Mutation (Twenty-Five Percent Book 1) (21 page)

He had a look around.  Some might have called it snooping, he preferred to think of it as getting to know his enemy.  Or his former enemy.  Or whatever Micah was now.  Alex wasn’t entirely sure, but he thought ‘friend’ might be stretching it a bit.  “Person he trusted not to kill him in his sleep” was perhaps the most accurate description.

He studied the pile of letters on the coffee table without moving them, but they were mostly junk mail.  A framed photo on the wall of a happy family showed Micah with an older couple and a teenage girl, the group smiling in front of a vista of green hills and fields. 

There were two tall bookcases against one wall and he walked over to take a look.  Micah had a wide variety of tastes in reading matter.  There were novels, mostly thriller and science fiction, books on history, photography and martial arts, a few in depth textbooks on anatomy, and a selection of anti-Survivor propaganda.

The microwave beeped. 

After a moment’s hesitation, Alex pulled one of the propaganda books from the shelf, fetched his pizza, set a second one heating for Micah, and settled down for a little light reading as he ate. 

The title was cheery,
The Meir’s Agenda: The Plot to Take Over Britain
.  After five minutes, his pizza was getting cold and his mouth was hanging open. 

Micah walked into the living room.  “What are you reading?” he said, going into the kitchen and returning with his pizza.

Alex lifted the book to show him the cover.  Micah winced, running his hand over his wet hair as he sat in an armchair.

“Yeah, that one’s a bit extreme.”

“A bit?  I thought I’d heard most of this stuff, but this one is insane.  Do people really believe a secret organisation is building an army of Survivors?”

Micah shrugged.  “Some.”

“Do you?”

“No, he’s completely out of his mind.”

Alex closed the book and put it down so he could eat.  “So why do you have it?”

“Bates gave it to me a few years ago.  He has some extreme views.” 

Alex took a bite of lukewarm, microwaved pizza.  He was so hungry it didn’t even bother him.  “How’d you get mixed up with him anyway?” 

Micah stared out the window for a while before answering.  “There was a girl in university.  Caroline.  We met in my first week there and we became friends.  She was beautiful and funny and way out of my league, but she liked me anyway.”  He paused, closing his eyes.  “We’d been together for six months when she was abducted one night by a white-eye.  They found her body the next morning.  Because her family lived a long way away, I had to identify her.  The things he’d done to her...”  He took a shuddering breath, staring down at his plate.  “She didn’t have a chance.”

It wasn’t what Alex had been expecting.  A deep anger at the man who had used his second chance at life to do something so terrible burned at him.  Some people didn’t deserve to be one of the twenty-five percent.   Painting all Survivors with the same brush was undoubtedly wrong, but now he understood why Micah had done what he had.  As he thought about it, he couldn’t say for sure that he would have reacted any differently in the same situation. 

“Did they catch him?” he said.

Micah nodded.  “He was a gardener on the campus.  He got life.  After Caroline was murdered, I was a mess.  Dropped out of uni, tried to drink away the pain.  Bates contacted me after the case was in the news.  I was nineteen and angry and grieving.  At the time, the things he said made sense to me.  I thought he had the answers.  Later I realised I was wrong.”

Alex didn’t know what to say.  It didn’t seem like nearly enough, but he said it anyway, and meant it.  “I’m really sorry.”

Micah glanced at him and smiled slightly.  “Thanks.”

They chewed in silence.

“That looks like some heavy duty stuff on anatomy,” Alex said after a while.

Micah looked at the large tomes in the bookcase and smiled.  “Yeah.  I was planning to become a doctor.”

“You ever think of going back?”

He seemed to think about it.  “Sometimes.  If we get through this, maybe I will one day.  Without all the Survivor-badgering, I’m going to need something to fill my free time.”

Alex looked at his final bite of pizza and smiled.  “Sounds like a good plan to me.  Any chance of more pizza?”

. . .

Altogether, they were in Micah’s flat for around an hour and a half. 

It was nice to relax, get away from what was going on outside, if only for a short time.  Alex’s head felt like it was spinning with the whole thing.  But for a while it was just two men who weren’t going to kill each other, putting their feet up, eating pizzas and weighing up England’s chances in the next World Cup.

As they left the flat, Micah took one last look around as if he would never see the place again.  A backpack was slung over his shoulder.  It was likely he’d be away for at least two days so he’d packed what he thought he’d need.  The last thing he did was remove the photo of his family from its frame and slide it into a pocket. 

They hadn’t discussed it, but Alex knew they were both thinking the same thing; how would this all end? 
Would
it all end? 

A few eaters were milling around some way away when they left the building, but they were able to slip out without being seen.  They headed in the direction of East Town.  The plan was to spend the night at Alex’s flat as it was closer to the location Bates had given them, then head out for the probably non-existent secret laboratory the next morning.

East Town was less than a mile from Micah’s flat, a brief, not unpleasant stroll when hiding from eaters wasn’t an issue. 

While the area could never be called picturesque, it wasn’t usually in such bad shape.  Abandoned cars were scattered along the roads, as seemed to be the case in most places now.  It was as if the whole city had decided to move out, and failed. 

They passed a row of local shops.  The windows were smashed on every one, even the florist.  A bakery looked like it had caught fire at some point.  The Co-op had been completely gutted.  A few eaters wandered among the aisles as if searching for the last loaf of bread before heavy snow was forecast.  Remembering Cutter’s mounds of supplies, Alex wondered if he should be concerned about food running out.  How much food was there in the city at any one time?  With no supplies coming in, were they going to start starving?  And where were the authorities in this crisis?  Had they really been abandoned?

