Panic (10 page)

When she reached the upstairs landing, she found Jason, face flushed and eyes wild, emerging from his old bedroom.

“Empty,” he said. “She's not here. Everything looks normal.”

His voice broke on that last word, and Rachel wanted to hug him.

“We have to call the police, Jase,” she said. “Whoever did this might still be close by. Mum might need our help. We have to get help.”

Jason nodded slowly, almost absent mindedly, as though the words had made it through his ears, but his brain was having trouble making sense of them.

“No signal,” he said, his voice clotting again.

“Same here,
” Rachel replied. She put a hand on his arm and led him into the nearest room, their parents’ bedroom, and sat him on the bed.

“I'm going to use the landline, okay? I'll get them to come out. In the meantime, just stay here. You're in shock. I'll get you some water.”

Jason nodded, eyes fixed on the floor.

“I'll be right back,
” Rachel said, and hurried downstairs. The house, previously so terrifying, seemed much smaller now that Jason was there, and so much less intimidating. She recalled how the prospect of searching the upstairs had scared her so badly, and gave silent thanks that her brother had turned up. It was awful seeing him so heartbroken, the normally grinning face stunned and frozen in misery, but his presence in the house gave her courage, like carrying a formidable weapon.

The house phone was in the hallway, sitting on a small side table that served no other function. Reaching it, Rachel cast another quick glance around the
ground floor, just to check that nothing had crept inside while they were in the bedroom, and lifted the receiver, keeping her gaze firmly focused on the back door, which still stood ajar.

She knew as soon as she pressed the receiver to her ear that something was wrong, the dial tone she had expected replaced by harsh undulating static, yet still she pressed the buttons anyway, hoping for a miracle.
None was forthcoming.

The
beeps that accompanied each button push dissolved back into the static.

Clammy fear gripped at her again. Had someone cut the phone lines?

Suddenly Rachel felt trapped; like she was having difficulty breathing.

During her first year at university, long before the requirement to do any actual work kicked in, Rachel and her house mates devised a drinking game, brilliant in its childish simplicity. The catchily-named
drink and hide and seek
incorporated two floors of their halls of residence, ample square footage to find a spot to evade someone who was, in all likelihood, already seeing double. The rules of the game were thus: play hide and seek. If you get found, you do a shot of tequila. If, after ten minutes, not everyone has been accounted for, the seeker has to do one shot for every unlocated hider.

Rachel had played the game enthusiastically, almost always getting caught due to her inability to stifle the giggles when the seeker drew near. Until the
last time she took part: an ill-advised game that took place when she returned with all her friends from a heavy night out. With all the participants already in various states of disarray when the game commenced, it proved to be an unfortunate time for Rachel to squeeze herself into a trunk that just barely encompassed her slight frame, and which, it turned out, could not be opened from the inside.

Months later that night became something she could look back and laugh at, but the night she spent locked in that trunk, while everyone else
involved the game either fell into a stupor or just plain forgot they were playing and wandered off, gave Rachel her only glimpse into claustrophobia, and it was an experience that, even when she thought of it months later, sent icy chills through her.

Echoes of that feeling came back to her now, and Rachel was suddenly certain that she could not stay in the house, feeling so vulnerable and trapped,
for a moment longer.

She dropped the phone receiver back into its cradle and hurried back upstairs to Jason.

He didn't look up when she entered the bedroom, holding his hands to his temples and staring, wide-eyed, into the carpet, as though the fibres held the answers to the mysteries of the universe.

“We have to go
, Jase,” she said, a little disturbed to hear a note of panic in her voice.

Jason
, still lost in the carpet, didn't respond.

“
Jason
,” she said firmly, wincing a little as she saw him jump at her harsh tone. “The phone's dead. We have to go.
Now
.”

Jason nodded for a second, seeming to mull it over, then stood. 

“Get your bag,” Rachel continued, trying to keep a lid on the hysteria clawing at her gut. “We're going to the police station. I don't think it's safe here.”

Jason's eyes clouded over, as though this was beyond his understanding, but then he seemed to snap out of it, and nodded again, more vigorously.

Rachel ushered her giant brother down the stairs. His bag – a huge and surely unnecessary rucksack sat in the hallway next to her suitcase and shoulder bag. He swung the bag easily up onto his shoulder with one bearlike hand. Rachel decided to abandon the suitcase. Everything she might need – phone, purse, keys – lived in the shoulder bag. It was as she slipped the strap over her shoulder that they heard it, a sound that cracked the silence of the morning in two, entering the house like an intruder, stopping them both dead in their tracks.

