Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4) (18 page)

He shimmied up the tree
a little further, as far as the narrowing branches would allow, until he was high enough to see a good distance around him. As moonlight filtered through the thick blanket of cloud above, he saw mile after mile of trees bisected by the wide road, and not much else. He thought he could see a tall steeple to the west, which likely meant a town, but it looked several miles away, and he couldn't even be sure that a town was what he needed right now.

He cursed his foolishness. He should have landed the chopper as soon as he was far enough away from Catterick. Should have flown low until he found an isolated spot and waited for daylight. At least that way he might have been able to scout out a safe
spot to land, or maybe to locate a place where he might be able to refuel.

Stupid coward. Running blindly until there's nowhere left to run.
When will you learn?

Below him, the dogs
' snarling intensified, as though they were reading his mind and had decided that his terror and self-recrimination needed a soundtrack.

He stared down at them through the branches. With the
shards of moonlight on the dogs at last, he saw their eyes, the livid red infections that they had become, and his heart sank.
All that time you worried about them drawing the attention of the Infected
, he thought.
The infection was down there the whole time. It's in the animals too.

For a while he had toyed with the idea of snapping a branch from the tree, as thick and sturdy as possible, and leaping down there amon
g the slavering beasts swinging; showing them there was a good reason why they were pets and humans were their masters. The idea had been pure fantasy, of course, and now that he saw their eyes, Nick was glad that fear had held him back. The creatures carried the virus. All it would take was one little nip, a scant breaking of the surface of his skin, just as he had suffered all those years earlier.

The effects of that bite had been psychological. A bite from one of the dogs that now cornered him would have a dramatically different outcome.

After a while, when the complaints of Nick's bladder began to get too loud to ignore, he contorted himself awkwardly to lower his fly, and relieved himself all over the pack below, relishing the sudden surprised yelps he heard in the darkness.

"Take
that
, you furry bastards," Nick mumbled, and he felt a smile creep across his lips. As he pulled the zip back up, he considered the way the tables had turned, the world twisting until a man was left in a position where he was pissing all over dogs, instead of the other way around, and he began to chuckle to himself; short snorts of laughter that he was dimly aware were veering close to full-blown hysteria.

He leaned back against the rough trunk of the tree, squeezing his eyes shut in frustration, desperately trying to
imagine a future that didn't involve him either starving to death up a tree or being ripped to pieces at the base of it.

He heard an odd yelp below him, and grinned a little.

Not so nice when it's you getting pissed on, is it?

The grin widened as he heard another yelp that sounded almost like a response.

Suddenly, the growling and snarling below increased in intensity and Nick's eyes flicked open.

Two more abrupt yelps. Now it sounded like there was only one dog growling and barking, and the noise sounded like it was receding away from him
at pace.

He peered down at the ground, trying to make out the shape of the dogs between the leafy branches of the tree. He saw no movement, but heard another squealing yelp, which sounded like it was definitely further away from
his position, and then
silence.

Nick
held his breath and listened intently.

"That all of them?"

The voice below nearly made Nick fall out of the tree in shock.

"Looks like it."

Nick froze, squinting through the branches, trying to get a glimpse of them. Two voices. Both male. He felt cold sweat running down his back as indecision tore him in two. Someone had killed the dogs, someone that now stood right below him. Whoever they were, they had weapons, and they thought nothing of taking on a pack of infected dogs. They were probably every but as dangerous to him as the animals.

Nick
swallowed painfully.

Best to stay hidden
, he thought, but as soon as he made up his mind to shrink back against the tree and wait for the strangers to move on, he realised the choice had been taken away from him.

"You coming down then, mate?" A voice called up to him. "We're not
gonna hang around here all day."

Shit.

Michael felt Claire's grip on his neck tighten.

He tried to grasp the words Gwyneth had just said, but they slipped away from the surface of his mind.

"Feeding him to her," he repeated slowly.

"Pete, why don't you take Claire up to the bedroom upstairs, okay?" Gwyneth said. "I need to talk to Michael. I'll be up soon, okay sweetheart?"

Gwyneth stepped close and ruffled Claire's hair affectionately, not noticing the way Michael flinched slightly. Claire nodded, and released her grip on Michael, following Pete upstairs. Gwyneth waited a moment until she heard the door above open and close.

She led the amputated man over to the wall, and gently guided him down to sit on the floor.

Michael stared at the man in horrified fascination. It wasn't just the grisly stumps where his arms should have been, not even the way the wounds seemed to have been burned extensively, presumably to stem the blood loss.

It was the man's eyes. A sort of madness lurked in those eyes, a screaming, clawing darkness that made Michael's skin crawl.

"He doesn't talk much," Gwyneth said. "I managed to get a few words from him. It was enough."

