Psychosis (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 3) (12 page)

The thought was incomprehensible. And untrue, he realised abruptly.
Something
had changed.

He saw his ruined mother standing at the end of the corridor, glaring at him, but it was different now, like he could feel her, like her presence was an itch at the border of his consciousness.

She looked furious, her ghastly face twisted into a mask of rage, and Jason shrank from her, pressing himself into the wall, his mind reeling.

*

It was a straight right, not too quick, not too powerful, and maybe at any other time John would have seen it and avoided it with ease. As it was, when Rachel drove her fist into his jaw, he
did not
see it coming, and it caught him flush. Hurt, too.

“Bastard,” she spat, winding up a left hook, “
Who the fuck do you think you are? That’s my brother up there!”

John caught the
second blow mid-flight, letting it defuse harmlessly against his palm.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” He said, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “But you saw him, he wanted you out of there, he wanted to protect you.”

“What is it?” Michael said, “What happened to Jason?”

Rachel’s eyes narrowed
dangerously. “I don’t need your protection, John. And even if I did, you’re a little late.” She spat the words bitterly, and Michael saw for the first time a crack in the wall she had built around herself after being left alone with Victor in the bunker. He realised then just how hard she was working to hold herself together, and marvelled at the way she had managed it. With his broken body and Jason’s broken mind, it was easy to forget that anything had befallen Rachel. That was her doing, he realised.

“Okay Rachel, fine, you got it. But I’ll protect
myself
any fucking way I see fit. And that includes getting as far away as possible when your wardrobe-sized brother turns into a fucking killing machine. Next time, I won’t bring you along. That’s no problem for me.”

“They got Jason?” Michael looked confused. “Then why isn’t he in here now? You think that door would stop him?”

Rachel stared at him for a moment, eyes lost in a cloud of fury, and then the storm of rage enveloping her seemed to pass.

“You’re right,”
she said, voice trembling.

Michael nodded. “Listen,” he said.

The three of them held their breath for a moment, ears straining against the silence. The sound they expected to hear - Jason crashing around upstairs in a murderous rage - was not forthcoming.

“He’s okay,” Rachel said, and she placed both hands on the cupboard John had thrown in front of the door and heaved.

“Hey, wait a minute.”

“She’s right, John,” Michael said. “When they turn, it’s pretty much instant
aneous. If Jason had become one of them, he’d have been chasing you down those stairs. He’d be hammering at that door right now.”

Rachel let out a cry of triumph as she s
hoved the cupboard away from the door with a squeal of wood on tile. Michael and John winced at the noise, but Rachel was already gone, sprinting up the stairs. Michael shot a glance out of one of the narrow windows. The storm was still raging outside. It might cover the noise they were making. He hefted the rifle across his lap anyway, and kept his eyes on the door.

“Better go after her
, mate.”

John
gave a frustrated nod, and hurried toward the stairs.

Jason sat against the corridor wall, his expression foggy as he stared down at the small tear in his forearm. Around him, the bodies of the rats, squashed like bugs, littered the floor.

“I don’t understand,” he mumbled. “Why am I still here?”

He looked at Rachel, and she saw a
heart breaking echo of her little brother in his eyes, the boy who had found school so overwhelming, who had been frightened of everything. The one she had so fiercely protected. Tears welled in her eyes.

“Come downstairs Jase, we’ll figure it out.”

She slipped a hand under his massive arm, pulling gently. After a moment of resistance he stood and followed her toward the stairs.

As they descended John crouched and examined the rats. They had been infected, he was certain, their eyes looked ready to burst, and he was sure if they could they would have chewed them out of their own skulls. So why hadn’t they passed the infection on?

He stared a moment longer, and a thought dawned, something that seemed important, though he could not put his finger on why.

The rats hadn’t attacked each other.

Lost in thought, he followed Jason and Rachel back downstairs.

*

“Do you think it’s like this everywhere?”

Claire had finished the entire pack of peanuts, and with the distraction of hunger pushed aside for the moment, her attention turned back to their predicament. As she waited for Bill’s response, she ran a hand along the bar at which she sat. She liked the way it felt: rough, grainy; old. A lot of people must have sat exactly where she now sat.

Bill was standing a few feet away at one of the pub’s large windows. Thick glass, opaque. They afforded some protection, but they also meant he could not see what was happening on the street. He felt far more exposed here than in the cellar. If one of the crazed lunatics out there put their mind to getting through it, the glass would present no obstacle.

He frowned.

“I think it might be, Claire. If it weren’t, I suspect the place would be crawling with police right now, or army.”

“I saw the police try to stop them in the market. They didn’t last long.”

Bill nodded absently.

“But we’re safe here, aren’t we?”

Bill turned from the window and stroked his rough chin.

“Ish.
We were safer in the cellar.”

Claire wrinkled her small nose, the memory of the smell down there still fresh.

Bill grinned.

“I think we should be moving on
, though. Aberystwyth isn’t safe. Maybe nowhere is, but I’d sure feel a lot better if I could get you somewhere with less people.”

Claire brightened.

“Like where?”

“My
brother has a place. Up on the north coast. Right on the cliffs, and not a soul for miles. I can’t think there would be many safer places than that right now.”

“How will we get there?”

Bill smiled at her, eyes twinkling.

