Wildfire Chronicles (Book 3): Psychosis

by K. R. Griffiths

  Crouching, they moved underneath and into the building, and immediately saw the light spilling from the cracks of a door that led from the loading dock and into the store beyond. John made for it, ears straining painfully to catch a hint of movement ahead or behind. Everything was still.

  He eased the door open and peered inside: offices, lots of glass, all floodlit by fluorescent strip lights. He saw dormant computers, stacks of paperwork, stained mugs and sad plants. Nothing was waiting for them. He poured himself through the doorway, making no sound. One by one they filed into the corridor, eyes scanning every corner as they moved.

  Lagging behind, contorting awkwardly to duck under the shutter, Jason and Michael brought up the rear, and when they joined the others in the corridor, Michael clutched Jason’s neck tightly as a thought occurred to him, far too late.

  This is all too easy.

  The lights went out.

  *

  Claire woke up, and for just a second forgot what waking up actually meant.

  I’m still alive.

  She was in a cramped, dark space. Twisting her neck uncomfortably, her eyes widened in surprise.

  The boy sitting next to her in the dark space clamped his hand over her opening mouth, and shook his head firmly. Releasing her, he touched his forefinger to his lips, and jerked his head up. Claire lifted her eyes, and saw the sliver of light above her, a perfect rectangle of it. They were in a bin.

  Her eyes widened, and she nodded her understanding.

  She was still on the street. The boy had seen her, and his attempt at a rescue had ended here, at an island in a deadly sea. She mouthed him thank you.

  He nodded, and seemed to relax a little.

  It was hard to tell in the darkness, and through the layer of filth that covered his skin, but he looked a couple of years older than her. Ten or eleven. It dawned on Claire that she was probably filthy too; she hadn’t seen her reflection in a week.

  They sat there, statuesque in the filth, for what felt to Claire like an eternity, trembling every time something shuffled into the dumpster with a thud, expecting at any moment to feel the lid being ripped open and the monsters coming in.

  Finally, when the sliver of light around the lid of the bin had all but gone, and dusk had fallen, it was the boy that moved, rising up slowly to peer through the gap like a periscope.

  He sat back down carefully.

  “I think they’ve gone,” he breathed. “They move like that now, in flocks, like birds. Back and forth. Until they hear someone. Have to be really quiet. They don’t seem to know otherwise, they…can’t see.”

  Claire nodded.

  “Thank you so much, I don’t remember –“

  “You fell,” he whispered. “From the roof. I think you were freerunning.”

  He grinned, and Claire felt her own mouth split in a smile.

  “They were all still going into the pub, I dragged you in here.” He puffed out his chest a little and smiled broadly.

  “But where have you been hiding? Shouldn’t we try to get there?”

  He looked a little crestfallen.

  “Uh…”

  “Oh!” said Claire, and he lifted his palms, wincing, bringing her volume back down.

  “You’ve been hiding here?”

  He nodded glumly.

  “For how long?”

  “Since it started.” His eyes hit the floor.

  Claire caught the next question in her throat. Hunger was at the forefront of her thoughts, but staring around the dumpster, she realised asking what he’d been eating the past week probably wasn’t wise.

  “I’m Pete,” he said, extending his digits for an oddly formal handshake.

  “Claire,” she said, and he grinned, before his eyes filled with concern.

  “You fell pretty hard. Are you hurt?”

  The truth was that Claire’s hip hurt like nothing she had ever felt in her eight-and-a-bit years, and her head was doing its best to catch up.

  She shook her head firmly, eyes flickering only a little at the pain of the motion.

  “You think we should find somewhere else?”

  Claire nodded.

  “I do, too.”

  The lid of the dumpster was heavy plastic, and it took all Pete’s strength to lift it, and to balance it as he gingerly propped it against the wall.

  They peered over the side. The roads looked to have cleared, the creatures apparently concluding that their prey had escaped. They clambered out.

  It was a simple twist of fate: Claire had no way of knowing that the bottle had snagged on the hem of her pyjamas, no idea until her leg was already over the side of the dumpster and she noticed the unfamiliar weight, and by then gravity took the bottle away from her and, with a smash, the week of careful dumpster-living Pete had endured was undone.

  Claire was out of the dumpster even as the blood was draining from her face, and for a brief second her gaze caught Pete’s and she saw her terror reflected in his eyes. And then they were running.

  Pete’s legs burned from several days of immobility, but he pumped them like well-oiled pistons when he saw the first of the Infected loping around the corner of the pub. He didn’t need to look to see if Claire was following: he could feel her presence beside him, heard her panting for breath alternating with his own as they ran.

  The open street would kill them; they both knew it, and so they bolted as one for the archway that led to the small underground car park that served the high street shoppers and filled every Saturday afternoon with cars and muttered curses.

  Inside there was a lift, but Claire dragged Pete away from it, her eyes wide with remembered fright, and they burst through flimsy swinging doors into the stairwell, throwing themselves down the steps as fast as their balance would allow.

