Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4) (9 page)

Michael’s gaze dropped to his useless legs.

“You’re sure?”

Rachel crossed her arms and glared at him.

Michael’s head dropped.

“Christ,” he said.

“Most of the men are carrying weapons,” Rachel said grimly. “They’ve all got blades on their belts. I haven’t seen any guns.
I haven't seen a woman carrying a weapon of any kind.”

She shrugged, and the gesture was clear.

You do the math.

“If anyone here has a gun, it will be Darren,” John said. “And if Rachel’s right, he’s got himself a group of people loyal to him, and they are controlling the rest. And she
is
right, Michael, the make-up of the place is all wrong. Like it or not, men are generally stronger and faster. When the shit hit the fan, it’s more likely that a greater number of men would have been able to fight off the Infected. This is more like…I don’t know, they’ve been drawing people in here with that light, and they’re only keeping the women.”

Michael nodded glumly as he saw Rachel’s expression darken. He knew exactly what she was thinking.
Victor
.

“So I guess the question is what are they doing with the men?”
Michael said.

“And the women,” Rachel snapped
hotly.

John nodded.

“That’s one question. And it’s an important one,” he added hastily when he saw Rachel’s head whip sharply toward him. “But the biggest question of all, Michael, is
where the fuck are the Infected?
And since we’re in the mood for questions, why do these people have one tied up in the town centre…and why the hell does it
talk
?”

Michael massaged his temples. He had only been awake a few minutes, and already he wished he could crawl back into oblivion.

Before he could respond, the door swung open, making them all jump. A young woman, barely older than a teenager, stood in the doorway and regarded them all with barren, empty eyes ringed by dark circles. She looked like she had been crying. Looked, in fact, like she had cried until she had no tears left.

“Darren would like to see you now,” she said, and her tone, flattened to a whisper by fear and damage, reminded
Michael of the way Rachel had sounded in Victor’s bunker, and made his blood run cold.

When dawn broke over Catterick, bullet-grey light and freezing wind chasing away the shadow of the night, it was only a matter of time before the screaming started.

Nick
Hurt was a first year Lieutenant. Or perhaps
had been
a first year Lieutenant was more accurate. What he was now, he wasn’t quite sure. Other than shit-his-pants terrified, of course. But in some ways that was nothing new. The army had terrified him long before its members began to eat each other.

Typically
,
Lieutenant
was a position held for about three years before promotion to Captain was considered. It was a chance to lead a platoon of thirty-odd soldiers, and to get some command experience before taking on bigger tasks.

To an outsider at least,
Nick had made a promising start to his career as an officer; his uniform had barely been emblazoned with his current rank before his superiors started dropping hints about what a fine Captain he would make. It helped that he came from a fighting family: his father had been a Lieutenant-Colonel, his uncle a Major. Both had trained at Catterick, and the Hurt name became a legacy that game him a powerful boost of goodwill, and meant the many mistakes he made along the way were overlooked.

His family had served with distinction in conflicts across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. His father had led a force of over six hundred heroically in the
brief war in the Falklands.

And I lost my entire platoon while I was
safely stationed at the largest garrison the British Army has to offer.

If dear old Dad was looking down from Heaven (unlikely) or watching from below (far
greater chance of that) he would have snorted with derision.
Of course
Nick had lost his entire platoon without even going to war.

Nick
knew that if Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Hurt had been able to give his opinion on matters, he would say that the best thing his son could have done was to die with them. At least then he might have brought
some
honour to the family.

The pressure to join the army had been present since
Nick, pink and soft and pudgy, had chewed noisily on his first rusk. It didn’t matter to his father that Nick was a terrible fit for the role right from the start. There was no chance in Hell that Colin Hurt going to raise a thoughtful, sensitive boy. He was going to raise an
officer
.

Nick had never quite found the courage to tell his father he wanted no part of the army, and once he was in, t
here seemed to be no escape from the preordained torture. Nick had a feeling that the army would keep promoting him until one day he found himself in charge of the entire damn thing, and still with no clue what he was doing. Even being inept had no effect: all he got was affectionate slaps on the back and conspiratorial winks from grey-haired warriors who had to ‘do right’ by the memory of Colin Hurt and take care of little Nick. Even in death the old bastard had managed to exert complete control over Nick’s life.

