Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4) (3 page)

The words entered his mind slowly; foggily, like he was hearing them through thick walls.

One of the kids he had been leading, one of the ones Darren liked the most - Trevor, a nice sort of guy who would have been more tolerable if he hadn't spent the whole trip trying to win Lexie over with a little-boy-lost act - completely lost his fucking mind and ran to help the woman.

Darren watched in horror as the thing
on the floor grabbed his legs and pulled him down, clamping her teeth onto his flailing hand and clenching, tearing away a finger with a sharp
snap
that cleaved the still morning air in two.

Trevor screamed and tore his arm away, sending an arc of blood across the floor.

And then abruptly the screaming stopped, and Darren could almost swear he heard the kid let out a
sigh
and then Trevor was tearing his eyes out and snarling and leaping on top of Lexie and the little-boy-lost routine evaporated in a storm of teeth and blood, and Darren was running for the bus station door and all around him there was screaming.

Darren was weak
; scared. Certain he was going to die. He ran blindly, like an animal terrified by the shriek and pop of fireworks, smashing his way through the door and into the station. Footsteps followed him inside; he had no idea whether they belonged to the group of excitable kids he was meant to be leading or the hideous monster that Trevor had suddenly become.

There was no time to think about that.

In the gloomy half-light of the bus station, teeth were aimed at him, driving toward him, snapping and tearing.

Darren crumpled backwards, slashing at the eyeless horror wildly with the tiny blade, driving it deep into its neck.

It's not stopping,
he thought dully, as the creature pushed its snapping jaws closer to Darren's face, forcing its flesh further onto the blade, apparently oblivious to the grievous injury, immune to the pain as it impaled itself to get to him.

With a roar, Darren flexed his old, weathered muscles, mustering all his strength to keep the mouth of the thing at bay. He couldn't find the energy he needed to throw it away from him, and so he was left there for seconds that felt like hours, feeling the creature
's blood pumping steadily across his arm, holding it in place while it died slowly atop him.

Even when the life had pulsed from the thing, its final action was a weak, pathetic snapping of its jaw.

It took a full minute for it to weaken enough that Darren was able to push it away from him.

He screamed the whole time.

When he hauled himself upright, he saw that seven of the kids had made it inside with him. None of them seemed to be injured; all of them were pressed against the door, holding back the relentless attempts of their former friends to get inside the building and kill them.

Darren saw
Lexie outside, eyeless and enraged, throwing herself at the glass panel on the door. He heard the splintering of the glass and knew there was to be no barricading themselves in.

The small room was filled with sobs and shrieks. For several long moments Darren simply stared down at the small blade, at the blood which drenched his forearm, and he thought about the lack of planes. The empty skies, and the satel
lite phone that found no signal, and he shuddered as his nerves blazed like wildfire.

For the first time in twenty years, Darren felt alive. Truly
alive.
It looked like he wasn't going to be forced into a lonely retirement of gardening and bland quiz shows after all. The world had thrown a curveball, and he would catch it and
run.

As the handful of kids pressed themselves against the door and shot
terrified looks back toward him, Darren realised they were waiting for him to tell them what to do, and he mumbled a few reassuring words.

And grinned broadly into the gloom
as a plan formed.

*

That had all been days ago. Enough time for Darren to lead the mountaineers to safety, as his contract with them had promised. Well, all but one. But that one had been a noble sacrifice. Without the distraction he had provided, how else would Darren have got them all onto the bus and away from the mayhem in the car park?

Enough time for them to realise that the world itself had become a vast mountain, and they needed a guide
more than ever.

Enough time for Darren to find the perfect place for them to stay and slowly expand their numbers with fresh blood. Enough time to plot out a future that would require every last one of them to look to
him
before they chose to do anything. Enough time for him to have been responsible for at least ten deaths.

And enough time to discover something extraordinary. Something that would give them a shot at survival, and Darren a shot at being someone far more important than a guy that teenage climbers spent a week with and promptly forgot.

A lot can change in a week.

Not the excitement, though. The thrill of the new world still coursed through Darren's veins like a powerful drug.

And more excitement was headed straight for him, propelled by large white sails and the choppy waves of the Irish Sea.

Darren had been so lost in thought that he jumped when the man with the binoculars appeared at his side.

“Sir, there’s six of them," the man said. "They’ve docked further down the river. Looks like two men, two women. Couple of kids.”

Darren nodded.
Six was a lot. There was a definite threat of...
dilution.

Kids
, he thought. Children had great value in a world riddled by death.

“Then get ready,” he said. "I think we'll let this group inside."

“Yes, Sir.”

Sir
, Darren thought, and smiled.

It looks like they want company.

Those had been Michael Evans’ words when he first saw the light that lanced the sky from the stone guts of the castle as they skimmed across the pitch-black water.

John Francis had stared long and hard at the beam of light as he wrestled against the sails and guided the boat from the open sea toward the mouth of the river that funnelled into the town of Caernarfon.

Three fast, three slow, three fast.

John knew what the sequence of flashing lights meant, of course; anyone with even the most rudimentary military training would. He also knew how an
SOS
could be employed as a lure in a trap. That they wanted company was in no doubt. What John needed to know was
why.
In a warzone, you don't just stumble forward blindly.

