Trauma (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 5)

by K. R. Griffiths

  What the fuck?

  Jason lumbered through the smashed window, and Rachel burst past John. When she threw her arms around her brother and Jason didn’t even acknowledge her, peeling her away from him like burnt skin and pushing her aside, John realised that the rescue mission had been doomed from the beginning. There was no rescuing a man that didn’t want to be rescued. No helping a man whose mind was as broken as Jason’s clearly was.

  As John looked into the big man’s eyes, he saw no flicker of emotion or recognition. Whatever the old woman had done to him had caused grievous, catastrophic damage.

  “Jason, stop,” John said firmly, bringing the gun around and pointing it at him.

  Jason didn’t stop, and when John heard Rachel shrieking in horror he knew that there was no way he could shoot him.

  Fuck.

  He began to crouch even as Jason swung his massive arm in a punch that would have pulverized John’s face if it had connected.

  John ran to his default response, dropping low instinctively and sweeping Jason’s leg. It was like sweeping a solid oak tree. John felt a little give in the big man’s knee, but not enough. Before he had time to think that getting Jason to the floor was imperative and perhaps impossible, a fist like a sledgehammer crunched into John’s cheek with the force of a locomotive, and his head rang like a bell.

  The world tilted dangerously.

  Move.

  John rolled away from a second punch that whistled harmlessly past his face and lurched to his feet already spinning, delivering a solid kick into Jason’s ribs.

  He heard the breath exploding from the big man’s lungs and followed up the kick with a blur of punches to Jason’s torso. Jason staggered backwards in surprise and pain, and John lined up a kick that would land on Jason’s square jaw and put an end to it.

  “John, stop!”

  Rachel, screaming. Crying.

  John hesitated, and his gaze flicked to her for just an instant.

  It was long enough.

  He didn’t see the punch coming; barely even realised that he had been struck before he was lying on the ground blinking up at the clouds that meandered across the dark sky.

  On auto-pilot, John rolled to one side as Jason threw an enormous punch down at him, springing onto his haunches and shoulder-charging Jason’s knee, desperate to bring him to the deck.

  This time Jason’s leg did snap backwards, but still the big man remained upright, and John felt huge arms wrapping around his ribs like a vice, lifting him away from the ground and smashing him back down. A searing jolt of pain travelled up John’s spine and he gasped. His vision began to fray around the edges.

  “Jason, wait,” John tried to say feebly, but the words were lost in the crunching impact as Jason brought his fist down from the heavens and smashed John’s head into the ground.

  As the darkness claimed John, he heard Rachel crying and an old woman laughing, chuckling appreciatively, as if someone had just told her a vaguely amusing anecdote.

  35

  John woke to a feeling of insistent nausea, almost as if he were being carried along by choppy seas. He blinked, staring up at clouds, dimly aware that it was daylight now, and hadn’t been when he had been smashed into unconsciousness by Jason. His heart pounded out a concerned rhythm.

  At least opening his eyes explained the rolling nausea: one-part concussion, two-parts the fact that he actually was on the sea, on his own boat in fact, though this was the first time he’d travelled on it while being tied down to the deck.

  He craned his neck to see who else was aboard, groaning inwardly at the pain even that slight motion caused.

  He saw Rachel immediately, tied to the boat’s low handrail, staring vacantly at the deck. Her blank expression told John all he needed to know: she hadn’t been able to get through to Jason, not even after the big man had finished rearranging John’s face.

  John heard muttered curses: there were a handful of men on the boat, struggling to comprehend the operation of the sails, apparently unaware that they could move the boom to switch the sail from left to right to catch the wind. John heard the old woman’s voice muttering something he couldn’t quite make out. After a brief moment of struggle, John discovered that he had been tied by someone that knew their way around a knot, and wouldn’t be freeing himself any time soon. He closed his eyes, and let his pounding head fall back to the deck.

