Mutation (Twenty-Five Percent Book 1) (25 page)

Janie turned round and saw Alex and Micah watching her.  Her smile vanished.  “If either of you say a word, you will be singing soprano for the rest of your lives.”

“Nothing,” Alex said.

She looked at Micah.  “What are you smirking at?”

“It’s just interesting to see you have a human side,” he said. 

She shook her head and turned to Alex.  “I’m going to find my son and bring him back here,” she said.  “I don’t know if he’ll want to come, but I’m done with not being in his life.  If I have to knock him out and carry him back, I’ll do it.”

Alex smiled, knowing she wasn’t joking.  “He’ll be glad to see you.”

A flicker of doubt crossed her face.  “You think so?”

“When men are scared,” Micah said, “we always want our mothers.”

Janie stared at him for a moment then amazed Alex by smiling at him.  “You two be careful,” she said.  “I don’t want to be having to come and rescue you.”

Alex smiled.  “We’ll do our best.”

“That does not fill me with confidence,” she sighed, then grinned, revved her engine and sped off, yelling, “See you later, white-eyes” as she disappeared around a corner.

“The eaters won’t know what hit them,” Micah said, watching her go.

“Yeah,” Alex said, chuckling as he mounted his bike.  He pulled his helmet on.   “I want to check on Gaz and the other two on the way.” 

“What are you going to do with them?” Micah said.

“I have no idea.”

Despite having to avoid eaters and abandoned cars on the roads, it didn’t take long to get back to the house where they’d left the three would be rapists duct taped in musical hell.  It was so quiet when they arrived that at first Alex thought they may have made a mistake and turned onto the wrong street.  No Birdie Song blared from the upstairs windows and no eaters crowded around the building.  The front door was wide open.

Alex killed his engine.  For a moment, he thought he heard another engine, but the noise vanished and he shrugged it off as an echo.  Or maybe someone else was travelling, like they were.  Just because they hadn’t seen many people, and no-one else with a vehicle, didn’t mean there weren’t any. 

Giving it no more thought, he climbed off his motorbike and drew his pistol.

“Maybe they got free somehow,” Micah said, looking around apprehensively as they approached the door.

As soon as they stepped into the living room, Alex could smell it.  “I don’t think so.”

They crept up the stairs, alert to anything that might be waiting for them at the top.  Alex had to cover his nose and mouth with his hand to keep from gagging when they reached the landing.  Micah took one look in the bedroom where they’d left Pi and Buzz taped to the radiator and turned away, retreating to the landing.

The two men were still taped to the radiator.  At least, what was left of them.  Blood soaked into the carpet over much of the room.  Two disjointed, twisted skeletons and a few lumps of mangled flesh was all that remained of the two men.  The eaters had done a thorough job.

Despite the knowledge that these men had left him little choice, Alex felt guilty.  He had left them here, unable to defend themselves from the hordes of eaters roaming the streets.  This was his fault. 

A wave of nausea swept over him and he was about to leave the room when something caught his attention.  With a grimace, he squelched across the blood saturated floor to get a closer look at one of the skulls, which was now hanging across the stripped, bloody ribs, the spinal cord the only thing keeping it attached to the rest of the body.  Around the eye socket, the bone was chipped and sliced.  There were marks on the rest of the bones where eaters had gnawed into them, but this was different.  Some kind of sharp instrument had created the marks on the skull. 

His disgust temporarily forgotten, Alex studied the rest of the bones he could see without resorting to touching anything.  On the other corpse, he saw similar marks on a few of the ribs around where the heart had once been.

“What on earth are you doing in there?” Micah said from the landing. 

“I don’t think eaters killed them,” Alex said, still peering at the bones.

“They look pretty eaten to me.  Of course, I’m not studying them as if they were porn.”

Alex straightened. “The eaters ate them, but I think they were already dead.” 

Micah turned to look at him.  “How on earth can you tell from what’s left?”

He pointed at the ribs.  “Look at these marks.  And here, on the skull.  Don’t you watch CSI?  Those are stab wounds.”

Micah’s gaze flicked down to the mangled crimson flesh before he turned away again.  “I’ll take your word for it.  But who would do that?”

Alex took one last quick look around for clues, then walked back out again, pausing to wipe the soles of his shoes on a relatively clean area of carpet. 

“I don’t know.” 

