Psychosis (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 3) (23 page)

Michael nodded.

Rachel ran to Jason’s side and grabbed his massive arm, halting its movement as he began to drive the knife forward again relentlessly, like a machine.

“We have to go
, Jase,” She said, and he turned to her, his eyes blank. “I need you to carry Michael.”

Jason stared through her, swaying
, as though drunk.

“
Jason.”
Rachel said sharply, and his eyes finally saw her. “Come
on.”

She dragged her brother over to Mi
chael, and heard another snap of metal.

“Come with us,” she yelled at the three strangers still plunging their weapons through the gaps in the shutter
and spraying thin streams of fuel into the flames, but only one of them looked at her, eyes wide.

They don’t trust
us
, she realised, and knew that distrust was going to get them killed. There was no time for persuasion, no space for saving anyone but the people she already knew.

She turned to run as Jason lifted Michael, and then they were running to the back of the store, through the swinging doors and down, scrambling toward hopes of survival that lay in entombing themselves in another underground room.

Rachel led the way, charging down the steps a
nd into a single large storage room. No doors, nothing beyond the swinging door they had just entered through. Even if they were able to remain perfectly silent in the basement, it would only be a matter of time before the Infected stumbled across them.

“Shit,” she
breathed, “
up!
”

And then
, in the store above them, the shutter gave way with a deafening roar, and Rachel heard the screaming start.

*

“Mrs Blake?”

Claire stared, stunned.

The woman in the flat opposite her, peeking through a crack in the door,
had
to be dead. Claire wondered if she was dreaming.

“Come in my dear, come in, you don’t need to worry, they’re all gone.”

Claire nodded dumbly, and the mere fact that there was an adult to tell her what to do made her feel like sobbing in relief. She grabbed Pete’s hand and led him into the apartment opposite.

Gwyneth
Blake shut the door behind the two children, and slid the bolts home.

“Where’s Mister Blake?” Claire asked
, looking around the small apartment for the man’s wide grin, and bit her lip when she saw the old woman’s eyes fill with tears.

Oh
.

Gwyneth
brushed her eyes and gave a watery smile.

“You must be hungry,” she said brightly, and Pete jumped.

“You have to be
quiet,
” he said sternly.

“Oh, not at all!”
Gwyneth said with a smile. “Don’t worry dear, they’re all miles away. Can’t hear you here.”

“How do you know?” Claire said.

“Because of this,” Mrs Blake said, and rolled up her sleeve to reveal her wrinkled forearm, and the mouth-sized chunk taken out of it.

“Because I can
feel
them.”

*

Jake could feel them.

At first the rush of power had overwhelmed him, and the
bewildering changes in his senses had been like a crushing weight, strangling the life from him. It took time to acclimatise.

He had thundered through the wall and into the dark space beyond, astonished at the way he was able to move now. It was like the world was moving in slow motion, and even the slight breeze emanating from the air conditioning units seemed to him to move like
syrup. When he was clear of the cell, and the figures he had felt watching him as his bones shattered and stretched and reset themselves, he slowed to a stagger, feeling his mind swimming at the sudden sensory overload.

He was in a storage area. Crates and boxes were piled floor to ceiling. There was no light, but he found he could see perfectly well. Better than that in fact. It was as though his eyes were picking up a faint residue of light and amplifying it until the room was brought into sharp focus.

But there was something else, something that it took him a moment to understand. He could feel them, thousands of them, people scurrying about in the spaces above him. He could even
see
some of the closer ones, and he realised it was his ears doing the seeing. Every sound, right down to the barely-there sigh of the muscles moving in their bodies, was reported to his brain, forming an image like an x-ray in his mind.

He clapped his large, deformed hands over his ears, willing the noise to cease for just a moment to let him gather his thoughts, but in truth there was only one thought: a humming engine at the very core of his being:
kill them all.

There was a door at the far end of the storage room, and he shot toward it, not slowing his pace even a fraction as he approached, knowing in his gut that the door, sturdy metal or not – provided no obstacle
. He crashed through it and into a corridor of white-hot noise. Several of the feeble creatures that he had once shared a species with were moving along the hallway, talking in low voices that erupted into screams when they saw the door smash off the wall opposite, and almost saw the furious blur that Jake had become.

His hand was deep in the chest of the last of them, tearing out the beating heart, even b
efore the decapitated head of the first had completed its journey from shoulders to floor. The power coursing through him was more potent than any of the drugs that had been forced upon him at Moorcroft, addictive and deliciously toxic.

He held the
warm heart in front of the pitiful creature’s face, growling in satisfaction as he saw the comprehension in the woman’s eyes for a fraction of a second before death took her.

And in the glorious silence
that fell on the corridor, Jake’s ears caught another sound, distant and muted. The sound of an elevator, whispering on a journey up and away from him.

There were hundreds of the creatures close by, he could hear all of their hearts beating, could see the clicks of the bones in their aching feet as points of light, tiny starbursts on his vision, but none of them compelled him like the sigh of the ascending elevator
, and the beating heart he knew instinctively that the moving metal box contained.

Ripley.

