Panic

by K. R. Griffiths

  Michael had been accepted quickly. He was physically fit, and showed a great aptitude for dealing patiently with people. His colleagues liked him, and for a while he felt happier than he had ever been in his life, part of something that could make a difference.

  The fast-tracking to a desk position, promotion to detective, proved more elusive, and he walked the beat for almost five years, but he didn't really mind. The pay was good, and the cheery lieutenant who was in charge of his section became a good friend. Promotion, he was promised repeatedly, was not far off.

  Until that bright October morning, and the call to attend the domestic disturbance, until the dark presence that Michael had always feared lurked inside him somewhere, the shadow of his father, finally broke violently free.

  Until the corridor of blood and bone.

  Michael shook away the grasping memories and tore his eyes away from the empty road that led away from town. Running was not an option. He had failed as a police officer once already. Every instinct screamed at him to head to Aberystwyth, to ensure the safety of his wife and daughter, but he dismissed the thought angrily. If the infection, the madness - whatever it was - got out of St. Davids, it would get there long before he could. If he was going to make a difference, it had to be here; had to be in St. Davids. The best thing he could do for Claire and Elise was ensure the infection did not spread.

  He twisted the throttle, and set off into the town.

  He knew before he rounded the final deserted street corner that the noise he heard was something more than anguish at seeing the destruction wrought on the town centre by the explosion. Knew it deep in his gut, where the truth squirms and writhes until it can not be ignored.

  Yet nothing prepared him for the sight that greeted him.

  The streets were painted red with blood. Dead bodies and dismembered limbs scattered the cobbled surface of the road, and everywhere Michael looked, he saw terrified people sprinting in all directions, chased by their former friends and neighbours, blood-soaked horrors from a fevered nightmare.

  A thousand Craig Haycocks had been unleashed on St. Davids. An army of men, women and children reduced to insane savagery. An army that grew larger by the minute as those whose wounds were not fatal rose from the ground, faces twisted into masks of pure hatred, and laid siege to whatever they could catch. St. Davids was lost, a casualty of a war that had erupted from nothing barely two hours before.

  The police station was a few hundred yards away, just a handful of streets. The radio inside would not save the town now, Michael was sure of that, but there was something larger at stake. Whatever this madness was, this disease that turned ordinary people into rabid animals, it had to be contained. Once it spread from St. Davids, once it hit larger populated areas like Carmarthen and Haverfordwest, there would be no stopping it.

  Michael gunned the throttle, shuddering as he saw several eyeless faces swivel toward the sound, and raced forward, squeezing every ounce of power out of the scooter.

  As he swept past some rubbish bins he snatched up the lid off one, a dented metal circle that would serve as a primitive shield.

  The cobbles didn't help, making the small wheels of the scooter bounce wildly, sending jarring currents of pain up into his arms, and he was afraid that he might lose his grip on the handlebars entirely, sealing his fate. He clenched his fingers tightly, keeping his head down, trying to focus on the path ahead; avoiding looking directly at the horror unfolding around him.

  The fast-moving noise of the scooter seemed to confuse the infected people initially, and they paused, heads swinging like antennae, as though struggling to get a fix on his position.

  As he ploughed through a gap in their ranks, bursting through the main bulk of blood-soaked people and out the other side, where they were less densely packed, Michael even thought that maybe that confusion would be enough to get him through the worst of it.

  Until he glanced over his shoulder, and saw the pack forming behind them. The noise emitted by the scooter had turned him into some grisly depiction of the Pied Piper.

  Michael grimaced, and returned his gaze to the road ahead, swerving away from grasping, red fingers.

  Reaching the end of the street, he veered left, almost crying out when he felt the blood-soaked tires slipping as they left cobbles and hit smooth tarmac, threatening to slide out from underneath him. He fought to correct the slide, shifting all his weight to the right-hand side of the scooter, bringing it upright again. A loud squeal. Michael didn't know whether it came from the tires, the straining engine or his own throat.

  Ahead, the street he had entered, Market Street, was the longest straight road in the town, leading directly to the centre shopping square, dominated by the cathedral.

  The road, he noted gratefully, was empty other than the bodies of those whose wounds had been too deep, and he couldn't help but take in the details: throats torn open, bellies ripped apart to reveal glistening organs, sightless eyes fixed on the empty grey sky.

  At the far end of the street, he saw the wreckage of the blast site, and realised his guess had been correct. Buried under the remains of the petrol station roof was a heap of twisted metal that just about revealed its original identity: the rear end of a car that had smashed into the pumps, starting the blast that had blown out windows all along the street.

  The wreckage resulting from the explosion was spread over an enormous area, filling and blocking off the road. There was no way the scooter would make it through.

  Dismay filled Michael, and the snarling of his pursuers suddenly seemed to fill his ears, as though somehow they were able to detect that their prey was running out of ideas and places to run.

  Frantically, he cast his eyes left and right, searching for an option, even as the scooter, which now seemed to be travelling impossibly fast, ate up the yards.