Micah’s eyes opened wide.  “You don’t think Gaz somehow got free, do you?”

They both looked at the closed bathroom door.  Alex took out his gun and opened the door carefully. 

They looked inside.

“Well,” he said, his words muffled as he covered his mouth with one hand, “I think we can safely assume it wasn’t Gaz.”

Without any windows to let in the air as there had been in the bedroom, the smell of blood and early decomposition had become almost corporeal.  Gaz was slumped where they’d left him against the toilet.  There was little doubt he’d been stabbed.  The lime green handled knife was still buried in his left eye.

“I’ll be outside,” Micah said, his voice sounding strained. 

Alex turned to see him almost run down the stairs.  He found it odd that they’d been killing eaters for three days, and yet Micah was freaked out by the sight of a dead body.  Maybe it was the smell. 

Shrugging, he turned back to Gaz.  The eaters hadn’t got into the bathroom so he was intact, apart from the knife.  Something about it seemed familiar, although Alex couldn’t think what it was.  After a few seconds of staring at the knife, he sighed in frustration, closed the door and went back down the stairs. 

He found Micah outside the front door, taking deep breaths of the fresh air.

“I thought you were studying to be a doctor,” he said.

“We hadn’t got to the dead bodies bit,” Micah replied, “it was all academic.  Our anatomy tutor used to boast that after two months in his class we’d be able to stab someone in the chest and miss all the major organs.”  He looked back at the house.  “Who would do something like that?”

“Maybe someone they’d had a run in with before found them and decided to take advantage of the situation,” Alex replied, although he was unconvinced.  The feeling that there was something he should remember was still nagging at him.

“Well, unless you want to go poking around any more bloody remains, may I suggest we get out of here?”  Micah said, already striding back to his bike.

The location of the supposed secret laboratory was to the north west of the city, in a largely industrial area filled with retail parks and warehouses. 

The most direct route was through the city centre, but after their Tesco experience they had decided to avoid that whole area.  Other than East Town, all the more densely populated areas were closer to the centre, with a smattering of twenty storey luxury blocks of flats along the river and streets and streets of narrow Victorian terraces next to an ugly sixties concrete council estate. 

It made sense that eaters would be concentrated in that locality.  Although, as they drove through the streets north of East Town, Alex was wondering if they could be wrong on that front. 

Abandoned cars blocked all of the major, and even some of the minor routes.  Some of the cars were burned out.  Some were still on fire.  Even on the bikes there were times when getting past the frequent obstructions was difficult. 

Progress was faster than walking, but hardly rapid.  Coming anywhere close to the thirty mile per hour speed limit was a distant dream.  Apart from the cars and other detritus making the streets a maze of potential hazards, there was always the danger of rounding a corner and running into a crowd of eaters.   

When it happened, Alex was in the lead. 

He reached a stop sign and, for the first time in his driving career, didn’t stop.  They hadn’t seen any other moving vehicles.  He thought they’d be safe.  He didn’t factor in other possible perils. Like a large group of eaters milling around the middle of the street for no apparent reason.

His bike almost went down as he turned sharply, trying to avoid ploughing into a wall of grasping hands.  The back wheel clipped the leading edge of the horde and spun out of control, whirling for a few moments on the asphalt before propelling him with a squeal of rubber back in the opposite direction, directly at Micah who was just exiting the junction.

Alex caught a glimpse of his panicked face as Micah swerved to avoid him.  A split second later, he heard the crash. 

Grasping the brake, Alex put his left foot down as he jerked the bike round one hundred and eighty degrees to a standstill.  The engine stalled.

A wave of eaters was surging towards him.  Between the horde and Alex, Micah was on the ground, his bike on its side, pinning him to the street.

Alex leaped from his bike and ran towards him.  “Are you alright?” he gasped as he skidded to the ground beside him.

Micah winced.  “I don’t think anything’s broken, let’s just put it that way.  But I can’t get out.”

Alex looked up at the eaters.  They were just a few dozen feet from them, their excited moans all he could hear.  He tried to tune them out.

“Move your leg so I can get the bike up.”

Micah twisted his right leg from across the bike.  Alex pulled it upright then took Micah’s hand and did the same for him.  Blood was soaking through the jeans shredded around his left calf and he grunted as he put his foot down.

Alex glanced at the approaching horde nervously.  “Can you ride?”

