Mutation (Twenty-Five Percent Book 1) (26 page)

“No.”

“Good.  Let’s go.”

They crept from the cover of the houses, Micah in the lead, Alex’s heart pounding.

The tightly packed crowds of eaters blocked them in on both sides, no more than two hundred feet away in either direction.  The moaning sound was almost tangible, throbbing against Alex’s chest, battering his eardrums.  Up close like this, the smell of the new eaters permeated the air, like thick pollen on a warm summer’s day.  He fought the urge to cough.   

Alex kept low as he ran, although he didn’t know why.  He knew full well how visible they were out here.  If even one eater saw them, they were in real trouble.

And then it happened. 

He was watching the eaters to their right as he ran.  One moved its head, glancing to the side, looking right at him.  Without thinking, Alex grabbed for his gun.  He stopped and took aim, but before he could shoot, every head turned to look directly at him. 

The moaning stilled.  

For a split second there was utter silence. 

Alex froze, staring at his death reflected in a thousand pairs of eyes. 

A cacophony of moans exploded through the air. 

“
Run!
” he shouted, launching himself across the road.

Seeing the danger, Micah sprinted for the car park.  They ran past the stores, which offered no real protection, and through a cluster of more industrial businesses beyond them, car repairs, kitchen fitters.  Alex risked a glance back as he left the car park and immediately wished he hadn’t.  It looked like every eater in the city was behind him.  The sound of the ravenous moans of thousands of eaters was deafening, almost drowning out the rapid shuffling gait of their feet.

Rounding a corner into the car parks for the group of office buildings, Alex stumbled to a halt next to Micah, who had stopped and was staring at the ground around him.

The first thing he noticed was the blood.  The ground was more red than grey.  The viscous fluid had stained the tarmac and seeped into the concrete walkways.  Dotted around, piles of clothing fluttered in the breeze, torn and bloody.  As they walked forward he noticed something worse amongst the shreds of material.  Bones.  Stark and white.  Licked and gnawed clean. 

The smell of copper still filled the air, that and rotting flesh, and Alex gagged at the stench.

The sound of moans shook him out of his shock.

“Come on,” he said, grabbing Micah’s arm and pulling him forward, trying not to look too closely at the carnage they ran through.

The front of the insurance building faced out onto the main road, so they aimed for the back which faced the car park. A solid looking door was set into the wall up a short flight of stairs against the outside of the building.  Micah took the stairs three at a time and yanked on the handle.  It didn’t move.

“We don’t have long,” Alex said, breathing heavily as he ran up behind him.  “I’m not sure, but I think they might be getting faster.”

“It opens outwards,” Micah said.  “Can you break it down?”

Alex scanned the thick security door.  They’d need a battering ram.

“Not in the time we have,” he said. 

He started down the steps, intending to try one of the other buildings, stopping as the leading edge of the horde of eaters emerged from the cover of the surrounding landscaped vegetation and buildings. 

Micah hissed in a breath.

It was like watching insects swarm from a nest.  They squeezed out from between the buildings and spread across the open area, swamping abandoned cars and stumbling over bollards and hedges.  Many fell and were instantly trampled by those behind them.  The whole space filled with eaters, yet still they came. 

A tidal wave of hunger.

Alex backed up the stairs, his heart thumping against his ribcage.  He’d never been so afraid in his life.  The remains of whoever had tried to come through here before them had been obliterated by the surge of eaters, but he could still see the massacre in his mind’s eye. 

As he looked out across the car park and the approaching ravenous crowd, he knew they didn’t stand a chance.

They slipped off their backpacks and left them against the wall by the door, freeing up their movements.  Alex pulled out the rifle, stuffed the spare magazine into his pocket, and set the selector to continuous fire.  He’d be out of bullets within seconds, but he knew it didn’t really matter now.

Micah took his skull-spikers from his pocket and glanced at Alex, his expression grim.  Alex loosened the sword in its scabbard and mustered up a small smile.

“Brought it all this way,” he said.  “Might as well use it.” 

Micah shook his head and smiled.  “Just make sure you point it in the right direction.”  He looked out at the horde.  “I’m sorry.  This is my fault.  If you hadn’t followed me here...”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Alex replied.  “I don’t do things because you say so.  I thought it was a good idea to come.”

“I thought you said you were going to blame me.”

“Oh, yeah.  In that case, I take it back.  This is totally your fault.”

Micah smiled.  “The last two days has certainly been an experience.”

Alex returned his smile.  “Yes it has.”

