Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4) (15 page)

John watched Sam leading them away confidently with interest.

You're the alpha dog here
, he thought.
And you've got the gun. So why is Darren in charge? What's he done to earn your loyalty?

John shook his head at Rachel, letting her know he didn't think it was worth making anything of the man's attitude, and with a nod of his head, headed off after the others.

*

"This is a virus, right?
" Michael said. "You know anything about the way they work? Generally, I mean."

Linda smiled.

"Generally is pretty much all I can give you, I'm afraid. I didn't specialise in any of the sciences. I taught the younger age groups. A little physics here, a little biology there. You get the picture."

Michael nodded.

"As I understand it," Linda said, "a virus takes over a host cell and replicates itself to take over other cells. It has to move fast in order to keep growing, before the cells develop a resistance to it."

Michael thought all the way back to his partner, Carl, crashing to the gravel in a remote car park with a placid fisherman sinking his teeth into him; about the way Carl
changed so
quickly.
It had taken mere moments for the affable guy to turn into a killing machine.

He shook his head, clearing away the memories. It had been a week; it felt like a lifetime.

"But when you say 'fast'," he said, "how fast are we talking here? I mean, if you get a Flu bug or something, it takes a while to take hold, doesn't it? You start coughing, sore throat - whatever. Then a couple of days later is when it really hits?"

Linda shrugged.

"Sure, with Flu. I suppose it would depend on the virus. Sorry, I really don't know enough to-"

"But a virus could be manufactured to move quickly. Quicker than usual," Michael interrupted.

Linda blinked.

"Manufactured? Is this thing man-made?"

Her eyes widened.

For a moment, Michael said nothing. Project Wildfire, John had called it.
Wildfire
. The thing had been designed to move like lightning.

"I think so," he said with a grimace. "And what happens when a virus meets a cell it can't take over?"

"The virus will die. Or it will mutate."

*

It was no supply run.

John knew it as soon as they passed what looked like a well-stocked pharmacy without even stopping to peer into the window.

The man with the gun led them through the narrow, twisting alleys, taking them deeper into the heart of Caernarfon until the castle was out of sight. John's nerves began to dance in anticipation.

When they passed a corner that John recognised, he slowed his pace, putting a light hand on Rachel's arm to stop her.

"The market is that way," he said, nodding down an alley to the left. "You think you can slip off and talk to the girl?"

Rachel stared at him.

"What are you up to, John?"

"Nothing," John hissed. "I think the girl knows something about what's going on inside that castle. Darren was very quick to stop me talking to her last night. This might be our only chance to
find out why. I can't go, the big guy has his eye on me. But I don't think they are paying much attention to the little woman."

He saw Rachel's hackles rising, and he knew he had her.

She glared in the direction of the men leading them, and saw Sam turn and stare at John.

"No time for dawdling back there, fel
ler," he called out. He hadn't even looked at Rachel.

"Fine," she spat.

"Coming now," John called. He shot a glance at Rachel.

"Be careful with her," he said. "Don't get too close, just in case."

He saw the simmering anger in Rachel's eyes, and was grateful when she turned without a word and slipped down the alley John had pointed out. Rachel could handle herself, John did not doubt that. But against four men, he did not think it would be enough. And he knew that if the four men turned on him as he expected them to do at any moment, Rachel would rush to his aid, and they would probably both wind up dead. At least this way, if things went bad, Rachel would have a chance to get away.

Gritting his teeth, he quickened his pace to catch up to the group.

Sam looked at him quizzically.

"Call of nature," John explained. "I think she's a bit shy. She'll catch up."

The man with the gun rolled his eyes, and turned. The road they were on reached a dead end some sixty yards away. If they were going to do it, it would be there.

Hopefully they want to do it quietly
, John thought, eyeing the shotgun Sam held casually at his side. If the intention was to execute John, to just blow him away, there would be nothing he could do.

He stalked after them, muscles tensed.

Ready.

*

Mutation.

Michael frowned, trying to recollect Victor's vague words in the bunker, right before Jason had crushed the life out of him.

The virus is in all of us. We've been breathing it in for years and it has lain dormant, waiting for someone to push the button and activate it.

Maybe they had poisoned the water. Maybe they had genetically altered food to include some insidious gene that would lurk in the human body, unnoticed, until the time was
right. Maybe the atmosphere itself had been tainted. It scarcely mattered now. John had said the people that designed the virus believed it had failed somehow; had been corrupted by Victor's interference. In fact the opposite was true. The virus was a raging juggernaut of success, far more effective that the people behind it had planned. Relentless and unstoppable. An efficient, invisible predator.

The weight of realisation crashed down on Michael, crushing him like a sudden increase in gravity. Somehow the bastards behind the apocalypse had poisoned the human race, altering the very structure of human DNA, preparing it for the time when they finally decided to
push the button and start the end.

Victor's attempt to create immunity had failed. All the lunatic had accomplished was to ensure that in certain people, the virus would mutate wildly, changing them into something else.

Not everyone would become the eyeless monsters. But everyone, once exposed, once
activated
, would become
something.
Everyone was susceptible. There was no stopping it. No fighting it.