  They descended two flights, to the basement level. Only a few cars were parked there, the harsh lighting casting long shadows from them, turning the floor into a chessboard of light and dark patches. In several of the lighted areas, Claire could see blood; in one, a severed leg, just sitting there, as though its owner had only put it down for a moment.

  There was no way out. Just the angled stair they had come down. Snarling erupted through the doors two floors above them, and Claire knew what the sound meant: they were trapped.

  Pete pointed frantically: a small hatchback stood in the centre of the car park, the driver side door wide open. Pete sprinted over and leapt inside, and Claire landed on top of him. She pulled the door shut as quietly as possible and they both held their breath, watching in horror as creatures began to emerge through the doors, fanning out, flickering in and out of sight as they moved under the lights and into the shadows.

  You will not scream, Claire thought, and then the lights went out, plunging the car into impenetrable darkness.

  *

  The electrical grid serving the UK, the lifeline that was warmth and light, the blood that pumped through the veins of every man, woman and child in the country, finally coughed out its last breath a week after the small army of people required to keep it running abruptly had their shift ended. In major cities the severing of power proved catastrophic and subtle, like a belly wound. The loss of power was fatal, but the death of the country was to be slow, an inevitable decay that would be punctuated by explosions, like boils bursting on rotting skin.

  Darkness fell.

  Chapter 12

  The base located at the heart of the Northumberland National Park was a splinter in the skin of the world; a jutting intrusion driving down twenty-seven levels into the earth like an inverted skyscraper.

  Construction had begun in 1971: an endless stream of mighty trucks arriving to pour millions of tonnes of concrete down into the bowels of the country, leaving and returning incessantly like bees visiting their hive over a period of many months.

  To the vast majority of the nearly four thousand people that now inhabited the base, it comprised of just twenty two levels: even within the most secret of cabals, there were so
me who knew more than others. The existence of the lowest five levels was known only to a select few.

  Some even knew the locations of the twenty other such bases that blemished the earth, and had a rough idea just how many people would be left when the project was completed, but all were drawing up their plans, carving up their particular slice of the planet that would be born when the fire burned out: Wildfire, boiled down to its essence, was a coup. Humanity had been doing it since the notion of hierarchy first dawned on the species. This was simply a new weapon, a genetic dirty bomb detonated everywhere simultaneously. Small, invisible Armageddon.

  It was meant to have a lifespan. Wildfire was supposed to have officially ceased operation entirely some forty-eight hours earlier. But in the hive of activity that was one of the base’s five secret research floors, the minds that had worked for years to perfect the ultimate cleansing of the planet had known that the train had come off the rails a long time before that. Each passing hour merely underlined the scale of the failure: the infection was supposed to spread and then cannibalise itself. The Infected were meant to kill each other. They didn’t.

  Victor fucking Chamberlain.

  Fred Sullivan had been part of the human race for seventy-three years and counting, and in that time he’d seen plenty go wrong. Nothing though, in quite the all-the-dominoes-in-a-line fashion that Project Wildfire had. Even with the benefit of hindsight, it would have been difficult to pinpoint the event that set the ball rolling on the chain reaction of bad decisions and worse luck that had led to the clusterfuck, but Victor Chamberlain was at the centre of it all.

  The man had been a nobody; just a programmer with an inflated sense of importance. All but invisible eight years earlier, when he had actually stood among them, but now Sullivan knew every contour on the man’s face. Everything stemmed from a problem in the guidance system of the canisters that didn’t even seem to affect anything. The guidance systems performed flawlessly because Victor’s addition to the code was a trickster: lurking in Guidance, focused on Biology.

  Letting the manipulation go undiscovered had been a grievous error. Letting Victor slip away when his work was done was a catastrophe. He just hadn’t been important. Then.

  The loss of contact with the team Sullivan had sent out to retrieve Victor meant death. Victor’s, most certainly; maybe everyone else’s too. Without knowing what Victor had altered, there was no way to fix what had been done. The architects of Project Wildfire hadn’t thinned the herd: they had altered it. Made it deadly and given it a singular hatred for humanity. Sullivan had resigned himself to this eventuality when the team had not returned. They were as capable as any of the few hundred men serving as military at the base.

  The only thing that would prevent the temporary safe-house the base represented becoming a prison was adaptation. In some ways, it occurred to Fred, nothing had really changed. Wildfire had given them a world ready for the taking, and those in the bases were better off than the poor bastards out there in the crumbling world; better positioned for the clean-up operation.

  What the people at the base needed was knowledge. They had some, but they needed more.

  Fred drew himself up to his full height. Age had shortened none of his bones, and he towered over several of the men that stood alongside him. In an impeccable silver suit, his appearance among them was startling, and he looked the more threatening despite the fact that they carried guns.

  Fred needed their guns because more knowledge was on its way down to him, taking the elevator down to the main subterranean entrance of the base. Sullivan and his men formed a semicircle, training their weapons on the doors as they slid aside with a metallic rumble.

  Fred grinned broadly.

  “Mr McIntosh,” he said warmly. “Do come in.”

  *

  Jake had a gun of course, but his wasn’t raised, and all eight of theirs were. He hadn’t really believed that he would just be able to slip into the base without being noticed. Hoped it might have taken a little longer, though.