The first wave hit the five foot high concrete platform on which they were standing in a sea of grasping hands and gnashing teeth.  Arms reached beneath the metal bars of the safety fence, grabbing at their feet.  Alex and Micah moved back out of reach and waited for them to find the stairs.  It didn’t take long. 

A few tripped at the first riser.  More clambered over their incumbent forms and staggered up the steps.  Alex opened fire, aiming at head height to kill as many as possible as quickly as possible.  The first wave fell, creating a mound of bodies that slowed those behind.  As he reloaded, for a moment he thought they could somehow block the way with bodies.  But the eaters that took the dead’s place simply scrabbled at them until their corpses rolled aside, opening the way forward.

He squeezed the trigger again.  Another swathe went down.  The rifle clicked empty.

He dropped the gun and drew his sword, looking out across the horde.  The pile of bodies around the steps was a drop in the ocean.  It hadn’t even made a dent. 

It took less than half a minute for the eaters to scramble past their dead comrades. 

The horde closed in again.  

Alex thrust and slashed, taking down the first few with his weapon’s longer reach.  Any who got past the sword fell to Micah’s knives. 

They fought with the desperation of men who knew they were about to die, every kill meaning a few more seconds of life.  The bodies piled up in front of them, collapsing down the stairs, tripping those behind.  But there were always more to take their place. 

Alex was breathing hard.  The sword felt like it was getting heavier, his movements slowing.  He was already tiring and he knew that, even though it felt like they’d been fighting for hours, it must have been less than ten minutes. Beside him, Micah was grunting with exertion and Alex could hear him panting for oxygen. 

It wouldn’t be long before their adrenalin fuelled energy ran out.  There were simply too many.  They couldn’t last.

Alex thought about the pistol at his waist.  When it came to the choice between a quick death and the slow agony facing them, he knew what he would choose.  He just didn’t know if he had the strength to do it.

From behind them, Alex heard a thump and a scraping sound.

“Come on!”

He glanced around at the voice to see the door wide open, two men beckoning them in.

Micah grabbed the eater in front of him, thrust the knife into its eyeball and pushed it at those coming up behind it.

“Go,” Alex grunted, stabbing his blade into another head.  Male or female, he didn’t notice any more.

Micah dashed for the door, grabbed their packs and disappeared inside.  Alex stepped back and, with the little energy he had left, smashed his foot hard into the chest of the eater in front of him, sending it tumbling back into those following, knocking them down the stairs. 

Then he spun round and threw himself through the doorway. 

A bang echoed around him as the door slammed shut.

Cocooned in the darkness behind the door, for a few seconds all Alex could hear was the sound of heavy breathing and a ringing in his ears from the sudden lack of sound.  He flinched as muffled thuds hit the door outside. 

As he gulped in oxygen, he looked around the room.  Micah was by the door, leaning against the wall as he gasped for breath, a skull-spiker still clutched in each hand.  Their two rescuers stood nearby, their eyes unfocused, and Alex realised how dark it was in the windowless room.  As he watched, one of the men felt along the wall next to the door and flipped a switch.  A fluorescent tube light on the ceiling flickered into life.  Alex squinted for a few seconds as his eyes adjusted. 

The room was essentially grey, grey floor, grey walls, grey locker style cupboards lining one wall, some grey metal shelving units against another, a couple of grey metal chairs in a corner.  Two grey doors lead from the room and a grey staircase ran up the far wall and disappeared into the ceiling.  It seemed to be some kind of storage/janitorial room, with cleaning supplies on the shelves and miscellaneous maintenance items propped in the corners.

“Holy crap,” one of the men said, his gaze darting between Alex and Micah.  “I’ve never seen anything like that. We thought you’d be dead for sure.” 

“Another couple of minutes and we might have been,” Alex replied.  “Thanks.”  He looked at Micah.  “You okay?”

Micah straightened, flipped his stilettos back into their handles, and began to laugh.  After what they’d been through, he sounded insane.  Alex found himself joining in.  The two men stared at them as if they’d lost their minds. 

“I can’t believe we’re still alive,” Micah said, shaking his head.

The adrenalin still coursing through his veins was making Alex feel slightly light headed.  Unable to find the words to sufficiently express himself, he whooped.

Micah froze and stared at him, then they both burst into laughter again.   

Wiping tears from his eyes with his sleeve, Alex walked up to the two men.  “I’m Alex, and this is Micah.  I’d shake your hands, but I’m covered in eater blood.”  Even with the sword, it had oozed onto his hands, seeping into his bandages.

“I’m Kevin, this is Jack.”  The man who spoke looked worried, staring at Alex’s hands.  “Aren’t you going to get infected?”

