Psychosis (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 3) (22 page)

Fred’s mouth dropped open in
detached wonder. It was impossible for a human being to move so
fast.
The creature in the cell was no more than a blur, like a phantom image left on the vision after too long spent staring at a bright light.

“He can’t actually…”
Phil Sanderson started to say in a terrified whisper, and then, with a thunderous crash, McIntosh was gone, and a dark, crumbling chasm left in the wall was the only sign he’d ever been there.

Ripley was screaming into his radio
, important and ridiculous-sounding phrases, but his noise barely made a dent on Fred’s consciousness. He simply stood there, sucking in air through his open mouth and staring into the newly-formed abyss.

“You lived here?”

At first, their movements had been trembling and intermittent, like hunted vermin.
Checking every corner for predators before moving on.

Claire nodded.

When they had exited the underground car park into the frosty night air and the abandoned street, she had been unable to think where else she and Pete should go. The street had been still and silent, and remained so until they felt alone enough to quicken their pace. When the sound of their footsteps brought nothing but silence they began to run until finally Pete stopped Claire, and asked her if either of them had any idea where they were running
to.
They didn’t.

Going home
had struck Claire as the only option.

“With my mother,” She said.
“At the top.”

Pete looked up, squinting into the gloom. The lack of light made the
dark tower difficult to pick out against the darkened skies; slippery somehow.

He shrugged.

“I guess we’ve got nowhere else to go.”

The power seemed to have gone across the entire town: streetlights that had illuminated grisly spheres of the road’s surface were
now dark.
Everything
was dark. More than anything, Claire simply wanted to be at home, in her bed, under the safety of the thick duvet, to feel that she was somewhere safe and to let the sobs building inside her loose.

The apartment building she’d left several days earlier looked different without the central column of light that always illuminated the
main stairwell. The building seemed to glower, the familiarity of the place stripped away, leaving something darkly intimidating.

M
emories lurked inside the walls. Unhealed wounds that she was afraid might never scab over. She tried not to think about the last time she had been there.

When she led Pete inside, Claire found that the doors to the apartments on the ground floor stood wide open; dark passages
leading into terrors that she tried desperately not to conjure up in her mind. She saw the dried spatter of blood around the door to the elevator, and her skin prickled.

When Pete made for the door, she grabbed his arm and shook her head, eyes filling with tears, and led him to the stairs.

Step by gruelling step they tiptoed up the winding staircase. On the third floor they were forced to navigate around the body of a neighbour that Claire did not recognise. Even in the heavy gloom she could make out the ripped-open stomach, and she squeezed her eyes down to slits, so that the stairwell became fuzzy, obscured by her eyelashes, a trick she had employed with limited success whenever something scary came on the television. Even so, enough of the visual information sneaked in.

Finally they reached the top floor, and she saw the door to her mother’s apartment.
Wide open, just as she had left it several days and countless terrors earlier.

“That’s it,” she whispered, and she led Pete inside. The place smelled stale, but at least the lingering stench of blood
and death that seemed to coat the buildings and roads of the town was absent.

Her
gaze came to rest on the breakfast counter, and the box of Crunchy Nut Flakes, and her eyes filled with tears even as her stomach growled. She picked up the box and gave it a shake. The milk in the fridge would be bad by now, but at least it was something. She opened the cupboard next to the sink, pulled out two bowls and poured generous mountains of the flakes into each. Pete’s eyes lit up as she passed him one.

“Claire?”

The whispering voice, disembodied; floating in the air behind her, froze her hand on the bowl.

*

Fred snapped back into action like a taut rubber band.

“Get the elevators sealed off,” he snarled at Ripley. “If that thing gets into the upper levels we’re going to have a big problem.”

Ripley glared at the old man. Just what
the fuck
did Sullivan think of him? He had been conveying precisely that order via the radio while the wrinkled bastard was still standing there open-mouthed like a cheap whore.

Simon
Ripley was forty-six, and had the best part of three decades’ experience of dealing with combat situations. This situation – more bizarre than any he’d faced previously, admittedly – was in some ways no different. There was still a self-important bastard in a suit somewhere struggling to get to grips with the notion that when the trouble started, their input was as useful as that of a bawling child.

The thing that had smashed through the wall in the adjacent room electrified him. He’d taken the gig as head of security
at Chrysalis Systems Ltd because he needed the money, and because it transpired that being charged with violent assault damaged career prospects fatally. Once he had been clued in on Sullivan’s plans – or at least the parts he was allowed to know – he was eager for the action to begin. Discovering that he was likely to be no more than a babysitter to the affluent while the action went down elsewhere had been bitterly disappointing.

This
was more like it.

Ripley had been in charge of a manhunt before, and it had ended badly for the raghead bastard who had the information he needed. Ripley never got the information – he’d conducted the manhunt a touch too…
enthusiastically
for that – but he got the raghead.

After that, the top brass had decided that
catching
people was probably not Ripley’s forte, and Special Ops had come calling soon enough. He thought about those days sometimes, and felt rare stabs of soft emotion. Those had been good times. He hadn’t lost a single target. Even the one that ended his career, the one that ended up dying in public and causing a ‘diplomatic incident’. No one got away from Ripley.

His radio crackled.