And then, after a battle in its own backyard, a shrieking, howling, terrifying hour spent killing people that wore the same uniform, the army looked to have unexpectedly died, and maybe, just maybe,
Nick was finally free.

In the chaos that followed the arrival of the virus, leadership seemed to have disappeared. All high ranking officers were gone or dead. All communication was down. There was,
Nick thought, a real danger that the people at Catterick were going to start thinking for themselves and behaving like
people
rather than soldiers.

Unfortunate, then, that the highest ranking officer left alive had decided that the army must prevail, and that anyone caught so much as
thinking
that maybe the army had had its day would be punished as a deserter.

Unfortunate
also that Colonel Dave Hopper was a raving lunatic; even more so that enough people still feared him sufficiently to propel him to power.

Nick
sat on the low wall that had become his regular perch in The Heart and glowered as he saw Hopper pass by in the distance, chest puffed out in self-importance, flanked by a ridiculously unnecessary security detail. Doubtless the man had found some ultra-important task that required his personal attention. Maybe someone, somewhere, had veered too close to independent thought.

Nick
had left the crowded dorm as soon as his eyes opened that morning. The proximity of hundreds of others, piled in sleeping bags almost on top of each other left him feeling claustrophobic and he slept terribly. He spent as much time as possible outside, on the low wall in the square, trying to find some space to breathe.

He
drained a thermos of almost-cold tomato soup, and grimaced. The soup was fine, though it made a poor breakfast. Still, Nick did not think the bitter taste in his mouth had anything to do with their food supplies.

In their attempts to block out the nightmare outside, the citizens of Catterick had simply kick
-started a different nightmare
inside.

Colonel Hopper
had been universally disliked even before his sudden ascension to the position of God-King of Catterick. His was the lowest of the staff ranks, but that had never stopped him browbeating all around him, regardless of their seniority. He was belligerent, abrasive and intimidating, and he seized power with fervent relish.

It made sense that
Hopper would survive the apocalypse. Nick had a feeling that if he were one of only two people left on the planet, Dave Hopper would be the other.

Hopper had quickly rallied a unit of terrified loyalists to his cause, and had then successfully argued that with tensions at Catterick rising like sun-blasted mercury, the carrying of weapons should be restricted to what, in effect, became Hopper’s own personal guard.

FUBAR didn’t do the situation any justice.

All debate about whether or not the people that remained after the grisly battle with the infection were still an ‘army’ or just
plain old ‘survivors’ was quickly shut down, or at least marginalised and pushed into the shadows. Those that King Hopper decreed were ‘trouble’ - even those that he believed
might
cause trouble - were locked away, and the rest began to build a wall around the centre of the Garrison, providing the new king with a fortress. Hierarchy had to be maintained at all costs in order to avoid The Heart sliding into chaos, of course.

It seemed that only
Nick could see the insanity inherent in locking able bodies away for ‘crimes’ they hadn’t even committed when a very real threat could stroll up to their front door at any moment.

The area they had chosen to wall off was a cluster of the larger buildings at the centre of the town. The
ridiculously-named Heart. The town centre was the wisest choice, strategically speaking. Hopper might be a slavering loon, but he was far from stupid.

At the nucleus of the makeshift fortress, the open space between the large medical centre and even larger barracks had been turned into a sort of public square. People gathered there, murmuring in small groups. Tables were laid out with food - the lukewarm soup mostly - and
cold drinks. It made the walled-off fortress they had created feel a little like a small community, as if the creation of a public space represented them clinging to society, or civilization, but Nick knew that wasn’t the reason for it.

It wasn’t a need for civili
zation that drove the soldiers to huddle together in the square; it was terror. It was the illusory safety of the herd that brought them together; the need to see that they weren’t facing the horror of the world alone. Strength in numbers.

And
Nick had a feeling it would tear them all apart.

Already there had been a couple of fist fights, and Hopper’s personal police force had stepped in to restore order by jabbing the butts of their weapons into the faces
of the men who had 'broken the peace’. The first shooting was inevitable, and once it happened, civil war would rip the place in two and give Hopper the insurrection he clearly longed for.

