Reaction (Wildfire Chronicles Volume 6)

by K. R. Griffiths

  The thought was surprising, but not shocking. Rachel supposed she had finally adapted to the idea that killing people was going to be a necessary part of her future.

  She stared around the room frantically, looking for a weapon larger than the knife she carried, and less valuable than the revolver. She was standing in a tiny, cramped kitchen, and her gaze immediately fell on a knife rack. She scooped up a large carving knife to add to the one she already carried, but it didn’t solve her immediate problem: any battle she had with the Infected would be at close quarters if she used knives. Far too close. She longed for the baseball bat she had lost days earlier; for something she could swing in a wide arc to keep the creatures at bay.

  Think, Rach.

  She glanced back at the door through which she had entered. It had been unlocked, so there had been no need to smash her way in, but in the centre of the cheerfully painted wood sat a large pane of glass that would easily accommodate a standard-sized human. The cottage wouldn’t keep her safe; the door would not hold, but she threw across the deadbolt anyway, and hunkered down by the exit, peering cautiously through the glass.

  By the look of it, none of the Infected knew where she was. That was no great surprise: the group of survivors had bolted in all directions, pouring into the nearby buildings for refuge. For the creatures charging along the street the sudden explosion of noise must have been confusing and disorientating, but not everybody had reached safety, Rachel could tell that immediately.

  She knew it by the bloodcurdling screams she heard, and the sound of snapping jaws and flesh being torn apart.

  Gasping for air, certain that there must be something wrong with her lungs that prevented her from getting enough oxygen, Rachel scanned the road next to the river and tried to calm her thundering pulse. Outside, the road looked clear.

  For a moment.

  An Infected body shuffled into the door, stumbling against the glass, and Rachel barely managed to catch the scream of surprise in her throat before it escaped and gave her position away.

  She crept backwards, holding a knife in each outstretched hand, moving away from the door slowly and silently, and nearly leapt out of her skin when she heard a whispered voice somewhere behind her, barely audible above the pounding of her heart against her ribcage.

  “Rachel?”

  Rachel span around to see Emma trembling in the doorway that led into the lounge beyond the kitchen. She clutched a small knife in trembling fingers, and let out an enormous sigh of relief when she saw Rachel’s face.

  It took Rachel a moment to realise that the terrified girl had probably assumed Rachel was infected, and that she had been just moments away from receiving a knife in her back.

  Thank God you decided to check I was still me, Emma. I’m not sure I would have done the same.

  She stared at Emma, wide-eyed, and put a trembling finger to her lips.

  Behind her, Rachel heard another thump on the door, and she scanned the ground floor of the cottage frantically. Through the lounge she saw another exit, and wondered if she dared to leave the relative safety of the cottage and head back outside.

  You have to, Rach. You've got to find Michael and the others.

  She heard a thump behind her, and then a sound that made her blood freeze: the sharp crack as the glass panel in the door fractured. The creature outside had apparently decided that the door in front of it needed further exploration.

  Fuck.

  *

  Ed made it about fifteen yards from the river before he felt fingers gripping his collar and pulling him off his feet. Before he could scream, a large hand clamped over his mouth and he breathed in a lungful of fear-ridden sweat that made him gag.

  He twisted his head as much as he could, and saw the huge biker standing behind him, clutching Ed to his leather-clad chest in a bear hug that felt like it might well crack ribs at any moment.

  “Shhh,” Shirley breathed into Ed’s remaining ear, and relaxed his grip when Ed made an attempt to nod.

  At the entrance to the alley, Ed saw a young woman tearing past, screaming. A second after she disappeared from his sight two Infected bolted after her.

  Moments later, her screams were silenced, and he heard a terrible wet snapping noise that he didn’t want to identify. He felt his feet meet the cobbled ground as Shirley lowered him gently and released him, and he turned to face the biker, praying that the big man had some sort of a plan to survive the next few minutes.

  Apparently not.