*

Rachel put a finger to her lips and stared at Michael and Jason. She pointed up, and crept to the foot of the stairs, wincing at even the soft
whisper of her pumps on the steps. She moved with as much speed as she dared allow, and reached the ground floor just in time to see the first shadows moving beyond the door, heading straight for it.

Feeling her muscles ache in tension as she moved with everything clenched, she started up the stairs to the first floor, and
reached the top just as something bumped into the swinging door below, and then she saw something that made her feel like weeping in relief: a door.

She
darted through it, followed by her brother just as the doors below opened like an overflow pipe, and the creatures spilled into the stairwell even as Rachel softly shut the door, blocking them from her sight.

Again she put her fingers to her lips, and noticed just how much her finger shook, dancing left and right. She held her breath.

Michael found he couldn’t take his eyes from Rachel’s wide, terrified pupils, as though even that miniscule movement might somehow alert the predators below to their location.

He saw her eyes widen further, and her mouth drop open as the walkie talkie at her waist suddenly blared static,
shattering the carefully constructed silence.

Below, the Infected roared.

Sullivan would be watching. Ripley knew it like he knew up was up. The base had to hold the densest concentration of surveillance cameras anywhere on the planet. Even here, at the centre of the most secretive of societies, everyone was being watched. Right now the old man would be poring over monitors, clawing out his white hair at Ripley’s handling of the situation, roaring into the nearest microphone, but that would get him nowhere. Ripley had turned his radio off.

There were at least three hundred men occupying the five concealed levels Ripley had decided to
cordon off. Sullivan would want more men down there, would want every soldier available to be hunting the creature, minimising the loss of life.

Ripley didn’t care about that. Hadn’t cared since the moment it had first become obvious
to him that the eggheads steering the vehicle had no clue how to drive. Maybe even all the way back when Sullivan had outlined enough of the plan to Ripley that he understood what the project meant.

When
Wildfire
went belly up, opportunity presented itself before him like a feast, laid at his lap. If the base was just a hole in the ground full of men, the ones with the guns held the power. And the people who would oppose him taking charge most strongly had now sealed themselves in the basement with a monster.

Ripley had just five men because he had watched Sullivan
carefully for four years as the crazy old bastard prepared to end the world. A small group of trustworthy, obedient men was exactly what he needed. A new government. It was exactly what Sullivan himself would have done. If the old man had been a fraction more suspicious and less arrogant, he might have seen Ripley’s intent early enough to stop him.

Those in the levels above, when
Ripley finally sealed off the base’s secret cellar, would do as they were
told.

McIntosh could have his fill of murder
in the levels below.
Gorge
himself on it. Only then would Ripley stop him.

Simon Ripley was just idly working through the question of how long it would take McIntosh to work his way
up five floors when two things happened that snapped him back to an abruptly altered reality. Firstly the door to the elevator at the far end of the corridor – the one he himself had ridden up only moments earlier – burst from its hinges with a deafening crash.

Secondly, an instant later, before he even had time to blink in response, the lights went out with a clatter of falling glass.

Only the soft glow of the buttons on the main elevator Ripley had chosen as his strategic advantage provided illumination, barely enough for him to make out the shapes of the men next to him. And then he heard it, in the darkness to his left.

Ragged panting, like a
n exhausted dog.

He turned and opened fire, and then they were all shooting, the staccato flash of muzzle fire showing them the empty corridor in capt
ured images, like a slideshow. In one of those flashes Ripley thought he saw
something
, some blurred hint of movement, and then the man immediately to his left simply disappeared. Ripley heard his scream of surprise start way down the right hand side of the corridor, and his blood ran cold. Was still running that way when the other soldiers were plucked away like stray hairs, and didn’t make a sound between them.

His felt the gun being snatched away from him, but by the time he did, it was gone, and the ragged panting was on his face, and something that felt like a bear trap clamped onto his neck. For four long, deep breaths
Ripley was permitted to do nothing but smell the blood and meat on McIntosh’s foul breath.

“You were right,
Mr Ripley,” Jake breathed in a voice like an idling truck, and the fact that the thing could talk, could remember, that it was still Jake McIntosh, wrapped itself like barbed wire around Ripley’s mind.

“This
has
been fun.”

And then Ripley wasn’t thinking anything other than pain as Jake McIntosh slowly and deliberately tore away each of his limbs in turn, the expression on his
misshapen face one of vague interest, like he was a bored child plucking the wings from a fly.

When Ripley was just a torso, his life gushing from his
sundered body at an obscene pace, Jake found himself grateful that the man had been so tough. That toughness meant he still clung stubbornly to consciousness, and Jake got to look into Ripley’s eyes as he grasped his head.

And began to pull.

*

John had been pinned down once before
, immediately after the vehicle he’d been travelling behind on a dizzyingly bumpy road suddenly erupted into a cloud of metal and glass that partially obscured the blinding sun for a heartbeat or two.

And then the shooting
had started: the whine and oddly-anticlimactic patter of the bullets rattling on the side of the armoured truck like a light, insistent rain, against the distant soundscape of muzzles exploding.