Twenty-Five Percent (Book 2): Downfall

by Nerys Wheatley

  Over the next half a minute, six more eaters shuffled into the light. Alex and Micah dispatched them with a skill and efficiency garnered from years of training and a week of fighting for their lives as their city was overrun. Alex had hoped that he would get more than a few days respite from slaughtering ordinary men and women whose only crime was falling victim to a virus he himself had once contracted. But as Micah said, they did what they had to.

  Standing side by side in the corridor, they waited for more eaters to appear.

  “Is that it?” Micah said.

  Alex shrugged, staring down at the bodies littering the floor in front of them. The choking stench of flambéed eater was making it difficult for even his enhanced olfactory senses to smell anything else, but he was getting something.

  “I think these are all the original Meir’s strain eaters,” he said.

  “I thought there weren’t any of those left.”

  Alex stared into the blackness ahead of them, remembering their first visit here and the room of cells built to hold the eaters the Omnav-paid scientists used for their experiments. “Only a few.”

  Micah followed his gaze. “The ones they were experimenting on here. But didn’t you say they had both originals and new strain?”

  Alex nodded, still staring into the dark. The extent of their illumination was closing in as the flaming eater in the lab died down and, thanks to his enhanced night vision being hampered by the light, he couldn’t see much beyond it. Had he heard something?

  Micah raised his spikers. “Well come on,” he shouted. “We haven’t got all day.”

  The patch of light contracted further. Alex could now only see seven or eight feet in front of them.

  Micah glanced at him. “If this doesn’t happen soon we’re not...”

  They came all at once.

  Six eaters, spanning the corridor side by side, more visible behind them. Silent.

  As the cloying pheromone fragrance wafted into the air, they attacked.

  While still relatively slow, their reflexes dulled by the disease that drove their hunger for human flesh, these eaters were far more coordinated than Alex was used to. He chose the biggest as his first target, aiming a kick at its knee and plunging the spiker into its head as it fell. The eater next to it grabbed his right arm, pulling it towards its mouth. He twisted from its grip and slammed a heavy kick into its stomach, sending it tumbling into two more behind it.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Micah take down two in quick succession then dance back from the grasping hands of a third. While he didn’t have Alex’s Survivor strength, he made up for it with speed and dexterity.

  Two more eaters lunged at Alex, forcing him to back up to give him room to manoeuvre. Ignoring their hands grasping his jacket, he drove a spiker into both foreheads at the same time. Their grip loosened as they fell. The last eater on his side of the corridor tripped over their bodies and he bent to finish it off before it could get back up.

  Micah was further along the hallway, backed against the wall, the remaining three eaters almost on him. Alex started in his direction, stopping when Micah leaped into the air and caught hold of one of the service pipes running along the ceiling above him. Swinging forwards, he drove each foot into the chests of two of his attackers, knocking them to the floor as he let go, twisted in midair and landed beyond them. Spinning round, he drove a spiker into the side of the head of the eater still standing before it could turn, then dropped to one knee and stabbed both eaters on the floor at once.

  Alex’s jaw dropped.

  Micah stood up and grinned. “Who needs super strength?”

  “Show off,” Alex said, rolling his eyes to hide how impressed he was.

  They waited for another minute for any stragglers. Alex searched the faces of those they had killed, but none looked familiar. That meant there was a chance Hannah, Carla, and the other doctors were alive.

  There was still hope.

  2

  When no more eaters appeared, they returned to the lab where the fire was running out of eater to burn.

  Alex cast a glance at the gruesome sight and looked away. Thanks to everything in the room being made of metal or plastic, the flames hadn’t spread. But they were losing light fast.

  “We need to find something that will burn,” Micah said.

  They spent a few minutes rummaging through cupboards and drawers before Micah exclaimed, “Yes!”

  He pulled something from a drawer and tossed it to Alex. It was an LED torch on an elastic strap, no doubt used during whatever inhuman experiments the Omnav scientists performed on the eaters they brought here. Micah produced a second head torch and pulled the strap onto his head, pressing a button to turn it on. A powerful beam of light shone from the cluster of tiny bulbs.

  “That’s a relief,” he said. “I thought we were going to have to set fire to some more eaters.”

  “Not if we have to feel our way around here in the pitch dark,” Alex said, settling the torch on his forehead and switching it on.

  They made their way past the corpses and continued along the corridor. The torches were very effective, lighting up everything before them. Alex’s nerves uncurled from their hidey holes and pretended they’d been brave all along.

  They followed the hallway round a corner to the left and came to the room where the eaters had been imprisoned. The door was closed.

  Micah grasped the handle. “Ready?”

  Alex nodded, raising his skull-spikers.

  Micah opened the door and stepped back. After nothing happened, he ventured in, Alex following.

  No eaters were loose. The cells were open, which wasn’t a surprise as they’d just killed all the former occupants, although why anyone would let them out, Alex had no idea. And they had undoubtedly been let out. No eater could have forced their way from the ultra strong and secure clear polycarbonate boxes, and there was no evidence of any of the multiple bolts on each door having been damaged. This had been done on purpose.