He made up his mind before the boat got anywhere near the shore. If he was going to walk into that castle, he would do it on
his
terms.

“You stay, I go,
” he said when the boat reached the dock.

John kept his voice low and his tone harsh. He expected a frown from Michael, and he got it.

“We should stick together.”

John finished tying the boat off, and played out a few feet of line, letting it drift away from the harbour wall, just far enough that only someone with Olympic prowess would have a
chance of jumping anywhere near the hull. He clenched his jaw in frustration.

Of course he wants to argue the point.

“Michael, I hate to be a bastard about this, but I’m not carrying you through a strange fucking town that is probably heaving with psychopaths to find out whether or not the people in that castle mean to do us harm. We need the boat, and if I come back running I want the fucking thing untied and ready to go, right? There’s no possible outcome for me that would be helped by being accompanied by two kids, a grandmother and a cripple. No offense.”

John hadn’t mentioned Rachel. He saw Michael making a mental note of
the omission and stifled a sigh. One way or another, Michael absorbed information and found value in it.

Or maybe 'leverage' is more accurate,
John thought. He could see why Michael would have been a good cop, back when law and order had been words that meant anything. Somehow Michael Evans had survived the apocalypse despite his paralysis, and had surrounded himself with people willing to go to great lengths to help him. John had seen men he would have considered far better equipped to deal with a world of relentless savagery fall at the first hurdle. Somehow Michael kept clearing them almost effortlessly. Maybe because he wasn't jumping. He was being
carried.

“I’ll be back,” John said flatly and, giving Michael no time to respond, hauled himself onto the rope, wrapping his legs around it and shimmying across toward the harbour wall.

As he made his way across the improvised rope bridge, John let his mind dwell on his own words for a second. He
would
be back, though as they had made their way up the coast he had again spent half his time considering the best way to ditch the group of people that had become his travelling companions. To let them all follow Michael down whatever path best suited him.

And what’s stopping you?

The answer was obvious, though he didn’t let it settle in his mind. Didn’t want to admit it to himself, he supposed. Forming attachments was only going to weaken him, and the woman had been badly damaged even before the horrific events at the harbour in Aberystwyth; before she watched her last remaining relative get torn apart in front of her.

He reached the wall and carefully swung a foot across, using the strength in his arms to lever himself upright with as little noise as possible. When he was safely on solid ground, he dropped onto his haunches out of habit and his face contorted into a wry grimace. There was little point trying to keep a low p
rofile: the Infected were blind; hunters that used preternatural hearing to track down their prey. Crouching low would have no effect on whether they were going to swarm toward him. And if the people signalling for help in the castle were keeping lookout - as they surely must be - they would likely have seen the boat approaching long before it actually reached land, and they would be expecting company.

John took a moment to study Caernarfon’s
picturesque waterfront, trying to gather enough data to form a rough map of the place in his head. Their approach by sea had obscured most of the town behind rolling hills that swept away from the ocean toward the foothills of the Welsh mountains.

When the town had finally hovered into view, John had been forced
to admit a grudging respect for Michael. Caernarfon had been his idea, and it wasn’t half bad. The crippled man was self-serving, but by luck or judgement his decisions had kept them alive.

But not undamaged.

John shook the thought away and reminded himself sternly:
forming attachments will weaken you.

They had approached Caernarfon from the south, skirting up the coast under the vast, cloudless sky. The castle jutted from the landscape like a clenched jaw, with the town at its back. A river that curved inward around the castle made it
virtually unapproachable by land, save for the bridge connecting it to the town.

The town on the inland side was huddled close, small buildings leaning over narrow streets
that were typical of old Wales; all crooked angles and glowering claustrophobia. Blind corners and hiding spots everywhere. A great place to defend; not so great to enter alone.

Caernarfon's
concessions to modernity were daubed across the ancient buildings like paint; chain stores and high-street brands crammed into narrow structures on cobbled streets. John saw a number of shops that sold fashionable clothes and gifts for occasions no one would be celebrating any time soon; mobile phone shops suddenly rendered obsolete. A market, a handful of pubs; a tiny church. The castle dominated them all, towering far above the rooftops of every other building. Eight huge stone towers clustered around a central node behind a wall that had to be at least fifty feet high.

The place looked about as defendable as any John could imagine. Warfare had been set back hundreds of years. The enemy didn’t use guns and planes and warheads anymore; it used fingers and teeth. Huge walls were suddenly a tactical necessity, as they once had been. The violence of mankind had come full circle
: eventually weaponry had become so advanced that the only place left for it to go was right back to the start, right back to bare fists and blades and slow, agonising death.

With the mountains of Snowdonia at its rear, cutting off
land approach from the south and the east, Caernarfon was a town surrounded by natural fortifications. And then there was the castle itself: a building that had died centuries before and become a tourist attraction had been given a shot at a full resurrection.

The place was perfect.

But someone else had taken it first.

John scurried to the cover of the nearest building and searched for the beam in the sky,
among the brilliant carpet of stars. After a few seconds he spotted it and reoriented himself.