Mutation (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 4) (7 page)

“Okay, Darren, thank you so much for taking us in,”
John said. “We’ve had quite a journey. Is there somewhere we can sleep?”

“Of course,” Darren said with a benevolent smile. “There are plenty of rooms in each of the towers, we can-“

“Just one will do,” John interrupted. “We’d like to stay together. We’re all family. You understand.”

John's tone left no room for further questions.

Darren’s eyes narrowed, just a little, and John thought he could read in the man’s gaze that he knew bullshit when he smelled it too.

“I completely understand,” Darren said amiably. He pointed to a tower at the
southern end of the castle. “That one’s empty, you’ll have plenty of space in there.”

“Thanks, Darren,” Michael said. “We’ll talk in the morning, okay?”

Darren smiled, and nodded. He strode away without another word.

*

Michael wheeled himself into the tower with a wariness that was beginning to feel like second nature.

The tower was cold
and bare, but it seemed uninhabited as Darren had promised, and as he made his way inside, just being surrounded by the thick stone wall made Michael feel safer than he had at any point since driving to a café for bacon and eggs and finding a bloodbath instead.

A winding stone staircase led up. Michael figured there might be as many as six or seven levels to the tower,
and he was grateful that no one seemed to even consider suggesting that they should ascend. The castle had been built a long time before wheelchair access had become a law, and though some concessions had clearly been made when the place had become a tourist attraction, getting wheelchair-bound people to the top of the towers had obviously been a step too far.

John shut the heavy wooden door behind them as they entered the large circular space. The
others made for the wall opposite the door without speaking, sitting with their backs against it, facing the entrance.

Even now
, Michael thought,
we’re putting ourselves in the safest place, burrowing deep. Getting as far away from the entrance as possible.
It had not taken long to condition human beings to think like hunted animals.

Michael watched as John stood for a moment at the door, listening intently, before apparently satisfying himself that Darren was
not lurking outside listening to them.

“What’s on your mind, John?”

John left the door and slumped against the wall alongside Gwyneth. Michael saw him cast a glance at Rachel, whose silence was obviously worrying him as much as it did Michael.

“Two things,” John said softly. “One: this place is perfect. Two: at least, it would be if
they
weren’t here.”

Michael nodded.

“How many of them are there, you think?”

Jo
hn’s eyes lifted to the ceiling as he counted the memories.

Rachel beat him to it.

“I counted twenty-three,” she said flatly, and the two men blinked in surprise.

“You don’t need to worry,” Rachel said bitterly. “I know what you’re all thinking. But I’m not Jason. I’m not…broken. I’m
angry.
And the subject you two are skirting around is that the guy out there is trying just a little too fucking hard to appear friendly. I’ve seen that fake smile before.”

She shuddered. Didn’t need to say the name.

“They’re afraid of him," Pete said suddenly.

They all stared at
the boy.

“You can see it in their faces,” Pete continued. “They all look at the floor when he looks at them.”

Michael clapped a hand on Pete’s narrow shoulder and smiled at him. He had feared that the whole group had been damaged psychologically by the events of the day, but putting a stone wall around them was gradually encouraging them to open up. Pete had a habit of vocalising what everybody else was thinking but seemed unwilling to say.

“Kid’s right,” John said, and Pete beamed. “He’s got some hold over these people. They’re here because it’s safe, but they are still afraid.”

“The question is,” Michael said, “afraid of
what?
”

"Not the Infected," John said, and rolled his eyes
when Michael looked at Gwyneth.

"Gwyneth, can you...uh...feel them out there?" Michael said.

John sighed loudly.

"I can't feel anything at all," Gwyneth said. "I think Darren was telling the truth. If they are out there, they must be a long way off."

Michael felt his shoulders slump. Every time he thought he was getting a grip on the world, something happened to rip it away again and plunge him back into confusion. He knew that John did not believe in Gwyneth's proclamation that getting bitten had imbued her with some sort of second sight, but after everything Michael had seen, he was not willing to rule anything out.

Back at the farmhouse, when they had watched a small army of Infected marching past the windows, they had all got the impression that they were communicating with each other. It wasn't beyond the realms of possibility that they could sense each other, just as
some animals could sense the presence of others, or the onset of a storm. And if they could, maybe Gwyneth could too.

One thing was certain: Gwyneth believed it.

Maybe you just want to believe it
, Michael thought,
because then Gwyneth will be like an early warning system, and God knows you need something like that.

"On the boat, you said you felt something else out there," Michael said. "Something different."

"Something worse," Gwyneth said in a low voice. She looked at the children, and Michael realised the conversation was likely to be scaring them. He should have realised it sooner. But he had to know.

"Can you still feel it?"

Gwyneth shook her head vigorously.

"Not since the boat."

Michael rubbed his aching temples, and realised suddenly just how tired he felt. It wasn't just the constant fear or the seemingly endless pursuit of the Infected. His mind was weary of the constant attempts to make sense of a world that he was beginning to believe could not be understood.

He nodded, and let silence fall over the group.
After a few moments his eyes closed slowly, and as sleep took him he thought that everything would make more sense in the morning, but he knew deep down that he was lying to himself.

