The door at the front of the bus stood open and Michael stepped inside cautiously, letting the barrel of the rifle lead the way. He had three bullets left, and hoped more than anything that he wouldn’t need to use them.
The bus was empty.
The keys hung in the ignition.
Michael felt like punching the air.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s safe. Everybody on board.”
As the survivors filed onto the vehicle, Michael surveyed the empty road behind them, expecting at any moment to see Infected charging toward him or to hear shrieking in the distance, but Caernarfon was a town of the dead now; a massive open grave.
Just like St. Davids and Aberystwyth.
Michael wondered if there were any places left out there that hadn’t been reduced to stark monuments to a dead past, and couldn’t help but shudder at the thought of what might be waiting for them in Liverpool. A city with a population of over a million. In a way, he hoped there was nothing to find there but more death and emptiness.
Not that it should matter: the plan did not involve sightseeing. If it were possible, Michael intended to drive the bus right to the waterfront and get everybody on board the first suitably large boat they could find, leaving the UK behind forever.
He let the thoughts of Liverpool dissolve. No point thinking about the city when just getting there was a task that might prove to be impossible to accomplish.
Just wing it, he thought, and he smiled. John would have approved.
When everybody was safely inside, he pulled the door shut, painfully aware of how flimsy it was. The bus would offer safety as long as it was moving, but if it came to a stop; if they ran into a herd…
No point thinking about it.
He settled into the driver’s seat, taking a moment to familiarise himself with the controls and dragged in a deep, shuddering breath.
Once he twisted the key there would be no turning back. The town looked clear, but the virus would not be too far away, stumbling around out there in the dark fields, listening intently. The roaring of an engine would bring them quickly. The only hope was to be moving by the time they arrived.
Fuck it.
He twisted the key and the engine stuttered loudly for a terrifying moment before roaring into life.
“Buckle up,” Michael said grimly to nobody in particular, and he stamped on the accelerator, turning the huge wheel smoothly and putting the picturesque town of Caernarfon in the rear view mirror.
*
A single wide road would take them all the way to Liverpool: one long highway that snaked right across the northern coast of Wales and into England to the east. For the most part, the road was empty, and Michael found himself giving thanks that the virus had attacked so early in the morning, long before the roads could clog up with traffic.
There was very little sign of the Infected. Occasionally a lone creature would stumble onto the road and throw itself ineffectually against the side of the passing bus, and the people on board would freeze as the thing’s shriek of frustration gradually receded when Michael floored the accelerator.
A couple of times they appeared directly in front and Michael yelled at his passengers to brace themselves, but the isolated impacts did not trouble the huge vehicle unduly. Beyond the surprise of the steering wheel trying to tear itself from his grasp a couple of times, Michael could almost believe that he was running over nothing larger than a rabbit or a fox.
After about twenty miles, when Michael felt more reassured that the bus could handle the scattered Infected, the worst part of the journey seemed to be the fraught atmosphere aboard the bus.
Claire must have felt it too, because she was the one that broke the tension when she burst suddenly into a shaky rendition of the wheels on the bus go round and round. After a few stunned moments another voice joined her, and then another, and soon the whole bus was singing, like children heading off on an exciting school trip.
Michael couldn’t help but smile. For weeks these people had lived under an oppressive cloud of silence, terrified that even the slightest noise they made might mean a terrible death for them. Now, they belted out a simple song at the top of their voices, and it felt like it was a necessary release for all of them; like a heartfelt fuck you to the horror of the world outside the windows.
He had been driving for around an hour when he saw the first signs for Liverpool, and slowly he began to allow himself to believe that they might just make it.
Twenty miles to go.
Fifteen.
Ten.
Five.
And then, without warning, the engine cut out abruptly and Michael looked down at the dashboard in horror as the bus began to coast toward a stop. A couple of the dials on the dashboard were cracked, and he hadn’t paid them enough attention. Hadn’t checked them properly.
Behind glass that was little more than a spiderweb of fractures, the fuel gauge sat and taunted him for his stupidity and for daring to believe.
Empty.
Chapter 41
For a long, dreadful moment Michael stared at the flimsy door to his left. At the darkness beyond it. Then he turned to find Rachel staring at him, her eyes as wide as his own felt.
“How long since we saw Infected?” she whispered breathlessly.
Michael felt like telling her the time for whispering was over. Every creature for miles around would have been following the roaring of the engine, closing in on them inexorably.
He stared at the dashboard, but the clock was smashed; stuck at 05:29am. It could well have been, he realised, the time at which the bus had encountered the Infected for the first time. The moment at which the driver had smashed his head into the dashboard, immortalised forever.
“I’d guess maybe eight or nine minutes,” he said.
“Then we’d better move, and hope most of them are somewhere behind us,” Rachel said.
Michael hoisted the rifle.
“Everybody off,” he barked. “Silent. Single file. Fast.”
With that Michael swept back the door and let the night air in.
