by Paul Kane
All I can remember are the hands, so many hands pulling him back out of the chopper, scratching and punching him; savaging that poor bastard. I made to get out and try to help, but it was already too late for him. I needed to get airborne as quickly as possible. There was a jolt, and I looked back to see that some silly tosser had run headlong into the tail-blade, sending bits of themselves all over the place. That was it; no more. I worked the collective – basically looks like a handbrake – and foot pedals, and we started to rise. The affected were clambering all over the landing skids, weighing us down. I shoved the cyclic – that looks like a joystick – forward, though, and we started to move towards the edge. A few of those crazies fell when we cleared it, but most of them stopped – staring at the chopper from the rooftop, some raising hands as if bidding us a fond farewell.
It was only after I’d been in the air a minute or two that I realised one had climbed into the back through the open door, and was in the well between the rear and front seats. A woman with bald patches in her mousy hair, face burned – like acid had been thrown into it – reached around and grabbed at me. I lost control, the chopper falling towards the ground. I wrestled with my passenger, at the same time trying to wrestle control back of the squirrel. In the end I punched backwards, hoping to hit her – but simultaneously gave a sigh of relief and felt sick to my stomach when I heard the crunching of bone as her nose broke. The grip released, I could fly the chopper upwards once more, but first I shoved the cyclic sideways sharply – causing the woman to fall right out through the back door again. She landed awkwardly, half on grass, half on concrete; her arms and legs creating a Swastika effect.
I levelled out the helicopter, giving a satisfied grunt when the back door slammed shut again, and continued on over the grounds. It was only now I was free of it, that I could see more of the effect of the fire from the outside – some of the windows on the lower levels of the facility had been smashed, letting out thick gouts of smoke. A few of the vehicles in the car park were aflame as well, and now that I was flying towards the fencing, I saw some of those guard dogs tearing into bodies – whether they’d actually killed the men or were just ‘playing’ with them after the fact was impossible to tell.
One thing I did know, the whole thing was a mess.
I was aware of something sparking off to the side, more gunfire. Someone at the gate was taking pot-shots at the chopper. God almighty, was this ever going to end? I veered off and away, climbing as I did so, hopefully out of range. Leaving the nightmare of that place behind me.
As I flew dead ahead I realised that nobody was going to come to those people’s aid, not somewhere as secret as that – not unless I notified the authorities. So, the first thing I did then was get on the radio, trying to hail someone… anyone. I thought I heard a tinny voice answering on one of the frequencies, but after that all I got was static. I kept trying for a little while, all the time moving forwards in a straight line, passing over patchwork countryside and narrow roads below – a chopper was much quicker than driving round all those snaky bends. When the radio went completely dead, I decided to keep going until I found the nearest hint of civilisation and take it from there. I had pretty much a full tank of fuel, according to the gauge; all I had to do was let someone in charge know once I arrived there. Simple, right?
First off, I was much further away from anywhere than I thought – took me a good hour or more to reach the nearest town, and I saw no cottages or houses between the facility and that place I could try. Heaven knows what state the facility would be in by the time I called up the cavalry. It didn’t look the largest of towns, but still I offered up a silent “thank you” when I saw buildings: warehouses and shops and fast food places; shielded on the far side by a large river, over which a bridge had been planted.
The closer and lower I flew, though, the more I saw what state the town was in. Smashed storefronts, rubble in the streets. One van was even upside down, either because it had hit something or been flipped – which must have taken several people to do. In short, it looked just as ravaged as the hellhole I’d escaped from. I think I’d assumed that whatever had happened at the facility had been contained to that place alone; it never entered my head that this might be a more widespread thing; that it might have happened anywhere else at the same time.
Yet I saw evidence of the same thing here – dead bodies everywhere. Live ones too, only they were running around, acting in that lunatic way I was familiar with. People beating each other with fists and rocks, mutilating each other with teeth and blades; others had stripped naked, fucking out in the open – not just couples, but dozens of them in scenes that would have made Caligula blush.
I couldn’t stop here. I wouldn’t find the civilisation I was looking for here. Only death and depravity, a new Sodom and Gomorrah. I’d already decided to move on to the next town or city when the chopper gave another lurch. Wasn’t anyone inside this time, no crazies in the back seat – nobody shooting at me, either. No, this was something happening internally. Something engine-related. The rotors above me began to slow down, the nose dipping as we fell; an alarm sounded, loud and annoying. I was right over the town, over the danger zone – I couldn’t drop here… Couldn’t, and yet I was; it was out of my control.
The chopper began to spin, then to roll… Over and over. I’d forgotten to strap myself in, hadn’t had time when I first got behind the controls and had been too busy with other things afterwards, so I rolled with the machine – hitting the roof, being smashed against the floor. The collective struck my side and I cried out in pain.
At some point the rotors just broke off, and the tail hit the side of a building, but that’s pretty much all I remember before I blacked out.
Before I thought I’d died.
Stop. Playback.
CHAPTER THREE
Record:
Wow – that was a lot to bombard you with, wasn’t it?