She rubbed her temples, as though trying to ward off an irresistible headache.

"They think the girl needs human flesh to survive, Michael. To keep the Infected away
, if that makes any sense. If anything does. They think we're dealing with
zombies.
This man was locked up in a room at the top of the tower. They've been...keeping him. Taking parts of him..."

Michael held up a hand to stop her. For the first time since he had first stepped into Ralf's cafe on the outskirts of St. Davids a million years earlier, he felt his stomach do a barrel roll, and the meagre scraps he had eaten tried to force their way up into his throat. He choked the bile back down.

"Darren said she was bitten," Michael said weakly. "She has some effect on the Infected. Like a repellent. She's what's keeping them out of Caernarfon." Michael's voice sounded as weak in his ears as his stomach felt.

Gwyneth looked stunned.

"She's immune?"

Michael winced.

"She's just a child, Michael. Just a little girl. Bitten, just like me, but she is still
human
. This is monstrous, we have to stop-"

He held his hand up again and nodded, and Gwyneth paused.

We die fighting them, not each other.
Michael had said those words, back in the retail park outside Aberystwyth, said them to avert the disaster that would have been John and Jason killing three innocent, terrified people.

Those people had died anyway. Jason had died anyway. The world was death now. There were no peaceful solutions.
He had hoped he could make it through the disaster with his conscience intact. He had been a fool.

Michael felt the room spinning around him, felt the image of Gwyneth standing in front of him dimming, and then he was back there, all the way back in Cardiff, locked in the memory he had tried so long to suppress, confronted by the version of himself that he had tried
for years to outrun. The version whose clutches the brutality of the world seemed determined to stop him from escaping.

Cardiff.

The nightmare corridor of blood and bone and screaming.

The darkness.

*

Michael killed the engine and unbuckled his seatbelt.

"Just another domestic," Michael said. "I was here a few weeks ago. The guy beats his wife. The neighbours call us. The wife sends us away."

He sighed, even as his partner rolled his eyes. The story was all-too familiar.

"It's alright mate, I'll go. I can see you're busy."

Michael stepped out of the police car. His partner, James, waved a dismissive hand, preoccupied with his mobile phone and a burgeoning text relationship with a girl he had met in a bar a couple of weeks earlier. The girl, James said, was a 'nine'. He always ranked women like that. Didn't hide the fact from the women either, and Michael was continually baffled that James seemed able to pick up girls almost at will
, when he made no effort to conceal his nature. He was a sly bastard, but a good officer. He had taught Michael a lot in the three years they had been working together.

Michael was still in uniform. He had been overlooked for promotion on
the two occasions that he had been certain he would get the nod. It was baffling, a source of constant frustration. When his last application had been rejected, they had told him he would make a fine detective. He just wasn't ready yet. They did not said
why
.

Michael shut the door, leaving James alone
in the car with his phone.

He remembered the house well from his previous visits; this would be the fourth time that Michael had personally visited the place. He knew other officers who had been there even more often. The joke around the station was that uniformed officers spent more time visiting
number 44 Queen's Drive than they did in the staff canteen.

The road was one of the rougher in Cardiff's poorest neighbourhood, far away from the harbour front that was undergoing significant redevelopment, with foreign money
and Government investment pouring into designing sleek buildings that offered a marvellous and expensive view of the crashing waves of the ocean. Queen's Drive felt like another world entirely: riddled by poverty and petty crime. There were some nights that James and Michael joked that they might as well just park the squad car on the street and wait.

He stepped up to the terraced houses, not making eye contact with the faces he saw peering at him from behind twitching curtains. Number 44 had a cheerful red door, although Michael always noticed the scratches around the lock. Gavin Edwards was permanently drunk: his key appeared to miss the lock more often than it connected.

Looking at the familiar scratches, Michael wondered with a heavy heart how often Rhiannon Edwards sat in her living room, listening to the key scratching around the lock, praying that her husband wouldn't make it through the door that night to unleash his latest drunken rage upon her.

He knocked loudly, and the door swung open. That wasn't unusual. Neither was the stink of liquor that washed over Michael as the door opened.

But something was different, and Michael noticed it immediately, and felt his nerves jangling in silent warning.

He couldn't hear Rhiannon Edwards crying and screaming at her abusive husband. Whenever Michael had shown up in the past, the woman had been locked deep in retaliation against the bastard she had married too young, and without any insight
into the sort of man he might turn out to be. Usually Michael had to separate them physically, and it was rare that he escaped from number 44 without a few cuts and bruises himself.

Never had a problem with Gavin
, though. Like most wife-beaters Michael had encountered, the guy was a coward when another man entered the equation, let alone one in uniform.

