Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4) (16 page)

Still cackling, Nick gunned the engine and stamped on the accelerator, and the truck roared forward, smashing into the hideous mutation at waist height and driving it into the wall behind it with a shattering crash.

The creature slumped across the bonnet, sending a shiver through the truck
that felt like a distant earthquake.

Nick
jumped out and stared at it in terrified curiosity. Its fearsome eyes were shut.

Is it dead?

Nick decided the only prudent course of action was not to hang around to find out. With a final glance around the garage to confirm that Drake had been nothing more than a figment of his imagination, he sprinted through the wrecked door and the twisting corridors that were now filled with debris, wondering idly if hallucinating a carbon copy of his father meant he had gone completely insane, and emerged onto the street that was awash with blood and sundered bodies.

Nick
heard a few low moans: a mixture of terror and stupefied pain. Not everyone on the street had been killed outright: the creature had ploughed straight through the middle of them like a tornado, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake.

He frantically scanned the twitching flood of gore on the ground for some sign of Colonel Hopper, unsure whether he
expected the man to be alive or dead, and hoping fervently it would be the latter. He was certain Hopper would be carrying the key that would enable Nick to get to the chopper on the roof, but the more he searched, the more hopeless he felt. It was difficult to distinguish which parts of the horrific scene splattered before him had even been human, let alone which particular human they might have belonged to.

He thought back to the garage, and briefly considered that he might be able to
head back there and find a jeep or a truck to flee in, but he quickly discarded the idea. The notion of going anywhere near the monster pinned beneath the truck left his stomach attempting to perform cartwheels, and in any case, a truck would not be safe in the long run. The Infected were still out there, a blight that stained the entire land, and sooner or later he would either run into them or run out of fuel. Either scenario would mean his death.

He felt like screaming in frustration.

And then he spotted the fire axe.

He tried to picture the door that led to the roof of the medical centre. Was it steel? Would
swinging an axe even leave a dent on it?

He was just bending down to
retrieve the axe when he heard it. The low hum of the helicopter's engine, the whipped-air noise of the blades slowly beginning to rotate, picking up speed, and Nick knew what the sound meant, knew it deep inside, where there was no room left for doubt.

Hopper.

Nick was running then, crashing through the wide double-doors that led into the medical centre, a rectangular building three storeys high, expecting that at any moment the creature might pop into existence right in front of him and that the first he would know of it would involve the sudden tearing away of some vital part of his body.

The ground floor of the medical centre was filled with equipment that had been rendered obsolete: all the stretchers and intravenous drips in the world weren't going to matter now. The game had changed.

At the far end of the building, an elevator door stood open, wide enough to accommodate up to three gurneys comfortably, and effectively killed by the sudden loss of electricity. Even if the lift had worked, Nick would not have trusted it. He veered through a door to the left and onto a featureless grey stairway, hauling his aching legs up two steps at a time.

When he reached the third floor he was greeted by the sight he knew he would see: the exit door leading to the roof unlocked; standing open.

He charged through it and out onto the roof, dominated by the helipad and the chopper that wobbled as Colonel Dave Hopper wrestled ineffectively with the unfamiliar controls.

Hopper
's eyes lit up when he saw Nick streaking across the roof toward him.

"You there, soldier! Can you fly this thing?" The Colonel hollered above the roar of the engine.

"Absolutely, Colonel," Nick snarled with a savage grin, and he grabbed Hopper by the lapels of his meaningless uniform, and hauled the old man from the chopper.

"Take your hands off me soldier, that's a direct order!"

Hopper screamed, showering Nick's face in hot spittle, and for a brief moment Nick looked into the old man's eyes and saw the fear there. Saw the terrified gaze of an eight year old coward paralysed by the impending arrival of the beast.

"I'm done taking orders, Hopper,"
Nick hissed, and threw the spluttering old bastard off the roof, grimacing as he heard the man's scream of terror end in an abrupt crunch.

He jumped into the pilot's seat, slamming the door behind him and took a second to study the
helicopter's controls. He didn't know how to fly it; not exactly, but he knew enough. A damn sight more than Colonel Hopper had known, apparently.

He yanked on the collective control lever, a little too hard, and the chopper lurched violently into the air, tail down, threatening to collapse back onto the building. Alarms began to sound, frantically chiming to catch
Nick's attention. Gritting his teeth, cursing the weight and size of the chopper - large enough to serve as a medical vehicle for much of North Yorkshire - he grappled with the pitch, getting the nose down, and finally lifting clear of the building.

As the front of the chopper lowered, he got a clear view of the
disaster on the streets of Catterick. He saw a couple of figures staggering to their feet, a further few emerging from hiding spots that had only proven marginally successful. He saw one man wandering in a daze, clutching dumbly at the oozing space that his left arm had occupied minutes earlier.

For a moment
Nick wondered if he might be able to land, and pick up the few that weren't dying slowly of their terrible wounds, but then he saw something that made his gut lurch in unison with the unsteady chopper.

On the ground sixty-odd feet below, one of the stumbling figures suddenly erupted in a cloud of blood.
Another quickly followed.

It's still alive.

It's free.

Sweating, panicking
at the belief that at any moment the unfamiliar controls would betray him, Nick lifted the chopper higher, his only thought to get the hell away from the massacre.