  When he opened his eyes again, the boat was anchored near the mouth of the river, and he saw the stone towers of Caernarfon Castle looming above him, and he felt a sickly anxiety rising in his gut.

  *

  "There, Dad!"

  Michael focused on the ocean in the distance, following the direction Claire pointed out. After a moment, he was able to pick out the rippling white smear of the sail against the grey waves.

  When Emma had told him about the strange conversation she'd had with Rachel, and the way Rachel had subsequently disappeared, taking the yacht with her, he had spent a long time putting the pieces together. Rachel had gone after Jason, that much was obvious, what Michael couldn't work out was why. Why then, rather than waiting to plan out a proper attack?

  The answer, of course, had to be John, who had a track record of disappearing on missions of his own whenever he felt like it. As the night had worn on, Michael felt bitter anger flowing freely through him at John's selfishness, mixed with desperate hope that the man was still alive.

  Hour after hour, he waited for the boat to return, and finally as dawn began to break over the horizon, he resigned himself to the fact that whatever had happened on Anglesey - whether Rachel had been right about Jason or not - they weren't coming back.

  The anger Michael felt was, he realised eventually, as much to do with his own helplessness as his grief at two more people dying. John and Rachel had become almost like family, despite how briefly he had known them. They bickered, and Michael was pretty sure John couldn't stand him, but they worked well together, and they had each other's backs. Without them, the idea of travelling north and getting away from Wales seemed overwhelming.

  Finally he gave up on watching the featureless ocean and slept, only to be woken a couple of hours later by Pete and Claire, excitedly telling him that the boat was coming back.

  He rubbed away the fog of sleep in his eyes and shivered at the cold that felt like it had invaded his bones.

  The boat looked to be a few minutes out, approaching the castle in a wide arc that made seeing who was aboard impossible. Something about that angle of approach made him nervous, and Michael told everyone to wait at the gate. He waited with them, and he kept the rifle clutched tightly in his hands.

  He laughed in relief when he heard Rachel's voice shouting to open the gate, and moved to the portcullis mechanism without thinking; without recognising the strange, clipped tone of her voice.

  The portcullis rose with a screech, and Michael nodded to Shirley to push the huge door open. Shirley heaved against the heavy wood with a wide, welcoming smile on his face and light flooded into the courtyard.

  The smile fell away immediately.

  *

  Annie blinked in surprise when she saw the large, tattooed man standing in front of her as the gate opened. She hadn't known what to expect: Rachel had refused to say anything about the occupants of the castle or the man Voorhees had beaten to a pulp.

  Annie knew his name - John - and nothing more, but she had seen him fight, and it had been impossible to miss the steely resolve in his eyes as he had pointed the pistol at her. I've been killing people since long before all this started, he had said, and it had not struck Annie as an empty bluff.

  The threat made him either military, police or some sort of serial killer. The way he had so efficiently taken Voorhees apart before the girl's unfortunate intervention narrowed that short list down even further.

  The girl had spark, Annie thought, and a dangerous, mutinous look in her eyes. Annie would have killed them both instantly, if it weren't for Voorhees. The big man w
as broken, perhaps irreparably, but there was no sense in risking losing her grip on him by executing Rachel.

  So she had settled for killing John, but had been stopped at the last minute by Gareth Hughes' ever-logical advice.

  We can use them to get inside the castle, Annie. Nowhere will be safer than there, Hughes had said.

  He was right, but that didn't make Annie feel any better about essentially being overruled in front of her sons and the rest of what remained of Newborough. Hughes had to be re-educated about his position, Annie decided, and filed his insolence away, determined to revisit it at the appropriate time.

  Annie finally got Rachel to speak for the first time when they reached the castle gate after an irritating swim that Annie thought was no dignified way for a woman of her age and standing to be travelling.

  Rachel had refused for a moment, glaring stubbornly at Annie, and had only relented when Annie pushed the barrel of the pistol into John's forehead.

  Her voice was like a key to the huge wooden door.