  The elevator doors had opened onto a large foyer. Sparsely decorated, all sleek metal and polished glass. Given the option to build a hideaway while the world collapsed, the people in the base had chosen to make their home look like an office building with a prestigious address. Disappointing.

  About the only thing livening up the décor were the eight men pointing guns at him, and the tall old man whose suit looked like it had grown out of the silver floor of the place.

  “You know my name?”

  “Please drop that gun, Jake. It is Jake, isn’t it?”

  Jake let the rifle fall from his grasp with a clatter. His eyes never left the old man in the ridiculous suit’s face. He would answer.

  “You have an eminently recognisable face, Jake. We have software for that.”

  Of course.

  “Mine is somewhat recognisable. More so than most here, that’s for sure. My name is Fred Sullivan. Yours is Jake McIntosh. Or Alex McIntosh. I suppose that depends.”

  Jake’s eyes narrowed dangerously as the old man’s mouth gave a hint of a smirk.

  “You’re a murderer, misters McIntosh.”

  Fred tutted, and shook his head disapprovingly.

  “It takes one to know one,” Jake said, and the oddly childish retort made Fred blink in surprise. He roared a laugh.

  “Quite so my boy! But I’m so much more efficient. Take him.”

  He turned, striding away from Jake, grinning as he felt the heat of the man’s psychotic gaze burning into his back.

  The armed men advanced on Jake, and he saw something he’d only just gotten used to not thinking about: plastic handcuffs. With an affable smile, he strolled forward, and held out his wrists. Meek surrender had worked for him once, three years earlier, when a fresh-faced uniformed police officer had stumbled upon him.

  They expect a fight, and a struggle to cuff a man’s arms behind his back, you provide a mental cue to keep the hands in front. It had worked that time, and then he had no knife up his sleeve.

  His fingers curled inward, the base of his thumb grazing the cool steel.

  “Take the knife too,” Fred barely raised the tumbling gravel of his voice as he reached elevator doors twenty feet away; didn’t need to. It carried.

  “We’re not amateurs here, Mr McIntosh. And you represent something of rare value to us. Your stay can be cordial, or it can be something more…fun. But your love of knives and killing will get you nowhere down here.”

  Fred took his hand from the elevators doors, letting them smoothly erase him.

  Jake had the barrel of an assault rifle pressed up under his jaw, felt strong hands clamping onto his arms. Two heavy boots crushed his toes, rooting him to the spot. He felt the knife being plucked from the makeshift sheath he had attached to his forearm.

  Finally, the gun released its grip on his throat, and Jake was allowed to lower his chin, and his eyes came to rest on the man directly in front of him. Late forties, bulky, sharp eyes nestling in the shadows cast by craggy lines cut deep onto a worn-leather skin.

  “Ripley, head of security.” The shadows on the man’s face grew deeper as he grinned. “And personally? I think your stay will be fun.”

  The butt of the rifle arrived without warning, jabbed sharply from his blind spot, smashing into Jake’s left temple and the room blinked out of existence.

  *

  The basement level of the car park stood in absolute darkness.

  The car shuddered a little every time one of the Infected stumbled into it, as though recoiling at their touch. With each vibration Claire felt her heart trying to evacuate her body via her throat, and was sure that it was just a matter of time before the thumping beat in her chest gave her away.

  She held her breath, releasing it in tiny instalments, praying that the air escaping from her lungs was not as loud as it sounded to her ears. In the impenetrable gloom, she could not hear Pete breathing, couldn’t see him either. The darkness and silence was otherworldly;
she began to feel as though she were trapped in a coffin.

  Once, in a different lifetime, her mother had visited a spa and tried out an isolation tank: when she told Claire about it, she’d said the experience had been relaxing. Claire thought it sounded anything but.

  She wasn’t scared of the dark; not exactly – she was confident she’d outgrown that half her life ago – but she had a fertile imagination, and darkness acted like an accelerant, and the notions that grew in her mind did so at an alarming pace.

  She imagined that the creatures outside were slowly lining up around the car, facing them, patiently waiting for the moment that they dared to make a sound before finally swarming over the car. Cold sweat dotted her brow, and she felt droplets running down her back. Her young mind frantically attempted to come up with some prior experience to help her deal with the situation; came up empty.

  Just as she was certain her terror was going to induce a heart attack, Pete found what he had been searching for in the dark: the controls for the headlights. In his father’s car the switch was to the right of the steering wheel. He found the lever on which the switch sat and twisted, and the headlights flooded the area in a bleak, brilliant light.

  They were all around the car, a wall of flesh closing in; chaotically moving in and around each other like bubbles in a glass of cola, as if some music that Claire and he could not hear was playing, propelling the things on in a grisly, dripping ballet.

  The sight was horrific, but in some ways being able to see them eased Claire’s howling nerves a little. Pete had found a solution to the dark while she was still paralysed by fright – or maybe his terror was simply even starker than her own. The light did nothing to disturb the infected men and women swirling about in the car park: they saw nothing.