Michael stepped across the threshold, and saw it immediately.

Blood.

A long, thin trail of it
smeared along the wall to his left, leading around a corner and into the living room, beyond his sight.

Shit.

For a moment he thought about signalling James to join him, but then he heard it, and all thoughts of caution and following protocol deserted him.

A baby, screaming.

The Edwards' didn't have a child.

Michael started to run, but his legs felt like they were locked in quicksand, and he knew he was going to be too late.

As he rounded the corner he heard Gavin Edwards snarling.

"Here's what I think about having a baby, you stupid bitch."

I'm too late.

When Michael entered the living room, his eyes took in the
horror of the scene even as his mind retreated.

Rhiannon Edwards lay on the floor in a pool of blood; an impossible ocean of it, black and toxic like an oil slick in the dim light provided by a lamp that had been flung into a corner. Her eyes were open; fixed and sightless.

Gavin Edwards stood over her, gripping a large kitchen knife in one hand, and the screaming baby in the other.

For a moment Michael froze as Gavin's eyes locked onto him, and Michael had a second to see the insanit
y there before the man screamed - a horrific, chilling noise that filled the room and made Michael's gut squirm - and dragged the blade across the child's throat, sending a spurt of arterial blood across the room; a spurt that was both tiny and all-consuming.

The darkness welled up inside Michael, tearing upwards and obliterating everything in its path; erupting
like a volcano. He wasn't even aware of launching himself at Edwards. Later on the evidence would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Michael had beaten the man to death, but that part of the memory was difficult to access, like corrupted data.

He had no memory
at all of James entering the building minutes later to see what had happened to his partner. No memory of the immediate steps taken to ensure the cover up. The public couldn't know. Some of them might understand
why
, his superiors had told him, but the fallout for the South Wales Police would be enormous. There had already been skirmishes on the streets of the city following supposed police brutality as the poor were driven back from the burgeoning wealth on the coast. Michael's actions could well spark a riot, and there was a lot of money being poured into Cardiff. No one wanted a riot.

So it was self-defence. And the end of Michael's hopes of progression in the force. He would have to undergo extensive, compulsory therapy. He would eventually have to relocate to a quiet town where there was no chance of him
ever again encountering unspeakable acts of violence.

He was to live with the knowledge that a murderer lived inside him, to suffer the yawning chasm of depression that claimed him as it had claimed his father. He was doomed to dream of the corridor of blood and bone every night, and to wake terrified and shivering, drenched in sweat and praying that
he might not remember the dreams, but he always did. He was to tell himself that he could never again allow the darkness at the heart of him to break free, for fear it might take over everything and consume him.

"Michael, are you okay?"

Gwyneth's voice. Tossed to him like a life-preserver. He clutched at it, dragged himself away from the horror of the memory and back into the present. When he spoke, his voice didn't sound like his own.

There was no room left in the world for conscience. There was only action. Only killing. He saw it now, as he had seen it years before,
lurking behind the red door.

"Darren has to die," he said.

Gwyneth's wrinkled face paled.

"I don't think that we can-" she began to say.

"I'll do it," Michael said, and the flat emptiness of his tone made him shrivel a little inside. The Michael he had tried so hard to leave behind. That Michael had never truly gone anywhere.

"Well, now, that sounds interesting. How do you think you'll manage that?"

Michael squeezed his eyes shut in despair.

Darren's voice.

Behind him.

Nick descended the tree clumsily, and all hope of retaining a semblance of dignity evaporated when he finally lost his foothold and fell the last few feet, landing heavily on his backside with an involuntary yelp. As far as first impressions went, Nick doubted he could have done much to make this one worse.

The two men waiting for him laughed, and Nick saw a helping hand dangled in front of his face. He grasped it, aware as he was hoisted to his feet that his bottom was now damp.

Landed in your own piss, Nick-yyyy. Nice touch.

Nick
y
. Nick didn't want to think about why the voice of his internal thoughts would now address him using the name his father had used so witheringly. To many people, 'Nicky' might have sounded endearing. Colin Hurt had developed a way of making it sound like a girl's name. Nick hated it with a passion.

He studied the two men carefully, and the first thing he noticed was the crossbow. At least the mystery of the disappearing dogs had been solved.

He gestured at the weapon.

"Thanks, " he said. "For getting rid of the dogs."

"Didn't do it on your account, mate. But glad to be of service. You with the army?"

The man gestured at Nick's crumpled uniform.

"Yeah," he said.

"Come to save us?" The man grinned widely.

Nick shook his head and flushed.

That was rhetorical
, Nick-yyyy.

"Nick Hurt," he mumbled, extending his hand.

The grinning man shifted the crossbow to his left hand and shook Nick's hand solemnly.