  Annie surveyed the small group of people that stood behind the tattooed man that had opened the door. To her surprise the majority of them were young girls. Annie had feared a force of people like John, but the most dangerous of all of them looked to be a man that sat in a wheelchair cradling a rifle.

  Annie had just five people with her, alongside the two prisoners, but all were large men, and all except one were armed with golf clubs. Annie knew Rhys and Bryn would not hesitate to use the weapons if she told them to. Both her sons had come a long way, and shared traits with their dead brother that were blossoming in the new world. They were finally making her proud.

  As for the others...well, the fear of the gun would work just as well on them if they fell out of line. The final man in her group was unarmed, but the sheer size of him would intimidate most people, and Annie did not think Voorhees would betray her, not now that the damaged giant had somehow concluded that she was his mother.

  "Hand over your rifle," Annie said pleasantly to the man in the wheelchair. She jabbed the pistol further into John's temple.

  "Don't, Michael," John mumbled. He appeared to be having trouble staying conscious. Annie smirked at him, and fixed the man in the wheelchair with a penetrating stare.

  "I'll kill them both," she said with a shrug. "Your choice."

  *

  Michael barely heard John's plea. As he stared at the group that stood outside the castle gate, his mind flitted between the present and a past filled with blood and the sound of a baby screaming, and a choice that had led to violence and death.

  He tightened his grip on the rifle, measuring the distance between himself and the old woman, wondering whether he was a good enough shot. A dark, insistent urge to shoot pulsed in his mind, and he fought to control it, focusing on Claire, standing beside him. Everything he had done had been with one goal in mind: keeping her safe. Staring at the old woman's cold, calculating eyes, he didn't think for a second that she would hesitate to kill a child.

  But if Michael started shooting...

  Darren Oliver's words came back to him abruptly.

  We do what we have to do, don't we Michael?

  Michael's shoulders slumped, and he let the rifle fall to the ground.

  "This castle is under new management," Annie said, beaming as she picked up the rifle and passed it to the man that held John's collar. "You'll all have a chance to prove your loyalty. Until then, I'm afraid you'll have to be locked up for a little while. It's for your own good."

  She grinned savagely at Michael.

  "But first, an example must be set," she sneered.

  *

  Kneeling, with his hands tied firmly behind his back, John watched numbly as the old woman and the man who now held Michael's beloved rifle herded the occupants of the castle up against the wall, and told them that if anybody moved, they would die.

  It almost made him smile. Even after everything that had happened; even with their very race on the brink of extinction, it seemed people hadn't changed one bit. Maybe they couldn't. If he closed his eyes, John could almost imagine that he was back in the desert. Only the names had changed.

  It's no wonder we've ended up destroying ourselves, he thought. It's in our nature.

  Rhys and Bryn grabbed John's armpits and hauled him to his feet. As they dragged him past Michael, he forced a stumble and fell onto the crippled man’s lap.

  “Get to Australia, Mike,” he growled. “They haven’t touched Aus-”

  Rhys hauled John upright and pulled him away, but when John looked back over his shoulder he saw recognition in Michael’s eyes and knew the message had been understood. It was all he could do.

  When they reached the centre of the courtyard, the two men forced John back down onto his knees, and for a moment they paused, looking to their mother for final confirmation. John felt the crushing weight of everybody's eyes on him, and heard a woman’s voice cry out a wordless grief-stricken moan, and his heart broke.

  Annie nodded, and John felt the cold steel of a knife against his neck.

  “You can do this, Rachel,” John said, staring numbly at the floor.

  When he lifted his gaze, a crippling, overwhelming sadness consumed him as he forced himself to look at her, and saw the tears in her eyes.

  Should have kissed her when you had the chance, John. You always were an idio-

  The thought dissolved in an acid bath of blinding pain as the knife bit deep into John’s throat and began its ragged journey through muscle and cartilage, and then with a strangely euphoric rush the blade was pulled free. John had a terrible, eternal moment to feel his life ebbing from the catastrophic hole that had been torn in him, and then finally, after a life soaked in unrelenting violence, he found peace.