  Shirley pressed his huge frame back into the wall of the building behind him in a vaguely pathetic attempt to make himself small. It didn’t work. That, it appeared to Ed, was the extent of the big biker’s plan.

  Close by, Ed heard a fearsome shriek that made his teeth clench so hard he thought they might shatter.

  We can’t stay here.

  After a moment spent persuading his feet that they still had the ability to move, Ed waved the hand that still had fingers, gesturing at Shirley to follow him, and pulled up short when the big man shook his head fiercely.

  Why? Ed mouthed.

  Shirley pointed to the pack strapped to his back, and Ed understood. The pack was makeshift: a ripped piece of bed linen tied together with some cord, and it had an enormous tear across the bottom where it had caught on the rough alley wall. Only the fact that Shirley kept pressed into the wall was preventing the canned goods inside from falling out and clattering to the ground.

  Ed felt the blood draining from his face.

  Go, Shirley mouthed.

  Ed shook his head firmly.

  No way, he thought. And then: shit, maybe I’m brave after all.

  Chapter 34

  Nathan stood on the deck of the Conqueror and watched in stunned silence as one of the ships at the western perimeter of the fleet dissolved in a ball of flame, cracking like an egg and spilling its contents into churning water.

  One of the destroyers had fired on the ship, decimating the vessel, and Nathan had watched it all happening in a bemused sort of slow motion as he carted dead bodies up from the belly of the Conqueror to the flight deck and tossed them overboard.

  How many bodies does the old bastard want to send to the bottom of the ocean today?

  Nathan stood and watched the fireworks as the container ship in the distance went up; a pulsing lightshow that hurt his eyes and defied comprehension.

  What the fuck is going on?

  Moments later, he saw Dick Skinner hurrying from the superstructure, hauling an assault rifle that looked ridiculous in his hands. The man had been a soldier once, Nathan reminded himself, but it always seemed more likely that he would see Skinner with a clipboard or a radio in his hands than a gun. If the man was preparing for an actual battle then matters in the control room must have taken a considerable turn for the worse.

  What’s worse than gassing most of the crew and tossing their bodies into the ocean? Nathan thought, but the question was quickly replaced in his mind by another, far more urgent in nature: who is there left to fight?

  “Skinner!” he yelled, and the man stumbled to a halt, searching for the source of the shout. After a moment he focused on Nathan and smiled in relief.

  “It’s you,” he said as he crossed the deck toward Nathan, wrinkling his nose at the pile of corpses laid out on the floor.

  Nathan estimated that they had thrown roughly half of the bodies overboard, but much of the interior of the ship hadn’t even been investigated yet. Thanks to Sullivan, there were rooms—hell, maybe even entire decks—heaving with bodies that hadn’t even been discovered yet. If ever there was such a thing as a ghost ship, Nathan figured the Conqueror was probably it.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” Nathan said, puzzled. “Who were you expecting?”

  Dick looked flustered and shook his head.

  “What’s going on, Dick? Did one of the destroyers just fire on that ship?”

  He pointed at the billowing plume of smoke that snaked up toward the clouds in the distance.

>   Dick nodded.

  “Sullivan’s orders,” he said, as if that was all the explanation Nathan could possibly require.

  “What? Why?”

  The question seemed to throw Dick, and he frowned, as if questioning Sullivan’s motives for anything had been beyond his remit until that moment.

  “Dick, for fuck’s sake. This whole enterprise is going to shit, surely you can see that? Why the fuck is Sullivan sinking his own boats? Is this just his way of putting down dissent? Because—”

  “No,” Dick said. “No, it’s not that. It’s…McIntosh. The mutation.”

  Memories flashed in Nathan’s mind. He hadn’t personally seen the creature during the attack on Northumberland...well, not really: he had seen something, but it hadn’t been anything his mind had been willing to accept. Something that moved invisibly, like a ghost, as it ripped and chewed through bodies faster than his eye could follow it.

