Panic (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 1) Read online

  It never occurred to her to even try.

  Kindred spirits began to awaken around her, and their presence made the creature that had been Paula Roberts feel glad in a way, a little safer. A part of the pack. But there were vast legions out there, all of whom smelled and sounded like the creeping darkness that now ringed her consciousness, entombing it, making her pulse pound wildly. She could feel them all out there in the dark, the invisible army.

  Prey.

  *

  In the confusion that swept through the square, panic spread like a virulent fever.

  Those who saw the blood-letting, who knew even as they struggled to comprehend the signals sent from eyes to brain that an atrocity was emerging, something ancient and primal and unstoppable, simply turned and ran blindly. Several, paying no heed to the limited visibility of the morning, smashed into walls or posts, and were swiftly set upon. Others found that the beings that now chased them down seemed indefatigable, reeling in the yards inexorably, until they were close enough to claw and rend their victims.

  James Thomas, retired gardener and still-going-strong octogenarian, had only set out for his morning paper that day, but with his knees playing up, had taken the car.

  James preferred to walk, even when the pain was present, because he understood that opportunities to get out and enjoy the world, or spend time with others, should always be taken. That was one thing about reaching what the TV euphemistically and poetically referred to as your twilight years: if you were lucky enough to hang on to your senses (as many of James' long-time friends had sadly not been) then the world was brought into sharp focus as the timer ticked down toward zero.

  So much of the modern world seemed designed to segregate and isolate, everyone sitting in protective bubbles of their own design: they travelled everywhere in cars, knowing only the destination and nothing of the journey that took them there, or they became slaves to their television or their computer or their office, living like ghosts, never connecting with those around them.

  James often thought of the time he had visited his grandson living in Bristol, discovering that his evenings were spent lost in an online game of some sort, and that he didn't even know his neighbours' names. James had left after a few days to return home with a heavy heart.

  On this day however, the fire that lived in his ancient knees had just been too much, his joints protesting loudly that the previous day's gardening – long hours of planting daffodils and azaleas and rhododendron bushes – had been just a tad too optimistic.

  So he took the car, but compromised. He would stop for a cup of tea somewhere and read his paper, hopefully finding a few people to have a natter with before returning to the hollow silence of his empty house.

  Now he sat, stunned, behind the wheel as the car trundled to a halt, and he saw the scene unfolding in the square before him, and found to his surprise that eight decades on the planet did not mean he had quite seen it all before.

  All around him were people running and screaming, dropping to the floor in sprays of blood, or pouncing on the people who had been their lifetime friends until moments before and tearing them apart with teeth and fingers.

  It was incomprehensible, and for a moment he felt the mind that he worked so hard to keep alert with puzzles and hobbies drifting like a leaf on the surface of a fast-moving stream, and he was back there in the unending nightmare, the one he worked so hard to submerge, the furious crimson skies glowering over the lowest ebb in human history. The broken bodies as skin clashed with industrial steel and the insanity of men that had grown too powerful, and too greedy.

  This was something different though, something that was immediately apparent. There was no order here, no purpose, no matter how evil or misjudged. Not war. Just chaos and disintegration.

  It was only when a man, covered in blood, strips of flesh hanging from his face and eyes that looked like ready-to-burst boils, leapt onto the bonnet of the car and threw himself bodily into the windscreen, sending sharp cracks right across it, that James snapped back into the present and found that age hadn't quite dulled his reactions entirely.

  He threw the car into reverse, and stamped on the accelerator, never taking his eyes away from the bloody horror that clung to the breaking glass.

  He would, he thought, readily throw himself out of the door when that glass fell away, and, dodgy knees or not, he would run like a teenager.

  Such was his focus on the monster trying to get in that he entirely lost the direction of the car, swerving blindly, glancing off the brickwork off one of the buildings that crowded around the narrow streets, the collision threatening to rip the steering wheel from his grasp. The impact made the car shudder and lurch, and suddenly the abomination that had gripped his bonnet was gone, lost in the fog.

  James began to give a silent thanks to whatever god was clearly watching over him, and ploughed into the petrol station he hadn't even seen racing toward his rear view mirror.

  The world ignited.

  *

  Michael's bed was hard and uncomfortable. It felt like every spring in the mattress had suddenly downed tools and gone on strike, and was poking him in the back to ensure he understood the situation. His sheets felt scratchy too, like that horrible wool blanket you sometimes get in cheap hotels, the one that you throw on the floor before you even consider getting into the bed.

  And it was cold. Really cold, despite the fact that for some reason he had fallen asleep fully clothed.

  His eyes flew open, and a brilliant star of pain in his skull went supernova.

  He wasn't in bed. Not even in his flat.

  The view that greeted him, when his eyes adjusted painfully to the unwelcome flood of light, was the sky. Or at least where the sky would be, if it weren't entirely obscured by the mist.

  It all came rushing back to him at once, like a system update. The café. The dead men and the bloodied ghouls chasing him through the forest. The bizarre interrogation by the hooded man. The butt of the gun.

