Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4) (2 page)

Until this time.

This time they had lost all communication at the end of day two.

There had been a little freaking out among the members of the group, of course.
Most of the twelve people Darren led toward the distant peak presented themselves with the typical bravado that came with not-quite-enough experience, but the sudden death of their mobile phones and the silence of the radio was not quite the same as a vertical climb. Communication was their safety net: the removal of that net brought the vertiginous drops and the jagged rocks into a sharper sort of focus.

It was
not the first time Darren had been without communication on the slopes; not the second or third time either. He knew the phones were an illusion: under most circumstances, if climbers needed to call for help it was because they were faced by a danger that probably wouldn’t wait for the arrival of rescue. The best thing to do on the climb was forget about whatever you had in your pockets; forget
everything
that wasn’t either your feet or the next foothold.

Maybe it was weather disturbance, maybe some satellite problem. It didn’t matter. The phones were down; the rocks were still the same. Debating it when you were clinging to lethal terrain was pointless.

Eventually Darren had snapped, and roared at the group of young men and women to shut the
fuck
up and watch their footing, or they would end up discovering that mobile reception was far worse at the bottom of a ravine. He hadn't meant it to sound like a threat, but that's the way it came out. It got the job done, though, and a pregnant silence fell on the group until Darren finally called them to a halt.

It was only then, as they had made camp at two thousand feet on a wide plateau that shivered under the first traces of the snow that covered the peak itself, and Darren had sat next to the fire, half-listening to the younger climbers turning over theories
about their dead phones that ranged from the mundane to the fantastic, that he noticed something. Or more accurately, the
absence
of something.

Where are all the planes?

Snowdon was a busy peak, although it didn’t seem that way when you were clinging to some stubborn part of it. There were a lot of trails, a lot of climbers, and generally there was a lot of traffic in the skies above. Darren had long since stopped noticing the gleaming cylinders that made their way across the sky from the airports of northern England toward Ireland and the Atlantic Ocean beyond: they were just background noise to him after twenty years.

But suddenly that noise had been silenced.

When the rest of the group finally retired to their tents, Darren slipped away from the camp to find a perch that offered a panoramic view of the endless night sky. For almost an hour he scanned the blanket of stars that took away the breath of those that travelled to Snowdonia from the light-polluted cities, searching for the tell-tale blinking lights of aircraft. The night was cloudless, and he knew he should have seen several planes in the time he spent watching, but there was nothing. It was as if the flight path had simply ceased to exist.

When Darren returned to his tent, deep in troubled thought, he retrieved the satellite phone from the bottom of his pack. He hadn’t ever needed to use it, but the device was faultlessly reliable. He would look like an idiot using it to ask why there were no planes in the sky, but so be it: the crawling sensation in his gut needed
to be halted.

The satellite phone was fully charged, and as the dim green grow of the screen illuminated the tent, he thought for a moment that he had been getting worried about nothing
, letting the infectious fear of the younger climbers get to him. Only when the phone had been scanning for a connection for a full five minutes without success did Darren’s gut finally get its point across to him.

There was something wrong out there beyond the barren wastes of the Snowdonia National Park.

That’s when Darren finally gave in and labelled the crawling sensation in his gut; gave it a name and made it real.

Fear.

As much as he had tried to deny it; to lay it squarely at the feet of the inexperienced climbers, fear had him in its clutches, and that could only end badly. There was no place on the slopes for fear.

He made up his mind then to cut the expedition short and get off the mountain. At the time it felt like the safest option
; like the sensible way to keep the group safe and healthy.

At the time. But that had been before they packed up camp and left the plateau, heading back the way they had come. Before they followed the winding trail down to the foot of the mountain. Before the bus station.

The
Snowdon Sherpa
was the ostentatiously-named bus that orbited the base of the mountain, making stops at each of the six main routes that wound up toward the peak, and delivering groups of climbers to the remote region from the nearby towns. The stations themselves were small and unremarkable; just squat concrete buildings and small car parks stuck in the wilderness like thumbtacks. Most were staffed by only two or three people; hardy souls who scraped a meagre living from the rocks and cliffs, and looked to have been there almost as long as the mountain itself. It had been years since Darren had paid either the stations or the staff any attention; they simply hadn’t warranted it.

The tiny bus station took
his full attention the moment the trail he had been following down the mountain brought it into his line of sight. Once he saw it, he could not look at anything else.

Darren made the sign of the cross in the air in front of his chest. It was a gesture he hadn’t performed in years, but it was programmed deep into his muscle memory, and his shocked mind ran backwards at the sight laid out before him; all the way back to a time when he had believed in something greater, hoping to find s
ome comfort in the old routine and discovering that there was none.

A single bus stood in the parking area at the front of the stati
on. It wasn’t a full-size coach: those were very rare sights around Snowdon. Only a couple of times a year did a large group of climbers make their way from one of the bigger cities to the Welsh mountains.

The bus, a cheerful green machine that looked to have been built in the seventies and had seen the last of its better days in the same decade, seated around twelve people. Darren’s party had taken a very similar vehicle from the coastal town of Caernarfon three days earlier. The vehicle stood dormant, with the door at the front, next to the driver's seat, w
ide open like a silent scream. Yet it was not the bus that held Darren's gaze like a magnet and made his breath catch in his throat. It was the passengers.