*

In the end, John was surprised that Gwyneth remained awake as sleep took the others. The kids had fallen asleep early, and Rachel had waved away the attempts John and Michael made to engage her in further conversation.
Not now,
her shake of the head seemed to say, and both men were content to leave her alone. In truth, John thought, he didn't know what to say to Rachel.
Keep your chin up
just wouldn't cut it.

Eventually they realised that she had dozed off, and they lowered their voices.

Even Michael did not seem to be up for talking much, and John could not blame him really. The fact was that there was only one subject that needed discussing, and it was the one they needed a break from. They seemed to have spent every spare moment speculating about the virus, or contemplating which angle of attack death would take when it next came at them. Just thinking that way got wearing. John knew that well enough from his years spent in the desert.

But that
had been a different sort of dread. At least there the enemy was something that he could comprehend. Every time he felt like he was getting to grips with the death rattle of British civilization, a new horror coughed itself up to take him by surprise.

Not always a horror, either,
he thought as he looked at Rachel, who even in sleep wore a troubled frown.
Surprises around every corner.

“How are you holding up, dear?”

John felt his jaw slacken a little. He had thought Gwyneth had fallen asleep. She had looked the most exhausted of all of them.

“Uh, I’m fine.”

“Pfft.”

The wrinkles on the old woman’s face deepened as she smiled.

“You’re troubled.”

John gave a shrug.

“Aren’t we all?”

“Not just by…the world. By me.”

John arched an eyebrow in surprise. Apparently Gwyneth could read minds now too.

“By what I can do. By my…ability.”

She smiled again.

“You should have a little faith.”

John sighed; kept his voice low.

“Look,” he said. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. You seem like a nice
person, but I don’t believe in ghosts. Don’t believe in magic. I don’t believe in mind-reading or psychics or any of that bullshit. Asking me to believe that you can somehow sense the things out there, or see them in your mind, or whatever, is like asking me to believe in Father Christmas."

John shrugged.

“For all I know you’re
just a crazy old woman,” - she smiled at that - “and maybe you were crazy long before any of this happened. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have been bitten, and you haven’t changed.”

Gwyneth opened her mouth and John held up a hand.

“What I mean is you haven’t turned into one of
them
. That changes everything. That’s not
meant
to happen. None of this has anything to do with special powers or magic or fate or
God.
Man did this. It was designed and planned and executed by very powerful people. By
the
very powerful people. This isn’t what
they
intended.
Faith
has nothing to do with this, just people with a plan they couldn’t carry out. Maybe you believe in all the other stuff. I don’t.”

Gwyneth chuckled softly.

“That’s all very interesting, John, but I didn’t mean faith in
God.
I meant faith
in me.
In the people around you. You can believe in anything you want, but if you’re not going to believe in the people around you, I don’t think you’ll go too far. And even if you do, what would be the point of the journey?”

John stared; he had no answer.

“My Steve was a soldier, just like you.”

This time it was John’s turn to get a pre-emptive
shush.

“I know, I know; the company line is you were a
driver
.”

Gwyneth rolled her eyes.

“But I know a soldier when I see one. Steve was a soldier for thirty years. How often do you think he
believed
in what he fought for? You don’t have to believe - in my ability or anything else for that matter. But you have to fight. And that will be a lot harder if you choose to do it alone.”

John could
not come up with a response to that.

“Glad we got that sorted out,” she said with a wink. “Wondering when you were going to skip out on us was getting tiresome.”

It took a moment for her words to sink in, and by the time John had opened his mouth to protest, Gwyneth had laid herself flat, turning away from him.

John could almost swear he saw her bony shoulders shake a little as she chuckled to herself in the darkness.

After a moment, he settled back onto the floor, certain that there was no chance he could possibly sleep, and then exhaustion overwhelmed him.

*

Darren stood in the warmth of one of the castle's two large fires for a long time after everyone else had departed for bed, staring at the tower that the newcomers had taken through eyes that narrowed in suspicion.

Family,
he thought, and his lip curled in a sneer. The man with the knives was selling lies, and Darren wasn’t buying. He seriously doubted whether any of the group of people that had just entered the castle was related. Maybe the little girl that clung like a limpet to the guy in the wheelchair, but the others?

No chance.

Most of the people that Darren had allowed into the castle thus far were weak; broken by the savagery of the world long before they found their way to the safety he offered, and Darren had fallen into the task of leading them easily. Much more easily than he had expected in fact. He suspected that most of them longed to have someone to tell them what to do. People, it turned out, would choose almost anything over helplessness and confusion. Even tyranny was preferable.

Of course it helped that he had
muscle backing him: a group of young men that followed him without question, men whose loyalty he had secured through a combination of fear and their own complicity in Darren's sacrificing one of their friends so that they might escape the bus station where it all began.

Few things could hold a man's tongue as firmly as guilt. Darren kn
ew that only too well. It was guilt that had driven him away from society decades earlier; guilt that condemned him to eke out a living in the mountains, where few ever asked him about anything at all, let alone whether he might have a wife and child somewhere. The mountains were a place to forget.