"I'm trying to help us all move on—"
"What for? Where is there to move to?" Any emotion that had blossomed in her words now drained away, replaced by an inaudible murmur. "The time for living is over."
"Gabriel."
He turned to see Flowers standing in the doorway, then glanced back at Anna; she had retreated back into herself, her eyes hooded, her breathing shallow. He inched his hand out to rest it upon her forearm, but it hovered a few inches above her before he pulled it back. Gabe quietly got to his feet and walked over to his boss, who nodded for him to leave the room, pulling the door shut after him.
"What did you talk to her about?"
"Nothing," the younger man replied. "Just offering my support, like always."
"She seemed upset."
Gabe shook his head. "She refuses to open up. I want her to progress past the state she's in. I want to help her to develop. But it's like she's... locked."
"Son, you know her condition. Even the bods in the lab are struggling to understand her psychological mindset. You think you can get her to snap out of it?"
"What's the alternative?" He could feel his anger rising. "Keep her shut away in there like a pet? Like one of your caged test subjects?"
Harry's expression darkened. "Anna will stay with me at my discretion, and I'll treat her as I see fit. Don't overstep the mark, boy, or you'll find your little visits curtailed indefinitely. You'll have to make your heartfelt confessions to somebody else."
Gabe clenched his fists and stared at the floor, saying nothing.
"Assemble your team," Flowers ordered, striding away from him down the corridor, "and let's focus on the here and now."
An hour later, Gabe led his squad in a two-vehicle convoy down the mansion's driveway and through the gates. Before it passed out of sight, he glanced back at the house in his rear-view mirror and saw a solitary figure watching from a second-floor window. For a moment, he thought he saw it move, as if reaching out to the glass; but seconds later it was lost to shadow.
19.46 pm
As far as Eric Richards was concerned, when he was behind the wheel of a vehicle, he was solely in charge. It was his dominion. He'd been a contract driver for St Thomas' for the past twenty-seven years and once a man occupies this kind of position for such a length of time - or so Richards liked to believe - he could be expected to exude a certain authority and command a little respect. He'd bowed before others with a similar weight of experience in their chosen fields - the medical staff he'd dealt with briefly, the admin office he'd answered to - and wouldn't have dreamt of telling them how to do a job they'd been performing perfectly well, and often for several decades. So it was that, considering his history, having first been employed as a porter in 1959 and moved sideways into transporting supplies, he felt he had the right to assume he could occupy a level of efficient autonomy. And up until recently, that had indeed been the case.
But when the dead rose, all boundaries shifted irrevocably, and Richards was someone who liked the comforting structure of routine and the knowledge of his place in the scheme of things. He'd been working when he received a call from his wife Doreen that the news was reporting cases of mass hysteria and murder taking place all across the country. It was impossible not to be aware that something was going on, with his colleagues' blasted mobile phones chirruping every few minutes, but he'd underestimated just how widespread the crisis was. TV reports and newspapers were always blowing up situations into full-blown catastrophes, then forgetting about them the following week to focus on another scandal, so when she first spoke to him, her voice breathless with worry, he'd calmed her with platitudes and told her to take such stories with a pinch of salt. They lived in Blackheath, for heaven's sake; very little of consequence affected them in the heart of suburbia. Doreen had been persuaded to view it all with a healthy degree of scepticism - drug addicts on a rampage on a council estate, no doubt, or maybe some kind of sickness brought on by an outbreak of food poisoning - and when he said goodbye she sounded halfway convinced. He'd returned to his duties, trying to brush off the uneasy pall that had settled over him, but word was snowballing through the hospital that something was definitely very wrong.
News filtered back that Casualty was being inundated with patients - those suffering from bite wounds, mainly, complaining of being set upon by complete strangers in the street - and that numbers were rising. Richards had always prided himself on his pragmatism and his ability to stand firm when others around him were flustered, but even he couldn't dismiss the sense that they were being catapulted towards a major disaster. He'd borrowed one of the other driver's mobiles to ring Doreen. After half a dozen failed calls, the network jammed solid, he ran to a nearby phone box and tried once more. She'd answered after it had rung for a full two minutes, sounding distant and distracted, claiming she and their fourteen-year-old son Max - sent home from school as news began to spread - had been hiding upstairs because somebody had battered on the front door attempting entry. He'd told her to stay where they were and that he'd come get them. Those were his final words to her. Richards never saw or spoke to his wife or son again.