Took a while to play that all back – it’s almost dark now – and thought to myself not bad, Adam. I think I more or less captured what a shitstorm that escape from the facility was, then the crash. I hope I did anyway, hard to tell. Nobody to play this out loud to here, but me.
Dramatic wasn’t it? Tense? Got the blood pumping? Yeah? That’s great…
Pause.
Resume record:
More or less ready to continue, though it’s been hard gearing myself up to carry on. I might joke about it…you could tell I was joking, right? About how dramatic it all was. But actually, reliving all that… I shivered at one point. I never shiver. Never get cold, the SKIN sees to that. Regulates body temp. And looking back, listening to all that again, I know how lucky I am. What a million to one shot it was I’d be wearing the SKIN in the first place when…
You want to know what happened, don’t you? After the crash. Here I am babbling about my feelings, back then and when I heard my story again – but I left it on what they might call a cliffhanger in those old serials I used to watch as a kid on Saturday morning TV. Well, not that much of a cliffhanger because you know I made it, I didn’t die. Haven’t yet anyway. But here’s why I didn’t back then.
When I woke up, it was still black… quite dark, at any rate. In fact, I had a little trouble realising I was awake to begin with. I blinked a few times, brought my hand up to a sore spot on my head. Should have come away wet, by rights, but the SKIN had contained the wound underneath, was already recycling my spilled blood, speeding up the healing process. Nothing’s ever wasted.
I heard movement off to my left and made to get up, remembering where I’d crashed – what had happened at the facility, what had been happening below me in the town. If I was still alive, I wouldn’t stay that way if the affected had found me. I let out a moan at the pain in my side where the collective had banged into me, but fortunately hadn’t torn the SKIN.
“Don’t move!” said a voice; male. “I’m warning you!”
If he was speaking to me, and not trying to either kill me or sh
ag me, then I figured I was okay. Slowly, I turned to look in his direction – and I saw the guard’s gun, the one that had been in the back of the chopper, pointing at me for the second time. It was in the hands of a guy of about fifty – with bushy eyebrows and a beard to match – wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and light grey trousers. I raised both my hands in surrender. “There’s no need for that. I’m okay.”
He looked at me sideways on, with suspicion. The light in the room flickered and it was then I realised it was coming from some candles. One quite close, a few more back there in the gloom, like they were deliberately keeping it dim.
“Where… where am I? How did I get—”
The man’s eyebrow’s met in the middle, and his grip on the rifle tightened. “I’ll be the one asking the questions.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Who are you?” was the first one.
“My name is Adam Keller.”
“Where are you from?”
“What originally? Well, my mother was from—”
“Don’t get bloody smart with me.”
“I wasn’t.”
It went on in that same vein for a little while until we got to the meat of it. I told him that I’d come from a hospital – thought that would be better than a heavily guarded R&D facility – about an hour away, but not to ask me where, because I didn’t even know where this place was.
“Hospital? Don’t know of any hospitals that far out, just our local one,” he said. I was trying to get a handle on his accent, not that it would tell me anything – he might have moved to this town for all I knew. Northern was about as close as I got.
“Well, you asked me…”
“That why you’re dressed like that?” he used the barrel of the rifle to point to my shorts.
“Er… yeah, that’s right.”
“Where’d you get the gun?”
“What?”
“This gun.” He shook it for emphasis. “The one we found in the wreck with you.” Now we were starting to get somewhere. We… so he wasn’t alone, and I had him to thank for dragging me out of the crashed chopper before any of the affected could get to me. “Military hospital, was it? You some kind of soldier?”
“Some… something like that,” I replied.
“Ask him about that stuff. What’s wrong with his skin?” Another voice – female – came from the back of the room.
“Who—” I began and promptly got cut off.
“Answer her,” said the man. “What’s wrong with you, why’re you scaly like that?”
From a distance, they might not have noticed – but up close, dragging me back here, they couldn’t fail to clock the SKIN. “It’s… kind of hard to explain,” I said.
He looked at me, puzzled. I wasn’t sure myself what exactly this thing was, so I sure as hell couldn’t explain it to this guy; he needed Weeks, and I’d left him hog-tied and barking in that corridor. “There something wrong with you? That it? That why you were in the hospital?”
“Yeah… that’s right.”
“It’s not… you know, contagious is it?” This was the woman again.
“No,” I promised her, shaking my head. “No, it’s not.”
“That why you’re bald, too?” The man again.
“Listen, doesn’t matter. What matters is that most of the people back there where I was being… treated just went nuts, same as they did here. Something’s happened and—”
“Something’s fucking happened, all right!”
“Dennis!” The woman scolded. “You’re scaring Jane.”
Now I knew there were at least three of them.
“She should be bloody well scared,” said the man, but his tone had already softened.
“If he’s with the military, maybe he knows what’s going on,” the woman said. And then, suddenly, she moved closer to one of the candles. She was slightly younger than the man, her hair shoulder length. It was hard to tell in that light, because everything had an orange glow, but it looked a reddish colour – probably from a bottle. She was holding someone’s hand: a little girl, presumably Jane, who was wearing a school uniform – black jumper and trousers, white shirt, and clutching a backpack. The pig-tails completed the look of innocence.