“He’s a wh...”  Jack looked at Alex and gave an apologetic smile.  “Sorry.  He’s a Survivor.  He’s immune.”

“Oh.”  Kevin smiled.  “Cool.”  He looked at Micah.

Micah lifted his hands.  “These are special protective gloves that kill the virus on contact.”

“Ohhh,” Kevin said, drawing the word out.  “That explains it.  I wondered why you were wearing evening gloves.”

Micah’s shoulders drooped.  “Why does everyone think that?”  He held his arms out in front of him.  “They don’t
look
like evening gloves.  Do they?”

“Sorry we didn’t get to you sooner,” Jack said, “but we’re up on six and it took us a few minutes to get down the stairs.  We’ve shut down the lifts because there are eaters in the lobby and we don’t want to risk them getting into the rest of the building.”

Alex waved a hand.  “We’re just glad to be alive, believe me.  Is there a bathroom somewhere we can clean up?”

. . .

Jack showed them to the men’s toilets on the first floor where they rid their weapons of eater blood and brain matter and Alex stripped off his blood-soaked bandages.  A first aid kit Jack brought them contained some plaster strips and Alex decided his cuts were healed enough for those to be sufficient.  He was tired of having to bandage them every few hours anyway.

Micah’s ripped jeans had stuck to his damaged leg and he winced as he peeled the material away.

“Well, it’s an interesting shade of purple,” Alex said.

The denim seemed to have taken the brunt of the damage, but Micah’s calf was still badly grazed and bruised, with a plethora of wounds caked over with blood.  He removed his shoe and bloody sock and sat sideways on the counter, resting his foot in one of the three sinks.  Alex hopped up onto the other end, leaning his back against the mirror as Micah turned on the tap and began to clean the dirt and blood from his leg.

“Are we doing the right thing?” Micah said after a minute or so of silence, other than the sound of running and splashing water.

“You’re asking me?”

Micah sighed.  “Up until now, I haven’t felt like we’ve been through anything that we couldn’t handle.  I mean, we’ve been in some tight situations, but nothing like what happened out there.”  He stopped working liquid soap into his skin and stared, unseeing, into the sink.  “I’ve never been so afraid in my life.  I knew we were going to die and I was terrified.  The truth is I don’t know if I can do it.  I want to help, but what can we possibly do against that?”

Alex leaned his head back against the glass of the mirror and looked up at the beige ceiling tiles.  “I
have
felt that afraid, once before.  Five days after I was bitten, in hospital, when my symptoms began and they chained me to the bed and put the bars up around me.  I knew I was going to become an eater and there was a very good chance I’d die that way and there was nothing I could do about it.”  He took a breath and sat up, looking at Micah.  “And now I’ve faced death again, I can tell you one thing, I’d rather die fighting.  Although, given the choice, I’d rather not die at all.”

“Do you really think we can do anything against that?” Micah said.  “There are so many of them.”

“I have no idea.  But if we’re going to try, I think we need to start making more intelligent decisions.”

Micah snorted.  “I’ll put it on my to do list.”

. . .

When Micah had finished cleaning his wounded leg and wrapped it with a bandage from the first aid kit, Jack took them up to the sixth floor where the rest of the people left in the building were hiding out.

Most of the floor was open plan, apart from some offices and a kitchenette, with the windows on three sides of the building visible.  Cubicle dividers had been moved out of the way into one corner and sofas were distributed around the open area, along with some chairs and tables. 

Maybe fifty men and women were scattered around the floor, lounging on sofas, sitting at tables, staring out of windows. 

Kevin rushed towards Alex and Micah, grinning.  “This is them,” he said, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear.

Every face turned towards them and they were quickly surrounded by people talking excitedly.

A woman in her thirties with short brown hair looked up at Alex.  “Kevin says you’re a policeman.  Are you here to help us?” she said, an expression of hopeful desperation on her face.

Alex looked at Kevin.

He shrugged.  “I saw your badge.”

He’d put the badge on because he thought it might help people to trust him.  If he’d known it was just going to cause disappointment, he would have thought twice.

“I’m sorry,” he said.  “I’m in the same boat as you.  I’d really like to help, but I don’t think I can.”

It was heartbreaking to see her face fall.  All the training he’d received to enable him to help people, to keep them safe, felt utterly useless.  A woman near to the back of the crowd began to sob.  Everyone wandered away, their expressions telling Alex everything he needed to know. 

These people had lost hope.

“Would you like some coffee?” an older man said.  He was wearing a dishevelled grey suit, but he held himself with an air of authority. 

