Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4) (5 page)

He stood for a moment, drinking the sensation in. He was, he realised suddenly, shaking with pleasure, every muscle twitching in unison as
a tsunami of adrenaline surged through him.

In the distance h
is hyper-attuned senses detected a large group of humans, and he could sense their terror wafting toward him on the breeze, and he very nearly charged forward immediately, throwing caution to the wind in his desire to taste their blood.

Only the memory of the way his energy had drained so suddenly back in the underground prison in which he had been birthed gave him pause. His body was uncharted territory. The thought of blacking out among the humans and leaving himself vulnerable was too much to bear. To die at
their hands simply because he could not control his urges would be a terrible waste.

You should proceed with caution
, he thought.
There's no need to rush in blindly like the pitiful eyeless creatures that they created to kill themselves
.

He inhaled deeply, a ragged, shuddering breath, trying to calm his racing nerves and clear his mind.

Just another taste...

*

Gillian Harper had been there right at the start. She had been one of the fortunate ones holding a weapon when the infection had walked in the front door at Catterick Garrison a week earlier and laid waste to the remnants of the British Army, felling the once-mighty force before the majority of them even knew there was a battle to be fought.

She’d seen the first bite at close quarters, the utter insanity
of it; the way the bitten soldier dropped to the floor for a moment, like a boxer floored by a sucker-punch. She saw the man rise and rip out his eyeballs with a yelp that sounded terrifyingly like
relief
and sink his teeth into the nearest stunned onlooker. Gill was there when the coruscating chain reaction of insanity began; one of the few who truly knew how things had escalated beyond anyone's control in
seconds.

After that
initial moment of shock the fearful images became a smeared memory, a grisly collage of teeth and blood and bullets fired indiscriminately into a wall of bodies that had belonged to her brothers in arms only moments before they were transformed into death made flesh.

She knew of only one other soldier that remembered it all beginning. Just
one
.

Thousands had died.

Her survival was blurry and indistinct. She remembered staggering backwards, expecting that at any moment the rifle would
click
instead of
bang
and her time would be up. She remembered the chopper roaring over her head, the soldiers inside pouring bullets into the crowd from automatic weapons, a fuel tank somewhere going up; the impact of the blast slamming her back onto the ground as she tried to scramble to her feet.

And the thing that had grabbed her while she was down, and the feel of the knife in her hand; Gill remembered
that
part with crystal clarity. She had a feeling she always would.

Death is the only quarantine that can be trusted.

Gill straightened with a weary sigh and a click in her back that sounded like far-off rifle fire. Every muscle complained, more than she had ever experienced on one of the pack marches she had hated so much during basic training, when she had been expected to carry half her bodyweight on her back mile after tedious mile. That had been a breeze compared to her current task: she had spent days carrying and stacking heavy furniture to fashion a rudimentary wall around Catterick.

“Ouch, that sounded painful. Want me to rub it better?”

Gill rolled her eyes toward Neil. Of all the people that might have survived the attack on the garrison, Gill was sort of glad to see Neil when the dust settled. The guy would probably have responded with a feeble quip on discovering his own legs had been blown off.

Most of the people trying to come to terms with life at the garrison after the attack were pitched somewhere between solemnity and total mental collapse.
Lame pick-up lines and innuendo at least carried an echo of normality.

Neil's outdated sense of humour had apparently survived the apocalypse, but Gill
didn't think it had done so without taking damage. Usually his lewd jokes made her grin despite herself, but she could tell that this time his heart wasn’t quite in it; like the script had gone stale. He still winked, but the cheerful mask he wore could not hide the haunted look in his eyes.

Neil hadn’t spoken in hours before he delivered the half-hearted quip on autopilot. And Gill had
not minded that silence at all. Being alone with her fearful thoughts was bad; constantly turning over doomsday scenarios with other terrified soldiers was far worse, and all anyone had talked about since they fought off the infection was death.

They had been building the wall non-stop for a week, ever since the
spread of the virus had finally been stopped, piling the structure higher and reinforcing it with everything they could find that hadn’t been nailed down. Three roads led into the centre of the garrison, and they barricaded each with vehicles and furniture and even bodies, walling themselves in. The centre of the tiny town had suddenly become their world.

Only snipers went beyond the wall, sneaking through the parked truck that served as the only gateway into the hastily-remodelled Catterick, and heading out to establish an outer perimeter. They only went
because they had to.
Someone
had to. The thought of the Infected appearing without warning on their doorstep again was too terrible for anyone to contemplate.

The snipers had been given orders to engage at will. If they saw movement, they were to stop it forcibly. If they saw
a lot
of movement, they were to get the hell out and warn the remainder of the troops at the garrison.

The remnants of the army were clustered now around two main buildings: Harden Barracks and the medical centre.
Thanks to its shape, they all called the ramshackle fortress they had built
The Heart.
Gill wondered if the name had stuck because the place offered them life, or because they all knew that a strike on The Heart would be a killing blow.

“I think we’re done here,” Gill said, hammering a final nail into a thick piece of wood and testing the result with a shove.