  There were no roads leading off Market Street before the blockage at the petrol station. He saw a couple of slender alleys, but knew he would have to slow almost to a stop to make the turn into them, and it was a turn he would have to make blind, with no knowledge of what lay in the alley waiting for him, or whether the exit was impassable.

  He glanced over his shoulder again. They were still coming: not gaining on him, not falling away. Just relentlessly chasing him down. He couldn't tell how many, but the glance was enough to reveal he'd have no chance of fighting them off, even with a weapon.

  Despair threatened to overwhelm him. He saw the face of his daughter, tears running down her cheeks as her mother passed on the news that Michael was dead. The face of his wife, the woman he loved so much and had let slip away, and thought of all the time he had wasted. All the time he could have spent trying to talk to her, trying to let her know that the man she had fallen for was still within him somewhere, shackled by invisible chains of his own making, fighting for freedom.

  The rubble blocking the street was a hundred yards away now, closing at an impossible speed. Michael fixed his eyes on it. He would smash into it at full tilt, praying that his head would connect with concrete and spare him the terrible end that chased him, a death of tearing fingers and snapping teeth.

  And then he saw it. Light glinting to his left. The plate glass store front of Meg Jameson's little wedding dress shop. The decision was made subconsciously, Michael's mind realising that there was no time for debate. In this situation, there were no pros, no cons; only survival.

  Using his right hand to hold the bin lid up, offering at least some protection for his head, he twisted the handlebars with his left, and sent the scooter at full speed into the glass.

  The world exploded around him.

  Sharp pain sliced into him: his legs, his arms, his back. A bloody roadmap etched onto his skin through the uniform.

  And the world moved in staccato, a sequence of images captured in his mind, playing like a slide show: Glass showering over him like raindrops. The lid he had been using as a shield slipping from his fingers, crashing into a mannequin dressed like an angel. The sc
ooter sliding away from him, continuing its journey into the shop counter, where it buried itself deep in the flimsy wood. His legs twisting painfully underneath him. The floor rising toward his face at alarming speed. His daughter’s face, eyes red and lined with tears, screaming at him to-

  Get up!

  And then, incredibly, Michael was on his feet again, oblivious to the pain, hurtling down a narrow passageway and shaking stinging sweat and blood from his eyes, smashing through the door that stood at the far end of the building, and then out onto the streets once more, racing among the bodies, running for his life.

  *

  She could sense them, somewhere in the dark, somewhere close.

  The creature that had been Paula Roberts did not understand why the presence of the two creatures was different from the rest, nor why she felt so drawn toward them. All she knew was the boiling of her blood, the frantic thrumming of the cells that formed her existence, a terrible vibration that seemed to make her head spin.

  The blackness gave away nothing, and her ears, suddenly so sharp, so reliable, twisted this way and that, hoping to catch something on the wind, some answer that might abate the gnawing hunger that drove her. Here in this scent was something different, something that stood out, some inexplicable gravity that she felt compelled to obey.

  Maybe it was the consumption of these two creatures that would finally release her from the hunger.

  She reached out her bloodstained hands, finding only a solid object in front of her. They were there, right there. They should have been within her reach. So close she could smell them. The scent was so strong. Intoxicating; overpowering. Different somehow to the stench of the other creatures that she felt compelled to tear apart.

  She began to pound against the obstruction before her, roaring in impotent rage. She threw her considerable weight into it, oblivious to the pain as her soft flesh connected with it; frenzied.

  And then, as she charged into it, her ears picked up the sound of something beyond. A cracking. Groaning. The sound of something loosening. It was beginning to give.

  With a roar, she charged again.

  *

  Rachel peeked over the low wall that served as a boundary for the flat roof, and her heart broke.

  Jason was right. There, in the narrow alley below them, the one into which she and Jason had fled scant minutes before, stood their mother. Paula Roberts had a chunk of her left arm missing, the forearm looking as though something had taken a bite out of it. What was left of her ragged dress was drenched in blood. When the wind caught the flimsy material it was pulled apart, revealing sagging, naked flesh underneath.

  Somehow that was the worst part for Rachel, worse even than the empty sockets where her mother's eyes had been. There was something so total, so final, about seeing her mother standing half naked on the streets, something that left Rachel in no doubt that this parent was as lost to her now as the one that lay unmoving in the basement of his house.

  She glanced at Jason, who was shaking his head as though answering a question, eyes wide and streaming with tears. He began to emit a low moan, and Rachel clapped her hand over his mouth, silencing him.

  In the alley, their mother was standing near the door that Jason had smashed open. As Rachel watched, she swayed, appearing almost drunk, her head swinging back and forth.

  Rachel tried to compartmentalise the horror of it, forcing the desire to scream into a dark corner of her mind.

  She wanted to look away, but some part of her brain was still functioning rationally, something that told her that they needed to know what they were up against, and so she forced herself to watch.

  Their mother began to move back and fore, small stumbling steps, moving in a circle, as thought trying to find something. Still her head was swinging around, and Rachel realised suddenly that she was sniffing the air, like a dog trying to pick up a scent. Her movements were becoming more frenzied, steeped in frustration, and then she roared.