No immunity.

The only hope was to find somewhere to hide, somewhere the teeth and tainted blood that activated the virus could not reach. Try to live out a semblance of a life in perpetual quarantine, and hope that whatever the key to the virus was, it would die out naturally, or never find them.

He had thought the castle would be safe.

And it might have been, if they were just dealing with sightless hunters; with something they could
fight
. But Michael knew that was no longer the case. He felt the truth of the revelation squirming in his mind.

The Infected weren't the enemy. Even the people behind Project Wildfire weren't the enemy.
The virus was the enemy.

And even now it coursed through the system of an old woman that he had left in charge of his daughter.
It had already breached the castle walls. They had brought it in with them.

Gwyneth was not immune.

She carried the virus. Activated. Deadly.
Contagious
.

She was a
timebomb.

Another crash, closer this time.

The creature that had single-handedly laid waste to Catterick Garrison, stabbing deep into The Heart that the soldiers had
believed was their fortress, was heading toward Nick and Drake unerringly. It sounded as though only a couple of doors now stood between them and a guided missile that would tear them apart. It was approaching slowly, and for a moment Nick was confused, until he remembered the way the thing had grinned; its dead eyes and psychotic stare.

It's enjoying the hunt,
he thought.
Getting a kick out of terrifying us.

Nick
bit his tongue painfully, trying not to scream, and desperately searched the vehicles in the cavernous garage, hoping that somehow he had missed a tank sitting among the jeeps and flatbed trucks; wondering if a tank would even be any use against an enemy that seemed to have been spat into the world from a vengeful Hell.

There was nothing. He saw useless crowd control vehicles that had been employed during the last round of riots in the UK, when people finally began to wake
up to the idea that the politicians dressed in designer suits were spoon-feeding them bullshit about prosperity while poverty crippled them. Trucks with armoured radiator grilles and water cannons intended to intimidate and disperse crowds of terrified people.

But this had nothing to do with
people
, and it seemed that only Nick felt terrified. Water cannons might as well have been water
pistols.

"Here," Drake hissed, leaping into the largest vehicle in the garage. It was a heavily armoured crowd control truck, and it was probably their only chance. But
Nick knew even as he leapt into the cabin that it was nothing more than a death trap; a bolthole that would do nothing to hide their presence from the predator stalking them. Nick had seen what the creature did to the trucks they had used as a wall:
obliterated
them; shattering the thick metal like a mini-nuke. The steel frame of the truck might slow the monster for a second, maybe just long enough for Nick to look again at its dead eyes before he was torn apart.

The door they had sprinted through moments before exploded from its hinges and travelled across the room like a deformed bullet, lodging itself into a Jeep that sat with its engine exposed for repairs with a crash
that sounded like a god roaring in the enclosed space.

Nick
whimpered.

The thing wasn't running anymore; wasn't moving at
lightspeed.

It doesn't need to
, Nick thought.
It knows we can't harm it.

He watched, teeth gritted, as the enormous figure ducked its head and
sauntered
through the ruined doorway. Even now Nick's mind tried to conjure up some reason for the creature's existence, but he found it coming up short.

It stood roughly seven feet tall, naked; rippling with twisted muscles that bulged like swollen infections. It looked like some insane scientist had tried to crossbreed a human with an enormous bear. It moved slowly now, with deliberate purpose; a swagger that came from being in absolute control.

It never took its dead eyes from Nick.

I am going to die.

Nick's hands began to move independently, stabbing at the controls on the dashboard wildly, flicking on the truck's lights and wipers, arcing a jet of screen-wash over the windscreen that made the hideous image approaching him ripple, lending it an even more alien look.

Finally he hit a button that sent a powerful jet of water at the creature from a side-mounted water cannon.

For a moment, as the jet hit the creature, it seemed to take a half-step backwards in surprise, and then Nick's stomach dropped like the stock market, crashing all the way down to the bottom, and the bubbling chaos that lived at the edge of insanity.

The thing
laughed.

Nick
was unaware of his own whimpering, unaware of the tears that streamed down his face. His entire consciousness was swallowed up by that laugh, by the evil cruelty of the sound. By its twisted
humanity.

And then, as
Nick continued to slap wildly at the dashboard, his fingers landed on the most hopeless button of all: the sonic generator that sent a low frequency rumble into crowds of protesters to instil headaches and gently persuade them to move on.

And his jaw dropped in astonishment as the terrifying creature collapsed to its knees, clapping its
club-like palms to its ears, and screamed in pain.

Nick
turned to look at Drake, and cried out in surprise when he saw the passenger seat was empty, and the big man had apparently dissolved into the air.

Losing my mind
, Nick thought, and this time it was he that cackled as he understood. There was no Drake. Never had been. Somehow, in the absence of his abusive father, Nick had dreamt up a bastard moulded in the old man's image to get his cowardly arse moving. He didn't know whether he should finally thank Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Hurt or curse him for the mental damage he had inflicted on his little boy.

Framed by the windscreen, he saw the creature struggling back to its feet, shaking its head wildly, as though it hoped to shake the sound out of its mind.