Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4) (11 page)

Even the rifle, which Michael had gone to great pains to take ownership of, was out of reach: buried under their bags back in the tower they had slept in the previous night. Without it, Michael was as helpless as a new born. John felt a stab of sympathy for the
man, and nodded at him reassuringly before turning to follow Darren up the stairs.

*

"I imagine you have a lot of questions," Darren said as they climbed the winding stone steps. "And I will answer them all in time. But the important thing is that you know what we are up against. Then you'll see there is only one question that matters."

The steps ended
abruptly at a heavy wooden door. Darren pushed it open with a grunt and stepped out onto the battlements.

"This is the highest point of the castle. It's the only place
high enough to see it."

"See what?" John growled. The guy was clearly loving the pantomime of it, the big theatrical build-up, and John felt his annoyance
growing. Glancing at Rachel's face told him she was a little further down the road toward outright hostility, and having difficulty keeping a lid on her temper.

Darren walked to the edge of the battlements. A small chair and table had been set up
, turning the roof into a lookout position. Someone would have sat there and watched our boat approaching, John thought, and the notion made him uncomfortable. Darren snatched up a pair of binoculars from the table.

"You wanted to know where the Infected are. See for yourself."

He handed John the binoculars.

When he lifted them to his eyes, it
took John several seconds to see it, and a further couple to understand what he was looking at.

Beyond the limits of the town, a dark
stain blotted the countryside. It looked like someone had drawn a dark circle around the town that stretched from one side of the peninsula to the other.

What is that?

Even as the question formed, John knew what the answer was. The Infected. Thousands of them, ringing the entire town from coast to coast, gathered at some invisible boundary. His mouth dropped open, and he lowered the binoculars.

"As you see, they have us cornered," Darren said.

John passed the binoculars to Rachel, and grimaced when he heard her sharp intake of breath.

"So why aren't they attacking?"
Rachel said.

"Ah," Darren said. "
That
is the question."

Confined to quarters
.

It would not have been so bad if Nick's quarters were not
also currently 'confining' a couple of hundred other people. Some chattered in low voices, some leafed through old books and  magazines. After an hour or so, Nick decided that oblivion was the best way to spend the time, and he pulled the thin blanket over his head until he fell asleep.

He
woke to find Drake standing over him, silently watching.

“What?”
Nick slurred as he struggled toward consciousness. “How did you get here? What do you want?”

“
Shhh.”

Drake put a meat
y finger to his lips and flashed Nick a conspiratorial grin.

“Follow me,
” he whispered.

Nick
stifled a groan, and glanced at his watch. He had been asleep for about an hour. His limbs felt heavy, his eyes gritty.

He sat up, pushing back the blanket that did
nothing to keep the cold at bay. Nick’s bed was in an overcrowded dorm on the third floor of Harden Barracks. He glanced around the large room. There were sleeping bodies everywhere, crammed together, almost on top of each other, like animals huddling for warmth in a nest. Everybody else looked to have opted for blissful oblivion too.

Drake had picked his way carefully between the
sleeping bodies, displaying surprisingly light feet for such a big guy. He beckoned at Nick to hurry.

With a final glance around to make sure no one was watching
him breaking the curfew, Nick carefully lifted himself to his feet and followed the path Drake blazed through the bodies, wincing a little every time one of them sighed heavily, or turned uncomfortably in their sleep.

When they were clear, Drake pushed the door that opened out into a corridor beyond, closing it carefully once
Nick joined him.

“I think I’ve found our murderer,” Drake whispered in a breathless tone.

He grabbed Nick’s arm and led him to a large window that overlooked the newly-built wall and the empty moors beyond. He passed Nick a small pair of field glasses and pointed outside.

A thick, low mist hung over the fields beyond The Heart
like a veil. It took Nick a moment to find what Drake was pointing at. He swept the binoculars left and right, and finally saw a small, flickering light.

Fire.

It looked like it was moving. Coming toward The Heart.

Nick
looked at Drake, puzzled, and then returned to the binoculars, adjusting the focus in an attempt to understand what he was looking at. As he watched, the fire split in two, and one half of it seemed to grow. It looked like a tree had gone up in flames.

“I don’t understand what I’m looking at,” he whispered. “A burning tree?”

He looked again.

Why is it moving?

Nick's mouth dropped open as he saw the tree suddenly lifting several feet into the air, drawing back in an odd, mechanical motion, like it had been loaded into a catapult.

And then the tree was arcing through the
misty sky, becoming a flaming missile, fired up and over the wall, and smashing into the medical centre opposite the barracks with a crash that sounded like a drum pounding in Hell.

He heard faint screams emanate from the other building, and saw people start to scurry from the building, scampering left and right in confusion, searching for an enemy they could not see.

Something just threw a fucking tree at us.

He looked at Drake, his mouth open. The big man’s face had paled.

“Wasn’t expecting that,” Drake mumbled, and then his eyes widened, and Nick saw flames reflected in them.

In the gloom beyond the wall, another fire had sprung up, and another.
Nick swallowed painfully, shrinking away from the window as another of the trees lifted into the air and launched itself toward them.

