Psychosis (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 3) (4 page)

Until he tried to get up
and found that his body ended at the waist; his legs a useless anchor to the ground. Straining, he spent a moment trying to move something, to feel anything.

Nothing
.

Lifting his head, finding that the parts of his back that weren’t now just dead flesh hollered in protest at a night spent on the
cold ground, he saw Rachel, hunkered by the smouldering embers of the fire, rooting in her backpack for a few morsels of food to serve as their breakfast.

She looked tired, dark circles smudged under her eyes, making the face that had been fresh and youthful
just days earlier look a decade older. And not just tired, Michael realised, but haunted. He remembered the glimpse of trauma he’d seen in her eyes back in the bunker. He hadn’t asked what Victor had done while alone with Rachel; hadn’t needed to. Rachel did an excellent job of covering up her wounds, but when her guard was down, Michael saw the scars.

Jason slept to her left, his back to the fire.
They must have taken shifts keeping watch,
Michael realised, and flushed guiltily. He had been left to sleep all night.

“You know
I don’t know anything about you,” said Rachel, never taking her gaze from the backpack.

Michael
blinked, and wondered how long she’d been aware of him staring. He reached for the bottle of water he’d placed next to his makeshift bed, took a long, delicious drink.

“I guess there’s not been much room for conversation, with all this going on.” He said finally.

“There’s room now.” She replied pointedly.

Michael caught the hint. Was surprised he hadn’t seen it coming sooner, really. Circumstance had thrown the three of them together in St. Davids, and sticking together had seemed the best way through the nightmare. Back then they had looked at him as someone to follow, authority bestowed on him by a uniform that was most likely now nothing more than a symbol of a lost time.
The reality now was that Michael was something else they had to carry. Something heavy.

Jason stirred, sat up next to his sister with a yawn, his eyes unfocused. The way they were
positioned, the two of them with their backs to the forest, Michael with his back to the sea, gave Michael the impression of being grilled by some sort of panel of investigators. Long-buried memories scrabbled at their shallow graves, clamouring for his attention.

He shook the
m away.

“What would you like to know?
”

He
drained the remaining water in one long, soothing gulp.

“I spent some time on the Force in Cardiff, transferred to St. Davids a couple of years ago. Was married, now separated. Probably a widower I suppose.” The word caught in his throat. “I have a little girl, Claire. There’s not much else to tell really.”

“Why move from Cardiff?” Rachel asked. Michael was impressed despite his discomfort.
She had instantly picked out the relevant piece of information, the one thing he didn’t want to discuss, filtering through the bullshit. She’d have done well in the police.

“I...wasn’t cut out for city policing I suppose. And I wanted to be closer to my
daughter. St. Davids was the opportunity that came up.”

“You think she’s alive?”

The bluntness of her tone startled him. It was a question he had tried to avoid thinking about since he’d first received the message that originated from a friend that worked in Aberystwyth’s modest police station. He had no reason to distrust the message.
Your wife has been taken to hospital. She had something wrong with her eyes. Your daughter is missing.

Missing.

He had scrutinized the words in his mind over and over, trying to read the truth between them
. Missing, not dead
. When the infection had taken his wife, Claire had survived. For the moment, it was all Michael was willing to consider.

“Doesn’t matter what I think,” he said. My job is gone.
My family - my whole life -
gone.
Finding Claire is the only thing for me to do now.”

Rachel paused for a moment, and nodded.
Took a bite out of a biscuit.

As she chewed, Michael stared over her shoulder. He’d seen the movement in the bushes moments earlier, slow and stealthy. His mind raced, and on some level he recognised how swiftly the world had been
distilled to a single variable:
safe
or
unsafe.

“T
here is someone standing in the trees behind you.”

Michael kept his voice neutral as he delivered the information, hoping that it would take a
moment for them to process it.

“Don’t react. Don’t look. Keep your voices low.”

Jason merely stared at the charred remains of the fire. It would take more than being watched to shake him from the stupor that clouded his mind, Michael guessed. Rachel’s eyes narrowed.

“How many?”
She whispered.

“
One, that I can see. Crouched behind you, about thirty yards. Just watching.” He saw Rachel eyeing the small pile of weapons they’d left by the fire, just out of reach.
Lesson learned
, Michael thought.
Sleep with a weapon on you.

“Don’t.” He said quietly, his tone steely. “If whoever that is has a gun, all you’ll do is
spook them.”

Rachel gave Michael a dubious look. Wales was home to very few guns. The look on her face gave him the impression that she thought the only person for a hundred miles with a gun was him.

“He’d have to be a good shot to take out all of us before someone got to him.” It was Jason who spoke, startling Michael.

“Wouldn’t need to, Jason. He could miss us all. But you know what’s out there. If he fires a gun, we’ll have more to worry about than bullets.”

Jason pondered that for a moment, and nodded.

“So what, then?”
Rachel hissed.

Michael thought a moment.

“I’d say our best option is to say ‘hello’.”

*

Bailey had worked as a receptionist at Moorcroft for almost eight months, and had quickly discovered that the term
reception
was somewhat misleading: very few people ever visited the place. Most of the two hundred-or-so inhabitants had families; hardly any of them ever kept in touch with what was undoubtedly the black sheep of their family. Even government officials and safety inspectors tended to give the place a wide berth. Moorcroft
received
almost nobody.