He was perhaps a hundred feet above the ground, eyes still fixed on the carnage below, when he saw it approaching. A body,
hurled through the air toward him like a guided missile.

It’s trying to bring down the chopper,
he thought, and then:
Oh, Jesus, he’s still alive…

The screaming man hurtled toward the chopper, casually tossed away like crumpled paper, and
Nick saw the terror in his eyes, saw the incomprehension as he shot past the windscreen, narrowly missing the body of the vehicle.

And then the man hit the blades, and
Nick's view was obscured by a sudden, heavy red rain, and he gunned the throttle blindly and screamed.

*

Jake collapsed to one knee. Getting away from the truck, and the infernal beam of terrible sound that had pinned him in place and made his head feel like it might explode had taken every ounce of his freakish strength. In the end he had been forced to crawl like an insect, dragging himself away from the nightmarish noise, until the sound of it was muted enough to allow him to stand. Even then he had felt crippling pain erupt in his lower back, where the truck had smashed him into the wall.

When he reached the street outside, the chopper was already in the air, lurching upward clumsily, and a
tidal wave of rage tore through Jake at the prospect that the hateful human that had humiliated him was getting away.

Tossing one of the
screaming creatures at the vehicle took the last of his strength, and he shrieked in frustration when he saw the throw had been good, but not good enough.

The chopper continued to rise, and headed south. The face of the man that had bested him was burned like a brand onto Jake's memory.

I'll find you,
he thought, and then, as he sensed movement stirring around him, the few dozen-or-so humans he had failed to kill starting to emerge from their hiding spots, Jake summoned a final burst of power from his aching limbs, terrifyingly aware of the implacable darkness riding toward him on a wave of fatigue and damage, and he bolted away from the wreckage of Catterick Garrison and ran until the darkness caught him.

*

Nick
flew until the fuel alarm on the helicopter began to ring out incessantly, and only then did he begin to panic.

Getting away from Catterick had been one thing. But he had no idea where he was actually heading
to
, and as darkness fell outside the narrow windows he realised that might just be a grievous oversight.

His original plan as he had put the horror of Catterick in his rear view mirror, had been
to fly south to Birmingham or Manchester, and to land the chopper on the roof of the tallest building he could find. There was, he figured, less chance of encountering the Infected on the top floor of a skyscraper. Plenty of opportunity to work your way down, securing the place floor by floor.

Not a great plan. But a plan, at least.

When the low fuel alarm began to shriek in protest at Nick, he had no idea where he was. He had flown blindly into the darkening night, not registering any detail in the land below. Power was out across the whole country: there was no light to navigate by. No glowing cities, no snaking lines of streetlights to follow. The chopper floated across an endless black canvas.

Only once had the terrain given him any indication where he might be, and then only because it soared up dangerously
toward him and he was forced to get the chopper up quickly before it smashed into the jagged face of a mountain.

That must have been the Pennines,
Nick thought.
How long ago was that? Shit.

The alarm pierced his thoughts, and a cold terror seeped from his pores. He was going to have to land, and the chopper was
loud
.

Shit.

He lifted the nose up, slowly stopping the chopper’s forward momentum, and then allowed the cumbersome vehicle to drop, as slowly as he could, which translated into jerkily plummeting for what felt like an eternity before he regained control. He descended in increments; jarring, stomach-churning drops of fifty feet at a time that made his already chewed-up nerves scream.

The fuel light blinked rapidly, red and ominous, and still he could
not see the ground.

What if I’m over the sea?

Terror clutched at him.

None of the instruments on the dashboard meant much to him: working out how to move the chopper had been one thing. Navigation was entirely another.

He let a shuddering yelp loose as he saw rocks and trees looming below him, and then something even better: four wide lanes of tarmac. A dual carriageway. A landing even he could nail. Nick couldn’t believe his luck.

It might have been his imagination, but
Nick thought the chopper’s engine died even as he descended the final twenty feet or so, hitting the ground with a thump that sent a savage shudder through the vehicle, rattling his bones and almost making him bite off the end of his tongue.

The lights on the chopper didn’t illuminate much, just enough to be sure that he had not landed in the middle of a herd of the Infected - though even if he had there was
not really much he could have done about it without fuel. The road looked empty, featureless in either direction, but he thought he saw the merest hint of light glinting over the horizon to the west. The last scraps of sunset.

He had come from the east, so he put his back to it, and trotted away from the chopper, trying to maintain a narrow balance between speed and sound.

He’d barely travelled a hundred yards before he heard the noise in the distance behind him, a sound that simultaneously bewildered and terrified.

Snarling.

He turned and looked back at the chopper, an island of light in an ocean of inky darkness. After several moments he thought he saw something there; just a hint of movement. His feet began to creep backwards of their own volition, apparently reaching conclusions his mind had yet to find.

A shadow moved in front of the chopper, and then another, and
Nick was at last able to make out what he was looking at.

Dogs,
he thought,
it's just dogs
. He almost laughed in relief.

Then he saw another. And another. Five dogs
in total. The hairs on the back of Nick's neck began to stand to attention.

Only when the dogs roared as one and tore toward him did
Nick's mind finally catch up with his feet.

Propelled by blind panic,
Nick turned and sprinted into the darkness, his feet pounding painfully against the tarmac. Behind him, he heard the snarling closing on him inexorably. Running was not going to matter. There was no way to outrun a pack of dogs.