Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4) (17 page)

Climb!

Nick veered to the left and hurled himself at the first tree he saw looming in the darkness. There was no time to judge how climbable the trunk was, no time to plot a course upwards. He wrapped his arms tightly around the trunk, ignoring the biting pain as sharp bark cut through his uniform, and began to shimmy upwards, every vertical inch gained feeling painfully slow, until he became aware of the thick branch above him and leapt for it, pulling his feet up and away from the first set of snapping jaws. He felt the teeth grip his boot for a brief moment, before slipping away, and he let out a cry of triumph.

The elation was short lived.

Nick was several feet off the ground. Ground that had now become a seething mass of furry bodies, all of them stalking around the trunk relentlessly.

He was trapped.

And worse. The dogs were making noise.
A lot
of noise. Snarling and howling and barking viciously. Nick stared down at them as horrifying realisation dawned. There was no way down. And anything in the vicinity would hear the noise they were making, and soon he might have to worry about more than dogs waiting for him to fall out of the tree.

Nick
fixed his eyes on the road, and the distant pool of light provided by the helicopter, listening to the snapping jaws below and the thundering beat of his heart, and waited for the Infected to find him.

Rachel felt growing horror as she cautiously approached the girl tied to a post in the market. It wasn't the girl's appearance that made a cold dread seep into the furthest corners of her soul, though that played a part: like all the others Rachel had seen, the infection had caused the girl to claw out her own eyeballs. The cavernous, weeping orifices left in her face, and the long, ragged furrows her fingernails had ploughed in the soft flesh of her cheeks were bad enough, sure.

No, not her hideous appearance
. Rachel was already becoming desensitized to that.

It was the fact that she was whimpering in terror.

It was the fact she was human. A frightened little girl.

All of a sudden the sickness of the new world slammed into Rachel like the shockwave from a dirty bomb, a concussive blast that left a dark burn on her mind that she feared might never fade away.

It only took a week for us to become barbarians
.
Only a week to sacrifice a child to save ourselves.

When Rachel got close enough, she heard the abject, whimpering terror of the girl take shape, forming words that sent icy daggers into Rachel's heart.

"Please don't, I don't want to, please..."

For a moment Rachel stood, swaying a little, feeling like the world was swimming in an endless pool of nausea.

"What have they been doing to you?"

Rachel's voice emerged as a hesitant whisper. It was a question she was compelled to ask; powerless to avoid, but some part of her didn't want an answer. Suddenly Rachel just wanted to curl up somewhere, in some dark corner. To squeeze her eyes shut and clap her hands over her ear
s and pretend that the world was anything but rotten to the core.

The girl's frail body was wracked by heaving, choking sobs that made Rachel's blood curdle and her soul shrivel in fear.

And then the girl told Rachel.

And
her words made the rage pulse in Rachel like hot lava, rushing up, searching for an exit.

Rachel took a half-step back, feeling like she might vomit or pass out or both, and then a noise in the road behind her swallowed up her attention.

A cry of pain.

Breaking glass.

John.

*

Four to one. Not great odds.

John hated gambling. H
ated being put in a position where the outcome of anything was uncertain or left to chance. He stayed away from casinos; he avoided card games. He had never played the lottery. Unfortunately he always seemed to end up in a position where he was forced to gamble with his life instead.

He glared at the four men walking ahead of him. It was doubtful that any of them had the sort of training he had; probably not even anything close to it. But there were four of them. All young. All looked physically fit. All carried knives at the least, and the biggest of them
, Sam, the one that smouldered with dark intent, carried a shotgun and a look in his eyes that said he was fully prepared to use it.

Terrible odds.

The big man was slowing the pace, heading for the dead end, making a show of pointing out a small convenience store. They had already passed by two.

If you wait, you die. If they
get to start this however they planned to, you die.

Rachel was safely out of the way and
John was already moving, letting animal instinct take over, trusting that surprise would prove a more deadly weapon than the two rounds in that gun.

He barrelled into the back of the
one called Glyn, sending him crashing into the man holding the gun from behind. The smaller man yelped as he connected with the back of the leader, a pitiful sound that was one part surprise, two parts fear at the physical collision with someone he so obviously feared.

Pathetic
, John thought as he dropped low and swept out the legs of another of them. As that one -
Brian? It doesn't matter
- crashed to the ground with a thump, John heard another sound; one that gave him a slight chance, just a sliver of light in the dark.

The shotgun, clattering to the floor ahead of him
, spilled from the big man's fingers.

The third of the men
- Jack - was still staring, stupefied, at the sudden chaos that had broken out around him. As John rose to his feet, he smoothly withdrew the bigger of the two knives he carried on his belt: a wicked eight-inch blade he had taken from the hardware store back in Aberystwyth. The thing was well-balanced; solidly made. It was a high-end knife designed for use in industrial kitchens and for cutting through stubborn hunks of meat.

The knife slid into the lower back of the man smoothly, like the area around his spine was a purpose-built sheath. John barely felt any resistance as the metal penetrated him, felt nothing beyond a jarring scrape as the blade nestled into its new home alongside the man's vertebrae.

He shot a glance at Glyn, the whimpering coward he had pushed into the big guy at the front.