A huge roar, louder than anything Rachel could reme
mber hearing in her entire life: a sound that shook the house, making the windows shudder in their frames.

Rachel whipped her head round toward Jason, and saw her own panic reflected in his haunted eyes.

The roar rolled and echoed, fading away like the rattle of a spinning coin on a hard surface.

“What
the hell was that?” Jason said in the swollen pause that followed; his voice barely a whisper.

Before Rachel could respond, the world erupted with noise as people flooded out onto the streets, screams of fear and confusion filling the
misty air.

It was that exodus, that sudden emptying of all the houses in town, as people sought what they thought was the safety and comfort of the herd, that truly marked the beginning of the end.

*

Victor kept a vehicle, an old flat bed truck, about a mile away from the entrance to his bunker, buried under foliage.

The truck was carefully blemished, dented and scarred so that anyone who might happen across would simply think they had stumbled upon an abandoned wreck.
Distressed
, he thought with a grim smile, like the fashion for artificially-aged clothing that the internet informed him was currently all the rage.

He cut the cop loose and hefted his slack body. The guy wasn't small, and the journey to the truck would be arduous. He briefly considered leaving him where he lay but decided against it. Just wouldn't be sporting.

Victor had spent years wondering what it would look like, when it all went down.
If
it went down, though his research – the pitiful, cautious net-trawling he had been restricted to by his isolation and paranoia - had always suggested that they would go through with it. To deny himself now would make it all so much foreplay. All preparation and no end product. The cop provided an excellent opportunity, one that he just could not pass up.

A chance to get eyes on the beginning of the end.

He wouldn't get too close to the town, Victor promised himself. Curiosity, after all, would kill even the most cautious cat.

In the trees, buried somewhere in the mist, he heard the rustling and cracking of people approaching, fast, and nodded in satisfaction. The cop hadn't lied. No one lies to the shotgun.

A thrill coursed through him, and he placed the limp policeman back on the ground gently, like a mother returning her child to its crib.

Then
Victor lifted the shotgun, aiming it in the direction of the approaching noise, and waited for them to appear.

Derek Graham knew Paula Roberts well, having been her source of minced beef and sausages for fifteen years.

Trade had slowed down for Derek in the last few years as the supermarket in the next town pulverized the competition with impossible prices and
buy-one-get-one-free
offers.
Loss-leaders
, for Christ's sake. Special offers designed to lose money. The free and fair market was a smirking misnomer, a barely-concealed sham.

Derek's father had been a butcher, a man who taught Derek to take pride in his work, to make the last slice of the day as carefully as he had the first, and it bewildered him that the majority of people flocked to the giant, soulless food warehouse, seemingly oblivious to the fact that every chicken breast looked identical and every slice of bacon was watery mush. After all, if you weren't going to pay care and attention to the things you put into your body then what would you pay care and attention to?

Derek stuck to his principles and his higher prices. Living creatures had died to make his produce, and to his mind, the least they deserved was to be prepared correctly for the next - and final - stage of their lives and their usefulness.

All of which meant that
Graham and Son's Butchers
didn't have a huge amount of customers, but the ones that did remain did so loyally, and Derek got to know them all. He knew what most would order as soon as he saw them opening the door.

Mrs
Christie wanted gammon, sixteen Lincolnshire sausages, a rack of lamb and six free range eggs. Mr Bale was a poultry man: chicken and duck for week nights, a pheasant for Sunday roast and an eight pound turkey every Christmas Eve.

Mrs
Roberts...well, she just wanted gossip. She was Derek's least favourite customer, always hovering around his counter for too long as though she couldn't make up her mind what she wanted (though in reality, Derek knew, she simply stayed in the hope that more people - and thus more gossip - would come in) and she never complimented him on his cuts in the same way his other patrons did. Derek worked hard to ensure that as much fat as possible never made it from animal to customer, and a little appreciation of that fact would not have gone amiss.

In the end, she always ordered minced beef and sausages. There was no artistry in minced beef and sausages.

Still, she was a customer, and Derek had gotten to know her habits extremely well.

Which was why he knew something was amiss as soon as he saw her walking down the street toward his shop. Well, not walking exactly, more...
stumbling
.

