He awoke to pain.
And when he tried to speak, he awoke to find that his tongue had been removed. The stump that squirmed in his mouth felt like an alien object.
He wasn’t Jason anymore, not really. Wasn’t Voorhees either. Whatever Jason was now existed purely in the cracks that divided sanity from insanity, drowning in an endless lake of pain both real and imagined.
He was tied again, once more posed like a crucifixion. No; not tied. He tried to move his hands and shards of agony that burrowed into his palms made him moan.
Nailed.
Not posed. Actually crucified.
Opening his eyes was a task that seemed almost beyond him. They felt as though they were glued shut. With a force of effort, he persuaded the lids to open. They did so obstinately, in increments, feeling like they might at any moment tear themselves apart as they struggled to unblock the dried blood that glued them together.
When he finally succeeded, the light brought a whole new pain along with it. A pain that seemed to sear his retinas and jab a hot brand onto the surface of his mind.
The view seemed familiar somehow, but the images in Jason’s head tumbled and shifted constantly, never staying still long enough for him to grasp. He saw a large window - smashed - that let in a stunning view of the dark ocean beyond and a wind that froze his bare torso.
Have I been here before?
He searched for memories, but all he found was pain that fizzed like an electric shock.
He looked down at his chest, and saw the rips and the tears that mirrored the carnage he felt inside. His mind was adrift on a river of poison. He trembled as much as the nails driven through him would allow. Even worse than the pain, worse than the horror, was the uncertainty and the fear at being so alone, and so helpless. He moaned again, and looked up sharply when an old woman appeared in front of him.
“There’s my boy,” she said with a benevolent smile. “I thought we’d lost you.”
Jason’s brow wrinkled. He understood the words, but they made no sense. Who was this old woman?
A gurgling moan bubbled from his dry lips.
“Oh, I’m sorry child. We had to put you there to keep you safe. You can’t just go wandering off, you know. It’s dangerous out there, and you’re very special. We all need you here.”
Special?
The old woman stepped in front of him and studied his eyes carefully, as though she was searching for a trace of something she expected to find but could not. After a moment she smiled at him again, and her expression made a hopeful warmth flicker into life deep in his ravaged heart.
“I think you’re ready to come down now, my child.”
She placed her hand softly on his cheek.
Are you my mother?
Jason rested his cheek on the cold, wrinkled flesh of the old woman’s palm, and sighed.
28
Ed surrendered immediately. In truth, he would have surrendered immediately to the man who had - and there was no other way Ed could describe it - boarded his boat like a goddamned pirate, even if the man had been alone. The fact that the man had backup simply made the surrender all the easier to contemplate.
The man talking about sockets was terrifying enough, far bigger than Ed and covered in ominous-looking tattoos. But on the boat beside him Ed saw an even larger man - equally heavily tattooed and glaring at Ed beneath fierce, bushy eyebrows - and a woman staring down at him with sharp, penetrating eyes that made him instinctively edgy. The woman threw a rope ladder over the rail and it landed in the water with a splash next to Ed’s dormant engine.
The tattooed man shoved Ed toward the rope and he climbed it with a sense of rising dread that he imagined prisoners on death row felt when they made their final walk from their cell.
Once aboard the yacht, they circled him like vultures.
“Where are the rest of your people?”
The tattooed man who had boarded Ed’s boat put himself right in Ed’s face and growled the question. His tone left Ed in no doubt that the wrong answer would probably get him killed.
“My…people?”
Ed hadn’t expected the zombie apocalypse to include quite so many unanswerable questions. He wondered, even as he stuttered out the response, whether he was shortly going to be knocked unconscious again.
“Calm down, Ray.”
Ed turned to see a man step out of the yacht’s cabin, who might have been marginally less terrifying than the others if it weren’t for the knives he carried, and backed up against the main mast, wondering how long it would be before he felt steel slicing through his flesh once more.
*
Ray looked to be about two questions away from gutting the quivering kid by the time John stepped in. Torture and intimidation generally provided answers in his experience, but they weren’t always the right ones. The kid looked terrified. Scaring him more wasn’t going to get anybody anywhere.
“Take it easy,” John said calmly, and shot a glance at the others. “He means the people you got this boat from, that’s all. Where are they?”
The kid stuttered and stammered, and twisted his neck wildly to keep an eye on the people around him. His eyes flitted from John to Shirley to Ray and back again.
John sighed, and sat cross-legged on the deck holding his arms wide, and smiled when he saw confusion dilute the fear on the kid’s face.
“I’m John,” he said. “The big guy is Shirley. I shit you not. That’s Rachel, and you’ve already met Ray. Kid over there doing his best to stay invisible is Glyn. Nobody here is going to hurt you. So tell me your name.”
“Uh…Ed.”
“Okay, Ed. The people who own this boat checked us out a while ago, and it seemed, well, a little threatening to be honest with you. I’m guessing you’re not with them, but you have their boat. Where did you get it?”