  “Alex?”

  He turned to Micah who was staring into the far corner of the room. Alex followed his gaze and his stomach dropped.

  “Oh, no,” he whispered.

  Phil Heaton was still in his cell, his pale, vacant eyes locked on them, white coat grubbier than it had been seven days ago. He’d been one of the Omnav scientists. His wife, MI5 agent Carla Heaton, was the first person Alex and Micah met when they came to the facility.

  Beside Phil, Carla stared out at them. Her mouth opened in a hopeless, ravenous moan.

  Alex walked up to the cell. “How could this happen?”

  Micah bent to pick up a piece of paper lying on the ground by the cell door. He read it before handing it to Alex.

  Dear Hannah, Pauline, Dave, Larry, and Jim,

  I’m sorry, I can’t go on. Phil was my life. Before him all I had was my career, but when I met him I learned to live. We never had any children and without him I have nothing.

  I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. I know that you will be fine without me and that you will fix all this. Phil once told me he’d never worked with anyone as talented as the group of scientists in this lab. I don’t know why he did what he did, why he was a part of the cause of this outbreak, but I know he must have had good reason. He was a loving, good man and a wonderful husband.

  Don’t be sad, this is what I want. Please leave us to die together.

  Yours,

  Carla

  Alex dropped the letter, closing his eyes. “She did it on purpose.”

  He knew she was devastated to find her husband turned, but he’d had no idea that she was on the verge of doing something so drastic. Could he have done something to stop her?

  “She must have let him bite her, waited until she was close to turning, then locked herself in there with him,” Micah said, indicating a bite wound visible on her hand. “What should we do?”

  Alex looked at the couple standing side by side. “Leave them, like she wanted.”


  Micah nodded and they left the room, closing the door behind them.

  They were subdued as they made their way through the facility, not saying anything. No more eaters were roaming the corridors and it didn’t take them long to reach the room containing the boiler, backup generator and fuse boxes. When they got there, they discovered the electricity had simply been turned off at the mains. The fluorescent strip lighting hummed into life as soon as Micah switched it back on.

  They made a sweep of the entire facility, but found no sign of the doctors they’d left here less than forty-eight hours ago. There were some signs of a struggle in a couple of the laboratories. More telling was the fact that every computer, laptop and tablet was gone.

  They ended up back in the staff lounge.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Micah said, taking a packet of biscuits from the counter in the small kitchen area and sitting at one of the tables.

  Alex nodded. It was the only logical conclusion. “Omnav.”

  He sat at the table and took the ginger nut Micah offered him.

  “So,” Micah said, “they came here for the research, but there are no other bodies apart from Jim. Which means they took Hannah, Dave, Pauline and Larry with them. They must intend to continue developing the new strain of Meir’s and they need their expertise. And that means...”

  “...they’re still alive,” Alex concluded.

  Micah smiled. “Yes.”

  Alex drew in a breath and let it out slowly. They were alive. Hannah was alive.

  He looked at Jim’s body still lying in the centre of the room. It disturbed him how quickly he’d become used to seeing dead bodies. “But for how long?”

  “We have to find them,” Micah said, finishing his biscuit and taking another from the packet.

  Alex nodded and started on his own second ginger nut. He hadn’t had breakfast and now he’d started eating, his growling stomach was urging him not to stop.

  “We should bury Jim,” Micah said, looking at the body.

  Alex nodded again.

  After finishing a third biscuit each, they walked over to the body. It had been less than two hours since Alex received Hannah’s panicked call telling him Jim was dead, but rigour mortis had already set in. He crouched, took hold of Jim’s stiffened arm, and immediately let it go again, a wave of revulsion shivering through his body.

  “What?” Micah said, standing above him.

  “He’s... the body is stiff.”

  “So?”

  Alex stood up. “It’s deeply unpleasant. You try it.”

  Micah rolled his eyes. “Fine. Let the men take care of it, little flower.” He bent to slide his hands under the body’s shoulders then yelped and jumped back, rubbing his hands on his jeans.

  “Oh yes, very manly,” Alex said, smirking.

  “That’s...” He shuddered. “Why does it being stiff make it so much worse?”

  “Probably some ingrained aversion to dead things. Maybe it would be easier if we wrap him in something.”

  A quick search produced a roll of black plastic bin liners and they taped a few together to make a sheet on the ground next to the corpse.

  “Okay, on three,” Alex said from his place at the head. “One, two...”

  He grasped Jim’s shoulders and lifted, scrunching up his face in disgust. Micah did the same with the legs, mirroring Alex’s expression as they moved the body onto the bin liners. Something dropped to the floor and Alex picked it up. It was a phone.

  “Maybe we can find his family’s phone numbers on there,” Micah said. “They should know what happened to him.”

  Alex was studying the smartphone. It had a red case with swirls and flowers on it. It didn’t scream Jim the ex-military security guard. It did, however, scream Hannah the geeky virologist.

  “I think this might be Hannah’s,” Alex said.

  Micah came to stand next to him as he brought it out of sleep mode. He was expecting to be faced with a request for a password or thumbprint, but instead a note appeared on the screen.

