Psychosis (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 3) (19 page)

Ja
ke’s eyes narrowed dangerously as the old man’s mouth gave a hint of a smirk.

“You’re a murderer
misters
McIntosh.”

Fred tutted, and shook his head disapprovingly.

“It takes one to know one,” Jake said, and the oddly childish retort made Fred blink in surprise. He roared a laugh.

“Quite so my boy!
But I’m so much more
efficient
. Take him.”

He turned, striding away from Jake, grinning as he felt the heat of the man’s psychotic gaze burning into his back.

The armed men advanced on Jake, and he saw something he’d only just gotten used to not thinking about: plastic handcuffs. With an affable smile, he strolled forward, and held out his wrists. Meek surrender had worked for him once, three years earlier, when a fresh-faced uniformed police officer had stumbled upon him.

They expect a fight, and a struggle to cuff a man’s arms behind his back, you provide a mental cue to keep the hands in front. It had worked that time, and then he had no knife up his sleeve.

His fingers curled inward, the base of his thumb grazing the cool steel.

“Take the knife too,” Fred barely raised the tumbling gravel of his voice as he reached elevator doors twenty feet away; didn’t need to. It
carried.

“We’re not amateurs here, Mr
McIntosh. And you represent something of rare value to us. Your stay can be cordial, or it can be something more…
fun.
But your love of knives and killing will get you nowhere down here.”

Fred took his hand from the elevators doors, letting them smoothly
erase him.

Jake had the barrel of an assault rifle pressed up under his jaw, felt strong hands clamping onto his arms. Two heavy boots crushed his toes, rooting him to the spot. He felt the knif
e being plucked from the makeshift sheath he had attached to his forearm.

Finally, the gun released its grip on his throat, and Jake was allowed to lower his
chin, and his eyes came to rest on the man directly in front of him. Late forties, bulky, sharp eyes nestling in the shadows cast by craggy lines cut deep onto a worn-leather skin.

“Ripley, head of security.”
The shadows on the man’s face grew deeper as he grinned. “And
personally
? I think your stay will be fun.”

The butt of the rifle arrived without warning, jabbed sharply from his blind spot, smashing
into Jake’s left temple and the room blinked out of existence.

*

The basement level of the car park stood in absolute darkness.

The car shuddered
a little every time one of the Infected stumbled into it, as though recoiling at their touch. With each vibration Claire felt her heart trying to evacuate her body via her throat, and was sure that it was just a matter of time before the thumping beat in her chest gave her away.

She held her breath, releasing it in tiny insta
lments, praying that the air escaping from her lungs was not as loud as it sounded to her ears. In the impenetrable gloom, she could not hear Pete breathing, couldn’t see him either. The darkness and silence was otherworldly; she began to feel as though she were trapped in a coffin.

Once, in a different lifetime, her mother had visited a spa and tried out an isolation tank: when she told Claire about it, she’d said the experience had been relaxing. Claire thought it sounded anything but.

She wasn’t scared of the dark; not exactly – she was confident she’d outgrown that half her life ago – but she had a fertile imagination, and darkness acted like an accelerant, and the notions that grew in her mind did so at an alarming pace.

She imagined that the creatures outside were slowly lining up
around the car, facing them, patiently waiting for the moment that they dared to make a sound before finally swarming over the car. Cold sweat dotted her brow, and she felt droplets running down her back. Her young mind frantically attempted to come up with some prior experience to help her deal with the situation; came up empty.

Just as she was certain her terror was going to induce a heart attack, Pete found what he had been searching for in the dark: the controls for the headlights. In his father’s car the switch was to the right of the steering wheel.
He found the lever on which the switch sat and twisted, and the headlights flooded the area in a bleak, brilliant light.

They were all around the
car, a wall of flesh closing in; chaotically moving in and around each other like bubbles in a glass of cola, as if some music that Claire and he could not hear was playing, propelling the things on in a grisly, dripping ballet.

The sight was horrific, but in some ways being able to
see
them eased Claire’s howling nerves a little. Pete had found a solution to the dark while she was still paralysed by fright – or maybe his terror was simply even starker than her own. The light did nothing to disturb the infected men and women swirling about in the car park: they saw nothing.

Claire and Pete watched the grisly dance in silence,
both wondering if they might ever again leave the car, when suddenly the inaudible music stopped. Every shuffling step halted, every mutilated face picked out by the glare of the headlights rose to the ceiling in unison, as though they had simultaneously caught the hint of a sound.

And then they did something new. Something
Claire hadn’t seen before.

*

Michael felt Jason’s bulky body stiffen underneath him as the place fell into impenetrable darkness. A trap. He could almost feel the clenching of Jason’s jaw.

John dropped instantly into a defensive crouch, blade raised in front of him. With his left hand he reached out and found Rachel’s arm, and pulled her down into a crouch next to him. He left his hand on her forearm, straining to hear anything, ready to squeeze a warning.

Nothing.

“It’s not just the lights,” Michael hissed, “Everything in the offices is dark. It’s a power cut.”

John allowed himself to relax a little, rising up on his haunches. Michael was right, even the blinking lights representing answerphone messages had winked out of existence.

“It’s okay,” he whispered, guiding Rachel back up.