It brought snapping teeth with it.
Michael fell backwards, stunned, jabbing blindly with the butt of the rifle and sending the creature that leapt toward him crashing back through the door.
Move.
He sprang forward, catching the creature once more on the forehead as it charged at him, oblivious to the weapon. Didn’t catch it flush, though; just a glancing blow, and suddenly the creature was on top of him and only the rifle was blocking the snapping teeth and Claire was screaming and—
The creature’s head collapsed, crumbling inward like a controlled demolition as the lead pipe swung through the air only inches away from Michael’s face. He felt the air the swing disturbed, and a second later the terrible weight was lifted from him.
Paralysed once more, Michael could only watch in stunned amazement as Jason squeezed his huge bulk through the door without a word and moved outside to begin killing.
On the bus, drenched in the heavy darkness, the passengers sat and listened for what felt like an eternity to the melody of death; the shrieks of frustration and the wet snapping of bone, until finally Michael shook himself out of the trancelike state he had fallen into.
More would be coming. Maybe a lot more. And Jason could only do so much.
Michael stood on legs that trembled as badly as they had the first time he heaved himself out of the wheelchair, and motioned to the people huddled on the bus.
Follow.
*
Rachel exited the bus to see Jason felling the last of the creatures that had streamed toward the vehicle in the darkness. When the body crumpled to the floor, Jason stood and stared down at it blankly. It was almost, Rachel thought, like he couldn’t see them either. Not really see them.
She took his huge hand in hers, and led him away from the pile of eyeless corpses that littered the ground at his feet, directing him back to the bus.
In the distance, Rachel hea
rd the sea.
No, not the sea. A river.
The Mersey.
So close.
It was as she was focused intently on listening to the sound of the water that she heard it. Somewhere behind them. A faint rumble of rolling thunder. The sound was odd, though. It didn’t seem to fade away as thunder normally did; didn’t recede as the atmosphere drew in its breath to bellow once more.
Rachel came to a dead stop.
It wasn’t thunder.
Shit.
*
Michael bristled when he heard footsteps approaching him hurriedly. Logic told him that Jason had killed all of the Infected, but still, as he turned to see Rachel approaching fast, he felt himself tensing up as if he expected an imminent attack.
“You hear that storm?”
Michael nodded. “It should help cover the noise of our movement, we’ll have to run the rest of the w—
“That’s no storm.”
Rachel fixed him with a meaningful stare.
“Listen,” she hissed.
Michael’s stomach lurched. She was right. The noise he heard didn’t have the undulating quality of thunder. The rumbling was enormous. Constant.
Getting louder.
Footsteps. Hurtling toward them.
“There must be thousands,” he breathed in a horrified whisper.
Rachel nodded.
“It’s getting louder, Michael. That’s the only reason I realised it wasn’t thunder. At first I thought the noise was behind us, but now it sounds like it’s everywhere. Listen.”
Rachel cocked her head for a moment, and jabbed a finger into the darkness.
“West.”
Jab.
“South.”
Jab.
“East.”
Michael’s eyes widened.
“We’ve driven into the middle of a fucking county-sized herd. They’re coming straight for us,” Rachel said.
For a moment Michael felt like his mind was a computer, and somebody had just hit the reset button. It was taking him some time to reboot.
“Do you know where we are? Where, exactly?”
It was a simple question, and one to which Michael had no ready answer.
“Not exactly,” he said. “The last sign I saw was for a town called Mold. I think that is pretty near the English border, just south of Liverpool. Hang on.”
Trying to make as little noise as possible, Michael stepped back onto the bus and searched the various compartments dotted around the driver's seat, sighing in relief when he discovered a roadmap.
He hadn’t needed to check a map while driving the bus: the roads were all clearly marked and well travelled. Getting to Liverpool had been a matter of just following the signs.
But on foot, and with the knowledge that there were Infected all around them, navigation became a different matter entirely. Following a road blindly now could well see them walking in the wrong direction and running headlong into danger.
He squatted, stifling a grunt as his back shrieked in complaint, and spread the map out on the floor, focusing the beam of his flashlight on it. After a moment, Rachel crouched down next to him.
“That would put us around here, right?” she said, pointing.
Michael followed her finger and nodded.
“This is the road we’re on,” he agreed. “And the last sign for Liverpool said it was five miles away…”
“Which means we’re here,” Rachel repeated, jabbing a finger at the map.
Michael followed her gesture and saw a peninsula that jutted from the Welsh coast, rising north until it was parallel with Liverpool. The peninsula offered a single way to reach the city, and as Michael realised what that route was he felt anxiety rising in his gut.
The Mersey Tunnel.
Three miles of claustrophobic underground darkness. One way in, and one way out.
Michael would have liked to avoid taking the tunnel even if he had still been behind the wheel of the bus. The risks were simply too great. There was no way of knowing if the tunnel was clear or not, no guessing what might be waiting for them at the exit. The only way to survive an encounter with the Infected on anything other than the smallest of scales was to run or to hide, and the tunnel severely limited the chances of either of those options being successful.