  He definitely did remember the aftermath, though. The underground base had been huge, but it felt like every corner of the place had been liberally doused in gore. Even if the damage to the entrance could have been repaired, he doubted anybody would have wanted to stay: the place looked like Hell’s waiting room.

  The mutation?

  “What about it? It’s locked up miles away from here, right? It’s in a coma.”

  Dick shook his head.

  “It’s loose. It was on that ship.”

  “So the response is to sink the fucking ship?” Nathan couldn’t keep the disbelief from his voice. “Don’t you think that’s overkill?”

  “Maybe,” Dick said. “If it weren’t for the fact that sinking the ship hasn’t stopped the creature. It’s here, in the fleet, Nathan. Out there, on one of those ships. Could be coming this way right now.”

  Nathan dropped his eyes to the assault rifle clutched in Dick’s trembling hands.

  “And, what, you’re going to stop it with that? No offense meant, Dick, but if the thing just survived an artillery strike from a damn destroyer, I’m not sure an M27 is going to cut it, you know?”

  “Oh, this isn’t for the mutation,” Dick said. “It’s for the next pilot I see. I’m getting the fuck off this ship, Nathan, even if I have to take someone at gunpoint to do it.”

  Nathan gawped at Dick for a moment, stunned, and then he laughed.

  “Now that’s something I can get on board with, Dick,” he said, peeling off the gloves that he had worn to carry corpses and tossing them to the deck.

  “Fine,” Dick said. “The more the merrier, right? But next time you feel like calling me ‘Dick’, please remember that I am carrying an assault rifle, and I’m pretty sure I’ve lost my mind.”

  Dick’s got some balls after all, Nathan thought, and chuckled despite himself.

  “Deal,” Nathan grinned. “So where are the pilots?”

  “Dead, mostly,” Dick replied, and turned to scan the deck, as though hoping he might see a queue of pilots waiting to be selected from. “I hoped I’d find one on the flight deck, but—”

  “All you found is me,” Nathan finished.

  Dick nodded.

  A moment later, Nathan heard a distant engine. Faint, but unmistakable. He lifted his gaze up, scanning the sky over the western edge of the fleet.

  “Not all of them are dead,” he said, and pointed.

  In the distance, a chopper approached, dropping smoothly down toward the deck of the Conqueror, framed against a backdrop of black smoke and rolling fire.

  Nathan searched through the nearby pile of bodies—the latest stack of corpses that waited to be tossed overboard—and saw what he was looking for immediately: a dead man in a corporal’s uniform, with a pistol in a holster attached to his hip.

  With a grunt, he pushed aside a couple of the rigid bodies and retrieved the weapon.

  Tucking it into his belt, he followed Skinner; racing across the deck toward the incoming chopper.

  *

  Kyle felt the blast rock the helicopter like a savage bout of turbulence as it approached the fleet, and the sky outside the windows darkened suddenly.

  Outside, the world had been reduced to thick, rolling black smoke.

  “What the fuck was that?”

  The pilot shook his head and grimaced, fighting with the control lever to maintain a steady course.

  “That was the Sea Star.”

  When the chopper burst from the fresh cloud that had been created over the fleet, Kyle craned his neck to see the damage below. The ship had been cracked nearly in two, and the stern was already sinking into the grey ocean.

  “I don’t understand,” Kyle began, but the pilot cut him off.

  “Join the fucking club, kid. As far as I can tell, one of the destroyers just sank it.”

  Kyle leaned forward to get a look out of the cockpit windows. He thought he could see a trail arcing from one of the heavily-armed destroyers; a faint whisper of smoke that suggested it had fired something at the sinking ship.

  “Kid,” the pilot growled. “You think maybe you could get that gun out of my fucking face please? I’m flying the damn chopper aren’t I? All you’re doing at this point is pissing me off.”

  Kyle flushed and lowered the weapon. Behind him he heard a snort of amusement. Tom.