  Michael tried to sit up and groaned as his muscles twitched and spasmed, sending irate feedback to his brain. As far as Michael could recall, he had managed to get through thirty years without ever being knocked out. Concussions, it turned out, didn’t like to dine alone.

  Slowly, he eased himself upright, clenching his teeth (and figuring, as the pain hit, that the trip to the dentist he'd been putting off for months was now unavoidable) and swallowing hard to overcome the nausea that erupted in his gut. He felt woozy. Visit the doctor first, Mike.

  When the urge to vomit passed, he scanned his surroundings. He had been unconscious in a roadside ditch, presumably just out of view of any traffic that might have passed by. The road itself was deserted, and featureless. Just a strip of tarmac lined either side by overhanging trees. There was no indication of what the road was, and he felt fleeting panic that the hooded lunatic had driven him miles away from home and left him for dead. Better than actually killing him, he supposed, but hardly ideal.

  What was it he had said? Something about ensuring Michael never came back? The details were fuzzy around the edges, and every attempt he made to sharpen them up in his mind sent a bolt of pain racing through his head.

  It was only when Michael staggered unsteadily to his feet and turned around that he saw the sign.

  Welcome to St.Davids

  Relief surged through him. He had a couple of miles to walk back to the station. A couple of miles to pray that some kindly driver would happen past and spare him. He thought about waiting, maybe standing in the middle of the road and flagging down the next car that approached, but the roads into town were hardly busy even at the best of times, and with the thick fog making driving an unappealing prospect, there was every chance he could be waiting a long time.

  Gingerly, he took a few steps toward the sign, testing out his legs, arms outstretched, ready to protect his head if he should collapse. The various aches and pains made it feel like he was taking a stroll through the lowest level of hell, but i
t was manageable, and he found the exercise even seemed to abate the sickness a little.

  Those few steps became ten, then twenty, and soon he was pushing forward intently, focused only on getting back to the station, and the radio. Something terrible was going on in St. Davids, something Michael did not understand at all, and all thoughts he'd had of being the guy to solve the problem, and prove he was still worth something as a police officer had long since fled. If ever a situation called for backup, this was definitely it.

  The guy in the woods was connected to the atrocity at the café somehow; Michael felt it in his bones, though how a crazy guy with a shotgun could have turned Carl into some bloodthirsty lunatic escaped him. But the lack of surprise when Michael had explained the situation to him...well, if he hadn't caused the deaths and the gut-wrenching transformation of two good men into bloodthirsty cannibals, he certainly knew something about who – or what – had.

  Michael was about ten minutes away from town and still pondering this, when the sky ahead of him suddenly pulsed with a bright orange light. A second later, he heard the roar, and felt the vibrations shake the road under his feet.

  The mist prevented him from seeing much, but intuition told him that the Shell station a few minutes down the road had just gone up in a mighty explosion.

  With a grunt, Michael tried to hurry his footsteps, pushing the pain back down. When Michael had injured his back the doctors told him not to be afraid of the pain, or to run from it. Pain did not necessarily mean that he was doing more damage when he tried to move and found his sciatic nerve screaming at him, enraged. If anything, they had said, it was remaining immobile, afraid of the pain, and letting the muscles seize up and swell around the damaged nerves, that would cause more trouble in the long run.

  He tried to focus on that advice. Each step set off tiny detonations in his skull and his jaw especially but, he forcibly reminded himself, it was only pain.

  As he pressed on, slowly drawing nearer to the town he was able to make out a darker patch in the fog above St. Davids, something that clarified itself every few yards: A plume of dense black smoke – an honest-to-God mushroom cloud – rising from street level to tower above the town's largest structure, the steeple of the cathedral, like a challenge to god Himself.

  *

  Victor badly wanted to smoke, and marvelled at the devious, slippery power of cigarettes. It had been six years since last he had felt the giddy, light headed rush as the hot smoke curled down his throat and filled his lungs. Six damn years, and the craving never quite went away. Instead it lurked like a childhood boogeyman, hiding under beds and in closets, ready to attack when you least expected it. Watching, and waiting.

  It was the first thing Victor had given up when he entered his self-imposed exile, knowing that regular trips anywhere to purchase cigarettes were out of the question, and likely to reveal him, but it had been hard going.

  A life spent hunched over computers was a fertile breeding ground for nicotine addiction. The little pauses, the moments of having no choice but to wait while programs installed or processors considered whether they would do what was asked of them without trouble leaving a vacuum that had to be filled. A bit like using public transport: what else were you supposed to do while you stood at a bus stop waiting, with no idea when your journey home might actually begin?

  At first he cursed those pauses, impatient that computers, for all their vaunted power, lagged so far behind the human brain. For Victor, whose brain began sprinting the moment it could walk, the waiting was torture, only finally eased when he discovered the calming effect of smoking, the bitter, delightful punch at the back of the throat.