Now there was no choice.
And no time.
Just go.
Michael straightened, and turned to the frightened group of people that huddled by the bus, their confident singing long forgotten.
“They’re coming,” he hissed. “Follow me. Run!”
He didn’t stop to look back. Grabbing Claire’s hand and pulling her into motion beside him, Michael tried to ignore the shattering pain in his back, and put his head down to the wind, running blindly, panicking because it was the only thing left to do.
Behind him, he heard footsteps clattering as the group followed his lead, and further back still, a wall of noise that approached indefatigably. Two miles to the tunnel. Three miles through it.
Michael blanked the thoughts from his mind; blanked out everything except a single all-consuming directive.
Right foot.
Left foot.
Right foot.
Faster.
Chapter 42
The Mersey Tunnel connected the town of Birkenhead to Liverpool, running deep beneath the Mersey Estuary. When Michael saw it looming in the distance, he had already been running for nearly two miles, and the pain in his back had consumed his entire being. Nothing seemed to penetrate the wall of agony: no emotion, even fear, found a way through.
Until he saw the yawning blackness of the tunnel entrance, and his pace began to falter.
Birkenhead was a ghost town, as the entire peninsula appeared to be. That wasn’t surprising: the virus would have ripped through the isolated stretch of land in no time, and the Infected would have been forced to move south to find more prey.
Or north.
Into the tunnel.
Into the impenetrable darkness.
A handful of the group had flashlights; a couple of them had mobile phones taken during the raid on Caernarfon: pocket-sized communications miracles that were now useful only for the soft light the screen provided. When the batteries ran out, the phones would become fossils. The days of recharging anything were finished.
The thundering of footsteps behind them had maintained its volume, and was still heading north. Michael imagined the entire peninsula heaving with the Infected, scrambling across each other to get to the fleeing group of humans, a seething mass of death that stretched from one coast to the other.
Not helpful, Mike.
He felt the group begin to slow behind him, and heard the clicking of flashlights being turned on. Felt the fear, too, radiating off the people in sickening waves.
In the tunnel they would be as blind as the Infected. The monsters would have a clear advantage.
They need your courage now, Mike. They need somebody to follow.
Michael gritted his teeth, pushing back the agony and the terror, and beckoned to the group to pick up the pace.
Thirty seconds later he plunged into the tunnel, and the world was reduced to darkness and writhing shadows.
*
The world was pools of light that danced across an endless dark, but Claire could feel the walls of the place even without seeing them. The air in the tunnel felt still, and heavier somehow than it had outside.
All the flashlights did was confirm that they were underground; none was powerful enough to truly light the way forward.
Claire had been underground in the darkness once before, trapped inside a car when the power died. Things had moved in the darkness then. Things that still terrified her and tormented her dreams.
She felt like screaming.
The tunnel was wide, and when lit it had probably appeared unremarkable; white-tiled and sterile. Just another road. In the darkness it became something else; filled with intent, like the blackness wanted t
o wrap invisible hands around her throat. Like the air itself was alive with something dangerous.
After every few steps, Claire hesitated, until finally Linda stumbled into the back of her, and it was all Claire could do to keep the scream from bursting out of her throat. She felt Linda’s hand on her shoulder. The woman gave a reassuring squeeze, and Claire began to move forward again.
Far beneath the estuary, the tunnel curved and snaked toward Liverpool, and Claire could no longer see the frail light of the stars behind her. In front there was only darkness.
Darkness and emptiness, until the silence gave way to a faint grunting sound on the road ahead, and Claire suddenly crashed into something.
*
Michael had held up a closed fist, but of course no one had seen it. Everyone that had a light had it pointed outwards like a searchlight, as though scanning for the iceberg that might sink them at any moment. He gritted his teeth as Claire ran into him, and heard the ripple effect as it moved through the group. The faint whispering of frightened bodies coming into contact. Nobody spoke. There wasn’t even so much as a grunt of surprise.
We might just get away with that, Michael thought, and he froze, straining to catch any noise in the dark space ahead. He was sure he had heard something. A soft grunt.
His flashlight had a range of about thirty yards, and Michael could only properly pick out detail for fifteen of those, but he thought he saw something further along the road. A shape moving in the darkness.
He crept forward, and saw it after five steps, and his mouth dropped open.
Another grunt.
The rhythmic movement was unmistakeable.
It can’t be…
He took another step.
About twenty yards ahead of him he saw two of the Infected, pressed together. Thrusting and bucking. Mating.
No, not mating, Michael realised in growing horror. Breeding.
Breeding.
The hideous truth of Project Wildfire rolled out endlessly before him, and he saw it all with a sudden, piercing clarity.
Reaction (Wildfire Chronicles Volume 6) Page 23