And then the sky seemed to be raining fire down on Catterick.

*

Jake had uprooted about thirty of the trees, tearing them from the ground like dead flowers. At first he had thought about just tossing them over the wall, to scare the people cowering inside as much as anything. But then he had remembered an old survival tip one of his foster fathers had shown him on an extremely ill-advised camping trip.

Fire was just a matter of creating friction. The only difficulty was getting the wood moving quickly enough to generate heat. On that camping trip, when his foster father had smiled patronisingly at Jake’s futile attempts to create fire from nothing, he had wished for nothing so much as to be big enough to wrap his hands around the man’s throat and squeeze the life from him.

He remembered the sudden look
of dark understanding that passed over the man’s face as he looked into Jake’s murderous young eyes. They never went camping again, and four months later Jake was back in the care system; back on the wheel of misfortune, wondering what might be in store for him when the spinning stopped.

Friction
wasn’t a problem for Jake now. He lazily twisted the piece of wood in his enormous mangled hand and flames burst into life almost instantly as the stick became a blur of impossible motion, like the fire was eager to be born.

He held the trees in his enormous hands, edging them toward the flames like cigarettes. Once the fire took hold on the wood, he drew the trunks back like a javelin thrower and speared them through the
foggy air into the tiny walled settlement. With each throw he cackled as his extraordinary hearing picked up the distant cries of panic and pain. On the ninth throw he hit something that sent a ball of fire up into the sky and his mouth dropped in delight even as he clapped his hands over his ears in a futile attempt to keep the pain of the deafening explosion at bay.

*

When the propane tank went up, blowing out every window in The Heart and sending a shockwave of liquid fire through the crowd, Nick knew that the time for planning was over.

He stared down into the square,
slack-jawed, as he saw several figures stumbling from the blast, shrieking human torches that cast a grisly glow on the horror being unleashed below, before they finally dropped to the ground, smouldering. The sickening stench of their cooked flesh floated on the air like confetti, so thick that Nick could taste it, and bile rose in his throat.

He turned to Drake.

“Hopper,” he choked. “Where’s Hopper?”

Drake shrugged and nodded his head down at the square.

Of course
Hopper would be down there, in the thick of it. His rank had taken him away from the action of war and into what was largely administration. He would be right in the middle, barking orders, loving every minute.

Nick
would have killed for a job in administration. He had been a coward all his life, shying away from the merest hint of confrontation, let alone any that might involve firearms. Even when he had been appointed as leader of a group of thirty soldiers, he had led by suggestion, never by command.

As he smashed open the cabinet that held the fire extinguisher, he wondered idly if his actions would still be considered cowardly. He was about to do the bravest thing he’d ever done in his life, and all so he could run away
once more.

A huge flaming tree trunk crashed through the window at which he had stood with Drake only moments before, crashing through the door opposite and into the dorm, ploughing into the terrified mass of people that huddled inside
, where they had believed themselves to be safe.

Nick
’s eyes fell on the fire axe that sat next to the extinguisher. He grabbed that instead, and hurtled toward the stairs.

When he reached the ground and burst out of the barracks and into the warzone that the square had become,
Nick heard Hopper’s voice immediately, screaming at no one in particular, barking out the order to get to the wall and open fire.

Mostly
Nick saw people milling around in confusion and terror; most were unarmed thanks to Hopper, and Colonel's words fell on deaf ears. He saw a few, the ones he had come to think of as King Hopper’s royal guard, hoisting assault rifles and heading to the wall, and moments later the chatter of gunfire fractured the night.

Heart hammering, his breath exploding from lungs that tried in vain to choke out the acrid smoke filling them,
Nick cast his eyes left and right.

Where the fuck is Hopper?

*

Jake had loved killing ever since he had been four or five years old,
when he had meticulously pulled the wings off a butterfly, slowly and deliberately, relishing the notion that if the thing had been capable of screaming, it would have. The insect hadn’t been delicate and pretty. At least not until Jake had finished with it.

That first kill, tiny and insignificant as it had been, had sent a
n unforgettable shudder of pleasure through his small frame. He had been chasing that thrill ever since, on each and every occasion that he had managed to struggle free of the prison in his mind, the sickness that meant he had to share headspace with a tedious bore.

He had chased
the thrill across the deaths of increasingly larger animals, and eventually human beings, and on each occasion he had been fascinated with tearing them apart; with seeing their insides and remaking them.

Even the killing of seventeen people in his previous life had turned out to be a case of thinking small, though. The gift given
to him at the underground base; the transformation of himself into an apex predator: that had changed everything.

The battle with the puny creatures at
Catterick felt just like killing that first insect, all those years earlier. It felt
new.

He was powerless to resist the lure of their blood now, reduced to a creature of impulse, as hopelessly directionless as the mindless prototypes that wandered the earth blindly trying to spread their pathetic seed by biting and tearing.

It troubled him a little; that he was drawn toward the people at Catterick as if his actions were predetermined somehow, almost as if he had no say in the matter. He felt a little like a bee that made for pollen mindlessly, with no concept of
why
it was fulfilling its destiny.