  *

  There was, Annie decreed, no need to lock up the cripple or the children. After all, she informed Michael with a sly grin, she wasn’t a monster.

  All the others - including Rachel - Annie told her people to lock into the cramped cells that lined the interior of the wall, leaving the castle almost empty while she sent one of her sons back to the boat to begin the task of shuttling over all her people from Anglesey.

  When she was satisfied the others posed no threat, she said, they would be welcome to join what she called my family. At least some of them, she had told Michael with a knowing smile, would be set free.

  He hadn’t missed the implication of her words. Some of the people now imprisoned would never get out alive. Maybe all of them would be left to rot. The castle was now in the possession of a cult, led by a maniac, and those that didn’t conform would be killed.

  But the castle would kill them all. John had been right about that from day one, and Michael wished he had listened.

  He sat once more on the battlements, staring out to sea and watching the yacht as it made the first of many trips across the Menai Strait.

  It was a clear day, and in the distance he thought he saw a thin plume of grey smoke rising into the sky. Trouble was brewing on Anglesey, uranium-tipped and deadly.

  We have to get out.

  I have to get them out.

  Michael dropped his gaze to his feet, and strained every muscle, willing them to move, gritting his teeth with the effort of trying to shift his legs, just an inch.

  His eyes widened.

  Epilogue

  Phil Sanderson had asked to meet Fred Sullivan at 3pm, so Fred left his office at one, and made his way directly to the research deck.

  The journey was irritating: everything on the ship was narrow, and the chopping waves of the North Sea challenged his balance with every step. Walking anywhere was a matter of squeezing through gaps and clumsily navigating the other people he met in the thin metallic veins of the vessel, and of grabbing handholds to prevent stumbling.

  Irritating, but worth it. Fred had long ago learned the virtue of dropping in on his staff unannounced. Arriving early was the quickest route through the bullshit.

  When Fred stepp
ed into the large space that Sanderson and his team inhabited he was struck by how messy and chaotic it appeared, and by the cornered look on Sanderson's infuriatingly round face.

  The journey had been essential: Fred could tell from the man's slack expression that the scientists Fred paid so handsomely were making no progress. Shaving off all the bullshit Sanderson would doubtless have embalmed his report in was a time saver in Fred's case, and possibly a life-saver in Sanderson's. Fred desperately wanted to kill the man. The big brain concealed beneath his expansive, sweaty forehead kept the scientist alive, but Fred’s patience was being severely tested.

  While Sanderson stammered and the atmosphere in the room began to thicken with anxiety, Fred said nothing. He marched to a bank of monitors that relayed images of the mutation's brain. The visual was, Fred thought, quite beautiful. Like a miniature universe, an array of pulsing lights like stars.

  "Mr Sanderson," Fred said without looking at the man. "Bad news is beginning to irritate me." His tone was like a loaded gun, and he knew the scientist wouldn't miss the implication of his words.

  Fred turned and looked at the man expectantly. Sanderson clutched at a handful of papers like a security blanket. He looked like he was having trouble choking back the urge to vomit.

  "Uh, Sir, it's not bad news exactly but, uh, well. You see the activity in his brain?" He pointed at the screen Fred had been watching, and cleared his throat, his eyes rolling up to the ceiling, as though trying to recall the best way to begin a rehearsed speech.

  "All humans have-"

  "Mr Sanderson," Fred hissed. "Get to the point. Now."

  Phil Sanderson swallowed visibly and nodded.

  "We need McIntosh awake, Sir."

  Fred's bushy grey eyebrows lowered.

  *

  At first in the underground base in Northumberland, and then on the ship that held position among a small fleet in the North Sea, they had tested the small vial of blood, hoping to reverse engineer the extraordinary mutation that had transformed Jake McIntosh from a schizoid serial killer into a more physical sort of monster, with some fascinating talents.