jeff.

  Ash, John realised, was stuck in the same predicament as their Captain: both believed they were still members of some mighty military machine. But that machine had collapsed when all the methods of communication on which humanity had relied had crashed – or had been crashed, rather – simultaneously.

  John only had sketchy details, of course; he was just a grunt. Across the course of his career in the forces he had found himself promoted to a position where he controlled other grunts, but he had been under no illusion: there would always be someone above him, someone whose tune he would have to march to, no matter how ridiculous.

  Still, the sketchy details were enough. The idiots at the base had changed the world irrevocably, and now that the proverbial shit had hit the fan, they had discovered that they needed the aid of a man that they had let slip through t
heir fingers years before, and subsequently dismissed as an unimportant lunatic.

  By the time they realised that their plans were to be dependent on Victor Chamberlain, he was just another man that their world had already killed. John had felt the change in the atmosphere at the base; hadn’t needed anyone wearing a suit to brief him that things were going badly wrong.

  The initial wide smiles and self-congratulatory backslapping had dissolved in less than twenty four hours after the initial influx of people to the base. After that, it was scientists and suits scurrying from closed office to closed office carrying clipboards and frowns. They’d lost control.

  John had time to think about all this while Jeff processed Ash’s plea like a heavy meal. His eyes were glazed over. Increasingly, John realised, their ‘Captain’ was there…but not there. Jeff stared at the locked door, nodding absent-mindedly.

  The chopper was still John’s best chance. The base, whatever catastrophic fuck-up the thinkers had inflicted on the doers, still represented some form of safety.

  “Fuck it,” John snapped, and delivered a heavy kick to the locked door. The thud seemed to make the small room shake. A second kick, aimed squarely at the lock, and the door spat away from the frame with a crack.

  The room beyond was lit by small television screens, most showing only static, a couple delivering what looked like a CCTV feed from cameras installed high in the trees outside the bunker. Maybe ten screens in total, clustered around a console heaving with buttons and switches.

  John saw a button marked ‘turrets’, another marked ‘fire’. The landmines they had stumbled across had merely been a part of it. Victor Chamberlain had extensively rigged the land around the bunker with defensive weaponry.

  John smirked. The weapons had been intended to repel a human attack. There would have been no need to use them on the Infected. The better way to deal with them was to sit in the bunker and wait them out. Instead, when one of the sightless bastards had stepped on a landmine, the resulting explosion had served as a beacon, drawing more and more of them to this particular spot.

  The bloodbath in the forest, bodies upon bodies, made sense to John now, though the knowledge that Victor had undoubtedly gone up to do battle with the creatures himself did not. Nor, come to think of it, did it shed any light on how Chamberlain had died.

  Not as a result of an encounter with one of his creations, that much was obvious. They had a preference for teeth and blood and exposed organs. Victor’s death had been sedate by comparison. Sedate and…personal.

  Victor had let someone else into the bunker. Somebody that had wound up crushing the life out of him before leaving. It made no sense. John scanned the rest of the small room. There was a notebook on a low table, and he flipped through it. A quick scan revealed it to be some sort of journal, ordered at first, gradually descending into chaos as he flipped through the pages, ending in scrawls and obscene doodles.

  The isolation had apparently driven the man – unhinged enough to begin with – into full-blown insanity. John sighed. Ash was right; there was nothing for them here.

  Nothing…except…something about Victor’s setup here nagged at the corners of John’s mind. Some feeling that he was missing something important.

  He was busy ruminating on this, feeling around the puzzle in his mind, so he didn’t see it. Didn’t see Ash reaching for the console until it was too late.

  John had only known Ash for about a week, but he knew within five minutes of meeting him that Ash was the kind of guy who loved to play with things. On the base, John rarely saw the man’s hands empty, always fidgeting with something. When he greeted someone, Ash did so by clapping them on the shoulder, a habit that John was sure he’d be sick of almost immediately, but the cheerful grin that accompanied the contact soon relaxed him. Ash was the kind of guy who had to touch something to understand it. Made sense he’d be a pilot.

  John cursed himself for not seeing it sooner, even as it happened. Ash started poking at buttons on the console.

  “What does this-?”

  Ash’s curiosity was submerged in a deafening alarm that seemed to reverberate around the cramped bunker, rising to an ear-splitting crescendo, dying away for a few seconds before starting up again; a keening, mournful howl that made John’s teeth chatter.

  An air raid siren, you crazy bastard…

  The three men clamped their palms to their ears.

  “Shut it off!” Jeff screamed.