Micah looked at the eaters coming for them.  “Under the circumstances, yes.”

Alex waited until Micah was back on his bike and had started the engine.  One eater had broken away from the pack and lumbered up behind them, reaching for Micah’s back.  Alex whipped out a skull-spiker and stabbed it easily, but the rest were close behind.

“Go,” he yelled.

He danced backwards from clutching hands as Micah’s bike took off before turning and running back to his own bike.  Given his luck with motor vehicles the last few days, he half expected it to not start again, but it roared into life as soon as he hit the switch and he made a tight u-turn and sped away, heart pounding with relief.

Micah had slowed to wait for him and Alex overtook and led the way down several small streets, making at least ten turns, before stopping again when he was sure they were clear.  Micah pulled up next to him.

“Cut your engine,” Alex said, removing his helmet, “I think I can hear something.”

Even over the sound of his motorcycle and with his ears beneath the helmet, something had got his attention.  With the remaining engine turned off, the sound was easier to make out.  From Micah’s expression, Alex could tell he recognised what they were hearing.

“We should walk the bikes until we know where they are and that we’re not going to get their attention,” Micah said, climbing off his motorcycle and removing his helmet.  He hooked it onto the handlebars.

Alex looked down at his leg.  “Are you alright to walk?”

He took a couple of experimental steps, limping slightly.  “It hurts, but yes.”

“Aren’t we near Newcastle Road?” Alex said, looking around.

“Yeah, I think so,” Micah said.  “I’m detecting a pattern here.”

Alex nodded.  “Roads that lead out of town.”

They stood for a few seconds, listening to the low thunder of a multitude of eater moans.

“It’s worse here,” Alex said. 

He remembered the horror he’d felt seeing the huge crowd of eaters two days before, even from so far away.  Just by the sound, he could tell these ones were much closer. 

They pushed their bikes for the next couple of streets.  Strangely, there were no eaters around, even though the rumble of the moans was growing in intensity.  Alex wondered if all the eaters in the vicinity had been drawn to it, effectively clearing the area.

Rounding a bend in the road ahead of Alex, Micah suddenly stopped and rapidly backed up again.  Alex opened his mouth to speak, but stopped when Micah raised a finger to his lips and shook his head frantically. 

Alex pushed down the stand on his bike as quietly as he could, then crept slowly forwards, lowering to the ground when the houses would no longer hide him and crawling. He peered around a garden fence.

The road ended around a hundred yards ahead at a T-junction.  Beyond, all he could see were eaters. 

It was as if they had been lined up like dominoes.  Each stood directly behind the one in front, no more than a few inches apart, creating a solid barrier across the road.  Every eater was facing in the same direction, to Alex’s right, their heads angled slightly down.  It looked like some kind of bizarre queue, as if they were waiting for something to happen. 

As he watched, every so often a movement would make its way along the rows, each eater moving just a little later than the one in front, creating rippling effect through the massive horde, a small Mexican wave of motion.

But worse than anything else was the sound.  Every single one of them was emitting a low moan, as though they were in some kind of trance.  It wasn’t the desperate moans of an eater when it saw food; it was a constant yearning, an unquenchable craving for something just beyond their reach. 

The intensity of the sound rose and fell, vibrating through the ground and thrumming inside his chest. Shudders drummed down his spine.  A deep, primal fear crawled through his gut. 

He pulled away from the corner and sat back against the fence, breathing hard and fighting down a wave of nausea.  The hand he wiped across his brow came away damp with sweat.  After a few seconds, he crawled back out of sight and stood to walk back to the bikes.

“What?” Micah whispered.

He didn’t even know how to put what he’d seen into words.  When he shook his head, Micah walked past him and crept to the corner as Alex had, to see for himself.  When he returned, he was noticeably paler. 

“That’s just...” Micah paused, taking a breath.  “What are they all
doing
?” 

Alex shook his head to indicate he didn’t know.  Although it was quieter around the corner, he could still hear that
sound
, making him feel like a thousand tiny insects were crawling down his back.  He shivered. 

“I think we need to see what’s going on outside that barrier,” Micah whispered. 

“And how are we going to do that?” Alex replied.  “As far as we can tell, every road that leads out is like that.”  He waved his hand towards the corner and the hordes of eaters out of sight beyond.