His efforts to return home were thwarted at every turn; roads snaking out of London were rammed with traffic, and the police started closing off areas considered dangerous. He abandoned his car at one point, seeing if he could perhaps make it there on foot, but every route he took saw him turned away by an official, who refused to listen to his pleas. A policeman advised him against travelling alone, and that he should seek the safety of a well-lit, well-fortified building, adding that the army was being consulted on containing the out-of-control individuals. Richards had trudged back to St Thomas', not knowing where else to go, the radio offering similar recommendations that citizens should find shelter with others in libraries, sports centres, churches, shopping malls and office complexes to ride out the coming storm. Public transport was grinding to a halt as train and underground operators abandoned their posts. All around him was chaos. He had never witnessed panic before, not in its purest form; as a child in the Blitz, every adult had seemed so reserved and resolute, waiting patiently in the Anderson shelters for the Luftwaffe to finish their night's work and then returning in the morning to pick up the pieces. Walking the city streets back to the hospital, crowds surged in every direction, equally lost and hopeless, shouting and screaming as they barged past each other, sheer fear etched on their faces. None of them, as far as he was aware, had even seen what it was that had ignited such anarchy, but the terror passed between them like a viral agent, spreading to all it touched. The monster didn't even have to raise its ugly head, and still its victims tore themselves apart to escape its approach.
He'd helped out where he could at the hospital, keeping himself busy in an effort to force from his mind the image of Doreen and Max cowering in the master bedroom, waiting for rescue. He consoled himself that it surely had to be a temporary situation, that the trouble would pass. The radio said as much, its resident experts speculating that once the armed forces entered the fray everything would be brought under control. That was until the broadcast stations went dead and they lost all contact with what was going on in the outside world. Richards felt as if he were adrift, cut off from his former life; the daily routines that he relied upon, everything he trusted and founded his beliefs upon, had fallen apart before him and he didn't have anything else left to hold on to.
Then the full horror hit, when the doctors tending the injured discovered that those bitten by the assailants became infected with their madness. A wave of violence washed through Casualty with a shocking suddenness, the corridors echoing with the cries of nurses as the bedridden abruptly rose and began to attack their carers. Richards hadn't believed the stories he was hearing from those fleeing the scene; that the bite victims had actually died, that their breath and pulse had ceased, that no brain activity could be detected, before their terrifying resurrection moments later. And the maniacs weren't merely lashing out indiscriminately,
they were tearing chunks from those they could overpower, consuming the flesh with an unholy relish. Other patients - the elderly and infirm, those plugged into drips and heart monitors - could only watch helpless as the killers rounded on them too. Richards had listened to these reports, shaking his head, unwilling to accept each fresh tale of atrocity.
He plunged into the mêlée, intent on helping where he could, but was faced with a slaughterhouse, bodies littering the wards, the shiny floor now slick with blood and viscera. One of those touched by the insanity - a bearded man in a trench coat, a large portion of meat missing from his neck - dropped the flap of crimson matter he was gnawing on and staggered towards him, a moan issuing from the back of his ravaged throat. Richards grabbed a fire extinguisher without hesitation and stove in the degenerate's skull, before retreating to the bright safety of the car park.
Army and police arrived within minutes, setting up a perimeter around the hospital's entrances, allowing none of the murderers to escape. They also corralled the survivors away from the building, telling them not to go near it until they pronounced it safe. Richards sensed St Thomas' had become strategically important for some reason, or why else would the authorities be so quick to come to their aid? Armed flak-jacketed soldiers strode into the reception area, and seconds later bursts of automatic gunfire and the dull thud of explosions ripped through the walls. He overheard an officer asking an administrator where the mortuary was, and then relaying the directions into a walkie-talkie.
For several long hours, two to three hundred staff stood in the hospital grounds behind a cordon of police, waiting for someone to explain what was going on. Eventually, a ruffled soldier emerged and nodded at his captain, and the lawmen relaxed their position. A smart, severe-looking woman Richards didn't recognise - one of St Thomas' directors, he guessed - seized the initiative and demanded to know the truth. A sergeant stepped forward and, with remarkable honesty and brusqueness, replied that an escaped virus had brought the dead back to life, with cannibalistic tendencies. Infection was passed on through the saliva of the undead, and those bitten would inevitably suffer cardiac arrest and join their ranks. They could only be stopped by destroying the brain, be it either by bullet or blunt instrument. Richards had glanced at those around him as they tried to assimilate this information, their incredulity tempered by the inescapable events of the day. Many began to weep. How could they argue against what they had seen with their own eyes? He himself didn't know what to feel, a cold, heavy rock in his chest where his heart used to be.
The sergeant went on to say that the plague wasn't just localised but spreading throughout the country, and a state of national emergency had been declared. The military needed to assume command of St Thomas' as a base of operations, and was requesting that all hospital staff remain to assist them. He warned them that right now the city was a no-go zone, and that they would be better served by staying put. Richards looked at the machine guns that each soldier carried and came to the conclusion that they weren't going to be letting anyone go anywhere. So under the supervision of the soldiers, the remaining workers returned to the deathly silent wards and began the slow, laborious process of removing the corpses, or at least clearing them to the fully stocked mortuaries so makeshift control centres could be established. The hours that Richards spent carrying cadavers indelibly seared images in his mind that he would take to his grave; both the victims of the Returners - looking like they'd been set upon by wild animals - and the remnants of the ghouls themselves, riddled with bullets, chilled his blood. Each new room held a particular horror. They found a few survivors hiding in locked linen cupboards and offices, only now summoning up the courage to put their heads around the door, but for the most part the corridors were carpeted with a red morass of bodies. Noting many of the wounds on the dead, Richards suspected the military had purged the entire building with little distinction between zombies and patients; any injured were similarly blasted in the head without a second thought.