“Or maybe power
failure
is closer to the truth,” Michael said, and their hearts sank. Rachel had been right about the future that lay in store for the country, the steady unravelling of the world the people had taken for granted. But it had happened so
fast.

We were always so close to this,
Michael thought,
only ever a few days away from things ending.
The thought terrified and saddened him. Civilization was just a flimsy floor that could have been whipped out from underneath them at any point.

Gradually their eyes adjusted to the heavy darkness, and they were able to pick out the shapes of the glass walls and doors, but little else. Progress through the offices, if it were to remain silent, would be painfully slow.

John reached into a pocket and pulled out a small flashlight he had retrieved from the wreckage of the car the day before, flicking it on.

Almost immediately he felt Rachel’s hand shoot out, covering the light.

“No light,” She hissed. “It’s not just the Infected we need to worry about.”

John stared at her in surprise, just able to pick out the expression
in the soft glow seeping out from beneath the hand that blocked the light. She looked deadly serious, and for a moment John could see the pain written on her features, the toxic memory of five days spent alone with Victor Chamberlain. He flicked the light off, trying to quickly construct a mental map of the path ahead. At the end of the glass corridor created by offices to either side, he knew there was a left turn, leading to a closed door underneath an exit sign. If they were lucky, that would lead them out into the store itself, and moonlight streaming through the windows might give them a chance to see their surroundings.

It felt like moving through soup, like a thickness hung in the air itself.

When they reached the door and John opened it, inch by dreadful inch, they saw it immediately: flashlights winking into life in the building opposite them.

Seeing the lights sent a quiver through M
ichael. It meant the chance of Infected nearby had to be small; to them the presence of humans seemed to act like a black hole, slowly sucking them toward it. It also meant there were humans who had survived through the week.
Just as they had
.

When Michael thought about the toll
the previous week days had taken on the four of them, he couldn’t help but wonder if other people were really something he wanted to run into either.

As the four of them approached the windows in the dark, staring across at the cones of light, and realising that the movement of them seemed odd, John didn’t see philosophy: he saw a combat tactic.

He twisted even as the first of them charged through the doors separating them from the main mall area to the right.

Two men and a woman
. Armed exactly as John had envisioned himself being; laden with knives. Bloodied.
Not
friendly.

He reached into the sheath at his side without missing a beat, bringing his arm up smoothly and releasing the smaller of his knives, sending it on a brief journey into the shoulder of the first of them, spinning him around. The section of John’s mind still capable of analytical thought registered disappointment:
missed the throat
, and then all thoughts were gone, and he was charging forward.

*

As one, the Infected surrounding the car hummed, as if in acknowledgment of something, and Claire felt the significance of the change in their behaviour despite her lack of understanding.

The creatures snapped into motion like one
coiled entity, all sprinting back toward the doorway, crashing into the walls, draining clumsily out of the room through the narrow exit like congealed fat.

Claire and Pete sat, stunned, mouths dropped open, until the last of the
Infected exited the basement level. They heard the noise of the creatures’ passage receding, finally disappearing back through the door two storeys up.

In the light cast by the headlights, Pete turned and saw Claire’s face, pale and white
, hovering in the gloom; disembodied. He hoped she could see no more of him, and he felt his cheeks burn a little as he clenched his thighs uncomfortably on the wet warmth at his groin.

After an age he whispered: “
Holy shit
” and Claire frowned a little at the word.

“It was like they all heard something.”

Claire nodded, lips trembling wildly.

“Did you hear anything?”

She shook her head.

“I didn’t either,” he said, sounding perplexed.
“They were…humming. I’ve never seen them do that. Like they were talking to each other.” His brow knitted.

“Thank you,
for turning on the lights,” Claire said, by way of her feeling that she should say
something.
“How did you know where the switch was?” Her eyes were wide, as it suddenly dawned on her that in the dark, Pete could easily have sounded the horn instead of finding the lights.

His pale face dropped, eyes squeezing shut.

“This is my Dad’s car,” he said. “This is where we were, when...you know.”

Of course she knew she shouldn’
t have asked; it’s just that Claire didn’t quite know it
in time
, but the words were faltering even as they spilled out of her mouth, and she saw the blood on the driver side window.
Inside.

“Where’s your Dad?”

She bit her lip as his eyes filled with pain.

“What do you think we should do?” She said
before he could respond.

In the ghostly light, she saw his narrow shoulders shrug.

“I think we should see if we can go somewhere else. If they come back, I don’t want to be stuck here.”

Claire saw his eyes fall to the blood spattered on the door next to him, and understood. She nodded. Headlights ran car
batteries down in any case, her mother had told her so once in laughing frustration, and she did not want to be there when the car park went dark again.

Careful not to make a sound, they crept
out of the car and over to the stairwell, and cocked their ears. A deep rumbling above them. Outside. Humming. Eyes wide, straining in the gloom to catch any sign of movement, Claire and Pete began to climb.

*

It was Cardiff that made Michael do it. The darkness that had fallen over him in Cardiff, the same darkness that had ringed his consciousness ever since, laying siege to his senses. The choice he’d made in Cardiff, taking the road that led to blood, the one he had prayed nightly he would never have to make again.  He had tried to keep the images of the door; of the corridor and the screaming baby, locked away from his consciousness, tried burying them in the noise of everyday life.