  For a while after he went into hiding he had limited himself to a cigarette every few days, working through the small stockpile he had brought with him to his new home, but, although he had been impressed with his willpower and self control, never breaking down like a true addict and tearing through his supply, oblivious to its finite status, in the end having a smoke every few days was simply masochism, like picking at a wound, never quite letting it heal.

  So he gave them up entirely, but never quite beat them.

  And now, as he sat watching the monitor, squinting to make out the picture that broke up frequently, he wanted to smoke more than anything.

  The signal delivered to the monitor was faint, but getting stronger all the time. The view it gave him was of an empty road, moving toward him at walking pace.

  It would take a while for the cop to get somewhere more interesting, Victor thought, and cursed the lack of traffic, unaware that through the screen, out there in the cold swirling mist, the cop was doing exactly the same.

  Victor turned his attention to the other monitors, the ones that surrounded his home. The forest remained deserted, and he was satisfied that no one else was coming for him.

  His hunch about what the policeman had said to him had been proven correct as soon as those two rejects from a horror movie had turned up, blissfully unaware of the shotgun that awaited them. He was intrigued to find that they had ripped their eyes out, and wondered if this would be the protocol for the rest of them.

  Why would they do that? He thought to himself, sipping on a hot coffee. He had never had much input on the biological side of the plan, and of course even if he had tried to glean information he would not have had much success, such was the stringent nature of the security measures put in place by those running the show. The various cells of Project Wildfire were purposely kept apart, and some of the lower-level people who had worked on applications and equipment probably would not even recognise their own fingerprints in the crime scene that was about to unfurl before their very eyes.

  Victor had known more, of course. It would have been difficult for them to have him working like some brainless automaton, given just how crucial and complicated his portion of the work was. And of course, to put it bluntly, he was simply too intelligent to remain in the dark, and too suspicious. He didn't know a great deal about how the biology of it worked, but he certainly understood the intentions of it. They tolerated his knowledge, he guessed, because of the leverage that they had over him, but Victor was keenly aware that he was an irritant, and the subject of many fraught meetings between those who truly knew.

  Subsequently it was obvious that his remuneration, when the work was finally done, would be bullet-shaped.

  Why the eyes though? Perhaps, despite all the efforts of those involved in Project Wildfire, some vestigial semblance of humanity or conscience remained, some unexplored sector of the brain that raged impotently against what it saw, and took the only way out it could.

  Certainly he could not imagine that it was an intentional outcome, for it limited the effectiveness of the subjects, and it would make clean-up after the event a bitch. The original plan was to have them crashing together like magnets, making them easier to target when the time was right. Now, surely they would drift like dust on the wind, spreading far and wide.

  Victor shrugged mentally. Conjecture was an exercise in futility now. It was done, and it would complete its journey like a driver-less diesel train. All that was left was to survive it, and make sure that the aftermath, with all its ripe opportunity, was available to him.

  His eyes flicked back to the most important monitor as the speakers attached to it emitted a distant, tinny rumble.

  Damn, he wanted a cigarette.

  *

  Jason watched as his sister cracked open the front door and peeked out, the blood draining from her face. Her jaw dropped open.

  His mind was reeling, struggling to put together the pieces of the last half an hour. It was like a box containing portions of two different jigsaws. No matter how he tried, he could not make the picture they formed make sense.

  He heard the screaming outside, and for a second he believed it was a product of his own imagination, a reaction to the horror of finding his father ripped apart in the basement.

  Then he heard it for what it was: a chorus. A great w
ail of many anguished voices, rising to the heavens as one. Something was going on outside, something terrible.

  The realisation snapped Jason back to reality.

  "What is it, Rach?"

  "Not sure," she responded, her voice cautious. "There are people out there, on the street. They're all looking at something."

  "Looking at what?"

  "I don't know, I can't see."

  Rachel turned to face her brother, her eyes full of concern.

  "I'm going to go look. At the very least, someone out there should have a working phone we can borrow. You want to stay here?"

  Rachel's voice was soft and caring, and Jason realised she was wrapping him in cotton wool as she had so often when they were younger. He felt a little fire of shame ignite somewhere deep inside him. This was all wrong; it should be him looking after her, not the other way round. He set his jaw firmly.

  "No, I'm okay. Let's go."

  As they stepped out into the mist, and away from the horror of their parents' basement, Rachel immediately felt a little more secure. The claustrophobia of the house behind her, she felt herself breathing more easily.

  The street was filling up as the residents of the houses spilled out to see what had made the ground under their feet tremble, and their very normality was reassuring. The morning that had, only moments before seemed somehow supernatural and terror-inducing suddenly seemed far away.

  In the gardens opposite her, she could see elderly women, their hair still in curlers, preparing for their usual trip out for afternoon lunch, a young mother rocking a squalling baby in her arms, a family huddling together, the two young boys that had been spending their school holiday tethered to their game consoles finally torn back into the real world. All were staring in the same direction.