So, the
fifteen-mile commute from Rothbury, the small town in which recession dictated she must live with her parents despite pushing thirty, was a pain in the rear, but the money was decent for the area. The job itself mainly consisted of flirting with the younger members of the staff and checking
Facebook.
She kept her reception in pristine order; and so on the morning the computers went down, Bailey found herself with nothing to do.

She had refreshed her page a hundred times, even tried to call Joe, the laughably under-qualified I.T. Support, but found the external phone
lines were down. In the absence of all other options, she fished out her mobile phone. The screen was small and fiddly, but at least
3G
would get her back in touch with the world.

Nothing.

Of course, if she had been able to access the internet, Bailey might have been lost in the virtual world, and she might not have seen the man sprinting toward the front door of the Moorcroft Hospital. As it was, with no distractions, she noticed him almost immediately, and she had as much as thirty seconds to react as he made directly for her.

Unfortunately, she also had time to see his face, to see the flesh ripped away from it, the bleeding holes where his eyes should have been, and the sight glued her to the spot, frozen like a mime, only her lower lip trembling, as though it possessed some advanced understanding of the situation that her brain did not.

She was still rooted in place when the man, who some deep level of her brain recognised was
growling,
snarling like an animal, crashed through the main door and hurled himself across her reception desk and smashed into her, cracking her spine painfully across the small table that held the fax machine behind her, and sinking his teeth into her neck, sending a spray of blood –
my blood! –
arcing into the air above.

Her last thought, the last action of
Bailey’s brain before it became something else, was that the smear he had left across her tidy desk would need cleaning.

And then she was up,
and nothing in the world mattered more to her than ripping out her eyes. Removing them felt like bursting painful infections, squeezing out the pus that rotted in her skull and removing a terrible pressure. Cleansing.

Bailey
clumsily stumbled out of the hopelessly inefficient four-inch heels she only wore to try to impress the man she’d had her eye on since taking the job and sprinted after the man that had bitten into her flesh, and she too was snarling.

S
tanding in the corridor, stunned by the sight of the receptionist streaking toward him, her face drenched in blood, was Robert, the man that had unknowingly prompted her to wear the high heels, and the thing that had been Bailey Smith charged at him drooling, and finally got her kiss.

Even at that last moment as the corridors began to fill with blood and pain,
Moorcroft might have survived the evolving onslaught but for a matter of timing, and the fact that Stuart White, head of the hospital’s small security team, was standing chatting to a colleague, and propping open the heavy security door with his foot.

Lost in conversation about the last round of football matches that would ever be played, Stuart didn’t see them coming until the chance to react was lost, and
he fell with a whimper and a spurt of arterial blood. Once inside the Hospital proper, the infection spread like steam, filling every crevice and gap, painting the walls red, and the fight was lost before the staff and patients even knew it had begun.

On the second floor, in Dr Jackson’s spacious office, the calming atmosphere her Feng Shui expert had
meticulously constructed broke like dropped china when the screaming began.

Alex heard and understood the commotion on the floor below them, was able to logically process that something had gone badly wrong: a riot perhaps; some poor unfortunate snapping and setting off a chain reaction. Yet his emotions remained flat.

The damn pills have neutered my mind.

Clearly, Dr Jackson had no such trouble: the blood drained from her face, taking away all colour beyond the ridiculously
bright red lipstick she insisted on wearing. Suddenly, she looked like some terrified porcelain doll. She stared blankly at him, and Alex realised that despite their relative positions, she was actually looking to him for guidance.

You won’t last long at this place Dr Jackson.

Alex stood and crept to the door, easing it open. The noise was approaching, moving through the hospital like an express train, almost as though the security officers had taken the day off. Why would they let trouble get out of the main hall and upstairs to the offices?

As he watched, Alex saw a woman – one of the patients – careering around the corner, running like her life depended on it. Seconds later, he saw a bloodied man wearing a security uniform catch her trailing gown, dragging her to the floor. The man proceeded to tear out the woman’s throat, pulling away from her with a large chunk of her neck still gripped
between his teeth.

Quietly, Alex closed the door, and turned to Dr Jackson.

“Does this lock?” He whispered, pointing at the door.

Deborah Jackson nodded,
terrified, and threw her key to him. Alex caught it and locked the heavy oak door with a
click.

A second later, the door shook
in its frame as something thumped into it from the other side.

“Ok
ay Dr Jackson,” Alex said, and the breezy tone of his voice unnerved him. “I think our session is over. And we have to get out of here.”

“W-What?”
She stammered. “Are you crazy? I can’t take you out of here!”

“I actually am crazy
, Doc, and you know it. But right now, something very, very bad is happening on the other side of this door, and by the sound of it, it’s happening on the other side of every door in this place. We have to go, out of that window, to the car park, and then as far away from here as we can possibly get.”

The bemused look on her face told Alex she wasn’t buying it, so he stood to one side and pointed at the floor. Following the gesture, she saw what had been
obscured by his feet: fingers, covered in blood, clawing at the space between the door and the floor. As she watched, the fingers gripped the edge of the sturdy door, and pulled, ripping away a fingernail.
Then
she moved, leaping up and snatching a small key from her desk.