  Red-faced, Ash stabbed at the controls again, finally succeeding in hitting the right switch. The alarm died a long, slow death, rattling away into thunderous silence.

  Thump.

  John lifted his eyes to the ceiling even as his heart sank, but the answers he sought were right in front of his face, emblazoned across Ash’s distant eyes and slack mouth.

  Ash had been the last one down into the bunker.

  He hadn’t shut the hatch.

  4

  Life had not been kind to Daley Williams.

  His mother had died in childbirth, and so Daley had been raised by his father, who would have been a hard man under ordinary circumstances, but who proved to be tougher than tempered steel on the boy that had killed his beloved wife.

  Daley grew up alone on the farm for the most part, Father generally finding that there was some urgent business that he needed to attend to, and which did not require Daley’s input in the slightest.

  Never enrolled in a school, Daley instead grew up working the fields and tending the livestock, and tolerating the beatings that followed his inevitable adolescent mistakes. The days became long and insufferable.

  And then Daley died, which proved to be the best day of his life.

  He’d been frozen in place holding a half-full bucket of feed when he saw the strange man tearing across the field toward the farm. A scream caught in Daley’s throat when the figure got close enough for him to see the blood, the ghoulish empty eye sockets. Shocked, he had barely flinched even when the creature had clamped its teeth into his forearm, chewing its way down through flesh to bone.

  Daley had stood in a daze as one of the farm’s dogs, an old Alsatian by the name of Bruce, leapt onto his attacker, knocking the sightless man to the ground. While the two of them writhed on the floor, all fur and blood and teeth, Daley simply wandered away.

  A pressure began to build behind his eyes, something that felt like needles were being slowly slipped into the retinas. As the pain became unbearable, filling every fibre of his body, Daley finally understood what he had to do. Digging his nails into the soft whites and tearing the cancerous orbs out of their sockets felt like the most natural thing in the world. It felt like being born.

  As the synapses in Daley Williams’ mind began to reorganise themselves, old connections snapping only to be replaced, one last conscious thought passed through, insistent enough to linger like a lens flare: find Dad.

  When the creature that Daley Williams became was done on the farm, when every one of the presences that it perceived only as other had been dealt with, it began to wander. Ever increasing circles around the farm, into the forest beyond.

  The walk was directionless, utterly devoid of intention, just a progression of nature, like water slipping downhill.

  Until the noise.

  The noise was close, very close. Muffled, and yet loud enough to Daley’s ears that it might as well have been a jet engine bursting into life at his side. It was a hideous affront, filling him with pain.

  Daley charged at the noise, crashed into something hard that bounced him away, and landed him on the floor a few feet away. Got up. Charged again. Got up.

  At the third attempt, Daley Williams crashed through the obstacle with a sharp crack, and suddenly found himself in the air, falling, landing in a heap.

  Now there were other noises. Noises that made something in Daley Williams scream until his head hurt. And then he could smell them, and the creature that had been Daley Williams was up on its feet, charging forward, roaring.

>   *

  Just a kid, John thought as he scrambled clear of the ladder and swept up one of the knives from the kitchen counter, burying it in the charging thing’s forehead. That was somebody’s fucking kid.

  Screaming above, getting closer. Fucking Ash had killed them all.

  Screaming behind now: Jeff, finally giving up on the struggle to keep his mind intact. Ash was still on the ladder, looking up, all blood drained from his face, John peered down at him, mouth open, and no idea what words were going to fall out.

  And then it hit him.

  The well.

  Suddenly, the thing that had seemed off about this place was glaringly obvious: Victor had built it to defend against humans. Against intelligent beings with the desire and the patience to get in. He had to know that sooner or later such an attack would succeed, no matter how many traps he placed in the forest above.

  He had another way out.

  The human brain can simultaneously carry out millions of calculations. At that precise moment in time John’s brain only needed to process one. There were three men in the bunker. There was no way three men were going to get out. But two might stand a chance, if something bought them a little time.

  Or somebody.

  His body was already performing the manoeuvre before his mind gave it the green light: feet moving by muscle memory, the sole of his right firmly planted, the sole of his left snapping through Jeff’s knee, sending the Captain crashing to the floor.

  “Go!” John screamed at Ash, “Down!”

  For a beat Ash stared at him, dumbstruck.

  Jeff’s screams of pain filled the tiny space.

  “GO!”

  Ash’s face disappeared down to the level below.

  John ignored the ladder, dropping down to the next floor, trusting his knees to take the impact, taking off again before his joints could even send a word of complaint to his mind; sprinting across to the next hole before Ash could get to it, leaping down again.