“Anglesey. A hotel,” Ed mumbled, and John saw everyone else on the boat relax a little at the kid’s tone. “Just across the Strait. Look, I’m not with them, okay? I only know a couple of their names, and I don’t know anything about them checking you out, but I can tell you it probably was threatening because they are fucking psychos. Every last one of them. Anglesey is fucked up.”
John couldn’t help but grin.
“No shit,” he said, and heard Shirley chuckle.
“Everywhere is fucked up, kid,” the big man rumbled.
“Okay,” John said abruptly, and stood, turning back toward the cabin.
“Uh, is that it?” Ed said, looking nervously from John to Shirley.
John shrugged. “I believe you,” he said. “We’ll talk some more. But right now we’re in kind of a rush.”
“So you’re…kidnapping me?”
John laughed.
“I guess that would only be possible if you had somewhere else to be, right?”
He grinned, and disappeared back into the cabin. Moments later the boat adjusted course, and Ed was left to stare fearfully at the others and wonder whether he had just been saved or taken.
*
John expected to hear someone in the cabin almost immediately. He wasn’t surprised that it was Rachel.
“You believe him?”
John nodded.
“Why not? The guy is practically pissing himself just being here. He doesn’t strike me as a great choice to go and infiltrate the enemy, so, yeah, I believe him. He didn’t find us. We found him. He was running. As for that stuff about people acting like psychos in Anglesey?”
He shrugged.
“That sounds about right to me. It doesn’t to you? Seems like it’s pretty much par for the course.”
Rachel flushed angrily.
“He knows more,” she said hotly.
“I don’t doubt it,” John said, staring through the window at the sea ahead. “But we didn’t just go through all that to clear the Infected away from Caernarfon just to waste time chatting. I’m going to have enough of that to deal with when we get back to Michael, and I don’t know how much time we have to waste. I’d
prefer not to push our luck.”
He glanced quickly at Rachel.
“You guys want to carry on talking to him, go ahead. I just didn’t want anyone killing the guy, that’s all. He’s harmless. At least until he shows me otherwise.”
For a moment, John thought Rachel was going to argue on, but she flicked her gaze to the window and the dark landscape beyond.
“He’s scared shitless of you, that’s for sure,” John said with a wry grin. “You see the way he looks at you? I’ve seen guys with that look on their faces before. Usually right after someone shouts incoming.”
Rachel snorted a laugh.
“One scary lady,” John muttered with a chuckle, and winced as Rachel landed a punch on his arm.
Outside the boat, the castle hovered into view in the distance, spilling dozens of flickering lights into the darkness that looked like a cloud of tiny fireflies. John’s fingers tightened around the wheel. Something had happened at the castle, and whatever it was, John suspected it was going to slow him up. If he was right about Sullivan and the navy, they had to leave the castle as soon as possible, and he was going to have to persuade Michael to leave the place he had believed his story was going to end.
He grimaced.
29
“How many people?”
John had to give Michael credit; the guy knew which questions to ask when John pushed Ed in front of the man’s wheelchair. That first one was the most important of all.
It had taken almost an hour for John to wrestle the boat back up the coast. The wind was against him, and every yard gained felt like pulling teeth. The castle hovered in the distance for a long time, without ever really seeming to get any closer. It gave him plenty of time to wonder why the place was lit up like a Christmas tree. None of the possible answers he came up with settled his nerves.
The boat had a small anchor attached to a winch, and John deployed it in a calm spot as close to the mouth of the river that flowed past the castle as possible. He wasn’t sure if he would need the boat again, despite how crucial he felt it was to persuade Michael to leave. The simple fact was that even if Michael agreed, not everyone at the castle would fit onto the small yacht. They would need something far larger.
Once he was certain the boat wasn’t going to drift away, John paused on the deck to survey Caernarfon’s small waterfront. The ancient, twisting buildings, huddling together as though trying to keep warm in the endless onslaught of the coastal wind, gave up no sign of movement. Most of the Infected would have trundled off toward the noise of the explosion, but John knew better than to assume Caernarfon was safe. Any one of the buildings might have one of the creatures trapped inside, frantically trying to figure out how to get through the doors that prevented it from tracking down the source of the distant explosion.
Still, the streets seemed clear. It was a start.
While the others waited, dividing their expectant stares between John and the castle, he rooted around in the various storage lockers on the boat until he found what he was looking for: a length of sturdy rope, long enough to span the river.
Rachel looked at him quizzically.
“We’ll need to be able to cross the river fast,” John explained. “And to transport back whatever we take from the town. I’ll tie this across the river, and we can pull ourselves across on a raft. Not great, but…”
He shrugged.
“Better than swimming,” Rachel said, her eyes darkening at the memory of her last dip in the cold water.
“Right,” John said. “You guys stay here. If the castle isn’t safe - if I don’t come back - pull up that anchor and get the hell away. Okay?”
John glared at Rachel as she looked at him dubiously.
“I mean it, Rachel. If things have gone bad, there will be nothing you can do. Just stay safe until I come back.”
He didn’t give her time to respond. Looping the rope around his shoulders, he dived into the water and swam towards Caernarfon.
Rachel watched as he tied the rope off around a post near the river bank, and dived back in, swimming toward the castle until he moved out of her sight, pulling the rope taut behind him.