Micah turned and pointed to the top of a tall building they could see over the houses to the east of them.  Alex recognised it as a ten storey office block he’d driven by on countless occasions.  It belonged to an insurance company, if he recalled correctly.  He remembered staring at the glass entrance from his car many times as he’d sat in the traffic jams caused by the construction a few years back.  It was very close, if not on top of, where he now knew one of the strange metal barriers would be.  The barrier towards which all the eaters were now facing.

Alex looked at Micah in disbelief.  “You can’t be serious.  I’m the one who comes up with the insane plans. 
You’re
supposed to be the voice of reason and talk me out of them.  You’re not supposed to suggest them.”

Micah huffed out a breath.  “You don’t have to come,” he said, “but I want to know why thousands of people are either being turned into monsters or dying in here and all we’ve seen of the army is those damn helicopters.  I want to know why we’ve been abandoned.  I want answers.  That’s all.”  He turned and stalked back to his motorbike, retrieving the backpack he’d left on the seat and sliding his arms into it.

Alex stood for a moment, then followed Micah and put on his own backpack.  Micah watched him, his eyebrows raised.

Alex spared him a glance then went back to his preparations.  “It will never be said that Alexander MacCallum baulked in the face of an insane, harebrained scheme.”  He pocketed the motorcycle key.  “So what
is
your harebrained scheme?”

Micah frowned and looked back at the tall building.

“You do have a harebrained scheme to get us there, don’t you?” Alex said.

He held his hand up.  “Give me a second.”  After looking around for half a minute or so, he smiled.  “Okay, we can’t get there by the usual routes, so we go for the unusual.”  He pointed at a narrow pathway leading to the back garden of a house on the east side of the road.

“You want us to climb six foot garden fences all the way there?” Alex said, not bothering to hide his reluctance.

Micah hoisted his backpack higher on his shoulders and tightened the straps.  “Well, if you think you’re not up to it...”

Alex sighed.  “Just shut up and let’s get this over with.” 

They spent the next half hour picking their way through back gardens and hauling themselves over fences and walls.  The walls weren’t so bad.  The fences were worse.  The single hawthorn hedge left Alex covered in tiny painful scratches and poked him in places that made his eyes water. 

He noticed Micah favouring his wounded leg on more than one occasion, but he made no complaint.  When they got into the office block,
if
they got into the office block, Alex knew he’d need to take care of whatever injuries he’d sustained when his motorbike went down.

The three roads they had to cross were a nightmare, with the vast horde of eaters visible away to their left.  They sprinted across, keeping to any available cover and trying not to make a sound, each time expecting to hear a sudden surge of moans and the shuffling of thousands of eater feet coming for them.  But, whether by skill or luck, they made it without attracting any attention.  Alex’s natural pessimism told him that couldn’t last forever.

Eventually they reached the edge of the residential neighbourhood and looked out from between two houses.  On the far side of the road in front of them was a small retail park with a line of large stores, then beyond that was a cluster of four ten storey blocks, the farthest of which was the insurance building. 

Stretching before them, the wide expanse of the road with a car park on the far side offered very little in the way of cover.  The streets at either end of the one in front of them angled slightly towards each other here, meeting some way beyond the barrier.  Thousands of eaters hemmed them in on both sides.  Crossing the road would leave them exposed in every direction.

They peered up and down the road, then pulled back out of sight. 

“Got any more harebrained schemes?” Alex said. “Because I think this one might have run its course.”  He leaned back against the wall of the house, winced, and removed a thorn hooked into the seat of his jeans.

Micah stared across the road.  “Run really fast and pray?”

“We’ll never make it without being seen.”

“They all seem to be really focused on the freaky moaning and swaying thing.  If we’re quiet, maybe they won’t notice us.”

“You know what I really love in a life or death situation?” Alex said.  “A good, solid maybe.”

“You didn’t have to come.”

“They’ll put that on my grave,” he said.  “If there’s enough of me left after this to need one.  Okay, let’s get this over with.  I suppose we all have to die sometime.  Although if now is that time, I’m blaming you.  That’s all I have to say.”

“If only it was,” Micah said.  He pointed to two large vans parked side by side in the car park, outside a carpet store.  They provided the only cover between them and the first building.  And they were at least two hundred feet away.  “We aim for those first, then head for the back of the insurance building.  There has to be a door there somewhere.  Ready?”