What was left of them.

It was impossible to count the bodies; as futile as trying to guess how many animals had been used in the processing of a packet of minced beef. All across the car park around the bus, Darren saw recognisably human parts mixed with frozen streaks of gore that he didn’t
want
to recognise. For just a second the sight of the blood gave life to an ancient memory, one he believed had been buried deep in the monochrome past.

Suddenly he was s
taring at the broken bodies of the two people that mattered most in the world to him, trying to comprehend that his young family had been alive one moment and fused terribly with the steaming metal of the car the next, and that it was all his fault.

“Darren?”

Lexie. One of the young women he had been leading toward the summit of Mount Snowdon. She stared at the car park in horror.

Lost in his memories,
Darren had forgotten the group of climbers was even there. He blinked, tried to keep his lower lip from trembling. Almost managed it. Lexie looked like she was almost scared out of her mind. She suddenly looked very young. No bravado left.

“What do we do?”

There’s no wild animal in Wales capable of this,
Darren thought.
No other damage; this wasn’t some accident or explosion.

Darren’s mind swam, grasping for an explanation for the carnage that lay only thirty feet away.

Find the next foothold.

He dropped into a crouch, letting the bushes surrounding the bus station block out the sight of the car park.

“
People
did this,” he hissed at the group, raising a warning hand to stop any debate in its tracks. One by one, the group dropped into a crouch beside him. “More than one, to kill a group that large.”

He saw something in
Lexie’s big, frightened eyes snapping.

“They might be gone. They might not. We stick together, okay? We move slow and quiet, an
d we get to the landline in the station. Once we’re inside, we’re fine, right? We call the police and barricade the door until help arrives. Stick
together.
”

He put a finger to his lips, and unzipped a pocket, sliding out a sleek multi-tool and releasing the small blade
with a faint
snap
.

You’ll only cut yourself with that, you idiot.

Darren silenced the voice in his head. There was no room for doubt. Not now. Even as he looked at the small blade, Darren was dimly aware of a thrill coursing through him. A feeling of excitement - of
life -
so unfamiliar he almost did not recognise it. The climbing and the rocks had long ago lost their thrill, the edge of danger blunted by experience.

With gritted teeth, he eased himself up and crept forward, twisting his neck with each step to search for a sign of movement.

The station was nestled against a crescent in the road that meandered around the base of the mountain. Darren was approaching from the trail at the rear, passing rocks that obscured most of the building. Each step brought a little more of the place into sight, and with every passing second as he approached the car park to the left of the station, he expected to see something charging toward him. A psychopath with an axe, perhaps, like Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
, a manic grin and murderous eyes, coming at Darren swinging and shrieking. There was nothing.

When he reached the horror that stained the floor around the bus, his brain wanted not to look, but his eyes just wouldn’t co-operate. All around the vehicle, the passengers had died grotesquely, their bodies sundered by some sharp instrument and, worse, some looked to have
bite marks
, ragged tears in their flesh that exposed muscle and bone. Several looked as if their eyes had been ripped out.

Freezing sweat ran down into the small of Darren’s back.

Most of the bodies were clustered in one spot; a couple had died further toward the front of the building.

It’s a trail. They were running for the bus
.

Needles of fear slowly pierced down into Darren’s mind.

Running from what? What would scare so many people?

He stepped past the bus and headed for the main station building, pressing himself
against it to provide cover. Darren paused there for a moment to heave in deep, quaking breaths. Just being able to press his back to something made him feel a little less exposed. As the team joined him, he peeked around the corner, taking in the front of the building in a quick snapshot. It looked deserted.

He held up a hand.

Wait.

He listened, imploring his ears to rise above the insistent pounding of his pulse.

What is that noise?

The sound was faint. A sort of soft scraping, like something wet being pulled along metal. He looked quizzically at the team, trying to confirm in their eyes that he wasn’t hearing things.

He leant close to Lexie’s ear. Smelled a trace of exotic perfume diluted by sweat and dirt and terror.

“Where’s that coming from?” He breathed.

Lexie started to shrug, but then her eyes fixed on a point over Darren's right shoulder and widened in horror, and he heard it.

Thump.

Darren turned slowly to face the bus, and the sight of what had dragged itself out through the open door made his blood run cold. They had walked right past it, assuming the vehicle was empty.

His thoughts froze as he tried to
understand what his eyes were seeing, and one of the little sayings his wife had been so fond of threw itself up from a pit of long-forgotten memories.

You know what happens when you assume…

A blood-soaked woman was hauling herself toward them using her arms to lever herself forward, dragging herself along the floor.

Both
the woman's legs had been severed at mid-thigh height, like some movie assassin had sliced them away with a sword, and her passage left a chunky streak of red-black gore on the cold tarmac. Both her eyes had been ripped out, and one hung uselessly against her stained-red cheek, like it had frozen there, sticking in place.

For just a moment, Darren’s mind went completely blank, just for a split second, and he lost his foothold; felt like he was tumbling away into some endless ravine.

“Jesus, get some help, go call an ambulance!”