The wait felt like an eternity; until Rachel began to wonder how she would even know if John had run into trouble.
Maybe he’s already dead, and I’m waiting here for a ghost.
Almost as soon as the thought formed in her mind she heard splashing in the water, and saw John heading back toward the boat. He grinned and gave her a thumbs-up.
“All clear,” he said, lifting his voice a fraction above the murmuring of the river. “Time to get your feet wet.”
He beckoned the others to follow, and turned to swim back upstream toward the castle’s main entrance. Once they were all inside and the main gate had been shut behind them, John finally let himself breathe a little easier.
Michael began questioning Ed immediately. All John wanted to do was find a room with a door that locked and sleep, but his own words rang in his head. There was no time to waste. He pushed away his exhaustion, wondering idly if he would ever again get to drink coffee.
When Michael started firing questions at Ed, John leaned against the wall of Michael’s room, which had somehow developed the feel of a sort of state area, like the steps at 10 Downing Street or the Oval Office, and listened quietly.
Ed shook his head. “I’m not sure how many there are,” he said. “I only saw a few. Ten at most, maybe less. I didn’t spend much time counting. But I think there were others. They’re in a hotel on the shore.”
“Who’s in charge there?”
“I think it’s an old woman called Annie. All the ones I saw were terrified of her, anyway.”
“They know about the castle?”
Ed nodded at John. “Like I told him, I don’t know anything about it. They were after some guy, they found me instead. I was only with them a few hours. I got the chance to run, and I took it.”
Michael nodded.
“What guy?”
Ed shook his head.
“I don’t know, just some guy, man. He got away from them or something, I don’t know. He was crazy, they were crazy. I didn’t ask many questions, you know? My experience with them was pretty similar to what’s happening right now. Only difference is you haven’t started cutting me up. Yet.”
Ed lifted his jaw in an attempt at defiance, but the gesture was undermined by the fearful widening of his eyes, as if he couldn’t believe the words had fallen from his own mouth.
Michael ignored Ed’s attempt at attitude, catching John’s eye and shooting him an inquisitive look.
“Maybe they aren’t interested in the castle after all?”
John held his hands up.
“I don’t know, Michael. Maybe. It really doesn’t matter right now. The castle isn’t safe regardless.”
Michael sighed.
“We’ve been through this, John. You said you wanted a place you could defend. Where better than here? Where is safer?”
“Not just the castle, Michael,” John muttered in a low, frustrated tone. “The whole country.”
Michael blinked.
“Listen, the guys behind all this, I think they have control of the navy. Nuclear capabilities. Every day that passes tells me they can’t get this situation under control. They will take the nuclear option. We need to get a boat. A big fucking boat, and we need to get away from here fucking pronto.”
Michael stared at him blankly.
“Where are we going to go on this boat?”
“Anywhere,” John said flatly. “Just being at sea will be a hundred per cent safer than being here.”
“This just occurred to you?”
John shrugged.
“I’ve had a lot on my mind.”
Michael stared at him, lost in thought.
“Uh…nuclear?” Ed broke the heavy silence in an apologetic tone, though his eavesdropping had been all but unavoidable. “You mean Wylfa?”
John and Michael both turned to
stare at him.
“What’s Wylfa?” John asked in a low voice.
“Wylfa Power Station?” Ed said in a tone that increased in pitch despite his efforts to keep it under control. “You said nuclear, right? You meant Wylfa?”
The sinking sensation in John’s gut told him the answer before his lips had even had time to frame the question.
“Where’s Wylfa?” he asked.
“On Anglesey,” Ed said in an oh-you-guys-didn’t-know-that tone.
John choked out an involuntary chuckle. Michael squeezed his eyes shut and lifted his face to the ceiling. He looked very much like he wanted to scream in frustration.
“Whole country’s falling apart,” John said. “’Time bombs all around us’. And we set up camp outside a nuclear power station. At least that settles it. We can’t stay here. Doesn’t matter whether Sullivan nukes the country or not. This place is going up in smoke either way.”
Once more silence fell on the group. All faces turned toward Michael. John braced himself for an argument as Michael’s brow furrowed.
“Agreed,” Michael said abruptly, and John’s mouth dropped open in astonishment at the immediate acceptance. “We get what we need from Caernarfon, and then we figure out getting away from here as quick as we can.”
“And go where?” John said.
Michael shrugged. “Liverpool? We need a big fucking boat, right? So we head to the nearest large port. Stay on the coast. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find something on the way. We know there’s nothing south.”
John nodded.
Rachel snorted a bitter laugh.
“Running again,” she said. “At least we won’t have to fight your weird friends across the strait,” she said, drilling her gaze into Ed. He let out a nervy chuckle.
“I’d say they are busy with that guy Voorhees anyway,” he said almost absent-mindedly, and took a step backwards in surprise when Rachel’s eyes blazed at him.
“With who?”
*
The old woman put a rope around his neck, and clutched the other end in her bony fingers. The rope, she said, would keep him safe, and would mean that he would never get lost again.
Trauma (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 5) Page 17