  It was a noise that Rachel would never have believed could have come from her mother: a hoarse bestial scream of rage that made the hair on Rachel's arms and neck stand up and her skin crawl.

  She realised that she was holding her breath, every muscle in her body clenched in terror.

  And then the pounding started. At first with her fists and then with her entire body, Rachel and Jason's mother began to attack the door that separated her from her children. Rachel thought of the broken lock, and the deadbolt. She prayed it would hold and cursed herself for not returning to barricade the door as soon as they had known the house was empty.

  A whimper escaped Jason's lips and the pounding in the alley below increased in intensity. Rachel squeezed her eyes shut, afraid to look, and heard one final, enormous bang, and then silence.

  When she peeked again, her blood ran cold.

  The alley was empty, and the door, weakened already by Jason's assault, had been smashed in.

  Their mother was in the house.

  "Oh fuck," she heard Jason say, the words reaching her dimly as though shouted to her from a great distance.

  "The ladder! We have to pull up the-"

  "No time!" Rachel screamed. "GO!"

  She grabbed Jason's collar and thrust him toward the boundary that separated the roof from that of the next building. There was a sheer drop on two sides, but the terraced buildings would allow them to run at least some distance before negotiating a path to the ground became a problem. Even as Jason began to move, the door to the attic burst open, and the bloodstained monster that had been their mother rocketed toward them, snarling.

  As Rachel turned, she felt fingers grasping at her hair and cried out in pain as it was torn out at the root. She hurdled the wall, landing on the tiled roof of the next building, almost losing her footing and scrambling forward on all fours, feeling the angle of the roof working against her. Jason was a few steps ahead of her, clumsily charging forward, each footfall loosening and cracking the tiles.

  Behind them, their mother was also scrabbling, oblivious to the drop that yawned below them, scampering across the tiles, clawing for Rachel's foot, missing by inches.

  And then it happened, as Rachel had known it must. Her foot hit a tile that betrayed her, slipped away, sending her crashing onto her belly.

  Her mother was on top of her in a heartbeat, face diving forward, and in that instant Rachel saw it all unfold: the teeth tearing into the flesh of her neck, snapping through tendon and artery, scraping on bone.

  She shut her eyes, trying to block out the vision, the horror of the woman who had brought her into the world savaging her like a rabid bulldog.

  And then she felt a heavy weight land on her chest, knocking the air out of her. The tearing teeth did not connect.

  Instead, when she opened her eyes again she saw her mother's body slumped on top of her, a sharp fragment of tile buried in her forehead, and her brother standing over them both, shaking; the honest, smiling eyes darkened and empty, as though the light that had powered them had simply been flicked off.

  8

  Watching the monitor, the weak, jerky signal beamed from the police officer's uniform, Victor felt strangely stunned.

  It was an emotion he hadn't expected to feel. Indeed, he had long since thought that his emotions had simply faded away, victims of his long isolation.

  Of course, he had been able to visualise the way Project Wildfire would pan out, when finally it was activated. He had seen numerous movies, read numerous books, all featuring the kind of calamity which was now being played out just a few miles from his home. He knew that these cultural artifacts served as both a blueprint and a warning.

  It would be fast, and it would be brutal. It was the reason, well, one of the reasons, why he had built himself an underground home and turned it into a fortress. It was, after all, exactly what those running the project had done, retreating into the safety of the earth. It was all that could be done. The storm was inevitable. The best anyone could hope for was to shelter under an um
brella that would keep out the worst of it.

  Still, seeing it now, the savagery of the blood-letting awakened a feeling of deep, confused dismay within him.

  He had watched as the cop moved into the town on the little scooter in a state of heightened anticipation, like a child waiting for Christmas morning. And when finally the cop turned a corner and came face to face with the wildfire torching the town, Victor had not been disappointed.

  But then something odd had happened. The policeman, of course, would turn tail and flee. That was the only normal, logical response. Hell, Victor half expected that he would find his way back to Victor's little spot in the woods, searching for a place to hunker down. Instead of this though, the grainy black and white picture had paused for a second, giving Victor ample time to see the full scope of what was happening on the streets, and then he had shot forward, going straight for them.

  Had the man decided to give it all up and let death have him? It made no sense to Victor, the irrationality of it, and anger burned in the pit of his stomach, along with something else, something he hadn't encountered for years. It felt like...shame, and it just angered him more.

  As the picture on the monitor weaved between the murderous arms that clawed toward it, Victor realised that this was no suicide attempt, this was movement with a purpose, a design that Victor could not comprehend.

  When the man turned the scooter toward the window and drove straight through it Victor was electrified, and when, after a moment of stillness the picture moved again, rising up and charging toward a closed door and out into an empty street, Victor was being pulled apart by conflicting emotions. On the one hand, the cop's heroics made him want to punch the air in delight, and on the other, he felt an enormous, implacable anger building within him, a rage so all-consuming that he nearly put his fist through the monitor.