Not important,
John thought, but his muscles were already ahead of his mind, and he launched himself into Sam even as the big man stooped to retrieve the gun, catching him around the waist in a tackle that powered the man's breath from his body in an explosive gasp.

With a deafening shatter, John drove
Sam's thick torso through a window into a small fashion boutique, and felt his heart drop a little as he felt the breaking glass shear a deep gash into his thigh.

He had only managed to disable one of them.

Shit.

Worse still: the big guy was fast, way faster than John had expected, bouncing to his feet like a
goddamned jack-in-the-box and delivering a heavy kick to John's ribs. It felt like a truck had sideswiped him, and a field of shimmering stars burst across his vision. He felt something cracking in his chest, and the pain erupted, blossoming outward remorselessly from the point of impact.

He tried to rise to his feet, only to collide with a meaty fist travelling at pace in the opposite direction, sending him crashing back to the ground. He groaned as the hard floor conspired with his cracked rib, hatching a plot to send him into darkness.

John grasped at consciousness; clung to it like a liferaft, and desperately tried to reach his other knife, planning to whip it out and sever Sam's Achilles in a single motion, knowing that his only hope was to bring the fight down to the deck and end it quickly.

But then, before his fingers could even grasp the handle of the small blade, the heavy
workboot filled his vision, and his head snapped to the side, and white-hot pain exploded in his mind.

For a moment that felt like a lifetime,
John lay with his cheek resting on the cool laminate floor, and he saw the boot approaching again, saw it connecting, but this time there was no pain, and he knew then that he was going to die.

He couldn't lift his head, but his eyes rolled upward to see the big man pulling a small knife from his belt.

Make it quick then, you bastard,
he thought, and then the room was filled with the sound of the shotgun roaring, and an impossible hole tore open across Sam's chest.

When
Sam fell, dead before his skin kissed the ground, John saw Rachel standing over him, the barrel of the shotgun pouring smoke and framing her face, twisted into a mask of pure rage, and he allowed his eyes to close, and let the darkness have him.

*

Rachel felt bile rising in her throat as she looked at the torn body of the man she had just murdered. It felt like the world was slowly twisting her, melting away all the parts of herself that she recognised.

How has it come to this?

She heard a groan behind her. One of the two guys that she had found on the floor when she sprinted up the dead-end alley. Presumably John had already gone to work on them. One looked to have smacked his head into the ground, and was sitting on the floor, staring dumbly at his feet and shaking his skull like a dog trying to shake water out of its fur.

Another was laying still, face down on the cobbles, the handle of a large knife protruding from his lower back.

The other one had just stared at her in mute apprehension. He hadn't looked damaged; just terrified.

He had almost appeared grateful when Rachel stooped and swept up the shotgun in her shaking hands, like the thought of picking it up himself and taking charge of the situation scared him more than anything.

Neither of the two John had left alive had followed her through the broken window, but both would have heard the result of her entry into the boutique. Their response would be either fight or surrender.

She turned quickly, lifting the gun and pointing it at the stricken face of the man
called Glyn as he peered through the window to see the guts of his former leader splashed across the wall above the unconscious body of John.

"Pretty sure I only used one barrel there," she said. "Not a hundred per cent, though."

Her eyes narrowed.

"How about you?"

*

Michael crashed through the door and into the tower, and almost lost his mind when he saw that neither Gwyneth nor the children were there. He frantically wheeled himself to the foot of the staircase, and hollered a
hello
up the gloomy, winding steps.

He gasped in relief when he heard Gwyneth answering, her voice distant and muffled by the stone
walls.

It took a few moments for Claire and Pete to bound into view, and Michael knew immediately from the look on his daughter's face that something was wrong.

"Claire? What is it?"

He tried to keep the panic from his voice. Claire's eyes were wide, her jaw slack. She looked terrified;
haunted.
She threw herself at Michael, wrapping her arms tightly around his neck. Michael could feel her rapid breathing, and the pounding of her heart against his shoulder.

He returned the hug, and stared quizzically at Gwyneth as she
appeared on the staircase.

And then he froze.

The old woman was not alone.

Michael stared in astonishment at the man who descended the stairs slowly behind Gwyneth. He looked skeletal, and his steps were faltering. In the gloomy stairway, lit only by the narrow slits that served as windows, it was difficult for Michael to tell at first what was odd about the man's gait. He moved
slowly, like simply balancing himself and remaining upright was a challenge. When the light fell across him, Michael saw why.

Both of the man's arms had been amputated at the shoulder. He was young, but looked frail and weak, and his skin had a sickly pallor.
The stumps where his arms should have been looked slick and rotten. He looked close to death. Michael could smell it upon him, a stink that followed him like a shadow.

Michael's mouth dropped open, and he turned to look at Gwyneth, trying to frame a question that would make sense of the confusion he felt. In the end, he didn't need to ask.

"The girl in the market, Michael," Gwyneth said.

Michael stared at her dumbly.

"They've been feeding him to her."

Nick
hated dogs.

He prayed the pack below might get bored or distracted, but God hadn't answered any of
Nick's prayers thus far, and it didn't look like he was about to start now.