He paused, the sharp blade hovering an inch or two above the leg of lamb that he had been trimming, lamb that had arrived in the middle of the night, so fresh it was still chewing, and frowned.

Derek's shop was in a narrow alley leading off the small square that comprised the town's area of commerce. Not quite an ideal location, but only a few steps away from it, and the plate glass frontage afforded him an excellent view of the town. It was, he had realised long ago, one of the reasons why Paula Roberts was so hard to shift once she had appeared. Like a grease stain.

It was a foggy morning alright, foggier than any Derek could remember, but he could see that
the figure approaching was Mrs Roberts, even though her head was bowed, as if in prayer. There was something wrong with the picture though, and it took a moment for him to realise just what it was.

It was her walk. Paula Roberts was moving...stiffly. Not the stiffness of someone who has pulled some muscles the day before, though. More like the stiffness, he imagined, of someone who had woken from a long coma, and had forgotten what muscles even were, let alone how to use them. Like someone learning to use their legs for the first time.

He watched, his work forgotten, as she drew closer, each step somehow faltering. An incongruous image flashed into his mind:
Bambi
, sliding about on the ice uncertainly, in the magical movie his parents had driven him twenty miles to see all those years before at the small picture house in Haverfordwest.

And then, as Derek watched, he saw something even odder: another figure appeared,
perhaps thirty yards behind Mrs Roberts, just barely visible in the shroud of mist. This one, Derek noticed, seemed to be levering themselves to their feet, standing for a moment swaying, as though dazed, before stumbling away. Whoever they were, their gait was a carbon copy of Paula Roberts' shuffling, angular movement.

It dawned on Derek then that there had been an accident of some
sort; maybe a car had hit these people. He'd seen in TV dramas the way that people involved in a car accident might stumble around in shock, unaware of their surroundings.

Derek wiped his hands on his apron and rushed around the gleaming counter, his mind suddenly filled with excitement and tension, and though he would never admit it, a little hope that he might be given the chance to play the hero
; to do something that would make his bafflingly miserable black-clad teenage sons proud.

He rushed out onto the pavement, and stopped dead when he heard the scream, a chilling, piercing yell of pure fright. The sound was disturbingly close, emanating from somewhere in the square.

And then he saw Mrs Roberts' face, and his jaw went slack with horror when he saw the empty sockets where her eyes should have been.

A slight whimper
escaped his lips, and when Mrs Roberts suddenly exploded into motion, coming straight at him, charging, Derek Graham had a moment, just a fleeting frozen second, to realise that he would not be playing the hero after all.

As Mrs
Roberts mounted the butcher, sending him crashing to the floor, her teeth frantically seeking out the soft flesh of his cheek, tearing it away with a wet popping sound, the screams in the square began to multiply, fanning out from the mobile epicentre that she had become like ripples on a pond, slowly devouring the calm reflection that had existed before and replacing it with jumbled chaos.

Of course, she
had long since ceased to be Mrs Roberts at all, and the person she had been, the person who had woken up that morning, cold toes emerging from the duvet and finding the slippers she needed to start the day, did not even exist now as a memory.

It wasn't hunger that drove her, not exactly, though certainly that was a part of it. No, it was a simple biological imperative, something entirely divorced from logic, or reason, or even insanity. Her existence now was
entirely dependent on sinking her teeth into the creatures that moved around her unseen; the malevolent forces she felt ranged against her. She could no more fight against it than could a man hold back the desolate, remorseless advance of age.

It never occurred to her to even try.

Kindred spirits began to awaken around her, and their presence made the creature that had been Paula Roberts feel glad in a way, a little safer. A part of the pack. But there were vast legions out there, all of whom smelled and sounded like the creeping darkness that now ringed her consciousness, entombing it, making her pulse pound wildly. She could feel them all out there in the dark, the invisible army.

Prey
.

*

In the confusion that swept through the square, panic spread like a virulent fever.

Those who saw the blood-letting, who knew even as they struggled to comprehend the signals sent from eyes to brain that an atrocity was emerging, something ancient and primal and unstoppable, simply turned and ran blindly. Several, paying no heed to the limited visibility of the morning, smashed into walls or posts, and were swiftly set upon. Others found that the beings that now chased them down seemed indefatigable, reeling in the yards inexorably, until they were close enough to claw and rend their victims.