“Thank you,” Alex said.

They sat at a table with Jack and Kevin as the man disappeared into the kitchen.

“That’s Cal Evans,” Jack said.  “He used to run the whole building.  Now he’s trapped like the rest of us.”

“Are these the only ones here?” Micah said.

Alex looked at the people around the room.  He had to agree, it didn’t look like many for a building of this size, or a company this busy. 

“Most of the people here left the first day, when things started to get bad and the phones went down,” Jack said.  “I have no idea if they made it.  We were too afraid to leave after it got dark, then the next day this started to happen.”  He tilted his head towards the window overlooking the main road where the eaters were gathered.  “There were over a hundred of us here then.  We made sure the building was clear and secure from the first floor up, found all the food we could, set up the sofas so we could sleep, made a watch schedule.  We were waiting for the army to arrive or something.  We thought we’d be rescued.  But yesterday, about half of the people here decided they couldn’t wait any longer.  Some were afraid of starving to death and others wanted to get home to their families.  By that time there were thousands of those things out there.  We tried to talk them out of it, but they wouldn’t listen.”

Cal returned with five coffees and distributed them to the group at the table, sitting down next to Kevin.

Alex nodded his thanks and returned his attention to Jack.  “What happened?”

Jack stared into his mug, a haunted look on his face.  “They left the same way you came in.  We waited for them at the door, in case they needed to get back in quickly.  At first, we thought they’d made it.”  He paused and shuddered.  “Then the screams began.”

He was silent for a while.  Alex noticed everyone else in the room listening, each wearing the same look of despair.  The woman who had been crying sniffed.

“They came running back into the car park,” Jack continued, “so many eaters behind them.  Some were being grabbed as they ran.  Some got further, but more eaters came around the building, cutting them off.  There was nothing we could do.”  He rubbed his hand over his eyes.

Alex leaned back in his chair.  He remembered the remains in the car park, shredded clothing, bones gnawed and stripped clean. 

Next to him, Micah was clutching his mug so tight his knuckles were white.  He abruptly let go, stood and stalked over to the window.  After a minute or so when nobody spoke, Alex stood, picked up their mugs and walked over to join him.

He handed Micah his coffee and took a few mouthfuls of his own.  Both of them looked down at the eaters crowded together on the street below.  The faint sound of their low moans drifted through the double glazing. 

“What do we do now?” Micah said, his voice quiet.

“What we came here to do,” Alex replied. 

“But what about them?”  He glanced back at the people scattered around the large room.

Alex leaned a shoulder against the window, feeling the cold of the glass radiate through his sweatshirt.  His breath fogged a circle in front of him.  “We barely made it in.  I don’t even know how
we’re
going to get out again.  Everything that involves them stepping out of this building is going to get them killed.”

“But if they stay, they’ll starve.”

“The human body can go more than forty days without food before it begins to suffer permanent damage.  This can’t go on for that long.  They’ll survive.”

“And if the eaters somehow get in?”

Alex didn’t answer.  The more time went on, the more he realised he didn’t have the answers to anything.  The feeling of helplessness made him want to punch something.

He turned from the window to see Cal Evans walking towards them.

“Listen,” he said when he reached them, “I’m responsible for these people and I’ve already lost too many.  You’re the only uninfected people we’ve seen for days and I get the feeling you’re not out for a casual stroll.  If there’s anything you can do to help us, I will do anything I can to help you.”

Alex handed him his empty mug.  “For now, you can point us in the direction of the roof.”

. . .

It occurred to Alex that he really needed to work harder on his cardio fitness. 

As he placed his foot onto the final step before the door marked “Roof Access”, he gasped in a breath.  Ahead of him, Micah glanced back, looking like he’d been doing nothing more strenuous than tying his shoelaces. 

Alex immediately closed his mouth and tried to pant surreptitiously through his nose.

Micah smirked.  “Just breathe, old man.”

“I’m only five years older than you,” Alex said.  The act of speaking opened the floodgates and he was immediately forced to start panting through his mouth.  “Oh, sod it.”

“Only thirty-two and can barely make it up a few flights of stairs,” Micah said.  “So sad.”

“Keep that up and I’ll throw you back down them.”

Still smiling, Micah pushed down on the bar and opened the door onto the roof.  Sunlight flooded the stairwell as Alex followed him outside.

There was a handle on the other side of the door, but Alex nevertheless used a hook fastened to the outside of the door to secure it to the wall beside it.  There was also a breezeblock nearby so he lodged that against the door too.  He didn’t want the inconvenience, not to mention the embarrassment, of getting locked out.