Nick
had taken to hanging around the small square, like so many others. The two main buildings felt cramped and claustrophobic: every square inch seemed to be taken up by improvised dormitories, and the atmosphere in them stank of sweat and despair. But it wasn’t a desire for company or the safety of the herd that brought him there each day when he awoke.

Nick
sat apart from all the others on the low wall, and stared longingly at the real reason he kept returning to the square.

There was a helicopter sitting on the roof of the medical centre,
which had mainly used as an emergency vehicle for ferrying members of the public to distant hospitals rather than for army business. It was far from being a gunship, but it didn’t need to be.

Nick
was no pilot, but he knew enough to get that chopper off the ground. And so he sat on the low wall in the square day after day, and waited. When the opportunity arose, Nick was going to take that helicopter and get the fuck out. He felt no remorse about the prospect of leaving his comrades, or taking the vehicle. The world had changed.

Let the deluded fools who still thought of themselves as an army stay and play politics while the world burned around them. The last place
Nick wanted to be was cramped into a tiny prison with a thousand people suffering serious mental trauma, under the control of a man who was only one loose screw away from authorising public executions, and daubing messages on walls in his own excrement.

He glanced up at the roof of the medical centre. It was stupid, to keep checking that the helicopter was there.
Reminded him a little of his days as a cadet, and how he would spend hours cleaning and checking his weapon unnecessarily.

Just checking to make sure it’s still there.

Nick tried to reassure himself that he had the courage to follow through on his plan. It sort of worked.

When he dropped his eyes back to ground level he found that his stare had
not gone unnoticed. Across the square, a broad-shouldered man with a hard face was looking right at him, his steely eyes locked on Nick through the crowd of passing bodies.

Shit.

The guy stalked toward him slowly, never taking his gaze from Nick, and sat heavily on the low wall with a sigh.

“You a coward, Lieutenant Hurt?”

Nick blinked; said nothing.

“Yeah, I know who you are,” the man said, and
Nick thought he heard a chuckle in his voice. “Bit older than you, see. I served under your father for a while. Brutal old bastard, he was. No coward, though, I’ll give him that.”

“What do you want?”

The big man leaned close.

“Name’s Drake. Saw you looking at that chopper. Seen a few people looking at it, truth be told, but no one looked quite the same way you did. There’s a countdown written on your face, Lieutenant Hurt. A timer in your eyes.”

Nick flinched a little and cast a furtive glance around him.

The big man’s face split in a grin that made
Nick’s blood run cold.

“Don’t worry there,
Nick. I’m not here to tell everyone that you’re planning to steal that helicopter.”

The man’s eyes twinkled wickedly.

“I’m not planning to-“

The man guffawed.

“Sure you are. And I don’t plan to stop you. Just hope you’ve left room for one more, is all.”

“And if I were planning to run, why would I take you with me?”

“Ah, there’s Daddy’s little treasure. Figured the old man might have raised a coward, but he’d also have raised a ruthless fucker. You’ll take me because Colonel Hopper owes me a favour. And I could easily make that favour dealing with
you
, if you know what I’m saying.”

He winked.

Nick glared at him.

“So what do you need me for? Why not take it yourself?”

The man shrugged.

“Call it settling a debt with your old man.”

Nick’s chin dropped. He should have known.

Dad.
Of course.

“And besides, I can’t fly the damn thing. And I’m not entirely sure there are any actual pilots left here. But
you
can fly it, can’t you Nick?”

Before
Nick could respond, the sound of raised voices froze the retort in his mouth.

He glanced at
Drake, who shrugged and leapt to his feet, heading in the direction of the noise. Nick followed, cursing Hopper for locking up all the guns. When he made it to the street beyond the barracks, he saw a group of people gathering near the wall they had built out of debris. He heard anxious voices raised; the sound of panic gathering.

Fear knotted in his stomach.

The infection? Inside the walls?

Even as the thought crossed his mind, he knew it could
not be true. The crowd seemed scared, but there was no sign of the violent explosion of chaos that had accompanied Catterick’s first skirmish with the virus.