I shook my head again. “Sorry lady, but I have to confess that I don’t have the first clue what’s happening – or why.”
“Carrie,” the woman said then. “My name is Carrie McCall.”
“Pleased to meet you, Carrie. You too, Jane.” I nodded at the girl, then the man. “Even you, Dennis. I think I have you guys to thank for saving me.”
“We were looking for more folk like us,” said another voice now, and a young man in his late teens or early twenties with a much darker complexion stepped forward. He was wearing jeans and a hoodie, his hair close-cropped. “Found you instead. I’m Rakesh.”
“Well, I’m very grateful. And hi Rakesh.” These people were survivors, like me. Maybe the only people in this godforsaken town who were normal – and they’d been doing the same thing that I was trying to do back at the facility, gather together anyone who wasn’t with the affected. Band together to protect each other, to live. To give each other hope.
“Dennis, will you put that thing down before you hurt someone,” said Carrie, and the man finally lowered the rifle… a little. “It’s obvious Adam’s not like—” She paused, unwilling or unable to say any more.
“I’m not,” I replied, filling in. “I’m really not. Can I just ask, how long has it been since you dragged me out and brought me here?”
“A good few hours,” Rakesh told me. “Maybe half a day.” So, definitely night-time out there; maybe even almost dawn.
“And where exactly is here?”
“The White Hart,” said Dennis, with more than a hint of pride in his voice. “Miccleston. My pub.”
Didn’t look like any kind of pub I’d ever drank in, or even got drunk in. But then the more my eyes adjusted, the more light was thrown out by those candles and the more of my surroundings I could make out. Barrels, shelving with bottles on them, boxes of crisps. “We’re in a cellar,” I said.
“Give that man a cigar,” sniped Dennis, pulling up an empty crate and sitting down hard on it; so hard it almost collapsed underneath him.
Not a bad place to hole up. There were provisions at least – and enough booze to make sure you didn’t care that the end of the world was apparently here. No, I told myself, there’s nothing to say it’s happened anywhere else. Just the two places so far that have torn themselves to pieces.
“And you all know each other?”
“We do now,” answered Rakesh.
“Any of you together?” I was thinking Dennis and Carrie surely – they spoke to each other like an old married couple – but apparently not. They lived on opposite sides of town, complete strangers until… I nodded then at her and Jane, thinking they might be mother and daughter; some kind of blood link between them that might explain the immunity.
“I’m… I live not far from her school; I know her mum and dad a little.” Carrie turned to Jane, said: “Sweetie, why don’t you go and do some more of that colouring in? Over there, right next to that candle where the light’s better.” The girl looked at her, then nodded, fishing stuff out of her backpack before heading off across the cellar. Carrie lowered her voice. “When it… The kids were just coming out of school when it happened. I can see them from my window, always makes me smile; they’re so full of energy. Takes me back.” She had a faraway look in her eye, as if she was remembering her own childhood days. “It’s always quite lively, boisterous. Only something was off this time, something not right. The kids were fighting, but then that’s nothing new – only it was the way they were fighting with each other. It was just more…”
“Savage?” I offered.
Carrie gave a nod. “They were really laying into each other, doing some damage. Not just to each other, to themselves as well. One lad was simply standing there punc
hing himself in the face. But it wasn’t just the kids, it was the teachers too – and parents. I watched for a few moments, not really knowing what to do… I got up off the sofa finally when I saw all the blood; when there were kids on the ground not moving. I tried to call the police, but the line was dead. So I got my shoes and coat on, went outside – just in time to see Jane running towards me, terrified. Her mother was chasing her, but she wasn’t trying to get her back, to keep her safe. Sandra had this odd expression on her face, a wild look in her eye, you know?”
I did. I knew exactly what she meant.
“Jane basically leapt into my arms. I think she had a sense that her mother wanted to do something to her as well. I took her back into my house, just as Sandra caught up. She was banging on that door, trying to get in – but she wasn’t shouting anything, just wailing. Screaming and wailing. I held Jane to me in the hallway; she was sobbing into my shoulder. Then the banging suddenly stopped. I don’t know what happened to Sandra, whether she just gave up or someone…” Carrie looked back across at Jane, busily colouring something in, tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth.
“What did you do then?” I asked.
“I waited a little while, but the noise was deafening outside – like a full scale riot or something. When someone put the living room window through, I took Jane out the back door, out into the garden, and we climbed over the fence. Wasn’t until then, until we were making our way through town, that I saw it had affected more than just the school.”
I recalled the images I’d seen as I flew over the place. There was no need for Carrie to go into any more detail.
“I just couldn’t get my head around it. How quickly it had turned… for everything to go to rack and ruin, to go to rot. If Rakesh hadn’t found us, I don’t know what would have happened.” She looked across at the youth and smiled a thank you.