A scream shattered his thoughts.  He looked around.

“That sounded like a child,” Micah said.

“Could you tell where...”

Another scream interrupted him.  This time it was obvious it came from somewhere ahead.  Both of them took off at a run.

Rounding a corner at speed, Alex collided with an eater directly in his path.  He tumbled to the pavement, the blood soaked man landing on top of him and forcing the air from his lungs.  He frantically struggled to free his arms pinned against his chest beneath it as its gaping mouth descended towards him.  Abruptly it slumped, face hitting the ground beside his head. Micah withdrew his skull-spiker from the back of its head and Alex rolled the body off with a grunt.

“No time for fraternising,” Micah said, offering his hand and pulling Alex up.

A crowd of eaters was gathered a short way along the road and a handful turned towards them.  As they began to lumber in their direction, Alex glimpsed a car through the space they briefly left before it closed up with more eaters. 

There were people inside.

Alex dropped his bag, Micah doing the same beside him. 

“That’s a lot of eaters,” Micah said.

More turned to look at them.

Alex removed his pistol from its holster.  “I don’t want to use the ammo or attract any more, but I don’t think we have a choice.”

The first eater was only a few feet away and Micah stepped forward, ducking under its clumsy grab to drive the skull-spiker into its temple before stepping back and pulling out his gun.

“Thin the crowd, then mop up with the spikers?” he said.

Alex nodded and took aim. 

As soon as they began firing, the eaters around the car switched their attention from the trapped people to Alex and Micah.  Alex tried to relax, taking his time with each shot, not wanting to waste a single bullet or accidentally hit the people they were trying to rescue.  Even so, head shots were difficult at the best of times and having to stand his ground against a significant horde of eaters was
not
the best of times.  Without Micah beside him, taking out the ones he missed, Alex wasn’t at all sure he would have been able to do it.

Slowly, the mob was reduced to a more manageable number.  Alex could see the car more clearly now.  The front of the vehicle was crumpled where it had hit another, empty car in the middle of the road.  Inside he could see a man and woman with three young children, huddled together, terrified.

“Alex, look out!”

He whirled around at Micah’s yell to see an eater directly behind him, its approach masked by the sound of their gunfire.  He ducked out of its way and sent a punch hard into its ribs, feeling them crack under the impact.  The eater staggered away from him and he leapt after it, bringing his spiker up before it could regain its balance and plunging it into the side of its head.  It fell to the concrete, unmoving.

Behind him, glass shattered.  Someone screamed.

Alex turned back to see Micah wading into the remaining eaters around the car, his movements almost a blur as he used both of the skull-spikers he carried to put down several in quick succession. 

One of the back windows was gone and an eater was reaching into the car towards the woman where she was trying to shield two of the crying children.  It grasped hold of her hair and she screamed.  The man grabbed its arm from his position in the driver’s seat and tried to push it away.  The eater leaned in, reaching its mouth towards his hand.  

Alex ran forward and grabbed the back of its shirt, pulling with all his strength.  Its teeth ate air as he hauled it from the car and threw it to the ground, puncturing the dead centre of its forehead before it could recover.

He looked around for any more eaters, but Micah was taking down the final one a few feet away.  More were approaching some way along the street, however, attracted by the gunfire. 

Alex bent to look into the car window.  The glass of the windscreen was shattered and looked like it was about to collapse inwards.  The rear window had a large crack across it. 

The family inside stared at him in terror.

“We need to get out of here,” he said as calmly as he could.  “You need to get out.”

The man let go of his wife, two sons and one daughter and lowered the passenger side window.  “Is it safe?” he said, his voice trembling.

“No, but if you come with us, we’ll get you somewhere safe.  But we need to go.  Now.”

He glanced at the closest of the new eaters a hundred feet away.

The man whispered something to his wife and she nodded.  The two doors facing Alex were opened and the man and woman, along with a boy of maybe eight, a girl of around five, and a slightly younger boy, all climbed out, looking around them fearfully. 

Micah, who had gone to check a couple of the nearby side roads, returned to the car.  “That way’s clear,” he said, pointing to a narrow alleyway across the road from them.

The man jogged around to the boot and tugged it open.

“Are you one of the bad people?”

Alex looked down at the little boy peering up at him, his eyes wide with fear and face streaked with tears as he clung to his mother’s hand.  He couldn’t have been more than four.

Alex crouched down to look him in the eye.  “No,” he said, smiling.  “I was sick once, which is why my eyes look like this.  But I got better.”

The boy nodded, accepting his words at face value in a way that most adults didn’t.  “I hurt my finger last week,” he said, holding one of his tiny hands up to display a faint white line on his middle finger.

“I bet you were very brave,” Alex said.

“I hardly cried at all,” he said, smiling.

Alex kept smiling despite the knot in his chest.  If they’d left five minutes later, or been held up somehow, they wouldn’t have been here in time. 

The man had taken a couple of suitcases from the boot and brought them to where Micah was handing Alex’s bag to him. Alex glanced at the eaters as he straightened.  They were getting closer.  He moved to block the children’s view.

“If we have to run, leave those,” Alex said to the father, indicating the suitcases.

He nodded.  “Thank you, for saving us.”

“We need to go,” Micah said, watching the eaters getting closer.

The man and woman each took a suitcase and picked up one of the younger children.  Alex knew they should just leave the luggage, but the suitcases probably contained things of sentimental value and he didn’t want to get into an argument about it on the street.  If it got bad, they’d talk about it then.  Or scream about it.  Whatever.