  [It’s Omnav. Taking us to headquarters outside Sheffield. Don’t know what will happen to us. Please help. Hannah]

  For a moment Alex couldn’t breathe, until Micah placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “We’ll find them,” he said. “We’ll get her back.”

  . . .

  It was the second grave they’d dug in the lawn behind the warehouse.

  Alex carried Jim’s black plastic bag wrapped body from the underground laboratory’s back door, carefully lowering it into the four foot deep hole.

  “He saved our lives, when I brought you here after you’d been bitten,” Alex said as they stood looking down into the hole. “If it wasn’t for him and Carla clearing the eaters at the door, I would have died there and you would have turned.”

  “Neither of them deserved this,” Micah said.

  Alex raised his eyes to the overcast sky. “I really want to find whoever is responsible for all this and make them pay.”

  After filling in the grave, they dragged all the eater bodies out and dug a second, shallow grave. When they’d rescued the doctors, and they would, Alex was sure of it, they would need to use the lab to complete their work into developing a cure and creating a way to control the eaters ravaging the country. He didn’t want to return to a pile of rotting bodies. Even though removing the corpses was the most unpleasant thing Alex had ever done.

  The incinerated eater was the biggest problem. Alex and Micah stared down at the pile of blackened, gooey flesh melted over scorched bones, shovels in hand and pillow cases wrapped around the lower half of their faces in a desperate and largely futile attempt to deaden the smell.

  “I’m going to put this on my list of things I never, ever wanted to do in my entire life,” Micah said, his voice muffled behind the fabric covering his mouth.

  “Just another pleasant morning in eater land,” Alex said. He suddenly realised he’d lost track of time. “What day is it today?”

  Micah frowned, looking up at the ceiling. “I don’t know, Thursday?”

  Alex shrugged. It was strange how not having regular things like work and TV as an anchor disconnected a person from the passage of time. “Let’s get this over with.”

  He slid his shovel under a foot and moved it into the black rubber trug they’d brought from the shed. Instead of separating from the rest of the leg, it simply stretched out the gooey flesh and muscle so that when he dropped the foot into the trug, strands of red and black goo trailed over the side, clinging on to the rest of the corpse.

  The smell could have laid out an elephant at thirty paces. He turned away to compose himself.

  Micah coughed several times. “I’m going to be sick. We killed the things, why do we have to clear up too? The cook shouldn’t wash up as well.”

  “Please don’t mention food,” Alex said. He wiped the back of his sleeve across his forehead. “Okay, let’s just do this as quickly as possible because I don’t plan on breathing again until we’re back outside.”

  There followed a period of scraping, squelching, grimacing and occasional dry heaving as they filled the trug with body parts. Starting with the extremities turned out to be a mistake when they were faced with a trug full of greasy, gooey bones sticking out every which way, with a ribcage still to fit in with them.

  The torso made a disgusting shlurping sound as they pushed a shovel beneath either side and levered it from where it had melted into the tiled floor. Together, they transferred it to the trug where it balanced precariously on the top of the other bones and globs of flesh. Something vaguely kidney-shaped slid from inside the torso cavity, landing on the floor with a soft splat.

  “I’m not carrying it like that,” Micah said. “It’s going to fall on us.”

  “Maybe we can squash it in more.” Alex gave the torso an experimental push with his shovel. It shifted down a little.

  “Okay,” Micah said, placing the blade of his own shovel by Alex’s. “
Together, on three. One, two, three.”

  They both pushed down at the same time.

  The torso shifted.

  A fountain of liquidised viscera erupted sideways from the body, showering their legs.

  They both yelped, leaping backwards. Alex slipped on something squishy and landed on his backside on the floor.

  “That’s it!” Micah exclaimed, dropping the shovel and throwing his hands into the air. “I’m done. We take this outside, bury it and leave the rest. No arguments.”

  Alex looked down at the reddish liquid seeping into his jeans. “What makes you think I would argue?”

  3

  They buried the gooey remains, still inside the trug, along with the other eaters, then headed for the facility’s showers where they rinsed themselves down, fully clothed, for a solid twenty minutes.

  They rode back on the motorbike, dripping all the way.

  After a brief detour to Micah’s flat so he could shower, change, and pick up supplies, they drove into East Town.

  They heard the ruckus before they saw it.

  Rounding the final corner before reaching the makeshift compound, they came to a small crowd gathered at the wall of cars their friends had set up across the road. People were shouting. A group of camouflage-clad men and women were pointing a variety of weapons at the barrier. Faces were visible peering over the top. One man was lying on the ground, groaning.

  “I say we just go in shooting,” a woman said, waving her rifle at the barrier. Alex sagged in his seat. It was Creedon, the rabid anti-Survivor who wanted nothing more than to put a bullet between his eyes and those of every other Survivor she met.

  “Just try it, bitch.” Alex recognised his friend Janie’s voice from the other side.

  “You injured Wright...”

  “He tried to climb over. He was warned.”

  “You didn’t have to punch him in the balls.”

  “I could have punched him elsewhere, but they were so convenient. You’d have done the same.”