The makeshift wall didn’t move. If it came to it, it could be defended. But if the things attacked in large numbers, the wall simply would not matter. It was far from impregnable, and their numbers were not sufficient to cope with a large-scale attack. Either the wall would fall or the bullets would run out. Most likely the former. Much of the protection the wall offered, she suspected, was symbolic. There was precious little hope left in Catterick, so they had been forced to build some.

Gill
jumped off the wall and landed heavily on the ground, and when she thought about returning to the others, her spirits continued to fall.

With the exception of the snipers, a
ll of the survivors of the massacre at Catterick were crammed into The Heart; into one sweat drenched, claustrophobic space. The tension in the air was palpable. Gill felt like she was choking on it every time she took a breath. Maybe when it came down to it, The Heart was most aptly named because one day it would stop beating. The place would not need to suffer an attack; it was collapsing from within, weakening as confusion and indecision raged among people that had relied for so long on a defined command structure.

It had
not taken long after the guns stopped chattering for the paltry amount of people that were left to divide neatly into two opposing factions; somehow humans found a route to conflict no matter what.

As far as Gill was concerned the factions could be summarised as those who still thought they were an army, and that they should somehow mobilise and get out there to
defend the civilian public, and those, like Gill, who
weren’t
completely bat-shit crazy.

The army was gone.
The public was gone. There was nothing left to protect, no one left to save. Gill knew it. Anyone who had not leapt feet-first into denial knew it. Any chance of continuing to function as they had before the apocalypse walked in had evaporated when the ranking system had collapsed, leaving one man with outdated symbols on his uniform with the chance to fill the resulting power vacuum. One man. The wrong man.

If history had prove
n anything, it was that when people were terrified and disorganised, they would happily let a monster rule them just to have
someone
prepared to call the shots.

The Heart was proving no different. Being away from the rotting centre and working on the wall was a blessing, no matter how concerned she might have been about what
horror might approach from the other side.

Gill was just thinking that it would be nice if she could crawl back to one of the overcrowded dormitories they had set up
in the two main buildings and fall into bed without being dragged into some heated debate when the object sailed through the air and landed at her feet with a wet
crunch.

For a moment she stared at it, stupefied.

A human head. Tossed over the wall.

Like a medieval siege
, she thought, and the notion seemed to form slowly in her mind, like all of a sudden she was having trouble thinking. She tried to turn her head, tried to search for some reassurance in Neil’s eyes, but for some reason she found that she could not move. And then she felt it: a crawling sensation, like insects had just hatched in her head and were scurrying about. She couldn’t recall ever having felt anything like it. Couldn’t, in fact, recall that part of her body ever feeling
anything
. Like straining a muscle you weren’t aware could be strained.

She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out.

Just liquid.

Warm and thick; clogging the back of her throat uncomfortably.

Her vision flicked off, like the plug that powered it had been pulled out abruptly.

Her last thought was
not a thought at all. It was a smell, a fragrance that made no sense amidst the stink of blood and death that hung over Catterick. Fresh lavender, just like her mother always used to put all over the house. She was trying to understand that smell, trying to comprehend why she felt like a little girl again, when the muscles in her face began to spasm wildly and death took her.

*

With a shudder of pleasure, Jake pulled his hand out of the woman’s head and licked his fingers clean, shivering as the blood set his nerves alight. Her brain had felt
wonderful.
Moist, and firm.
Fresh.
He had enjoyed the tender caress before the squeeze.

Almost as much as he enjoyed the look on the man’s face as he watched Jake killing her, the sheer unadulterated
awe
of it; the distilled terror.

He enjoyed it so much that he didn’t kill the man.

At least, not right away. There was no one there to see Jake and alert the other creatures hiding away in their pathetic compound. He needed to taste the man's fear-soaked blood; needed it like his deformed lungs needed oxygen.

But there was alway
s time for fun, so he ripped out the man’s tongue to silence his whimpering and then tried his hand at
skinning.
He had never skinned anything before, and he did a far from perfect job, but it was definitely
fun
. All the better for the fact that the man lived through it, gurgling like a baby.

When
Jake finally tore off the man's head, he drank deeply, until his mind span, making him feel giddy.

When he was done, the urge to press on, to simply charge into the mass of creatures he felt milling around in the near distance, was almost impossible to resist. Jake had always had severe problems with delaying gratification
. It was, he would freely admit, the only flaw in his character. Yet for the first time in as long as he could remember, he managed to suppress his desire to rush forward and begin killing.

This was clearly a military installation of some kind. They would be armed, and already he felt a slight twinge of fatigue as the unnatural movement of his muscles took their toll. It was taking him a long time to adjust to the rhythms of his new body: the extraordinary, explosive bursts of energy he was capable of came at a price. Like a cheetah, his fuel tank emptied quickly and left him vulnerable.

There was no point in rushing things. Better to pick them off slowly, better to enjoy the hunt as he always had even before the scientists in the underground base had turned his body into a glorious weapon.

There was much more fun to be had in terrorising the army garrison. Now that he was closer to them, he could taste the bitterness of their terror on every breath. They were scared of the Infected, even though Jake could tell there were none for miles around. The
humans' fear was outdated. When Jake revealed himself their terror would multiply exponentially. An intoxicating shudder of anticipation rippled through him, right down there in the twisted DNA, and it felt almost as good as ingesting their blood.