James Thomas, retired gardener and still-going-strong octogenarian, had only set out for his morning paper that day, but with his knees playing up, had taken the car.

James preferred to walk, even when the pain was present, because he understood that opportunities to get out and enjoy the world, or spend time with others, should always be taken. That was one thing about reaching what the TV euphemistically and poetically referred to as your
‘twilight years’: if you were lucky enough to hang on to your senses (as many of James' long-time friends had sadly not been) then the world was brought into sharp focus as the timer ticked down toward zero.

So much of the modern world seemed designed to segregate and isolate, everyone sitting in protective bubbles of their own design: they travelled everywhere in cars, knowing only the destination and nothing of the journey that took them there, or they became slaves to their television or their computer or their office, living like ghosts, never connecting with those around them.

James often thought of the time he had visited his grandson living in Bristol, discovering that his evenings were spent lost in an online game of some sort, and that he didn't even know his neighbours' names. James had left after a few days to return home with a heavy heart.

On this day however, the fire that lived in his ancient knees had just been too much, his joints protesting loudly that the previous day's gardening – long hours of planting daffodils and azaleas and rhododendron bushes – had been just a tad too optimistic.

So he took the car, but compromised. He would stop for a cup of tea somewhere and read his paper, hopefully finding a few people to have a natter with before returning to the hollow silence of his empty house.

Now he sat, stunned, behin
d the wheel as the car trundled to a halt, and he saw the scene unfolding in the square before him, and found to his surprise that eight decades on the planet did not mean he had quite seen it all before.

All around him were people running and screaming, dropping to the floor in sprays of blood, or pouncing on the people who had been their lifetime friends until moments before and tearing them apart with teeth and fingers.

It was incomprehensible, and for a moment he felt the mind that he worked so hard to keep alert with puzzles and hobbies drifting like a leaf on the surface of a fast-moving stream, and he was back there in the unending nightmare, the one he worked so hard to submerge, the furious crimson skies glowering over the lowest ebb in human history. The broken bodies as skin clashed with industrial steel and the insanity of men that had grown too powerful, and too greedy.

This was something different though, something that was immediately apparent. There was no order here, no purpose, no matter how evil or misjudged. Not war. Just chaos and disintegration.

It was only when a man, covered in blood, strips of flesh hanging from his face and eyes that looked like ready-to-burst boils, leapt onto the bonnet of the car and threw himself bodily into the windscreen, sending sharp cracks right across it, that James snapped back into the present and found that age hadn't quite dulled his reactions entirely.

He threw the car into reverse, and stamped on the accelerator, never taking his eyes away from the bloody horror that clung to the breaking glass.

He would, he thought, readily throw himself out of the door when that glass fell away, and, dodgy knees or not, he would run like a teenager.

Such was his focus on the monster trying to get in that he entirely lost the direction of the car, swerving blindly, glancing off the brickwork off one of the buildings that crowded around the narrow streets, the collision threatening to rip the steering wheel from his grasp. The impact made the car shudder and lurch, and suddenly the abomination that had gripped his bonnet was gone, lost in the fog.

James began to give a silent thanks to whatever god was clearly watching over him, and ploughed into the petrol station he hadn't even seen racing toward his rear view mirror.

The world ignited.

*

Michael's bed was hard and uncomfortable. It felt like every spring in the mattress had suddenly downed tools and gone on strike, and was poking him in the back to ensure he
fully understood the situation. His sheets felt scratchy too, like that horrible wool blanket you sometimes get in cheap hotels, the one that you throw on the floor before you even consider getting into the bed.

And it was
cold
. Really cold, despite the fact that for some reason he had fallen asleep fully clothed.

His eyes flew open, and a brilliant star of pain in his skull went supernova.

He wasn't in bed. Not even in his flat.

The view that greeted him, when his eyes adjusted painfully to the unwelcome flood of light, was the sky. Or at least where the sky would be, if it weren't entirely obscured by the mist.

It all came rushing back to him at once, like a system update. The café. The dead men and the bloodied ghouls chasing him through the forest. The bizarre interrogation by the hooded man. The butt of the gun.

Michael tried to sit up and groaned as his muscles twitched and spasmed, sending irate feedback to his brain. As far as Michael could recall, he had managed to get through thirty
-plus years without ever being knocked out. Concussions, it turned out, didn’t like to dine alone.