The strangest discovery was in the morgues themselves, where the catalogued cadavers that had been residing in the drawers - the DOAs from the previous few days, the flatliners - had attempted to punch their way through their steel coffins upon their resurrection. Fist-sized gouges were visible in the metal as they'd been torn open from the inside. Each slab had to be pulled out with an armed soldier standing close by, ready to put a round through the carcass within if it had somehow missed the cull.
Toiling day and night, the authorities gradually reshaped the hospital into a research base; military personnel used the wards as barracks while escorted Ministry of Defence scientists began to arrive in batches to conduct experiments on the dead they'd kept aside. Richards could not sleep for thinking of his wife, but news brought in from the outside was not good; the city was a mess, lawlessness running rampant as the plague spread with frightening rapidity. With communications failing daily, there was no way he could get word to see if she was out of harm's reach. The military posted a permanent guard, as much to stop those inside from straying as to protect them; staff were effectively warned that they would not be allowed to leave the facility. Thus Richards found himself employed on what became, over the following months, a government outpost, receiving his instructions from the captain in charge. Many of his colleagues voiced their disapproval at the military suddenly assuming command of what had been a civilian organisation, but short of staring down the barrel of a service revolver there was nothing much they could do about it. It was clear that this wasn't an isolated case; the authorities were struggling to maintain control across the country, and if it meant the boys with the guns were running the show, then everybody else had better fall in behind them.
It was errands such as tonight's delivery that Richards was tasked with: driving a truckload of medical samples to another of the MoD complexes across town. It wasn't a million miles away from the job he'd had in his previous life - that regular existence in which he'd been embedded seemed centuries ago - but it was now shorn of any shred of independence. He was accompanied in his cab by a Sergeant Perrington, who ordered him at what speed he should drive, the directions he should take, and constantly advised on what safety tips he should adhere to. Richards found it utterly demeaning for a man of his years but was as powerless as a prisoner. There were half a dozen armed guards riding in the back with the cargo, and an army van was tailgating his vehicle. In fact, the only reason they bothered to use him at all, rather than have a squaddie drive the supplies, was because he knew best how to handle the truck's temperamental gears and spongy clutch.
They were crossing Westminster Bridge when he first caught sight of something in his headlamps. He glanced in his wing mirror, and checked that the escort was still following; in fact, it was so close that if he stopped suddenly it could rear-end him. If that were the case, he would have to flare his brake lights and warn them. It was raining lightly, a sprinkle of drops peppering the windscreen, so he scraped the wipers once against the glass to get a better view, peering out into the night, the headlights casting a pool of illumination onto the road ahead. The edge of their limit just brushed against a silhouette that was jogging towards the truck, its outline barely discernible from the surrounding blackness. He could sense Perrington looking at him questioningly.
"What is it?" the sergeant asked.
"Not sure. I think there's somebody out there."
Perrington leaned forward. "A stiff?"
Richards shook his head. "I don't think so. It's moving towards us too fast. I think he's alive." He expected the army man to respond to that but there was no reply. "You want me to stop?"
"Keep going."
"But he might be in trouble—"
"You keep going," Perrington ordered sternly. "We stop for no one."
As the truck progressed across the bridge, the figure emerged into the light: he was indeed one of the living, and he looked terrified. He was little more than a teenager, probably barely into his twenties, and he was sprinting towards the
truck, his arms waving in the air in an effort to get them to slow down. The rain had plastered his hair to his forehead, and Richards could even see the puffs of condensed breath blown out with each exhalation. The kid was exhausted, as if he'd been running a great distance.
"He's scared about something," the driver remarked. "I don't think he's going to take no for an answer."
"He'll soon get out of the way when he realises we aren't stopping."
"What if he's warning us about something? Could be the road's blocked."
"Then we'll find out for ourselves."
"You think that's wise?" Richards started, then fell silent for a second. "Oh shit." He tapped the brake, hearing the van behind him screech as the tyres skidded on the wet tarmac.
"What the hell are you doing?" Perrington snapped, momentarily ignoring his two-way, which barked into life on his lap as the other driver demanded to know what was going on. "I gave you an explicit order not to slow down."
"Look!" the older man yelled and lifted one hand from the wheel to point. The truck was still moving, but now coasting to a halt. The runner saw the vehicle had altered its speed, and dropped his arms, casting a glance over his shoulder, his gaze resting on the same sight that Richards was focusing his attention on.
Shuffling into the truck's beams of light was a gaggle of Returners, at least thirty in number. They shambled forwards, the kid their object of interest, their groans echoing amidst the metal stanchions of the bridge.
"Goddammit," Perrington breathed. "Put your foot down. We can go through them."
"We can't leave him here."
The Words of Their Roaring Page 6