On the fifth of the levels that remained a secret from most inhabitants of the base, the single elevator that connected the lower levels to the base proper was already being secured by five men he’d hand-picked from the several hundred combat-trained souls protecting the base to be his personal team.

McIntosh might have broken through one wall, but unless he was prepared to smash his way through miles of rocky earth, the only way out was
up.
The old man was shuffling away, the infuriatingly pudgy scientist trotting along behind like a puppy. They would be heading for Sullivan’s panic room. Ripley raced to the nearest elevator that would take him up to level five. When McIntosh went up, Ripley would be waiting.

The elevator moved up swiftly and silently, reaching the fifth level in a matter of seconds, and Ripley sprinted out before the doors had fully opened.

Each of the levels that comprised the base was enormous: any one level could comfortably accommodate anything up to thirty football pitches. Some, like the third level – a weapon and research testing area – were cavernous. Endless spaces that proved disorientating and uncomfortable even to Ripley. Being in a room so large that you could hardly make out the walls was unsettling. The fourth and fifth levels represented more domestic, familiar surroundings. Most of the scientists that had worked on various segments of Project Wildfire now lived on those levels, and most were not permitted to enter the levels above to avoid arousing suspicion. Levels six through twenty seven comprised what Ripley thought of as the hotel – all rooms bought and paid for by influence and power, or by years of combat training, and in some cases by plain old monetary wealth.

Ripley could only imagine that t
he base had cost
a lot
to build.

Personally, Ripley didn’t much care what happened to any of the engorged buffoons on any of the levels, but he did care about the hunt. Cared very much, and the choke point that the fifth level represented was his best shot at cornering McIntosh.

He reached the elevator that was the only conduit leading up to find his five-strong team standing guard. All were heavily armed: M27s, frag grenades, C4, flashbangs. Ripley thought about the swords that the team they’d sent to South Wales had been given, weapons with a primary attribute of silence. They wouldn’t need them here. Ripley grinned as one of his team tossed him an assault rifle.

He intended to make
a lot
of noise.

*

The rifle held five rounds.

Michael hit the target with all five, but it would have been more difficult to miss: the
target
filled the whole mall, wall to smearing wall, and the sight of the Infected tumbling over each other in their desperation to get at their prey sent blinding floodlights on his mind, and his thoughts were reduced to one cowering shadow.

My legs don’t work
.

If the things got through the gate, he would b
e dead in an instant. Or worse.

Fuck the noise.
They have to stay out.

Hit five.

Stopped maybe two.

Fingers trembling
, he began to reload as the first wave crashed against the security shutter and time seemed to sigh for an instant, as the metal bent inwards, inwards…and held.

“Fuck it, then,” Rachel said.

At his side, Michael heard a soft
whump
as she opened fire with the nail gun, firing in bursts, sending a river of iron into the advancing horde, aiming high, faces wherever possible. The things snarled and hurled themselves into the shutter, the ones at the front being slowly minced through it, clutching at them. The nails slowed them, but they weren’t stopping them, just adding a layer of numbing horror to their appearance.

Michael snapped in the
fifth bullet, and joined Rachel in spitting metal at the creatures. They were so close now that he was able to level the rifle at each forehead in turn, before blasting a hole between the grisly eye sockets. Each creature that fell away was swiftly replaced by another.

He snatched a glance about him. He saw Jason at the opposite end of the shutter; saw the three strangers sprinting to their aid, brandishing knives and garden implements. Someone was missing.

“Where the fuck is John?”

Rachel cast another look about the store. John was gone. Hiding in the basement or hiding on the roof. She gr
imaced, and shook her head abruptly.

To their left, Jason was stabbing the spaces in the shutter with a kitchen knife clutched in each massive paw. The sight of him, drenched in blood, eyes wide and unfocused as he stabbed and stabbed and stabbed, made Rachel’s blood run cold.
She focused on the shutter, blocking out the horrific image of her brother.

The shutter groaned, and
above the snarling rage of the Infected, above the clicking of Michael reloading the rifle and the wet thumping impact of Jason’s knives Rachel heard something that shook her into action: a metallic snapping, something in the shutter mechanism starting to give up the fight for them.

There were too many
Infected. More, still coming, an endless supply of snapping jaws and sightless faces. They were going to get in, unless she could think of another way to stop them. Frantically, she pleaded with her mind to offer up something meaningful.

Fire.

Something Rachel’s subconscious had noted on the way into the store surfaced, and she ran to the shelves behind the till. Lighter fluid.

She grabbed two of the cans and popped the lids, squirting the fuel onto the creatures pressed into the gate, emptying both cans, and pulling
out the box of matches that still sat impatiently in her cigarette-less pocket. She struck them two at a time, tossing them through the shutter, and the hideous moaning of the burning creatures, and sickening stench of their flesh as it began to melt onto the steel made her gag.

She grabbed more
cans of the lighter fluid, passing two to Michael, and they both began to spray, spreading the fire as far as possible. After a moment, the three newcomers followed her lead, gathering up cans of the fuel and squirting it into the flames. The fire was spreading, but it was small yet. It wasn’t going to stop them.

“It won’t hold,” Rachel said. “The gate’s coming
down; we have to get to the basement.”