“Same way you get anywhere young lady.
One step at a time. And the first step is getting out of this pub. Come with me.”

He started for the door that led out of the bar area. Claire shuffled off the bar stool that she’d been dangling her short legs from and hurried after him.

“Where are we going?”

“Upstairs. First thing we need to do is get a look at what’s out there.”

Through the bar exit and into a murky corridor beyond: Claire saw several doors bearing universally-recognised stick figures representing man and woman. A wider door depicted a stick figure sitting on a wheelchair, and to the right of that, another door marked
Staff Only.
Bill pushed it open with a wrinkled hand.

Bill climbed the stairs in silence, which made the wheezing of the air travelling around his lungs all the more noticeable to Claire. She ascended behind him, slowing her steps to avoid crashing into the back of the old man.

Away from the open-plan bar area, the first floor of the pub looked much like any other house to Claire’s eyes; not too different to the flat that had been home to herself and her mother until only days earlier. Seeing the cheerful domesticity of the place, the snug-looking couch and the TV placed directly in front of it, the small kitchen area that still bore the signs of cooking – dirty dishes, a stained coffee mug, sent a powerful shudder of emotion through her, bringing tears to her eyes.

She hadn’t thought much about her mother, hadn’t really had a chance. Staring into the kitchen
, memories threatened to overwhelm her. And then her leaking eyes alighted on an opened box of
Crunchy nut flakes
and she could choke back the sobs no longer. They escaped, huge and painful, making her slim shoulders heave, and then the old man’s arms were around her, warm and snug, the smell of stale liquor somehow comforting, and she buried her face in his stained sweater and let the emotion pour out.

*

Michael arched an eyebrow as Rachel led Jason and John back into the kitchen. He had half-expected the big man to be dead. How could he be bitten and not turned? He set the rifle down on the sturdy kitchen table, felt the tension in his shoulders that had built up as he had sat there alone with his thoughts and the weapon dissipate a little.

“What happened?”

Jason shrugged, held out his bleeding forearm.

“Got bit.”

Michael nodded, and found himself wishing that he had gotten a little more experience with the police in Cardiff. He could feel the group fracturing; the addition of John maybe, adding an extra level of stress to an already delicate and complicated relationship the three of them had been trying to forge in the fire of madness. Or maybe it was Jason himself: brooding, exuding menace. Slipping away into some dark place, towing Rachel along behind him.

Michael
’s experience of questioning people – suspects – in Cardiff was limited, despite his one-time status as the station’s up-and-coming golden boy, and his lack of knowledge on how to get straight answers out of people was becoming problematic. He had been involved in two interrogations, but he hadn’t been asking the questions in either. He glanced down at the gun. The last time he had been questioned, he’d been tied to a tree with the business end of a firearm levelled at his face.

For the briefest of moments he found himself thinking about the shotgun, and how quickly it had compelled him to tell the truth.

I do have a gun.

Firearms were worse than useless against the Infected. But against humans, they would still hold their power to persuade. The rifle, he thought, conferred a certain level of authority. More than his uniform ever had. He cast the thought aside, but felt some part of it clinging to him like the smell of stale tobacco.

H
e had once been part of a team. A duo, at least. Two people pulling in the same direction until one day they stopped talking and all sense of direction was lost. He felt that same sense of helplessness now, of things slipping beyond his control. He knew instinctively that this ragtag group had to be pulled together, and fast.

“We’re as blind as those bastards out there,” he said finally.
“No clue what we are dealing with. It’s going to cost us.”

Rachel blinked.

“The only way we get through this is by trusting each other,” Michael continued. “The
only
way. Anything anybody is holding back is going to get us killed. If John had
this
,” he lifted the rifle, “up there, then Jason would probably be dead now, and all because we’re operating in the dark. Any information any of us has got, we
all
need it. Anybody disagree?”

He looked round each of them slowly.

“Then I’ll start. I watched my partner get bitten, and a few moments later he was one of them. He was trying to kill me in about thirty seconds. Then I met Victor, and he told me, or at least hinted, that this…whatever
this
is, it’s man-made, and he had a part in creating it. He said something about his blood type being immune. It’s not much help, I don’t know what blood type he was, I don’t even know what blood type
I
am, but there it is. Rachel?”

Rachel looked at him for a moment, puzzled, and then spoke.

“Victor tortured and raped me for nearly a week.”

She kept her jaw up, mouth set firmly
, delivering the line like a letter bomb, and stared Michael straight in the eye, waiting for a reaction that didn’t come.

“
He didn’t tell me anything about this. Mostly he talked about his fucking bunker. But he did talk about how things were going to be…afterward. How his time was going to come. Nothing of much use unless you’re trying to determine whether Victor was a psychopath. He was.”

Her eyes dropped.

“But I do think I might know why the rats haven’t infected Jason. My mother’s dog had it, he was infected. He…killed my father. But my father died human. He didn’t turn. He dragged himself into the basement, but the dog just attacked and kept attacking, until I turned up, and then it tried to kill me. Kept coming even when it had a pitchfork in its back.”

She shuddered a little at the memory.

“
So maybe my father was immune. Maybe Jason is too. Say they both had the right blood type, maybe. I don’t know. You’d get your blood type from a parent, right?”

She shrugged
an apology.