  He turned to face his brother, and felt hostility rushing through him, desperate for an outlet. Maybe it wasn’t right, maybe it wasn’t even fair, but Tom had fucked everything up. He had been right about Wildfire but wrong about everything else after all. There was nothing they could have done to stop it. They should have gone to ground, should have found a place to hide and ride out the apocalypse. Tom had lost himself in dark fantasies, and Kyle’s guilt had allowed him to drag them both down, and now there was nowhere to run and they were both almost certainly about to be executed.

  “Got any bright ideas?”

  “I’m sort of still focused on the fact that we just escaped from a fucking monster, Kyle. Whatever this is, it hardly seems to matter. Trouble’s been brewing on these ships for weeks.” He shrugged. “Nobody knows what’s going on. Some people are starting to realise they aren’t getting paid, and everyone is pissed off. Maybe that ship tried to make a break for it and that’s how Sullivan deals with mutineers.”

  Kyle rubbed his temples.

  “In that case I can only imagine how he’s going to deal with us," he said. “I don’t think he’s going to be happy that Sanderson isn’t with us. What’s our story when he asks? Got a smart answer for that?”

  Tom slipped a pistol from a pocket and stared at it lovingly.

  “Something short and to the point,” he said absently, as though the gun had hypnotised him.

  Kyle gritted his teeth in frustration, and was about to shake his brother out of it—physically, if necessary—when the helicopter began to drop sharply toward the deck of the Conqueror.

  Chapter 35

  Rule one when it came to holding a sword, Michael had discovered, was keeping hold of the damn thing after you plunged it into somebody. Learning the rule by actually losing your sword was, he guessed, inevitable. Believing that didn’t improve the situation one bit.

  “Go!” he screamed, turning from the creature that collapsed away from the broken window, taking the sword with it. He was relieved to see the Claire hadn’t waited for his prompt: she was already pounding her short legs and crossing the restaurant’s small dining room with surprising speed, through a pair of swinging doors that presumably led to the kitchen, and hopefully to the rear exit.

  Michael took a step after her, and crashed to the floor as strong fingers reached through the window and clasped the makeshift rucksack on his back.

  The impact as his backside met the floor sent a shockwave of white-hot pain travelling up his spine, and for a fraction of a second the terrible prospect that he would once again slip into paralysis made him whimper in terror.

  With a grunt he shrugged out of the rope straps and away from the rucksack, scrambling back to his feet and offering
a silent prayer of thanks when he found they still worked; pausing only to slide the rifle from the pack and smash the butt of the weapon into the ruined face of the creature that loomed at the window once more.

  The creature fell away again, and Michael figured he had a second or two at most before it once again tried to scramble through the window.

  He turned and bolted across the dining area, crashing through the doors, and almost colliding with Linda. To his left he saw Pete and Claire hiding behind a large refrigerator, their eyes painfully wide.

  “Why aren’t you running?” Michael gasped.

  “The back door is locked,” Linda replied grimly.

  Michael dropped his gaze and saw the carving knife clutched in her trembling hand, and understanding uncoiled in his mind, dark and terrible.

  This isn’t an escape.

  It’s a last stand.

  Somewhere behind him, Michael heard shards of glass clattering onto the floor.

  Heard a thump as something heavy followed it a moment later.

  Michael stared at the rifle dumbly.

  Five bullets.

  He pressed the butt of the gun into his collarbone and aimed it at the doors.

  And waited.

  *

  Rachel grabbed Emma’s clammy hand and hurried to the rear exit of the cottage. Somewhere behind her, she heard another thud; louder this time. Either the Infected had heard them inside or somehow sensed that hunting inside the cottage would bear fruit.

  Whatever the case, it was just a matter of time before the creature stopped beating on the wooden panels and focused on the large pane of glass set into the door and—

  The sound of cracking glass suddenly became the sound of shattering glass; an almost harmonious twinkling of fragments rattling on a tiled floor.

  Rachel had hoped to spend a moment studying the road outside the rear of the cottage, but moments had become valuable currency, and her purse was empty.

  As the sound of the glass raining down on the floor inside the cottage reached her ears, Rachel took a deep breath and pushed the door open.